“We got a while before Knightley’s people come and collect the brains.” Jacinto nodded toward the hatch to the cargo bay. “You wanna…I dunno, interrogate ‘em a little before they do?”
“No,” Walken said. “I think that I’ve gotten everything I needed to know from the bugs.”
Jacinto flipped up his visor and blinked. “Yeah? What do you think?”
“I think that they can do the job,” Walken said. “Whatever the job ends up having to be.”
“Yeah,” said Jacinto, “But will they?”
Walken only shrugged before turning toward the hatch.
Strikeboy greeted Jacinto with a hug, the lean youth practically wrapping himself around his older lover. “Always glad to have you home.” He sighed into Jacinto’s shoulder. “We done with these people?”
Walken noted the reactions of the four passengers. Carnegie made a face at the display, no surprise, while the other men seemed neutral. A flash of something in Nguyen’s eyes, perhaps, but nothing that Walken’s study rig tagged as negative. Jacinto murmured something into Strikeboy’s ear and he extracted himself, waving the other men along to follow him into a squat barrelhouse on the periphery of the lot. Soon, Walken and Jacinto stood alone on the parched, faded blacktop.
“So here we are,” Jacinto said.
“Indeed,” Walken replied.
“My contract’s done with this,” he said. “Once we get those guys into orbit, you really think they’ll be able to do…whatever’s needed to end all of this?”
Walken shrugged. “I would like to think so. The numbers aren’t high on that score. However, if Knightley can turn his insights into results, I believe that there is a good chance.”
Jacinto nodded. He looked to the barrelhouse and sighed. “That boy… I think I’m gonna take him somewhere. Somewhere that they can’t get him.”
“Do you love him?” The question came out of Walken’s mouth before he realized it.
Surprise lit Jacinto’s face. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. I said I did, didn’t I?”
“Then you should go with him.” Walken jerked his head toward the Agincourt’s sleek black fuselage. “Go, spend your life with him. Be happy.”
Jacinto’s brows arched a little more. “Look, jefe. I appreciate what you’re saying, and maybe I’m wrong, but once I get my boy somewhere, I’m coming back to sign on with Mama January. I’m of use, as they say. In demand.”
“After this, you may find the Yathi much harder to avoid.”
“If I don’t do this,” Jacinto said, “I won’t ever be rid of them. Isn’t that what you’ve said? They’ll colonize all these people, and the rest will be made into machines and slaves and whatever else. Nobody is gonna escape them if that happens. I can’t run away from that. And besides, if they did somehow get a line into our little conspiracy, they already know I’m involved.”
Walken stared at the man for a long moment. “There was a time when I had thought that nobility had been squeezed out of human DNA.”
“I don’t know about nobility, man,” Jacinto said, “But survival doesn’t necessarily have to be selfish. I want all of us to come back all right.”
To him, the possibility was so astronomically remote as to not beg consideration. He nodded toward the barrelhouse again. “Well, if you’re going to sign back up, you’ll want to get more time with your boy before we leave.”
Jacinto gave Walken a wary look. “Oh yeah?”
“Yes.” Walken nodded. “I have something that I need for you to do.”
still can’t believe he’s not dead,” Bobbi said.
Bobbi, Janelle and Mulcahey sat in the conference room at Plato’s Cavern, surrounded by their respective lieutenants. It had taken a week for everyone to be extricated from their positions, and to center themselves in Washington. Skeleton crews still maintained Mulcahey’s Chicago base and Janelle’s warehouse, but otherwise the main force, as it were, had been centralized at the Cavern. Not that this boosted their numbers much. The so-called human resistance still numbered just over a hundred souls.
“I mean, if he’s fighting the Yathi, they would have removed him ages ago, right?” Violet shifted in her seat next to Bobbi, frowning at the table. She looked distinctly uncomfortable with the other woman’s demeanor. Bobbi had been more or less made of ice, sticking purely to unraveling what had happened in Los Angeles. She had not talked further about Walken’s appearance save for in meetings.
“I guess he got away from them.” Janelle shrugged. “Maybe he’s gone the way of Redeye.”
“The Eye was a different case,” Violet insisted. “She was human. She was raised by Cagliostro, but she was still human.”
“Begging your pardon,” Mulcahey said. “But so is Walken, if it is truly him. He’s had to throw off the shackles of the consciousness inside of him.”
“Assuming,” said Janelle, “that it ever woke up.”
“I can’t imagine they’d give him that body if it hadn’t,” said Janelle. “They don’t waste technology – especially that kind of technology. Did you see him take those four apart?”
Bobbi looked around the table as they spoke, taking in each face in turn; the appearance of Mendelsohn’s troops, the presence of the Tom-thing, Stormy – they had all turned a supposed assassination into a fucking three-ring circus for everybody. But why would she think like that in the first place? Tom was apparently up and around. Shouldn’t she be happy, at least a little, about that?
