by Unknown
Chapter One
"Riders On the Storm"
The tradition of the witch is as old as history: the ancients were acquainted with the powerful spells of "Striga" or " Maleficia" and feared them. In the Middle Ages - contrary to popular opinion - it was held that the mere belief in the existence of witches was sufficient to constitute herecy. It was, however, only the modern age that produced witch-hunts, in the course of which countless women, but men, too, fell victim to defamation and superstition. Interpretations of this period range from the misogyny of the Church, through the deliberate killing of midwives knowledgeable in herbal lore, to the attempted extermination of clandestine animist cults.
This last reading, especially, has been gaining adherents since the middle of the twentieth century - not so much in scientific circles as among "new witches" and Wise Women, who first went public at this time. From sections of the womens' and environmental movements, as well as older esoteric traditions, a new force arose, initially in the then USA: names like Gardner, Sanders and Starhawk are merely examples of the Wicca Cult, which flourished particularly at the turn of the century and is in the main dedicated to the Great Nature Goddess.
Dr Natalie Alexandrescu:
Witchcraft and Other Natural Magic in the AGS, German History on Vidchips VC 24, Erkrath 2051
A cold, stiff northwester whipped up the waves. The wind tasted of salt and petrochemicals, a disgusting mixture that, experience taught, not even a double aquavit could dislodge from the palate. At least the breeze dispersed the penetrating, chlorine-permeated washhouse smell that had been hanging over the water with the fog of the past days. The pirates would have preferred the fog to hold a few more hours and mingle with the dark of the night to produce an impenetrable black soup.
In the southeast, a good ten kilometers away, the lights of the Bremerhaven arcology gleamed across the water. From this distance the roving halogen beams of the searchlights twinkled like the harmless lights on a Christmas tree. But as soon as a sizeable aircraft or vessel came into the five-kilometer radius of the security zone and failed to radio the valid security code, the wee lights turned into predators' eyes, below which greedy jaws gaped and spat out their deadly load. But the pirates had no intention of taking on the firepower of the arcology and so kept a respectful distance.
"No weather for dudes who hide their bald pate under a toupet," called across Druse, who, like Pandur, was bracing himself against the wind as he wiped a rag over the launch rails of the catapult.
In the light of a shaded low-frequency lamp, Pandur examined the ammunition feed of the minicanon and offered no reply.
A short time later, the two men had completed their routine inspection of the wamos, which were latched into the launch bays in the bow of the hovercraft, and returned to the bridge.
Neither the wind nor the flying spray had any effect on their smooth, dark-red syntholeather outfits, but since they had not yet donned their helmets, their hair was swept back and plastered down against their skulls. For a matter of seconds the heads of the two men were caught in the beam from one of the two lamps. Druse's craggy skull, with the red flag of his curly hair, looked as if it had caught fire, making his forehead jack resemble a bullet wound to the head. In addition to this, what had once been a harelip between mouth and nose but had been stitched up and had long ago knitted together, made him seem like the victim of a blow from an ax. In contrast, Pandur, with his vigorously cropped, short blonde hair, looked more like a stubbly punk that a determined hairdresser had unsuccessfully tried to force into a permanent. His forehead jack was likewise exposed. His ascetically stern facial features with the pale skin like stretched parchment, his slightly hooked nose and the deep shadows under his eyes signalled physical toughness and at the same time a kind of spiritual weariness copied with an otherworldliness bordering on self-abnegation. It seemed as if the elements were momentarily depicting his innermost soul in his face. The moment passed, leaving behind rigid lines that expressed steely determination to do his job to the best of his ability and nothing more.
You're a pro and that's that!
Pandur lowered his head against the wind and plodded on, a hand on the rail at all times, his knees counteracting the roll and pitch of the ship. Beneath his synthojacket, his cyberdeck dug painfully into his ribs. It was foolish to keep dragging it around with him and he frequently got to hear scoffing remarks on it. Since the Renraku caper he had not been back in the matrix but, however much he had broken with the past, he had not so far been able to part with the deck. Indeed, he positively clung to it. It was both his talisman and the symbol of a lost identity. He persuaded himself that without his deck he would be submerged in a vortex which would devour all his feelings and thoughts and then spew him out again as a soulless machine. And perhaps he was right to fear this.
