by Unknown
"And it doesn't worry anybody?"
Juriela shrugged her shoulders. "Why should it? The water's already contaminated as it is. If you throw in a bit of radioactivity, maybe it'll start glowing. It'd be a great tourist attraction. Tourism would be good for the region."
"Surely Proteus would have objections."
"Why? They're far enough away. Or think they are at least. At any rate, our little atomic monument didn't stop them taking over the arcology."
They left the concrete mountain behind. The launch was approaching the shore. Pandur had never been to this area. After the Great Flood all the coastal regions had had to be abandoned. Resettlement had got underway hesitantly. Almost all the people who returned had roots here. Strangers had come in with the arcologies. Scientists who had nothing but formulae in their heads. Mercenaries from the sprawls, graduates of the company-owned weapons schools. All people who had next to no contact with the locals. Except for the few centers, this was an unpopulated swampland, too barren and ornery to be of interest to anyone. It could have been a biotope, a refuge for rare species, but there were still toxins in the ground. So it was mainly a black, dead country containing small detoxified islands. It went well with the arcology.
Brown, stunted reeds came into sight. There was the stink of decay and chemicals. The remains of old floodgates with a piece of dike that had become an island. Juriela steered in the lee of the island through the reeds, came into shallow water again and finally headed into a lagoon. At the far end, there was a landing stage composed of several pontoons attached to one another. Nearby were a number of houses, a few made of stone and built on the foundations of older constructions, most of them temporary accommodations made of prefabricated sections, and a few dozen trailers. Satellite dishes all over. No people showed themselves.
Juriela and Druse made the launch fast.
"Land's End," said the young woman. "That's what they call it round here."
"Delightful," was Pandur's comment. "A place you could fall for."
Druse had put his arm round Juri and was whispering with her. Then he turned to Pandur. "What're your plans, chummer?" " Just what I was going to ask you."
Juri released herself from Druse and stepped onto the pontoon. "I'll go ahead and settle the bill," she said. "The launch belongs to friends of mine who live over there."
She pointed to one of the larger, fixed houses and set off towards it. She seemed to be in a deliberate hurry so that the men could talk undisturbed.
"Been turning it over in my head," said Druse, as the men climbed first onto the rail and then down onto the pontoon. " I'm so fuckin' pissed with Tupamaro. I wanna pay her back." " You want to go back to the pirates?"
"Don't know yet. But I know Steffi's fence. She's gotta show up there sometime. Could be she'll catch something worse than the clap. Could be it'll be outa the barrel of a Beretta."
"You so angry that she abandoned you? Seems to me you already found a little comfort." Pandur felt no hatred for Tupamaro, contempt at the most. Perhaps even less. Disappointment.
"She double-crossed me, broke the agreements."
Pandur pricked his ears. "What agreements?"
Druse didn't answer. "I'm aimin' for Hamburg. And you?"
The nearest megaplex. Hamburg."
"Tupamaro?"
"Drek, she can kiss my ass." He wondered whether he should come clean with Druse. "See what I can find there," he said vaguely.
"Mind if we hit the road together?"
"Would have been my suggestion," Pandur replied. "What about Proteus?"
"What about the drekheads out for your balls?" Druse countered.
"They'll try again or they won't," said Pandur. "I'm no fortune teller."
"Proteus'll try again or they won't. I'm no fortune teller either."
"So ka. Let's go."
"Not so fast, chummer." Druse grinned. "Got good chances with the chick. And I'm hungry - for all sorts of things.
Listen, chummer, give me a coupla hours. We'll meet in Stotel at twelve. By the high-rise. There's only the one. Till then I'll do somethin' to keep body and soul together. Juri's gonna organize clothes for us and I'll bring ya somethin' to eat. So ka?"
Pandur nodded. He didn't feel under any obligation to Druse. If something better turned up, he'd take it. In the shadows Druse had bad cards, he thought. He let himself be lured into bed to easily. That sort of thing could be fatal. With Proteus breathing down your neck you didn't hang around. Land's End was too close to the arcology not to be part of their control zone.
