“‘Platinum-level mortality protocol’”, Violet said. “Meaning some rich trash bag got shot in the face.” Bobbi shook her head. That was, of course, exactly what had happened. She had put an explosive round right through one silvery eye. The back of the Yathi vessel’s head had opened up like a flower, white nectar going everywhere. Bobbi closed her eyes. “Okay. No need to panic.”
“My lady,” Violet said, tension in her voice. “What do you think happened?”
Bobbi drew a deep breath.
The tension had been bad enough before. Bobbi had thought she had gotten away unnoticed. She had checked several times to ensure the alarms hadn’t gone off. That the news report stated they had tripped an hour ago made the anxiety she had already been fighting back swell into a roaring tide. “I don’t know. It’s possible that they just failed, or some other redundant system tripped. I mean the shutters engaged, so they worked to a degree…”
“Or perhaps they were watching when you killed him. Is it possible?”
“If they had, they would have followed me, and taken me out before I even left the building. Just a glitch somewhere. We’re fine.” But as she said the words, old, familiar thoughts arose. Perhaps they were following her, watching her, to see where she was going. Perhaps they intended to track them all down and kill them at once, like rats in a hole. Always the same paranoia. Just keep driving. Faster we can get to Shaper, the faster we can get out of here.”
Violet nodded. “All right.” She fixed her gaze on the cars in front of them. “I just hope that nobody decides to come back here after us.”
Bobbi let out a sigh. Ahead of them, a sea of taillights stretched across the bay, a road of light leading to the pleasure colonies of Bainbridge Island and the Bremerton military complex beyond. She had people waiting for them at Bainbridge in a stealth-equipped yacht. They needed to drive a half hour in traffic, without incident, to get there. They should be able to do that; the party was back in the New City with Aaronson’s brainless corpse. And yet, Bobbi knew very well what kind of a death-spot this bridge could turn into if they got stuck on it when company came calling.
Her group had scored their first hit on this bridge. It had been a coup straight out of the gate. Emmett Mills, founder and CEO of Immersive Holographic Media, had been crossing the Sound toward Bainbridge like they did now. He had his lawyer in tow, along with his mistress and a ten-man security detail – in reality, two lesser Yathi and a unit of drones – when a remote-piloted missile loaded with solid fuel-air explosive hit them. The resulting blast vaporized the whole group, and damaged the Trans-Sound Bridge enough that it had to be shut down for a week before it could be patched with nanopour.
Outwardly, the public mourned the loss of a man who had been considered a technical genius in the mold of Jobs and Tulevsky. Mills had pioneered the creation of the domestic holographic theater unit, new tech that allowed anyone to transform their living room into an ‘immersive entertainment environment’ on top of the more traditional holographic projection display. With his new holounit, called the Liberty, Harris had single-handedly slain the telescreen. He had promised a next-generation version for that year which would bring the somewhat limited resolution of previous models into near-realism, and now some band of terrorists had killed him. The company hadn’t finished the new software for it; Mills had been heading development, which meant the much-desired new hardware died with him. IHM ended up cancelling the product not long after the attack.
The death of the Liberty meant that those who had preordered the unit were out on their asses, to say nothing of the various studios and networks working to produce content for the new unit and the technology it promised. There would also be no photorealistic, interactive, holographic porn for an audience that had been foaming for it—bastions of the pornographic media industry that had invested heavily in the new technology collapsed, their talent scattered to the winds. Many performers retired, leaving the everyday perverts and sweaty basement-dwellers with a vastly reduced stable of people to obsess over, never to be pretend-fucked through the magic of science.
People lost their shit entirely.
Authorities blamed the attack on l’Alliance de la Pureté Intellectuelle, an anti-media outfit out of France who saw American network entertainment as a crime against human intelligence – which, depending on how one looked at it, may not be considered an unrighteous cause. The API was famous for using violence to silence American media icons; the most atrocious of their crimes was the Tinseltown Massacre of ‘79 wherein members of the LPI, painstakingly concealing themselves as a private film crew, machine-gunned the entire cast of Better Than You at an orgy in a rented Malibu party home. But then again, the network replaced everyone and kept on going as if nothing had happened without so much as a blip in the ratings, so maybe the French were onto something after all.
Traffic moved. Bobbi thought of Mills and his other blasphemous friends, going up in a fireball. The site came into view up ahead, where the fresh nanopour created a lighter gray stain against the weathered matter of the bridge deck. It sounded silly to ace an entertainment exec first, but Cagliostro had all but demanded it. The Liberty, he said, was not just the next generation in entertainment. Its specific brand of holographic technology would have allowed for much greater ease of psychological programming. People would have had their brains conditioned while they watched the network – and given how many people watched the network on a 24/7 basis, the strike, however risky, had been an absolute priority.
The car passed the place where Harris had been incinerated; the new bridge strands that had replaced those melted by the blast had yet to lose their shimmer. Back when the bridge was new, it glittered like a black ice sculpture; she closed her eyes and let out a sigh, trying to recall the image in the dark, and instead saw only Anderson kneeling before her.
