Janelle’s eyes narrowed faintly. “And what if he’s one of them, now?”
Bobbi didn’t want to think about it, but there was only one real answer. “Then we do what we need to do and we move on with the fight. We can afford nothing but victory.”
Janelle and Mulcahey shared a quiet look full of meaning before Janelle turned back to Bobbi. “All right. All right, I’m convinced. I’ll get my people in order, and you have Violet here play inquisitor. They’re clean as far as I can tell, but I don’t have her talents.” Violet, despite being a vat of boiling rage, inclined her head to Janelle in a gesture Bobbi knew as grudging appreciation. Still, grudging was better than nothing. “Mulcahey’s people are in Chicago, so we’d have to make arrangements.”
“I can go there,” Violet said. “Shaper and I could go and be back in Seattle in just a few days. We can help with inspection.” She looked to Mulcahey. “No offense meant, of course. I only mean we can help check your troops and check inventory. Sumire will want to know what you have, so she can help plan materials sharing and everything else.”
Mulcahey nodded. “I know how this goes. It’s all right. The military did the same thing.”
“About that.” Bobbi leaned forward a little, folding her arms on the table. “Look, we aren’t a military organization. I’m not assigning ranks or forcing you all to go through drills. But you guys, I’d like you to stay in charge of your own folks. These are your people; you’ve fought with them. I don’t want factionalism, but they don’t know me short of what they’ve heard post-split. I am trusting you two to help me keep things together.” The concession exceeded anything she would ever have agreed to before she came into that vault today, but insights—even those delivered at the end of a tank gun—were insights, and she knew she’d have to handle things a different way to avoid another shitshow. “Can you do that for me?”
Janelle turned to Mulcahey, who smiled.
“We weren’t expecting that,” he said.” It’s very good of you.”
“It’s the right decision,” said Shaper. “I know you lot think of her as some kind of spider up in a steel tower, but she knows esprit de corps, mate. She’s got the stuff.”
“Yeah.” Janelle nodded, smiling. “Okay, so we’re in agreement. Let me and Tom here talk to my people, get things together. Shaper can inspect what we have in storage, here, and Violet, you can do your thing.”
Bobbi nodded. “Sounds good. And me?”
Mulcahey coughed faintly. “Just keep your seat, please. I’ve still got a few things to talk with you about after everyone else dismisses.”
Bobbi waited quietly while Violet and Shaper left with Janelle, who led them through the curtain of silence and across the concrete floor. Mulcahey produced a smokeless cigarette from some pocket beneath his coat, crushed the tip to light it, and took a long drag before speaking again.
“So all right,” Mulcahey said. “I’m going to be as blunt with you as I possibly can, here.”
She nodded, expression grave. Here we go. “All right.”
Mulcahey took another drag. “The truth is, we aren’t hiding out because we don’t have targets, or because we don’t know what to do. I think you already might have figured out that you aren’t the only person who’s been targeted.”
Bobbi tried hard not to show any reaction. “Tell me about it.” She forced her face blank while inside her heart crackled with an electric wave of dread.
“She hasn’t actually done anything per se,” Mulcahey said. “But she made it clear we were either with her or against her. Julia, I mean. Janelle and I have both been told to stay out of the way and not to engage the Yathi on our own, because we would be considered hostiles in our own right. She has the resources to prosecute a war on us as well. You can imagine that we would be anxious to join up with a greater body to protect ourselves.”
Why Mendelsohn would take that track with them eluded her. Why isolate a perfectly good pool of fighters? She didn’t know Mulcahey save for what she’d read in Syme’s dossiers, but it outlined a strong battlefield commander, a leader of men and women committed to discipline and to results. And then Janelle, who had no military training yet possessed a charisma and ferocity that carried her people into battle time and time again. They kept up morale, even in a holding pattern. Why the hell wouldn’t Mendelsohn want them?
Because she wants all of the marbles. Play the way she wants, or don’t play at all. “Do you really think she’d do that? I mean, she used to be an executive, she’s used to slinging her weight around and bullying people into doing what she wants.”
