Incorporated with DeepSeek
The rain came at noon, as it always did, a scalding sheet that turned the ruins of the Autobahn into a steam bath and made the asphalt sweat black oilslick rainbows. From the shotgun seat of the BMW M5 command car, Jara watched the world dissolve into wet grey static, the wipers beating a useless two-four time against the windshield. The convoy’s net shivered in her neural link—a quiet hum of engine stats, heat signatures, encrypted chatter—and she let the data wash over her like the rain did the dead concrete.
“Scout reports deck failure at kilometer two-twelve,” came Ansel’s voice over the radio, filtered through the deck’s audio shunt. His Xantia rally car was two klicks ahead, hopping potholes on its long-travel suspension. “Bridge is gone. We’re looking at the old riverbed. Thirty-meter drop into mud and rebar.”
Jara thumbed the send key. “We see it on drone feed. Hold position. We’re coming up.”
She glanced left. Volker, her driver, had the M5’s yoke in a loose grip, his face a mask of old sweat and scar tissue beneath the cooling cowl. The cowl hummed softly, circulating refrigerated gel through the tubes sewn into his jacket, keeping his core temperature at 38.2. Without it he’d be dead in twenty minutes. Most people would.
“Bridge gone means detour,” Volker said. “Through the villages. We lose three hours. Heat spike in the engine bay already.”
“We lose more if the MAN sinks into a ford,” Jara said. She sent the halt order across the convoy net. Behind them, the two Dodge RAM 2500s downshifted with a diesel bark, and the heavy MAN 30-tonner wheezed to a stop, its turbo spooling down like a dying ventilator. The four Unimogs fanned out automatically into a circular security pattern, their roof-mounted M249s tracking lazy arcs through the steam.
Jara opened her door and stepped into the rain. It hit her duster with a sound like frying meat. The heat was immediate, a wet blanket that tried to fill her lungs with soup. She coughed once, a dry hitch she’d learned from the Weeping Lung virus that swept through Würzburg after the first bridges fell. Her mutation had come late, and only partially: her sweat glands now processed salt at three times the normal rate, keeping her alive in the lethal wet-bulb temperatures, but her lungs still carried the scars. That was the deal the Fever gave you—adapt or drown in your own fluids. She’d adapted just enough.
The valley homebase called Würzburg the “Sick Basin” now. Most of the old city had collapsed when the concrete cancer hit, the rebar inside swelling with rust until the structures simply unzipped. The old stone buildings—the fortress on the hill, the cathedral, the medieval cellars—stood solid, mocking the modern ruins around them. Berlin and Munich had declared the region “unsustainable” three years ago, which was bureaucrat-speak for *you’re on your own*. Helicopters still came twice a year, seeding antiviral canisters and collecting tribute in the form of salvage. The rest of the time, the valley lived by the caravan runs. Striding merchants, they called themselves, though the stride was mostly done by diesel and desperation.
Jara walked back to the MAN, her boots squelching in the mud that had once been the emergency lane. The trailer was covered in tarps, but she could see the load manifest glowing in her mind’s eye: sixty cases of stabilized horse serum from the Jena vats, twenty sealed crates of old-world antibiotics, four pallets of dry-stacked circuit boards, and a single armoured box containing two functioning cyberdeck spinal interfaces—worth more than the rest of the cargo combined. Destination: the Prague Enclave, where the Charles Bridge still arched across the Vltava, untouched by rust because it had been built when steel was a dream and stone remembered how to stand.
Zeph, the convoy’s decker, climbed down from the MAN’s cab. He was a stick figure in a patched environmental suit, his eyes hidden behind mirrored goggle-implants that never stopped flickering. A dataspike cable coiled from his wrist port to the portable satellite uplink mounted on the trailer. “Homebase confirms weather window closing,” he said, his voice flattened by the vocoder. “They’re tracking a heavy cell moving east from the Ruhr. If we’re not past the detour by nightfall, the Unimogs will need snorkels.”
