Mason stared at her. “It matters if we end up in the path of that thing while trying to get out of here!”
“But we don’t.” Scalli looked at Redeye now, gauging her. “Do we? That’s what your people are for.”
Violet opened her fanged mouth to speak, but Redeye lifted her hand. “When I gathered my people,” she said, “it was under the promise of revenge against the people who had stolen their lives and sanity from them, and a good death carrying it out. Nobody in that room wants to outlive the Yathi. Each and every one of them are broken, and they know that. They are all aware of what creatures they carry inside of them. Should something happen to me, or if they survived the death of the other Yathi, they would pose a bigger threat to the city population than any other threat you can imagine. Some of the people in there contain the suppressed consciousnesses of military officers, weapons designers, and worse. What do you think would happen if they were to return to control of those bodies? Can you imagine what they could achieve, free of the Mother of Systems and insane as they are?”
They were all quiet for a moment. “Well, all right,” said Bobbi. “I guess we’d better get going.”
“Yeah.” Scalli looked at Violet. “You okay, Vi?”
Violet gave him a thin, ugly, but grateful smile. “I’m all right,” she said. “I trust the Eye. She knows better than I do about this sort of thing.”
Bobbi looked at Violet too. She’d felt like that with Tom, too. Yeah, she was really seeing some parallels here, parallels that she found uncomfortable. “All right,” she said, “well, we still need to get the fuck out of here.” Turning to Redeye she said, “You said we can’t get out of here through the elevator. Is there another way?”
“Through the hatch,” said Redeye, and she walked that way. “We will have to move through the maintenance tunnels into the primary drainage canal, and from there we can get to the overpass.”
“And the truck that we came in on,” Bobbi said. Another bright flash filled the room; Bobbi caught the blue-white trail of sparks that spat from the centipede’s eye, and the room shook around them as if the fist of the Almighty had come down on the ceiling. The force of impact, and the thunder that rolled down from the incinerator vault on the other side of the door, drove Bobbi against the console. She braced herself there for a moment, beholding the awful glow of the scene that the system shifted to display; as Redeye cranked the wheel open, the rest watched as the elevator shed was reduced to a trail of burning debris blown off the concrete floor of the park. No rubble choked the shaft that Bobbi could see, but there was no way for Redeye’s people to get out now. Would they come out the other way, with them? Would they stand their ground and wait for the Yathi forces to come down and slaughter them?
And then, as if to still her concerns all at once, a sound came from the shaft’s ravaged mouth. It reminded Bobbi instantly of the bestial howl that had come from the chorus of ferals the night that she and Tom had traveled through Renton, but it was not that sound; that sound, however terrible, had been human. What came from the depths of the shaft now was a monstrous thing, ululating and growling all at once, and it seemed to reach into Bobbi’s brain and turn off the switches that would cause her to flee. She could only stare, all of them could only stare, as the sound filled their senses, a distinct and alien roar of rage and pain the mere human throat had not the plasticity to summon. Even the armored drones who had been fast reforming their vanguard at the fore of the centipede-thing gave pause, as if the corpse-machines could not fathom what madness was coming for them.
They boiled out of the shaft like ants, a gout of bodies, white flesh and ragged cloth, all death and fury. Redeye’s reclaimed Yathi were nothing like the drones, who seemed like clumsy children as they struggled to bring their guns to bear in the face of the assault. Bobbi remembered the white killer in the bowels of Orleans Hospital, the speed with which she and the drones had torn apart their unprepared human combatants— and it was the same scene replayed here, the would-be ferals with their bodies filled with exotic implants and nameless systems, blurring as they moved, punching with bare fists and extruded blades as they shredded through armor plate and reanimated flesh. Poleaxed by the collected howl of otherworldly rage, Bobbi, Scalli and Mason could only stare as the advance was taken apart by the angry mass, much as the real Special Tactics officers had been at Orleans. The others behind her began to stir from their spell, but not Bobbi. She could only stare as her personal history repeated itself in an orgy of terrifying violence and milk-white blood.
