Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

I watched the fire crew die in my left goggle. They scrambled down the halls, leaping over the occasional crewman they found collapsed on the floor or coughing. One of my bug cams flitted after them, all the way to the fire. They began spraying containment gel on the flames when suddenly, a door slammed behind them. Two of the three stopped spraying. One of them managed to turn to try to see what was happening.

  Not one of them saw the grenade before it exploded.

  * * * *

  Ngunu's men used air-powered guns so quiet that I only heard them through the audio feeds from my cams. Within minutes, all of the men from the rig were either dead or squirming like worms, gagged and bound in plastic cuffs on the floors of the tug's hallways.

  I stood there, waiting. Terrified. Jumpcutting feeds from one bug cam to another was all that kept me calm.

  Jump. Static was all that streamed back from the burnt cam in the grenaded room. Jump.

  Lokondo hurried down the tug's inner hallways with two of his men, kicking prisoners in the ribs and asking whether they had sub-clearance.

  Kick, Kick, Kick. They shook their heads, over and over, No, No, No.

  Kick. Yes.

  “Great!” Lokondo said. The prisoner flinched. “We need you!” The African grabbed him by the shoulders and, with a little help from another of Ngunu's soldiers, hauled the man to his feet. He was tall, a blond Scandinavian, arms bound behind his back.

  Defiant, scowling. “I won't help you,” he growled.

  “Fine,” Lokondo said. “Your choice.” Then he raised a pistol to the man's head.

  “Security choppers are on the way,” the blond snapped. “They'll be here in ten minutes, and...”

  “Yes, yes, good,” Lokondo said, gagging the man again and shoving him toward the stairs to the main deck.

  Jump. A view of the deck from above, a man standing behind another man, reaching gently toward him.

  And then there was a hand on my shoulder, and I realized I was seeing myself. The hand didn't move. I turned to find Ngunu.

  “Are you recording, brother?” he asked quietly. I nodded, trying to hide my nervousness. Ngunu was a different man than the one I'd set sail with that morning. I couldn't help but both fear and admire his guts.

  Ngunu smiled. “Good,” he said. “This is a very big day. Today, history will change forever, my friend.” He nodded out to the waves, for me to look.

  An enormous form was surfacing, like Leviathan from the depths. After a moment I realized that it was a submarine. I focused my goggles’ direct cams and a couple of hull-hugging crawler cams onto it, and zoomed.

  Through the streaks of water trickling back into the ocean shone the bright red A.C.T. logo, same as on the rig. The sub turned slowly and drifted toward the deck, and the impression was somehow ghostly. The Lurking Dutchman. Still recording, I switched my left goggle cam view back belowdecks.

  Jump. Lokondo hunched behind the blond man. Behind them a couple of crewmen crouched silently. Further down the hall, a group of men were hauling up a wooden crate a couple of meters long. A drab ray of sunlight shone down onto Lokondo's dark, angry face, and he whispered to his men a single word:

  "Wait."

  * * * *

  It took less than a minute.

  Once the sub's ramp clanged down across the gap and onto the dock, the hatch hissed open. A couple of muttering, rumpled-suited young men—just assistants—emerged bearing briefcases and computer gear. They picked their way across the ramp to the dock, staring in obvious disgust at the flaming tug.

  Ngunu leaped from the tug to the dock, and hurried past them, pistol in hand. They yelped and flinched backward. When I hurried up onto the dock after him, they dropped their equipment and retreated to the rig facility's main entrance, staring at me with terror in their eyes.

  By then, Ngunu had been spotted. He was scrambling for the hatch, which was about to snap shut again. He caught it with his free hand, and fought to keep it open. Roaring from the strain, he glanced back at me with wild eyes.

  “Help me!” he yelled. It was the voice of a man who knew what it was to see death, to fail, to lose everything. A haunted man.

  I did. Whether it was panic, or hope, or perhaps it was sympathy, I don't know. Maybe it was all of them at once. As I ran over, I thought, Oh my god I'm going to go to prison for this. Yet there they were, my hands, clinging to the lip of the hatch, dragging it up. There was my voice, shouting, drowned out by an awful, familiar shriek. It was a sonic weapon. I felt bile rising in my throat, my guts going watery. I fought to hold on longer.

