CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

Kharkov

Valdaire worked with Chloe to trace Waldo through Kolosev’s files. She was tired and her muscles were stiff from hunching.

Rain rattled on the windows. 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. She’d taken one look at Otto and Lehmann and her face said it all. The Ukraine was a part of the USE, but Russia was close, and altered men like Otto were a common sight as muscle for Chinese exile-clans or the Slavic crime barons that fought them.

The room smelled of pickled cabbage. The wood around the handle on the connecting door was black with contact grease. There were hairs on the soap and stains on the bed headboard. It was all wood and dumb cloth. There were no modern materials in the room to absorb the leavings of human life, and no machines to scrub them away. Veronique had not felt clean since she came to the country.

Chures sat in a corner eating a bowl of vending machine borscht with a sour look on his face. He raised another spoonful to his lips, changed his mind and put the bowl on the 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 and sat back. She rubbed eyes aching with screen glare. “I’m done. Chloe will do the rest. I’ve constructed a set of algorithms that should get round Kolosev’s security. I’ve already narrowed Waldo down to three possible locations. I’ve also got Chloe burrowing into the Russian military datanet in case Kolosev can’t tell us anything, to look for likely candidates. Their data is patchy, but it will help us narrow our search down. One way or another we’ll find Waldo soon.”

“You’re pretty good at this,” he said. “You’ve been working hard. Do you want a beer?”

“Sure,” said Valdaire. Chures’ face was hard despite his warm words, and Valdaire couldn’t hold his intense gaze for long. She was glad when he got up and turned away.

Chures took out two beers from the dirty mini-fridge, then hunted round for a bottle opener. “Your record is impressive; not many backroom operatives get medals.”

“My squad was good. I don’t know why they singled me out.” She meant that too. “Some online hate-shit said it was only because I fit the profile. Female, immigrant, black. I don’t like being used as propaganda. As far as I’m concerned the medal didn’t mean anything.”

Chures moved carefully. He was such a precise man, thought Valdaire. “Who cares why they chose you? It does not mean you do not deserve it. InfoWar is a serious business. You are good at it. That is the truth.”

“I don’t see it that way,” said Valdaire.

“You should be less modest,” said Chures. He found what he was looking for in a drawer. The bottles clinked as he gripped both in one hand to work the opener. There was a pair of sharp escapes of gas. Chures held out a beer to Valdaire. “People like us have it hard, having to prove ourselves all the time. But we have to. Every success we have reminds the people up here that climate refugees are human too.”

She took the beer. “Do you always tell women what to think, Mr Chures? You’re patronising me.”

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

“The patronising kind?”

“I apologise, I am what I am, but I meant what I said. You are good. We have a moral duty. End of lecture.” Chures took a pull of his beer. “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’s twitchy. He’s emotionless at the best of times, but he was looking through me if I wasn’t there. I guess five days with no sleep is not good even 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 he go on guard anyway. 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.”

“You don’t like cyborgs much,” said Valdaire. It was getting dark early, the nights drawing in. The rain showed no sign of letting up.

“Definitely not,” said Chures. “They have given up their humanity. They are servants to the machines.”

“You used to wear a personality blend. That kind of mind-to-mind intimacy made you closer to the numbers than the cyborgs are,” said Valdaire. “In fact, you were a cyborg, by the official definition.”

Chures rubbed at the scar on his neck where his AI receiver unit had been. “My reasons were different. I joined with Bartolomeo so I could understand the numbers better, not because I wanted to be more like them,” he countered. “And I was always in control.”

“Until it betrayed you, and fell in with k52.”

Chures nodded. “Until it betrayed me.” He took another pull of beer.

“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.

“OK, fine, but I think you wish for a world where there were no thinking machines,” said Valdaire. She took her first sip of beer. Chures was right, it was good.

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

“You’re changing the subject,” she said.

“I’m not. You asked why I wore the blend. I am telling you. Do you remember what it was like, for you, there in…?”

“Côte D’Ivoire, we came from Côte D’Ivoire. And no, I don’t, not much. I was very young.”

“Your file says you were seven, that’s not young enough to forget.”

Valdaire let out a ragged breath and placed her beer on the table although she didn’t let it go. Through the glass, the table, to the floor, touching it anchored her to the world. “I’ve blanked most of it. And before you ask, I don’t want to talk about it. And don’t talk to me about moral responsibility. I’m just trying to live my life.”

“You were talking to Klein about it in the car.”

On her hand, around the neck of the beer, if she looked hard, she could see thin, silvery lines. They could never get rid of all the scars. “Not really. I was talking to myself. It helps, and I don’t want to talk about it now.”

Chures took another swallow, fixed her with cold grey eyes. “Your father was a university man, yes? He got you into USNA, right away, and to Canada, no less. 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.”

“That is my point, and you were lucky,” he said. “My family was not.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Valdaire. A machete blade flashed in her mind, and she gripped the beer tighter.

