by R. K. Syrus
He hits send and gets a reply right away.
On it. Rex scooped an all-ship’s pass + I’m jimmying some f/wall doors.
Bryan checks GPS data coming in via his implants.
Get on it faster. Lee changed course and is picking up speed.
Minutes grind by. He pokes at the ship’s comms and dials up a few contacts in NC and DC. He waits to be rerouted to ship’s security and hits End Call. Obvious attempts to go over Stahlback’s head, done. Next, time to go under Captain Bobblehead’s radar.
He slips out. Bryan’s vision is sensitive enough to make out fading heat shapes of footprints in the hallway. Someone just walked by in corrugated soled boots. The images fade in reverse order, like the trail of a ghost. No one waiting in ambush.
He takes an early morning walk.
His scraped hands, the muscle spasms of his jaw clenched too tight for too long, reiterate his silent agony. Every second he’s using up is one Sienna doesn’t have to spare.
He passes the ship’s cubbyhole barbershop. It’s open twenty-four hours. Inside, a pimply seaman recruit scrapes a gray-haired man’s head with clippers. A small red, white, and blue striped barber pole rotates, squeaking like a mouse with Tourette’s. Beside it is a mirror, and stencilled lettering asks passing sailors:
Bryan’s own reflection startles him. He’s never gotten used to the flash his augmented eyes make in reflective surfaces. They used to be electric blue. These new ones are gold. The below-decks light is crappy. His face looks extra horrible, like it belongs on a comic-book zombie.
Arterial corridors running through the Lee’s hundred-thousand-ton bulk are oval. Noisy. Machinery hidden behind steel walls competes with turbine engines below.
Bianchi’s a good guy. Smart enough to keep all this organized. It’s the captain that’s the problem.
Why did Sienna order the chopper off course? What was so important she’d risk diverting a damaged copter? How could he and Petr not have grabbed her before she fell?
It had to happen here. As if Khorasan were stealing back Sienna’s life, like it was something it was wrong for them to save all those years ago.
Up on the Lee’s flight deck, gulls screech greedily at waste spewing from galley slop holes. Bryan pretends to study the dark horizon. He acts calm. Like a man contemplating a failure he can do nothing about.
Damn fat chance of that.
Two mechanics walk from where the search-and-rescue helicopters are parked. Bryan nods in their direction and slouches behind a cluster of oil drums.
Nothing to see here.
One by one, the Dogs appear out of several doorways.
Just some Army grunts going for a stroll on this big old floating airport. An aimless stroll.
He greets a lone technician exiting a stealth hovercopter: No. 6. Bullfinch. The spotless ride sits like a cipher, its oily blue skin shimmers, grudgingly reflecting arc lamp light.
“Hi, son,” Bryan says to the Marine. “We have a high-priority mission, Corporal Coram. She ready to go?”
Recognition crosses the crewman’s graveyard-shift tired expression. He reacts like the teen fan of a pop band that has shown up unannounced at the local coffee shop. The Sidewinder grab was need-to-know; Sienna’s MIA status won’t have filtered out beyond the bridge island yet.
“Yes, sir, I mean, Sergeant Bryan—I just have to see your orders, and then check with the CAG’s officer of the watch.” He pauses. “Should we even be using your name? Aren’t there code names you special operators go by?” The overall-wearing young man smiles self-consciously. “You know what they say, loose lips—”
“Sink ships,” Snakelips says from the other side of the copter.
The sailor turns toward her, presenting Bryan with a perfect jawline angle. He knocks him out as gently as possible. Snakelips drags him behind some mobile master crates.
“Sorry, son, but we gotta get our CO.”
Whatever it takes.
Relying more on speed and audacity than a large amount of planning and forethought, Bryan and the Dogs implement their plan to steal a hovercopter right off the deck of the Lee. Snakelips ties a line on the unconscious sailor so rotorwash won’t blow him overboard. Bryan holds the hatch open for her.
“Nobu, you sure you can fly this thing?” she asks as she straps in. “This ain’t your granddad’s helicopter.”
