“Call it TechNoir. Call it CyberPulp. Just so long as you call it original.” – William Vitka, Writer & Journalist
“A futuristic crime thriller that hits the ground running and never pauses for breath. It reminds you of Blade Runner and Shadowrun, but never comes off as derivative, having a unique and well rounded take on a genre.” – Joshua Bumgarner, Amazon Reviewer
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To Ben, yes, you DID tell me so.
You were right.
To Carol, Verity and all those readers
who made this work possible...
Mother loves you all.
To Christina, without whose faith
I would not have finished this at all...
The best is yet to come.
When the call came in over the Bureau net, Walken had been sitting in his parked car listening to the rain. On nights like this, when the breath of the Sound condensed the mist into silver sheets of cool, drumming water, he found his thoughts directing inward more than usual. The rain drove his thoughts, the rain let him focus. He had a lot to think about on nights like these.
Seattle was a town in the middle of yet another cycle of reinvention. Over the past two hundred years the city had burned, expanded, gone through civil and economic collapse and dragged itself out of those ashes as well. Somewhere in the process it had lost its soul, though the city wasn't special in that case. The whole world was soulless in Walken's estimation. Commercialist, amoral, ambitious without cause - these were the symptoms of the sickness that pervaded the world around him and most everyone seemed to have bought in. Nobody seemed to care very much at all.
So why did he?
He couldn't say as to the precise moment that he had grown his conscience, strange as it was. Walken had been like everyone else once, after all. He'd joined Baltipol because it was a corporate job and he had intended to make Executive of Pacification by the time he was thirty; now he was working for the Fed. The badge in the pocket of his long coat identified him as an investigator of the United States Industrial Security Bureau. He was the technology police; the Man. As the call came over the network on his car's console terminal, he resolved to do the Man's work. Walken looked to the display as dispatch sent over the details and he sighed as he looked at the data that spilled over the terminal's screen. Wonderland again.
Nothing good ever came from Wonderland.
That thought pulsed repeatedly through Walken's mind as he drove. The call that came in was marked AX219, the code reserved for a very specific source of criminal behavior. Trafficking, Illicit Technological Device(s), Nation Code 219. 219 was the code for Great Siam, which came into being when a militarized Thailand annexed its neighbors. Everyone on the streets called it Wonderland. It had become the single biggest hive of advanced, illicit technology on the planet thanks to the criminal labs that helped prop up the junta that ran it. Wonderland was a nightmare place where black magic was worked every day in laboratories that rivaled those of the corporate blocks.
Walken leaned into the driver's seat and let the car drive for him, listening to the rain wrestle with the hum of the hydrogen engine for supremacy. Four years ago he had been doing the narcotics beat. Now he worked for the Bureau, far away from the world of corner pushers. But you never got away from vice in this game. Not ever.
His destination was Seattle-Tacoma Transorbital, which even now landed ramjet-laden angels from all over the world. The Bureau had gotten a tip that an incoming cargo flight was smuggling a trio of Princess Dolls and wanted Walken to intercept. Dolls were usually made from street children, snatched off the street and chunks of their brains replaced with specialized hardware. They were illegal, perverse and way too goddamned popular with wealthy citizens and visitors in the city.
But a single Doll could cost as much as a small apartment building, never mind three of them and the slip-job into the country would have been no mean feat to arrange. He could already smell the tide of paperwork to come.
The sky darkened with the stain of night as he drove on. Up ahead the black spire of the Sea-Tac terminal was thrown into sharp relief against the fading evening by a halo of ground lights. Walken sat up in his seat and dialed the Bureau office through the terminal.
"I thought you'd have gotten there by now." The voice that rumbled from the car's speakers was rough and yet somehow brilliant, like silver gravel. "You waiting for a parade?"
A smirk tugged at Walken's lips and he rubbed at his forehead, peering at himself in the rearview: brown eyes under dark, heavy brows and a short fringe of equally dark curls. His face was pale and lean, with frown lines etched into his skin. It made him look much older than he was. "A beautiful night for a crusade, sir," he said with a thin chuckle. "Perfect sky and everything."
"Don't be a smartass," was Arthur Wolsey's grunted reply. Wolsey was his supervisor back at the Bureau, the big fish of their pond. Wolsey was the great eye staring down at him from atop the pyramid.
"You're the boss." Walken wrinkled his nose and peered out through the windshield as the car trundled along, graceful as a whale, down the offramp. The truth was that he'd chosen his pace based on nothing more than his own intuition. His own conscience. He had always relied on it, the voice in the back of his head, like a little ghost whispering to him the right way to go. It rarely failed him.
Wolsey knew this and his voice rang with disapproval. "Just you make sure that you don't miss the flight," he growled.
Walken nodded vaguely. He scanned the weeping sky one last time, poisoned gray-silver clouds hung against a slate-colored background darkening with oncoming night. He thumbed the car over to manual control and took the wheel.
"Don't worry, sir," Walken said to the console. "I wouldn't miss my own party."
"Yeah," Wolsey rumbled in grim reply.
