by Unknown
"Well then, said Pandur.
He trod water and waited. A shot to the head would be better than filling your lungs with this toxic swill.
Chapter Two
"Sympathy for the Devil"
The name "wicca" comes from the Anglo-Saxon "wicce" (witch) and was initially used by those groups for whom the traditional German term "Hexe" seemed to have too many negative historical connotations. In the US, the decline of the wicca movement, which was predominantly oriented on European myths, occurred almost simultaneously with the growth of Native American power; many cult sites now lay inaccessible in NAN territory, while the burgeoning nature cult of shamanism lured away numerous adherents of wicca.
At the present time in North America, few groups of this kind still exist, mainly in the CFS. In German, conversely, the cult became the natural magic movement per se. Even men and women who, before the Awakening, considered magic a ridiculous whim or a flight from reality, now turned to the new movement, which brought with it a new understading of the environment. The media-effective shamanism of the Native Americans led for a period to the use of terms such as totem, medicine lodge, etc.
In the meantime, though, a more traditional system has established itself, the name "wicca" being replaced by the more general "Wise Women and Men", "Wise People" or simply "Wise Ones" - not by decree from above, but through gradual development.
Dr Natalie Alexandrescu:
Witchcraft and Other Natural Magic in the AGS, German History on Vidchips, VC 24, Erkrath 2051
The anticipated MG bursts and single shots never came. In the first moment neither Pandur nor Druse could understand why the megacon guardsmen were taking so long. The heads of the two men lay in the water like ripe melons that merely had to be plucked. Child's play, even if you considered that the marksmen's aim was impaired by the rolling of the vessel.
Pandur had closed his eyes and was trying to prepare for death. He believed he could see the heavenly light shining from the Other Side, as reported by people who had crossed Death's threshold only to be brought back. The light that embodied the the last spark of hope of not being extinguished when the body had died.
When death didn't come, Pandur opened his eyes again. He was bathed in the light he had already noticed through closed eyelids. It didn't appear glaring and didn't dazzle like the cones of light of the halogen spots which were still there but had paled into insignificance. A cold light, milkily blurred and incredibly intense. It had no clearly definable source, seeming to come from everywhere, from the air and the water. Like thick, shining fog above an ocean of shining milk, and the two men were in the midst of it. The same was true of the megacon yacht. She was only sketchily visible, a grey shadow in the misty light, floating on milky light, like the silhouette of a Christmas tree picked out with a few shimmering points of light. No wonder the guardsmen hadn't fired. Pandur and Druse, no more than tiny pearls of fat in the broth, no longer offered targets. The mercenaries would have had to fire blindly in the supposed direction. And, to judge by appearances, they were too confused to do that.
Pandur wanted to say something, but couldn't get a sound past his lips. He found that his voice didn't carry. There was nothing from Druse either. The whistling of the wind and the hissing and snorting of the spray had stopped. The yacht lay deathly silent in the water. There was no sound whatsoever to be heard.
Then Pandur had to revise that impression. There was a noise as diffuse as the light. Milk for the eyes, honey for the ears. Gently humming honey, rising and falling, coming from everywhere.
There was only one explanation for the whole thing, thought Pandur. They had blown his head off so fast that he could no longer perceive anything, no pain, no blow. He had slid straight into the Other World. So there was life after death. He was living it. What he took to be sensory impressions were the perceptions of his astral corpus, his reactions to the new surroundings.
He was brought up sharpish when he stopped kicking with his legs and rowing with his arms to stay afloat. He sank beneath the surface, water got into his helmet, and into his mouth when he tried to breathe. He felt the disgusting swill in his mouth, in his throat, almost in his lungs.
Desperately he tried to come up again before he choked on the poison. In the next instant he burst through the surface, spluttering, gurgling, panting and gagging without being able to hear any of the matching sounds. He fought for air and slowly quietened down again. If this was life in the Other World, then it was one that could put over decidedly realistic impressions. Actually, Pandur felt his body only too distinctly. Whatever had happened to his eyes and ears, he was unquestionably in a corporeal world.