“Don’t I?” said Chures. “I grew up a refugee, a real refugee, no home, no cushy job for my parents. We left Colombia when I was seven too, struggling north with thousands of others in the great caravans. Mexico was in chaos back then, just joined USNA and under martial administration, open war in all but name. 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. “It was one camp among many. It was there, when I was ten years old, that I killed my first man. He was trying to take my sister. There was such abuse, so much rape, pain and death, it was so easy in the confusion for bad men to act, and bad times make a lot of bad men. He thought she was easy prey.” He took another sip of his drink. “I used a screwdriver. It was aid-issue, carbon plastic, supposedly too hard to take an edge, but I sharpened it and sharpened it, grinding it on stones until they were worn to sand. Eventually it took an edge so sharp I cut my own finger just by touching it. The blood fascinated me.” He watched her closely. “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 to Valdaire’s arms, and she hugged herself self-consciously. She wanted to shout that she hadn’t given the scars to herself, she wanted to hit him to get him to shut up, she wanted to cry. She did none of these things. “There is only despair that way,” said Chures. “Despair is the worst emotion of all, it makes people weak, it makes them give up. Never give in to despair.”

The rain hit harder at the windows. Chures’ eyes asked her to respond. She said nothing, so he continued to talk, low, and relentless.

“I can still see the man who went after my sister. I can still smell his stink of shit and sweat. He paid me no attention when he lunged for her in the street. I was a starving child. His mistake. I leapt onto his back from a crate.” He smiled. “A ‘temporary containment box’ given to us when we arrived, to use for a few weeks; years later they were all we had for furniture. The screwdriver went in easily, a slight resistance, before the skin stretched and split and it slid into the muscle. The man threw me off and dropped my sister. It was too late then. Perhaps he realised his mistake.”

Chures’ cold eyes never left Valdaire’s.

“Are you enjoying this?” she said. “Are you trying to make me uncomfortable? You don’t. You think I’m pampered, that we got off lucky. You know nothing about what happened to me.”

“Did you have to kill?”

She didn’t answer that.

“This man,” said Chures. “His arm went out, grabbing at the sky, the other clutched at the screwdriver but he could not pull it out. He was dying. We scurried back, like mice, into the shade behind the boxes. The man fell to his knees, his eyes flat, blood pumping. He stared at me as if to ask why.

“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 got into his spine, because he couldn’t move, and he took a long time to die. It was raining then, like it is now.” He looked out of the window. “We watched his life wash into the mud.

“Persephone was my sister’s name. My parents 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. Your family lived, yes?”

Valdaire nodded. “What happened to yours?”

“Persephone was 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.” Chures put his empty bottle down, got 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 saw the worst man has to offer. The machines can deliver us a better world. They are less selfish, and less sentimental. But they must be subservient to us, not our masters. Humanity should have a hand in its own destiny.”

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

“The world is full of horror,” said Valdaire. “I don’t see the machines stopping it. They put up the walls, they turned their back on the south. They have delayed collapse by trapping half of the human race, and their actions excuse all the old prejudices.” 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 south has bad memories, Chures. What makes you different?”

“What makes me different?” He laughed. “I could sit in Fresno, Valdaire, like my father, watching sports all day and brooding. I don’t. I choose to do something about the shitshow this world has become.”

They sat in silence for a while, until the connecting door to Otto’s room opened and he entered. 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 Valdaire, looking out at the large van parked up the street.

“They are not,” agreed Otto. He whispered, for Kaplinski certainly would have directional mikes pointed at their position “It’s Kaplinski’s way. He deals in fear. He’s playing games. Trying to make us run and lead him to Waldo. Let’s not make it easy for him. Are you ready?”

“Ready?”

“Ready,” she said.

“Then do it,” he said.

At Valdaire’s command, Chloe pumped out a swarm of attack ware, swamping the local Grid. Already shaky from the events playing out round Hughie’s choir, it took a big hit and slowed to a crawl. 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.

The ware invaded the systems of the van, causing emergency venting of hydrogen from the fuel cell. Another command tripped off the ignition.

The van lifted off the ground 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 whined, 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, Otto was right about that, but he’d been wrong about how she’d felt; it had just been button pushing, easily dealt with. She’d never had to watch. She looked at Otto. He clearly was not bothered by the killing.

Sirens sounded far off down the streets.

“OK,” Otto said, and ushered Valdaire out of the room. Chloe invaded the building’s SurvNet as they hurried out a side door, scrubbing their presence from the recordings.

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

Lehmann and Chures joined them on the street, and they moved off quietly into the town.

“Messy,” said Chures. “But effective.”

“Kaplinski will not dare to make a move now,” said Otto, looking up at the rooftops. “Too many eyes on this place, but he’s still watching. We need to lose ourselves, quickly.”

“We’ve got no car,” said Valdaire.

“We’re leaving the roads to go east. They’re not safe in Russia anyway,” Otto said. “We’ll go by rail, on the Transiberian Express.”