Bobbi might have been impressed if she didn’t know the technology. “This isn’t necessary.” Violet and Shaper both stiffened up at either side of her. “You and I both know that if one of these go off, it’ll just make a big hole and kill everybody in it. Me, mine, and yours.”
“I had these tuned down to a much lower charge.” Janelle shrugged. “And they’re loaded with flechettes instead of solid slugs. Won’t kill us, but will turn you three into hamburger. Combat ordnance should go through whatever armor or implants you got.”
Bobbi gritted her teeth. “So, what? You brought us down here to kill us? You could have done that back at the beach.” She felt rather stupid, coming in like this and getting lured into the front of a pair of goddamned minor tank guns. But on the other hand, she couldn’t believe Janelle would bring the three of them down and kill them like this, not when it could have been done so much more easily before. There had to be an angle.
Janelle’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe I don’t trust anything but these to do the job.” She gestured to one of the guns trained upon them. “But this way we get straight answers. You put yourself in my position: our leader’s gone, our previously unified family split into factions, all of us underground save for maybe big ol’ Julie Mendelsohn with her tribe doing…whatever the fuck they’re doing now. And over all of that, we still got this alien race, changing the world more and more, taking over people every day, every one of them very happy to put a bullet in us, change us, cut us up into parts, or otherwise keep us from stopping them destroying the human race. That shit makes a woman stand back and get a little more cautious than she was before, you know? Gives her a renewed perspective.” She folded her arms over her chest and cocked a hip to one side. Badass posture. Angry. “So let’s talk about Syme and how you met him, since he believed in you and ended up dead for it overnight.”
Bobbi’s flinched, though she did so internally. Outside she remained stony, staring at Janelle from behind hooded eyes. “Fine. Let’s do.”
And so she did, starting from the beginning, telling Janelle about the hit on Anderson, the attack on the bridge, about meeting Syme and Tanaka in Tenleytown. By the time they got to Syme telling them about the fracturing and Scalli’s disappearance, Janelle looked grim indeed.
“So he’s in the middle of giving us a history lesson,” Bobbi said, “when someone snipes him through the fucking window.”
“So who the fuck was responsible?” Janelle’s eyes, black and hard, bored into her.
“Still trying to figure that out.” Bobbi shook her head. “We had to kill the guy, but we took him back for analysis. Only thing is…”
Janelle’s eyes narrowed further.” Yeah?”
“Guy didn’t have a face. Well, he did, but it was just a rebuild, blank mask, no features. No prints, no distinguishing marks. No genetic profile on file anywhere, either. Complete cipher.” Bobbi spread her hands. “He had some standard combat implants. Older models, but well-maintained. Batch and serial data gone from those as well, pre-implantation. Just no way of telling who the hell he was supposed to be.”
“Then that’s a real fucking bad night for you, ain’t it? And a real bad time now, too.” Janelle nodded upward. “Makes it a lot easier for me to give the signal.”
“Try it,” Violet hissed.” Let’s see if you can raise your arm before I kill you.”
“No,” Bobbi said, trying to keep calm. “No, listen. I’m not done.”
“You got five seconds,” Janelle hissed.
“The dart!” Bobbi spread her hands a little wider. “The implants were plain mundane combat hardware, nothing to write home about in and of itself. But the dart, now that’s something else. Custom manufacture, and if you’d check it out—”
“I don’t think so.” Janelle’s voice was hard and tight, familiar old iron. “I think we’re done. You turn around and walk, Bobbi, and we’ll forget this conversation ever happened. Or we put you down right here, your choice.”
“Janelle.” The fear blew out of Bobbi like a candle and cold set in. No way was she getting shot in the back here, or at least not without laying out her entire case. “You fucking listen to me, all right? Do I look stupid to you?”
A moment of hesitation. Janelle seemed taken aback by Bobbi’s sudden fury. “No.” Her confidence faltered for a beat before her iron returned. “But time does do a lot to a person. And don’t think for a minute I’m going to back down because some white girl barks at me, even if it is you.”
