He approached with caution. Unlike the other side, filmed over only with everyday litter, a forest of rebar, broken spars, and the hulls of sunken vessels studded the approaching bank – casualties of the war, watercraft and buildings alike protected the land with their bones. Their shadows floated in the water, urging him to come out and embrace them. Walken picked his way through the wreckage in search of a good way up, hands reaching out and grasping old wood and steel slippery with moss, his armored skin ignoring the bite of rust. Something appeared at the edge of his senses, moving fast.
Something familiar.
Walken’s brain screamed alarm as the centipede-machine slithered in his direction. He stared at the ghost-shape it made in his ultrasonic view, cutting through the water, its many legs still held tight against its armored belly. Had it seen him already? He thought again of the sensor buoys, but saw in a further second that the machine did not make a beeline for him. It hunted for him, certainly, but it had not found him yet.
He pressed up against the riverbank amid a collection of junk, hoping the machine would not find him. He was so very, very glad he did not need to breathe, and yet he suffered all the same. In his new body, emotions dulled not because he did not wish to feel them, but the body could no longer help with the experience. Fear had taken on a different shape, a construct of pure intellectualization made into horror he could observe, quantify, and muse upon – but not experience in his flesh. No pulse roared in his ears, no adrenaline, no muscle tension. Just the awareness of the moment, the inexorable approach of certain death and the end of self. In a way, it made the fear worse than it might have been. He had no chemical release to soften things afterward—only the clear, unblurred memory.
The centipede seemed to come in slow motion, its flanged, arrowhead segments rippling over the course of what felt like years. The single orb in its face swept blindly back and forth, the triple apertures in its surface a three-lobed eye. It drifted ever closer, meters ticking away, until it veered elsewhere, passing him by, disappearing into the dark and out of range of the sonar. Walken lay against the bank, as still as a machine body could be, for another minute or so before he trusted the thing had gone. He clambered among the wreckage to the surface.
The Zone looked worse up close than it ever had from across the river. The land had become a plain of solidified ash, cratered by explosives and studded with the bones of long-dead buildings. The authorities applied spray fixative after the war, converting the ground into a substance tantamount to clay, thick clay that yielded slightly to Walken’s feet as he started toward the interior.
The points of nails, glass, and rusted steel tried in vain to pierce his feet, but his attention swept across the vast field of devastation in search of his promised deliverance. The more he looked, the surer he became that no satellite fell here. Something else, something perhaps larger, but certainly with far greater impact energy had hit the land. Probably some indiscretion from one of the warring states, some weapon whose existence had been long since buried.
Walken crouched against the blasted earth, aware of how easily he would show up against a satellite scan. His whiteness would be no protection from his foes. Walken waited as the minutes passed – five, ten, well beyond the twenty minute window, certain that someone had to have seen him. Again the anxiety came, his awareness of danger without the chemicals followed, and he called the mystery man’s number on his Unicom once more.
No answer.
He dialed again. Still no answer – and he realized, after a moment of further haranguing, that a problem with the hardware did not make his connection fail. The call met a barrier somewhere out in the system. It simply ceased to be. He stared as the words ‘DATA PACKET BLOCKED’ flashed in the air over the Unicom, unsure as to how to proceed. They had to have found him, and when they came, they would find him naked and unarmed in the filth. That could not happen.
Walken slinked across the spongy ground. He could sprint, of course, but what if they had already sighted him? The desire to flee warred with the desire to see where death would come from, and it kept him from acting at all. This cloudiness of augmented, but undisciplined thought likely kept him from escaping every time.
As if detecting his confusion, the centipedes surged out of the water.
All at once, like roaches pouring from a broken pipe, the machines rose over the wall that ringed the Zone. They came amid a hissing of claw tips on the concrete as they crested, the thump of impact as their heavy bodies landed one after another onto the glazed ash. They scuttled across the blasted earth in a slithering horde, water beading on their plates and dripping from their mandibles. Masses of feelers unfurled from compartments beneath their cycloptic heads, limbs with many joints Walken knew were meant to collect him once more. Or worse.
Walken broke and ran toward the city interior, gaining ground swiftly as his body responded to his fear. He made the first two hundred feet easily, but soon he hit a weak patch in the chemical glaze that bonded the surface gave in . His feet went in, one after the other, and moored in wet death and soil. He fell forward, landing, flailing, pulling at the mud, but the poisoned earth trapped him like a bog of wet cement. He would pull out one foot, only to fall forward and an arm would root itself in its place. He looked over his shoulder and beheld their coming, swarming over each other, a metal tide hidden from the view of the rest of the city by the containment wall. Though he could move quickly, two legs were no match for a thousand if they could move with the speed of a city train. They would be upon him in a handful of seconds.
He could do nothing but fight them. Walken pulled hard, hard enough to dislodge his arm, and brought himself to his feet. Anchored thus, he tightened his fists. He would resist them with all he had, fight them with whatever he could summon, with his strength, with the durability of his body. Needles of frustration lodged themselves in his brain as he watched them come, knowing he had so little awareness of what this body could do, knowing it was capable of so much more and yet—
He balled his fists, facing the wall of writhing steel. As he did, as the fear and anger and frustration built up within him to heights he had not been able to experience since the old days, a buzzing sensation filled his arms, his hands. He watched with a mixture of horror and wonder as his hands began to glow with a fierce heat – no, not his hands, but the very air just above them – before coalescing into an envelope of bright, blue-white light.
