Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  "All right," he said, letting the words spill out slowly, "What do you want me to do?"

  "I want you to go see her," said Wolsey. "Tonight. Not at the office, mind you, I want you to see her at home. Convince her."

  "I can try," said Walken, though he hated the idea of having to face off against the woman. The last thing he needed was to get a poison pen turned toward him and the rest of the Bureau. "You're not afraid that she'll just turn the whole thing into more fodder for her articles?"

  The lines of Wolsey's face crinkled slightly. "Not if you're charming. You can be charming, can't you, Agent?"

  "....right," said Walken. There was no extracting himself from it now, he knew. "I'll do my best, Chief."

  "I'm sure you will. Go ahead and talk to Kelley, then wrap up the paperwork on last night's events. As for the Dolls, I've already spoken to the brass at Civil Protection and they've agreed to cooperate entirely. They've got every cop on the beat looking for the two of them, though they've been told they're VIP runaways. Daughters of a member of the Laotian Parliament. They're ordered to report, but don't approach. It's not like they can tell the difference, after all, can they?"

  Walken merely nodded. "Of course, sir," he said simply and rose. Wolsey was usually far more professional in his mode of conduct. He could not imagine the motivations behind this sort of behavior. "Was that it?"

  "That's it, Agent," Wolsey agreed. "I expect to hear back from you concerning Hunt before the night is out." With that he turned his chair around to face the wall monitor, then spoke again. "If charm and good manners won't work, Agent, follow up with the threat of a detainment order. And get Kelley to run down all our alternatives for who killed the Koreans. I don't want to assume the worst unless we haven't got any other recourse."

  With another nod, Walken left Wolsey to the floating ghost-image of downtown's neon heart. The giants were looming again in the background. In that moment, he thought perhaps they might be waiting for him to come outside for them to crush. The idea didn't sound half bad.

  Kelley had a lot to say about the terrible Annika Hunt. Never mind her politics, never mind her journalism — what Walken learned about the woman he had never expected to hear.

  With a glee usually reserved for frat boys preparing for hazing new pledges, Kelley had given Walken the address for a private, members-only network address which he said that he had been watching for some time. It turned out to be dedicated to a voyeur fetish node, home to the 'beautiful' Candy Alpha. Beautiful from the neck down, maybe; she was lean, pale. Hard-bodied. Piercings everywhere, expensive computer-controlled skin-art swimming over her flesh.

  From the neck up, however, there was no human head but a wide array of cartoon mascot heads. Danna-kai, Kimbo the Seal. Pretty Mami. Most of them were helmets generated by computer, animated by whatever software drove the site, but every now and again she'd wear the real thing for a 'treat' to her visitors. He tried to imagine what kind of person logged in to see Kimbo the Seal drill herself on camera while hung upside down in a carboelastic harness and found his criticism thwarted - for fetish knew no stereotype, as he well knew. Everyone was a freak of some flavor.

  It was the propensity to use computer-generated 'heads' that exposed her. Even with layers of very expensive data encryption and a private node on an unlisted black server, Kelley's sublime skill was sufficient to flay the pixels back to show the face of the woman beneath. Though normally she wore a form-fitting hood of black lexiprene over her head, Kelley's obsessive unraveling had revealed an unbroken clip in which the lean, vaguely horsey face of Annika Hunt was unmistakably revealed.

  It was an unexpected development, but he felt armored by the discovery, by the hilarity of seeing such a foaming hypocrite made vulnerable before him in that way. He had ammunition, after all. For the first time in the past few nights, he did not feel like the universe's meat puppet. At least, not as much.

  The cheer had left him, however, as he finished his paperwork and the evening loomed. Leverage or not, he did not cherish the idea of having to face the sublime bloodsucker; his thoughts turned toward the future as he left the office.