  Didn't have to. Ngunu gritted his teeth, rammed his pistol through the crack in the hatchway, and began shooting.

  The hatch swung suddenly open, hard, and knocked me back on my ass. There I stayed, in shock, not even bothering to jumpcut through different cam views. Ngunu's men—many now in army fatigues, with cheap Singaporean automatics cradled in their arms, grenades sprouting from bandoliers like a harvest of deadly fruit—poured along the dock and onto the sub, straight into the open hatchway. Even running, they seemed so ... orderly. Passing with his blond, gagged prisoner at gunpoint, Lokondo smiled and nodded.

  Ngunu beamed at me. Then I realized that I'd crossed over from filmmaker to accomplice. Terrorist. Criminal. He thanked me sincerely, before yelling past me in Portuguese. I followed his gaze, for a moment. A trio of his men were on the dock, tearing open the long crate.

  The shooting inside the sub continued for many long seconds, followed by a chorus of screams and yells. I switched my left goggle to the cam flittering above the tug, and saw myself sitting there, staring dumbfounded at the open hatch, as the last of Ngunu's foot soldiers rushed through it. On the dock, the men had affixed electromagnetic clamps of some kind to the sub's hull, and were hauling something long and heavy from the crate. It was riveting, Ngunu standing there: calm, powerful, commanding his soldiers. The shot was brilliant. My confidence surged. Whatever else happened, this was going to be a hell of a documentary ... if I lived long enough to make it.

  “Inside,” Ngunu yelled at me, the gun still in his hand. Heaven help me, I did as I was told.

  * * * *

  “Now, now, my friends! The hull is fine!” Ngunu hollered at the chattering, terrified men and women. “We are using rubber bullets. We're not as stupid as you think, ah?”

  They were a mess, these terrified suits, crouched on the floor, hands on their heads and mascara smudged. Tears and sweat ran down their faces. Shock-eyed and stunned. Their broken phones and smashed net gadgets were piled in one corner. Ten enormous security thugs lay slumped on the luxurious red carpeting. Some were bound and gagged, others dead. I sent cameras flitting and crawling about the cabin, scanning each and every face. A few were vaguely familiar: rich, famous climatech people. Europeans, mostly.

  “Mister Follesdal,” Ngunu proclaimed, as if welcoming an old acquaintance. “Please get up.”

  The suits turned, staring at an older, bald-headed man crouching among them, and something clicked in my head. Halvor Follesdal: the CEO of A.C.T., the world's largest climate control tech venture. The inventor of the dimming stacks, clogger of the skies. When Follesdal didn't move, one of Ngunu's men stepped in among the crowd and hauled him to his feet.

  “Please,” he begged. “I don't know what you want...”

  “Of course not, Mister Follesdal,” Ngunu snapped. “That's why we're here today, to tell you.” Ngunu laughed, and the other soldiers chuckled, too. This terrified the suits even more, men with guns laughing. Another chorus of whimpers followed. “We want the monsoons back,” Ngunu said over the noise.

  “The ... the monsoons?”

  “Yes,” Ngunu said slowly, as if to a mentally handicapped child. “The mon-soons. You've heard of them? Big rains? Oh, yes, you don't have monsoons in Norway, right?”

  “I...” Follesdal faltered. “I don't understand.”

  Something thumped loudly against the hull, and everyone there realized the same thing: security had arrived.
Hope flashed across Follesdal's face.

  “Take us down!” Ngunu shouted, and the command was relayed out into the hall by one of the men. “Now!” he added, loudly enough that no relay seemed necessary. Almost immediately, I felt that slightly odd sensation of sinking. The suits were shivering and weeping again, and Follesdal slumped forward.

  “How did you know we were taking this tour today?” a horrified woman in a black pantsuit asked. She sounded German, and I would have sworn she was some politician I'd seen before.

  Ngunu ignored her. “Let's go, Follesdal. We have some questions for you.” Then he nodded at me and said, softly, “Come along, brother. Time to earn your paycheck.”

  * * * *

  “I've never heard of this Agrebi fellow,” Follesdal said, shaking his sweaty, shiny-pated head.

  Ngunu faked his surprise badly. “Really? Tunisian scientist. Lady. Not a fellow. Used to work for you. You sued her and...”

