As they clambered up the ladder to the catwalk at the top of the drone processing floor, they found Scalli sitting on the lip of the doorway. He wore skin-tight silver spraypants and a pair of athletic shoes, naked to the waist – which would have struck Bobbi as funny were it not for how strange he looked to her in his natural state. Tall enough to fill his towering suit, his body was thin and lean, covered in scars and the gleaming silver lesions of interface ports. He looked up and smiled widely as they approached, tired and weak but still alive, and he got to his feet as the two women approached.
“Told you I’d live,” he said, but Bobbi did not answer. She grabbed his arm as the doors hissed open in her presence, revealing the white hall beyond, and the open hatch leading to salvation. Scalli stumbled a little as she pulled him out with her, Violet slinging her rifle and planting her hands against his naked back to propel him forward. Scalli didn’t protest when he saw the look in her eyes, he just moved – and soon they were running with all the power that they could muster, down the tunnel and through the ruptured scar that the centipede-machine had left, farther and farther away. Bobbi felt her leg try and give out twice over as she ran, thinking of Diana as she went. If she could survive this, she would avenge her old friend. There would be a lot of revenge to hand out for everybody.
They had made it halfway to the station when the earth turned over and screamed around them. Running between the two women, Scalli looked over his shoulder just in time to cry out as a wave of collapsing mortar and sound crashed down around them and the world went away.
The last thing that Bobbi felt was the tunnel closing around them like a mouth and roaring of splintered concrete like an angry sea in her ears. Then there was nothing but the dark.
Somewhere, she imagined that the Mother was laughing.
When Bobbi finally woke, it was in a hospital bed in the very familiar confines of David Chin’s black clinic; after many years of cosmetic surgery and getting implants jammed into her brain by his expert hand, she had come to know the seafoam green tiles and the recessed, colored lighting of his recovery rooms very well indeed. She had a crease in the back of her skull and regrown muscle in her leg, along with a completely reworked body; now she looked like the girl she had been when she had first come into Chin’s clinic all those years ago, only caught up on the years she was playing surgical dress-up. Plain, dark-haired, with half the chest she’d had back then, slim and slight and elfin with her reduced height, she was the adult version of what she had been born to be.
It had enraged her at first, especially when she had discovered that Scalli had Chin do the work while she was out and without her permission. This disappeared, however, when she discovered the circumstances behind it all. She had been pulled from the wreckage of the subway system by emergency crews with a massive head wound, having very nearly given out on the spot from loss of blood; Scalli and Violet were much less damaged, with just a few broken bones between them. Through whatever work of spook-artifice, Cagliostro had managed for a ‘black’ ambulance to pick them up from the site, then re-route them to Chin’s clinic. She had been in a coma for five weeks.
Bobbi had awoken to find that the world had been changing rapidly while she was out. The police were looking for her, for one. The detonation of Redeye’s nuke had taken out the building over the factory and most of the block around it, leading to the destruction of several corporate offices worth billions of dollars. On television, a somber-faced Maya Frail had announced to the world that three hundred people had been killed in the explosion and the following collapse. NewsNetNow had claimed that a data-terrorist group called the New Human Army was responsible for the attack, which it had carried out against what it claimed was a “corrupt and guilty member of the greater establishment against the freedom of information for all peoples.” Bobbi – pictured on screen as “Brain Mother” with her old face staring out at the world – was being depicted as the movement’s leader. The Feds had hit the Temple and shut it down, but not before Bobbi’s well-programmed self-destruct systems had turned all the computer equipment to slag. At least in that way she had protected herself from being found.
“New Human Army.” It was a ludicrous name attached to a ludicrous cause, but the public ate it up; by the time Bobbi had come out of her coma there was a great clamoring for greater anti-hacking laws, and funding for new agencies to counter this new “threat.” The Yathi were already hard at work setting up new methods by which they could counter the weapon that Bobbi could most directly employ – her ability to hack their networks – while she had been dreaming away. But Bobbi’s experience with Yathi protocols had already been tested, and her ability was such that she was able to escape the Mother herself; when the time came, she believed that she could give them a run for their money. The mercy was that Redeye seemed to have been right – there was no massive change in the environment, no sudden disasters born of voracious, transmutative nanomachines. But maybe that wasn’t how it worked. Maybe the changes would come on gradually, like a cancer. They would have to watch carefully for that.