“So you would think.” He nodded. “Only we’ve seen her in the act before. Tell me something. What happened in your outfit when someone looked as though their spirit was going to break? When they became a risk?”
Bobbi frowned. “That really doesn’t happen in my unit. They’re all Reclaimed now, after all. You can’t go back, not really.”
“But before that, when you and Scalli were working together still?”
She let out a long, ragged sigh.” Suspended animation until it’s over. Or memory alteration via nanomachine-based cortical suppression therapy. They can’t remember anything, they aren’t a threat. But it’s only happened once or twice before.”
Mulcahey’s brows lifted. “Tell me about it. Please.”
Bobbi shook her head. “I’m not a neuroscientist.” She shifted in her seat in a fruitless attempt to get more comfortable. “But the treatment uses nanomachines to identify and block memory chains in the brain pertaining to the movement, the Yathi, all of that. It’s not foolproof, but it really takes a lot to break down, much less identify. Keeps people from using a SQUID to sample brain activity, too, so it makes them all the more protected. And I have all the skills to invent a new identity from scratch, as it happens. It’s not great, but as I say, it hasn’t happened often. The people who come here tend not to have much left of their pasts.”
He frowned, brows furrowing. He looked angry. “Do you know what Mendelsohn does when she thinks someone is compromised?”
“No.” But she thought she could guess.
“She kills them. Euthanizes them. Painlessly, yes, but in the end, they’re gone forever. I’ve witnessed it myself.”
Bobbi’s eyes tightened into slits. “But that makes no sense. I mean, Jesus, she has all these resources, why not just, I don’t know, freeze them, or put them into chemical comas, or ―”
“Because she is ruthless in persecuting her war against the Yathi!” Mulcahey threw himself back in his seat, looking stormy. “You said it yourself, she pulled a satellite out of orbit to do in that Authority member. Would you have ever done something like that? Killed civilians? Been so blatant?”
“No,” Bobbi said. “Not on purpose, at least. It takes longer to kill them my way, but between Scalli and me, we had a good number of people to throw at the problem once we stopped trying to hit their facilities. Blowing up drone processors isn’t going to help anybody. You gotta take them out. They’re the only real finite resource.”
“How many of them do you believe there are?”
“Now? About six, seven thousand awake.” She knew the figure by heart, though couldn’t figure out why it felt so accurate. “But most are menials by comparison, and their minds can’t last forever. Eventually, they’ll go feral. We know this, and we know Mother knows it. Kill off the top folks, especially those in the colonial matrix, the rest will wither and die, either by their own devices, or by ours. In the early days, we purged a lot of the wild ones out of Seattle, for example.”
“You and Redeye.” He nodded. “Bobbi, we have no interest in working with a tyrant, and that’s what Julie Mendelsohn is. As far as I’m concerned, she’s no better than Mother.”
The declaration made Bobbi stiffen and arch her brows high. “That’s a bold statement you’re making, man. She sounds brutal, yeah, but she ain’t trying to kill off the human race.”
“Yes,” Mulcahey said. “But what
would you do with all of the technology that you have access to if she were to die tomorrow? If the Yathi ceased to be a threat to the human race?”
That struck her silent. All this time, she had never considered the possibility. Thousands of incarnated Yathi, and the Colonial Matrix still beaming them out into the skulls of the empty? Bobbi had never imagined what life beyond this little war of hers would be like. “I don’t know.” She rubbed at the bridge of her nose. “Something responsible, I should think. I mean we see what Wonderland does with this stuff, and what they use is always less powerful.”
“That’s my point,” he said. “You’d be responsible with it. I think Julia would try and turn it into power in a post-Yathi world. Maybe even use it to take over Wonderland operations, run it for herself.”
Bobbi’s voice went iron hard. “I wouldn’t allow it.”
“Maybe she knows that,” Mulcahey said. “And you’re more powerful than she is. Enough to send a drone out to kill you. You’re only human, after all.” He smiled a little when he said it, and Bobbi felt her sides warm with a blush of gratitude.
