New Praetorians 2 - Shetani Zeru Bryan

by R. K. Syrus

  The waterway was built for the future. Dynamic locks created artificial currents. In contrast to the route through Panama, ships traveling the Liberation Canal would no longer have to slow down in their haste to reach the Atlantic or Pacific.

  When Delicia was six, Rosa had just turned fifteen. The valley was confiscated. Their father was given a handful of córdobas and told to pack his things. A few months later, Ramondo Ortiz got a final retirement settlement. A bullet in the back.

  Displaced and not able to bribe himself a job on the canal construction crew, Sr. Ortiz got odd jobs doing road-upgrading work. This mostly involved cutting down old-growth forests and putting the timber someplace it could quietly rot.

  One day, Delicia, her father, and his brother came upon a magnificent mahogany tree. It was long, straight, and old. Very old, it had been cut down in an improper way. Even Delicia could see the people who killed it knew nothing about trees. Its trunk had been partly hacked and partly burned through. It lay half out of the rising waters.

  The refuse log’s grip on the shore was slim. In a few days, it would be on the canal bottom or drifting, partly submerged, toward the ocean. It would have been worth thousands of dollars had it ever made its way to a proper lumberyard.

  Delicia’s father, who knew something of carving and woodwork, envisioned a new life for this discarded former tree. A fine second life as furniture or panelling in the grand house. Or even a musical life, as part of a guitar. It was a treasure the forest was offering. It would be a sin to waste it, her father told them.

  Ramondo and his brother, Stephano, worked with bare hands and short ropes to free the fallen colossus from the mud. The plan was to ride it downstream to a village, where a truck might be hired to haul it ashore. They thought of themselves as entrepreneurs, gathering what the land offered. A land they had always been told belonged to everyone.

  The fallen mahogany tree was full of possibilities. Even if the Ortiz brothers sold it for a fraction of its value. A few hundred faded and worn paper dollars would be enough to buy an urban visa. A new beginning.

  With the canal sending city property values sky high, Ramondo told his daughters as he worked that there would be plenty of work building large houses. Ones that foreign contractors and their local friends could afford. Somehow, they might end up installing mahogany flooring made from this same tree they were salvaging. It would require a deft touch, this fine, dark wood, especially in a humid climate. Everything would have to fit just so. But he was sure his hands would find their way, given half a chance.

  Then, that half chance was taken away as a bullet snapped Sr. Ortiz’s spine. From their gunboat, a paramilitary security patrol saw two raggedly dressed men on Liberation Canal property. Miscreants and squatters. They could land and arrest them or beat them and drive them off. Murder was faster.

  Anyone trespassing on the waterway was deemed hostile. Those were the canal zone’s rules of engagement. Insurgents on a jury-rigged suicide canoe or two carpenters floating on a half-sunken log, it was all the same to the paras. No bodies meant less paperwork.

  Delicia’s uncle Stephano was the next to be shot. A bullet went diagonally through both his lungs. He had time enough to signal the girls on the shore to be quiet.

  “Shhh.”

  He gurgled in foamy blood before he splashed out of sight.

  Delicia, clutching muddy reeds, frozen in fear and unreality, watched her father’s hands rise once from muddy water, slap weakly against the slick bark of their simple wooden craft, then slip away without a sound. Then he became tangled in rope and branch. All three of the discarded now deceased: two men and a tree, drifting toward the Atlantic.

  Delicia’s mother was overwhelmed. In rich countries, they would have called it a breakdown. The staff of the rural hospital took her in. It was run by Worldwide Help. Officially, Mrs. Ortiz was a member of the cleaning staff. In reality, she could barely look after herself.

  Her sister, Rosa, talked quietly and wrote furtively about her fears. They were in a hollowed-out contortion of the forest. Birdcalls had been replaced by the screech of chainsaws; garbage burned everywhere. It was like trying to live inside the guts of a suffering beast being stabbed by thousands of devils.

  For once, Delicia thought, Rosa’s imagination did not exaggerate. On a night when it felt like their lean-to shack was slowly sinking into the eroding soil, she told Delicia they had to leave or they would surely die.

