by Unknown
What's closer than Harburg?"
"Stade. Or Neugraben. That'd be better. If we circle Buxtehude to the south, we'll hit it automatically. Know some folks in Wildost who'll help ya."
"Wildost?" Pandur had heard plenty of stories about the pontoon ghetto. Horror stories. "They can't even help themselves."
"Not a swish place, chummer. But ya know how it is in these ratholes: zilch to eat, but any amount of high-tech, drugs, transplants. Course it's all hot. They got docs, too, real good docs. Affordable prices. Could be the guy in the white coat got a few nasty hobbies and had to lie low. But he can still be a good surgeon. Maybe for that very reason. You just gotta watch him, is all."
"Okay then. Let's see what Doc Ripper's got going for him. Get us out of here, Freda."
She settled herself behind the wheel. Her body appeared tense and fully concentrated. The whine of the turbine started
Up.
The orc had already proved she was a good Manta pilot. Now she demonstrated that she not only knew how to handle an unfettered hovercraft but also one that was half-sunk. The Manta's center of gravity now lay below the grey-black silt. Freda activated the jets. With a gentleness you wouldn't have thought her fat fingers capable of, she pushed the speed lever forward in an infinitely slow, sliding, graceful, perfectly smooth movement.
The Manta juddered, dirt spattered, branches cracked. The hovercraft lay askew, rocked, then got stuck at the rear. The fingers of Freda's left hand danced over the sensor field that re-aligned the twelve different jets. She seemed to be lacking a third hand for the steering wheel, but steering wasn't called for at the moment. The rear end detached itself from the mud with a smacking sound and crashed into rotten wood. A last stabilizing of the jets, then Freda was satisfied and switched off manual correction. The computer would take care of the rest.
The Manta lay like a board over the swamp, its jets hissing. Pandur wouldn't have thought, after all those months at sea, that he would ever again enjoy this bobbing dance on the spot. But he savored it. He loved it. And he loved the fat frog in the dungarees who was controlling this thing and had saved his life.
The orc woman had the Manta turn on its own axis, gave Pandur a silent thumbs-up and then burst out through the same gap they had used to enter the wood.
"Neat job," said Pandur. "I didn't get round to thanking you for what happened before. I won't forget it."
"Was worried 'cos the tank's full to the brim and it was pushing us down at the back. But then it plopped out like baby shit." She didn't respond to Pandur's thanks. She grasped the steering wheel and gazed rigidly ahead. She appeared almost embarrassed.
What your people did in Schneverdingen will always be there for me. But you don't know how much good it does me that you exist, fat girl!
The Manta drove out of the mist into dim yellow sunshine. Freda guided it across what had been the fields belonging to the farm. The mist still hung dense and impenetrable over the wood. It looked like a giant ball of cotton wool with a few trees and branches sticking out of it.
Pandur had secretly feared that the helicopter of the Proteus men had landed at the farm. That those guys were waiting for them. But there was not a helicopter to be seen far and wide.
Freda punched in the course and had the autopilot do the rest of the work. The Manta was moving south at a fast lick.
Druse was groaning away to himself. Without asking him a second time, Freda opened the medical kit and passed Pandur a tranqpatch. He pushed up the sleeve of Druse's anorak, tore off the backing film on the patch and stuck the patch on the skin in the crook of Druse's arm. Mutely he gazed at the knife handle sticking straight up. The bloodstain had long since swallowed up the naga's entire head and blood was spreading sideways onto the cushioning of the seat. Druse had closed his eyes. His face looked grey and bloodless. Pandur didn't think he had long to live.
"Traumapatch!" he said quietly.
The orc reacted at once. She seemed to be glad to be able to do something. She passed him the thick plaster. Worked into the gauze pad were minute channels, tiny solar cells to provide energy, micro-dosage pumps hardly visible to the human eye and distribution tubes the breadth of a hair. A work of art in miniature and highly effective. It wasn't responsible for miracles, though. And Druse seemed to need a medium-sized miracle to pull through.
