“This is the Fleet,” he whispered.
Than shuffled toward an opening in the railing and turned. “What?”
“The Fleet that went out to fight the Sommen. This is it.”
“What’s left of it,” said Than. “I’m surprised you even know about that; the Americans and their allies still keep this secret.”
“Why us?” Maung asked. “If it’s so secret, why show it to people who once fought the Allies? We were enemies so why give us a job in such a secret place?”
Than laughed. “You are one stupid kala, kala. We’re not ever leaving. Who are we going to tell? You have a radio that can reach Earth or access to some coms pod we don’t know about? You may as well throw away the coms card they gave you. You think you’re going to do some time here and then move on like it’s a normal job, working the docks for a while? Nah-no, kala. You just became a prisoner here; just like the drifters.”
Than turned away again; he jumped off the platform and fell, then laughed on the way down as he got smaller in Maung’s view screen; he called out, his voice full of static. “I’ve been a prisoner here for five years so come on kala; you get used to everything. And there’s little gravity; we only use the ladders to slow us down a bit on the way down; just grab onto the side railings until you slow, then let go again. It saves time.”
Maung leaned over the edge—making sure his grip on the railing was tight. It was like being on the roof of the highest building he’d ever seen, one of the skyscrapers in Charleston, but ten times higher. His heart almost beat out of his chest. Maung closed his eyes, prayed for help, and stepped off. When he opened his eyes, he screamed.
“Speed exceeding safe limits.” The suit computer sounded soothing. Maung reached out and took hold of the railings, squeezing until his descent speed slowed to almost nothing, then he let go again.
Than was already at the bottom. “Woohoo! I’ll tell you, kala, that never gets old. Keep a gentle grip on the railing now and don’t let go so you stay at a reasonable speed; you don’t want to break your ankles.”
Maung hit the rocky bottom to send up a cloud of gray dust, and the blow caused his knees to buckle so he rolled on the ground before bouncing to his feet. He waited for his head to clear. The partial gravity was so different that it made him grin to think that outside of the tunnels he was light—not weightless, but lighter as if now he was made of feathers and if he tried hard enough, he could jump, sending himself up and into space and away from everything. For the moment he forgot what Than said, that he wouldn’t ever make it back to Earth; he could travel to Sunny Side and jump as hard as he could, launching himself into space and toward home. Of course, he’d die long before he ever got there.
Than ran a kind of wand over Maung’s suit. “This is to make sure those assholes on Sunny Side coated it properly.”
“Properly with what?” Maung asked.
The pair stood on the crater floor and Maung stared up at the steel and carbon fiber buildings, which stretched toward the blackness above and reached higher than anything he’d seen on Earth. Yellow dots moved on them, near their tops. Maung watched as the dots danced across the faces of the buildings and they occasionally sparked, sending searing white flames to jet outward and form something like a plasma flower.
“Null fibers,” said Than. “They mask electronic emissions from your suit so that other than your radio, there’s nothing coming from you, no emissions that would give you away.”
“I’m not following—you mean hide me from the prisoners?”
Than laughed and finished his sweep. He tucked the wand into his belt. “I mean hide you from the Sommen. They left all sorts of neat toys for us to find, including nano-mines that activate when they detect the presence of living organics and then before you know it, they’re all over you and the prisoners, eating at your suit and then finally your flesh, at the same time decompression makes your saliva boil. But the coating of null fibers messes with their targeting. Keeps you safe, kala. Invisible.”
Maung was about to respond when something flashed past and hit the ground next to them, silently, and then bounced up until it reached its apex and fell again. Maung fought against nausea. It took less than a second for him to understand that this was a person and the environment suit was yellow; the yellow dots that he had been watching were prisoners, Maung realized. And one was here now, having fallen quietly to his death. Whoever it was, his body was still bouncing and the fact that it all occurred without any sound made Maung shiver.
