“I will,” Bobbi said. “This a secure line you got set up?”
“Secure enough.” Syme nodded. “If you call the address, I’ll get back to you within ten minutes, guaranteed.”
“And if you don’t?”
Syme shrugged. “Then I probably won’t be calling. I’ll wait for you, then?”
Bobbi narrowed her eyes. Violet hovered on the other side of her desk, steaming cup of coffee in hand, her blue eyes luminous with the fairy light of the holograms. “One thing. I need to know why you’re doing this, first.”
“We’ve got our reasons,” Syme said. “I’ll tell you when we meet.”
“You tell me now.” Bobbi laced her words with steel.
Syme stared at her, but nodded. “All right. But don’t kill the messenger?”
Bobbi felt her guts begin to work themselves into knots. “I’ll try.” She pushed the feeling down. “Hit me.”
Syme arrived at the safe house alone and in a cab, which pulled up to the squat, forgotten brownstone without fanfare. This close to Frontier Park, the neighborhood was expensive enough to be quiet and far enough from the bars and historical district for the neighbors to keep to themselves. Though one could argue that the whole area qualified as a historical district, and its often elderly inhabitants made it doubly so. Said inhabitants—Bobbi, Violet, and another of the Reclaimed named Hepzibah—waited for his arrival in the front room, while Shaper and Sumire manned the sniffer and doubled as fire support. As Syme took the steps toward the front door, it swung open, revealing Violet in street clothes, her hair pulled up into a bun, and her expression so wary it made him freeze in place.
“Come on in,” Violet said, though her gaze tracked not his movements but the street beyond. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Never thought I’d hear that again,” said Syme, and he took the stairs two at a time to the top and stepped past Violet to go inside.
There in the front room, a single antique plastic chair awaited him. Empty, there could be no doubts for whom it was meant. Bobbi stood on one side, while Hepzibah, whom Syme favored with a nervous look, stood on the other. Bobbi didn’t blame him. Hepzibah was a tower of a woman, boosted with vat-grown muscle long before Yathi that once rode her infiltrated her mind. A life playing shield maiden for the Svenska cartels hollowed her out, resulting in a mostly mute shell happier murdering people than anything else. At least, at first. Like Violet, Hepzibah had calmed down a lot, and Bobbi always called on her when she needed some additional muscle.
“It’s a night for surprises, I guess.” Bobbi gestured to the chair.
Hepzibah took two steps away, and as Syme settled into the chair, Bobbi came around to stand directly opposite him, some four feet away. Violet hovered behind her. Though none of them had any obvious weapons, Syme would be the worst kind of fool to fuck around with them.
“Yeah,” said Syme with a bob of his head. “You’re right about that one.” He looked around at his guards. “I don’t think I know everybody.”
Bobbi waved a hand, not in the mood for glibness. “Introductions later. Let’s start the debrief.”
Syme spread his hands. “All right. Where shall I start?”
“Start with what you told me last,” Bobbi said.
“All right, well…” Syme looked around at the three women again, and coughed. “Well, it’s as I said. I haven’t seen or talked to Marcus Scalli since Shanghai. He was a part of the attack, wanted to help kill her himself, but when she started taking people apart, he tried to pull everyone out. He ran a flakker on her that he’d brought himself, and that slowed her down a little – but not enough that she stopped killing people. Last thing we saw was from his combat visor’s video feed, with her reaching out to tear it off of him.”
Scalli, missing. Though it had been a few hours since he last told her this information, ice still packed her guts from hearing it. “Go on.”
“After Shanghai, everything more or less collapsed. Scalli had disappeared, but we didn’t hear any chatter or celebration about him. If anything, it was as if the attack never happened. And that’s when someone got the bright idea about there being traitors in our midst.”
“Traitors.” Violet stepped forward to stand at Bobbi’s side. “Was there any evidence?”
