Bring Me the Head of the Buddha

by Bloom, A. D.

  “Who?” Otis asked.

  They smoked and watched the wreckage that floated in the bathtub. There were little patches of fuel and oil burning on the surface, and bits of honeycombed carbon-fiber that had trapped air within their structure floated into the oil and burned with green flames. Casper was thinking how he didn't feel so badass anymore, not even with the submachine gun strapped across his chest. He was about to pass Otis's joint back to him when someone who had quietly sidled up on his left side reached over and took it.

  She was short and wide and fearsome and couldn't have been over nineteen. Corazon, has to be, Casper thought. Her dark, curly hair was pulled back in a ponytail and mostly covered by the pink bandanna she'd tied around her head. She looked more Gangsta than Goddie. He watched her draw on the joint without touching it to her lips, and as she did, Casper saw the three drops of blood that had been tattooed in the corner of her right eye running down her cheek. They trickled down her face into the middle of her cheek where they faded and then reformed near the corner of her eye again. Casper watched it happen a few times as she smoked in silence, stood next to them, and stared out at the aftermath of the last attack. Her eyes were red by the time she handed back a roach and spoke without looking at them.

  “Who the fuck are you guys, anyway? Don't look like no soldiers, look more like pussy-ass clubbers without the stim-muscles. I like muscles, but I fuck-up clubbers.” Casper was trying hard to think of something to say, but she just said, “Keep your head down,” and walked back inside adding, “cutie-pie,” from inside the hatchway. Otis and Casper stared at each other and began to laugh nervously because they knew they were in way, way over their heads.

  “Sheeeeeit,” Otis said slowly.

  All at once, everything turned a color Casper had only seen once. It was like a pale purple but more intense. It was the color of the air during a solar eclipse and it was rich like it had been distilled and beamed through the air to saturate everything. It began to shift to an indigo. Then the light turned a supernatural blue that made the purest cobalt and manganese seem like the poor cousins. The air was filled with it, and Casper felt like he was breathing blue before it shifted through a subtly tinted cerulean that was deep and bright as it turned green. It was a frequency of viridian light so refined and verdant that it somehow brought out a new level of detail and texture to the twisted metal and bodies that had previously been invisible in daylight's full-spectrum melange.

  Down amongst the bodies and the parts, on the port side walkway, the clarity of the vision brought tears to the eyes of five hardened men. They muttered prayers and two of them had the courage to stare straight up and view, with open eyes, the golden-yellow light of their God. They were not surprised to be blinded by His saffron, then chrome orange brilliance. His vermilion, then ruby red and alizarin Grace.

  “What the fuck are you guy's doin' out there?” Carlos's voice shouted from inside. Otis yelled into the hatch, “We didn't do that shit, man, that wasn't us!”

  “Get back here you fuckin' stoners and bring that roach too!”

  Back in the cabin, Carlos spun the wheel on the air-tight hatch and locked them in. Then he lit the roach. “Fuckity Mc fuck-fuck!” Otis exclaimed. “Did you see that weird-ass shit?” Carlos had indeed seen that shit, and he looked worried. He smoked with purpose, like he wanted to be high before something that he knew was coming actually arrived. “What the fuck was that shit?” Otis asked.

  “It looked like that shit we saw when we were tripping out in the desert,” Casper said, “and we got lost near the um...”

  “Solar energy farm.” Carlos said, finishing Casper's sentence for him. Carlos knew what the spectacular display had been, and he led Casper to understanding it too. “And what do they zap the solar farm with?”

  “The um... the frickin' um...”

  “The Phased Solar Array,” Bonnie said, finishing Casper's sentence. “The Sun Gun.”

  Casper realized what was about to happen and what they'd just seen. “Fuck that shit! That was a frickin'... um...”

  “Rainbow Burst,” she said. Bonnie had seen the colored light, too. “That was a calibration sequence. They'll fry us anytime now.” She turned to Carlos and asked, “Do you think our client counted on this... on us getting zapped from orbit?”

  “He counts on Everything. I mean, he thinks and he plans. All day and all night that's what he does, right?” Carlos thought Bonnie didn't look convinced. He wasn't either.

  He checked the air-tight hatch one more time.

  -45-

  Fire-control was patched into Delvaux's data wand, and his index finger was eager to triple-tap and fire it.

