Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3)

by Michael Shean

  Jacinto’s voice was tight.

  Walken said.

  Jacinto hissed.

  Walken stopped as the door swung open to another corridor. The faint sound of bootheels on the concrete rang from somewhere behind him. He ducked back onto the charnel room, where a vent cover awaited him high on the wall behind the pile of corpses. Without hesitation, he vaulted over the bodies and took hold of the louvered cover, pulling hard. Its latch twisted away as easy as paper, and he swung it open. The footfalls increased in haste and volume; he slithered into it and shut the hatch behind him. He doubted that anyone who came upon that sight would be paying much attention to the ventwork.

  As he lurked near the vent mouth, a number of dark figures in combat armor charged into the room. One let out a very human shriek as they slipped in the blood and went down. The two behind them drew automatic rifles and covered the room. No sound escaped their sealed helmets, but despite masks with blank red lenses concealing human faces, their body language spoke volumes. Horror, revulsion, all the things that he did not feel but knew he should. Very human reactions. Somebody unsealed their helmet and vomited in the hall outside. He did not see the face, but the sob that accompanied the retching was young and male.

  Walken murmured into the throat pickup of his suit.

  Jacinto’s voice was wire coiled around a spool, ever tighter.

  Walken replied.

  Silence on the other end. Beyond the vent, the armored figures tracked the pile of corpses, looking for survivors. Walken knew they would find none.

  His response came in grim waves.

  Walken stared hard at the figures; one of them made hand signals. The trooper who vomited had reentered, lingering near the vent cover.

  Jacinto replied,

  Whatever these people were up to, his objective was Kim and his comrades. They were sure to get themselves killed if he didn’t. He backed away from the vent, limbs extending, becoming a spider again.

 

  Walken thought about the smoldering remains of the drone that lay next to the human corpses.

  the pilot said, but he didn’t sound entirely convinced.

  Walken twisted himself around inside the duct and moved deeper into the building’s guts, silent thanks to the suit’s incredible sound-absorbing qualities, and found himself wishing he could have confidence Stadil’s ghost didn’t already know exactly what was happening.

  lato, Wrench here.”

  Bobbi blinked out of her reverie.” Plato here. Go ahead, Wrench.”

  “I think our boys have shown up in the parking building.” Wrench sounded tight, wary. “Four of them, no security.”

  “No security,” Bobbi repeated. “Are you sure about that?”

  “We’re watching them get out of the car right now,” he replied, and a picture-in-a-picture view of four men in suits emerging from the banal confines of a Mitsubishi Amana sedan appeared in the corner of Wrench’s window. They matched the descriptions of the four United Hydrogen executives. “Just them. No chase car, nothing else. We’ve been watching for it.”

  “A moment,” Bobbi said, and pinged Sumire.

  “Yes?” The woman’s voice floated out of a summoned window, cold and flat as it had been through the network link – but at least this way Bobbi didn’t have to feel it as well.

  “Our boys are here, Sumire.” Bobbi licked her lips. “Wrench says they’ve got no security with them.”

  “Unusual,” said Sumire. “At least, for a sanctioned meeting between two corporate parties.”

  Bobbi frowned. “What do you mean?”

  “I have considered the possibilities,” Sumire said. “I no longer think that they are going to meet The Sensation of an Oncoming Storm for the reasons that had been advertised. I do not believe that this is a business meeting of the usual sort. So much trouble covering their itinerary, and now no security? What reason can you think of that might require such measures?”

  Bobbi blinked at the empty display, as if Sumire’s eyes might see her through the panel. Why would they be coming to see an executive from another energy company with no security and no handler? Especially, Bobbi reminded herself, a competing energy company? “Oh, shit. This isn’t a meeting. It’s an extraction.”

  “Pardon?” Wrench’s voice floated out from the link; Bobbi looked up to see his seamed face staring at her through his own display. “Can you repeat that, Plato?”

  “Wrench, the situation has changed,” Bobbi said. “The executives from United Hydrogen aren’t here to make a business deal with the target. I think that they’re here to defect.”

  Wrench spat to the side. “Shit. That’s going to fuck things up a fair bit.”

  “Just a little,” Bobbi said. “Where are they now?”

  “Elevator,” he said. “They’re on the way up to the target floor. Your orders?”

  “Lock them in,” Bobbi said. “Knife?”

  “Knife here, Plato.” Tension dripped from Camilla’s voice. “Company’s arriving.”

  “What?” Bobbi turned her attention to the view from Camilla’s rifle camera. Stormy opened the door to his suite and stepped back, admitting a quartet of bland-faced men in suits, men who looked exactly like the men who, Wrench’s picture-in-picture view now showed, found themselves standing in a stalled, sealed elevator and acted out accordingly with frightened glances and frantic looks at holo-projecting wristcomps.” If they’re in there, then who’s coming to…”

  Bobbi’s realization barely dawned before the four men lifted their arms as one and unleashed a flood of death into the hapless Yathi at point blank range. He dropped amid a cloud of livid red as the men emptied automatic pistols into his body, compact affairs called “blender pistols” on the street. The guns strobed silently as Stormy fell to the ground, and again as they emptied them into his twitching corpse. Little remained of the man’s torso but an empty cage of splintered and flapping skin that served as a container for pureed flesh, pulped and splattered across the oatmeal-colored carpet.

