Point Apocalypse (11 page)

"Wait," I raised a warning finger.
"And what if somebody tampers with mind scan settings..."

"Impossible," he shook his head. "You might just as well suggest
paying off the entire mind scan staff. You just can't. The equipment is too complex. Every module has its own operator, plus three more doing the scan and the duty shift supervising their work."

"I see," I let the air out
of my lungs. The tiredness was getting the best of me. I lay down and closed my eyes.

"Mind te
lling me why you need to know all this? All these mnemotech inquiries. What're you up to? Mark?"

Valdas' voice grew far and low. I wanted to look at him but
couldn't open my eyelids. I couldn't even move my hand.

"It's n-nothing," I managed. "To- morrow... we'll see
... where to go... Wong-"

I
heard a rustle. I sensed the Chinese coming near me.

"Try to get... some rest. Tonight we're safe..."

Hundreds of bright dots appeared before my shut eyes. My mind collapsed into a void and rushed toward a brilliant kaleidoscope of shapes and stripes. The last thing I saw was the hotel sign. The glowing lettering loomed close and took over my brain. The light grew unbearably bright before it went out.

I had no idea what was going on but suddenly I knew that
from that moment on, everything was different. A strange voice boomed in my head, painfully familiar. Its sound calmed me down drowning me in a vortex of memories. I gave in to the flow and sank in, willingly and yieldingly.

Chapter Six

New Identity

"M
ark?" came from afar. "Mark..."

I
forced my eyes open. A haze filled my vision.

"Mark!"
a voice spoke clear next to me. "D'you hear me? Wake up!" Wladas' anxious voice cut through the mental fog.

Only then
did I realize he was shaking me awake.

"
Get up, Private! Now! Come on..."

I
sat up and shook my head, trying to rid of the haze. For a moment I squeezed my eyes shut. When I reopened them, the blurred outlines around me started to take both shape and color. Wladas stood by the bed looking into my face. Behind his back, Wong's silhouette loomed by the half-open door. He was fully dressed, shotgun at the ready.

A strange disturbing sound came either through the
door or through the window. I couldn't work out what was going on and what time it was.

I turned my head. Sunlight
poured through the window. I'd slept all night. The sound came from the street. Now I knew it: someone was banging at the hotel door with a gun butt yelling to be let in.

"What
..." I licked my dry lips. My throat felt like a blocked drain as if the night before I'd made my way through a bottle of vodka. The downstairs banging echoed in my head. "What's going on?"

"Mark, it's those
people in the street," Wladas stepped over to his bed and took a peek out of the window. "I think they're looking for us."

Wong
stood by the door, cool as a rail. One shotgun was slung behind his back. The other aimed at the floor, his finger on the trigger, the lower part of the butt touching his shoulder: a practiced stance that betrayed a professional. This wasn't his first mission.

A
mission! My mission... The Chinese was my partner and my cover man. I was Mark Posner, an FSA major, sent to Pangea on a confidential mission. I had to locate the researcher, Boris Neumann, and bring him back to Earth with me. I took my orders from the Federal Agency director alone. Seeing as Wong and I were now in the hotel, our penetration of the Base must have gone like clockwork: the visual triggers must have unpacked in the right progression and now the night's sleep had undone the temporary modifications done to my identity.

Bu
t the man, what's his name... Wladas, yes. What's he got to do with us?

"
Mark? What do we do?" Wladas stepped toward me. "They'll break the door down in a minute."

"Wait," I waved him off.

The gesture brought my headache back. My temples throbbed. Blood flushed my face, and I felt queasy. I winced, rubbed my temples, reached under the pillow for my gun and started to dress.

The hammering of gun butts
shook the whole building. I stepped over to the window swaying. Wladas grabbed my elbow and shoved me a mug.

"This should help. Try it."

My fingers shook. I upended the mug and reached to the window, setting one knee against the bed. A large backyard was bounded by a sandstone wall. A huge tank sat in the far corner - apparently, holding drinking water. Some pipework ran from the tank to the house. Next to it, a man with a shotgun guarded a water pump. Judging by his clothes, he was one of McLean's men. Two more waited by the side gate. On the other side of the wall, a Willis stood in the street - an ancient army jeep, a driver waiting in its seat. In the truck a gunner sat next to a machine gun mounted in its cradle. He leaned forward, his hairy arms crossed on the extension, puffing on a roll-up and squinting at the sun. All five men stared into the yard and did nothing. But those on Broadway kept yelling demanding to be let in. How many raiders were there?

I turned and sunk onto the bed. My head had stopped spinning
but was still pounding.

"Mark,"
Wladas placed his hand on my shoulder. "Stop jumping up and down. Let me examine you."

He
squatted and showed me his open hands. Our eyes met.

"
May I? It's only to take your pulse and check for a papillary response."

'Go ahead, then."

He pulled back my eyelids, one after the other.

"Got vertigo?"

"Almost gone."

"I want you to look up and follow my finger,"
Wladas started moving his index finger in front of my nose while holding my pulse. I could hear him counting to twenty. Then he stood up. "Papillary reflex almost normal, with a slightly quickened pulse. You show all the symptoms of memory release. So you were right about the chemicals, then."

It sounded like a statement.

