Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  During his tenure with the Bureau Walken had seen some of the worst shit he'd ever thought possible. Working the Wonderland beat was like falling into a well to nowhere. You tried very hard not to think about it. It was the same with the cops, he knew, people who saw terrible things all the time on street level. You got up, got back on the horse and moved along to the next abomination while savoring the peaceful hours in between.

  But corporate cops didn't have to deal with the special kind of terrible that Walken and his kind were treated to. The perversities that they witnessed were of a kind he had come to hold as distinctly pedestrian. His lot, by contrast, was to serve as a witness to sins that would kill faith in many human creatures. His own had long been worn at. He often felt it nearly giving way.

  Tonight's episode had proven to be especially corrosive. While with the Bureau, Walken had seen plenty of sex crimes committed in the course of the so-called 'Wonderland beat.' Some had applied to children. On occasion some of those children had been killed, sometimes very messily. And yet these had been affairs to be glimpsed and moved on from as CivPro took over, sordid matters for the sordid hands of corporate police. It was something to be acknowledged but never visited.

  The Dolls were different. They weren't just victims of the Wonderland trade — they were the Wonderland trade. He had watched as they were unloaded from their coffins and placed in isolation capsules, watched as they were carried into the back of a waiting ambulance where they'd be taken back to the Bureau office for analysis.

  Walken knew what they'd get after that. They'd each get fifty cc's of neurotoxin when the Meds were done with them and they would sweat out the last bit of their sad, pointless lives as anonymous victims. It wasn't mercy to the Bureau as much as it was policy, the disposal of contraband. It was the same policy for firearms disposed in an impound smelter. The parents they had left behind — if they had ever known them at all — would never have known what happened to their daughters. Walken thought that if there was anything merciful at all involved in this whole terrible business, it would be that.

  In the meantime Wolsey had sent him to see a man named Anton Stadil. Stadil, an Albanian, had been a big wheel in the industrial game out that way around the time of the European War. Whatever had happened to his industries during the war wasn't clear, but he had disappeared for the duration of the conflict only to surface again as an entrepreneur in the States. His current claim to fame was a particularly lucrative club on the waterfront, tailored toward the rich-and-pervy set, called the Ballroom.

  The Ballroom was a rich front, but the Bureau had long believed that his real business was in illegal goods. Civil Protection had never been able to make anything stick to him and the fact that he wasn't known to deal in Wonderland tech made him pretty difficult for the Bureau to pin down as a priority. Some people called him the 'Lucky Angel' after his ability able to keep himself out of the prison pit on wings made of expert attorneys and lots of cash.

  Stadil was a beast who knew a lot of things and the Bureau wanted to harness him. The best they had been able to manage was to pick up certain obscure yet valuable pieces of information from him at a premium rate. Though he didn't deal in the stuff himself, Stadil often had connections that intersected with Wonderland interests; given that the Bureau's informant on the Dolls had been tossed under a Phuket City transit bus mere hours after giving them up, finding the Dolls' source meant a great deal of work cultivating new sources.

  Given the amount of work that would involve, the Bureau decided to take the express route. Stadil would have to do.

  Wolsey reasoned that if Stadil had any knowledge of

  the Dolls he would pass it off for easy cash. If he were somehow involved, Walken should still be able to tell. Either way, Wolsey and the Bureau would get what they wanted from the situation. Everyone's happy, Walken mused grimly as he muscled through traffic down the coastal highway. He watched the streetlights swing by throwing chalky haloes over the passing traffic, phantoms haunting the same of highway. Everyone's happy but those girls in the meat bus. Everyone's happy but me.

  The Ballroom was on the other side of the Field, what people called the largest concentration of warehouses in the area. It was a vast floating construction tethered to the shore south of Alki Point, a vast expanse of cargo barns and warehouse structures stretching out into the Sound to the south of the Puget Trans-Sound Bridge. Part nightclub, part sex club, the Ballroom was a Bacchic temple that catered to everyone who could afford it.