Bobbi sat in her bed, staring at the telescreen mounted on the opposite wall. She wasn’t allowed to use the network until Chin was finished testing her brain for signs of injury, nor was she allowed to get out of bed until Chin was certain that all of her body modifications had fully healed. Scalli and Violet didn’t visit Chin’s clinic, either; all of Bobbi’s communication with them was through one-sided data wafers delivered to the clinic through Chin’s regular shipments of samples to and from a private laboratory. Without network access, Bobbi couldn’t look for Cagliostro, either. And so she sat, spending day after day watching the telescreen, playing games, reading. It didn’t take long to get extremely boring, but she made due with what she could.
A week or so after she awoke, one of Chin’s medical techs brought in a small portable computer that he said had been sent over with the regular supplies. It was an extremely expensive model, a tiny Excellis AV6200, as powerful as several of the next tier of machines put together and only half as large. It made the little Matricomp she’d carried around with her look like a pocket calculator. The gearhead in her awoke and salivated over the little machine, and she put it in her lap and fired it up without hesitation. When she did, the Excellis projected a holographic monitor that displayed not the standard bootup screen that she expected, but a misty blue decahedron that floated serenely in the air above a few feet from her face. Before she had a chance to wonder what the hell was going on, the thing shivered, and out of it came the Stadil-turned-Yahweh voice that belonged to Cagliostro.
“Good evening,” the machine said. “I am pleased that I am able to find you in good health.”
“Good evening, yourself,” Bobbi said, acid on her tongue. “I guess you can say that I’m all right. I’m not dead, at least, but not for lack of trying.”
“Indeed. I was pleased that I was able to have you rerouted to this clinic once you were discovered.” There was a pause in which the icon’s surface seemed to shudder. “I see that you did not succeed in destroying Redeye.”
“Yeah, funny thing about that.” She squinted at the floating avatar. “Didn’t you see what all happened? Where the hell did you go? I woke up and you were gone from the system.”
“Indeed,” said Cagliostro. The shape spun lazily on its polar axis. “The Mother of Systems arrived. I was forced to withdraw if I wished to retain my hold on the factory’s drones.”
Bobbi’s brows arched. “Yeah? Was that before or after I ran into her?”
The shape stopped its spin. “You encountered the Mother?”
“I did,” Bobbi said warily. “I’m kind of surprised you didn’t see it, man. There were all kinds of fireworks before she rolled in, and when she did it was like a fucking black hole rolled into the network. I nearly died.”
“I am aware that you were responsible for disrupting various systems in the network,” Cagliostro replied. “It was why I was able to keep the maintenance dron
es from finding and killing you in the ventilation ducts.”
“It’s apparently why a lot more than that got fucked up.”
“I do not understand.”
Bobbi snored. “Can’t have that,” she muttered. “Right, here, let me tell you the story.”
Cagliostro listened as she explained everything to him: Meeting Mother; Redeye’s incredible push into the bottom chamber of the complex; the coffin they had found; the horrible gestational pods. She told him of Redeye’s death and of the ghost that the cyborg so briefly became. She told him about the end of the Yathi race on the other side of the galaxy, or wherever it was from whence they came. Bobbi told him so much – but she did not tell him about the hole in her memory, nor did she tell him about the data which she still waited to collect from the drop account. She did not trust what the demigod-machine would do with her, or that the data would be intact when she finally got it. She didn’t trust him at all, in fact. Why would she?
When she finished telling him the story, Cagliostro’s avatar strobed slowly in the air. “It is a very interesting thing which you have told me,” the machine finally said. “Much of this I did not know, even when I was of the Yathi. I can tell you that nearly none of that race has this information.”
That surprised her. “Well what does that mean? Does that mean that Mom is keeping everyone in the dark about what’s really going on? Is this something that we can use?”