“Then we don’t stop.” Jara looked at the old Autobahn bridge, or what was left of it. The central span had collapsed in a sagging V, the concrete pillars sheared at the expansion joints where water had seeped in, cooked in the ever-rain’s heat, and birthed iron oxide tumours that pushed the aggregate apart. Below, the river was a brown fury, carrying the skeletons of cars and the occasional bloated animal corpse. “Volker, get us onto the secondary route. Xantia, you’re still point. RAMs, tighten up on the MAN. Mogs, watch the flanks—we’ve seen heat signatures in the treeline.”
The convoy lurched into motion, peeling off the Autobahn onto a cracked farm road that wound through a string of forgotten villages. The houses here were half-timbered, their oaken frames still solid after four hundred years, though the plaster had sloughed away in the rain. Jara saw faces in the windows: pale, gaunt, some with the telltale lesions of the Shivers, others with the unnatural stillness of the adapted—wide pupils, thickened skin, gill-like folds on their necks that fluttered as they breathed the saturated air. The adapted had started to organize, forming village councils and trade pacts that bypassed the dead governments entirely. In a way, the caravan was a symptom of that new feudalism. Every village was an independent entity now. Every merchant caravan was a mobile kingdom, armed and armoured against the mercenary bands that sometimes forgot whose coin they’d taken.
The road dipped into a shallow valley. Zeph’s voice cut across the net: “Three vehicles, stationary, blocking the road ahead. Civilian, but they’ve got a technical—RPG mount on a flatbed.” His drone feed appeared in Jara’s overlay: a rust-streaked truck with a steel plate welded to the cab, a tube launcher aimed roughly at the convoy’s approach. Four figures in rain ponchos, faces hidden by rebreather masks.
Jara didn’t hesitate. “Weapons free. Xantia, go left and draw fire. Mogs, suppress. RAMs, push forward and shield the MAN.” She reached under the dash and pulled out her own H&K, the grip worn smooth by a hundred such encounters. The M5’s armoured windows slid down, and the rain hammered in, carrying the smell of cordite before the first shot was even fired.
The Xantia’s engine screamed as Ansel threw it sideways into a field, the little car’s white-and-yellow rally livery disappearing in a rooster tail of mud. The technical’s RPG whooshed, trailing a dirty smoke line, and missed the swerving scout by ten meters. Before the smoke cleared, the Unimogs opened up. Their M249s walked a line across the flatbed, shredding the steel plate and the launcher and the men behind it in a single second of hellfire chatter. The RAMs rolled up, their own mounted guns silent because there was nothing left to shoot.
Jara strode through the aftermath, rain washing blood into the mud. The mercenaries had been a small outfit, underfed, their gear second-hand. One of them was still alive, a woman with a chest wound that sucked air with a wet whistle. She looked up at Jara with adapted eyes—a mutation that gave her nictitating membranes, sliding sideways across the pupils like a reptile’s blink. “You’re from the center?” the woman whispered.
“There is no center anymore,” Jara said. “You should know that.” She put a single round through the woman’s forehead, because that was the only mercy left.
The convoy pushed on, the road twisting through hills where old castles clung to the ridges like stone memories of the dark ages they’d all slipped back into. The satellite link crackled with a message from the valley: a new virus outbreak in the Erfurt zone, mutating faster than the antivirals could chase it. *Avoid contact. Proceed with caution.* Jara acknowledged and killed the feed. The sky was a bruise-purple ceiling, and the rain never let up, drumming on the roof with the persistence of a dying clock.
Ahead, the Xantia’s taillights glowed dim red through the murk. The convoy moved like a single organism, metal and flesh and code, bound by the radio’s quiet hum and the deck’s cold logic. They were six days from Prague, if the roads held and the viruses didn’t find new hosts in their lungs. They carried medicine and machine parts, but what they truly traded was the one thing the feudal patchwork of villages lacked: connection to something larger than a single valley, the faint, stubborn pulse of a world that refused to completely die.
Jara lit a cigarette—an old-world habit she couldn’t shake, the smoke mixing with the steam that leaked into the cabin. The tobacco was dry because she kept it vacuum-sealed. In the ever-rain, dryness was a currency of its own. Everything that mattered was about keeping the wet at bay, the rust at bay, the heat at bay. And if you couldn’t, you adapted, or you became another skeleton in a collapsed concrete tomb.