“What did he say before you shot him?” Violet liked to hear about kills, the vicious little thing. Bobbi sometimes forgot that because Violet was so sweet to her. “Anderson, I mean.” Shewa’s the one with the killer instinct, where Bobbi just did it out of duty. Or so Bobbi liked to tell herself.
“He cursed me for a primitive,” Bobbi said. “Isn’t that what they all say? Cattle do not slay the butcher, that sort of thing.” She sounded as distant as she felt, distant from the car, the bridge, the world, herself. Anderson’s image appeared in her head clearly: the older man with his handsome face, lined and craggy, which filled out as if by magic into a smooth and angry mask when he came home to find Bobbi waiting for him wearing breather plugs and the air thick with synaptic inhibitors. They knew Anderson didn’t have lung filters. “Seemed all that he could get out. His brain wasn’t really working well once he got a lungful of the gas.”
Violet nodded. Bars of light fell quickly across her face from the bridge lamps, reducing her movements into a stuttered sequence of frames.” Defiant until the last. See what arrogance gets you.” She looked at Bobbi. “Are you all right, my lady?”
“Yeah.” Bobbi hated this part of the job. She wouldn’t be human if she didn’t, she guessed. Four years ago, when they were fighting for their lives in alien laboratories and the urban wastes of the Old City, things had been different. Now they were on the offensive. These were murders they committed. She didn’t like it, but she couldn’t flinch from it. “How much longer till we get to Bainbridge?”
“Twenty minutes.”
They drove on a little longer in silence. Finally, Maya Frail appeared on the holographic monitor again, and Violet brought the volume up. “We are continuing our coverage on an apparent incident which took place at Seattle’s Kallistrata Building, where police converged after emergency services reported a platinum-grade mortality alarm coming from the penthouse level approximately ninety minutes ago. Civil Protection now confirms that the dead is fifty-three-year-old architect and futurist Martin Anderson, the designer of such legendary structures as the San Bernadino Aerovator, the Obsidian Palace, and the Puget Trans-Sound Bridge
. Details of his death are still unknown at this time, but…“Maya paused a moment before speaking again. “Civil Protection has just issued a bulletin confirming that foul play is involved.” You didn’t have to look very closely to see the glitter in the hologram’s eyes. Murder.
“Not hard to figure that out,” Bobbi muttered, but she scanned Maya’s face as if the anchorwoman’s placid features could help her scry out the future. “But what else do they know…“She fell back in her seat. “Keep an eye on things here, Vi. I’m going to see if I can’t find out what’s going on.” Without waiting for a response, she closed her eyes, and reached out for the car’s satellite node. Every single car her little band procured had one – usually along with discreet body armor and heavy engines, and guns in the trunk. This being one of the nicer cars they had secured around town, it wasn’t quite armed for bear, but it could hold its own should a road battle commence.
Bobbi reached out with her mind into the warm water of the Yathi network. No longer constrained by the entirely left-brain machinery of the mundane global communications system, she leapt across the city with a thought toward the waiting bastion of One Wilson Plaza where Civil Protection’s central precinct was based. Central’s firewalls served as impenetrable barriers to most datanauts, like the armored nanopour of its physical structure, but to Bobbi it was so much wet paper. Her programs easily sliced through such defenses, but she had to do so carefully. The Yathi had long anchored watchman programs in the system, and even if she couldn’t be detected by mundane security instances, she would not be to them. Soon, she safely made her way in, however, and sat in a corner of Central’s dispatch nexus while feeding queries to its New Crimes database.
Bobbi watched incoming data from the officers on the scene spool in. They had breached the security doors with a laser cutter, something that they didn’t have last year. Bobbi wondered what kind of budgetary flex they had in the case of top citizens to carry such a thing. Damned expensive to own and operate, to say nothing of repair. It had taken them the better part of an hour, but they had found Anderson’s corpse sprawled in his living room where Bobbi left him.
She saw straight away that something was wrong.
In the images of the data feed Anderson lay there, brains across the pale blue carpet. Red and raw, garish chutney where they should be a smoking skull. The blood was red, he smoothness of its altered face and body now receded. Anderson’s eyes stared into space, blue and unfocused, where in death they had remained sharp and silvery like the blades of scalpels. In the compressed existence of the Network, Bobbi could cycle through crime scene photos in milliseconds, drinking in the gory images of her own handiwork. There should be a dead and heavily modified cyborg, loaded with hyper-advanced technology, lying on that floor – and yet according to the data, what lay there instead was a human corpse.
Someone had altered the feed.
For a moment, the gears of Bobbi’s mind locked tight with the frost of horror. She had told Violet that he had simply cursed her, but Anderson’s words had been very different, even in the slurred tangle of Yathi syllables escaping his stolen tongue.
“It won’t work,” he had said as she put the muzzle of her pistol to his eye. He had smiled as she pulled the trigger.
