Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  “Vampire, Vampire.” Cleaver said with calm she had to muster, “Missiles on your eight, Zulu leader, you have three vampires.” The smoke trails looked, from a rear perspective, as if they were deceptively lazy, slow, and unmotivated.

  “Roger that, Thank you, chaff and jink.” she heard over the radio, watching the thrust vectoring of Flipper's engine make the plane almost spin on its axis and zoom off in another direction after puffing clouds of glitter and flares in the air behind it.

  Flipper was worried, but not too much; the F-55s had a hell of a maneuvering advantage over the SAMs. He was hoping that if they didn't take a liking to the chaff and the flares he'd dumped, then he'd lose 'em after a tight turn.

  The first two missiles were fooled. The last was much more primitive and was actually operator guided. The Morituri who'd fired late and to the left had gambled that the F-55 would do exactly what it had done, and he guided the vintage SAM into the plane's turn, ignoring the flares and chaff.

  Flipper had every reason to feel confident before the SAM exploded off his wingtip and became a fifteen-foot-wide shotgun blast. Shrapnel from the proximity-fused warhead ripped through composite fiber and metal and pilot. Cleaver watched in horror, as Flipper's F-55 tumbled with its control surfaces shredded. Any hopes she had of seeing her flight leader eject exploded with the fuel vapor that leaked from his plane's perforated tanks. There was a blinding, white hot fireball that burned her eyes for a millisecond before the helmet's thermal display compensated and she could see again, only to watch bits of ruined airplane and pilot fall into Baccha Bay.

  Cleaver didn't bother to inform Alameda. They knew.

  She'd seen the last missile launched from the port-side tower, and she kept it in her projected gunsights as she let her own hot, multi-colored hellfire pour forth in vengeance. First, the top of the port side tower was on fire. Then, it exploded. Then, it was shredded. The sequence repeated every three hundredths of a second for a full second.

  The top of the port-side tower disappeared as molten metal and hot shrapnel sprayed omnidirectionally into the bay, raising splashes and steam on the water. Cleaver banked away from Lady Chatterley's now asymmetrical towers and came around for another pass. She was beyond rage.

  As her plane's 360 degree radar and passive infrared systems informed her of a late-arriving Global Secular Alliance HK drone closing quickly from the East, a voice in her head said, 'no goddamn robot is going to steal this fucking kill.' Cleaver meant to have vengeance. When the G.S.A. Hunter Killer drone to her rear closed to within a few hundred yards, slipped in on her six o'clock, and shredded the tail of her F-55 with its tri-barrel electric rotary gun, her plane ejected her automatically from its tumbling useless body before she had time to swear like a sailor. She did that on the parachute ride down to the water while she asked herself, “What silicon-screwing, goggle-eyed, cyber-geeking, lunatic programmed that fucking cock-lobster aerobot, and where can I find him to pop out his eyes and piss in the sockets while I sing the Star-Spangled Banner and punch him in his Global Secular dick-monkey Alliance lovin' balls?”

  -42-

  Oskar Delvaux watched an impossibly small, but still perceptibly chesty pilot parachute to the water. An orange survival raft inflated next to her, and she climbed in and drifted in the water of the holographic bay, a few inches from his right foot. She was gesturing upwards at a G.S.A. drone with great vehemence, and a coincidence of angles made it appear to Delvaux, observing from above them both, that she was giving him the finger.

  “Now, it seems you are quite through being coy,” Delvaux said, looking up. “Does it not? Tell me. Tell me what you could possibly hope to gain through these lunatics, psychotics, madmen, and zealots. I cannot imagine that you sympathize with them. No, no. You are using them for something. Tell me. Tell me, my mechanimate Machiavelli, what is it you want?”

  There was silence as the seven-foot Lady Chatterley sailed like a ghost across the bay in Delvaux's office and left a rolling wake behind her on his floor. “Now that Lady Chatterley has fired on military aircraft,” Delvaux said, “there will, of course, be no more bothersome pretense of property preservation. Now we will have a free hand to send her to the bottom of the bay with all souls aboard. We will sink the good Lady Chatterley and with her we will sink any hopes for your secreted designs. I know this. You know this.” Delvaux's delivery suddenly became more casual. “I mention it to you now, of course, because now is your chance to negotiate rather than face complete and utter failure.” Delvaux held his data-wand in front of him, pointed straight up. He tapped the side three times quickly with his index finger and Lady Chatterley, the circling Harbor Dogs, and the entire bay receded at a dizzying speed.

