Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  Before climbing the ladder, Casper took one last look towards the stairwell. He saw the over-encumbered Eastern Front insurgents in their assault-suits. Spying one with a rocket launcher slung over his shoulder, he heard a voice in his head say, “Now that rocket launcher is just... too much for the outfit.” He was embarrassed to have thought it, and he was glad he hadn't verbalized it. It seemed like something Hi-5 would say. Casper couldn't imagine a world without peacocks like Hi-5 but here he was, he suddenly realized, on a boat full of Goddie terrorists who couldn't accept a world that included them. How the fuck did that happen? The money, I'm here for the money, Casper reminded himself, and suddenly he wasn't as proud of being a merc as he had been earlier.

  Bonnie climbed the ladder after Casper. Looking down from the deck above, she saw flashes of gold in the crowd. The gold-robed, shaven-headed monks who she'd noticed earlier in a tour boat near the stern somehow slipped through the crowd like water. Bonnie thought it looked like they were making for the stairs.

  The automatic weapons fire was what Bonnie heard first, and with that many heavily armed, nervous insurgents lining the decks she was surprised it had take that long for one, then another, and then a third and fourth, to fire on the drones. The camcopters didn't carry any weapons, only a surveillance package, but their hovering ten foot-long bodies made tempting, if deceptively difficult, targets. After a few seconds of firing, Bonnie saw one hovering a few hundred feet above Lady Chatterley shudder in the air as rounds bored through its side and into one of the battery packs under the skin on either side of the camera dome. The drone shunted power from its other batteries to maintain the revolutions of its rotors, but a moment later, its tail rotor was hit, and it began to twist in the air to the cheers of the crowd below. It spun wildly off to the Northeast, descended at a steep angle, and splashed into the bay, where its still spinning rotors tore off against the surface. This drew cheers from the starboard side that saw it hit the water, but the cheers were drowned out by a panicked volley of fire from those who saw the approaching Wasp autonomous attack drone.

  It was the size of a very small plane and flew with directed thrust from a center-mounted jet engine and two sets of counter-rotating fans integrated into the wings. It existed as an airborne platform for a miniature 15mm grenade launcher mounted in its nose that was most often used to abruptly stop fleeing insurgent vehicles marked with a targeting laser.

  When the camcopter was hit, it squawked out a distress signal and used a laser mounted on its camera dome to briefly designate exactly where the fire had come from. The spot it designated was along the starboard side of Lady Chatterley, and the Wasp autonomous UAV saw the camera drone's pointing finger.

  As the Wasp flew up Lady Chatterley's length at only thirty miles per hour, it fired a burst of six miniature grenades at the spot that had been marked. It flew into a lucky burst of fire from below. Urban operations required accuracy, and the Wasp was very accurate, but the burst of rounds struck it near the nose, and it shook briefly in the air while it fired its burst of grenades.

  A millisecond before firing, the Wasp had programmed all its grenades to detonate at a distance of one yard from target for good anti-personnel effect, and the first three mini-grenades detonated in the upturned faces of the shooters that had removed the camcopter from the sky, tearing them and five other Angry Angels to shreds, but the next three 15mm grenades weren't so well-placed. The first off-target grenade flew into the bathtub and airburst over a motorboat. There were some minor wounds from its shrapnel, but most of it perforated and sank the fiberglass motorboat. The second grenade went twenty feet right of the starboard walkway and detonated fifty-five feet above the bay, throwing fragments that burst out in all directions. Most of it splashed into the water like hail. Some of it bounced off the armor of the nearby Chinese Christian insurgents or gave them minor flesh wounds. The last grenade from the Wasp's burst of six exploded just a yard to the right of the open starboard stairwell where Alvin was stuck. Bonnie couldn't see it, but the detonation was close enough that it shook the deck.