Then Redeye’s warriors began to charge the centipede, and everything changed.
As best as Bobbi could tell, the centipede was not just a robot, but somehow the leader of the assault. The moment the focus of the assault shifted from the drones to the war machine, the corpse-machines recovered. As one the drones brought their rifles up and fired, at full auto and at point-blank range. At first, the angry mass resisted; hardened skins and body plating, or merely impossible stamina, shook off the wave of armor-piercing death that smashed against them from both sides. Then the first fell, a thin man in a too-big plastic overcoat with long blades sprouting from his fingers, and the mass divided.
Bobbi stared as a broad-shouldered man took the rifle of the nearest drone as if it were a toy, fired a burst of rifle fire through its helmet, and then proceeded to mow down its nearest fellows while hoisting its corpse like a shield. Another, who had inflicted great horror with what looked like an industrial plasma torch that had sprouted from its wrist, suddenly seized as if hit before his back split opened and a battery of articulated cutting arms erupted from its ruin. He waded into the drones again as a thin girl who reminded Bobbi strongly of Violet unhinged her jaw and began to fire lances of red light from her too-wide mouth. Even through the pixellated lens of the holographic display, Bobbi could see her distended throat. Where they had been furies before, Redeye’s followers were now transforming into grotesques of flesh and mechanism that left any cyborg she had ever seen far behind.
“What the fuck is happening to them?” Scalli had slung the machine gun across his back, and now stared at the display with expression hidden by his visor.
“They’re beginning to remember themselves,” Redeye said in a voice soft and heavy with sadness. “We have to go. It won’t be long now.”
The words jerked Bobbi from her horrified reverie. “Won’t be long until what?”
“Until they lose it entirely. Then they’ll kill each other, if they haven’t already. The last will self-destruct.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because that’s what they’ve been ordered to do,” Redeye said with a shake of her head. She gave the wheel a final turn and wrenched it open. “They always follow orders.”
“They can’t do anything else in the state they’re in,” Violet said when Bobbi opened her mouth to press further. “They listen to her like they listened to Mother.”
Bobbi gave the display one last glance. All of Redeye’s former Yathi had become bizarre things, and they waged terrible war on their enemies— both the rapidly thinning ranks of the drones and the centipede itself. White bodies hung from the thing’s plates as it now began to rear up, becoming impossibly tall as it loomed over the lot of them.
“All right.” Scalli tore himself away from the carnage on the holoscreen and wrenched open the unsealed hatch. The smell of dampness and decay filled their nostrils, a fitting perfume to the destruction going on overhead. Unslinging the gun again, he stepped through into a narrow channel of dimly-lit concrete. A few moments passed as he scanned the tunnel in both directions, then stepped back so that the rest of them could enter the tunnel behind him.
“The badass parade,” muttered Scalli as he gestured for the rest of them to follow. “On we go to fuckery.”
They moved through the cloying dimness of the access tunnel with as much speed as they dared, while a storm of sound raged on overhead. The tunnel slanted gently upward, so that the terrifying sou
nds overhead grew louder with every step. Scalli led the group with the heavy gun pointed forward; Bobbi kept close to the enormous man, barely able to see enough to keep her footing, while he hunched to keep from banging his head while tracking the machine gun’s muzzle back and forth.
“Christ, it’s dark,” Bobbi heard Mason say from behind her. “Don’t you people believe in lights?”
“I can see just fine,” said Redeye from the back.
“Of course you can,” Mason muttered. From somewhere over her shoulder, Violet stifled a snicker.
Above them another explosion rocked the park, this one more distant. “Sounds like we’re getting away from them,” Bobbi said.
“Yes.” Redeye’s tone had lost the soft sadness it had before, replaced with resolution. “We’d better pick up the pace if we intend to escape unnoticed, however.”
Scalli grunted. “There might be sentries up ahead. Someone to pick off survivors.”
