House of the Sun

by Nigel Findley

  I took a couple of steps into the HabiTrail, and then stopped dead, earning a bad look from the shaikujin—still jacked into his portacomp—who tripped on my heel and collided into my back. I couldn't help it; I'd never had a chance to look at a suborbital from this close up before, and I certainly wasn't going to pass it up so he could get to his complimentary pretakeoff gin and tonic a couple of seconds sooner.

  The thing was huge, much larger than I'd expected. Hell, suborbitals only carry about 150 people. How much space do you need for that? But of course, there's a lot more to a suborbital than the passenger compartment. There's all the stuff that goes into any standard civilian transport: turbojets, fuel, landing gear, navigation drek, baggage bays, and that place up front where the crew and the flight attendants have their parties. And then there's the extra stuff needed when you're flying at altitudes of 23 klicks (75,000 feet, for the metrically challenged) and speeds of Mach 20+. SCRAMjets to get you to cruising altitude and speed. Fuel for those SCRAMjets ... and lots of it (SCRAMjets aren't known for their fuel economy). Cooling systems to keep your hull from melting under the air friction. And on and on. All in all, the suborbital was longer than a football field, a big integral lifting-body with tiny stub wings bolted on apparently as an afterthought. The body lines followed some complex—and very beautiful—multiple-recurve pattern, making the thing broad and high at the nose, but narrower and thinner toward the tail: something like an asymmetrical teardrop, maybe.

  Finally, the pressure of shaikujin behind me got too much to ignore any longer, and I had to move along. Once I was inside, I could just as well have been in any plane—row upon row of seats in a three-aisle-three arrangement—except for one detail: no windows. The entertainment suite mounted in the seatback ahead of me made up for that lack, I decided quickly once I'd found my spot. As well as the usual selection of mindless movies, and even more mindless "classic tri-V" reruns, several of the program selections offered views from various microcams mounted on the hull. While the cabin attendants handed out free drinks and flavorless snacks—to the first-class passengers only, not to the great unwashed flying cattle-class, which started one row behind my own seat—I thoroughly enjoyed watching the baggage handlers conduct torture tests on people's suitcases as they threw them aboard.

  Then we got the standard safety lecture—what to do in an emergency, like if the galley runs out of Bloody Mary mix—then we were rolling, and then we were climbing out. On my seatback screen I saw the ground drop away behind us, becoming a detailed scale model, then a contour map. Speed and angle of climb seemed—in my limited experience, at least—pretty extreme. But then the SCRAMjets kicked in—the pilot actually warned us before he lit them off—and I got a taste of what "fast" and "steep" really mean. Some ridiculously short time later, a voice came over the intercom, telling us we were at cruising altitude—23,000 meters, give or take—and flying at a mind-buggering 29,000 klicks per hour.

  "We're on course and on schedule," the friendly voice announced, "and we should have you on the ground at Awalani a couple of minutes shy of four-fifty a.m. local time. Have a good flight." I checked my watch, which I'd already adjusted for Hawai'i time: a couple of minutes past four in the morning. That put total flight time at something under one hour, gate-to-gate, Casper to Honolulu. Ain't progress wonderful?

  With some regret, I wiped the external view—a distant horizon, showing some definite curvature—from the seatback screen, and tried to concentrate on biz. I'd never been to the Kingdom of Hawai'i before and knew next to squat about it (apart from what I'd seen on trid pabulum actioners like Tropical Heat). Sure, some of the runner wannabes who hang out in low-life bars copping a 'tude will tell you that the shadows are all the same, no matter where in the world you are. But I've never bought into that. Hell, from my own experience, not extensive, I know it's not true.

  The shadows of Cheyenne are very different from the grungy underbelly of the Seattle sprawl. Maybe not if you take a big enough, abstract enough view, I suppose. If you think in terms of dynamics, there's much that's similar. The sex trade, the chip/drug industry. Organized crime and iconoclastic freelancers. Gangs of various stripes and flavors. Grifters and abusers, stalking the grifted and abused.