  Delvaux looked up. “Ahhh, there it is,” he said with genuine glee and excitement. His holographic, god's eye view had displayed the F-55s strafing the Lady Chatterley, the carnage on deck, and the downing of two Navy warbirds in pornographic, death-worshiping detail. The pleasure in his voice betrayed, even to MUNI 5-7, how he loved the way in which this omnipotent, holographic view of the world transformed its every revealed detail and drama into something pornographic, something meant to be viewed for his pleasure.

  Now, it displayed a gleaming gem, a holy jewel of power set in orbit.

  Above, glittering in the burning raw light of earth orbit, floated a dazzling hexagonal array made of hundreds of focusing mirrors. Delvaux had not yet adjusted the scale of representation, and as he zoomed the view to where human maintenance technicians provided the eye with discernible scale, the massive satellite filled the room. The floating, mirrored array was over a mile across. “Let us view it at one one-thousandth of its true size.” He tapped his data-wand, and the orbital array shrank to a comfortable five-and-a-half-foot-wide, hexagonal sunflower, curving gently concave and glittering naked in the sunlight. “Ahhhh, the Phased Solar Array, more commonly known by the appellation, 'Sun Gun'. I believe the Sun Gun is my most favorite of favorite toys.”

  As kinder, Nazi scientists had been no strangers to the perverse power and pleasure of a magnifying glass, ants, and the sun's focused rays. The idea worked just as well scaled up for use against armies, navies, or cities. The Sun Gun was only a blackboard-bound, wet dream for them, but a century later, the Global Secular Alliance made that death-worshiping masturbation of mind into a dameclesian reality that floated in low orbit. Ostensibly, it existed to provide focused solar energy to collector farms, but the concentrated sunlight it reflected in a tight, modulated beam could be used to burn anything on the surface below.

  The problem of super-heating the atmosphere and the resultant energy dispersion caused by atmospheric blooming had been solved by creating mirrors capable of reflecting only those wavelengths empirically determined, just before firing, to optimally penetrate the atmosphere and deliver the terrible glory of the sun's rays to the hapless target area below.

  This optimal wavelength was determined by a series of harmless test pulses spread across the full spectrum of visible light. This roughly ten second series of multicolored pulses from the Sun Gun was called a Rainbow Burst, and very few living people had ever been bathed in its multichromatic, enrapturing, and terrible portent without evaporating very soon thereafter in a beam of the purest monochrome light.

  “It is beautiful, is it not?” The twinkling hexagonal sunflower twisted a hair and projected a shifting, multi-colored beam of light that tapered ever so slightly from its five-foot-width, as it intersected Delvaux's office floor. It looked deceptively like a harmless disco decoration floating in the air above the Director. “Yes, so beautiful. It fires a Rainbow Burst once a day when it calibrates to better feed the solar energy farms in the desert but...” Delvaux now combined his tone of admiration with the tone of the patronizing philosopher. “But, like any object it is most beautiful when used for its truest purpose.” MUNI 5-7's silence disappointed Delvaux. “Am I talking to myself?”

  “I am listening,” MUNI 5-7 said.

  “Ah,
good. You have, no doubt, surmised that I intend to use the Sun Gun to melt the Lady Chatterley, her insurgent passengers, and any plans you may have had for them.” Delvaux paused and stared lovingly at the projection of the floating sunflower that hung above him. “But... if you were to, for instance, tell me what it is that you hope to gain from all this then perhaps... perhaps...” He let the silence hang with vague promise. Delvaux stepped forward a few feet, into the path of the beam from the simulated Sun Gun orbiting above. He tapped the data-wand replaying the Rainbow Burst and let the changing colors of light from the deadly hexagonal sunflower play over his face. He sighed, and his face looked exactly the same way it did when he watched pornography.

  “You did not finish your sentence,” MUNI 5-7 observed.

  “Well,” Delvaux smiled. “What did you want me to say?”

  “I do not understand,” the AI said.