  He wondered what people like him, the hands of the Bureau, would be like in the future. He wondered if, at some point, field agents would turn out to be something closer to Special Tactics, seeing the world through a viewplate and then with senses dictated by computer. What kind of a man, he wondered, would that make him? He had always distrusted the heavy boys in his own hometown, which were just like the ones here. Kitted out in paramilitary gear, bodysuits and automatic rifles. The designs of the suits were different — it was a different company, after all — but the look was the same.

  He tried to imagine what it was like as he left the office. When he entered the elevator he stood there, listening to the dubious whisper of its progress, still unable to mark the passing floors or any motion at all. Did the elevator really move, or did the building move around it? What kind of reality was there for the CivPro heavies, projected through the video? When they shot at people, did they really see the same targets that people in the real world saw? Walken imagined the elevator opening to a fine vista over a rust-colored Martian desert instead of the vast gray of the garage.

  He'd heard a rumor once that data wasn't streamed among the Special Tactics troops from a local source but via the greater corporate network. Well, hackers and burners and pirates of all sorts were always looking to wiggle in through the cracks to get at the data within corporate systems. What would happen if someone got in with a doctored feed?

  The elevator finally chimed and the doors whispered open. Instead of the red rock, the bare concrete of the garage bay yawned before him. He stepped out, turned to the kiosk and, with another retinal scan, the ceiling opened and the car was deposited in the marked space by the great arm once more. He got in, took a deep breath and prepared to go back out into the commercial wilderness again.

  Hunt lived on the sixty-seventh floor of the Parksbury Building, a megarise apartment tower overlooking the lights of the commercial sector. That close to all the best boutiques and restaurants in town, you could follow the trail of burning cash straight to the place's door if you didn't know the address. It was a stepped glass needle soaring upward toward the silver sky, gleaming and beautiful, another product of over-artistic builders and their supercomputer slaves. A parade of exposes and journalism awards apparently netted you a corner suite; not quite into the strata of the truly wealthy, but pretty damned nice for someone still working city news. He was glad for his badge; it was probably the only thing that would have gotten him through to see her, short of a personal invitation or a well-armed team.

  The gilded, frosted glass doors slid open before him and Walken strode into the lobby. Immediately the eyes of the man behind the front desk, an enormous slab of red Martian stone, were upon him. It wasn't Walken's face that was unfamiliar to him, no doubt, but the slightly rumpled suit of brown synthetic fabric he wore. It spoke of a low credit rating and security didn't like poor-looking folk.

  "Can I help you?" The guard called to him across the lobby even as he moved to approach. His own suit was worth probably half of Walken's whole yearly pay, sleek gray silk spun in orbit. It made him look like he wore liquid metal. The man stuffed into it, though, was as hard as the worked slab of granite that he sat behind — maybe military at some point in his life.

  Walken decided to be harder. "Industrial Security." He drew his badge from inside his coat and flipped it over his hand at the man, brandishing it with a flat look. "I need access to the elevator, please."

  He looked at the badge, then back at Walken. "Is someone expecting you, Agent?" He was polite, but left no room for question in his tone.

  "No," replied Walken. He left the badge out. "Investigating. I need access. Let's go."

  The guard leaned back in his chair, arms crossed over his wall of a chest. "Do you have a warrant, Agent?"

  Oh, boy. "Don't need one for this," Walken replied. "Just n
eed to talk to one of your tenants, here."

  But he would not be moved. "This is private property," the guard said, his frown deepening slightly. "I don't have to let anybody in — not even you, Agent. Not without a warrant. Why don't you go and see about getting one and we'll see about getting you that access."

  Impatience and irritation rose in Walken's throat. His eyes tightened as he regarded the man, adding an inch to his height by straightening up and looming. "What is your name, sir?"

  "Ronald Angstrom." The guard's lips flattened slightly.

  Walken took a step forward and leaned over the desk a bit so that he loomed all the more. One hand rested on the cold desktop. His badge, still in his other hand, flapped in its wallet like a warning flag. "Mr. Angstrom," he said, his voice low, "I have an investigation of the utmost importance to pursue here. I appreciate your desire to keep your job, but anyone who gets in my way is going to be considered a suspect on their own. I'd really rather not put a veteran on my list."

