Ah, well.
Bobbi and Scalli swung by Pierre’s place. The Frenchman didn’t have a whole lot to report on Cagliostro, which she had expected; all he had were little fairy tales from the street, stories about Cagliostro appearing when people needed help in exchange for little favors like some sort of ridiculous Faustian machine. Unlike poor old Faust, however, the bargaining party ended up better off than they were before, and the price paid in the future was not onerous at all. As a side effect of his digging, a whole lot of attention had been turned on him from various people of import thanks to his inquiries; Bobbi would have thought he would be upset about that, but instead he seemed to be pretty thrilled. The fact he knew Cagliostro’s name to drop had apparently made Pierre a person of interest and potentially useful company to many of these individuals – he was expanding his circle of contacts in ways he had never expected to do in the past. It had put him in a very good mood indeed.
Pierre’s mood and new connections had allowed him to dig up a lot of information on Redeye. Some of it Bobbi already knew from the news: that she lived in the Old City, and that she had a growing group of followers she had recruited from the local ferals. By gathering the tribes, however, attacks by the crazy ferals on the other folks who lived out there had plummeted; it appeared that she was actually making the Old City safer by putting together her little force. But safer for who?
And then there was the eye. Obviously synthetic, it was possibly some kind of military prosthesis given a street-friendly look; she was supposedly an amazing shot. Her followers also seemed to look to it as a kind of symbol, for some of them were reported to use the symbol of a single red eye in graffiti and body art. She definitely had a cult of personality going on, and that could be a very scary thing indeed. They were savage fighters when throwing down with the locals, but their purpose was still as of yet unknown – however Bobbi got a hint of that when Pierre told her that the ‘salvagers’ that her outfit was supposed to have hit not long ago was in fact a convoy belonging to Genefex. So they were blowing up locations supposedly containing Genefex facilities, and now they were hitting vehicles belonging to the company out there in the urban wilds. But why? And for what purpose? They would need to do more digging, but now wasn’t the time.
Bobbi had Pierre order a laundry list of gear that they would need to carry out Caglistro’s mission. Scalli had given it to her, although it had surprised her that the list was so short. Pierre had cheerfully taken her money and started the work, saying that it would be a few more days before much of the equipment could be gotten, and that was fine with her – she’d want to make sure she was ready to hit the data nexus, and more preparations would be required.
They didn’t say much on the way back, short of Bobbi insisting that they hit up Rocket Chef again – she had a maddening craving for Maxi-Buns again. She’d almost think she was pregnant save for going for two years without getting anything. And what was that about? She used to love getting it, and now … well, priorities change, especially when one carries the sort of weight that she did now. Just wasn’t important to her, and if anything that disturbed her most of all.
She munched on her burger, staring out the window. “I hate the Old City,” she said.
“Yeah,” Scalli said. “Bunch of crazy fuckers out there.”
“Not all of them,” Bobbi said, and looked at him. “I mean that’s not why I hate it. I used to live there, you know.”
He looked at her sidelong, squinting. “No shit?”
“No shit.” Bobbi let out a deep sigh. “It was a long time ago, though.”
“Not so long ago,” he said. “You’re not even thirty yet. You wanna tell me, or do I have to guilt you until you finally crack?”
Bobbi gave him a level look, green eyes flashing in the light, and then she shook her head. “Here,” she said, “I’ll tell you the story.”
The story went like this. Her dad had served, ages ago, in the United States Army – which back then was still called the Crusader’s Army after the crazy, evangelical authoritarian government that existed back in the first thirty years of the century. Just like Cagliostro had said, he’d served in the Lord’s Second, and he had marched all over the face of the Middle East spreading the Lord’s sacred ammunition to the heathens in the most direct and terminal way possible. He’d served for two years before the Great Rejection, when people finally came to the startlingly intelligent decision that bombing the shit out of each other in the name of what may very well amount to the first and greatest example of the imaginary friend in human history might be, you know, a bad idea. Most of Iran and Saudi Arabia had been turned to glass, and with the latter fully half of the Crusaders had gone with it when the former’s batshit Ayatollah had forced the government to push the button rather than allow American troops anywhere in the vicinity of Mecca.
