Speak for yourself, a voice muttered in the back of Bobbi’s head, but she nodded anyway. “Just get in front of me if someone tries to shoot me, Mr. Wall of Iron,” she said, and gave him a thin smile. “Let’s go.”
“You’re the boss,” Scalli said, and gestured for her to lead him – but as Bobbi walked and stared ahead at Redeye’s shrinking figure, she had the distinct feeling that she wasn’t leading anything at this juncture. This was the Fury’s show, and now the only thing that Bobbi was sure of was that success could be as costly as victory.
True to Redeye’s suspicions, they met no further resistance as they marched on toward the facilty’s back door. Despite the destruction wreaked in their wake, there were no signs that the authorities above had any clue as to what was going on. Once again the tunnels were silent, and they soon enough found themselves confronted with the heavy maintenance hatch that masked the entryway into the complex. It was a solid door, though freshly painted, a fact which made Bobbi wonder if it was meant to mark the spot.
“Well,” said Scalli from behind the lot of them, “here we are.”
“Nice paintjob,” Violet deadpanned. “It’s almost like stage dressing.”
Mason snorted. “And in Act Four, the protagonists all get it in the neck.”
“Not if I can help it.” Bobbi stepped forward and climbed the concrete ledge to the service walk, grunting as her sore back kicked up. She got to her feet in front of the door and frowned at it. “Red, you see anything unusual?”
“Not immediately.” Redeye’s tone was placid, but Bobbi could just imagine the bloodlust that must be boiling inside of her. She wasn’t entirely a machine, after all.
“Could burn the lock assembly with the Dragon and see if there’s anything behind the hatch,” said Mason. “Course, that’d probably trigger something nasty and kill us all.”
Bobbi grunted again, this time in irritation. Adrenaline started to flood into her system again in earnest, and her mouth went dry. “Just…stand back, kids,” she said, and closed her eyes to try and summon her concentration. “Let me see what I can do.”
Without waiting for a response, Bobbi reached out. She felt the familiar cold of alien systems, reached into the depths with a cautious hand. The nearest system was a security node, to operate the door – and something else, probably some manner of defenses. Bobbi reached past the door routines and found the new code, caressing it with analysis programs, sniffing it out. She was amazed and cautious to find that the unfamiliar system, though isolated from whatever greater network to which it belonged, was not protected with counter-intrusion software. It made a little sense, at least; by the ghost’s own admission, Bobbi would be the first human – the first enemy – who would have been able to intrude upon their systems. Why would they have any kind of protection? Bobbi found markers for a weapon, which she disabled, and then triggered the marker for deployment…and found herself staring down at her own body, with the anxious remainder of her party looking up in the direction of her new vantage point. It was a gun turret, probably armed with one of the hideous X-ray flash guns that Redeye had told them about.
“Relax,” said Bobbi, having to concentrate very hard to work her mouth. “It’s just me.”
“Christ.” Mason shook his head, looking both ways down the tunnel. “Open this thing up, will you?”
Bobbi left the gun disabled and reached out with a ready template, spinning together a rather neatly-done counter-intrusion routine that wrapped the security node like an iron jacket. “All right,” she forced herself to say, “get ready.” She hit the hatch’s entry code and killed the link in time to get out of the way as the heavy door swung open, letting the rest of them cover the opening with their weapons. The door, at least, made for an excellent shield.
Moments passed, and nothing happened. Bobbi peeked out from around the hatch when she was certain the world wasn’t going to explode and found the rest of them frowning into the doorway from the track. Bobbi looked in as well; there was a stark white lobby waiting for them there, a tunnel no larger than the door itself. It was intensely well-lit, though there were no obvious apertures or fixtures for illumination. Bright white light spilled out from the doorway and made a shaft across the subway tunnel. The walls were made of the same glossy material that the xsiarhotl and moxhalal had been plated in – Bobbi used the alien words in her head rather than think of the previously-used descriptions, which disturbed her – and a heavy hatch of black material sealed the other end.
