Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  “They brought me to a death house, one we’d used many times. Bodies upon bodies under the sand in the backyard. They tied me to a chair in the living room and there were the knives and a cigarette lighter and a bottle of acid and I started weeping uncontrollably. Save your tears, faggot, they said. Because we’ll really give you something to cry about. But they didn’t understand—I wasn’t crying from fear of pain, but because I was afraid I would hurt them.

  “There were four of them. They were drunker than usual, and my bonds were loose, and I prayed that they’d just kill me before giving me an opening, but the devil was near, I could hear his footsteps as he walked through the house, opening drawers and looking in closets, and then he was listening behind the kitchen door, and despite my prayers one of the men went outside to call a girlfriend and another went off to take a piss and another went to get a beer and the last was a friend, a man whose life I had saved many times over, and I thought he might even let me go, and I tried to keep God’s face in my mind’s eye while he stood there telling me how badly he would make me die, and I prayed fiercely for the strength to just let it happen, but then I stopped, because suddenly I knew beyond question that I’d been praying to the void, that no one was listening, or ever had been, and with that I felt nothing but a profound emptiness and a slight sorrow. Before that, I’d thought I didn’t fear death, but it was only then that I realized that fearing death was all I’d ever done, and in that moment my fear was gone, which made me free, though all the light had left the world. Then my friend turned his back on me to find a cigarette.

  “For practical reasons I spent no more than a minute on any one of them, though for them I suspect it was a long minute indeed. You have to be careful, or they just go into shock, and then what’s the point? I smoked a cigarette, while I worked, to cover the smell. Ever seen an altar of Mictlantecuhtli? A brutal relic of the Aztec past, now in vogue again. I made one, though it wasn’t easy, human sinew being more resilient than I’d expected, and me not having the right tools to hand.

  “Before I left town I went to the billboard and shot His eyes out, so that His face framed little burning holes onto nothing, which seemed about right. I was raised Catholic, but, frankly, its virtues are those of women and of slaves.”

  Silence. Kern says, “Why tell me these things?”

  “Want to see something funny?” Hiro says. “The day after I killed my unit I went and killed my old boss.” Another silence. “He was the one putting contracts on my head. With him in the ground, I’d get breathing space. It was the savvy career move.”

  Hiro hands him his phone which shows birds-of-paradise on a dusty hillside, and then the view rotates sickeningly into cloudless blue sky before panning over dry distant mountains and settling onto a large white house roofed in red tile, and down by the garden is a wall of glass and behind the glass a fat old man and a pretty young girl are naked on a bed. Crosshairs snap into place alongside fluctuating numbers marked “meters” and “windage” and Kern realizes that this footage is not from a phone but from the scope of a gun. As though reading his thoughts, Hiro says, “It’s an M-110XE, the old U.S. Marine Corps sniper rifle. A classic. We trained with them at the academy.”

  A sequence of tones as a number is dialed and then ringing and an older man who sounds like he’s used to giving orders says, “Hello?”

  From the phone Hiro’s voice says, “What would you pay for the death of Don Victor Garcia?”

  The older man says, “Who the fuck is this?” and then, after a pause, he names a large sum.

  Hiro: “I just emailed you the account information. Transfer the funds in the next two minutes and it’s done.”

  Older man: “Who is this?”

  Hiro: “I think you know. Yesterday I resigned from Don Victor’s service, so, counting me, he’s down five men.”

  Older man: “I did hear about that, and yes, I do know who you are. And as much as I would love to see Don Victor dead, and however dearly I would pay for that privilege, the problem is that I don’t trust you in the slightest, you backstabbing, coat-turning son of a bitch.”

  Hiro: “I appreciate your point of view. I just sent you a link to the video feed from my rifle’s scope.”