“Tell me we’re clear to the next waypoint,” Volker said, not taking his eyes off the mud-rutted track.
“Clear enough,” Jara said, and meant nothing by it. In the new dark ages, clear was a myth. But the convoy was still rolling, and the cargo was still dry, and the old buildings on the Prague skyline were out there somewhere, standing solid in the rain. That would have to be enough.
The Xantia’s taillights flickered like a dying candle, then steadied. Ansel’s voice came through the net, laced with the slight static of a weather-degraded signal. “Village ahead. Drei Eichen. They’ve got the torches lit, so they’re expecting us. Or something else.”
Jara pulled up the overlay. Drei Eichen was a friendly waypoint, one of the forest settlements that had turned a pre-collapse hunting lodge into a communal kitchen and a fortified granary. The lodge’s massive stone hearth still worked, and they’d salvaged a vacuum sealer from an old meatpacking plant, running it off a water wheel in the creek. The meals they produced—venison stew, mushroom ragout, smoked trout in foil pouches—were worth more than gold in the protein-starved highlands. The convoy always stopped here to trade, loading up on sealed rations that would buy goodwill and local goods further down the road.
Volker eased the M5 down a track that wound between ancient oaks, their trunks wrapped in moss that drank the rain like sponges. The Unimogs fanned out, their roof-mounted spotlights cutting cones through the steam. The village palisade was a mix of sharpened logs and old shipping containers, rusted but reinforced, with a gate that rolled on cast-iron wheels. Armed villagers watched from a covered platform, their weapons a quiet statement: hunting crossbows, a few old Mauser rifles, one man with a cyberarm that ended in a shock-prod. Adapted, all of them, their gill-fronds fluttering as they breathed the saturated air. Peaceful, but not soft. No one survived out here without edges.
The gate creaked open. A woman stepped forward, her rebreather mask hanging loose around her neck, her eyes the colour of the moss. She was the Küchenmeisterin—the kitchen master—a title that carried more weight here than mayor. “Die Händler aus dem Tal,” she said, a smile cracking her scarred lips. “We’ve got eighty pouches of venison and forty of mushroom. Also twenty of lake trout from the new nets. You brought the salt?”
Jara nodded, climbing out of the M5. The rain hit her face, warm and insistent. “Salt, dry yeast, and the coil wire you asked for. Plus a case of analgesics from the Jena vats.” She gestured to Zeph, who was already unspooling a trade ledger from his wrist display, his goggle-implants reflecting lines of inventory code. The Küchenmeisterin gestured, and villagers emerged from the lodge carrying plastic crates stacked with vacuum-sealed pouches, the edges of the meals visible through the clear plastic: dark meat in a brown sauce, golden mushrooms, pink trout fillets. The seal on each pouch was a promise. In a world of rot and wet, a vacuum seal was a little fortress of dryness.
The trade itself was a ritual, performed under the overhang of the lodge’s porch while the ever-rain drummed on the roof. The villagers wanted more than salt and yeast. A man with a hand-carved rebreather offered bundles of dried forest herbs—woodruff, yarrow, St. John’s wort—worth a few meal pouches each. A woman with adapted eyes that could see in the near-infrared brought a basket of wild honey, the comb sealed in wax that her children had harvested from a hive in a dead concrete building’s wall. Jara’s team haggled in low voices, exchanging pouches for these local treasures that would sell for a premium in Prague: the herbs for the city’s adapted who used them to manage viral symptoms, the honey for the enclave’s elders who remembered sweetness.
“This,” said an old man, his skin bearing the mottled pattern of a partial heat-adaptation, “you’ll want for Prague. Found in the ruins of a server farm.” He held up a cloth pouch that clinked. Inside were a dozen pristine neodymium magnets, each the size of a finger joint, scavenged from dead hard drives. Rare earth magnets. Essential for hand-building cyberdeck armatures, for generator stators, for a dozen things the new dark ages had forgotten how to manufacture. Jara didn’t blink. She traded him twenty meal pouches for the lot, knowing they’d fetch ten times that in Prague component markets, or trade straight across for the Korean-manufactured micro-servos she’d been promised by her contacts.