Don't you sometimes wish to be that soulless machine so that you're better able to deal with this world? Why do you fight it? You're a bundle of contradictions and you ought to finally commit yourself to one line!
Unwelcome thoughts and, right now, about as much use as a hole in the head, even dangerous, and downright unprofessional. Get that into your thick skulls, you damn synpses!
He had by now reached the door to the bridge, was the first to squeeze in and enjoy the sticky warmth.
The Broken Heart was holding her position on quarter power from the braking jets so as not to be driven by the wind and tide still deeper into the Weser-Jade Bight - a product of the last Great Flood, which had wrought such incisive changes on the north German and Dutch coastline. Brack, the helmsman, had no trouble maintaining control of the hovercraft while Captain Tupamaro scanned the horizon through night glasses. As always, she carried her Colt Manhunter openly in a hefty holster on her belt as if she were some gun-toting dame straight out of a spaghetti western. A stunbaton dangled on her other side. She looked up briefly as Pandur and Druse returned, but said nothing. Tupamaro was not exactly one of the world's silent souls, but in moments such as these she liked to demonstrate what she believed was poise, and which she came across as taciturnity. A facade, which crumbled in really tense situations, when unchecked aggression was apt to discharge itself in wild outpourings of anger. Tupamaro was her elected pirate name but, owing to her excesses in some battles, she was often called Bloody Steffi behind her back. Nobody was quite sure whether Steffi was her proper forename, and nobody really cared. Or did they? It crossed Pandur's mind that Druse might call her that when he was giving it to her in bed. But Tupamaro really suited her better. Probably in bed as well.
Pandur and Druse joined the others. In addition to Tupamaro and the helmsmen, there were two men and a woman, the men armed to the teeth and wired. The woman, older and garbed in a kind of tunic in dirty-blue linen, was pale and unkempt and gave the appearance of having just been dragged out of some basement hole after weeks of starvation. Absurdly, she called herself Lady X and was a practising witch. Carlo, the smaller and older of the two men, operated the radio computer and intercepted whistling codes from vessels moving some distance from them in the deep channel. The Broken Heart had a very shallow draft. Tupamaro took advantage of this by letting her sit in the shallows, which, at low tide, protruded from the water as sandbanks. These had once been manmade mounds, dikes and other elevations; now they formed the seabed, at least at high tide. Strings of lights advertising her presence was the last thing the pirate hovercraft needed and so position lights had been dispensed with. The bridge was blacked out; just a few shaded low-frequency lamps were burning and these exuded a diffuse, bluish light, hardly discernible at a distance. Although the vessel would appear on ships' radar screens, it would attract little notice. There were plenty of structural remains roundabouts: former harbor cr
anes, the crushed and stacked wrecks of cars and other relics of bygone days, sticking out of the water and confusing the radar.
The wired samurai were troubleshooters, the intervention reserves, as well as being Tupamaro's bodyguards. The actual boarding party comprised another eighteen pirates, twelve men and six women, waiting below deck. Some of them were lounging around the guns or the gun computers, while the rest were probably killing time dozing or drinking, although Tupamaro came down heavily on anyone caught with a bottle, drugs or a BTL chip while on active duty.
Together the bridge crew looked over to the lights of the arcology. From a distance it looked like the silhouette of a ship towering above the waves but the arcology, five hundred meters in length, actually soared to almost two thousand meters and dwarfed even the biggest ocean liner. Its core was a square block, tapering in the last three hundred meters to form a blunt pyramid. The property of Proteus.
It was not known exactly what purpose the arcology served. Proteus merely spoke of research projects, which could have meant anything. The multinational megaconglomerate had varied interests in all the major high-tech sectors. Its staff, brought together from around the globe, was hermetically sealed off from the world outside. The only sure fact was that the megacon was not only expanding, but positively exploding and building more arcologies which, as arcoblocks, already dominated the north German coastal region. Proteus's anxiety to entrench itself behind fortress-like arcologies was an ominous sign.