With stiff fingers and a deathly fear of touching the knife handle, Pandur pushed up the wounded man's anorak. A pool of blood awaited him. He mopped up the blood with Freda's paper handkerchiefs but more flowed out. Druse's ribcage was rising and falling only shallowly but the knife trembled with every breath. His breathing was irregular.
Wordlessly, Freda passed him a pair of scissors when he couldn't push the anorak up any further. He severed the naga's body and folded back the blood-soaked piece of cloth he had cut. He cleaned the skin over the heart and was glad when he had finally stuck down the traumapatch and activated it with gentle pressing movements with the ball of his hand.
He looked like a butcher emerging from the slaughterhouse. Freda passed him more Kleenex. Pandur wiped off the blood.
There was nothing more they could do for Druse at the moment.
"We could hand him over to the cops of course," said Freda hesitantly. "Might save his life."
Pandur gestured no. "They'd do less for him than Doc Ripper. Minimal care. Sticking plaster, aspirin and ointment."
Freda didn't seem to believe him. "If you're not keen on the cops, I could drop you off first."
"Forget it. They'd let him shuffle off. And if some cop medic really did take pity on him and get him through, they'd hand him over to Proteus. And you know what they'd do to him for not bringing them my head on a plate."
That was the reality. Conglomerate law ranked above Alliance law. You could, with a clear conscience, wipe your backside on so-called human rights. Since they didn't generate any profit, they were of no interest to the megacons. If a megacon was interested in somebody the police had picked up, it got him and could do what it wanted with him. If the Mafia was interested in someone the police had picked up, they got him as well and could do what they wanted with him. The first was legal, the second illegal. But these fine distinctions didn't matter to the victim.
The orc was silent. Perhaps she was thinking that Suhrkamp's zombies were totally superfluous. There was enough horror in real life.
The man with the knife in his chest commenced talking. Quietly but intelligibly. He was delirious. His dulled consciousness was telling the world what fantastic things the synapses were experiencing under the influence of the drugs. Really weird things of course. Reporting something about knives in chests and stuff like that. Saw that as the same shit as everything else and preferred to rummage where the oldies were kept. Pandur listened. Most of what Druse was going on about was garbage. Complete crap. Brain droppings. The greater part of the rest consisted of rehashed bouts of screwing. But a few times, memories and feelings added up to clear information, sometimes whole sentences.
Gradually a picture built up from the scraps. Contours of the burden that weighed down on Druse's soul like a fat dinosaur became evident.
The man had worked some godalmighty scam at Proteus. An honest-to-goodness humdinger. Large-scale fraud or suchlike. Pandur would have expected woman trouble but it actually did seem to involve brimful credsticks. In this regard there was no fooling with megatons. Druse had managed to escape just before they got on to him. Since then it had been open season on Druse at Proteus. But contrary to what he had been claiming earlier, it didn't seem in essence that Druse was out to be received back into the Proteus family. That was secondary. Means to an end. Pandur was surprised when he realized Druse's true motive: hatred of Tupamaro. Revenge. He wanted to use Proteus, wanted to win over the megacon to the idea of hunting Tupamaro.
A few times Druse's strong will conquered his erratic synapses. In moments such as these he tried to tell Pandur things that would be important for him. He apparently assumed he was dyi
ng. He wanted to jettison some ballast to give his soul more lift. So that it might just make it to heaven and not get stuck with its butt in hell.
"I knew about it... Steffi... had offer to... throw ya... to... the wolves," he whispered. "But she... double-crossed me... abandoned me... wanted to get... rid of me."
For a while there was only total gibberish of an anal and genital nature.
Then he said, "She knew... Proteus... looking for me... Bet she... told Proteus... when she found out... we survived... Shit-scared... I'd get... my revenge... Was right... the bitch!"
The rest was wild fantasies of revenge. If he survived and really got his hands on Tupamaro, the captain could expect to have to weather stormy seas. Druse would make finely ground mincemeat of Bloody Steffi - but not until the very end.