The transaction happened on the open tailgate of Unimog Three, the pouches stacked in a neat pyramid while the rain pattered on the green canvas canopy. The villagers and the merchants stood shoulder to shoulder, armed but relaxed, the radio net humming softly with the Mogs’ idle telemetry. Ansel had climbed out of his Xantia and was demonstrating a hand-cranked vacuum pump to a knot of curious children, his face animated behind his breather. For a moment, Jara let herself feel something almost like peace. The feudal patchwork of central Europe had its own rules now, and a well-stocked merchant convoy was a travelling embassy, a neutral ground that even the mercenary bands were wise enough to respect—most of the time.
They left Drei Eichen with the Unimogs heavier by several crates and the RAMs’ cargo beds rearranged to protect the magnets and the honey. The Xantia found the old B-road that would take them around the collapsed bridges of the Saale and into the Bohemian highlands. The rain never stopped. It hissed on the hot engine blocks and turned the road into a slurry of gravel and mud, but the convoy’s lifted suspension and aggressive tires ate the terrain. Zeph’s drone circled overhead, its thermal cam painting the landscape in shades of cold blue and suspicious orange.
Six days later, they crested a ridge and saw the Prague industrial complex sprawled on the eastern horizon: a grid of soot-stained concrete buildings, many of them toppled, but others—the ones built with pre-stressed, uncorrupted rebar or reinforced with later retrofits—standing defiant. The most intact structures were the logistics parks on the outskirts, vast warehouses with corrugated steel roofs that had been replaced with salvaged aircraft aluminum, immune to the rust that had eaten the city’s modernist heart. The Hostivař Enclave, the locals called it, a walled trade town built inside a former DHL freight hub. Its perimeter was a double row of shipping containers filled with sand and concrete, topped with walkways and floodlights. The gate was a massive sliding door from a decommissioned aircraft hangar.
The convoy approached through the vehicle sally port, a winding concrete chicane designed to break the momentum of any attacker. Guards in proper uniforms—adapted, with military discipline—waved them through after scanning Zeph’s cryptographic trade token. Inside, the space opened into a bustling bazaar under high vaulted ceilings: stalls selling salvaged electronics, hand-sewn cooling garments, herbal antivirals, dried meat, bootleg cyberdeck components. Forklifts powered by biodiesel shuttled pallets between storage cages. The air smelled of ozone, cooking grease, and the faint, sweet tang of antiviral aerosol. Above it all, satellite dishes sprouted from the roof like metallic fungi, linking the enclave to trade routes that still reached as far as Istanbul and the Asian manufacturing hubs.
The convoy was assigned a parking bay—a concrete pad with a roof and a lockable storage cage. The drivers shut down their engines, and for the first time in ten days, the ever-rain was a noise outside the walls, not a hammer on their heads. Jara stepped down from the M5 and stretched, her spine popping. Ansel was already checking the Xantia’s suspension, while the Unimog crews started pulling tarps and setting up a small camp. There was a container hostel on the eastern side of the compound, a stack of refrigerated units retrofitted with bunks, air conditioning, and a dehumidifier that turned the air into something almost crisp. They’d sleep there for three nights. In real beds. With no guns in their hands.
The recovery days followed a rhythm Jara knew by heart. Sleep until noon, then maintenance: oil changes, filter swaps, rust inspections. The Hostivař had mechanics who worked for trade, and Pavel was the best of them—a wiry Czech with a cybernetic arm that had more torque settings than most factory robots. He’d been there since the collapse, running his shop out of a converted shipping container. He and Jara had known each other for three years, ever since the first Würzburg caravan limped in with a blown head gasket and a truckload of fear. Now they traded jokes and spare parts with the ease of old allies.
