Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  And yet, Walken never could really seem to 'get' her. The world was in love with her, with her nearly poreless, milk-white skin and hair a shade shy of polished platinum. Walken always thought she looked — well, there was no other way to describe it — kind of spooky. There was just something about her, the too-perfect lines of her nose, the startling metallic silver of her eyes, which seemed warm and alive and absent of the cold grace of synthetics. She recalled something out of myth rather than a real person. She was a beautiful jigsaw of all the features prevalent in modern culture, which while possible with surgery always seemed to have some terrible truth of nature to it. Looking at her in that moment, smiling down with her painted lips and the white teeth behind them, he was reminded very strongly of Coleridge.

  Not that anybody read Coleridge anymore.

  He put some music on the sound system and stared at her ghoulish beauty for what seemed like hours before sleep took him. He didn't dream; instead, he found the deep oblivion that only exhaustion sets men's minds into.

  He woke later to find that only a few hours had passed. The dawn was coming now, but the vigil of sleep still insisted. Only the chiming of an incoming call, bright and insistent, had roused him to waking and, opening his eyes, he found’ the paling sky still leaking drizzle around him. "One of these days," he muttered, reaching to touch the word 'ACCEPT' that had been conjured in throbbing green upon the console's display, "I am going to build a goddamned Ark."

  "Good morning, shining sun!" The voice emanating from around him was Kelley's.

  Walken groaned inwardly. His back hurt, he hadn't showered and the last thing he'd wanted was to hear that voice in his ear being so damned pleasant despite all that had happened the night before. That was Kelley, all right; cheerful through Armageddon, laughing as the flames rained down. "All right, all right," he muttered and sitting up in his seat blinked bleary eyes at the video image of his fellow agent peering at him through the channel.

  "Jesus," said Kelley, a look of amusement crossing his features. "You look like hammered shit. Did you sleep in the car?"

  "Yes," replied Walken tiredly. "Yes. I slept in the car."

  "Must've been real tired."

  "Considering I spent all day on a goddamned corpse expedition," said Walken, "Yes. Yes, I was. And still am, by the way."

  The irritation he felt at being roused seemed to have crept into his voice, because Kelley's expression had become contrite. "Sorry, man," he told him. "I just thought you might want to know, Karen's working on getting the data together on the Koreans and Stadil's boys. I've been doing some digging as well, but I probably won't have a report together until morning. Chief says you shouldn't bother coming back in until then unless the Dolls are sighted."

  It was more and more disappointment: some fourteen people had either died or gone missing in the space of eight hours and still nobody had any real clues. Walken wanted to punch the monitor. "But you'll see what you can do," he said instead, his voice bearing with it a certain weight he hadn't really meant to hang on it. "Right?"

  "...yeah," Kelley said with a nod. "I'll see what I can do. It'll take some time, though. Maybe you should get some sleep instead, eh?" A smile, small but irrepressible, returned to his lips. "Nothing we can do until the data all gets processed and I can't figure you smell too great, eh?"

  "Fresh as a fucking graveyard daisy." Walken grunted. "But all right. Call me when you're done."

  "You got it, Agent. I've got your number."

  Despite his smile, as Kelley reached to kill the transmission Walken caught a glimpse of his face. It was disturbed, the unsure grimace of someone who has seen a mystery that he neither understands nor really wishes to. That Wonderland feeling again, Walken told himself. The birth of new and horrible life. Whatever it was that Stadil and his circle had done to destroy the computer cores, it wasn't likely that it was of his own volition. Chances are he was dumping all the data he had on his operation. And didn't fast dumps like that sometimes lead to brain-burn, after all? As he turned the car toward home, he hoped that Stadil's death had been some sort of happy accident. The pale sky seemed to mock him.

