Convergence

by Michael Patrick Hicks

  I lowered myself onto the tracks, unworried about the third rail. Electricity hadn’t flowed down there in a long time. The tunnel was a large, gaping maw, pitch-black before me. I shined a light down one end then the other. I could follow the lines to Union Station or Pershing Square, hoping to find Jaime somewhere along the way, stopping to investigate the nooks and crannies that passed the beam of my flashlight.

  “Which way?” Kaften asked.

  I appreciated that he considered me a part of the search, even though he could have easily ignored me. His trust was a very tentative step forward, and I wasn’t going to goad him back toward his usually brusque attitude.

  I went with Pershing Square, toward North Hollywood, for no real reason. A hunch was all I had to go on. The park there had fountains, a purple bell tower, an ice rink, and a concert square. Husbands had gone there with their wives to sit in one of the plazas and watch kids play in the streams of water while listening to the sounds of summer music. Selene and I had gone there with Mesa, and perhaps Jaime had gone there with his wife.

  Kaften and I set off down the tracks with a third man. He sent a second team of three down the opposite tunnel. Spotters were stationed on the rooftops across the way, taking advantage of the few snipers peaks outside, in the hopes that they could spot Jaime coming or going. We would all be staying in touch through a private IP over the commNet.

  “Guess we’re too early to ride pantsless, huh?” Kaften said.

  His humor surprised me, and I laughed a bit. I remembered the annual bottomless subway ride commuters held every January. Back when the Red Line was running, hundreds of people—from the punks and Goths, young men and women, and exhibitionistic thrill-seekers, to the businessmen wearing dress shirts, ties, sport coats, and tighty-whities—had taken to the subway in their underwear. Even some of the zanier elderly had gotten in on the act. I remembered sitting across from a man who had to be in his nineties and was wearing a stained undershirt and an adult diaper.

  The tradition was one more thing lost to the war, I realized, and my smile died. The PRC would have considered such a display an indecent form of protest and rounded up the revelers with guns drawn while lobbing tear gas into the crowds.

  My laughter gave way to the nerves I had been trying to disguise. Pre-fight jitters. I could feel the acid in my stomach churn, creeping up my throat. A hot ball of lead in my core struggled to climb up, and I fought it back down. Fucking nerves. My head was swimming. I was afraid. Afraid I was right. Afraid I was wrong. Afraid of all the potential horrible paths we were treading. Afraid of what we would find at the end of the line.

  Kaften and I had come to an amicable arrangement. We both had something the other wanted. He wanted Jaime. I needed an army. Support. Help.

  “What do you want with him?” Kaften had asked me earlier, as the jeeps we had been riding in pulled into camp. Although no fires or lanterns burned, I could make out the downcast eyes of those who lived there, people who were as much survivors as victims. A stab of pity for them echoed through me, as it had the last time I was there, and I couldn’t help but wonder if I found Mesa alive, was this what I would be condemning her to? Shame crept through me at that thought, but I was getting uncomfortably used to that feeling.

  “He has my daughter,” I said.

  Kaften stared at me for a long quiet moment. I didn’t know if he was a family man or if he had anyone at all in his life whom he cared for, other than the small regiment of soldiers he commanded, but I sensed a familiarity pass between us. A newfound interest glittered in his eyes. Before, he had regarded me with bored disinterest, as if I were a lesser man for having his gaze fall upon me. A small measure of fragile equality, not quite a bond, but perhaps some association akin to it, existed between us, but I knew that the ground could shift away from me any moment.

  “You understand that if we find him, I’ll kill him.”

  “I understand,” I said. A part of me, the part of me that was beholden to Alice Xie, had been counting on it. Despite all the things I knew about Jaime, I still regarded him as a friend. For all the atrocities he had committed, all the sins he had trespassed… The more I learned about him, the more my closeness to him became shaded by anger and disgust. But I did still care for him, and when the time came to put a bullet in his head, I would be unsure. I would not be able to approach the task with the impartiality of my previous murders. Kaften was my ace in the hole.

