House of the Sun

by Nigel Findley

  Down in the elevator we went—me, Pohaku, and Akaku'akanene. Another call from the ex-Ali'i had arranged for a car—a Toyota Elite, as it turned out, gleaming like brushed stainless steel under the lights of the underground parkade. My little entourage piled in—Alana Kono was waiting for us inside—and we were off, howling westward along the semideserted streets.

  It wasn't what you'd call a comradely ride. Akaku'akanene was talking to geese again, staring off into space like a chiphead. Alana Kono looked like she might be up for friendly conversation ... if her boss, Pohaku, hadn't been doing his best imitation of a slotted-off statue. So I sighed and settled back in the upholstery, trying to relax . . . and trying to figure out just what the frag I'd gotten myself in to.

  Out onto the Kamehameha Highway we hurtled, me wondering idly what it would be like being descended from someone they named fragging highways for—and westward toward the airport.

  And past the airport. Lord knows, I was no expert at Honolulu geography, but I could recognize an airport when I saw it flashing by at 200 kilometers per hour. I leaned forward and rapped hard on the kevlarplex partition. "Hey, slot!" I yelled at the driver. "You missed the fragging turn"—I hesitated—"didn't you?"

  Pohaku's iron-hard hand on my shoulder pulled me back. He sneered at me and pointed out, "You think we're going to the civilian field ... e ku'u haku?" His tone of voice turned the term of respect into the foulest of epithets.

  "Where, then?" I shot back, loading my response with as much sarcasm as I could generate on the spur of the moment.

  Pohaku didn't even bother to answer. Instead he just turned away, and pointedly stared at nothing out the Elite's window.

  Alana Kono touched my arm, and she shot me a slightly embarrassed grin. Apparently, she'd finally decided that her job description might just include acting like a human being after all. "Kaiao Field, Mr. Dirk," she explained softly. "Used to be Hickham Air Force Base."

  I sat back and tried to pretend I was as unconcerned as Akaku'akanene. But it wasn't easy. Jam or no jam, did Gordon Ho really think he still had any influence over the military?

  Within a matter of minutes the Elite slowed, and we took a long sweeping left onto a minor connecting road. A few hundred meters to our right, I could see the floodlights and warning signs of a military compound. Ahead of us was ...

  Well, nothing that I could see. It was pitch black ... apparently all the way to the horizon. The only illumination came from the headlights of the Toyota limo.

  Finally, after a minute more, those lights fell on a heavy-duty chain-link fence topped with hair-thin lines of refracted light that I identified as monowire. A sign on the fence read, "Lahui Mea Ki'ai o Hawai'i." Basically meaningless, until I saw the translation in small letters underneath: "Hawai'i National Guard."

  The Elite sighed to a stop in front of a reinforced gate. Uniformed guards double-timed it toward the limo from an armored guard post, then suddenly snapped salutes to the car—or anything else that happened to be in their field of vision—and double-timed it right back to the guard post. The gate rolled back silently, and the Elite accelerated through.

  Out onto the apron of a small airbase we drove, hanging a sharp left and finally to a stop in front of what looked like an administration building. A uniformed NCO—a troll, looking entirely too spit-polished—opened the door of the limo and snapped me a textbook-perfect salute as I climbed out. "Welcome, sir!" he damn near bellowed. "If you'll come this way ... ?"

  Believe me—I've never been one of these hard-case slots who thinks that happiness is a warm gun, but ...

  By Ghu, it felt good to wrap my hands around something with a little more authority than a pistol, let me tell you that, chummer. The spit-polished troll presided over a load-out that would have left an NRA nut juicing his jeans. Basically, I'd been given my choice of any personal arms and armor I wanted from the Hawai'i National Guard's extensive collection. Full-on battle armor? What's your size, hoa! Panther assault cannon? Would you like that with or without a smartlink, sir?

  Don't get me wrong—I didn't go overboard. There are people out there who think they're innately capable of handing top-drawer military hardware. Active battlesuits? Man-pack miniguns? Bring'em on!

  Not me. Frag, I remember how much it affected my balance the first time I tried on a suit of heavy security armor during my Lone Star Academy training. I fragging near did a face-plant when I tried to get up off the bench. Any sales slot who tells you "Anyone can wear any kind of armor, right off the shelf' is giving you the major song and dance, trust me.