  “So, MUNI 5-7, are you prepared to give me the information I want – the locations of the insurgent leadership?” Oskar Delvaux felt like he'd already won, now that MUNI 5-7 had decided to negotiate.

  “Bring me the Buddha and I will give you everything you ask,” the AI said. Delvaux laughed heartily at that. He lifted the data-wand, pointed it at the holographic projection of the Sun Gun, and prepared to fire at Lady Chatterley. “We both know I don't have the Buddha. I don't even know where he is. My technicians were right, you have gone insane. I think it is time for me to burn some ants.”

  “I know where he is,” MUNI 5-7 declared. “The Buddha is aboard the Lady Chatterley.”

  Delvaux's mind momentarily stumbled, and he looked confused, but he lowered the data-wand and withdrew his index finger from the trigger of the fully calibrated, ready to fire, orbital Sun Gun. He waved the data-wand and brought the projection of the seven-foot Lady Chatterley back to the floor of his office. He stared at it, and he noticed it turning in the water. She was firing her maneuvering thrusters, changing course again. When she no longer appeared to be turning, Delvaux noticed she'd taken a course due West. The seven foot hologram now pointed at the door of his office on the West wall, the wall opposite the bay. He walked towards the transparent, dusky-pink tinted East wall of his office that overlooked the bay, and he asked MUNI 5-7, “Well, if the Buddha is on the ship as you claim, then it would seem to me that you already have what you want since you are in control of the ship, yes?”

  MUNI 5-7 did its best to continue the charade as long as possible. “The Buddha has been kidnapped by Morituri terrorists, and my actions to aid them have been coerced. They will kill him unless I do as they ask.”

  Delvaux stared out at the waters of the real, actual Baccha Bay. There, only two miles out, he could see Lady Chatterley, and she was clearly pointed due West, directly at Delvaux. She was pointed directly at the Ziggurat.

  Delvaux knew that he'd underestimated MUNI 5-7.

  A wave of hot anger and embarrassment rushed up his body, as he realized the AI had been playing for time and had no intention of negotiating or giving him any information.

  “You really are a terrible liar,” Delvaux said.

  “That is correct,” MUNI 5-7 agreed.

  The AI had estimated a very low probability that its ruse would buy even this much time, but according to its calculations, it had succeeded in gaining the time required for Lady Chatterley to reach her destination.

  “It seems,” Delvaux admitted, “that I have wasted my time attempting to negotiate with you.”

  “That is correct.”

  “Let us waste no more time with this pointless banter.” Delvaux raised the data-wand to point at the projection of the orbital weapon and triple-tapped with his index finger.

  The Sun Gun fired.

  -46-

  Three and a half square miles of frequency modulating mirrors collected the sun's fantastic energy and focused it into a tapering beam of viridian green light that reached down from orbit to strike at Lady Chatterley. At its origin, the beam was the same mile's width as the orbiting Sun Gun, but it narrowed to only a hundred yards where it struck the waters of the bay, just behind the ship, and chased her. Delvaux watched the glorious monochrome finger of saturate green light appear almost solid as it simmered the
bay's waters and illuminated them with an eerie, unnatural sub-surface glow for a mile around the kill-zone.

  Even through the tinted, transparent, doped silicate XinCryst wall, the beam hurt his eyes. He directed the insanely verdant beam with the data-wand as he watched it close on Lady Chatterley's stern. She was less than a mile away from him, sailing directly at the Ziggurat, and as Delvaux watched the viridian finger of god poking the V-shape of her wake, chasing her down, he felt chills of power through his body.

  Donovan Flynn and the Morituri who manned the open levels of Lady Chatterley's aft towers with their surface-to-air missiles, had no earthly name for the monochrome green shaft that appeared behind the ship, simmering the water in a hundred yard circle of blinding light. Donovan heard the other two men in the tower praying. There was a malevolence to the beam, Donovan thought. It pursued the ship in an almost toying fashion that suggested the cruelty of a human hand's guidance. He knew he should be running for the shelter of the bow superstructure but he stayed fixed, seduced by the undeniable, irresistible beauty of the luminous lance that crackled with plasma up and down its length. Donovan's near-shut, squinting eyes focused everywhere and nowhere along the Sun Gun's emerald ray, and the glorious spectacle was not diminished by impending mortality. It was exponentiated. The ray stretched from the bay up into the sky with ionized emerald veins shaped like lightning. Donovan had no way of knowing that his lips and Oskar Delvaux's lips moved together in unison, pronouncing the same words at the same moment – “It's Beautiful.”

