Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  Ah. "I do." From the back of his mind came the urge to push her. "But a Press badge doesn't trump my badge, Miss Hunt — I have expanded powers in a case like this. You'll have to give that data over to me if you want to avoid... trouble."

  The moment those last words left his mouth, he knew that he'd misspoken. "Ah ha." Her voice was filled with triumph. "That's just like the government to threaten a trip to the gulag the moment they don't get what they want." She put out her chest, eyes widening in defiance. "So where is it going to be? Winter Harbor? Minidoka? Oh, do please be honest. I'm sure my editor's just waiting to hear."

  So that was it. She had assumed that he would come and threaten her with internment, just like Wolsey had given him clearance to do — and even though he hadn't intended to do so, she jumped right on the slightest word. Hunt assumed that she was recording, or maybe streaming live to someone else — but of course, Kelley had taken care of that.

  "I'm sure your editor's waiting on a lot of things," he said. "But that's not what's going to happen here. There's no data feeding out of this apartment — that's been taken care of." He took a step forward, shoulders squared, his expression hardening. "Now I don't have anything against the press, but what you've got is evidence. And I have orders. Now hand it over, please."

  She rose. Her horsey face pinched itself in anger as she did so and she folded her arms over her breast and scowled at him. "And if I don't?"

  "Do you really want me to answer that?" Now she would make him wave that detainment order at her, frog-march her out the door in strip-cuffs in front of all her neighbors and shove her into his car where she could hiss at him all the way back to the C.E.P. It would be another scoop for her to crow about on every newsfilter she could shoulder onto. The Bureau would have the spotlight on its face and even if he’d solved the mystery behind the Dolls by then he would still be good and fucked.

  But she didn't. "Fine," she spat instead and stalked across the floor into the bedroom. She came back out moments later with the oblong of a memory cell, which he shoved into his waiting hand. "Here."

  Walken looked at her for a long moment, then looked down at the cell. "...thank you very much," he finally said. Suspicion roared for a moment through his mental complex, only to be soothed by the whisper of instinct. No, he thought. This was real. It wasn't a trick. "I'm surprised you gave it over so quickly."

  "I can't make the news while I'm rotting in prison," Hunt said, eyes blazing. "No news, no ratings, no..." She spread her hands. "Well, none of this."

  "I see." He looked down at the datacell again. Simple, flat holograms of dolphins played on the golden foil that banded its middle, disappearing and reappearing beneath the Mitsubishi logo that was stamped on it. "All right, then." Walken flicked a glance upward at her face, then and his eyes narrowed faintly. "I don't think I need to tell you what will happen if this isn't the real thing, do I?"

  "No, Agent," she nearly spat. "You don't."

  "All right then." He nodded once and slid the datacell into a plastic evidence pouch which he took from his coat pocket, put it away and made for the door.

  "Oh and Agent?"

  Walken paused by the door. "Yes?"

  She stood behind him, arms crossed again. Her long face was soured again with a frown, but behind her eyes there was something like a hint of admiration. Maybe he'd impressed her a little, but it didn't keep her next words from spooling cold and sharp from her tongue. "You can take your data, but don't think that I'll forget it. Not ever."

  "I'll keep that in mind." He didn't bat an eye, which was to his credit. Her words sent ice cascading down his back. He had no desire to be a media target, but there was no avoiding it as long as he had her on his ass.

  He cursed his way all the way down to the lobby and out the door. Angstrom gave him a nod as he passed, but either didn't see the look that had settled upon his face or thought it wise not to comment. Indeed, he was a black cloud on the wing as he made his way out to the traffic circle where the car waited for him. The rain had let up and the sky was now hard and starless as it hung over the city. He got in and took a deep breath before he dialed up Wolsey, whose face loomed like a pig-eyed moon in the display.

  "Agent Walken," he rumbled. "Didn't expect to hear from you so soon. You look angry."

  "I'm fine," Walken said with a shake of his head. "I'm just... never mind. I've got the data."

  Wolsey's brows lifted in surprise. "Already? What the Hell did you have to do for that to happen?"

