Taj’s chair toppled over and he tried to catch himself but landed hard on his tailbone. He rolled over onto his side, clutching his wrist.
The hologram’s library pyre was now extinguished and the black forms found themselves underwater. They flickered out one by one as the water rose quickly from floor to floor. Smythe turned off the hologram and looked at Aboye with something like shame. The automated defenses had detected and defeated them. The cone of light around them brightened slightly, indicating the test was over.
Aboye moved to help Taj up but then checked himself. Angrily, he thought that perhaps Taj needed to learn a lesson from the pain, and maybe grow up a bit. He turned his back on the group and made for the darkness across the hangar, walking past row after row of murmuring servers, the waves of warmth washing over him.
He reached the exit. He faintly heard Smythe issuing commands to the room, but the rushing of blood in his ears prevented him from understanding them.
As soon as he was outside, he sat down, closed his eyes, and covered his head with his arms. He sighed. What else could he do? This was not working out like it was supposed to.
He felt a hand on his shoulder. He sprang up and saw Taj, a white cryo-pack on his wrist.
“Is it all right?” asked Aboye.
“My wrist or the project?” said Taj. “Thanks for making sure I was okay.”
“My apologies. I didn’t handle that well,” said Aboye. “You know how I can be, and, well, this didn’t go as planned.”
“Look, there’s no sugarcoating it. We’re in trouble. Running out of time and money too,” said Taj.
“I will spend every last dollar I have,” Aboye said. “I started with nothing, so that is not my fear. I fear failure, and what it would mean for this country. We need to succeed because of the importance of our mission, yes. That is crucial. But there is something bigger on the line. Do you know what it is?”
“I’ve been going full tilt for three days. Stop with the riddles,” said Taj.
“We need to become again the country that breaks the hard problems, that sees the virtue in innovation and the reward in risk,” he said. “If we do not succeed, then I worry that all truly is lost.”
“Daniel, stop trying to put the weight of the world on our shoulders. We’ll never crack it if we think that way. We all joined for that stuff, but also for the challenge. That’s the fun part.”
Aboye could muster no reply. Instead he turned from Tai and walked slowly down the runway, gazing up at the starry sky.
As he walked along the deserted tarmac, the massive hangar building slowly shrank behind him and clouds gradually hid the stars above him. A gust of wet wind left a fine mist on his face, and he stopped in the middle of the runway. He felt truly lost, and he did the only thing he knew to do when he felt that way. He sank to his knees and began to pray.
USS Zumwalt, Mare Island Naval Shipyard
“Smells like victory!” somebody said. Laughter followed.
Vern Li peeked out between the fist-size gap in the curtain on her bunk. Flashes of flesh. Gray underwear. She wrinkled her nose as the funk of digested rations worked its way into her bunk. It mixed with the smell of her coveralls: her sweat and the remnants of epoxy from some of the structural reinforcements she had been trying to work around a few hours before. She smiled and stifled a laugh. It was so awful, all of it, that you had to just give in to it. It had been three days since she’d showered.
Closing her eyes, she tried to wedge herself into the corner. But what had started out as laughter flipped over to tears as quickly as powering on a pair of glasses.
She felt silly, knowing the mix of laughter and tears were just from being so tired and loopy. Before the war, she had planned to redefine how to power machines. Energy, the magic of the battery, was the essence of their utility. It was what gave machines life and gave humans their life force: an electrical spirit. Or so she’d thought when she was smoking weed in high school. Now she was just a machine herself. No different than any other device on the ship. She felt drained, empty.
Vern wiped her tears away and slipped on her glasses to check the time: 0443.
She batted the curtain aside, trying to ignore the yellow pulsing 14.3 in the corner of her vision that indicated the number of hours of REM sleep she needed in order to return to average performance. She hoped the rainbow glow of the code she reviewed as she made her way to the galley would help obscure her red eyes. Somehow, she would get through another day.
Out in the hallway, or passageway, as the crew kept telling her to call it, she followed the line headed toward the galley.
“Good morning, Dr. Li,” said a voice behind her.
Mike stood in the middle of the passageway, a massive ceramic coffee cup held loosely in his left hand. He wore his usual orange utility vest over the navy blue overalls, a color combination that made him look like one of those prisoners from the Syrian intervention. But the old guy still had that something, she had to admit. He’d aged well, sort of like that old movie star the People zine kept putting in their annual list, decades after his first time on the cover.
“Can I ask you to come with me to the rail-gun magazine? Need you to take a look at something I’m working on,” he said.
She looked at him blankly, still trying to wake up fully.
“If you want, you can grab some chow. The work can hold for a few minutes,” he said.
“Maybe for you, old man. But all a modern girl needs is a little willpower and a lot of pill power.” She stepped into the galley and grabbed a bright red can of Coke Prime and an inch-long foil packet of energy and sustenance pills.
Vern’s stomach was growling, but she didn’t want to show weakness. She smiled to herself. It was all the same, whether you were on the high school volleyball team, in grad school, or at war: never let ’em see you sweat.
“All right, then,” he said with a slight tone of admiration. “Breakfast of champions it is, Dr. Li.”