  Home was an apartment on the thirty-second floor of the Rodman Building, an aging apartment building in the Verge. Every street was a long expanse of buildings much like the Rodman, all in various states of disrepair sandwiched between the New City and the Old. It was a kind of moat of lower-rent structures that stood as a retaining wall, the last bastion of civilization before the urban ruin of Old City usually capitalized sprawled out for miles. He could have lived in far better environs, of course. Agents of the Bureau were rather well paid, but the bleached, modern interiors of downtown apartments did nothing for him. He needed space to do his work, space in which his mind could expand. He did a great deal of pacing. The Verge provided such space very cheaply, so it was a perfect arrangement.

  The Rodman was far from glamorous. It was a dense, forty-floor block of apartments, largely empty and crumbling away. It had been mostly abandoned some thirty years ago when botched renewal had cracked a sewer main; even now the bottom ten floors, save for the foyer, smelled of refuse, which had saturated the walls and defied any attempts at scrubbing. He smiled to look at it. Walken thought it was beautiful. Devoid of the trappings of the New City, it was anonymous and filthy and noble in its staunch resistance to any kind of repair or change. He loved it quite to the quick of him.

  Walken parked the car out front of the building without fear. What people still lived in the neighborhood had sniffed him out as a cop long ago and they didn't bother him. Nobody wanted to bring down the heat after all. The uniforms didn't show much in the way of community care when they were called into this part of town. If anything, his presence made his block one of the safest to live around. That didn't mean he didn't bother to lock up.

  Walken shuffled through the building's entryway, a crumbling arch of beige concrete and dialed in the entry code for the steel door that had replaced the original glass. Walken had set this up himself. It keyed straight to the elevator and depending on what code you entered allowed you access only to specific floors. It wasn't hard to set up since there were only a few others who lived in this sprawling urban estate; a couple of young artists, a particularly shy Pakistani family who didn't speak a word of English or any of the other languages he knew and a thoroughly ancient Polish couple who had lived there since before the Expansion and refused to go anywhere else.

  He was the only one with any kind of technical command, so when things broke or ran down it was up to him to patch it. Generators that needed to be rewired, power conservation in the form of shutting down juice to most of the suites in the building. Security on the doors and in the halls. In truth, Walken had become a kind of super, unpaid and unknown. He rather liked it.

  The lock buzzed as his fingers caressed the keypad set into the concrete arch. He pushed the door open, shuffling through into the entryway. The insides weren't much different than the outsides, being of a singularly worn appearance, but it was much cleaner. He'd seen to that, after a few months of shuffling around the building's halls in the wee hours. Now he just shuffled around with a mop.

  "Meester Walken." A voice squeezed out of leathery, wizened lungs filled the hallway. An aging man stood at the end of the short corridor to the elevator, having undoubtedly just stepped out. Most likely he had been waiting in ambush.

  He regarded Walken with a squint that he knew well. It was the squint which meant he was displeased about something, which in turn meant work for him. "Mr. Kowalski," he began, his voice bearing his exhaustion more than he probably felt. "Good morning."

  The ancient Pole just peered at him. "Is network," he announced. "All broken. Marta is not seeing shows."

  Marta Kowalski adored her soap operas: 'Morning Thunder,' 'Nightside,' 'The Beautiful and Damned.' She had a fierce mania for primetime programming, which, due to her advanced age, meant she had to watch in the mornings after recording them the previous evening while she
slept. There was an endless parade of soaps. The fact that most of them were often damned near pornographic had long since failed to shock him. Even old people like to fuck, Walken figured. Or at least liked to remember fucking. "All right," he told Mr. Kowalski. "I'll look at it. Let me get upstairs and situated and I'll see what I can do."

  "Is marathon today!" The old man thrust that same thick finger skyward. He looked like an enormous gumdrop of pure, gray-haired adipose in his checked shorts and rubber shoes, breasts heavy and pouring over his swollen belly beneath a thin, stained t-shirt. "Marta is not leaving me alone until the service coming back. I live here for many years..."

  Oh God, thought Walken, not this again. Mr. Kowalski seemed to think he owned the building. He was always quick to point out the many years he and his wife had spent together when demanding repairs. The fact that he didn't pay rent or otherwise contribute to the furthering of these services never seemed to do much to deter him. "...yes, yes," he said with a nod, tossing a hand in the air, "and we greatly appreciate it. I'll come up in an hour and have a look, all right?"

