Whatever Valdaire had done was triple gold standard; his ID checked out and he passed without incident, although it took him ten minutes to walk the five cars to the refreshments car. As he went the train swayed, AI-guided bogies negotiating a track and bed centuries old. Soon it would be replaced with a super-wide-gauge line. Adverts for the new trains plastered the walls of the carriages, liners of the steppes; others were a litany of technical specifications as worthy as psalms. These trains would be large, well armed and luxurious, another way of shutting out the wreck of the world. The bulk of the line's new embankment was black outside the train windows, a wall to carry a fortress.
The executive refreshments car was a doubledecker, the lower floor a restaurant. Otto ignored this and headed for the spiral staircase leading to the glass-roofed upper lounge. The stairs were clear, glowing plastic, lighting up motile silhouettes of naked women gyrating on the surface; tasteless East Euro robber-baron glitz. The bar area was the same, dimly lit, a long padded bar with a human tender down the right-hand side, blue-lit plastic straying into the ultraviolet range illuminating an array of bottles, more pornographic images flickering in holo and relief around and along it, writhing across the ceiling. Brassy music played, horns and new guitar with soft and sleazy cymbals. The wall at the far end of the room was occupied by a fishtank, denizens luminous under the light. The room's decor gave Otto a headache with his wider spectral capacities engaged, so he turned his vision down to the human norm. It wasn't any prettier the way unenhanced eyes saw it.
The barroom was divided into several horseshoe-shaped booths lined with seats of buttoned brown leather, a table at the centre of each. Most were occupied, patrons silent behind acoustic privacy shields. Otto took scant attention of these details as he walked in. Head full of the scent of Honour, nervous system juddering under the rip and write of mentaug spooldown, he was intent on the bar, needing to wash it away. He ordered a whisky from the bartender, some vile Chinese malt, downed it in one and gestured for the bottle.
When he turned around to look for a corner to drown his sorrows in, his twin hearts stalled.
From a booth, Kaplinski was staring right at him.
Otto hadn't seen him. He hadn't even been looking for threats, too deep in his own misery. He could have silenced the mentaug, put himself into combat readiness. He was in the field, he should have had its umbrella capabilities offline, but he hadn't. He knew why.
If he carried on like this, he was going to get himself killed.
Kaplinski sat with a drink of something pale lit up by the glow of nearby UV illuminations, his teeth and the whites of his eyes similarly eerie. He put his hand out, palm wide, and indicated the sofa he sat on.
Otto's MT buzzed, a fizz of painful static. Someone trying to hook in. A squad icon that had lain dark for many years ignited. Vier; Kaplinski's number. Kaplinski's personal ident, a grinning shark's face, glowed by it.
Hello Otto, came Kaplinski's emotionless machine burr over the MT. Please, join me.
Otto weighed his options. A Cossack guard stood to attention at the top of the stairs, staring resolutely ahead. He carried a caseless carbine and a charged sabre. Neither would stop the Ky-tech, but there were a great many of his friends aboard the train, and some of them would carry specialised equipment. Cyborgs were a common tool of the plutocracy and the Sino-gangs. Not all of them had good manners, and the Cossacks were equipped accordingly.
Otto made his decision and walked over to the booth, stepping into its acoustic privacy cone, cutting the shitty music out.
"Isn't there anyone on this damn planet that doesn't have access to my MT encryption?" he said, sliding himself onto the horseshoe sofa, his knees tight under the table.
"So good to see you, Leutnant," said Kaplinski. He'd become lean, his face sharp and more wolfish. He'd aged as hard as Otto, the stresses from being Ky-tech written on his skin. Only Lehmann had escaped those. Kaplinski was smaller than the other Ky-tech in Otto's squad, wiry with hard ropes of natural and implanted muscle, hair shaved close, electoos set into his shiny scalp, both glinting in the light. "Not going to kill me?"
Otto held Kaplinski's gaze. The fugitive's eyes were dark as flint, calculating, devoid of pity. And yet Otto could see no sign of the feverishness that had been there last time they'd met. "I could kill you right here, or maybe, just maybe, you would kill me." He inclined his head toward the Cossack. "But neither of us would live to tell the story."
Kaplinski laughed and slapped the table. "Same old Klein! You always did have a sense of humour buried under that overbearing sense of duty."
"Duty's done, Kaplinski." Otto poured himself a tumbler full of bad Chinese scotch and drank it down with a grimace. "I did my part."
"And now you are a mercenary, like me."
"Not like you. I am no murderer."
"You are a killer, Klein, we both are."
"I do only what is necessary."
"So you still have your sense of duty," countered Kaplinski. "You carry it around with you like a full kitbag." His face switched, becoming disdainful. "You always were maudlin; honour, duty, responsibility. A good little German. Still pining over your dead wife?"
Otto looked into Kaplinski's face and fought down the urge to attack him there and then. He'd never forgive the things Kaplinski had done. That time in Brazil when he'd roasted a container full of frightened women and children had just been the start of it. Otto had brought Kaplinski's erratic behaviour to the attention of his superiors more than once, but they'd let him serve; the EU mission to Brazil had been stretched tight, and personnel like Kaplinski were expensive.
Idiots, thought Otto. The girls, three of them found raped and ripped up, near their barracks in Magdeburg: only that had brought Kaplinski down and got him locked up. Then he'd escaped, running wild and murderous across the state until they'd brought him to ground outside of Hasselfelde.
Otto remembered the hostages — not his word, the response team's — he'd never thought it the right one. Kaplinski hadn't wanted to trade them for anything, hadn't taken them to bargain. By that point Kaplinski had devolved to a point of animalistic savagery. They were playthings. The mentaug presented Otto with the memory in merciless clarity. He was sighting down a flechette railgun at Kaplinski while he picked out the eyes of bound shop assistants in a car charge station. Kaplinski's face at that moment, oblivious to the moans of his captives, his fingers slick with humours, his expression that of a child crushing ants. He'd looked up preternaturally swiftly when he heard the crack of the dart as it broke the sound barrier, staring right at Otto before he went down. He should have waited for the catch team to get into position, but twenty men had already died, and it was such a perfect shot, and what Kaplinski was doing…
When they'd got to the charge station, Kaplinski had gone.
Otto pushed the memory away, looking deep into the soulless pits Kaplinski had for eyes. Perhaps the purestrain parties were right; altered men like them were not improvements, they were less than human. "You're an animal, Kaplinski, a sick one. You should be destroyed."
"Not tonight," said Kaplinski. His smile returned as if someone had flicked a switch. He sipped his drink. Otto smelled it, sweet. His adjutant put the name into his mind: Furugi, thick pseudoJapanese stuff made of almonds. Kaplinski finished it off, brought up the menu on the glowing surface of the table, ordered another. His fingers slid over the menu in the table. Music filled the quiet of the privacy cone: "Clair De Lune". "I like piano, so calming," he said. "I have found it hard to be calm, in the past. I…" He stopped and shook his head hard, a man trying to shake bad thoughts away. He smiled again, and Otto saw some of that old feverishness creep back onto his face. "You know, Otto, we could be friends again."