Somewhere down the lightless corridor from which he had come, there were distant sounds of surprised, loud conversation.
Stooping slightly, feeling along the near wall with one hand, Caine ran the opposite direction into the darkness.
Chapter Twenty-Three
U.S. Naval Academy, Annapolis, Earth
The wind was coming straight up the Chesapeake. Although it was slightly warm for the season, the breeze made the tattered dockside flags snap straight out. Trevor looked up at the Stars and Stripes and Navy ensign, remembered the first time he had seen them here. Wide-eyed beside his father, he watched those flags flying free in a fresh wind, bringing vibrant life to the memorial foremast which had been salvaged from the USS Maine. Then, on his own Induction Day, he had seen those flags again, saw them as living symbols of the duty and honor, orders and oath, that were the seamlessly interwoven sinews of his new life of service.
He chinned down into his old, cedar-scented deck coat. That was all long ago and far away. He was only eighteen years older than he was the day he took his oath of service at Tecumseh Court, hardly more than half a kilometer behind him. But if time was measured by what you’ve done, seen, and lost, and if distance was a factor not of where you stand, but how far you’ve traveled to arrive there, then those free-flying flags of his youth were farther away than the few surviving scraps of the hull he had lost at Barnard’s Star. My only command: a module half-dead in space, briefly surrendered to assist the enemy with his communications, before scuttling. A brilliant career at the conn. At least it had also been mercifully brief.
Not that there had ever been much chance he’d be posted to the Fleet, not after he had entered the Teams. The SEALs like their recruits brawny and Trevor’s athletic background hadn’t hurt. And since that was a rare combination with the cognitive aptitudes and tactical instincts he had already displayed, his course was set: a fast launch up through the officer ranks and JSOC assignments. Always busy, often exciting, sometimes challenging—but never what he had envisioned. Or maybe, it was simply not what Dad had envisioned for him. Face it, Trevor, he was looking for himself in you—and he didn’t find it. Dad was a good soldier and a great skipper, but more than anything else, he was an outstanding strategist, the kind that comes along two or three times in a generation. Maybe.
Trevor squinted against a snowy gust, could just make out the approaching lights of the scheduled naval auxiliary. Dad was all about people, plans, and politics. Me? I’m just a glorified, high-end grunt, specializing in machines and mayhem. But maybe, right at this moment, grunts were exactly what was needed. All the plans in this world would not save it, not without enough boots on the ground to do the dirty work. Then again, there’s some work that’s too dirty to do, if you want to remain human, if you want to be able to live with yourself. Pity you don’t get that, Uncle Richard.
The auxiliary—a tug-become-day-ship that had been pressed into service as a freight and passenger packet in the ad hoc coastal feeder system—loomed quickly out of the mist that had rolled in just ahead of it. Trevor heard the reassuring, steady sputter of an ancient diesel engine go into double-time reverse just before she lightly bumped the stanchions’ improvised fenders. A preteen girl—lanky and in a grease-stained goose-down jacket—hopped over the gunwale and hooked the bowline over a bollard. The voice that came from the upper level of the pilot house drew Trevor’s attention to a salt-and pepper beard and a seamed face that poked over the bridge deck’s railing. “You’re it? No more?”
“I’m it. Not a great day—well, night, for boating.”
“True ’nuff. So why are you here? Suicidal?”
Trevor wondered for a moment. “Maybe,” he admitted.
The Old Man of the Sea stuck his face farther out. “A man who takes that long to answer is giving the question some serious thought. I carry legitimate passengers, not walking death-wishes.”
Trevor smiled, reached down and hauled up his footlocker in a single grab. “Oh, I’m legit. But I think I might be heading into a worse storm than this one.”
“Oh? And where’s that one brewing?”
“Java, if the weather reports are right.”
The gruff act was abruptly over. “Long journey just to satisfy a death wish.”
“Longer than you’d guess. My route is via the Caribbean.”