Somewhere in the distance, beyond the boundaries of the network, she felt a distant rumbling. It rang like a dream, or perhaps the echo of one – easily discarded, but years of working deck reminded her the sensation came from her living flesh being tossed about in the primitive world of the real. Her alarm protocols triggered, and red chaos filled her head as the network forcibly dumped her… into the real, where it sounded as if the skies had opened and emptied the Deluge upon the car.
“Countermeasures!” Violet shouted over the rain, her voice tight and steady. Bobbi slowly realized that Violet’s hand was on her shoulder, her nails digging into flesh. She opened her mouth to complain, but her scattered mind had pulled itself together enough to realize that the car shook on its wheels from a battery of impacts. She came to herself entirely, as a cloud of thick white foam flash-hardened into a pearly shell around the sedan, and it was instantly clear to her that the rain falling upon them was not made of water.
Someone was firing on them. In the middle of traffic, where they could not drive away. Once again she had disconnected from the Network to the sound of alarms and gunfire.
“What the hell?” Bobbi looked around for the source of the attack as Violet punched an emergency button underneath the dash. With the low thunder of explosive bolts and the cracking of defense foam, the doors flung themselves open to provide a protective canopy. “Someone’s shooting at us? Who the fuck is shooting at us?”
“I don’t know, my lady,” Violet called as the rear seat swung up to brace the roof and her seat back collapsed to follow it. The trunk, now accessible, was loaded up with firearms. Violet pulled a brick of seamed black metal from the compartment and tossed it to Bobbi, who took it by the pistol grip that jutted from its bottom and pressed a release catch in the side. A lethal jigsaw undid itself around the grip, and a weapon that resembled a compact submachine gun came to life in her hand with a droning hum.
Bobbi leaned out the side over a plume of glittering smoke that billowed from beneath the car, turning the vehicle into a concealed bunker. Between the impact foam and the armored hull, they would have time to identify their enemy. With the IR smoke and laser-scattering matter that swirled within it, they would have cover to either shoot back or escape. All around them came the cries of citizens, swiftly climbing out of their cars and running away en masse. Bobbi swore under her breath as she checked her gun’s safety. Over the shouts of the panicking crowds, came the soft, buzzing thunder of distant VTOL fans.
“I’ve got it.” Violet called up a tactical display on the holographic panel. Where Maya Frail had been, appeared a heads-up view of the bridge and a rapidly-circling pair of sensor contacts. VTOL, my lady. It looks like…a drone?”
Which is all we need. “What are they armed with? Tell me they don’t have missiles. I don’t want this bridge going up with all these people here.”
“Not that I can tell.” Violet stabbed manicured fingers at a newly-conjured holographic keyboard. “It’s unmanned, very small. Most likely an electric rotary cannon, seven-six-two millimeter. From the hits the car took, it’s loaded with solid AP rounds.”
“Christ.” Bobbi reached under her seat and pulled out a veil of black plastic hanging from a pair of faceless matte black goggles, which she quickly strapped on. The veil sealed against her face, forming an air-permeable filtration barrier. At a thought, the combat visor hummed to life and connected to the car’s sensor suite; the VTOL displayed as a weak target contact as it slowly circled her side of the bridge. “Why aren’t they firing?”
“Probably trying to gauge if we’re dead or not,” said Violet. “As soon as the first rounds hit the car, the foam engaged; they can’t be sure if the defenses are all automated postmortem.”
“Fair enough,” Bobbi replied. “Did the emergency call get to Shaper in time?”
Violet’s leaden calm faltered a hint. “I can’t tell. They started jamming transmissions the moment the first hits came in.”
Bobbi drew a deep breath. The machine on her side drew nearer. “I think they’re going to come in and finish the job. We need to show them that’s a bad idea.” She looked back at Violet, who had a visor on as well. Even behind her mask, she could tell the other woman smiled.
“As you wish, my lady.” Violet slid out of the car into the smoke.
Bobbi followed.
Thus protected, they crouched in the smoke and pressed themselves against the neighboring cars, then duck-walked rapidly past the cars toward the edge of the cloud. Keeping the bulk of the now-abandoned vehicles between them and the gunfire, they executed a long-practiced drill, albeit one originally designed for use against full-sized combat craft. A drone was faster, smaller, and much harder to hit.
Bobbi grunted.
A blossom of fire broke through the graphic superimposed upon the incoming drone, and from it, a stream of glowing death sped toward the bridge. Bobbi cursed and hunkered down as a stream of sparks and the screaming music of tearing metal raced across the bridge deck. High-velocity rounds raked empty civilian cars through the dim mist of the now-fading smokescreen. Ahead of them, a little Citroen wagon burst into flame as rounds tore through its hydrogen cells and set them off. The Mercedes bunker rocked on its wheels while the drone’s cannon sheared chunks of foam away. The target indicator in her field of view sputtered. For a moment, Bobbi feared the car’s sensor suite had been hit, but moments later, the indicator returned. She didn’t intend to let it get any closer.
Four hundred meters…three…
Two hundred fifty meters. The targeting icon went from white to red, indicating her aim was true.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 2
