Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Kelley had described brainriding to him once, or had at least attempted to. It was like traveling to a different world, he had said, one made up of fleshless mentality. There was no stylized analogue, no symbolism, no virtual world. Instead it was like the data conjured itself into your head. It was like reading without seeing, like acting without moving, the will and the knowledge in a runner's head translating itself into tangible force amid the systems one accessed. The brain was a muscle that led to an endless array of limbs with which to do work. You ran a program by thinking about it, the inventory known to you the moment you linked up.

  Hacking with it was even stranger because you actually had to experience it and there was no disconnect between the fingers and the keys. Doing the brainride meant you were only as slow as it took signals to move between your brain and the terminal. To be any good at it, at least good enough to do the kind of thing that Bobbi was doing in the seat beside him, you had to have a certain nerve, a certain edge. He didn't have it; his was a different kind of edge, mingling mind and meat. The detective, not the deck man.

  Walken had never understood the appeal. It had always seemed ghoulish to him. In a way, he feared it. It was a very real incarnation of what was wrong with the world; surrendering oneself to a greater system, unable to protect the flesh as one entered the cogitative trance. He often wondered what happened to those whose bodies died while still connected. If he killed Bobbi while she were linked, slit her throat with the prog-knife or drove it into her heart, would she still exist out there? Would she be a ghost, haunting the vastness of the Network? What if she was killed by some program while she was cutting systems? For him, the flesh and all its failings was an anchor to keep him firmly tethered to the world, such as it was. He had no desire to abandon it just yet.

  Presently her eyes twitched, returned to life and warm victory filled them. "Got it," she said. "Spliced a loop in the security grid for this area. They'll see what I tell 'em until I say different." Beyond them, the gates lowered and gave them access to the outer fringe.

  "Fair enough." He took a deep breath. If he did this, he'd be committing a real crime, not just the ghost offense that Bobbi claimed Stadil had engineered for him. He eyed Bobbi for a long moment, then and said, "Bobbi. You said Stadil had a line on me."

  She was plucking the jack from behind her ear and putting the terminal back into her bag. "Uh-huh."

  "You sure you don't know what it is?"

  Bobbi shrugged. "I already said I didn't," she said, spooling the cable around her palm with expert care before tossing it into the bag too.

  "I'm not taking a chance on my career and my liberty on something some sonofabitch smuggler king said, especially when I don't have any evidence." He frowned. "I'm not sure it's worth the risk, whatever it is he's trying to throw at me."

  She took a deep breath. When she spoke again she wore a frighteningly maternal tone, patient and patronizing, as if he were five years old. "Lemme tell you what I am sure of. Right now, you're at a fork in the road. One ain't got no future and the other you can't see shit as to where it's going. You don't have a career anymore, Tom; you knew that already, lest you wouldn't have come seen my sunny self and risked getting a tail. It's your instinct put you here."

  "I thought it was a friend," he said.

  "Don't give me that shit, honey," she chuckled with a toss of her crested head. "You don't wanna admit it, fine, don't. You're still here." Her face changed, then, turned serious. The glow of the Honda's instruments threw weird shadows on her face as she regarded him.

  "If you knew you didn't have a future," she continued, her voice matching the gravity that had hollowed her with her frown, "That's only 'cause they think you're guilty. You ain't got 'liberty', neither, save for what you wanna give yourself from here on out. Now I could go and hack out all that shit if I wanted and serve it up to you on a silver platter, but that ain't gonna convince you if you're set on ignoring it. So what's it gonna be? What's that famous gut of yours say?"

  He looked at her, struck dumb by the sudden shift in her, her seriousness. Whatever he wanted to say, the words wouldn't come; only this, the resignation. "We go," he said finally, hating the whisper now. Hating what it told him. "All right. We go."

  "Well, Hell yes!" She turned back toward the windshield with a crazy grin on her lips. "Drive on."

  They drove out to the end of Runway 14, running the Honda between the looming warehouses and hangar barns to dodge the possibility of detection. Walken ran the wheel while Bobbi — with surprising efficiency — operated the Honda's sensor node. He'd asked if she were police at the dawn of her career, but she'd only smiled.