The others began to climb up, but Bobbi, seized by a strange sense of morbid wonder, stepped past the hatch and into the lobby. The door was unusual, both in its appearance and its composition. There was no texture, no hint as to if it was metal or something else, and it gave off a freezing chill; the stuff was so dark that it seemed to eat the light that pervaded the corridor. She wanted to touch it, but every sense she had screamed that it was wrong – the animal thing inside of her, the prey-instinct that had been evolved over millions of years, begged her to run away, and the urge made her stomach ripple with nausea.
She thought of Tom, laughing half-mad in her monitor from the elevator at Orleans as he hinted at the horrors which he had witnessed in its bowels. Bobbi had surprised herself with the toughness that she had shown so far - but as she stared at the door, the wall of blank nothingness that beckoned them to enter, she knew that they would be entering a hell that would dwarf that of the chamber of the Chorus.
But there was nothing to do but to play Dante. Bobbi reached out and touched the door, felt bone-rattling coldness against her fingertips for a fraction of a second, and then the black panel slid open without a sound.
She had expected something new and strange to her, but the scene beyond the doors was all too familiar to Bobbi and in the most horrible of ways. The entrance had opened on some kind of catwalk; she stepped out upon it now, staring numbly out upon the chamber as it yawned forth like a tremendous cave beneath her. Unlike the bright and glossy corridor behind her, the cavernous walls were of dark metal, as were the nameless machines that crowded the floor below her feet. A legion of grim devices crouched upon the distant floor, their details lost in shadow. Brutal shapes of metal and plastic, every one of them suggested efficiency in their ineffable purposes.
Yet as if she had been born amongst them, Bobbi knew their names and purposes as she beheld them through her visor’s electronic lens. Body dividers, flaying machines. Lymphatic extractors and marrow blenders. A symphony of brutal slaughterhouse mechanisms lurked in the factory pit, purpose-built with the task of rendering human victims into parts for future use. And around them all shone a mist of burning green, the dim illumination of eldritch lamps that only encouraged the deepening of shadows. The air fled from her lungs as Bobbi realized it was a scene from Cagliostro’s nightmare visions, a piece of dying Yathkalhgn brought into being here on Earth. She would scream, but the air had left her; Bobbi could only stare open-mouthed in horror as her mind and lungs burned in unison and truth pulled her like a weight into a river of despair.
Pulled, and then drawn out – at least to the shoulders – by Scalli’s broad hand as it lay upon her shoulder. “Bobbi,” he murmured into her ear, trying to calm her but unable to betray the tremble in his own voice as he beheld the room himself. “You all right, girl?”
“I…yeah.” The lie was enough to pull her back into the here and now, pushing the waters back. Bobbi shook her head to clear away what fear she could. “You?”
“Not even fucking remotely.” Scalli frowned at the vast field of machines below. “This place. This place is bad fucking news.”
Bobbi nodded. She heard Mason make a soft sound of horror as he stepped out onto the catwalk with the two of them, taking up a place next to her. His hand was a vise on its rail, the other one holding his rifle so that its muzzle tracked the ceiling. “Jesus fucking Christ,” he muttered shakily as he looked into the cold field of machinery below; the glow of the lights was reflected in the lens of his
visor as if it were a ghastly eye. “What the fuck is all this shit? Why is it all ’Starbase Glory’ out there and fucking ‘Lord of the Eight Hells’ in here?”
“Because this is what it is like at home. For them.” Redeye stepped out onto the catwalk, taking position at Bobbi’s other side. She seemed untroubled at the blasphemous machines, nor did she look at them. The light of her eye was a sickly orange-red as it battled with the glow of the lamps for supremacy. “This is a safe place for them. No discovery. There is no need to hide their nature here.” She glanced at Bobbi. “Would you agree?”
“I…” Bobbi closed her eyes, eager to shut out the sight of the machines for just a moment. “Yeah. This place, it’s for dissecting bodies. Like a chop shop, you know. A black clinic.”
