Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2)

by Michael Shean

  In the meantime, Violet got a new face. It had been her old face, which made it easier to reconstruct, but the young woman had been much prettier than Bobbi had expected. She wasn’t just pretty, she was radiant in way that Bobbi had only ever gotten with heavy surgery, and the way that Mason and Scalli looked at her stirred a strange jealousy in Bobbi that had also took her unawares. Violet got new teeth, too, made from triple-strong bonded cermet with fractal edges. Underground technology, not quite Wonderland caliber but pretty damned nasty. Bobbi had Chin do it, the same guy who had done up Tom’s face a few years back, and was surprised at how advanced the doc’s technological base had become in that short time. Violet seemed to revel in the attention she was getting, though around Bobbi she remained cool, something that both mystified and bothered the hackette.

  Mason and Scalli had become friends, or at the very least close comrades. Bobbi had expected that the brotherhood provided by combat and military service, corporate or otherwise, would bond them. They were gearing up for the operation using Bobbi’s money, giving Pierre (who now was very happy indeed to receive her calls) an enormous amount of business. Redeye worked with them quite a bit as well, demonstrating her capabilities. Bobbi watched footage of the thin woman sparring naked with the two men, spare and hairless under her clothes, her plastic skin deflecting blades and bullets as if they were made of paper. She moved with the grace that Bobbi remembered from her vigil over Orleans, the lethal delicacy and speed of the gazelle-woman whose sister Tom had killed. It was a sobering thing to watch, and not just because of her incredible durability; Bobbi could see that her false skin bore scars from weapons which could do what mundane arms could not. That she could weather the wounds made by the exotic weapons of the Yathi and her body could still heal gave Bobbi confidence – and yet it brought up terrible memories each time she watched, reminding her of the dark waters through which she navigated.

  Bobbi didn’t sleep much at night, either. Her dreams boiled and writhed with the nightmare images of all that she had witnessed. The faces of those who had died, the wild-eyed creatures under Redeye’s command, spending their fury against the things that had taken them. Freida, murdered and instantly recycled into an abomination by an equally abominable machine. Diana – or what had once been Diana – consumed by her own sins, and ultimately slain at Bobbi’s hand. That last bit Bobbi dreamt the most of, the last moment in which the crusher fried her heart. Had she really been so easy to kill? Just a thing riding in a body which had never been given the treatment of her fellows? The moment had marked a first for her, the moment she had dreaded all her life, when she had been forced to take another. Her business was sometimes a dangerous one, of course, but she had always carried the nerve crusher when lethality would have served her far better. She had never really been an innocent, but at least she had been able to say that she had never harmed another. She could not say that now. Bobbi felt the pain of that loss, keen and hollowing, and she knew that something had changed inside of her.

  But so many things had changed in the past two months. The world’s foundations had been cracked for them all by the bows of truth’s black hammer. For Bobbi, however, nothing had changed her perception of the world more than the first time she had used the network after speaking to Cagliostro’s ghost-image. It had taken her a day or so after the first nightmares before she did it; though she had announced to the rest that she was ready, Bobbi had felt anything but. She had sat at her desk in the top of the Temple, staring at the silver network port mounted in the floor beneath it, musing on what the ghost had told her and the knowledge that it had revealed.

  She knew how the Yathi had such incredible control over the world which she once thought herself an adept; there was no need for an interface wall, no need for static programs, no need for a terminal. Entire programs were woven into being, on demand, through sheer mental ability; their hackers worked off memorized templates which they could then modify on the fly as the situation required. Cagliostro’s ghost contained a small archive of the most useful such templates, and united with her interface she could pull them as she required. It would give her power over the global communications network – and every mundane system connected to it – that she might have given her soul for a few years ago. Now, though, she was terrified of that power, what it meant, where it came from. Cagliostro could have helped them…but Cagliostro wasn’t here. He might not ever return – he could have been destroyed when the Yathi hit Redeye’s complex, and the thing lurking in her headware might very well be the only thing left of him. They couldn’t depend on the great disembodied mind-system; like any other god, it had left when they needed him most.

  Well, that would explain the state of the world for you, Bobbi thought when she finally decided to take the plunge. I guess we’ll just have to help ourselves.

  Logging into the network was not the dive into Stygian waters that she had expected. Unlike the cold torpidity of the Chorus system, the experience of the global information network through the Yathi infrastructure was now like diving into warm, fast water; welcoming but hazadrous, the currents of data threatening to carry her away until she found her bearings. The certainty of knowledge was still there, of course, but that awareness was far more powerful; Bobbi heard the whispers of other voices, felt the speed of transfer as if it were the rushing of wind over her skin. There was no need for a terminal, no need for specialized software. Her brain processed layers of subtlety that incarnated themselves as a second body, a body made of thought and of awareness, yet as real to her as the living flesh that she had for the moment been divorced rom. Cagliostro’s ghost no longer spoke to her as a conscious entity, but rather as an instinct pressing upon her from somewhere in the back of her mind. With its help, she flew through the network as surely as if she were a bird on the wing, yawning fields of data wheeling beneath her, and she knew in that moment that she was a master of the world.