  “You’re not really Army, are you?” I asked.

  He shook loose a smoke and offered me one. It was tempting, but I said no.

  “We’re private,” he said, confirming what Alice had told me earlier. We sat around a long table, kitty-corner from one another at the head, leaving a lot of open space around us.

  “Corporate,” I said.

  “America’s gone, pretty much, and what’s left ain’t what it used to be. The world’s moved on, and everyone’s starting to recognize that in order to get on with tomorrow, we have to face today. That’s the PRC, the big old elephant in the room nobody wants to talk about. But behind closed doors, in far off places, people are talking and scheming. California’s big business, regardless of which flag it’s flying.”

  He was talking about oil—and land, lots of prime real estate that could be bought and sold for development.

  “In ten or fifteen years,” he said, “you’ll be seeing all these little post-nostalgia places. Chinese fryer joints with retro-cool movie themes and pictures and placards of Hollywood stars that nobody remembers or has even heard of. You’ll start seeing little Asian men impersonating Arnold Schwarzenegger, with little Asian Marilyn Monroes dangling off their arms. PRC, USA, it don’t matter. What matters is money. The new regime wasn’t expecting the uphill climb to be as steep as it is now, but that’s because they’re politicians and not businessmen. Now the real businessmen are stepping up. Pretty soon, this’ll all be familiar again.”

  “Especially after the displaced are flown out to Montreal and forgotten about,” I said.

  He blew out a big cloud of smoke and shrugged, unconcerned. “If they want to, they’ll be let back in, if they’ve got the funds for it. I wouldn’t worry too much about it. This is still California, and the PRC is surrounded by North America over here, not Asia. They’ve done about all they’re going to, proved what they needed to. They’re holding a solid hand now. So…” His voice trailed and gave way to another shrug.

  “This camp, though… you’re shuttling refugees out.”

  “The ones that want to go, that want jobs. The UN’s not cutting it, so the Brits are helping out. They feel bad about how it all went down over here, and they’ve loosened up on their immigration policies. Ireland, too.”

  “So I figure, these businessmen you’re working for, they must not like Jaime too well, him blowing up everything and calling for revolution.”

  He smiled. “Maybe I was wrong about you. You’re not so stupid, maybe. Yeah, Jaime’s a problem for them. Nobody wants to come in, spend a few billion rebuilding, and then have it all explode in their faces.”

  “How did you know who he is? I mean, who he really is?”

  “Military ain’t the only thing that’s private. And Alice Xie ain’t the only one with a batch of memorialists. You seen her outfit on that, right? Now imagine if you’ve got real money backing it up, lots of it.” He let that sink in for a bit then said, “It’s how we found you, you know.”

  “A convergence web.”

  “Right in one,” he said. “You’re a minor data point when all is said and done, but you’ve shown up in enough important places with enough of the key players here to be a significant piece.”

  “So why go around killing all these people to get to him? To me?” I wanted to be angry about it, to feel some kind of justified indignation, but I was too used up to feel anything. I didn’t have the energy for moral outrage.

  “We’re an army, son. It’s what we do. Plus, it makes for good cover. PRC sees all these attacks and thinks
there’s in-fighting among all the disparate groups they haven’t managed to snuff out. My group, we’re working behind the scenes a bit. Think of it as urban camouflage.”

  “When you attacked the reclamation site… I was your target, wasn’t I?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “All those people you killed…” I thought of Hafiz’s face exploding against me from a high-velocity sniper’s round.

  “We had to make it look good. If one person disappears, PRC would get suspicious. Jaime might have gotten spooked and rabbited. We go in guns a-blazing, round up you with a few other civvies, and leave a high enough body count… well, that’s just another day in the DMZ, isn’t it?”

  Bile rose as I listened to his justifications, but getting angry wouldn’t do me any good. I thought about all the collateral damage his so-called urban camouflage had wrought then reminded myself I wasn’t here to argue morality with him. Fuck it.

  He must have reached the same conclusion. He stubbed the cigarette out on the table and stood to stretch with a loud grunt. Then we got down to business.

