As the truck laboured through the snow, gusts of frigid air throwing up fine spray of ice crystals, the air in the cab was warmer – in some cases, quite heated. Aswon, Hunter and Marius were all chuntering about their last encounter, and how Kai and his shocking grasp of Russian had nearly bought them a one-way ticket. Kai responded, saying he would work on it, but that seemed to be the wrong thing to say – the others proceeded to put their opinions more forcefully, and even Shimazu and Tadibya, normally the quiet ones in confrontational situations, were nodding with them. Kai realised that he'd probably crossed a line with the last altercation, composed himself, and then spoke to them at length – describing how he was going to fix this, and it wouldn't happen again. Eventually his charisma and charm won through – or at least mollified them a little – and the complaints subsided.
The truck shuddered and lurched up the road, struggling with the deep snow and patches of ice. Marius had to fight hard to keep the truck moving, and the journey was considerably rougher than the inbound leg. Tadibya asked her existing spirit to move to the front left wheel, and break through the snow there for her, and to keep doing that until they were out of the snow, or they got to dusk. She shifted her centre, moving from the domain of land to that of sky and felt her control over the previous spirit fade. It should carry out her last request with no problem – but she couldn't change it now, or ask it to do anything else instead. In her new domain, she called an air spirit and asked it to blow the snow out of the way for the right wheel. With both wheels now being cleared, there juddering of the truck was somewhat lessened, and the journey became easier. Reaching the main road, they swung to the right, turning west again and heading for the coast. The snow up here was just as thick as it had been overnight, and it was clear that snow plows or other similar vehicles had not made it up here yet.
As they turned onto the main road, they found themselves in an odd situation. Every vehicle they passed, waiting in the snow for rescue, started up and joined up with them – using the truck as the next best thing to a bulldozer. They slipped and fought their way through the snow with various amounts of skill and sometimes lots of scraping and cursing, but the wide tracks and trampled snow left by the truck was manageable – just – for the standard cars in the area. With the damage to the truck, they were hard-pressed to manage more than a few kilometres per hour, and it took them nearly three hours to clear the zone of control claimed by the warlord in the valley. Once they cleared that area though, Marius pulled over into the next wide area he found. It wasn't clear if this was a passing point for wide loads, or a tourist spot that gave a spectacular view over the valley to the south – but it did give them room to pull over a little and get around all sides of the truck and view the damage. Behind them, the convoy of cars, now nearly twenty strong, skidded and slowed to a halt, a few of them sliding and gently rear-ending the ones in front. At least half of the cars just had plain glass in, and they could see the occupants watching them through their windscreens – wondering what had happened.
Everyone but Kai got out of the truck, with Aswon making a point of climbing out with his rifle slung over his shoulder, before racking the weapon, making clear to everyone watching them that yes, they were armed. Marius started to dig at the snow around the wheels, and after a quick examination said that they really needed to swap over the front and middle tyres. The rest of the team set to with shovels, clearing out space around them to help with the changeover.
Inside the truck, Kai called his friend in Vietnam – Ngo Ding Diem. Reaching her on the first try, he asked her how the credentials were going that he'd previously requested. She advised him that they were in progress, but it was proving a little harder than expected to get IDs that matched their descriptions thrown together, and it was going to take another ten days or so. Kai and Ngo then chatted for a while – until Nadia interrupted them, pulling open the back door and letting a blast of cold mountain air into the vehicle, and demanding tea for everyone working outside. Kai finished his conversation, and then set to with the kettle.
It took them about forty-five minutes to do each side, jacking up the truck, loosening the wheel nuts and exchanging the metre high tyres from one axle to another. Fortunately the rounds that had shredded the tyres hadn't damaged the rims or the axles, and the swap went ok. Ninety minutes later, and the team mounted up again, and set off on their journey – gratefully followed by the convoy of battered cars who had waited with them. Everyone but Kai cycled through the back of the truck, getting out of cold wet clothes and into something more comfortable, and within a quarter hour the back of the truck looked like a raid on a launderette, with clothes strung everywhere, slowly dripping water onto the floor. As they started to clear a path through the snow again, Tadibya made a suggestion.
"Maybe we should stop and have a wander down the line with a donation bucket, see how much they value our services?"
