Bobbi flicked a glance at Violet, who doubtless had trained her blue eyes on Mulcahey’s face the moment he reached for the seal of his mask. Scanning him, searching for signs that Yathi may dwell within him. Her indispensable talent.
“Nice to meet you.” Despite the honesty with which Bobbi had just spoken, she felt a sting of embarrassment at nigh prostrating herself before total strangers. She looked beyond him. A woman had drawn off her mask, pale and Nordic with a shaved head and ice chips for eyes. Next to her a brawny man with vaguely Middle Eastern features. “Any other surprise guests?”
“No.” Janelle chuckled, and without warning threw her arms around Bobbi in a crushing hug. “Jesus Christ. Am I glad to see you, girl! You got no idea how hard it’s been, hiding in this hole like a bunch of fucking rats.”
Bobbi endured Janelle’s squeeze with mingled surprise and confusion. One second Janelle had cannons turned on her, the next she treated her as if she’d come in with a lottery check. “You’re gonna have to explain things to me, Janelle. You’ve kinda spun around on me here.”
“I know it.” Janelle stepped back from Bobbi. She kept her hands on Bobbi’s shoulders. Shaper and Violet had moved to one side, now, and looked at the two women with the same uncomprehending confusion. “I know that I have. But see, we’ve been told all kinds of things about you and your people since we split, and you haven’t been around to counter them. We had to make sure that you hadn’t gone nuts with the rest of them, or worse, gone over with the milkbloods.”
Bobbi frowned. “No way in hell. But how can you be sure that you can trust me now? Syme’s still dead, and so are all of his people.”
“Syme figured he might get killed,” Janelle said. “Part of the reason that Trent’s here with us. Look, you three come with us, we’ll get you some coffee or whatever so you can calm down a little. Trust me, shit’s bad, and we’re gonna need you if we’re gonna get through this.”
“The Yathi don’t know where you are, do they?” Bobbi’s heart picked up a good bit.
“The Yathi are the last of our concerns right now,” Mulcahey said. “As strange as that may sound. Let’s go with Janelle, and she and I can tell you all about it.”
oon after Kim finished his work, Walken led the climb up the freight chute. Walken had no problem getting through its access shutter, after disabling the sensors that would sense its opening, and by the time the bomb went off, they had climbed several levels. The way Kim explained it, when they paused to make sure no fireball rushed up and turned the chute into an oven, the cylinders he had connected did not contain medical nanocolloid, but a chemical that would transform into a considerable amount of explosive once mixed. Sort of a nanomachine-fueled binary explosive, a particularly fiery variety. Everything below them not made of ultra strong materials or blast proof nanopour would be slagged. That meant basically everything but the superstructure. His clone would be a genetically-identical greasy spot, but one that would confirm his “death.”
They had heard other explosions going off on the level, secondaries kicked off by the blast and the heat that spread through their section of the lab. Walken thought he had just been complicit in the deaths of any number of soldiers and scientists, but Kim assured him that the emergency muster points were in a different part of the level. They would be safe, the data and materials that Kim had been working on would be obliterated, and it would be some time before they could get in to determine just what the hell had happened. All in all, it sounded extremely effective, assuming it worked. They really had no other choice.
The two men made their way up to the processing room, where a fire had broken out and been snuffed by suppression foam that filled one corner like a vast, pearlescent tumor. Past that and into the loading chute, they finally reached the loading room.
“Wait,” Kim said as they neared the end. “The doors are shuttered.”
“I see that.” Walken nodded. It didn’t look like the flimsy steel cover from before, but a slab of heavy alloy an inch or so thick, the kind used to contain blasts. Beyond the barrier, alarms wailed, and something else, the rumble of weight and metal.
“That sounds bad,” Kim muttered. “They must have activated additional security.”
“Additional security,” Walken repeated. “In what form?”
“Possibly the tank suits. They may be evacuating the upper levels.”