While the vehicles were tended, the real trade began. Jara, Volker, and Zeph walked through the maze of the bazaar to a corner bay marked with a faded sign: NOVAK & KOVAC – SPARE PARTS & ELECTRONICS. The bay’s door was a heavy steel shutter, half-raised. Inside, shelves towered with plastic bins, each labelled in a mix of Czech, English, and what Jara had learned to recognize as Korean. A woman with silver hair and a leather apron looked up from a workbench where she was micro-soldering a circuit board under a magnifying lamp. This was Eliska Novak, and her family had run an import-export business before the collapse, moving components from Asian factories to European assembly lines. When the rain came and the concrete fell, she’d pivoted to moving those same components from the warehouses they still had access to, via the Silk Road routes that crossed the steppe and the Balkans, straight into the hands of people like Jara.
“You made it,” Eliska said, not quite smiling but not not smiling. “I heard about the Autobahn collapse near Erfurt. Lost a whole shipment of Korean VRAM chips there last month. Yours?”
“We’re still standing,” Jara said. “Got the serum you asked for, the stabilizers, the antibiotic vials. Plus something special—two unused cyberdeck spinal interfaces, Takeda series, still in the factory argon seal.”
Eliska’s eyes widened, a flicker of the old-world hunger for bleeding-edge tech. “Those aren’t European manufacture.”
“Japanese. From a research lab in Heidelberg that didn’t get properly looted. We traded a small fortune in meal pouches and medicine for them.”
“You’ll trade them again, then.” Eliska gestured to the shelves behind her. “I’ve got what you asked for. Korean micro-servos, twelve hundred units. Japanese-made optical fiber spools for data lines—real glass core, not that salvaged plastic crap. Chinese brushless DC generators, ten-kilowatt, with voltage regulators. Indian-made cyberdeck cooling plates, the good ones with the microchannel etching. And this.” She picked up a small, sealed metal case. “Nuvoton microcontrollers from Taiwan. The last shipment before the shipping routes shifted south. Enough to run a hundred decks.”
Jara let out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. This was the lifeblood of the valley. The non-European manufacturing capacity hadn’t collapsed the way Europe’s had. Asia had adapted, building new factories in climate-controlled zones, running supply chains that skirted the worst of the heat and the rain. Getting these components meant the Würzburg enclave’s cyberdeck workshops could keep building, the generators could keep spinning, the water purification pumps could keep humming. The valley’s fragile techno-feudal independence ran on these little boxes of silicon and copper.
The trade took three hours of careful inspection, serial number verification, and the exchange of cryptographic notary keys. Zeph managed the digital side, his deck humming as he confirmed the provenance of each shipment against the distributed ledger that had replaced banking. Volker handled the physical loading, his broad shoulders moving crates with the ease of long practice. Jara and Eliska did the human part: the small talk, the shared cigarette (Eliska’s dry-cured tobacco was legendary), the exchange of gossip about which routes were still safe and which warlords had started demanding “taxes.” The trust between them had been forged in the collapse itself, when Jara’s convoy had arrived with a truckload of antiviral serum and Eliska’s husband had been dying of the Shivers. They’d traded on credit, on a promise, and neither had ever broken it. In the new dark ages, a reliable contact was a kind of family.
On the third night, Jara sat on the roof of the container hostel, a cooling cowl draped over her shoulders, watching the ever-rain sheet off the aircraft-aluminum roof of the enclave. The convoy was fully loaded now. The MAN’s trailer was stacked with sealed crates of components, the Unimogs’ storage compartments packed tight, the RAMs carrying backup fuel and water filters. Tomorrow they’d turn west, back toward the collapsed Autobahn and the flooded valleys, back to the Sick Basin and the people who depended on them.
Volker joined her, handing her a cup of hot chicory brew. “Pavel says the M5’s got another twenty thousand klicks in her, easy. The Mogs are good. The Xantia needs a new clutch plate eventually, but Ansel’s nursing it.”
“Ansel’s always nursing something,” Jara said, but there was no bite in it. She sipped the chicory. “We did good. We’ll be home in ten days if the rain doesn’t wash out the passes.”
“And then we go again.”
“And then we go again.”
