Omega point

CHAPTER 7

Autumn rain rattled hard on the windows as Veronique Valdaire worked on Chloe, attempting to trace Waldo through Kolosev's ripped files. She was tired and her muscles were stiff from hunching over her equipment, her nerves tense as she checked and rechecked her systems for infiltration by Kaplinski.

They were in a cheap hotel in Kharkov, five hours east of Kolosev's hideout, posing as tourists. The desk clerk hadn't believed them, but had not said a word. She'd taken one look at Otto and Lehmann and her face said it all. The Ukraine was a part of the European Union, but Russia was close, and altered men like Otto were a common sight, enforcers for exile Chinese clan-gangs, or muscle for Russian oligarchs and resource barons.

The room smelled of pickled cabbage and heavy bread. There were hairs on the soap and grease stains on the headboard above the bed. There were no modern materials in the room to absorb the signs of human life, no drones to scrub them away. Veronique had not felt clean since she came to the country. It didn't seem to bother Chures, who sat in a corner eating a bowl of borscht bought from a vending machine with a sour look on his face. He raised another spoonful to his lips, changed his mind and put the bowl on the scratched coffee table.

"Not to your taste?" she said.

" Sopa de mala," Chures replied. "How is your work coming?"

Valdaire tapped a few icons on Chloe's screen and sat back. She rubbed her eyes; she'd been staring at screens and holos for three hours and they ached with the glare. "I'm done. Chloe will do the rest. I've constructed a set of algorithms that should get round Kolosev's security — to say he was a hacker, his 'ware is pretty simple, all sequential, once you untangle the cover. If he knew where Waldo was, we'll know soon enough. I've some financial transactions to look at, which he buried deep. I've also got Chloe burrowing into the Russian military datanet, to check out likely locations for Waldo's base of operations should Kolosev's data lead us to a dead end. Their data is patchy, but one way or another we'll find Waldo."

Chures' face was hard to read. Valdaire couldn't hold his gaze for long; he was too cold and appraising, but spoke relatively warmly now. "Good, you're pretty good. You've been working hard. Want a beer?"

"It's not much," said Valdaire.

"You shouldn't be modest," said Chures. He hunted round for a bottle opener in the room's dirty mini-fridge. "Your record is impressive; not many backroom operatives get medals. I don't impress easily."

"I was only one person on my squad. I don't know why they singled me out." She meant that too. She had a suspicion, planted in her mind by Reardon, her jealous NCO, that she got picked out of all of them because she was the most photogenic, and because she was an immigration success story. That annoyed her, more because she hated to be judged for her looks, though like anyone she enjoyed being thought attractive. That annoyed her too, an annoyance at herself for such paradoxical, typically human, typically female, thinking. And fuck Reardon if he hadn't planted a worm of doubt in her mind over it.

Chures moved carefully. He was such a precise man, thought Valdaire. "InfoWar is a serious business. You should be proud of the service you gave our country."

"I don't see it that way," said Valdaire. "Most of the programmes I use are buy-ins."

"Apart from the illegal ones," said Chures. He found what he was looking for. Bottles clinked as he gripped two in one hand. "What about those? All self-written? You're a skilled programmer."

"I'd love a beer," said Valdaire.

A pair of sharp escapes of gas, and Chures handed a beer to Valdaire. "No need to be nervous, senorita," he said.

"Do you always tell women what to do, Mr Chures?"

That made him smile, a slight curve on his full lips, barely perceptible. "I am a Latino of a very old-fashioned kind."

"The patronising kind."

He shrugged. "I apologise, I am what I am." Chures took a pull of his lager. "These Ukrainians make bad soup, but their beer is not so bad. Where are our German friends?"

"I made Otto get some rest," said Valdaire. "He was beginning to look twitchy. He's emotionless at the best of times, but he was looking through me as if I wasn't there. I guess five days with no sleep is no good even for cyborgs. No, make that especially for cyborgs."

"And Lehmann?"

