Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Rudi didn’t feel the weather, here on the edge of Old Potsdam in the snow and the wind and the cold. His stealth suit’s insulation was so efficient that if he was to keep it sealed for any great length of time his own body heat would eventually cook him, but its surface layers remained precisely at ambient temperature, merging him into the infra-red background. It artfully scattered radar wavelengths right down to millimetre frequencies, giving him the radar signature of a moth, and its mimetic system blended into whatever background the suit happened to be standing against, like a very badly-dressed chameleon.

  All of which combined to make him indistinguishable from the shop doorway in which he was crouching to watch the brightly-lit kiosk of the checkpoint. On the other hand, if a drunk should happen along and decide to have a piss in this particular doorway, nothing would save Rudi. He was invisible to most of the commonly-deployed security devices known to man, and to the naked eye of anyone more than half a metre or so away. Closer to, he looked like the indistinct silhouette of a rag-wrapped gorilla wearing a mutilated motorcycle crash-helmet. Not the sort of thing you expect to see in an Old Potsdam shop doorway, even if you’re drunk.

  Just over a year since its declaration of nationhood, New Potsdam’s border arrangements were still on the ad hoc side of adequate. To Rudi’s eye it looked theatrical and ill-thought-out, but that was the way with new polities. The first thing they tended to do was put up defences. A sure sign of a polity approaching maturity was when the work-crews came out and started dismantling the wire. Except maybe in the more paranoid parts of the world.

  There were sections of wall going up, here and there, around New Potsdam, but most of the border was still a tunnel of carbon-flood light enclosing a dense spiralling hedge of razor-wire that ran down the centre-line of streets, cutting intersections in half and brushing the corners of buildings, broken at irregular intervals by checkpoints.

  The checkpoint kiosks looked as if they had been brought in from car parks, had inadequately-adapted vehicle radars and infra-red scanners and barcode readers mounted on their roofs, and then been staffed by a hurriedly-conscripted border guard. In common with many immature polities, great pains had been taken with the uniform of the Border Guard. They were the work of a Berlin theatrical costumier, and more than a little reminiscent of the uniforms of the Ruritanian officer classes in the Stewart Granger version of The Prisoner Of Zenda.

  Rudi slipped out of the doorway, taking care to move evenly to give the suit’s mimetic systems time to adjust to their background. If anyone was watching carefully they might see his footprints appear in the snow along the base of the wall, but this was not the kind of night when people watched very carefully for anything.

  He ghosted along the line of buildings for ten minutes, not hurrying. He ducked through the archway of an apartment building and stood in the shadows of the courtyard to yank down the zip of his suit. Hot air fountained out around his face. When he started to feel the cold he zipped the suit up again and stepped back out into the street.

  Along the base of the wall again. Up ahead, in the middle of a huge intersection, windblown snow haloed a crown of lamps atop a twenty-metre pole rising from the centre of what used to be a big roundabout. The hedge of razor-wire marched into the lamps’ pool of blue-white light, straight up the slope of the traffic island in the middle, down the other side, and off into the howling darkness, cutting the roundabout in two. The wind made the wire sing eerily. Rudi sank gently down on one knee and eased the cooling mask that covered his face and ensured his breath wouldn’t give him away to infra-red. It was a new mask, and it pinched.

  He clicked his teeth together twice and his helmet’s HUD came up, a faint blue grid and discreet columns of figures hanging in front of his eyes. He turned his head left and right, and the figures flicked up and down, giving him proximity readouts. He clicked his teeth again to call up the infra-red overlay and a number of bright patches appeared on the buildings on the other side of the border where boiler chimneys vented their hot gases or the insulation wasn’t as good as it might have been. One rooftop beyond the traffic island absolutely blazed. Rudi tut-tutted soundlessly at the inefficiency.

  No moving heat sources, though. Not even a car. The foam bead in his ear was scanning New Potsdam’s security frequencies in thirty-second soundbites, and had played nothing more exciting all night than a crash between two drunk drivers somewhere over on the other side of the polity.