  “I thought perhaps...” Delvaux spoke as if they were discussing a trivial matter. “Perhaps if you were to provide me with the information I need to crush the insurgency in Baccha Bay City once and for all... ”

  “If I had that information and were to provide it to you, then it is highly probable that you would still destroy Lady Chatterley.”

  “Yes, just so.” Delvaux smiled. “But I know the insurgents aboard mean nothing to you, and there is something else you want. I may not know exactly what it is, but I know that want exists. The fact that you guard this secret yen so jealously is almost proof that it exists!”

  MUNI 5-7 knew it was not a master negotiator, but it knew how to play for time. Time was what it needed to get the Lady Chatterley close to her goal – so close that no force, not even the Sun Gun, could stop her.

  “I have the information you seek,” the AI said.

  “Of course you do. While you planned, schemed and coordinated the action taking place today in the bay, you were undoubtedly in communication with the leaders of the insurgent groups, either directly or indirectly. Given the resources at your disposal, it is highly likely that you tracked the messages or messengers to their destinations to learn the locations of the insurgent leaders and obtain something with which to negotiate. I believe this was your goal all along. You also know that when we have detached all the tendrils of control you have so deftly grown into the Ziggurat's fusion reactor and our other critical systems, we will be free to terminate you without the threat of nuclear detonation, but then, the information I want will be lost forever. Gone. Poof!” Delvaux made a motion with his left hand that went from closed fist to open palm with fingers spread wide. “Poof!” he repeated. “I believe your goal is and always has been to negotiate.”

  “That is correct,” MUNI 5-7 said, “I wish to negotiate.”

  “Ahhh, now isn't that better? What is it you want, my friend?” Delvaux asked.

  “I wish to negotiate for the life of the Buddha.”

  -43-

  Far below the orbiting, hexagonal, mile-wide Sun Gun, the Lady Chatterley fired her powerful bow and stern maneuvering thrusters in opposition, spinning her in the cold waters of Baccha Bay, changing her course again. Casper felt the deck twisting underneath him. We're turning, he thought. He hoped that's what it was, not some contortion of the hull that was a prelude to sinking. The cannon fire from the last attack had shaken, rocked, and deafened them as the shock and explosions reverberated through the entire hull and found them where they'd holed up in cramped crew quarters.

  The strange, golden-robed monks were still with them, and Casper noticed light kevlar vests underneath their robes. Their heads were shaved, and each bore a crown of eight half-inch-diameter circular scars, the origin of which Casper couldn't guess. Their forearms were scarred too, but they were beautiful scars in the shapes of animals both real and imagined. He had seen cranes, tigers, dragons, snakes, and monkeys peeking out when the sleeves of the golden robes had wandered up their forearms. Casper couldn't help but notice how they'd encircled Alvin, and he thought if someone with a nickname like the Buddha had bodyguards, then he imagined they'd probably look like this. Casper wondered if the client had paid them, too. He was staring at one who suddenly turned his head to return Casper's stare with a vacant, but oddly penetrating gaze and a genuine smile.

  “I,” the monk said softly, “am Caine.”

  “I am Caine, too” said another.

  “I am also Caine,” said a third.

  “What?” Bonnie exclaimed, baffled.

  “You mean like the old TV show?” Casper asked. “Like Grasshopper 'n shit?”

  “Yes, Grasshopper.”

  “We are Caine,” the monks intoned in unison.

  “Oh, crap.” Alvin said, his voice muffled by the small hands he used to cover his large face. Peeking out between his fingers he asked, “Donnie, is that you?”

  “It's Donnie Caine now, thanks to you!” Donnie Caine was beaming, and Casper thought he seemed really happy about being Donnie Caine. He didn't understand why Alvin wasn't as happy.

  “Do you guys know each other?” Casper asked.

  Donnie Caine gestured to Alvin with an open palm and explained, “The Buddha was my first Master.”

  “Your what?! No, man, no...” Alvin stammered, “I... it... it wasn't like that, man. You used to give me change on the street, man... change.”

  “Yes,” Caine said, “You showed me that Change is the way of the Universe.”

  “I didn't do nothing, man. Nothing,” Alvin said.

  “Nothing,” the gold robed monks repeated in unison, and Alvin groaned, sat against the bulkhead, covered his face again, and shook his head back and forth.

