Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  "No bother car," Walken repeated. "Thanks, kid." He plucked a wrinkled ten-dollar bill from his coat pocket and held it out to the little sentinel, who eyed it a moment before wrinkling his nose.

  "Well?" Walken waved the bill at him. "C'mon, take it. I'm getting soaked out here."

  The kid stared at him a moment longer before snatching the bill out of his hand. He muttered something in Vietnamese that sounded like thanks and took off down the street.

  Walken stared down the way at his back for a moment, watching the kid vanish into an alley before he slid into the car. The drizzle beaded up on the car's heated windscreen, its drumming again wrestling with the hydrogen motor. He pushed the noise into the back of his mind and kept the car on course as it nosed its way through afternoon traffic. Overhead the persistent lightness of the sky, like canvas stained with mercury, continued the tyranny of rain.

  The drive to the office led through the deepest reaches of downtown, through the Waters Commercial Complex, the city's commercial heart. The Waters, as the locals called it, was like Shinjuku had been in Tokyo's heyday but ramped up by a factor of a thousand. Everything glowed with color, moved, demanded to be seen at the expense of overloading senses.

  You didn't look at it all at once; try to and the brain shut down and screamed in protest like an overtaxed transmission. Instead you tried to just narrow your eyes, try to corral your vision into a tunnel, so that you didn't run off the road or plow into some group of tourists or corporate employees. That'd be a great thing to get put on a company tomb, Walken thought. 'Run over by an overstimulated consumer.'

  The city's heart was everything that he had attempted to flee by moving to the Verge. It was packed with office buildings, towers raking the heavens and blaring at its poisoned canopy every kind of photonic obscenity it could conjure. It was a collection of modern architecture, steel and glass and plasticrete connected by veins of pulsing neon. There were a few oddities among the towering monoliths of the malls and office blocks. Strange figures had begun to dot the skylines of late, the ultra-modern structures of the Neue Erde design movement.

  To build them, construction crews had sprayed currents of programmable foam into frameworks made of carbon fiber and exotic alloys and left it to congeal into material far harder than stone. The result was a structure that could fit the imaginations of its designers. Buildings fifty stories high could go up in a few weeks. It was wonderful technology, but because of it the city had become an architectural freakshow and among the sullen geometric towers the occasional mutant twisted skyward at regular intervals amid the downtown blocks. Fueled by fever dreams and adorned with light they were giants standing grim watch over the people who swarmed beneath them, ants to be crushed on the day they chose to strike.

  He tore his mind away from the gilded giants, focusing on the streets below. He was moving well into the Waters now and the traffic slogged through the avenues like ice floes drifting down a narrow river of asphalt. Down here the neon and holograms ringed their ankles in what a man from a century before might consider the height of neo-teknologik perfection. Storms of light and color, painfully engineered and expensive, they were art bent to the wills of corporate masters.

  No clearer was the statement of what New City was than here. Advertisements and signs shifted and danced in competition with the traffic signals. A thousand different labels manifested themselves in their respective fashions, most of them incorporating some form of signature logo or design. Stopping at a traffic light Walken saw a woman walking by under the overhang of a boutique nearby, wrapped up in a coat that continuously depicted Art-Deco renditions of waterfalls crashing down around her ankles. Miniature logos of an electronics company tumbled through the undulating waves.

  The whole place was slowly turning into one vast, multichannel advertising system, moving beyond the Network, beyond the holographic boards and print media. The people, who were before merely being advertised to, were now becoming willing parts of the greater organism — selling to themselves, doing the machine's own work. It was hard to see sometimes where the machine ended and the people began. He wondered if this might not be the next step in human evolution, to become living billboards dangling color and slogans before them like deep-sea fish luring in monetary chum.

  Something jarringly incongruous to all this engineered glamor was coming up on the right; this was C. Elden Parksley Tower, headquarters to the Bureau office and the primary Federal building in the city. Unlike its exotic brethren, the C.E.P. was a proper government structure, all straight lines and bulk, a monolith of concrete. It was heavy and unwieldy, unchanged over seventy years, a static brick among all the fluid lines of modernity around it. Unlike the Rodman, though, Walken found its inflexibility obscene. It had none of the nobility of the stoic hi-rise. To Walken, the C.E.P. was more a fixture of oppression than endurance, as if it imposed itself upon the modern landscape rather than submit to the flow of change.