The Old Man of the Sea leaned into the snow-spitting air. “I can get you down as far as Norfolk. That’s the connecting terminal between the northern and southern halves of the emergency coastal feeder system. You can get a bigger ship out of there. Coast Guard hull, probably. All the way down to Jacksonville or Miami, usually. Beyond that, I can’t tell you.”
Trevor judged the height of the gunwale, decided to use the gangway. “There are usually some inter-force packets running Commonwealth exchanges throughout the Bahamas, and then down into the Leeward Islands. The Brits have commissioned some civvies to serve that route, I hear.”
“Hope the civvies are still running after tonight’s little surprise.”
“Yeah.” Trevor swung his locker through the hatchway into passenger’s section, just aft of the pilot house. “Did the EMP bursts give you any trouble?”
“What do you think? I was dead in the water. But I was never so glad to have an old bucket like this one. She’s such a simpleminded cow, that my little grease monkey there”—he nodded in the direction of the girl, who was already casting off—“had the diesel hand-fired in an hour. Radar’s shot, though.”
Greasemonkey thumped past gracelessly. “Yeah, but you know every light, every, buoy, even every house, from here to Newport News. The radar only makes you double-guess yourself.”
As she rambled aft, he sent a scowl at her—and behind it, Trevor saw a poignant, even painful love for which the Old Man doubtless had no words. Trevor suddenly missed his own father so much that he wasn’t entirely sure if the salt he tasted was from the heavy, sea-churned mist. “How much do I owe you?” he asked quietly.
“Just give me name, rank, serial. I’ll submit to the government for credit. DC is supposed to pay us back, and they had damn well better do so, after mobilizing us all for national service the moment all the aircraft were grounded.” He eased the throttle forward, kept the engine unengaged.
“Lines away.” Greasemonkey’s shout was high-pitched and bored.
Old Man put the shafts in gear and heeled gently to port, bringing the sagging hull into a half-circle that would take her straight between the first pair of new, solar-juiced biolume buoys and into the waterway.
Trevor turned, looked back toward the Academy, at the foremast of the Maine that marked where the Yard met the Bay, briefly saw the flags before the mist closed over again, and wondered, Why does this feel like the last time I’m ever going to see them?
West-Central Jakarta, Earth
Caine didn’t mind the dark, or the tight crawlways, or even the smells of stagnant water and much-rotted mold. However, the rats—large and ominously curious—were somewhat worrisome. But there had been little choice regarding an escape route from the bank complex that CoDevCo had commandeered as its headquarters.
As he fled, Caine reasoned that, judging from the hasty landing field provisions, vehicle barriers, and the curtain walls fronting the plaza, the megacorporations had not had time to turn the complex into a fully self-sufficient fortress, sealed off from the outside world, both above and below ground. And there would have been little enough reason to do so immediately. It wasn’t as if foreign commandos would soon be infiltrating the warren of conduits, pipes, and localized sewer subsystems that made up a subterranean sprawl even more confusing than the street-level chaos of Jakarta.
So Caine had kept going deeper into the building, until, in the subbasement, he found what he was looking for, framed in emergency lights: a workman’s access shaft into service crawlways that joined the banking complex to the essential services and resources of the outside world.
The worst aspect of Caine’s sub
terranean journey was the inability to measure direction or even distance. He held as straight a course as he could, and philosophically allowed that he’d never have found side-branching passages in this Stygian darkness anyhow.
Ultimately, it was Caine’s ears that provided him with the only navigational data he received during his long crawl alongside the PVC tubing that housed the power and data lines for the banking complex. After what seemed like several hours, he heard what he first believed to be the harbinger of his demise: a siren. But a moment’s reflection made him revise that assessment. Any pursuers would be underground, too. Not exactly the environment where sirens were used or needed. And if it was above ground, it was unlikely the siren was being used by anyone pursuing him.
Another minute of crawling and listening provided further information. The siren was not sequencing through a variety of different alarm modes, as was the case with most emergency vehicles. It was a steady, repetitive sound, more like a car or a building alarm. That meant he had to be getting close to the surface, and to some opening that let in sounds from the street level. Caine felt a surge of renewed energy, and doubled the rate at which he wriggled toward the next corner.