  It had once been a corporate warehouse, one of the big, hardened concrete vaults used for bulk merchandise, but Stadil had bought it years ago and had spent a lot of money to have it redone into a shape more fitting his needs. Walken had never seen the place, but he had heard it was impressive. As he navigated the maze of warehouses he was not disappointed.

  He caught glimpses of it as he approached, viewed through the spaces between buildings. It was a bizarre half-molten thing, a concrete ziggurat sloping upward from the ground like wax left a little too long in the sun. It was as if the whole thing had risen, failed and then sort of coagulated in spite of gravity. The sight of the structure, impressive and out of place as it was, made Walken inexplicably uncomfortable.

  The car threaded its way through the Field and eventually into the Ballroom's shadow. Walken parked it in an alley behind a line of warehouses facing one side. Night was falling; the lot on the Sound side of the pier was already full of limousines and sleek sedans, the angular wedges of sports cars, indicating that business was already well on its way. I guess there really is no rest for the wicked, Walken thought as he sat watching people clad in the dubious skins of this year's fashions queue into its waiting doorway.

  He sat in the car for a while and stripped his pistol in the back seat, waiting for the time to be right. It was a graceful thing, the Nambu, with a sculpted grip and a long muzzle. The whole gun was made from ceramic and polycarbon for lightweight carry. It felt like a toy in his hand as he took it apart, cleaned it and put it back together again in an act of seamless meditation.

  An hour later, just as evening had cured into night, the time came. Walken finished re-assembling the Nambu one last time and tucked it into his coat, swinging easily out from under the car's gullwing door. The club pulsed with light as he stood before it. Every step of the ziggurat was illuminated with bright blue xenon bulbs hidden in their recesses, making the Ballroom glow like something out of myth on the edge of the water. As Walken started off toward the place he tried to imagine what it must look like from farther down the Sound. Babylon came to mind.

  Bouncers of all stripes gave cops attitude. It's something in their DNA, Walken figured as he waited patiently to get the attention of the monstrous fellows hovering outside the Ballroom's doors. He watched them with amusement as he stood there, badge clearly displayed in one hand, waiting for one of them to pretend that they had only just noticed. Every one of them looked like upright bulldogs with a severe myostatin disorder; slabs of lab-cultured muscle had been slid under their skins and stapled onto the original beef. You didn't need steroids when you got in and out of a surgical boutique in a few days. None of that was cheap, of course. They were show ponies as much as they were functional security and demonstrated the amount of money that Stadil was willing to put into his men.

  Eventually one of the beef jockeys copped to the show. He stood there for a moment, peering at Walken in his gray suit and long coat, frowning. They always frown at cops, Walken thought. It must make them feel badass. He was coming over to quiz him - name, purpose, the validity of the badge. Walken was used to this.

  He put up a bland mask as the bouncer – whom he had decided to name Beefy – gave him the expected static; it didn't take long for Beefy to tap his neck, have a brief conversation with someone through what must be an implanted microphone and, after informing Walken that Stadil would send for him soon, jerked his head back toward the doors. A cluster of girls in black plastic harnesses were being herded in li
ke giggling cattle. He flashed his best and brightest at the boys by the door before ducking inside.

  Entering the Ballroom was like entering a cathedral. Its interior was cavernous, giving credence to its initial existence as a warehouse. It took up the two lower 'steps' of the three-level ziggurat, covered with neon sculptures and holographic panels depicting sexual acts of every possible configuration. These images drifted on the walls, as if the place was Angkor Wat and they were apsaras writhing and twisting away in their ecstasy. The black marble floor was dotted with piles of cushions in lieu of tables.

  A heady mix of tribal rhythm and sharp electronic fugues pulsed from hidden speakers. It reached in and pulled some of the steel from Walken's spine; even he, with his brain dialed entirely over to police instinct, couldn't entirely deny its relaxing power. The music served as the undercurrent upon which everything floated.

  As he crossed the floor he saw a girl laid out among one of the piles of cushions, surrounded by a group of people lounging like lions in the grass. She was stripped to the waist and on her stomach and Walken saw that each of those around her had a needle as long as his forearm. They were sinking the spines into her back, causing her to writhe as if she were in panting agony.

