Designated Targets — Axis Of Time Book II

by John Birmingham

“Hiya, sexy,” she said, beaming, her lethargy falling right away with a hot surge that started somewhere down in her thighs and ran right up through her stomach until she was sure her face was flushed bright red.

  “Hello, darling,” Dan said, a tad more demurely.

  Julia, however, grabbed him by the belt and wrenched him into her, keeping hold of the buckle while she slipped her other hand around to grab a butt cheek. She gave it a good squeeze as they kissed. “God, it’s good to see you,” she said.

  As they parted slowly, both of her legs now firmly clamped around one of his, Dan patted her jacket where it covered the handgun. “You expecting trouble from your editor?”

  “Girl can’t be too careful,” she said, smiling. “Get me home quickly, and you can take it off. Or you could leave it on, if you think you’d like that.”

  “Julia. People could be listening.”

  “Really? Well, that’s a little kinky, but if you want it that way . . .”

  A porter appeared, carrying her bags. Two Antler suitcases, with retractable wheels and a telescoping handle, which he clearly thought of as the greatest invention he’d ever seen. And one medium-sized backpack in jungle camouflage, still carrying one large, faded bloodstain—about which he seemed less enthused.

  She tipped him what felt like a ridiculously small amount and shouldered a smaller backpack full of electronic equipment: her carry-on luggage. Then he followed them out to the limo pool.

  “I didn’t expect to see you at all, Dan,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to surprise me like this.”

  He slipped an arm around her slim waist as they passed into the cold night air, drawing more looks—some offended, some envious. “I didn’t want to get your hopes up, telling you I’d be here before I knew I had the leave. And then you were out of reach anyway. So I figured, what the hell? It’s no fun arriving in town when there’s nobody to meet you.”

  “Man, you can say that again. This city still freaks me out. I keep expecting to turn around and see my friends on every corner, but, you know . . .”

  She trailed off, the weariness and jet lag—or prop lag, she corrected herself—catching up again.

  “I know,” he said, kissing the top of her head.

  Then they went home and fucked for three hours without a break.

  “This place looks amazing, Jules!”

  “It is cool, isn’t it?”

  Yes, it was. Dan had never seen anything like it. Not that he’d ever thought much about design and architecture before he met Julia. Even so, he’d never imagined that an apartment could look this way. His idea of how rich folk lived was informed entirely by Hollywood. Their homes were larger; the furniture was plush. But an armchair was an armchair, whether it was a hand-me-down from the welfare, or a big leather chesterfield in the Vanderbilt drawing room.

  The stuff in Julia’s apartment, however . . . even the way the rooms were laid out . . . it was . . . Well, words failed him.

  He hadn’t noticed it at first, when they’d spilled in through the door, hands all over each other, clothing already half-undone. They’d made love standing up, half-undressed, right inside the entry hall; then she’d hauled him straight into a bedroom and onto the mattress, which he hadn’t left for a long time.

  Jules had disappeared to get a bottle of champagne at one point, but otherwise neither of them had ventured out of the room until much later in the evening.

  After the third time, when it was going to take him a little while to recover, he’d begun to notice the bedroom in the light of the candles she’d lit.

  The bed looked Japanese, like a futon, they called it, if he remembered right. It had no headboard to speak of. A big rectangle of padded leather seemed to be fixed to the wall behind the pillows.

  And the wall itself was inset at random places with boxes or something, in which Julia had set up books or little pieces of art. He noticed that some of them were faintly backlit, adding a soft glow to the light of candles that were burning on tiny white shelves that protruded from the other walls just as randomly as the insets. There was no other furniture to speak of, just two fuzzy cubes, covered in what looked like polar bear pelt. He wondered where she kept her clothes.

  “They did a great job, don’t you think?” she said as they stood in the living room—or what he assumed was the living room—just before midnight.

  “Where’d all the space come from?” he asked. “I’ve never seen such a big parlor before.”

