The link died after that. Bobbi chewed her gum, feeling the Pranazine blunt the worst of the fear that came racing through her as the sounds came closer; she turned on the visor again, saw the virtualized north star overhead, the bizarre trail of red that marked where she had come before spiraling into the depths below. The ghost-walls of the tunnels yawned all around her, four possible conduits from which the voice billing itself as Cagliostro’s may be coming. Bobbi took the knife from its sheath in her coat pocket, seeing it as a strange white shape in her hand, her world made entirely of chiaroscuro shapes. She waited, the knife in her fist, blade pointed upward to lunge with – and then she heard the voice in earnest, the bizarre slapping of what sounded like skin on steel. Something approached to the right of her, and against all of the pleading of her prey-brain kept rooted to the spot as it emerged from the duct mouth.
She had to bite her tongue to keep from screaming.
It didn’t just crawl through the mouth of the duct – it unfolded itself. She saw it in the stark white of the ultrasonic imager, the matte white textures on a wireframe mesh that was shaped something like a human being. A human child. Naked. Bald. Jawless, something mechanical in its place. She saw that it had too many arms, arranged down its side like a crab’s legs, and the hips were reversed –
Bobbi tore the visor off her head. Her chest rose and fell like a diver gone under too long, her lungs burning, the prey-brain quailing and clawing at the walls of her mind. Her fingers spasmed on the handle of her knife…and then calm came, a practiced, clinical thing, enforced from that rarified circuit in her brain that fired in emergencies. She lay there a moment, gasping for breath, and fought the fear down hard.
In the dark, a pair of small eyes shone in the blackness, silver discs gleaming with their own illumination. “I am sorry for that,” spoke a deep, flat, basso profundo voice from what her fevered mind told her was the machine the blasphemy had for a mouth. “I understand how disturbing it appears.”
It took a minute or so for Bobbi to pull her heart out of her throat. “Fuck you,” were the first words that came out of her mouth, followed by “What the fuck is wrong with you, coming at me like that? What the fuck is that, anyway?”
“It is a labor unit.” The drone’s ‘voice’ wasn’t very loud, yet it managed to reverberate off every angle around her – even in her head, where it seemed to bounce around the most.
“It’s fucking horrible,” Bobbi replied.
“Indeed. The Yathi race care nothing for the dead. If it helps, they do the same to their dead as well. Even on the homeworld.”
Bobbi shook her head. “No,” she said in the blackness, “It does not. But thanks for fucking my brain up a little more by telling me that.” The fear was receding, and so long as it was dark, she did not have to focus on what lurked before her – she need only pay attention to the voice, not the horror that it issued from. “How the hell are we talking here, anyway, Cag? How are you here?”
“Your activities have alarmed the entire Yathi community in this city,” Cagliostro replied. “By utilizing the protocols that I implanted in your neural interface hardware, you have made the Yathi aware that there is a traitor in their midst. They have been racing to find the source of this treachery.”
“Why not drop everything and kill us instead?”
“Have they not tried?”
Got me there, Bobbi thought. “Well, yeah,” she said. “But I mean, this place has a whole storehouse of corpses we had to fight off to get away. Mason got killed making sure of that. And we’re cut off from Redeye, too.”
“I am aware of the situation,” Cagliostro replied. “I have spoken with your remaining comrades. Geneva Riley and Marcus Scalli were as surprised as you to hear from me, but they were very helpful.”
Bobbi was quiet for a moment. Geneva? Was that Violet’s real name? She’d never thought that it would be anything but what Vi had said it was. “Are they all right?”
“They are quite safe at the moment. The unit Redeye has drawn the garrison’s attention as she moves through the complex, and all resources are currently occupied attempting to fight her. The others will not be bothered.”
“Well, I’m glad about that,” Bobbi said in relief. “Wait, what about Redeye? Have you spoken to her?”
“No.”
“Well, why the hell not?”
