Tool of War

by Paolo Bacigalupi

  Just do your job.

  Mercier hadn’t recruited Arial Madalena Luiza Jones to be a pain in the ass. They’d recruited her because she’d nailed the MX.

  So let it go.

  But still, it bothered her. She’d always been curious about things, always been obsessed with questions, and when her mind caught on something, it was hard to make it let go.

  She mulled, considering the augment. One routine pattern match, and suddenly Caroa had been all up in her business, making her re-task drones and ordering their North Atlantic assets closer to the coast in case he wanted strike capability.

  She’d asked the general which company they were up against, and who was directing the augment’s activities, but Caroa had rebuffed her, saying it wasn’t relevant.

  Her best guess was that the augment had been working for some company that wanted to corner the Drowned Cities’ scrap and recycling market. Lawson & Carlson, or someone. But that, too, made no sense. A single augment’s activities in one of the world’s countless irrelevant hellholes was trivial in comparison with the kinds of operations Caroa normally oversaw. The man tasked thousands of augments to go to battle, to conquer territory, to put down rebellions, and to take over deepwater seaports. Caroa organized military monopolies of the sea trade over the melted North Pole; he didn’t waste his time with one augment in one backwater scavenge zone.

  Except, now he did.

  So now Jones, instead of worrying about whether Mercier was about to lose control of their lithium mines in Peru, was worrying about whether some tin-can smuggler ship from the back ass of the beyond had survived a hurricane.

  Frowning, Jones returned to her desk. She sipped her coffee/espresso combo, made a face at the bitterness, and keyed open her research files.

  Lists of ships scrolled past, Manta-class clippers that had docked in dozens of ports around the Atlantic, from Reykjavik to Rio de Janeiro. Even the nearest ports boasted hundreds of likely ships. Jersey Orleans. Seascape Boston. Mississippi Metro. Miami Reef. Or maybe they’d gone farther. London, or Lagos. With a Manta-class, the entire world was within reach. They might be headed for Island Shanghai for all she knew.

  She studied the few image captures she did have of the docks. Fuzzy, distant pictures. She hadn’t had the Raptors aimed at the clipper ship during her surveillance, so there was really only one good series of stills, pulled from about ten seconds of a Raptor panning shot.

  Jones clicked through the images again, unconsciously leaning close to peer at the screen, even though it didn’t make the grainy pictures clearer.

  Soldier boys, wearing the colors of the augment’s troops, carrying some kind of oddly shaped cargo up the gangplank. A dark-haired, dark-skinned young woman looked like she was supervising. Her facial features looked East Asian, but not straight Chinese or Japanese, more African. Chinese and Drowned Cities mixed, maybe? Maybe a castoff orphan of the Chinese peacekeepers, from when China had tried to restore order in the place?

  It looked as if the girl was in charge of the cargo, even though she didn’t look much older than Jones. But then, all the people down in the Drowned Cities were young. The old ones had been shot dead years ago. This one looked pretty chewed up. Jones tried refining the image. The girl had scars on one cheek that looked like an old militia insignia. Jones called up her research files.

  UPF. That was it. Triple hash, burned into her cheek. Just like a bunch of the others on the ship. United Patriot Front was what it had been called. Jones went through the images again, frowning. The girl had some kind of prosthetic hand, too. Skeletal blue-black metal. High-end, considering the girl clearly wasn’t with any of the major trade combines. If she’d been working with Mercier, sure. Lawson & Carlson, or Patel Global… but for an indie smuggler to have that kind of prosthetic?

  Jones stared hard at the pixelated images of the mechanical hand. Blew out her breath, frustrated. If the Raptor’s cameras had been focused on the girl directly, Jones might have been able to pull a specific design, maybe even a serial number from the prosthetic, then ID the girl and maybe finally the ship… But no.

  “Okay,” she murmured, studying the one-handed girl. “So what’s your business in the Drowned Cities?”

