The Mother of Systems laughed, and the haughty, musical lilt of it sped the corrosion of reason.
Through the haze of rising hate and anger, Bobbi was suddenly aware that a program had finished compiling. It took her a moment to realize that it was her own. She laughed – she heard herself do it, very far away – and her mental voice took on a dangerous edge.
In an instant, the sea changed. The surface of the Mother’s presence began to thrum in earnest, and as it did Bobbi felt white-hot lances of pain run through her. Her brain felt as if it were vibrating apart. She wanted to scream, to say something – anything – but nothing rose to the surface but garbage characters across the back of her mental screen.
So powerful was the pain and shock that shuddered through Bobbi’s body, the clamor of the alarms that crowded up her head from her implant monitors, that she could barely perceive the ranting of the monstrous thing that was now literally battering her mind apart. And yet, through the haze of pain, there was a light; as there had been before, she perceived something, something tiny, almost unreachable. The program that she had written. With the last of the power that her fading mind possessed she reached out, bidding it to execute, and then…
For a moment, her mental presence was replicated by a factor of twenty, then twenty more, and twenty more than that – mirror images everywhere, they soaked up the power of the assault that the Mother of Systems poured forth, shattering like glass even as they piled up around Bobbi’s battered consciousness. For a moment she thought that she would be lost. Instead she found herself coming back, and what’s more, she felt something else return: control, control that must have been subtly draining away from the moment she entered the network. Control over her connectvity.
She willed the link to break, a hard drop, and found herself plunging into eternity.
With the wireless link severed she was falling back into her meat, and when she returned her head very nearly exploded. Bolts of white-hot pain lanced through her as if a cage of barbed wire were wrapped around her brain, squeezing down hard into the tissue, and she saw the white planes of the junction room through her visor for only a moment before she blacked out on the floor.
“Son of a fuck, Vi. What happened to her?”
Scalli’s voice rang in Bobbi’s ears, and she realized that she was no longer in the ducts. She opened her eyes and found the hard green light of factory lamps bathing her skin again, and that her visor was off and in her hand. Her head didn’t hurt anymore, but her brain still ran so very, very slow as she returned to consciousness. She knelt upon the floor of the warehouse room that she had originally left; Scalli and Violet stood over her, looking down with a mixture of shock and deep concern written over their faces. Bobbi did not know why they looked so stricken. Her eyes tracked everywhere – the walls, the ceiling, the still tomb that rested in the center of the room. She saw with that the hatches were open, and that now simple gratings separated the room with what looked like dimly-lit tunnels beyond. Yet their attention was upon her. Why did they look at her like that?
“She must have run into the corpses,” Violet said, her brows arched. “I don’t know how she did it, cuz she didn’t have a gun. Holy shit, man, look at her!”
Bobbi did just that, and shuddered. The front of her was coated with the white tide of synthetic blood; her senses suddenly filled with the stink of it in her nostrils, the ozone stab surging and fading away, as she stared down at herself. She froze as she looked at herself, the world draining away.
Scalli crouched down to look at her. “Bobbi, honey,” he said, his voice low and soft, “Bobbi, honey, look at me.”
“Yeah?” Bobbi did so numbly. Confusion filled her mind as she met his gaze, blinking at him as if she were coming out of some kind of dream or trance. It certainly felt like it. What had happened? Where had she been?
Scalli glanced at Violet before looking back to Bobbi. “You all right, baby girl? Where’s your armor?”
“I…had to take it off, in the ducts.” Bobbi said the words but she did not feel them at all. She did not remember where the blood had come from. In fact, she found that she was having a hard time remembering anything at all after linking up with the Yathi system. The blackness yawned at her in her mind like a hungry mouth, which in itself was an image that she felt she should remember but her sluggish mind resisted recollection. “On the way up. And then I hacked the control…system, and then…then…”
Enormous cold, the yawning death that came to eat her mind. The narrow escape that frayed her mind. She felt calm now, but how?
“I think I ran into one of the drones on my way back.”
“And? What happened?”
Bobbi reached in the dark for memories, but found only snatches of images floating to the surface. Fragments of paper on black water, soaked through and ragged. “I…I must have killed it,” she said.
“But how?” Violet frowned at her. “You didn’t have a gun.”
Bobbi blinked at them slowly. Her brain was starting to work again, even if remembering was still like fishing in a dark lake. “With my knife.”
Scalli and Violet exchanged looks. Scalli was shocked, even impressed; Violet’s face was weirdly calm as she looked back at Bobbi. “With a knife, you said?”
“Yes! Close quarters, makes a mess,” Bobbi blurted, and the memory of crisis pushed the disturbing blank out of her head for the time being. “We have to get out of here. We have to get down to find Redeye.”