  “A.C.T.'s a big company. Many people used to work for me.” He coughed, looked at one of my cameras, and added, “But anyway, she's wrong. There's not a shred of evidence that the sunlight filtering achieved with our toner emissions has any effect on patterns of precipitation, but we know that it has achieved a significant contribution to stemming the tide of global warming that threatens us all!” He sounded like he was rattling off ad copy, evasive and nervous. It was bizarre, maybe a stress reaction, but great footage. “Now, if you'll...”

  “The more you lie and change the subject, the more dogshit my cameraman has to cut,” Ngunu snapped, his face radiating photogenic rage, broken and defiant all at once. I watched rapt through my goggles. “Everyone knows about the link between your toner stacks and drought. Dimming the sun is fine, it slows down the warming, but you killed the monsoons. Ev-e-ry-one knows that....”

  “That's not proven,” Follesdal insisted. “The evidence is too scanty and controversial—”

  “Then why did you cancel the stack projects in Australia?” Ngunu shouted the word “why” so harshly that even manic Follesdal flinched. “And why did the monsoons stop completely after the big stacks in Spain and France and Morocco were finished?”

  “You can't blame that on...”

  “Agrebi says it's the toner. That it gets into the clouds, and reacts with the water. Bleeds out more aerosols and gases that cause the water to condense differently. So it rains less often. So you can keep the clouds big and reflective, especially with the ‘local blends’ coming from the stacks south of the equator. She showed me studies. Many studies, and computer models.” Ngunu said. “She's a scientist.”

  “We have scientists, too,” Follesdal grumbled.

  Before Ngunu could snap at him, I said, “Yes. In your pocket. Half of them are the same bastards who worked for Big Oil thirty years ago. Nobody trusts them, and you know it.”

  Follesdal frowned hard, clearing his throat to speak. I didn't let him. “As far as the majority of the scientific community is concerned,” I said, “The toner stacks have brought drought to Africa, isn't that so?”

  “That's a baseless overstatement....” Follesdal said.

  Ngunu lifted his pistol, aiming it at the CEO's heart, and ground his teeth. Follesdal eyed the gun, and raised his hands a little. “Uh, yes, some scientists think that.”

  "Some?" Ngunu cleared his throat, tensing the hand holding the gun very slightly. I zoomed in carefully on Follesdal's face, to keep the gun out of the videos. “Hands down. Quit lying,” Ngunu said, moving the gun closer to Follesdal's chest.

  I almost smiled then. After all those years, looking for a way to make businessmen quit lying and admit the truth—and here it was, really so very simple. I almost wished I'd thought of it before.

  Follesdal frowned and lowered his hands. “Okay, many respected scientists blame it on our stacks. But others say it's mostly the atmospheric salting pumped out by Sodion International, or AeroClimact's stratospheric gassing program. We're not the only company working in the dimming industry! We're competing with dozens of...”

  A soft click. The safety on Ngunu's pistol.

  Follesdal nodded. “But yes, there may be some evidence of possible significant undesirable side-effects apparently caused by the particulate emitted by our toner stacks.” Follesdal sighed dramatically. “Look, no solution's perfect. I don't see you Africans giving up fossil fuel-based industrialization. What are we supposed to do? There's a price for saving the world....”

  “Where is this world you saved?” Ngunu said, lowering his gun. “When I was a little boy, we had schools in my country. I went to a school built for us for free by a Chinese oil company. We asked our teacher whether the toner stacks would save us. He said yes, of course. Told us to pray for you. Now we don't even have a country left. We have millions dead.”

  Ngunu leaned forward, his voice suddenly quiet, focused as the point of a needle as he spoke. “I can see them, right now, looking at me, asking me, When will the rain they promised finally come? You said the rain would come again next year. Or the year after. It's been thirteen years now. Lake Niassa is gone. Gone. The fish are gone. What fucking world have you saved? All you bastards have given us is dhuluma. Do you even know what that word means, dhuluma?” Ngunu asked, his whole body tense, barely containing what he felt.

  Rage. I realized it was surging through me too. I'd forgotten how it felt: to want to strangle a man with his tie, or beat his head against a wall and roar at him. I couldn't remember what dhuluma meant, but I wanted to crush Follesdal's throat over it.

