by Guy Haley
He took in the room. Other than himself and the mortal remains of the unfortunate Waldo, it was empty of human occupants,
Something was wrong.
Chloe lay on the floor, case cracked.
Valdaire would never drop her phone.
Otto scooped her up and ran from the building. As he went down the dank corridors he turned all his cybernetic enhancements to maximum – risky in his state, but the complex was about to be turned into ash and, although he couldn't outrun a bomb shockwave, he would at least give it a spirited try. He rapidly assessed what could have occurred to make Valdaire be so careless with her closest friend. His mind kept returning to the same answer. Kaplinski.
He ran out into the main body of the tank garage.
Sure enough, in the failing light Kaplinski stood outside, one arm clamped round Valdaire's throat, holding her off the ground. She stared at Otto, unable to speak, her hands clutching at Kaplinski's distended forearm. She was not struggling, but hung there desperately, attempting to keep the pressure off her neck. Otto snatched up the bar Marita had hit him with earlier, and walked into the square.
"Klein!" shouted Kaplinski, "looks like I got here a little too late. How's it feel to damn the human race?"
Otto circled the other cyborg cautiously, his senses thrumming, data processed lightning-fast by his mentaug. Kaplinski's body still burned with the strange energy signatures he'd seen on the train, but he was malfunctional. His face had not healed properly, half of it still black bone. There was visible damage to his knee. Evidently the tesla cannon had compromised several of his systems, healthtech included.
He was not invulnerable, then. Otto had a chance.
"Look at us, Klein! Two broken toys, used and thrown away. k52 offered better, and you did not listen!"
"Kaplinski! In five minutes this place is going to be levelled by another of k52's traitors. You hear that? He's going to nuke this place, you along with it."
"Fitting!" said Kaplinski. Strange light shone from his retinas, the wild look of a wolf caught in headlights. "That you and I should die together, if not as comrades-in-arms, then at least in war, and as worthy enemies."
"The damn war's over, Kaplinski. Stop fighting! Let Valdaire go."
"Listen to yourself!" spat Kaplinski, "always for the other, always thinking of anything but yourself when you could take anything you wanted. You make me sick, Klein."
A counter rattled down in Otto's head. On the far side of the square stood a large Chinese airbike. His mentaug adjutant played dozens of tactical scenarios, but each one ended in failure; there was no way to get Valdaire, get on the bike and get out of there before the bomb fell. He could not possibly take on Kaplinski and win in that time.
"I wanted to be more like you, you know? I wanted to be a better man. I did try, Klein! I did try to stop fighting!"
"You didn't try hard enough, you miserable son of a bitch. Let her go!"
"So you do have some human failings, eh, Otto? Anger, that was always yours."
"I control it, Kaplinski."
The other cyborg twitched a shoulder. He looked old all of a sudden. They were both old, old, damaged men whose war was long done, shouting at each other as the world burned. Senseless.
"Seems that not all of us have the boy scout in us," said Kaplinski. Otto's adjutant registered strange patterns of EM rippling through Kaplinski's body. His forearm writhed as the very flesh reformed. Spurs of bony carbon extruded from the top, flexing as they came. Valdaire's eyes widened in as they twitched in front of her. "I will stick with the pleasures I know then, and enjoy the look on your fucking superior face as I rip the face off your friend. See you in hell, Klein."
"You're a walking cliché, Kaplinski." Otto prepared himself to attack. He wouldn't stand there and watch.
Kaplinski grabbed Valdaire by the throat, bent her over his knee and forced her eyes closer and closer to the spines on his arm.
The countdown in Otto's head flashed red and chimed. Three minutes.
Otto coiled and leapt, dropping Chloe as he came. He cannoned into Kaplinski; it was like hitting stone. He heard Valdaire scream as his barbs ripped her cheek. Kaplinski dropped her and rolled back. He skidded in crouch backwards, swollen fingers and heels ripping up the thin soil on the concrete, a savage smile on his face. "That's more like it, Klein, that's more like it."