  Inside the starboard side stairwell, there was blood. Five Angels of Badur had been unlucky enough to be practically next to the grenade when it detonated outside of the stairwell's landing. They wore heavy armor but no helmets, and as they were hit by the spinning metal micro-fragments, they sprayed blood from mortal head wounds and fell to the steel-grate landing. Alvin was close by, but he was lucky enough to be shielded by the Eastern Front's assault-suited insurgents in front of him. The shrapnel that didn't get absorbed by the people on the outside of the stairwell bounced off the Eastern Front's walking tanks or barely penetrated the surface of their armor and clung to them. Alvin was too short to get sprayed with the blood, but the walking tanks in front of him were wet with it, and the blood spray that didn't soak them spattered above, on to the inside wall of the stairwell. Where the Eastern Front insurgents blocked the blood-spray they left shapes like their shadows before they stumbled, fell against the wall, and smeared it pink.

  Alvin was horrified, and his ears were ringing when, enveloped in gold. He saw a dragon and a crane. He felt someone pick him up and practically fly up the stairs, over the fallen walking tanks who still struggled to right themselves. He felt himself whirled around in the air as he was carried first to the landing, then over the dead men and through gaps in the crowded stairwell. It felt like being carried by a river's flowing waters.

  When the golden cloth fell from his eyes, he was surrounded on all sides by what looked to be shaolin monks. Only one of them was Asian, and Alvin doubted he was Chinese, but he didn't much care. He was just grateful to be out of the blood-soaked stairwell and on the second level outer deck of the bow superstructure. The monks were all around him, and through the gaps between the ones in front he could see a very confused looking Bonnie Levi-Mei.

  Bonnie didn't know who the monks were or how they'd managed to move through the bloody congestion of the stairwell, but when she moved towards Alvin one of them blocked her path for a moment. Then he sidestepped around her, and she was inside the golden ring of shaolin with Alvin. She grabbed Alvin by his orange sheet and pulled him towards a hatch a few yards away into which Otis had just disappeared. As she half dragged the stumbling Buddha, the ring of monks moved with them, absorbing Carlos and Casper as well. She could hear the whining from the drone's center-mounted, thrust-vectoring jet grow softer, as the Wasp climbed, flew over the superstructure, and out in front of Lady Chatterley. It wasn't mortally wounded by the rounds it had taken, and she was pretty sure it would be back for a strafing run. Bonnie knew if you shot at those things, then they held a grudge.

  No time to ask about the monks now, she thought, dragging Alvin the last few steps to the hatch. Two golden robes preceded them as she pulled Alvin through the hatchway and into the superstructure. Casper and Carlos followed Alvin, and six more monks followed them inside. Most everybody was heading for the interior stairs and the upper levels, but the passageways were already clogging up with bulky, encumbered insurgents. Bonnie looked left and saw Otis standing half in and half out of a hatch, waving them inside. She pushed Otis inside and pulled Alvin through the hatch after her as they heard muffled explosions and shrapnel that sounded like angry steel bees hurling themselves at Lady Chatterley. Casper, Carlos, and all the monks followed Bonnie inside the refuge Otis had found for them.

  “Alvin?” Bonnie asked, looking around at eight beatific smiles in golden robes, “Are these guys with you?”

  -40-

  “Stop! Stop! Stop that damned shooting!” the lawyer representing the Dutch Corporation that owned Lady Chatterley screamed at the Mayor of Baccha Bay City through a hastily connected holographic link. He demanded that the Baccha Bay City Police override the autonomy of their drone and force their Wasp to stop firing grenades at his very expensive semi-submersible ship.

  After the verified transfer of a significant campaign contribution totaling only a fraction of a percent of the ship's val
ue, the Mayor had seen the wisdom of preserving property until the situation had been examined by experts. The mayor called the Chief of Police and the order passed down the chain until the autonomous Wasp was given an override code and returned to base with the insurgents firing at it and cheering as it retreated, trailing thin white smoke, leaving the insurgents to plink the defenseless camcopters.

  Lady Chatterley's owners were notified both via a satellite relayed transmission, and through the Network, when lifeboats were deployed by the crew. The crew fled in response to the ship's computer's grave assertion that Lady Chatterley's small reactor was on the verge of running wildly out of control. Having no wish to be irradiated to the degree that their bodies would be preserved like processed foods, the crew had, quite understandably, abandoned ship. The chief engineer protested, noting that there was no radiation, but that made no difference to the underpaid crew, and he'd followed them into the lifeboats for the sake of solidarity.