So Dad came home, and when he returned the country was in chaos. The evangelical movement had splintered into militarized factions, New World Evangelicals tangling with smaller splinters for the spiritual heart of a country that was swiftly deciding that they should all wipe each other out and let it all be done with. It was the same in the East – those who weren’t glowing in the dark or falling apart from radiation poisoning seemed to see the same flaws in the system, deciding that maybe the sword of Allah wasn’t the best thing to swing around anymore. And so it was that peace was coming, or at least peace from religious violence.
There was a new movement that sought to replace Christianity and Islam and all the other major faiths. It had always existed, predating religion itself, and in the past three centuries it had captured the public imagination and rooted itself like a glittering tree in the hearts of human beings. Those roots had reached deeper and deeper; the first blooms had started to open in the past century, and now they opened up all over the world.
That force had a name, and that name was Commerce.
The last fifty years had been basically one glorious commercialist renaissance; historians she’d read often compared it to the nineteen eighties, but that was just the first rumbling of the eruption that was to come. To hear her dad tell it, things had been like night and day – one moment the country had been a dignified, if insane and patriarchal, republic. Commerce was regulated under the culture of New World Evangelism. It had been the culture into which he had been born. But after that there were no gods, no masters. Her dad had always said that this way was evil, but to Bobbi it sure as hell seemed to have put the world back on track for a while, back on track and heading toward a future which did not involve getting nuked or otherwise blown into pebbles by some other jackass nation. Thanks to the globalized commercialism that now prevailed in the modern day, nobody could afford to destroy anyone else; property values would plummet and even world nations didn’t get insurance payments for self-inflicted arson.
So he came home and found the world changing around him. The Faith had never been too strong in her dad, but when he came home he claimed to see the evils of the world all around him – and so he took his wife and they moved to the Old City, just after the big crash had come to the state and Seattle was floundering. Back then, the Old City was basically like the Verge, or like Detroit had been back in the late Twentieth. Lots of abandoned houses, lots of empty structures. Bobbi’s dad just moved into a place down in Federal Way, far from the city center, and decided to try and live a decent life.
Things proceeded as they always do – decently enough at the start, though slowly degenerating by a matter of degrees. Dad met her mother, who was working in a cantina that refused to go out of business, and they set up housekeeping while the city continued to flounder. They didn’t get married, not even after twenty years together, and not even after Bobbi was born. Things were still decent.
The crazies and the criminal element had, originally, settled at the borders of the Old City to get away from the heavy police presence and federal troops that kept the peace back during the riots that came with the crash. As time wore on, howe
ver, these groups expanded in numbers and in territory; the Oldies kept moving inward to keep from being exploited, killed, or worse. Most of them, anyway. Her dad didn’t. Her dad elected to live like he always had, as the righteous man, the soldier, and he had built up a sizable militia of fellow Oldies down in Federal Way. For a time they’d kept things decent, but that time swiftly came to an end when Bobbi was four years old. On a “mission” out in town, her dad had tried to shut down a narcotics operation that was sourced in the crumbling inner districts. The guys that ran it had sent his head, along with those of the rest of the groups’, in a shipping crate to her mother’s porch. She didn’t clearly remember it, of course, as young as she was – but she remembered clearly her mother’s wail of horror and loss, and the gory splatters that persisted upon the porch for days after. Every now and again she’d dream of severed heads, one that looked very much like her father, but she wasn’t certain if this was reality or simply her imagination fucking with her.
“Jesus,” Scalli whispered when she had said that last bit, looking down at her as if he had witnessed the thing himself. “That’s terrible, baby girl. I never knew that about you.”
“Well, if you had a nickel for everything you didn’t know about me, Scalli, you’d make me look like a waitress in the savings department.” She shook her head. “Tom didn’t know either, really.”