"Better keep the cowl on," Druse advised him. "The folks here know the cultists and tolerate them. Who knows if they'd do the same for retired pirates."
He went towards the building Juriela had disappeared into. Wearily Pandur walked along the only street in the place. It was paved. A clear indication that the dock was not only used by cultists for the purpose of bringing ashore pirates rescued by the light witch. Was this one of Proteus's supply routes? One more reason for Druse to get out of his pants fast, thought Pandur.
After ten months at sea he felt lost on land. And lonely.
He had once walked another road as lonesome. Two years ago, after Natalie's death. Then, there had been nothing but a dreadful emptiness in him. Disappointment, sorrow for Natalie even though she had betrayed him. The wish to leave everything behind. Not to be the chess piece pushed around the board, but to be left in peace.
On that occasion he hadn't noticed the car until it pulled up next to him. Ricul was at the wheel. With a contemptuous gesture the mafioso had thrown the credstick to him, his pay for the Renraku job. Pandur would not have turned back to collect it.
Ricul behaved as if it were the thirty pieces of silver Judas had received. The wage for Natalie's death. And in a twisted way, Ricul was even right. But for Renraku, but for Thor Walez, she wouldn't have died. Ricul seemed to sense this. Or was there something else in his eyes, a hidden truth that had remained closed to Pandur?
Pandur sighed. He could use that fat credstick at this moment. But it had long ago been debited to the last ecu. A few months out of the country, Paris, Nice, Lisbon... Memories drowned in drugs, alcohol, senseless consumption... In the end he had been glad to meet a Portuguese in a waterfront dive who had good contacts with pirates. With three stops in Spain, Holland and Scotland, he had eventually reached the Faroe Islands, where he had joined Tupamaro's pirates.
The odyssey had come to an end. He was back home. There were no flowers. Nor had he expected any. Instead, there was a welcome committee waiting before he reached the coast. Pandur could have done without it.
But nobody here is interested. You'd do well to remember the customs and ways of home.
Chapter Four
"Alone in the Endzone"
After the Great Flood the appearance of the German North Sea coast underwent a radical change. Parts of East and North Frisia became the seabed or mudflats only exposed at low tide. The flood had a particularly devastating impact in the area of the Weser and Jade Estuary, where the sea made deep inroads into the land to form what is now the Weser-Jade Bight. For the population, the economy and the entire infrastructure of the North, the collateral damage of the flood was, however, even more destructive than the loss of land. The poisoned water of the North Sea had advanced into vast areas of the North German coastal zones had saturated waste dumps caused oil tanks to leak flooded nuclear power plants and put chemical factories underwater. The result was a poisoning of the countryside the destruction of nature. The coast has not recovered to this day. Vast tracts are dead, uninhabitable swamplands. While the economy of these coastal regions of the North German Federation collapsed and most people fled inland the very inaccessibility of the region seems to offer locational advantages for a number of mecaconglomerates. Against the bitter opposition of environmental organizations, they utilize the dead land for environmentally harmful production processes and thus prevent its regeneration.
Dr Natalie Alexandrescu: Th
e North German Federation, German History on Vidchips, VC 4, Erkrath 2051
You just had to keep following the road and then you got to the freeway feeder at Stotel. It was really simple, but it took Pandur two hours for the maybe six-kilometer stretch. This was partly due to his weary step, his inner aimlessness, but also to the fact that he avoided making any contact with people. Four times, trucks thundered towards him traveling in the opposite direction. Each time, Pandur managed to get off the road in time and take cover. Twice, he slipped behind the remains of the walls of ruined houses, dozens of which lined the road; once, he got out of sight behind a dead tree and another time he ducked behind a pile of rubble. Each time, he crouched in his hiding-place with heightened senses, his Walther Secura ready in his hand.
None of the trucks stopped. Either the drivers hadn't seen him, or they paid no attention to a curious, robed figure playing hide-and-seek. Actually, Pandur didn't expect a truck to pose any danger to him, but he preferred not to be seen by people driving to Land's End. Naturally, he and Druse had been seen at the dock, but perhaps those living there felt a certain loyalty to Juriela. He hoped they did and that it was deep enough to stop loose talk if any megacon guards started asking questions.
