Realms, and they were keyed into human minds. AI and near-AI within were run strictly as bubble simulations, consciousnesses as separate from them as humans are from the mathematics of the Real. That's what's happened to me here. I've been walled in. No wonder I can't make myself a new hat.' He sniffed his coat. 'Or do my laundry. You got any people back at your HQ with higher access rights?'
'Yep,' said the bear. 'A couple.'
'I should speak to this boss of yours,' Richards said. 'Maybe he can sort me out with a hat.'
'Right you are, sunshine, because that's where you're going. Now,' said the bear. He swung his head from side to side, looking out over the plain. He peered into the distance and righted his helmet decisively. 'This way. If there's still a this way left.' He pointed his muzzle out across the plain. 'Here,' he said hopefully. 'You got any fags?'
Richards shrugged his shoulders. 'Don't smoke. Who does? It's bad for you.'
The bear gave him a disdainful look. 'Oh, puh-lease,' he said.
Out on the plains, thunder rumbled.
CHAPTER 5
Kolosev's mother didn't know where her son was, but the servers delivering her mail did. Veronique cracked the old lady's Grid profile quickly, Kolosev's cryptography a little less so, but by 3.30 she had him.
'South,' Valdaire said over a glass of black tea. Kolosev's mother was handing out cake, as eager to find her darling son as they were. Always the way, thought Otto. Every time Oleg went underground, Otto and Richards came to see his dear old mama. She was as helpful as she was the last time.
'Here.' Valdaire pointed to Chloe's screen, at a locator point flaring on a map.
'He is a mummy's boy,' said Otto quietly to Valdaire as Mrs Kolosev flirted with an uncomfortable-looking Chures. 'All his super hacker crap. He still needs his socks washing, this is how we find him every time.'
Otto, Veronique, Lehmann and Chures left Kiev that evening. They travelled along the E95 in a rented groundcar, Kiev being a city where Richards amp; Klein had no garage. Systems cracked by Valdaire, the car proved suitably anonymous. Otto debated taking an aircar, but ground vehicles drew less attention, especially so far east. As was his habit, Otto drove himself, not trusting the vehicle's automated systems against outside interference. He turned down Lehmann's offer of help. He said he wanted to think, but in reality he didn't want to sleep, he could do without the temptation of the mentaug's dreams.
The forests of the north turned to steppe as they headed south, fertile plains tilled by enormous, automated harvesters. The highway was eight lanes wide, full of slaved cars in tight road trains, as busy as any in Europe, but once they turned off the highway AI guidance cut out, and traffic dwindled until they were the only car, sharing the road with robot grain trucks shuttling ceaselessly between the fields and rail depots and heavy lifter stations, busy with the second harvest.
Valdaire sat up front with Otto for a day, watching the plains roll by. She talked a little about her early childhood in Cote d'Ivoire, about her life with Chloe before the country had exploded into violence and her family had fled. She was speaking more to herself than Otto. She seemed content talking levelly this way, staring out of the window as she made sense of her life to herself. She probably does this a lot, thought Otto, I may as well not be here. He was willing to let her continue, until she looked at him and asked suddenly, 'Have you ever been married, Klein?'
'Once,' he said reluctantly.
She waited for more. He didn't offer any. 'You don't talk much about yourself, Klein,' she said.
'Read my files,' he said, even though that's what Richards always said to him. He wished she'd leave him be. He didn't mind listening to Valdaire. It helped some people; the last sixty years or so had been such that half the people on the planet had some kind of horror story to tell, but he preferred to keep his pain to himself.
'I have. Not the personal stuff,' she added hurriedly. 'I feel like I'm prying.'
'You are.'
'Sorry.'
Otto grunted through a half-smile at that. 'You'd make a poor security consultant.'
'Maybe that's why I'm not one,' she said.
'There is not much to tell,' said Otto.
Valdaire looked as if she didn't believe him.
'I work. That's all,' he said and kept his silence. Lehmann swapped over with her at the next stop. At least he knew how to keep quiet.
They passed the grassed-over sites of collective farms and abandoned towns, by low arcologies, through freshly cut fields being tilled for winter wheat, through a million-hectare rewilded patch of steppe teeming with Saiga, Przewalski's horse and gengineered megafauna. Through sleeping villages little changed in centuries, past the neat rows of a Han agri-engineering dormitory town. Night deepened, and lightened into day, and came once more. They stopped twice in nowhere towns grey with sad histories, and were gone quickly.
The second morning. Otto steered on to an unmetalled road, nothing but crops of all kinds around them, low rumble of the auto-harvesters at work carrying over the rolling vastness of the country, trails of dust marking their progress.
They approached an abandoned farm complex, mid-twentieth century, most of its concrete crumbled to ivy- choked grit. Weedy mounds of stone to one side of the road marked the remains of the village it had sprung from, windowless brick walls on the other the Soviet failure it had become. Ancient and newer parts were as ruinous as each other. They arrived at a square before a dilapidated office block. A few barns from the early twenty-first century tottered round its edges. A camouflaged satellite dish sat inside one barn with no sides, pointed through a hole in the roof, cables snaking across the dusty ground.
'We are here,' said Otto, setting the car to park itself.
'What is this place?' said Chures.
'Ancient village turned Soviet collective farm, abandoned eighty years ago,' said Otto.
'What, one of your ancestors burn it down?' said Chures.
'Don't start on the Nazi shit, SudAmigo, that was near two hundred years ago,' said Lehmann.
'This place was hit hard by the Christmas Flu,' said Otto. 'A fifth of villages inhabited a century ago are like this. It is still endemic; there was another outbreak last year. That's why you see so many biofilters on faces out here.' Otto looked around. 'Kolosev has worked out of here before. He's short on imagination.'
'Kind of desolate, even for a criminal,' murmured Valdaire.
'He is useful,' said Otto. 'Let us approach him gently. He is prone to nervousness, and he will have seen us approach. We go in too hard, he'll wipe it all. Lucky for us he's curious; he'll want to know what we want. This barn — ' he pointed to one less damaged than the rest '- it has a high EM field, plenty of equipment working. The rest of this place is inactive, as dead as it looks.'
'Veev!' piped Chloe. 'That is incorrect, there is minor activity detectable in the office building also.'
'More there in the barn though, yes?' said Otto.
'Yes,' said Chloe.
'Then we check the barn first. Lehmann, activate squad interface.'
Otto's iHUD flickered on; squad icons, years unused, came on, but most blinked off, leaving Lehmann's signifier alone in his mind. A squad of two, he thought, better than no squad at all.
'Shouldn't we be more cautious?' asked Valdaire, snagging Chloe from the backseat. Lehmann unfolded his body from the car, groaning as joints sounded an unnerving percussion of pops. He swung his arms round a few times. Valdaire found herself entranced by the unnatural shapes his artificial muscles made.
'This is Kolosev,' said Otto.
Lehmann grinned, went round to the boot and pulled out three components that he snapped together into a long rifle.
'I'll check out the offices,' said Lehmann. 'Better to be safe. I'll take up position on the roof, cover you