  Julia smiled at him with that almost-pitying look she got sometimes. He suspected it was because he’d used the word parlor.

  “Well, this used to be a three-bedroom apartment,” she explained. “But I had them knock out a bunch of walls, and now it’s one bedroom with a massive open living area which flows from the kitchen down there, through the dining and entertainment space, into my chill-out zone, here.”

  Dan sort of understood what she meant, but only because they were standing in the “chill-out zone,” a strange, sunken, carpeted half-moon heaped with piles of weird Arabian-looking cushions. It seemed like the sort of place Fatty Arbuckle could get himself into a lot of trouble.

  A data slate hung on the wall like a picture, and he guessed the area would serve as a sort of mini movie theater. Thirty or more data sticks sat in tiny slots, on top of another small white ledge that grew straight out of the wall by the slate.

  “I thought nobody was allowed to own that sort of technology without a government permit,” said Dan.

  “Settle down, Eliot Ness,” she said. “That’s my personal slate. Only government-issue property is covered by the legislation. We were deploying for three months, so I brought quite a few personal items with me.”

  She moved through the sunken lounge to pluck a data stick off the tiny shelf.

  “Twenty-five years of The Simpsons,” she said, clearly thrilled with whatever that meant. “Every episode of Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives. Before I left the Clinton, I downloaded terabytes of shit from the library. I’ve got movies, TV, music, games, books, magazines, the whole nine yards. I’m telling you, Dan, I can live here now. It’s just like my place at home. I even had the library run me up a couple of print-on-demand books for the shelf, some old favorites, just so I can see them when I come through the door. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.”

  Those must have been the books he saw in her bedroom earlier. He noticed others now, tucked in recesses spotted around the massive room.

  The long, rectangular “space,” as she referred to it, seemed to get harder and colder as it receded toward the kitchen at the far end of the apartment. That space was arranged around a long central bench that appeared to have been fashioned out of railway sleepers and stainless steel. He couldn’t be sure until he got down there, but it looked as if she’d had all her carpet and linoleum removed and left bare wooden boards and concrete in their place.

  “It’s polished concrete,” she said enthusiastically when he asked. “Fucking cool, isn’t it? And it’s well within the very limited abilities of your local builders, thank God.”

  “It’s, uh . . . I’ve never . . .”

  “I know. You’ve never seen anything like it. You wouldn’t have. I had a hell of a time finding a designer who could understand what I wanted,” she said, beginning to pace around and whip herself into a frenzy. It made Dan wonder if she’d found a new supply of combat drugs. She spoke faster and faster, but with an enthusiasm he’d never seen her display for anything before.

  It was actually kind of cute. She was like a teenager, for a change.

  “I had a couple of copies of Monument and Wallpaper,” she said, picking up a magazine from what was probably a coffee table and passing it to him. “I bought them at the airport in Bangkok, back in my time, before I flew down to Darwin to join the Clinton. And that was all I had to work with. But I read about this totally outrageous gay guy in The New Yorker, you know, your New Yorker, and this graphic designer—he was just about to pack his b
ags and head out your way, to the Zone—but I grabbed him before I flew out last time, showed him the magazines and he, like, totally got it. He agreed to manage the renovation. We were using these Italian builders who got run out of Florence by the fascists. And anyway, I’m stoked. It’s just like being home.”

  She threw her arms around him, and Dan could tell she was as happy as he’d ever known her to be. She was almost jumping with pleasure.

  “It’s a great-looking pad, Jules—Is that the right word?”

  “If this was nineteen sixty-two, and I was Gidget, then yeah. But go on, keep telling me how great it is.”

  Dan made a show of flicking through the Wallpaper magazine, which wasn’t about wallpaper at all, as far as he could tell. He could see where the designer had picked up some ideas and recreated them in Julia’s apartment.

  “That’s like what you’ve got, right?” he said, pointing out a review of a restaurant, which seemed to have only one table, a long bench, like in a mess hall.

  “Close enough,” she said, squeezing him again. “Do you like it?”

