Ember

by James K. Decker

  “Greetings soldier,” he said. “Heading home?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  He looked at the ticket information.

  “Destination is Hangfei, Ginzho Terminal,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Very good. Just give me a minute to clear it with control.”

  I waited while the technician propped the console up on the counter and tapped at the screen with a stylus. Hanzi characters scrolled past, along with long number sequences as a waveform appeared and began to oscillate. Energy began to crackle around the gate, and my hair stood on end as the controller spoke rapid fire into his headset.

  The plain white wall on the other side of the gate frame warped as the field activated, and then it disappeared. In its place appeared a view of another terminal where crowds of people milled by from either side.

  “Gate successfully established,” a female voice chimed over the intercom. “Connection to Ginzho Terminal, Hangfei, is now active.”

  “You’re cleared to jump, Sergeant,” the technician said.

  I nodded, but didn’t step through right away. I stared at the bottom edge of the field that divided the two terminals which were, in actuality, thousands of miles apart. Ginzho Terminal had a gloss of wealth to it, full of neon and tinted glass. Shops ran the length of the throughway, and the people there were dressed in high fashion. They wore stylish haircuts, and carried bulging shopping bags.

  I looked back toward the exit, through the glass doors to the borderlands again. Scrubby plants shook in the wind beyond the landing platform and it suddenly felt strange leaving. The Hangfei on display through the gate felt unfamiliar, even though it had only been three years.

  “Sir?” the technician prompted.

  I had an urge to turn around. To head back to Lobnya, and to try and find Olek Salko’s sister, as if that were possible. I would never be allowed over the border. Even if I were, I wouldn’t get far before being captured or killed. I would never find her and even if I did, and she was alive, what would I do then? Give her a ration, and some water, and hope that absolved me of killing her only brother and leaving her alone in this world?

  “Sir?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m ready.”

  “What will you do when you go back?” he asked.

  “They set me up with an apartment,” I told him, “and a job with Hangfei security.”

  “You should take a vacation,” he suggested.

  “Job starts in a week,” I said. “Maybe I will.”

  I stepped forward, through the gate.

  Passing through a jump gate didn’t feel instantaneous, although the haan had assured us that it was. Traveling from the northern border across the entire country to the southern shore seemed to take a beat that lasted a few seconds. This lag, the haan told us, was manufactured by our brains which were not accustomed to spontaneous travel.

  Real or imagined, it was unmistakable. Stepping into a gate field always felt to me like stepping into a wall of cold, loose gelatin. All momentum slowed and then stopped, and for those few seconds I had no sense of up or down. The bustle of the terminal ahead froze like a paused video feed, and I stood suspended in mid-stride, weightless. Before I could get my mind around it, my foot came down in the Hangfei terminal as movement and sound erupted around me. The cozy heated air that had taken the chill from the border cold became crisp, cooled air to fight the Hangfei summer’s jungle heat. I turned and looked back, but the field had collapsed after I’d passed through, leaving only the Hangfei gate and a cinderblock wall. Next to it, a row of screens displayed ads for the haan-human surrogate program. The ads showed a beaming young woman who smiled down toward a bundle of blankets. She had one finger extended toward the swaddle, from which a tiny gray hand reached. The foster infant’s long, spindly fingers clutched hers.

  “Welcome back, sir.”

  I looked up, disoriented as one of the gate’s two guards nodded to me.

  “Welcome home, sir,” he said again.

  “Thanks.”

  I adjusted my pack, and made my way toward the exit. The border zone had been quiet by comparison, and it took me a moment to get used to Hangfei’s constant buzz again. I hadn’t gotten halfway across the terminal before being swarmed by peddlers who milled through the crowd looking for marks. Information and advertisements crawled along electronic marquees that ran the length of every wall, while A.I.’s called to me whenever I passed by an interactive screen or ad box.

  “Dragan Shao, our records indicate you have been out of country for three years, may I interest you in . . .”

  “. . . may need new furnishings . . .”

  “. . . attractive leases on next generation aircars and . . .”

  It didn’t take long to slip back into the groove of tuning it all out. You had to. I ignored the babble, and the bustle, and made my way forward without slowing until I reached the main exit. Near the automatic doors a Reunification Church member, or “gonzo,” as the kids called them, knelt near the exit in front of one of their shrines. Her white robes draped onto the floor around her as she fanned the sticks of incense with one hand while bowing to the wax apple that spun above them, suspended in a graviton field. The incense and ashes represented the impact site. The spinning apple, which had been a real phenomenon at the site shortly before the impact occurred, represented the haan’s arrival. Or maybe it represented the haan themselves. I wasn’t sure.

  “Are you seeking reunification?” she asked, without looking up. Off to her left an amber fly strip hung covered in scaleflies, the pests which the haan had brought with them when they crashed. One still struggled to free itself, its hooklike forelegs peddling in front of its single compound eye.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Only He can move the stars,” she said, without offense.