“But what about the alarm?” Walken looked around the mouth of the chute, and found a lever marked ‘GATE RELEASE’ along the shutter’s frame. “Wouldn’t they keep people locked down due to protocol?”
Kim shrugged. “Not if they don’t detect radiation in the upper levels. If the labs were affected first, why wouldn’t they try and get people out from elsewhere?”
Walken nodded.” All right. Let me see if I can get this gate up without alerting whoever’s on the other side. Are you ready to play along?”
He got a black squint from Kim in reply. Walken activated the camo system and became part of the backdrop once more. He pulled the release with one hand, while pressing the other against the shutter to slow any upward motion. The shutter released with a muffled clacking sound, barely audible beneath the howling of the alarms on the other side, and Walken crouched low in order to peek out through the other side.
Through the wide metal teeth at the bottom, Walken saw the same truck from before, being loaded hurriedly with panicked people in both civilian clothing and uniforms of various types. Many, he noted, seemed to be wearing the same scrubs as Kim. People filled the loading chamber, surrounding the truck in a tense mob. Harried cattle, they filed into its flatbed, eyes wide and blind with terror. More crowded the lift platform, sitting with heads down, troopers overseeing them all.
“All right,” he said.” They’re getting people out of here.”
“It’s taking them much longer than it should,” Kim groused. “Good thing it’s not an actual emergency.”
“Yes.” Walken looked to Kim. “Do you know of any other way out of this place?”
Kim shook his head. “No. What do we do?”
Walken produced the badge and camo mask from his pocket. “Here.” He passed them over to Kim. “Just in case we had to do this the hard way. It’s keyed to your badge. You’re going to have to put it on and blend in. I’ll come up with you.”
A curse from the other man served to illustrate his opinion, but he put the mask on anyway. Once the gray hood went over his head and he secured the collar, he touched the power stud and another man’s face, a bland Asian youth, appeared over its contours.
“How do I look?” Kim asked, his new face uncertain, his voice a convincing synth.
“Like someone else.” Walken handed him the badge. “Clip this on and let’s get out there. No room for second thoughts now.”
Kim nodded, the young illusion frowning. “Wish me luck.” He reached for the shutter. He pulled it up enough to let him through, rolled out of the gap, and hurried off.
Walken crouched by the side of the half-opened hatch and looked on as Kim headed across the concrete until a trooper intercepted him. The memory of panic rose in Walken’s mind, distant and ghostlike, as the two conversed. The trooper checked Kim’s badge, and looked back at the chute. Stared. Walken drew back a bit farther, wary of ultrasonics. The moments ticked by, each one a spark of potential disaster. The flicker of gloved hands on the grip of an unslung assault rifle. The rigid line of the trooper’s back. Kim, filled with tension, a marionette with barbed wire strings. Could he get there quickly enough to save Kim if things went badly? How could he save him? The variables came in unwanted waves, and deep behind them, the coldness of something not him. For a moment, he almost feared the ghost of the alien would take him on the spot, and muffled fear flashed the complex of his nerves.
The trooper questioned Kim more thoroughly, even as the others were herding the last onto the elevator and the truck, and Walken prepared himself to do battle. He slipped out under the cargo hatch, his body a supple
stream of motion, and crossed the concrete floor with every intention of giving the soldier something else to worry about. As he drew close, however, the trooper disengaged, pushing Kim toward the elevator while jogging after. Walken followed, fists clenched, ready to deliver the hot death promised to every enemy. No room for second thoughts, he had told the scientist, and he followed his own advice. He sped across the concrete, footfalls hidden by the sirens that screamed on, and angled to find a spot on the deck away from the terrified staff. An instant after he found a corner to crouch on, the lift rumbled to life, and began the climb toward the bunker and new, exciting varieties of doom.
