“They don’t let drones fire too far,” said Redeye. While Violet got down next to Mason, she and Scalli still stood. “Their range should be no more than our combat rifles. It ensures maximum firepower, and restricts unnecessary attention should someone miss.”
“Can’t have people taking out passing planes,” Scalli muttered. “Besides, we don’t know they’re using lasers.”
They got into position while they waited for the line to draw closer. Violet joined Bobbi on her side of the tunnel while Mason took the other side, aiming to get the enemy in a crossfire while the drones focused on Redeye and Scalli. Far down the tunnel at the edge of their line of sight, the half-hidden shadows resolved themselves into more visible shapes: two lines of five figures, dressed in suits of body armor, jointed and white and glossy even in the dim lighting of the subway tunnel. Bobbi zoomed in on them with her visor; the night-vision filters kicked in, revealing them in the dark. They were figures made of ice. Their helms bore blank faceplates, each marked upon the brow with what Bobbi knew to be the barbed runes of the Yathi language. A single seam ran across the lower third of each visor like an exaggerated mouth. Instead of rifles, each drone had its right forearm replaced with a cylindrical, blunt-ended appendage that reached to the knee. Covered in the same glossy white plating as the armor, each weapon of the curious extrusions terminated in a narrow aperture.
“Jesus,” Mason hissed over the link. “That’s them all right. I remember those fuckers from the War. Bunch of goddamned evil snowmen.”
Like the robots they were, the corpse-drones marched with absolute precision and indifference toward what waited for them. Seconds passed to the tune of the buzzing dim tunnel lamps and the growing sound of boots upon the tunnel floor. Crouched low under the lip of the tunnel walkway, Bobbi’s calves burned as she waited for the enemy to come. She watched the white figures grow larger through the glittering haze of the disperser cloud, time stretching on into numbing oblivion as if nearness made them move ever more slowly. The tromp of boots gave way to the pounding of Bobbi’s anxious heart. Why were they taking so long?
“Something’s wrong.” This from Scalli, who hefted his support gun to the ready position; he stood there, half-wreathed in the sallow glow of the phosphorescent lamps. “They’re slowing down. Do they see us?”
“Not you.” Bobbi could hear the smile in Redeye’s voice. “They see me.”
“Not for long.” Scalli was wreathed in light and thunder as he opened up with the support gun on the slowing drones. The heavy auto-rifle spewed a foot-long tongue of flame from its muzzle as he swept it across the front rank, which shuddered with the impact of a hail of exploding shells; even the heavy plating of their combat armor could not withstand the rain as Mason and then Violet joined in, adding their own streams of devastation. A few flashes of bright light registered from the mass as a few drones tried to get shots off, only to be met by patches of dispersement gas that dazzled with diffused energy; if anything got through it wasn’t obvious. In less than a minute, both ranks went down in a mass of sundered plate and reworked flesh, forming a reef of dead things saturated in the small white ocean of their artificial blood.
“So much for the welcome party,” said Mason, who rose to his feet by the tunnel wall. He took a few steps forward, just to the edge of the gas barrier, and strafed the tumbled corpses with a long burst that caused the already damaged bodies to blow apart like gory melons. When he stopped, his voice persisted through the echoing roar of death over the radio link. “I think that should do it.”
“Indeed.” Redeye stepped through the wall of vapor. “I wonder.” She walked over to where the corpses lay, staring at the sorry remains with a posture that suggested skepticism.
“This does seem pretty easy,” Bobbi agreed. She felt something – something in the back of her head, something that flailed about in the dark. “They just…walked into it, don’t you think?”
Violet grunted and rose as well. “It’s in their nature to do so,” she said, with a voice that dripped with acidic contempt. “They’re machines. It’s their purpose to die.”
Bobbi nodded, still swallowed by blackness as she crouched by the walk. “Maybe,” she said, wrinkling her nose against the stench of burnt flesh and the antiseptic sting of vaporized fluorocarbons. “Maybe. But I don’t know…” The thing in her head writhed on, screaming to be recognized. Screaming to be identified for what it was.