  She called up more research screens. The major exports from the Drowned Cities were all raw materials that came from scavenging the city’s orleans. Iron. Marble. Scrap. The civil war that had raged along that part of the coast had kept it from producing anything agricultural. Same for manufacturing. And the only things the Drowned Cities really bought were more bullets, sometimes meds. That was the trade: scrap for bullets, bullets for scrap.

  So, a gunrunner.

  If they were bringing in weapons, it would mean Havana or London most likely, possibly Qingdao. Jones went back through the Raptor images again, this time examining the cargo the soldier boys were loading. Boxes. Crates. Something large and flat. A rectangular shape that sort of reminded her of a large mirror her mother had had…

  Jones stared at the package wrapped in burlap and canvas and everyone gathered around it. From their postures, they looked… almost worried about whatever it was, like it was delicate.

  Guns or meds were what they’d be bringing down to the Drowned Cities.

  So what were the smugglers taking in payment? The Drowned Cities had no cash, and a Manta-class was too small to make scrap worthwhile.

  Jones stared at the flat rectangle.

  “Art!” she exclaimed.

  The analysts around her all startled in surprise at her outburst.

  “What the hell, Jones?”

  “Keep it down!”

  Jones waved a distracted apology at her peers. “It’s art,” she muttered to herself. “They’re exporting art.” She had the same electrified feeling she’d gotten when she’d sat for the MX. Knowing answers as soon as she read the questions. Knowing she was right. Knowing that she was creating a future for herself, that she wouldn’t cut lumber for life. That she would rise. She could practically see her old teacher, Mrs. Silva, nodding approvingly as she worked. Encouraging her to think more deeply, to be relentless. To never doubt, no matter what her mother said.

  Art. It made perfect sense. It was light, it was compact, and it was wildly valuable. Even a small clipper’s hold was more than sufficient to ship guns and bullets in, and haul art out.

  Humming to herself, Jones started running searches, pulling on the thread of possibility, seeing how far it would take her. A few minutes later, she placed a call to Caroa.

  “I know who they are,” she said, smiling as Caroa came on-screen. “I know where to look for them.”

  “Yes?”

  “Their clipper ship is Manta-class. I matched her lines. There are plenty of those, but not so many that would want to run to the Drowned Cities. Those ships are fast, but holds are small. You need to move things that are light and valuable. You’re not going to haul out a couple hundred tons of copper wire from the Drowned Cities. That’s for the Beluga-class ships. Or dirigibles. Yetis, right? Big old lumberers—”

  “Get on with it, Junior Analyst.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  She shared one of the surveillance images across the comm. “I think they’re hauling art, sir. Old imperial memorabilia. There’s all those wrecked museums down there, right? And the capital used to be there, so it’s loaded with loot. I think we’re looking at a painting here. Wrapped up in canvas, obviously, but I think that’s a painting they’re loading.”

  She switched over to an auction catalog and sent across more images to the general. Caroa’s brow wrinkled as he examined her finds: paintings; old war items; ancient crumbling texts, written in black fountain pen.

  “Go on.”

  “I looked for arrival and departure patterns that sync with global art markets, and you see this one ship, the Raker, showing up every couple months in Seascape Boston.”

  “Why the Seascape?”

  “It’s the closest link to the Drowned Cities for the major a
uction houses. Christie’s. Excavation House. Malinda Lo. Davis & Ink. The Seascape has got a huge deepwater port, and no orleans to get tangled up in, so it dominates polar trade. Plus there’s wealth there. You’ve got Patel Global building clippers there. All kinds of commodity shipping, too, with their interior continent mag-lev links. And then there’s banking and finance. Ever since Manhattan went orleans last century, there’s a lot of money sloshing around up there. With direct links to China over the pole, it’s ideal if you’re in the antiquities business.”

  She ran her hand over another screen, pulled up a display of shipping names, and mirrored it to the general’s terminal. “Here…” She highlighted the shipping lists of the Seascape. “The Raker shows up right on time for the pre- and post-hurricane-season auctions. And sure enough, when you check the auction catalogs, that’s when you suddenly see a lot of First Civil War rifles. You see Pre-Division American flags. Old paintings. Warhols and Pollocks. Memorabilia from the nineteen-hundreds space program. It goes on and on.”