Otto rolled, winded. Kaplinski came at him, so quick Otto struggled to follow it. He performed a salmon leap over Otto's head, landing squarely on his feet behind him. Pain exploded all over Otto as Kaplinski slammed him on his damaged shoulder. Alarms flashed in his head and his adjutant registered a deep puncture wound, scraped down off his scapula, through his subdermal plating and into his left lung.
Otto staggered. Kaplinski had put something in him. His healthtech went haywire as it fought off an invasive presence. He felt his left side go weak as his cybernetics ceased to function. He limped round to face his erstwhile corporal.
"Leutnant, Leutnant." Kaplinski walked slowly up to him, a sharp probe on his left hand morphing into a boney blade. "I expected a better fight from you." Otto's healthtech fought Kaplinski's infiltrators to a standstill, but his breath burned, and his chest was tight and painful. He sank to his knees.
"Fuck… you…"
Kaplinski smiled and drew back his bladed arm.
A rattle of heavy-calibre gunfire sounded. Kaplinski shuddered as bullets tore into him. His face twisted into annoyed surprise, and he turned round.
Behind him Valdaire sat upon the Chinese airbike, Chloe in her hand, twin cannon smoking. Kaplinski walked towards her.
Valdaire fired again and again as Kaplinski marched toward her. His skin warped and bubbled as it attempted to reform. Valdaire fired and fired. Kaplinski kept on coming.
He came to a stop in front of the bike as the guns clicked dry. Valdaire looked up at him.
Kaplinski sparked and bled, but stood yet. "You should have left when you had the chance," he said.
There was a loud clang as Otto's pipe connected with Kaplinki's damaged knee. It bent sideways, and Kaplinski toppled like a tower. Otto swung the pipe again with his right arm, smashing at the other cyborg's head, snapping it sideways. He kicked Kaplinski hard, sending him onto his chest. He drew his arm back and drove it with all his might into Kaplinski. His adjutant picked out a weakened point in Kaplinski's back, and the pipe went through, out of his side, and crunched into concrete. Otto swung his arm, knocking Kaplinski's bladed hand aside as it came at him, then stamped the pipe as hard as he could, punching it into the ground, and pinning Kaplinski in place. He stepped onto the altered cyborg's blade, braced his damaged side against Kaplinski's head, and bent the pipe back on itself. For good measure he stamped on Kaplinski's neck, crushing vertebrae. Still Kaplinski struggled.
Otto looked at Valdaire, her cheek bloody, her phone clutched in one hand, screen alive, the Chinese airbike thoroughly cracked. She looked defiant.
Lehmann really was right about her.
"Let's get the hell out of here," she said.
Otto limped over to the airbike as the countdown timer in his head hit one minute thirty and began to flash red. He climbed on clumsily, and belted the harness about himself.
Valdaire pulled back on the airbike handles, turbofans whined, and it rose up into the air. Otto looked down at Kaplinski. The other cyborg ceased struggling and turned his head almost 180 degrees to look Otto right in the eye.
I should have gone for that headshot a long time ago.
"We haven't much time," she said, and opened the throttle to maximum. Both of them hunkered into the bike's moulded seats as the air in front of the bike protested against their speed by taking on the resistance of wet concrete. The pointed nose of the bike cut through its objections, burner jets kicked in and it accelerated massively.
Above the roar of the passing sky, the bike's jets and fans, Otto heard a familiar rushing noise. He looked up. Twin contrails etched themselves across the sky, a t
rail of fire behind them: stratobomber.
"We need to go faster," he shouted right into Valdaire's ear. Air was ripped from his throat, and he belatedly realised he should be wearing a mask. The Soviet base was receding rapidly behind them. There was a dull explosion, and Otto saw a bright dot separate itself from the bomber high above them. "We need to go faster right now."
Valdaire twisted the throttle as fast as it would go. Speed indicators crept up to five hundred miles an hour. The atmosphere did its best to tear them from their seats.