Pandur was both impressed and dismayed. Druse's hate seemed to know no limits. Was it anger for the fact that he was the one to be ditched by a woman? He seemed to have regarded ditching people, especially women, as his privilege. Pandur didn't consider Druse to be a person who got along without ethical values, but he seemed at least to be a person driven by urges. Anyone not thwarting his urges would find him a most congenial, even likeable, fellow human. Pandur had had the bad luck, though, to get in the way of Druse's satisfaction of these urges. And that, in its turn, with a detour via Freda's knife, had been his undoing.
Interaction chummer human intercourse. The Theater of Fate. Even in a two-character play the end is open. Forget the rehearsals. Only opening night will determine whether the character piece turns out to be a farce or a tragedy. And vice-versa. If more than two characters appear on the stage, however you can expect your play to be dropped and another one performed.
The orc guided the hovercraft unerringly through the swamp. The Manta had crossed a few paved roads but Freda followed her instruments and her own landmarks. And there were plenty of them: shattered ruins in abandoned communities ravaged by the Flood, by plunderers, by battles between the forces of law-and-order and anarchists, by lightning strikes and fire, charred remains of railroad bridges, power pylons, vehicles. Freda crossed the West-East Freeway on one of the few bridges which had remained unscathed after the turmoil of the past decades. The orc woman knew this area like the back of her stubby hand. She criss-crossed morass day after day, heading for the few industrial centers such as Stade, Bremervorde, Zeven, Buxtehude as well as the arcologies of Cuxhaven and Bremerhaven. Here they produced what was too toxic, too hazardous or too secret for other areas. The megacons were beginning to discover the Elb-Weser region. Only the treachery of the swamp and the high development costs had acted as a brake on unfettered expansion.
Freda took special care to stay out of the zone in which the toxic spirits were getting up to their mischief. Now and again she switched on the multiscreenled tuned to SPIEGEL or some other news channel on 2DTV. The blockade had not been lifted. At one point she came across SCOR, a pirate station, which was egging on the toxic spirits. Though it was a bold thought that the spirits had 2DTV and were watching SCOR. SCOR stood for " Shamanist Cells of Odin's Rebels", a magical-anarchist splinter group with pronounced GreenWar sympathies. According to SCOR, Buxtehude was a "center of the toxins mafia", which " ought to be dunked in the shit it turned out". The wage mages deployed to combat the toxic spirits were described by SCOR as "a stinking heap of shit with a sick aura", who would be " consigned to a cesspit in an unedifying manner" by SCOR activists on an appropriate occasion.
Finally, the Manta reached the Elb marshes southeast of Buxtehude. Freda used the remnants of a dike as a paved road. It rose only a few centimeters above the morass.
The dead colors had been replaced by a clay-like yellow-brown and sedge-green. Near the river, the hardiest plants had been able to assert themselves. On the left lay the Elb, four times as wide as formerly. Further to the east on both banks, the skyline of Hamburg and Harburg glinted in the sun. From this distance it was mainly the choice pieces that could be seen, the glittering showpiece edifices, the soaring towers of the most powerful megacons, the freeway bridges, the pillars of the monorail, the port facilities. The other Hamburg, the luxuriating, half-flooded sprawl that covered the other bank like a suppurating cancerous growth, lay like a grey furring below the towers.
"Rat-hovel Hamburg looks like the shit of commercial Hamburg," was how Pandur put it.
"So, what's new, chummer?" Freda asked. "It's the same everywhere, right? Got something against it?"
"Just an observation. Anyway, shit is more fertile than the ass it comes out of. But what strikes me most here is how close the two are to each other."
"The ghetto," Freda said simply and pointed ahead. "We're coming from the northwest and there're hardly any checks here. Can live without them, huh?"
On this side of the Elb, before the distant towers of Harburg, the new center of the megaplex, they could make out the high-rise tenements of Neugraben and Neu-Wulmstorf, where hundreds of thousands of wage slaves were herded together. A city in itself. Before that lay Wildost, the pontoon ghetto. Here, too, there were almost a hundred thousand people. Not wage slaves. Outcasts.