  "Park where you were before," she told him. "I'm gonna run the scanner. I wanna make sure it's still here."

  "What is?"

  She smiled. "What Stadil had left for you, of course." Bobbi held up her hand, stilling the questions he now burned to ask and dialed the node over to narrow, high-resolution scanning. Quiet reigned for a few minutes as her fingers stroked the Honda's console touchpad, guiding the node's unseen eye across the access road to scan the buildings there just as he had done just a few nights before. This time, however, she seemed to pick something up. "Aha," she chimed, "Here it is."

  Walken peered at the console. There, picked up by the electromagnetic scanner, was a small device shoved into a blue plastic barrel sitting outside one of the maintenance barns. "What the Hell is it?" he asked.

  "I'm not sure," said Bobbi, "Electronic, in any case. You wanna get it, I'll look at it close-like."

  His brows arched. "Just me?"

  She snorted. "Hey," she said, "I'm a sherpa, not a porter. Seriously, just go get it."

  Walken gave her an irritable look, but did just that. He slid out of the Honda, crept past the tricar's tapered nose and, like a mouse attempting to creep to safety from under the shadow of a cat's paw, hurried across the access road to where the barrel sat. Most were full of rain water, but Walken's barrel was full of watery fuel sludge.

  Walken wrinkled his nose, shrugging off his coat. He very nearly considered engineering some tongs but thought differently when he looked back to find Bobbi frowning at the console again. He dipped his bare arm to the elbow into the barrel, feeling thick, cold, oily fluid clinging to his skin — until finally his fingers closed around a plastic bag, which he extracted. "Jesus, that's disgusting," he muttered, immediately drenching his arm in the rain barrel and cleaning it as best he could. His nostrils filled with the metallic solvent scent of very old jet fuel and he winced.

  He turned the bag over in his hand. It was transparent, sealed and full of air. Inside a flat wafer of plastic sat, faced with a liquid crystal display. Walken made back across the road for the car, holding the bag in his greasy hand while taking out the prog-knife in his dry one; the knife's ceramic blade easily slit the plastic, giving him a sniff of hydrocarbons and dust.

  He rummaged a mesh evidence glove out of the interior of his coat. He put it on, opening the car door and getting in. "Jesus," said Bobbi, the terminal in her lap again, "You smell like an old gas station."

  "Yeah," Walken murmured and extracted the monitor with his gloved hand. It was an expensive model, a Marktronics tracker. It was a display unit and an extremely powerful, miniaturized receiver all in one. Spooks and high-end corporate security used them to track down personnel or tagged marks. Each unit was specifically coded with a single matched transponder, which was either implanted or otherwise kept on the subject's person. With this unit you could track them with it anywhere, even places where satellites couldn't go. Its ranging soliton scanning unit was protected technology, something that possessing without a license would send him to a Federal cryotomb even if he wasn't already on his way there. Now, he'd just be going for longer. He sighed.

  "Nice little toy you've got there," Bobbi cooed, peering at the tracker as Walken weighed it in his gloved hand. "What's with the mitten?"

  "Fingerprints," he said.

  "Gonna do you fu
ck all, baby," she said with a bit of an 'I told you so' note in her voice.

  Walken looked at her. "What do you mean?"

  "Check it out." She gestured to the console; while he was digging in the barrel she had linked up the terminal to the console's display.

  With a thrill of absolute horror, Walken saw that it was the Bureau’s blotter node on the screen. There, among the other data superimposed upon the watermark of the Bureau's logo, were these words:

  'WANTED: WALKEN, THOMAS COOLEY. For evidence tampering, assistance and facilitation of illicit technology trafficking and moral offenses as per Section 47 of the Federal Industrial Ethics Code."

  He gaped at it.

  "I told you," said Bobbi, sighing very softly, "They got your number, even if it ain't real."