Scalli looked at her. “You didn’t tell him?”
Bobbi shrugged. “It never came up,” she said, but though she did her best to look nonchalant the old feeling of something … disturbed … came back to bother her. Why didn’t it come up? Why didn’t she ever tell him? More to the point, why didn’t he ask?
“I suppose,” Scalli said with a toss of his head. “All the same, it was terrible. And I guess you got out of it afterward?”
“Something like that,” she said with a shrug. “I mean, after that it kind of went pear-shaped. My mom went from guy to guy, closer and closer toward the New City until finally we stayed in Tenleytown.”
They rounded a corner and Scalli bobbed a slow nod as they went. “Oh yeah, Tenleytown,” he said lightly. “That’s that border settlement, right? I mean, that’s all you can really call it.”
She snorted. “That’s about right,” Bobbi said with a nod. “Of course, it was bigger then – might be big again, now, if Pierre’s talk about street people fleeing the Verge has any truth to it. It was civilization, you know? It was a bottleneck community. This was just when Civil Protection came into the picture, see, and the military still operated checkpoints. Then they took over and shit started getting real bad.”
“Yeah,” Scalli said with a nod. “I’d heard about that.” Twenty years ago there’d been a massive riot, when the crazies flooded out of the Old City and tried to hit the Verge, only to be turned back by a combination of Civil Protection and the National Guard. That was pretty much the only time it happened; hundreds of people died, lots of ferals of course, but also Oldies who got caught in the crossfire. “Your mom made it, though, right?”
Bobbi nodded. “Yeah,” she said, “But only just. She didn’t take it too well in her head, you know. Finally just offed herself, walked into the Old City and never came back. I was thirteen.”
Scalli shook his head. “I’m sorry, baby girl.”
“Don’t be,” she replied. “She was never that much of a mother in the first place. If I miss anyone, I miss my dad.” Bobbi looked out the window now, her Maxi-Buns forgotten. “I guess that’s how it is for lots of girls, though. I guess if it weren’t for the fact I was good with a terminal, I’d have ended up dancing on the pole.”
“Yeah, but you can do that anyway,” Scalli said, and then winced. “Sorry. I didn’t mean–”
“It’s cool,” she said. “Yeah, I stripped from time to time. Did worse than that, too, until I got enough money together to get my first real hackworthy machine. Then I was a cowgirl, regular. Didn’t look back after that.”
Scalli nodded, though still looked really sheepish. “I guess that’s where I met you, huh.”
“Yup,” she said, “That’s where you met me. And that’s where history began.”
They said nothing else the rest of that night, save for a quick “good night” said as he dropped her off at the Temple. The club was closed, of course, but word had gotten out through the regular social channels so it wasn’t as though anyone was waiting on her. Bobbi watched him drive off toward the other end of the Scrap Field and turned back to the door, walking up to molten ziggurat’s big double-paneled portals.
“There you are.” A woman’s voice. Low. Quiet, too quiet to be identified. Bobbi paused, her heart rate picking up exponentially.
“Uh, yeah,” said Bobbi, wishing that she’d remembered to bring her nerve crusher. “Here I am.”
“Turn around, slowly.” There was steel in the voice. “Are you alone?”
Bobbi counted backwards from five. She tried to see where the voice was coming from – there were only the warehouses across the traffic lane from her, the parking lot being on the other side of the structure. No cover that she could see, unless …
Someone was above her.
“Well, you saw me stand here as my ride drove off,” she said with a grunt. “You’re right on top of me and all.” It was a guess, of course, but she wanted to show a little control in this situation. Best way to defuse it if whoever it is that’s in the shadows doesn’t want to drop you straight off.
There was silence a moment, and then a soft laugh. From over the edge of the bottom tier of the concrete ziggurat, a figure flipped and landed on the concrete not far from her. It was Freida, of course, in black jeans and boots and a zipper hoodie that had stiff panels in it like body armor. “Sorry about that,” she said, her red hair pulled back in a tail and her eyes twinkling. “Didn’t mean to scare you!”
