Omega point

CHAPTER 11

Otto walked the narrow corridor, compartments off to his left, headed toward the executive restaurant car at the centre of the train. A Cossack stood guard at every break between the carriages, and he was forced to undergo security scans at each. His faked details held, one of two mercenaries in the employ of Corporate Energispol, escorting two scientists to new field stations in Sinosiberia, all part of "The New Spirit of Cooperation", the Chinese called it. The Russians railed ceaselessly against the loss of the east, but it didn't stop them doing business there.

Whatever Valdaire had done was triple gold standard; his ID checked out and he passed without incident, although it took him ten minutes to walk the five cars to the refreshments car. As he went the train swayed, AI-guided bogies negotiating a track and bed centuries old. Soon it would be replaced with a super-wide-gauge line. Adverts for the new trains plastered the walls of the carriages, liners of the steppes; others were a litany of technical specifications as worthy as psalms. These trains would be large, well armed and luxurious, another way of shutting out the wreck of the world. The bulk of the line's new embankment was black outside the train windows, a wall to carry a fortress.

The executive refreshments car was a doubledecker, the lower floor a restaurant. Otto ignored this and headed for the spiral staircase leading to the glass-roofed upper lounge. The stairs were clear, glowing plastic, lighting up motile silhouettes of naked women gyrating on the surface; tasteless East Euro robber-baron glitz. The bar area was the same, dimly lit, a long padded bar with a human tender down the right-hand side, blue-lit plastic straying into the ultraviolet range illuminating an array of bottles, more pornographic images flickering in holo and relief around and along it, writhing across the ceiling. Brassy music played, horns and new guitar with soft and sleazy cymbals. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied by a fishtank, denizens luminous under the light. The room's decor gave Otto a headache with his wider spectral capacities engaged, so he turned his vision down to the human norm. It wasn't any prettier the way unenhanced eyes saw it.

The barroom was divided into several horseshoe-shaped booths lined with seats of buttoned brown leather, a table at the centre of each. Most were occupied, patrons silent behind acoustic privacy shields. Otto took scant attention of these details as he walked in. Head full of the scent of Honour, nervous system juddering under the rip and write of mentaug spooldown, he was intent on the bar, needing to wash it away. He ordered a whisky from the bartender, some vile Chinese malt, downed it in one and gestured for the bottle.

When he turned around to look for a corner to drown his sorrows in, his twin hearts stalled.

From a booth, Kaplinski was staring right at him.

Otto hadn't seen him. He hadn't even been looking for threats, too deep in his own misery. He could have silenced the mentaug, put himself into combat readiness. He was in the field, he should have had its umbrella capabilities offline, but he hadn't. He knew why.

If he carried on like this, he was going to get himself killed.

Kaplinski sat with a drink of something pale lit up by the glow of nearby UV illuminations, his teeth and the whites of his eyes similarly eerie. He put his hand out, palm wide, and indicated the sofa he sat on.

Otto's MT buzzed, a fizz of painful static. Someone trying to hook in. A squad icon that had lain dark for many years ignited. Vier; Kaplinski's number. Kaplinski's personal ident, a grinning shark's face, glowed by it.

Hello Otto, came Kaplinski's emotionless machine burr over the MT. Please, join me.

Otto weighed his options. A Cossack guard stood to attention at the top of the stairs, staring resolutely ahead. He carried a caseless carbine and a charged sabre. Neither would stop the Ky-tech, but there were a great many of his friends aboard the train, and some of them would carry specialised equipment. Cyborgs were a common tool of the plutocracy and the Sino-gangs. Not all of them had good manners, and the Cossacks were equipped accordingly.

Otto made his decision and walked over to the booth, stepping into its acoustic privacy cone, cutting the shitty music out.

"Isn't there anyone on this damn planet that doesn't have access to my MT encryption?" he said, sliding himself onto the horseshoe sofa, his knees tight under the table.

"So good to see you, Leutnant," said Kaplinski. He'd become lean, his face sharp and more wolfish. He'd aged as hard as Otto, the stresses from being Ky-tech written on his skin. Only Lehmann had escaped those. Kaplinski was smaller than the other Ky-tech in Otto's squad, wiry with hard ropes of natural and implanted muscle, hair shaved close, electoos set into his shiny scalp, both glinting in the light. "Not going to kill me?"