  "I was charming." Walken leaned back in his seat, letting the foam embrace him. "But she's got it in for me now."

  "Well, I don't envy you there." Wolsey frowned. "Don't worry. The Bureau will back you if she gives you any static. We know all about her little side business, after all." He leaned back behind his enormous desk and sighed. "Take the evening off, Tom. You can give that datacell to Kelley when you come in tomorrow morning — just make sure a copy of that archive gets sent to him tonight."

  "All right." The chain of evidence wouldn't slip so long as it was in Walken's custody, after all and sleep sounded pretty good to him right now. "Anything else, Chief?"

  Wolsey shook his head. "Nothing. You did a good job, Agent. Now go get some downtime."

  He terminated the call and Walken found himself staring at his own reflection in the screen, frowning again. He took another deep breath before starting the car. Somehow, he didn't feel that he was going to be getting much sleep just yet.

  Walken dreamed of a flood that night. The whole of Puget Sound had suddenly rebelled as if animated by God Himself, angry at what the city had done to His waters. It broke over the shore, pouring into the city in great gulps, engulfing the New City in an angry deluge. He could see the waters overturning the arcologies, submerging the pyramids of glass and steel so that they glowed from beneath the turbulent depths.

  It was a theme that continued as the commercial districts were consumed as well and, for a few bright moments, the sea seemed to glow with incandescent, multicolored rage before the holograms and neon and diode signs all began to short out. The coast was dark, New City was drowned and the city was what it should have been; the Verge remained, with its proud, crumbling structures and beyond that the wilds of the Old City begging to be resettled.

  It would be a return to humanity for this terrible place, he thought in his sleep. It would mean the survivors could turn the city into something other than what it was, much as the crash had annihilated the city's former self. But as he dreamed further, the bay was not finished; after a peaceful vista passed beneath his mind's lidless eye, the sea began to stir again. Suddenly the water surged anew, even angrier and more violently than it had before. He saw the sea rise, draining the submerged New City almost to the streets as it gathered up its fury, until it had become a towering wall rising and standing great and awful before the trembling city. Doom hung in grim silence, foaming and terrible, casting its shadow across the land as it scraped the sky of nacre.

  Suddenly he was no longer floating but in his apartment, staring out the wall of windows, beholding the wave in the distance. In that moment he knew that the sea wanted not only to drown the New City, which he had thought was the true cancer, but to engulf everything beyond it. He knew that the sea had judged and it had found them all, every human soul that ever lived there, every soul that had left its trace in steel and concrete, guilty of defiling it with their mere existence. It would expunge them all and leave no survivors, no evidence of the fleeting colony of man which dared to raise itself upon its shore. It would have the towers buried, the land cleansed and made green again.

  The sea moved and as the wave began to fall Walken felt a distressing calm about this death that came toward him. He knew that something righteous descended and drew strength from it. He did not try to cover himself as the sea reached through his feeble windows to claim him.

  He was saved from his watery dream-death by the chiming of his earbud phone, which was pitching a tantrum by his pillow.
Grunting, he reached for the thing and crammed it in his ear with the gracelessness of the stunned and sleepy. "...Walken," he mumbled, sitting up and blinking in the darkness.

  "Yeah, hey, Boss," Exley's raspy bass sounded on the other end of the line. "It's me."

  Walken blinked back more sleep and nodded to himself. "Exley," he replied. "Right. What's going on?"

  "Civil Protection called a few minutes ago. Looks like like one of your girls was seen by a pair of their uniforms, who then went and flatlined right after the call." CivPro heat carried sat-trackers and monitors to read their life signs among their standard gear.

  A stone formed in Walken's gut. He was up and reaching for his pants. His hands felt heavy, weighted down by the mass of the terrible feeling. It was a familiar sensation, one he'd felt when he was working the uniform himself. No cop, even a former one, likes to hear about uniformed fatalities. "Jesus," Walken muttered. "All right, I'm on the way. Where'd it happen?"

  "Not too far from where you are, actually. McConnell Bridge."