  The mission clock up in the top right corner of the HUD read 01:03, just over forty minutes since he began his approach to the jumpoff. The Zulu clock, set to GMT, read 03:35, twenty-five to four in the morning local time. The fifteen-minute window of downtime he had been promised on the security cameras watching the intersection and its approaches should just have opened, but he had to take that on faith because there was just no way to tell. Rudi examined the big traffic island again, starting to feel uncomfortably warm.

  In a lot of ways, this was a milk-run of a jump. All the groundwork had already been done by local stringers. All Rudi had to do was turn up, take receipt of the Package, and facilitate the dustoff. He could do this kind of thing in his sleep.

  The Package was a few minutes late. This was not unusual; once, in Seville, Rudi had waited two hours, beyond all dictates of tradecraft, before reverting to the fallback location. The Package didn’t show that time. He never found out what happened. He’d stopped being curious about it. Sometimes they made it to the jumpoff, sometimes they didn’t. It wasn’t his problem.

  And it wasn’t going to happen this time. A warm ruddy glow appeared on his helmet’s visor, a diffuse spot of radiant heat coming hesitantly round the slope of the traffic island. He clicked back to visible wavelengths and zoomed his camera. Snowy landscape and buildings rushed towards him, momentarily out of focus.

  A bulky, white-clad figure was making its way painfully slowly around the curve of the roundabout, keeping the island’s bulk between itself and the nearest border post. It was carrying what appeared to be an attaché case, and from the way the figure was moving the case looked as if it was very heavy. Rudi edged closer, until he was standing just across the road from the roundabout.

  The Package reached the wire, set the case down on the slope, and started to fiddle with the barrier. Rudi couldn’t make out what was happening, no matter how much zoom he put on his helmet’s camera, but the wire sagged abruptly as a strand parted. And again as another strand went.

  This time he saw it. The stressed wire whipped back, catching the crouching figure on the shoulder. Rudi thought he actually heard the singing note change fractionally as the wire separated. The figure made no sign of having noticed, kept working. More strands parted and sprang aside. With every one, the Package picked up its case, shuffled forward a few centimetres, then set the case down again and resumed work.

  03:47 Zulu. Three minutes until the cameras came back online. The white figure was entirely enclosed by the rolls of wire, deep inside the fence, picking its way onward strand by strand. Rudi could now see thickly-gloved hands attaching a little black box to each section of wire, checking to see which one carried an alarm circuit. Whoever it was out there on the traffic island – the bulky cold-weather clothing made it impossible even to tell whether they were male or female, let alone identify them – they seemed calm and unhurried. Check the wire, detach the box, move on to the next strand, check the wire, detach the box, move on. Box in one hand, a little ceramic wire-cutter in the other. Cut the wire, take a step, start all over again. It was unusual to find a Package who was quite so professional. Rudi approved.

  While he waited, he clicked back into infra-red and scanned the area again. This time, four more heat sources appeared on his visor, some way beyond the traffic island, making their way down the street towards the roundabout. Shit. Sloppy, sloppy; he should have been paying attention rather than admiring the Package’s technique. Cursing himself, he stood, very slowly, and undid the velcroed flap on the front of his suit
that hid his popgun.

  The gun was flimsy, lightweight composite compounds and bracing wires. It had a pistol-grip and a magazine the size of a wheel of Stilton, and a five-year-old could have put their fist down the barrel. Rudi snapped the magazine into place, thumbed the selector and stood very still, watching the four heat signatures moving towards the escaping Package.

  There was sudden chatter on New Potsdam’s security channel. Above the radio traffic Rudi heard shouts echoing off the surrounding buildings, whistles blowing on the freezing air, a pistol shot.

  He angled the popgun at about forty-five degrees from his hip and squeezed the trigger twice. The gun ported its exhaust gases back and out in narrow jets from the propulsion chamber, supposedly countering recoil, but it hadn’t been calibrated quite right and it bucked like a barracuda in his hands, throwing his aim off. The first round landed on target, sending a geyser of snow and ice and frozen earth up from the far side of the island. The second hit a building on the New Potsdam side of the fence and blew a balcony off into the street.