  So I crammed my fears way down deep into the back of my brain, and I kept tight rein on my impulses. No heavy security armor or miniguns for this kid. I picked out a nice, familiar set of Level 3 form-fitting body armor, and—okay, maybe I overreached myself on this one—an Ares high-velocity assault fire. As an afterthought, I picked myself out a nice assault vest—basically, a harness with the sole purpose of carrying an obscene number of spare ammo clips—and I was ready.

  When I came out of the armory, my "troops" were waiting for me: Pohaku, Kono, and eight hoop-kicking military types.

  Well, okay, apparently they weren't my troops. When I stumbled out, weighed down with lethal ordnance and feeling like a cheap knockoff of Slade the Sniper, they didn't spare me so much as a glance. Instead, their attention seemed focused entirely on Pohaku. For a moment I considered bitching about it, but then my better judgment overrode the testosterone overload the armory seemed to have caused. What the frag did I know about leading troops? Sweet frag all, that's what. Much better to leave it to someone who at least thought he was qualified.

  Pohaku's expression told me he shared my viewpoint. He spared the time to shoot me a nasty sneer, then turned to my "troops" and snapped, "E hele!" The fire-team took off at double-time, with Pohaku picking up the rear. Kono was there, too, and she gave me what could have been a smile of sympathy. But then she was double-timing it after the combat troops as well.

  Akaku'akanene was still hanging back, waiting for me. The shaman hadn't slapped on any armor or picked up any weaponry; apparently, she was content with her shapeless sack of a dress. She turned to me and gave me a gap-toothed smile.

  Wonderful. Moral support from someone who talked to geese. I turned and jogged after the receding backs of the military types.

  Out onto the apron we went, and I saw my contingent piling aboard a Merlin, a tilt-winged VTOL built along the same lines as a Federated-Boeing Commuter, but much smaller. I glanced back over my shoulder. Akaku'akanene was bringing up the rear, but at her own casual pace. The Merlin was already spooling up its engines, and I considered yelling something to hurry the old scag up .. .

  And that's when I froze in my tracks. Not my idea—every goddamn muscle in my body seized up on me at once. I teetered for a moment on one foot, then started to overbalance as the vulcanized composite of the apron began to swing up toward my face.

  In that instant my muscles unlocked again, and I did the kind of broad, lurching recovery that you expect from circus clowns. Cursing under my breath, I looked around me, knowing what I'd see.

  There he was, just as I expected. Quinn Harlech, or whatever the frag his name was. He was cloaked in shadow ... even though the section of the apron he stood on was well lit. He was wearing some kind of military uniform, but a couple of decades out of date. If his grin had been any broader he'd have swallowed his pointy ears as he swaggered up to me.

  I glanced back over my shoulder. Akaku'akanene was a few meters behind me, looking madder than a wet cat. She was frozen in midstride, precariously balanced on the toe of one foot and the heel of another. She could still breathe, but she didn't have any fine muscular control of her throat or mouth—I knew that because her attempts to curse and bitch came out like, "Aaaaargh, aaaargh!"

  Quinn Harlech took a step toward me, and instinctively I tried to bring my shiny spanking new Ares HVAR to bear. No luck. I could still breathe—thank the spirits for major favors—
and I could still keep my balance, but I couldn't zero the assault rifle on the elf's chest. Momentarily, I considered butt-stroking him across the face with the rifle stock . .. and instantly the muscles I'd need for that move seized up on me, too.

  "All right, already," I snarled. "What?"

  Harlech smiled, but it wasn't the self-confident expression I remembered from our last encounter. If anything, he looked like some teenager trying to explain to his dad how he'd "creased" the family 3220 ZX. "Gerelan-o te-makkalos-ha, goro, " he said. "Forgive my stupidity, Mr. Montgomery." He shook his head. "I misunderstood. It's been long"—he frowned—"very long, since I mistook matters so badly."

  Again I tried to bring my rifle into line. Not so much because I wanted to cut him down, but just to see if I could. I couldn't.

  "What the frag are you talking about, you slot?" I demanded.