Scalli blinked at her. “Yeah, we know,” he said, and he rose with Bobbi; his expression was one of disbelief. “Girl, are you okay? Are you –”
“No time!” Bobbi shook her head. “No time, no time!” She looked at Violet then. “Violet, honey, I need to say this, and you have to promise not to gnaw my face off when I do. It’s very important.” She didn’t give Violet a chance to respond, however. Instead she began to tell them, all in a flood, what it was that she had experienced and what Cagliostro had told her. She told them about her attack on the system and about her brush with the great horror that was the Ghia-Mother, but her passage back to the storage room after blacking out still eluded her. She did not give them opening to speak, so fast was the gushing of her words, and when she was done they stared at her in silence.
Finally, Scalli spoke. “Well,” he said, “that…sounds like a hell of a time.” His voice was very quiet.
Bobbi stared at Violet, waiting to see if she would leap at her and try to bite her throat out with those ultra-sharp teeth of hers. And yet she did not; the blankness remained on her face for a long moment, and then, when she spoke, Violet’s voice was very thin, very hurt, but entirely unsurprised.
“The Eye had always said that she would make them pay with her own life,�
� Violet said, and took a deep breath. “She told us that it would all end in fire.”
Violet’s reaction – or rather, the temperance of it – made Bobbi anxious. She’d expected that Violet would have tried to bite her throat out for so much as thinking about taking Redeye down, but this was entirely unexpected. “You believe me?”
“Of course I do,” Violet said. Her brows turned down a bit. “I was built to tell when people lie, remember?” There was something in the way she looked at Bobbi now, something weirdly…admiring, perhaps. It made Bobbi even more nervous in that moment than the prospect of her fury.
“Bobbi,” Scalli said, “are you sure that this is all on the level? This isn’t some crazy shit that Cagliostro is coming up with for his own ends? He was one of them too, after all. It’s because of him that we’ve gotten dragged out here in the first place.”
“He was,” said Bobbi with a nod, “and this may in fact be according to some plan of his, I don’t know. But we’re here, and we’re going to eat it if she goes off, and so will half the goddamned city. We need to get down there and try and talk her out of this. Maybe we still can.”
Violet made a soft noise. “I don’t think that’s going to work,” she said. “Maybe, if we’re lucky. But I’ve never known her mind to change. We may have to…” She shut her eyes tight for a moment, then sounded very sad indeed. “We will probably have to kill her.” Despite everything that went on, despite the sudden gaping hole in her memory, Bobbi still felt a stab of pity for the girl. She knew how this must feel. She knew how it was when her own mother died, crazy bitch that she was. Violet may have had her own parents, but she had given them up when the Yathi took her and Ghia served as mother. Then Violet shook that bitch off, and then Redeye took the post. It seemed fated that there would never be a mother for her now that she would not have to kill or abandon.
Bobbi understood that plenty. “We’ll see what we can do,” she said, and she reached out past Scalli to lay her hand on Violet’s shoulder.
“But wait, Bobbi.” Scalli frowned. “What about Merducci being here? Surely that puts a kink in things, doesn’t it?”
“As ridiculously fucking scary and mind-damaging as running into her was, I don’t think it does. She came because of me, not because of Redeye.”
“Yeah, but she told you that Red would get killed one way or the other down here. She sounded pretty sure of that. Maybe this is part of her plan, too?”
Bobbi glanced at Violet, who was still staring at her in that same weird way. “I don’t think she does know what’s going on with her,” she said, looking back to Scalli. “I think she’s just dead set on killing Red, which means we need to be very careful.”
“Dead set on killing you now, too,” Scalli pointed out.
“Yeah, well, I make friends wherever I go, don’t I?” Bobbi nodded at the chutes. “We need to get out of here.”
“Well, you got the hatches open.” Scalli nodded at the two screens which led to the tunnels. “We can go now, though I don’t know how we’re going to get back out. The screens there slide open easy enough, but we’re at the top of the chutes. If we want to get out of here, we’ll have to go back the way we came.”
“Considering how Red’s going through the local constabulary, I don’t think that’s going to be much of a problem.” Bobbi shook her head. “Cagliostro said that she’s tearing through the defenses, and the Yathi are putting all their energy behind stopping her. She’s being slowed down pretty good, I would imagine.”
“Let’s hope we can get down there before she does.” Violet glanced at Bobbi’s hand, but didn’t shrug it off. She then turned toward the entrances to the chutes. “Do we know which goes to where?”
“Unfortunately not,” Bobbi said. “But I’m actually pretty sure they both go down to the drone factory. Honestly, I’m not really sure what’s going to happen when we get there – I don’t even know if Cagliostro’s gonna be around to help us any more than he has.”
“Well, let’s assume he will be eventually.” Scalli walked to the screens, reaching for the handle of one and pulling it open; it slid silently on its tracks, just as the hatches must have, and it was with caution that the big man leaned through the opening and peered down the chute. “We haven’t seen anything that would be any kind of defensive measure, at least nothing that either of us could identify. Does look like there are ladders down this way, or something like that.”