The light and sound increased dramatically as he turned that corner and emerged into a funnel-shaped chamber roofed by a grate: a catch tank for flood control. A workman’s hardhat lay in a corner, along with several tools, a pair of shredded work gloves, and rat-gnawed candy-bar wrappers. Either the construction crew assigned to this part of Jakarta’s intermittently expanding sewer system hadn’t tidied up, or had been swept away into the same bureaucratic limbo that perpetually undermined Indonesia’s waste management efforts.
Rusted rungs fixed in the sides of the poured concrete hole led up to the surface. One of the abandoned tools, a long-handled pry-bar, was just the right lever to lift up a small section of the grate. Which Caine did, before peeking out onto the streets of Jakarta.
Burning vehicles hemmed him in, one of which was the source of the relentless alarm that he had started hearing long before. A fast patter of explosions rumbled in the distance, followed by a rush of VTOLs overhead, their fans screeching as they accelerated. In the narrow bar of gray, premonsoon sky over the street, a dozen ragged columns of smoke communed with the lowering rain clouds. Across the roadway, one storefront was burnt out, another was still aflame. The tar-stinking macadam was littered with broken glass, scorched roofing tiles, abandoned bicycles, shopping bags—and was utterly devoid of people.
Whatever else might have happened during Caine’s long underground crawl, one thing was quite clear: Jakarta was now fully and ferociously at war. Which was certainly bad for Jakarta, but might be good for Caine Riordan. Before, he had anticipated emerging into a merely turbulent city where, as a foreigner—a bule—he might still have stood out. Now, he was in an urban war zone where order was deteriorating with frightening speed. A good environment in which to stay very, very lost. He levered the grate up enough to wriggle out. He just might manage to elude the clones and soldiers and Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh long enough to get away—
But as soon as he stood up, he heard hissed exclamations from the buildings behind him:
“Look! Quick, aim at the—”
“No, don’t shoot.”
“He’s wearing gray; he’s a clone!”
“No, idiot! That’s dust!”
“Hey! He’s a bule!”
Louder: “Hey, bule! Get down! You stupid or sumthin’?”
Caine dropped, looked around, didn’t see anything, starting crawling toward where he had heard the voices.
“No, bule, over here. More to your left. Yeh, that’s right. We’re in the hardware store.”
Caine glanced up, still couldn’t see anything. How the hell are they seeing me when—?
Then he saw a glint, through the hardware store’s shattered display window: the fragment of a mirror, propped up on a display rack. Huh, pretty clever. And for the first time in many hours, Caine smiled. As a military analyst, he knew his history, and from this one sign—from the hasty innovation of using a mirror to watch for the approach of enemies while remaining hidden—he felt fairly certain that the invaders would soon learn just how difficult it was to be an occupation force trying to control a nation in Southeast Asia.
Of the five Indonesians in the store, the oldest, middle-aged Teguh, spoke fair English. Two of the others had a smattering of it. They were all nervous, angry, and—surprisingly—armed. The weapons were old, cartridge-firing rifles. Caine stared, frowned, and suddenly recognized the manufacture—but not due to his years reviewing international weaponry for Jane’s. Rather, he recalled the gun from images he had flipped through while researching military history. “That’s—” he said, pointing in surprise, “—that’s a, a—Kalashnikov. An AK-47. How’d you get that? Indonesia never—”
“Lissen, bule. I don’ know why you so interested in the gun, but it says ‘Type 56.’ Right here, see?”
“That’s just a Chinese AK. Where did you—?”
“Bule, pay attention. You in a war, here. Where we got these guns don’ matter—”
“Actually, it does matter.” Something in Riordan’s voice made them look at him differently, like there was now a better than even chance that he wasn’t crazy. “Let me guess. Someone gave the guns to you. Passed them out from the back of a truck or up from a cellar or something. Was giving them out to whoever wanted them. Am I right?”