  The man and the girl are having sex now, the man’s face turning red, his eyes squeezed shut, the girl staring at the ceiling like she’s trying to remember something as her feet flop up and down on his shoulders. The crosshairs come to rest over the man’s right ear. On his tricep is a tattoo of Saint Death, a skeleton in a robe holding a scythe. Beyond the bed is a television showing rioters in a public square throwing bottles stuffed with burning rags at cops with plastic shields and it must be someplace really poor because none of the cops have powered armor.

  Hiro: “If you want to make sure it’s real just turn on CNN.”

  Older man: “If you’re fucking with me, if this is a trick with computer graphics, then by the Virgin’s cunt you’ll find out how I got such a hard reputation. You’ll have a team of doctors, quite talented men, graduates of the very best schools, all to keep you alive until I’m done with you. Be certain you understand the consequences of breaking your word to me.”

  Hiro: “I’ve got a clear shot at his medulla oblongata but she just put a finger up his ass so you’ve got about thirty seconds to make up your mind.”

  A pause in which Kern can hear the older man breathing.

  Older man: “I sent it.”

  A pop like a firecracker, and the fat man collapses onto the girl. She starts to embrace him and even pats him on the back before she realizes that part of his skull is missing and that his blood is pouring onto her shoulder.

  Hiro: “Of course, I’d have killed him either way.”

  Now the scope is tracking the girl, her face streaked with blood, as she throws open the French doors and runs across the lawn wearing nothing but striped panties and clutching her blouse to her chest. In one hand she has a man’s watch, its dull gold gleaming, inset with what can only be rubies. The crosshairs find the ground in front of her and there’s another pop, and then the girl is sitting on the manicured lawn, looking stunned, and just as she’s about to cry Hiro-in-the-video shouts, “Hey! You in the panties! His wallet! You forgot to take his wallet!”

  Hiro takes his phone back. “That’s our recruiting video. We’re still a young organization.”

  Fully awake now, Kern looks out a window at the moonlight on the sea, wonders where they are, and where Akemi is, how many thousands of miles away. Hiro seems to be feeling confessional so he says, “How did you end up working for Cromwell?”

  “Because my world’s time is ending, though it sometimes seems I’m the only one who knows it. The U.S. doesn’t care about other sovereignties or collateral damage anymore. A few days of daisy-cutter bombs and all my old bosses are dead and some U.S. senator gets a political win. So I came to the North, and found a software baron who’s been accumulating wealth these hundred years and more, and is eager to adapt to the emerging realities.

  “Which reminds me. There’s something I forgot to do.”

  Then Hiro’s gun is in his hand and pressed to Kern’s temple. Kern forces himself to meet Hiro’s eyes in order to keep his dignity while part of him wonders if it’s even safe to discharge a round in a plane like this—would it pierce the hull and depressurize the cabin, or, as this is a bird-of-war, would the round bounce off its armor and carom around until both of them were dead? In any case he’s glad to have something to think about besides the steel against his forehead.

  “Boom!” says Hiro, and then puts the gun away. “There was an order for your execution, which I gave, and now it’s done. So your old life is gone, and, improbably enough, you have another, and with that life you can do as you will. How’d you like to work for me?”

  48

  World Is a Chessboard

  The outside world is a sense of mass sliding by behind the town car’s darkened windows. Clink from the micro-fridge as the car corners; mouth
dry, Thales opens it but finds nothing but two splits of champagne, one open and half empty, its carbonation hissing. As the car corners the crash seat tightens, pressing the gun into his chest.

  He isn’t sure what he’ll say when he takes the gun out and points it at the surgeon—is there some form or accepted usage? In the stress of the moment he doubts he’ll be able to manage either the lyrical profanity of a gangster or the ironic detachment of a gentleman-at-arms; best, no doubt, to make his threats simply, and in his own words. He imagines the surgeon seeing the gun and instantly submerging himself in an immovable professional gravity while he, Thales, rants on disjointedly about cities in the waves and oracular strangers and his accelerating sense of losing the thread, and it’s in his mind to stop the car and toss the gun out the window but then he remembers Akemi’s suggestion that his mother sold him out which elicits a sense of emptiness so profound that he feels almost weightless and the imminence of violence no longer much concerns him.