  Harlech shrugged uncomfortably. "I misjudged you, Mr. Montgomery," he said. "I thought you were a destabilizing influence. Instead, you were striving to stabilize the situation. I misinterpreted your place in the zarien. Do you understand?"

  "Actually ... no," I told him.

  "I was striving to eliminate a force that supported the se-curo ja-rine" he said earnestly. "The Chaos. That's what I thought you were. In fact, my actions might well have precipitated the se-curo ja I was trying to prevent. Will you forgive me, goro?"

  I shook my head slowly. "Maybe," I said. "If I ever understand what the fragging hell you're talking about."

  "Let me help put things right." Harlech reached out toward me, a gesture of pleading. "I can, you know. Let me come with you."

  And that's when I laughed. "You've got to be farcing me."

  His monoblade-sharp blue eyes flashed. "I know things you'll never know, Mr. Montgomery," he said softly, insinuatingly. "Do things you'll never be able to do. Things you can't succeed without."

  "Then I'm fragged, aren't I?" I shot back, my voice harsh. "I'd rather French-kiss a fragging juggernaut than trust you, slot."

  I could feel the elf's sudden anger, like a static charge in the air around me. But then I felt him willfully suppress it. "At least let me accompany you," he said reasonably, gesturing toward the Merlin.

  "Frag you," I told him. "You try to get on that bird, I'll have you cut down in your tracks."

  Harlech lowered his head, glaring up at me from beneath his dark brows. In that moment I felt real fear. "Do you really think you can do that?" he whispered.

  From the corner of my eye I saw Akaku'akanene, still struggling against the magical control immobilizing her. "Maybe not, Quinn," I said conversationally. "But what do you want to bet? Are you willing to bet your life that you can control me and the soldier-boys on that bird ... and keep her from tearing your liver out?" I gestured with my chin toward the Nene shaman. "Do you want to bet on that, Quinn?"

  I watched as the elf's eyes narrowed, and my gut churned with the conviction that he could manage it. But then his frown eased, and he shrugged lightly. "A point to you, my friend," he said. "But you will find it difficult to keep me away from Haleakala, you know. I will be seeing you again."

  Harlech turned away, his old-style camouflage coat flaring behind him like an abbreviated cloak. Again—out of a sense of completion, if nothing else—I tried to bring my assault rifle to bear.

  My muscles worked this time, for a wonder. My finger touched the trigger, the sighting laser burned, a ruby firefly tracked across to rest on Harlech's spine ...

  And in that instant he changed, momentarily shifting into an extended prismatic after-image. An instant later, he was gone as if he'd never been.

  With an effort I backed off on the trigger, a gram or two before it broke. Something told me that hosing down a Hawai'i National Guard base in the middle of the night wouldn't be the smartest thing I'd ever done.

  24

  Pohaku, Kono, and the military team were looking a tad edgy by the time I climbed aboard the Merlin, but I wasn't about to explain to them what had kept me. For that matter, Akaku'akanene was acting a mite testy, too, but I wasn't really in the mood to talk to her either.

  The Merlin was set up as your standard troop carrier, with basic sling seats bolted to the fuselage on both sides, facing inward. Clambering up the ladder, I saw one empty seat up forward—beside Alana Kono, as a bonus—so I excused my way past the troops and slumped down into the kevlar fabric. I buckled up the four-point harness and then stashed the assault rifle under my feet, hooking its sling onto a retention bolt. In my peripheral vision I saw Akaku'akanene giving me a solid dose of stink-eye as she buckled in toward the tail of the plane, but I made sure not to make eye contact.

  Someone outside folded up the ladder, before slamming and locking the hatch. The engines ran up, a howling turbine shriek that came right through the fuselage and drove into my ears like icepicks. The Merlin bobbled and shook, and then lifted up, up and away.

  I'd ridden in Merlins and their ilk before, of course; who hasn't? So I wasn't expecting any problems with motion sickness. Of course, what I was familiar with was the civilian configuration of the tilt-wing bird, with comfortable, forward-facing seats and lots of windows. The military configuration? It sported the most uncomfortable seats I've ever gone a long way to avoid, and no windows whatsoever.

