Ghost Fleet

by P. W. Singer, August Cole

  He felt her hand around his neck. She gasped as the meaty rawness of the remains of her burned finger pressed into his throat. But it wasn’t a cry of hurt, Markov realized. She was savoring the pain.

  “I want my hairbrush!” she whispered in his ear.

  In that instant, his vodka wore off with a chill.

  Tiangong-3 Space Station

  “Sir, I know you are excited to seize your prize, but you need to let Tick go in first,” said Aaron Best in the practiced tone of a commander used to dealing with very difficult situations. He was tethered just outside the main airlock of the Tiangong, trying to stay out of view of the porthole next to it. The airlock access panel glowed green, indicating it was safe to enter the purgatory between the vacuum of space and the oxygenated confines of the Chinese station.

  “But it is my mission, isn’t it?” said Sir Aeric Cavendish.

  “Affirmative. But once we exited the vehicle, mission execution became my responsibility. Sir. We did not drill for you to join the boarding party, so we are going to need you to hang back outside until things settle in there. Highest probability for success that way. We can do the breach with fewer men, but not more.” He pointed toward the hatch with a gleaming silver dagger that caught a flash of the sun and momentarily blinded Sir Aeric. “But we’re honored to have you as part of the assault crew, Sir Aeric.”

  Best’s logic was as obvious as his sarcasm. Cavendish nodded his assent.

  “Stack up,” said Best. The commando called Tick was first inside the airlock, which was soon crammed with four men.

  Once inside, the men stopped and paused as the airlock depressurized. Immediately, they took off their helmets, stripped out of the bulky EVA suits, and secured them to the airlock wall.

  The men wore slash-proof, formfitting, tiger-striped gray-and-black bodysuits that covered their heads, making them look like evil speed skaters. They put on ballistic masks, motocross-style eye-and-face protection that was resistant to bullets up to nine-millimeter rounds, each painted over to give its wearer a savage look. Another of Sir Aeric’s ideas, but the men had taken to it with relish. Tick’s black facemask had been overlaid with a ta moko, the facial tattoo of a Maori warrior. Hugger, who hunched behind Tick, had used a metallic gold to create hyena-like fangs beneath deeply sunken eye sockets. Hook wore a black mask with almost abstract white brushstrokes to indicate eyes and mouth, like a savage Kabuki actor. Best was the fourth and final commando of the first wave. His mask was airbrushed a gleaming bone white in the style of an old-school hockey goalie’s mask. He’d seen it once in an old horror movie; the lack of expression on the killer’s face made him somehow more menacing. The effect was that these men, while obviously human, looked immune to reason and appeal. The sense was reinforced by the fact that each had a Taser X26 pistol in his hand and one of Sir Aeric’s foot-long titanium-handled steel-bladed brass-knuckled trench knife strapped to his hip.

  The first thing Tick noticed when the airlock groaned open was the smell of piss. Floating weightlessly, he pulled himself one-handed inside the main research bay and looked at the three taikonauts there. They had apparently been trying to get into EVA suits.

  “Do you surrender?” he asked them in Mandarin.

  The three taikonauts stared back at Tick.

  Tick repeated himself as the three other commandos made their way into the room, each holding on to the wall with one hand and pointing a Taser with the other.

  “Do you surrender?” he asked yet again in Mandarin.

  The three taikonauts stayed silent; there was no real movement, just darting eyes and dry lips being licked. Then a hatch to their side opened.

  “Contact,” said Best. “Head on, Tick.”

  Tick pushed off the station’s wall and rotated his body, turning to parry. But the taikonaut moving through the hatch closed in on him with far more speed than he’d expected given their training. Then he saw why. The man wore a pair of orange exoskeleton boots from an EVA suit, their micro-rockets firing. He had a titanium-mesh frame on his back, and attached to it were the bulky robotic gloves designed for repair jobs in space. One of those exo-gloves wielded a massive wrench.