  There’s a succession of basso thumps, probably his brothers’ dance music with the volume turned low.

  The map is gone from the seat-back display, replaced with an interface he hasn’t seen before, enumerating munitions remaining and hull integrity broken down by panel.

  The crash seat seizes him so tightly that it crushes the air from his lungs and then the car clips something and, discontinuously, is spinning, and he wonders if here, right now, this is his death, and then there’s another impact, and the car has stopped.

  Engaging, reads the display, and the car hums as the ammunition meters tick down, all at different rates, like stopwatches out of synchrony.

  The enforced passivity is unbearable but the seat won’t let him go. Psychologically better if they at least give you the illusion of control, maybe let you fire one of the car’s ancillary guns. The car shakes as the larboard hull integrity falls.

  A sound like a whip cracking right in front of his face and now there are matching holes to his left and right in the darkened windows, each the width of a champagne flute. High-velocity armor-piercing rounds, he thinks, just like before, and if it was his father’s turn then it must be his turn now, and it’s almost a relief that it’s finally happening. Through the holes he sees color and hints of texture—grey of concrete, black of smoke, radiant blue sky—and now he can hear the polyphony of gunfire.

  The shooting stops, and the ammunition meters stop counting down. Executive override: Standing down, reads the display. It smells of sulfur, burning rubber, hot concrete.

  The crash seat releases him. Crouching on the floor, he tries to decide if he should stay in the town car, though it’s either malfunctioning or compromised and its armor is of demonstrated ineffectiveness, or run for it, though he’d have to fight off unknown and heavily armed attackers with an antique pistol he’s never fired and for which he has exactly six rounds.

  The windows turn transparent—there’s a chromatic corona around the bullet holes—and he sees he’s in a wide street in a sort of canyon of favelas. The town car is wedged into a pile of cars, some burning, all wrecked, black smoke pouring up. Shattered bits of chassis smolder on the ground, and the walls are marred with bullet holes and black starbursts of carbonization. Drones swarm in the air—he sees with relief that some have the livery of the Provisional Authority but their guns too are trained on his car. There’s no one around—the favelinos apparently know when to scatter. It’s as squalid as a war zone, the kind of place where death comes easily, and now a woman is stepping through the smoke rising from the wreckage of a motorcycle.

  Her face is covered with a cloth, probably against the smoke but it makes her look like a bandit. She seems unfazed as the drones converge on her, and then they arrange themselves into a hemisphere with her at the center, their weapons pointed outward, maintaining formation as she approaches the car.

  The town car’s windows descend of their own accord and a drone appears on his right, the side opposite the woman, its guns trained on him at such an angle that the rounds would go through him and into the seats—he remembers how stubborn bloodstains can be, and how particular his father’s valet was about the upholstery—but it doesn’t fire, and he’s aware of the passing of more seconds of life.

  The woman leans in through the window and pulls down the cloth that hides her nose and mouth. She’s of his mother’s age, or rather agelessness, and her hair, tied back, reveals a scar on her forehead, and then he realizes that he knows her, that it’s the ragged woman, or her twin, but with none of the evident craziness or erosion of the street.

  She’s about to say something but stops short as realization hits and then in a flat, definitive voice she says, “You’re the Brazilian prime minister’s son.”

  You said that before, he thinks, as she steps back as though scalded, and then something seems to drain out of her and she suddenly looks old. “Oh,” she says, and holds her face in her hands, and now she’s looking at her hands like they’re someone else’s and peering around as though the morning held a secret.

  The drone’s guns are still trained on him, the barrels black tunnels into nothing. The woman seems to have forgotten he’s there, and there’s nothing to do, and nowhere to go, but then he remembers that the town car, for all its sleekness, weighs over seven thousand pounds, and is engineered to run roadblocks—the Mitsui salesmen had said it could easily push a tractor off the road.