  Mr. Kowalski looked as if he might die of shock. "An hour," he cried, little piggy fists curling up in outrage. "An hour!? Marta, she yell at me since I wake up! An hour?"

  "An hour," Walken repeated in a tone he usually reserved for suspects or city cops. The Great Finality. "I promise." He stalked past the old man to fill up the elevator, then punched his code without waiting for him to come in.

  "Asshole!" the old man shouted as the doors slid closed. It always ended like that, of course. No matter what he agreed to do, even if it was right away, he was always an asshole. One day, Walken thought, he might say something snarky back to him. But the truth was he was just an old man and he liked having people around.

  The elevator trundled quietly upward. When it stopped it was at his floor, the thirty-second, and he stepped out into the hall. Like the lobby, the hallway had a distinct tang of disuse about it. The white carpet had long since yellowed and the paint was peeling back. Walken had done his best to make sure it didn't look entirely like a cesspit, but he had no reason to overhaul the entire floor. After all, it was just him up here. What reason did he have to do it up?

  Walken shuffled down the hallway, peering at the peeling walls, the doors unopened in years. They were all empty space behind them, empty space and abandoned furniture. He certainly didn't want for anything. If he needed something domestic, he just plucked what he needed from other apartments like inscrutable plastic fruit.

  His apartment was dead in the middle of the outer side of the corridor. Its door was solid black steel compared to the hollow doors of the other apartments, sealed tight with a magnetic lock. His fingers dipped into the keywell mounted into the side of the door, stroking the slabs of plastic inside. As the door hissed open clean, ionized air chased the dampness from his nostrils. He went inside.

  The vague squalor of the hallway persisted inside, though it was of a more comfortable shade. Walken's place was a vault, crammed with a mixture of scavenged furniture and very expensive, modern devices; he had knocked out the walls of three separate apartments to form it and it yawned around him down either side.

  Windows ran down the entire opposite wall. He had hung sheets of heavy tinted plastic to filter out the light; even in the gray of the daytime there was nothing but a pervasive gloom that filled the place, beaten back only by whatever lights might be on inside. They were a veil for him, shelter from the mad, savage world outside. Rarely did he draw them back to look at it.

  With a deep sigh of exhaustion, he fell onto the sofa and stared at the ceiling a little while, his brain emptying itself of thought. For the first time in nearly twenty-four hours, he was able to exist in silence. It was his favorite state, a zenlike quiet of mind and flesh that was afforded only by isolation. It was the rarest commodity, this meditative quiet, in times where far more disposable conveniences were in great supply. It was substance which seemed to him to be the rarest thing of all.

  In times like this, however, he could simply allow himself to be, to soak in the universe on its own time. He found that it was here that he made the discoveries. All that pacing leading him straight to where he needed to go. No pacing at the moment, however. He needed to relax. He needed a shower. He needed to sleep. And, of course, he needed to ensure that the Kowalskis would give him peace. Besides, he reminded himself, barring anything sudden he'd be waiting on the forensic boys to give him something more.

  A half hour later and he had gotten the shower, changed into a pair of coveralls and gone to see about the Kowalskis' network woes. A piece of masonry had fallen down in one of the abandoned sections and severed a line. It was an easy fix and soon he returned to his apartment to collapse for a few hours. He didn't dream.

  He awoke to the chirping of the terminal perched on the coffee table, signaling the arrival of messages.

  Walken sat on the couch in his underwear. The little Mitsubishi booted up in front of him and conjured a battery of screens hovering in midair. Spelled out in fairy light were the initial findings from the city's crime scene unit, annotated in places by Dr. Hammond, the medical specialist at the Bureau office. He took them one at a time.

