by Jock Serong
hey n00b wassup
His left hand stayed on the joystick. His right darted from the mouse onto the phone.
yo
quik round of F7?
He dropped the cup in the wastepaper basket. Probably not the time for this.
nuh
hey
nuh
He pulled down a request form from the toolbar at the top of the screen, typed in some details and sent it.
wot thn
He was so bored with Fallout. And besides, he might have to do some work here for a change.
fallouts so 2015. Halo?
ok hey you still at Rslv?
Yes, I’m still at Resolve. That’s why you haven’t seen me in eight months. That’s why the phone’s encrypted. That’s why I never see the sun, why I’m sitting in a bus driver’s chair in a soundproof booth deep in a secure floor in the ugliest building in Pyrmont. Yes I’m at fucking Resolve.
yeah
on console?
Hah. You could say that. A joystick and about three trillion square miles of ocean. Slower than the Xbox on your livingroom floor and you never got to waste the bad guys.
yeah
whatyu do like blow shit up
fk yr imature
?
Cant talk about it
??
They watch me. Srsly
He looked up at the bank of three cameras high on the wall behind him. They were trained on the screens, on him. Reminders, along with the physical searches on the way in and out, that his work was never to be anyone’s business.
And he couldn’t honestly say he blew shit up. It was mostly a process of image matching—what he got on screen to instructions from above. Mouse clicks and typing. Finer resolution please. Apply coordinates. Run video. No different to what the stoner on the end of the phone was up to all night, only the money was fucking royal.
kay login then lez do it
He wouldn’t mind an hour on Halo. But this business would have to be dealt with first.
hang on sthingz cumup
An icon flashed on the screen. An answer coming back in response to his request form.
Slow pass at 500 please and boost res on video.
Oh the sheer joy of having something to do. He issued instructions to the device and watched it stripping altitude. There was a protocol for slow passes, and it took some skill. At five hundred feet he drew it around the boat in a wide circle, zooming in on the humans standing on the deck, the plume of dirty black smoke issuing from the bow. His body intuited the G-force and tilted itself unconsciously in the chair.
At first he thought they were on fire. Then he could see the smoke was coming from a stack they’d made: a pile of burning luggage or timbers or something. He pulled in the optical res until it reached its limit and waited for the focus to adjust.
He could look right into their eyes.
Isi could hear something.
Something other than the slapping of tired water against the hull of the Java Ridge, other than the muffled voices from below decks. A faint whining sound, coming from the direction of the thunderhead. Coming from the southeast, and from above.
Roya had emerged from below, drinking in the fresh air. She was dry now, had brushed her hair. The plain fabric of the T-shirt was nearly dry too, patches of salt forming on it. She went first to Shafiqa, who was slumped in the shade, heavy and exhausted. They spoke briefly and Roya went to get her a cup of water. She must be so close now, thought Isi.
Roya bent close to her mother and watched her drink. Once she was satisfied, she looked up and saw Isi. She sidled up to her and sat on the narrow ledge that ran around the cabin so that her eyes were at the same height as Isi’s.
‘What is that sound?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Isi. ‘It sounds like a plane, but maybe a small one.’ She listened again. ‘A jet. You know?’
Roya nodded. Oh yes, she knew about jets.
The noise grew louder now. They both stared into the haze that was its source. The sun was still low but already ferocious in its intensity. A couple of the others came up from the bunkroom, blinking in the sunlight.
The air was nearly still but now and then it would swirl as some pocket of heat stirred restlessly, and the smoke from the pyre on the bow wafted past them. Roya coughed.
‘Can you see anything?’ Isi asked her.
‘No.’
Isi climbed into the wheelhouse and found a pair of polarising sunglasses. She returned to her spot next to Roya.
‘Here, try these.’
Roya put the glasses on, admired her reflection in the cabin window. ‘I am like a movie star,’ she laughed. Hamid was lying on the bow, beyond the signal fire, just as he had done on the Takalar. She waved to him through the smoke, imagined herself on a red carpet with cameras flashing.