Bobbi closed her eyes. “You don’t work for me. That’s not what this is about. You want us to fuck off, fine, we’ll fuck off, but you need to hear what we’ve got to say about this. If you were behind this, it would make sense, but I’m still standing here so it can’t be that. It’s almost like you…” Something clicked in her brain. “Wait. Has this happened to anybody else?”
More hesitation. From beneath one of the hoods, someone coughed.
After a few moments, Bobbi pressed on. “Syme gave us dossiers on everyone, how to reach out to them. Lot of red ink in there. Casualty lists. He told me about Mendoza.”
Janelle shifted her weight a bit, but did not lower her pistol. “What else did he tell you?”
“He told me a lot of things. He told me about Mendelsohn and her crew, all these big names they’ve been taking down, and how she had a massive hate on for me. And once he started talking about her, that’s when he got a dart in his back.”
Janelle’s twisted face pinched into a scowl. “That’s where you heard about the big man.”
“Yeah, he’s the one who told me. And that’s why I’m here.” Bobbi let her tone soften by degrees with each response, her sadness about his disappearance settling in behind it. “Look, we got a lot of history, he and I, and I know what he thinks. But that’s not me. That’s not any of us. Would I be here if I didn’t believe in what we’d been doing before?”
“Wait a minute.” A man’s voice emitted from behind one of the masks. “If Syme got killed, what about the rest of his people?”
“They hit the house as the sniper tagged Syme,” Bobbi said, her voice straining again. “They tried to shoot us all up.”
Something about that took some of the fight out of Janelle. Her shoulders loosened slightly. “So you killed them all.”
Bobbi nodded. “We didn’t want to, but they’d crawled up on the front of the house with full combat gear.”
“It’s true,” Shaper said from behind her. “You want to hate someone for that, you can look my way. I shot them all down as they came charging the proverbial battlements.” He proffered his cannon arm. “They were gonna storm the place. We didn’t know who they were until the fighting stopped.”
Janelle frowned at him, but didn’t beam more hate-rays his way. “All right. So you know all that. You said he had dossiers on all of us?”
Bobbi nodded. “Yeah.”
“And that’s how you got to us?”
“Yeah.” Bobbi gestured to her pants. “I got it in my pocket. You can look at it, we get this sorted out. You turn us all to shredded beef and it’s gone.” Bobbi tried to keep herself as stock still as possible. She’d seen a lot worse in this world, but death was death and Janelle seemed hard enough to blast them if she didn’t like what she heard. “You want real answers? All right. So we’ve been carrying the fight to the Yathi as best we can since we all went our separate ways. Assassinations and sabotage, mainly, because we don’t have the manpower to do really big things and honestly, a suicide swarm on Genefex Tower wouldn’t help anybody anyway. We keep things careful and surgical because we want to make sure that we stay alive and unknown as we do our work, the same as you guys, though based on what you and Syme have indicated, you haven’t really gotten to do much in that direction. I don’t know about the other groups.”
Janelle’s brows arched; she made a show of looking impressed. “So you’re killing them yourself, now? I thought you preferred to stay back where it was safe and hack the way clear.”
“And they don’t look at all human, either.” Janelle nodded. “So what, you decided that you’d rather get us back, have some disposable bodies that you can throw at the big bad Mother? People who don’t look like milkblood freaks, that it?”
“We decided to come and find you because it’s the best thing for everybody,” Bobbi shot back. “What are you wanting me to say, here? That I’m looking for disposable bodies? Cannon fodder? Because you know very well that I’ve never been about that. Even before you left, I was always trying to minimize casualties.”