  The scene on the plane was straightforward enough. The coffins the Dolls had come in had been hardened, shielded from radiation and sensor tracking. It had only been a small flaw in the casing of one of the coffins that allowed Walken to catch a blip with the sniffer. A lucky break, but it would be the only one he'd get. There were no other traces as to who the coffins were meant for. No prints, no genetic evidence of any kind. Kelley's hack team could find no indication as to who was supposed to pick up the delivery in the first place. The theory Kelley offered was that Park and his group were to arrive at the Sea-Tac in due time once the flight had been unloaded, hack the airport systems to make a false record of the transfer and deliver the coffins to whoever had ordered them. Only Walken had gotten there first.

  This led in turn to the hit on the bus. The evidence told him a lot of what he already knew. Park and his gang had been waiting on the bus, hacked its systems and had it drive over to the intersection where they sprayed it for effect. They were very clearly firing to take out the crew and not the capsules containing the Dolls. A review of the ambulance's records showed that there was a last-minute load of diagnostic gear put in the spot that the third capsule should have been in, which was unusual but not out of the realm of reality. It was an accident of paperwork that had doomed the Doll to joining the fates of her minders and those of her would-be abductors.

  Park and his people had been taken by surprise when they were murdered; chemical analysis of their weapons suggested that they hadn't been fired since the ambulance assault. Kelley suggested that it was most likely a group of high-tier mechjobs (the term 'cyborg' had fallen into antiquity decades ago) that had done the honors. Surplus military bionics, even current-generation models, were available in the aftermath of the European War — one just needed a sufficient roll for the hardware and the surgery. There were also plenty of amped-up veterans from that war that were still in circulation as private muscle. Hammond was still working on autopsies, but it appeared as if they had been torn apart by hand.

  Then there were the deaths of Stadil and his bouncers. While CivPro was busy evacuating the building, Stadil and his men had gathered around his tacky desk and plugged themselves via skulljacks into his terminal, which in turn had been connected to that trio of most potent computers and a high-capacity emergency power cell. While Walken drove through the vacated wastes on the way toward the club, Stadil had engaged a lethal failsafe that caused the cell to dump its charge into the system. Stadil and his men cooked from the inside out, their skulls converting instantly into cauldrons of steaming brain matter. The steam pressure should have burst their skulls, but it had not. Nobody had an explanation for that. Nor did they have an explanation as to why every man's head was emptied of anything but trace elements. Ritual suicide was hardly the end
that anyone had expected for that pack of nasties and the method of their passing was the biggest mystery of the night.

  Lucky him.

  Science would have to carry them forward for now, forensic examinations lumbering on in the absence of further leads or word from his own vaunted instincts. What in all hell was going on here? Where were the remaining Dolls? The puzzle defied him, beckoning to be unraveled, but for now there was the ever-demanding specter of bureaucracy to be sated. Paperwork loomed. He looked at the chronograph floating on the border of the terminal display. It was only 11:30. Shit, he thought. Gonna be a long day.

  The report was finished by 2:00 and after submitting it over the network Walken headed to the office. He'd have to check in with Wolsey, talk to Kelley and see what else Forensics had come up with while he had been crunching paper. No sound from the Kowalskis on the way down. He was thankful for that; he didn't want to deal with the Dracula brigade before having to face the day. It was raining again as he emerged. He wrinkled his nose under the curtain of cool drizzle and hurried out to the curbside where the car waited for him.

  He found a neighborhood kid crouching next to it. He was ten, maybe twelve and Asian. A comic figure in his enormous rain hat and plastic zoris, the blunt shape of a shock prod sticking out from the waistband of his jeans was all Walken needed to see to understand why he was there. The neighborhood people had fear of the Fed as much as the street creatures did. To them he was a kind of local idol, something to keep happy lest he become wrathful and bring down heat upon them all. They had a reason to fear, after all; the Fed wasn't exactly the paragon of beneficence these days.

  He cleared his throat as he stepped up to the curb a few feet away. The kid blinked up with a start, reaching for his stick. He stopped as he saw Walken. They looked at each other. Walken nodded, gazing down into the kid's bright, dark eyes.

  "No bother car," the kid said, his voice soft and his accent thick.