Syme shrugged. “No smoking gun or anything, but it was possible, wasn’t it? All the bad shit that happens to us in the middle of fighting these people can hollow you out, let them in…and of course we are all human, those of us who went with him, weren’t we? Unlike you, we didn’t have a way of finding out who was who.” He looked at Violet as he spoke. “And we couldn’t trust Cagliostro to tell us, could we? His information had just led to the deaths of the best of us.”
“So what are you telling us?” Bobbi crossed her arms over her chest, cocking her hips – she wanted to look every bit of the tough creature she needed to be, rather than acknowledge the incendiary fear roaring inside of her at the thought of her old, dear friend having potentially been killed by the goddamned Yathi. “You saying you just took off?”
“No. Shit, if anything, I tried to keep as much together as possible. Bobbi, you haven’t heard of a movement because there is no movement, not really anymore. The whole thing’s collapsed; gone. Splintered into cells. And we don’t all keep in communication with each other anymore, either.”
Silence hung like a black cloud among the four of them. Bobbi felt as though she’d been punched. The air seemed to form sharp crystals in her lungs, cutting her up and burning until she realized she was holding her breath. She let it out, and with that breath came the words, “you’re fucking kidding me,” in little deadpan gusts. Scalli having vanished, perhaps even been killed, was bad enough. But she had definitely not expected his part of the movement to have collapsed in his absence. Bobbi tried her best to collect herself.
“All right,” Bobbi said. Calmly, slowly. “How many factions are we talking about?”
“Five cells.” Syme looked at the floor. “Originally. I…brought a datastick with the salient details.”
Violet stepped forward and held out her hand. “I’ll take it.”
Syme reached into the pocket of his jeans and produced a dull plastic datastick, which he handed to Violet.” The file’s encrypted. But I guess you’ll be able to take care of that. We don’t have Yathi—I mean, Reclaimed programmers. The truth is that we realized soon after we followed Scalli that you had the best part of the deal by far. We thought we could handle the Yathi like a fifth column influence.”
“You tried to handle it military.” Bobbi nodded. “No, I get it. I do. But like I said, that doesn’t work against them unless you’ve got all the right intelligence.”
“And we never did,” said Syme. “Scalli wouldn’t see that, though. He thought it was wrong to work with you, because of the…” He paused to look between Violet and Hepzibah, who fixed her silver eyes on the man as if she scried the future from within his skull. “…Well, you know.”
Violet snorted. “You mean because she wasn’t supposed to be human anymore.” The datastick disappeared into the pocket of her fatigue jacket.
Syme winced. “Yeah. But he was wrong about that, too. I knew that from before.”
“Wish you would have kept that in mind back then,” Violet said.
Syme had never liked Violet in the past. Most people didn’t, on account of her violent threats and her protective nature toward Bobbi. His agreeing with her now struck Bobbi as being a reasonable sign of sincerity. “You’re right. I should have. It was stupid to assume that just because she worked so closely with your people that she had somehow become something other than human. After all, you were all human again, just…well. Just as you are now.”
“You mean batshit crazy.”
“If you want to call it that.” Syme shrugged. “Look, I realize that this is really difficult to take in, but this has been our reality for the last year or so. Trust me, I would have been having this meeting with you a lot so
oner if it weren’t for us not really knowing where you were or what you were doing these days.”
Bobbi frowned. “You knew we were still taking heads.”
“Yeah, but…” He squirmed in his seat and winced again. “Look, we were wrong. We were all wrong. And so was Scalli. But now, things are as they are, and I’m hoping that you’ll take us back. All our information, all of our resources, such as they are. It’s unanimous.”
“Even your boy Mark?” Violet’s tone dripped with savage disbelief.
“He was the first to support me when I said that I was going to meet you.” Syme looked between Bobbi and Violet, his eyes widening. “Look, what else can I say?”