  When she disconnected, Bobbi was surprised to find the warm kiss of tears drying on her cheeks. She should probably not have been; the experience had been bliss that she had never known, a rarefied magnificence of thought and action, was enough to make most anyone cry. But this sensation, as beautiful as it was, became immediately blunted as the memory of the voices which she’d heard came to the fore. She knew that they were not mere traces of data, but something far darker: the tracks of other minds in the network, deadly and sharp, the Yathi which she sought to destroy. Realizing this, Bobbi felt the joy in her blood simmer away to nothing. She damned them – and Cagliostro, too – for now she felt the destruction of the thing which she loved most of all. The righteous art of the hack was irrevocably crushed into the shape of a sword, dark and sharp, meant for only the future purpose of destroying others. She would never forgive them. She for damned sure couldn’t forgive herself.

  But the damage had been done, and Bobbi could not deny the power of the weapon that she had been given. She soon found that the systems which she had spent all her youth learning to hack were nothing before the power of the Yathi protocols, even government systems. It was clear to her now how easily penetrated the world’s systems truly were. And why not? The Yathi had manipulated humanity to embrace the technology which they themselves invented, this spiderweb of data networks at whose center they were busy tugging threads. Bobbi felt like an intruder, which was fairly hilarious considering the kind of business she was in – and yet she did, like an unwilling thief in the night, knowing that she could essentially dive into whatever system she wanted so long as there weren’t Yathi components or subsystems to challenge her.

  But that was the other side of the sword that she had been given. Now that she knew how the digital realm truly worked, and the Yathi protocols had been subsumed inside her headware, she was keenly aware of the presence that they had throughout the global communications network. It was as the ghost-image had told her; they were everywhere, and she couldn’t know what might be in a given node or system until she attempted entry. One errant dive
could tip them off. It kept her from exploring her newfound abilities beyond the few nodes that the ghost had already provided as practice in her headware memory, constantly flexing her new mental presence until she was able to make use of the protocols with reasonable agility. She didn’t feel up to her old standards, but she wasn’t even sure if her old standards would have been enough in the first place. Bobbi was swimming in the dark.

  The fact that civil infrastructure was one of the systems that was almost guaranteed to be saturated with alien subsystems made planning difficult. Bobbi did not dare hack subway computers to monitor train movements or observe through security for fear of tipping off the Yathi to their plan. While Bobbi sat on her hands, or did more everyday research into train schedules and downloaded freely available civil floor plans from the hall of records database – tasks that didn’t require hacking, that could be done on enough ghost accounts so as to not attract attention. She analyzed real-time feed sent over encrypted radio by Mason and Scalli from sophisticated imagers disguised as contact lenses, gritting her teeth every time a new spool came in to keep from reaching for a network plug to double-check it. Violet, with her new face and in socially-acceptable clothes, had done a remarkable job changing into something of a Jane Wa girl, doing recon while riding trains in a five-grand Bella Rossi babydoll dress (yet another resuscitation of that particular fashion) and rain boots like some animate china doll. Bobbi had thought unwelcomely of the Princess Dolls when Violet first brought it home, so between her fashion choices and the still-sour looks, Bobbi was pleased to have her away.

  Bobbi had gone over every possibility – in through the front door, guns blazing; through the sewers; Scalli had even done the legwork on possibly approaching the roof via stealthed microlights and going down through the building after office hours in thermoptic camo. In the end, however, none of these approaches panned out. Redeye said the building had laser projectors on the roof, invisible death on speed dial, and there was no sewer access; everything was provided on-site by what appeared to be some kind of reclamation suite. So they decided that they’d go in through the subway tunnels. It was cliché, sure, but the Yathi had been cliché as well. They had built an access tunnel from the tunnels to the complex, bypassing the elevator entirely. Even monsters needed back doors, as it turned out. They had to figure out a plan to get down there without discovery, all of that special forces bullshit.

  The boys had bribed a maintenance worker at the Belltown station that Violet had scouted for them – she didn’t say how, and Bobbi honestly didn’t want to know. Scalli vouched, and Violet would have sniffed him out if he were Yathi. That was enough for her. Through their new agent, they’d stowed a cache of gear and weaponry in a maintenance closet a little down the line from the platform. They’d come in at 2 a.m., just before the last train went out – and with the maintenance guy’s help they’d head down the tunnel, suit up, and make the long walk down to where the maintenance tunnel awaited. As they’d be underground, a satellite network connection wasn’t reliable and a local signal was likely to cut in and out, a severe liability considering the kind of work that Bobbi was expecting. Apparently one couldn’t connect to Yathi computer systems directly using traditional radio wavelengths, either, but Redeye corrected that by building an appropriate transmitter for Bobbi when she wasn’t practicing her nutbar ninja-girl routine. It was only the size of a baby’s fist, but Redeye assured her that it would do the business.

  According to what they’d laid out, it shouldn’t be very difficult for them to get into the subway tunnels with the help of their newfound friend. They were prepared to shoot their way through if they had to, though Bobbi had insisted it would be nonlethal; Scalli arranged to get them little needle pistols loaded with flechettes coated with tweaked synthetic etorphine, enough to drop anyone hit in seconds. What Redeye and the boys had in store for the Yathi was entirely different, but Bobbi hadn’t accepted anything more than the needler herself. She knew, of course, that there was nothing in that hive that she wasn’t prepared to kill. She just didn’t want to accept it too readily.

