That came together two months ago. From her command center in Plato’s Cave, Bobbi looked on through a battery of holographic monitors as Janelle and Mulcahey, both of whom had first jockeyed for the rights to the target’s head, now worked together in order to carry out the plan. They were in Los Angeles, where Stormy—or so the target had been nicknamed—waited in a suite on the sixty-third floor of the Hilton Grand Los Angeles for a big meeting between his company, Golden Sun Electric, and some particularly high-placed members of United Hydrogen’s North American offices. An intrusion into United Hydrogen’s networks revealed that the two companies were to meet to discuss the possibility of a business partnership to build seafuel extraction plants all down the eastern coast of United Korea. This would turn Golden Sun into a massive player for the hydrogen fuel markets in Asia, but Bobbi hadn’t been convinced it would be a simple business meeting. Or if it was, she had suspicions that the seafuel plants already dotting the coasts of Asia generated the silver “slick” spreading across the Pacific in the first place. Either way, drilling Stormy would rid the world of one more Yathi and push back their plans. It would also give the rebuilding crew a much-needed chance to work together as a team.
Bobbi tried hard not to think that Park Jae Hyung, the man whose mind Stormy had violently appropriated, had a large family, a loving wife, five children. Killing him would bring them all a great deal of pain. It always did. Then again, Park was long gone, and what remained would probably kill and eat his precious family when it returned. That thought allowed Bobbi to justify this kind of thing. The only way she could bring herself to. Frankly, she was grateful for the excuse.
Through the lenses of co-opted police surveillance cameras and the eyes of microcams on their uniforms, Bobbi watched as the two chiefs worked together to move their people into position. A squad of Janelle’s bruisers posing as a maintenance crew had already made it inside, their identification cards hacked to give them the access they needed. They wouldn’t be going in to do the wet work, of course. They were the cover team, prepared to deal with anything that might go nuts in the building. They would handle security, get information, and make sure the police were delayed long enough for everyone to get out safe.
The team walked down narrow halls, laughing and joking in the way of workmen – which many were before they’d known the touch of Yathi violence, workmen, mothers, or children. They could pretend to be normal people. The illusion always seemed so real because they embraced the opportunity so desperately. She felt a crush of guilt at that. After all, it had ultimately been her to bring them all to this pass in the first place. The moment that came to mind, she thought of how Violet would chastise her for it. It wasn’t her fault, Violet would tell her. The Mother had started it all.
Janelle’s squad finished taking up the last of their stations along the maintenance level. Just as planned, network taps went into secured lines, and diagnostic probes interfaced with machinery.
“Plato, this is Wrench,” said the leader of the squad, a grim-voiced man named Leroy Porlock, one of Janelle’s senior people, a technician formerly with Strickland Technologies. Bobbi didn’t know much about his story, short of that he’d faced down a pair of Yathi drones during a nighttime assault on his office – what they had been looking for, or why drones were used, nobody seemed to know. That happened thirty years ago. Now well into his fifties, Leroy was a hardened rivethead who had become more knowledgeable about advanced technologies than probably anyone else in Strickland’s technical corps.
“Plato here.” Bobbi spoke into the open air of her office.
“We are…” Wrench paused to look down both ends of the darkened hallway, where his comrades in blue jumpsuits bent over their tasks.”…getting set up here. You should have a connection to the hotel network in a few minutes.”
“Acknowledged, Wrench.” Bobbi flicked a glance to a new panel, where another set of eyes tracked an ascent up an empty stairwell. Labored breathing filled the channel. “Knife, this is Plato. What is your status?”
After a moment, the view in that panel swept down the stairs behind them and then upward, ensuring they were alone.
“Knife here,” a woman’s voice replied, soft but solid. “I’m almost to the target level. Will give you visual as soon as I set up.” Knife was Camilla Djerrkura, Mulcahey’s prize sniper, an indigenous Australian, a Yolnu who had fought in the Australian Civil War to secure Home Land from the government. Mulcahey had claimed to be the very one who had saved Uluru, formerly known as Ayer’s Rock, from being demolished by a satellite strike with a single bullet put in an Australian field comms nexus. Bobbi would find out if she was as good as she said very soon. As for the breathing, Bobbi wasn’t worried. Camilla carried an electromagnetic sled rifle up fifty-six flights via a sealed maintenance stairway; that load would make anyone huff it a bit on the way.