"Up on the roof, keeping watch. I have Chloe plugged into every piece of surveillance in the area, but he insisted. I think it's hardwired into him. They're worried about this Kaplinski."

"They should be. Have you read his file?"

"No."

"Then don't. You will not sleep for weeks."

"I can handle it."

"If you say so."

"You don't like them much," said Valdaire. It was getting dark early, winter drawing in, the rain showing no sign of letting up.

"No," said Chures. "No man should become too much like them; like the machines."

"You used to wear a personality blend. That kind of mind-tomind intimacy made you closer to the numbers than the cyborgs are," said Valdaire.

Chures rubbed at the scar on his neck where his AI partners' receiver unit had been implanted before it had betrayed him. "It was limited, traffic between him and me, buffered in my favour. I did it so I could understand them better, not because I wanted to be more like them," he countered.

"We'll never have a world without machines," said Valdaire. "You're swimming against history. Give up. Better to follow the current and hope we wash up somewhere safe."

"I don't recall saying I wished for a world without machines," said Chures mildly.

"OK, fine. Do you wish for a world where there are no thinking machines?" said Valdaire baldly.

"You come from the south," said Chures, and sat back in his chair.

"You're changing the subject," she said.

"I'm not. You ask why I wore the blend. I am telling you. Do you remember what it was like, for you, there in…?"

"Cote D'Ivoire, we came from Cote D'Ivoire. And no, I don't, not much. I was very young."

"Your file says you were seven, that's not so very young."

Valdaire let out a ragged breath and put her beer down, although she didn't let it go. Through the glass, the table, to the floor, its touch anchored to the room. "I've blanked most of it. It's all very dark and thankfully a very long time ago. And before you ask, I really don't want to talk about it."

"You were talking to Klein about it."

Her hands, around the neck of the beer; across the back of the left, if she looked hard, she could see a thin line, barely visible through the heavy pigmentation of her skin. They could never get rid of all the scars. "No, not really. I was talking to myself, I think. It helps. I don't want to talk about it now."

Chures took another swallow, fixed her with those cold grey eyes. "Your father was a university man, yes? He got you into Canada, right away. Good points score, straight over the Atlantic wall."

"The walls had not been finished then," Valdaire said, "but if that's your point, yes, we were lucky."

"You were. My family was not."

"You don't know what you're talking about," said Valdaire. A machete blade flashed in her mind, and she closed her eyes. She remembered more than she let on.

Chures cradled his beer. "I grew up a refugee, a real refugee, no home. We left Colombia; I was seven too, struggling north with thousands of others. Mexico was still in chaos back then, just joined USNA and under martial administration. What we found when we got there was…" He paused for a moment, took another mouthful of beer. "I was in Puerto Penasco. You ever hear of it?"

"No," said Valdaire.

Chures pursed his lips. "Why should you? It was one camp among many. But it was there, when I was ten years old, that I killed my first man, Ms Valdaire, a stinking beast who tried to rape my baby sister. There was such trafficking in the young then, such abuse, so easy in the confusion. He thought she was easy prey." He took another sip of his drink. "I used a screwdriver, one of the tools provided by the USNA authorities. It was carbon plastic, supposedly too hard to weaponise. One of the things I discovered in the camps was that there is little that cannot be used as a weapon. I sharpened it and sharpened it, grinding away at stones until they were worn to sand. Grinding it took me weeks, but eventually it took such an edge I cut my own finger just by touching it. The blood fascinated me, but I never cut myself again. I saw some of the other kids go that way, carving themselves in the night time, trying to secure an illusion of control." His eyes flicked toward her arms, and she hugged herself self-consciously. She wanted to shout that she hadn't done that to herself, she wanted to hit him, she wanted to cry. She did none of these things. "There is no control there, only despair," said Chures. "Despair is the worst emotion of all, it makes men weak, it makes them give up. Whatever happens, Ms Valdaire, never give in to despair."

Rain clattered harder on the windows. Chures looked at her, his eyes asking her to respond. She said nothing.