The ascent must have been an eternity for the huddled workers. But for Walken, the minutes that ticked on seemed a slow march to certain discovery. The suit’s powerful graphene batteries, which had so far done incredible work keeping the thermoptic camouflage powered, finally wore thin. According to the flickering ghost of the battery indicator in the suit’s goggles, he had perhaps ten minutes’ worth of charge left. After that, he would have to stick to the shadows like some cartoon ninja. He could be stealthy enough on his own, thanks to years of police training and the sneak suit’s light-absorbing coating, but he just didn’t see how he’d be able to get himself and Kim out of a military complex without the extra help. The man sat not far away, sweating out the long ascent under the holographic mask, which would not last for long or under scrutiny. Shit was going to fall apart, he was going to have to reveal himself, and half the Communist Korean army was going to be after him before the evening ran out. No matter how powerfully the Yathi had built his new body, he doubted he could get out of that.
The upper doors slid open, and a horde of people in NBC suits descended upon the assembled throng, waving sensor wands like rubber truncheons, a white tide of plastic suits seeking out any trace of radiation. Of course, they would find none. He backed off the pad as the technicians swarmed, checking badges and instruments, with a fury and thoroughness that shocked Walken. People filtered out of the knot almost as soon as they had arrived, hurrying out of the mass in rough lines to the park outside the hangar. Walken craned to see if he could spot Kim amid their numbers. Minutes ticked by. Each face that streamed away seemed to sync with the dwindling slices of the battery meter, and yet still he could not locate Kim’s face, real or otherwise, amid the throng. Nothing. He circled around to the front of the lift as the truck emptied. Where was he? A sudden cry arose from somewhere near the front, a loud bang, and to Walken’s astonishment, a cloud of yellow smoke spread out across the garage from the middle of the crowd.
For the workers and scientists, already poised on the edge of anxious collapse, it proved to be that little bit more necessary to push them into the realm of blind panic. People ran everywhere. Even with a full quarter of them already in the yard, there were more than enough to cause bedlam as they poured forth in a wave, crashing through the suits and the spreading yellow vapor, emitting a combined sound equal parts bright keening and low, coughing thunder. Walken had never before heard its like, and knew he would never want to again. He moved with the wave, squeezing out the dwindling energies of his sneak suit in an invisible dance between blindly hurtling bodies. Such terror in their faces, terror that he caused—ghost-pale masks with rolling animal eyes, driven only by the desire to escape. He had no connection to that feeling in the moment, only the outside eye of the observer.
Walken thought that he had simply missed Kim among the fleeing workers and the billowing fumes, but then he caught sight of a distorted video flickering from the corner of his eye. He reached out, closed his hand around the arm of the figure to the right, and found Kim’s mask-face looking back at him. “We need to get out of here.”
Walken, a ghostly void in the smoke, pulled Kim with him in a charge toward the mouth of the bunker. He had little idea what to expect once they cleared the gas. He only knew that nobody fired a shot. Yet.
Walken moved level forward, his limbs pumping with silken efficiency. He met no resistance, seemingly from Kim or from gravity itself. He willed himself in a direction and the body responded like a sublime vehicle. They rode the human wave, past the howling screamers and the sickening vapor that wreathed them, breaking through, then straight into a line of startled soldiers, who, unprepared for a gas attack on top of the radiation alarm, stood alert but unsteady inside the mouth of the bunker.
Walken took Kim with him, plowing through and onward, between the legs of the tank suits arrayed behind the soldiers like strident colossi. Presence of action aside, Walken didn’t bother to look back until after he’d managed to pass between the war machines. He found, much to his sudden and abundant horror, that the scientist looked as though he flew through the air behind him. Walken had taken off so quickly, without thinking and without hesitation, that he yanked Kim off his feet. The man hung listlessly in the air, like a child’s crude tissue-paper ghost, before reality reasserted itself and the Koreans reacted to the astonishing sight that had just passed them.