  There were several bays set up around the back side of the building, each with an automated kiosk and security door set into the wall near the entrance. Walken pulled the car into a marked spot in the middle of the garage and got out. He had barely made it to the kiosk when the ceiling opened like God's own iron mouth and extended servo-driven arms from its expanse, snatching the car and carrying it upward into darkness. There was a glimpse of other cars suspended in tight rows like slabs of hanging meat. He smiled; that never got old for him. The door buzzed open and he stepped through.

  Walken lurked in the elevator as it made its way up the shaft, climbing the stories toward the Bureau office. He tried to count the ticks as the car slid upward, brought aloft on magnetic tracks, but the lack of wheels or gears frustrated him. He had only the elevator display to believe as to the count and he didn't trust it. Eventually at the tick of thirty-two the doors hissed open and he stepped through into the building.

  The C.E.P. was as featureless within as it was without. He proceeded through a maze of flat white corridors strung between the office blocks, swerving to avoid people in the halls as if on automatic. He sensed them before he saw them, having long developed an excellent sense for the nondescript suits and the nondescript people that filled them. Government drones shuffled by in droves, forgettable, mobile smears of gray. When he did catch a flash of color — a scarf, a blouse, some daringly electric tie — it was swiftly swallowed by the shifting masses in the halls, buried under the monochrome as if it were a blemish to be concealed.

  The Bureau office was set up in one corner of the building. Though taking up only a small portion of the total office space in the C.E.P., one quarter of a single floor, it was a world unto itself. It was part police structure and part fortress. The office contained segregated sections comprised of Wolsey's office, a cluster of cubicles for Bureau agents and analytical personnel, an evidence vault and a surgical suite that allowed personnel to conduct forensic examinations and autopsies independent from the city coroner. It had a direct feed from the ambulance bay in the garage level. Walken always thought it strange that they'd allow such a thing in the middle of a federal building, considering all the office personnel and the kind of tech they hauled in. Then again, the enclosure was built to safely contain explosions that would otherwise have gutted an entire floor. It made him wrinkle his nose to think of what could happen if something like whatever had taken out those Koreans got brought up here after a firefight and decided it wasn't ready to go yet.

  Walken thought grimly of the abattoir scenes that had met him the night before as he reached the door of the Bureau office. It was a foot-thick slab of heavy alloy, set with the seal of the Bureau and its motto — 'VIGILANCE SHIELDS THE INNOCENT' — in large, elegant sans-serif capitals. A panel set into the wall by the door hosted an eyecup, which Walken ducked to look into so that the security computer could read his retinal pattern. The flash of the laser scanner inside made him wince. This done, the hatch hissed open on magnetic tracks, as if it were the unsealed door of a long-forgotten tomb a
nd he stepped through.

  The Bureau office was very different from the gray, bureaucratic hell of the rest of the C.E.P. It was dimly lit, even atmospheric with the dark blue of the armored walls set with phosphorescent tubes on quarter power, leaving shadows clustering thickly in the corners. Curved, graceful cubicles of plastic and steel were arranged in a fan before the door to the Chief's office, their lamps throwing golden halos about the artificial gloom. It was surprisingly comforting, though somewhat grim on days when he was to go about fatality paperwork. Nobody likes to do that kind of work in the dark. In the back corner, to the right of Wolsey's office, another heavy door lead to the medical suite.

  The majority of the cubicles were slated for support staff, men and women sitting with their faces largely eclipsed by interface goggles and connected to the office core by skullwires, cables socketed into their heads under their hair. Towers of the cables extended upward from their skulls, twisting like tethered braids into the ceiling. They were a crop of strange fruit hanging from an unseen tree. The agents' cubicles, except for Kelley's, were dark.

