"Right," said Lehmann, "if Waldo's not here, someone is."
"It is Waldo." Otto walked on past the vegetable patch, and pointed to a quartet of bunkers. "These have been threaded with cable." His Ky-tech eyes revealed a spider web of silver energy spread over them.
"Satellite relay," said Valdaire. "Not as efficient as a dish."
"But not as easy to spot," said Lehmann.
" Genau," said Otto.
There was a flicker of movement. One of the Dragon Fire soldiers shouted and raised his gun arm. Otto slapped the weapon aside as it discharged, the distinctive muted crack of the flechette going supersonic, followed by a clack as the round blew a crater in rotten concrete.
"Klein," said Guan. "You are not to act here."
"Then tell your soldiers not to shoot. We have to take him alive," said Otto. The figure darted away, weaving round bushes and vanishing into the rows of bunkers. "Come on, we're going to lose him! Lehmann, go left."
Otto set off at a sprint, ignoring the shouts of Guan behind him. Jets roared as the Dragon Fire troopers lifted off and those already airborne converged on the fleeing shape. Despite his anger at Otto, Guan must have ordered his men not to fire, as no more rail gun shots sounded. Dragon Fire troopers roared through the sky, Mandarin barked from their speakers, followed by Russian, English and Buryat, ordering the figure to halt. Otto vaulted a fallen tree, thrashed his way through undergrowth dying back for the winter. The figure appeared, a flicker between two bunkers before it disappeared. Otto had his iHUD capture the moment, and enlarge.
"It's a young woman, perhaps mid-twenties, threat levels minimal!" he shouted into his radio. Get to her before the Chinese do, Lehmann, he added via MT.
Otto sprinted through the lines of bunkers, bouncing from their sloping sides, twisting past obstacles and leaping the detritus of long-gone men.
Lehmann thought to him, I nearly have her!
The two of them converged, Lehmann running along the avenue parallel to Otto's. Tree branches whipped at Otto's face, old glass crunching under his feet, Dragon Fire troops sketching trails of fire above him. The girl was running for her life. Habitation in the DMZ was strictly prohibited; the Chinese could execute her just for that.
They cleared the lines of munitions bunkers. The girl was passing through a crack in a set of big double doors into a large building half-sunken into the ground, perhaps once a tank garage.
Otto accelerated as he cleared the ground between the munitions dump and the tank garage. The trees were shorter here, few of them having forced their way through the concrete of the square, the soil on top too thin to support proper growth.
Otto ran through the door and stumbled in shock.
Honour stood there, half in shadow. Her hair shaved, pretty eyes smudged black underneath, pink scar on her head from the mentaug implantation.
"Honour?"
The girl's face wavered and she hit him hard across the head with an iron bar.
Honour vanished. The woman in her place wore a threadbare grey dress with a heavy wool cardigan and fingerless gloves. Long brown hair whipped round as she dropped the bar with a clatter and ran across the garage. Light slanted in through the ceiling where the roof had failed. She headed for a cowled doorway at the back, from which came weak artificial light.
Lehmann leapt over the prone Otto, humour gone from his face under the influence of the mentaug, stone cold.
Otto scowled and recovered his footing. Lehmann caught up with her as a Chinese Dragon Fire rocketed in through a hole in the roof and knelt, covering the door at the back with his weapon.
"Steady there! Steady!" said Lehmann. The girl punched him hard in the throat, and gasped as her fist encountered his subdermal plating. Lehmann caught her by the wrists. He tried English, then Russian. The girl quietened, but her eyes were wide with terror.
Otto approached and spoke to her in Russian. It was halting and heavily inflected, not as good as his English. With connection to the Grid he could run a translation programme, but in the DMZ, where Grid coverage was patchy and officially circumscribed, he had to rely on his own meagre skills.
"We mean you no harm, we will not hurt you. We are looking for Giacomo Vellini, also known as Waldo. Do you know where he is?"
"Fuck you, you German pig!" she snarled at him in Italianaccented German.
"Vellini? You know where he is." Otto remembered something from Waldo's file: family. His mentaug caught his mind searching for the information, and dumped it into his higher consciousness along with a EuPol mugshot. "You are his sister, Marita?" said Otto.
The doors squealed as golden-armoured hands forced them back, crumpling their decayed edges into powder. Valdaire pushed through beneath them, followed by Guan. She panted hard. Though fit, she was no match for the enhanced Ky-tech. Otto was glad to see her. The sight of another woman might calm Marita.
"Waldo?" she gasped.
"Not found him yet."
"This is his sister," said Lehmann.
Valdaire frowned.
"She was heading towards that door down there," Lehmann added.
"You and your black whore will get nothing from me!" screamed Marita, adding a stream of Italian whose vehemence made Otto glad he didn't speak the language. Her defiance was impressive, he thought, but she was still scared, her eyes flicking back and forth between the Ky-tech and the Chinese troopers.
Valdaire was patient. "We really have to speak to your brother." And she reached out to the woman.
Marita flinched. "Don't touch me!" she said in English.
Valdaire withdrew her hand, and explained why they needed Waldo.
Some of the fight left Marita. "You are too late."
"Has he fled?" asked Otto.
Marita gave a choking laugh, halfway to a sob, and shook her ratty brown hair. "He's not here any more."
Marita led the three of them, Commander Guan and two Dragon Fire troops through the door at the back of the tank garage. The Chinese soldiers' armour was too bulky to fit, so they stripped down to their lightly plated undersuits, Guan retaining his command collar, and carried pistols down with them. They took a staircase down into a subterranean complex of rooms. The stairs turned and a long corridor doubled back under the garage. The place was dank. Steel doors were jammed open, hinges rusted solid, water pooled round equipment abandoned a century ago, the concrete ceiling prickly with stalactites of lime leached from the walls. They ascended a short flight of stairs and the area became less derelict. Marita had a home there, of sorts. Furniture scavenged from the base combined with the odd brought-in item made it almost welcoming. She took them into a room that looked as if it had once been a kitchen large enough to feed five hundred men. Much of it was dusty, but one corner had been cleared and decorated with homely scraps, a splash of bright paint, postcards on a rickety set of shelves, old photos gathered from the barracks, mildewed faces of dead Russian soldiers grinning out at a future they'd not foreseen. At the centre of this spot of domesticity an old gas cooker had been patched up and converted to burn wood, its gas vent to the outside jerry-rigged as an impromptu chimney. She asked them to sit at a rusty table in mismatched chairs while she went to a coffee pot atop the stove.
"Your brother was resourceful," said Otto. He spoke German, as the language most present shared to the highest level. Commander Guan set his command collar to translate the conversation into English for Valdaire's benefit. It marched out blandly spoken and overly ornate.
Marita shrugged, shoulders thin under her threadbare clothes. "He tried his best to make something for us here. He was always practical. He used his talents for computers, but he was so clever, it was not difficult for him to learn how to do this. How many people could do the same in our age? Learn how to live in the woods, without machines to help?" She smiled defiantly; there was pride here.