  “So you think they’re bound for the Seascape now.”

  “Well, it matches the pattern. It’s their last chance to catch the Chinese tourist traffic before winter makes polar sailing really miserable.”

  The general was quiet for a long moment. “Good work.”

  Jones felt a flood of relief. After the miss of the augment, it was always possible that her superior would decide to blame her for failure. Demote her to work on some Antarctic gold exploration outpost. Or back to the Amazon—

  “Set Strike Raptors on overwatch.”

  “Strike Raptors?” Jones tried to master her expression.

  “Is there a problem?” Caroa asked.

  People, turning to ash. People, curling up and dying.

  “I… Sir, it’s the Seascape. We have trade agreements there. They have mutual defense pacts. Patel Global. Kinshasa Nano. GE. Beijing has embassies and port agreements there. There’s a lot of potential for blowback.” Caroa’s eyes had widened with surprise. Jones rushed ahead. “We could do a Strike Claw, though. Have our augments wear the livery of Patel Global, or one of the financial factions there. We could use Fast Attack augments from the Kilimanjaro. It would be clean.”

  For a long moment, Caroa was quiet. Jones held her breath. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft.

  “Jones…”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m sure you think you’re being clever.”

  Jones couldn’t help wincing at his tone. “Yes, sir?”

  “The next time you’re feeling clever, Analyst, I want you to put your hand over your mouth and stifle that cleverness. I want you to smother your mouth like you’d smother an unwanted baby in the orleans. Your job is not to give me geography lessons, and your job certainly isn’t to tell me what tactical options are at my disposal. The very last thing we want is for any augments to get near our target. Is that understood? No. Augments.”

  “But, sir—”

  “No augments, I said! Absolutely no augments!”

  Jones froze in the face of the general’s fury. Fates. He’s going to send me down.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, nodding vigorously. “No augments.”

  “Good. Better.” Caroa visibly controlled himself. “I want that ship burned to the waterline. I don’t care if you hit it in international waters, or if you hit it in the heart of the Seascape, but I want you to find that clipper and sink it before it has a chance to off-load the target. Do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Caroa switched off, leaving Jones staring at the blank screen. Tory glanced over from his own workstation. “He can assign you to work as a trial subject for Ebola IV, you know.”

  Jones shook her head mutely.

  “Jones?”

  “I just screwed up, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. He must like you for some reason. I’ve seen him send people to Antarctica for less.”

  When she’d been assigned to the Annapurna, she’d been so sure that it was the beginning of a glorious future. A sharp uniform. Profitable responsibilities. The potential for fast promotion.

  And now this.

  It was just like when she’d been young. Her mother had used to slap her for saying things out loud that wiser people left unsaid. Again and again, she’d made this mistake. A problem of discipline and character, her mother said. More than once she’d broken the silent agreements that kept her mother’s fragile world functioning, and that had kept them eating. Arial wasn’t to talk about how stupid someone was, or how Supervisor Marco looked at the wood pulp girls. It didn’t matter if Arial was right. If you made trouble, trouble came back hard on you.

  “He wants to bomb a city,” she said.

  “So? We do it all the time.”

  “It’s a real city, though. The Seascape? It’s not just some orleans.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s the job. If you want the nice salary and the promotions, you do the job.”

  Jones avoided meeting Tory’s eyes.

  “What’s going on in that pointy head of yours, Jones?”

  I don’t want to drop any more Havoc.

  “Who’s above Caroa?”

  “ExCom.” Tory gave her a look. “Please tell me you’re not going to try to go over Caroa’s head to the Executive Committee. The insubordination—”

  “He wants to drop a six-pack on a trading partner city.”

  “And?”

  “We have treaties with them! They’re allies with China! It’s crazy!”

  Tory shrugged. “I dunno. I dropped Havoc on Prague, once. I think they were an ally of somebody or other. Paris, too, come to think of it.”

  “I don’t know why I’m even talking to you.”