  Angstrom's brows quirked a bit, then furrowed. Maybe he was a veteran after all. Maybe he had some skeleton in his closet that he sure as shit didn't want aired. "All right," he said finally, jerking his head irritably toward a gilded pair of doors behind him. He touched a button under the desk and the doors slide open "Go on."

  "Thank you." Walken smiled. "I'll make sure to note your cooperation in my report."

  He stepped inside the elevator and took it up toward the sixty-seventh floor. The front of the shaft was transparent; as it slid up the glassy face of the tower he saw the wide vista of the New City sprawling around him. He rose above the smothering bath of colored light that suffused the street level, the blocks of malls and parking structures, smaller apartment towers and such. In the distance, further down the bay, the office quads loomed and he could clearly see the vast holographic signs that took up whole stretches of their towering facades. Large mobile platforms bearing massive screens wheeled slowly over the city on hydrogen jets, ensuring that even the sky was stained with the filth of media.

  Beyond the towers sprawled the bay, the arcology domes floating like fairy lilies on the polluted water and beyond that the islands of light that demarcated the small cities and the naval base on the other side of the Sound. Walken sighed. Wonderland lay on the other side of that unseen expanse, behind the blue-black horizon.

  Eventually he reached Hunt's floor and the doors swept open. He shuffled out into the hall, where everything was white plastic and glass, tastefully spartan. Strips of polished, vented metal served as brackets from behind which fluorescent bulbs burned. He thought of his home in the Rodman, of its nobility and crumbling splendor. He counted the doors and made his way along.

  Hunt's door was a white slab with its number picked out in golden lettering on its surface. There was no handle; access was admitted by personal network, with a pass card emitting a signal transmitted via the body's natural salts. It meant that anyone with the card could get in but breaking in without it was something damned near impossible without alerting the whole damned building. A video panel was set into the face of the door instead of a peephole.

  Walken hung by the door. He checked his watch; the scuffed face of the cheap holofoil display read 21:57 in gleaming blue light. The first show of the night should be over soon. He squared his shoulders and touched the chime button set in its gilded panel by the door.

  There was silence for a solid minute. He kept his expression neutral in case she was watching him through the door camera. Finally, the display snapped to life and she came into view on the screen. There she was, just as he had seen her on Kelley's monitor: blonde, blue-eyed and just a little too horse-faced to be truly pretty. She looked into the monitor bearing a fantastic bedroom smile.

  "Hello? Who's this?" Her voice was rich and smoky and he felt himself grow a bit irritated that such a terrible person would have his favorite set of pipes.

  "Miss Hunt?" He spoke calmly, trying not to be all business. No point to set her off early. "I'm with Industrial Security."

  "Ah." Something hardened behind her eyes and her smile shifted into an impious smirk. "Yes, well. I was hoping that he was wrong — what do you want, Agent?" Even as she said the word there was doubt on her tongue. Journalists were even more suspicious than most cops.

  "I'm here to speak with you, Miss Hunt," he said. That dick at the front desk must have called up and tipped him off. "If you'll let me in? You have something that belongs to us."

  "Oh, really." Hunt fluttered her lashes. "And what might that be? You know I don't date cops, right?"

  Walken stared at her image for a long moment. "I think you know what I'm talking about," he replied. His voice had turned to lead. Don't fuck with me, lady, he thought to himself.

  She snorted. "You have no idea how many people come to my door wanting something, honey. All right, let's see the badge."

  He held up his badge, which was still in his hand from the encounter downstairs. "Here you are," he said. He tapped a square on the badge's lower right corner with his pinky, a holographic stamp endlessly replicating Brownian motion. It was called a Winter Stamp after the snowflakes that endlessly fell in the stamp's blue field. Its algorithm was a state secret and thus considered unreplicable by most.