  Walken wrinkled his nose. "And the Dolls?"

  "No idea. I'm heading over now, but the clubs are emptying out and traffic's a bitch. I won't get there before CivPro does."

  "Right." Walken got to his feet and pulled on a t-shirt, then reached for his Nambu. He strapped it on over his ribs and pulled on his jacket as he headed for the door. "Give me the details on the way."

  McConnell Bridge was more of an elongated overpass than anything else, running across a drainage canal dug during the development of the New City. Shadows hung thickly from its edges, draping the channel beneath in an obscuring veil. It was a place where the homeless camped out and the junkies made their scores, a spot for the creatures to lurk and trade in everyday sins. It wasn't a murder spot, though. The killing fields lay out in the Old City and not the Verge.

  As he arrived, however, the car's lamps raked the darkness aside to reveal a pitiful village of battered tents and makeshift shelters, all tarpaulins and ramshackle frames, crowding around the pylons. It wasn't anything like the undercity that clung to the belly of the Tacoma-Narrows, for example, or even the TransCity Bridge, but it was clearly indicative of the worsening conditions to be found eastward. These people still had hope. They still lived in the shadow of the New City, hoping perhaps to be bathed in its light through some trick of circumstance or by their own labor. They had not yet gone native to the ways of the feral poor.

  It was a village, but an empty one. Walken frowned as he reached for the console and turned on the sensor node. He swept the underpass with its eye, searching out thermals and electromagnetic traces among the still-cooling campstoves and pirate televisions left in such a hurry by the denizens of the collective. There were two signatures that he could detect, two fading ghosts lying in the dirty hollow of the canal. The biosensor read zero on both.

  Walken frowned, cut off the node and slid out of the car. His feet crunched on gravel and feeble tufts of grass. He drew the Nambu from its holster and thumbed it over to the tranqs. The green light that confirmed his choice glowed softly over the fire selector. His brain was a mingling mass of static, instinct and learned procedure flowing together; adrenaline spiked his bloodstream and he rode it with a cautious hand.

  He dug the communicator bud out of his pocket and pushed it into his ear, murmuring for it to dial Exley as he approached the side of the embankment. Again the Agent's rough voice sounded in his ear.

  "Exley."

  "Walken here," he said, walking cautiously along the gravel embankment toward the bridge. "I've confirmed the two uniforms; they're dead, all right."

  "I'll inform CivPro." Exley's tone turned a bit curious. "You see anything else?"

  Walken grunted. "Not yet," he said, though his mouth was dry. He picked his way along, nearing the edge of embankment in the shadow of the bridge. This close the overhang was a looming thing, malevolent in its enormity and the darkness that it cast. Walken shivered despite himself, scenting the mingling smells of the squatter-village: sweat, excrement and cheap cooked food and beyond that the stinging copper tang of spilled blood. "I'm going to go down and see what's up."

  "Whatever you say, Agent," Exley said, though he didn't sound convinced. "Sure you shouldn't wait by the car?"

  A tinge of iron settled into Walken's tone. "Would you?"

  "Fine enough," Exley replied, his voice lighter by degrees. "Fine enough. My ETA is twenty minutes. CivPro should get there in ten."

  "Acknowledged," Walken replied and he cut off the channel with a subvocalized cough. Moments later he was starting down the bank, the Nambu brandished in one hand as he reached in his pocket for a palm lamp with the other. He slid his hand into the elastic loop that was tethered to the back of the semi-flexible plastic square, then squeezed it so that it projected a beam of pale light from its outward surface. It was a beam of moonlight, silver-white and paling, as he turned it down the bank toward where the bodies lay.

  Compared to the viciousness of the assault on the Koreans, the fate of the two CivPro cops was almost gentle. They lay there, heads twisted in the wrong directions, sprawled atop each other on the filthy concrete. Neither had gotten their pistols out, but their pacifier sticks lay nearby. Walken saw with a start that one had been snapped in half. He swept the area, but saw nothing else save for the usual detritus that clung to the edges of the canal bottom.