  Walken stabbed at the console, scrolling through the bulletin using the screen. "Thomas C. Walken," he read, "Former Special Agent of the Industrial Security Bureau, is hereby wanted for questioning concerning his involvement in the illegal transport of Class B technological contraband, willful destruction of evidence, interference in a Federal investigation and the murder of a Federal witness. Last seen in the 1700 block of the Carrolton Heights section of the Intra-Convergence Zone. Subject is believed armed and extremely dangerous."

  They were quiet, the two of them, staring at the screen, the text and his image floating there amid clearly spelled damnation. Walken felt a core of rage flare to life inside of him, unquenched and raw. It was a well of fuel he did not realize was there. It lit, exploding, pushing up, bidding him to scream, to strike, to —

  "God damn it!" His fist struck the Honda's console, bouncing off the plastic. "God damn it! Those motherfuckers!" His words were lost in his ears, so much noise. They were just a precipitate of years of frustration in that instant, poisonous vapor and as they tumbled out he was only dimly aware of the red moire that had fallen across his field of vision. And then the explosion was gone, leaving in its wake a lesser, exhausted anger, smoldering in his gut. It took him a minute or so to realize that Bobbi was silent.

  He looked at her, suddenly tired. Bobbi's bright green eyes were large with surprise and traces of fear and she had put herself in the corner of the passenger side. It was a street instinct, unconscious, the desire to get away from something furious and crazy. "Jesus," she finally breathed. "You all right?"

  "No," he rumbled. "But I guess I'm gonna have to be." Walken's eyes fell to the monitor, at the smiling face there on the screen. His face, the recruit, fresh from Narco and ready to take on all of Wonderland himself. "Asshole," he muttered, "Look at you now." He pulled off the evidence glove, shoved it into his pocket and started up the tricar again.

  They made their exit in silence. Bobbi plugged herself into the terminal again, returned the cameras to standard function and when that was done picked up the tracking unit. "Go back to my place," she said absently, turning it over. "At least for the moment. I'll put your old Fed friends off your trail. You don't got nothing at home you need, do you?"

  "No," he murmured. He thought of the Kowalskis, watching their television only to have Special Tactics kicking in their door. He imagined Mr. Kowalski, quivering, shaking his fist in rage at the faceless, armored soldier-cops. He hoped that they didn't hurt them. Despite the enormous pain in the ass the old Polish couple had been, now that he would never see them again he realized how fond he'd been of them.

  "All right. I'll getcha some new stuff — gifts, you know. Not like I won't be drowning in cash soon enough." She turned the unit over. "Hey, lookit."

  Walken glanced at her. Stuck on the back of the monitor unit was a folded yellow adhesive note, which she peeled off and opened up to look at. He briefly saw a few lines of spidery black script written on it. "'Mr. Walken,'" she began, reading, "'Please excuse the inconvenience of your current situation. I assure you that there is necessity in playing the game as it has been arranged. You will find it very profitable. Miss January will be of great assistance; though you will not trust me, or my motives, I hope that you will trust her as far as your situation allows. She will do you good.'" Bobbi smiled a bit. "'Signed, A.S.' Well, that's nice of him."

  "Who's Miss January?" He felt a smirk bubble to his lips. "You a centerfold?"

  "No," she grumped lightly. "S'my name, baby, Bobbi January. Well, Roberta, but you call me that and you ain't got my help no more." She shrugged. "Well, let's get over to my place, all right? We can put together a plan from there."

  They got back without incident, though Walken found his sense of paranoia increasing rapidly with every police flasher they saw. The gnawing fear of discovery didn't dampen when they climbed back into Bobbi's place either, not even when she came out with a scanner and showed him that the place was clean outside of her own security grid. "My homebrew's better than what the security firms can put together," she said, her pert nose wrinkling in contempt. "Nothing makes you wire right like doing your own place, you know?"

  "Yeah," Walken said and rubbed at his forehead. His body suddenly felt as though it was made of wood, exhaustion crashing over him. He felt as though his brain was stuck. "So, how're we going to do this?"

  "Gonna do some magic," she sang. "C'mon, I'll show you."

