Jade Dragon
( Sundowners - 5 )
James Swallow
Jade Dragon
James Swallow
My fellow Americans,
I am speaking to you today from the Oval Office, to bring you hope and cheer in these troubling times. The succession of catastrophes that have assailed our once-great nation continue to threaten us, but we are resolute.
The negative fertility zone that is the desolation of the mid-west divides east from west, but life is returning. The plucky pioneers of the new Church of Joseph are reclaiming Salt Lake City from the poisonous deserts just as their forefathers once did, and our prayers are with them. And New Orleans may be under eight feet of water, but they don't call it New Venice for nothing.
Here at the heart of government, we continue to work closely with the MegaCorps who made this country the economic miracle it is today, to bring prosperity and opportunity to all who will join us. All those unfortunate or unwilling citizens who exercise their democratic right to live how they will, no matter how far away from the comfort and security of the corporate cities, may once more rest easy in their shacks knowing that the new swathes of Sanctioned Operatives work tirelessly to protect them from the biker gangs and NoGo hoodlums.
The succession of apparently inexplicable or occult manifestations and events we have recently witnessed have unnerved many of us, it is true. Even our own Government scientists are unable to account for much of what is happening. Our church leaders tell us they are holding at bay the unknown entities which have infested the datanets in the guise of viruses.
A concerned citizen asked me the other day whether I thought we were entering the Last Times, when Our Lord God will return to us and visit His Rapture upon us, or whether we were just being tested as He once tested his own son. My friends, I cannot answer that. But I am resolute that with God's help, we shall work, as ever, to create a glorious future in this most beautiful land.
Thank you, and God Bless America. President Estevez
Brought to you in conjunction with the GenTech Corporation.
Serving America right.
[Script for proposed Presidential address, July 3rd 2021. Never transmitted.]
Ladies and Gentlemen, at this time Virgin SubOrbital would like to announce that our flight is entering the descent phase toward the Hong Kong Free Economic Enterprise Quadrant and our arrival at Chek Lap Kok SkyHarbour is on schedule for seven forty-five pee-em, local time. Your cabin staff wish to remind you that there is still time to make any purchases of perfume, smoking materials, caffeinated products, cyberware or pharmaceuticals from our in-flight dutyfree catalogue; simply press the blue dot on the datascreen installed in your seat arm. Passengers are free to move about the cabin and take drinks at the upper deck bar or use one of our recreation pods in the discreet cabin. However, we would ask all clients to note that once the seat belt sign has been illuminated, all passengers must return to and remain in their seats as the aircraft makes its final approach to Chek Lap Kok. For your comfort and safety, neural induction coils mounted in the headrest of your seats will automatically engage to help minimize any discomfort due to pressure changes in the cabin. In the event of an emergency landing, these coils will also lull you into a dreamless, peaceful sleep while the cabin is flooded with ShokFoam™. Should you have any questions about today’s flight, please feel free to discuss them with one of our polylingual flight attendants. We know you have a choice when selecting the carrier for your company’s international transit needs, and we thank you for choosing Virgin SubOrbital today.
1. Once Upon a Time in China
Frankie worked his jaw and frowned, shifting slightly in the depths of the padded acceleration couch. The conformal cushion gave a sensual sigh and moved to accommodate him, but he fidgeted again. The book he’d loaded into his palmtop remained unread, his attention unable to hold past page six of What Gangcults Can Teach Us About Management. Stuffing the computer into his carry-on bag, his eyes returned to wandering over and around the smooth lines of the airliner cabin. On some level he felt like he was failing to project the right image. The other men and women in their seats, each an arm’s length away from the other and surrounded by an expensive halo of legroom, all seemed so at ease in here as to be profoundly bored with it all. Moving so she wouldn’t know where he was looking, Frankie observed the lady in pinstripes with the Eidolon cheek-tatt. She was still having the same conversation she’d started as they came out of boost phase from LA-Double-X, in poppy little spits of subvocalisation that weren’t real words, talking to a dermal mike in her larynx. A privacy masking field made it impossible for him to figure out what she was so animated about, but by the way she kept miming a gun-forefinger extended, thumb a falling hammer-it was clear somebody back in NorCalifornia was getting reamed. Next to her was a large man who looked like a sumotori, forced into a black Ozwald Boateng suit that might have made an elegant pup tent in another life. The big fellow was engrossed in the screen he gripped with fat sausage fingers; the sound was on direct beam, but Frankie could see the tanned face of ZeeBeeCee’s Tammy Popeldouris engaged in serious conversation with Juno Qwan, while the idol singer’s new vid played picture-in-picture.
