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© 2016 Michael Shean
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ISBN 978-1-62007-377-3 (ebook)
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ou aren’t getting yourself out of this, man. That’s just how it is.”
Martin Anderson stared up at his assailant and strained to see. Small and thin, the female figure didn’t resemble the kind that Anderson normally had in his apartment. Were he in better straits, he might have amused himself by reflecting that she was the skinniest girl who had ever been near him, really, outside of the office. The human he had once been gravitated towards curvier specimens. He certainly would have laughed. He even might have mocked her. But on his knees, with his lungs filled with gas and his brain shutting down one circuit at a time, Anderson had to fight hard to keep himself awake and alive.
“I’m more than a little surprised that your place isn’t a fortress,” the figure said. Entirely anonymous, a black shape wearing a helmet – or perhaps a mask, he could not tell the way his vision bloomed with video artifacts and flickering –her voice rendered in the unidentifiable mechanical growl of a vox-filter. “Rich man like you are.”
“Funny,” he willed himself to say, the words coming out like a hissing flame in his throat.” I…thought…the ssssystem was sssstate…. of the art.” It should have been; military-grade anti-intrusion software, and then…
Pain lanced through Anderson’s body and he let out a sharp hiss.
“You and I both know that it’s more than state-of-the-art, buddy.” The woman crouched down in front of him. His face reflected in black lenses. “Look, you don’t have long here, man. Either the gas gets you or I do – so if you got last words, I’m ready to hear ‘em.”
Why was this meat here? Could it be a terrorist? One of those ridiculous anti-corporates? What could be so brazen, so well-equipped, so skilled as to be able to break into this building, his sanctum?
Then understanding hit him, like a bolt of lightning clearing away the fog of failing neurons. He knew who this person was, or at least with whom she affiliated herself. The primitives have come for me with their flint spears, at last. An unprecedented feeling came over him – rage, raw and red and boiling, jockeyed with the pain for top billing inside of him. Phantom mandibles arched and spread in defiance, echoing a form he no longer had. His skin changed, as did his eyes, and he allowed his true self to be seen. Silver glinted, reflected in the mask. Anderson laughed.
“What’s so funny, buddy?” The figure produced a small, blocky shape from its jacket pocket, some kind of pistol.
Anderson would have been able to identify the device, had his memory not been in a state of flux. As it was, he felt himself dissolving away, along with his rage, suppressed beneath a leaden sheet.
“It’s you,” he managed to say through ragged laughter.
“There are a lot of me out there. You can take your pick as to who.” The figure thumbed a button on the side of the gun and it whined softly. “So you got anything to say before I put a bullet through your head, you nasty son of a bitch? Any last words for the folks back home?”
A twinned note of loss and anger seized him at those words, and his mouth worked to use syllables that he had never thought worthy of a human being. Hissing and clicking the words of his people, Anderson tried in vain to move his body, to wrap his hands around his attacker’s slender throat.
The figure stood, dimming to but a shadow in Anderson’s faded vision. His words must have found some purchase, to his surprise, for the killer paused. “So you say,” it said, and held the gun out toward his face. “But we sure have been tagging lots of your folk as of late.” The muzzle, short and wide, seemed big enough to eat his head by his increasingly skewed vision. Yet he felt no fear, only the ebbing anger, a sense of loss, a deep sense of shame. He thought of grand edifices he had made in the centuries of his life: bridges that crossed a planet, palaces of metal and spun crystal, vast subterranean complexes. Grandeur on a scale never before seen on this pitiful rock. In the end it did not matter; it had all long gone, and soon he would join it. He would be killed by a primitive, and he would never build again. “All right. Time to go.”
Time to go. He stared up at the figure still, unable to move thanks to failing nerves. His lips spread into a horrifying rictus, the last vestiges of challenge, an echo of the shearing mouthparts he once had as a creature of another world. He was not Anderson. Once, when he wore another body, his name translated in his parent tongue as The Anticipation of a New Sculpture. He pushed aside the useless and thoroughly outmoded meat whose name he took – and for a moment he succeeded, became a point of new rage, an alien sun that radiated waves of an unknown fury.
He locked his gaze upon his reflection in the helmet’s visor, and did not even flinch when the killer put a white-hot thermite needle through his eye.
Somewhere else, halfway across the world, a different figure staggered out of an underground sewer pump house, naked and soaked with fluids best not contemplated. It had escaped, and this time there was no detecting it. It had made certain of this, though at the moment, it had no concept as to how it knew. The knowledge seemed as closely coded as its DNA.
No real conscious thought sparked in its mind as it struggled down the vast and ancient concrete hall. It did not know who or what it was, nor did it know where it staggered – only that it must escape from where it had come, the gleaming tubes of a place it knew to be a laboratory. That place held only pain– pain, abomination, the piercing stares and smiles that seemed warm but were deathly cold beneath their surface. Behind it, many levels down, nothing waited but agony.