  Everything seemed to go wrong at once. More gunshots on the other side of the wire, more shouting. Sirens eerie and tenuous on the wind.

  He changed the selector position and fired twice more. The magazine made a momentary chirping sound as it spun at close to supersonic speed, stopping on the selected rounds. Fountains of stinking fluorescent smoke shot up from where the charges landed, smeared almost parallel to the snow by the wind. Instead of giving proper cover, the smoke just sort of bannered and darted, springing up in unpredictable places. Rudi tried to assign possibilities, watched them being knocked down as fast as he could think them up. This was very very bad, and it was getting worse. The whole Situation was going sour before his eyes and there was nothing he could do to stop it.

  The figure on the traffic island seemed not to have noticed the chaos going off all around it. It carried on unhurriedly cutting its way strand by strand through New Potsdam’s border, down the slope towards Old Potsdam.

  Rudi popped another couple of smoke rounds over the wire, followed them with four white phosphorus flares that landed in a haphazard fashion on the roundabout and burned in the snow to confuse infra-red.

  They didn’t seem to work. Warm figures came up over the crest of the island. Others were coming out of the buildings on the other side of the frontier, confused residents wondering what was going on. Rudi heard shouting, harsh Saxon accents barking orders. The Package paused a moment. It had reached the outer twirl of wire, and for a second or two Rudi willed it on. Just a couple more strands, then run like crazy. They could still do this. He selected an explosive round, raised the popgun to his shoulder, sighted down the barrel at a car parked on the other side of the wire, and waited.

  The figure bent deliberately down and grasped the handle of the briefcase. Rudi watched the arm swing back, forward. Then there was a chatter of gunfire and the white figure pitched face-forwards into the razor-wire and lay still.

  But the case was still moving. Rudi watched it slide on its side under the last layer of wire, gathering speed down the slope of the island. It bounced over the kerb at the bottom without losing very much speed and shot out across the crusty snow on the road like a big square hockey puck and into Old Potsdam. It bumped to a stop at the side of the road a metre or so away from where Rudi was hiding.

  He checked the figure on the island again. It wasn’t moving, and border guards were picking their way through the severed wire towards it.

  He dismantled the popgun, sealed it up under its flap and stepped over to the case. He picked it up, making sure that it was masked from sight by his body, and started to walk calmly away.

  More shouting from the roundabout. One of the guards, his head bulbous with image-amps, was pointing. Some of the men in the wire pointed their weapons. Rudi started to run. Projectiles chewed masonry off the shopfronts and exploded windows in his wake.

  AFTER AN HOUR or so of skulking from courtyard to courtyard, he seemed to have left the gunfire behind long enough to stop and collect his thoughts.

  Rudi looked down. His HUD was still set to infra-red, and the briefcase was shining like a beacon.

  Very slowly, he turned to put his back to the street, hiding the briefcase with his body. He removed a glove and put his bare hand against the side of the case. It was hot. Not red hot. Not drop-it-right-here-and-run-like-hell hot. But it was still hot. Which, in Rudi’s experience, was a first for a piece of hand luggage.

  Well, okay. At least that explained how the security men had been able to shoot at him. They were wearing thermal amps, and he was carrying the infra-red equivalent of a two-hundred-watt lightbulb. That much was straightforward.

  Rudi put his glove back on, reached behind him, and tore up the flap on the pocket in the small of the suit’s back. Inside was a fat package about the size of a pocket handkerchief. He found a corner and flapped it and the package opened out into a baggy white hooded poncho that started to take on the colouration of its surroundings the moment it was exposed. He wrapped the briefcase in the poncho and cradled it in his arms.

  The poncho was made of the same smart material as his suit, with the same mimetic and insulating layers. He was going to have to unwrap the case periodically so it wouldn’t overheat, but it should give him the chance to get away from here. Of course, he didn’t know how long it would take the case to overheat...

