Читать книгу The Puzzler’s War - Eyal Kless - Страница 12

Clearing the ruins of the Radiated City took several days and a third of my nourishment pills. As I walked through the empty streets I realised why, despite the dangers of contamination, the looters still came to plunder. The city was destroyed probably within hours, not weeks or months. Missiles rained from the sky, and power rays carved the ground, destroying everything in their path. The nature of most Tarakan weaponry was such that tens of millions died within hours, but a lot of their items survived. I know this because I had been in charge of security when those weapons were mounted, piece by piece, on the Star Pillar and smuggled up to the hub to be assembled in space, then sent on long orbit so they could not be shot down by antisatellite batteries on Earth. At first, I did not know what we were carrying up. Even with my security clearance, I still shouldn’t have known that we were breaking several international treaties by secretly carrying missile parts up the Pillar, but all the secrecy in the world can’t stop a drunken intelligence officer from blabbing while trying to pick up a woman at a local bar. We had surprisingly good sex that night, but the next morning, I got him fired.

Aside from the awfulness of the world I woke up to, the trek was a long way from the worst situation I’d been through. I remembered having to survive twenty-seven days in a Bangladeshi sewage system while an army of assassins hunted me down. Compared to that, walking in a ruined city, even in the rain, was almost a relaxing affair with the added bonus of casual looting.

Of course, by now, clothes and delicate items were long gone, but I still managed to find neo-flex plastic material, and with the help of my power sword, I cut and wrapped it around the soles of my shoes and made a cover for my head. There was also enough material for a crude sack. Remembering Malk’s debriefing on currency, I filled it with pieces of junk, mostly metal. I even found a cracked porcelain cup, which somehow had survived all this time. I wrapped it carefully in the last remaining piece of neo-flex plastic and walked away, feeling somehow more optimistic than before. The sword belt was too large for me to tie around my waist, so I threw it over my shoulder and under my armpit, bandolier style, making sure the hilt behind my back was within easy reach.

Aside from the great destruction, the second noticeable thing about the place was how empty it was. There were endless rows of buildings and not a single soul. If what I’d heard about the war was true, and the weaponry Tarakan possessed had been used to their full potential, billions had died in a very short amount of time. I found myself contemplating survival rates. Was the entire planet completely destroyed?

Two days later I spotted another looting party treading through the ruins, but this time I kept my distance. There were five of them, all more or less the same make and creed as the three I left behind. Since they were all heading into the city, I followed their tracks in the opposite direction until I eventually found their camp. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been surprised. There was always a camp, even in the most remote of places. If there was business to be made, merchants came to trade. Bring enough people together and someone would eventually bring a cart and begin trading. Soon enough women would appear, either of their own free will or, more likely, under coercion. In time, the camp grows to a small hamlet, then someone usually takes control of it by force.

Until the moment I saw the camp I hadn’t fully comprehended what had happened to us as a species. The vast city behind me was in ruins, true, and a man had aimed and shot an arrow at me, but I still somehow expected to encounter modern life on the outskirts of the city. Seeing a horse and cart travel the unpaved road towards a camp surrounded by a medieval wooden wall turned my stomach. It was as if I’d stepped out of a time machine.

I sat down amid the tall grass and watched the camp until nightfall, noting the two hanging corpses outside the gate, the smoke coming out of the wooden houses, the water well and the people coming to use it. It could have been a scene from a period virtual flick, but for the large truck parked in the middle of the camp, and even that vehicle was antique, the sort that drove on cooking oil and coal. All but the poorest countries of the world had shied away from the use of such polluting trucks, but right then, to me, that truck was a beacon of modernity. It became my mark. I had to get into that truck.

With the poor zooming ability of my vessel, it was too far off for me to see any details, and parts of the truck were obscured by what looked like poorly erected wooden buildings. After changing position several times, I managed to watch it being loaded with what seemed to be metal junk. The truck owner’s face was hidden inside a grey cowl but he had an obvious limp. The men helping load the truck were armed to the teeth with a mixture of antique twentieth-century weapons and more medieval-looking ones. They were a rough enough bunch, but the man wearing the cowl seemed to control them. They dispersed as night came.