  “Plato,” Camilla said, her voice a frozen wire. “What are your orders?”

  “Plato?” asked Wrench, hushed and urgent. “What the hell’s going on up there? We just registered gunshots on the security sensors!”

  Bobbi’s gaze flickered between the gunmen and their victim, unsure of what she was seeing. Was this a defection gone wrong? Those men looked exactly like the men in the elevator. Were they assassins? Were they the original men?

  “Plato?” Camilla on the line.

  “Plato? Are you there?” Wrench took on a whole new tone. Urgency. Fear. “Plato! We got another problem!”

  Bobbi blinked at Wrench’s window. “Hold, Knife.” She snapped back into the world. “Wrench, go ahead. What’s the problem?”

  “I don’t know what the hell’s going on upstairs,” he said. “But look at hallway outside!”

  The view of the frightened executives switched over to a view of the corridor outside of Stormy’s suite from a camera m
ounted in an end corner, staring down the hall to the elevator where the executives had intended to emerge. A vent cover over top of the elevator doors had fallen open, and something unfolded itself from the space inside. In one fluid motion, long, spidery limbs emerged from the vent mouth and pushed the body to which they were attached out onto the floor. The figure looked lean, thin enough that it seemed almost deflated, the legs as long and strange as the arms, and everything clad in a skin-tight suit so black that it seemed to devour the light around it. Bobbi stared in horror as it filled the corridor, flexing fingers that began to radiate a pallid sheath of light around their tips even as they crooked into claws. It lifted its head so the camera could see it; hooded in the same material, no face, only a featureless void set with a pair of tinted lenses.

  Bobbi could only stare. A fear had seized her in that moment that she could not explain but was so very, very familiar, something terrible and animal, the braying of sheep, the wailing of children. Get away, get away, that tiny part of her screamed. Don’t look at it, it’s going to see you! It’s going to eat you, get away!

  “Plato,” Wrench barked over the link, “Plato? Plato, are you there?”

  The words snapped Bobbi back into the real world. She pushed the squealing part of her brain back into the dark corner from whence it came and keyed the mic again. “Wrench, get your people out of there.” She marveled at the hysterical edge in her voice. “I don’t know what’s happening up there, or what that thing is, but you need to get out. Direct security control to me.”

  “Roger that,” he replied, and called into the background. “All right, shit’s going down. Pack it up! We’re out of here.”

  “Plato!” Camilla’s voice rang out, and Bobbi turned her attention back to her window.

  The four men didn’t check the corpse. They readied themselves for what they apparently sensed on the other side of the door. Bobbi noted that their skin had changed. The flesh tones had bleached out entirely, their hair the same, their facial structures shifted into bland masks. When had they done that? They were Yathi – and Bobbi had lost all sense of understanding as to what was happening. “Get out of there, Wrench. Knife, keep your camera on. I want to know what the hell’s going on over there.”

  “Roger that,” Camilla replied, voice hardening up.

  While Wrench continued barking orders, the sight of the thing in the hallway had clearly rattled him. Camilla, on the other hand, had her game face clamped down. Bobbi couldn’t help but admire that, even in the chaos of the moment.

  The monster slunk toward the door to Stormy’s suite with a grace Bobbi had not yet encountered. Yathi fighters were incredibly fast, incredibly precise. But this thing moved as if in slow motion while covering ground at speed. In an instant, it stood before the door to the suite, and its hands rose as if about to play a piano concerto.

  Bobbi thought the dark figure would shear through the door. In fact, the ominous halos about its elongated fingers suggested it could do so with little effort. But it did not. To Bobbi’s amazement, the creature lifted one hand, the glow guttering away from the fingers there, and…knocked.

  Once. Twice. Three times.

  Silence. The Yathi killers froze.

  Twice more. Bobbi thought she knew the rhythm from ancient cartoons.

  …two bits…

  Then the horror-figure burst through the door.

  Bobbi had fought hand to hand with the Yathi, through formations of drones, against exotic combat machines, against the horrors that were the Yathi themselves. She had witnessed the wake of Redeye as she carved through a Yathi facility ahead of her. Bobbi had even witnessed the grotesque native forms of the aliens themselves, the spidery monstrosities that died hidden in glass cylinders, incinerated by Redeye’s fusion-bomb guts. What transpired when the nameless horror crossed into Stormy’s suite and engaged the four Yathi agents was not the most dramatic or terrible scene she had ever witnessed, but it came close.