The humming seemed to be getting louder, the light more intense. It glowed. Visually and acoustically. And there was nothing about it that pointed to a technical origin. It rose and fell, organically guided, in the slow, steady rhythm of the heart. At least that's how it seemed to Pandur.
Then he sensed a movement in the water below him. A gigantic something came out of the depths, drifting upwards in slow-motion. It was more a contour than a body, a force held together by the water, then by the air as it rose out of the water and kept on climbing. Brighter light in darker light. But in the bright object there were dark spots which made of the object a human form, a giant, a hundred meters long, lying on its back. The spots sketched an enormous, sharply hooked hawk nose and shadows under the eyes in a hollow-cheeked face, they marked out a ragged robe over a hunched body as well as finger and toenails like the claws of a predator. The figure appeared to be female, old and wizened. It looked like a witch straight from the pages of the Brothers Grimm. A giant witch composed of light, water and mist. Showers of light, as if from a burning sparkler, came from her eye-sockets and finger tips and wriggled like worms of light over her scalp, forming a wild tangle of dishevelled hair and extending into her face and onto her hands as knotted veins.
Pandur felt himself thrust aside by the figure, and Druse likewise. As the witch rose up, she dragged some of her water mass with her until it was released, replaced by air and then slopped back into its original element. A huge wave seized the two men and swept them away with it, making them ride the crest, sending them down into the wave's trough and heaving them back up to the crest, driving them towards the coast.
The yacht suffered a different fate. The light witch had surfaced right under the vessel. Just as she had absorbed and lifted the water, she absorbed and lifted the yacht, making it a part of her body before spitting it out again. From a height of ten meters, already strangely deformed in the air and no longer recognizable as a vessel, it plunged into the water. It created a second giant wave, which chased the first one, and was buried under the colliding waters.
This all took place to the accompaniment of the hum and glow that suffused the scene. The crushing of steel, the fall, the impact, the rearing up of the floods - none of it caused the slightest sound, or the sounds were soaked up by the all-pervasive humming. Simultaneously, time seemed to have been dislocated, to have stretched. Pandur had the impression of being in the circulatory system of a gigantic creature, experiencing its heartbeat, hearing the arteries hum under the pressure of the blood and seeing a silent movie in slow motion.
Then the light paled. The figure became faint, transparent, and disappeared. The heartbeat stopped. The humming whirred away. Before Pandur and Druse lay nothing but the night.
The two men fought the floods. Waves broke over them, now with a crash. The time of dead sounds had ended. Finally the water calmed down.
Ahead of Pandur were the lights of the arcology of Bremerhaven. Nearer than before, but still some six kilometers away. Much closer, only two or three hundred meters off, another light glowed dimly, but bright enough to mark the remains of a high-rise towering out of the water.
Ten meters away Druse drifted head up, like Pandur wrestling with the floods, arms and legs thrashing, but not done for yet.
Judging by his mouth movements, he seemed to be saying
something but Pandur couldn't hear him. Apparently one of the two helmet radio sets had not withstood the poundings of the last half hour, or, and this was more likely, it had come into contact with water. Pandur fervently hoped that the same had not happened to his cyberdeck. He still felt it against his ribs. The carrying case enclosing it, at least, was supposed to be watertight. But whether that referred to rainwater or a soaking in the chemically aggressive waters of the Weser-Jade Bight, he didn't know however.
Only now was Pandur becoming aware of the coldness of the water. The turbulent events of the last few minutes had blocked his senses with other impressions. He registered cold, wetness, the oily smell of the water and felt his syntholeather outfit dragging at him. Luckily, the clothing was light, flexible and tight-fitting. It only allowed dampness to penetrate slowly to the skin and didn't soak it up. It was no accident that wamo riders wore this gear. Although thicker and more heat-retentive than a drysuit, it approximated to one in many characteristics. Most importantly, you were barely restricted in movement and you could swim passably well in it. A sensible and deliberate feature. A wamo rider who didn't expect to take the occasional dip with his machine would be truly more at home in a rocking chair in front of a wa_m fire and should leave the job be.