Below them, the bazaar was closing for the night, the stalls being locked behind metal grates. A few adapted children ran through the corridors, their gill-fronds fluttering with laughter. The radio net hummed in Jara’s implant, a quiet lullaby of system checks and encrypted data packets. She thought about the valley, about the old stone buildings that still stood because they’d been built before steel, about the way the world had broken and then re-formed into something harder, stranger, but still alive. The merchants were the veins of that new body, carrying the things that kept it alive from one end to the other. It was a hard life, wet and hot and dangerous, but it was a life with purpose.
The rain fell. The concrete ruins of Prague’s old center were invisible in the dark, but the Charles Bridge was out there somewhere, its ancient stones standing solid, a promise that not everything built by human hands would fail. Jara crushed out her cigarette, careful to save the dry butt, and climbed down to get some sleep. In the morning, the convoy would roll, and the ever-rain would beat its endless rhythm on the roofs of the vehicles, and the radio net would hum with the music of connection. That was enough. That was everything.
The sound came first, a low thrumming that cut through the ever-rain's hiss like a knife through wet wool. Jara was on the old fortress wall above Würzburg, staring out over the Sick Basin, when she heard it. The valley's adapted guards on the Marienberg battlements lifted their heads, their gill-fronds fluttering with alertness. The thrum deepened, became a staccato pulse—*chop-chop-chop-chop*—and then the machine itself appeared, skimming the treetops like a dragonfly made of salvage and obsession.
It was a tiny helicopter, barely larger than a coffin with rotors, its twin contra-rotating blades spinning in opposite directions above a skeletal frame of chromoly tubing. There was no tail rotor, no wasted mass, just a seat, an engine, and two carbon-fiber discs that blurred into a translucent halo. The fuselage was wrapped in iridescent, heat-reflective film that shimmered between charcoal and ghost-grey depending on the angle, the same skin a stealth drone might wear. It flew low—always low, never more than twenty meters above the ground—and it moved fast, following the contours of the river and the collapsed Autobahn as if the map were burned into the pilot's nerves.
The pilot landed in the fortress courtyard, setting the machine down with a delicacy that made the guards flinch. The rotors slowed, drooped, and stopped. The canopy—a piece of repurposed aircraft glass, hazed with microscratches—swung open. Out climbed the man they called Strider, and behind him, something else uncoiled from the passenger space: a beast the size of a small pony, covered in mottled grey fur and bearing a set of chrome-titanium teeth that gleamed in the rain-filtered light.
Strider was tall. He had been tall before the Fever took him, and the mutations had only stretched him further. His frame was a cathedral of muscle and sinew wrapped in a patchwork of armoured skin grafts, some organic, some synthetic, all of them blending into a hide that was thicker and tougher than any baseline human's. His face was long, his jaw too broad, his brow ridge heavy enough to cast shadows over eyes that glowed a low amber in the dark—night-adapted, pupil-less, the irises transformed into full-spectrum collectors. He moved with the rolling, deliberate gait of something that had learned to navigate by sonar in pitch-black caves and by the electromagnetic hum of buried power cables in collapsed cities. The street samurai mods were layered over that base: servo-assist muscle cables that whispered under his skin, a reflex booster bolted to his spine, subdermal ceramic plates that gave his silhouette the bulk of a walking tank. And over all of it, woven into the very fabric of his nervous system, was the thing the valley's deckers called "worst spell magic"—a suite of experimental bioware and signal processing implants that let him perceive data streams as synesthetic visions, hack firewalls with the power of a focused migraine, and pull electronic secrets out of the air like a soothsayer reading entrails. It wasn't magic, not really. But to the adapted farmers and the mercenary captains who barely understood how their own rebreathers worked, it might as well have been.
None of that was what made people step back. What made them step back was the wolf.
The beast dropped to the wet cobblestones on paws the size of dinner plates, shook itself, and fixed the nearest guard with a gaze that was pure predator calculation. It was a wolf in the genetic sense, but the Fever had twisted it too, or someone had twisted it with a gene-splicer. Its shoulders were higher than Strider's waist, its jaws capable of cracking a femur with a single snap, its claws sheathed in retractable carbon-fibre. Cybernetic optics gleamed in the sockets where its eyes should have been, and along its flanks, patches of fur had been replaced with reactive camouflage skin that shifted and flickered. The wolf yawned, displaying a tongue that was unnervingly pink and normal, and then it sat down and began licking its paw like a house cat.
