“I’m sorry,” said Walken, looking upward again. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“No offense taken,” Kim said. “I get the idea that you aren’t entirely certain what you’re capable of in the first place. Mistakes are going to be made. As you said, you aren’t a professional here.”
Kim reached for the mask, but Walken stopped him. “Wait. Just keep it on until we get clear.”
“All right.” With a groan, Kim hauled himself up on his good arm; the other hung limply at his side. “When do you think that’s going to happen?”
“I’m in contact with the plane,” Walken muttered. “He should be coming down to get us. What the hell is he waiting for?”
“I hear jets,” Kim said.
“Security pods. They followed us out. Those couple of hits I took ruined my suit.” Walken gestured at the rents in his torso. “They’re probably tracking us on thermal right now. Can you move?”
A pained laugh escaped Kim. “I can try, but you’re probably going to have to carry me soon enough. I hope you’ve got a good medic waiting if you’re going to run across half the country with me.”
“You’d get rattled into jelly, I imagine. Or shot to death.”
“Ah, well. Worth a try, I suppose.” Kim chuckled softly, then sobered. “Any word yet?”
“I’m trying to get in touch with them.” More furious pinging – and he decided to throw off any supposition of secrecy.
Jacinto’s whistle crackled as it came over the link.
Jacinto made a dark sound.
“All right,” he said. “They’re coming in. It’s gonna hurt, though. You ready?”
Kim looked up at him and shrugged. “Define ‘hurt.’”
“You might dislocate more than an arm.”
“If that’s the case, I’m going to take this fucking thing off.” Kim pulled off the holomask. It sputtered and died, became gray plastic that went into the pocket of his scrubs. “The things I do for the human race.”
“I’m sorry,” Walken said, and felt stupid saying it. He was the reason they were here in the first place, after all. “I take it the gas was in your bag, by the way?”
Kim nodded. “I thought I might need it. It was just smoke, though. I didn’t expect you to scare the hell out of the whole base, but I guess it served the right purpose in the end.” He sat up, then got to his feet. “All right, I’m ready.”
In the back of Walken’s mind, the numbers shrank rapidly. In the distance, the sound of jets and motors grew louder. “Hang on tight.” He slung an arm around the smaller man’s waist, pressed him close against him, and waited for the lead to come.
The spots of the VTOL pods raked the trees as the whisper-soft sound of the lead came to his ears, a song of snapping wood and flexing metal. He closed his eyes and reached out to hear it, sensing it come, triangulating direction. Snapping his eyes open, he found it in the dark, whipping through the trees like an angel’s pendulum some ten feet overhead. Walken leapt straight up and took it in hand. As he did, his whole body snapped rigid by the incredible force that shuddered through him. Sensors screamed in his head, warnings about energy absorption and material limits, information useless so long as his arm did not come off. Luckily, it did not. In an instant, he passed up into the tree canopy, airborne once more, bending over Kim to do his best to shield the man from the lashing fury of the pines. A second or two later, they whistled upward through the night toward Agincourt’s black wedge, which hurtled skyward while spooling them in.
Walken allowed himself to look down, both to check on Kim and to ensure the dwindling sprawl of lights that the base had been reduced to did not send death in their direction. Only then, when he got a pained nod from the man under his arm, did he allow himself to relax a little. He had done it. He had infiltrated a military installation and snatched his target, more or less in good condition, and nobody had died on either side. As the line drew them up into the plane’s armored belly, he could not help but feel the tiniest spark of pride somewhere inside of him.
Proving that the universe had its humor, Kim let out a groan, and vomited explosively down his side.
anelle’s crew resembled their leader—lean, angry, and tough as spider-silk weave. Having converted the basement levels of the garage-vault into operational space, they camped out waiting for word from above. Camped in the literal sense, as the drab gray domes of military tents dotted the floor of the main cargo floor underneath the surface. Janelle had twenty men and women under her protection, and Mulcahey thirty-two. They served as a decent addition to Bobbi’s thirty-seven Reclaimed, though of course each of them rated three or four human fighters on their own. Where Bobbi’s group consisted mainly of specialists, Janelle and Mulcahey’s possessed far more flexibility. Most had seen combat, against Yathi targets. They were primarily former Oldies or PMC vets; the Oldies all victims of harvesting parties, often having grown up on their own after drones carried off their families, or worse. A sad story, uniform.
The soldiers had different backgrounds, more varied but not unusual. A lot served in Bonn, where Yathi activity had become so blatant in the ashes of the warzone that whole cadres of corporate troops were hospitalized for combat delusions, much to the delight of the aliens, who happily located and colonized those whose spirits had broken.
“That was me as well,” said Mulcahey as they walked across the camp floor to where a rough conference area had been set up in a distant corner. “I was in Bonn in ‘sixty-seven when Allied defense dropped sat-bombs on the city. They’d buried us in the downtown sector, you know, the historical region. I suppose they cracked open a drone facility or something similar. Big factory, bigger than I’ve ever seen since; thousands of drones pouring out in various states of completion, all swarming over us.” Mulcahey spoke conversationally, but he couldn’t hide the haunted look in his eyes as he related his tale. Nobody survived such things without their soul being scorched. Certainly not Bobbi. “We thought we’d cracked open some military facility. We beat them back as best as possible, but one of my men went crazy and triggered an orbital drop beacon of our own. We had rail satellites available to us in those days. Rods from the gods, you know.”