  As he drew nearer, however, he could see nerve ports shining like silver lesions on her skin — the needles were probes, stimulating her nervous system directly. What he mistook to be pain was now clearly a far more desirable agony. As he passed he watched as she arched her back with slow deliberation, attempting to impale herself further beneath the lurid smiles of her fellows, opening her mouth in silent supplication to whatever gods of pleasure that rode her like a Voudoun cheval.

  Walken looked away. He was suddenly and crushingly aware of similar scenes unfolding around him. A knot of arousal and inexplicable discomfort bound itself in his guts and he found himself focusing hard on the music as he pushed toward the bar that lined the far corner. He let it fill him up, drive his steps, each footfall landing with the thumping of the bass. His head bobbed as he bellied up to the bar and ordered a beer from a smiling, curvy girl who stood behind it.

  She wore a tight catsuit of matte red vinyl, unzipped to the top of her navel. The inner halves of her unclothed breasts made impressive cleavage above the dangling charm her zipper served to be. Her hair was like a cockatiel's, dyed bright neon pink and catching the light of all the neon over the bar it shone like a halo. She introduced herself as Bobbi and took the rumpled plastic bills he gave her with a wink. Twelve dollars for a beer, Walken thought. It's a club all right.

  "So you don't look like you're here for any reason I'd expect," she called to him, shouting cheerfully over the noise as she sat his bottle of Tsingtao down in front of him, pulled its cooler tab and popped its lid by hand.

  "What gave it away," he deadpanned, taking a deep swig of the beer. He liked her voice. It was light, feminine, yet crackled with energy. She had substance that pushed her away from the background.

  Bobbi smiled, exposing rows of small white teeth. "You don't look like you're here to enjoy yourself," she said. She leaned forward on her elbows to further perpetrate her charms on him. "And they're always here to enjoy themselves, one way or another."

  A wide bar of white paintstick was drawn across her eyes, catching the light and dampening their intense green which he felt was a shame. "Maybe I get off on looking gloomy."

  "That's a whole different scene." It was her turn to shrug. "But that's cool, you know? Everybody got their kick."

  A broad hand fell on his shoulder. "Time to go," said Beefy, his voice low and grim in Walken's ear. "Mr. Stadil will see you now."

  The show still lingered in the back of Walken's mind as he followed the bouncer through the door by the bar. He wondered what kind of alchemy had changed her senses to appreciate that pain.

  He had always been interested in it, the ability to transmute agony into pleasure — flickers of memory shone in his mind as he passed through the doorway and into the storeroom, himself as a kid in Baltimore, reading Japanese skin mags in the back of an abandoned store. Beautiful girls in webs of knotwork, some with nerve-probes jutting out of plugs in their spines. You could stimulate their pleasure centers directly by just grazing your fingers over the plugs, send them twisting away into orgasm. You could to the same thing without the probes, he knew, but it took practice and an intimacy that didn't really exist these days. Well, not without a lot of recreational drugs.

  Not that there was any shortage of those.

  He'd never done it, but he sure had thought a lot about it. The thought of Bobbi, how she might have looked there on that floor, surfaced briefly in his mind as Beefy conducted him into the elevator. It was a pleasant thought.

  They stood in silence, only the electric pine-tree scent of the big man's cologne hanging between them. The climb was soon over, but before the doors could open Beefy had punched the stop with a knuckle on the elevator's stainless steel panel.

  He turned to Walken, arms crossed over his breast and gave him a formidable look. "Your gun," he commanded.

  "I'm a federal investigator," Walken reminded him with a hint of irritation.

  Beefy grunted. "I don't give a damn. You want to see Mr. Stadil, you stow your blaster."

  This whole thing was swiftly getting old, but he agreed. 'Extend courtesy', Wolsey had told him. Stadil was a source that the Bureau wanted to cultivate, after all. He didn't want to be the one to fuck it up.