"The man went after my sister, stinking of shit and sweat. He saw me, but he paid me no attention. I was an undersized child — there was little food in the camps. His mistake. I leapt onto his back from a crate." He smiled. "You know, they were 'temporary containment boxes' given to us when we arrived, to use for a few weeks; years later they were all we had for furniture. The screwdriver pierced the man's neck more easily than I thought it would, a slight resistance as it hit the skin, before it stretched and split like a smile and slid into the muscle. The man dropped my sister, stamped about from foot to foot like one of the cheap robot toys that could be bought in the camp for ten cents."

Chures' cold eyes never left Valdaire's; there was a grim enjoyment now. Is he enjoying reliving this? thought Valdaire. He wants to discomfit me. He wants me to share. He thinks I am pampered, thinks I got off lucky. He knows nothing.

"There was only one fabber in the place," continued Chures. "I became fixated on those robots, spent an age getting the money together, to find that they weren't true robots at all, but clockworks that quickly broke.

"This man, he was like that; broken. His arm went out, grabbing at the sky, the other clutched at the screwdriver; he'd thrown me off, but it had stayed there. A froth of blood was on his lips. He flailed at us, so we scurried back, like mice, you know? Into the shade behind prefabbed shelters. The man fell to his knees, his eyes flat, blood pumping. He stared at me as if to ask why. I did not feel the need to answer.

"I had been aiming for the carotid artery, the way one of the older boys showed me. But I missed and only nicked it. I must have hit something vital, because he could not stand properly. The fat man took a long time to die. It was raining then, like it is now." He looked out of the window. "We watched as his life washed into the mud.

"Persephone, she was my sister. My parents were poor but they were not unsophisticated. My mother would have been a doctor if the war had not come, and my father, he loved stories, he told me so many. Persephone, like the daughter of Demeter, married off to Hades and whose six-month stay in the underworld every year caused Demeter's winter of grief to fall upon the world."

"What happened to them?" said Valdaire.

"Persephone died not long afterwards, killed by the haemorraghic fever. My mother died in a later epidemic. I was fourteen before I and my father left that place. He lives in Fresno now, but he no longer tells stories. The camp outside Puerto Penasco was dismantled in 2120. Nothing but fields there, those big round ones with the irrigation drip tracks." Chures put his empty bottle down, bent to the mini-fridge for another and opened it. "So, you ask why I wore the blend. Many people make the mistake of thinking I hate the machines. This is not so. In the camps I have seen the worst man has to offer, and later I learned of the mistakes that led to them. The machines can deliver us a better world, because they are good at forcing us to work together. We do not have a good record in this area; they are less selfish. But they must be subservient to us, not our masters. I am afraid not that they seek to rule us, but that they will, eventually, by default. That is why I behave the way I do. Man should have a hand in his own destiny.

"The Ky-tech are too close to machines. What they did to their minds was dangerous, and that is why Klein and his friend and that maniac Kaplinski are the last of a dying breed. Why do so many have phones, and not an internal link? I will tell you. It is not the fear of Bergstrom's, but because you know that to alter our minds makes us inhuman. Our humanity should stay in control, or we will cease to be human by small steps. I wore the blend so that I would know them better, not to become one of them, not like Klein."

The rain hammered down, mixed now with the ball-bearing rattle of hail bouncing off the pavements outside.

Valdaire spoke. "The world is full of horror. Every day brings more. I don't see the machines stopping it. They put up the walls, they turned their back on the south. They have stopped collapse by trapping half of the human race." Her voice was small but she was angry, not with him, not directly, not entirely; his story opened up the windows on some of her own past she'd rather forget. "Every one of us from the southern hemisphere has bad memories, Chures. What makes you different?"

"What makes me different? I could sit in Fresno, Valdaire, like my father, watching sports and brooding. I don't. What makes me different is that I choose to do something about it, senorita."

They sat in silence for a while, until the door connecting Chures' room to the other in their suite opened and Otto walked in. From the look of him, he still had not slept.

