Rain clattered harder on the windows. Chures looked at her, his eyes asking her to respond. She said nothing.
"The man went after my sister, stinking of shit and sweat. He saw me, but he paid me no attention. I was an undersized child — there was little food in the camps. His mistake. I leapt onto his back from a crate." He smiled. "You know, they were 'temporary containment boxes' given to us when we arrived, to use for a few weeks; years later they were all we had for furniture. The screwdriver pierced the man's neck more easily than I thought it would, a slight resistance as it hit the skin, before it stretched and split like a smile and slid into the muscle. The man dropped my sister, stamped about from foot to foot like one of the cheap robot toys that could be bought in the camp for ten cents."
Chures' cold eyes never left Valdaire's; there was a grim enjoyment now. Is he enjoying reliving this? thought Valdaire. He wants to discomfit me. He wants me to share. He thinks I am pampered, thinks I got off lucky. He knows nothing.
"There was only one fabber in the place," continued Chures. "I became fixated on those robots, spent an age getting the money together, to find that they weren't true robots at all, but clockworks that quickly broke.
"This man, he was like that; broken. His arm went out, grabbing at the sky, the other clutched at the screwdriver; he'd thrown me off, but it had stayed there. A froth of blood was on his lips. He flailed at us, so we scurried back, like mice, you know? Into the shade behind prefabbed shelters. The man fell to his knees, his eyes flat, blood pumping. He stared at me as if to ask why. I did not feel the need to answer.
"I had been aiming for the carotid artery, the way one of the older boys showed me. But I missed and only nicked it. I must have hit something vital, because he could not stand properly. The fat man took a long time to die. It was raining then, like it is now." He looked out of the window. "We watched as his life washed into the mud.
"Persephone, she was my sister. My parents were poor but they were not unsophisticated. My mother would have been a doctor if the war had not come, and my father, he loved stories, he told me so many. Persephone, like the daughter of Demeter, married off to Hades and whose six-month stay in the underworld every year caused Demeter's winter of grief to fall upon the world."
"What happened to them?" said Valdaire.
"Persephone died not long afterwards, killed by the haemorraghic fever. My mother died in a later epidemic. I was fourteen before I and my father left that place. He lives in Fresno now, but he no longer tells stories. The camp outside Puerto Penasco was dismantled in 2120. Nothing but fields there, those big round ones with the irrigation drip tracks." Chures put his empty bottle down, bent to the mini-fridge for another and opened it. "So, you ask why I wore the blend. Many people make the mistake of thinking I hate the machines. This is not so. In the camps I have seen the worst man has to offer, and later I learned of the mistakes that led to them. The machines can deliver us a better world, because they are good at forcing us to work together. We do not have a good record in this area; they are less selfish. But they must be subservient to us, not our masters. I am afraid not that they seek to rule us, but that they will, eventually, by default. That is why I behave the way I do. Man should have a hand in his own destiny.
"The Ky-tech are too close to machines. What they did to their minds was dangerous, and that is why Klein and his friend and that maniac Kaplinski are the last of a dying breed. Why do so many have phones, and not an internal link? I will tell you. It is not the fear of Bergstrom's, but because you know that to alter our minds makes us inhuman. Our humanity should stay in control, or we will cease to be human by small steps. I wore the blend so that I would know them better, not to become one of them, not like Klein."
The rain hammered down, mixed now with the ball-bearing rattle of hail bouncing off the pavements outside.
Valdaire spoke. "The world is full of horror. Every day brings more. I don't see the machines stopping it. They put up the walls, they turned their back on the south. They have stopped collapse by trapping half of the human race." Her voice was small but she was angry, not with him, not directly, not entirely; his story opened up the windows on some of her own past she'd rather forget. "Every one of us from the southern hemisphere has bad memories, Chures. What makes you different?"
"What makes me different? I could sit in Fresno, Valdaire, like my father, watching sports and brooding. I don't. What makes me different is that I choose to do something about it, senorita."
They sat in silence for a while, until the door connecting Chures' room to the other in their suite opened and Otto walked in. From the look of him, he still had not slept.
"We have a problem," he said.
Chures joined Lehmann on the roof while Otto remained with Valdaire and the phone.
"They are making no effort to hide themselves," said Chures, binoculars trained on a large van parked up the street.
"They are not," agreed Lehmann. "It's Kaplinski's way: he deals in fear. He's trying to frighten us — that and I don't think he wants to tackle me and Klein together."
Otto, keyed in to the conversation via his and Lehmann's Kytech machine telepathy, spoke to Lehmann. He has more than enough manpower to take us, Lehmann. He is waiting for us to figure out where Waldo is.
If it is important to him, it must be important to this k52 also. Which suggests we are on the right track; he could be a threat to them.
"He's playing games," said Lehmann out loud, although he whispered, for Kaplinski certainly would have directional mics pointed at his position. "Trying to make us run, lead him right to Waldo."
"What?" said Chures, party to only Lehmann's side of the exchange. Lehmann waved him to silence.
Yes, he is playing us, said Otto, his voice emotionless through the MT. Let's keep this short. Kaplinski might have access to our MT cipher.
Want me to put a cannon shot into that truck? I can take it easily from here, said Lehmann.
No. We're going to plan three as of now. Confirm.
Confirmed, said Chloe over the MT. The phone, modded and tinkered with by Valdaire since she was a child, pumped out a series of viral hunt and attack ware, swamping the local Grid. Already shaky from the events playing round Hughie's Choir, it took a big hit and slowed to a crawl as Valdaire's programmes reproduced rapidly and hit everything with Gridside ingress. Lehmann and Otto, shielded as they were, still felt the effects of one of Valdaire's presents, a worm tailored to disrupt cyborg interfacing protocols.
Another invaded the systems of the van, causing emergency venting of hydrogen from the fuel cell. Simultaneously, Chloe had all the lasers in the vehicle ignition system trip off together and focus in one spot rather than in their programmed depthvaried ignition sequence. There were many safeguards in fuel cell vehicles to prevent either thing ever happening. Valdaire's 'ware circumvented them all.