Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Walken moved past the pods and the dead woman to check the other two slumped over the dash. Like the other medic, these two had also been shredded with gunfire; the driver's face was a void of bloody hamburger hanging off in strips from ruined bone. The other medic, a tech, was still tethered to the bus's systems by an interface cable leading from the back of his ventilated skull. More blood across the ruined windows.

  A Romeo. Walken drew a deep breath and collected himself before he turned to address Davis, who was still lingering at the door. "I'm invoking a Code Romeo," he informed him. "I'll need all the surveillance data you have in this area — patrol cameras, whatever street cameras still function in this area. Drone footage. Whatever. Cook me a relevant précis. Any witnesses in the area?"

  A Romeo was an emergency code that was applied to situations where Wonderland tech was missing — or, in this case, absconded with and on the move. Invoking it meant a press blackout and a demand of full cooperation from civil — that was, corporate — employees. It meant that Davis would be looking at a near-endless line of overtime hours for which he as a salaried employee would not be getting paid, something that seemed to dawn on him now as he gave Walken a deep frown. "Not a one," he replied, his own tone very grave. "This part of the Verge went empty after the water grid was shut down. I'll see what I can do about the footage."

  He moved to go, but Walken stopped him. "Get the quarantine box out," he instructed Davis, lips pursed.

  "Beg pardon?" Davis's expression had already soured in the face of work already requested.

  "The quarantine data recorder." Walken jerked a thumb at one of the corners at the end of the bus bracketing the back doors where a small button lens had avoided destruction; federal regulations required that all medical transports be outfitted to record events transpiring inside when quarantine protocols were engaged. "Might get an idea of where they were going." He looked at the empty pods, the third where the doll still lay. He frowned again.

  "Most likely shot to hell along with the rest of the thing," Davis said.

  "Most likely," Walken agreed, voice stern. "But get the module out and see what you can get, Detective. Or do I have to get one of my own people down here to do it and spare some taxpayers' dollars?"

  Davis gave him a black look; detectives were shareholders as much as employees, after all. He ducked out with a curse on his breath, leaving Walken alone with death and punctured steel.

  The scene had yielded little more than bodies and paperwork. The shooters had used surplus military ammunition, caseless rounds that fragmented so badly on impact that the forensic team was having difficulty picking anything but splinters out of the bus and the building beyond it. The coroner had come and taken the bodies back under heavy guard to Bureau headquarters, where hopefully a few rounds could be pulled intact.

  The Bureau were looking for the serials to trace back to their supplier. Romeos weren't like your standard police action; the Bureau didn't stop until it sought out and collared everyone involved, from the thieves to the triggermen to the dealers who pushed them ammunition. It was a poisoned tree to the roots, now and everyone was due for the choke.

  CivPro found where Park's crew had been lurking in the alley opposite the intersection, six sets of feet and a van. Drag marks where they'd had some trouble with the girls. Had there been witnesses the whole thing would have gone much faster, but any squatters or residents that might have been about had long fled with the appearance of armed men and massed firewpower. Without them, Walken only had the hope of video evidence and he sat in his car going through Davis's précis waiting on word concerning the quarantine box.

  The précis was exactly what Walken had expected — a stream of police harassment and sordid social minutiae. He watched it on fast-forward. Car theft. Fights on the sidewalk. A bodega robbed right in front of an uninterested street cop. People being hassled on the civilized end of the Verge by beat officers, laughing thugs with badges learning well to walk upon the backs of others. Everything in 10x speed.

  It was completely useless. Forty minutes ran by as he cycled through the only recording in the area, that of the nose cam of a distant CivPro enforcement drone angling over overgrown ruins of Hilltop Park. Nothing.

  Walken heaved a deep sigh and began to rub at his bloodshot eyeballs. Sloppy as they might have been hitting the bus and taking the dolls, Park and his crew were fantastic at the vanishing act.

  Presently there was a knock at the window. He looked up; Davis stood outside, draped in a plastic slicker. The rain had started again and he looked like a sort of frowning storm god with his eyes shadowed by its dripping hood.