"We have a problem," he said.

Chures joined Lehmann on the roof while Otto remained with Valdaire and the phone.

"They are making no effort to hide themselves," said Chures, binoculars trained on a large van parked up the street.

"They are not," agreed Lehmann. "It's Kaplinski's way: he deals in fear. He's trying to frighten us — that and I don't think he wants to tackle me and Klein together."

Otto, keyed in to the conversation via his and Lehmann's Kytech machine telepathy, spoke to Lehmann. He has more than enough manpower to take us, Lehmann. He is waiting for us to figure out where Waldo is.

If it is important to him, it must be important to this k52 also. Which suggests we are on the right track; he could be a threat to them.

"He's playing games," said Lehmann out loud, although he whispered, for Kaplinski certainly would have directional mics pointed at his position. "Trying to make us run, lead him right to Waldo."

"What?" said Chures, party to only Lehmann's side of the exchange. Lehmann waved him to silence.

Yes, he is playing us, said Otto, his voice emotionless through the MT. Let's keep this short. Kaplinski might have access to our MT cipher.

Want me to put a cannon shot into that truck? I can take it easily from here, said Lehmann.

No. We're going to plan three as of now. Confirm.

Confirmed, said Chloe over the MT. The phone, modded and tinkered with by Valdaire since she was a child, pumped out a series of viral hunt and attack ware, swamping the local Grid. Already shaky from the events playing round Hughie's Choir, it took a big hit and slowed to a crawl as Valdaire's programmes reproduced rapidly and hit everything with Gridside ingress. Lehmann and Otto, shielded as they were, still felt the effects of one of Valdaire's presents, a worm tailored to disrupt cyborg interfacing protocols.

Another invaded the systems of the van, causing emergency venting of hydrogen from the fuel cell. Simultaneously, Chloe had all the lasers in the vehicle ignition system trip off together and focus in one spot rather than in their programmed depthvaried ignition sequence. There were many safeguards in fuel cell vehicles to prevent either thing ever happening. Valdaire's 'ware circumvented them all.

The van lifted off the ground, carried skyward on a pillar of fire. It twisted over and came crashing back down, blocking the road. Alarms went off round the entire block, car lights blazed on and engines revved, the vehicles banging into each other as they came online and tried to remove themselves from the danger.

Back in the room Otto said, "Now our car."

Out the back of the motel, the groundcar's windows went black. Broadcasting fake Gridsigs for Lehmann, Otto, Valdaire and Chures, it reversed out of its parking bay and headed off at high speed. Otto smiled as Chloe picked up a trio of airbikes lifting off and heading in pursuit.

"Do we go now?" asked Valdaire. She felt sick. She hadn't liked blasting the van; there were men inside. She'd killed many, she supposed, back in the war days, Otto was right about that, but he'd also been wrong; it had just been button pushing, easily dealt with if she didn't think about it. She'd never really squared it with her conscience. If she thought about it, it brought her too close to the men who scarred her hands, so she didn't. Maybe that made her worse than the cyborg. He clearly was bothered by it.

"Wait," said Otto. "Is the area clear?"

"Yes," said Valdaire.

"Then detonate the others."

Valdaire checked them quickly for human occupants. None. A street's worth of cars, dancing round each other as their onboard systems communicated and attempted to bring order to their escape, exploded one after the other.

"That will do it," said Otto.

Sirens.

"OK," Otto said, and ushered Valdaire out of the room. Chloe invaded the building's survnet sensors as they hurried to a side door in the building, scrubbing their presence from the recordings. "We're leaving now."

The noise of emergency vehicles, police and machines filled the night, lights sparkling in the rain. What little Gridwidth remained was clamped down, swamped by the informational traffic of AI and human emergency services.

Lehmann and Chures joined them on the street.

"Messy," said the VIA agent. "But effective."

"Kaplinski will not dare to make a move now," said Otto, looking up at the rooftops. "He's still watching. We need to lose ourselves, quickly."