“There is a way,” Walken said.
“Yes, but what?”
“You will see.” Walken did not want to talk anymore. His thoughts beyond the constant stream of tactical data were of Kim Jin Woo, the man who wore the name of Park Jae Hyung, who had been something of a friend. He had not deserved to die. And what of his family, now? Emotion did not come easily to Walken, but the loss came through as a thin silver river. They had known he was coming. They had waited for him to find Park’s corpse. They had tried to kill him, or at the very least prune his synthetic frame for capture. Mother still wanted him for the being suppressed in his skull. You have taken my child from me, she had told him. These other men were already dead, unless of course he could ferry them to where Knightley awaited them in orbit.
Treehaus, where humanity lived free of any alien taint. Where the end of the Yathi race gestated even now.
He led the four men to the roof. The bright wash of spotlights swung across the hotel’s glittering bulk, picking up sparks along a chrome lip that slanted weirdly over them. No doubt they would have scanners running, but the motes of chaff emitted from Walken’s back would take care of them. His charges emerged from the access hatch behind him and stared in wonder at the faint fairy mist that wreathed them all.
“You’re masking them,” Carnegie said. “Anti-radiation nanomachines.”
“Better than that,” Walken said. “Adaptive emitters. They broadcast the signal that I want, short of visual contact. We will not appear on their sensing devices.”
Van Pelt let out a whistle. “I admit it, I’m impressed. I hear the best that the stuff coming out of Wonderland can achieve is a dead-zone. Not total invisibility.” In the face of this simple trick, he had been calmed.
A familiar distaste rose within Walken once again. “It is not total invisibility.” He scanned the skies, looking for Jacinto and his cloaked VTOL. “There are still types of radiation that they cannot emulate. It is simply that the police will not use that kind of technology.”
Nguyen spoke after a short silence.” A lot of people died today for us to get away. Is it worth it?”
Walken paused. He did not anticipate such a question, but he turned toward the men and nodded, looking at them through the shredded hood with one silver eye.” You will save them all. All of humanity. All from this…” He waved a hand over his body. Hating his new flesh, its power. It was not meant for him. “Well. You know the score, as it were.”
“Yes.” Carnegie again. The old man looked up as a police flyer went past. “They aren’t high enough to get a visual.”
“The pilots are using telepresence rigs,” Walken replied. “Easy to fool.”
“So why the jamming mist?” Bradshaw, his hands in the pockets of his dirty, expensive slacks.
“Because they aren’t the only one watching the sensors,” said Walken. A slight wiggle in the back of his mind manifested. He looked up. “Our ride is here.”
From somewhere above the clouds, a thin line of darkness rocketed downward to impact the roof. Glittering black like ice, the narrow cable stretched in a rigid line.
“Here.” Walken distributed molded handgrips, their forward faces terminating in a dull metal plate, to each man.” Touch the contact end to the cable. Do not let go, or you will die.”
They said nothing in reply, four sets of eyes locking on the black wire so as not to lose it. Walken gestured to them. Carnegie went first, then Van Pelt, then Bradshaw. They sailed silently upward into the silver sky, never looking back. Perhaps they couldn’t, like Lot, afraid they would meet their doom if they did so. Nguyen waited to be last, stepping forward to touch his grip to the line, but hesitating.
“I want you to know,” he said after a moment, looking upward into Walken’s half-hidden face, “that it is not your fault. What happened to you. And that I appreciate what you are doing.”
Walken blinked at the man’s words. He had no reply. Nguyen nodded once, touched his grip to the line, and sailed upward. Walken followed moments later. As he ascended, he watched the psychologist’s body shrinking, a black spot against clouds still pale despite the darkness of the evening, lit up slightly from within by a wealth of nanomachines and terraforming chemicals. Beyond the ceiling, Jacinto’s black craft waited like a sleek raptor, its belly open, taking in its passengers with a hunter’s patience. The clouds swallowed Nguyen, and Walken followed. The machine floated, its vented drives spewing bright alcohol-blue fire downward toward the earth, swaying slightly on all axes as Nguyen’s body disappeared into its open hatch. It ballooned in size as Walken grew close, cold air biting his face through the wounds in the mask, and he felt a tiny pang of terror. The sensation did not belong to him, but rather to the monster in his head, as he made the ascent and stepped onto the deck of the plane’s armored belly. The cable’s penetrator end slipped into its socket a second later. They were free.