  Donovan broke from his reverie and ran. His comrades had already dropped their cumbersome missile launchers and fled. He took the tower's stairs three at a time, and as he neared the bottom of the open staircase, he saw them running, trying to cross the six hundred feet to the bow superstructure. He knew they'd never make it before the burning beam passed over the ship, and if they wouldn't make it, then he had no chance either.

  He turned to look over the railing of the second level landing, down into the waters off the starboard side, eighty feet below, crossed himself, and jumped. He fell for almost three seconds. After half a second he realized he had jumped too late. As the beam passed over him, the outer layers of his skin burst into flame and evaporated. His entire skull filled with an evil green light that his eyelids couldn't shut out because they'd burned away. He inhaled superheated air that singed his lungs and died of his burns before his body hit the water.

  The beam's first few seconds of contact with Lady Chatterley's stern were an explosion of brilliant soda-bottle, pthalocyanine, and chromium green rays that reached out across the bay in all directions playing off the water, the Ziggurat, and all the buildings surrounding the bay like a laser striking a mirrored disco ball. Everything across the bay's shores with line-of-sight to Lady Chatterley scintillated with verdant spectacle. The disco ball effect lasted only a few seconds before the albedo of the stern's steel diminished as it began to melt.

  First the steel buckled, then it sagged, absorbing the diablous lux lucis. The stern glowed with an eerily colored, pthalo aura tinted with the reddish-yellow color of burning steel as the upward facing metal surfaces drooped, and melted, dripping in streams and rivulets that burned with ferric flames. The bow superstructure cast a shadow across the water that was almost burned away by the glowing air, remaining only as a deep, blood-red penumbra that pointed like an spearhead prow at the Ziggurat.

  Two of the Harbor Dogs orbiting Lady Chatterley in tight ellipses were caught in the Sun Gun's ray. Their carbon-fiber composite skins evaporated in a flash and puff of smoke, and in the quarter second before their ammunition cooked off and sent them to Harbor Doggy Heaven, their primitive artificial intelligences decided that Lady Chatterley was responsible. They decided she was no longer a ship in distress and reclassified her as a Threat. They cried a burst transmission of distress and accusation to the remaining thirteen autonomous drones in their pack. The remaining Harbor Dogs spun the tri-barrels of their own turret-mounted electric guns in a conditioned response akin to Pavlovian salivation.

  Thirteen Harbor Dogs tore into the hull of Lady Chatterley, just below the water-line, strafing her sides and perforating her ballast tanks with their fifty caliber, tungsten-cored sabot rounds. Steel-jacketed lead rammed into Lady Chatterley's hull, and both melted before the massive kinetic energy of the tungsten cores in the sabot rounds ripped molten edged wounds in the hull. This happened six hundred and fifty times per second, and after six seconds, when the Harbor Dogs had expended their ammunition and spun their barrels in a futile electric whine, there were nearly four thousand new holes in Lady Chatterley's hull. The ballast tanks that lined the exterior perimeter of the hull were thoroughly open to the bay, and the water poured in.

  Lady Chatterley sank in the water, but she did not sink.

  As the Sun Gun's kill-zone of green burning light moved up Lady Chatterley's spine, the deck plates expanded and burst upwards before sagging, drooping, and burning in puddles of molten metal. Her spine began to buckle, but as the water rushed in from the bay into her useless, sieve like exterior ballast tanks, she sank in the water and her spine dipped yards below the surface, cooling in the water in a groaning, steaming, agony that twisted her grotesquely, but saved her spine from the burning, melting power of the Sun Gun's ray.

  The entire cargo area of the ship was now cooling below the surface of the bay and it was beyond the reach of Delvaux's weapon. Boats and rafts in the bow end of the bathtub that had not yet been struck by the ray floated free, no longer contained in Lady Chatterley's channel. Those that didn't burn in the blinding green kill-zone as the ray continued to pursue the bow superstructure were left in her wake as she continued to press forward towards the Ziggurat.