“Do not worry, my warrior queen.” Nobu flicks switches on the controls, almost like he knows what he’s doing. “We soar like eagle.”
In an emergency, which stealing a real expensive aircraft usually is, the dual plasma rotors can go from standby to full power in a second.
Nobu has logged many hours. On simulators. This will be the first time he’s actually flown this particular model all by himself.
No choice. Stahlback saw to that.
There’s no doubt or hesitation in any of their eyes. Of course, they are not robots.
While strapping his barrel-sized chest into the seat, Whitebread comes out with a reasonable question. “Sarge, we trust you and all, but do you know where we’re going, exactly? Last I checked, it’s a big desert.”
Nobu adds, “I tried to backdoor the XO’s file stash. No dice. Bianchi’s got tripwires set on all his access points. But the CIA guys who took Sidewinder were getting updates on local chatter. All after we landed. I bet they got a pretty good triangulation on where it’s coming from.”
“You bugged the Langley goons?”
As if they weren’t in enough trouble already.
“Of course not, Sarge,” Nobu assures him. “I bugged Sidewinder.”
“Once we’re up, we’ll get what we need,” Bryan says. “I’ll ask the captain for the intel. After all, we might forget to bring his fifty-million-dollar chopper back.”
This brightens Whitebread’s morning. He grins. “Blackmail, that’s hot! Hooah.”
T-Rex can’t resist needling their pilot. “Yo, Nobu, just try and control any kamikaze urges. Or leastways drop us off before you follow the shinin’ path to the risin’ sun.”
The turbines to either side of them make promising noises. “I can get us up, but you sure they won’t shoot us? Stahlback was pretty quick to threaten Nightjar.”
“That’s why we’re stealing their best stealth chopper,” Bryan says coolly. “Get out of visual, cut transponder, and they won’t have nothing on us.”
“All right, everyone. Hang on. This might jack around.”
The rotors send ever-higher pitched vibrations through the fuselage. The Dogs brace themselves for a high-speed, elevator-style, gut-shifting upward acceleration. And then…
Nothing.
“What did you screw up?” Snakelips snaps at Nobu.
The dartlike craft remains on the Lee’s deck as though it is welded there. Something sinks in Bryan’s gut.
“I didn’t!” Nobu says. “It just lost power.” His hands work furiously over the control panel.
From the loudspeakers over the flight deck and their comms comes a menacing rumbling. Someone’s clearing his throat too close to the mic.
“This is XO Bianchi. Sergeant Bryan, give it up. We’ve shut you down remotely. Prepare to be taken into custody.”
The master-at-arms and half a dozen Navy cops march up double time. Their uniforms look so damned neat. They have white gloves and lanyards on holstered pistols, like they are on parade.
Stahlback must be enjoying this.
It’s useless. It’s a ship. And they fight bad guys, not each other.
“Army Sergeant Bryan? You and your men are under arrest,” the master-at-arms says. “Captain’s orders. Sorry.”
He must be a fan.
The one who prepares to shackle them is not.
Mr. Reynolds glares at him with swabbie contempt. “How you dooin’, Sergeant Friendly Guy?”
The Dogs look ready to make a break. Maybe they could take this cute uniformed troupe hostage, make the control tower cut them loose. Even if Whitebread and T-Rex had to st
ay behind, they’d have a chance to get Sienna.
Bryan shakes his head. “Down. Stand down. We’ll have to work it another way.”
But what way, dammit?
Reflexive anger suddenly wells up inside him. The SPs flinch as he rips off his Kevlar helmet and crashes it into the hatch window. The glass cracks in the pattern of a spider’s web.
16
USS LEE
HIGH-SECURITY DETENTION
SNAKELIPS
Delicia “Snakelips” Ortiz doesn’t feel completely like a freshly opened can of crap until they take Jane Bowie.
Security officers had just finished seizing, admiring the lightness of, and then stroking the mahogany wood of her custom rifle. They wrapped it in a lined case as if, after it was through putting holes in people, it was destined for a modern art museum.
The pink-handled Bowie, the colonel’s, which Snakelips had picked off the hovercopter floor, they snorted at and tossed in a drawer.