  The dark skies rained on the night they left the Temple for Belltown. The group took two vehicles according to plan: Scalli, Mason and Redye took the van that Bobbi bought for Scalli to replace the one they left in Tenleytown, while Bobbi and Violet took a black-market Piette Stiletto with fictional tags. The Freakshow and the Face Brigade, Scalli had called the two units. They loaded up into their respective vehicles and marked the way to go, synchronized the little earbud radios they all wore, and made their separate ways into the night.

  Bobbi was in no way happy to be riding with Violet, who still had not warmed up to her since the night she took on the Yathi protocols, but the reconstructed feral had not acted against her. Bobbi drove quietly, swallowed in the heavily-pinned length of Tom’s black coat, which she’d liberated from its lexan cage. Wrapped up in memories as well as fabric, she felt better in ways that she couldn’t explain to anyone – least of all to Scalli, but he only shrugged when he saw her come out wearing it.

  “So I didn’t think you’d be taking that thing out of storage,” Violet said as they prowled the roads along the mouth of the bay; the water glittered like a dark mirror, lit up by the lights of ships and the jeweled pyramids of the arcologies floating out in distance.

  The words jolted Bobbi out of the reverie of driving. “Do what?”

  “I said, I didn’t think you’d be taking that coat out of storage,” Violet said. Bobbi looked straight ahead, but she could feel the girl’s eyes fixed upon her – the new nose was narrow and turned up at the end, a perfect little white girl nose, but Bobbi could only see the puckered hole in her mind at the moment.

  “Lot of history in this coat,” Bobbi said, and she felt her fingers tightening on the steering wheel. “Why shouldn’t I, considering where we’re going? Seems a waste to leave it hanging on the wall.”

  Violet snorted. “I suppose I didn’t expect you to be so sentimental.” She picked a piece of imaginary lint from the front of her Agent Europa ski jacket. “So here we are.”

  “Here we are,” Bobbi said with a slight toss of her head. “Think we can do it?”

  “I think that we can get in,” said Violet. “Why, don’t you think that we have a chance?”

  “I think that chance doesn’t matter,” Bobbi said.

  Violet made the slightest little coughing sound. “I would agree, as it happens,” she said.

  Something in her tone made Bobbi squint, and she felt irritation boiling up under the skin of tension. “All right,” she said, “you’ve been looking at me strangely for a month now. What’s your problem?”

  “My problem is that you’re different,” Violet said. “You’re not the same as you were when I met you.”

  “When you met me, I had just killed one friend and was in fear for the life of another one,” Bobbi rumbled. “And I’d taken a crack in the head – not to mention all the other shit that had happened up to then. A girl can only take too much before flattening out.” Her words were confident, but inside she wondered if Violet had sniffed out the change in her headware – and if so, what did that mean? Images of the severed heads in the grocery shrine flashed before her, and she found her pulse had begun to race. She was driving this time around; if Violet attacked her, could she pull her needler and get a shot in? Bobbi thought of the fractal-edged threshing teeth and felt her muscles tense.

  “Mmmm. Maybe.” Violet looked at Bobbi for a long moment. “Do you know what implants they put inside of me?”

  Bobbi kept her face as straight as possible, a porcelain mask. “No.”

  “Before the transfer failed, I was fitted with a variety of…social systems. Pheromone emitters, mood-altering toxins. I was also fitted with an empathic analyzer – do you know what that is?”

  “No.” Fear continued to spread through Bobbi as she shouldered the car through an interchange; a wall of skyscrapers loomed ahead, marking their entrance into downtown. If this
was going to go south all of a sudden, maybe she could get them into the Waters first, into the crowds and distractions. She might be able to escape.

  “A combination of facial analysis and biomonitor systems,” Violet said, keeping her eyes trained on Bobbi. “Coupled with chemical sensors in my lungs. I look at someone, I breathe the air, and I know what people feel. When I was…not myself…they used me as a deep agent. Because I was so pretty, you see. Because I knew what people liked. It’s why I destroyed myself after that thing died inside of me.” Her eyes narrowed faintly. “I can read you.”

  Bobbi made a nervous little laugh. “Is that a fact? That how you sniffed out all those Yathi before?”

  “That’s exactly how I did it,” Violet said with a nod. “The Eye wasn’t kidding when she said I was her bloodhound. They always show themselves in the end; I’ve gotten to where I can recognize them in minutes.” Her tone was easy, though her gaze never wavered. Piercing. Bobbi didn’t know if she was preparing to strike, or if this conversation was going elsewhere. “Tell me something, Bobbi.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why have you been so nervous all this time?”

  Bobbi’s spine turned to a pillar of ice. “I don’t know what you mean,” she said, trying her level best not to show the tension spiking within her. Knowing what Violet carried now, she wondered if the effort would do any good. “This is some scary shit we’ve gotten ourselves into, don’t you think? That ain’t enough for you?”