Read Omega Point for Free Online Page B

mind listening to Valdaire. It helped some people; the last sixty years or so had been such that half the people on the planet had some kind of horror story to tell, but he preferred to keep his pain to himself.
      "I have. Not the personal stuff," she added hurriedly. "I feel like I'm prying."
      "You are."
      "Sorry."
      Otto grunted through a half-smile at that. "You'd make a poor security consultant."
      "Maybe that's why I'm not one," she said.
      "There is not much to tell," said Otto.
      Valdaire looked as if she didn't believe him.
      "I work. That's all," he said and kept his silence. Lehmann swapped over with her at the next stop. At least he knew how to keep quiet.
      They passed the grassed-over sites of collective farms and abandoned towns, by low arcologies, through freshly cut fields being tilled for winter wheat, through a million-hectare rewilded patch of steppe teeming with Saiga, Przewalski's horse and gengineered megafauna. Through sleeping villages little changed in centuries, past the neat rows of a Han agri-engineering dormitory town. Night deepened, and lightened into day, and came once more. They stopped twice in nowhere towns grey with sad histories, and were gone quickly.
      The second morning. Otto steered on to an unmetalled road, nothing but crops of all kinds around them, low rumble of the auto-harvesters at work carrying over the rolling vastness of the country, trails of dust marking their progress.
      They approached an abandoned farm complex, mid-twentieth century, most of its concrete crumbled to ivy-choked grit. Weedy mounds of stone to one side of the road marked the remains of the village it had sprung from, windowless brick walls on the other the Soviet failure it had become. Ancient and newer parts were as ruinous as each other. They arrived at a square before a dilapidated office block. A few barns from the early twenty-first century tottered round its edges. A camouflaged satellite dish sat inside one barn with no sides, pointed through a hole in the roof, cables snaking across the dusty ground.
      "We are here," said Otto, setting the car to park itself.
      "What is this place?" said Chures.
      "Ancient village turned Soviet collective farm, abandoned eighty years ago," said Otto.
      "What, one of your ancestors burn it down?" said Chures.
      "Don't start on the Nazi shit, SudAmigo, that was near two hundred years ago," said Lehmann.
      "This place was hit hard by the Christmas Flu," said Otto. "A fifth of villages inhabited a century ago are like this. It is still endemic; there was another outbreak last year. That's why you see so many biofilters on faces out here." Otto looked around. "Kolosev has worked out of here before. He's short on imagination."
      "Kind of desolate, even for a criminal," murmured Valdaire.
      "He is useful," said Otto. "Let us approach him gently. He is prone to nervousness, and he will have seen us approach. We go in too hard, he'll wipe it all. Lucky for us he's curious; he'll want to know what we want. This barn –" he pointed to one less damaged than the rest "– it has a high EM field, plenty of equipment working. The rest of this place is inactive, as dead as it looks."
      "Veev!" piped Chloe. "That is incorrect, there is minor activity detectable in the office building also."
      "More there in the barn though, yes?" said Otto.
      "Yes," said Chloe.
      "Then we check the barn first. Lehmann, activate squad interface."
      Otto's iHUD flickered on; squad icons, years unused, came on, but most blinked off, leaving Lehmann's signifier alone in his mind. A squad of two, he thought, better than no squad at all.
      "Shouldn't we be more cautious?" asked Valdaire, snagging Chloe from the backseat. Lehmann unfolded his body from the car, groaning as joints sounded an unnerving percussion of pops. He swung his arms round a few times. Valdaire found herself entranced by the unnatural shapes his artificial