She gives them a tattooed finger. Wasted. Her hands are cuffed to her waist. Rather than share verbally or angle for a lucky headbutt, she says, “I’ll need a receipt for that.”
The swabbie’s scarred lip twitches.
“That’s right, Mr. Sailorman,” T-Rex puts in. “I’m the stenographer of this here elite fightin’ unit. I’m taking mental inventory. I expect to see a personal custody property record receipt. Typed out in triplicate.”
The brig officer shrugs, takes some pictures with his inventory scroll bar, and waves them on.
T-Rex continues threatening a tsunami of paperwork. “Don’t make me file a UCMJ Article 138 abuse of authority on you.”
The high-security cells are small and brightly lit. If she squints, they could be capsule hotel rooms like they once had in Japan. Whitebread ducks his head, twists sideways, and checks in.
Once her butt is on the composite slab bunk, Snakelips rubs her wrists. She wants to do something, anything, to set things right. To fix her part in Denbow’s screw up. The malada screw up of the century.
My weapon, my fault.
If only she had kept control of her rifle. Or kept it locked in the rack until it was in her hands.
Then the hyperhomicidal Navy guy wouldn’t have shot the doorway while trying to shoot a civilian kid.
Then the doorway wouldn’t have jammed open.
Then Colonel McKnight might only be recovering from electric burns from whatever that estúpido RAPTEK thing did to her. If the door had been closed, she’d be with them instead of…
This can’t be the end of trying to go back. It’s the first thing they yell at you in basic: The team’s only as strong as all of its links. You never, ever leave anyone behind.
Sarge’ll think of something.
She hops off the bunk and pumps out incline close-grip push-ups. Her elbows knock against metal walls.
Tight places are nothing new to Snakelips. Nearly sixteen years ago, another man-made leviathan of biblical size delivered two skinny, hungry girls. Like Jonah, Delicia Ortiz and her sister were disgorged on a strange fog-shrouded shore in America.
• • •
She was born in Nicaragua. Her earliest memories are of a deep green valley cupping morning mist and leaves shedding dew in the first rays of dawn. Their home was mostly ignored by the revolution and succeeding counter revolutions, until it wasn’t.
Her parents’ wages never went far, only about one hundred meters to the sugar cane collective general store. That didn’t matter. They had their ancestral homestead. The central government’s apathy gave them what they really cherished: freedom.
It was theirs until the distant rumbling of machinery drew closer and closer. Trees shook down to their roots, even on Sundays.
Soon the plantation, their homes, and everything else in the valley had to make way for their country’s answer to the Panama Canal. A supertanker-sized trench was being gouged out between Lake Nicaragua and the Atlantic Ocean. Anything in the way was bulldozed and consumed by the future.
Millions of tons of fertile earth were pushed up to build berms along the waterway. These were topped with barbed wire. Coal-fired pumping stations had spare electricity to sell. Local residents were forced to buy. The Ortizes had a small solar array, which powered a fridge. Delicia’s mother used the rugged appliance to make frozen sweet pops. One day it was decreed unpatriotic to gather free electricity.
Their solar panels were confiscated and thrown on a garbage barge. Delicia and her sister watched it disappear into new mists. A heavy false fog lingered all day long, gray and choking.
Her sister, Rosa, said the barge was going to a land far away called Korea. There, people spoke a language that sea creatures could understand, and they were so used to living with advanced technology they were nearly like aliens in movies. That all sounded like one of her sister’s stories; she was always writing on scraps of paper instead of doing homework.
Before the Nicaraguan People’s Liberation Canal, cane-field workers were only out of a job for understandable reasons: when they lost a critical limb, their lungs got too charred from inhaling the preharvest burning smoke, or dehydration finally caused their kidneys to fail. It had been this way, or worse, since Europeans came to these shores.
After the new Nicaragua Liberation Canal project started, men and women still perfectly able to stand and cut for sixteen hours a day were laid off. Delicia’s father was lucky. His collective hired him out to a butterfly reserve. His job was bussing tables and keeping things nice in the restaurant and bar, catering to wealthy ecotourists.