“Right, get me a visual when you get set up, please. Thank you.” Bobbi’s hands rose and danced through a battery of keyboards that conjured themselves, bidden by her mind. Wired in, the vast computer cores of Plato’s Cavern acted as mere extensions of herself, sleeping minds prepared to wake and attend her like ladies in waiting. She reached out and found Sumire, several levels below her, similarly connected by a nest of neural cables to the network in her simulation tank.
The mental voice seemed so different from what Bobbi knew in the living world. Beatific, placid, but incredibly cold.
She must have been so loving before the Yathi took her. She thought of Sumire’s past. She had been a brilliant university student in Tokyo, a master of mathematical and psychological analysis. Corporations would have harvested her within minutes of graduating. They’d already been scouting her. She’d also been in love. But unfortunately, she also lived in a very different Japan than had existed before, one which had undergone a tectonic shift back to extreme social conservativism after decades of liberal expansion. Which meant her truth – living as a bisexual woman in love with another, and her professor to boot – ultimately would not survive. When she expressed her truth to a dear childhood friend, something that would have gone without so much as a blink elsewhere in the world, that friend replied by outing her to her friends, family, and to the staff of the university. Goodbye, family. Goodbye, prospects. Goodbye, life. The resulting rejections utterly hollowed her, and the Yathi moved in and turned her inside out. It was a story that should have stayed dead in the early part of the century, when so much of that bullshit had gone away.
But it had not, and Sumire – now ever more brilliant than she ever could have been as an unaltered human being – bore too many of the shades of cold logic she must have wielded in the service of the Mother of Systems. Left to her own devices, Bobbi imagined she would be the kind of cold mind capable of dooming nations in the name of the greater good. Sometimes, it seemed that only her love for Shaper kept Sumire glued together. Bobbi had no issues with that. She knew Shaper would never leave her. That love was solid as the rock the world was made from. And yet, she didn’t quite feel comfortable relying on only love to tame Sumire’s inner cold. Her fragmented sanity had to be carefully managed, like so many other matters.
A flicker of something passed beneath the mental ice that Bobbi could not identify.
Somewhere in the distance of the physical world, Bobbi’s back straightened.
“Well, shit,” Bobbi hissed under her breath as she broke the connection and returned to the real world. Once back, she addressed the tech crew slicing it out in the basement.
“Wrench,” she called over their secure link.
“Here.”
“Be on the lookout, old son, there’s something going on over there.” It was an understatement, she knew, and so did he.
Over the link, his voice grew tight.” Right, got it.” He called out to his people.” Let’s get the irons out, people, bad shit is going down upstairs. Keep your eyes open.” His focus returned to Bobbi.” You have any idea what we might be looking at?”
Bobbi grunted.” Nothing certain, but the executives supposed to show up seem to have disappeared.”
Wrench, the picture of eloquence. “Shit.”
“Yeah. So please keep track of your ass down there, and get ready to get the fuck out if you need to. Where are we with the security tap?”
“Just about there. Where should we start?”
“I’ll need a slip into the whole system, Wrench. I want video feed for the entire approach up to Stormy’s suite to start with, and then the rest. I’ll run the data feed through my expert systems so we’ll get a hit if something goes down.”
“Right,” he said. “Anything else?”
“Just watch your ass,” Bobbi replied. “Out.”
The link cut out, and Bobbi leaned back in her seat. What the fuck was going on over there? Cleaning up the trail behind them was certainly one way of making sure nobody knew the meeting happened, but why would reps from a power concern take such pains to hide their progress? No, Bobbi decided, maybe this was going to be something totally different.
“Plato. Knife here.” Camilla’s voice came over the link, flat and cool as ever.
“Home here,” Bobbi said. “What’s the deal?”
“I got a visual on the target,” said Camilla. “He’s in the suite. Looks like he’s having his tea while he waits.”
“Show me.” On Bobbi’s word, a new window appeared over the others, one that depicted a short, unassuming man in a plain gray suit sitting quietly by himself on one of several graceful leather couches. The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Through the lens of Camilla’s rifle camera, Stormy plucked pieces of sushi from a glazed ceramic tray and chewed on each, one at a time, without the slightest hint of tension or anticipation. If anything, he looked bored, which tracked with the Yathi in general when it came to dealing with the rest of humanity. And why not? To them, it had to feel like waiting for cows to show up for inspection. They’d all be slaughtered in the meantime, right? It wasn’t as if he had a rifle’s sights on his head, death only a hypersonic slug away. The gun Camilla had set up across the street was meant to take out tanks and other armored vehicles, not pick off human targets. Maximum damage in a single shot, which of course was the way to go with these assholes. It wasn’t like Anderson, who they were sure had been bare of any armor.