There was little point in playing hide-and-seek in Stotel.
Lurking about near the town would make him look suspicious straight away. He had no fear someone would say later they had seen a cowl-wearer walking towards the freeway or the monorail station. But he didn't necessarily have to start doing a clog dance or hitting passers-by for the price of a soup with drawn Secura. He didn't want to give anybody cause to get on a vidphone and tell anyone else about a crazy monk hanging around town.
When he was still three kilometers from the town center he saw the high-rise Druse had mentioned. From a distance, it looked like another ruin, buffeted by storms and abandoned. As Pandur got nearer, he realized it had been left in the building stage and never completed. Either the disaster had struck while work was going on, or it was some speculator's tax-deductible ruin. The one certain thing was that the ugly tower would never house any inhabitants other than the rats, seagulls, pigeons and crows that had so far withstood the environmental toxins.
All in all, Stotel had more to offer than Pandur had expected. Half the houses were ruined, the rest carefully rendered more or less usable again. But there were new buildings. Small-town amenities: three supermarkets, an ALDI-REAL Center with Aldiburger, two gas stations, a High Tech Center, two multi-repair stores, which also carried used cars and rented out land hovercraft, several bars, vidcenters and live shows, a church, a mosque, a talistrader's store for the local ghost watchers and other mages, a surprisingly well-stocked cyberware store. Pandur had had a bet with himself that banned weapons were illicitly on sale in the shed behind the shop. To buy all these blessings, which would rapidly have made him fit for the shadows again, he lacked only the magic wand of the monetary world - a full ebbie. He didn't even have a few ecu bills to be able to afford a soyburger at ALDI. He noticed a music club: PINK SHIT. He could well imagine that Juriela got her cult action here if Tungrita didn't deliver.
Idly, he killed time by walking up and down the streets, taking a look at the bleak monorail station, browsing in the stores. He earned the occasional inquisitive glance, but there were a few other dudes walking around who looked at least as odd. Freaked-out chipheads with wild hairstyles and facial tattoos, a few skinheads in brown outfits, too drunk to cause any friction, two ores, several dwarfs, a sinister-looking street samurai, apparently just passing through. Actually, most of the freaks seemed to be from out of town, just taking a break here. There were any number of trucks and land hovercraft parked outside ALDI-REAL.
One incident caused him embarrassment. Another cowl-wearer was walking in the opposite direction, a bearded man in his mid-fifties. He stopped dead and stared into Pandur's face in astonishment. Pandur grinned at him and pushed past. The man mumbled inarticulately and went on his way.
Pandur slowly began to feel uneasy. He didn't know his way around. It wasn't good to stay long in a place you didn't know. You were identified as a stranger and this invited reactions. You became locatable. No doubt, behind some walls or in some trucks, there were people who worked with crime syndicates. People who wondered what was under the cowl. People who weren't interested in sexy underwear or bare facts, but were receptive to credsticks or other useful bits and pieces. People who didn't consider long whether this cowl-wearer would object to a body search. And if the street robbers were too indolent, there were always the rumblekids who could always use a few ecus for some designer drug or other. Pandur had already seen one or two. As they weren't wearing robes, he couldn't assume they would display brotherly likemindedness.
He feared neither the one nor the other, but they would have compelled him to show his true colors, maybe use his gun, stand out. It was time to do something before others did.
Without a social security number, taking the Transrapide was out. Quite apart from that, nine out of ten trains tore through without stopping. The vidscreen showed one solitary afternoon train that made a stop here.
Pandur decided to ask a trucker if he could give him a ride a ways. He might be lucky and hit on a truck going straight to Hamburg. Bremen would have been alright by him, too. The city was no megaplex, but big enough to go underground. He chose the ALDI-REAL parking lot. It had the most trucks. Once decided, he wondered why he had waited so long in the first place. Solidarity with Druse? Maybe. Faith in Druse? He had no grounds for that.