One Saturday afternoon, Ramondo Ortiz decided to take her along. She was young. Maybe six. This would also be the last time she and her father, just them, did anything together.
“Only you,” her father had said. Her older sister was too nervous, too active. She would scare them away. This was natural. Rosa Araceli Mariposa Ortiz was growing up. While it was not all bad, her father assured her, there were certain things you had to leave behind in childhood. He encouraged Delicia to enjoy them while she could.
They got a lift from an empty bus coming back from the airport. The air-conditioning inside felt strange. It was like putting your head in an ice box. After a while, Delicia decided it felt good to be cooled in this way.
In her judgement, the nature reserve was basically an inefficient campground. It featured a maze of souvenir stores and stalls flaunting T-shirts. These had butterfly designs and were hand-embroidered with local sayings. Her father told her that foreigners would pay crazy prices for these because they were proof they had seen this beautiful country and its creatures with their own eyes.
“Aren’t there any in the foreign cities?”
Her father, who surely had never been more than twenty or thirty miles from where he was born, considered the question. He shook his head.
“No,” Ramondo said with kind conviction. “How could there be? They are all full of stone and cars. The air is not nice. The butterflies would not like it there.”
That made sense to Delicia.
The hillside nature reserve was mostly empty. Guests had gone for short guided hikes in the woods. A nurse’s station stood where the buildings ended and the forest began. A large banner emblazoned with a red cross fluttered over several comfortable-looking beds. Her father explained it was always attended. Foreigners were not used to the heat. Once in a while they fainted and had to be revived.
“If they faint, do they still pay?” Delicia asked.
Since they were selling shirts for a month’s local wages, this was a fair question. The whole place seemed conceived with the purpose of relieving extranjeros of their cash.
After considering, he said yes. In his opinion, fainters would still have to pay. Though they may get ice bags to put on their necks, and these would be free. Her father borrowed a small blanket of red flannel from the nurse. She followed him into a stand of trees away from the center of the camp.
A few meters in, they came to a large web of delicate netti
ng. It hung high and wide. It was the casa de vuelo, a flight house for butterflies. Unlike many insects and animals, it was quite okay to have many different species of these creatures in one place in great numbers. They would not fight or try to eat one another, her father told her. That was not their way.
With a wave of his nut-brown arms, steady and strong, Delicia’s father gently placed the red cloth over her shoulders. He picked up a copper mister and sprayed some water. It tickled her nose and tasted sweet. He sat in the shade by a tree and watched.
Delicia stood in the sunlight. And stood. She felt dumb. She wanted to move and imagined that her sister, who was in constant motion, would have liked this game even less. They might not have come to her.
Slowly at first, then all at once, dozens of fluttering patches of color came out. They must have been there all along, in the trees and underbrush.
Maybe special forces operator Corporal Snakelips Ortiz would have spotted them. But to Delicia, they seemed to appear from nowhere.
Attracted by the color of her covering, which was the same rosy pink red as the guava flower, and encouraged by the windborne scent of sprayed nectar, soon they were all over her.
They were blue-colored with gold stripes; gold-colored with light red freckles; tiny ones, three or four of which could and did land and cling to her outstretched index finger; a huge fantastic one with every color of the rainbow and designs on the end of each wing that looked like four eyes. And, of course, there were monarchs. Many monarchs with dark etchings and white dappled body and trim. They were the most regal, if not the largest, members of her instant menagerie.
The creatures that alighted on Delicia Magdalena Paloma Ortiz that day gently flapped their wings. Maybe they were doing it to keep cool as bright sun rays slanted through the tall trees. After a minute, she recalls, their movements stopped being random. They formed a harmonious pattern. The beats of hundreds of wings moved as one, surrounding her and holding her motionless.
Delicia never returned to the casa de vuelo. For a time, its managers and employees thought it might be spared because it brought in foreign dollars. Like the tremors of an earthquake victims could feel long before they knew the nature of the calamity consuming them, her nation became caught up in the devouring frenzy. The canal left their home and the home of the butterflies under meters of water.