The others smiled, and for the first time since leaving the valley there were a few jokes made and the mood lightened. They didn't stop, though – the idea of getting back out into the groin-deep snow didn't appeal to anyone.
The truck rounded the shoulder of a mountain, and a wide vista presented itself to them. The road started to descend, and looking ahead they could see it wound around the mountain they were on, entered a wide looping switchback, and dropped, then headed for the next haunch a few miles away, winding down again. They could see to the south and west for what must have been thirty kilometres, and it all looked downhill from here. More importantly though, as they rounded this corner, they hit a dividing line in the mountain range, and the weather pattern changed abruptly. Inside a few hundred metres the snow diminished rapidly, dropping down to barely thirty centimetres deep, and inside a few hundred more it faded away to almost nothing. Marius slowly increased speed as the battering on the truck faded away, and the digital readout on the dash crept up…. 30…35…40…45... As they pushed past this and closed in on fifty, the truck started to vibrate and there were some weird grating noises. They slowed a little, and settled on forty-five, and rolled down the hill.
Within a few minutes, they started to get overtaken, as the convoy of cars closed up on them and then in clouds of blue smoke and the sounds over over-revved engines, hammered past them on the straight sections. As each one passed, there was a chorus of honks and toots from their horns, presumably of thanks for services rendered.
They continued to descend, now travelling much more smoothly though the pace seemed maddeningly slow. On the bright side, as they got closer to the coastal areas and lower in the mountains, the signal on their commlinks picked up, and soon Hunter was able to get some useful data off the matrix about their destinations. He plugged in, and was soon updating the maps with some information that he shared with the rest.
"Right folks, we're heading for Batumi, which is the second largest city in what was Georgia. Biggest place for miles around though, and should have the infrastructure we need. It's got rail links and a port, and according to this at least one actual shipyard, so there should be some heavy industry around as well. Lots of light manufacturing places listed, some feed processing and they've got a bunch of casinos listed and some pretty good tourist facilities. Population is a little under two hundred thou, with a mix of religions – most of 'em are Orthodox, but there's Catholics, but some Muslims, Jewish and Armenian Apostolic, whatever the hell they are. There's an airport here that is listed as international as well, but I can only see one runway, and it's barely two and a half klicks long. Um… yeah, I suppose you can get a widebody down on that ok, as long as it's not too heavily loaded. But it's probably going to be local and mid-range flights from there mostly. Nearly everything we want to see will be in or near the city centre, which has some towers and large modern buildings – outside that, there's miles and miles of suburbs, just like Baku."
As he described what he had found, he highlighted areas of interest on the maps that he piped through to pads and displays around the cab.
"I've also found three possible places we can try to get the truck fixed. First one is this place – 'Car Happy Friend Garage'. I've checked the translation, and that's what it's really called. Look!"
The map was displayed with a low resolution shot taken of a battered and tired-looking building, covered in car logos and with exhausts and wheels piled up in big heaps. Sure enough, there was a hand-painted sign with the name, in English, in big bold letters.
"Next place is Batumi Heavy Transport, place looks like it does work for a number of the local hauliers and advertises rebuilds and conversions, service work and such like." The picture changed to show a much larger double warehouse, with a number of trucks being worked on over pits or on heavy duty lift mechanisms. It looked much more like the facility they had visited back in Karaj.
"And last of all, as an out of the box thought, we could try the shipyard. They're going to have all the tools needed, should be skilled on the fabrication side of things, and will have masses of raw material to work with." The picture changed again, showing a busy drydock where a mid-size freighter was being worked on, with twenty-five milimetre steel plates being cut up and used to make replacement hull plating for a large rent down one side.
"Otherwise, it's a town, much like any other. I've found a couple of hotels, from the big luxury jobs – one here from Renraku Hospitality with five stars – all the way down to smaller motels and cheap end stuff, where they probably won't check our IDs that carefully. Oh, and two casinos that keep trying to install some pop up game on my terminal – one from Aztechnology, and one from Fuchi. Though I'm not sure how long that one is going to stay open!"
The last comment was met with snorts from the rest of the team, and a confused look from Nadia, who shrugged when nobody explained, pouted a little and went back to hugging Marius.