They were already coming into the outskirts of Wildost. The destitute vegetating away here had next to no chance of fleeing across the Elb or through the swamps. Only death awaited them there. The mostly illegal immigrants were hunted mercilessly if they ventured out of the ghetto. The bars of Buxtehude and Neugraben were the haunts of hundreds of bounty hunters. Many were tattooed from forehead to calf with crosses and stars. Each cross and each star stood for a kill and a 500-ecu bounty. Boats of the Federal Border Protection Force patrolled the Elb. In the east and south, where there were no natural barriers and, instead, the tenements of the wage slaves beckoned, the ghetto was hermetically sealed off. Fence, exclusion belt, watchtowers, fence. Only those with an ID chip were allowed through. Drivers carrying food supplies. Workmen from the cemetery agency or garbage collectors, who brought out the corpses and threw them in a mass6°grave. Representatives of emergency aid committees and the emigre organizations of eastern European refugees, who trundled up with donations. Nurses and doctors of the health agency, who distributed medicine. People wanting to do business. People looking for male or female whores. People with degenerate proclivities. Murderers. Gamblers, addicts, lunatics, preachers from all manner of sects. Police. The Border Protection Force. Raids were carried out at least twice a week. Those wanted were rarely found, stolen goods more frequently, there were always deaths. Most of the dead were guilty of no more than having got in the way. In the narrow confines of the ghetto, there were always people in the way.
Wildost was made up of thousands of pontoons lashed together, floating on the water or lying on the mud. Big ones, small ones, purpose-built ones or any other floating objects that could be bent to this task. To these were added prefabricated parts and constructions of every description.
Rubber dinghys, log rafts, plastic rafts, the wrecks of ships or launches, largish containers of all kinds, bizzare edifices made of scrap metal and garbage built into the water. Every week one of these properties went down, dozens of inhabitants were drowned or sank into the mud. The remains of these properties served as foundations for new creations. On the pontoons and other constructions, stacked on top of each other to form up to three levels, were prefabs, barracks, tents, reed huts, corrugated-iron shanties, lean-tos, shacks put together from hard plastic and plastic sheeting, hovels made of wooden cases and cardboard boxes. Next to each other, on top of each other, higgledy-piggedly, wherever there was space. All of it was interconnected at all levels by walkways, ladders and crude
bridges. Anybody looking at it from the outside could scarcely believe it was possible to get from one place to another in this chaos. But anybody who lived there or had reason to frequent it could slip with often astounding speed to the cook-shops, to the tiny stores, to the few, constantly packed washrooms, to the trid booths, to the bars, to the whorehouses and back.
The first pont
oons had been fitted with prefabs as emergency housing and anchored here years ago. The others followed in time, more or less illegally like the residents, more or less tolerated because the authorities preferred to have them concentrated in this one place to anywhere else. On the first pontoons there had even been toilets. They had long since been divorced from their original purpose. Now the swamp and the river were the toilets. It stank accordingly. There were more infectious diseases than there were names for them. A stubborn rumor circulated that behind the scenes AG Chemie was preventing the break-up of Wildost. It was said that the ghetto was a kind of open-air laboratory for the megacon, where the development of new diseases could be observed and new medication tested.
The population of Wildost consisted almost exclusively of Russians, Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Hungarians and Czechs. Norms and metahumans. The flotsam and jetsam of the Eurowars. Former soldiers, mercenaries, refugees, the uprooted, criminals, perpetrators and victims, alone or with their families. Not one possessed an ID chip, not one an SSIN. Most of them owned nothing more than their questionable lives, a few clothes and perhaps a few odds and ends that others had discarded.
Freda cut the thrust jets, and the Manta came to a stop five meters from the mountain of cases and crates. Slowly it sank into the silt. The orc kept the vertical jets running on minimum power to prevent the craft subsiding any further. What the layer-upon-layer of hovels rested on was anybody's guess. The visible elements bearing them on the eastern side comprised roped-together oil drums. Presumably this entire extension, the most recent to be driven into the mud, was supported by barrels and similarly fragile hollow objects. In conjunction with the superstructure, the construction made an extremely shaky impression. As more or less all the pontoons looked like this, it was, however, nothing special.
"Just plopped there like turds," Pandur remarked. "If a seagull settled in the wrong place somewhere, the whole kit-and-caboodle would probably shoot down into the mud as if it was rocket-powered."