  The four possessed men that stood on the other side ditched their weapons for far more exotic defenses as the black figure arrived. Their suits burst open as their bodies swelled in size, not with sinewed muscle beneath their white skins but with a hurricane of articulated arms tipped with industrial cutters Bobbi had seen only in small numbers before. Blunt-edged blades flailed and dipped en masse at the black shadow as it closed with the knot, each weapon lit bright blue with the same ghostly envelopes of plasma that sheathed their target’s fingers. The glowing lances destroyed the rest of their clothes in an instant, silk and synthetic fibers going up in a lethal haze.

  It should have been a massacre, and it certainly was, only not the one that played by the numbers. The black shape seemed to stand still as the forest of blades slashed and stabbed away. Then, the unknown figure exploded into a blur of motion too fast to perceive. In seconds, the four Yathi collapsed in a tumble of synthetic parts and a milk-white haze. Camilla drew a deep breath as the gangly shadow stood over their ruins, as weirdly articulated arms shuddered and smoked with the vaporized blood of their hosts, the light of the fading plasma reflecting like balefire off its ribbed suit. It stood there, untouched, flecked with light and synthetic blood, like a statue in its victory.

  “God of our Dreaming,” Camilla whispered. “It’s a bloody monster.”

  “They’re all monsters,” Bobbi hissed. “But it killed them. That makes it our kind of monster for the moment.”

  “They’re fighting each other,” Camilla murmured to herself. “That can’t be possible.”

  “Plasma-envelope technology doesn’t exist anywhere else,” Bobbi said. “That speed and precision only comes from Yathi engineering. It could be a drone, maybe, but I doubt it went there by mistake.” She paused. “Wait…what is it doing now?”

  The shadow stepped past the ruined corpses of the Yathi killers, leaving footprints in the blood-soaked carpet. It knelt beside the ruins of the man they knew as Stormy and gazed down into the pulp left of him, then did something that Bobbi had never seen one of the enemy do – it slumped down on its knees by the body, the tension leaving its frame entirely. Its head hung down over its chest. Spider lenses stared blankly at the corpse. It looked almost to be grieving.

  Bobbi could not help but stare. Camilla’s rifle remained trained there, but the soft hiss of her breathing through her headset indicated the tension on her end. Silence hung for a few seconds more, before the sound of gunfire came from the lower floors of the hotel.

  “Plato.” Wrench’s voice, tight with pain.” Plato, this is Wrench, do you copy?”

  “I copy,” Bobbi said, snapped back into reality by the torn-canvas sound of automatic weapons, deafening over the link. “What the hell is going on over there?”

  “You tell me,” Wrench called. “We were just about out of there when a whole fucking swarm of people came out of the sublevels.”

  Bobbi stiffened. “What? Are you all right?”

  “For the moment,” Wrench replied. He sounded as if he were speaking in a bucket. “They sealed us in a maintenance room because they thought that we were just hotel staff. They’re blasting it out with…somebody, I don’t know. They got a pair of high-velocity assault guns going out there, rotary barrels and all.”

  “Are they cops?”

  “No,” Wrench said, and Bobbi learned why his voice was so hard. “They’re Mendelsohn’s people.”

  A long second of silence. Mendelsohn’s people. “How do you know?”

  “I recognize the gear,” he said. “It’s custom-fabricated, commissioned from a Chinese nanofactory that her people helped out with the security sideline.”

  “Fuck,” Bobbi muttered. This was the worst kind of dream. “They recognize you?”

  “I don’t think so.” Wrench chuckled thinly. “I’ve lost a lot of weight since I was recruited. The beard helps, too.”

  “All right.” Through Camilla’s camera, the shadow had sprung to its feet and darted out the door. Bobbi looked to the hallway cam Wrench had set up.
The figure had nearly made it to the vent hatch from whence it came. Such speed, incredible. What the hell was it? “There’s bad business going on upstairs, and you don’t want to be a part of it. Can you tap back into hotel security from there?”

  “Not from here,” Wrench said. “But you should be able to do anything you want with that stay alive link we set up. Otherwise we’re locked up tight.”

  “Damn it. Can you get out?”

  “Ah.” Wrench coughed. “When they put us in here, they put something on the door mechanism. I’m guessing a self-contained magnetic lock. I don’t know that we can get it off short of shooting the door open.”

  “Right,” Bobbi said. “Okay. See what you can do, otherwise we’ll have to find some other way of getting you out. You get ready to trash your gear if the cops come, copy?”

  “Already got it packed up to torch,” he said. All of Wrench’s team had their gear in suicide cases, rigged with thermite charges in case of emergency. “We’ll stay here. Best of luck figuring out what’s going on.”

  “You just take care of yourselves,” Bobbi replied softly. “Out.”

  As she said this, she willed the cameras on the lower levels of the hotel to cycle – and doing so, found that the lobby had been reduced to a slaughterhouse. Once it had been a pretty, neo-modern affair, all marble floors and gilded fixtures, but the raw geometrics were splashed with blood and pocked with bullet holes, and bodies lay strewn across the gray marble. Figures in tactical armor and sealed helms, like Seattle Special Tactics cops but painted black, traded fire with pale-skinned, blonde men and women in tailored suits. Both sides used furniture for cover, stone risers and a fountain, the coffee bar in the corner.