But as Vern followed Mike down the passageway, she held the cold metal of the can to her forehead, trying to keep back the headache until the pills hit.
They came to a hatch, what the Navy guys called a door, and Mike moved aside to let her pass through first. She thought he’d smell like old man or engine grease, but instead she smelled citrus.
“Don’t want you getting scurvy. We had to worry about that back in my day,” he said as he held out a freshly peeled orange to her.
She took the orange with a smile.
The rail-gun magazine extended below the turret, deeper into the ship, and that was where Vern sat, on an upturned plastic crate. She watched Mike welding and slowly ate the orange slices, savoring the tartness. This space was cramped, and she sat within arm’s reach of Mike. Looking through her goggles, she saw the flare of the welding torch create an eclipse-like profile of the old chief. Streaks of sweat tracked down his neck. Then the torch abruptly snapped off. He lifted his welding mask, eyes blinking at the smoke, and moved so she could see the rack that held the armatures for the rail-gun rounds.
“You see how it’s done, Dr. Li?” said Mike.
She slowly chewed her last orange slice, unsure what he meant.
“The welds? I want you to see how it’s done,” he said. “Up there, in the turret, we can do it your way, but you’re missing the technique, the art of it . . . If you just melt the surface of the wire or fitting and let it stick to the surface, it might be good enough for some lab, but it wouldn’t hold under the kind of pressures we could get in action. It’s about doing it smoothly, to ensure a proper mixing of the materials. Let me show you. Put my mask on and pass me your goggles.”
He motioned her over to the square of blue-foam padding he’d been kneeling on and handed her a pair of welding gloves.
“Those gloves should fit. I had to guess the size, b
ut I think I got it. So this is structural, what we’re doing. Nobody’s going to see it, but everybody’s going to depend on it,” he said. “We’ll do a first pass then we’ll see how it goes.”
She knelt and he sat on the box behind her, reaching around to her left side to help her keep a steady hand as the torch flared. Back and forth they went until Mike let her use the torch without his help.
“There you go. Make a puddle, keep track of that as it builds,” he said, guiding her hand slowly across the seam where the armature rack connected to the deck. “We’ll need to make a few passes and then let it cool. Then again. Good technique comes with practice.”
“Why aren’t you using a laser welder?” asked Vern.
“Because there’s no reason to get fancy,” said Mike. “The old MIG welder works, so why change? No need to teach an old dog new tricks if the old ones still get the job done. You’ll learn that one eventually.”
Lotus Flower Club, Former French Concession, Shanghai
He knew not to ask her name, so for now, she was just the new Twenty-Three.
Sechin opened the door and found her waiting under the sheets. Her eyes were wide open, unblinking, and tracked him with the kind of focus that came from a pill. To Sechin, she looked harder and, while still beautiful, slightly less inviting. The downsides of a professional’s existence. Once again, purpose trod upon pleasure, thought Sechin.
With the old Twenty-Three, everything was about what he wanted; with the new Twenty-Three, it was about what she wanted, first details on the Cherenkov program and now information on Directorate defenses in the northern Pacific.
Once he’d undressed and folded his clothes, he slipped under the sheets. They were orange this time. The delight of being under the covers with her warm, naked body was undeniable. It was that moment he savored, that first moment of contact with her skin as she quickly pulled the sheets over him.
She put a finger to her lips and he nodded. She lay back and closed her eyes. He watched her chest rise and fall with her steady breathing. He studied the tattoo at her waist. It was an intricate wreath of roses and snakes. He made out a cobra and a coral snake. There were two others that he could not identify. The roses were beautiful.
Then she turned on the recording of Sechin and the previous Twenty-Three’s lovemaking and began to arrange the thin blanket that would shield their conversation. He felt his cheeks flush with embarrassment.
“I think it is everything you are looking for,” said Sechin. “But I can’t guarantee that I was able to get it out clean. I tried but there is an urgency to all of this that —”
“Are you compromised?” she demanded, leaning on one elbow. She ran a finger down his chest and stopped at a fresh scar just below his navel. It was about an inch wide and was covered with the clear surgical glue used to seal the incision. Sechin had made the cut himself using the surgi-pen he found in the CIA dead drop behind an eel vendor’s stall at Shanghai’s Tangjiawan Lu wet market.
“Entirely,” he said with a dramatic sigh that released a warm cloud of stale tobacco and vodka under the covers. Twenty-Three wrinkled her nose with disappointment.
“This is not the time to make jokes,” she said. “So tell me, are you compromised?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Like I said, I moved quickly because I had to. But I was careful. I always am.”
“Then let’s proceed,” she said. “And you can relax.”
“Happily,” he said. “Do you want to be on top?”
She shook her head and shifted her weight under him. Her hand probed around the area of his incision. He winced at the pain, and she apologized.
“Okay, I feel the chip,” she said. “Move a little to the left. Your left. There.”
The epidermal electronic reader hidden in the tattoo’s ink vibrated faintly as it downloaded Sechin’s file with a tickling sensation. He tried to kiss her and she pulled back.
“Stop!” she hissed. “Hold very, very still.”