Strider patted its head. "Good girl, Maus," he said, his voice a deep rumble that carried a warmth utterly at odds with his appearance. "See? No trouble." He looked up at Jara, amber eyes crinkling into something that was trying very hard to be a smile. "She only eats the bad ones."
Jara, who had known Strider since the first summer of the collapse, did not flinch. She walked down from the wall and clasped his armoured forearm. "You've been gone three weeks. We were starting to worry the rain had finally claimed you."
"The rain claims everyone eventually," Strider said, and it was not a joke. He handed her a datachip from a sealed pouch on his chest rig. "But not yet. Not when there are places out there that are *loving* to trade."
That was Strider's gift. Before the collapse, he had been one of the invisible working poor, a man who had seen more of the continent than most diplomats by stringing together hostel beds, cheap train tickets, and seasonal labour. He had been a dishwasher in Krakow, a vineyard hand in the Loire, a warehouse picker in Antwerp. He had never owned a car, never had a savings account with more than a thousand euros, never touched anything stronger than the occasional bad beer. The sobriety had been practical: every euro saved on drugs was a euro for a rail pass, every clear-headed morning a chance to see another city. He had made friends in the way the rootless do, brief but intense connections that left their coordinates in his memory like GPS waypoints. When the rain came and the concrete failed, when the governments collapsed and the new feudalism rose, those waypoints became the most valuable resource in the Sick Basin.
Strider had built a cyberdeck for himself before he built one for anyone else. He'd seen the profit potential while the rest of the valley was still scavenging canned food. A functioning deck—a real one, with a neural interface, a signal modulator, and a cooling system that didn't clog with humidity—was worth more than its weight in pre-collapse opioids. There were warlords in the east who would trade a truckload of fuel for a single high-bandwidth transceiver module. There were enclaves in the south that would hand over sealed medical supplies if you brought them the chips to run their diagnostic equipment. The deck-building trade gave Strider the capital to build the helicopter, and the helicopter gave him the mobility to find the people who remembered his face from a decade ago and would still honour a handshake.
The twin-rotor machine was a marvel of desperate engineering. He'd scavenged the rotors from a delivery drone hub outside Nuremberg, the engine from a crashed gyrocopter in the Harz mountains, the airframe from a hang-glider manufacturer that had gone bankrupt long before the rain. The contra-rotating design eliminated the need for a tail rotor, making it compact enough to land in a village square or on a rooftop. He flew only at night, when the ever-rain was slightly cooler and the thermals that could swat his ultralight craft out of the sky were at their weakest. He flew low, following the old roads and the rivers, navigating by a combination of pre-loaded map data, inertial guidance, and the uncanny instincts of a man who had once navigated Paris on foot with only a paper map and a prayer. The helicopter's skin made it almost invisible to thermal scopes, and its electric engine—powered by a removable battery pack he recharged at friendly waypoints—made it almost silent. Strider flitted through the fragmented landscape like a moth, touching down in remote villages, forgotten monasteries, and rooftop encampments where no convoy could ever hope to reach.
He always took Maus with him. The wolf had been a pup when Strider found her, the sole survivor of a litter that had been exposed to an early strain of the Fever. Her mutations had made her large, tough, and uncannily intelligent, with a problem-solving capacity that sometimes frightened even Strider. She had imprinted on him with the ferocity of a true pack bond. To Strider, she was still the little ball of grey fluff that had chewed on his boot in a flooded basement in Erfurt. He did not see the way other people saw her—the way their eyes went wide, the way their hands crept toward their weapons, the way their adapted noses flared with the scent of apex-predator musk. He would introduce her with the same casual affection a normal person might introduce a Labrador, utterly bewildered when the villagers backed away. "She's friendly," he'd say, genuinely puzzled, as Maus's chrome-titanium teeth glinted in the torchlight. "She just wants to sniff your hand."
It was a quirk that had nearly gotten him killed more than once, but it had also saved him. In a world of warlords and mercenary bands, a man who walked unafraid with a monster at his side sent a message that no words could convey. Strider was not a threat. He was something rarer: a force of nature that had chosen to be benign.