  Walken rolled down the window. "Detective," he said. "What's going on?"

  "Got your data." Davis held out a data chip; the thin plastic wafer beaded with drops of rain, the solid-state elements suspended within glittered like nerves. "The box was shot up pretty badly, but we managed to get something. You'll want to see it."

  "All right." Walken took the chip, wiped it dry on the lapel of his coat. "Thanks, Detective."

  Davis lingered a moment, as if he had something that he wanted to say. Instead he turned away and trudged off toward the scene again where white-suited evidence techs swarmed him.

  Walken turned away, rolled up the window and slotted the chip into the car's console. The display flared to life.

  He sat in silence as five minutes of fragmented video, pieced together somewhat jaggedly by forensic software, displayed the last minutes of the lives of the medics and the Princess Doll. Duty; the medic in the back, tending to the Dolls in their capsules, drowning panic in routine as the bus drove itself. Horror; the van rocking suddenly as its interior was filled with automatic fire. He watched as the medic shuddered in the spasmodic dance of the gunshot victim, falling against the far wall of the van as she was shredded by fire. He watched as her head burst and splattered against the cool white of the van's plastic liner, jump cuts of her sliding down the wall and then crumpled suddenly on the floor. The driver and the tech were next, furiously trying to find a way to free themselves from the inevitable, only to shudder as if electrocuted as the windshield exploded in front of them and they too were riddled.

  Walken watched as their murderers, young men in singlesuits and exotic hairstyles carrying bullpup-style automatic rifles, opened up the back. A thin young man in dull red and wearing heavy black orbital boots winced as he stepped past the dead medic. He froze as he saw the ruptured capsule, streaming white from its new vents. Confusion amongst the killers, silent working of mouths. Panic in their eyes. Good. Walken smiled despite himself as he watched the boy in red turn, pale-faced, to crouch down and plug his skull into each capsule, managing an expression that was vaguely zen as he brainrode the locks. It did not take long at all for them to open. He stepped out of the bus onto the street and leaned heavily against one open door as his fellows hurried the surviving Dolls outside and into the night. The thin boy stared at the last capsule, silent terror held in his eyes as the recording paused itself at the end of its run.

  Walken stared at that image. He took in the face, the crop of black hair shocked with streaks of cyan. The dark eyes wide, unbelieving, empty of understanding. They had no idea about the third Doll, or was it that they did not expect the capsule to be in its upper bracket? Either way the recording did not give him much to go on. What was it that Davis had seen?

  He watched it again and then a third time. Only when he played it backwards, bidden by the voice in the back of his head to stare at every frame — as Davis no doubt had done — did he catch it himself. A smile of triumph sprang to his lips.

  "Got you, you fuckers," he murmured. He reached to call up the car's phone interface with the burning swell of victory daring the shores of his heart. They were all his.

  A half hour after Davis handed over the quarantine film, Walken was on his way toward the barrens of the Old City. It was with a flare of victory that Walken had noticed that one of the Dolls being unearthed from the cap
sules was wearing a monitor module around her thin wrist. The little black bracelet monitored vital signs and broadcast them to the ambulance computers; in case of an emergency, however, it could also serve as a locator device. It was pretty standard equipment — but the Koreans, panicked as they were, had forgotten to check. It was that error, that most glorious of fuckups, which now sent him into the border reaches of the Old City.

  The Old City was made up of the suburban reaches, or what they had been before the city had imploded upon itself. What it had been before urban rebuilding had turned it into a cancer metastasizing into the Sound. It was the place of the gangs and the forlorn masses, the mad and the terminally impoverished. Tonight, however, the heat was on patrol and the ferals and gangers had scattered to the four winds in the wake of their baleful lights.

  He drove at the tail end of a column of CivPro heat, plowing through the streets of the Verge as if being drawn by a vast team of angry horses. He should have been happy — they were plowing after the bad guys, soon to collect the lost Dolls and his Romeo would be solved in record time. A gold star for him. Hell, gold stars for everyone.