"Right, good work Hunter. Let's try giving them a call. Pass the data over will you?" Kai waited until all the numbers filtered through to his pad, and then selected the heavy transport company and dialled the number. The team listened to his half of the conversation, and could more or less follow along. No, the person who answered didn't speak Russian. Or English. But someone else did. Here they are now. No, they'll be shut by the time they would arrive – Hunter working out an ETA for the slow moving van and holding up a pad with the time scrawled on it – no, they'll still be shut, even if it's an emergency. What's that? Paying in cash, with a bonus? Oh, that's different. For two hundred nuyen, they could get someone to stay and wait, no problem. Around 20:00, yes, see you then.
The truck trundled along the main road, heading for the coast as the sun dropped to the horizon. The mountains were behind them now, and they were well onto the coastal plains, the ground relatively flat and showing signs of agriculture and light industry but still with huge swathes of undeveloped land around them. As they got onto the coast road, they could see the Black Sea to their right, looking harsh and uninviting in the wan sunlight of the late January afternoon. The beach was made of pebbles or gravel, rather than sand, and stretched about fifty metres on a very shallow incline.
As they headed south along the coast, the character of the buildings changed. There was a near constant level of development, all along the left side of the road – inland. House after house with large double fronts were built up on raised rock piles – presumably to avoid flooding during storms and high tides. All of them looked to be "guest houses", able to hold the tourists from the inland areas during the summer months for their precious few days of holiday away from the factories. All of the guest houses looked closed though, and from the exteriors also looked to be in a poor state of repair. They drove on, kilometre after kilometre, with the same thing repeated – a single row of housing on the left of the road, closed and feeling abandoned, and the rocky beach and sea to the right. The only life they saw were the few other trucks on the road and the passing motorists who jockeyed for position to overtake them.
They drove over an old concrete bridge, covering an inlet or gully of some kind, and could see down to the water as they crossed. It was dark and looked oily, and as they hit just the right angle, the water reflected the last rays of sunlight back in a rippling rainbow. It looked quite pretty – until it sunk in that this was oil, lubricants, long chain hydrocarbons and other industrial pollutants. Black films covered the rocks, and they could see swirling pools of rubbish caught in the eddies and basins. That probably explained why the guest houses looked run down – nobody wanted to come to a beach that looked like that.
Not far after the bridge they passed a large fuel stop, one with a two-tier roof system designed for the large long haul trucks to fit under. They checked their fuel status, but having filled up in Tbilisi, they were still pretty good – they'd used a higher than normal amount of fuel due to pushing through the snow, but they still had a good thousand kilometres in the tank. Hunter added a note to the map with the location, and they pushed on towards the town.
They found the place ok, finding a few bored-looking employees waiting outside the mostly closed doors, smoking cheap-looking cigarettes. One of them wandered over to the truck and waited for Kai to climb down, then walked with him to get a quick look at the damage down each flank, raising eyebrows at the blast damage and making clucking sounds in the back of his throat. After a quick assessment, he looked up at Kai.
"Much damage, my friend, and hard to fix – very heavy parts and difficult to work with. Will cost about sixty thousand, and will take us two, maybe three weeks. Depends on parts and other work we have in."
"Ahh, that's really too long. Is there no way we can speed that up?" Kai watched the man, and saw him glance at the man leaning against the door, taking a long drag and blowing smoke out of his nose. He seemed uninterested in what was going on.
"I don't think so, garage is very busy, with much work to do. Would be very expensive to let other customers down." Kai listened to his response, and then lowered his voice, to barely more than a whisper.
"Would you care to come and discuss this with us in the back of the truck. Maybe a cup of tea? Just you and me?" The man stared at Kai for a while, then took a step back, shaking his head. Kai tried a different tack.
"Ok, look, if you could get the parts shipped priority, and if you had no other work – how long would it take you to do the job? What's the fastest time you could do it?"
In the truck, Shimazu stirred as his pocket buzzed. He fished out the phone, and saw that it was from Saito, his fixer friend back in China, and keyed the accept key and listened. Back outside, Kai listened to the response.
"Well, it will take us about a week of work. Cut away damage. Fix box section. Replace damaged control runs. Balance wheels. Load test… yes, five days. But that is five days with two crews working, morning and afternoon. Would be very expensive. Would cost…. A hundred thousand."
