Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  “What’s the point behind that, then?” Mason cocked his head and studied her anew. “I mean it’s an indicator light, sure, but indicating what?”

  “Mine is a two-stage system,” Redeye explained. “In the first stage, physical systems are brought online to ensure the platform – that is, I – can physically survive. This occurred when I was released from the storage structure in which Cagliostro had kept me.”

  “And the second?”

  Redeye smiled faintly at Mason. “The second stage allows for activation of the failsafe payload. I need a target for that, but thankfully that can be self-realized and does not require outside direction. It must be in sight, however, and in close proximity.”

  “Well there’s something at least,” Bobbi muttered. “So what about a target, then? Do you have one now?”

  “Before the attack came, the one you know as Cagliostro was transmitting data on the location at which he wanted us to strike. I have the location, partial data on its defenses – but I do not know what is inside.” Redeye frowned in thought. “However, I think that I know what it might be.”

  “All right,” Bobbi sat forward, fixing her eyes on Redeye’s face. “So what are you thinking?”

  “I can think of only one area that he would select, given my internal parameters,” she said. “And that would be the planetside terminus of their colonization matrix.”

  Scalli sat forward, too. “I’m assuming that ‘s some kind of transmitter?”

  “Indeed.” Redeye nodded. “The colonization matrix is the device which transmits compressed consciousness data from the Yathi homeworld to this one.”

  “Yeah,” Mason said cautiously. “So what’s the deal with that? Minds transmitted across space into the brains of the broken? I guess folks were right about tinfoil hats all those years ago.”

  Scalli snorted.

  “Something like that,” said Redeye with the faintest smirk. “Not that it would have done anything to disperse the signal. The matrix is made up of the transmitter on their homeworld, which takes up nearly half the planet in its infrastructure and power systems as far as I have been told, and the receiving unit which is here on Earth. For whatever reason, they cannot replicate or otherwise replace the receiver should it be destroyed; they can merely repair and maintain it. Therefore, it makes sense that destroying the receiver would be his goal.”

  “Destroy it,” Bobbi said. “You mean shut it down.”

  “It’s all the same thing,” said Redeye with a shrug. “It will be nonfunctional, and the rest of them will burn alive when their sun explodes.”

  Silence fell amongst them for a moment; she spoke so calmly of such genocide, even if the victims did deserve it. Or did they? Surely they weren’t all foaming psychopaths, plotting to destroy the human race through psychic replacement. Surely they weren’t all evil – alien, perhaps, but that did not mean evil alone. “I…I need to know something,” said Bobbi. “Something more about them. They came here…when?”

  “Three centuries or so ago.” Redeye looked amongst them, face stern now that it was story time. “They had already determined the impending death of their civilization and set up a schedule, as well as selected the human race as the garden from which they would blossom. At the time, cosmological conditions were such that single individuals could be transmitted alone – one or two a year. Apparently there was even the ability to quantum-tunnel small amounts of physical matter to this world, which was how they were able to establish their technological base so quickly on this planet, but when they cracked the crust of the planet from the stress of it they thought better of trying again. That’s when she came. She was the first.”

  “Ghia Merducci.” Bobbi’s expression hardened. “The Mother of Systems.”

  Redeye nodded. “That’s why they call her what they do; it is as much a literal description as it is a title, you see. It was she who engineered the entire colonial program, she who chose our species for replacement. She came, and others followed. It took them a hundred years to establish themselves here. Small numbers, limited technological resources.”

  “So what about this matrix?” Mason asked.

  “I’m getting to that.” Redeye looked past them a moment to the rows of cult-soldiers standing in their neat rows beyond. “This place is a colony. Colonies take time to establish. Early on they’d projected themselves into only choice individuals, people who had the resources and intelligence that they could emulate without causing undue problems. Brilliant, mercurial types. In the case of the Mother of Systems, she incarnated in the body of Jeanne Antoinette Poisson, the Marquise de Pompadour.”

  Scalli and Bobbi looked at each other. “Who’s that?” Bobbi asked.