While Pandur was swimming towards the dim light, he realized that his career as a wamo rider was over for the time being. He decided to cancel "for the time being". He was sick to the back teeth with it anyway. If he came out of this alive, he intended to break with his life as a wamo rider and pirate. With some sadness he thought of his machine, which had probably been devoured by the light witch together with the yacht. She had served him faithfully to the end. It had been a grand feeling to ride her. Still, he'd had enough of it and she had slipped away from under his butt at just the right time.
Druse was swimming alongside him, now close enough to make himself understood above the wind even without the radio. " Quite some ghoul, huh?" Druse called.
"Any idea what it was?"
"Nope."
"Toxic spirit?"
"It would have... eaten us..." Druse gasped. "More like an elementary spirit."
"But looked... like a witch."
Pandur had never heard of such a big, witch-like spirit. But there were rumors about peatbog witches, who were supposed to belong to the Awakened, the critters, the beings of the new Age of Magic. But there was no reliable data. Anyway, they weren't in a peatbog, but on the open sea... On the other hand, what the sea had reclaimed had once been land. The idea of a peatbog witch might not be all that far out. And maybe even the rumors were true that out in the Atlantic those giant serpents and other monsters that sailors in the olden days had reported seeing, but without being believed, had re-awakened.
Pandur reflected whether this creature had appeared of its own volition, or whether magic had been involved. Thinking back to the witch's appearance made him shudder but, seen soberly, she had saved Druse and him from certain death. The megacon guardsmen had been the tasty morsel the witch had wanted to savor. Unless she was above such things and had just squashed the drekheads casually like bothersome pests.
When cracked concrete walls towered over him within reach, Pandur realized for the first time that he had would escape a watery death. Life, with which he had come to terms out there, would go on. He didn't even know if he should be pleased. Recently he had not had the impression that this life still held any particular pleasures for him.
That's the kind of attitude better suited to a bedridden old man of eighty. Not a thirty-one-year-old who had just proved yet again that his body is tough and efficient. Who can get out of situations that would kill others.
But the enjoyment of life can't appear on command. When Natalie had sold him to the elven hitmen in return for a chip, something had shattered inside him. And Tupamaro's betrayal didn't exactly contribute to boosting his faith in other people.
He reached for a kind of parapet, which shielded a platform jutting out from the high-rise. He pulled himself panting out of the water, dropping behind the parapet onto a fairly dry concrete floor. Behind him a second wet body slapped onto the ground; Druse, exhausted, gasping, wordless like him. The two men tore off their helmets and fought for air.
Lying on his back, Pandur gazed at the sickle of the moon, which appeared briefly from behind a few clouds. Silently, Pandur savored the feeling of being able to rest at last and not have to move arms and legs ceaselessly. Even his thoughts came to rest for a moment. At an instinctual level he felt satisfied, fulfilled, even happy in a limited, physical way. As the gazelle might feel that had escaped the lion. But in this quiet after the storm lay the certainty that there would be other storms. Until the end of the hunt. Until death, or until a miracle, which was necessary to turn the hunted into the hunter.
After a brief eternity, Pandur finally turned his head. With the reluctance of the sleeper who blinks into a new day from the diffuse halfway world between sleep and wakefulness, he stared at the light piercing several windows in front of him from inside the building.
He sensed Druse stirring beside him.
"You got any idea where we are?" he asked softly.
"Definitely one of the high-rises in old Bremerhaven." Druse spoke just as quietly, as if he had entered a place of worship and didn't dare disturb the sacred peace by talking too loudly. When Pandur looked at him questioningly, he went on, "The arcology was built in the southern part of the city. The town used to lie on the banks of the Weser like a ten-kilometer-long tube. I'm not sure what kind of building this is. There're quite a few sticking up out of the water. Maybe the old Columbus Center. No idea. Don't matter much."