“The unit designated ‘Redeye’ is not my ally, nor is she yours.”
Bobbi blinked at the gleaming eyes in front of her. “You’re gonna have to repeat that. You sent us to get her. How is she suddenly not our ally?”
“You were dispatched to interface with the unit because it was expected that her psychological programming remained intact. Her personality has deviated, however.”
“Deviated how? She sacrificed her people to get us out of the Old City, man, and helped us get in here.”
“Indeed. However, her behavior has become erratic.”
A flash of impatience stiffened her aching back. “Dammit, Cag,” Bobbi said, her tone heavy with annoyance, “that tells me exactly dick. Erratic how? We knew she was crazy already.”
“She attacked me.”
Silence. Bobbi blinked again in the dark. “Come again?”
“It was she who attacked me when the strike force arrived at her location.”
“How the fuck is she supposed to have done that?” Bobbi stared at the space that Cagliostro’s vessel filled. “I mean, why would she?”
“The motivations for the attack were unknown to me at first,” he replied. “However, the unit has been well equipped with intrusion and counter-intrusion facilities as a part of her specifications. She has always been quite adroit at assaulting and disabling systems and software.”
That made Bobbi sit up a little more. “She never told us that,” Bobbi said. “She said she could take down machines, sure, but now she’s got all this military hardware, and punching through people’s chests and shit. What the hell is she, then? You said she was a failsafe.”
“That is an accurate, if somewhat metaphorical, way to describe her.”
She pursed her lips. “Red also said you built her.”
“That is correct.”
“To do what?”
“To wage war upon the Yathi race. I would think that this would be obvious.”
“Well, yeah,” Bobbi said in consternation; she was rapidly forgetting the terrifying presence of the thing in front of her in favor of her impatience with the obtuse mind that operated it. “And she’s pretty fucking well built for that. But if she’s able to attack you, and fuck you up badly enough that you’ve been offline for a month, why the fuck does she need me? Us? Why can’t she do it herself?”
“To be fair,” said Cagliostro, “the unit caught me by surprise; were I expecting trouble, I would have been able to turn back her assault. That she was successful only in temporarily disabling me should demonstrate the limit of her ability.”
Bobbi snorted at that. “Sorry to kick you in the dick there,” she said. “Okay, so she’s not been straight with us about the hacking. Why is that, then?”
“She does not want you to know her true intentions.” The corpse-thing shuffled a moment, and Bobbi was reminded that it was still there. She shivered. “She believes that she is going to destroy the colonial matrix that allows transference of Yathi consciousnesses into human minds. I attempted to disabuse her of this, but she grew enraged and attacked me – she believes that she can end the colonization effort by severing the link between the two worlds.”
“How is that a problem? I mean, the severing bit, not the attacking you.”
“The matrix is not there.”
“But something else is.”
“Yes.”
“Still not seeing
the problem here, man.” Bobbi’s brows arched a bit. “What the hell’s down there?”
“A laboratory.” Though the voice was toneless, Bobbi couldn’t help but imagine a bit of concern there. “This complex is a major hub of drone manufacturing and tissue processing in this zone of the world, but its true function is that of planetary reconfiguration research.”
Things just kept getting better and better. “Reconfiguration. Like what, terraforming?”
“Precisely. The Yathi colonization schedule anticipates a three hundred percent spike in human conversion numbers over the next two years. When that occurs, they will release a nanomachine colony that will begin working to reformat the ecological and material makeup of the planet. Do you recall the images of the terrestrial makeup of Yathkalgn that I transmitted to you when we communicated directly?”
Bobbi frowned again at the thought of the horrible landscapes that rose in her mind. “Yeah,” she said, “I remember.”
“That is what the Yathi seek to bring here. Eventually, through their work and the increasing conversion of the human species, they will completely remake this world in the image of the last one. And this is vital to them, because they have no home to go back to; changing the environment is important to ensuring that the Yathi mind remains dominant, and thus ensuring also that the species does not fragment from its host. Though this has always been part of the colonization strategy, it has become necessary to the survival of the species. It is for this reason that I sent you to destroy this location.”