The four men sat on acceleration couches, not having the experience to lock themselves into harnesses but knowing supportive chairs when they saw them. Walken approached them as the VTOL moved, not losing an ounce of grace.
“We will proceed to a neutral location,” he said. “You will be given your assignments there. Once we have discovered who sought you, and made suitable arrangements, you will be sent to the staging area.”
“Where are we going?” Van Pelt blinked slowly at him. “Can we do the work without Park?”
“He was of no consequence to the plan.” The words come out too easily for Walken; they tasted bitter, and he hated them. “He arranged for you to come to him. Now the real work must begin.”
The four men looked at each other.
Carnegie said, “Will we see you again?”
“Yes.” Walken looked at them all, his eyes probing each man for any last potential signs of betrayal. “I will put you in your harnesses.” He stepped up to bring each one down over them, finishing the job that gravity would start once Jacinto put the plane into supersonic mode. He brought the arms of Nguyen’s harness last, locking eyes with the man as he did so. It is not your fault, Nguyen had told him. Walken stared at him for a long moment, then broke away to walk up the plane’s neck to where Jacinto sat in the pilot’s seat, framed by the clouds as they washed over the bubble canopy.
“Hey, big man.” Jacinto frowned back at Walken. “Are our eggs all in the basket?”
“No.” Walken pulled himself into the weapons operator’s chair, looking down at the other man’s helmeted head.” Kim has been killed. Yathi agents.”
Jacinto turned back to his console so Walken could not see his face. “Someone told them where we were going to meet?”
“Perhaps,” said Walken. “At least, not directly. There were the others as well. They may have left obvious signs.”
“I think I might know who they were.” Jacinto looked troubled. “I think…I think it might be the Fury’s work.”
Walken got into his station. “Mendelsohn. Are you certain?”
“No,” Jacinto said.” We didn’t have black combat armor or anything back in the day, but it sounds like her—straight custom, just like her boss. I remember when January used to run the show. She understood how to fight them. I never understood why her people split off like that.”
Walken wondered, too, what had happened in Bobbi’s past. He knew that given her skill set and what she knew, learning the truth was inevitable. At the time, he would never have thought she would jump-start a resistance movement. But then again, he had always underestimated women in his old life. His old self, so eclipsed by his personal failings and lack of evolution. He supposed in that way all that he had experienced since meeting the Mother of Systems had done him a world of good. “It is unfortunate. But only temporary. You know that Bobbi is reforming her movement.”
“Yeah,” Jacinto said. Holographic data screens winked into view around him and floated there, spilling over with flight information. “But if she’s still doing it, she’s doing a damned quiet job.”
“Mendelsohn is making more than enough noise to conceal her actions, “Walken said.” Anything not done by her or her people is still attributed to her. Bobbi is still being billed as the proverbial Bogeyman, so to speak, but these people don’t strike me as stupid. I doubt Mendelsohn will last long with an alternative available on the field. She is too harsh, and it strikes me that even the Bogeyman is preferable to her rule.”
Jacinto grunted as he guided the plane through a cloudbank, broke through, and rose above the sprawling sea of vaguely lit green-gray mist; above, the moon an orb of bright silver in the night. Walken blinked at it, marveling at its beauty.
“I think that the end will come soon,” Walken said.
“For them,” said Jacinto, “Or for us?”
Walken thought about it a moment. “Either way, it will be a new world.”
The great and timeless hand of gravity kept them hemmed into their seats as Jacinto flew the Agincourt across the world. The VTOL’s nuclear heart purred as it flew. Walken could feel it in the system, its ghost-signal whispering as they crossed over the United States. He still hadn’t gotten used to having complete awareness of every device around him, yet not yet having control of it. He felt the power in his head somewhere, distant, encoded with foreign thoughts and foreign words. The barbed glyphs of the Yathi tongue, covered with razors just like their minds. He could invoke the power, he knew, but that would mean letting the thing inside of him back into his head. He could not do that, not ever. Control of the body and its senses would have to be good enough.