“Perhaps,” Cagliostro said. “I will have to process this information.”
Bobbi snorted at that. “Yeah, you go on being ineffable there, buddy. In the meantime, I’ve got shit to do.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“I have that promise to keep,” Bobbi said, and smiled. “You just keep doing what you’re doing. I’ll be in touch.”
She shut off the Excellis and put it on the bedside table. Then she lay down in bed and rolled over on her side, trying hard not to think of the future. It worked long enough for her to sleep, but her dreams were full of green skies and blasted landscapes, and the many eyes of silver that stared out at her from a black pit that hung in her mind.
The next day, Chin announced that she was able to leave the clinic. Scalli and Violet came to see her in the morning. Scalli looked healthy, as tall and lean as he was when they had found him sitting by the exit doors, stuffed in an oversized sweater and the pants from a set of French lunar fatigues. Violet had dyed her long hair black, had it cut so that it swung down from a bob in the back to a pair of wings that swooped down and licked her chest. She wore a Variable Sisters t-shirt and a pair of dull red Mitama leather jeans; Bobbi counted the fact that she was picking out designers again as a sure sign that she didn’t suffer from any more brain damage than living in commercial culture once inflicted on a person. They were pleased to see her, but Bobbi couldn’t help but detect a note of tension as Scalli smiled and talked, and Violet hovered over her like some kind of blue-eyed matron. Scalli kept looking at her as he talked, glancing over her new body.
“So, okay,” Bobbi said after she’d let them get the concern out of their system for a bit. “We’ve covered that I’m not gonna die, and we’re all happy to see each other again. Let’s handle the real subject hanging in the room, huh?”
Violet blinked at her. Scalli’s smile faded. “All right,” he said.
Bobbi chuckled. “Two things,” she said. “First, I’m not angry about my body. I mean I was when I woke up, but then I spent like thirty seconds watching the news and I understand why you did it. It was a real good call, and I owe you both for it.”
“It was Marcus’s choice,” Violet murmured. She wouldn’t look Bobbi in the eye. “He was wise.”
“Yeah, well, that tends to be the case,” Bobbi said with a chuckle. She snaked an arm around Violet’s waist and squeezed her gently. Bobbi felt a lot of guilt coming off the thin woman at the moment; she thought she knew where it was coming from. “You been doing okay?”
Violet didn’t answer. “She’s been helping me get things together,” Scalli said after a moment. “I mean, we’ve gotta rebuild, right? They shut down the Temple, locked everything down out there on the Field.”
“Yeah,” Bobbi said with a sigh. In a very real way, she was happy that she would never go back to that old home; it had been Stadil’s haunt, after all, and now she found she wanted as little to do with that man, ghost or otherwise, as she could get away with. “Which reminds me. How are we able to pay for all this? They’d had to have frozen my accounts, however well-protected they were. They were still mine.”
Scalli and Violet looked at each other. “Funny thing about that,” Scalli said. “I got a call from the Zurich Orbital Bank about the new account set up in Miss Goodacre’s name, and how I had been listed as a person with access and could I tell them what I wanted to do with it.”
Bobbi quirked a brow. “Miss Goodacre?”
“Alexandra Goodacre,” Scalli said with a nod. “That’s your new name. Or one of them. You got a lot of aliases overnight. Cagliostro set us all up very nicely – IDs, accounts, everything.”
For a brief moment Bobbi felt bad about hanging up on the errant ghost, but that faded away. “I guess he’d already anticipated that we’d be carrying on,” she replied. “Damn spider.”
Scalli and Violet looked at each other again. “We… weren’t sure that was what we were going to be doing,” he said.
“And why not?” Both Bobbi’s brows arched high. “You two aren’t getting second thoughts, are you?”
“Of course not,” Violet said, and she laid her hand on Bobbi’s shoulder. “I follow you gladly. And I know that Marcus will help you as well.” Scalli said nothing; he only nodded his assent.
“All right.” Bobbi pursed her lips. “Then what’s the problem?”
“We…” Violet looked at Scalli again.