Otto held Kaplinski's gaze. The fugitive's eyes were dark as flint, calculating, devoid of pity. And yet Otto could see no sign of the feverishness that had been there last time they'd met. "I could kill you right here, or maybe, just maybe, you would kill me." He inclined his head toward the Cossack. "But neither of us would live to tell the story."

Kaplinski laughed and slapped the table. "Same old Klein! You always did have a sense of humour buried under that overbearing sense of duty."

"Duty's done, Kaplinski." Otto poured himself a tumbler full of bad Chinese scotch and drank it down with a grimace. "I did my part."

"And now you are a mercenary, like me."

"Not like you. I am no murderer."

"You are a killer, Klein, we both are."

"I do only what is necessary."

"So you still have your sense of duty," countered Kaplinski. "You carry it around with you like a full kitbag." His face switched, becoming disdainful. "You always were maudlin; honour, duty, responsibility. A good little German. Still pining over your dead wife?"

Otto looked into Kaplinski's face and fought down the urge to attack him there and then. He'd never forgive the things Kaplinski had done. That time in Brazil when he'd roasted a container full of frightened women and children had just been the start of it. Otto had brought Kaplinski's erratic behaviour to the attention of his superiors more than once, but they'd let him serve; the EU mission to Brazil had been stretched tight, and personnel like Kaplinski were expensive.

Idiots, thought Otto. The girls, three of them found raped and ripped up, near their barracks in Magdeburg: only that had brought Kaplinski down and got him locked up. Then he'd escaped, running wild and murderous across the state until they'd brought him to ground outside of Hasselfelde.

Otto remembered the hostages — not his word, the response team's — he'd never thought it the right one. Kaplinski hadn't wanted to trade them for anything, hadn't taken them to bargain. By that point Kaplinski had devolved to a point of animalistic savagery. They were playthings. The mentaug presented Otto with the memory in merciless clarity. He was sighting down a flechette railgun at Kaplinski while he picked out the eyes of bound shop assistants in a car charge station. Kaplinski's face at that moment, oblivious to the moans of his captives, his fingers slick with humours, his expression that of a child crushing ants. He'd looked up preternaturally swiftly when he heard the crack of the dart as it broke the sound barrier, staring right at Otto before he went down. He should have waited for the catch team to get into position, but twenty men had already died, and it was such a perfect shot, and what Kaplinski was doing…

When they'd got to the charge station, Kaplinski had gone.

Otto pushed the memory away, looking deep into the soulless pits Kaplinski had for eyes. Perhaps the purestrain parties were right; altered men like them were not improvements, they were less than human. "You're an animal, Kaplinski, a sick one. You should be destroyed."

"Not tonight," said Kaplinski. His smile returned as if someone had flicked a switch. He sipped his drink. Otto smelled it, sweet. His adjutant put the name into his mind: Furugi, thick pseudoJapanese stuff made of almonds. Kaplinski finished it off, brought up the menu on the glowing surface of the table, ordered another. His fingers slid over the menu in the table. Music filled the quiet of the privacy cone: "Clair De Lune". "I like piano, so calming," he said. "I have found it hard to be calm, in the past. I…" He stopped and shook his head hard, a man trying to shake bad thoughts away. He smiled again, and Otto saw some of that old feverishness creep back onto his face. "You know, Otto, we could be friends again."

"We were never friends, Kaplinski."

Kaplinski's smile became fixed, his teeth small and sharp. Had he always been bad? Some men were born predators.

Kaplinski ran a finger round the top of his glass where a smear of his drink glowed in the UV. "We could have been friends, then," he corrected himself. "We still could be. k52's fixed me, Otto." His smile jumped up and down his face, as if he couldn't quite pin the emotion down. "He can fix you too."

"I'm glad you decided to celebrate your new-found sanity by trying to kill me," said Otto. "That was you in the Rockies, and in London, trying to blow up my partner."

Kaplinski inclined his head. "Yes. Regrettable. You had to be stopped. Orders are orders."

"Money is money, you mean."

"Not this time, Klein. What k52 intends is worth a few lives."

"I feel honoured one of them is mine. How much did he pay?"

"I promise you, money had nothing to do with it. You will understand, in time."

"We've fallen for this kind of shit before, Kaplinski, or don't you read history?"

Kaplinski laughed. "Otto, what can I say? Sorry? Will that satisfy you, if I apologise?"

Otto sucked another glass of whisky through his teeth and squirted it round his mouth. He breathed in hard. His progress through the bottle was not improving its flavour. "No."