  In the Mayor's office, the Chief Operations Officer of Haan-Munki Shipping was holo-projected beside the company's local legal representative. He demanded they find a way to kill the insurgent hijackers and leave Lady Chatterley unharmed. When the Mayor asked what exactly he should do, the COO of Haan-Munki mentioned to the Mayor that he'd once had pubic crabs and noted that, thanks to a miracle cream that killed the crabs and nothing else, he still had his balls. The Dutch executive suggested using nerve gas. After the Mayor refused to use the nerve gas that he didn't have anyway, the Haan-Munki executive suggested that the mayor must have once had pubic crabs and speculated that the Mayor must have used a shotgun to remove the infestation, along with his manhood.

  Meanwhile, armed forces not under the control of the Mayor had taken a keen interest in the Lady Chatterley and a race was currently underway to bring manned military might against her and her hijackers. The Coast Guard and the Navy designated them as Pirates, but the Air Force preferred to call them Hijackers. The Army didn't care, and the Marines just called them Targets. G.S.A. and their Ziggurat based VTOL hunter-killer drones were the closest, but due to unexplained technical difficulties they appeared to be sitting this one out.

  As it happened, the Marine attack helicopter pilots, Air Force drone operators, Coast Guard cutters, and a marine boarding party in a hovercraft could do nothing but shake their fists at the already airborne patrol flight of two Navy F-55s that screamed through the morning air towards Lady Chatterley. The F-55s beat them all, won the race, and claimed the prize – a chance to Blow Up Something Really Big.

  -41-

  Lt. Candice Dawson, callsign 'Cleaver', worked a joystick with her right hand, a throttle and electronics with her left, and viewed the world through a helmet mounted display that showed her almost more data than image. Cleaver stayed close on the four o'clock position of her flight leader, Lt. Brady Tsu, callsign 'Flipper', as they completed their first pass over the Lady Chatterley.

  It was a weird scene. The ship seemed to have her own harbor or pool running down her spine, and it was full of small boats. There were people on-deck too. Little orange and green ants carrying cool black guns showed up clearly in the thermal imaging. They'd obviously come from the boats that still held some residual red-orange heat from the passengers. Cleaver only saw a couple hundred on deck, but from the number of warm footprints on the walkways she knew there were more, many more. Most of the footprints she saw in thermal false-color pointed towards the bow superstructure, but a few sets of footprints pointed aft to a pair of identical, narrow, six-story towers.

  Lt. Tsu proudly announced they were first, “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu... We are first on-scene and have visual contact with Lady Chatterley. Report two hundred plus, repeat 2-0-0 plus armed individuals on deck.”

  There was nothing but static then, “6-5-Zulu, Alameda... Repeat your last, please.” Flipper thought he heard screaming in the background at Alameda. It sounded tinny, like the screamer was on speakerphone.

  “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu reports two hundred plus armed individuals on deck and evidence of more. Please advise, Alameda, Please Advise.” There was more screaming in the background. One of the voices had a euro accent, Flipper thought, maybe German. “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu... what are your orders?” Then both pilots heard a senator's aide pleading with Alameda, on behalf of the Haan-Munki Corporation, not to sink Lady Chatterley.

  Flipper swore he heard something about crabs.

  The two planes were banking sharply now and positioning themselves for an attack run. “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu... what are your orders, Alameda? Please Advise.” Flipper was really hoping for a call of 'weapons free', but the answer he got wasn't what he wanted. Under pressure from the senator's aide, the Officer On-Duty gave what, from his perspective, was the only order that might cover his ass from all angles.

  “6-5-Zulu, Alameda... You are to engage terrorist personnel only. Repeat, engage terrorists only, do not engage Lady Chatterley.” Now that, Flipper thought, was some fucked up shit. Flipper let the static linger on his frequency while he thought, How the Fuck are we supposed to do That?

  “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu... Interrogative: Do you want us to Engage Terrorists Only using the missiles or the guns?” He meant it as a joke, even though he delivered the words with the same pleasant calm that pilots use to discuss engine failures, parachute malfunctions, and the speed of the ground rushing up at them. The silence was brief this time, Alameda knew the answer to that question.