“I like the sound of that,” she said. “Better than being told I’m something else.”
Mulcahey laughed. “You’re something else, all right.” He sighed. “But you’re not a monster, no. I think that’s Julie. She’s on her way, if she isn’t there already. They call her the Fury now, of all things, and she certainly plays the part.” He looked down at the table. “We’re probably going to end up having to kill her first, you know. Sometimes I wonder if the materiel Scalli’s had us put together was to eventually be used against her, not the Mother.”
Bobbi scowled into the table as well. “Maybe. I sure as shit would like to think we’d never need to use a bunch of pocket tanks against her. For now, let’s wait and see before that happens. Too many things need doing. We need to reorganize. Mendelsohn may or may not be a problem, but the Yathi aren’t going to sit around waiting for us to work out internal strife before they continue their program. Shit’s not good. We need to keep the pressure on.”
He grinned at her, seeming more cheerful in the face of impending bloodshed. “Janelle said you had spirit. I’m glad that we agreed to join with you. Not that we had any choice.”
“We always have choices,” Bobbi said firmly. “I learned that a long time ago. Just it’s my job to make sure that you don’t regret the one you made today.”
“I doubt that.” Mulcahey grinned a little more. “Somehow, I think we’ve made the best possible decision.”
Bobbi smiled back at him, but couldn’t agree with him. The whole thing stunk, like rotting corpses.
She just hoped the corpses wouldn’t be theirs in the end.
he flight back was simple. No interceptors, no radar, just the endless purr of the Agincourt’s engines and the occasional roller-coaster turns of flight. Walken slumped in the copilot’s station, his mind tired, so close to sleep, but dreading what dreams may come to him. In the end, the dreams won out.
This time he had no tank; he dreamed instead of the aftermath of his first failed bid for freedom. Originally, he escaped through the waste ducts, after finding a way to trigger the emergency dump protocols in the laboratory system. Now he knew his limited ability to hack into electronics made it possible, of course, but at the time it had seemed an act of sheer luck. He slithered out of the dump pipes, made his way out of the city sewers, and into the river. Only, of course, to be collected by one of the centipede-machines that trawled it looking for him. It didn’t take the Yathi long, after all, to find him. In the dream, they sealed him in the featureless white void of a holding cell, post-capture, shackled and waiting for the attentions of some alien execution squad. He felt no fear, only the miserable shadow of concern that had replaced it. He waited for death.
The door chimed, and Walken looked up. A tall, thin man stood in the doorway, a pretty creature, feminine, like Martin Dayne of the Ecliptics or James Wrench. Elegantly styled shoulder-length hair covered one polished silver eye. The stranger wore a black suit, the kind of plain that cost a fortune. “You are undamaged.” He looked at Walken from beneath long lashes.
“‘Undamaged,’” Tom repeated.” Yes. At least physically.”
The stranger’s visible eye glowed hot as a torch. “Mother wants to talk to you. Come with me.”
He didn’t wait for Walken to rise. The stranger disappeared into the hallway outside, and Walken followed with slight hesitation. No death squad yet, and now an audience. She would want to know why he tried to escape, or how. She might yet call him to doom. Nonetheless, he got to his feet and followed the man, down the clean white hall to the elevator.
They waited for a moment before Walken, desperate to fill the silence that hung between them, spoke. “She’s going to kill me.”
The two of them entered the elevator. The stranger said nothing as the doors sealed shut, and didn’t speak until a faint shift in motion signaled motion. The elevator had no visible controls, but it shuddered softly to life all the same. Walken kept his eyes trained on the door, all of them strange in this place, black and nonreflective, as if made of ink. Walken remembered the door into the organ lab at Orleans and suppressed a mental shudder.
“No,” the stranger said. “She is not.”
“I don’t understand,” Walken admitted. “I escaped.”
“Attempted to escape.” The stranger folded his hands behind his back. “It was entirely expected that you would try.”
