RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

  “Agreed,” said Hassan. “But there must be another option besides simply turning tail—can’t we remain in Tokyo, tell the Japanese government what we’ve learned? The carnage of the helicopter carrier is a drop in the ocean when compared to the war we’ll soon witness if Japan and North Korea go at it. And by fate or happenstance, we, and we alone, have the only proof that it’s all based on a lie—we have both the identity of the perpetrator and the means by which he strikes. He has betrayed and killed his own countrymen, slaughtered sailors and civilians alike. We have a moral responsibility to tell the truth and exonerate ourselves in the process.”

  Jonah shook his head. “Do you really want to roll the dice with a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians? This conspiracy dates back decades, and we still have no idea how deep it all goes. I’d be up for dropping a few dimes, but not until we are far, far away from here. My crew is my first responsibility, moral or otherwise.”

  “You and I both know it will be too late by then.”

  “There’s no way staying in Tokyo works out for us,” said Alexis. “Even if the government listens instead of sinking us on sight, we’re all still looking at indefinite prison sentences. No thanks.”

  “Been there, done that, got the T-shirt,” said Jonah. “Not looking for a second stay anytime soon.”

  “What about Marissa? Should we be worried that she’s in yakuza hands?”

  “She’s always had a well-honed instinct for self-preservation,” said Jonah. “I doubt she would have placed herself in any true danger. We’re just going to have to trust that she can take care of herself. In the meantime, let’s get the fuck out of here while we still can.”

  Hassan cleared his throat and tilted his head towards the corridor. Jonah and Alexis turned to see Sun-Hi standing in the open hatchway, her face aghast. He didn’t know how much she’d heard, but it’d been enough. Jonah could hardly bring himself to look at her. He could already see it in her eyes, the suffering that her country would soon face.

  “Sun-Hi—” started Jonah, but it was already too late. She turned and fled back down the corridor before he could shout another word after her.

  “I feel like shit,” said Alexis. “She shouldn’t have learned about the decision this way. We should have sat her down, talked to her one-on-one. She’ll never trust us now.”

  “Wouldn’t have changed a goddamn thing,” said Jonah, his voice low. “We can’t realistically do anything about the coming war, and Himura’s not our goddamn problem. We’re leaving and that’s final. The only discussion I want to hear at this point is where we should lay low.”

  “Perhaps Buenos Aires?” suggested Hassan.

  “Good enough for fleeing Nazis, good enough for me,” said Jonah. “You pick that out of a hat or something?”

  “I checked a map—it’s nearly opposite to Tokyo on the globe. It’s the furthest we can possibly flee by ocean.”

  “Still might not be far enough,” mused Jonah. “But we’ll give it a go. Specifics can come later. My immediate concern is getting the fuck out of Tokyo Harbor. In fact, I have an idea on that—”

  “But we’re not going to like it,” said Alexis as she crossed her arms again. “We all know how this part goes.”

  Jonah just grinned. “The way I see it, we just had an escape route handed to us on a silver platter. Trying to sneak past the fleet and into open waters would take the Scorpion’s computers running at full tilt plus every dirty trick we can muster up—and even then it’d be a straight coin toss as to whether we could pull off a getaway or not.”

  “But everything is broken,” said Hassan. “How can we possibly slip past the fleet?”

  “That’s the thing. We don’t,” said Jonah. “We follow the fleet out to sea, stay underneath them. I took a look at a few of their hulls during my dive. They’re a hodgepodge of military and commercial ships—our propellers will be inaudible beneath all that engine noise. Their minesweepers and helicopters will be running a perimeter while underway, but they won’t be looking for a submarine that’s been within their midst since before they even left port. Our batteries won’t make it the whole way, but we can raise the snorkel and charge them each night in the stern wake of the larger ships. It’s risky, but I think we can do it. We’ll make our escape once the convoy hits North Korean waters.”

  “And if shooting starts?” asked Hassan.

  “More ambient noise for us to hide in. It’d only make it that much easier to slip away.”

  “It’s like we’ve just witnessed the full Jonah circle,” said Alexis, her eyes wide with amazement. “So insanely stupid it actually becomes smart again.”

  “You figure our electric engines have the range to keep up with the fleet?”

  Alexis scratched her head. “Hard to say for certain— we relied pretty heavily on the computer system to manage the battery banks. But we had a full charge before things went to shit, so they should last a few hundred miles at cruising speed, minimum. We’ll have to pop the snorkel up regularly for a crash re-charge to eighty percent. I suppose the heavy storms should give us decent enough cover. I’d have to ask Vitaly what he thinks and go over the numbers together, but I’d guess he’d be willing to give it a shot.”

  “Good,” said Jonah. “Keep your ears open and let me know if you hear the fleet on the move. We’ll leave the harbor when they do. In the meantime, I’m going to go change into some proper clothes. Someone once told me I look like a misshapen condom in this wetsuit. Speaking of which, we’ll have to figure out what to do with Freya. But I’m willing to leave that particular albatross alone for the moment.”

  Jonah didn’t know how long he’d been sitting alone in the forward section, eyes glassy as he stared at the smoke-stained bulkhead before him. It could have been hours; his broken ribs had a way of accelerating time, his brain throttling all perception of the world around him as it dealt with his aching body. He’d deliberately taken his last painkiller more than ten hours ago, swallowing the pill dry before carefully slipping the half-full bottle back into Hassan’s dwindling medical kit.