Bobbi frowned all the more. She paced, feeling a great division opening in her heart beyond the partition behind which she had locked her grief and fury. On the one hand, they would be allies, people she could hopefully use after screening them all and ensuring their humanity. But on the other hand, while she had no difficulty believing that they would kill Yathi for her if they did in fact join of their own accord, many of them had left with Scalli because they believed in what he said. And if he thought that Bobbi had become other than human, well, she had no guarantee their opinion would change either. “Tell me about these factions.” She regarded him like an impatient lioness as she went from side to side. “You said there were five including your own, right?”
Syme nodded. “At first.”
Bobbi paused to squint at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means that not all of them survived.” Syme sounded exhausted. “It’s all down there in the report, but suffice it to say that one of them, run by a guy named Mendoza, split off and decided to carry on the tradition of shooting the Yathi straight in the face from day one. His people didn’t have a chance. Most got killed when they hit a drone facility in Los Angeles.”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” Violet said. “I mean we’ve known for ages now that drone processors aren’t good targets. They’re resources, easily replenished. We go for command.”
“He wanted to build morale by hitting one.” Syme shrugged. “Asked us to join up with him, but we weren’t in any shape for it. My group’s pretty small, you know?”
Bobbi nodded.” So he goes out and tries to hit the facility, and then what?”
“Didn’t suppress the security in time. They breached the entrance and made their way in, but they didn’t take out the automated turrets before they blasted them. They only had the one survivor, and she died of radiation poisoning not long after coming to us for help.” Syme grunted in bitter disgust. “Goddamned x-ray turrets. They don’t kill you outright, but they’ll sure as hell kill you later.”
Bobbi winced. She took a step toward Syme, arms again crossed over her chest, and sighed. “Jesus, man. I didn’t know a Mendoza, though. He must’ve come after me, right?”
“A lot of them did, yeah.” Syme leaned back a bit in his seat as Bobbi came closer, as if worried she’d pull something. “I mean once Scalli had the reins, he started bringing in people that we judged to have seen things during the War. Lots of vets, PMC and corporate security types. You know how much crazy shit went on after all.”
“Only reason we’re standing here now is because they couldn’t get a handle on it.” Bobbi nodded. “So these guys, they’re all hard asses, right? That explains why they do it the military way.”
“Yeah, well. I know we gave your people a lot of shit for coming back crooked, so to speak, but we weren’t much better. These guys had seen a lot of terrible things in the field, a lot of it related to the Yathi, but a lot more that wasn’t. Twisted a lot of them to one side or another.”
“That happens, yeah.” Bobbi made a face and went over to pull a chair out from the side of the room, dropping into it and feeling as if her bones were made of stone. “Okay, so that’s one of them. I guess the rest aren’t all that much to write home about.”
At that, Syme looked askance—first at Hepzibah, but seeing her there he looked the other way. “Man… I wouldn’t go that far.”
Bobbi watched his face carefully, eyes hooded. She looked for weaknesses, for signs of untruth. She hadn’t found any yet, though Syme was a tricky one. Violet being on hand was a great comfort. “Go on.”
“Well, the largest of them has proven to be quite a sizable power. They’ve taken down Tamzin Aydou, Jack Washington, Martin Prochnow. More.”
“We thought they were all Scalli’s doing,” Bobbi said. “Interesting.”
Syme chuckled. “Yeah. Impressive enough, right?”
She nodded.” And who leads this faction?”
“One of the earliest of the new guard, a woman named Julia Mendelsohn. The lion’s share of Scalli’s resources stayed with her, and most of the fatalities that haven’t been inflicted by your group are because of her people.”
Bobbi quirked a brow. “So, pretty badass.”
“She killed that authority bitch I was talking about,” he said.
“Really.”
“Yeah. And she wasn’t fucking around where that was concerned, either. They managed to get into a Chinese military satellite, drop a sat-guided bomb on her when she was out of the city. You remember that big explosion that happened out of Nanjing last year? Chinese government made it out to be a gas pipeline?”
“Hey,” Violet said.” That’s some big voodoo.”
Yes it was, and Bobbi found herself as unnerved by it as she was displeased. “She’s got to have a hell of a hack team to make something like that happen.” She frowned.