The vibration continued for almost a minute and then both of them looked at each other as the sensation abruptly ceased.
“That wasn’t so bad,” he said. “Is it enough to end a war? Certainly wars have been started for less.”
“I need to go,” she said, trying to roll him off her. “This cannot wait.”
“Of course it can,” he said. “Besides, if I leave too quickly, won’t they think you’re not up to the job?”
With a resigned look, she nestled next to him. “You’re going to just hold me,” she said. This time, it seemed her command was not about the job. He grasped her shoulder and felt her tremble for a moment.
“If you were not scared, you would not be doing your job,” he said gently.
He’d begun to tell himself that they were making a connection when the recording stopped and she abruptly threw the sheet off them.
“Our time is up,” she said as she turned her back on him and began to get dressed.
“Of course it is,” he said.
USS Zumwalt, West of Alcatraz Island, San Francisco Bay
“Remember, just don’t hit the bridge,” said executive officer Horatio Cortez as the Zumwalt passed Angel Island to starboard.
Two cups of coffee ago, the ship had cast off from the pier at Mare Island for the first time since its overhaul. It was an anxious moment. Had it not been for the Mentor Crew’s ease in handling the ship’s lines, Simmons was pretty sure the ship would still be in port; the kids who’d helped refit the ship’s systems had no idea how to get a warship under way. The Zumwalt had carefully processed from the shipyard at Mare Island down to Alcatraz Island, where it maneuvered to a very specific patch of the Bay, just off eBay Park’s pier.
The highly anticipated visit was timed to coincide with a San Francisco Giants game against the Washington Nationals. The Directorate well knew the Americans were refurbishing the ship by watching from above; they just didn’t know any details. So the public rollout at the baseball game on a night when military personnel were given free tickets was billed as a morale booster. Secretary of Defense Marylyn Claiburne was even coming in to throw the first pitch.
After her debut on the pitcher’s mound, however, she was not going to the owner’s private box, as most visiting dignitaries would do. Her next stop would be the Zumwalt’s bridge, where they could use the night game at the park as a cover to test out the ship’s new power systems.
Pier 1, Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone
She actually had to fight for this one.
At Local, a nightclub off Ala Moana Boulevard near pier 1, Carrie nearly caused a brawl trying to get this marine to dance with her. The Russian prostitute he was with looked like a junkie, and all it took was a discreet and well-placed foot to send her sprawling on the dance floor. Local’s security, off-duty Directorate forces, whisked the prostitute out before she even had a chance to get back to her feet. It was her pimp that was the problem. He took Carrie for competition and grabbed her by the back of the neck to pull her off the dance floor. A roundhouse kick from her dance partner sent the pimp into a group of Directorate sailors stuffing money and pills into a naked table dancer’s scuffed white boots.
After another close dance, she asked him to take her somewhere they could be alone. That turned out to be an eight-wheeled armored assault vehicle that looked exactly like one of the vehicles she used to see around her fiancé’s air base. Cocooned inside the welded steel hull, the two sat facing each other in the compartment that was big enough to carry up to seven soldiers. A monitor’s faint red light shone down from the opening to the wedge-shaped 105 mm cannon turret above them. With the stench of sweat and stale food inside, the Directorate marine must have felt like he was trying to get laid in a dumpster, but apparently he didn’t care.
He turned his back to her and reached forward to the music player
rigged between the front seats. She could see the muscles in his shoulders ripple and looked at the four rainbow-hued tiger tattoos that covered his back and upper arms. His shaved head revealed a Morse code of scars, a lot for someone who couldn’t be more than twenty-five.
“I have jazz,” he said. “Chinese. Okay?”
Carrie laughed. “Sure.”
Through the open rear hatch, she could hear the faint lapping of the water just beneath the pier where the vehicle was parked.
“Your English is good,” she said.
“My parents made me learn since I was two,” said the marine. “For business.”
Carrie raised a shot glass of the baijiu he’d poured for her. It tasted like shitty vodka.
“To your parents,” she said. “But this is not business. A thank-you for your rescuing me . . . I think you should shut the door now.”
“The hatch,” he said and squeezed past her to shut them inside the vehicle. The heavy steel and the layer of reactive armor affixed to the exterior suddenly made the soundproof space they shared feel very small.
She climbed forward on all fours with a feline fluidity and straddled him. She still wore the black silk cocktail dress, but her high heels hung from a gear rack. He wore only the sheer black pants that seemed to be the Directorate off-duty uniform for nightclubs and bars.
The piano playing on the speakers was barely acceptable; it sounded kind of like Art Hodes, if he were a half-drunk robot and had a stim pump running on overdrive. Carrie’s father had come from Gary, Indiana, in Chicago’s shadow, and had taught her about the beauty of jazz and the horror of men.
She kissed him, tasting only alcohol, then she arched her upper body away from him.
“Do you have any restraints?” she said.
“I’ll do anything.” He grinned.
“Of course you will,” she said. “I mean like a rope.”
“Can I record it for my feed?”
“This is for us, nobody else. No viz, okay?”
She leaned forward and kissed the nape of his neck and then his ear, careful to let her nipples move their way toward his face.
Ghost Fleet Page 22
