Kitabı oku: «The Puzzler’s War», sayfa 4
4
Peach
I only let myself cry once, that very night. I found a secluded ruin and with a little reverse engineering, managed to spark a fire from the power sword, although it did cost me too many energy cells and I promised myself to try and do it the old-fashioned way the next time around. Then I cleared the bone and skewered the meat on several sticks from the broken bow so the meat would cook faster. I’d only resorted to cannibalism three times before, and it was never a cherished culinary experience. This time was no exception. As the human flesh sizzled and cooked, I moved away from the circle of fire and found a dark corner, where I curled into a ball and sobbed quietly.
I was only a toddler when the Paralytic Plague, known as the Purple Plague, struck our town. Victims lost control of their bodies, then their respiration systems, and they fought to breathe until they died. My father and three brothers were gone in less than forty-eight hours, and I still remembered my little brother’s body being wheeled away to the local crematorium. My mother was not affected, but I was already developing high fever and had lost control of my arms and legs. The doctors moved me to a large hall where many lay waiting to die.
I’ve heard the story from my mother so many times, I’m sure my memory is as false as it is vivid. But I remember a group of men and women walking into the hall. They wore thick bio suits and blue facial masks even inside their helmets. Each carried a temperature-controlled medibag imprinted with the glowing logo of Tarakan. They quickly dispersed among the sick and dying. One of them, the only one who was also wearing old-fashioned spectacles inside the protection of his helmet, came and sat by my bed. He spoke in a soft tone of voice, almost a whisper, to my mother and told her he was from Tarakan University and that he had an experimental vaccine for the plague, but that it was not fully tested yet. The vaccine could kill me or it could cure me, and my mother had less than a minute to decide whether he should administer it to me or move to the next patient.
After watching her three sons and husband die, my mother didn’t hesitate. She told me years later that she had made a pact with herself that if I died, she would take her own life. The Tarakan doctor administered the vaccine by touching the fevered skin of my stomach with a metal object. I remember sweet coolness spreading quickly through my body. The next day I was on my feet. Out of 822 patients who got the vaccine, 645 survived.
My mother, a tax consultant by trade, applied for Tarakan residency the following week. Luckily, Tarakan was still accepting ordinary people back then. We moved to the City of Towers within a year, even though her trade was not needed there. She took any jobs they assigned her to, all below her skill and pay levels, but she never complained. Her sole ambition was for me to become a full Tarakan citizen.
I tried. I really did. But the shock of losing my family was too great. My mother worked hard and tried, without success, to compensate for the trauma we’d both endured. On the brink of adolescence, I became notoriously short-tempered. The puzzles and riddles were especially infuriating to me, and one day I threw a puzzle box at my teacher’s head, and someone came to speak to my mother. I was sure we were going to be sent away, but the Tarakan talent scout had a different idea. I was sent to the newly formed military academy and became a professional Tarakan soldier, eventually rising to the rank of colonel major.
These were pre–Guardian Angel days, when Tarakan still followed the international treaties forbidding them from using clones as soldiers. Keeping Tarakan assets safe meant biological humans had to do the soldiering. That was my job, more or less. I worked my way up the ranks not by solving odd puzzles but the old-fashioned way; killing Tarakan’s enemies.
I watched as Tarakan expanded and flourished, but I also saw the looming shadows and growing threats as other countries’ jealousy turned to fear, which festered to deep loathing and eventually hate. There were terror attacks, acts of sabotage, cybertheft, and even the danger of direct hostilities to many Tarakan assets around the globe.
When the decision was finally made, I helped train the first Guardian Angels. Well, trained is not the right word for it, as they knew how to fight from the moment they were created, but I did make them march in beautiful formations and sent them on countless black ops. It did not take me long to realise they were the future and I was becoming obsolete.
