The corporal ushered me into the crawler at the same time the storm hit, so that just before our driver gunned
the engine, I heard the patter of grit outside. I tried one last time, to see if I’d miss them—Bea and Phillip.
Nothing
. There had to be something wrong with me, but damned if I could figure it out, and it didn’t matter anyway; I’d be gone within forty-eight hours, with other things to worry about.
“Nice visit?” the corporal asked.
I nodded.
“Bet you can’t wait to get back home again.”
I shook my head. “I’m not coming back. I’d forgotten how shitty the central monitoring computers are.”
“Well, we don’t want to go back to those days,” the Corporal said, probably without even realizing it, and I almost slammed him against the bulkhead.
“Another sato. Another day.” Wheezer sat next to me in a beat-up eco job, the recycled plastic ones with an electric motor and two seats. A computer tablet sat on his lap. “Jesus I hate these urban ops, give me a suit computer any day. It’s friggin’
day
time.”
“Where is she?” I asked.
“Two blocks up, on the left, three-slash-two-to-four. Pine Street. The locals know we’re here, right?”
I nodded, pulling the car into an empty slot—far enough away from the target that we shouldn’t be noticed, but in position to get a good view. “Briefed ’em this morning. They’re glad to have us so
their
guys don’t have to deal with them.”
We saw Manly beach from our spot. How’d she make it this far—to Australia of all places? It didn’t really matter if I figured it out or not, the betty would wind up like
the others, but I’d never been this far from a war zone to have to track one down. People laughed as they walked by our car, headed for the sand, some of them carrying surfboards and all of them oblivious to why we were there and what had infested their corner of the world. If we did it right, they’d never know.
“Movement,” said Wheezer. I slowly lifted a pair of field glasses, aiming at one of the windows.
She had one blind up, peering through the narrow crack that formed so that I could see those eyes, a deep blue like some exotic berry, broken by a pinpoint of black pupil. There was another window nearby and its blinds flickered.
“There’s two.”
Wheezer shook his head. “Aw, crap. That ain’t good, intel said only one.”
I thought for a second, still looking through the binoculars when the first one looked directly at me. The blind snapped shut. “We’re burned,” I said, cursing myself for parking too close.
Sloppy
.
“Let’s get the hell out,” Wheezer said, yanking a flechette pistol from his shorts. “
Now
.”
I had just put it into reverse when the passenger window shattered. Wheezer didn’t have time to react. One of them had snuck up behind us, must have already been on the street, and punched through the glass as if it were paper. She slammed her fist into Wheezer’s temple and his head went limp, unconscious, after which I grabbed the pistol from his hand, kicked open my door, and rolled into the street.
Her figure blurred when she slid over the back of the car, toward me, barely giving me enough time to think
my God this one is fast
just before I fired. The flechettes
snapped through her torso; tiny spots of blood appeared on her white T-shirt as the flechettes worked their way upward until she collapsed on the street.
My car trunk didn’t want to work. I slammed my fist on it, working the key simultaneously until eventually it gave, everything moving in slow motion.
Grenade launcher
, I thought,
where is the fucking grenade launcher?
I lifted it, resting the barrel on the top of the car, running through a list in my head:
Blinds open now; movement; they were still there
.
The first grenade detonated when it hit glass, sending shards everywhere so that people in the street screamed, running for cover. I fired a second, then a third, and kept going until the clip chimed empty. I grabbed the carbine, a special model without a hopper but three thousand flechettes in a banana clip that angled upward. The weapon was short, for tight spaces.
My legs didn’t move as fast as I wanted them to and crossing the street seemed like it took an hour, the apartment steps feeling endless. I wasn’t afraid, didn’t feel anything except a vague notion that I had entered a zone where it all clicked by the numbers, the knowledge that everything was as it should be making it feel
smooth
.
The door splintered when I kicked it, and I sprayed the room, moving forward in a crouch. It got quiet then. A siren blared in the distance, getting louder, and it took me a second to realize that they were all dead, three satos on the floor and splayed in different poses, with expressions of surprise on their faces as if the grenades had shredded their minds—before they had a chance to figure things out.
I slung the carbine and headed back to the car; by the time I got there, the first cop had showed.
“They
were
genetics?” he asked.
I nodded. “Three in the flat, one on the street. Shredded.”
He looked at Wheezer and shook his head. “I already checked him. He’ll be out for a bit, but should be OK. Nothing that won’t mend.”
“Yeah.” I tossed the carbine into the trunk, then slid into the driver seat, trying not to say anything that would show how glad I was that she hadn’t killed him. “But he missed all the fun.”
The car didn’t want to accelerate, and whined as if it was angry that it had to move again. I hated the things. Wheezer was right: screw urban ops, give me the steppes or the jungle—the night—where we’d play the game
our
way with microbots and air support, would get to carry our weapons in the open instead of having to lock them in the trunk. Even walking across Turkmenistan would have been better then being trapped in a plastic box because at least out there you’d have a combat suit.
The mission hadn’t ended. I thought we’d get the recall notice as soon as we got back to the hotel, by which time Wheezer had come to, but instead of the regular phone call, we got orders to head to the Sydney desalination plant south, in Cronulla.
Cronulla
. It was the kind of place that immigrants wound up, the working-class slums of Sydney, a mega-city that was more Asian than anything else and every night we heard gunfire from the battles raging between Korean and Japanese gangs, the product of decades of war and famine that had spread from East Asia to the entire Pacific. We drove through a Korean neighborhood on the way to the meeting and I
marveled at the front yards, none of which had a blade of grass or a shrub. Each lawn had been replaced by concrete aprons, some decorated by imitation stone statues, but most contained groups of young men who stared at us as we passed, their eyes indifferent to who we were as long as it was obvious that neither of us was Japanese. Finally we crested a hill and turned east toward the ocean. In front of us we saw the entire shore, on which rocks and sand had been taken over by fusion power plants interspersed with desalination units, and even from that distance we heard the hum of the switchyards and throbs of pumps, struggling to convert the salt water into something that could support Sydney’s bursting population.