  I stepped out and as soon as the glass doors opened, the heavy, humid heat hit me along with the brilliant sensory overload that was Hangfei’s Ginzho district in early evening. The border zone had been all squat military structures and arid, frozen rock. Even Lobnya, while quite large, didn’t even begin to approach Hangfei. Buildings towered all around me, monoliths of brilliant light and color stretching up past the canopy of flashing, blinking signs that extended over the congested streets from either side. Signs in hanzi, pinyin, and English filled every available space, competing for attention with sparkling light shows. Street traffic flowed around the central traffic star, floodlights in the center aimed up at the bronze statue of Military Governor Jianguo Hwong. High above, streams of air traffic painted streaks of light across the night sky as they zipped along three layers of skyway. Crowds of people milled around me as I got my bearings, in waves of pedestrian and bicycle traffic that flowed among shop fronts and street-vendor carts.

  A group of protesters, larger and more rowdy than I’d been used to seeing before my tour, had assembled on the other side of the street. I could see their signs sticking up above the mob. Down the main drag in front of me, off in the distance, the faint blue light of the haan force-field dome glowed. Behind it, looming above even the tallest buildings, sat the haan ship, a dark mountain with only a handful of flashing lights to mark its outline.

  “Dragan Shao?”

  I turned and saw that an ad box mounted on a lamppost had targeted me, the A.I.’s logo bobbing on its screen.

  “Excuse me,” it said, “but it appears you have been on a military tour at the border zone for three years now.”

  “That’s true.”

  It lowered its voice. “Do you know what many returning military men crave more than anything?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Female companionship,” it said in a sotto voce. “My records have you down as heterosexual, is that still accurate?”

  “I’m all set for now, thanks.”


  One of the protesters on the other side of the street hollered something, waving his fist. They were calling on Governor Hwong to evict the haan, I thought. Or maybe to cut off their food supply or to trip the failsafe graviton lenses that surrounded their ship and destroy them. I’m not sure they knew what they wanted. They were tired of being hungry, and they were wary of the haan. I remembered what Olek had said about the haan controlling our minds, something a lot of foreigners thought. If that were true, everyone would be complacent, and docile. I wished he could have seen these people, and their anger.

  On one of the big screens above the protesters, an image of a haan appeared. They began to boo even as others slowed down to watch. The haan looked down, his big saucer-shaped eyes an interesting shade of glowing orange-yellow. He bowed his wide head a little as the three dark pupils in each one did a slow revolution.

  “Only three months left until the official release of Phase Three technologies,” he said, his voice box flickering as his smooth, calm voice issued forth. “Our most exciting package yet.”

  “Go back where you came from!” one of the protesters screamed. Someone threw an empty can at the screen, but it fell far short of its target.

  The haan wore the same style of suit that they’d been wearing when I left several years back, with a draping jacket that hung almost like a cape. The top buttons of his shirt had been left undone to show his chest and the honeycombed cage of ribs visible beneath the skin there. Behind the delicate bones, which were as fragile as they looked, the mass of his heart pumped. Safe on the other side of the screen, he opened his graceful hands like a magician performing a trick.

  “Of particular interest are new advancements in brain band technology . . .”

  He began running down specs, to the delight of the younger onlookers and the fury of the protesters. Beneath the dome of his skull, his brain-pair shifted. The larger one shivered in its bath of fluid while the smaller, second one dropped a little, and stirred the cottony tissue around it.

  They’re really not so ugly, I thought as I watched him. I remembered being a little shocked as a kid the first time I’d seen one, but once you got past the obvious stuff they were actually kind of elegant. They certainly weren’t disgusting, or horrible as so many foreigners liked to say.

  Another protester threw something. A bottle, that time, which shattered on the sidewalk. People began to shout back and forth as a pair of uniformed officers made their way over, black helmets shining under the neon lights. Before they’d even reached the crowd, one of them drew a stun gun.

  I turned and headed down the main drag in the opposite direction to lose myself back in Hangfei.

  THREE

  The apartment they set me up with was located in the warren district of Tùzi-wo. It wasn’t a bad setup. With two bedrooms, a half bath, a living room, and a kitchenette, it had a lot of space for Hangfei—and it beat a military barracks any day.

  After a week, though, I realized I’d barely left it. I sat staring at the television feed while the sun faded and the apartment turned dark. When the faint glow of neon began to bleed in through the window, I stood, unsteady, and my pistol slid off my lap to clunk down onto the floor. I took the remaining half bottle of ’shine from the coffee table, then picked up the weapon and tucked it into my waistband as I made my way to the kitchenette. I took one of the rations from the cupboard, and headed to the window, standing close enough that my breath fogged it.

  The place had an amazing view. The entire northern wall was glass, with a glass door that opened out to a small, railed balcony. I opened the door and stepped into the humid air and the white noise of faraway street sounds. Hangfei sprawled below as far as I could see, a sea of colorful electric light that blazed up the night sky. Streams of headlights coursed far below through the streets, while the air traffic streaked through the air between the buildings. Looking down over the balcony’s railing I saw vehicles whipping past maybe thirty stories down, layers of air lanes crisscrossing one another.

