Omega point

CHAPTER 20

"It was a set-up," said Valdaire.

Otto nodded. He avoided looking at her, keeping his gaze fixed on the wall of the heavy lifter's second tactical command. The room was plain aluminium and carbon plastics, utilitarian military. There were no windows on the lifter, for they presented vulnerabilities. Instead screens were imprinted into the walls, giving front, rear, dorsal, ventral, starboard and port views. There was a lot of degraded forest here and not much else.

"Did he know?" asked Valdaire quietly.

Otto closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the cold metal behind him. "Of course he knew. That eugene boss of his — it was his idea to draw Kaplinski out. We knew that he'd either be looking for Waldo too, or he'd do his damnedest to stop us from finding him, being as he's the only hacker to breach the Reality Realms successfully."

"Waldo was caught. He was no success."

"It all depends on one's measure of success," said Otto. He opened his eyes and looked at Valdaire. "The others might have done a lot of damage, but most of them died."

"So," said Valdaire, her voice hard. "By your measure then, was it a success, your gamble?"

"Leaving an operative like that working for k52 freed was never an option," said Otto.

"And Chures? What about him? An acceptable casualty?"

Otto shrugged. "There is no such thing, Valdaire. Don't goad me. But one loss to neutralise Kaplinski? Our mission was a success."

"You're a cold bastard, Klein."

Otto stared at her, his eyes vacant in a manner that disturbed her, hollow like those of all Ky-tech, something taken from them. "When you have seen what I have seen, Fraulein, come back and tell me that again."

"Did Lehmann know?"

"No," said Otto.

"Do you trust anyone, Otto?"

He closed his eyes. She looked tired. "No."

Valdaire puffed a breath out, half in anger, half in frustration. "You screwed up, Klein. Kaplinski's too much for you."

"Maybe," he said.

"Maybe what?"

"Maybe to both," he said. "But you haven't."

"What do you mean?"

"The engines have stopped." Otto stood. "We have found Waldo."

Lehmann and Otto requested their weapons, but were refused. Whatever agreement the VIA had thrashed out with the People's Dynasty Government did not extend to them being armed.

The Dragon Fire troops went first, jetting off from the wide bay open on both sides of the heavy lifter. Below them stretched endless taiga, a carpet of sharp-pricked trees wrinkled where a river cut a shallow valley. There were signs of an overgrown road leading to a complex of long-abandoned buildings, a military base by the look of it; a series of squares and hard lines under the vegetation. The forest had reclaimed much of it.

Otto watched with approval as the Chinese established a perimeter and swept the area for hostile presences. They worked with little wasted movement. In half an hour they were done, and the heavy lifter moved over the abandoned base and lowered itself to treetop level, the resurgent woods preventing it from setting down.

Otto, Valdaire and Lehmann rappelled down to the forest floor. The Dragon Fire soldiers were occupied elsewhere.

Commander Guan joined them on the forest floor, distinguishable from his men by his red helmet and rank markings.

"This is the correct location?" he said, plastic English coming from his helmet speakers.

"Yes," said Valdaire. "If Kolosev was correct and managed to find Waldo. But we could be looking at a dead end."

"He has found him alright," said Otto. The base was piles of crumbling concrete streaked brown by centennial rebars rusted to nothing. Trees thrust up through asphalt gone to gravel. "He is here somewhere."

They walked through the ruins, the Dragon Fire soldiers golden blurs as they ran with superhuman speed from bunker to bunker or streaked overhead. Guan stopped, and bid Lehmann, Otto and Valdaire do the same. "This way," he said. He led them to where two soldiers stood alertly, another on a munitions bunker covering them, one of nine such buildings in a long row. Behind it were three more rows, some collapsed in on themselves, most sound.

"A vegetable garden," said Valdaire. The garden had been painstakingly hacked out of the base's pavement. Camo netting held up by poles canopied it over.

"Well hidden," said Lehmann. "I suppose he's got to eat something."

"And there," said Guan, pointing to another bunker. "A store. My men have found many provisions and foodstuffs."