“If there are, I guarantee you that it will be in our interest to meet and kill them now while the bulk of the Yathi force is entangled.” Redeye pressed past Bobbi, cold and sleek, and shouldered herself into the lead. “Come on, I will show you.”
“Hey!” Scalli gruntled like a startled bear as Redeye took point, but he did not argue— he only shook his head and muttered something that sounded to Bobbi like “crazy bitch.” The big man picked up the pace, and in seconds the whole group was moving at a run toward the end of the tunnel. The burning in Bobbi’s leg renewed, her drug-calmed muscles complaining as they were rudely jogged back into action. She nearly asked to stop a moment, but a new eruption of blasts behind them changed her mind.
The tunnel grew brighter by degrees as they charged ahead, and the sounds of battle grew dimmer again as they outpaced the carnage. By the time they finally reached the tunnel’s mouth, Bobbi’s leg throbbed in earnest. While the others stepped out into the night she slumped against the concrete, gasping for breath, and Scalli bent over to try and pick her up.
“No,” she said, pushing him away. “I’m fine, I’m just…a little winded.”
“Well I don’t mean to sound harsh,” he said lowly, “but we’ll get all the time you need to breathe once we get the fuck out. C’mon, I’ll help you.”
“No, I’m fine!” Bobbi pushed herself off the side of the tunnel and past Scalli into the open air, where she found herself emerging right at the base of the overpass. The industrial park was a mass of flames, great columns of smoke reaching toward the sky. There had been no victory for either side, for the sounds of gunfire and the exotic hiss of energy weapons could be heard in the distance. It looked as though it had been hit by a large military force, not just the less than a hundred combatants that still clashed there. Bobbi thought of the monstrosities that Redeye’s people had become, and shivered.
“Come on!” Redeye’s voice rang from the left; Bobbi looked to see the pale woman scaling the ladder that still hung from over the lip of the overpass, followed dutifully by Violet. Mason was already on the bottom rung. Bobbi limped toward the ladder, Scalli taking up the rear, and began to follow the three of them with difficulty.
“Hey,” said Scalli from the ground after she had struggled up a few rungs, “you sure you gonna be all right? We could pull you up.”
“I’m not crippled,” Bobbi rumbled. “I’m just hurting. I’ll be fine once we get out of here.”
“Suit yourself.” Scalli turned and kept the big gun trained on the distant battle whilst Bobbi crawled her way up the ladder, every step causing her leg to tremble and sear. She found herself wishing that she were anywhere else but there, and admonished herself— after all, there were people dying so that she could escape, people who were losing reclaimed humanity to carry the fight against true monsters. Guilting herself gave Bobbi the drive that she needed to pull herself up the ladder, and soon they all stood sore and winded, blasted with adrenaline, upon the overpass.
They could only stare at the sight of the park from on high, and be amazed. Another of the great armored centipedes had joined the fight, along with what looked like a fresh swarm of armored troopers. Though it was difficult to count the numbers, Redeye’s people still survived to harry them, flashes of light and thundering blasts sounding throughout the complex. “Jesus,” Bobbi whispered as she beheld the might of the angry few. “This is what they can do?”
“This is what they can do,” said Redeye with a nod. “But to be honest, this is still largely pulling punches. I’ve seen far worse in the bellies of their complexes. Those machines, they’re only one type of field apparatus.”
“Ladies!” Scalli called to them as he moved around to the back of the truck. “Let’s get the fuck out of here!” He pulled the back hatch open and tossed in his gun. “We can talk about it inside.”
Mason stared at the conflict below for a moment longer before nodding agreement. “I’m all for that,” he said, and turned to get into passenger side of the truck’s cab. Bobbi could see a certain wildness in his eyes— the reflection of an older war, perhaps, of atrocities in Europe now long passed. Violet and Redeye shared a look before she went around and climbed into the driver’s seat, leaving Bobbi and Redeye to get into the back.