"First we'll take the arcoblocks from Helgoland to Emden," said Tupamaro quietly, "once we've proclaimed the Freebooter Republic of Frisia."
"Pipe-dreams," Pandur rejoined, but without rancor. "Sooner would a camel pass through the eye of a needle than that the freebooter captains would ever reach agreement."
Tupamaro looked at him furiously. "That's a fucking big mouth ya got on board my ship, chummer!"
"And that's the long and short of it, Captain," countered Pandur, who respected Tupamaro but was not afraid of her, which distinguished him from most of the others on board. "You don't stand for any argument on board, least of all would you let yourself be swayed by any other captain. And the other skippers are just the same. So how would you ever manage to get a republic together?"
"At the last captains's assembly we almost got agreement."
"You were miles apart." Pandur had been in the Faroes two months ago and had witnessed the assembly personally. The captains co-operated well and efficiently when it came to making booty together, selling it or acquiring weapons. But none of them wanted to share or relinquish power. And this was instinctively the right thing to do. So far the Border Protection Force, the Navy and the security forces of the megacons had confined themselves to occasional raids when the pinpricks of the pirates had become too bothersome. As a unified force, eventually even with a locatable base, the freebooters, on the other hand, ran the risk of being destroyed by a few serious, targeted strikes. Many a pirate mind was too infected by a buccaneering romanticism. Blackbeard himself, to whom some of the modern freebooters liked to hark back, had not had the faintest chance against a determined Hanseatic League, and nowadays the opposition was of quite a different caliber.
The pirates, smugglers and fences merely occupied a niche in the system and were well advised to stick to it.
"Ya haven't been with us long enough to be wised up to the ins and outs of the whole thing," Tupamaro replied. "So just keep that big trap of yours shut, ya fuckin' jackhead."
"Aye, aye, Captain," said Pandur ironically. He knew you couldn't argue with Tupamaro about her dream. He let her crude remarks pass. He knew that basically she appreciated him as much as he did her. And she needed him. Not as a decker. He didn't go into the matrix anymore, he had retired himself. But as a wamo rider. That was what Pandur was good at. Better than Druse and most of the wamo riders on the other ships. Tupamaro appreciated that, and so was prepared to excuse quite a bit. Even the fact that he had refused to go to bed with her despite several explicit invitations.
She was in her late twenties, maybe three years younger than Pandur, had a body that for his tastes was too broad-shouldered and muscular but she undoubtedly possessed erotic charisma. Yet Pandur had seen her eyes when she killed. Holding this woman naked in his arms was beyond his imagination. He didn't even want to find out whether his sexual urges could override this feeling. Perhaps he was even afraid of being physically capable of sleeping with her.
"We oughta give the goods to Cisco," remarked Druse, who was apparently more concerned with the booty. "He'll ship them over to Paris. That's where electronics are fetching the best prices at the moment."
"No way," Tupamaro informed him. "Better a few ecus less, but quick and safe. Anyway, how come you know we're carrying electronics, huh? Keep your nose out of these things, so ka? We'll send the stuff to Prague via Hamburg as usual."
"But... " Druse had raised his bushy eyebrows, which were so huge they looked like false ones glued on.
Tupamaro cut him off. "My decision, chummer. And anyhow I happen to know why you want to bring Cisco into it. It'd fetch you a tidy little commission, wouldn't it?"
"Drek! I'm talkin' about the higher prices in Paris! "
And I'm talkin' about Cisco's backhanders. Forget it!"
Druse let the bristly things slide back down. "Only a suggestion."
"I think I got it," the radio operator broke in. "Three sea miles north-northwest, heading for Bremerhaven. That should be the King Creole. The code fits."
"About time." Tupamaro went over to the radio modem of the on-board computer and checked the man's readings on the screen.