Janelle made a soft huffing sound, but Bobbi couldn’t see how she could argue. “We know exactly how you were able to do that. Scalli told us that you had Yathi hardware in your head, and that’s how you were able to do what you do with their networks, how you can hack them. And what were we supposed to think? You never told us that your implants were fucked around with by that big ol’ fucking ghost in the network, another former alien that says he’s killed his mortal body to translate himself into a digital consciousness cured of that particular curse. Except he doesn’t act like he gives much of a shit about us, does he? He floats in the network, setting us all up to die in time, never giving us all the details, never quite giving us everything that we need.” Janelle shook her head. “You were already secretive as hell about everything, Bobbi. When we heard that, well, that was enough for us.”
“Look,” Bobbi said. “I can appreciate why you would be upset about that. I know that I never told you guys the full story behind how I could access Yathi technology, or their sublayer of the network. So let me fix that now, all right? It isn’t Yathi hardware, it’s a set of interface protocols which allow me to access the Yathi layer of the global network. When we first got wrapped up in this business with Redeye a few years ago, when I showed Cagliostro what I had discovered at Data Nexus 231, he transferred these protocols to me knowing that I’d be able to make use of them. The Yathi layer of the network is way more complex than the one humans know. You feel things as much as you know them, or do them. They have expert systems that allow you to rewrite whole programs on the fly if you need to, metamorphic intrusion software, that kind of thing. That’s why there’s not a single human system that can stand up to scrutiny, you get me?
“Only, in order to transfer the system to me, yes, Cagliostro had to interface with my implants for a moment. And yes, I did in fact receive a fair download of data along with it. Not just the protocols, but facts, truth. That’s how he convinced me. That’s how I convinced a great number of you, if you remember. Those brain tape recordings? Straight out of my head.”
Janelle frowned at her. “All right. So all that tells me is that you hid a bunch of shit from us, and had direct contact with an alien mind. That doesn’t convince me that you’re on the up at all. Why would you hide it in the first place? Because you knew we’d flip our shit?”
“Because of the way you lot treated the other Reclaimed,” Bobbi said. “Initially, people like Shaper, who had been with us since almost the beginning, knew about what was going on with my noggin. But as we took on new members, many of you guys started to show a real bias against anything Yathi. You didn’t want to use the technology, you didn’t want to have to deal with it. You just wanted to kill things and blow shit up. And that’s why I started segregating the base human and the Reclaimed. Think of what you just said a minute ago, Janelle. They’ve always been ‘them’ to you, and frankly, there were times when we thought we might start seeing dissent in the ranks. Moving them to their own areas quieted that and made sure we could all work together in peace.”
Janelle flicked a glance past Bobbi’s shoulder, presumably at Shaper, and then to Violet. “They are different from us.” She returned her gaze to Bobbi.” They’re all crazy in one form or another.”
“Different, but equal,” Bobbi said. “Human nonetheless. And yes, all with fairly severe psychological damage. But that doesn’t mean they don’t deserve respect. They had no problem dying for you, or for the cause.”
The words made Janelle flinch as if struck. “Look. That’s not the point here. The point is that you’ve kept a ton of shit from us, that you came in contact with an alien mind, you kept us apart from each other, and you didn’t exactly complain when we announced our departure.”
“You didn’t give her a lot of time, love,” Shaper said. “As I recall, we came back to the Vault from San Angeles to find it empty of almost everybody, to say nothing of gear and equipment.”
“We left you plenty,” Janelle shot back, her voice taking on an edge. Silence hung between them all before she returned her attention to Bobbi. “So that…is what I’m asking you.” The challenge in her eyes mixed with something else, something Bobbi thought might’ve been pleading. “I am asking you why you’re back here. Why we’re important again. Because I tell you now, I got no problem dying for the right reasons. But I don’t want to get killed, or worse, because you think you’re gonna keep us in the dark all over again.”
For a long time, Bobbi couldn’t answer. She wanted to rail at Janelle, tell her that all of her decisions were right, that they couldn’t handle what she had learned, not everything, that everyone before that who had learned the whole of it all had either been killed, went crazy already, or became tainted overtime by that knowledge. Bobbi searched for outrage, burned for a moral defense, groped for it in the dark, and found none. “You’re right.” She looked at Janelle as if she had seen her for the first time.