It ventured forward, blindly stumbling, feeling nothing, only registering the cold and wet as data values somewhere in its brain. It had no vision, no sensation, only mathematics. Had it escaped once before? It seemed to recall so, but even this dim knowledge came from somewhere unknown within the depths of its brain. Was escape even certain? It did not know. It did know, however, that anything ahead of it – even death – would be better than where it had come from.
And so it staggered on…
he sun went out, abruptly smothered by the thick gray clouds, and night spread cold and empty across the city, a bedroom choke-out gone wrong. The days didn’t seem to fade anymore as much as they just ended, leaving the city, burning with light, an electric bonfire casting its glow across the iron shores of Puget Sound. People lived, died, consumed enormous amounts of bad food and drugs, and bought things they didn’t need and never would. People lost their souls to the predations of unknown creatures.
Another Seattle evening. The brave new now.
Down by the Ferry Terminal, where the polluted water licked at gray concrete in the shadow of the Trans-Sound Bridge, a shadow picked its way along a rain-spotted freight lot. It moved with caution, though everyone did; the waterfront at night was no safe haven, and the bridge had paid mute witness to many an act of violence in the sh
adow of its span. Swallowed in a heavy jacket, it looked as if it were trying to melt into the concrete as it crossed the lot, turned into the street, and started down the sidewalk away from the sound. The water hissed as it went through its cycle, bearing lesions of silver – signs that the great chemical slick that stretched like a vast mirror-skinned cancer across the Pacific was finally stretching into the sound.
It paused, turned toward the sound, and stood there for a long moment. While it did so, the filthy, spidery body of a homeless man unfurled itself from behind a cluster of barrels like a dusty flag.
“Hey there,” he said in a voice cracked from lack of use. “You all right there, buddy?”
After a moment’s silence, the figure slipped the coat from its shoulders. “Take this,” it said, its voice soft. Female. “Don’t freeze out here on my account.”
The bum reached up to snatch the coat from the slim hands that held it, surprise and gratitude in his expression. “Hey, thanks.” He paused to squint at the woman. “Are you okay, lady? You smell like–”
“Forget what I smell like.” The woman was already walking past him, her fringe of red-brown hair plastered to her plain face, swallowed almost entirely by an enormous pair of sunglasses. Beneath the coat, she wore simple black fatigues and boots. “Have a warm evening, citizen.”
The bum said nothing as she walked away, but he sniffed at the coat again before pulling it on and returning to his steel nest. The ozone tang of chemicals hung in his nostrils, as they did in hers – but though he could not identify them, Bobbi January had no trouble picking out the smell of synthetic blood the night air refused to scatter from her. It was a smell she had lived with for years now.
Bobbi proceeded down Alaskan Way for a few minutes, rolling up the sleeves of her fatigue shirt. The enormous lenses of her shades made her look like a kind of street organism–a plain, thin scavenger. She paused again this time, scanning the street. Its emptiness. The distant sounds of the city beast in constant operation. A pair of headlights appeared at a distant intersection. Bobbi pressed herself against the guardrail overlooking the scarred water. Her hands slid into her pants pockets as she waited for the car’s approach, black and sleek, a modern beast of burden. It slowed as it drew closer, until it stopped next to her and the headlights winked out. In the sodium glow of the streetlamps, her reflection was a pallid ghost in the car’s skin as she crossed around the front and opened up the passenger door. She ducked under the gullwing panel and slid into a leather bucket seat. Looking up she saw a fellow phantom, dark-haired and beautiful, dressed in Paolo Manack’s finest iteration of the classic little black dress, at the helm.
“It’s done?” Violet asked her captain. Bobbi closed the door, immediately drenched in the glow of the dashboard where holographic instruments hovered dutifully over a smooth, leather-upholstered plane. The inbuilt clock read 11:35 PM.
The smell of the new car cleared out the worst of the synthblood odor. Bobbi took off her shades and heaved a deep sigh, melting into the seat as the car provided her safe haven. “Yeah.” “It’s done.”
“Good. Bastard had it coming to him.” Violet’s face, pale and delicate, turned fierce as she eased the car back to life. The headlights raked the street as their sedan glided forward on trackball wheels, as silent as shadowy death.
Bobbi watched the bridge as Violet drove. An undeniably impressive edifice, thousands of feet of grown alloys and sprayed nanofoam, stretched into shapes more akin to an ambitious spider’s funnel web than something made of beams and cables. Built in 2055, it was hailed as a ‘work of architectural inspiration, a thing made from dreams or science fiction.’ In reality, it was imagined by a man who had been possessed by a Yathi mind for the last sixty years, a mind that had built far more complex things billions of miles away.
“I feel like we got away too easily,” Bobbi said as the bridge loomed closer.
Violet steered onto the onramp and into traffic, the car lurking amid its fellows. It started to rain, thin sheets of water caressing the windshield as they sat in traffic. “You did the work yourself, my lady. You know better than anyone how well it worked.” Though she spoke softly, her blue eyes were iron-hard as they tracked the view around them. Presently the windows lit up, becoming a three-sixty wraparound display. Movement markers and ID numbers of surrounding cars floated serenely about them, provided courtesy of the sensor module they’d installed in the trunk. Nothing suspicious, Bobbi saw with relief. It really wasn’t the best place for them to be, stuck on an onramp.