  He rubbed the back of his head unconsciously as he walked in, heading toward the Chief's office. As he passed Kelley's head popped up from his cubicle, wires sprouting from the plugs behind his ear.

  "Hey," said Kelley brightly, flashing him a wide smile. "You look like you've been plowed over by a maintenance truck."

  "Yeah, yeah," said Walken, who adjusted course to approach Kelley's cubicle. "Being bent in half for the better part of a few hours while sleeping in the car will do that." He leaned over the wall of the cubicle as Kelley sat back down. His desk was a nest of consoles and holographic screens, plastering the walls and streaming with data. "I still don't see how you can track all this shit."

  "It's that old black magic, my friend." Kelley ticked off a salute with two fingers and winked. "You talked to Wolsey this morning?"

  "No," replied Walken. "I was gonna see him after I talked to Hammond."

  Kelley paused, looking over his shoulder a moment before looking back up to Walken. His tone turned conspiratorial. "Well, look," he said, "He's been in a mood all morning. I get the feeling he got some bad news at some point between last night and today. You get any mail from him?"

  "Not a thing," murmured Walken. He frowned, drumming the fingers of one hand against the rim of the cubicle. "Do you think this has to do with my case? Think he's learned anything new?"

  "Maybe he's read my report," said Kelley, his expression darkening.

  "What about it?" Walken leaned in a bit, peering more closely from his position at the monitors.

  "Well." Kelley rolled his head a bit. "Why don't you go see Karen first and I'll collect my thoughts for you. Maybe I can put it together in a way that won't make your head spin off your shoulders."

  Walken snorted. "I'll do my best. Thanks." He pushed off from the cubicle and proceeded past Wolsey's office and the nests of tethered analysts and entered the medical suite.

  It was a large, sterile vault of white tile and plastic, the complete opposite of the room outside. A forest of diagnostic equipment and trays clustered around the corners. Consoles studded the walls, blinking and droning like hives of glimmering bees. A number of slabs were set up along one wall, bristling with the insect-legs of manipulators rising up still and quiet from pods mounted on their corners. Laid out on each one were the pale blue shrouds of body bags.

  Walken walked over to the nearest one and peered at the tag printed across where the face should be. 'JANE DOE' indicated the first of the Dolls and he felt a shudder of anger and inexplicable fear flash up his spine as he hurried past it. The medics were next and beyond that a cluster of mountainous lumps that marked Stadil's over-beefed cadre. Among them, dwarfed on either side by the bulk of those men that he took with him, he found Stadil's bag.

  He stood at the end of the slab, looking at the label set into its surface. 'STADIL', it read. 'ANTON V.'. Walken's fingers stretched out to trace the line beneath it. He stared at it, remembered the gory mask that had been left behind. Smiling. Burnt-out eye sockets. The smell of cooked meat, the flesh oozing, stretching like melted cheese when he'd pulled Stadil's head off the terminal. The fear that had spiked through him upon seeing the Doll's bagged corpse now turned to something else as the voice in his head stirred — Walken craned to listen but a sound at the back of the room caused him to jerk upright, wary.

  "They don't like to be manhandled, you know." As if she'd been conjured out of thin air, a figure emerged from behind a bank of consoles set up in the far corner. Karen Hammond was a tall, lean black woman in sterile scrubs and a white coat and her skin stood out in stark contrast with the walls around her. She wore her long hair in a tight bun gilded with lengths of rainbowchrome smart-wire. The filaments sometimes shifted to ensure the fit of her hairstyle, at times giving the unsettling impression that something living was dwelling in all that brown silk. She was the Bureau's medical specialist in Seattle and possessed of at least four degrees that Walken knew of. She was absolutely brilliant.

  "Sorry," he said, his shoulders tightening up. "I didn't see you in here and I thought I'd have a look."

  "It's all right." She gave him a smile and he felt himself disarmed immediately. Karen was very beautiful in a natural way — no surgery, not even a touch-up, was used to enhance it. He liked her for that. "You're here to see what else I came up with, right, Agent?"