Otto felt his left side augmentations come back online as his healthtech purged Kaplinski's infiltrating nanites from his blood stream. He looked back.
The counter in his head reached five seconds.
Thirty kilometres behind them, the bright dot of the bomb streaked groundwards, toward the army base.
He turned his face away and shut his eyes as it detonated. The light from the explosion burned white through his eyelids.
A shockwave hit them seconds later, tossing the airbike about like a leaf in the storm, Valdaire wrestled with the machine, managing, somehow, to keep it level, and then they were away from the blast front.
Valdaire turned round and smiled a tight smile. "I think we're clear," she mouthed.
Otto nodded. He looked back as fire raged through the taiga under a towering mushroom cloud.
It really was time to go the fuck home.
In the Real, over Nevada, a second remotely controlled stratobomber screeched down from the edge of space. At ten kilometres up, it dropped three bombs that little in this world could stop. They exploded as airbursts above the Nevada desert, a threeheaded mushroom rearing into the sky as they each vapourised a circular portion of scrubby land.
This physical destruction was not their principle purpose
A surge of EM energy blasted the area, frying electronics of every kind for kilometres in every direction. Although stymied by the ground, of such force was the gamma wavefront that the pulse irradiated the Realm House, the attack's target.
The faraday cage in the walls of the Realm House shorted. Spider drones fizzed and died. Cascades of sparks showered from the hardened servers as the sheer magnitude of the EM pulse overwhelmed their protective measures.
The governing machinery of the fusion reactor under the servers was scrambled. Power surged into the tokomak, overloading the reactor. It went critical within picoseconds, and, picoseconds later, a star lived and died violently in Nevada, heaving millions of tonnes of earth up into a low dome lit from within, the mass collapsing into itself to leave a crater of white-hot glass.
The entire contents of the Reality Realm servers were wiped clean nanoseconds before the Realm House was utterly destroyed. But not before k52's damaged web focused a portion of these energies in a manner that physicists would not fully understand for another few centuries. Somewhere that was not in the Real, nor in the digital ghostworld of the Grid, thirty-seven universal histories played themselves out, twelve billion years each, in mere nanoseconds of Real time, free of interference from man or thinking machine; a dead nerd's gift to totality.
He did it for his sister.
CHAPTER 24
Aftermath
Cricket's was cool and dark, buried deep in one of the less wellheeled levels of the Wellington arcology of New London, far enough from the area damaged when k52 blew up Richards and Klein's main office to remain open. Antique sporting gear hung from the walls in odd juxtaposition with gelscreens and fashionable décor, bringing with it smells of leather and old wood to fight with the prickly tinge of EM energy that saturated everything in the modern world. There were a lot of screens. Cricket played on all of them.
Richards and Klein did not much care for cricket. But they liked the place anyway. They sat there at the bar, annoying the head barman by drinking fine single malts in whiskey sours, with ice, of all things.
They had had a dozen or so already. Neither of them was drunk, because neither of them could become drunk, or rather one could, but with difficulty, while the other could appear so but it was a lie, like so much else about him.
Otherwise, they were happy.
"What troubles me," said Otto, hunched and somewhat morose, though calmer and more at ease than he had been for the last few weeks, "is that it is only by chance that we won over k52 – if the construct of Waldo's had not been there, he would have achieved his goals without a problem. What does all this mean for the world, if k52 nearly succeeded but for a fortuitous happenstance?"
"Nice English, Otto." Richards' sheath drank down a goodly slug of cocktail, tinkled the ice in the glass, then tipped a cube in, sucked it and crunched down.
"I aim to improve my vocabulary without recourse to the Grid."
"Well, good." Richards smiled plastic teeth through plastic lips. "But it wasn't chance."
"Fate then? I do not believe in that."