He could have stopped, but he didn’t. Instead, Walken charged for the armory building where he had surveyed the situation in the first place, vaulting into the air past wide-eyed onlookers who perhaps believed a man could fly on his own power. By the time they took the rooftop, the first of the gunfire started, but by then it was too late. Walken hurtled from rooftop to rooftop, pulling Kim along with him like so much fluff, not waiting for anything but an attack to stall them. The assault did not come, for how could it when he moved so fast that the world seemed to melt around them? Walken keyed his transmitter, signaling the Agin court with coded pulses they were coming in hot. As they reached the periphery, the vast fence of concrete with its crown of concertina wire, Walken prepared to make a final leap to safety and escape.
The guns hit him.
He should have heard them coming. After a sudden blast, Walken found himself flung down hard on the concrete roof of the last building, rippling with punishing vibration. His body screamed with data that ran in from all quarters—impacts down his back, ballistic strikes, high velocity. He laid there for a second to catch his breath, and then, realizing that he had no breath to catch, drove his palms into the concrete, propelling himself into a fluid backflip that left him staring at a VTOL pod that had caught them on the edge. Little more than an armored cylinder suspended by a pair of articulated jets, a single heavy-barreled automatic cannon studded the pod’s lower end, the same one that had drilled Walken in the back. A moment ago, he had been invisible. The word ‘FAULT’ flashing in the corner of his vision from the suit’s visor made it clear he had appeared. Light and thunder burst from the end of the muzzle once more, catching Walken straight in the chest. He went down hard.
In that moment, what could the capsule’s pilot be imagining? A man in a stealth suit, hit twice by a gun that should tear any living man apart with the first blast, lying there apparently winded with a wardrobe malfunction. The white skin of his body gleamed bright in the capsule’s floodlight spot, unblemished still beneath the rents in his perforated suit, and the sounds of activity reached Walken as his jarred senses snapped back into focus. He did well to take the cannon fire, but he didn’t know that he could do it again. In that moment of hesitation, he did the only thing that he really could. He looked down, grabbed the fallen body of Kim, who lay on the rooftop in a heap, and took off. He did what only action heroes and the finest alien-engineered cyborg bodies could do. He ran away in the face of an armed aircraft, albeit a tiny one, and before it could buck back into action, threw himself and his passenger over the wall and into the dark, cool night.
Walken hit the ground running. Behind him, jet engines fired, and the report of automatic weapons tore through the darkness. He did not stop. His body could run without cease, so long as his power kept up. As far as he knew, he had not yet exhausted so much of the stores within him that he could not get Kim and himself away. As he sprinted across a dark field, he continued pulsing his location to Jacinto, not yet seeking to break radi
o silence or to dare look down at the body he carried. The latter was more out of a desire not to tempt fate, such as it was. He did look back, however, at more pods swarming over the wall in his direction. No time to do anything now but run.
Pouring himself into it, it took him sixty-two seconds to cross the blasted field to the tree line. In the dark, Jacinto and the Agincourt would be waiting for him. He let the pulses home him in, moving like a missile with Kim in his grip like a man-sized suitcase and the wrath of the Korean military washing out in a tide behind him. He heeded the lashing of the branches in his face no more than he did the wind, the caress of pine but a breath across his skin at any speed. He moved quickly, though not with the same insane speed that had taken them there. Assuming Kim unconscious, he did not want to harm him further. He did not stop until he made his way deeper into the wood, where the pines muffled the whine of the jet pods. They would not find him in time, he hoped.
Agincourt was supposed to be waiting for them in a clearing. As he breached it, however, he found empty grass and the night sky yawning overhead. He stood at the edge, staring at the canopy of dull gray clouds in disbelief. Could he have been forced away? Had Stadil’s disembodied consciousness recalled him, leaving them for dead? No, Jacinto wasn’t the type. He put Kim down, hunkering low against the trunk of one of the pines, and checked his charge while he scanned the sky.
“I think,” came Kim’s weak voice from beneath the flat video mask, “that I might have shit myself.”
Walken frowned. He reached down and eased Kim over onto his back. The false face stared upward. “I’m sorry about all of that. Are you all right?”
Kim chuckled tightly.” I think that you might have dislocated my shoulder with that escape act of yours. I’m going to need a lot of painkillers soon, or I might pass out again.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 27