"Right," said Lehmann, "if Waldo's not here, someone is."

"It is Waldo." Otto walked on past the vegetable patch, and pointed to a quartet of bunkers. "These have been threaded with cable." His Ky-tech eyes revealed a spider web of silver energy spread over them.

"Satellite relay," said Valdaire. "Not as efficient as a dish."

"But not as easy to spot," said Lehmann.

" Genau," said Otto.

There was a flicker of movement. One of the Dragon Fire soldiers shouted and raised his gun arm. Otto slapped the weapon aside as it discharged, the distinctive muted crack of the flechette going supersonic, followed by a clack as the round blew a crater in rotten concrete.

"Klein," said Guan. "You are not to act here."

"Then tell your soldiers not to shoot. We have to take him alive," said Otto. The figure darted away, weaving round bushes and vanishing into the rows of bunkers. "Come on, we're going to lose him! Lehmann, go left."

Otto set off at a sprint, ignoring the shouts of Guan behind him. Jets roared as the Dragon Fire troopers lifted off and those already airborne converged on the fleeing shape. Despite his anger at Otto, Guan must have ordered his men not to fire, as no more rail gun shots sounded. Dragon Fire troopers roared through the sky, Mandarin barked from their speakers, followed by Russian, English and Buryat, ordering the figure to halt. Otto vaulted a fallen tree, thrashed his way through undergrowth dying back for the winter. The figure appeared, a flicker between two bunkers before it disappeared. Otto had his iHUD capture the moment, and enlarge.

"It's a young woman, perhaps mid-twenties, threat levels minimal!" he shouted into his radio. Get to her before the Chinese do, Lehmann, he added via MT.

Otto sprinted through the lines of bunkers, bouncing from their sloping sides, twisting past obstacles and leaping the detritus of long-gone men.

Lehmann thought to him, I nearly have her!

The two of them converged, Lehmann running along the avenue parallel to Otto's. Tree branches whipped at Otto's face, old glass crunching under his feet, Dragon Fire troops sketching trails of fire above him. The girl was running for her life. Habitation in the DMZ was strictly prohibited; the Chinese could execute her just for that.

They cleared the lines of munitions bunkers. The girl was passing through a crack in a set of big double doors into a large building half-sunken into the ground, perhaps once a tank garage.

Otto accelerated as he cleared the ground between the munitions dump and the tank garage. The trees were shorter here, few of them having forced their way through the concrete of the square, the soil on top too thin to support proper growth.

Otto ran through the door and stumbled in shock.

Honour stood there, half in shadow. Her hair shaved, pretty eyes smudged black underneath, pink scar on her head from the mentaug implantation.

"Honour?"

The girl's face wavered and she hit him hard across the head with an iron bar.

Honour vanished. The woman in her place wore a threadbare grey dress with a heavy wool cardigan and fingerless gloves. Long brown hair whipped round as she dropped the bar with a clatter and ran across the garage. Light slanted in through the ceiling where the roof had failed. She headed for a cowled doorway at the back, from which came weak artificial light.

Lehmann leapt over the prone Otto, humour gone from his face under the influence of the mentaug, stone cold.

Otto scowled and recovered his footing. Lehmann caught up with her as a Chinese Dragon Fire rocketed in through a hole in the roof and knelt, covering the door at the back with his weapon.

"Steady there! Steady!" said Lehmann. The girl punched him hard in the throat, and gasped as her fist encountered his subdermal plating. Lehmann caught her by the wrists. He tried English, then Russian. The girl quietened, but her eyes were wide with terror.

Otto approached and spoke to her in Russian. It was halting and heavily inflected, not as good as his English. With connection to the Grid he could run a translation programme, but in the DMZ, where Grid coverage was patchy and officially circumscribed, he had to rely on his own meagre skills.

"We mean you no harm, we will not hurt you. We are looking for Giacomo Vellini, also known as Waldo. Do you know where he is?"

"Fuck you, you German pig!" she snarled at him in Italianaccented German.