Now he sat in the fortress's common hall, a stone-walled room that had been built in the 12th century and had survived everything the weather had thrown at it, while Jara and the convoy's core team gathered around a table. Maus lay at his feet like a massive, breathing rug, her tail thumping whenever Strider's hand strayed to scratch behind her ears. Zeph was jacked into the datachip, his goggle-implants flickering as he parsed the information.
"Two places," Strider said, spreading his long, armoured fingers on the table. "First, a village in the Vosges mountains. They're calling themselves Le Refuge. About three hundred adapted, living in a restored medieval abbey. They've got goats, honey, and—here's the part you'll like—they've figured out how to culture a strain of penicillium that works on the Shivers. I saw it. A woman with stage-two lesions, gone in four days. They're running low on vacuum pump parts and they need new gaskets for their sealing machines. We bring them what they need, they'll trade us litres of the culture medium. Prague will pay us in components for a fraction of that." He paused, the amber eyes flicking to Jara. "They also asked about cyberdeck interfaces. They've got three tech-adapted who are trying to build something from scrap. I told them we might be interested in a long-term arrangement."
"Second?" Volker asked.
"Second is trickier, but the payoff..." Strider's voice dropped, and the amber glow in his eyes seemed to intensify. "You know the old Zeppelin hangar at Friedrichshafen? On the Bodensee?"
Jara nodded. The hangar had been a military logistics hub before the collapse. It was supposed to have been evacuated, but rumours persisted of a skeleton crew that had stayed behind, maintaining the equipment and waiting for orders that never came.
"It's not a skeleton crew," Strider said. "It's a full enclave. They've got a functioning 3D printing farm that runs off geothermal, and they've been printing circuit boards. Not the fancy multi-layer stuff, but single-layer, clean, on fire-retardant substrate. They need rare earth magnets, copper wire, and industrial epoxy. We've got all three from the Drei Eichen trade. In exchange, they're offering printed drone airframes, replacement vehicle control modules, and—" he leaned forward, "—a sealed crate of Chinese-manufactured IGBT modules. Power transistors. The ones we can't make anymore. Enough to rebuild every generator in the valley for the next decade."
Silence fell around the table. The value of those modules was incalculable. The valley's power grid was a patchwork of salvaged solar panels and water wheels, held together by generators that were slowly dying. An IGBT module was the heart of any modern inverter, and the Chinese-made ones were the last of their kind in Europe.
"How do we get there?" Jara asked, her mind already running convoy routes. "The Autobahn to Friedrichshafen is gone. The bridges over the Neckar are down. It's mountain roads all the way."
"I didn't say it was easy," Strider said, a hint of his old backpacker's grin breaking through the armoured facade. "But I've already mapped a route. The Xantia can handle the scout work. The MAN's lifted, the Mogs can do anything. We take it slow, we can be there in fourteen days." He stroked Maus's head, and the wolf's tail thumped harder. "Besides, they're *loving* to trade. The hangar commander—her name is Reuter—she remembered me from a hostel in Konstanz, fifteen years ago. We shared a bunk room and a bottle of terrible wine. When she saw the helicopter land, she thought she was hallucinating."
Of course she did, Jara thought. Strider had that effect. The man who had once wandered Europe with nothing but a backpack and a stubborn refusal to spend money on anything that dulled his senses had become a living myth, a nocturnal courier wrapped in muscle and bioware and the gentlest heart in the valley. He was the reason the convoy's trade routes kept expanding, the reason the Sick Basin had more than just survival—it had connection. And he never seemed to realize how terrifying he was, sitting there with his amber eyes and his combat mods and his wolf that could bite through an engine block.
She looked at the datachip, at the promise of trade routes and components and medicine that could push back the viral tide. "Alright," she said. "We load up. We leave in two days. Strider, you're taking point from the air until we hit the mountains. Maus rides in the M5 with Volker and me."
Maus lifted her massive head at the sound of her name, and for a moment, her chrome-titanium teeth gleamed in what might have been a smile. Jara decided to take it as one.