Eventually, it was my time for an early retirement. I never married, never had children—never had the urge, frankly—and was not big on friends, either. I had seen enough of the world to satisfy my need to travel without those endless boring vacations retired people take. So, it was either sit around in an undistinguished two-bedroom flat somewhere in the Eastern Spires till I died, or accept a second offer from the Tarakan security agency and become a hibernating agent, or a sleeper. When the offer came, I didn’t hesitate.
I thought I’d already seen it all, but the training to become a sleeper was a whole different ball game. You left everything and everyone behind, your body included, and uploaded your consciousness into Adam. You would wake up in different vessels, on different continents, countries, and cultures, knowing only who you were, what your alias was, and, most of the time, your mission. Despite what the name suggests, you didn’t actually spend your time there sleeping. The downtime was filled with training and briefings, teaching, virtual vacations, assignment preps, and a few more activities designed to keep you from losing your mind.
Once in the physical world, I could never recall the full details of my past operations, a needed security measure should I have fallen captive, but I did know the missions were getting significantly more aggressive as time passed. From simple data theft or blackmail to high-risk sabotage, kidnappings of major political figures, and high-profile assassinations. I even lit the spark, via a well-placed chemical bomb and several misleading fingerprints, to a major war in the Middle East, causing seven figures in casualties and the breakup of two regional powers.
Was I always on the just side? Hell if I knew. Many of my missions were on the shady side of the moral scale, and in my reports, as I remembered them, I mentioned more than once that aggressive subterfuge and iron-fist diplomacy led only to shortterm gains at best. We were becoming the bad guy for too many global players, and although they were weaker and far behind us on the technology scale, their combined force was a real threat.
Now I sat among the ruins of mankind. From what I gathered, they … well, we, as a species, seemed to have somehow survived Armageddon only to continue to fight and kill each other over and over again. Tarakan, the shining-bright gem of humanity, was destroyed. All I’d worked for and risked was for nothing. Billions of people had died, and those who were spared simply picked up a gun or a sword or even a club and kept at it.
Yet here I was. Someone had downloaded me into this vessel and given me a mission, so there must be some hope. I wiped away the tears and walked back to the fire, where the meat was slowly turning black, then sat down, picked up a stick, blew carefully on the meat, and chewed off a mouthful. The taste matched my mood.
Tomorrow would be a new day. I would find a way to reach the City of Towers and find out what my mission was. Tarakan was defeated, but perhaps it was not dead yet.
5
Twinkle Eyes
It was a much longer trek to the farm than anticipated, even considering our condition. The land was hilly and hard. Only bushes and an occasional low, twisted tree grew. Coming down the hills barefoot left the soles of my feet bleeding from countless cuts. As before, the pains were a little distant, and I stifled the unmanly yelps and cries I made after several amused glances from Galinak, who bore his pain in stoic silence. At some point, he found a hefty chunk of wood which in dire circumstances could perhaps be used as a club.
“You won’t knock out a hungry bear with that,” I half joked, filling the silence.
“No offence, my sharp-eyed friend,” he said, waving the chunk of wood at me, “but if we meet a bear I am planning to knock you out with this and run for it.”
That shut me up for a while. Normally I would have dismissed that kind of talk as Galinak’s rough sense of humour, but he was in a foul mood. I filled him in on the details of our mission as I knew it, and that caused two major tantrums and several more outbursts.
“No wonder everyone hated those rust fuckers,” he exclaimed, his unfamiliar face turning red. “They are playing us again.”
“They kept their word, and kept us alive.” I knew it was a mistake to try this argument as soon as I said the words.
“Did they short-circuit your wires, Twinkle Eyes? Tarakan only brought us back because they need us to do their dirty work.” Galinak waved his finger at me. “I ain’t gonna play their game again. You might have struck a deal with them rusters, but no one asked me to chase no little girl.”
“She’s not a little girl anymore, she’s probably seventeen by now.” If I thought that such a fact would cool Galinak’s temper, I was mistaken.