What had happened here, and in the States? It had been so long ago, that even the living among us—ones who could remember when Kazakhstan had been an unknown land, or when Sydney had been a relatively safe city—hadn’t been alive before the Asian Wars, and everyone had to rely on the claims in history books. Either you believed them or you didn’t. What nobody denied, though, was that the world was fucked up by limited nuclear exchanges, so badly that even though I hadn’t ever been to Sydney or Cronulla, the air itself seemed to hum at the wrong frequency, like the earth had a bad case of the nerves and could snap at any minute. It put everyone on edge. Projects like the ones to reclaim the west back home or establish desalination along Australia’s east coast, these were Band-Aids, maybe just psychological ones, designed to assure the public that what could be done was being done, and that if everyone could just hold out until space colonization and mining went large-scale, well then everything would be just fine.
We turned into the plant, where an armed guard
ushered us through, and I pulled up to a group of Australian soldiers where we got out to shake hands.
One of them introduced himself. “Lieutenant Grimes, Sergeant. Sorry to have your people call you out after your mission.”
“It’s all right, but they were light on the details. What’s going on?”
“We don’t know. We found a bunch of dead bodies, in a boat moored to the desalination plant’s pier.”
I shrugged. “So? Call the cops.”
“We did. They told us about your party in Manly this morning, and referred us to your SOCOM liaison. That’s when you got the call.”
“You think this is related?” asked Wheezer.
The lieutenant nodded. “We do. You’d better come with us, it might be easier to just show you. We found a boat that came in a few days ago. From Vietnam.”
We followed him through the plant. Five men surrounded us, in half combat gear consisting of a chest plate and bucket helmet that concealed their faces, but for some reason they kept scanning from side to side, with Maxwell carbines ready to go if needed. The Australian version was similar to the American one: a coil gun, with a flexi-belt that fed thousands of flechettes from a shoulder-mounted hopper, but it made me wonder, what was going on? They were acting skittish, as if expecting an ambush. I began to wonder if we should have brought our own weapons, the thought making me feel naked.
Our path wound through the plant, which swallowed us amid its pipe galleries and buildings, the noise of machinery punctuated by an occasional hiss when steam valves opened to relieve pressure. Everything was light blue. The color, I
supposed, had been chosen for some reason, maybe to put its workers at ease but the only indication of a worker I saw was a glimpse of a figure, which soon disappeared and left me wondering if I was seeing things; even in the poor lighting I saw that his features were Asian, and assumed that this was where the Japanese had found jobs. It must have been a hell of a commute. The Japanese had settled downtown, mostly near the university, and so it explained why the Koreans had watched us as we passed, since they would have been wary of any Japanese on their way to the plants.
Five minutes passed and still nobody had said anything. It was as if some unspoken signal had been exchanged between us, that something was way off with this place, and when we finally climbed a metal ladder to mount one of the jetties, the boat and the ocean finally came into view, making me sigh with relief. The boat was old, though. Rusty. Japanese lettering declared its name, under which it had been hand-painted in white,
The Golden Flower
. It looked like an old fishing boat, and I wondered how it had made the trip all the way from Vietnam to Sydney, but something wasn’t right with the craft and it took me a second to realize what it was.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the pilot house. Its windows were shattered, and something had been smeared across the white paint.
“Blood,” the lieutenant said. “We think your girls arrived on her, killed the crew, and took off.” He gestured for us to board ahead of him. “After you.”
“You sure this is safe?” Wheezer asked.
The lieutenant nodded. “We checked the plant and rechecked it, so the workers are terrified right now and think we’re going to deport half of them. But we’ll be
watching from the jetty and guards are patrolling the plant now. It’s safe.”
“You’re not coming onboard?” I asked.
“Nah, mate. I’ve seen it.” He handed Wheezer a holo-camera. “Your SOCOM people wanted it recorded. We’ll take you to the American Liaison in Sydney when you’re ready to transmit.”
We boarded the ship on its ladder, which creaked under my weight; I prayed it wouldn’t give, and the smell of death filled the air, strong enough that even the evening breeze wouldn’t remove it completely. Dried blood covered the deck and bulkheads. Two dead Japanese lay near the bow, their necks snapped and their bodies lying where they had been thrown, heads turned at impossible angles. A third was at the wheel, his throat slit. All of them had clearly been there for some time, and the air buzzed with the noise of bottle flies, laying their eggs as quickly as they could until I couldn’t think about it without feeling like I had to get out.
“They’ve been dead for a while,” Wheezer said, filming everything.
“And the satos did this. It’s totally their style. They painted a cross in blood on one of the doors.”
“How could it have been here for this long, unreported?”
I shook my head. “If this was some screwed up Japanese smuggling op, I doubt the plant workers wanted to get near it. Nobody would want to stick their nose out and bring down the law, or worse.”
“Bug, this is messed up.”
“Why?” I asked.
He shut the camera off. “When was the last time
SOCOM cared about some dead Japanese smugglers? Why would anyone smuggle satos to Australia anyway?”
I didn’t have the answers. Nobody ever paid me to be a detective and I had the same questions he did, unable to shake the feeling that the boat had been cursed and understanding now why the Australians had been so edgy: it didn’t add up. The body at the wheel had bloated to point of seeming like a caricature of a human, his eyes covered by swarms of black flies.