“Then we need to put an end to that.” And so there was no alternative other than to get into the basement; she would have to get into the control center, or at the very least hack it from nearby. The way out wasn’t back, it was through. “All right, so it’s not this matrix thing, but it’s a priority target. So we destroy this colony. And then, what, we find the nexus and destroy it, too? What’ll keep them from creating another one, or more terraforming nanomachines?”
“One objective at a time,” Cagliostro said, and though the voice of the corpse-machine was flat she could not help but feel iron in those words. “We begin with the control center. Follow this drone; it will lead you to a location under the room that will allow you maximum chance of system intrusion.”
Bobbi felt a twinge of disgust. Follow that monstrosity? “And if that doesn’t work? Do we have an alternative?”
“No.” The drone began to turn around; she felt its body shift the air, its palms hiss against the duct floor as it went. “We must go now. If Redeye destroys the laboratory, which she intends to do, we will find ourselves at the center of a disaster for both sides.”
“That doesn’t make any sense, though.” Bobbi frowned. “I mean, you sent us to destroy the lab in the first place, right?”
“Correct.”
“So why can’t we talk her down? I mean, yeah, she throat-punched you and sent you to the bench for a month, I can see why you’d have a problem with that. But why the fuck would we want to put her down for doing what you asked us to in the first place? Isn’t this what you built her to do? Or is it because she’s acting off script that you want us to wax her?” Cagliostro had led her here, burning the lives of two companions now – perhaps the disembodied hybrid mind may consider it collateral damage, but she wondered how many of them, if not all, were expendable. After all, he sent Tom to kill Ghia Merducci, knowing that he would probably have been killed – what hope did she have for them to escape unscathed? It came to her that he probably didn’t, and she wasn’t sure why it hadn’t before.
“I have told you before that she has committed herself to destroying this complex because she is convinced that the colonial matrix can be found here. Knowing of the existence of a laboratory containing a large amount of terraforming nanomachines exists, what do you believe will happen if she succeeds in her mission?”
“So you’re saying that if she blows this place, all that bad shit gets out. The city turns into an ecological disaster zone.”
“At the very least. However, that will be the least of your immediate problems.”
“You’ll need to detail that,” she said.
“There is little time.”
Bobbi gave the drone a flat look. “Yeah, that mysterious benefactor shit got old a long time ago, Cag. We’re down here getting shot to pieces, you know? You keep holding out on me, I’ll just sit here and let her trash the fucking place, see what happens.”
As fierce as her words were, Bobbi didn’t mean them – and of course the bastard ghost called her on that. “You would do no such thing,” the drone replied. “However, I understand your sentiment. Very well; the unit called Redeye does not intend to merely destroy the laboratory, she intends to destroy the entire complex. Doubtless a great deal of the nanomachines will be consumed in the initial blast, but the remainder will be scattered throughout the atmosphere. On some level, the world will change. Every simulation that I have run indicates that this will be to the direct detriment of humanity.”
“All right,” Bobbi said, and her brain was ticking along fiercely now. “So let’s start from the top. If she’s going to blow the factory, how is she going to do it? Is there a reactor in the complex that we missed?”
“No,” Cagliostro replied through the drone. “The generators installed within the complex are not nuclear and cannot be detonated in the way that you suppose.”
“Is there a weapons laboratory or factory here? What the hell is she going to use to take out a whole complex?”
“She will use herself. The unit, Redeye, is a repurposed design; I ensured that her development was redirected toward my own desires, but there were elements of her construction that could not be avoided.”
Bobbi stared at the thing, ignoring its obscenity. She felt a weight begin to pull at her stomach. “What the hell are you telling me, man?”