"Damn right, that's k52 talk. What I mean is this, Otto. Waldo's world was what tripped k52 up, yes, and it was kind of handy that it did. What I'm talking about is why it was there at all. Thing is, old buddy, it was there because a brother loved his sister so much he was willing to go to jail for her, to throw everything in his life over, and eventually to die."
Otto shrugged. "He felt guilty."
"Exactly!" said Richards emphatically. "There's a complex brew in there, guilt, anger, arrogance, but also a whole lot of love. I won't be so trite as to say love saved the world, and we were lucky…"
"We often are," interrupted Otto.
Richards grinned. "That's why we're the best. But seriously, man, love, family ties, shame – all that chemical stuff you meat people have whizzing round in your systems –" he rattled his glass in a circle, carbon plastic finger pointing at his head "– we'll never have that. Never. We're superior to you in some ways…"
Otto opened his mouth.
"Now come on! Don't disagree, you know it, but we'll never have all that. How many million years' worth of evolution made you? Two thousand, seven hundred and forty-three geeks and who knows how many doughnuts made me. There's no comparison."
"Doughnuts?"
"Geeks like doughnuts," pronounced Richards, with all the solemnity of a priest. "Fact. But listen, family ties stopped k52 from realising his plans, Otto. That's not small beer, it's not chance. We machines might surpass you in many things, but we will never be you, and that is why you will survive." He smiled. "With a little help, of course."
"You forget your father, Richards."
Richards frowned, his softgel face crinkling awkwardly. "Yeah, yeah, maybe I do."
The bartender put another glass in front of Richards on the uplit bar, a paper coaster underneath. Richards saluted the man's scowl, pushed back his hat and downed the drink, ice cubes and all. "I've got to get back, someone to see. I'd just go from here, but I've wasted too many sheaths recently. I don't want to leave this one lying around; losing these things is costing us serious money."
"Hughie?" said Otto, and sipped at his whisky.
"Hughie," confirmed Richards. "Gehst du nach Hause, oder bleibst du hier?"
Otto held up his glass in salute and smiled a rare smile. Funny, he thought, how Richards could coax that out of him, for all that he annoyed the shit out of him. "Ich möchte eine weitere." He took a sip. "Guten Nacht, Herr Richards," he said.
Richards stood and set his hat on his head, turned up the collar of his trenchcoat, ran a robot finger round the peak and gave a little smile. "Bitte, mein Freund, es ist einfach Richards."
And he left Otto to it.
Otto rattled his ice round his empty glass. "Er geht mir auf den Sack," he said, and shook his head.
"What was that, sir?" said the bartender.
"Nothing," said Otto. "Get me another, would you?"
• • • •
Richards took his sheath back to their garage, thankfully one hundred floors below the radioactive sphere of nothing where their office had once been. He shunted himself back into the Grid, poppe
d over to his virtual office to see how the regrowth of his facsimile of ancient Chicago was going, and went over the plans for their reconstructed office. Then he put in a request to see Hughie.
For once, he was piped right into Hughie's garden. Hughie sat at his wirework table, his arms crossed and face grumpy.
There was no cake. It was going to be one of those meetings.
"I suppose you feel oh-so-pleased with yourself," said Hughie.
"Hiya, Hughie, nice to see you too," said Richards, and plonked his saggy-faced avatar down in front of Hughie. "Don't mention me saving your shiny arse, no problem at all. Nothing's too good for my old friend Hughie."
Hughie gave a dismissive little grunt. "Don't irritate me today, Richards, I've a hundred bureaucrats the world over badgering me about, one –" he ticked the points off on his fingers "– the complete destruction of the RealWorld Reality Realms, two, the detonation of three atomic bombs, three, the destruction of 13 per cent of Nevada's energy disruption, four, the loss of three Class Five AIs, five, a violent incursion into the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone that culminated in another atomic detonation, six, a UN-led review on AI policy…" He stopped. "Have you seen the news, by the way? They're calling this the biggest catastrophe since the Five crisis. This is not going to go away. Things are bad enough for us as it is, we don't need more enemies. Need I go on?"