Mulcahey whistled. “All right. So what about Mendelsohn? We gonna have to wage a war on two fronts, now?”
“She agreed to an alliance,” Walken said.
“Yeah,” said Janelle. “I mean, why would she? She’s got a big fucking hate on for Bobbi, you said so yourself.”
Bobbi only shrugged. She got to her feet. Everyone watched as she circled the table, her hands in the pockets of her fatigue pants. She looked so small, so thin without her synthetic curves, but hard, like a ribbon of steel. No. She is smart, she is strong. She always had been, but now she had become something utterly different. He felt reduced, watching her, knowing how he had treated her in the past, how he had thought of her – or, more the point, how he had not thought of her. Not really. Again, the shame bloomed inside of him, the only true strong emotion he had yet to suffer.
“This is stupid!” Bobbi exclaimed. “We already wage a war on one front, I do not want another one. Or I guess a third, really, because I have no reason to trust that this alliance Tom’s holding out to us is going to work in the end. No offense to him, of course, but if I have to deal with a race of genocidal aliens, a person who may have already attempted to kill me twice, and another who’s absolutely batshit fucking crazy, to say nothing of a digital demigod, the only one I’m going to actually consider trustworthy is the one who I have real experience with – and yes.” She paused to gesture at Janelle’s floating image. “The thing in his head is still there, but it’s totally isolated. He’s had his brain severely fucked with, but the consciousness within him, the alien, it’s in a vault. He is telling the truth when he says he’s buried the thing. Which brings us to why I want us to enter into this alliance despite my very obvious reservations.”
Walken watched quietly as she walked, listening to her, noting the reactions of the others. Janelle stared at Bobbi, eyes burning in silence. Mulcahey resumed his impassive look, the wonder gone. Violet remained a mask, and the others looked to their masters for cues. The potential divisions were obvious; he would have to work to help her, if she would let him, solidify those lines. She could do it herself, he knew that already, but time was of the essence. Time was always of the essence.
Without response or objection raised, Bobbi perched upon the edge of the conference table. “We have an axis going between Mendelsohn and Knightley; they seek to destroy the Yathi, same as we do, and Knightley believes he’s on to how to do that, to the point of sending scientists up to Treehaus and working on his solution. Which, Tom tells us, is the widespread destruction of the Yathi race through methods Lionel has yet to fully detail. Lionel, by the way, is not answering the phone.”
“I can contact him,” Walken said. “They are waiting to hear from me.”
“All right, great.” Bobbi nodded. “I figure they are, considering. So in the meantime, I guess we start studying up on operating in low gravity.”
Janelle looked bleak at this point. Walken watched her quietly from the corner of his eye, waiting to see if she would cut the connection. She seemed more upset with him than Bobbi, much to his relief. He could accept her hatred. At Bobbi’s last words, however, she turned her attention fully upon her leader.” You want to go into space?”
“I want us to go into space,” Bobbi said. “I want to build a unit and put them through low-gravity combat drills. If the Yathi won’t go into space, I wanna go up there and see what Lionel is doing firsthand. If we’re going to be allies, I want to know exactly what he’s up to. Like Walken told us, he’s already expecting me to come up there, so we might as well get prepped for it.”
Janelle frowned. It looked like disapproval, but Walken saw through that to the layer of satisfaction that formed beneath it. They may be an angry lot, but Bobbi seemed to know how to talk to her people. “All right, but I want in on it.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Bobbi nodded. “Trent, can you coordinate the training?”
“I have some people who are rated for it already.” He nodded. “I’ll see to it that they start educating those whom we select.”
“You and Janelle pick the team,” she said. “I have no idea if mine will go.”
“I will,” Violet said fiercely, though panic flashed in her eyes.
Walken found himself respecting Bobbi’s apparent lieutenant.
Bobbi flicked a look at Violet and smiled. “Well, there’s one. So that’s good. In the meantime, Tom? You come with me. We’re putting you through the scanner, see what’s going on with you. Lionel might be doing weird shit up at Treehaus, but we’ve got people who really understand your technology.”