“We still have a while to go,” said Redeye. She looked past the sundered drones down into the tunnel. “I do not sense anything else. We may be lucky.”
“Nobody’s lucky like that,” Bobbi said as she finally rose. “We need to seriously watch our asses.”
“I think we did pretty good, you ask me.” Mason turned her way, his expression that of an incredulous cyclops with the visor. “Maybe this isn’t gonna be–”
“No, she’s right.” Scalli nodded toward the line of corpses and the tunnel beyond. “They barely got shots off. This doesn’t sound right at all. Next time it won’t be so easy.”
“He is correct,” said Redeye. “We can expect a stiffer response next time.” The cyborg turned and began walking quickly down the tunnel, her figure swallowed up by the glittering mist and the shadows beyond.
They did the only thing they could do, now. They followed the eye.
They proceeded with the constant fear of ambush hanging over them. Having already met the enemy and put them down, they had expected to meet more groups of the armored corpse-machines, or something equally terrible, with every new section of tunnel they entered. The thing in Bobbi’s mind still begged her attention, but she did not know how to reach it.
They walked along in the shivering blackness, deeper and deeper under the city, taking a branch not far from the ruins of the xsiarhotl that led well away from the rest of the system. The tunnels there were much older than the rest, reaching back fifty years or so – perhaps during the first major revamp of the subway system that happened just before the Collapse. Led only by the plans that they had memorized and the flickering bulbs, they were met with only silence as they trudged on. Her heart had not stopped racing since they had left the bodies behind them. The clarity of vision provided by their combat visors was no comfort in the dark, for that uncertainty grew within them as they drew closer to their destination without resistance – save for Redeye, who forged ahead seemingly undaunted.
“Maybe Cagliostro was wrong,” Mason murmured over the radio link as they fell within a thousand feet of the tunnel entrance. “Maybe this isn’t any kind of a vital objective at all. Do you think he could have been mistaken?”
“I do not.” Redeye’s voice remained flat, unshakeable. “He is an abomination to both species, perhaps, but he is no fool. The attack cut us off before he could explain precisely what we are going to destroy – but even if it is not what I believed it to be, the objective is vital.” For a moment, Bobbi thought she saw the faintest flicker of…something…in the woman’s pale face. “Come, we must push forward.”
Bobbi wondered at that flicker of strangeness, wondering if it were a sign of instability that she had only picked up unconsciously before. Is that what the screaming weirdness in her head was? Or was it only the animal quailing that came with all dangers, the knowledge that something horrible was all but certainly going to befall them within the Yathi vaults? She let her mind shift from the immediate to the possibilities of the future – and in doing so, realized what the little haemonculus was only just as the tunnel behind them exploded in a hail of roaring sound, shattered concrete, and the skittering of metal limbs.
Flames. The gutteral coughing of gunfire, the dull thud-thud-thud of explosive rounds smashing against something that refused to yield. Pain lanced through Bobbi’s head and down her back, and she realized that she was sprawled across the ground; her eyes fluttered open to see a line of jointed white flash across her field of vision. Another blink, and she realized what it was: one of the great centipede-things, like th
e kind that had killed so many of Redeye’s people. Unlike those at the industrial park, this one was not gray but gleaming white, the same as the armor that the dead drones had worn. The thing was arched like a cobra, weaving back and forth over a pair of bodies sprawled across the earth. The howling tongue of fire that twisted and flashed on the other side of the fallen shapes lit up Scalli as he poured death into the machine’s dense plating. But unlike the armor that the xsiarhotl had worn before it, the thing’s glossy skin was too thick for even the support gun’s heavy rounds to pierce; a cloud of explosions sent pieces sprawling away from its sinuous body, but Bobbi could see that it would not be cracked before the big man ran out of ammunition. Her mind whirled; how could she have missed the thing’s coming, when she had the ability to sense their signals, their network presences – and as the thing arched high to come down upon Scalli like a barbed wave, she realized that the trembling in her head had been the machine’s presence all along.