Janelle blinked at her slightly. “Excuse me?”
“You’re right,” Bobbi repeated. Quite without understanding why, she sank to one knee, arms folded over her legs, looking up at Janelle and her troops, the tanks, the vault, the world. “I fucked it up. There’s no excuse for it. I was wrong not to tell you things. All of you. And I was wrong to keep you all apart. I was looking for a reason for things to break, when all this shit was going on. I should have been trying to find ways to keep you all together.” She looked at Janelle and spread her hands before her, as if supplicating. How strange it is that our most absolute certainties can collapse beneath the weight of a word. She felt no despair in it – only understanding. Understanding that she had been wrong all this time.
Janelle stared down at her. Her eyes, hard and fixed, bored into Bobbi’s face. “You’re saying that you, Bobbi fuckin’ January, you were wrong. Wrong about…” Janelle waved her hand a bit. “About everything.”
Bobbi nodded once. “I was. I was completely wrong about how I handled things. I was the one who dictated organization. Maybe if I had done it differently, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place. I think probably Scalli and I would’ve had a falling out anyway, for reasons more personal, but maybe we wouldn’t have split things up.” Somewhere beyond the clarity of realization, a weight formed, one of regret. She had always known the fault lay with her for some of it. She just didn’t realize how little of it was Scalli’s taking things and running and how much of it came from people being pissed at her bad judgment. “See, Janelle, it’s easy for me to get mad about this, tell people back home that Scalli betrayed us all, took off with half the stuff, half the people, to play armchair general on his own. And you know, maybe there was a time for that, but that time’s long since passed. I look at you, I see all this, I know that I should have said something to Scalli a long time ago. I don’t know why I didn’t. Maybe it was – like I say, I was too hurt about it. But it didn’t keep me from killing off the enemy, and it didn’t keep him from doing it either. Maybe that’s how I dealt with it, you know? Live and let live as long as we were on the same side. We’d send informa
tion over to you guys when we got it, you know that.”
Janelle didn’t blink. “Yeah.”
“So, yeah. This is me. Trying to get the band back together. Because we already had someone try and blow us up on the bridge, somebody took out Syme and may well have had a word in the ear of his other people, and the list of suspects is awfully damned narrow if it wasn’t you or Mulcahey. I don’t know if you’ve talked to him. Either way, I should have never done what I did, and I should never have let it split up in the first place. But I did, and now we’re here. I want to do whatever I can to make things better. You, me, and the whole human race reaps the benefit from it.”
Janelle remained quiet. Finally, she lifted a hand and waved it at the tanks above her. The cannons drew away, hissing like disappointed snakes. Janelle squatted in front of her, staring at Bobbi, still. Somewhere around the borders of those hard, dark eyes, something softened. “That’s all I wanted.” Her voice sounded as weak as a ghost. “All this time. That’s all I wanted to hear you say.”
They both stayed like that for a moment, staring into each other’s faces, until Janelle rose. “All right.” Her voice held something like relief. “You get that?”
“We did.” This came from one of the masked figures.” I never thought I’d hear her admit to being wrong about a damned thing ever, but I’ve been plenty wrong before. Are you convinced?”
Janelle nodded once. “Yeah. I think I pretty much am.”
“Wait.” Bobbi rose slowly to her feet as well, looking at each mask in turn, all bearing a reflection of her face in tinted lenses. “Janelle, who do you have with you?”
At that question, one of the figures reached up to unseal its mask just under the chin. The neck cowl fell back, revealing a crop of short dark curls and a handsome, craggy face.” That would be me.” His voice became a strong, deep thing much improved without the muffling. “Trent Mulcahey, Captain, Battlefield Concepts Combat Forces.” He used the name of his old PMC as if it were a nation. “Retired, of course.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 26