“Let’s consider that he may not be,” said Shaper. “I mean, much as I’m pleased that he’s taking apart our enemies for us, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a bug sitting at the controls.”
“Indeed.” Sumire looked at them all placidly from her place at Shaper’s side. Since she came out of her tank after the Los Angeles operation, she had kept herself attached to him. Bobbi knew, of course, she did it for his benefit, not the other way around. “What is more important is that we have sufficient evidence that the drone attack was not of Yathi origin. Hence, at least for the moment, we are safe.”
Janelle blinked at Sumire. “What do you mean, ‘safe?’”
Sumire smiled. “Ms. Green, we have assumed from the start that we have been potentially found out by the Yathi, but with the results of our attempted assassination of who we believed was The Sensation of an Oncoming Storm, the evidence points to a lack of awareness on their part. We should remain careful as ever, of course, but the issue at hand is the question of just what took place in Los Angeles. And, working with Ms. January, I believe I have some insight into that.”
The room hung in edgy silence, all eyes flicking between the two women. Sumire seemed to wait for a moment, to give Bobbi room to speak. She didn’t.
“Circling back and doing a deep probe into the identities of the men,” said Sumire, “we found that they had been wiped clean from the traditional records. But as Miss January has abilities above and beyond that of human technology, she was able to recombine the data scattered across the network despite these attempts. The men we believed were executives of United Hydrogen were not, in fact. Those men never existed.”
Mulcahey’s eyes narrowed. “Then who were they? How did we not see this before?”
“Because I didn’t look hard enough.” Bobbi’s words rang hard and flat. All eyes turned to her. She knew just what had happened, where the blame fell. Right on her shoulders. Anger surged up inside of her as she spoke, but she did her best to keep it back, releasing only the flat iron of her words. “The truth is, the records had been assembled in such a way that I had no reason to assume a problem, that they didn’t exist. In the crush of things, I wanted things to go back to normal. I wanted alien things to seem alien, and that’s what we focused on. We knew who the target was, knew we looked at a real Yathi threat, knew we were picking up business as usual after a deep shock. We wanted everything to be business as usual – I wanted it to be business as usual. And I was wrong. My actions could have killed Wrench and his whole team, at the very
least, and possibly Camilla as well if they had been watching for a sniper.”
Bobbi let the words ring. She expected someone to stand up, to denounce her on the spot, just as she had already denounced herself so many times in the last week after discovering the information. She was ready for it, and Violet’s hand did nothing to make her feel better as it clasped and squeezed hers. If anything, its overwhelming warmth made her feel worse. She sat, and she waited, and nothing came. No shouting. Only silence.
“It seems to me that being human isn’t something to be considered a sin, in this situation.” From Mulcahey’s camp, a woman stepped forward from the corner of the conference room, arms folded over her chest as she approached the table. Bobbi had only seen pictures of her, but the voice of Camilla Djerrkura was well etched in her memory. The sniper slunk forward with an easy grace, her frame slight but strong, wearing fatigues with the sleeves cut from her tunic. She looked lethal, dark skin rippling with muscle, her wavy hair drawn back in a fierce bun. Her eyes, however, seemed kind as they fixed on Bobbi, and she found herself taken aback. “You sound as if you’ve had to give this speech before, Miss, and I’m sure you’ve gotten this response before as well. But putting your head out on a block for someone to cut if off really isn’t necessary. It certainly isn’t anything that we got from Julia when something went wrong.”
“That’s for sure,” Janelle said with a growl.
Camilla nodded. “We all know what we’re doing here, and what we signed on for. We all know that things go wrong. Captain here could tell you how many times things happened when we were operating with Julia, nevermind when we’ve pulled off things on our own.”
“It’s true.” Mulcahey smiled faintly at Bobbi from his corner of the table. “No plan survives execution, Bobbi, you know that. We haven’t been working long, but I’ve seen your record. Marcus was wrong about you. He was wrong about a lot of things. If it’d been us in there instead of Mendelsohn’s people, she’d have expected us to throw that suicide grenade.”
“So, thanks for trying to make the big sacrifice, honey,” Janelle said. “But it wasn’t necessary. We’re with you.”
Bobbi relaxed a little. Violet squeezed her hand again before withdrawing. “Thanks. All of you. Ah…well, then, going forward. The four men at the hotel were in fact all scientists and engineers.” She called up the pictures–Carnegie, Van Pelt, Nguyen, Bradshaw. Their affiliations and specialties scrolled out next to them in holographic text. “As you can see, they are some of the greatest names in their collective fields.”
“So how the hell can you hide people like that?” Violet frowned at the holographic portraits. “I know I’ve seen that guy Bradshaw on the news at least once, and I’m sure he’s been in other publications on the Network.”