“That’s why you need to be careful,” Than said. “Looks like the drifter wasn’t wearing his harness. You might think that the lighter gravity means you can’t die, but you can reach speeds of over a hundred kilometers per hour in this place—if you go high enough. And you don’t want to break their fall either, kala; so look up every once in a while.”
“What is a drifter?” asked Maung. “I’ve asked two other people and nobody will tell me.”
Than knelt beside the body and waved the floating dust away before wiping off the faceplate and looking inside. “This is—a dead drifter. They’re prisoners. Drifters wear yellow so we can see them more easily and they’ve been subjected to a medical procedure called trammeling. A tiny chip goes into their brain and deactivates any portion that made them violent. It also makes them obedient. They’ll do anything you tell them and that might seem cool at first, but really it’s strange. Drifters are totally out of it—like zombies, kala. You’ll see. They just kind of drift through their sentence. Forever.” Than paused and held up a finger to keep Maung quiet. A few moments later he clicked back in.
“Come on, kala, we have to go. The boss is pissed because we’re so late.”
Maung bounced over the body and followed Than into a narrow alley between two structures. He felt it again—the same kind of danger he had experienced during war when the Americans hunted him in Burma. The jungle itself had been alive, watching. But this time what searched for him wasn’t human or even alive, it was the creation of an alien race that Maung had trouble fathoming and it made him nervous to think that creatures like the one he killed in Charleston had laced the area with automated killers—things that he couldn’t even see and that could activate at any moment. Every time he took a step, he expected to die.
“Where are we going?” he asked.
Than pointed upward, toward the yellow dots. “Eventually up there. We’re supposed to be watching those guys and making sure the job is done right. But first we have to do something.”
“To hell with this place,” Maung whispered, but Than overheard.
“This place is already there, kala. This is hell.”
“I can’t do this,” Maung said.
Than crossed a thin steel girder at the top of a hangar, the roof of which had been almost totally destroyed; flaps of torn metal sheeting on either side reminded him of sawteeth. Maung waited by the edge; he did his best to keep his balance, imagining that the hole in the roof was the mouth of a demon and although he’d been praying since his arrival, he still doubted that his ancestors could get near Karin. Too many ghosts. This place lured the unaware and the desperate, the forgotten who nobody cared about, even when they died. Maung shook the thoughts off. When Than reached the middle of the girder he turned, waving for Maung to follow and Maung looked down at the impossibly thin line that linked to his belt by a single metal carabiner. The other end attached to Than.
“It’s safe,” Than said. “The girder was placed by us and welded in. Besides, I’ve done this before, alone, and you have me to catch you. If you fall, Maung, I promise the line will hold.”
“I can’t!” Maung shouted. Now his hands shook, and he backed away, but the safety cable kept him from moving too far.
“I thought you were army—thought you were some kind of war hero or something. Fearless. Killed lots of Cans and Pinos.”
“Who told you that?” he asked. Cans and Pinos—slang for Americans and Filipinos. Maung hated the words, not because th
ey were derogatory but because they were mutated forms of English not Myanmarese, suggesting his people couldn’t even come up with their own slang.
“Nam told me. He knows a lot about you, kala, and he told me some but the old man keeps his mouth tight. Even tighter than the Old Man in Charleston, same one sent me here as you. Before we start our shift you have a meeting with him, with Nam. And I always deliver, kala.”
The line went taut and Maung screamed upon realizing what was about to happen; Than heaved him over the edge. Maung fell toward the blackness below, between the demon’s lips and past jagged sheets of fang-like twisted metal. Maung closed his eyes. Then the cord tightened again, and he had a sensation of butterflies while accelerating, swinging across and underneath the hangar roof like a pendulum, toward some height based on the physics at play—physics he couldn’t understand without awaking his semi-aware.