He was aware of incredible temperatures within the light conjured around his fists, numbers that belonged to the skin of suns, squinting at the glow that so brightly radiated from them and reflected against the metal ring that had sprang up around him. Walken looked up at the machines, rearing, capturing tendrils whipping manically beneath their heads. Time seemed to slow as they descended over him, blotting out the sky, the distant walls, the world. He fell back against the glossy earth, felt it give and embrace him gently as the machines came down to collect him, and did the only thing that his disconnected mind would let him do in that moment of crisis.
He started punching.
Only his arms existed in his sensorium, gauntlets of bright blue flame moving in concert, firing at the approaching machines. He felt his fists make contact, saw cherry-red liquid glow and splash in the dark, molten metal. He sensed tendrils closing around him, squeezing, then shuddering and falling away as he punched through the creatures who meant to seize him.
He did not stop to ponder these wonders. Guided only by the light of his arms, he continued to punch, rake, clutch at his enemies. But the fire faded. The blazing light began to sputter. He tried to will the fires to start again, but to no avail. He was tired now, tired and wooden, as if a battery inside of him had been drained with his efforts. The machines would have him, and it would be too late.
Walken went slack as the light went out around his hands. Vaguely, he registered the sensation of falling, down into some dark, warm well, a direct channel into Lethe waters. At the edge of consciousness, an urgent and da
ngerous thunder loomed all around him. A shockwave slammed him into the ash and the darkness tore away, revealing the open sky, a bright beam of light directed onto him from on high, and behind that…an angel? Walken stared up at the shape behind the light, broad and winged, held aloft on plumes of bright blue alcohol flames so much like that he had himself just used. Not an angel, then, but a plane, its turbines whispering metallic notes into his ear as his senses returned. The world snapped back into focus and he dragged himself to his feet, fighting through the mire of plasticized ash and mud holding him down.
He blinked, finding himself surrounded by a tangle of steel. The plane must have hit the Yathi machines with a missile of some kind. The explosion that had forced him into the ashen soil had not destroyed them, or at least it hadn’t blown them apart. The centipedes lay entwined about each other, some feebly twitching a capture-tendril or some other limb. He thought of his own troubles with Exley’s EM lance – could it be something similar? He looked up at the plane once more, watching in silence as it descended on its brilliant blue jets and hovered over the earth, not daring to land. Up close, he gazed upon a sleek, dark thing, delta wing and fuselage merged into one piece like the stealth bombers of the late Twentieth century. The hull had been coated with an absorptive material so black it seemed to eat any light that fell upon it. Its belly split open, and a gangplank extended from the revealed bay.
Walken frowned at the aircraft, weighing his options, and finding he had none, took a tentative step toward the hovering plane. As if to urge him onward, the spotlight winked twice. Looking around him at the tangled machines, he knew that wherever the plane would take him was far better than what waited for him if he remained in the Zone. He took another step, then another, and abandoning caution, jogged up the deck into the waiting warmth and light, transporting him away from the blasted land, the ancient city, and everything which he had sought to flee from.
He had finally made his escape.
obbi had tried to contact Scalli’s people for a week without so much as a blip in response. In other situations, she might have become terrified they had been taken out. With her inbuilt protocols, however, she could tell her hails were being heard―heard, and ignored. Given her history with Scalli and his group, she could understand some reticence, but she pumped each message with the direst of warnings and had expected at least some sign they had heard her. Dead silence made her nervous. And so, with a last plea sent to Scalli’s people, Bobbi also fired off an impassioned plea to the equally quiet Cagliostro requesting he meet with her. After that, she kept her proverbial chickens close, ensured constant communication with her own people, and settled in to wait for a response.
In the end, Cagliostro stirred first. As Bobbi napped on an ancient chaise-lounge in the Paris safe house, connected to her superdeck even as she slept, the sudden awareness of an incoming connection roused her. With a jolt, Bobbi sat straight up and interfaced with the little computer, sending her consciousness sliding down the cable into the ludicrously secure vault, the superdeck’s “lobby.” She arrived clad in layers of digital armor, a litany of weapons at hand, and found Cagliostro’s fragmented vastness filling the digital space before her.
Bobbi folded her arms and smirked.
A lance of irritation shot through her.
he said after a pause.
She did so. When she had finished relating the whole sorry saga – a task w made far easier by direct electronic translation from her brain – Cagliostro offered an explanation Bobbi hadn’t prepared for.
If he was at all insulted, Cagliostro gave no sign.
The thought froze her innards all the more. But who could it be? Pierre qualified as ‘close,’ of course, but he had no knowledge of her operations. She’d merely been a favorite customer. She supposed he could piece things together, but to what end? Certainly not profit, and that’s all the man seemed to care about. Gerald Chin, the underground surgeon who had restored her original body, had died three years ago in an automobile accident. She had taken care to ensure the Chin who died, and not some clonal body. A sick feeling arrived, a sucking hole in her gut that ate away stability and surprise alike. Barring some incredible coincidence, only one other entity she knew of could be responsible for the strike.
Bobbi heaved a mental sigh. She disliked that Cagliostro was able to zero in on things with such accuracy, but she couldn’t really argue with him.
The machine dithered.
Another pause. Then, with an alarming note of human irritation, Cagliostro replied.
Not the news Bobbi had expected, and it certainly didn’t give her any comfort.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 9