  In her desperation, with tactical skill and guile far beyond her years, her older sister hatched what Snakelips would call a nervy exfiltration plan. In the artificial river, Rosa noticed a silt bank. Big machines might one day come and claw it away. At the moment, it was marked by a blinking buoy. Ships had to slow to a crawl and veer around. The biggest ones sent down crews to measure the edges of shifting sand.

  The next clear night, fuelled by the tenacity and luck of youth with nothing left to lose, they set out. The two sisters clambered up a ladder set into the side of a massive cargo ship. The vessel’s name was spelled Halfdene Ryg in a language they did not understand. Five hundred meters long, it was filled with thousands of steel containers and surprisingly few crew.

  During their journey, Delicia and Rosa counted only eight. Early on, for a time, they thought there were nine. For days they lived in fear thinking that the missing one, whose whereabouts they could not mark, was always just about to catch them. Eventually they figured out one fellow had gotten a very bad haircut a few days after their unofficial boarding. There were only eight.

  It was only later, when Delicia came face-to-face with the more advanced and deviant cruelties people were capable of, that she reflected on how lucky the two girls were. What if the eight men alone on the open lawless sea had found them? Would she and her sister have fed their vile passions before feeding the fish as desiccated chum in the ship’s wake? Would they have been set adrift to cover up the crew’s own incompetence? Turned over to the coast patrol and sent back to Nicaragua?

  As it was, the two skinny girls never came close to being discovered. In fact, Delicia had access to amenities she and her sister had only had seen in magazines. Armed with pocket bolt cutters and can openers, they dined well. While the crew slept, they enjoyed flushing toilets and stall showers with actual hot water. But for the reasons forcing their escape, they could have been on a floating spa cruise.

  Only the lowest levels were scary. Her sister told her there were no rats on modern ships. Maybe that was just to make her stop worrying. At night, sometimes, from vents that plunged all the way down, she could hear scraping sounds like scrabbling of rodent paws and teeth.

  The Ortiz sisters’ final stroke of luck came at Halfdene Ryg’s last port of call. The modular compartment they had stowed away in was lifted wholly out of the bowels of the ship. In what seemed like a miracle at the time, a huge robotic crane raised them up. The entire forecastle anchor mechanism was swapped out. These details Delicia figured out over the years, as learning and memory and imagination made sense of their journey.

  Back when she was six, all she felt was a jostling, flying sensation. So different than the chivvying of sea swell. It seemed like the hand of the Almighty plucked them up and set them down.

  Once the obsolete module with them inside was set down, Rosa rehearsed an elaborate kidnapping story. It featured pirates and would surely appeal to the goodwill of the locals. Only Delicia ever heard it. No one cared about two small girls on the waterfront.

  No one cared much for the old forecastle unit of the Halfdene Ryg either. It just sat there. Hours later, the machine noises of the cranes moved on. Morning light seeped pale through cracks in their hiding place. Delicia and Rosa emerged.

  They were dirty, slightly dehydrated, and more than a little disoriented. They stepped over old planks, wandered over pitted concrete, avoided tall thorn bush weeds, and finally squeezed through a small hole in the fence surrounding the shipyards.

  During their sea journey, Rosa had snuck up to the
bridge when it was empty and seen that computers were in charge of navigation. There were maps with courses marked. They guessed they would soon arrive in a place much different from a Central American rain forest. They just did not know how different.

  One of Delicia’s earliest and most vivid memories is of that morning. Like the mahogany stock of her custom sniper rifle, this memory has been cured and tinted and burnished. Like Rosa’s hand in hers that cold morning in Port Jersey, this memory holds her as warmly and gently as she holds it.

  Delicia looked across the harbor. Through a weary little girl’s eyes, she stared. She thought she saw a green arm raising a dimly glowing torch up high. Amazed, she tugged her sister’s hand and pointed. By the time Rosa turned, the fog had closed fast. The arm and the light it raised were gone.