“I don’t care how old she is,” he bellowed at me. “I ain’t doing this again. They can kiss my naked, hairless arse, if they ever find me.” He began walking faster, leaving me behind.
I stiffened a yelp as I stepped on a sharp stone. “Wait, Galinak.” To my surprise, he actually stopped and turned, and I hopped closer.
“Remember what Rafik said. We’ll die in less then three years, and not in a nice, quick way.”
He looked at me. “Sometimes living a short, free life is better than a lifetime of bowing your head to a master.”
I could sense there was no point in trying to convince him of anything at that point. “Look,” I said, tuning my voice to sound calm and reasonable, “let’s find something to wear, food and water, and perhaps a weapon that is better than a branch. Then we’ll talk about it.”
“Fine.” Galinak nodded. “But there ain’t nothing to talk about. I’m done with those rusters.”
We continued to walk at a slower, careful pace. Galinak brooded in silence while I took my mind off a possible encounter with a bear by playing with my sight. It was similar to the power I had in my old body, but tenfold. It was as if I’d attached a Tarakan artifact to my eyes. I could see ants crawling on the ground or a bird of prey far up in the sky as if it were up close, but despite looking all around us every chance I got, the seemingly abandoned farm remained the only man-made structure I could detect. It was no surprise, really. The Catastrophe had left behind only remnants of the human race and a lot of empty land. Many survivors instinctively congregated in hamlets, villages, or towns, but there were others who moved away, or simply stayed where they survived, choosing to brave the elements on their own.
We reached the farm as the sun disappeared behind the mountains. Despite its abandoned look, we didn’t take any chances. I stayed low outside the premises and Galinak snuck in solo. After a while he came out and waved me over. It was indeed abandoned, from the look of the unkempt vegetable garden. We were in no condition to be picky, and we found several vegetables to nourish us. Eating for the first time in our new bodies was an odd experience. Like before, the feeling was duller than the awareness of the effect. I could tell that my body was being recharged by eating the rotting tomato, but thankfully, the taste was distant enough for me not to gag.
The barn had been emptied out long ago, but Galinak did find a butchering cleaver, which must have fallen when the owners were packing. It was a lucky find, since metal was priceless in these rural parts. It had some spots of rust, but the edge was true. Galinak kept it for himself and gave me the wooden club with a sly smile and a meaningful wink. I chose not to protest.
The living structure was only one story high but spacious enough to contain an extended family, perhaps even several generations, and it was almost completely cleared out. We found a few pieces of wooden cutlery near the cold hearth, too used and chipped to be worth taking. There was no food anywhere, and the wild ferret we discovered in one of the rooms wisely escaped via a hole in the wall before Galinak could make dinner out of him.
“Galinak, I found something,” I cried out. Despite the lack of alarm in my voice he arrived, quickly brandishing the cleaver. I nodded toward the closet.
“The door is stuck.”
He shrugged, lay the cleaver gently on his foot, placed one hand on the handle, and braced the other against the twin door. He looked at me.
“Why the gloomy face?”
“Because I can see what’s inside.”
He considered my words for a few heartbeats before pulling hard enough on the handle to yank it out of the door.
“Rust,” he swore, and without preparation he simply punched through the wood, pulling back to break it into several pieces. Once the dust had settled, we peered inside. There were only two items of clothing hanging from the rack by a wooden hook: a farmer’s blue overalls and a farmer’s wife’s dress.
Galinak looked at me again.
“Oh,” he said. “Now I get it.”