“This thing is huge, though.” Mason shook his head as he surveyed it once more, his face set in a frown. “Look at the scale of it!”
“The Yathi race seeks to render all uninfected humanity into spare parts. We’re cattle.” Violet stood by her mistress, her visor up and her cheek stained with the light of her mistress’s baleful eye. “Motherfuckers.”
“Yeah, but why not have these things chugging away, doing shit? Why isn’t it active?” Mason shook his head again. “Is it shut down for maintenance or something?”
“That is an excellent question.” Redeye frowned, the white lips dipping down as she turned her face toward the processing floor. “Every other facility which I have been to has been in operation. I wonder why this one is not?”
“Might have something to do with whatever’s down in the basement, so to speak.” Scalli’s attention was not on the machines, it was on the wide door set into the lower half of the opposite wall. “This is a fine place for an ambush, people. Very hard to track targets here.”
Violet nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Does the Eye sense the enemy down there?”
“I do not.” Redeye looked back to Bobbi. “But before we take another step, perhaps you should search out computer systems.”
“Already did,” Bobbi said with a shake of her head. “I didn’t sense anything.” She could not hide how disturbing that was for her – for all the dense security they were expecting, nothing was alive. Short of the lights, the place was like a tomb.
“Curious.” Redeye looked at the distant door with interest now. “Very curious.”
“Maybe we should go back,” Mason said. “I’m all for slaying demons, so to speak, but this smells like eight kinds of a trap.”
Redeye turned her head a bit toward Mason; her burning eye glowing behind its hooded lid. “If you wish to, you can leave,” she said. “I doubt that anyone would hold this against you. But I have a role to fill, and I will fill it. Otherwise everything else has been done for nothing.”
“Well, Jesus, Red,” Mason sputtered, “I didn’t really mean–”
Bobbi took a deep breath. She opened her eyes again to the terrible machines and lifted a hand to quiet the others. “It’s going to get worse before we get to the bottom,” she said, and surprised herself with the steel that rang in her tone. “Nobody goes back. We all have to move forward, because at this point going back isn’t going to save anybody.”
“Well said.” Redeye gave her a bit of a smile. “Shall we descend to the floor, then?”
“Yeah.” Bobbi scanned the catwalk. “All right, just watch out as we cross the floor. Power could come online at any time.”
“Let’s go, then.” Redeye turned right and walked down the catwalk, her footfalls rebounding like tin off the grillwork as she went.
They had all committed the fragmented plans to memory, but Redeye knew them best. They moved quietly down a wide-mouthed ladderway to the processing floor, where they found themselves instantly dwarfed by the sprawling slaughter-works. They took careful steps amongst the sleeping machines, seeing up close the horrible truth of them: wheels of flensing blades and suction tubes, arcane assemblies of what looked like beam scalpels and primitive forceps crowding for space on spidery surgical arms. Though they could see the blank ceiling from the catwalk, it was a night-black sky as they proceeded below – Bobbi felt herself shiver more than once as they went, for her imagination conjured the specters of horrible shrieking drones falling down from on high to butcher them.
There was no assault, however, and they made their way to the massive double doors unharmed. They were made from the same metal as the walls around them, and to Bobbi the doors seemed somehow pedestrian compared to the slab of black-hole darkness from the lobby above. Bobbi looked over the door for several minutes, seeking controls but finding none, and ultimately reached out through the radio link to nudge them open. There was no network yet that she could find, and that disturbed her; there were only single devices such as the subway hatch and its turret, and now the double doors that were operating independently from whatever greater system existed. The complex really did seem to be in full shutdown. Bobbi reached out with invisible hands and tripped the opening mechanism, and slid out of the connection-trance as the great slabs of metal trundled open into further industrial space.
“Well,” said Bobbi, “here we go.”
The next chamber was a warehouse structure whose name Bobbi remembered as Storage Vault Three. Not quite as tall as the last room, the warehouse nevertheless yawned around them, stacked to the ceiling with containers as large as compact cars and marked with barbed Yathi script. They walked along a broad central lane between the great stacks, the fighters covering the shadows and Bobbi seeking any sign of systems activity as they approached another set of doors on the far side.
