Harmony (25 page)

Uwe’s eyes went from narrow with suspicion to wide open.
Boy he’s easy to read.

“You kidding? It’s way too dangerous. Whenever we hold negotiations we have to set a meeting place days in advance and arrange for contracted security. It’s not something that can happen right now or even forty-eight hours from now.”

“I don’t need protection. I have something to give to one of the leaders of the front. Something very, very small. I don’t even have to meet them in person, just get it to someone who can get it to them. Don’t tell me you can’t even do that?”

Uwe scrunched down into his gelatin seat and began tapping one finger on his chin. My guess was he was worried less about how to pull off my request and more about whether or not I was worth the trouble.

“Know what Stauffenberg told me?” I said. It wasn’t really my style, but if there was ever a time to pull rank, now was it. “She said the fate of the world was resting on my shoulders.”

“For real?”

“Feel free to call her up on your HeadPhone.”

“No thanks. I spend enough time trying to avoid her calls as it is.”

Uwe turned to look me straight in the eye and smiled. I detected a glimmer of irony. “This must be pretty serious for
you
to go pulling the Os Cara card.”

“People are dying all over the world right now, and a lot more will be soon. If that’s not serious enough, I don’t know what is.”

Uwe stretched in his chair and laughed out loud. The sound echoed off the walls of the spacious room. “No, no. I’m surprised
you
are serious about this, Tuan. I know your profile. I’ve heard the stories. Don’t tell me you give a shit about what’s going on in the world. You have some personal connection to this, don’t you? That, and the thing with your dad—sorry about that, by the way. You don’t strike me as the vengeful type, so I’m going to say you’re after something. A little revenge on the side would just sweeten the deal. Look, I’m not one to point fingers. I’m here in this camp half for the booze and the smokes myself. As are the guys we got from your Niger operation. You’re not the only one who wandered out here to get out of the kindness compactor and found themselves somehow responsible for the well-being of the whole fucking world.”

I was shocked, a little, to find that there were others of like mind outside of the crew I had cultivated at my old post.

“You’re working for yourself. Admit that, and I’ll do what I can to help you.”

I sighed, though to tell the truth I wasn’t unhappy. I was starting to like this guy. “You might say it’s a private affair.”

“Private, eh? Sexy. I approve.” Uwe’s lips curled into a smile and his hand went to one ear to make a call. “Call the kid from the Fawn, will you? I doubt they have much business these days anyway. Right. Later.”

≡

The Fawn was an eatery across the street from the old city hall where the camp was located. Much to my surprise, they had beer on the menu. Previously, their clientele had been mostly city officials. Portraits of several soldiers had been printed out and hung on the walls—memories of numerous conflicts this land had seen. I asked about them and Uwe chuckled.

“Those aren’t printouts, Tuan. They’re called photographs.”

“Photographs?”

“Yeah. Bitch to make. You need all this film and photo paper and developing fluid. Really annoying protocol. It’s not like just changing the cartridge in your printer.”

“Another dead medium, then.”

“Guilty as charged. Though for dead media, it’s still pretty alive in these parts.”

“Speaking of things I thought were dead and gone, I’m a little surprised they’ve got beer on the menu.”

“Yeah. That’s the kind of thing the Russians love to grumble about,” Uwe said with a grin. “I can’t tell you how many thousands of reports I’ve read about the ‘shocking consumption of dangerous libations in this hopelessly backward region.’”

“I can imagine.”

“Funny thing is, I looked into it and it turns out that out of all the thousands of admedistrations in the world, only twentysix have laws on the books actually prohibiting alcohol. Just twenty-six that forbid their members to imbibe. In all the rest, it’s just not done.”

“I’m sure the SA analysts have something to do with that.”

“Oh, I know. That’s how the social assessment points work. As long as enough people agree about something, it starts being reflected in your points, and before you know it, you’d better behave or else. And enforcement is built in.”

I smiled. “You know, I think this could be the start of a beautiful friendship.”

“How nice of you to say that. I wouldn’t mind—ah, here comes the food.”