  In the years that followed, Delicia attended a succession of schools. Some were run by the order of nuns who first took Delicia and Rosa in. From the Sisters of Saint Xenia of the Healing Hands, she acquired the nickname Boca Serpiente for her sometimes brassy way of speaking. The perpetually nosey T-Rex somehow found out about it. A mistranslation became her codename in the US Army’s most exclusive fighting unit.

  Of her former country’s project to join the Atlantic and Pacific, history tells a cautionary tale. These days it is better known by its unofficial titles: the Malaria Sea Highway and El Río de los diablos. At its inauguration, the president cut a ribbon hundreds of yards long and declared that the genius of their construct would defy the elements in perpetuity.

  Perpetuity turned out to be shorter than advertised. Ometepe and Zapatera, twin volcanoes located near Lake Nicaragua, had the last word. A few years after the ribbon cutting, they both erupted. The canal route was deluged by ash and lava.

  Keeping the poorly planned waterway free of silt proved as productive as the labors of Sisyphus. The international transport artery was soon clogged with debris. Greed and infighting over toll revenues caused the national government to collapse into shambles long before ships started running aground.

  Today, only small boats brave the mosquito-infested waters. Toll fees are still collected, but not by anyone wearing a uniform. Money for safe passage is paid to other bandits who have the good grace and honesty to wear masks over their faces and not hide what they are.

  • • •

  #marg-bot Tight places like the brig are nothing new to Snakelips Ortiz. In many ways she was delivered into a second life out of the steel embrace of another ship. Deep inside the Lee, she patiently squeezes out rep after perfect rep. Letters inked on her knuckles are a not-so-subtle taunt to future challenges.

  WHO’S NEXT

  17

  BRYAN

  Last in line into the brig is Sarge Bryan. Mr. Reynolds hassles him every step of the way from the flight deck. The space he gets shoved into is the cleanest, most downright antiseptic jail cell in the world. Bryan hadn’t been in as many as Petr Whitebread, but that probably went for the specialist too. A whistle chime sounds as the door slides closed. They are prisoners of Captain Bobblehead.

  Inward-facing walls and grill doors are made of some sort of transparent aluminum. Running between the two rows of enclosures is a narrow shelf for trays and full-body restraints.

  “You know, Sarge,” T-Rex says as he settles in opposite, “if you was thinking to take the team out for a special getaway from terrorism and blowin’ stuff up, dinner at Chick-fil-A woulda been jus’ fine. This here bed an’ breakfast gig’s way too fancy for my country ass.”

  Sarge knows Rex is just keeping up verbal appearances. He’s as discouraged as any of them.

  “Shh,” a Navy jailer cautions over the PA. “I got a hose and the whole Indian Ocean if you want to test me.”

  The only moveable objects, the same in each cell, are a nonflammable mattress sheet and some odd-looking pens and toothbrushes. Snakelips gets some exercise. Whitebread licks a pen. All their utensils turn out to be made of plasticized sugar.

  “Guess we won’t be shankin’ anyone or digging any escape tunnels.” T-Rex bites the handle off a toothbrush and chews on it. “Man, this is some lame incarceration. I bet movie night is Rocky III.”

  Despite being inside spaces about the size of a handicapped toilet, the mission hasn’t changed. But they are not going to have any chance to get to Sienna as sardines inside this hundred-thousand-ton tin can.

  There’s another, last option. Bryan alone knows. Only he can initiate it. But without the intel on Bianchi’s data scroll, there is no way he can risk it. The local chatter, the triangulation on her location. Unless he has that, they have to keep trying on their own.

  He exhales. The tantalizingly translucent cell door fogs up.

  By the time lunch is served, they’ve batted a jailbreak together through hand signals and verbal innuendo. It’s not elegant, and it hinges on them getting to where their confiscated stuff is, three locked gates away.

  When they were taken off the helo, Nobu had a pocket microSwarm device. It looks like a plastic candy bar and has five preloaded drones. These can release smokescreen or knockout gas.

  It’s the gas that sparks Whitebread’s imagination. Out of all of them, he is the best chemist. Bryan knows this right away when his rumbly baritone starts talking from the last cell. For quite a while, he just can’t suss out what the specialist is talking about.