“That sounds about right,” Walken muttered.
“You’ll go back in the tank,” the stranger continued. “But that will be it. Mother does not wish to punish you.”
Walken blinked. “I don’t understand that. Why?”
“I don’t understand it either,” said the other man. “But Mother always has a reason for feeling the way she does. If you are precious enough for her to protect you in this way, then you should be happy. She does not grant her favor at all lightly.”
The thought had come to him many times as to why the Mother of Systems had seemed to care so much about him at some times, and full of contempt at others. It didn’t always feel as though she addressed the being locked away inside of him, either. Sometimes, rarely, she almost seemed sorry for him. For Tom Walken, the human. The idea frankly disturbed him a little. Nevertheless, he kept his silence as the elevator moved, and when the doors slid open, he followed the other man out.
They stepped into a warm summer evening, on top of what appeared to be a roof, a vast square of smooth black stone quite different from the sterile whiteness of the rest of the complex. The weather was completely different from what it had been when they had got him, he had seen that in snatches of media reports and the like piped into the system to keep him entertained in his periods of wakefulness. There never seemed to be a winter anymore, just a constant summer interspersed with short periods of a rainy spring. The sky had changed, too, no longer simply gray. The clouds glowed faintly with veins of electric green haze, which pulsed at times to set the whole sky shuddering with light. It was like viewing the aurora borealis through an ancient monochrome display, the scenes of his nightmares from long ago, and the sight filled him with an unnameable dread.
“There you are.”
Walken looked down. A thick parapet ran along the border, though at chest height he would have to lean to see what lay below. Against it, not far from where they had arrived, leaned the Mother of Systems. She wore her wide matron’s smile, and a pale shift that floated around her ankles and picked up the occasional mint-colored flash from on high.
“Yeah, hey,” Walken said. He found that he could not meet her eyes.
Her voice brimmed with its usual solicitous warmth. “So you are restored to us.” She gestured to the other man. “Yek’n hk’ghal tells me that you are unharmed.”
That was its name. The Light at the Edge of the Blade, his mind told him. Another Yathi name. It seemed oddly appropriate. Walken looked at the pretty man for a moment,
taking him in again. “I believe ‘undamaged’ was the term that he used.” Walken decided to be stubborn.
“Quite,” the Mother replied, undaunted. “You had quite an adventure tonight. Penny?”
Walken looked up and blinked.” Huh?”
“For your thoughts, Tom. A penny for your thoughts.” She smirked at him. “An impressive escape, but we anticipated it. Mind telling me what you were thinking?”
It was the strangest thing to ask him, in his opinion. “I wanted to get the hell out. You’d put me in a tank and done all these things to me. Why are you asking me what I thought when you said yourself that you anticipated my escape?”
The words brought delight to her features. “It’s simple, my dear man.” She pushed off the parapet to walk toward the two of them. Sweet as she seemed, Walken could not help but feel trapped between her and the elevator structure. To say nothing about Yek’n hk’ghal. He shrank slightly before her as she came, his unease magnified when the Mother of Systems reached out to cup his chin in her pale fingers. “You are not yourself. You may never be. But I want to help you, Tom.”
“You really sound like a holofilm villain.” He frowned. “All of this monologuing.”
“I suppose that I do, indeed.” Her arm snaked around his waist, something he found he could not resist, and she steered him to the edge of the roof. They looked out over the parapet together, upon a city not Seattle. It bore likeness to no kind of city he had ever heard of or seen before. Sprawling around them in all directions, as far as the horizon, a forest of black towers clawed toward the glowing sky. Twisted and angular, they resembled ritual knives studded with windows and a vast fog sprawled across their foundations, masking smaller buildings from sight. The fog, too, glowed with a strange green light, much as the sky did, though far more brightly, as if a vast, hellish fire burned on the ground, and its radiance filtered up to light the city instead of neon. The sight filled Walken with wonder and awe, suspended in the cloying aspic of sudden fear.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 29