  “I think so,” he said. “It looks, I dunno, like a house at the World’s Fair. The view looks good.”

  “It’s got a great fucking view!” she cried, grabbing him by the arm and dragging him over to the window. They were at least nine floors up in a corner apartment, and when he looked out, ribbons of light and moving traffic stretched away beneath them. He hadn’t been paying attention in the limo, but the building had to be somewhere on the extreme eastern side of Manhattan, overlooking the river, which cut through the scenery outside like a black ribbon of negative space. He’d been to New York a couple of times before and was pretty sure he could see Brooklyn and Queens and Long Island. From the corner window, a wide sliver of Manhattan proper was visible, including a small dark wedge of Central Park, then the West Side and what he guessed was the Hudson River.

  “This must have cost a mint, baby,” Dan said, and he regretted it instantly. Had he broken some weird twenty-first-century taboo, implying that she couldn’t afford to pay for her own home?

  But Julia was surprisingly matter-of-fact in her answer. “Well, I sold some of my stuff. You know, silly little things like an old calculator, and a digital translator, and this ancient fucking iPod that’d been in my backpack for a decade. And I got a fucking packet for them.”

  As she explained how she’d cashed in, Julia grew increasingly animated again, leaving Dan confused. He’d always thought of her as an adventurer, someone for whom ties and commitments were nothing more than dead weight.

  But as she spoke, her voice became faster and her hands began to fly around like birds released from a cage. “The Times had just deposited some hazard money into an account for me,” she said, “back up in twenty-one, which I could access through the Clinton, and the office here agreed to pay that out dollar for dollar, in order to get me on staff. Which meant I got another big fucking payday right away. And then I had a lawyer do my contract negotiations for me, this chick named Maria O’Brien. Actually, she was the one helped me set up my garage sale. I would never have thought to charge anyone fifty grand local for an iPod with a flat battery. She used to be with the Eighty-second, but she finished her hitch about five days after the Transition. She’s gone into business for herself here, providing legal services for anyone wanting to do business in the Zone. I tell you, Dan, she’s going to be as rich as a fucking astronaut.”

  “A what?”

  “It’s an in-joke. Forget it. Anyway, she got the Times to honor my pay and bonuses, and to pay me what she called a temporally adjusted salary—which, bottom line, is a shitload more than a reporter gets here, and she squeezed a great big fucking on-signing bonus out of them, as well. It was all more than enough to pay for this, and make some strategic investments with the leftovers. I’ve got another place, even bigger than this, over in Gramercy Park. I bought it with Rosanna, and we’re going to redo it together.

  “Maria’s formed a partnership with a local brokerage house, and I’m having about half of my salary invested by them. You could get in on it if you wanted, Dan. You should think about it. This war’s not going to last forever, and when it’s done, you’re looking at compressing eighty years of growth into a decade or two. It’s going to be fucking crazy. It’s already crazy.”

  He didn’t know quite what to say. He’d never been on the receiving end of a spiel quite like it. The closest he could recall was opening his door to a Fuller Brush salesman once. That guy had made him feel like he’d be on the road to hell if he didn’t finish the day owning a complete set of Mr. Fuller’s brushes.

  Julia made him look tame.

  “Uh, well, I guess I could,” he said. “I don’t have much to do with my pay, except buy you presents.”

  “Well, forget about that, buddy. Get yourself a portfolio. You’re in town for, what, three days? We’ll set up a coffee with Maria and . . . Hell, fuck that . . . Let’s go see her right now. She never sleeps.”

  As so often happened around Julia, Dan Black felt himself swept along in her wake. She disappeared into her bedroom and reappeared with her flexipad.

  “There’s no net here,” he said.

  “I know. But Maria’s got a mil-grade unit that’ll pick up a point-to-point message within five klicks, if it’s on . . . Hah! And it is!”

  Julia ran her fingers through her hair and looked into the flexipad as though it were a makeup compact.