The prudent thing to do was to wait at least another day, gather intelligence and figure out the best way to act. Special hibernating agent Vera Geer, or even Colonel Major Vera Geer, would have strongly suggested such caution, especially when operating in a noncombat vessel. But I was afraid the truck would leave at first light, or even before, and I would be left behind in the Middle Ages. Besides, the night’s darkness provided an opening. It was true darkness, the sort you rarely experienced in the world I used to live in. The cold temperature was another consideration, and it was taking its toll on my vessel, which was shaking and consuming a lot of energy to continue functioning. There was danger I would damage the vessel or even freeze to death. Or perhaps these were just excuses. I was tired, hungry, cold, wet, and still emotionally in shock. I wanted heat, and light, and food, and perhaps even a conversation. I wanted to get away from this place, which looked and felt like a bad hallucination. I also needed a good night’s sleep. I needed to dream. Operational directions might be received via dreams, but I had to find a safe place to fall into a deep sleep, enough to open my mind up to such transmissions. That could not be done in the field.

I unwrapped the neo-flex from my shoes and made sure everything was tied, secured, and as jingle free as possible, although with the coin bag and a sack filled with metal loot that task was bordering on the impossible.

The camp had four crude guard towers, but for some reason only two were manned and their only light sources were torches. Reaching the outer perimeter was an easy enough task and I didn’t even need to crawl, a blessing since after the few days of light drizzle, the ground close to the wall was awfully muddy. There were wooden stakes in the ground, as if the people in the camp were afraid of a cavalry charge. I slipped past them and reached the wall.

I aimed to reach the part of the wall that was closest to the truck, but that part was impossible to climb. Primitive or not, whoever had built the wall had done a fine job. Moving a little farther, I managed to find a part where I could get in at least two handholds. They were impossibly far apart, but that was all I needed.

Before climbing, I stayed still and tried to deepen my hearing. My vessel’s senses were only one notch above biological human level, but it was enough for me to hear the stutter of a small engine, the steps of three people walking away from me, coarse singing, and the snorting of pigs. That last one came with a stench as well. I took a deep breath, entered ESM, feeling adrenaline rush once again through my body, and quickly climbed the wall, my fingers digging into the wood like an alley cat. I found myself on a narrow parapet, from which I quickly jumped down to the other side, landing behind a hut and huddling down. It took me a few minutes to recover from the disorientation and nausea of the ESM.

The stench of livestock mixed with rotting garbage and human excrement was apparent. This place was the graveyard of hygiene. I leaned and peeked around. Apart from four guards standing around a small bonfire behind a gate, the dark streets were deserted. I sneaked away from them, passed the central well, and headed towards the truck. It was parked next to a second gate, effectively blocking it. Years of usage and crude patch jobs were apparent, as well as bullet holes and scorch marks, but the makers of the EverTyre company would have been proud to know that their product, worn and battle scarred, was still functioning even after a nuclear holocaust. I still toyed with the idea of stealing the truck, smashing through the gate, and driving away into the sunset, but the motion sensor lock on the truck’s doors made me change my plans. Actually, the placement of a modern gadget such as the motion sensor was uplifting. It meant there was still hope …

With the right tools, I could have bypassed the lock, but the risk of attracting attention and turning this into a massacre was too great. Besides, even if I got into the truck and managed to drive it, I hadn’t a clue where to go. I needed information and, if possible, assistance.

A dog began to bark and I retreated back to the central well. I followed my ears to the back of the biggest wooden shack of this sorry little settlement. The engine noise came from a small generator, which, by the smell of the black smoke it was exhaling, was fuelled by a mixture of cooking oil, fat, and perhaps even manure. As I watched, the back door opened and a middle-aged man, dressed in disgustingly stained clothes, poured a bucket of such slop into the open tank. I waited for him to go back into the hut and headed towards the front entrance.

Generator or not, the main light source of this small tavern was a central fire under a large iron pot, a serious fire hazard under any modern law anywhere in the old world. The stench almost made me walk back out, but once the door opened, enough people turned their heads at me to make a retreat dangerously noticeable, so I walked into the gloomy shadows of the room and closed the door behind me.