The centipede was a machine, and machines could be hacked. Even Yathi ones.
Bobbi shut her eyes and found the radio transmitter in her pocket, feeling fleeting gratitude that the little device was in one piece. Her ears filled with the horrible sound of the machine’s beam weapon humming to life – not the keening wail that had spelled the doom of entire buildings but a smaller burst of death meant only for Scalli, who fired on despite what he must have known was coming, his face a phantasmagorical gallery of rage.
Scalli, she thought. You brave, beautiful son of a bitch. Her mind detached as if it were a separate creature, speeding away from her body toward the horror before her, and as she plunged into its core she had only the faintest sensation of her knees giving way.
As flesh fell to earth, the conscious mind pierced through into the frigid depths of alien waters. As before, the weirdness of it almost swallowed her up straight away – she was aware of the numbing cold she felt through the bridgework of the Grail, but now she was aware of hundreds of individual combat programs swarming in on her digital presence like swarms of hungry beasts. It was these voracious things that she felt around her, working at stripping her defenses away with dedicated ferocity; it was nothing like it had been at the facility. There was great power in the assault, but she also felt an immediacy that was different from the languid swatting of the Chorus. In the worm’s computerized brain, she sensed something akin to fear.
It was that which pulled her out of the night. With fear came vulnerability, and knowledge of that lit a flame inside her mind. In milliseconds, that flame had become a conflagration. With the mailed fist that was the ghost-system, Bobbi spun into being a powerful reply; attack programs were instantly blasted into fragments by the wall of defensive programming that she compiled around her, depleting them faster than they could be cloned. The ghost’s knowledge and Bobbi’s brilliance worked in tandem to weave together the defense, turning Yathi counter-intrusion templates into magic of smoke and flame, transforming her inner fire into something far more tangible. In the flash of milliseconds, cold oppression boiled away, and the power of her counterprogram built and built – until it became all she could sense, a single gleaming sun of data with her at its core, and its fire threatened to consume her. It was then that the system crashed. Jericho’s walls splintered around her, and Bobbi’s consciousness was thrown from the machine’s core like a rider from a dying horse.
Her eyes opened to the sight of the tunnel ceiling. Her back was wet and cold, and the stench of hot metal and burned flesh stung thick in her nostrils. For a horrible moment she thought that she had been too late, and they had all been killed. Bobbi sat up hard, ignoring the throbbing in her back as she looked for the others. It was hard to see; the right side of the tunnel had collapsed, partially burying the now-motionless centipede-machine beneath broken concrete and ruptured pipes. Water was everywhere, glimmering in the flickering glow of the failing bulbs. Bobbi blinked hard to try and clear the lingering fuzz from her head, and called out into the darkness. “Is everyone all right?”
“We’re here.” Scalli’s voice rang out from the shadows.
Bobbi got to her feet. “Where are you?”
“Over here.” From behind a slope of collapsed concrete, the big man emerged; covered in dust, Scalli held in his hand not the support gun but the weapon that Mason had called the Polish Dragon. Bobbi saw that the sleeve of his coat appeared to have been torn off, and his arm bore multiple slashes so that the black musculature of his suit could be seen beneath the false flesh.
“Is everyone all right?” Bobbi picked her way across the rubble, eyeing the fallen machine as she passed it. It showed no signs of life.
“Mason and Violet are fine,” said Scalli as Bobbi crossed over to him. “We’re still looking for Redeye. And that fucker…” He gestured to the centipede with the Dragon. “What did you do to it? I saw you fall over, and then suddenly it started thrashing all over the goddamned place. Barely got a shot in with the Dragon here.”
Behind the shield of fallen concrete, Bobbi saw Violet and Mason leaning against the wall. Violet leaned against the old soldier, a thin stream of red blood staining the left side of her face. Mason’s nose was swollen and purple, obviously broken. “Yeah, they look just fine,” muttered Bobbi, glancing back to Scalli. “And look at you. Did it get through your armor?”