  “Hey, Maria. It’s Jules. Dan’s in town and my head’s in a different time zone. You up for a drink? Zap me.” She tossed the unit onto a cushion in the chill-out zone and took his hand. “Come on, baby. Let’s have a shower and get ready.”

  As she led him through into the bathroom, which looked like something out of the later Roman Empire, he heard the pad chime behind him.

  Music and the sound of a party followed them into the shower.

  “Hey, Jules!” he heard a woman call out. “Great to hear from you. Bring your big boy out. I’m with the famous Slim Jim down at the Bayswater. And get this, Frank Sinatra’s here!”

  16

  SPECIAL ADMINISTRATIVE ZONE, CALIFORNIA

  Having been born in 1969, Admiral Phillip Kolhammer wasn’t a true child of the digital age. He grew up with rotary telephones, cassette recorders, black-and-white TV, pinball machines, one type of Coke, and the unfortunate musical legacy of the 1980s. The most secure personal files on his flexipad were a collection of bootleg tracks by a long-forgotten country rock band called Lone Justice, and the first two seasons of Miami Vice.

  He’d never really mastered text messaging by thumb, but like everyone who grew up after the rise of digital entertainment, he had learned to split his attention along multiple tracks. Given the immense flows of data that streamed in from a properly monitored battlespace, he was often required to concentrate on a surprising variety of information from competing sources.

  Even so, chairing the R & D committee was a real pain in the ass.

  Six full-time members came to each meeting, but anywhere up to eighteen or twenty part-timers, consultants, or guests might also attend. The sessions were held every Friday afternoon, between 1400 and 1600 hours, in the largest briefing room of the nondescript, two-story prefab offices that were the power center of the Special Administrative Zone.

  The building sat in a tight cluster of similarly unimposing structures, at the western edge of the Valley, in a huge agglomeration of half-built factories, empty warehouses, and unfinished offices known collectively as Area 51.

  Kolhammer couldn’t recall which of his underlings had first coined the name for the facility, but it had stuck, largely because it appealed to his own quietly mordant sense of humor. Half the country seemed to imagine that dark conspiracies were carried out there as a matter of daily routine. In truth, most of his time was taken up with land development, transport, housing, and industrial project management.

  He had effectively become the mayor of the greatest boomtown in U.S.
history, and he spent a good deal of his down time wishing he was still a junior officer, so the Zone would have been somebody else’s headache. Then he’d be free to go off and fly jets. Or even build them, which was one of the things the R & D group met to thrash out every Friday morning.

  On this particular Friday, with the formal part of the meeting over, everyone had broken down into smaller discussion groups scattered at tables throughout the room, to knock heads over things that should have been easily resolved. The main problem, Kolhammer had found, was the seemingly infinite bounty of knowledge the Multinational Force had brought through the wormhole. This seemed to induce a state he’d once heard described as “option paralysis.”

  He could feel his patience running out as he moved through the briefing room, on the way back to his own office.

  “We should just forget the torpedo problem,” one of his officers was arguing, “and concentrate on mines instead. Those babies sank more tonnage than any other weapon, and in fact—if I recall correctly—more than all the other weapon types combined in the Pacific theater.”

  At the next table, a marine, one of Lonesome’s people, was counting off points on his fingers as he tried to make his pitch for the projects he thought should get priority. “We need to begin immediate mass production of the Vought F-Four-U-One Corsair,” he said emphatically. “It was a tough, reliable ground-attack fighter which saw constant active service through to the end of the Korean War. It’ll make a huge difference in the Pacific, in places like Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, when we finally get there.”

  A ’temp, an army captain, made another point. “I agree that we have to keep on building the Sherman, to make the best of a bad situation. But what would even the odds against the Axis tanks—and the Soviets, if that became necessary—would be upgunning it straight away to the E-Eight Super Sherman. Those were originally produced in late ’44, as the result of two years’ hard combat experience, and the technical data is available immediately, in the goddamn Fleetnet lattice.”