  Tick fired his Taser; the compressed air in the chamber shot out the electric dart on a thin wire, but it pinged off the bulky gloves and then floated weightlessly in the air.

  The two men collided, and the taikonaut’s momentum knocked Tick into the bulkhead. The impact broke Tick’s right forearm; he tried to pull out the short sword but had to release it. Screaming, Tick attempted to grapple with the taikonaut using his legs, but one of the taikonaut’s exo-boots drove into his left foot with a crunch of flesh and bone.

  Tick’s agony was muted due to the pain pump implanted in his abdomen. Triggered by a sensor in his spinal cord, it released a massive dose of opiates so he could keep fighting. The tiny actuators of the taikonaut’s powered exo-glove now gripped him, and though Tick writhed and flexed, he was unable to escape from its grasp. As the two wrestled, the other commandos closed on their opposites, and the sounds of grunting and stabbing filled the air. Tick tried to wrench his body to the right when he saw his sword float by, mere inches from his uninjured arm. But he was unable to break free to reach it, and then he spun off in another direction, bounced against the far bulkhead, and cracked the back of his helmet. The last thing Tick saw was the wrench smashing into his faceplate.

  Ehukai Beach, Oahu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  The SEALs and Conan eased deeper into the thick trees. The robot lobster sat idle at the feet of one of the frogmen until he picked it up and put it on his back; its claws wrapped around him like straps.

  “Butter’s pretty creepy, right?” said Duncan.

  “At this point, nothing’s creepy to me,” said Conan. “Any more gizmos we’ve added since I’ve been living under a rock?”

  “Just this,” said Duncan, tossing a small nylon bag the size of his fist to Conan.

  “What is it?” said Conan, unwrapping it to reveal a poncho.

  “You remember Harry Potter? It’s his invisibility cloak,” said Duncan. “Well, it doesn’t really make us invisible, but it does fuzz the Directorate sensors. Metamaterials in it fuck with the EM spectrum, kinda like how a magician uses mirrors in a trick.”

  “We’ve done all right with these,” said Conan, drawing her wool blanket around her shoulders. It was so stiff with sweat and dirt in places that she seemed to be donning a mantle of armor.

  “But this doesn’t smell like a dead goat,” said Duncan. “We have others for the rest of your unit.”

  “No need; I’m it now,” said Conan.

  Duncan knew not to ask anything further. It was not the time for that kind of conversation. From the way Conan’s voice dropped with her response, he knew she would be trying to figure out her own war for the rest of her life.

  A rustle in the scrub at the seam of the beach made Conan fling off her blanket, drop down, and put her weapon to her shoulder. Duncan dove down behind her. She saw a figure advancing slowly, staying in the shadows. The silhouette of an assault rifle showed it to be armed. Conan looked over to Duncan and motioned with her finger for him to follow her lead. He shook his head.

  Screw it, this was her turf and her war. She leaped up and smashed the figure full in the face with the butt of her rifle.

  “Co kurwa, do kurwy nedzy!” the man hissed from the ground, blood coming from his apparently broken nose.

  A Russian. She knew they’d been aiding the Directorate with advisers. Conan leveled the rifle at him, pressed it to his forehead.

  “I don’t know if you understand me,” she whispered, “but you need to shut the fuck up or this will be the last thing you see.”

  Conan felt something cold and sharp at her neck. “Major, you need to stand down.” The man who’d called himself Duncan was holding
a knife to her throat.

  USS Zumwalt, North Pacific Ocean

  Mike wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. It was hot in the rail-gun turret. The cabling that snaked through it seemed to be choking the air out of the space. But that was not what was making him sweat.

  “Please take it,” said Mike. He was embarrassed, never having heard himself plead like this before. “It’s a float vest.” This flotation vest was not like the others aboard. It was a dark green inflatable model, the kind issued to Navy aviators, not the bulky vest in bright orange that just made it easier for the sharks to find you. The aviator’s vest had more than a dozen pockets stuffed full of essentials, as much to put a pilot’s mind at ease as to enable him or her to make it in the wild or survive ditching in the ocean. The detachable pockets were hooked with Velcro straps onto horizontal lanyards stitched into the vest and they opened in various directions, each holding a mystery, like an aviator’s Advent calendar.