“Well, mission failed on that one, girl,” said Bobbi with a long exhale. She tried to seem relieved, but her heard rate had yet to dampen – she heard Cagliostro in her head, speaking to her with Stadil’s voice. YOU ARE BEING DECEIVED. And then, YOU MUST ASK HER. Though Freida didn’t have a weapon in her hand, the recollection of those words caused Bobbi to tighten up as if Freida had a pistol pointed squarely at her chest. “Where the hell have you been?”
“Funny you should mention that.” Freida took a step back, twisting slightly on the balls of her feet. She surveyed the area, eyes hardening for a moment as she did so. “I’ve been looking into your buddy, Scalli.”
Bobbi stared at her. “What the hell for?”
“I dunno, something about him.” She checked the sleek watch that hung from her wrist, a mens’ diving chronograph finished in black chrome. “I wanted to make sure where his loyalties were, in case you decided to bring him in.”
“Already done,” Bobbi said, her expression flattening, “I’ve known Scalli for years. You don’t have to worry about him.”
Freida paused as she looked at her. “Oh,” she said. “You’ve told him about everything?”
“He knows everything that you know.” Bobbi looked straight into her face, daring her to protest – if anyone’s going to be questioned here, honey, it’s you, she thought. Behind the mask her face had become, anger flared. How dare she question him! “I trust him, Freida. As I say, he’s guaranteed himself in my eyes.”
There was a pause. “But I haven’t, you mean to say. Is that it?”
Bobbi did not reply for a moment, merely staring into that hard, pretty face. Finally she asked, “Is there some reason why I shouldn’t? You’re not hiding anything, are you?”
Freida stared back at her. More silence, the seconds ticking away between them. When she spoke again, Freida’s voice was … softer, a bit strained. Angry and defeated at the same time. “We’d better go inside,” she said.
“All right.” Bobbi stepped up to the doors and took a keystick from her pocket, which contained all manner of biometric data, and slotted it into the lockplate. From somewhere inside magnetic b
olts could be heard hissing open. Bobbi pushed open one side and let them in.
In silence Bobbi walked to the bar, leaving Freida to follow her with that same air of resignation. “Do you want something to drink?” she asked Freida, selecting a bottle of old Greek ouzo from the top shelf and getting herself a glass. “I got pretty much whatever.”
Freida shook her head, and she took a seat at the bar. “No,” she said. “I’m all right.”
“Yup.” Bobbi poured herself a little bit from the bottle before setting it aside, letting the clear liquid film the inside of her glass as she sloshed it around. “So what’s going on, then?” Simply put.
It wasn’t a challenge so much as it was an invitation for confession, and Freida decided to seize upon it. “I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” she said, looking down at the bar.
Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch! Bobbi took a sip of the ouzo to still the sudden rage and anxiety that swirled around in her chest, maintaining her outward calm. “Oh?”
Freida looked askance. In fact, she seemed to look at everything in the building but Bobbi, letting her blue eyes track the walls, the tables. “I said that I had left the Bureau,” she said. “That’s true. I did. But I didn’t quit on my own.”
“Oh no?” Bobbi canted her head, took another sip. Her irritation was boiling about, but this intrigue held it back a bit. “Go on.”
The redhead heaved a deep sigh. “Exley had me turned out,” she said. “On account of my … extracurricular interests. I was doing a private study of datanauts, you know, looking into new techniques, that sort of thing. At the time our digital defenses weren’t up to snuff, and I wanted to bolster them.”
“The best way to do that would be to become a hack artist yourself, huh.”
“Exactly!” Freida nodded, leaning forward a bit. Her eyes widened a little. “So I was going on as Mysteron, you know, trying to get information so I could make sure we would be safe from intrusion. I … ” She paused, frowning at the bar. “I guess I’m ashamed to say it, but someone got in a few years ago. I don’t know who, and I don’t know how, but … ”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 11