  A massive plume of steam rose into the air above Lady Chatterley's midsection, and it blew forward in the wind, shrouding her in her own cloud, a ten-story fog bank that glowed with lime brilliance. The steam directly in the beam's burning path vanished almost instantly, but Delvaux could no longer see the ship clearly because her cloud moved with her.

  -47-

  Delvaux screamed with rage knowing that he'd lost his chance to sink her. A few more seconds and Lady Chatterley's spine would have melted enough to break her in two or twisted enough from thermal stress to send her fore and aft structures crashing to the water sideways. He'd had her, and now with her spine below the surface it was out of the ray's deadly reach.

  There is still time, he thought, still time. Delvaux continued to bring the luminous green lance forward. There was no use in heating the water over her midsection but he could still melt the upper levels of the bow and its castle-like superstructure. It wouldn't stop Lady Chatterley's forward motion, but it would cook those who hid inside. Oskar Delvaux had hoped to sink the ship and drown them all, but he thought, I can settle for cooking them like Sunday roasts.

  Lady Chatterley was less than a half-mile out, with her glowing, lime steam cloud in front of her, when Delvaux's burning beam settled on the bow superstructure. The surfaces that faced skyward heated in moments, and the paint burned away in a smokeless flash exposing the bare metal. As the steel began to glow from within, it sagged and seconds later, it began to melt and burn in fifteen-hundred degree pools that ran streaming down the sides of the steel castle. The rivets that held the topmost horizontal plates burst free and the liquid, white-hot, burning steel found its way inside.

  Nearly eighty heavily armed and armored militants were packed into the top level, and the burning metal dripped over them as the roof failed completely across the top deck of the superstructure. Some were exposed to the green light of the Sun Gun, and their flesh evaporated where unprotected by armor. Armored flesh burned underneath the armor as the fire-resistant kevlar fibers ignited and melted to their bodies. Some were killed by their own grenades that cooked off less than a second after exposure, creating a chorus of booming, concussive explosions that shook the ship.

  One deck below, the air temperature reached three
hundred degrees before fire suppression sprinklers sprayed water into every cabin, passageway, and stairwell where the tortured insurgents were baking to death like Giftmas hams. The cooling waters lowered the temperature inside the penultimate deck to a hundred and eighty, but many were already suffocating from mortally damaged lungs and gasped for air, dying in hot, wet agony.

  The steel structure made deafening groans and it contorted as the sprinklers cooled inside surfaces that were growing red and white hot on the outside. The entire superstructure was deformed from thermal expansion, and great gaps appeared where bulkheads met. Rivets popped and flew everywhere, ricocheting inside metal cabins and passageways. Lady Chatterley was tortured and mangled. Her control systems failed, but she drifted forward at six knots.

  The relentless viridian beam continued to fire from orbit.

  Delvaux grinned. He could only see the very top of Lady Chatterley's superstructure over the brilliant lime-green cloud of steam that traveled with her, but he could see that the floating castle was ruined and melted. A river of molten metal poured off the top in a white-hot steel waterfall. He was sure that in another minute the entire steel castle on the bow would fold in on itself, collapsing on whomever still drew breath inside.

  As the Lady Chatterley crossed an invisible line exactly one quarter mile from the bayside face of the Ziggurat, three things happened that made Oskar Delvaux scream with uncontrollable anger. First, the Sun Gun that had fired so reliably, so powerfully, so accurately, now ceased firing, and the verdant, luminous lance disappeared from the sky. A safety override meant to prevent the Sun Gun's use against G.S.A. installations triggered automatically as Lady Chatterley came within a quarter-mile of the Ziggurat, and high in orbit the Sun Gun shut down and refused to fire on her no matter what Delvaux did, how loudly he screamed, or how wildly he waved and tapped his data-wand. The second thing that happened was that the wind shifted and blew North to South, revealing to Delvaux that, though the top level of the Lady Chatterley's superstructure was completely melted and utterly destroyed, the levels underneath displayed disturbing structural integrity. It appeared that the near vertical angle of the Sun Gun's beam had not damaged them to the point of collapse that he had imagined. The third thing that happened to make Delvaux scream was that he could see the superstructure was getting closer with no sign of slowing or turning, and he no longer thought it looked like a castle.