Quiet. Than spoke and Burmese floated through Maung’s speakers but he wasn’t there, he was under a blanket of thoughts as he inched toward the hangar roof. Than must be tired, he thought. In this gravity Maung weighed next to nothing, but it still couldn’t be easy to reel in that much carbon-fiber cable, going hand over hand for hundreds of meters of line and there was still a long way to go. Maung stayed silent out of respect. Far below him the hangar’s contents rested: A semi-intact ship that looked split in two so that Maung imagined a massive beetle, burst open from a weapon that no insect could have imagined. A mixture of bodies surrounded it; some were in vacuum suits, which appeared pristine and untouched, while others were only in jumpsuits. Frozen. Maung was close enough that he saw expressions of horror and pain in those ones, captured forever in faces whose eyes stared upward.
“You fucker!” Maung screamed and launched himself at Than, who was laughing, making Maung even angrier. He missed and sailed off the roof until Than yanked on the line, pulling him back onto an unbroken section of metal sheeting with enough force to knock the wind from him.
“You don’t get it, kala. We’re on a budget and a schedule. Our drifters have to process so much metal every period and collect a certain number of bodies. Without guards to guide them they won’t reach quota. You’re holding me back, kala.”
Maung got to his knees. “What happens if we don’t get to quota?”
“Then you get to work alongside the walking dead because every pair of hands helps. And then you stay outside until you reach quota, and then you and your team lose sleep so the next period you can’t perform and you wind up missing quota again, but worse this time; it’s a spiral.”
“Nobody told me about the dead,” said Maung; now they were on the downward slope of the roof, carefully picking their way through wreckage. “Nobody said that we would be their keepers or that they would be frozen like that, like they’re still alive. What do we do with them?”
Than changed direction. Maung turned to follow so the two moved parallel with the hangar axis, bouncing toward a black tower, the top of which had already been partially disassembled. Maung ignored his vertigo. He barely kept his eyes open for having gone so long without sleep, and the experience of moving across the face of an asteroid was beginning to weigh on him, now that all his adrenaline had vanished.
“What do we do with the dead?” Than asked. “We recycle them, the same way we recycle everything here. Our business is reclamation. Now shut the hell up so we can concentrate on where we’re going; one wrong step here and you fall through.”
For a while they said nothing. Maung heard only his breath and was almost too exhausted to pay attention to his footing, and even if he wasn’t, he had no idea what to look for or where to step. He had no business being there. Even through his exhaustion he factored it, understood how stupid he’d been to think Karin was a better route than facing federal agents, because it was possible that his chances for survival were lower on the asteroid. He wished he’d said more to Nang before they parted. Maung conjured her in his mind and if he thought hard enough recalled the smell of her hair, which had wafted over him whenever the two had been together on the Singapore Sun.
“Wake up!” Than shouted.
Maung’s head jerked up; he was less than a few centimeters from the hangar’s edge and Than was to his right, moving across a narrow bridge connecting the roof to the tower structure. Maung edged toward him and shivered, realizing he’d come close to falling again, floating downward to land among the bodies.
“Thanks,” he said and pointed toward the tall building. “Where are we?”
They’d reached an airlock door and Than opened a panel to punch in a code. “Electronic warfare center and listening post. This entire tower was filled with transmitters, supercomputers, and storage. Its foundations go into the asteroid for a kilometer, where the personnel bunkers were.”
“Did everyone here die?” Maung asked.
“Almost, I’m sure. You’ll see. From what I’ve seen, it looks like the Sommen hit their defenses and any ships in port, then took the time to invade with ground troops and make sure nothing was left alive. Later, after the Sommen left here, some of the Fleet limped back after attacking the blockade and as far as I know they were the only survivors. Just a few crew members.”
The airlock opened silently and Maung and Than entered. A screen showed that the facility was trying to cycle air but Maung knew there was no air to cycle, and Than wasn’t waiting for it to finish anyway; he punched at the screen and overrode everything, forcing the inner door to open. The entire port, Maung recognized, was a crypt—vacuum sealed and preserved. It was an empty shell, slowly being reclaimed not by rot and decay but by humanity, who wanted each atom of carbon, titanium, and iron it could get, each atom of nitrogen squeezed from the corpses.
“That’s the smell,” he said.
