Shadow of a Dead Star (The Wonderland Cycle)

by Michael Shean

  When Exley did show up, he showed the usual professional courtesy. He didn't even ask a lot of questions at first, those which he did being perfectly polite, but Walken's inability to explain just how the Hell he managed to splatter the Doll when he knew that he'd selected the tranquilizers caused Exley to begin grilling him in earnest. There was just no answer he could come up with, short of mechanical failure. Maybe the Nambu's selector was fritzed, he didn't know. He just couldn't explain any of it.

  Exley seemed very dubious of Walken's story about how the Doll attempted to attack him, which made him even more nervous. Exley was a good guy and all, but on the other end of the sword like this Walken was suddenly very clear as to just how effective Exley was at this job of his. Confronted with the horrifying bulk that was his fellow Agent, Walken felt any desire that might lurk in the dark parts of his mind to lie dissolve immediately. He found himself thinking that Exley probably could've killed those two CivPro cops as cleanly and quickly as the Doll seemed to have.

  Goddamned Wonderland.

  After a quick conversation with Wolsey over his earphone (Walken didn't want to think of how angry Wolsey was over getting woken up with this whole thing) Exley took Walken's gun and had a CivPro unit send him home. It was policy, of course; the gun had to be analyzed and he couldn't exactly drive around in Federal property — which, upon being delivered to the door of the Rodman by the sleek blue carriage of the CivPro tricar, put him in the middle of the Verge without easy transport.

  Sit tight and don't worry about it yet, he'd been told. We'll come and talk to you soon. For Walken, who had never lived in this city outside the bubble of the Federal system, he felt suddenly as if he had been dropped off in the wilderness and left for dead.

  It was this feeling of dull abandonment that he carried with him up the elevator and into his suite, unfurling the numbness like the tinted plastic hung over the windows. The Nambu could have been fritzed, sure. It would have to be. But as he lay down to sleep for the second time that night, he found himself bracing for the worst.

  This time he didn't dream.

  "Tell us again about the Doll."

  Walken had risen early the next morning, feeling like he'd spent the night strapped to the inside of a cement mixer. He'd showered, tried in vain to eat a slab of beef he'd made with the industrial protein printer that loomed in his kitchenette, pulled on a pair of old fatigue pants and a t-shirt while he waited for the Bureau to send someone over.

  'Someone' turned out to be Exley, this time joined by Brighton. They'd been at it all morning, the two of them, grilling him over what had happened the night before and, though he'd had to answer questions in the past when he was on the Narco beat, it was nothing like what he felt sitting stuck between those two.

  Currently they were in the living area that made up the central section of his suite. Walken sat on the overstuffed synthetic leather sofa, hands spread upon its thinning surface, while Brighton sat in one of the chairs that stood opposite the battered old coffee table. Exley circled like a mammoth shark; his bulk threw a mean shadow across the two of them as he revolved, slowly, with one hand jammed into his pocket.

  "What about her?" Walken was looking up at him, sounding resentful.

  "You did a real number on it with that blaster of yours." His penchant for peppering his words with street slang only seemed to make him ever more of a brute, harkening back to the bruiser he was in his young days. Despite his anger at the situation, Walken could only admire his technique.

  "Yeah," Walken said flatly. He shifted faintly in his seat, but he didn't take his eyes off Exley.

  Exley seemed unaffected by Walken's stare, pausing instead to examine a fingernail. "Took out most everything important," he said. "Splattered the biocomp, too. Nothing to confirm or to refute your story — which was what, again?" He looked down at Walken expectantly. Brighton smiled.

  "To repeat...again..." Walken's voice was thick with his resentment now. "I had gone down the side of the canal to attend to the fallen officers."

  "Without backup," Brighton pointed out.

  "They could've been alive," Walken replied. "I decided it was better to go down and see what I could do than to wait."

  Exley paused, his hand resting now on the back of the sofa. "You car's data log indicated that their heat profiles were weak," he said slowly. "Why did you think they might have been alive? They were cooling corpses at that point."