A gentle swell of turbulence rocked the liner, reminding him where they were. He sniffed the air; the same canned, conditioned taste that the atmosphere in the office had, that the airport lounge had too. The cabin was seamless in muted reds and pale cream, matching almost perfectly to the decor of the executive embarkation area at LAXX, and no doubt to the egress lounge at SkyHarbour and any one of a hundred other airports around the world. Usually that sort of thing made Frankie feel safe, the idea that the corps were helping to maintain a homogenous profile across the world, so that anyone could find a Buckstars or a MacDee no matter if you were in Manchester or Mumbai… But all of a sudden it seemed too plastic to him, just a veneer over a dangerous, unfamiliar place. He looked away, forcing down the little flutter of butterfly nerves rolling around in his gut. He was supposed to be a professional; this sort of giddy rush was the kind of thing a single-term window gazer would experience, not an echelon executive like him.
I should be making the most of this, he thought. It wasn’t every day he got to fly transcontinental; what with the shifts in the fuel markets and the rise of franchise terrorism post Y2K, aviation had moved back to the rarefied state it was in at the dawn of commercial flight-when only the military and the very rich could afford it.
Frankie let out a controlled breath and, for what must have been the hundredth time during the flight, he unfolded the photo.
There they were, the two of them with big, goofy grins on their faces on the upper deck of the Star Ferry, the lights of the city a rainbow blur behind them. He tried to remember who had taken the picture-one of the other grads, maybe that thin girl from Foshan who got posted to orbit? They both looked so happy there, fuelled by too many bottles of Tsingtao and the elation at making the cut at the corporate academy. That was before the company had parted them, sent him to the other side of the world while his brother got to stay home and rise like a rocket through the ranks of the head office. Frankie felt the bite of resentment and instantly flattened it. No. Alan deserves his success. Deserved it. He was always the more diligent of them, and Frankie knew it. While Frankie had toiled to make any kind of advancement at the Los Angeles division, Alan Lam had caught the eye of the upper tiers and skipped entire grades on his way to the top floors.
Not that any of those things mattered now, a morose inner voice reminded him. When the summons from Yuk Lung Heavy Industry’s headquarters had pinged into life on the LA branch office d-screen, there was a moment when Frankie’s supervisor had automatically assumed it was for him. Burt Tiplady, all one m
etre sixty of his arrogant, noisy self, had swaggered over to take the comm, oozing smarm. Burt had been waiting for four years to get cherry-picked by Hong Kong. The look on his face when he realised the message was for Frankie, not him, was worth every day that Lam had weathered his bellicose presence; but try as he might, Frankie couldn’t rekindle that feeling right now. The cold hollow that formed as Burt passed him the screen to read had overwritten that one moment of elation.
Alan was dead; the company expressed its deepest sympathies, and requested the presence of his brother in the Hong Kong office on the next available stratojet.
That was two days ago. Time had passed in a whirl. The forms authorising his transfer were attached with the comm, and he’d gone back to his dormplex in Santa Monica to find his gear already stowed for transit. YLHI wanted him to come home, and so he did, propelled on a cushion of numbness and faint guilt. Frankie had not spoken to Alan in a year, and even then it had only been a cursory hello-goodbye, something to do with that GenTech problem in Texas. Once, they had been inseparable. Now, the company that had parted them was all that connected them.