There were five trucks to choose from, also a Messershmidt Kawasaki SX-A heavy-duty hovercraft. Pandur inspected the line, one after the other, but none of the drivers showed himself. Probably all at Aldiburger. Sooner or later someone had to turn up. Pandur leaned against the cab of one of the trucks, a bright-red MAN Koloss X-7, keeping the other vehicles in sight. He didn't forget himself even so. The skeletal high-rise towered up on the other side of the parking lot. If Druse did indeed show, he couldn't miss him.
He idly glanced towards the entrance portal of the ALDI-REAL. The maxi-trid mounted above it, at six meters across visible far and wide, was showing the center's really hot lines. After a highlight from the trid remake of "The Chainsaw Massacre" a little boy appeared waving a Saeder Krupp chainsaw and brightly announcing: "I love my Mom to death! And my Dad, too!" The saws being hyped were available at 300 ecu. Pandur felt reminded of a street samurai by the name of Pepe, who had had cyberwired chainsaws emplanted and always had to haul a ridiculously heavy powerpack around with him. His saw-arms hadn't saved him, though, from dying in the gutter. But the rumor went that, in his death throes, he had first of all cut the drain cover and then himself into little pieces. This brought back his own memories. Cracker. A street samurai as well. And member of a sect calling itself "Church of the Last Heathens". He, too, had operated his trusty geeker beyond death and signed off with his signature.
The last runs in the Rhine-Ruhr sprawl were damn tough. Especially the Renraku run. Do you really want to get back into that business, chummer?
Between two trucks at the other end of the parking lot, he caught sight of a surreptitious movement. Instinctively, Pandur hurled himself to the side. In the next instant an arrow whizzed up, hitting the armor-glass cockpit of the MAN Koloss and rebounding at an angle. The glass dome vibrated slightly and a high-pitched hum hung in the air as if someone had hit a giant triangle.
Pandur rolled behind one of the truck's front tires and drew his Secura. He felt a shiver run through his body.
Arrow, composite bow, elven hitman. Natalie's killer.
He waited for the next arrow, but it didn't come. Then he hunkered down, gathered up the robe, which was hampering him, and leapt forward out of cover, his Secura at the ready in his right hand. Without worrying about offering himself on a plate, he ran across the parking lot towards a gap between the two trucks.
No second shot. No sound. No movement between the trucks or to the side.
<
br /> No bow. No bowman. The earth seemed to have swallowed both.
Pandur went through the gap with Secura extended and covered both ways in a flash. The trucks stood abandoned. There was no one in the cockpits. One of the trucks was a tanker, the other had a massive superstructure of shining aluminum, enclosed all round. Pandur circled both vehicles. The tank cylinder provided no place to hide, the rear doors of the other were sealed.
It was a mystery to him where the bowman had dissapeared to. Behind the trucks there was an open space. Beyond that, the base of the skeletal high-rise rose up. The marksman must have been a darn good sprinter to have covered the distance of about fifty meters in a matter of seconds. Or was Pandur deceiving himself? Had it all taken much longer? He no longer had the reflexes of ten years ago.
To the side of the high-rise's foundations something moved. Pandur swung his gun round and was within a hair of pulling the trigger.
"Stay cool, chummer!" someone called, stepping out of cover. When Pandur lowered the weapon, the figure came nearer. Pandur had already recognized him from his deep voice, and the red mop of hair removed any remaining doubt. Druse!
"Can't leave ya alone for a minute," the redhead greeted him. Instead of the cowl, he had on a pair of well-worn jeans and a grey anorak with the picture of a critter printed on it. The critter was a naga, only the dragon-like head and the tip of the tail showing on the front, although the snake body wound round the whole anorak. This garment also looked used.
Under his arm, Druse was carrying a bundle wrapped in plastic and he tossed it to Pandur when he came up to him. " Threads," he explained. "You can take off your penitent's robe, brother. We're back in the world again."
Pandur was in no mood for joking.
"Someone just shot at me, damn it," he said, looking sharply at Druse. "With a composite bow. The bowman could only have disappeared in the high-rise."