Shimazu said hello a few times, then pressed the phone right up to his ear. Across the connection, he could hear the sound of fighting and things breaking. Thuds and "oofs". Definitely not happy noises. He waved for quiet in the cab and hit the speaker button, and seeing the frown on his face, the others listened in. Outside, Kai continued to talk, unaware of the situation inside.
"Ok, here's a deal for you. You get your crews working on this straight away. You bump whoever you need to down the queue, so we're first. You get the priority shipment on the parts you need. And you get your best crews on, morning and night, to get this done – in four days." As the man started to protest about the impossibility of such a thing, Kai waved him to be quiet. "In exchange for this ahhh… overtime and great customer service, we will pay you one hundred and ten thousand – with half up front to cover the parts and disruption, another quarter when you are midway through the job and the last quarter when you hit the deadline. Oh, and we'll need a new pair of runflats as well."
The spokesman turned to glance at the silently smoking figure, who gave a tiny nod of the head.
In the truck, the mood had sobered. They could hear the unmistakable sounds of someone being beaten, and the sound of destruction. Tadibya paled, and spoke quietly.
"Something is on fire there, and they are inside whatever it is." There was something to her voice, a faint tremor – but she sounded certain of what she said. Hunter chimed in as well.
"And that was someone being thrown through an external window – a large framed window, with no openings. It's quite distinctive."
Shimazu's frown deepened, and his hand clenched white around the hilt of his sword, matching the set of his jaw. He looked around at each of the others, but was aware of the distance between their current location and his friend.
Back outside, the spokesman held out a grubby hand to Kai.
"For one hundred and ten, we will get you a blowjob as well from our secretary!" He cracked a large smile, and the rest of the men guffawed loudly, before they set off. Kai smiled, but didn't respond.
"You bring truck back, tomorrow morning, 8:30, we start work". Kai nodded and told him they'd be back, on the dot, before turning to climb back into the cab. As soon as he entered, he could feel the tension, and stood quietly, absorbing the situation.
"Shimazu, show me on the map where your friend is. As precisely as you can. I can fly there astrally and at least go and check on him." Shimazu nodded at Tadibya, and then took the proffered data slate from Hunter and zoomed in, panning to the east from Turkestan and towards the edge of China. He zoomed in to the area, and then paused for a moment, looking around at the team. He seemed to wrestle with something for a moment, and they could see the muscles working on the side of his jaw. Whatever was going through his mind though, he made a decision, and then zoomed in more on the map and identified the house where Saito lived, and further across town, the safehouse that was maintained for him.
Tadibya took the pad, and zoomed out a little, looking at the mountains and rivers nearby, the layout of the town – trying to get a fix on the geography of the area, and then mentally converting that into what it might look like on the astral plane. She zoomed out some more, then a little more, then more – until she could finally see where they were, and where she was headed.
"That's about three thousand kilometres," said Tadibya, using the ruler widget to bring up a rough distance. "Ok... that's going to take a while." She saw the look of disappointment and worry on Shimazu's face, and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. "I'll go fast, as fast as I can, and look for your friend. It will just take me a while, maybe twenty-five minutes each way." Shimazu nodded mutely, as if unwilling to say anything that might betray his feelings. Tadibya curled up on her bunk, and then projected out of her body. She took a moment to align herself and then accelerated. Faster and faster, until the landscape was a pearlescent blur beneath her. The astral plane shifted under her, becoming a hue of pale blue with streaks of gold as she crossed the Caspian Sea, and for two minutes she swooped down until her astral body was ripping through the waves, feeling the mass of life in the form of plankton and bacteria spraying against her.
With a flash, she transitioned back to land, and space became dark around her as she entered the desert. Bereft of life and harsher, the space became unwelcoming and cold, apart from the odd clusters of life around settlements, rivers and oasis patches. She banked and followed a river, driving headlong towards her destination, at an equivalent speed of around seven thousand kilometres per hour.
Back in her bunk, the body lay silent, only the faint rising and falling of the chest betraying that it was still alive.