  But when you get down to the personal scale—where it matters from a practical, rather than academic, point of view—there's a world of difference. In terms of dynamics, the threats are the same: the cops, the corps, the competition. In personal terms they wear different and unfamiliar faces. In the shadows sometimes the only way to win the game—whatever it happens to be at the moment—is to cheat. That's much harder when you don't know all the rules, and when to bend or break them.

  Leaving Seattle for Cheyenne, I left familiar territory behind. I left behind my support network and many of my resources. I left behind my personal knowledge of the way the underbelly of the city worked—where to go to buy a piece of cold iron, what alleys not to flop in at night, what bartenders will swear up and down that they haven't seen you for weeks while you hide behind the beer fridge. Now I was doing it again, and it made me very uncomfortable.

  I folded out the membrane keypad from the seatback entertainment unit and started checking out the system's data retrieval function. Not bad for a mobile unit. Somewhere deep in the plane's electronic guts an optical chip contained the latest editions of the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia, plus the World Almanac and Book of Facts, plus some fairly funky search algorithms. All for the convenience of Global Airways' cherished passengers (and to keep them occupied so they wouldn't drink too much and hit on the stewardesses). As the suborbital hurtled on, five times as fast as a rifle bullet, I started working out some search strings.

  * * *

  We were well along on the glidepath by the time I'd done what I could, and the stewardess had already warned me three times to return my seat to its upright and most uncomfortable position. I had a lot to think over as I folded up the seatback system's keyboard, and tried to keep my stomach out of my mouth as the suborbital pitched over even steeper for final approach.

  The on-board data retrieval system had given me some background, but I'd soon come to the conclusion that the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia seemed to be targeted at elementary-school kids who were considerably less streetwise than I'd been at that age. Sure, it was a great source for data on the kingdom's population (four million and change), its capital (Honolulu, natch), its average per-capita income (20,000¥), and the other superficial drek a kid would want to plagiarize for an essay. But for the real meat, I soon realized I'd have to access sources with a slightly more mature worldview.

  Fortunately, the seatback system offered a gateway to the plane's communication systems, and from there an uplink to the Amethyste system of low-Earth orbit comm satellites. Through the Amethyste grid, I could sidelink to Renraku's DataPATH system, and then downlink to the public databases with which I'd been familiar in Seattle. Hell, returning to my old electronic stomping grounds was easier from 23,000 meters over the Pacific—once I'd figured out the gateway protocol—than it was to navigate the Sioux RTG system to get to the same nodes. (Of course, it was also a hell of a lot more expensive. When I finally logged off and the system reported my connect charges, I went pale for a moment, then thanked the fine folks at Yamatetsu—in absentia—for picking up the tab.) The only thing I'd wanted that the system couldn't give me was access to a Shadow-land server. (Well, I suppose it probably could have, but the audit trail stored in the guts of the big suborbital would have been like garish flags reading "Shadowrunner On Board.")

  So here's what I managed to dig up about the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i, summarized in the inimitable Dirk Montgomery style. (Oh yeah, one quick aside. Mainlanders probably aren't used to seeing Hawai'i spelt with the apostrophe. Back in the weird old days, when the islands were actually a state of the now-defunct U.S., the name had been spelt Hawaii. No longer, chummer. An easy way to slot off an islander is to spell the name of his country without the apos
trophe. An easier way is to mispronounce it, apparently: it should be pronounced ha-VEYE-ee, with a noticeable glottal stop before the last syllable. At first I thought this anal retentiveness about pronunciation was stupid, but then I considered what I'd think of someone who pronounced my city of birth as SEE-tul. Point taken.)

  Okay, so anybody who's attended elementary school in the United Canadian and American States will know that Hawai'i used to be the fiftieth state of the union. What I hadn't known was that this was originally accomplished not by negotiation, but actually through the actions of a U.S. naval officer who'd placed his gunboat at the disposal of some American robber barons who considered that the incumbent national government was actually an obstacle to doing business. (Who says history never repeats itself? A corporation effectively taking over a sovereign state? Sounds like the early twenty-first century, neh!) Once the incumbent monarch, King Kamehameha III, was ousted, one Sanford B. Dole—a high corp muckamuck who'd made his fortune in pineapples, or some damn thing—named himself head of state of the entire island chain.