Walken nodded. That detached concern filled him once more. “All right.” He drew an example from Violet’s fierceness. “Lead on.”
“We’ll talk soon,” said Janelle, and her image vanished along with Mulcahey’s, leaving Walken with the staring mass of Bobbi’s Reclaimed, her lieutenants, and the woman herself, all turning their combined attention upon him. He shrank a little.
“All right,” Bobbi said with a faint smile. “Guess it’s time to get you on the table.”
“I always hated doctors,” Walken said.
“Yeah,” she replied with sympathy. “I hear you. But who knows? Maybe we’ll be able to tell you something good.”
He smiled back at her, alas a false gesture. He felt only concern, and a distinct awareness that the likelihood of anything good coming from an examination was exactly zero.
“Jesus fucking Christ.”
All in all, not the most auspicious thing to hear while one is on the diagnostic table. Walken lay there, as he had for the last eight hours, while a whole host of pale-skinned technicians swarmed over him. He stared up at them, outwardly calm but filled with a storm of concerns. The Reclaimed, as Bobbi called them, and she said they were safe, but they were also all crazy in some form or fashion. Walken braced himself for one to snap and try and take revenge against him, to decide him Yathi after all, but none of that happened. Instead, they did their work quietly and without a single demonstration of even the slightest emotion. Like bees, really, if bees were filled with all manner of retractable prosthesis.
The biomedical theater occupied a bowl-shaped cavern cut in the island strata, plated with white tile and filled with devices no human hospital would possess. Many of the devices that they employed had been either removed from Yathi laboratories or hybrids fused with more traditional equipment—head and shoulders above anything Walken had seen at either Jacinto’s or Lionel’s clinic, but he had seen much of the same equipment in the cavernous laboratories in which he had been rebuilt.
At the sound of Bobbi’s voice, the technicians paused in their work and drew back as Walken lifted his head. “Is something the matter?”
Bobbi strode into the room with Violet and another of the Reclaimed at her side, a giant, muscle-boosted brute of a woman with her silver hair in a buzz-cut. The three of them strode right up to the table and Bobbi looked down at him with a combination of aggravation and what appeared to be almost awe. “You. What the fuck have they done to you?”
“Ah.” Walken relaxed a bit, and laid back down. “All manner of things, I imagine, but Lionel’s people were only able to dig up so much.” He looked at Bobbi. “Why, have you been able to make further discoveries?”
The small woman frowned at him. Her new body made her look frail at a distance, but up close he couldn’t deny the power inside of her. Bobbi was all steel, through and through. “A number of them. Your friend who got killed, he was definitely right about you not being able to use your capabilities to their greatest extent. Jesus Christ.” She radiated that same awed concern. “Tom, I’m letting my people finish up here first, but you’re…well, you’re unique. There’s more engineering gone into you than anything we’ve ever seen.”
The big woman squinted at him. “He is a great fighter, Ascended Mother.” Walken was more than a little surprised to hear she used the Yathi tongue. “I have examined the readouts. No fighting-corpse-machine could
stand against him, even the specialized units. Nor could a number of citizens of a lower social level.”
“Hepzibah can’t speak anything but the Yathi language,” Bobbi said, perhaps anticipating his surprise. “But she’s the best close-in fighter that we’ve got. Hep, think you could take him?”
Hepzibah shook her head. “He would kill me in moments.”
That gave Bobbi a start. “Are you sure?” She looked between the two of them several times, the concern on her face deepening greatly.
“Absolutely. My capability is perhaps half of his. Ascended Mother, this man’s body is easily on par with those of the Authority.”
Bobbi looked between the two of them, frowning deeply. Walken had no idea what this Hepzibah’s qualifications were in terms of combat technology, but she certainly looked like no stranger to a fight.
Bobbi eventually settled her gaze on him and drew a deep breath. “So I guess the big question here, Tom, is who’s inside your head?”