Hunter had pulled up the details of the town, and tried calling through to the town's emergency switchboard, trying to report a fire at the location. He was sure he had the right dialect of Chinese, and she understood him, but he had a hard time trying to explain. It took a good five minutes of back and forth he realised that was she meant was that they didn't have a fire service, or fire trucks. And there was no police – just the local garrison of the Warlord.
Shimazu dialled Odemoyd, as the closest person he knew to Saito that might have some hope of having an effect, but snarled when it went straight through to voice mail. He dialled again, but got nothing different. He kept redialling, getting more and more frustrated as he did so. The others sat in silence, waiting – unable to offer any advice or help.
Tadibya arrived, swooping down from the mountains and plateaus and dropping down to "normal" speed. The blur solidified into a landscape, and she checked her surroundings, then zipped north again for a few more seconds at maximum. Ahh, there, that was better… now she could make out the formations of rock she had seen on the map. Not bad for a three thousand kilometre journey – she had only been about twenty kilometres out! She sped down, moving as swiftly as she could whilst still perceiving the world around her clearly, spiralling down until she spotted the house. It wasn't that she recognised the house – but she figured that nowhere else would have an astral signature like an abattoir right now, so it was the right one.
Tadibya looked down at the scene, recoiling somewhat from the devastation. The intense emotions, pain and suffering had distorted and corrupted astral space, sending out shock waves and emotional eddies. As she watched, she saw a body come flying out of the house, triggering a few more shards of glass to explode outwards. A spray of arterial blood arced through the air, accompanied by a high pitched shriek of pain. She flinched herself as a fresh wave of anguish erupted from the scene and washed over her, feeling the aftermath of the considered and deliberate act. The body landed in a clump and after some pitiful struggles slowed and then stopped as it quickly bled out. One of the arms had been removed from the body, strips of flesh and destroyed tendons waving in the breeze.
Then she saw the monster that had caused this climbing out of the window. It was huge – and for a moment her senses boggled as she tried to evaluate it. It was about two and a half metres tall – nearly as big as a troll in fact – but was clearly a man. But the man was distorted and formed with body parts that didn't seem to fit. A normal sized head sat on top of enormous shoulders, with rippling muscles and taut skin displaying lumps and bumps in strange places. The chest was equally over-sized, and tapered down to a waist that was as thick around as most human shoulders. It was like a man had been scaled up to the size of a troll, and then released into the world.
She focussed her vision on him, and tried to read his astral signature through the pallor of destruction that surrounded him. She felt his soul, his inner spirit, and examined it, or at least she tried to. The first thing she noticed was that his body was covered in tattoos – faint henna-like marks, carefully painted over the enormous canvas of his skin. They glowed, radiating power in the astral realm – though what they did was unclear to her. She tried to see past them, to his being, and noted that there was no tell-tale blackness, no signs of pollutants such as Cyberware, Bio-enhancement or disease. He glowed brightly, too brightly – his soul was stronger than that of a normal person, much stronger. He was somehow more "whole" than others, stronger than anyone she had ever met. Yet despite this, her gaze slid off him, not able to get a feel for him, and build a unique key. Something was very odd about this man – something had protected him with some kind of magical defence, perhaps tied to the tattoos. Whatever it was, she could not get a good look at him.
Her gaze was caught by the sight of someone breaking from cover on the other side of the house, running to a car and quickly getting in. It looked like the description of Saito, and radiated fear, anger and alarm in roughly equal parts. Saito left the door open, and frantically tried to start the engine, but was met with crunching and whining from the dilapidated vehicle. She flew down to the vehicle and manifested, causing a scream of fear to erupt from his mouth.
The noise carried around the house, and the huge figure put down the body it had been poking, turning with ponderous grace towards the noise. It strode like a behemoth, tiny eyes almost hidden in the deep face, itself ringed with a mass of dark black hair.
Tadibya spoke rapidly, realising she didn't have much time.
"Saito – calm down. Shimazu sent me. Call him. But get away, I will try to distract… whatever that is!"
Saito pumped the gas pedal and twisted the key again, but with his other hand, pulled out a phone and thumbed it on. She heard him say something, and the name "Shimazu" – and guessed he had his burner phone set up for voice dialling.
