Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  Listening to him, Bobbi was struck by the lack of emotion there. She was used to Anton being his smarmy self – this was his voice, but it was almost like…clothing, a bad Chinese copy of a Paris fashion. Nevertheless, it was better than the alternative. she said,

  In the darkness of the slow-box, Bobbi thought she felt him take a deep breath.

 

  he asked. She said nothing further, and so he continued.

  Here it is, Bobbi thought. Whatever it is. Christ, how I wish I had some scotch right now.

 

  Bobbi felt herself growing more uncertain – and uncomfortable – by the second.

 

 

  He paused. Again, Bobbi got the distinct impression of amusement.

  she said, mostly to make herself feel a little better.

 

 

  Cagliostro actually chuckled. he said instead. A slip of something came through in that, perhaps pride or something like it.

  Bobbi knew this part of the story very well. That seemed to Bobbi an exercise in common sense, but before the world would get the message there first had to be the European War. In the wake of the madness of the American Crusade, the European Union had problems of their own – resource shortages, famine in member countries, enormous amounts of refugees from the Middle Eastern nations pouring into borders on all sides. It got too much for the poorer states to bear, and soon enough blocs were being formed to compete for those resources still locally available.

  The problem was, each nation had only the smallest security forces. Up until that point the Union had become a nation unto itself, complete with a unified armed force drawing from the militaries of member states when necessary. After splitting apart, they found that their shares of these forces were too small for their needs; the armies of each state were now much smaller than their 20th century counterparts. And so it was decided that private military companies would be hired to supplement these forces, and the war began – but soon the PMCs could afford to hire many more soldiers, many of them deserters collected (or scalped, as rumors would suggest) from their own clients. Before long, the state militaries, dwarfed by their private contractors, withdrew to form a strong core defense against vital resource infrastructure whilst the PMCs waged war in their name.

  The war dragged on. And on. The pool of cash and resources just recirculated amongst the various combatant PMCs, until the warfare took on a very corporate dimension. PMCs would be given secondary contracts by multinational corporations to strike their competitors’ facilities during attacks on cities in order to further their own interests. Civilians would be bombarded with skillfully branded care packages and pro-corporate propaganda. Hell, by the end of the War some critics had said that even the bombers that flew overhead should be branded to show what corporation sponsored them. It was a mess, a real mess, and of course in the search for money a great many needless atrocities were committed. Bobbi figured that this was how this story was going to go.

  And she wasn’t at all disappointed.

  She did. The heart of Tblisi burned in a matter of hours when the massive hydrogen vaults were bombarded and destroyed, creating an explosion that made the ghost of Krakatoa look on in astonishment. she said, realizing how hollow it sounded.

  said Cagliostro, bombing of Bonn. He destroyed everything that was once sacred to him, you see. And like so many men, he did so because he thought it was the right thing to do. In this case, Ivan did not do these things of his own volition.>

  Bobbi took this in with an increasing sense of horror. If this story was at all true, then the man that she had worked for was not just a criminal of the mundane sort, but responsible for some of the most grievous moral offenses of the European War. Hitler could have taken a page or two from this particular book. Revulsion spread through her mind like the most virulent of plagues and she found herself hard pressed not to speak out, to rail at him. She wanted to condemn him with every atom of her being – but she managed to hold her tongue and her breath, however figuratively, and allowed him to continue.

  said Cagliostro,
 

  Bobbi wasn’t sure what he was trying to say – no, she did know what he was trying to say. She didn’t want to hear it. She had known something was wrong the moment she stepped into that facility, when she had seen the eerie precision of the angles and the horrible towers filled with stolen flesh. Human minds could create such things, but not capture the same tone. she said, carefully choosing her words.

  replied Cagliostro.

  she said,

 

  It was Bobbi’s turn to be silent now. Her mind whirled; she had thought that the enemy had been a corporation, in itself a pernicious form of life, but entirely tied to human beings. But something alien? UFO-flying, cow-burning, probe-her-in-her-pink-little-ass aliens? She didn’t know if she should laugh and tell him that he was fucking with her or unplug and spend the next few years in a fetal position. There was no existential frame of reference for this. But she was not weak, and she had seen much. She would hold herself together.

  she said instead.

 

  She was silent for a while. Six seconds, precisely. It felt like a thousand years.

  Cagliostro replied.

  she said instead.

  said the ghost-thing.

 

 

  Hesitation flooded her. Bobbi said; she felt fear from whose source she could not be certain – fear of invasion, or betrayal, or perhaps simply of learning truth that she would never have wanted on her best of days.

  said the shade of Anton Stadil.

  The admission seemed to help a little, but then his answer came and washed it away.

  A pause.

  she said.