Isi squeezed her shoulders as Roya squinted again at the distant southeastern sky.
‘I see it!’ she cried. Seconds later they could all see it: the strange aircraft that didn’t quite look like a jet. It was streaking towards them at an alarming speed, but then it banked hard and slowed, large ailerons flaring on its wingtips. It was loud, too, so loud that it was impossible for any of them to hear each other. Now they could see its whole fuselage side-on, could see that there weren’t any windows. But it wasn’t this that struck Isi as sinister. It was the lack of any kind of livery—not a badge, not a flag or a logo. Plain, clinical white.
‘What the hell is that?’ she muttered. But no one could hear her.
The operator had sent the video back, along with another request form. His controller wanted to know if there were any westerners on board. The operator thought hard about that, scrolled through a few frame grabs: the bearded men in their torn robes were without doubt OMEA: Of Middle Eastern Appearance.
The pregnant woman and the small girl with her? The mother had her head covered. Dark skin, both of them. A short man wandering around deck barefoot, brown skin, no beard but working on the boat. Likely to be part of the smuggling op. But then there was the younger woman. Short hair, uncovered. Bikini top and shorts. Most definitely not a Muzzie outfit, but he didn’t know about the Sri Lankans, they might rock togs. Olive skin but not as dark as the others. Brown eyes. She was borderline: borderline enough that the operator felt entitled to zoom even further and allow the camera to wander a little over her body. A fit, healthy girl. Very healthy.
And indeterminate. But given the context most likely also to be part of the smuggling op. He dwelt a moment on that, but without real concern. On the lanyard around his neck hung an ID card which didn’t mention his name: only an alpha-numeric code—N2HD4435. So. He sighed deeply. I am N2HD4435 and you are a timber boat on a faraway ocean. His fingers raked the keyboard once more. No westerners on board.
He tapped the phone to reply about that game of Halo, but the icon flashed on the big screen before he could type. The orders appeared in plain letters but for a moment he thought he’d read them wrong.
He brought up the inquiry field again and this time didn’t bother with the formalities. He typed the first word that came into his head.
Really?
The orders appeared again, followed by a curt postscript.
Confirmed.
The device had completed a slow lap around them, its shadow crossing the deck as it passed before the sun.
Some of the passengers were wild with delight, elated that their ordeal was nearly over. They cheered and embraced, waving their shirts and towels at the craft and offering prayers to the heavens. Others seemed uncertain, watchful.
‘What will it do?’ asked Roya.
‘I don’t know,’ Isi replied. ‘Maybe it can send for help.’
The aircraft widened its circle once the lap was completed and now it headed directly away from them, down low over the surface of the sea, perpendicular to the beam of the Java Ridge. They watched the thin stream of exhaust issuing from its tail as it rapidly disappeared.
The no
ise from its engine faded as it went. They looked at each other blankly. The men who had been waving shirts and towels stopped now: the coloured fabrics hung limp at their sides. No one spoke for a long time as the thick tropical air closed around them and fed upon their collective will. The men who had come up went back below, and others wandered up to take their place. Isi could hear someone urinating over the other side of the boat. There were banging sounds in the galley where someone was making food.
Isi was about to go back to the wheelhouse when she glanced at Roya, sitting with her hands tucked under her thighs as children do. Her head was down. She was looking at her legs, at the paler brown skin of her knees, and she did not look up at anyone as she spoke.
‘It is coming back.’
Isi listened hard. Roya was right; the whine of the jet engines was growing louder. Maybe it didn’t have the information it needed. It might have to do a dozen of these passes before anyone in Australia would be alerted to their plight.
Shafiqa had lumbered herself along the deck with one hand on the rail until she reached her daughter. She was smiling and squinting at the bright sun, her long hair free of the scarf now and floating lightly when the air moved it. Isi could see clearly for the first time how beautiful she was, how much like her daughter. Shafiqa looped her arms around Roya’s neck and nuzzled into her hair, speaking softly in Persian.