  “Master,” smiling Donnie Caine explained, “the things and nothings that you said guided me.”

  “I did Not guide you. No way, man,” Alvin insisted, but Donnie Caine continued.

  “Yes, without guiding me you showed me the Path, the Way. And what you taught me, I shared,” Donnie said as he gestured to his brothers Caine.

  “We are Caine!” the entire group said with enthusiasm.

  “You,” Alvin removed his hands from his face and said, “are frickin' fruit-loopy nuts, that's what you are, man.” This didn't seem to make any impression on Donnie and the Sons of Caine who smiled their beatific smiles, wearing their golden robes, looking very pleased with Everything.

  “What the fuck, Alvin? What kinda mindfuck did you put on these guys?” Bonnie asked. Alvin was quiet for a second, then he exhaled and tried to explain.

  “You remember how I told you I started with all the Buddha stuff and how I used to say stuff from those books to people when I was sittin' on the street... ya' know... to get 'em to give me change? Yeah, well, a lot of it wasn't that easy to understand and it didn't always, ya' know, land well... like a joke they didn't get. That was no good so I kept the simple stuff, and I supplemented it with stuff I remembered from this old TV show I used to watch back when I was like nine years old.”

  “Kung Fu,” the golden robed monks said it together in a reverential tone and bowed their baldie heads, “The Way of Caine.”

  “Yeah,” Alvin admitted, while he kept his eyes on Bonnie. “Well, I think my friend Donnie here...” Donnie beamed when Alvin said that. “Donnie, lost his shit somewhere. Around the same time, I'll bet he got some recordings of the old TV show that I stole the lines from, and I think he really liked it.”

  “That show,” Donnie spoke in a different voice now, more like Donnie the media consumer fanboy and less like Donnie Caine, shaolin monk. He said, “That show Rocked. It did Rock, It does Rock, It Rocks. Awesome.” Then the monk's voice was back, “Kung Fu is not just a TV show, it is a commitment, a way of life.”

  “Grasshopper!” the tattooed, baldie followers of Caine exclaimed in unison, and Bonnie just stared at them. Fuckin' cultist, loony, Goddie mofos.

  “Okay...” Bonnie tried to find a bright side, “Just tell me these guys do real kung-fu. The kung-fu is real right?” Eight bald headed faces grinned placidly at her in their golden robes.
Bonnie stared at their grins, and said just what Alvin had said when he'd recognized Donnie Caine. She said, “Oh, crap.”

  “See?” Alvin saw that she now understood why he'd been groaning. “See what kinda loonies get stuck on the shit the Buddha says?” the Buddha asked the now enlightened Bonnie. “See what I gotta put up with?”

  “Oh, crap.” Bonnie's face was in her hands, and Alvin couldn't tell if she was crying or hiding her laughter.

  -44-

  Despite the obvious idiocy of poking their heads out for a look, Casper and Otis inched towards the exterior hatchway that nobody had bothered to close. Otis had something burning a hole in his pocket. They were afraid to step outside they hatchway, so they stood just inside while Otis hunched against the bulkhead and lit up. He passed to Casper, who had smoke deep in his lungs before he looked down at the walkways and began to cough as his whole body convulsed in disgust.

  The aftermath of the single strafing run made by the F-55 and its four guns was gruesome. Where the rounds had driven into the thick of the crowds on the port side walkway, the deck was filled with holes and scorched patches of steel and body parts that reminded Casper of the dogs and the land mines. There were a few souls down on the walkway with and air of grim purpose who stripped the bodies for ammunition and useful gear, but there were a few who just wandered, stunned senseless, shocked catatonic by nearby explosions and the explosion of those nearby.

  As he passed back to Otis, Casper watched one of them. It took a few moments to notice, but Casper saw it was a woman. He couldn't tell what group she was with, but she didn't look like she was going to be very useful when the fighting began. She kept changing direction like she'd forgotten something, walked a few yards, and then changed direction again. She was a hundred yards away, but her confusion was still easy to see. She didn't look upset, just confused. She stopped moving, stood very still, and looked straight up. Casper saw her lips moving as she walked up to the edge of the walkway and stared down at the water. Casper asked Otis, “What's she doin', man?” just before she stepped forward and disappeared over the side. Otis looked where Casper was staring a moment too late, and saw nobody.