 

  Another eon passed in miniature. she said.

  He did. At first there were just images, snatches of memory from a thing that had lived long before she and the modern world she knew had been conceived of, let alone born. At first she saw a place like nothing she had ever thought of. She saw vast masses of black rock, continents sprawling beneath a violent bowl of clouds that glowed green with the energy of sprawling storms. She saw cities that never ended, bizarre towers and nameless industrial machinery reaching from coast to coast across the black stone. And around this all, a vast and fog-choked sea of gleaming liquid silver.

  After this, more images – this time scenes within the great industrial complexes, of great machines thrumming away in near-darkness, lit only by the dim green haze of lamps bolted into walls of black metal. Conveyors churning out devices that she could not identify, yet somehow seemed familiar. She saw fields of tanks arranged in rows, each containing large, dark shapes, each the size of a horse; though blurry thanks to the milky fluid in which they floated, Bobbi was reminded shudderingly of spiders and lobsters and wished she could look away.

  And then, a view of a small, dim world turning in the dark, swirling with pallid green mist – the same mist, she knew, that had clad the skies that she had just seen. Flashes of light shot through the horrible clouds like the firing of nerves, playing across its surface. She knew its name as human tongues could manage it – Yathkalhgn – but in her head heard the name it only as a hissing, clicking, animal thing that she understood its native species applied to the twisted globe.

  As the view turned round the planet, she saw that massive, livid wounds had been torn across its surface; the eldritch clouds could not disguise the great volcanic rents that belched flame and magma without cease, the traces of the great transmitter that had been built to end humanity and save the race that dwelled there.

  Finally, when the view had turned so that the ravaged hemisphere was full in view, Bobbi saw thing that spelled the doom of the Yathi race – a great red sun, so massive even at a far distance that it seemed ready to consume her entire field of vision, stood sick and dying in the center of its benighted system. In the background of all this, the horrible clicks and hisses were growing louder, and she knew the sounds to belong not just to one mouth, but many; they boiled into a mass as the sun began to flare and burst, pour into her skin like hot water, ravaging her, tearing at her very substance until she felt that she was one with the ailing star, that she may explode just as it now did, and the voices were a tide that crushed her own mind’s feeble pleading without mercy. White light filled her mental theatre, and she felt herself blown apart…

  …and reformed, knowing of the truth, the reality of things that were and of things that may well come. Bobbi finally understood. She understood the world. She understood Tom. She understood what lay behind the veil of reality, and now she understood what must be done to ensure that things didn’t get worse than they already were.

  She thanked him out of the reflex of politeness, nothing more. He told her what she must do, and she thanked him again with a brain full of mental static. She disconnected from the network, and then she cried, long and hard, curling up in the dark until Scalli came and held her. She didn’t stop until her eyes were bloody red and her heart was emptied, and there only remained the cold dark of the void she had beheld.

  They drove in silence for a while, slowly traveling
along the Renton border. They stopped to eat what was possibly the world’s most ancient Rocket Chef, but the printed protein was ashes in her mouth. Maybe the technology had come from them, these horrible things that lived in the skins of so many people. Anton – Cagliostro – had said that they saw humans as cattle, those which they did not directly inhabit. She wondered if they ate human flesh, and recognized that as the fear of a herd animal. Now they sat outside the weed-choked parking lot of the crumbling burger joint, surrounded by a landscape of squalor with this massive truth looming between the both of them.

  Bobbi remembered a very similar situation, staring across the Sound with Tom sitting like a storm cloud beside her. Now it was Scalli – who sat more like a mountain than a cloud, but the feeling was the same. “So,” she said, not sure what else to say.

  “So.” Scalli took a deep breath. “They’re called the Yathi. They rule the world, or are trying very hard to do so, and eventually want to infect us all with their own minds and take us all over.”

  Bobbi nodded once. “Most of us, anyway,” she said. “The population’s smaller. The rest…well, it’s like I told you.”

  “Experimental subjects and breeding stock,” he said. “Jesus fuck. So what the fuck are we supposed to do? We can’t kill them all.”

  She shook her head. “Yathi like to emulate what they used to look like, kinda,” she said. “So you know, they like the white skin and silver eyes like Merducci has. They do the same thing with the…” Bobbi paused for a moment, trying to remember the word that Cagliostro had given her. “Xsiarhotl. The ghouls, whatever.”

  “Sounds South American,” said Scalli. “Mayan, Aztec, whatever. What were these things like back, uh, home?”

  “Cagliostro didn’t go into details,” she said. “But I get the idea they’re like…spiders and lobsters and things. Kind of. Not at all human-like, that’s for sure. They can’t stand that we only have the four limbs. Consider us a substandard organism.”