  Of course, if Stadil had truly been the one to have arranged for the Dolls to be smuggled over from Wonderland he'd want to see him swing, but it was Wolsey's call and Wolsey always had a plan. No doubt he was simply seeking to determine the measure of guilt; it wasn't the Bureau's job to snag the usual kind of smugglers, after all and some other bureau probably had connections to him anyway. He handed the Nambu over to Beefy; the palm-lock on his weapon beeped, ensuring that Beefy couldn't turn around and tag him with his own gun. He had a backup anyway, a little Matreiyu ultralight tucked into a hidden pocket in the crotch of his slacks. "All right," he finally said. "Here it is."

  Beefy took the gun without looking at it, tucking it into the waistband of his slacks and punched the stop again. The doors slid open.

  Beyond the elevator doors was another large room, though much smaller than the Ballroom floor had been. It was an office, crammed with antiques and vintage paraphernalia; Victorian furniture arrayed upon a prewar Klimt rug, the organic porcelain forms of a Twenties-era Braun tea service, signs from Old Europe, an Autobahn exit marker and a filthy factory placard covered in Cyrillic spray bomb.

  The room was framed with enormous video screens which, in lieu of windows, gave an excellent view all around. The Field spread out on one side, the city glowing beyond it and on the other the black expanse of the Sound. The view was so clear that Walken could nearly count the needles on the arcology domes that floated on the polluted water. The mixture of modern technology and antiques might have been elegant somewhere else, but in Stadil's realm it was an excessive mishmash, lacking theme - almost as if he had no clue why he was collecting in the first place.

  "That will be enough, William." A voice, rough and heavily Slavic, came from an open doorway in the far wall. A man followed it as Walken turned in that direction. This, he knew, must be Stadil.

  There was such a brutal look to Stadil, tall and broad-chested with blunt lines and heavy features, that he couldn't have mistaken him for anyone else. Yet, as he moved into the office and looked the two of them over, he carried with him an air of incongruous charm. Beefy nodded once and exited the room without a word, leaving the two of them alone.

  Stadil smiled, showing a mouthful of broad, perfectly white (and synthetic) teeth and Walken found himself possessed of the distinct sensation of being faced with a cheerful tiger. "You are... Agent Thomas Walken of the Industrial Security Bureau. Yes?"

  Walken merely nodded.

  "Badge number seven-seven-three-one-two-alpha. You are coming to see about thre
e items that were to be brought here from Great Siam this evening that have been inexplicably tied to me. You think that I have ordered them for a client."

  Walken nodded once. Stadil's naming his badge number was a show, something to say 'Ha ha, you fucker, I got you pegged.' He was used to such grandstanding in people like him. "That's the word," he replied.

  Stadil's heavy brows lifted just a hint before he nodded. "You are of course coming to see if they are here, yes? I can assure you that they are not. There are--"

  Walken wrinkled his nose. "Mister Stadil," he began, forcing his voice into what he felt was a very professional, very patient tone, "Let's be straight with one another, shall we? If you've enough information to pick my office and designation, sir, you know I'm not coming to search the premises."

  The reply seemed to please Stadil; he smiled that tiger's smile again and moved to take a seat behind a heavily scrolled, massive oak altar of a desk that took up much of the back end of the room. "I deal in industrial machinery," he said with a chuckle. "Milling parts, generators, this sort of thing; metal, computers maybe, but not flesh. And I do not handle orders from Great Siam, I think you know."

  "Industrial parts," Walken repeated. His hands slid behind his back, slowly but deliberately. He tried not to seem amused.

  "Exactly." Stadil leaned back in his padded leather chair and nodded. "And none come from the 'Wonderland.' But... that is not to say that I am not hearing about these... what do you call them?"

  "Princess Dolls."

  Another smile. "Yes, the 'Princess Dolls'." Stadil leaned back a bit more and produced from a drawer a large remote. He prodded at it a moment and the screens flickered off. "In my business, to satisfy a client order you are sometimes made to search out... alternative means of securing resources."

  Walken frowned and nodded. "All right," he said. "And this is where you heard about them?"