  I unwrapped the ration puck, some kind of processed scalefly, and stuffed the foil in my pocket. I took a bite, and chewed the crunchy, slightly bitter cake which I found I liked better than the salty krill. I chewed, staring at the metropolitan wonder displayed before me, but my mind was back in Lobnya. Maybe it never left. The lights below made the memories of the Pan-Slav city seem even more bleak, with its cracked streets and its once great buildings shelled. Lobnya could have rivaled Hangfei, once.

  “She won’t live. Please . . .”

  I took a pull from the bottle and swallowed hard. The border had to be controlled—I had no doubts there. Lobnya and border cities like it had become occupied by their own armies. The foreigners launched terror strikes from there against our people, bombing our feed lots, and our ration reclamation centers. They were a threat and they had to be held back, but things were different at the border than most people down below thought. I’d seen how they lived over there. They experienced a collapse that hadn’t touched us yet. It had taken decades for things to get so bad. Things hadn’t been like that when I’d lived there as a child, and at the time no one believed they ever would be. Younger people in Hangfei believed that if push came to shove and war did come, then the Pan-Slav Emirates would crumble before us, but the PSE kept their military strong while their people starved. I could understand why because they bordered other, even more desperate countries, and their military was the only thing that let them keep what little they had. It was also the only leverage they had to take what they needed, should it come to it, from one of the only places left that could still provide for them—us.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Sergeant. . . .”

  The memory of the dying girl, Olek’s sister, kept cutting through the haze. I’d never seen her, of course, but I imagined her as young, and pretty before the starvation had taken its toll. I imagined her lying on a mattress in the cold, waiting for her brother to return.

  “. . . he threatened you and you reacted, that’s all.”

  It was true, but she and her brother weren’t the only ones I had to answer for. Faces I’d tucked away while serving at the border had begun to reappear in the quiet of my new apartment. Faces full of hatred, and anger. Scared and desperate faces that stared back at me, knowing that their end had finally come. I’d seen it, in some of their eyes.

  I swallowed the last of the ration and washed it down with a mouthful of the shine, feeling the scratch of stubble on the back of my hand as I wiped my mouth. While it warmed me, I leaned against the rail and opened the pack of cigarillos I’d bought a week ago from a street cart while on my way home. I’d never smoked before in my life but the box promised a profound lack of worry, and by that point I’d begun to feel reckless. I shook one out and held it between my lips, tasting the paper’s sweet anise flavor. The tip had been infused with Zen oil, a powerful, supposedly nonaddictive synthetic opiate which they’d legalized during my time away.

  I sparked the lighter I’d bought along with them and puffed on the cigarillo until the end lit and crackled. I took a drag and immediately coughed it out again. My eyes watered as I gasped for air, almost dropping the smoke over the balcony rail in the process. When the fit passed, I tried again, ready for it that time. I sucked in a mouthful of smoke, then breathed it in and held it as long as I could.

  It wasn’t long, but long enough. Even as I fell into another coughing fit, I felt the opiate kick in. It eased down over my brain, turning it pleasantly fuzzy in seconds. A mellow sort of disconnectedness came over me, so I took another drag, and that time my lungs didn’t complain. I held the cigarillo between two fingers, then put down the bottle and pulled my pistol out from my waistband. I held it, one finger against the trigger guard as I leaned further over the railing.

  These people have no idea what’s coming.

  Things would get worse before they got better. In spite of e
verything I’d done, they’d get worse.

  “Sergeant Shao’s record is well documented. . . . you hoped to avoid bloodshed in this case. . . .”

  The end of the barrel felt cool against the heat of my forehead as I leaned forward, resting my head on it and looking down at the streets far below.

  “You have no idea what’s coming,” I breathed, and the view beneath me began to blur.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, but I didn’t answer it, not at first. I just stood there, the pistol’s grip in both hands now with the barrel digging into the skin between my eyes. The phone rang three more times before I stood up straight, wobbling a bit, and picked up.

  “Shao here.”

  “Shao, this is Chief Inspector Ling, Hangfei Security.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise, and took another quick drag from the cigarillo.

  “Good evening, Inspector. How can I help you?”

  “I just wanted to welcome you to the team in advance, before you start your new job.”

  Right. The security position the Reintegration Department had set me up with. With the opiates tamping down my defenses, I had to admit that on some level I think I’d had no intention of showing up there. I wondered if he hadn’t somehow sensed that after speaking with Ông.

  “You sound a little off,” he said. “Everything okay?”

  “Just getting acclimated, sir.”

  He paused in a way that made me feel sure he could picture me there, slipping into stupid numbness. When he spoke again, the formality had left his voice.

  “Look, Shao, I understand things are a little gray at the border zone.”

  “With respect sir, I don’t think you quite—”

  “I want you to know things are more black and white in Hangfei.”