‘Mother want to know what are we looking at,’ said Roya.
She clutched her mother’s forearms with her small hands and answered her, her face upturned and her dark eyes trained on Shafiqa’s.
The drone had reappeared and was travelling fast, ahead of its sound. It was low and precisely front-on, its wings lowered and spread like the fins of an advancing shark. Although it was only a piece of machinery, a blind canister, it chilled the air with its menace.
In the last moments Isi failed to understand the yellow-white lights that sparked under its wings as it knifed close enough for them to make out the play of light and shadow over its contours, as the surface of the sea began to explode in front of it, as the great towers of water erupted and fell, trained in two straight parallel lines, unerringly seeking the exposed beam of the Java Ridge. The percussion of the cannons and the smacking of the rounds on the sea’s flat surface; these were only sounds, comparatively slow-moving. The destruction slipped lethally faster.
When the first round ripped through the hull it splintered the rainforest timbers and tore open an old Tajik man and his grandson in the bunkroom. Milliseconds behind it, further rounds punched through two women on beds and dismembered their children, seated on the floor. Ricochets made crazed detours, whirring like saws. The air filled with flying metal.
The operator was slumped in his seat. He had lifted his hands from the joystick and keyboard when the firing sequence took over, the breath dying in his lungs. He could feel nothing, see nothing but the screens. Had he closed his eyes he would still have seen them: the brown girl thrown and slammed against the timber, bursting into lurid red against the greenery. The pregnant woman and her little girl, hand in hand as the scything shards tore them to pieces.
The rounds cut their tracks through the centre of the boat, smashing their way in: shattering into fragments that sliced through water bottles, scattered books and shoes and ruptured human flesh until one punched through the steel shell of a gas bottle and a bright fierce ball of flame consumed the air inside the hull with an inrushing whoomp that catapulted everything and everyone aboard into the hot, still air lying so tired upon the sea.
The fragments spun and drifted and fell, one by one, back to the surface of the sea. And it was only after the last of them had fallen that silence returned to the place. A place beyond sight and hearing, unmarked by anything but the distant presence of a coral reef.
SATURDAY MORNING
Parliament House, Canberra
The Honourable Member for Walyer, Cassius Calvert, hadn’t moved from his seat at the desk through the dying hours of the night. Every two hours, on the hour, the security guard would appear in the doorway to check on him. ‘I’m fine, Priya,’ he’d mumble. ‘How are your kids?’ Priya looked more worried each time.
He couldn’t feel his feet.
The phone on Stella’s desk was ringing. He listened to it through two rings, three, four. He let it ring again, like answering it was optional. Finally he dashed across the office and reached around the doorway to pick it up. As he did so, he saw the sticky note. He loved the girl and her ridiculous ways. Loved her impossibly.
‘Mikey and Mel make my morning.’
The voice on the other end of the line was calm, male, quiet.
‘Minister?’
He sat down in Stella’s chair. ‘Yes. Sorry…sorry. I thought you were someone else. I…who are you?’
The man was from Core Resolve. Telling him an unauthorised incursion over the territorial line had been neutralised.
Cassius tried unravelling the jargon but the caller declined to lapse into ordinary human language. The incursion had been confirmed by correlated geo-digital data. The location had been optically surveilled. The incursion was now neutralised.
Cassius put the phone down and didn’t move for a long time. When at last he stood, he had to hold the edge of the desk for a moment to regain his balance. Had he slept? He couldn’t tell. Daylight streamed down through the light wells in the open meeting area, though he had no memory of the dawn. He looked at his watch: 9:48.
He needed to piss, stood there in the ensuite draining a horsey stream of dark urine that smelled like stale coffee. Ran a hand over his prickly jowls while he waited for it to finish. His face in the mirror as he washed his hands should have horrified him but he barely saw it. It was just someone. Someone who lived in this office.