  "Good morning," he said, hands digging themselves into his pockets. The sight of her, the faint discomfort he felt about being discovered like that, chased away that nameless fear. "Uh, yeah. I'm in to see Wolsey, but I wanted to drop by here first. See things for real, you know?"

  "Pictures and datafeeds do no justice to the victims," she said with a nod, walking past him to stand at the other side of the slab. The manipulators shifted around her, sensing her presence. Walken shivered despite himself. "I'm impressed, Agent. Most of the time your fellows just wait for me to send them a file." She paused a moment and smiled again. "Well, except for Arnold, of course."

  Walken smiled as well. Despite the fact she was as thoroughly oriented due south of straight as she could be, Kelley had always had the most monstrous crush on her. "Still not letting up, huh."

  She shrugged. "Well, he isn't a stalker or anything, but he still hasn't seemed to get the message yet. Now, if he'd go and get himself reassigned..."

  "Hey," said Walken, blinking, "I don't think that's necessary."

  "No, Agent," Karen said with a faint smirk, "Genetically reassigned. He'd make a gorgeous woman, that one. He's got the bones for it."

  His own smirk budded in answer. "That's all it would take? Just changing equipment like that?"

  "Well not for most," she said and shrugged. "But he's a gentle soul. I dare say he'd make the transition in rapid time. I doubt even psychological reconditioning would be necessary. And I'd be there to help him learn his new body. And how to dress, of course."

  Walken snorted and then screwed up his eyes, trying to imagine Kelley as a woman. "Hell," he finally admitted, "I guess he would. As a redhead, anyway."

  Another of those dazzling smiles appeared. "Now you see what I'm talking about."

  "Right." He cleared his throat then. "Well, maybe sometime I'll drop it in his ear. What more can you tell me about these poor folks?"

  "Well," she said, "I don't have much more than I'd already given you. The Doll was stock, about what we'd expected, but you already know that. No strangeness beyond what made her up in the first place. She and that ambulance crew all died purely from gunshot wounds. Now if you're asking about those Koreans you found out in Renton, the poor bastards were taken apart by hand. Small hands in this case."

  "Small hands? What're you talking about?"

  "Look at this." Karen beckoned him over to another slab beyond Stadil and his mountainous guards, where one of the unfortunate Koreans lay. She waved a hand over body bag; a computer-generated model sprang into being where her hand had swept, showing a r
ebuilt version of what must have been the body. It was the one that he'd seen as he came through the hole blasted by the Special Tactics thugs, the one missing his lower jaw. "You've been operating on the assumption that a third party had been responsible for all this, right?"

  "Right," Walken agreed. "Mech, I thought. Paid assassin, maybe, or an enforcer — someone juiced up and outfitted with plenty of bionics."

  "Exactly. You'd need serious power to be able to do this kind of damage to a living being. I started with this one — teeth shattered with what looks like a punch and the lower mandible literally torn from the skull." Karen wrinkled her nose faintly at Walken's look. "I know, right? There's no transfer of skin or other material, though, not even particles of metal or plastic."

  "But that's not that unusual," Walken reasoned, turning his attention from the hologram to look at her. "Not all prosthetics are cosmetic, after all; we could be looking for someone with combat limbs, paramilitary or worse — they have bonded plating. That wouldn't scrape off on teeth or bone."

  She nodded. "You're right," she said, "It wouldn't. But then I took at look at the bodies again, starting with this one." She gestured back to the hologram; he peered at the image of the skull, which detached and expanded at the doctor's urging. "Look at the pattern of the void in his teeth." She reached toward the image. The skull was currently twice the size of normal, so her fist went easily through the gap. "I have small enough hands." She drew her hand back and when she put it forth again the skull had reduced to normal size. This time her fist was twice as big as the aperture left there.

  Walken's brows arched. "Maybe it wasn't a fist," he pointed out. "Could be... I don't know, a baton. A pneumatic ram, maybe?."

  "It's certainly possible," she said. "But let's look at this next one." She led him to the next slab, summoning another hologram from the air. This corpse had suffered a similarly grisly injury; the right arm had been amputated at the elbow and not at all cleanly. "This one had his arm twisted off the joint."