“You’re right,” Bobbi said, feigning relief. “I didn’t see anything else, but who knows? It’s not perfect, you know, hacking their machines. Now that they know it can be done, it’s as hard as it was when I could just crack normal systems.” Normal…I can shred the most complex computer system ever made by human hands, that’s normal. Cracking alien systems even more so. She inhaled deeply and let that thought pass, blowing it out of her mind with her breath.
“As you say, lady. I am sure that you know best, “said Violet, her volunteer priestess. With the death of her last patron, the former feral and Yathi vessel had latched on to Bobbi for more reasons than Bobbi could guess. Strength seemed to have something to do with it, as did bravery – she had spat in the eye of the Mother of Systems while encountering her in the Network, something Violet had seemed more impressed with than anything else. And, of course, Violet had fought beside Bobbi as they had probed the depths of the Yathi clonal facility deep beneath an office complex in the Verge. Four years later, there had been many other battles, many other facilities, many other Yathi killed. Bobbi had a priestess, a divine overseer in the form of the machine-mind Cagliostro, even an army. Such as it was.
“You know better than to say that to me,” she muttered. “I’m no smarter than the rest of you.”
As traffic began to move, Violet turned the car toward the bridge and followed the rest of the metal herd onto its four-lane deck. “Was he what we believed him to be?”
Bobbi stared out at the bridge as it spun and stretched like a black-veined gullet, spiderworks of carbon fiber arching gracefully in all directions. “Yes.” “Exactly what we’d thought. Cagliostro hasn’t lost his touch.”
“The old monster’s got a long list of targets,” Violet muttered.
“He’s had a long enough time to collect them. Anyway, we wouldn’t be where we are if he didn’t have that list of his.” Even as she said the words, however, Bobbi felt an old wariness tug at the strings in the back of her mind. One alien intelligence steering her against its former comrades. That too served as normal now. “We’ve started shaving that down a good bit, too.”
“Yes, my lady,” Violet replied with a nod. “Saboteurs and assassins, we are.”
A smirk tugged at Bobbi’s lips. “Family business since twenty-eighty.” Cold sparks of shame spat through her at playing so cavalier about the death of living beings, but she quickly snuffed them. No, fuck ‘em. Since the events at the drone factory in 2080, Bobbi, Scalli, and Violet had gone underground – far more than they ever had previously –plotting resistance against the Yathi expansion. Guided by Cagliostro, ever the dark angel overseeing their fates, the three lived in hiding.
They gathered resources, hacked systems to raise capital and to find others affected by the Yathi hand, whether they realized it or not. Some were just everyday people who had seen too much, yet had either not been discovered or hid so the Yathi had forgotten about them or simply allowed them to disappear. Some were like Violet, former vessels who still clung to some semblance of sanity. Bobbi did not like to think of those others whom they had discovered, raving in asylums and on the streets, howling for death. Cagliostro had a knack for targeting the ones who had gone feral, who they then tracked down and euthanized. It was not difficult; they were all grateful to die in the end.
In two years, they’d built a small army. They gathered weapons and laid caches, securing safe houses and vehicles across the planet, in major zones whe
re they would deploy. All except for Wonderland, of course. They wouldn’t go there yet.
They had prepared themselves well, or as well as they believed they could be without tipping off the Yathi. At the beginning of the first year, Cagliostro had produced a detailed list of targets, many of whom Bobbi would never have believed to have been alien. Many were captains of industry and scions of wealthy families–these people she could understand–but some were entertainers, charity workers, even children. That was the worst for her. She thought of the horrible drones she had found in the Yathi ventworks and shivered.
The traffic crawled. Bobbi looked out the window and frowned. The HUD picked up the tags of police VTOLS moving toward the city, running full lights. The alarms she had set up in the system, meant to trigger when the body was discovered, had yet to go off. But that hardly meant anything. “violet, turn on the news.”
Violet nodded. She murmured to the car, crooning soft commands. A holographic panel popped into being between them, set to NewsNetNow. Maya Frail’s ageless self-hung suspended before a scene of a familiar building, the very tower Bobbi had infiltrated just hours ago.
“…Civil Protection is converging in force on the Kallistrata Building,” she intoned with her lake-calm voice, looking out at the two of them with sad, violet eyes. “A much-loved bastion of Seattle’s corporate elite. Though we cannot be certain what has happened, sources within the Emergency Services branch of that company report that a platinum-level mortality protocol was tripped a half an hour ago. First responders arrived on the scene one hour ago, but sources report that security doors on the top ten floors had been sealed and did not respond to panic protocols. NewsNetNow will continue to report on this ongoing situation as it has information. In the meantime…“Maya’s china-doll mask swung from sorrowful to chipper in the space of an instant. “Tyler Leung has this report on the Madrid Fashion Festival, which is in full swing. Tyler?”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 1