He tumbled his hands over and over in the warm water, watching the fingers pass over the knuckles, the greenish veins on the backs, the bumps and ridges of scars that proved he’d been a child once. The four lumps at the bases of his fingers where the oar had over so many years worked his skin into calluses. The spill of clear water over his skin.
It took some time for him to knock the lever of the tap to off.
Exhaustion giving way to rage now. The rage threatening to boil over in some unspecified way. The mechanisms of his body were crowding in and mocking him: his eyelids itchy and coarse, flaring each time he blinked. His breath came and went in shudders and a deep, unpleasant chill afflicted his feet while his chest and arms felt prickly and hot. The weight of his hands was wrong. And behind and above and inside and around it, the ringing and screeching in his head. There was no space left for thought anymore. The sound, or the pain or whatever it was, had installed itself and eliminated all else. Escape was the only rational response. He walked away from the holy relics he usually kept close: the phone, his wallet and glasses. He left them all behind, passed ghostlike through the door and down the corridor.
The place was abandoned like there’d been a bomb threat—the campaign staff were all at their electorates, hugging idiots with balloons in their clammy hands, wearing message T-shirts that bulged in awful ways. The ministerial staff would be home among friends waiting for the result: the believers hollering and seeking to draw unsubtle credit to themselves. The agnostics simply enjoying the day off.
But for the candidates—he should have been among them—this was a working day, another round in the ceaseless carnival of falsehood. Wolfing gladwrapped passionfruit sponges in town halls, smiling at people for whom they felt little but contempt. Patting dogs and carefully shaking the hands of wheelchair-bound kids, hand sanitiser at the ready.
He should have been strolling into the grounds of a scout hall this morning wearing a sports jacket over an open-necked shirt. Gorgeous wife on his arm, advertisement-grade children, empty gratitude for the volunteers. But instead, his morning was unspooling like the lost reel of a dark film, and he was powerless to stop it.
Into the lift. Mercifully empty, smelling of cleaning spr
ay. He was hungry. The foyer, with its grand marble and lofty ceilings and cluster of streaky columns. Out through the revolving doors and into Australia.
Australia was sharply cold, the sky clear and still. The sun hung over the airport, trying to hoist itself aloft. He paused on the forecourt, an impossible choice of left or right around the pond. Straight down the barrel he saw the sharp light of the new day on the Old House, and above it the War Memorial. On the induction tour they’d told him there was a straight line of sight from the PM’s desk; clean through the viscera of the new building, framing the memorial so it would stare back, a prick to the prime ministerial conscience. He’d never believed it. There was so much you couldn’t see from that desk.
A cloud of breath issued from his mouth as he started down the slope towards Federation Mall. The ground soggy and thick: a waterline of mud around the sides of his shoes forcing him to veer left onto the footpath. His thoughts were scattered and slow moving. The PM’s face, his voice. The boat, the damn Zodiac. Carmichael, the chicken, Joel Hughes. His child, the trust in his eyes.
Birds clattered and rawked overhead as the soles of his shoes clacked precisely against the concrete path. He looked up to see a currawong watching him, the cruel beak under the poisonous seed of its eye. For some reason it made him think of the chicken; that beak stabbing lethally into its soft body, laying beads of bright blood on the white plumage as the evil bird gorged.
He walked on.
The overpass vaulted the traffic on State Circle, the heavy façade of the Old House growing larger as he approached. The ghosts of Gough and Malcolm frowning on him from the parapets, mocking him in baritone: both of them as huge and permanent as moai. The gravity. He was just a balloon in their company.
He found a new path intersecting his. Leading left, under the trees and through a patch of eucalypts, out onto the long, straight run of Commonwealth Avenue. Across the road he could see the walls of the embassies, flanked by European trees: heavy and dark in the cold light. The Hyatt Hotel, set back from the street, the spectre of Scullin peering out through the heavy drapes, and the Albert Hall passing slowly by and the buildings conceding to open space; Australia revealing itself to him as cut grass and highway.