Mason muttered over the link as they went. “What do you think they’ve got stored in here,” he asked, his voice muted with morbid fascination. “Parts from the other place, maybe?”
“Maybe,” Scalli muttered in reply. “We haven’t seen the other rooms. Bobbi, you pick up anything yet?”
“No.” Bobbi had been actively reaching out at this point, pinging carefully as they went – between her network probes and the augmented senses granted by visors and implants, something should have come up.
Mason was guarded now. “Not even the door?”
“Not even that,” Bobbi replied. “You guys, this is seriously—” And as the words left her mouth a wave of startup pinging sounded in her head like the pealing of bells as all around them systems began to wake. Above them new lights began to flicker to life, throwing spots of evil green light down upon them. Behind them, they heard the heavy doors begin to trundle open again.
“Oh, shit,” Mason hissed.
“Cover!” Scalli’s command was unnecessary, for they had broken to crouch behind the walls of thick pods the moment the doors began to open. The sudden rush of pinging had thrown Bobbi for a moment; Violet grabbed her arm and pulled her behind a stack with her, while Mason and Scalli took position behind another. Though they could not see them, yet thanks to the blockages down the aisle, Bobbi knew what was coming. Only Redeye stood out in the open, arms crossed, her head tilted slightly like a dog as she listened to the sound of many boot heels on the metal floor.
“Red,” Bobbi murmured urgently over the link. “What the hell are you doing?” She tried to quantify what was coming, but the waking systems were causing too much interference – the knowledge was coming, but it so very slow without the active trance of Awakening.
Violet put her hand on her arm and shook her head. “The Eye is preparing for battle,” she told Bobbi in tones reserved for prayer.
“That’ll be a welcome first,” Bobbi said darkly, and she turned back toward the aisle. She had not forgotten that Redeye had only been proven in a fight against Scalli and Mason, and that was only on the training mat. She had no idea what the cyborg could do against a real foe, but it looked as if she was going to find out.
It took only a few seconds more for that to happen, as the shapes of gleaming figures, white armor stained hellish green by the overhead lamps, began to flood around the stacks of crates that were piled at the
head of the aisle. Bobbi knew what they were, knew the slinging club-arms of what Redeye had called combat limbs – from where they came, however, she had no idea. Storage pods here? A security station that they hadn’t noticed? Maybe the factory on the level below was active, feeding them from the previously inaccessible transfer chutes that linked the complex.
The xsiarhotl came in numbers, and they did not bother with cover – at least not until they met with the first volley of death that was spewed from the assembly. The gas whipped and shuddered before them as Mason, Scalli and Violet let loose with their explosive rounds, pouring death into the charging throng.
Perhaps it was the nature of the corpse-machines to charge first and then fight intelligently only when they had impulse to do so, to adapt only when meeting bloody stimulus. Bobbi watched as the vanguard of the charging xsiarhotl were blasted into a cloud of white blood and armor shards, just as they had been in the tunnel. It wasn’t hard to fire around Redeye the way she had positioned herself in the center of the aisle just ahead of Bobbi and the rest, and the hem of her coat danced a nervous tarantella with the passing of every round. Soon the machines were retreating behind the bodies of the fallen and taking cover behind cargo pods, which proved far more resistant to damage than Bobbi had expected; in the smoke and noise of the slaughter, Bobbi saw that the lethal bullets made only the slightest dents when they struck the dense gray metal.
It was then that Bobbi first knew that they were in real trouble. The other end of the aisle exploded in a dazzling sea of light as the xsiarhotl fired their flash guns, and the dispersal gas became a sea of black as the nanomachines contained within the cloud changed polarity to suck up the incoming radiation. But the gas had been whipped up by the initial volume of firepower, and the barrier was not entirely whole; patches of darkness swiftly thinned, and the crate in front of Bobbi let out a hiss as a laser blast ablated a chunk of its armored surface.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 37