“We’re going to be making our descent soon,” Jacinto said from the pilot’s seat. They had not spoken since they left Los Angeles. He had remained silent while Walken sat and eavesdropped on his passengers through the mikes fitted into the plane’s hull. Nothing unexpected came up in their conversation – questions about what had happened, who might be following them, that sort of thing. They seemed to focus more on Kim’s death and what they each knew about the situation when they spoke at all. Exposing too much about themselves seemed to be an unacceptable risk. Interesting.
Finally, the conversation came around to focus on Walken. “I don’t know about that guy,” said Van Pelt. “He’s one of them, isn’t he?”
“Park said that he wasn’t,” replied Bradshaw. “They apparently do something to your brain, personality overwriting or something similar. I’m not sure how they’d overwrite the engrams, but that’s why they’re where they are, right? They have the technology.”
Van Pelt coughed. “So who was he before?”
“Police.” Carnegie now, calm and measured. “Or more specifically a federal investigator. There’s a large reward on his head, actually.”
“Yeah?” Van Pelt sounded like a child being told the first lines of a bedtime story. “What’d he do?”
“The official line is that he killed three Princess Dolls to cover his involvement in the smuggling operation that brought them overseas,” Carnegie replied.
A low whistle. “Those are very expensive,” Bradshaw said.
Carnegie’s voice cut the silence like a saw made of ice. “You would know.”
“Agent Walken was a very conflicted and tortured individual,” Nguyen said. “But he was not a murderer. It isn’t in his nature.”
Silence from the other men. Walken’s nerves stood on end under his skin.
“How do you know about him?” asked Van Pelt, as if collecting the words from Walken’s brain. “Were you involved in the investigation?”
“My wife…” said Nguyen, his voice light, but etched with lines of pain. “We both practiced psychology. She worked with federal agencies. She talked to me about her cases.”
“And his was one of yours.” Carnegie, voice carefully neutral. “You aren’t supposed to share your work with anyone, Doctor. It’s unethical.”
“We shared everything,” Nguyen replied, again light – but firm. Drawing a line. “But in the end, yes. It was part of why she lost her job. The Yathi have penetrated the ranks of the Industrial Security Bureau, you see. It’s little more than a filter now, ensuring that technology from Great Siam gets only to who they want.”
“Social engineering,” said Bradshaw. His voice had grown toneless in the wake of Carnegie’s words. His sexual predilections were not public knowledge by any measure. “That is what they do, isn’t it?”
“They tried to break him,” said Nguyen. “When he was younger. He and his partner were deep cover narcotics officers in Baltimore. He fell in love with her.”
A snort. Van Pelt said, “Down that way lies madness.”
“Indeed. She went mad after taking too many doses of a drug called White Rocket. It destroyed her mind and her body.”
Another whistle from Bradshaw. “I read about that. I mean, what it does. Turns the skin into polymer. Extremely painful.”
“That wasn’t a drug,” said Carnegie. “That was a product trial.” The old man made a strange sound in the back of his throat. “I saw the analysis of that stuff – the narcotic was just the suspension for the nanomachines. To get people to keep taking it, you understand.”
“To what end?” Van Pelt, curious.
“The true goal wasn’t to get people to keep some pusher in millions, of course,” said Carnegie. “The transformative effects were the goal. It was obviously a pharmacological trial of some sort, gentlemen, but we didn’t know who was behind it. Once I discovered that Genefex funded certain black-market clinics in Great Siam, however, it just made sense.”
“Perhaps Walken understood that as well. Either way, that’s why he went to the Bureau. And that’s why they wanted him, I think.” Nguyen paused. “And of course, they got him in time.”
“But he’s fighting them now,” said Van Pelt.
“Obviously engrams and personality can’t be overwritten the way that these…people thought they could.”
Carnegie chuckled. “Do you have a hard time saying it, Doctor?”