“The unit was originally intended to be a terror device, during the violent activism which took place immediately following the European War. A pilot program, so to speak. It was originally envisioned that the unit would be built to infiltrate military or civilian targets, where she would detonate. The resulting – “
“Wait, what?” Bobbi sat up hard. Her eyes narrowed as she stared at the drone in disbelief and anger. “Are you telling me that she’s some kind of fucking bomb?”
“That is precisely what I am telling you. The unit you know as Redeye was originally constructed around a miniaturized thermonuclear device from which she draws operating power. That device has been designed to overload once certain protocols have been initiated, however, leading to an explosion in keeping with a tactical nuclear device.”
Bobbi was silent for a long moment. “All right,” she said at last. “How large are we talking?”
“The intended yield is four kilotons, with extremely limited fallout. While civil defense nanomachines in the atmosphere will ensure that there is no lingering radiation hazard, there will of course be many immediate civilian casualties, as well as yourselves.“
The shock that had settled on her shoulders was a mantle of lead, cold and heavy in the darkness. Bobbi could do nothing but stare at the horrible drone, intoning these facts as if they were the words of Death itself, extolling the doom of the city. “It’ll kill a lot more than that,” she murmured, more to herself than to Cagliostro and his cheval. “The ferals will come in during the chaos.”
“That is very likely,” Cagliostro agreed. “And the blast will carry the remainder of the terraforming colony high into the atmosphere. It will circulate globally, as I have said. The world will change. Humanity will suffer.”
“And the only way to stop this is to kill her?”
“Unless you can somehow convince her to stop, yes.” The drone swung its head toward one of the vent mouths as if it had sensed something; Bobbi’s shock turned to fear, and then determination. When it looked back to her without comment, she spoke.
“All right,” she said, “lead on, man. I hear what you’re saying, bu
t I’ll try and talk her out of this thing first.”
“She is deeply embroiled in fighting the xsiarhotl within the complex,” said Cagliostro. The drone turned and began padding into a duct, its limbs carrying it along like an obscene white lobster. “And quite focused on completing her chosen objective. If she determines that you intend to stop her, she will kill you before you can speak a word.”
“Fuck.” What else was she going to say or do? With a deep breath, Bobbi pulled the visor over her eyes again; the ultrasonic device came online again, and she found herself staring at the horrible rear quarter of the child-thing. Its reversed hips allowed its coiled legs to ‘walk’ along the ceiling of the vent, and seeing it made Bobbi’s stomach churn in ways she could not at all explain. Again, the horror of the alien made primordial circuits fire and beg for flight. She would not allow it. She could not. Like a black rocket, the stakes were hurtling ever higher.
Bobbi took another deep breath and began to crawl.
The two of them moved with purpose through the twisting guts of the ventwork, Cagliostro’s blasphemous puppet moving with the ease with which it was designed and Bobbi struggling to keep up. Her armor and the coat grew so problematic that she ditched the plates in the next junction cubicle Cagliostro led her to. She kept the coat, though. She had also gotten used to the awful sight of the drone – the child’s face was what bothered her the most, but it was largely invisible behind the crablike flailing of its limbs. If anything, it only further toughened her sense of purpose; she already knew how little the Yathi valued human life, but the hideous reworking of the chimera ahead of her made Bobbi angry in new and astonishingly violent ways.
But the anger that she felt was really only a stopgap measure to suppress the gnawing fear that now constantly laired in her belly. It wasn’t enough that she was involved in a horrible alien conspiracy to effectively destroy the human species – oh no, she now found herself attempting to wrest the fate of the city, to say nothing of her own and those of her surviving friends, from the madness of a walking nuke. There were no means of getting a sensible handle on this scenario; it was entirely too weird to believe, much less process. There was only the moment at hand, the reality of it, and the only way out was through. She would probably have a long future of alcoholism ahead of her, if not a galaxy of tranquilizers as well, by the time this all came to a close.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 40