We were alone in the restaurant. The proprietor brought out our food on a large platter, placing it on our table before retreating to the kitchen.

“You think he’s wondering what he should do before the deadline?” I asked, eyeing the retreating man.

“I doubt it. I certainly haven’t given it any thought.”

“That so?”

“You can believe me or not, makes no difference to me. I plan on taking whatever happens that day as it comes. More importantly, this here’s a Chechen specialty.
Zhizhig galnash
. In other words, meat.”

It was, literally, a mound of meat on a bed of what looked like penne. I dug in, the stench of mutton filling my nose. “You dip it in this,” Uwe said, pushing a saucer of garlic oil across the table. It did a lot to improve the flavor. Still, the meat was unbelievably tough. I really had to go at it with fork and knife for a while before I made any progress.

The dishes kept coming out. There were lamb dumplings. And then more lamb. Eager to wash the taste out of my mouth, I found myself ordering a beer—right in front of a fellow Helix agent.

“Good call. I’ll have one too. Don’t see anyone else coming in tonight anyway.”

“How do fool your WatchMe?”

“Ah, turns out that by agency regulations, the health risks associated with any consumption of alcohol during negotiations in regions where drinking is common isn’t counted in your SA score. All I have to do is write a report. You went the DummyMe route, am I right? My way involves a little paperwork, but you got to hand it to the agency for showing a little common sense now and then.”

“I had no idea.”

“Few people do. Myself, I prefer to enjoy life, so I spend a lot of time finding loopholes in the system.”

The proprietor brought out chicken pilaf next. I looked up from my plate to see a boy tapping Uwe on the shoulder. When did he get in here, I wondered. He certainly hadn’t come in through the front door. He was wearing a necklace of spent rifle cartridges over a woven ethnic shawl of some sort. Maybe a warrior, and a young one at that. Uwe turned around and said something to him, upon which the boy faced me and stuck out his hand.

“He says give him whatever it is you have for his boss,” Uwe explained.

I pulled a scrap of paper out of my pocket.

“What, just a piece of paper?” Uwe asked, and I assured him that was all. I told the boy to make sure his boss got it, and Uwe translated for me. The boy nodded, a serious look on his face, and slipped out through the back door of the bar.

“You sure that was all you wanted to give him?”

“I am. Better dig in. Your pilaf’s getting cold.”

“Not a bad idea—and since we’re both here on business, we don’t have to worry about oil or cholesterol or any moral concerns. Let’s eat!”

≡

We stuffed ourselves and went back to Uwe’s office, where he found a single folded piece of paper sitting on his desk. He frowned. “You got a response. That was quick.”

I stepped in front of him and picked up the piece of paper. It began with a line of numbers: coordinates. And then a single word.
ALONE.

“That’s waaay out in the mountains,” Uwe said.

I called up WorldVision in my AR and inputted the numbers. A visualization of the world appeared spinning in front of me until I was looking at Eurasia, then the line of the Caucasus in between the Black and Caspian seas. When the texture of the mountainsides became clear, I found I was looking at a rock-strewn hillside with a few straight lines defining the edges of something rectangular in the middle of it.

“That’s a bunker. Pretty old by the looks of it. Must’ve been some Russians holed up to get away from the bombs last century or at the beginning of this one.”

“I’m going. Think you can get me part of the way there?”

“By yourself? No way.”

“I noticed your six-legger out front is armored.”

“Yeah, it’s got a cannon. I forget how many millimeters. That’s an armed transport-use coolie goat.”

“Then I’ll need two days worth of food in bags on that thing. If you can get a truck to carry me and the goat as far as the road goes, that’ll be fine.”

“What about contracted security?”

“Won’t need it.”

“Then you’ll be taking a one-way trip. I can’t stand by and watch you do that.”

Uwe was a surprisingly considerate man. I clapped him on the shoulder. “You wanted me to admit it, so here goes. This is a very personal mission for me. An extremely private mission.”

“We’re talking about your life here. I don’t care how private your reasons are.”

“No, we’re talking about the life of every admedistration civilian in the world. Compared to that, I’m nothing at all. Remember what Stauffenberg said, the fate of the world is on my shoulders. This is something I need to pull off on my own.”