Moments later she saw relief on Saito's face, and a quick glance towards her and a nod. She couldn't hear Shimazu on the phone – noise made by electronic sources, things that weren't alive, wouldn't be audible on the astral plane. Only the living were really able to interact with her.
She turned towards the figure as the engine finally caught and the car lurched forwards, the driver's door flapping shut with the sudden movement. Saito jammed it into gear, and floored the engine, sending mud and gravel flying, and headed down the road, the back end of the car snaking and twisting as it fought for grip.
The figure broke into a run, moving quickly - faster than anything that size had the right to move. Arms and legs pumped, and it rocketed forwards in a bounding gait that looked effortless. It ate up the distance, following the fleeing car – actually closing on it a little as it took bounds over the corners of plots and across gardens and wastelands. It looked like it could keep going all day, indefatigable, without pause or lethargy.
Tadibya blipped forwards for a heartbeat, getting ahead of the figure. Normally, she would be only a bystander here – her form on the astral plane, the enemy – and it was an enemy, of that she was sure – on the physical plane. Spells could not cross the boundary that way normally. But…. Those tattoos. She concentrated, trying to isolate them from the body. To look at them, as distinct astral constructs. Slowly she managed to unravel them from the spirit of the foe, seeing the magical protections and wards, the enhancements upon its body and mind. She got a good metaphysical grasp on one of them, and then pulled a bolt of power from the area around her, channelling the mana through her astral form and trying to ground it through the tattoo.
It was dangerous. Her astral form, bound together only by her will and fleeting sense of ego was less well-suited for channelling power than her physical body. She had to be careful – whatever power she did not carefully manage and send down to the body, would backlash and tear her form apart. Potentially, too much backlash would kill her outright – severing the link between her form and her body.
The bolt of power arced down and into his head, and impacted with a massive flash of light on the astral plane. Power flashed back towards her, and with a grunt and great effort, she twisted and channelled, directing it back again, fingers fluttering through the air as she struggled to direct the blast. The figure rocked and slid to a halt, and the car with Saito in sped away. Slowly the figure turned and looked up at her. She hovered in astral space, perhaps thirty metres away, and her astral form panting heavily from the effort of casting as if she had run a race. The figure slowly walked towards her, and just as she was about to fly back, fearful of his proximity, he stopped. She knew her spell had hit the target – it should have been reeling, barely able to keep upright. Yet it walked towards her calmly and with composure.
Still wary – she had seen some of the leaps that physical adepts were capable of – she watched and waited. Every second she delayed it, was more time for Saito to get away. The figure just glowered at her, staring from underneath enormous bushy eyebrows at her. She moved a little, floating from side to side, and demanifested. Now her figure was only present in the astral plane – but still it watched her. Interesting. It was definitely gifted, with the ability to perceive spirits.
For perhaps thirty seconds they observed each other. Staring across the gulf of two planes, despite only standing a handful of metres apart. The figure started to speak, but she didn't understand the words – the language sounded familiar, but she didn't understand it and couldn't place it for sure. The emotional content was clear though – she felt the waves of hatred and spite from him.
A vehicle started to bounce down the road towards them, a large panel van in a plain brown paint scheme. As it approached the enormous hulk of a man turned and approached it, walking towards the side doors as it slid to a halt near him. Tadibya took this as her cue to leave, and started the long journey back to the coast. As she flew back towards the team, she kept repeating the words she had heard but not understood, trying to retain the phonetics in her mind.
She got back to the team and was grateful they had stayed put – she felt tired and drained from her long journey, and the toll of being out of her body for over an hour left her feeling a little weak. Shimazu was still a bundle of nervous energy as she entered the cab, but he gave her a wide grin and bobbed his head at her respectfully – she guessed he'd been on the phone a little more, and that Saito was away – at least for now.
She poked Hunter, who was busy reading the intro section on the two language primers he'd downloaded whilst she was away – Turkish and Georgian, by the looks of things.
With difficulty, she repeated the phrase she had heard, apologising at the end for her pronunciation. Hunter shifted uncomfortably in his seat, and then summarised it back to the team.
"Death to you, oh infidel, death in the most painful way, that stands in the path of the righteous about our holy task."
As they headed for the hotel that Marius had booked, she filled them in on the events she had seen, and the mood in the truck grew sombre.