  The drone in the window rises away, its sudden absence an unexpected grace. He says, “Command escape, all-in, now!” The car’s engine roars as it breasts through the smoldering wrecks and then the acceleration throws him back into the seat.

  The car goes up on two wheels as it corners without slowing and Thales looks back in time to see the woman raise her hand toward a drone like a contralto about to sing, and then the drone detonates like a firework.

  Her face is washed out in the flash. She looks self-contained, interested, a little sad.

  Then she’s gone, but he hears the echoes of more explosions, guesses she’s blowing up the rest.

  * * *

  The clinic’s steel gates close soundlessly behind the town car and he kicks open the door and scrambles out onto the courtyard’s sand. The town car’s right side is unscathed but the left looks like a target at a shooting range. Where armor’s been shot up he can see that it’s ceramic, and about half a foot thick, which would be why the interior is so cramped. Bullets are buried in the armor like grubs in a rotten log—he pulls one out between thumb and forefinger—it’s like a crumpled metal mushroom the thickness of his thumb. He watches it scintillate in the light, then flings it off into the garden’s raked sand.

  A girl in clinic livery approaches—young and pretty, he notes distantly—and in her posture is both welcome and submission. He gestures at the car and says, “Something happened. There was an attack,” speaking too fast, his fear and urgency demanding a response but she just smiles professionally and he wonders if she heard him because she doesn’t even look at the car, just takes his elbow and ushers him into the cool dark of the clinic. She checks her tablet and says, “We’ve lowered the lights for you, to minimize the potential for”—she frowns—“disturbance,” and he’s going to ask if she happened to have noticed that his car’s been shot to fuck, and call his family, their security, the police, somebody, but he stops, says nothing, somehow certain that his words would disappear like stones dropped in a deep well, and it occurs to him that he’s now inside the clinic and was too distracted to be nervous about bringing in the gun.

  The surgeon’s office is as dark as a tomb, the only color the muted red of the worn Persian rug, and from behind his desk the surgeon says, “These are the final tests, on which everything depends, so please do your best today.”

  “Actually, today’s going to be different,” Thales says, aware of the weight of the gun over his heart, and it seems like his confidence must be unmistakable but the surgeon just pushes his tablet across the desk and on it there’s video of a man sitting on a st
ool in a cinder-block room. His arms are folded and he’s staring off to one side, wide-eyed, as though shell-shocked. His sleeveless T-shirt reveals a wiry musculature, and on his shoulders are mottled pink patches of recently regenerated skin. He’s sweating under the harsh overhead light and Thales wonders if this is a deliberate stab at a film noir sensibility.

  “Why didn’t you fire?” asks someone off-camera.

  The man blinks, seems to recollect himself. “What?”

  “Why. Didn’t. You. Fire. We have you on video walking out of the villa and ditching your armor. You could’ve shot out one of the plane’s engines before it got ten feet off the ground.”

  “Because she won,” the man says in a hollow voice.

  “The audit clearly shows that you had full control by the time you left the villa, yet you did not engage, so how do you—”

  “Because she won,” the man says, fully present for the first time. “She could’ve killed me if she’d wanted to.” His accent is languid, the vowels long, some subspecies of American English. “You know what an iron maiden is? That’s what my armor was, once she owned it. But she must’ve found the pictures of my girls, and took pity on me. She told me to remember that, and I intend to. So that’s why I let her go, and that’s why I’m done. I don’t care if I end up digging ditches for a living. I lost, I should’ve died, and I’m going home.”

  “Failure is never acceptable, Corporal Boyd.”

  “If you don’t like failure, maybe you should give your shooters armor with more security than my kid’s Barbie. She burned it in the time it takes to light a cigarette.”

  “Did you make a deal, Corporal Boyd? Did she buy you off? Because we think you made a deal, and we’d be more inclined to show clemency if you admit it.”

  Boyd regards him, and beneath his surface apathy there’s a glittering readiness to harm. He says, “Why don’t you come on over here, sweetheart, and whisper that in my ear.”