"It's not too late, Otto. Help me find Waldo."

"He is a threat to your boss? Well, that just means I will do my damnedest to make sure you never set eyes on him. You shouldn't have shot Kolosev. You didn't get what you wanted from him, or you wouldn't be here. Did he stop being so helpful before or after he was dead?"

Kaplinski stared, smile hard and close to cracking, fingernails scratching the table's active surface as his fist clenched.

Otto swilled his drink round his tumbler. The liquid was too quick to run down the glass. Chinese shit. "Kolosev, he was a mummy's boy, but he wasn't an idiot. He hid that data well, but I have a genius on my side. Where is your genius, Kaplinkski? Now we've got what you thought you had. Whatever k52 is paying, it's too much. You're a joke."

Kaplinski glared at Otto for a long moment, smile feral, then leaned back, choosing to break the tension. That was a change; the old Kaplinski would have gone for him by now. "That trick you pulled back in Kharkov was a good one, Otto, hiding in plain sight — " he looked around the bar "- but we won't be in plain sight for much longer. Once we're out in the zone I will not hold back."

"Try your best," said Otto. "It won't be good enough."

"I could have killed you tonight, Otto. I didn't have to see you. I knew you'd come here. The mentaug. It was a problem for me, I guess it's a problem for you too. Tell me, Otto, do you sleep much? I think that you don't. That damn machine whirring away up here all the time." He tapped his temple, and renewed his jerky smile. "We don't have to fight, Klein; k52 can stop it. Join with us. The memories, the violence. It can all stop."

"Screw you, Kaplinski."

Kaplinski dropped his attempt at warmth. Frustration warred with anger on his face. "You're a fool, Otto. I have changed, why can you not see that? What do I have to do to convince you?"

"As the English say, Kaplinski, leopards do not change their spots, and you're the most fucked-up leopard I ever met."

"Soon we'll all be better, only if you don't join with me, you won't live to see it."

"Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. I prefer to see what I'm buying. I don't trust k52."

"You trust Richards."

Now Otto smiled. "No. I don't." He stood and turned to go, but Kaplinski called to him.

"Tell me, Klein, I have been meaning to ask you, for years now. When you had the chance, why not just kill me there and then? Is that why you left the army, Otto? Because you couldn't kill a comrade-in-arms? Did your sense of duty desert you for a moment? Did it shake you, Otto?"

Otto stared at Kaplinski. They'd asked him that in the inquiry, asked him almost as many times as he'd asked himself since: why not go for the head shot?

He'd given neither them nor himself a satisfactory answer, and he didn't have one for Kaplinski either. He stared a moment longer, then walked away.

"Klein!"

The privacy cone cut out Kaplinski's voice and Debussy, and he was back in a world of bad Russian music and the pornographic dreams of the Slavic resource elite.

The others were eating breakfast when he returned to their compartment, the sky outside lightening.

"Where are we?" Otto said, reaching for his bag to pull out a water bottle.

"Three hours out from Bratsk," said Chures. "You been drinking, Klein?"

"Yes. Don't concern yourself about it, I can drink my own body weight in pure alcohol and not feel it. Big disadvantage of being Ky-tech," said Otto. "We need to go now. Kaplinski is on the train. We cannot disembark on the Chinese side as planned."

Valdaire put her fork down. "What now?"

The train was moving slowly through an abandoned town of ruined houses, taking it slow over track warped by melting permafrost. A battered sign, name in flaking Cyrillic illegible, passed the window. Larger signs dwarfed this, lining the track in long procession. A high fence abruptly started, caging the railway line, active electronics bearing one message in multiple languages: "Danger. Demilitarised Zone."

"We have to go now," Otto repeated. "Into the DMZ, away from the train."

"This is going to be hard," said Chures under his breath, pushing his breakfast plate away, omelette half-eaten, his expression saying he'd suddenly lost his appetite. "They'll come after us, not just Kaplinski."

Otto shook his head. "Perhaps easier than jumping the fence on the Sino-side as we planned. The Russians don't care so much, they like to make work for the Chinese."

"But the Cossacks. They care," said Chures. "They're relentless. And there's the Han. They will come for us."

Lehmann flung out his arms and patted the backrest of his chair. He shrugged with easy insouciance and smiled his little boy's grin. "Yeah, getting in to Sinosiberia won't be easy. But if anyone can do it, Otto Klein can. Now, are you going to eat that omelette or not?"