Than waved him out of the airlock. “What smell?”
“The smell on Sunny Side. Death.”
“Yeah,” said Than. “The reclamation process gets nasty and some of the off-gases travel through the transport tunnels; they have no idea what it is on Sunny Side, though. And we can’t say anything to them about what’s going on over here; every two months the Allied military sends a rep to monitor our progress and we get the same warning: a shit storm on anyone who doesn’t keep their secrets. You know. Bodies are just as important as metals.”
Maung laughed. “Talk to the Koreans? Back on Earth, as soon as other Korean workers find out you’re Myanmarese and not Filipino, conversation stops anyway.”
“Exactly. Like we’d even want to talk to those bastards on Sunny Side, so who we gonna tell?”
Than stopped. They were inside the structure now and it shocked Maung to see gleaming white walls, plastic panels that covered everything with graceful curves and perfect joints. Except for the blood. Before freezing in vacuum it pooled on the corridor floor to form a small river, locked in a solid state until some time in the future when someone threw the entire thing into a furnace for reclamation.
“We’re heading for the control area now. Guard teams are usually three to four of us, so someone is already there but are you OK with the concept of a drifter?”
“Sure,” said Maung, “why would you even ask?”
Than poked him gently in the chest. “Your accent, kala. You aren’t exactly a city boy. Where you from? Mandalay district? You Karen from the mountains or something?”
“Outside Mandalay. Way north of the city, a small village in the foothills but we moved to Yangon eventually.”
“See, kala?” Than slapped Maung’s shoulder. “You’re from the jungle and I’ve seen guys like you before: getting used to living and working on an asteroid isn’t exactly easy for someone who smears on thanaka. You guys freak out about ancestors and working with the dead and when the drifters show up it’s the last straw because then it becomes something about demons. So I need to know now: Are you good so far?”
Maung shook his head. “No. I need a cigarette.”
Only one man stood in the control room, a steel box that barely h
eld the three of them, but which was airlocked and connected to the prison’s main life-support system. Maung rushed to take his helmet off. The room smelled of sweat and staleness but he was grateful to have his head free and no longer had an urge to vomit. It was the first time he’d seen all of Than’s face, and Maung was shocked to see a four-inch-wide scar, which ran down the left side of his forehead and cheek, and ended just under his jaw.
“Torture,” said Than; Maung was embarrassed for having stared. “Cambodians held me head against a motorcycle tire and then throttled up the engine. They did it four times until an American patrol came by and took me from them. The Americans saved my life and sent me here.”
The other man looked old to Maung, and his skin was a deep brown with hollow cheeks, a skull with just a thin layer of skin separating it from the air. He looked at Maung, up and down and then sneered at Than.
“Old Man Charleston said he was coming earlier,” he said.
Maung nodded. “Nam Su Thant?”
“Yeah. You do everything I tell you, kala, and we’ll be fine.” He used his thumb to point to the airlock. “Than. Go wait outside until I tell you to come back in.”
Than looked dumbstruck. “Nam?”
“Get out. There are things the kala and I need to discuss. Go check on a drifter or two and by then we’ll be set.”
“Nam,” said Than, “this one is nothing, a country idiot whose accent makes me laugh; what the hell could he have to say that’s important?”
But Nam didn’t answer and just looked at Than until the man bowed and picked up his helmet. Maung noticed his face had gone red. Than glared at him as he sealed his suit, and he kicked Maung’s feet out of the way when he headed to the airlock, sending Maung into a spin. Once he was gone, Nam sighed.
“He has no idea, does he?”
Maung shrugged. “No idea about what?”
“Don’t play dumb with me, kala; Dream Warrior. Old man told me everything and we need you here, especially now because you can just tell that something is in the air. Not just death. The end of the game, death of us all—of the species. I’ll tell you something: Burmese used to rule Dark Side. Nothing happened over here that I didn’t know about and the military never showed their faces because they were happy with the amount of materials we sent them from our reclamation outfit.
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