  It was Mason who answered that, to Bobbi’s surprise. “She was the mistress of Louis XV,” said the soldier. “A French king – one of the most famous kings, in fact. She was known for her mind and her intellectual attachments.” He frowned faintly at when he everyone was staring at him now. “I went to college, you know.”

  Well well. There were unplumbed depths to Harry Mason yet. “Right,” said Bobbi, “so she started it all.”

  “Bet it was easy to recruit in the court,” said Mason. “I mean. Those people had nothing to live for but shoes.”

  Redeye smirked. “Very different from today, to be certain.”

  “Right, well.” Bobbi cleared her throat. “So things went from there. We know that they’ve infiltrated society since then, and that they’re behind the way things are going now – accelerating the advance of technological development beyond the ability of human beings to cope with.”

  “It’s not that.” Mason was getting into it now, the old man he truly was coming out to speak with experience. “It’s not the technology itself. It’s not just advancement. It’s the system, the socio-economic policies behind it. The erosion of culture in the face of pop sensibilities far beyond what seems real. I’ve lived through this already, you kids. That’s what it is. It’s like…”

  “It’s like something from another planet.” Bobbi looked at Mason now, equal parts impressed and wryly amused. “It’s no wonder you jumped in with us when Scalli told you what we knew.”

  “We’re getting sidetracked,” said Scalli, as if on cue.

  Redeye blinked at him; Bobbi saw how the light of her namesake glowed through the thin tissue of her eyelid as it fluttered. “Ah,” she said, “I suppose that we did. As I said, when they first arrived, the projection assembly back on their homeworld was only strong enough to project one mind at a time; it was costly, and time-consuming. Over a hundred years or so, the Mother and her people here built a kind of receiver here on Earth – first a small-scale one in France, which they then dismantled and moved to Vienna after the French Revolution. At the end of the 19th century, however, they moved it here, to Seattle. It is now large enough to facilitate a massive broadcast that should supplant the majority of the cultivated population before their star goes nova. From there, it’s a matter of either processing or destroying the rest of the human population, while they continue to change the climate.”

  “That’s something I don’t understand,” said “Bobbi. “Genefex is a biogenetics concern. They’d have to have carried their medical expertise with them else they wouldn’t have lived these three hundred years. So why use people at all? Why not just grow clones in tanks or whatever, and then possess those?”

  “I am not an expert on the technique,” said Redeye. “I only know that there is something about the process that requires a developed template consciousness to work from. As it stands—”

  “Guys.” Scalli cleared his throat. “If we destroy this thing, it’ll will stop the invasion, right?”

  “Yes.” Redeye shrugged again, deflating a little. “And no. In the end, the ones that remain will have to be hunted down and killed if we are to be rid of them entirely. The current population could still control the planet from the shadows, just as they have been. They, however, could not be left to degene
rate like the other former Yathi have . Can you imagine if a large enough number of people went insane like they did? All life on this planet may well be destroyed.”

  “But killing them would take a lot of planning,” said Scalli, though he didn’t sound like he disliked the idea at all. “Be a hell of an operation. Long-term.”

  “Terrorist organizations exist for far less noble aims than the survival of the human race,” Redeye pointed out.

  Bobbi blinked at her. “I don’t know that I’d call that terrorism.”

  “I can assure you that the Yathi remaining would feel very much in disagreement.”

  “History’ll judge that,” said Scalli. “Right now, it’s like you said, Red. We – well, you – destroy this…matrix. You said you know how to get there.”

  “I do.” Redeye nodded, reaching up to brush the sheet of long hair from her face again. Flickers of humanity there, the dark eye that of a living woman, still unlit with balefire. “I know very little about the installation short of its structural plan, as I said before, and a little about its defenses. That isn’t the problem, of course.”

  Bobbi’s brows arched. “No?”

  Redeye shook her head. “No,” she said. “The problem is its location. It is right under the middle of the New City, and not terribly far from Genefex Tower. If we were to go there…” She shrugged. “It would be a very difficult undertaking.”