  “Pilots wear them,” Mike said. “So do some of the SEALs. You’ve got these here pockets that —”

  She did not let him finish. “Where did you get this? Nobody else is wearing this, are they?” said Vern. “It’s just me in this . . . straitjacket?”

  “It comes from the captain, who knows you’re the most important person on the ship.”

  At least part of that was true. He’d actually gotten it from a supply contractor at Mare Island whom he’d served with in the Venezuela campaign, no questions asked about why he wanted the best life vest in the warehouse, size small.

  “It inflates automatically if you don’t pull this tab first. Now, here’s the smoke hood, this is the locator beacon, here’s the strobe . . .”

  He had kept the float vest out of sight, waiting until he knew she really needed it and, more important, until she finally realized she might need it. That moment was now.

  Vern put the vest on, moving carefully, as if it weighed ten times more than it did.

  “Well, thank him for it,” she said. “And thank you.”

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he said with a wink. “It’s government issue, meaning it’s made by the lowest bidder in order to get some overpaid jet jockey to think the Navy actually gives a shit about what happens to him.”

  She smiled. “I mean it. Thank you, Mike.”

  She wrapped her slender arms around him with surprising force.

  A call to general quarters battle stations prevented either of them from saying anything more. They stepped back and looked at each other at arm’s length, then took off in opposite directions, unsure if they would ever see each other again.

  Tiangong-3 Space Station

  Chang screamed into the monitor as he watched the battle play out, but none of them were able to hear him.

  At first, seeing Huan floating above the limp commando with the crazy mask, Chang thought that Huan’s madness just might have worked.

  But behind Huan, the monitor showed the three other taikonauts had not fared as well. One floated unconscious, knocked out by the commandos’ Tasers. The other two had their faces against one of the station walls, each with a commando floating astride him, their suits streaming red blood globules into the air.

  Huan pushed the unconscious commando back toward the airlock, which opened as if to swallow him up. But instead, another commando slipped into the station. This one, much slighter than the others and wearing no mask, appeared shocked for a brief second, his eyes wide. Then he batted the floating commando’s limp body away and fumbled with something at his side. He pushed toward Huan with a diver’s kick of his legs against the airlock door, his entire body formed into a spear, the short sword at its tip.

  Huan pushed forward off his side of the wall with his arms in an attempt to kick the commando with his feet first. The bulk of the exo-boots smashed into the blade, and the force sent the two men careening off in opposite directions. Huan bashed into the hard plastic of a food station, his exo-glove ripping open the rehydration unit, while the slight commando banged headfirst into the wall.

  Before Huan could pull his arm out of the mess of the food unit, the commando with the blank white mask was on him. He jabbed the foot-long sword into Huan’s leg, straight through his suit and into the bulkhead’s insulation. Huan, his body now diagonally pinned to the wall, tried wrenching free, to no avail. Chang watched as the white-masked commando drew a six-inch-long metal stake from a bandolier on his assault vest and drove it into Huan’s chest, puncturing his lung.

  Chang could see Huan looking up at him in the monitor, his face imploring, as if Chang could do anything to save him now. Then Huan’s head lolled to the side, lifeless.

  The man in the white mask removed the sword and stake from Huan’s body and slapped tape over the holes in the suit to keep them from leaking more globules of blood into the station’s atmosphere. The rest of them began to tape up the other bodies. Sheng Hu, the taikonaut who had been shocked unconscious, jerked slightly when the white-masked commando thrust another metal stake into her.

  They truly were monsters, Chang thought. The most disturbing of them, though, was the small, maskless commando. He had a tiny cut over his right eye but was smiling and wildly gesticulating, replaying the battle that had just ended. He seemed to be enjoying it all.