“She does,” Syme said. “Her people put together the data masking scheme on Knightley’s systems.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.” Hepzibah opened her mouth, but the words weren’t in English. Guttural, horrible sounds emitted from the tall woman, the barbed syllables of the Yathi language.
Syme gaped at her. “She speaks their language.” His voice was tight with fear and accusation. “Why can she still speak their language?”
“Relax,” Bobbi said, anticipating what he might be thinking. “She’s not some pet Yathi, man, just that’s all she can speak. It’s why she’s been all strong-and-silent, some wiring in her brain left half-finished in the process of coming back. Good thing, too, since nobody else can speak it. You can learn to understand it, sure, but the human brain normally just can’t form the words. Hep’s an exception, obviously, but we still don’t know why.”
Syme gaped at her, but said nothing else.
Bobbi, on the other hand, acknowledged her with a nod.” All right.” She looked to Hepzibah. “What doesn’t make sense about it?”
“Forgive me, Ascended Mother,” said Hepzibah, using the same honorific terms when speaking to Bobbi that her invader had used for its leader, “but military satellites of any provenance are extremely advanced. How many talented specialists would she need to access their systems? How would they be so familiar with Yathi programming techniques to be able to synthesize them as they have? I do not like it. It smells of treachery.”
Bobbi flinched inwardly at the appellation, but couldn’t deny Hepzibah’s logic. “Hep here makes a good point.” She ignored for the moment Syme’s continuing horror. “She says it doesn’t make sense that this lady’s team should be able to hack a military satellite, considering how dangerous and secure those systems are. I mean I could do it, you know that, but I’m a bit of a special case.” Unless Cagliostro’s using someone else, too. It’s possible. She sometimes imagined herself as one of many disposable creatures, outfitted with Yathi hacking mechanisms and set out amongst the world, a legion of potentials. But she knew she would have at least sensed one already if that was the case, and put the thought of her mind.
“Well,” said Syme, who finally came back to calm once the shock wore off, “That’s the whole thing. She’s got someone on staff who understands milkblood programming, you know? He can’t handle it like you can, I mean who could? But he understands it. He’s the one who did up Knightley’s se
rvers like that. Invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking for them. No normal hack artist would see them like you did, Bobbi.”
“What is this person’s name?”
Syme shook his head. “We just know him as Whistler. Whoever it is, that fellow’s identity and location are probably the most guarded secret she has.”
“So when you said Knightley was working for you, you were lying.” Violet’s upper lip drew back a little bit in a half snarl.
“No, I mean well, not entirely. He works for all of us. He’s a shared resource. That much we all agree upon. He won’t work for any one group, so we have to more or less deal with it. Last person who tried to make him didn’t like the result.”
“That a fact?” Bobbi didn’t want to imagine what horrors Lionel could unleash on people if he was angry. Especially now.
Syme waved in a dismissive gesture. “I mean not like that. He didn’t hurt anybody. But the guy they sent to talk to him, he got a little, uhh, insistent. Knightley misted him with some custom toxin that made him real unpleasant to be around for a few weeks after that.”
Bobbi entertained herself with the image of some poor bastard wandering around with rampaging diarrhea or the like, but pushed it aside. “All right, so that explains a lot. It also means that I’ll be going back to talk to him also.”
“I don’t recommend doing that just yet.” Syme sat up a little bit straighter in his chair. “See, I said that we would have come back to you, but I was only talking about the smaller groups. Me, Mulcahey—you remember Trent Mulcahey, I think—and Janelle Green, but she keeps things really close to the vest. Mendelsohn is newer by far, but she took Scalli’s story about you guys close to heart. I think if you gave her half a chance, she’d be happy to kill you.”
The exact words Bobbi didn’t need to hear. “Great. Do you think it could’ve been her that sent the drone?”
“Maybe, but I don’t know where she would’ve gotten the intel. Unless she’s just been waiting for you to do a hit in town, and was watching for you.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 21