Uwe stared at me for a moment, not really buying my story. Then, at last, he shrugged. “You really do think about nothing other than yourself, do you?”

“That’s right. Like you said, I’m very serious about this. And yeah, I don’t give a shit what happens to the world.”

“That’s not very constructive of you, but I can’t say I disapprove. Hey, I’m mostly in this job for the beer and the smokes myself.”

Uwe put a hand to his ear and began talking to someone.

“Yuri? Hello? Uwe here. I need someone to carry a woman and a transport goat up into the mountains. Yeah, right away.”

03

I could feel the wind growing colder against my skin with every gain in elevation.

It was just me and the six-legged goat in the back of the truck. The goat had been put together to army specs, so no pink was involved. Everything was drab olive, smoky, dirty— the colors of war. I had been told that the six-legger’s control mechanism consisted of cultivated horse nerves specially trained for the environment. The original horse came from local stock, so they were used to the mountains, Uwe said. It bore a Geneva Convention Forces stencil on its amply armored side. There were cultivated parts, muscles extracted from an actual mountain goat, and a complex network of machinery, making it impossible to tell whether it was more biological or mechanical.

The goat had no head, and it would have taken considerable imagination to call the sensors bristling from its front end a face. The closest I could get to making sense of it was to think of it as a mountain goat with its head lopped off.

We went rocking and swaying up the mountain road for some time, but not once did the driver look back to talk to me. Not that I would have been able to respond, not knowing Russian. I was beginning to feel a strange affinity for my cybernetic companion when the truck came to a lurching stop.

The back opened, and the driver was standing outside, motioning me to exit. I gave the goat a slap on the rump and it stood smoothly under its heavy load and hopped down onto the gravelly path. I scanned an aerial photograph of our surroundings linked to the GPS in my AR. It would take a half day or more from here to reach the bunker site. There was hardly a path at all, but my high-resolution satellite imagery would make the going relatively painless. I waved to the driver and thanked him. He went back down the road without a word.

I was now thoroughly in the mountains. The rocky face of the Caucasus was black. According to Uwe, the name came from a Greek mutation of an ancient Scythian word meaning “white snow.” Chechnya was to the north of the mountains, and our truck was now near the top of the range, close to the Georgian border to the south. The only snow on the Caucasus was at the peaks. Below 2,500 meters there was only black rock and dirt.

I started to navigate my way up the rocky slope, the goat deftly picking its way along behind me. I felt like a mountain ascetic on his way to meet the gods, though as soon as I had the thought, I banished it from my mind. I didn’t think of—I didn’t want to think of—Miach as a god.

There were no clouds. The humidity was low, but the sun didn’t feel too hot as of yet. Despite the lack of a path, this was where the Chechen guerrillas had made their home, and I didn’t find the going terribly difficult. I could feel the air in my lungs growing thinner as I climbed. A lack of oxygen wasn’t something even WatchMe and a subdermal medcare unit could fix. I had gone off-line some time ago for that matter. My AR was a local simulation, working off the GPS I carried.

“Being this alone is actually kind of exciting,” I said to the goat.

The goat plodded along in silence.

After three hours in the trackless wilderness, I found something resembling a proper path. According to my navigator, I had another six hours of this before I reached my destination. The path was fairly wide—I even saw traces of tire tracks. Probably left by the Russians during earlier conflicts in the region.

Every once in a while I rested to fill my mouth with water and acclimatize to the air. The transport goat had its own recycler unit embedded, so it didn’t require much in the way of drink. I touched his back, as though it were a pet. It wasn’t all that different from a regular animal. The skin was warm beneath a layer of fur. I had seen a civilian militia charge an army riding on these once, though I had forgotten whether it was in Niger or some other part of Africa.

The army in that conflict had been comprised entirely of remote surrogates. The militia had set off an electromagnetic pulse in the area, cutting the connection between the command center and the surrogates and forcing them to enter automated battle mode. Faced with a completely unexpected cybernetic cavalry charge, the surrogate troops had been decimated.