  “It's Swahili. It means injustice,” Ngunu snapped, and then went silent. I recognized the word, suddenly: it had come into widespread political use when I'd been in East Africa during the freshwater wars.

  Anxiously, I asked Follesdal, “Assuming A.C.T.'s Eurasian and North American stacks are shown to be responsible for the droughts in Africa and Latin America, what is the company going to do for the affected countries?”

  Follesdal swallowed quietly. “I need to discuss that with our legal advisors before...” he said.

  “Come on. If it's your fault, what are you willing to do?”

  The gun jabbed deeper into Follesdal's chest.

  “I suppose,” he said, “We would clean it up. But that will never be proven.”

  Ngunu cleared his throat, and raised the pistol again, drawing back one fist. “He's right. Even though it's true, we'll never have enough proof. But that doesn't matter. We've got another solution.”

  He hesitated for a moment, and then turned to me and said, “Cameras off.”

  When I nodded that they were off, he slammed the grip of his gun into the man's face.

  * * * *

  “What the hell is this?” I asked as my reactivated cams wandered around us.

  Lokondo laughed. “This is how the other half lives,” he said, gesturing at the plush red carpet, the Rembrandt and Picasso and Warhol on the walls, the wide couches. A huge video screen covered one wall, beside a full bar. “You mean you don't have one, boss?” he added, grinning. He and Ngunu laughed.

  “What are we doing down here, Ngunu?” I asked.

  He looked at me funny.

  “We are not doing anything,” he said, gesturing to me. “But we,” he said, indicating Lokondo and himself, “are going to shut down the toner stacks ... by killing the Gulf Stream.”

  The archived footage shows my typical brilliance: “Huh?”

  To Lokondo's surly blond hostage, who was piloting the sub, Ngunu said, “Bring up the cameras.”

  The huge videoscreen flickered alive with a view of the murky, dark ocean floor. Amid huge seabed plants, an enormous robot worm inched along through the muck, suddenly stopping and burrowing into the sediment. The sub drifted above the muddy cloud it had kicked up.

  “These are A.C.T.'s methane clathrate mining fields,” Ngunu explained, glancing at his cell phone briefly. To the blond man he said, “Stop! This is the spot.”

  The blond prisoner scowled at Lokondo while Ngunu pu
nched more keys on his phone, but did as he was told and stopped the sub. I turned my attention back to the viewscreen in time to see something large and white briefly flash by, sinking past the sub's viewcam. The camera followed the movement.

  A small warhead was sticking into the muck, nose-first.

  More brilliance from me: “What the hell?”

  “No, no,” Ngunu said. “The question you must ask me is, ‘How are you going to kill the Gulf Stream?’ Then I can tell you how a nuclear blast will liberate all this methane. What the tsunami will do to the Greenland glaciers. How the sudden melt will kill the Gulf Stream, and make them shut down the—”

  I nearly choked. “But ... you can't kill the Gulf Stream!”

  “Why not? If they don't mind killing the monsoons...”

  I shook my head. “I mean you can't do it, physically. One nuke?”

  Ngunu laughed. “This is the biggest deposit of frozen methane ever found. Plus who knows how much pure gas is underneath. This stuff is amazing, Illingsford! Do you know how much it can outgas? But no, our bomb isn't the only one: just the first. We have friends who are contributing. They're ready to help crack up the Greenland ice. Easy as that. One phone call is all it will take.”

  I felt sick. “Friends? Who?”

  “Many, many people want it to rain again, brother. People who don't mind if Europe's covered in ice for a while.”

  “What?” I yelped, my horror clear. “Wait, Ngunu, just—your people have the moral high ground right now. And what Follesdal said ... If you just let me make the documentary...”

  “Nobody will care,” Ngunu grumbled. “You know that.”

  I leaned on a chair. The room swam before me, and once again I thought of Laura, our last night together in Jaipur. Her sorrowful face in the choked-off sunlight, light dimmed already by toner from stacks half a continent away, at that time of day when the rose hues of sunset turned the pink-painted buildings ominously bone-white. How she'd answered my question so simply, so quietly: that she had to do the work. That she couldn't go and live in an exurb of Toronto and pretend that the world wasn't falling to pieces, have kids and host dinner parties and ignore the wars and plagues and the broiling, rainless lands burning under the sun, their orphans clutching guns, screaming and running.