“What do you, mean, ‘something like that’?” Bobbi let go of Violet and walked over as well, peering down through the chute. It yawned downward, a dizzying hexagonal passage lit greasily in distant intervals by light fixtures. The bottom was not immediately visible. She took a deep breath as she gazed down into the poorly-lit well, feeling a flash of vertigo. “Christ,” she muttered. “That’s a fucking long drop, all right.”
Bobbi felt Scalli’s eyes on her, covered with drying blood as she was, and tried very hard to push that out of her mind. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay, so, look over here, right?” Scalli gestured with a wide hand at a series of what looked like rungs, four or five of them, that were set into a track that ran down toward the bottom of the chute. A set of these rungs were built into each of the chute’s six walls. “I think they’re like ziplines, you know?”
“Yeah.” Violet had come up behind them both. She put her hand on Bobbi’s shoulder, squeezing it gently through the coat. “So, I guess you grab one and it takes you to the bottom of the shaft.”
“Makes you wonder how they get stuff up here,” Bobbi said.
Violet leaned in a bit more. Bobbi had the bizarre thought that she was sniffing her, but Violet drew her head back to speak before she could tell for sure. “Probably the tracks, same thing. Well. I guess let’s get there.” She sounded sad, though not as much as she had a moment ago. Resolved, now. Bobbi wasn’t sure what to think about that.
Bobbi reached out for the closest rung, but Scalli reached out and gently drew her hand away. “Bricks first,” he said, and took hold of a grip up from the bottommost, which he planted his foot upon. It eased down with his leg to become a foothold, and the two women moved aside as Scalli swung his great bulk into the chute and immediately began to descend. After a few moments’ descent, when Scalli was a few body lengths away, Bobbi followed on the wall facing opposite the exit. Violet descended soon after.
It wasn’t as slow as Bobbi had thought it might be, though part of her wished that it would take a little longer than it was. It was the same part that had felt strangely exposed when Violet brought her head near, that wondered what had happened after she blacked out tangling with Ghia. She felt the strangest fragment of a dream, felt a strange taste in her mouth. With the back of her free hand she wiped at her face, came back with a greasy slick of white. Shit, she thought to herself. Must have gotten all over me. She reached into her bag as she descended, rummaging around for a mirror; she came up with the reflective case of a hand-warmer that she carried around to dick with infrared sensors, and held it up to her face.
She nearly dropped the damned thing when she saw the face that stared back at her; her face was smeared with the stubborn gray-whiteness of drying synthetic blood, her eyes staring back in the gloom as if her face were covered with warpaint. All in her hair, too, so that it looked like a flipped-back wing atop her head. It reminded her of the bird-of-paradise job she had when she met Tom, but more so it reminded her of the girl in her dreams, the one with the digital spear. The girl that she had been so long ago. She thought of the great coldness that had tried to eat her mind in the network above, how it had been so different than the bland beast of the Chorus – it had been many and yet one at once, so hungry, so angry. She had met the tiger that she had dreamed of so many months ago, and she had been very nearly mauled. Nor did Bobbi have the spear of fractal data yet, whatever it would prove to be. But she would. She’d make sure of that.
A shudder ran through Bobbi’s body and the hand warmer fell from her grip. It fell like a gleaming stone
and clattered as it landed upon the bottom of the factory chute. Scalli tensed immediately and shot a black look upwards at her, which she answered with one that was equal parts ‘sorry!’ and ‘oh, shit.’ The big man unlimbered the Dragon from his pack, being the smaller and more maneuverable of the guns available to him now. He must have already chambered a capsule beforehand, because he kept its fist-sized muzzle trained on the exit hatch as they drew near the bottom.
Scalli landed first, stepping off onto the floor of the chute. He looked out of the open hatches, the Dragon in his hand. Bobbi waited until she landed behind him to speak. “Hey,” she said. “You see anything out there?”
It took him a few seconds to reply. “Uh, yeah,” he said, and his voice was distant. “Yeah. Wish I didn’t, though.”
Bobbi pushed past him and looked out at the room beyond, and found pause as well. The drone factory was as the processor was, as twice as cavernous as the structure above and jammed packed with the bizarre machinery required to carry out its grim work. At a glance, the engines of dark industry that towered over them were obviously designed to accept the corpses delivered from above and assemble them into…whatever it is that they wanted, really. And it was also clear that a great number of active corpses had been kept in storage in the factory – for there was a wide central aisle that ran from the chute hatches to the far end of the room, and it had been converted into an impromptu slaughterhouse floor.
The naked bodies of countless drones lay strewn in the aisle, fallen across the path or piled up against the sides of the machines that made them. Each one of them had been violently killed, reduced to gory tangles of severed limbs and ruptured torsos that littered the gore-slicked floor. Many of the dead were naked, freshly-created perhaps, but some others were armed and plated up like the ones above. Either way, it didn’t seem to have mattered; they all fell just the same. It was as if a storm had torn through the risen horde, and everything before it had been scythed down without mercy. They had not seen much of Redeye’s ability on the warehouse floor above, but now there was clear testimony as to what they truly faced.
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 42