  A better part of the night was spent studying the subway lines, gathering as much information as we could. Infrastructure records weren’t quite as publicly accessible as they’d been in the old days, and the PRC was slow at restoring information records. They knew that information was power, and that was something no one gave freely or readily. It took a lot of archival digging to come up with very little. The EMP attacks had decimated the public record, wiped out all those little ones and zeros we’d all become so goddamn reliant on. In the end, we came up with about as much as we already knew.

  Kaften had maps—a lot of them. Schematics. Blueprints. Building plans. I was surprised, awed really. He was sitting on a powder keg of knowledge.

  The Metro subway system covered more than fifty miles of rail below ground. The Red Line had been built in phases, and we were traveling through the first phase, a five-station corridor that ran from Union Station to Westlake/MacArthur Park. The tunnel was roughly four miles long, with Pershing Square almost at the halfway mark. We were a bit closer, though, since Civic Center was the second stop.

  It should have been easy. A seventy-five-foot-long subway car took up most of the tunnel. I recognized the Ansaldobreda A650 from Kaften’s notes. The six-car train, all electric, had gone into service back in the 1990s. Ten feet wide, twelve feet tall, it sat on the rail tracks like a metal behemoth. I spotted the signature block-style M inside a red circle on the face of the car. We had to pick a side to go around it. The tunnel itself had an eighteen-foot diameter, and we were able to move beside the train easily enough. But we had little room for maneuvering, and we had to walk single-file, which was not good when the bullets started flying.

  The first shot pinged off the concrete wall beside Kaften’s head, showering both of us with bits of stone. He dropped to his knees, and I followed suit. We pressed up to the metal side of the Ansaldobreda, trying to make ourselves into smaller targets.

  “We’ve got a collapse on this line.” The voice of one of the men who had been sent down the Purple Line came across the comms. His voice was tinny inside my skull, but the bio-fi reception was clear, despite the thick concrete and the distance between us. He started to say more, but the sounds of gunfire and a sharp scream of pain interrupted him. I lost his signal, and from the looks of the men around me, they were equally troubled by the vacant pIP broadcast.

  We were being ambushed. Hot sparks splashed across my face, and I could feel the heat of a bullet that had narrowly missed me.

  “Turn off the goddamn light!” Kaften shouted, his voice booming across the feed in my head.

  I responded to his barked order on pure instinct and the urgent weight of command. I was blind in the sudden dark, and I hoped that whoever was shooting at us was, too. That small sliver of hope was futile. Whoever was down there probably had night vision or optical upgrades.

  “I can’t see a fucking thing,” I said, straining to see down the tunnel past Kaften’s shoulder.

  He and the other man, Andersson, both had optics and could see fine. Nanos imbedded in their optic nerves would be processing the data and filtering it for thermal vision then transmitting the information for display directly in front of their retinas. The imagery would be an odd dual overlay of their vision as it normally would be, with the computer-enhanced imagery mapped against it with as much clarity and color as could be filtered in through the software. From what I’d heard, it took some getting used to, and it had taken a few software upgrades for the mapping to catch up with the real-time vision processing.

  “Just stay close,” Andersson said. I could feel him shuffling close to me, but his voice was oddly disconnected through the comm relay, as if he were farther away.

  “Get the door open,” Kaften said, firing a short three-round burst toward our attackers. “Beta, what’s your status?”

  “One tango down. Alvarez and Laidon are KIA,” Mitchell said. That meant he was the sole survivor of Beta team.

  “Son of a bitch,” Andersson said. This time, his breath was hot against my ear, close enough to ruffle my hair.

  “I’ve got maybe half a dozen out here,” the voice said. Periodic gunfire underscored his message, echoed in front of me as Kaften fired again. “SITREP?”

  “It’s shit,” Kaften said.

  I needed a minute to remember “SITREP” was short-hand for situation report.

  “Hard to say how many are out there. Thinking six, maybe. We’re all healthy, though.”