  Bobbi led him through the walls of plastic sheeting and into the deeper reaches of her warehouse. He glimpsed more aging crates, an enormous futon of silk-covered tempera foam, old racks of steel piping, hanging clothes, refugees from a very old laundromat. She was more than a tweaker or a datanaut, he decided as he followed her, she was a scrap-rat as well. It was because of this that he liked her, quite despite himself. The fact her ass swung fantastically in those jeans didn't hurt either.

  She took him to what he guessed was the middle of the warehouse, where a large round 'room' had been formed. Tables piled with computers and communications gear formed a ring around the edge of the room, a henge of electronics and alloys, surrounding a central table where a battery of blank holoscreens, cables and empty cans of coffee hovered around a rectangular void. It was like an altar to Walken's eye, perfect for the digital witch that Bobbi claimed to be.

  He watched, over the space of an hour and a half, while she did her magic. She'd used a black-market transmitter wired to the roof to hack a NewsNetNow satellite, turn it briefly into a pirate link and used it to drop a tip from a 'concerned journalist' that a certain Benton Kingsley was securing tickets for a late-evening TransCon flight to Rio de Janeiro. Walken had offered the name; it was the first of many past aliases he'd used in undercover operations when he joined Narco. It was obscure enough to seem credible when they double-checked the claim, he hoped and they would have to follow every lead in the case of an agent gone bad. It would send the heat off to Sea-Tac while he and Bobbi undertook the first leg of their journey unmolested.

  They were going to need some things on the way first, Bobbi'd said as they fired up the tracking device. It was sending them back to the scene of the crime, back to where the Koreans had been so neatly dissected by those tiny hands.

  It was sending them back into the Old City.

  There is no danger in the Old City when surging into the wilderness in the wake of — a swarm of police vehicles. When Walken had driven into Renton that day it had been along a specific route, the corridor that the CivPro heat had plowed clear with their cars and ST carriers. The wildlife that populates the crumbling complex had already scattered before their lights, neither seeking nor combating the police in force.

  For the solo explorer, however, the Old City was a land of sudden and, if one remained there long enough, almost certain violence. It was a study in urban decay, constantly on fast-forward; street tribes rose, merged and died at once and the rule of law was what they commanded it to be. Even CivPro usually abandons all but the very rim of Old City, where it and the Verge meet. There was no profit in dealing with the primitives on their own turf, after all. Old City was anachronism and atavism, the post-apocalyptic vision of an end that has not yet come.

  And
he and Bobbi were going straight into it solo.

  The office building, at least, was not near the heart of Old City but at its borders. They would not have to go too far in, but far enough that predation by the natives was a danger. "Gonna have to get suited up some," she told him. "Gonna have to go see my boy Pierre."

  Pierre was a fixer, a fence who doubled as an employment agent for the criminally-directed. He was French, reasonably well-connected and, by Bobbi's say, very professional. He lived in a small industrial building along Lake Washington's upper shore — far from Walken's digs at the Rodman, in a perfectly presentable sector of the Verge shadowed by the first gleaming spires of the New City. They drove there in the Honda and he waited in the tricar while she went into the featureless square of stained concrete, as quiet and serene as a financial institution.

  He thought about the situation, about where they were going. He'd asked Bobbi to get him a gun while she was in there. After all, if she was going to be his guide, he at least needed to be able to contribute in some way. Despite the mess that went down with the Doll he at least was a good shot. He'd never been in the Old City save for the occasional raid and then only under escort. Sometimes the crazies and the tribals came out into the east side of the Verge to cause trouble, but the CivPro heat that deigned to patrol that side was usually enough to send them scattering into the wilds. The last time a real riot had started in the periphery of the Old City, it took military help to quash it. Walken wondered what would happen if the desperate, crazy masses that dwelled down there rose as one in revolt and shuddered.

  "Hey hey, baby," Bobbi called through the window of the Honda. He looked up, blinking at her smiling face on the other side of the plastic. Her pupils were slightly dilated, but Walken couldn't tell if that was due to pharmaceutical abuse or the two shopping bags she now held in her hands. She'd picked up new tech, after all and if her place was any indication she was the kind of girl to get off on it. "Lemme in. I got toys."