"Vellini? You know where he is." Otto remembered something from Waldo's file: family. His mentaug caught his mind searching for the information, and dumped it into his higher consciousness along with a EuPol mugshot. "You are his sister, Marita?" said Otto.

The doors squealed as golden-armoured hands forced them back, crumpling their decayed edges into powder. Valdaire pushed through beneath them, followed by Guan. She panted hard. Though fit, she was no match for the enhanced Ky-tech. Otto was glad to see her. The sight of another woman might calm Marita.

"Waldo?" she gasped.

"Not found him yet."

"This is his sister," said Lehmann.

Valdaire frowned.

"She was heading towards that door down there," Lehmann added.

"You and your black whore will get nothing from me!" screamed Marita, adding a stream of Italian whose vehemence made Otto glad he didn't speak the language. Her defiance was impressive, he thought, but she was still scared, her eyes flicking back and forth between the Ky-tech and the Chinese troopers.

Valdaire was patient. "We really have to speak to your brother." And she reached out to the woman.

Marita flinched. "Don't touch me!" she said in English.

Valdaire withdrew her hand, and explained why they needed Waldo.

Some of the fight left Marita. "You are too late."

"Has he fled?" asked Otto.

Marita gave a choking laugh, halfway to a sob, and shook her ratty brown hair. "He's not here any more."

Marita led the three of them, Commander Guan and two Dragon Fire troops through the door at the back of the tank garage. The Chinese soldiers' armour was too bulky to fit, so they stripped down to their lightly plated undersuits, Guan retaining his command collar, and carried pistols down with them. They took a staircase down into a subterranean complex of rooms. The stairs turned and a long corridor doubled back under the garage. The place was dank. Steel doors were jammed open, hinges rusted solid, water pooled round equipment abandoned a century ago, the concrete ceiling prickly with stalactites of lime leached from the walls. They ascended a short flight of stairs and the area became less derelict. Marita had a home there, of sorts. Furniture scavenged from the base combined with the odd brought-in item made it almost welcoming. She took them into a room that looked as if it had once been a kitchen large enough to feed five hundred men. Much of it was dusty, but one corner had been cleared and decorated with homely scraps, a splash of bright paint, postcards on a rickety set of shelves, old photos gathered from the barracks, mildewed faces of dead Russian soldiers grinning out at a future they'd not foreseen. At the centre of this spot of domesticity an old gas cooker had been patched up and converted to burn wood, its gas vent to the outside jerry-rigged as an impromptu chimney. She asked them to sit at a rusty table in mismatched chairs while she went to a coffee pot atop the stove.

"Your brother was resourceful," said Otto. He spoke German, as the language most present shared to the highest level. Commander Guan set his command collar to translate the conversation into English for Valdaire's benefit. It marched out blandly spoken and overly ornate.

Marita shrugged, shoulders thin under her threadbare clothes. "He tried his best to make something for us here. He was always practical. He used his talents for computers, but he was so clever, it was not difficult for him to learn how to do this. How many people could do the same in our age? Learn how to live in the woods, without machines to help?" She smiled defiantly; there was pride here.

"Why did he bring you here?" asked Valdaire. A short pause while Guan's suit translated for Marita.

Marita returned to the table with a coffee for herself, none for the others.

"I am a Grid addict," she said matter-of-factly. "I have been for most of my life. I got hooked when I was ten years old on the RealWorld Reality Realms. I spent all my time in there. I lost all my friends in the Real. I skipped school to go to jacking parlours. Our parents tried to force me to stop. Clinics, psychiatrists, drugs… I ran away, hitching rides over the Alps. By the time I was fourteen, every minute I was not in the game I was on the street, earning money. I speak good German, yes?"

Otto and Lehmann nodded.

"I learned it sucking the cocks of fat businessmen who liked little girls. All so I could get another fifty New Euros, another few hours of game time. For what? So I could redecorate a room in my castle? Or earn another pony with a silver mane?" She grew angry. "I wasted my life in there. But I could not stop." Her head dropped, hair curtaining her face.