Walken gave her a rueful smile. “I’ve been asking myself that for quite some time. The fact is, though, that I have no idea.”
Bobbi nodded. “I know that. But I think what I’d like to do, if you’re all right with it, is sit down with you and try and probe what memories have been electronically stored. We don’t have the technology to read protein chains, so as I said before there’s nothing we can read before your reconstruction. But if you’d let us make a copy of your memory—”
Walken sat up a bit. “Is that something that you can do?”
She nodded again. “Well, yes. At least, those who have electronic memories. Our people are priceless, but the knowledge they possess is absolutely unique. They only retain fragments upon returning to their humanity, such as it is.”
“So you record it for later use,” Walken said. “I can see what you mean. I don’t know how useful my memories will be, but you’re welcome to them.”
Bobbi chuckled. “At the very least, the memories you have of the Mother of Systems alone will be of great interest. We’ve been trying to develop a psychological profile of her, if you can call it that, for years. I can get Sumire on it, see what she can come up with. She’s good at that sort of thing. Plus you’ve seen faces, like that bodyguard of hers. I bet he’s a nasty piece of work.”
“Yes, that’s the impression that I’ve gotten.” Walken frowned. “So I take it none of your Reclaimed have been able to retain knowledge of the Mother and her circle?”
“It is unfortunate, but we most often retain either historical or technical information. Memories with strong emotional attachments are lost with the trauma of resurfacing.” Hepzibah looked at her feet the entire time she spoke to him, like a shy young girl. “Considering the psychological damage that these memories tend to cause, it is perhaps a blessing in the long run.”
Walken’s brows arched. “I don’t doubt it.” He found himself very pleased indeed that he did not suffer from the same brain-destroying effects the big woman must have. On the other hand, as shy as she seemed, she certainly didn’t come off as crazy. “I’m confused. It’s said that the Reclaimed are insane, or at the very least very badly damaged psychologically speaking. Yet everyone I’ve seen up to now are rather well put together.”
Bobbi’s expression grew a bit dimmer. “Well, you’d think so, yes. And it’s true, the folks that work here are pretty good. Not putting them through endless contact with the Yathi and treating them like people over tools has done a lot toward helping them out.”
“The Ascended Mother heals us with her kindness,” Hepzibah added. “We are individuals with purpose under her command. The madness is there, but we are able to put it aside.”
“For the most part,” Bobbi said. “We had to put a lot of people down in the early days, Tom. You wouldn’t believe how many ferals weren’t just crazy people, but Yathi that had gone sour and escaped into the wild. The Yathi have such control over news and other communications services that they were able to make the feral problem something that nobody would want to fuck with.”
Walken should not have been surprised at hearing that sort of thing at this point, but the scale still managed to tug at him from time to time. “Well, at least you’re able to help these people in the meantime. When would you want to access my memory?”
Bobbi pursed her lips. “How about now?”
He knew she’d say that. “Now’s good.” He lay back down. The machines around him resembled the bones of ancient monsters, black steel gleaming in all directions. For the greater good. “All right. Will I be conscious for this?”
“I’m afraid not,” Bobbi said.
“Well, that’s something.” Walken closed his eyes. “I suppose we should get on with it.”
He did not open his eyes, nor did he speak again. He slipped into the deep well of sleep, though whether it was by his design or that of the technology Bobbi possessed he would never be able to say for certain. For what felt like ages, he could only sense warmth, and darkness, the faint smell of blood. Then his life—such as it had become since his resurrection—ran fast-forward in a series of movie frames, too fast for him to track, a smear of color and garbled sounds leading away into night. Before finally succumbing to darkness, he hoped that the celluloid blur in his head would be of better use to Bobbi than it had ever been to him.
n six years, Walken spent most of his time awake talking to Mother. When he wasn’t trying to escape, that is.
Bobbi only needed a cursory examination to know that he had never been bullshitting her; electronic memory could be indexed thanks to the way Yathi software worked. Every thought had a data tag, everything indexable and visible in seconds. What required massive SQUIDs and a small reactor to do in everyday people, Bobbi could do by running the equivalent of a database search on him. Which was pretty much the point, she supposed. It wouldn’t do to make things like recollection sacred among the Yathi or their pawns, would it?