  “But that’s where we need to go.” Scalli leaned forward a little, looking the woman in her burning red eye, not afraid at all. After all, he had seen worse now, and her power was lost on him. “Is that right?”

  She looked back at him. “Yes.”

  “Then I say we go.” Scalli looked to Bobbi. “You agree?”

  Bobbi nodded. “There’s no other choice, the way I look at it. But what if it isn’t the receiver? I mean, what if this is something completely different and we don’t know about it?”

  “Then we will have struck a blow,” Redeye said. “Considering the situation, have we any more important a duty than that?”

  Bobbi looked at Violet, who was looking up at her leader with rapt attention. The smile on her face told of adoration that had long since become zealotry. She wondered if this was how they all would have been, the maddened fighters that had followed the enigmatic cyborg, if they had arrived at the base on a better day.

  “I guess not,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. “Let’s just all try and get out alive.”

  Based on the data salvaged from Redeye’s exchange with Cagliostro, the facility – whatever it maintained – was a fortified complex buried ten stories under a very normal business tower in the middle of Belltown called Staunton Tower. From the surface up, the structure was a standard one: twenty stories of absolutely everyday businesses and office facilities that had been nanoformed twenty years ago, absolutely nothing associated with Genefex or its Yathi masters. Access to the complex below was made through a single elevator shaft hosting double cars. Some mechanism identified secure personnel and called up the elevator leading to the complex, so that only Yathi could normally get in.

  The complex itself was comprised of four floors, if you could call them that. Each room was connected to the other through a system of corridors, but at different levels; the effect was that of a web of sorts, or perhaps an ant farm. There were also a series of distribution shafts running straight up and down between certain chambers, but those would be locked down from the control nexus at the topmost chamber – a heavily fortified chamber that they would avoid unless they absolutely couldn’t. As Bobbi stared at the holographic map that the computer had generated she remembered what Cagliostro had said, how the Yathi in their native form looked nothing like humanity. The names of each room seemed to point toward ominous function: tissue processors and drone programming centers, assembly plants and the like. One chamber stood at the bottom of the web, connected only by a single corridor: this one bore no title, and it was there that Redeye swore they must go.

  Redeye talked about what she knew of its defenses, of automated guns and security barriers and hordes of corpse-drones altered to do combat. The security network grew more and more dense as the route neared the bottom chamber, until Bobbi wondered if it were the Mother of Systems herself that laired down in the nameless place. Even a handful of the defenses would have been death for the five of them, even as unusual as they all were. Bobbi felt herself shrinking as the cyborg went on, until Redeye stopped to look at her.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong?” Bobbi lifted her brows. “Well, yeah.” She sat up in her seat, realizing with surprise that she had slid down in it so far as she had. “Look at this place. How are we supposed to get into that mess and come out living?” She had become the leader, she knew, but her optimism – if not her credulity – could only be stretched so far. “Swarming with gun turrets and monsters and whatever the fuck else, and that’s only what we know about. How do you propose that we get past all that?” Her words echoed the thoughts of everyone else in the room, the way they looked at Redeye with expression clouded with doubt. Even Violet looked unsure.

  “Well,” said Redeye, without so much as a tic in her placid expression, “how would you normally disarm such defenses?”

  Bobbi frowned at her. “I’d normally hack it all, of course,” she said, “as much as possible. But how am I supposed to do that? These are alien systems, and even if they weren’t–”

  “You did it at the other place,” Scalli said. “I mean, at the Data Nexus where…” He shook his head. “I mean, with the Grail.”

  The images swam back. Freida in that horrible chair, possessed by the chorus of machine-things. The strangeness of the system’s landscape as she entered through the Grail, the darkness that swallowed her, the brain-cracking effort with which she somehow forced her way out of the grip of that distant place. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t do that again. I don’t know how to interface with it. And even then…”

  Redeye was quiet for a few seconds. “I think,” she said, unfolding herself so that she stood, “That you should try and speak to Cagliostro again on that topic.”

  “We can’t get to him yet,” Bobbi said darkly. She thought she knew what was coming next.