"It's classified," I finally remembered his name and our conversation from the night before. The Feds had warned me about possible chemical withdrawals. They'd just started tampering with identity-modifying injections and I knew they could cause temporary amnesia and memory overlap. Side effects were not fully known. I had volunteered, as the situation had demanded. We needed an experienced operative to infiltrate Pangea and we couldn't sit and wait for Federal neurotechs to finish their field trials. The Agency director himself suggested my cover as an ex-army convict. He had summoned me into his office and spent three hours letting me in on the kind of secrets only a limited few would know. That's why I accepted his offer. I had no way back.

"You're going to kill me now?"
Wladas gave me a grim look. "You're here on a mission," he glanced at Wong. "You both are."

"
Wong? He's only a cover man," I answered. This Wladas wasn't stupid. It had taken him no time at all to put two and two together.

"I..." he leaned forward. "You... you two are going back to Earth, right?
I have a family, I... I will cooperate, I'll do what you ask me to. If only you'll take me along. I won't let you down, promise. I..."

"Do shut up," I got off the bed, checked the shotgun and
slung it over my shoulder.

In
view of the new developments, Wladas could be useful. My withdrawal could last another twenty-four hours or even more. Besides... I looked at Wong. He could be the best fighter in the world with his six-unit combat potential. But he wouldn't be much use against cyber troopers. We needed every pair of fists available.

I turned to
Wladas. The mission made provision for engaging some of the deportees in our operations, without revealing any details.

"
Wong? How much time do we have?"

The Chinese took his hand from the gun and raised two fingers. A couple of minutes. Enough to
rearrange my plans.

"Keep an eye on the yard," I told
Wladas.

I gave it
some thought and decided against entrusting him with any weapons. I couldn't verify what he'd said about his supposed family and homesickness. Thoughts were crowding my mind. Rita, the hotel owner. She must have ratted on us to McLean. I needed to see him anyway, but had planned to do it the same night and under different circumstances. Firstly, I had to meet my contact. McLean was a big fish, a player in the great game between Pangea and the Federal Security Agency. Or should I say, between the Feds and General Varlamov, the ex rebel. He'd been in charge of the Fort at the time of the coup and had had time to disappear with a handful of his supporters. The Feds had sent a squad of our best men to bring Varlamov back. None of them had returned. The general had lain low somewhere in the mountains. According to our sources, he'd used Professor Neumann for his own interests, but what those interests were, we had no idea. About two dozen men had followed Varlamov, three of which were cyber troopers. You wouldn't want to meddle with those guys. Their bodies were crammed full of combat implants, their skeletons reinforced with Teflon, titanium and bypass resistors, their neural chains modified, their brains shortwired to those of tactical autonomous combatants.

Cyber troopers
were radio-controlled and supervised by the general himself. Nasty boys, worse than Pangean tigers, unless you're a cyber yourself. Or unless you happen to have a clever neurotech at hand. He'd still need special radio equipment to connect himself to their brains in order to scorch their neural chains or at least disrupt their communications. But that would be asking for too much, wouldn't it?

The racket downstairs stopped.
Wong raised his shotgun and walked out into the hallway. So. My mission was to find Professor Neumann. The Chinese was the muscle man protecting the information carrier. The carrier being myself. Apart from me, the only other person who knew of the mission was the FSA director. He had supervised my identity modification personally, afraid of eventual leaks in his own office where General Varlamov could keep a mole or two. I was forbidden to engage in action unless in dire need, leaving all the dirty work to Wong. I winced. My head was splitting.

"The raiders seem to
be on the move," Wladas said without taking his eyes from the window. "The driver has got out. They've picked up their guns. They're getting ready."

"
Wong," I told the Chinese, "we're going out. Don't shoot."

I needed to see
McLean because he was the unofficial baron of New Pang and had agreed to help the FSA. He had his informers everywhere on the Continent feeding him intelligence on the confederation of settlers who'd fled the coast during the pandemic. McLean had been the only one - apart from the clones - who'd at the time ignored the invitation to join the confederation of loggers, farmers and oil riggers. He didn't give a shit about the confederation and its laws. All he cared about was turning the city into an empire of his own. And as for the clones...

The room swam. I tried hard to remember
something about the clone settlers in the mountains at the Continent's eastern edge. I couldn't. My heart pounded as I remembered the army school - an unwanted, non-existent memory, part of my cover story. I forced clone thoughts away and tried to relax and think of something else.

Wong
stole down the hallway and disappeared past the wall.

"Follow him," I glanced over
the room and walked out behind him.

We were the only people in the hallway. I could hear Rita's angry voice downstairs
, playing a pretend game. She must have grassed us up to Tex (which was was McLean's cover name according to the Information that had just gone off in my head again) and now she was doing a decent job of sounding innocent. Now my contact would lie low, and I'd have to play it by ear when I met McLean. The worst thing was, I had no idea what exactly McLean knew about Professor Neumann.

I
rummaged through my memory for the basic facts. Neumann, who'd moved to Pangea over thirty years ago, wanted to get to the truth behind the Continent's anomalies. The place hadn't yet been a prison at that time. The government had funded his research until it became clear they couldn't expect a quick return for their money. And when rioting had gained momentum followed by the Coup of the Seven Generals, they became too busy to continue financing. Six of the conspirators had been shot; the seventh, General Varlamov, had escaped. Two years later our Continent informers became active sending contradictory messages. The FSA analysts had come to the conclusion that the insurgent general had more on his agenda than just taking control of Pangea. It looked like he'd gotten hold of something capable of changing the course of world history. Neumann had helped him, apparently. The FSA then decided to use McLean by warning him about the planned attack on New Pang. Varlamov and his clones had to-