  Slowly, with his arms spread out to steady himself, Walken made his way down the side of the canal. The ground was well-gritted with fallen gravel and wear and he made it with little difficulty thanks to the ghost-beam the palm lamp threw. He stepped over the cordon of trash at the bottom and made his way across toward where the dead cops lay.

  Up close, he could confirm that their necks had indeed been snapped. Walken could see the purpling bruises around their throats where the high collars of their ribbed armor jackets did not cover them. One of them lay face down, but the other, draped over the back of his partner, stared upward in shock at the starless, darkened sky. Walken was reminded of Park's face when he pulled him off his desk, the same expression of surprise. He frowned, then frowned all the more deeply when he saw what was clutched in the dead cop's gauntleted hand.

  A scrap of dirty white silk shone from his padded fingers.

  "Shit," Walken hissed and brought up the Nambu. He crossed his arms, the Nambu pointed straight and ready and the lamp crossed behind the wrist at the forearm; the ghost-beam split through the darkness, flashing around him and through the hedge of trash. He very nearly made a complete circle when a form emerged from the darkness.

  He wasn't sure how he managed it. Walken had actually swept past the place where the Doll had emerged, but managed to flick back just in time to see her. It was the older one, tall and slender. She was filthy in the ragged remains of her silken dress, an idol of death that came staggering out of the flotsam. But instead of shyly peeking out at the sight of another person as he had seen Dolls do before, this one approached. Slowly, like a terrible thing newly risen from a crypt, she took a wobbling step toward him. Her hands were crooked into claws, her lips drawn back in a rictus of fury. She made a sound. It was not quite a scream, not quite a bellow — it was an inarticulate thing that promised violence, something too deep and hoarse for a young girl's throat. She charged him, moving with a speed that stunned him, her dark eyes bright with a predator's certainty.

  Walken hesitated in the presence of her viciousness, precious milliseconds flashing by. He could not quite allow himself to understand what was happening before him. Almost too late he recovered and he remembered the gun in his hand. His finger spasmed on its trigger and the Nambu roared its challenge in return.

  He had expected the bright green fletching of the darts to sprout as if by magic from her chest. Even with a Doll's doctored metabolism and synthetic components, there was enough paralytic in the flechettes to bring down a man three times their size. She should fall before him, almost instantly asleep.

  Instead, something
horrible happened. The child-thing flew back amid a chorus of wet thunder, her head and upper chest vanishing in a pale haze as the azides found their mark instead. What remained of her landed in a gory splatter and a tangle of limbs against the concrete. The white pool of blood substitute flowed about her. It spread faster than blood, Walken thought in the detachment of surprise. It was unnatural, just as wrong as she was.

  He stared at the corpse in shock. The thunder of the pistol rolled about in his ears, slowly fading away and in a moment Walken found himself fully cognizant of what had just occurred. A ringing silence, the gong of realization sounded in his ears, a gong that turned into a voice broadcast from his earbud. It was Exley's voice, rough but taut with curious tension.

  "Agent," he said, "Your gun transponder just registered a live-fire. You all right?"

  "I'm fine," Walken heard himself murmuring. "But she's, she's..."

  "She's what, Agent?"

  "But she's dead," he replied, his voice seeming to him a distant thing, floating away from him. "How is she dead? I selected the tranquilizers. How is she dead?"

  Exley's tone became wary. "Tom," he asked, "What did you do?"

  With a wooden hand Walken turned the Nambu's muzzle to the left and he stared down at its side — the LED that burned above the selector switch was an angry red, the eye of Balor staring up at him. Blank incomprehension filled his head like television snow.

  He swallowed with difficulty, his tongue going numb. "I don't know."

  The night swam past in a blur of shock, confusion and a sphincter-clenching barrage of questions by Exley the moment he hit the scene. The CivPro heat, arriving not long after Walken's gun had gone off, actually seemed very pleased with the outcome — they stayed back to form the cordon and keep back any street creatures that might return, not that they would and hovered waiting to claim the bodies of their fallen. Walken sat stricken on the car's front bumper waiting for Exley to show up and with him the forensic techs to go over the scene.