Bobbi shuddered. “Man, that must have been a mess. How many did you lose?”
“Everybody, basically.” Mulcahey looked grave. “They only let off one or two, you know, due to budget restrictions, but it was enough. Erased the drones, but only myself and a few others escaped out of three hundred and fifty men.” He snorted. “Bonn was pretty much a write-off after that, really.”
Bobbi made a sour face.” Well, at least you got out. So where did Scalli find you?”
“In a mental institution, drugged to the gills and dreaming of white devils.” Mulcahey shrugged. “He pulled me out of there and showed me what I had seen was the truth. I really didn’t need any convincing.”
Bobbi gave him a tight smile. She could imagine not. “Well, at least you’re able to live for a good cause. Best cause we got, right?”
He nodded. “Though I’m sorry that
it has to be this way. You know them better than us. Do you think that any kind of peace is possible if Mother is killed?”
The words gave Bobbi pause. She certainly wasn’t used to talking about the possibility of peaceful relations with the Yathi.” I…I really don’t know. I mean it’s not like if you kill her everyone will turn back to normal, you know?” She thought of Walken and shivered again. “I mean the problem with killing her is that there will still be the Colonial Authority to deal with, and while they’re not nearly as bad as she is, they’re still horrible fuckers and there’s more than one of them.”
“The Colonial Authority is her circle of subordinates,” Mulcahey mused.” Have you not tried to reach out to them, perhaps? I mean, maybe she can be overthrown.”
“‘Subordinates’” would be a real rough term,” Bobbi said. They passed a row of tents. Inside, someone murmured fervently to themselves. Bobbi knew an old-fashioned Christian prayer when she heard it, and it gave her pause.”…I mean it’s like Caesar and the Senate, if you know your history. They all have their own divisions of authority, but they’ve given overall power to the Mother. She isn’t going to let it go unless we kill her ourselves. And even if they could overthrow her, they hate us as much as anyone else. It isn’t going to be any different.”
Mulcahey clucked his tongue. “That’s a real shame.” He fell silent as they reached a table with a small holographic projector on top of it in the middle of a ring of cone-of-silence generators. He took a seat on one end next to Janelle, while she took the other end. Nobody had ever mentioned peaceful relations with the Yathi before, especially with what they knew about the bastards. The suggestion almost seemed heretical, and yet…
Surrounded by the silence bubble, they conferred over what had happened to them in the last two years. Once Scalli went missing, things fell apart in rapid order. They already regarded Bobbi as a figure of major doubt, so coming back and trying to re-enlist with her wasn’t an option for those who came to lead the rank and file. Mendoza, Syme, Mulcahey and Janelle had become captains in their own right, but Mendelsohn was the real leader. Described by both Janelle and Mulcahey as having an angry charisma as well as a keen mind, she had been an executive of Telematrix GmBH whose life was being neatly destroyed by Mother’s agents so as to engineer her collapse. Scalli came to the rescue, as he always did. When she went underground, she also ended up his number one lieutenant. More than that, Janelle suspected. When the other captains suggested to her that they form an operational council, however, she swiftly crushed any thoughts of shared power. Mendelsohn wasn’t having anything but a dictatorship, believing that only she had the vision and intellect among them to make the required administrative decisions and sacrifices to save the human race.
“And they believed her.” Janelle sighed from her place at the other end of the table.” I mean she already had Scalli’s seal of approval, right, and she promised big things. Like revenge on that Authority bitch, first order of business and all.”
“Big talk.” Shaper smirked.
“Only she carried through on it,” Janelle said. “Had her people hack that Chinese satellite and bring it out of orbit to do what Scalli and his toughest could not.”
Bobbi had something to say about that. “Look. That’s all well and good that the Authority creep got dusted, but that didn’t just kill her. Nevermind the fact it’s blatant. It killed almost a hundred civilians! That shit isn’t acceptable.”
Janelle nodded. “That’s why we pulled away. Julie, she gets a lot of results, but not in the right way. Of course, she tried to say that you killed a lot of civilians when you took out that drone factory in the Verge, since those buildings collapsed when it went up.”
“That wasn’t me, though,” Bobbi said. “Redeye had already been mortally wounded and was ticking down. We couldn’t stop her from exploding.”
“Right.” Janelle nodded.” Only most people don’t know that, you see? Because you never really talked about it beyond the early days. You let Scalli do most of the talking, and Scalli wasn’t there when it went down.”
Bobbi frowned into her lap. More of her own failings, paving the road to this point. “All right. Well, if we’re going to work together, we can’t do that. No pulling satellites down on people, no blasting people off bridges with drone missiles. We can’t afford to be blatant, not when someone else is making a lot of noise already. The Yathi will sniff us out and kill us before we have a chance to really reorganize.”