"So ka. We'll let him pass and ram something up his ass from behind. Escort?"
"Doesn't look like it. The nearest tub's steaming a half sea mile further south and losing headway. Seems to be a ghost ship anyway - not an Atlantic runner with crew."
"Keep an eye on it."
"So ka." The man continued to study the screen, dissecting the incoming codes.
Tupamaro again put the night glasses to her eyes and scanned the horizon. In the distance the steady throb of an engine could be heard. The King Creole was apparently a container ship with traditional screw propulsion. In large-scale marine engine design the diesel unit, powered to greater efficiency by turbo-chargers, had held its dominant position for decades. But the end of this era was in sight. With the new, more efficient solar cells, solar-powered electric propulsion was also beginning to establish itself on ships. If it was a question of maneuverability and high speeds, however, then turbojets were used on water. For cargo vessels this was not necessary, but the Border Protection Force naturally had hovercraft torpedo boats.
The Broken Heart was smaller but just as fast as the swiftest Border Protection Force units. Otherwise the deep sea pirates' trade in the North Sea would hardly have been conceivable. Inferior in armor and weaponry to the warships, the pirates banked on a swift escape after a raid to the rocky outcrops left by the Great Flood off the coasts of Schleswig-Holstein and Denmark. If pursuit was particularly stubborn, they fled even further north, if necessary as far as the Norwegian coast or the Faroe Islands.
Combat aircraft or helicopters were rarely deployed in the chase because the risk of their being attacked by toxic spirits in relation to the significance of the incidents was considered too great. Some of the toxic spirits were capable of rocketing out of the water with ease and seemed to show more interest in flying objects than in ships.
The pirates attacked mainly at night, were well able to defend themselves with flak canons against enemies, used the heavy marine traffic as camouflage and, last but not least, almost invariably had a shaman on board. Not even he, or she, was able to establish genuine communication with the spirits, but he could often mollify them. If he was good, he might even manage to sell them the aircraft as a tastier morsel, or himself fetch down flying metal from the sky. This was what Lady X was quite good at when she wasn't bombed out of her mind. Mostly, though, she was bombe
d out.
When the engine noise of the passing ship had grown quiet again, Tupamaro sat herself in the pilot seat in the command cockpit, which extended out from the bridge like a nose of armored glass. She pushed the speed controller forward two notches and started up the generator for the two main thrust jets. The quiet humming was barely audible, but a change in the vessel's vibrations indicated the engines' eagerness to perform.
The Broken Heart, with a length of about thirty meters, was scarcely bigger than Bremer Vulcan's Lloyd V5 ferries, designed to carry fifty passengers, but she had a thrust scaled up to twice the power. She was actually based on stolen Lloyd V5 design plans and had been built illegally in a Nigerian shipyard and later fitted out in Algeria with more powerful engines, armor plating and two computer-supported 4cm flak canons. Six months ago the catapults for the water motorbikes had been added in a Ukrainian shipyard.
Only the installation of the catapults, the wamos themselves, as well as a little modern electronics, had been at Tupamaro's expense. She had taken the vessel itself off another pirate as a result of a not altogether kosher duel that it was better not to talk about if you didn't want to bring down her wrath.
"Clear the wamos for action," Tupamaro ordered.
Pandur and Druse grabbed their helmets, putting them on as they made for the door and then feeling their way back to the catapults in the bow.
Fighting a slight sensation of stiffness in his hips, Pandur clambered into the bike's saddle, wired up the helmet to the wamo's computer and pushed the safety guard over his thighs.
Now of all times, a faint pain in his right knee made itself felt. Pandur had knocked it a few days ago in a heavy sea and it was still somewhat swollen. He suppressed the pain as well as he could. It was the last thing he needed at this moment.
In the ship's hull, the alarm ullulated quietly but piercingly. The crew were being called to action stations while. at the same time two hydraulic motors, with a nerve-jangling shrill whine, opened the cowling over the muzzles of the canons. They opened up like shells that had some damn hard and fast pearls to pass out.