“No, it’s fine. What did you do to the goddamned thing?”
Bobbi looked back at the fallen machine. “I hacked it,” she said. “What did you do to it?”
Scalli snorted. “As it turns out, that armor isn’t all that useful against energy weapons.”
“What?” She glanced back at him. “What do you mean?”
“The Dragon’s a laser weapon.” Mason’s voice was thick and nasal as he spoke from his seat. “That’s what I was so surprised about. Something from the war, rare as hell.”
Scalli nodded. “Polish special forces developed it, called it Smok Model Five. A few units were issued with them before the Julius Plague took out Krakow.”
Bobbi blinked at them. Laser weapons were arcane things with backpack power units and armored cables, not…this. “It looks like a grenade gun,” she said. “How the fuck does it fire lasers?”
“That’s what’s so clever about it.” Mason paused to check on Violet, who was blinking blearily into existence against him. “Fires chemical laser bursts in single-use canisters. Lens optics, binary fuel, everything. Poles wanted to use it as a sabotage weapon, maybe for field troops in the future.”
“Yeah, and it only took two shots to take that thing down once you got into its…whatever.” Scalli pointed behind them with the Dragon’s muzzle at the head of the centipede, which had a pair of fist-sized holes punched through. Bobbi frowned as she saw that white fluid dribbled from the wounds.
“Am I crazy,” she said, “or is that thing bleeding?”
Scalli frowned as well. “No,” he said, trailing off – he walked over to the thing’s head and crouched down next to it, keeping the Dragon in hand if it started to move again. “Let’s find Redeye, ask her what this thing is all about.”
Bobbi eyed him a moment. “You’re not worried that she might be hurt?”
“The Eye has fought these things before.” Violet pulled herself up and rose somewhat unsteadily to her feet. “I’ve heard the stories. They’re not alive, they just use biological computer hardware like the corpses do.”
“Fucking fabulous.” Bobbi shook her head. “Come on, let’s find Red.”
They found her buried under a fallen slab from the tunnel roof – alive, unhurt and in the process of digging herself out. If anything she was only displeased that she had not gotten a crack at the monstrosity herself. “I do not understand why they would have sent a moxhalal after us in such close quarters,” she said as she looked the thing over. “It could have brought down the entire tunnel with an errant shot.”
Moxhalal. Bobbi tasted the word on her tongue and found it bitter.
“Maybe local forces ar
e depleted,” Mason offered.
“More like they’re overconfident,” Scalli said.
Bobbi shook her head. “I don’t think so. I felt…I felt like it was afraid, somehow.”
The comment drew strange looks from Scalli and Mason, but Violet wasn’t surprised – and neither was Redeye, Bobbi saw. “It may have been piloted remotely, then,” Redeye said, and she smiled that Fury’s smile of hers. “Good. They know you can get to them now. We can capitalize on that confusion. It has only been a half hour since the attack; if we hurry, we can reach the complex while the defenders are still considering their response.”
“I’d like to know why they haven’t come down here and killed us while we were out.” Mason was on his feet as well. “It makes no tactical sense.”
“You cannot reason with such creatures.” Redeye shook her head. “They aren’t used to resistance as it is – and not only have they failed to kill me, now there is someone who can intrude upon their systems. They are most likely waiting to see what it is that we intend to do. Let us not disappoint them.” With that the dust-covered creature strode forward, passing the fallen machine and toward the far end of the tunnel. In her wake, the others looked at each other uncertainly – but Violet turned to follow her mistress, and Mason followed with a shrug. Bobbi and Scalli were left to look at each other.
“Well, girl,” he said, “what do you think?”
“I think we don’t want to be on the end of the line,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. “We’ve gone this far. Do you have enough ammunition to continue?”
“Plenty.” Scalli reached back to tap the backpack. “Caseless rounds take up a lot less room. Besides, these are smaller than you’d think to pack so much power.”
“And the Dragon?”
“Enough that if we need more, we’re already fucked.” He shrugged. “Come on, I didn’t want to live forever anyway.”
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 36