  "But I didn't know that," he shot back. "Thermal data can be misleading in terms of determining survival. They could have been in shock, bleeding but intact, or — "

  "Are you a doctor, Agent?" Brighton's brows arched.

  "You know I'm not," Walken growled.

  "Did you have any medical or first aid training in your police days that would give you any insight as to their survival?"

  While Walken liked Exley well enough — despite the current situation — he'd really never realized what a fucker Brighton was. "No," he repeated, "But Jesus, I couldn't just leave them there if they might have been—"

  "Tom." Exley frowned faintly, but his tone was as gentle as it was firm. "Now, I told you myself that CivPro had registered flatlines on both those boys. You had no reason not to wait for backup."

  Walken's eyes narrowed faintly as they swept up to regard Exley again. "What the Hell is this about, Exley? I never had to worry about backup on a solo before. Procedure allows me to step in as I see the need to."

  Exley and Brighton looked at one another. "...Agent Walken," Exley said after a long moment's pause, "You said that you had dialed over the tranqs as you got out of the car, right?"

  "Right."

  "You're sure about that?"

  "Yes, dammit," Walken nearly snapped. "I told you, I confirmed a green light visually before I approached the scene. There's no way that I could have been mistaken."

  Again the two agents looked at one another. "The Chief agrees," Exley said and now there was a real heaviness in his voice that made Walken's blood run cold. "You're on suspension pending an investigation into this situation. They're not convinced you didn't kill that thing on purpose."

  "So the gun didn't glitch?" The dread that had settled on his shoulders now reached down to seize at his heart. How the Hell could this have happened?

  Exley shook his head and his tone dipped into apology. "I'm sorry, Tom," he said, "But your transponder registered a manual selection before you fired. As far as the Bureau's concerned, you dialed those explosives yourself. You're off the job until they make a determination as to why."

  He stared at the floor. Anger flared in him, anger and confusion about the night before. He thought about the girl again, the white halo of artificial blood that ringed her ruined body. And then another thought struck him and he looked up at Exley with his eyes narrowing. "Wait," he said, leaning back in his seat. "Why are we doing this here? It isn't regulation to do a preliminary interview outside of the Bureau office."

  With a shrug of his mountainous shoulders Exley took a step toward Walken, hands sliding out of his pockets. "Wolsey wants this taken care of right away," he said, the apology still in his voice. "The Bureau doesn't want a rogue in the press and there are more than a few Civil Protection cops going on about your so-called act of revenge in the name of their fallen buddies. Word's getting around despite the media blackout - probably thanks to that cunt you pissed off last night, from what Wolsey told us. Now it's only a matter of time before your story reaches the public and the Bureau wants this whole thing answered for one way or another before that happens."

  Politics, Walken thought darkly as he looked back up into his comrade's brown eyes. Always fucking politics.

  Exley and Brighton had left with Walken's badge, his backup pistol and Hunt's datacell, leaving him feeling more naked than he had felt in a very long time. Without the Bureau to work with, the constant press of work, he found himself suddenly devoid of purpose. His life had been the jihad, the war against the darkness and suddenly that had been ri
pped away from him.

  He spent the remainder of the morning staring out at the city through the tinted plastic, hating its tyranny. What had happened to have made the gun register as it had? His hand didn't slip and bump the selector as he was squeezing the trigger and even if he had, the Nambu would have bucked or jammed. Could he, somehow and without thinking, actually have chosen the azides? It was this thought that chilled him more than anything the Bureau could throw at him.

  No. He did not believe it. Walken did not need his inner voice to confirm what he knew of himself, nor did he consult it. He had seen people crack up in his police days, certainly in his early days at the Bureau and he was not going down that road. Wonderland business required certain steel that he possessed. At least he thought he did. Isolation from people didn't keep you from doing your job, did it?