  Whitebread starts by blathering about fast food he’s enjoyed while in the can.

  “Yeah, Sarge, uh, listen,” he adds in a slightly more meaningful tone. “If we ever get to make a choice on the menu, from our takeout, like we been talking about, y’know? If we ever get to do that, we could serve up some Manchurian fast food, done any way you like. But you have to eat it in thirty seconds or it will get cold, out cold.”

  Every word they say, every gesture they make, is being recorded. The swabbie in the brig’s monitoring room is not the threat to any jailbreak plan, his big brother mechBrain is. Military-grade AIs have voice-recognition and gesture-interpretation software. They can burn through any codes or crypto. Sienna had them work out their own system that would befuddle the sharpest digital minds. The downside is it’s also befuddling his sarge-brain.

  It’s not till T-Rex starts humming the Frank Sinatra song “My Way” that Bryan clues in. Their cover-chat often features references to old films and things. Bryan puts things together.

  The brand of KO gas Nobu’s microSwarm drones serve up makes people suggestible. Like in the old film The Manchurian Candidate. The effect, he gathers, would last about thirty seconds. Maybe just long enough for a guard to be persuaded to hit the unlock button on his side—it is their only way through the final hatch. After that, the jailer would be out cold.

  Man, we gotta get a better cable channel back home.

  After a meal of mush and Wonder Bread, they’re led out for eighteen minutes of exercise. Stahlback’s a stickler for regulations. This time it can work for them. They are out of their cells.

  One of three gates down.

  The next section over is a medium security lockup and drunk tank. The prisoners’ effects locker and the exit into the ship are at opposite ends of a room outfitted as a basketball court.

  It’s the only court he has ever seen with barf pails hanging on the wall. Over each puke station is an encouragement poster:

  The captain must have picked them out.

  One features an illustration of a flotation device being thrown to a drunk sailor who has fallen overboard.

  At the moment, no one is partaking of this amenity.

  They trot in formation around the edge of the gym. The handcuffs they wear don’t concern Bryan as much as the nonlethal electrostatic EEL rigs carried by the three guards hovering over them. One of them wears a cap, seems not to be paying attention, and already has a bruised jaw. He should be an easy out.

  They need every advantage. If even a single one of his people gets stunned, it could be a wipe. They have maybe thirty or forty seconds to get into the storage area and
grab the micro drones. Any longer and even the lazy swabbies watching surveillance feeds will snap to and lock the joint down.

  On their third lap, everyone’s getting restless. Whitebread inches a little closer to his man. Snakelips pretends to be winded and slumps over a bucket. Quietly, she unlatches it from the wall.

  So far, so stealthy. In Bryan’s mind, the trick will be—

  The cap-wearing guard who has been avoiding his glances kicks his buddy. Gets him good in the small of the back, then smacks a stun cuff on his wrists. The polymer goo staples him face-first to the bulkhead.

  What’s he doin’? That’s our job.

  In another pretty good move, the rogue guard turns and wings his baton at the second guard’s legs. That guy stumbles into Whitebread. The specialist just flops on him. His shouts are smothered and hands yanked away from the alarm button.

  Their unexpected accomplice puts his finger to his lips and points up. Bryan zooms in on the video surveillance. Scroll screens are taped over the cameras. These are looping their first few times around the track. Good enough for a lot longer than forty seconds.

  The guy’s face isn’t familiar. The swelling on it is. Bryan caused it. It’s the Marine he conked out on the flight deck as they were stealing the copter.

  Bryan mimes the only logical reaction: Huh?

  The guy points to a pin above his nametag, “Semper Fi.” The US Marine Corps motto, Always Faithful. He nods to the gatekeeper and the guy in the effects room. They are also leathernecks. The doorway to the rest of the Lee hisses open.

  They’re free. Nothing can stop them from going back for Sienna.

  Once they’re in the hallway, Lance Corporal Coram half smiles at them. His face is purple and looks numbed by topical painkiller.