  The men conferred briefly, and the one in the white mask slowly drifted over to the camera and tapped a bloody stake on the screen. He held up three fingers and began counting them down. Three. Two. One.

  Alone, Chang didn’t know what else to do. He let the monsters in.

  Honolulu, Hawaii Special Administrative Zone

  “It itches, right? That’s the thing with amputation, they say. Not the pain, but the itch.”

  Markov was doing exactly what she wanted. As far as Carrie could tell, he would have been happy to oblige her, even without the muzzle of the pistol that she’d lifted from the guard pressed against his kidney. They drove slowly through the dark night in his mottled green-and-gray Geely SUV, the Russian glancing over at her whenever the road straightened. It was not lust or fear; she knew those looks well. It was more a sort of scientific curiosity.

  They drove past a parking lot full of Directorate vehicles. It looked familiar, and she recognized it as where she’d listened to jazz in the APC.

  “You’re taking us the long way,” Carrie hissed. “If we’re not there soon, I’ll —”

  “You’ll what? Kill me with that gun because you’re in a hurry?” said Markov. He drove on, stopping briefly at the corner of Queen and Ward, just across from the Alto Café.

  “I am sure you don’t want to kill me just yet, especially with that gun. That wouldn’t feel right, yes? So if you can give me a little bit of your time, I will take you to what you really want. Or, rather, who you really want.”

  He drove on, humming to himself. They passed by Addiction, the nightclub attached to the Modern, the hotel where she had strangled that naval officer in the bathroom three weeks ago. At the next intersection, he turned to look at her.

  “Where to next? Maybe the hotel? Or did you kill any at your home?” He laughed. “My, how that would surprise your neighbors. You know they all think you are a traitor who enjoys our company.”

  “Whatever. They can think what they want,” she said.

  “So, if you’re not a traitor, then you’re a predator? You kill only the healthy? A wicked insurgent princess of the night wearing a red, white, and blue cape?”

  “The flag’s got little to do with me,” she said. “I just want everything back the way it was.”

  “You mean you want to be back the way you were? Before the war?” said Markov. “What was that like? All I know is the pictures from your file that I see on the hologrid. There’s nothing of Carrie Shin’s heart or soul there.”

  “You’re not looking hard enough,” she said.

  �
��I doubt that,” said Markov, chuckling.

  She put her pistol on her lap and watched him with a slight twist of her head, as if sizing up a target.

  “You should put the safety on if it’s just going to sit there,” said Markov. “For both our sakes.”

  “I guess you’re a professional,” said Shin. “Through and through?”

  “You stick with something long enough and it’s what you become. But you’re certainly no amateur at this,” said Markov. “This war was waiting for somebody like you. Or were you waiting for the war? Did it make you, or was it already there, just waiting to be released?”

  “You talk too much. You said it yourself, we are all changed by war,” said Carrie. “Some more than others.”

  “The war is all about you, then? Did it take something important from you?” asked Markov. “There are many who feel that way. Maybe you are not as unique as I thought.”

  He slowed the car to a walking pace as they passed by Duke’s, overflowing with drunk sailors, marines, and soldiers. He slammed the brakes to avoid running into a short, stocky sailor who’d dropped to one knee to throw up in the intersection.

  “Perhaps we can test it. Should I let you out here, perhaps?” said Markov. “I think you’d quickly make new friends again, maybe visit old ghosts?”

  She didn’t reply, but she adjusted her wig in the side mirror as if slightly tempted by his offer. As she did so, Markov spotted the cut marks on her forearms.

  “The cutting, did it start before or after your loss?” said Markov. “You know, it won’t stop, even if all of them go back home. What are you going to do then?” He winced as the pistol’s muzzle pressed into his rib cage.

  “Your little tour is over,” she said. “The next stop better be where we agreed or you really will be dead. I won’t enjoy it, but I’ll do it.”

  He nodded and kept driving, humming to himself as they headed through the night. After ten minutes, he made another turn and pulled the car to the side of the road.