Frankie sighed and it came with a shudder. He felt isolated, impossibly disconnected from the young guy in the picture, his hand around his brother’s shoulder, laughing and carefree.
“Going home?”
Frankie looked up with a start and blinked. The flight attendant had materialized from out of thin air, a tray of data needles in the crook of one arm. She had ice blue eyes that matched the sliver-grey glolights in her blonde hair. The smile on her lips was utterly perfect. “I’m s-sorry?” he managed.
“Are you going home? To Hong Kong?” She indicated the picture with a gente incline of her head. “Meeting family?”
“Yes.” His throat went tight. “Can I, um, have a drink, please?”
“Of course. Glen Fujiyama on the rocks, wasn’t it?” She produced the tumbler of whiskey from a trolley at her side.
Frankie took a deep sip, feeling stupid for asking for it like a child begging for sweets. He was in the rare air of the high corporates now, and no one who travelled here had to ask for anything. They were entitled to it.
As if she saw it in his mind, the attendant asked, “Is this the first time you’ve flown with us?” She smiled again. “Congratulations on your promotion.”
“Yes,” he repeated. “Thank you.”
She indicated the tray of software, the varicoloured pins like a spread of fly-fishing lures. “Can I interest you in an entertainment programme? Something from the cinema of the Ukraine, perhaps?”
Frankie shook his head.
“We have sensual recreation automata on board, if you’d prefer. They support a wide range of romantic configurations.”
Another sip. “I’m fine. ”This time he said it with the right tone of dismissal and the attendant melted away with a final, perfectly sculpted smile. He nursed the drink as a low rumble worked its way through the liner’s airframe. Through the half-open window blind, he could see distant hazy blobs that represented the coastal city sprawls of Vietnam. With every passing second the stratojet brought Frankie closer to the point of no return, the moment looming up in front of him where finally irrevocably, he would have to face the hard reality that his brother was gone. But as much as he tried to convince himself that the churn of emotions in his gut was some ridiculous hope that this all might be some huge mistake, he knew in his marrow that Alan had perished. There was nothing arcane about it, no ephemeral spiritual bond between siblings. He just knew it; it seemed right somehow, correct in the order of things.
No, the sick dread that gathered at the corners of his thoughts had a different source. His transfer had come directly from the office of the chief executive officer of Yuk Lung Heavy Industry, from the man who ruled the corporation like a feudal warlord. Mr Tze. If he had a first name, no one spoke it. In an age when the corporate hierarchy was the new royalty of the Twenties, the master of YLHI was a reclusive, shady figure. He never left Hong Kong, rarely even ventured from the towering citadel headquarters of the company, and only then to the fortress compound he maintained along the Pearl River. The man wore his command of the corporation like a suit of ancient armour and he was as ruthless as the Mongols that some said he descended from. The mere idea of being in this man’s physical presence threatened to overwhelm Frankie if he dwelled on it too long. See, there were stories about Mr Tze. The kind that only ever appeared on viral samizdata netcasts in the instants before Datapol shut them down. To even admit to having watched such seditious material would warrant instant termination of contract for Frankie. He drained the last of the drink and lost himself in the motion of the ice cubes in the tumbler, moving over one another as the aircraft’s nose dipped toward China.
Distantly, Frankie Lam heard a soft chime and the ends of his seatbelt snaked across his waist, their steel heads meeting with a decisive click, locking him in place.
“There was this time,” began Lau Feng, fingering the unkempt stubble on his chin, “I think we were near Guilin, when this girl came up to us on the path.”
“Mmm.” Ko gave one of those nothing replies, just a noise at the front of his lips to indicate that he was hearing Feng without actually listening to him. The youth squatted in the lee of the concrete stanchion and threw a quick left-right glance about the underground car park. He knew the security drone sweep patterns better than the guys on the monitor desk.
“She had the nicest eyes. Green. Or something.” Feng’s hand drummed on the breastplate of his armour, and wandered like a bored spider down past his belly and across the threadbare strips of boiled leather that made up his battle skirt. “Anyway, she wanted to come with us. She’d stolen her father’s sword. Very emotional about it all.”