"And the light? Surely there can't be people living here, can there?"
Druse shook his head. "Kinda hard to imagine. What could they live off? And then right under Proteus' s nose? It sure beats me."
"An outpost of the arcology?" As the thought occurred to him, Pandur instinctively reached for his shoulder holster. His Walther Secura was still there ready. He had heat-sealed it in plastic film along with a supply of ammunition before the mission. He carefully opened the upper part of his synthosuit and drew out the cyberdeck and the gun.
"Wouldn't hardly think so," Druse replied, standing up and shaking water out of his clothing. He took off the thin rubber gloves, wiped them more or less dry with his hand and slipped them on again. "They got enough of a fortress already. What'd be the sense in it?"
"Perhaps just a stop-gap until the arcology is completed? Pandur opened the case containing the deck, laid the deck on the ground, activated it and booted a program that checked all the functions. A short time later he knew that his trusty old deck hadn't taken exception to the rough treatment and was working perfectly.
For a while Druse had looked over his shoulder, interested. Then he answered the question. "There might still be a lot to do and the sararimen aren't up to strength by a long way. But security is up and runnin'. They don't need any guard dog out here. Anyway, things would look a whole lot different: searchlights and a few bursts of fire as a welcoming cocktail. Forget it."
"And the light?" Pandur had stood up. While listening to Druse and speaking himself, he had ripped off the plastic film, shoved a twelve-round ammo clip into the Secura and put the gun back into the holster.
The weird but indespensible rituals of the shadow runner. You follow them without thinking about whether life means a lot or little to you. Not obeying them means choosing a short life for certain.
"Maybe Bremerhaven's last mayor forgot to switch out the lights?" Druse grinned. As if the example had triggered a reflex, Druse proceeded to go over his weapon as Pandur had, almost without looking. Plastic film crackled, a Beretta 100ST
clicked, a magazine disappeared into the butt and the gun itself into his clothing.
"Why the mayor exactly?
"Forget it. I just had the picture of a captain who stays on board and chooses to go down with the ship instead of abandoning it."
&nb
sp; "You won't find that among politicians," Pandur said. "And as far as captains go, I can't believe in any noble traits there any more."
That opened up wounds in Druse. "That fuckin' whore of a pirate," he cursed in a suppressed tone. "I knew she'd cash in her grandmother's artificial heart if she was hard up. But I never would've imagined she'd throw brother pirates to the sharks. All that stuff about freebooter republics - a load of bullshit!"
"Wouldn't say that," Pandur contradicted. "She believes in it, it means something to her. For her it's a utopia she dreams about and works for. But what she sells others as a fine ideal, she mainly sees deep down in her black soul as an instrument of power. All ideologists trample others underfoot to reach their goal. And when they reach it, the same shit is churned out as in any other power system. Could be Tupamaro didn't betray us out of greed, but because she was offered something that brings her one step nearer her dream."
"Paw," went Druse disparagingly. "If she dreams of anything, then it's men with big cocks."
"You should know," Pandur replied ironically, earning a furious look from Druse. He decided to break off the fruitless discussion. "I don't know about you, but I'm freezing my balls off. If there are people living back there, we might have a chance to get hold of some dry things. And if not, it's at least warmer inside than out here."
Druse nodded.
The two men slowly edged along the platform. They left their helmets behind. They only got in the way. Walking in their wet clothes was doubly unpleasant. Their muscles began to ache as well. But movement was far better than standing around.
The nearest of five illuminated windows was about forty meters away. It was an empty hole without a window pane. As they got nearer, they spotted the jagged remains of the glass sticking out of the frame. Storms had long ago broken out the rest. A glance at the other windows confirmed they were no different.