6
Peach
Clearing the ruins of the Radiated City took several days and a third of my nourishment pills. As I walked through the empty streets I realised why, despite the dangers of contamination, the looters still came to plunder. The city was destroyed probably within hours, not weeks or months. Missiles rained from the sky, and power rays carved the ground, destroying everything in their path. The nature of most Tarakan weaponry was such that tens of millions died within hours, but a lot of their items survived. I know this because I had been in charge of security when those weapons were mounted, piece by piece, on the Star Pillar and smuggled up to the hub to be assembled in space, then sent on long orbit so they could not be shot down by antisatellite batteries on Earth. At first, I did not know what we were carrying up. Even with my security clearance, I still shouldn’t have known that we were breaking several international treaties by secretly carrying missile parts up the Pillar, but all the secrecy in the world can’t stop a drunken intelligence officer from blabbing while trying to pick up a woman at a local bar. We had surprisingly good sex that night, but the next morning, I got him fired.
Aside from the awfulness of the world I woke up to, the trek was a long way from the worst situation I’d been through. I remembered having to survive twenty-seven days in a Bangladeshi sewage system while an army of assassins hunted me down. Compared to that, walking in a ruined city, even in the rain, was almost a relaxing affair with the added bonus of casual looting.
Of course, by now, clothes and delicate items were long gone, but I still managed to find neo-flex plastic material, and with the help of my power sword, I cut and wrapped it around the soles of my shoes and made a cover for my head. There was also enough material for a crude sack. Remembering Malk’s debriefing on currency, I filled it with pieces of junk, mostly metal. I even found a cracked porcelain cup, which somehow had survived all this time. I wrapped it carefully in the last remaining piece of neo-flex plastic and walked away, feeling somehow more optimistic than before. The sword belt was too large for me to tie around my waist, so I threw it over my shoulder and under my armpit, bandolier style, making sure the hilt behind my back was within easy reach.
Aside from the great destruction, the second noticeable thing about the place was how empty it was. There were endless rows of buildings and not a single soul. If what I’d heard about the war was true, and the weaponry Tarakan possessed had been used to their full potential, billions had died in a very short amount of time. I found myself contemplating survival rates. Was the entire planet completely destroyed?
Two days later I spotted another looting party treading through the ruins, but this time I kept my distance. There were five of them, all more or less the same make and creed as the three I left behind. Since they were all heading into the city, I followed their tracks in the opposite direction until I eventually found their camp. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was always a camp, even in the most remote of places. If there was business to be made, merchants came to trade. Bring enough people together and someone would eventually bring a cart and begin trading. Soon enough women would appear, either of their own free will or, more likely, under coercion. In time, the camp grows to a small hamlet, then someone usually takes control of it by force.
Until the moment I saw the camp I hadn’t fully comprehended what had happened to us as a species. The vast city behind me was in ruins, true, and a man had aimed and shot an arrow at me, but I still somehow expected to encounter modern life on the outskirts of the city. Seeing a horse and cart travel the unpaved road towards a camp surrounded by a medieval wooden wall turned my stomach. It was as if I’d stepped out of a time machine.
I sat down amid the tall grass and watched the camp until nightfall, noting the two hanging corpses outside the gate, the smoke coming out of the wooden houses, the water well and the people coming to use it. It could have been a scene from a period virtual flick, but for the large truck parked in the middle of the camp, and even that vehicle was antique, the sort that drove on cooking oil and coal. All but the poorest countries of the world had shied away from the use of such polluting trucks, but right then, to me, that truck was a beacon of modernity. It became my mark. I had to get into that truck.
With the poor zooming ability of my vessel, it was too far off for me to see any details, and parts of the truck were obscured by what looked like poorly erected wooden buildings. After changing position several times, I managed to watch it being loaded with what seemed to be metal junk. The truck owner’s face was hidden inside a grey cowl but he had an obvious limp. The men helping load the truck were armed to the teeth with a mixture of antique twentieth-century weapons and more medieval-looking ones. They were a rough enough bunch, but the man wearing the cowl seemed to control them. They dispersed as night came.