“Anyone can hide if they want to,” Camilla said. “At least, from normal people.”
“It’s true,” said Bobbi.” In this case, a cluster virus was employed to hunt through the Network for traces of all these men. Basically, it’s a collection of intrusion programs tasked to work with a central coordination program. Usually that would be very large, but in this case, the software was much, much smaller than it would otherwise be.”
Janelle squinted. “Why is that?”
“Because,” said Sumire. “It was not of human origin. At least, not entirely. We’ve seen this kind of programming before, used by Julia Mendelsohn’s forces.”
“I really need to meet this woman,” Bobbi muttered. “Regardless of if she wants to shoot me or not.”
“She might listen if you tell her that you know about these guys,” Janelle said. “And that you know they were waiting for her people.”
“Maybe.” Bobbi nodded. “In this case, we have to assume that they were here to collect these men. The Yathi were waiting for them.”
“Which brings us to Thomas Walken,” said Mulcahey. “We saw him collect those men. Mind you, they were terrified, and if it weren’t for the fact that he had taken down those Yathi murderborgs I would have assumed that he was just part of their collection team. The question is, of course, who does he work for? Himself? Others? Why isn’t he crazy?”
“Some of us are less crazy than others,” Violet drawled.
Mulcahey glanced her way. “Point taken. At any rate, who does he work for, and where did he take those men?”
“Maybe he just let them go.” Bobbi shrugged.
“Maybe, but you don’t believe that.”
She smiled. “No. I don’t. There’s only one point that I’m aware of where Mendelsohn and these men intersect, and that’s Lionel Knightley.”
“But Knightley’s disappeared,” Janelle said. “We don’t know where he’s gone.”
“No.” Bobbi nodded. “We don’t. But Mendelsohn does, I bet. Maybe Tom does, too.”
“All signs point to him being in league with Julia Mendelsohn,” Sumire said like a crystal bell. “The likeliness of this is well within the margin of probability. But to what end?”
“A psychologist, a bionics expert, a neuroscientist, and one of the great old bad men of modern nanotechnology. Well, it’s possible that they’re just on staff to advance their technological base, but they could be going farther than that. They could be repurposing captured Yathi.”
“I don’t see that happening,” Janelle said. “It just doesn’t sound like her.”
“Without the ability to judge for myself,” Bobbi said, “I have to assume that this is a possibility. She might be trying implant Yathi systems into her people without damaging them.”
Janelle arched her brows. “Is that even possible? I thought that you needed a fairly steady supply of their blood substitute in order to allow the implants to work. And…well, everything else.”
Sumire nodded. “It’s true that the formula of synthetic blood contains nanomachine colonies that maintain native Yathi bionic and cybernetic systems. And that, at least to this point, it required some attachment to a Yathi consciousness for these colonies to work. If that is the case, it would require a team of people with great skill in the necessary disciplines to even attempt to countermand this. We know that Mendelsohn’s forces have some measure of knowledge about Yathi programming. They can make some use of Yathi technology, albeit to a degree inferior than ourselves. Why not try to harness more of the enemy’s technology, so long as it does not, as far as Mendelsohn’s creed dictates, violate their perceived humanity?”
The words “perceived humanity” made Bobbi shudder. “It’s a theory, but it fits all of the facts. We don’t know what else these people have sought to collect, or who else they may have kidnapped. It does appear, however, that they sought to collect these men – enough that they would sacrifice a good number of people to try and do it.”
“Well, what does Cagliostro say about it?” Mulcahey looked between Bobbi and her three lieutenants, lips pursed. “The old ghost is still useful, isn’t he?”
“Less and less every day,” Bobbi said. “I haven’t been able to get a response from him in weeks, not since just after the thing at the Trans-Sound Bridge went down. He was surprised that it happened, too. I just don’t think…I just don’t think he’s with it as much, anymore. Either that or he’s involved in something that takes so much cognitive power that the parts of him that reach out are instead pointing inwards. Either way, he’s not really of use to us right now.”
The instant the words left her lips, a shock ran down her spine. Her implants engaged; the real world vanished, replaced with the boundlessness, warm-water bath of the Network. But no…not the Network. She was in her own head, the well-known trod of her skull’s ROM. Bobbi let out a mental gasp, as if she had been thrown into a pool, and hurried to collect her defenses. Iron walls made of programming code began to spring up at her mental signal, but a familiar voice boomed from all around her – from within her – with enough force to blast them right down.
The voice of Cagliostro boomed. But
then, the words that appeared inside her brain were strained, thin, as if heard from very far away. She felt only the slightest pressure of his consciousness, and the mental voice, though Stadil’s, fragmented at the edges. Distorted.
She quieted. Cagliostro had never said “please” before. After a few milliseconds’ pause, the old ghost went on.
Anger lanced through her.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 37