  “6-5-Zulu, Alameda... Do Not use missiles, repeat, Do Not use missiles, 6-5-Zulu.” Flipper thought that was some masterful ass-covering. Alameda had never even actually said to use the guns, only to engage the terrorists and not the ship and not to use missiles. Flipper didn't acknowledge. “Do you copy, 6-5-Zulu?” Alameda asked. Oh, I copy alright, Flipper thought. He was just letting the frequency stay silent for a good five seconds to express displeasure.

  “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu... copy your last, loud and clear.” Flipper kept the calm in his voice, but left out the pleasant until he was talking to his wingman, Cleaver. “Okay, Cleaver, let's correct for a nice Southwest to Northeast strafe up those walkways. Guns Only, repeat Guns Only.”

  “Uh, Wilco, Zulu Leader. Guns Only. I'm feeling like a sharpshooter.” Cleaver's cheerful voice hid her sarcasm from Alameda, but Flipper heard it. Shoot the people, not the ship. How the Fuck are we supposed to do That? Everybody knew it was impossible, but if Lady Chatterley sank it wouldn't be because Alameda had ordered them to shoot at it.

  Flipper doubted they even had enough ordinance with them to sink a 700 foot ship, but it still pissed him off. Fuck it. At least if she sinks, he thought, I'll get to paint a ship on the side of my plane. They banked. That is some masterful ass-covering, he thought. Always giving respect where it was due was something Flipper prided himself on.

  Flipper and Cleaver used their thrust-vectoring jets to bring the F-55's out of their high banking turns and lined up to strafe the terrorists on Lady Chatterley's deck, but not the Lady Chatterley herself.

  Cleaver saw her flight leader line up for a stern to bow strafing run. She was just coming out of her own turn, having fallen back from her usual position on Flipper's four o'clock, and from her perspective she could see the shadow from Flipper's F-55 preceding him on the water, in-line with his plane. Is he coming out of the sun? What a ham, she thought, immediately reminding herself that, given the ship's course this was the optimal angle for an attack run. He's still a ham, she decided, as she watched the hot white of Flipper's single jet engine against the deep maroon alizarin of the cold bay waters.

  “Alameda, 6-5-Zulu is engaging targets.” Flipper chose the plural to clearly state for Alameda and everyone else listening that his intention was to strafe only the plural terrorists and not the singular Lady Chatterley. The twin towers at Lady Chatterley's stern rose a good sixty-five feet off her deck, and if Flipper wanted to strafe up the Lady's walkways, then he'd have to come in a bit higher than he'd like. This oughtta be fun, he thought, eying the orange and green fig
ures in his thermal display. They scurried on the narrow walkways with nowhere to go as he approached.

  The F-55s on patrol that day carried a mix of ammunition loaded into their four twenty-five millimeter, wing-mounted guns. It was loaded in a repeating sequence of incendiary tracer rounds, high-explosive, and armor piercing sabots with dense tungsten cores. That mix was less than optimal for anti-personnel operations, and it was likely to do serious damage to the ship, Flipper thought. He shrugged and thumbed the safety cap off the electric trigger that was mounted on the joystick. Flipper knew that the armor piercing sabots and the tracers would take out a Goddie or two per round, but the high-explosive rounds were a different story. If one of those landed in the middle of those crowded walkways, then it would take out a few bad guys at once and maybe knock a few overboard to drown in the bay. It might even set off some secondary detonations depending on what those guys were carrying. As he screamed in over the towers, he kept the crosshairs projected in his helmet over the densest patch of little orange and green figures he could see on the port side walkway and let a burst of hellish fire rain down.

  Flipper watched two simultaneously detonating sets of explosions walk up Lady Chatterley's spinal canal and the port walkway. There were two parallel displays of destruction. One was made of explosions and steam and water, ripping and shattering and plumes. This was the track of destruction that roared up the canal. The terrible path of Flipper's fire up the walkway was made of people and parts and screaming souls.

  Cleaver saw Flipper deliver fire up the canal and the walkway and pull up, banking away sharply to come about for another run, but also to deny anybody with a surface-to-air missile an easy target. Flippers run was a brilliant false-color thermal display of destruction, and she was preparing to deliver her own when she saw something that made her stomach flip over. Two twisting, fluffy trails of smoke climbed into the sky from the aft towers. Cleaver watched them rising to follow her flight leader's plane. Another one rose from the left tower.