For a moment, the image of the man she had murdered floated in her vision. One more for the books, Bobbi girl. No point in getting upset about something she’d been doing for ages now. “He looks as if he’s not expecting any trouble, at least. Knife, your analysis?”
“I say I shoot him in the head right now and leave the other lads to find him,” she said. “He’ll go up in flames, won’t he?”
Bobbi paused to consider that. “No. I want to know what it is they’re talking about. Wrench, you hack the phone system yet?”
“…affirmative,” came Wrench’s drawl over the link. “We’re set up here. We can turn on the suite phone the moment you’re ready.”
“Then we wait for them to arrive. Hold for further orders, Knife, Wrench. We’ll be in touch.” Bobbi cut the link and went back to Stormy, her lips set into a line. According to their plan, they would allow the executives to assemble, while Bobbi and crew eavesdropped on the meeting through the phone system Wrench and his crew hacked into – speakerphones went both ways, after all – and recorded the data for analysis. Barring any new developments, once the meeting ended and the other executives left for the dinner that they had put on their agenda, Bobbi would have Camilla drop Stormy with a single well-placed bullet before extracting herself. Then they’d ring up the ISB with an anonymous tip to get an agent over to find him. Yathi infiltrators had fairly eaten up The Bureau at this point, and they had regularly made use of the enemy’s own infrastructure to clean up such messes while sending a message to the Yathi in the process.
But on the other hand, those executives were awfully squirrelly about cleaning up their traces…
acinto.>
Jacinto snapped to attention.
Walken followed the length of a primary duct, easily big enough for him to go through.
Jacinto replied, his voice stony.
Jacinto spat a curse.
He certainly didn’t sound happy about it.
Walken synthesized an affirmative grunt.
After cutting the signal, the sound of something moving around a corner up ahead got Walken’s attention. He slowed, pressed himself against the tangles of piping that clad the walls of the basement corridor. No voices, footfalls scraping on the concrete. Walken reached the corner and peered around.
A short connecting hallway led to a large door, currently ajar. Though Walken could not see beyond it, the smell that hit him was easily identifiable—blood, shit and viscera, all very fresh, all very human. Even without the processors built into his body, he would have known it. That odor had been his old and terrible friend all through his law enforcement career. Such as it had been. The duct he’d been following led into the room beyond. No real alternative, then, though he wondered what happened upstairs if the smell made it into the ventwork. Walken braced himself, creeping forward in a defensive stance, and looked through the crack in the doorway.
What had recently been a maintenance room had been converted into a charnel house. The corpses of humans, men and women, l
ay tangled in a bloody heap in the middle of the room, carelessly piled amid the machinery like so much kindling. Lolling eyes stared out into the lands of the dead, at least from the dead who still had eyes. Twisted limbs lay stacked among the bodies, as if parts to be reunited with broken dolls later on. This most cursory glance told Walken that they had been killed by powerful hands, brutally and without thinking – he knew that kind of killing, quick and careless like children pulling the wings off of flies. He’d walked into Orleans Hospital all over again. Lying in a pool of blood near the door, a narrow brass lozenge bore a Hilton logo with the word ‘LIBERTY’ engraved beneath it. Walken stared at it, wondering if this was a name or a description of what they had finally found. Perhaps, in this world, it might well be both.
The shuffling came again, beyond the door to his left; he looked to find, emerging from the far left corner where he could not have seen, a pale, thin man dressed in what appeared to be a hotel attendant’s uniform. He did not appear entirely shrunken like the drones Walken had seen before. Perhaps less altered, or simply fresh, the walking corpse did not even bear the white-blonde hair that the Yathi preferred, having instead a shock of dark curls. Walken could not mistake the bleach-pale skin or the gleaming silver of his irises.
As the drone worked to knot the tie at its throat, Walken leapt into action. It had no chance, really. He blurred through the doorway, throwing the heavy steel door wide open. Before the corpse could react, he grabbed it by the hair and drove the fingers of his free hand through its forehead and into the synthetic tissue that filled its skull. The plasma sheaths lit as they went in, vaporizing bone and brain alike. As he snapped his hand back, the drone fell, smoke and steam pouring from its brow like an escaping spirit. Walken stepped over it, passed the mound of corpses, and opened the door set in the opposite wall.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 33