  And yet even as he said this to himself Walken felt a certain familiar chill settle over him, for if it was not his own hand that had selected the lethal rounds, who the Hell had? Could someone have hacked the pistol's transponder, forced the mechanism to switch over without noticing? He thought about the telltale click as the Nambu's electronic switch bid the feed plate to shift, how difficult it was to hear in a crisis, how the recoil dampener completely hid the sensation of the feed change. It could be done, he knew — but who would go so far as to frame him out of a job?

  And what, Walken wondered stormily as he watched the silhouette of another needle-plane descend on Sea-Tac, had happened to the Doll? What about the other one? For a moment, thoughts of his own plight shifted in his mind to give way to the ones that had gotten him into this mess in the first place. If he had killed the first, after all, where had the second gone? Had they captured her and said nothing? He thought of Stadil and his fleshless, grinning face and wondered if he were somewhere in Hell laughing.

  Walken spent the afternoon on the Mitsubishi scanning the newsfeeds, occasionally checking his barren mailbox in the vain hope he might hear from someone further about this mess. United Europe was menacing the East again and riots raged in Atlanta, but he saw nothing about the rogue daughters of the Laotian parliament minister or of any killings or disappearances that he could link to their story. The Bureau was doing a good job of keeping things quiet to have all of CivPro looking for them. Or was it that they'd given up the case? He didn't think so. Romeos weren't so easily pushed aside in his experience.

  And certainly not those in which an Agent had appeared compromised, the voice in his head reminded him. He felt sick for a moment and decided to get up and do something else.

  When he'd come back to the Mitsubishi night had fallen thick and sullen across the city and he was encrusted with dust and the sweat of labor. He had spent the afternoon working in the building, doing some long-needed repairs that work hadn't allowed him to indulge in. Now that he was on suspension he had time to handle all sorts of earthly concerns.

  The majority of that work was spent in the elevator shaft, prying off old slabs of epoxy that had once anchored advertising plaques in the time between the Rodman's closing and his arrival. You did it with a sharp industrial cutter; Walken had a progressive knife himself, a nanoextruding blade that hardened into ceramic once it 'flowed' out of the grip. Nearly monomolecular, it was inordinately sharp and dangerous to the unwary wielder. He often thought it could be a good impromptu combat knife.

  He spent the better part of the day in the elevator cars, scraping away, dulling down the blade and smacking the handle so that the nanomachines reformed it. After that, he'd gone upstairs and repaired the various dishes tied in to the network hub. He had almost found himself enjoying it from time to time, performing his duties as unofficial super, but then some stray thought would remind him of why he was there and the joy would be drained out of it.

  The Kowalskis were happy for the effort, though. He thought Mr. Kowalski might have actually been struck dumb by suddenly having a non-intermittent network link to keep his wife consistently entertained, but he had rallied and complained that the heating was set too low.

  "It's the middle of summer," Walken had told him. "Why do you need heat?"

  "Because Marta, she is cold, asshole!" Well, at least some things remained as they had been.

  When he next sat down to the Mitsubishi and fired up its holographic screen, the mailbox chime rang alerting him to new messages. Walken's heart was still as he stared at the icon flashing in the corner, then took a breath before calling up the mailbox display with a dip of his finger.

  Sure enough, a message waited there, but it wasn't from the Bureau. Instead, a curious entry appeared in the mailbox window. There was no source, no timestamp, nothing but a single word in the subject field glowing bright and blue against the holoscreen's slate-colored plane.

  "STADIL," it read. The letters seemed to pulse, as if in challenge.

  Walken sat there a moment, staring at the word as if it were in some foreign alphabet. Curiosity was by far a greater force than reticence however, a force that bid his arm to lift, to extend his finger and press it against the dead man's floating name. At his touch a message window sprang to life over the mailbox. A single line of text manifested there. "HEARD ABOUT YOUR SITUATION," it read. "WANT TO HELP. PIKE PLACE, EAST SIDE, KIOSK C. 23:30."

  He sat there for a while, staring at the message. Was this a Bureau trick? Mysterious messages coming out of the blue didn't exactly spur his desire to further imperil his position. And yet, even as he stared at the words, he wondered; was this Kelley? He'd always been a good guy, even kind of a friend (which were, in Walken's case, in very short supply). Was he trying to pass on some information to him? He took a deep breath and decided that he'd have to chance it. He needed to know just what the Hell was going on.