  That was in 1893. After five years, the good old U.S. of A. decided that having a corp suit as head of state wasn't a Good Thing. So they moved in and annexed the islands from the robber baron who'd annexed them from the native Hawaiians ...

  And immediately started peppering the islands with military bases—naval, air force, etcetera, drekcetera. In 1959 the U.S. government decided to legitimize this shotgun marriage of an annexation, and declared the islands to be the fiftieth state. Again—judging by the historical records I could access, at least—nobody bothered to consult the native Hawaiians about this change. (Hey, they were just primitive Polynesians, weren't they? And they couldn't even vote ...)

  That's how things stayed, more or less, for fifty years. Oh, sure, there were occasional resurgences of nationalism, of "Hawai'i for Hawai'ians" sentiment—led most notably by a group calling itself Na Kama'aina ("The Land Children")—but nothing much happened until the first decade of the twenty-first century.

  Back on the mainland, trouble was brewing. The U.S. government—and mainly the U.S. military—saw the writing on the wall, and knew that the "Indian problem" would soon be coming to a nasty, violent head. Suddenly the military bases on the islands of Hawai'i became even more important than they were before. Here were bases and assets that the SAIM "terrorists" couldn't sabotage or infiltrate easily. (Much harder for some militant Sioux warriors to blow the drek out of Pearl Harbor than to terrorize Colorado Springs—so the reasoning went, at least.) More and more major military research projects were moved to the islands, "out of harm's way."

  Hah, and again hah! Na Kama'aina, and more hard-hooped splinter factions like the whimsically named ALOHA (Army for the Liberation Of AMwai'i), started looking to the SAIM hotheads as role models. Hey, if the mainland aboriginals could kick the drek out of the Anglos, why couldn't they?

  Between 2011 and 2013, ALOHA and its bomb-throwing brethren went on a rampage, car-bombing government buildings, army barracks, and military installations. During the two-year reign of terror, ALOHA claimed to have greased some 150 "legitimate" targets. (Its leaders didn't have much to say about the three hundred-plus innocents offed in "collateral damage.")

  Predictably, this made it heat-wave time. At the request of the state government, the feds sent a battalion of troops to Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Base, renamed the combat troops the "Civil Defense Force," and proceeded to break heads. According to my research, there was a surprising incidence of suspected ALOHA sympathizers "killed while resisting arrest" or "shot while trying to escape." Who would have thought it? (Yeah, right.)

  The heat wave went on, and Na Kama'aina, ALOHA, and their fellow-travelers dropped from public ken. For a while, at least. To (mis)quote Shakespeare, the Civil Defense Force had scotched the snake, not killed it. The ALOHA boys and girls kept working, but in the shadows now rather than out in the bright tropical sun.

  Some bright spark decided that a PR coup was needed, so ALOHA and the rest started looking for a legal lineal descendent of King Kamehameha I, the Ali'i ("king") who'd united the islands initially, turning a bunch of squabbling islands into a single nation. Surprise, surprise, they found one. (Well, sure they did: Look for something hard enough and you're going to find it ... whether it actually exists or not.) Seems that one Danforth Ho—a twenty-four-year-old management consultant on the island of Maui, who happened to be one-quarter Polynesian by blood—was actually the direct lineal descendent of King Kam I ... and hence the True and Rightful King of the Islands. Now that ALOHA and crew were able to produce—or at least talk about—a "rightful king in exile," more and more of the islanders started to swing over to their cause. (The fact that the Civil Defense Force wasn't exactly discriminating in which heads it broke couldn't have hurt.)

  Now, Na Kama'aina and ALOHA apparendy thought that their "Ali'i in exile" was just puppet, a mouthpiece they could use to build up support from the populace. And at first, that seemed to be the truth. Danforth Ho wasn't really what you'd call king material; both Ho himself and his "handlers" agreed on that. But then, when he saw that people were really starting to follow him, to believe in him, Danforth had something of a change of heart. He did some studying and learned more about his true heritage, about what his umpty-ump-grandfather had actually done for the people of Hawai'i. And he realized that he could actually do something about the situation. Without the knowledge of his handlers, he started to become an "Ali'i in exile," not just a figurehead. On his own initiative he started negotiating for support and funds with various megacorporate interests in the islands. (Want to take a wild guess about one of the key corporations he dealt with? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. A clue for you: the corp name starts with ay...)