Ko peered closely at the sensor plate on the car locking mechanism. It was a retrofit, reasonable quality European manufacture, probably a Moulinex or a Krupp. He reached for the bright pink disposable cellphone that he’d picked from the pocket of a small boy in the departure terminal and levered off the back with his balisong knife. “You’ve told me this story before,” complained Ko, although not with any real strength behind it.
“So the captain, he laughs at her, because she was just a girl. And she took his head off with the blade. Just like that.” Feng mimed the motion across his neck. “Like that,” he repeated. His stray hand settled on the hilt of the lionhead sword at his hip. “I admired her for it, you know? But in the end we had to hurt her to get the weapon away. ”
Ko actually bothered to give him a look. “Will you shut up? Can’t you see that I’m trying to concentrate?” To punctuate his statement, Ko tugged on the front of his jacket and pulled the kevleather tight. He had the guts of the cellphone in one hand, the microtransmitter inside it making distressed squawking sounds as it fired off spasms of misfired signals. Lights blinked on the lock once or twice, which meant Ko was close to getting the door to open.
Feng sniffed and cocked his head. “Soldiers are coming. You won’t get that done in time.”
“Liar.” Ko glanced at the cellphone. It was overloading, getting hot in his hand. Trying to crack a microwave lock like this was always a roll of the dice; sometimes the phones would blanket the locks with enough conflicting signals that they’d run home to mama, snap back to their default settings and pop open; other times it would fry them solid. Ko was sanguine, though. It wasn’t as if the G-Mek Vista GL he was crouched by was his, after all.
“Bet you a smoke,” said Feng.
“Stop distracting-” Ko’s retort was cut short as something came alive inside the sports car. The vehicle’s lights snapped on all at once, full beam and glaring. From a speaker in the grille a synthetic voice barked at him. “Attention! This vehicle is undergoing a theft! Alert! Alert! Contact authorities immediately!”
Ko swore under his breath; suddenly Feng was nowhere to be seen and sure enough, there were two men in APRC fatigues jogging across the car park toward him.
“Phase t
wo alert!” shouted the Vista GL. “Lethal deterrent charging! This is your legal warning!”
The youth turned and ran as the electro-zappers on the bodywork whined up to full capacity. He’d picked this part of the car park because it was close to the maintenance access wells. Ko forced his way through the gap between two chained gates and sprinted up three flights of concrete stairs. He forced himself to a slow, casual walk as he emerged into the evening, around the blunt concrete architecture of the airport’s vast parking field. Faintly, he heard the deep buzz-crackle of the stunner going off below.
Feng sat cross-legged on a wall. “I warned you.”
“Shut up, dead man.”
The swordsman hopped down and trailed after him. Ko paused to throw the ruined cellphone in a waste drum, and Feng pointed at the vending machine next to it. “You owe me a smoke.”
“Fine.” Ko slammed his debit card into the machine’s slot and the vendor disgorged a packet of Peacefuls cigarettes. Feng licked his lips as the youth removed the plastic wrapper and carefully set the packet on fire with a disposable lighter. The box combusted quickly and Ko let it drop to the ground. Feng stooped to follow it, watching it crumble into a mound of grey ash.
The machine had a mirrorscreen facia, and despite the gang tag scrawls across its surface, Ko could still get a good look at himself. The screen showed him on a tropical beach, cartoon cans in white and blue dancing about him with wild abandon. “Enjoy the Great Taste of Lan Ri!” said the screen. “The Flavour is Now!” Ko used the screen to check himself over; his face was a little flushed with effort, but his spikey black hair-do was still intact and the hachimaki band across his forehead hadn’t slipped. He flicked minuscule dots of dust from his jacket and straightened it a little.
“You preen too much. Like a dandy.” Feng had a cigarette in his hand now and he took a drag on it in the way a starving man would eat a meal.
Jade Dragon s-5 Page 1