  Hunt stared at the badge for a long moment. "All right," she said finally. "Do you have a warrant?"

  Walken drew a deep breath. "Miss Hunt," he began, "I am here in an official capacity. If you don't want me standing here speaking, at the top of my lungs, for everyone in the hallway to hear — "

  "All right, all right. Jesus." She stepped back from the monitor — Walken saw what looked like a printed silk robe over her shoulders — and reached offscreen. The door slid open.

  Hunt stood in the doorway. She wore a floor-length robe of white silk, upon which a cloud of stylized cranes soared over her hips and toward certain escape off her right shoulder. "What the Hell do you want, Walken?"

  "Agent Walken," he said on reflex.

  "Whatever."

  "Let's go inside, shall we?"

  "All right," she replied stonily. The way she turned her back on him as she walked into the apartment made him feel that he was making progress already. She knew what he wanted and the nasty shock from whatever performance high she had been riding had set her off balance. The voice in his head whispered the promise of success. He just had to play it right.

  He followed her into the apartment, which made his digs at the Rodman seem all the more squalid by comparison. Smooth white walls, burgundy carpet. Sofas made from real black leather polished to a dully reflective sheen. Tables made of tinted glass and artfully-worked steel. His eyes tracked the room — and found, as he had expected, the telltale dimples of camera eyes glinting from the corners of the ceiling. He was just glad that Kelley and his hack team had succeeded in suspending recording functions like they had planned; there was no profit in a journalist having a record of being threatened with a detention order.

  Hunt draped herself over a leather chaise-lounge the color of sand, her robe contrasting sharply against its blandness. Her hair was a tumbling pour of golden curls over one eye; the rest poured over her back and breast. He looked at her, remembered the footage of her riding a pleasure saddle, penetrated doubly, endlessly mouthing in ecstasy while being confident in her anonymity. The bliss on her face, the arch of her back. Every muscle taut with the wondrous release of anonymity. He wondered if Hunt was just an avatar, a mask that the true woman — the real Candy Alpha — wore for the public throng.

  He felt that way very often. Only he didn't have a name for the one who was riding in Thomas Walken's skin.

  She picked up a pack of Anoraks off a nearby table and lit the cigarette with the gold torch lighter that lay next to it. "All right," she said after a moment, taking a deep drag and blowing a tongue of smoke toward the ceiling, "Agent Walken. What the Hell do you want?"

  Walken stood there with his hands jammed into the pockets of his coat. He looked at her for a
long moment, seeking to give her the impression that he was calculating. Then he drew a breath, looked at his shoes and spoke. "We have information that you've been in contact with a man named Anton Stadil."

  Hunt paused to take another drag, peering at him through the gray halo collecting around her head. "He's a source from time to time," she answered. "Not anymore, thanks to you boys in the Bureau."

  "Oh?" One brow quirked.

  "Yeah," she said. "I heard you killed him."

  "That's not exactly accurate."

  A faint smile lined her lips and she leaned back in the corner of the chaise-lounge. "Isn't it? I'd heard you boys went in with guns blazing. Lost his face, I heard."

  Walken shrugged; he wasn't going to let her bait him. "The details will be released eventually," he said. "We know, though, that you were sent a load of data around the time that he died. We know you received it and we know you have it in your possession in the form of an encrypted datacell."

  She was quiet for a while. She looked out, not at him but at the spreading city behind her, at the Bay and the bridges and the towers all gilded with light. The black mirror of the Sound beyond them. Smoke curled from her forgotten cigarette, no ashes in the wake of combustion. "Well," she said, wreathed by the smoke's grey halo. "What if I did?"

  "Then you've got evidence." Walken tried to sight her reflection in the glass, to try and read her face. The voice in his head stirred and mumbled.

  "Evidence..." He could almost hear the wheels clicking in her head. "You realize that I'm a member of the Press, don't you?"