  It was in 2016 that Ho started cutting his own private deals. It wasn't until 2017—when various megacorps started throwing their resources behind Na Kama'aina plans—that Danforth's handlers realized what had happened. Apparently some hotheads came this close to icing Ho on the spot—probably by arranging for a "tragic accident"—so they could keep the reins in their own acquisitive hands. But wiser heads prevailed, realizing that having promoted Danforth Ho as the True and Rightful King and all that, now they were stuck with him. And by this time, the people were following Ho, not the leadership of Na Kama'aina . . .

  While Na Kama'aina's leaders were still trying to get Ho back under their control, they found out to their absolute horror that he'd cut a deal with the local yakuza, along the same lines as the ones he'd penned with the corps. (Now, this surprised me a little when I learned it. I guess I hadn't thought that there was much yak activity in Hawai'i. I should have known, though: Wherever there's a large proportion of Japanese, you're going to find yaks.) Na Kama'aina felt control really slipping away now.

  By late summer 2017 the federal government mobilized its armed forces on the mainland and set forth to implement the Resolution Act of 2016—in other words, the "Genocide Campaign" against Native Americans. We all know what happened immediately thereafter: Multiple volcanoes blew their tops under the influence of the Ghost Dancers, and that was the end of the Genocide Campaign. When word reached the islands of just what kind of drek had gone down, Danforth Ho decided that der Tag had finally arrived. He issued his orders to the army of followers he'd built up throughout the islands.

  Whole assault teams of kahunas—the local flavor of shamans, I think—engaged the Civil Defense Force, and tied them up real good. Where resistance was especially strong, Great Form spirits backed the kahunas. Simultaneously, the yakuza mobilized a "civilian army" which, supplemented by heavily armed megacorp security forces, closed down basically all military and government communication channels on the islands, and blockaded various key government buildings.

  Meanwhile, Danforth Ho—backed by the street-fighters of Na Kama'aina (who'd finally realized on which side their bread was buttered) and by thousands of devoted civilians—marched on the capitol building next to the old
Iolani Palace in downtown Honolulu. The mob broke down the doors, rousted out the government officials and functionaries, and basically installed Danforth Ho as Ali'i. On August 22, 2017, King Kamehameha IV—born Danforth Ho—officially declared Hawai'i's sovereignty.

  Predictably, the U.S. government back on the mainland didn't take too kindly to a bunch of jumped-up pineapple-pickers—led by a management consultant, for frag's sake!—taking over their major military staging area in the Pacific basin. It seems that most of the Pacific fleet wasn't in Pearl Harbor in late August of 2017. In fact, it was in transit to the west coast of the U.S., presumably to provide support, if necessary, to the abortive Genocide Campaign. (And you can bet that Danforth Ho, aka King Kam IV, knew that, and planned on it. Otherwise things might have gone very differently in the streets of Honolulu.) When word reached D.C. about Hawai'i's declaration of independence, encrypted messages downlinked from military satellites to the flagship of the Pacific fleet—no doubt the military equivalent of "get your sorry asses back there, and clean this mess up."

  While the new King Kam was consolidating his control at home, his new allies weren't idle. A delegation of megacorps—led by Yamatetsu, it seems—was already pressuring Washington to recognize Hawai'i as a sovereign state. The feds told the corps precisely what they could do with that idea, and ordered the Pacific fleet to flank speed.

  I wish I'd been there for the next act of this saga—it must have been quite a show. Mere minutes after Washington's rejection of the megacorps' "polite suggestion," a barrage of "Thor shots" bracketed the USS Enterprise, the flattop that was the flagship of the Pacific fleet.

  ("Hold the phone," I hear you say. "What the flying frag is a 'Thor shot'?" Thought you'd never ask.