Walken took the long way around, making a brief tour around the terminal lot before heading out toward the runways. He used a maintenance gate that Bureau hackers had isolated from the airport network. Soon the terminal was behind him again and the vast, pale ribbons of the runways stretched out before him.
Walken put the car between a pair of hangars near the edge of Runway 14 and waited. The plane had mercifully refrained from arriving early. He scanned the scene for obvious signs of trouble and finding none fired up the car's sensors. It took three passes before he was finally satisfied that he was alone.
His fingers danced across the liquid crystal panel set into the dashboard, connected to the Bureau net and checked to see if someone was be watching the flight on the airport network. Nothing. No suspicious persons visible through the camera grid, nobody riding the nets. Not one goddamned peep.
Walken checked his watch with pursed lips, waiting for the flight's approach while occasionally checking the scanner. He watched the display tick away until finally the time came, marked by his watch's tinny beeping and looked up through the rain-beaded windscreen at the black spike that now pierced the clouds.
The plane was long and slender, a flanged needle driving down toward the earth as it made its approach. The gun wedged against his ribs seemed to grow heavier as the plane descended; that was never a good sign. His nerves bristled. "Flight Seven-Two-Seven-Four inbound," he told the console. "Sensors read zero - doesn't look like there's anybody here."
Wolsey answered. "All right," he replied. "Maybe they got tipp
ed off. Go ahead and set up. I'll have the flight put down right there."
Five minutes later the plane had touched down. It cooled at the end of the runway, silent and blind with no windows where the cockpit should have been. There wasn't a single living soul on board, only the AI that served as pilot and cargo steward. No doubt the AI would be hacked to blind itself against any attempted retrieval.
In the air the plane had been almost painfully graceful. Up close however, its grace had been lost and it looked more like a clumsy rendering of the ethereal thing it had been. On the ground it was phallic and angry, standing on thin struts as it towered over Walken and his car. Walken saw how its shoulders sloped out over the ramjet blisters, how they swept forward into narrow wings silhouetted against the fading rain. His nose wrinkled; technology was often like this for him, so lovely at a distance only to disappoint him up close. Unlike those around him, he was no worshiper at the altar of progress.
Presently Walken busied himself with his work. He pulled a sniffer out of its case in the trunk and set it up on its tripod. With it he could scope a Doll's augmented brain activity straight through the plane's hull. Visions of little girls in boxes or stuffed into crawlspaces hung in his mind as he started the sniffer up.
He swept the sniffer's blunt nose back and forth across the plane's belly with a practiced hand while keeping an eye on the display. One sweep, then again. Nothing. The distinct tang of ozone filled his nostrils as rain ionized in the wake of its searching beam. Crew vehicles approached now and his frown was thrown into sharp relief by their lights as he tried the sniffer again.
Where the Hell were they? Walken's brows knit, plastered against his face by the drizzle. He stared into the monitor as if it were a wishing pool, eyes searching, straining for the luminous pulses he had been so sure he was going to see. The tip had come from one of the Bureau's most reliable Wonderland sources, one who had ended up getting thrown under a city bus not long after the plane had gone airborne. For a moment he was afraid that they might have been dumped on reentry over the Pacific, but the sheer cost of the three girls - he'd refused to call them 'units' as they were referred to in reports - made that very unlikely.
He swept the sniffer through again, tightening up its focus and was finally rewarded by the telltale blip of pale blue light on its display that marked what he had been looking for. It was in the tail section, jammed under the shadow of downswept canards, in the heavily shielded avionics bay. That was clever, he thought. It was a perfect location to stow contraband. He'd been lucky to find them with the sensor beam.
It didn't take long for Walken to flash his badge and direct the crew into opening the bird up. Red-suited technicians swarmed the plane like ants on an apple, opening up the accessway. The crew chief was a guy named Marcus, a good-looking man with coffee-colored skin and silver temples. He unsealed the maintenance hatch for Walken and pulled down the collapsing ladder to allow him access. Walken was about to start up the ladder when Marcus moved to follow him.
"Don't do that," Walken told him, standing on the bottommost rung.
"Why not, Agent?" Marcus' brows lifted a bit. "Regulations say that I have to be on premises in case of an emergency situation."
"This is a federal crime scene, sir."
Marcus snorted. "Not yet it ain't," he replied. "You break something up there and it's a whole night of overtime for me and my boys. I'll come back down if you find something, Agent, but until you do I need to be on hand. Besides," he said, a grin blooming across his face, "I'm the one got the passcodes."
Walken peered at him in annoyance, but he nodded. Dolls weren't dangerous in and of themselves. "All right," he sighed after a moment, turning back to start up the ladder. "But once the bay's open, don't go inside or touch anything. All right?" Marcus shrugged assent and followed him up the ladder.
Soon the two of them were crouching in the compartment ahead of the avionics bay. Walken had abandoned the sniffer for his sidearm, a caseless Nambu nine-millimeter with burst capability and a selectable magazine full of tranquilizer flechettes and sealed copper-azide explosive rounds. The tranqs were for the Dolls themselves, should they not be sleeping already, but the explosives were for anything defensive that might have been shoved in there with them. As Marcus punched a sequence of numbers on the keypad built into the bay hatch, Walken brought the gun up into a ready position and braced himself.