The Indonesians looked at him askance again, but now it was as if he had pulled a rabbit out of a previously unseen top hat. “How you know that, bule?” Although no one raised their guns, Caine noticed their hands had grown more tense, stayed very near the trigger guards.
“Because I worked as a military analyst. And here’s what I know about that gun you’re holding. Indonesia never adopted the AK. Your country used—er, Pindad assault rifles. And I also know that no major power has used an AK for fifty, maybe sixty years. They’re still used by some backwater warlords, but most of them are just gathering dust in reserve armories for national militias.” He smiled. “Until now. When they just happened to be here to arm a resistance movement.”
“Why you smilin’ like that, bule?”
“It’s not important. Not compared to what’s going on around here. About which I know nothing.”
Teguh swept a hand at the street. “Is like a crazy house, man. It was pretty bad before. Lots of rioting ever since the president was killed and that keparat Ruap took over and brought in these clones. More when these aliens showed up. Not a lot of them at first. Mostly the Roaches. But since yesterday, we been seeing these big Sloths, and they jus’ as bad as the clones. Maybe worse. If someone shoots at them, they kill everyone around. Unless you lie down in the road. An’ who stupid enough to do that? You run ’way! But when you run, that’s when they kill you. And if you do lay down in the road, a lot of times the clones kill you. It’s crazy, man, pure crazy.”
“Did the clones and, er, Sloths, just start killing people for no reason?”
“No,” said one of the younger ones. “That started after the power went out. Everything stopped working. They warned people not to use anything electric but, you know how it is: no one paid a lot of attention. And hey, everything is electric. So all ’a sudden, there are elevators falling down in buildings, cars going out of control. No phones, no computers, no way to buy anything.” He shook his head. “And after the massacres over the past few days, well—people had enough. They went a little crazy. That’s when the clones came out, along with their new friends. And the army just stood by while those tukang ngentots shot anyone who protested, anyone who got angry.”
The older man nodded. “Yeah—and then, the word started going ’round there were free guns being given out by soldiers who deserted when the real president was killed. Most just showed up on trucks. People took them, took ammunition.” He hung his head. “Not everyone shot the clones or the aliens. At first, a few held up stores for money. But then more
and more started stealing food, ’cause there’s not much left. It was bad, very bad.”
The youngest one nodded his head. “Yeh, but mostly, people started attacking the clones and the aliens and any soldiers who helped them.”
“All that in just two or three hours?” Caine asked.
“Well,” said Teguh, “more like seven or eight hours.”
Caine found it hard to believe he’d been underground that long, but looking at the darkening sky, realized his error.
“And then, about an hour ago, they started bombing neighborhoods. Anyplace there was fighting they couldn’t control, they just—” Teguh shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. “I don’t know who’s left. My family, my neighbors, my friends, I know a lot are dead. But that’s all I know.”
Caine nodded slowly, spoke softly. “I’ve seen them bombing, even before the power went off.” He looked around the group. “But why are you here?”
Teguh looked even more distraught. “Because they trapped some of my friends—rebels, real rebels for a week already—in a building. We were looking for a way to help them, maybe get around behind the Roaches and draw them off—long enough for our friends to find a way out. But—” His voice failed.
The next oldest picked up the tale. “We had to hide in here. There were aerial ROVs—small ones—going up and down the street, looking for anyone with guns. Some people shot at them from the store across the road—”
Caine nodded. “So the ROVs backed off. And about twenty seconds later, a couple of rockets slammed down into the store and blew it to pieces.”
“Yeah. Like you say. Hey, you a soldier?”
Caine hoped he didn’t blush. What was the truth? Was he a soldier? A piece of paper, probably reduced to ashes now floating in orbit around Barney Deucy, said he was. But the real truth was that he wasn’t: that had just been a bit of legitimated theater to ensure that he’d have a rank if he needed one. “No, I’m not a soldier. I’ve just had a little bit of training,” Caine explained. “A very little bit.”
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