  No windows. Ever think about what that means? A tilt-wing VTOL like a Federated-Boeing Commuter or a Merlin takes off and climbs like a helicopter ... which means that it generally takes a serious nose-down pitch when it's climbing out. So how does the old sensorium interpret that? The floor's horizontal, chummer—that's what the eyes and the brain say, because floors are always horizontal. But the inner ear says the floor's at least 20 degrees horizontal. It's that mismatch between what your brain knows and what your inner ear's saying that causes serious motion sickness. Typically the cure is to look out the window and get a reality check from the horizon ...

  No windows in a military transport, chummer. I was starting to feel real green around the gills when Alana Kono came to my rescue. At first I thought she was just massaging the base of my skull behind my ear, but then she removed her finger and I realized she'd slapped one of those neoscopolamine narco-patches onto my scalp over a major artery. I turned to thank her ... and the neoscope in the patch had already kicked in enough to turn my grateful smile into a bedroom leer. The female gillette had the courtesy to blush and turn away.

  I was really glad for the narco-patch as the Merlin pivoted its wings to shift from VTOL to forward flight. The turbulence was bad enough; even worse, though, was the knowledge that tilt-wings like Merlins are very vulnerable to engine cutout during the pivot process. If the engines stall out then, there's nothing to save you. Not gliding—there's no lift from the wing in the transition aspect—and not autorotation—ditto for the rotors/airscrews. Apparently, though, my narco-patch was dosed up with so much don't-worry juice that I could observe the tilt-transition as "just one of those things."

  Suddenly I realized something and turned to Alana Kono. "You know," I said somewhat sheepishly, "I don't have a fragging clue where Haleakala is."

  That earned me a sneer from Pohaku—no fragging surprise there—and another grin from Kono. From inside her armored jacket she pulled out a palmtop, flipped open the screen, and worked for a moment with the stylus. Then she handed it over to me. "Here," she said, pointing to the map.

  Okay, there was the Hawai'ian island chain, traced out in plasma-red on the flatscreen. Not that it helped me much. "And Honolulu is ...?" I mumbled.

  "Here." She touched the map, and one of the islands—the second major island from the northwest end of the chain—burned brighter. "That's Oahu. And this"—another touch with the stylus, and an island that looked something like an asymmetrical dumbbell glowed in double intensity—"is Maui, see? Haleakala's here." She stabbed at the center of the larger, lower "lobe" of the island.

  "And that's ... about how far?"

  She shrugged. 'Two hundred klicks, maybe?" She nudged me gently with an
elbow. "Not long."

  I nodded glumly. Neoscope or not, my guts would be glad to get out of this bird, but my mind would have been a lot happier to know what was waiting for us when we got there.

  Through the thin skin of the fuselage, I could hear the Merlin's twin engines straining. We still seemed to be climbing—at least, my inner ears were convinced we still had a slight nose-up pitch—but the engines didn't seem to like it in the slightest. Why? I wondered grimly. Headwinds? There'd been clouds building up to the southeast when I'd last looked out the window at New Foster Tower, hadn't there? And according to Kono's map, that was the direction we were heading. Into the teeth of a storm? I closed my eyes and tried to hear if there was rain hitting the airframe, but the tortured howling of the engines made it impossible.

  Just fragging great, I thought. Couldn't King Kam have gotten us a bird with two good engines? Then I remembered something I'd scanned on the flight over to the islands, oh so long ago now. Haleakala was a big fragger of a mountain, wasn't it? Three thousand meters or something like that. No wonder the Merlin didn't sound too happy. It was intended for low-altitude short hops, or so somebody had told me once. It must be a cast-iron bitch for the little bird to claw its way up to this kind of altitude. No wonder the engines sounded like souls in torment. I sat back and sighed. I wasn't really sure whether that made me feel any better or not.

  I tried to disconnect my brain, then, to give it something else to think about, anything, so it couldn't worry about the engines and the storm. Haleakala, I thought. "House of the Sun." I remembered that's what the name meant from my database scan during the flight to Hawai'i. Hale—"house." A—"of." Ka—"the." La—"sun." Simple, neh?

  Interesting, too. It had stuck in my mind, like so many little bits of irrelevant trivia, because it had prompted a question when I'd first noted it. The Hawai'ian word for sun was La. And wasn't the ancient Egyptian word for sun Ral La—Ra. Pretty fragging similar, particularly if you included the possibility of "phonetic drift." Was it just coincidence?