“That’s only part of it,” said Mulcahey. “You remember what I said upstairs, they’re not our most immediate problem.”
Bobbi nodded. “I heard you say that, but I don’t understand. What’s the deal?”
Janelle looked at Mulcahey. “Well. Let’s talk about that sniper first, all right? You bring any analysis data on that situation?”
“I did.” She produced two data wafers from the pockets of her jeans, one being Syme’s dossier. The other she slid across the table to Janelle. “Tell me what you make of that.”
Janelle slotted the wafer into the projector. A battery of windows floated overhead, glowing vivid and green against the flat gray of concrete surroundings. Material scan data, toxicology results. Structural diagrams. The sniper had an anonymous face, but his personal effects remained: a surplus Russian tactical rifle, a spare magazine of traditional antipersonnel rounds, and a single projectile that had been carefully packed in a rare-earth cartridge.
Bobbi gestured to the image of the cartridge as it spun slowly over the table. It looked like a snail had been crossed with a rifle round in a child’s computer. “This is the same type of bullet that we believed killed Syme. Some kind of two-stage round, an outer penetrator layer shielding a toxin delivery system.” The twisted, vented casing of the bullet vanished to reveal a needle-and-reservoir arrangement. “The payload is a pretty complex nanotoxin, designed to paralyze the central nervous system while actively attacking vital tissue. Kill you in under thirty seconds. Very nasty.”
“Very nasty,” said Shaper. “But not Yathi.”
Janelle’s brows quirked. “Not Yathi. She and Mulcahey shared a look. “And the bullet?”
“Doesn’t appear to be of Yathi manufacture,” Shaper said. “They usually either use stock hardware to hide traces, or a solid mercury needle propelled by electromagnetic rail. You all remember that trick, I’m sure. The metallurgy also appears to be of a more traditional nature – none of the exotic alloys typical of Yathi manufacture.”
“This is definitely something different,” Bobbi said. “The question is, how is it connected to what happened on the bridge?”
“And you have a theory?” asked Mulcahey.
Bobbi nodded. “Yeah I do, though you very well may not care for it.”
“Try us.”
“Well, I keep coming back to what Syme told us just before he was killed. How Mendelsohn had a real hate on for me, how she’d love to put a bullet in me if she got half a chance. Well, what if she tried to do just that? What if she’s been watching?” Bobbi looked around the room. “I mean she likely has my heat and kinetic profile, never mind she probably knows what I look if she was that close with Scalli. Maybe she’s got an ID program running on the city’s camera networks, just watching for us. If she saw me on the way back from my killing Anderson, then perhaps…” Bobbi spread her hands, letting the point settle in before continuing. “But on the other hand, this may be yet another strategy designed by the Mother to get us tearing at each others’ throats. If they can’t kill us, they get us to do the job for them. But if that were so? Man, the timing, that would be so corny. Like something out of a damn holographic drama.”
Bobbi sat quietly on her end with Shaper and Violet as stone bookends, while Janelle and Mulcahey conversed, sotto voce, with one another at their end. The cone-of-silence system allowed them to direct some of that quiet over themselves. After a while, the two turned their attention back to Bobbi with their faces set in identically flat and somber masks.
“All right,” Janelle said. “We want to know: if we join forces with you again, what’s going to need to happen?”
Bobbi quirked a brow. “Well, we’d need to meet everybody, Violet would need to check them all over, make sure that nobody’s a plant and that everyone’s compatible. Once everybody signs over of their own accord, then we’ll all sit down, have a mutual debrief, work out what needs to happen from there. I don’t know if you want to stay here, you might, but you’re welcome back in Seattle.”
“How are you going to ensure loyalty?” asked Mulcahey, while watching Bobbi’s face intently.
Bobbi didn’t know if she liked where this was going, but she squared her shoulders and pressed forward. “Look, I can’t make anybody stay loyal. The cause is what it is, and everybody has the same hate on for the Yathi that we do. If you want autonomy, we’ll work it out, but in the long run I’m not going to be sticking explosive collars or some other shit on people to try and enforce the status quo. That’s not what this is all about. That’s not how I work.”
Mulcahey pursed his lips. “What about the materiel we’ve compiled via Scalli’s orders?”
“We sit on it,” Bobbi said. “What can’t be immediately used, we keep in storage. Kind of have to, don’t we? We’ve got no idea what Scalli was planning for, and assuming Mendelsohn isn’t the one gunning for me, then she may have an idea of what he wanted.”
Janelle and Mulcahey looked at one another.
“And what about Scalli himself?” Janelle asked.
“Do you all have any idea as to where he might be?” Bobbi glanced between them, curious.
“No,” Mulcahey said. “We don’t. We don’t even know if he’s still alive.”
Bobbi’s guts twisted a little.” Well, we gotta find out. We’re already looking. And if he is alive, and he’s in trouble, we get him out of it. He and I don’t get along anymore, but he’s still my oldest friend. Even if you said ‘no thanks’ to my asking you to come back on board, I’d still help you find him.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 28