  He lay down again, setting the clock alarm to try and rest. Meeting mysterious strangers usually meant you needed all the strength you could muster.

  Pike Place Market hadn't been a market, open-air or otherwise, for over forty years. In the modern day it existed under glass, or more specifically a cubic canopy of Lexan panels and steel framework that sealed over its boundaries. It was little more than a corporate-sponsored exhibit now. Since the crash and the subsequent redevelopment it had been preserved as a slice of what had made the city great, another throwback landmark of the city's previous grandeur. Like the Space Needle it had been walled off and segregated from the rest of the New City, a lingering reminder of the city's old glory.

  They were also islands of sanity to Walken. He didn't visit the Market nearly as much as the Needle; it wasn't on the way toward his piece of the Verge. But he'd come out there at night sometimes, when the tourists had all gone home and the only corporates were security staff. He could park in the sprawling lots surrounding it, relax and not even the junkies would come crawling. A junkie who got caught by the corporate heat usually disappeared and nobody wanted that kind of shit to deal with. They usually left Walken alone, the corporates and the street creatures alike. His usual car screamed 'cop', but the lack of corporate branding screamed 'Fed' even louder. Now he was neither a Fed nor even a cop and there would be no guarantees.

  The Market was surrounded by bus kiosks, where the public transports came and transferred passengers. During the day they were abuzz with advertisements and holograms, but at night, when the Market was closed, they were just squat barns of clear plastic lined with the dull slabs of sleeping displays. One of these would be the stage for their rendezvous.

  He had rented a squat Honda tricar from a black-market transport agent who lived deeper in the Verge, just on the edge of the Old City where the harsh underground, the wilderness, began to spring up. It had once been an undercover car for the CivPro heat, paid for with a fistful of wrinkled dollars cribbed from his oft-neglected account (he'd saved a fortune in scavenged furniture and rent, after all), but what had really been expensive was the fact that it had a sensor unit on board. It was an old unit, not nearly as sophisticated as the modern types, but he felt the extra insurance was worth i
t.

  Now Walken headed toward the Market in the aging, gunmetal wedge, wondering what would come for him. The car's headlights raked across the row of kiosks, sparking flashes of blue gleam and pulled up to the curb a few kiosks away from the chosen spot. He sat in the sudden silence for a moment before starting up the car's old sensor suite, squinting into the overhead map displayed on the car's onboard display panel. There was nothing.

  He frowned and checked the display clock; he was five minutes early. He waited a bit more, watching the display. Five minutes became four, three, two... and still nothing showed. He gave up the sensor for glitchy; sometimes the moisture got in under the cowlings and screwed up the already aged electronics, finicky after long years of use. "I am gonna get killed," he muttered to himself, but he slid out of the tricar anyway.

  A cool drizzle started as he stepped onto the lot. Walken reached inside for his long coat and pulled it on. As he did so, he caught a look at himself in the glossy plastic wall of the kiosk. Fatigue pants splashed with paint, his ragged t-shirt, his hair rumpled by the wind. He looked like one of the junkies coming for a fix. How quickly the image of Thomas Walken, stalwart investigator, had faded! He frowned at his reflection and shut the door of the Honda, stalking into the kiosk where the dead screens would hide him from himself.

  He stood there for a while, watching as the drizzle became a gentle, constant shower. The rhythm of the rain was here again and he found the old instincts coming back with it. The hairs on his neck pricked up, as if someone might be looking over his shoulder. He had no gun, only the fat grip of the progressive-knife he used to cut cable. Its weight filled his hand as he drew it out of his pants pocket and he felt the segmented blade snap out into its narrow triangular form. The segmented ceramic blade gleamed whitely in the refracted glow of the parking lot lamps, a fang in his hand.

  "No need for that." A familiar voice sounded from the sidewalk just behind him.