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. By the time I made it back to the car, the first local cop had already arrived.
“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 were angry that it had to move. 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 where immigrants wound up, a rats’ nest forming the working-class slums of Sydney, a megacity 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 a decades-old war and famine that had spread from east Asia to the entire Pacific. We drove through a Korean neighborhood on the way to the plant, and I marveled at the front yards, none of which had a blade of grass or a shrub. Each lawn had been replaced by a concrete apron, some decorated by imitation stone statues, but most contained groups of young men who stared at us as we passed, their eyes indifferent to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 gone down 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 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 so badly by limited nuclear exchanges that even though I hadn’t ever been to Sydney or Cronulla, the air itself hummed 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 to 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 who helped us from the car.
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. “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. The Australians’ weapons were similar to the American version: a coil gun with a flexi-belt that fed thousands of fléchettes from a shoulder-mounted hopper, but it made me wonder. What was going on? They were acting skittish, as if expecting an ambush, and I began to suspect that we should have brought our own weapons.
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 the plant’s workers at ease, but the only indication of a worker we saw was a glimpse of a figure, which soon disappeared and left me sure I was seeing things; even the poor lighting showed that his features were Asian, and I assumed that this was where the Japanese had found jobs. It must have been a hell of a commute. The Japanese had settled downtown near the university, and so it explained why the Koreans had watched us as we passed, since they would have been wary of anyone on their way to the plants.
Five minutes passed, and still nobody had said anything. It was as if an unspoken signal had been exchanged between us, that something was way off with this place, and when we climbed a metal ladder to mount one of the jetties, the boat and the ocean came into view, making me sigh with relief. The boat was old, though. Rusty. Japanese lettering declared its name, under which 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 was wrong with the craft, and it took me a second to place it.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing at the pilothouse. 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 arrest half of them. So it’s safe.”
“You’re not coming on board?” 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 hot guts filled the air, strong enough that even the evening breeze couldn’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, and a third was at the wheel, his throat slit. All of them had 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 satos definitely did this,” I said, nodding. “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? And why were the betties you wiped in such good shape; why weren’t they rotting like the rest of them?”
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 into the caricature of a human, his eyes covered by swarms of black flies.
“I don’t know. But we did what they wanted, so let’s get the hell out of here.”
I had stepped back onto the deck and was heading for the ladder when Wheezer called out.
“I’m going to pull the ship’s records, Bug. To see if maybe there’s something on the logs that might give us a better idea.”
I swung onto the ladder and had just begun to tell him
to let the Aussies handle it when it happened. Wheezer had gone back into the main cabin and was staring at me through the broken window when he leaned over the boat’s main console to reach for the log-file chits. A second later there was a flash, a moment of curiosity as I flew backward toward the plant, and then darkness after I collided with something solid. When I came around, nobody had to tell me; the chits had been rigged to blow when pulled, and nobody on board could’ve survived that blast.
The Australians did what they could for me, but I wasn’t staying in their hospital and grabbed my street clothes to hit the road as soon as the doctors turned their backs. I bought five bottles of scotch on the way back to my hotel.
Wheezer’s hotel.
Although the bandages were tight around my head, blood must have soaked through; guards in the lobby stopped me and asked to see my room chit, then escorted me all the way up to make sure I was OK.
Wheezer’s things were still there. I didn’t bother with a glass and cracked open the first bottle, turning it up to let scotch wash in, burning my throat at the same time I willed it to burn away his memory and my brain.
My wife and her son.
There was feeling in me for Wheezer because he had watched out for me over the years and we’d shared the same missions, walked the same dirt, and had both decided that the real world was for fucks, a crazy house that had mixed up what was important with what was garbage.
But nothing for my family.
You could give a guy like Wheezer the name of a Kazakh town, and he’d just nod because there wasn’t any need to explain; he’d either been there during the action or had heard all about
it. Bea wouldn’t have understood even if I tried to tell her why we did it, why we’d been cursed with an addiction. Being on a job was like having the shades pulled up by God so he could scream at you,
See, you stupid little sacks; see what matters more than a paycheck or the day’s grocery ration?
You whored with Turkmen women because to hell with it; tomorrow might not happen. You dove into the fight because someday you might need someone else to do it for
you.
Being shown the truth like that was like having a one-way ticket to Mars, and once you stepped on board, there wasn’t a return flight to the real world. Wheezer had dug that one too.
His memory didn’t leave until the second bottle, and after that I called an escort. At about the same time she showed up, I opened the third bottle, then paid her to get lost after figuring out I was too drunk for anything to work right, and when she shut the door, it all hit at once, the fact that Wheezer was gone. The chair was an easy choice. It sailed through the closest window, and I giggled as I leaned out over the sill, my hands gripping it as hard as they could, daring it to hurt, searching for broken glass on which to cut themselves. It took a few seconds for the chair and glass shards to shatter on the street below, and someone flipped me off, so I sent out a second chair, then my empty bottles. Someone would come for me soon, I figured. With only a matter of minutes before the cops showed up, I chugged the last two bottles and began wrapping my hands, which had somehow escaped being cut. But maybe they weren’t my hands. Instead of hurting they were numb, as if the pair were attached to my wrists but had failed at birth to connect via nerves. How many people had these hands killed, anyway? Maybe it would be better to have none at all;
maybe it was because of them that I couldn’t get back to the real world, the one where Bea lived.
The first cop didn’t bother with a key and burst through the door so the frame splintered, and by then I was naked anyway, no clothing except for a new bandage around my head, fashioned from the bedsheets. He stumbled upon seeing me. Even drunk I saw the opening and kicked him in the groin, wondering how it was that he could stand there like that when there was an insane man in front of him. How could he give me such an opening? His partner came in then, and behind him I saw a team. Twenty of the bastards had gathered in the hallway, their uniforms making them look like crossing guards instead of police. One of them hit me with a nonlethal, a tiny needle that sounded like a bee when it slammed into my chest, injecting a dose of tranquilizer that was supposed to put me to sleep, but all it did was piss me off.
Before I knew it, one of them hit the ground, and I stood over his back about to snap his neck when the rest of them boiled into my room, slamming their clubs into my head, making me even more angry. What had I ever done to them? They said things but none of it made sense, and the nonlethal must have grabbed hold because everything moved in slow motion and a soft glow came from their faces as they handcuffed me and wheeled me out on a gurney.