The prudent thing to do was to wait at least another day, gather intelligence and figure out the best way to act. Special hibernating agent Vera Geer, or even Colonel Major Vera Geer, would have strongly suggested such caution, especially when operating in a noncombat vessel. But I was afraid the truck would leave at first light, or even before, and I would be left behind in the Middle Ages. Besides, the night’s darkness provided an opening. It was true darkness, the sort you rarely experienced in the world I used to live in. The cold temperature was another consideration, and it was taking its toll on my vessel, which was shaking and consuming a lot of energy to continue functioning. There was danger I would damage the vessel or even freeze to death. Or perhaps these were just excuses. I was tired, hungry, cold, wet, and still emotionally in shock. I wanted heat, and light, and food, and perhaps even a conversation. I wanted to get away from this place, which looked and felt like a bad hallucination. I also needed a good night’s sleep. I needed to dream. Operational directions might be received via dreams, but I had to find a safe place to fall into a deep sleep, enough to open my mind up to such transmissions. That could not be done in the field.
I unwrapped the neo-flex from my shoes and made sure everything was tied, secured, and as jingle free as possible, although with the coin bag and a sack filled with metal loot that task was bordering on the impossible.
The camp had four crude guard towers, but for some reason only two were manned and their only light sources were torches. Reaching the outer perimeter was an easy enough task and I didn’t even need to crawl, a blessing since after the few days of light drizzle, the ground close to the wall was awfully muddy. There were wooden stakes in the ground, as if the people in the camp were afraid of a cavalry charge. I slipped past them and reached the wall.
I aimed to reach the part of the wall that was closest to the truck, but that part was impossible to climb. Primitive or not, whoever had built the wall had done a fine job. Moving a little farther, I managed to find a part where I could get in at least two handholds. They were impossibly far apart, but that was all I needed.
Before climbing, I stayed still and tried to deepen my hearing. My vessel’s senses were only one notch above biological human level, but it was enough for me to hear the stutter of a small engine, the steps of three people walking away from me, coarse singing, and the snorting of pigs. That last one came with a stench as well. I took a deep breath, entered ESM, feeling adrenaline rush once again through my body, and quickly climbed the wall, my fingers digging into the wood like an alley cat. I found myself on a narrow parapet, from which I quickly jumped down to the other side, landing behind a hut and huddling down. It took me a few minutes to recover from the disorientation and nausea of the ESM.
The stench of livestock mixed with rotting garbage and human excrement was apparent. This place was the graveyard of hygiene. I leaned and peeked around. Apart from four guards standing around a small bonfire behind a gate, the dark streets were deserted. I sneaked away from them, passed the central well, and headed towards the truck. It was parked next to a second gate, effectively blocking it. Years of usage and crude patch jobs were apparent, as well as bullet holes and scorch marks, but the makers of the EverTyre company would have been proud to know that their product, worn and battle scarred, was still functioning even after a nuclear holocaust. I still toyed with the idea of stealing the truck, smashing through the gate, and driving away into the sunset, but the motion sensor lock on the truck’s doors made me change my plans. Actually, the placement of a modern gadget such as the motion sensor was uplifting. It meant there was still hope …
With the right tools, I could have bypassed the lock, but the risk of attracting attention and turning this into a massacre was too great. Besides, even if I got into the truck and managed to drive it, I hadn’t a clue where to go. I needed information and, if possible, assistance.
A dog began to bark and I retreated back to the central well. I followed my ears to the back of the biggest wooden shack of this sorry little settlement. The engine noise came from a small generator, which, by the smell of the black smoke it was exhaling, was fuelled by a mixture of cooking oil, fat, and perhaps even manure. As I watched, the back door opened and a middle-aged man, dressed in disgustingly stained clothes, poured a bucket of such slop into the open tank. I waited for him to go back into the hut and headed towards the front entrance.
Generator or not, the main light source of this small tavern was a central fire under a large iron pot, a serious fire hazard under any modern law anywhere in the old world. The stench almost made me walk back out, but once the door opened, enough people turned their heads at me to make a retreat dangerously noticeable, so I walked into the gloomy shadows of the room and closed the door behind me.