  “Because I’m looking out for you, Jones, and I’m telling you that you’re swimming in some dark waters, and you don’t have any idea how many sharks are all around you. Do your job. Don’t piss off Caroa. Soldier up.” He lowered his voice. “Cover your ass.”

  “Yeah…”

  She wanted to explain her true reasons, but something about Tory’s expression made her stop. Anything she said would just put her in a worse position.

  “Raptors on overwatch,” she said grimly. “Yes, sir.”

  “I knew my baby analyst was a learner,” Tory said. “Little learning machine. First time I saw you, I knew you were a learning machine.” His words were light, but his expression was serious. “Young ones gotta learn fast, or they get dumped back where they came from, right, Analyst? They get dumped back in some hot-as-hell rain forest pulp mill, and everyone forgets how sharp they were on some exam. Right?”

  Jones made herself nod. “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Tory watched her for a minute longer. Jones, painfully aware of his gaze, pulled up the Raptor task panels and started setting overwatch duties.

  Maybe I can catch them outside the territorial limit, she told herself. Then it’s a freebie. Drop Havoc, and move on.

  But on the heels of that thought, another followed, the question of what she’d do if the ship made it to the Seascape. If the ship made it safely, would she still drop Havoc? Would she make more bodies? Would she turn the world to ash?

  She could hear her mother’s voice, mocking and scornful.

  You gonna make more trouble, daughter? Gonna show us how smart you are again? Brag about how great you’re gonna be, where you’re gonna go? Pretend the rules don’t mean nothing to you? You gonna make trouble again? That what you’re gonna do?

  Jones went grimly to work.

  No, Mama. I’m going to survive.

  10

  CLAWED FEET AND hands scrabbled over Tool in the darkness, stomping and shoving him down deeper into the bone pit as his brethren all fought to climb out.

  Struggling bodies surged and writhed, snarling and snapping, clawing at one another and at the steep sides of the pit. Fighting blind. Dragging one another down. Bitter warfare in the darkness, everyone desper
ate to escape. Fighting to be first. Desperate not to be last, desperate to escape before the pit was filled in.

  Tool fought. He clawed and bit and tore, proving himself worthy. This was the law of the bone pits, and he had learned it well. From his first days, as a wriggling and mewling pup, he had been taught the lesson of his worth. Only the most savage survived. He had grown to strength with bloody hunks of meat raining down from the trainers above, but never enough, never enough for all. The weak became weaker, and soon fed the strong. But Tool learned quickly and fed well, preparing himself for the day when he would show himself worthy.

  And now, clawing out of the pit, into the light of the sun. First of his kind. First from his pit. Birthed out of darkness and into the light. Out of the bone pit, and into the waiting arms of General Caroa, who welcomed him, and named him…

  Blood.

  Worthy. Judged worthy of standing beside a great general. Found worthy of fighting on Caroa’s behalf.

  Tool stood tall in the light. Covered with the blood of his lessers, he turned his face to the fabled sun.

  11

  THE RAKER SAILED north under clear skies, gull-white sails billowed taut. Just two days after the storm, the blue waters of the Atlantic glittered under bright sunshine, calm and inviting. On the Raker’s deck, Tool still lay limp, an inhuman mound of scorched flesh, but Mahlia had no time to attend him. Now, Mahlia was only aware of her own sweat, and Ocho, circling her.

  The sweat soaked her shorts and tank top, and dragged against her movements. It dripped in her eyes, stinging and blurring her vision. It slicked her palm, making her knife slippery in her grasp.

  Ocho continued to circle, looking for her to falter.

  Sweat bathed him as well, but he never seemed tired. Fates, the former soldier boy wasn’t even out of breath. He moved easy with the pitching deck, always sure-footed, a snake looking to strike.

  Mahlia knew she couldn’t get inside his guard. She’d already tried too many times, and failed every time. He was too good.

  Ocho gripped his knife in his right hand. It moved, back and forth, hypnotic and sinuous. She knew he was trying to make her focus on the blade, instead of watching how his feet moved, how his body shifted. He was trying to trick her into watching where the knife was instead of where it would—