“Can you two stop staring at each other and tell me what the hell’s going on?” Bobbi spat the words like sparks.
This time it was Scalli that spoke. “I didn’t tell you what happened to me,” he said. “After I got out of my suit.”
Bobbi frowned. “I take it that this isn’t a story that I’m going to like,” she said. “All right, go ahead then.”
Scalli cleared his throat. He took a seat in the visitor’s chair next to the bed. He looked nervous, which considering everything else he’d been taking on of late with a snarl of contempt made Bobbi rather concerned. “So when I got out of the suit,” he began, “I wasn’t in good shape. It’s supposed to take time to get out of it; the nerve connectors, you know. The emergency blow screwed my nervous system up pretty good. I was weak, and I knew I wouldn’t be carrying a gun anytime soon, so I tried to stumble back to the exit in case you came back in a hurry.”
“Good thinking, that,” Bobbi said. “So what happened then?”
“I made it back through the drone factory, climbed up the chute toward the second storeroom that we were in. Only as I got closer to the top, I heard voices, right? Speaking that horrible shit they call a language. Now I was smart enough to come up one of the sides near the mouth of the chute, so they wouldn’t see me all that easy, but there were two of the Yathi there – not the drones, but full-on fuckers, you know. They were opening up the coffin that was in the storeroom.”
Bobbi frowned a bit at that. She definitely got the feeling that she wasn’t going to like what was coming. “Were they making a deposit or a withdrawal?”
“Definitely cashing out,” Scalli said. He glanced at Violet, who Bobbi realized had slid her hand from her shoulder to grip her bicep in a bracing manner. “They were taking a body out on a pallet. Hovered above the ground, like a metrorail train. Antigravity, I guess.”
“Scalli,” Bobbi said thinly. “Who was it?”
“Well you have to understand,” he said, “I mean I couldn’t see very well, and it was dark–”
“Scalli!” Bobbi felt the blood begin to burn in her veins, her heart swiftly becoming a furnace. She leaned
forward, staring at him, Violet’s fingers wrapping tightly around her arm. “Who was it?”
The big man let out a sigh that hung heavy from his lips with regret. It was as if he were giving something up entirely, resigning hope. “It was him, Bobbi. It was Walken. I’m sorry. I’m sorry…” He closed his eyes and hung his head, as if he had betrayed her with the words. As if they were not enough.
Bobbi sat still for what felt like hours, staring at him. She had always known that the possibility was there – she had spoken to Redeye about it, after all – but that he was there, right under their noses. She could have opened the coffin and saw his face. She could have saved him, perhaps. “Tell me,” she said finally, and her voice was low and hollow. “Was he…alive?”
“I don’t know,” Scalli murmured. He sounded very tired now. “I think so, yes. There were machines connected to him on the edge of the pallet.”
Another horrible thought crashed down on her like a burning wave. “Scalli, was he…” The words shivered and died in her throat, then resurrected themselves to spite her. “Was he one of them?”
Scalli spoke the words as if they hurt him. “I don’t think so, no. He was pale, I mean, but he looked alive. As much as you can in that light. I mean he didn’t look like a white-haired ghost. But Bobbi…” The big man swallowed, and someone looking in from the hall might be amazed at how unnerved the tiny woman seemed to make him. “He had a nasty wound. Scarred up one side of his forehead. If he’s alive, I don’t know if he’s mentally functional.”
“He would have to be, Marcus,” said Violet fiercely. “Otherwise why would they have him in a medical container? Don’t say those things.”
Bobbi closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She felt as if the room was closing in on her. He had been there the whole time, and she had walked right past him. Bobbi felt sick to her stomach, swirling with emotion – she had lost him again, and even if she had not loved him like she might have expected, she had wanted very much to have held him again. The truth was that she would have had to kill him then and there, however; perhaps this was a mercy. Perhaps this way, she could extend the grasp of the coming battles to include a method by which Yathi minds could be safely extracted. Assuming he was still all in one piece. But if he wasn’t, why keep him?
Redeye (The Wonderland Cycle Book 2) Page 46