"My brother, he blamed himself. He could always walk away from the Grid. I could not. He introduced me to the Realms. For fun, he thought it would be something fun to do with his little sister…" She stared into her coffee. "He found me, living in a squat in Dusseldorf, after they shut the Reality Realms down. I was filthy, skin and bone. He'd spent so much time looking for me, turning his talents to hacking the old databases to find me through my avatar information. He almost did not. He tried so hard, first to fix me, then breaking into the Reality Realms over and over again to try and get me back in when I sickened more. He went to jail."

"His name suggested he wanted to get caught," said Valdaire.

"You cops, social workers, do-gooders, psych-men, all such idiots. He didn't," said Marita. "He knew how much money he could make from becoming a celebrity criminal, so he let you get him. That's why the stupid name, that's why he let himself be arrested."

"None of this is on his file," said Valdaire.

Marita's voice grew high and angry. "Because he didn't want it to be! If it weren't for me, you would never even have heard of him. He wanted to keep me out of the hands of the authorities, he didn't want me rewired. But he miscalculated, and the sentence was longer than he thought. When he found me again, I'd become a real junkie whore, hooked on heroin, hating the greyness of real life, hating what was left available online even more. He tried again, he was so patient, he loved me, and I broke his heart so many times. He brought me here. I was almost dead from withdrawal, mad with depression. He did the only thing he knew; he hooked me up. But he did it differently this time, so they would never find us."

"Hooked you up to what?" asked Otto.

Marita smiled. "He was so clever. To the Reality Realms, of course. Not the old one I used to love so much, that was gone. He made a whole world, just for me. He hid it so carefully, a happy place full of life and love, and while I was in there he watched over me, protected and cared for my body out here. He tried to bring me out over and again, but I always wanted to get right back in."

"I never understand Grid addicts. Far better to live a real life that means something," said Lehmann.

"You are a man who is not really a man any more, and you are a soldier, you live a life of adventure others can only get online. And I am an addict. It is a sickness, not a preference." She spat the words out as if they were poison.

Careful, thought Otto on MT, she's unstable.

"You are out now. What happened?" said Valdaire, again waiting through the pause of translation.

"I will show you." She stood, and beckoned them to follow. They left the kitchen and went further along a corridor, to a room that hummed with power generation and the subtle work of machines. Two immersion couches took up much of the space, next to a wall of blank-faced computers. Real immersion couches, with proper vintage medical tech, not like the improvised set-up Valdaire had used to enter Reality 36.

A shrunken figure lay on one of the couches, a v-jack askew on dirty blonde hair, skin brown and shrivelled, lips drawn back in the hard grin of death, eyes small in their sockets. One hand clutched protectively to its chest, holding a dirty blanket in place.

"My brother died. He became sick. He was so good at making sure we were not detected here, and getting us enough to eat, but he could never take care of his health. Mama scolded him for it when he was little, not eating the right food, not wearing his hat and gloves in the cold…" She trailed off. "It was Christmas Flu. A year ago. When he came to get me, he was already very sick. He could not bring me out on his own. He had only enough strength to lie down next to me and put the v-jack on. He was sure he could wait it out, but by the time he realised he was seriously sick, it was too late. He tried to get me, to help him, but died in there, right in front of me. I came out to find his body. I have never been back."

"And you will not go in again?" said Valdaire.

Marita stared at the corpse of her brother. She was frail and dirty, and so small, thought Otto. "Who knows?" she said. "Giacomo's death may have shocked me out of it. I was selfish, addicts are. I've always known it but I didn't give a damn. The pull of it, it's so strong, to live a life in there, many lives… So much better than life…" She shuddered. "I have left myself a reminder, in case I ever feel the need to go back in.

"I turned the dehumidification equipment up to maximum," said Marita, indicating machinery that Waldo must have installed to protect his computers against the damp. "I didn't want him to rot, my brother who threw his life away for mine. He made me a queen and died for it, my poor, poor Giacomo."