  And yet Walken felt nothing but dread as the car drove him toward the wildlands. For one, he ended up at the back of the column thanks to some suspicious maneuvering from the cars around his own. Secondly, he had heard that a unit of CivPro's armored response team had joined the group at the column's head, the paramilitary special tactics unit that was dispatched only on the most expensive of occasions. It had been Davis's idea, called in without his knowledge.

  Park and his people had tagged corporate people. The medics had been CivPro employees too, after all and though Davis had acted as if he hadn't cared at the scene, the inclusion of paramilitary units for a handful of armed men was distinctly overkill. He wanted suspects to interrogate without the corporate heat killing everyone in a fit of vengeance.

  He tried to talk to Wolsey about it. The burly senior agent had simply dismissed him, stating that the additional backup was justified — the team that hit the ambulance might have been only six men, but there could be a larger knot waiting with much heavier artillery. The Bureau would take up the cost in order to ensure that the mess could be cleaned up — and in the Old City, automatic fire and the occasional explosion were hardly unexpected.

  He should not have been surprised by Wolsey's answer. These Koreans, whomever they were, were trafficking Wonderland goods and that made them a particular threat to the social good in the big black book of American policy. In this gilded land of hypocrisy that was America, the preeminent way to dispose of social threats beyond simple containment was to crush them like a roach under a boot.

  Walken expected a lot of messy boot heels by evening's end.

  It took him half an hour to reach the scene, a gutted office building in Renton just beyond the northernmost border of the Old City. When he had arrived the the majority of the column had already formed a cordon and were setting up for the siege. CivPro patrol cars, like gleaming arrows with strip lights flashing red and blue, jockeyed for position with the graphite-colored slabs of police tactical carriers. Uniforms were everywhere.

  "Jesus," Walken muttered savagely to himself as he steered the car slowly through the cordon, "leave it to the cops to start a blood circus." This was the exact opposite of what he had wanted and he sure as hell wished there was someone other than the ST heat to give backup.

  Davis was there amid the constabulary, his face bland as he watched his men standing ready before the hulk of a long-abandoned office building. The thing was an ancient edifice, over a hundred years old. It yawned like a great skull, windows long gone and its upper floors lost to the night. Pallid concrete had been stained with polluted rain until it was streaked like black-veined marble. He stared at its façade, caked with a veritable historical exhibit of graffiti, as if perhaps he expected the building to get up and move.

  Walken crossed the scene toward him. The ground floor was lit from within with the dim blue haloes of electric lanterns hanging around the empty windows. The Koreans were in there, camping out under what had to be a mounting tide of desperation. He flashed his badge to banish the officers who rose to intercept him and had almost made it to Davis's side before the detective — not yet having looked at him — deigned to speak.

  "Well you got here in time to see the show, at least," said Davis, turning around to nod toward the building. Walken's eyes followed in time to see the gray figures of the ST troops piling into one of the waiting carriers. Encounter suits, combat armor, battle rifles, the whole kit. Those boys were loaded for war. As he looked back he saw Davis consulting a massive watch that hung off his spindly wrist.

  "What the hell does that mean?" Walken blinked at Davis' watch. The Rolex projected its display into the air, a miniature battery of neon green digits and calendar data tilting toward the detective's eyes. It was an expensive model plated with blue-white Lunar silver and the phantom numbers projected from it were ticking back in a countdown.

  It took a moment before he understood what was happening, but when realization came its weight pulled his lips into a grim frown. They were going in. "You silly bastard," he rumbled, flicking a glance back at the carrier as the last man sealed the hatch behind him, "This is Bureau business. If any of your men damage the materials in that building..."

  The sound of the carrier's engine revving cut him off. Deep inside the machine's belly a pair of ceramic turbines were starting to spin, flooding power into the wheel motors. A large red flasher began to work at the front of its roof and suddenly the machine was a lighthouse, declaring hostility and intent, rumbling forward into an alley running down the side of the building. Walken's tongue was leaden as he turned on the man, eyes narrowed. A hot plume of fury bloomed inside of him. This was bad, bad news.