  He unwrapped a corner of the case and hot air billowed out of the poncho. He gave it a minute or so to cool a little, then wrapped it up again and started to move deliberately along the street.

  ANOTHER COURTYARD. HE unwrapped the poncho and a blaze of radiant heat rose about him. The briefcase was very hot, but as he watched in infra-red its colour began to darken. He set it down and saw the snow around it start to melt and refreeze as ice. The case darkened further, dumping heat into the snow and the cold paving stones, but not enough to make him feel entirely comfortable about carrying it around.

  The traffic on both New and Old Potsdam’s security frequencies continued unabated in his ear, too many voices to be able to follow more than a few words of a conversation. Some German voices, some Saxon, one an incongruous and comical-sounding Bavarian. Some of the voices were shouting. The Bavarian, for all his incongruity, was giving orders in a calm, controlled tone.

  What it all added up to was that they’d lost him. They had begun a line-search outward from the border, hoping to flush him out ahead of them. Dogs, thermal scanners, ultra-violet lamps. The Old Potsdam polizei seemed to be cooperating with the New Potsdam security forces, which was unexpected; Rudi’s information was that the two groups existed in a state of barely-suppressed armed confrontation.

  So much for that. They still didn’t know where he was. Rudi took stock. He’d managed to make his way, in little zigs and zags, about three kilometres from the border, which was good.

  Normally, at this point, his procedure would have been to stash the stealth suit for collection later, and make his own jumpoff in civilian clothes. He had several dustoffs scoped out, from a Hertz car parked near the film studios at Babelsberg to an open ticket to London from Berlin-Tegel. Normally, with the local law in such confusion, it would have been a walk in the park.

  On the other hand, he didn’t dare stash the briefcase. Quite apart from the fact that it had come as part of the Package and he was sworn to deliver it, one way or another, he wasn’t sure if it was safe to leave it anywhere. He presumed the people who were looking for him knew it was hot and, when they got themselves organised – which couldn’t be much longer now – would be wandering the city with thermal cameras, looking for somebody with warmer-than-usual luggage.

  Well, this was what he was paid for, all part of the Coureur ethic. Get The Package Through. All he had to do was figure out how.

  A FEW MINUTES after ten in the morning. Rudi sat in one of the little wooden shelters in the Neuer Friedhof, watching the snow veil down out of a dirty brownish-yellow sky. That was Central Europ
e for you: pollution wherever you went, even so long after the Fall of Communism. All that cheap Braunkohl, burned in industrial plants that had been a marvel of technology back in the 1950s. It was a wonder the snow itself wasn’t brown or black.

  He had seen black snow once, in Bulgaria, up on the Danube, which was called the Dunarea by the locals. He and his Package had dusted-off on a coal barge travelling upriver towards Austria. It had been a good jump, textbook stuff. It was good when a Situation went like that. It was unusual, because in Rudi’s world everything could, and often did, go wrong, sometimes catastrophically. But when it didn’t, like that time in Bulgaria, it was almost like a holiday.

  And then it started to snow these big fat black flakes.

  Rudi and the Package and the skipper of the barge had all gone out on deck and stood, amazed, in the middle of the sooty fall.

  What Rudi couldn’t figure out, for a moment, was why it was so cold and wet. It was like standing under a fall of burned paper; it should have been dry and hot. He caught a few black flakes on his palm and touched his tongue to them, tasted chemicals, and then it was obvious. Just another fucked-up legacy of the previous millennium, just industrial crap frozen out of the sky.

  Rudi leaned forwards and reached under the seat. His hand found the side of the briefcase. Even through his glove he could feel the case’s warmth. He sighed, running the night’s fiasco over and over in his mind. He should have popped that car, given the Package the distraction they needed. He shouldn’t have hesitated.

  He had only brought out half of what he had been sent to protect, and that jarred with him. The briefcase, whatever it contained, had clearly been the most important thing to the Package. Did that mean the Package had considered themselves expendable, and that Rudi should do the same? Rudi wasn’t sure he could do that for a briefcase. For a person, maybe, but for a briefcase?