“A little, yes.” Nguyen sounded a little embarrassed.
“Trust me, then. I’ve seen the research that this fellow Knightley has uncovered. Anything as advanced as that, well, I don’t have any problem thinking that the minds that made that up aren’t from this planet. You’ve got your work cut out for you, Doctor. You might not want to admit what they are, but you’re going to have to model their minds soon enough.”
Silence for a little while. Walken stared straight ahead, watching the clouds glide by beyond the barbed glyphs constantly spelling out incoming data. They never left, even when he closed his eyes. Even when he slept. He thought of Annie, both back then and in his dreams now, how she looked in all the stages of her life in which he was there. Her beautiful dark hair, her olive skin, the glittering green of her eyes. The pallid ruin that slowly spread over that beautiful frame, turning her inch by inch into a pain-maddened plastic doll. Plastic-skinned, at least. She had to be dead now, dead and split up into a number of laboratory jars. Maybe Carnegie had read her research record. It certainly wouldn’t surprise Walken anymore if he had.
Nguyen’s voice jolted him out of his reverie, tinged with realization. “You said I’d have to model their minds. You think you know why we’re being assembled. A reason beyond what Knightley told us.”
“Of course I do,” Carnegie said with a snort. “There’s only one logical possibility.”
“And that is?”
Carnegie chuckled. “A bionics engineer, a neuroscientist, a psychologist and a scientist specializing in nanomachine engineering – all experts in their fields, all clear of alien influence. There’s only one thing that I can think of that Knightley might want to achieve. I think he wants to try and control them. It’s obviously just another takeover.”
Van Pelt whistled. “Stiff proposition. He wants us to do that? Is it even possible?”
“Obviously he thinks so,” said Carnegie. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t have picked us out. Destroy them, and then what? A whole lot of technology that nobody understan
ds outside of a body of dangerous psychotics. But control them? Well, then you have a whole body of people across the world, all knowledgeable about a technology that nobody else on Earth has the slightest clue about. He would have the strongest monopoly in recorded history. It would be as if someone…I don’t know, patented the wheel. Or fire.”
“But to what end?” Nguyen asked. “I don’t see it as being part of his psychological makeup. He’s extremely flawed, certainly, but ultimately altruistic.”
“Altruism is not a practice by which to run the world, doctor,” Carnegie replied. “History has demonstrated that.”
Walken sighed as Carnegie said those words. The Yathi had a point about humans in terms of their susceptibility to exploitation. These men discussed the very things that made humanity so easy to manipulate. A man like Carnegie, aloft in the heights of human brilliance, should know better. Obviously not.
“Of course,” Nguyen said coldly. “We’ve clearly been assembled here not by misfortune, but all thanks to the glory and perfection of the unrestricted free market. Imagine what terrifying straits we would find ourselves in were we subscribed to a culture of avarice and material gain.”
Carnegie grunted, and silence followed. A thin thread of warmth spread through Walken, directed at Nguyen. The psychologist clearly had the right attitude for the assignment.
Soon, Jacinto brought the plane down through a bank of cloying industrial fog, and the corrupted sprawl of Cuidad del Carmen glittered up at them. The coastal radar didn’t so much as sniff the Agincourt as she descended through the smog into Jacinto’s corner of the industrial zones. A wide bare patch once a parking lot, served as a landing field, marked out with hand warmers by Strikeboy. Invisible except on thermal scopes, and even then you would need to know where to look. As the VTOL descended over the vast tangle of the automated oil complexes, Walken prepared himself to deliver the four men in the cargo bay into the arms of what might very well be a madman. He could only hope that Knightley was for real.
Strikeboy waved them down with a pair of infrared flares. The tarmac seemed to shift in protest beneath the aircraft’s weight. Walken feared that it would collapse, sending the plane and its passengers to an improbable doom. The Agincourt bounced on its landing gear, however, and remained crouched panther-sleek in the Mexican twilight. Walken climbed down from the co-pilot’s station as Jacinto unstrapped himself, looking back at him from over his shoulder. Walken’s reflection gazed back at him in the tinted gloss of Jacinto’s visor.
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 36