As the truck started up and they climbed inside, Scalli closed the door behind them. The dim light that filtered in through the cab hatch seemed to draw back a bit before the glow of Redeye’s namesake, and Bobbi realized with a start just how bright the glow of the woman’s eye really was. “Move, Violet,” Redeye called through the hatch, and with a lurch the truck sped away from the scene.
As they pulled away, Bobbi felt relief flooding her body, relief coupled with guilt. “That,” she said, “was scary shit.”
“I can understand that,” said Redeye. The woman brought her legs up against her chest, curled into the corner by the hatch. She was watching Bobbi quietly, the eye burning away, her face set in concentration. It made Bobbi feel as though the other woman was looking through her skin, peering into her organs and trying to foretell the future.
She shuddered. “I’m guessing you know where we go from here,” said Bobbi, trying not to think about the eye that blazed at her. “Do you think they’ll come after us?”
“Yes.”
“Do you think your people can hold out?” Scalli drummed his fingers against his knees; the machine gun was propped against a corner. “You didn’t say what they were capable of.”
Redeye looked up at them and shrugged. “Many of them were hardened combat units, enhanced for frontline and security duty, but almost all of them had seen combat. In any case, I imagine our lot will become much simpler very soon.”
Bobbi blinked. “What—” and before she could finish her sentence, a tremendous sound came from behind them. It was a shuddering boom, like the sky cracking open, and with it came a shockwave that sent Violet’s truck pitching on the highway.
“Fuck’s sake!” shouted Mason, and Bobbi shoved her head through the hatch leading into the cab— where she saw reflected in the truck’s rearview mirrors a great column of flame lancing toward the sky. The mushroom cloud that came with it loomed over the distant industrial park, lit up from below by the flames. A vision of apocalypse, it chilled Bobbi’s blood to watch it rise.
“Wait,” rumbled Scalli, who was looking in now as well. “Was that a nuke?”
“No.” Redeye looked at the floor. “We seeded the place with explosives, along with an overload device set up in the incinerator. When the last of my people died, I detonated them all.”
Bobbi looked over her shoulder at Redeye, dumbstruck. “Wait,” she said. “You were…”
“Tied into their vital systems through remote connection.” Redeye’s voice sounded very far away. “I’ve been watching them die as we talked.”
Nobody said anything after that. Nobody had the words.
Eventually, they’d passed through an unsecured section of the Old City running along northeastern Renton, and entered into the Verge. There, they aban
doned Violet’s truck and stole another one that was sitting in the parking lot of an abandoned bodega. Another old conversion, it was too small for Scalli to drive – which seemed to suit him just fine, oddly enough. Given the conspicuousness that Violet’s appearance would have outside of the Old City, Bobbi decided to drive. Mason sat up front with her. They had to be careful not to attract the attention of Civil Protection, after all, and the two of them looked the most normal by far.
They drove across the city toward the Temple, watching the landscape unfold around them like complex origami of light and concrete, a crane with alloy wings. After the madness of the Old City, it looked like civilization…but it didn’t feel like it at all. This was just another wilderness, only the animals didn’t come screaming at you with knives. It was much more dangerous that way, Bobbi thought, with a clarity she had never had before. Now, more than ever, she thought she understood how Tom must have seen the world. It made her feel close to him again, but it disturbed her how empty that feeling was.
“You all right?” Mason was watching her face as she drove, his expression one of fatherly concern.
“Yeah.” She’d forgotten again how old he actually was. “Just trying to process everything. How about you?”
“I’m all right. It’s hard, I know. Especially after bad things happen. But you’re tough.” He smiled a little and looked back out at the city. “You know, this is the first time I’ve actually been inside the city for a long time. Years.”
Bobbi chuckled. “No taste for civilization, huh?”
“Please.” Mason gave a dismissive snort. “You used to live in Tenleytown, you know how we are there. We’re all close. Everyone looks out for each other. Nothing like here.”
“Maybe not as much as we thought. Diana certainly wasn’t looking out for me. Or you.”
Mason’s face darkened at that. “Maybe so,” he said. “Or maybe she was just looking out for someone who died a long time ago.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 30