She plowed through the last six years in fits and spurts, aided by the time acceleration that digital communication and her cognitive hardware provided. Huge gaps of unconsciousness took up most of his memory, easily skipped through. She found it interesting to see that the Mother of Systems had decided to allow him to be actively informed of events outside of the laboratory until his first escape attempt, and then after that kept him stuck in the dark. Not that it did anything to stall him. For all of his faults – and he still had many of them, especially in the way he judged others – Walken definitely had no love for the enemy. The first time she saw the Mother of Systems in the memory scan, her skin crawled as though watching a live broadcast of Satan. Bobbi had only the one moment of contact with the alien matriarch, in the Network when she buzzed the computer nexus of the drone factory Redeye had invaded. She remembered with a shiver the enormous, howling black sun the Mother’s network presence had manifested as, how it threatened to blast her mind apart just being in its presence. As the memories spooled out, however, she began to see the woman as this bizarrely maternal creature, which ramped up cognitive dissonance to a degree where she felt rather uncomfortable. Their conversations always had the same quality, that of a fencing match, with the Mother of Systems trying to get Walken to abandon his humanity and Walken telling her to fuck right off.
Then he would escape.
The first time they got him in the river, she could see why. He obviously had no idea as to the sensor ranges of Yathi machines, or the hidden buoys she could easily pinpoint in the sonar display that overlaid his vision. The second time, however, a monster got him. She felt a swell of pride—pride, and pity—watching him fight the mass of war machines that tried to pull him back to the underworks of Berne. In the end, she found nothing that would answer the questions she already had. Nothing here for her but many more questions, which she had to address with Walken directly.
When she cut the link with his head, she felt ravenous. She downed three printed burgers from the galley and a liter of electrolyte solution before finally going back do
wn into the lab to face him. He lay on the table quietly, still fussed over by the techs. Scipio, Martin, Alaina and Tetsuo swarmed over him with internal probes, which she found incredibly useful and creepy as hell. When she entered the room, however, the techs melted back as though she were made of fire.
“I’m awake,” Walken said from his perch. The smile on his face as convincing as a cheap hologram. “And in need of a massage, apparently. You have such good service here.”
Bobbi smirked as she approached. She had to admit, she did like him better this way. She wondered what that said about her. “Well, we try.” She looked him over as he lay naked on the diagnostic slab. “But, uh…you know you don’t have tackle, right?”
Walken looked down at himself, at the smooth curve of his pelvis. “I do appear to have been turned into a doll. Funny, I don’t miss it at all.”
She grimaced.” I sure as hell would.”
“I suspect they anticipated that I’d be happy just being alive,” he said. “Or perhaps that would come later. Optional parts, that sort of thing.”
Bobbi had a flash of memory. Diana, before she revealed herself as an unaugmented agent, joking about how Scalli’s dick came out of a sheath. “Yeah, well… We figure out how to slap one on and you want it, you let me know.”
He gave her another of his after-market smiles. “You know, Bobbi, I think I’m okay for now. As I recall, I got led around into danger quite a bit by that old fellow.”
Bobbi hadn’t expected that, nor had she expected to laugh. “I suppose you did, Tom.” She shook her head. “I suppose you did indeed. But that’s no different than anyone else.”
“I doubt you came looking for me out of romantic desire,” he said.
A few years earlier, she might have flushed. She shrugged. “No. I guess I didn’t. But I did look.”
Walken let out a sigh. He’d been getting practice, and it sounded almost real. “I wish that you hadn’t. I’d have liked to leave you in ignorance of all this. But it appears that you’ve managed very well with the truth.” He leaned up on his elbow. “Really, all this…it’s incredible, Bobbi. I’m sorry that I ever thought of you as anything but the person you are.”
Gathering Ashes (The Wonderland Cycle Book 3) Page 44