"You ready?" Marcus asked him. His finger hovered over the hatch panel and at Walken's nod he punched the release. The door hissed open as he stood clear.
The bay beyond was the size of a large walk-in closet. It was completely dark; the only light came from the banks of avionics gear that was crammed into the walls, alight with luminous motes of green and amber.
"Get some light in here," Walken rumbled, the Nambu in his hand tracking shadows. Behind him he could hear Marcus draw a breath before fumbling with the controls. Tension stretched his shoulders taut as he waited for the shadows to be banished.
The lights came on and from behind him Marcus made a soft noise. There were three coffins leaning against the back of the bay, made of what Walken guessed was rubberized steel. Unmarked and featureless they loomed as monoliths before the two men, unknown and forbidding in their silence.
"All right," said Walken and he took a step toward the containers. He swept the gun's muzzle beyond, spotted nothing out of the ordinary. Could they really just be here without defenses? "Go ahead and make your report to the terminal, Marcus. I've found what I was looking for here."
"Great," Marcus murmured and took a few steps backward on the deck. He didn't leave just yet; Walken could feel him hovering back by the hatch, no doubt wanting a peek at what lay within the coffins. Well, that was all right. If he wanted to play tourist, he was doubtless insured.
Walken reached for the first of the coffins and his hand found the handle recessed into its lid, which was cold and slightly tacky from its coating. Amid the clunk of magnetic tumblers he turned the handle toward the open position and took a step back.
Although the coffin's lid weighed at least two hundred pounds it moved smoothly on concealed hinges, revealing what lay inside.
As pale and as peaceful as a corpse, a little girl lay snuggled in the coffin's padded interior. She couldn't be older than eight.
Someone had put the little girl in a sexed-up version of a traditional white European wedding dress, complete with lace gloves, veil and train. The bodice was cut low for cleavage she didn't even have and the front of the dress's belled skirt was peaked high to show her thin legs clad in fishnet hose and garters. The towering heels of the pumps she wore would not have looked out of place in a strip club.
Her face was as peaceful as if she were dead. It was tiny and round, but the sweetness of it had been hidden away under the artfully-styled waves of her black hair and the garish colors of her very modern makeup. Presented thus, she might as well be a shop front mannequin. She was a parody of everything she might have been had she not been put through the atrocity mill.
Walken heard Marcus mutter from behind him. "Jesus. Is that what you were looking for?"
"Yeah." Walken reached into his pocket for his button phone, slipped it into his ear and after connecting its mic to the line of his jawbone gave a command to dial into the Bureau net. "Walken here," he rumbled coldly when Dispatch answered. "I've found the delivery." He didn't wait for a response; he hung up, knowing that even as he did so the Dispatch ops would be summoning Civil Protection and forensic techs to secure the area.
He moved to unseal the hatch of the next coffin and then that of the next; they revealed two other Dolls in identical dresses, though these girls were slightly older than the first.
"Seems a waste to put a kid in a dress like that," Marcus said behind him. His tone was soft, almost reverent and at first Walken almost thought that he felt as badly for the girls as he did. But as he was carefully looking over the three little Dolls, pity and revulsion painting a black streak down the back of
his throat, Marcus disappointed him. "Those are Dina Berans."
"What?" Walken looked hard at him from over his shoulder and Marcus flinched. The anger Walken felt, not only at the state of the Dolls but at the apparent lack of concern toward their state held by the other man, made the bitter taste in his mouth even worse.
"Dina Beran," Marcus repeated as if this should answer everything, taking a step back against the accessway and spreading his hands. "The dresses. They're from this year's collection. My girl, she's been going on about them since they came out. They cost a hundred thousand each, you know?" He was about to say more, but something caught his attention. "Hey, what's that the little one's got with her?"
Walken looked at the youngest of the three and frowned again. She had a small shadow tucked under her arm, previously hidden by a fringe of lace. The tender warmth of youth had been obliterated to allow the perverse canvas made of her to shine and, as if in recognition of this fact - or perhaps in celebration of it - a teddy bear in a groom's tuxedo had been tucked under her arm. Something was embroidered in neat cursive letters on its lapel.
Walken pulled on a pair of filmy gray evidence gloves from his pocket and reached for the bear. What he saw written on its jacket made his face harden and the noxious sewer of anger inside of him surge to the top of his throat.
"What's it say?" Marcus's tone was guarded this time.
Walken took a deep breath; his hand clenched around the bear, crushing it in his fingers. "'Daddy'," he rumbled and his voice was as cold as the blood that now ran in his veins. "It says 'Daddy'."
Walken said very little while on the scene. After cordoning off the area he reset the sniffer and made sure that neither the coffins or their cargo were trapped against further tampering; once he was satisfied there was no danger he waited for Civil Protection and the Bureau's technicians to arrive. He stayed with the Dolls up until the CivPro rep called up and growled at him for not being outside to greet him. Walken didn't care; CivPro might be the police, but they were corporate contractors. They charged the city by the hour anyway.
Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle) Page 1