  “Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean he won’t be back soon. We’ll need time to plan our assault, and I rather think that we all need a break. Perhaps you’ll find him by tomorrow; I cannot imagine that would have been destroyed by such an attack, assuming that he was.”

  Bobbi frowned a little, but she nodded her head. “Yeah,” she said in resignation, “yeah, I guess you’re right. We’ll all bunk out as we can tonight, and then see what can be done in the morning.” She’d keep the place closed; it’s not like she needed the money, and having Redeye and Violet around customers would just invite disaster. Besides, they might wake up to find Yathi agents pounding on their door. “I’ll get some beds set up downstairs for you guys.”

  “That’d be nice,” said Violet, who seemed to be perking up much more in civilization; she smiled at Bobbi from Redeye’s side, the yellowed fangs and missing nose breaking up what would have otherwise been a beautiful face. “I appreciate it.”

  “I’ll take care of it.” Scalli sounded about as excited as Bobbi did, but he got up without disagreement. He and Mason headed for the elevator, joined by an increasingly cheerful Violet. Camp bed or not, Bobbi figured it was probably the first time she’d had a clean place to sleep for a very long time.

  They packed themselves in and the doors sealed shut, leaving Bobbi and Redeye alone once more. The two women sat quietly for a bit, just as they had before, as if each one waited for the other to speak. There was so much, after all, hanging between them. Finally, it was Redeye who broke the silence once again.

  “I understand that your friend was taken by them,” she said.

  Bobbi felt her hand ball into a fist on its own. “Yeah, but it looks like I ended up killing him anyway.”

  “
And if you did not?”

  Bobbi stared at her. This, again, was land into which she did not wish to venture. “But I did. There’s no way he could have survived that blast.”

  “What if he escaped beforehand?” Redeye turned her face toward Bobbi, fixing her with that one angry eye. “What if he’s out in the world, ridden by one of those things?”

  A knot of dread formed deep in Bobbi’s guts. She set her lips, unwilling to show emotion to the other woman – angry again, angry that she would dare to bring the topic up. But then, there wasn’t much that Redeye did not dare. In that moment, Bobbi hated her for her boldness. “I guess I’ll have to kill him, then,” she said in a forced voice that did not belong to her at all. “I mean that’s the alternative, else he ends up crazy.”

  More silence passed between them, in which Redeye continued to stare at her, bore into her skull with that dim red light. Then she nodded and got to her feet. “I am glad to hear it,” she replied. “I have never had someone special, but I imagine that it would be hard for me to face it. I do not know that I could do it. I am glad that you can.”

  And then Redeye left her with the words ringing in her ears: I’m glad that you can. The murderous machine-girl, the cyborg killer, praising her for doing the worst thing that Bobbi could think of. Not even the hottest setting on the shower dial could purge the chill that filled her, nor could she push it from her mind when she tried one last time, in vain, to find Cagliostro before collapsing into bed. She lay there staring at Tom’s coat in its lexan box, pinned to the wall, the bloodstains dark and shiny in its fabric like the tracks of tears she could not shed.

  She closed her eyes, and prayed she would not dream. It did not come easily, nor was it answered; that night, her mind was filled with the horrible visions that Cagliostro had shown her, the distant and horrible world which Earth would someday become.

  If not for her. If not for them.

  The next morning found NewsNetNow all abuzz about a Civil Protection raid on a drug factory in the Old City. News footage of a battle in the industrial park that they had fled, incredibly doctored, premiered on the morning feed. There, valiant Special Tactics officers battled with what looked like maddened victims of Shard overdoses, throwing themselves at the guns of the armored men who of course had no alternative but to tear them down. “Officers sustained only light casualties as they repulsed the wave of violent addicts,” said Maya Frail in grave tones, “before attempting to secure the repurposed industrial space in which the factory was located. Sources within Civil Protection say that surviving gang members operating the factory detonated a self-destruct device within the complex as officers began securing the premises, but that all officers involved in the raid were able to evacuate before that happened. A marked increase in violence in the Decommissioned Suburban Zone has sparked new outcries to begin resettlement…”