  "You were supposed to wait," he hissed at Davis, fists tightening at his sides. "What the hell do you think you're doing, Detective? Call those men off! I am in command here."

  Davis simply shrugged. He didn't look at Walken, instead consulted his watch again. "I'm sorry, Agent," he replied, voice dry, "There'll be radio silence until they breach — automated protocols, you know. Company policy. I can't do anything about it." His smile was almost predatory.

  "Bullshit," Walken hissed. He wanted to reach up and wring the bastard's scrawny neck. The asshole thought he was topping a Fed at his own game. Enjoying it. City cop, corporate cop, it made no difference. Everybody wanted to outdo the Fed.

  But Walken's venom did nothing to blunt that smile. Davis merely shrugged and jerked a thumb toward the building. "Save it, Agent," he replied lazily. The carrier disappeared down the alley, but the bright spot of its light could be seen careening rhythmically off the alley's decrepit walls. "I'm not trying to get your collar. There's something going on in there. I felt it better to go ahead and err on the side of caution."

  "Like?" The carrier had stopped. Only the soft hum of its turbines could be heard, reflecting off the concrete.

  "Like the fact we haven't been getting shot at. There hasn't been any activity that we could perceive since we got here, so I surmised that either the hostages were already dead or the suspects were preparing their defenses. For all I knew, we might all be dead in flames by the time you got here... Agent." He smirked again, then fell silent. The aura of bored smugness gave way to something more intent. His fingers rose to the headset, holding it close to his ear.

  Walken gave him perhaps fifteen seconds before he spoke again. "Well?" he demanded. "What the hell’s going on?"

  "Listen for yourself," Davis told him. He reached into his pocket and produced from it a much smaller receiver, a little hemisphere of silver with an auto-molding earpiece and a blunt, rounded antenna. Walken snatched it from his hand and jammed it into his ear.

  Chatter spewed from the earpiece. "Delta seven-two-seven," one of the troopers was saying, in a modulated masculine voice. "Breaching charges are set, fifteen seconds on the timer. Requesting clearance for go."
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  "Proceed," Walken heard Davis say.

  Walken flashed a black look toward the cop. The anxiety of the moment was swallowed by his anger. "'Automated procedures', motherfucker?" he hissed but his words were lost, for a thunderhead had exploded within the narrow confines of the alley and every eye was forced upon the scene.

  A bright flash rose and died in milliseconds, then came the noise; the sound of explosives and splintering concrete tangled into a terrible roar, echoing off the alley walls, filling up the street out front. And yet, as fearsome as that sound was, it was as brief as the flash and left little else in its wake. There were no plumes of dust, no flying papers. There was only the fading thunder ebbing from his ears and Walken blinked in surprise as it was swiftly replaced with a forbidding silence.

  "Unit Delta seven-two-seven is in," barked the voice on the comm, snapping Walken back into focus. "Sweeping the perimeter."

  "Is there any resistance?" Davis's interest had finally been peaked.

  Static spat in his ears, eating the first words of the trooper's reply. "...here. I have seven hostiles down, no civilians sighted. I repeat, no sign of any civilians, just a whole lot of dead men." The sound of boots crunching rubbled concrete filled the space between words. "Looks like someone got here before us. It's a real mess, Command. Instructions?"

  Walken had pulled out the earbud and had barely pushed it back into Davis's hands before he was charging for the alley mouth. "Jesus fucking Christ," he was growling to himself, the weight of the Nambu already dangling in his grip. "I knew it. I goddamned well knew it."

  The alleyway was nearly filled by the bulk of the carrier sitting there low on its wheels like a rhino. Smoke rolled acrid and stinging from a hole blasted in the tenement wall by its armored side and the hatch still hung open. Crash seats and empty weapons racks could be seen in its dimly-lit interior as he passed by. Walken pushed himself along between the building and the carrier, badge in one hand and gun in the other.