  “I’m locked down in a small maintenance cubby. I don’t think I’m making it out of here, Sarge.”

  “You stow that shit, Mitchell. You hold your ground, and you don’t give one fucking inch. You understand that? We’ll wrap this up right quick, and then we’ll come and save your sorry ass. You hear me?”

  A moment of silence ticked by, then another and another still. The commNet was dead—painfully dead.

  Kaften let out another three-round burst. His voice practically boomed through the comm. “I said, do you hear me, goddamnit?”

  Silence.

  Another group of bullets pinged dangerously close. A spattering of concrete. A shower of sparks. The heat of metal.

  I found myself inching back, butting up against Andersson, who was fighting with the door, trying to pull them apart. I wedged my fingers into the door, one hand above his, the other below, and we fought to pull. The work was difficult from a crouched position below the doors, but if we stood up, we were dead. We didn’t have the leverage. I wondered if the Ansaldobreda’s doors were locked. We would never get them open. We were going to die in this fucking tunnel.

  We were maybe halfway between the emergency cross-passages that ran between the Red and Purple lines every eight hundred feet. Little cubbies like the one Mitchell had been holed up in were scattered along the line, too, for maintenance or utilities access.

  “What about the troops outside?” I asked, thinking of the rooftop snipers Kaften had positioned outside the station entrance.

  “No,” Kaften said, so quickly I figured the word was a reflex action for him. “If Jaime bolts, those snipers could be our last chance to bag him up. He runs, and I pull those men down here, he gets away, and maybe I lose a few more men. Not going to happen.”

  “I’m sending a peaceful their way,” Andersson said.

  A peaceful was, in the parlance of the military’s ironic naming scheme, a sonic grenade. It did not detonate in the typical sense that most grenades do. After a short warm-up period, it would unleash a nauseating sonic wave in a small radius to cripple those it landed near.

  “Do it,” Kaften urged. “Everitt, you cover your eyes.”

  My eyes were adjusting to the darkness well enough to see Andersson wind up and throw. The grenade landed with a soft thud a few yards down from us. A surprised shout followed. I shut my eyes tight, but I still saw the bright flash of light and heard the soft whump and the high-pitched screech of the
sonic field.

  The peaceful grenade had been a popular mainstay among crowd control and riot police. When it went off, anyone caught in the sonic blast was shut down instantly with uncontrollable vomiting and migraines. Although it was meant to be a more measured, more rational response than simply opening fire on a crowd of people with a hail of bullets, the effects were so severe that some people claimed that being shot was far less debilitating.

  We still met some gunfire, but it seemed to have diminished. The muffled retching of at least two people confirmed this. They would be the two we would try to wring some answers from if we didn’t find Jaime. We had no way of knowing who might be wired for DRMR or if any of them had mem backups, so the plan was to play it as safely as possible. If we met resistance, and obviously we had, we needed some of them alive.

  Kaften returned fire, keeping the tango pinned down. Andersson and I took the chance and stood, working together to pry open the train car’s doors. With both of us on our feet and getting proper leverage, we forced open the doors, and I climbed in.

  Bullets chased after me, pinging off the sides of the train where I had been standing. Andersson grunted and fell back a step, almost losing his balance. I knew he’d been hit, but I couldn’t see how badly or where.

  “Reinforcements are here,” I shouted, this time vocally. It was stupid, but it was a frightened reflex. I wasn’t used to the long, sustained conversations over commNet. Kaften made his annoyance clear and shoved me back with one hand while helping Andersson aboard with the other.

  “How bad?” Kaften asked, firing at the opposite end of the tunnel, where the reinforcements were filtering in.

  “Not very,” Andersson said. “It’s healing already.”

  I watched him as he checked his loadouts and put a fresh magazine in his assault rifle. The stupid jingle from those old medichine man adverts danced in my head. Andersson didn’t seem all the worse for wear, and that was certainly a good thing. Kaften knelt beside me, ejecting a magazine and replacing it with a full one. If he gave a damn about being seriously outnumbered, he wasn’t showing it.