  The bulkhead hatch behind him opened as Sun-Hi let herself in. She wordlessly sat beside him and neatly divided the remaining portion of her partially eaten MRE, parsing out a broken cracker, a few bites of a BBQ sandwich, and a handful of chocolate M&M’s. Jonah took them without argument and the two ate in silence.

  “Why are you here?” she said, looking up at him from behind her thick dark bangs.

  “I’m letting Freya brood in my cabin uninterrupted. Just needed a place to sit by myself and think for a while.”

  “Think about what?”

  Jonah stared at the floor, not sure how to answer her.

  “How we ended up in this goddamn mess,” he said finally. “It’s all so absurd. One minute we’re taking on a few refugees for some quick cash, the next we’re blamed for a war that’s about to spark off. Worst of all, it’s not even our fault. We’re just a pawn in a scheme that dates back generations. We’re the revolver in Gavrilo Princip’s hand. We’re the stray dog on the boarder of Greece and Bulgaria. We’re Jenkin’s goddamn ear. And now all we can do is flee with our tail between our legs.”

  “You say Jenkins . . . ear?”

  “Uh, I guess it’s kinda hard to explain that one.”

  “It’s okay. I think you will change your mind. You will not be Jenkin’s Ear. This will be the War that Jonah Stopped.”

  Jonah laughed, long and bitter. “It’s not up for discussion. I talked about it with the crew, and none of us have a notion of stopping anything, much less a no-shit shooting war.”

  “You will stop it because you are good captain, good man.”

  He stared at her for what seemed like ages before saying anything. “I killed two human beings in this very room,” said Jonah, voice barely above a whisper. “The fight was getting down to loose bullets and bare knuckles. I couldn’t beat them fairly, so I burned them alive with a white phosphorous grenade. Closed the hatch door so they c
ouldn’t escape, held it tight while I listened to them die. Ever seen what white phosphorus does to the human body?”

  Sun-Hi shook her head.

  “I don’t care what terrible things you’ve seen in your life. You’ve never witnessed anything like the shit that went down in this very room. I didn’t think twice about it at first. Didn’t even give them a proper burial, just blasted what was left of their bodies out of the garbage chute. So I don’t know where you get this ‘good man’ horseshit from. Maybe you still don’t know a goddamn thing about me—other than the fact that I’m tall.”

  Sun-Hi silently leaned over and placed a hand against the side of his face before running it down his neck, across his chest, over his broken ribs. She closed her eyes as she felt every scar, every pain-wracked bruise and broken bone, the accumulated damage of a short, brutal lifetime. But he couldn’t let it matter, couldn’t let it change his mind—her touch was only a fresh layer of pain atop the old.

  Hassan hunched over the command compartment’s chart table and scowled at the splayed mechanical carcass before him. He repositioned his carefully arranged surgical tools and smoothed the plastic beneath them for a third time. The doctor sighed; fussing over organization and sterilization only served to put off the inevitable. This thing, whatever it was, resembled nothing he’d ever seen before, and the task of dissecting it was exhilarating and troubling in equal portions.

  The doctor closed his eyes, silently retreating to a calm deep within his mind, an oasis where fear and emotion evaporated before his twinned pillars of medical rationality. The first pillar was patience and understanding the needs thereof. The second was that he was a surgeon, and his performance was measured by the blade of a scalpel.

  Hassan snapped on a pair of clean latex gloves and slid a surgical mask over his mouth and nose. He doubted any disease could be transmitted from a thing so strange, but his training and convention demanded the familiar ritual. The protective glasses in his kit had broken at the bridge, the plastic snapped too cleanly to glue, so instead he’d borrowed a pair of mechanic’s goggles from the engine compartment. They worked, barely. The low quality plastic lenses were badly scratched, and condensation had already begun to form in the corners.

  But the old goggles were still in better shape than the organism. Its viscera was a mess of now-withered organs rapidly decomposing in the stagnant air of the command compartment. The doctor sighed a second time. He could see the collection of parts, but not yet their purpose. Jonah’s hands had done rough work, his prying fingers had left behind a jagged mess of bent metal and torn flesh, offensive to the surgeon’s eye.

  Hassan twisted a small carbide tip into a handheld electric drill for use as a cutting tool. With precision, he drew it along the exoskeleton, grinding away at the seams until the metal casing parted to reveal the dead flesh within. It was all quite gruesome, a thick, stinking pile of flaccid organs and stretched membrane atop metallic components, medical tubing, and electronics. The doctor fixated on a moist, disk-like depression barely larger than a pencil eraser, almost indistinguishable amongst the viscera. He realized with a start that he was looking at a tympanum, a sort of evolutionary precursor to an eardrum most commonly found in amphibians.

  This thing could hear.

  He shivered, steadying himself as he adjusted his grip on the scalpel. Moving away from that alarming discovery, Hassan began to cut away at the thin layers of muscular tissue around the organs. The device clearly used them to articulate its exoskeleton, and they were integrated into a serpentine matrix of intricate hydraulics at each intersection between segments. The musculature parted easily, retracting to reveal the web-like peritoneum membrane that encased and protected the larger organs.

  Now deep within the carapace, Hassan pulled back a flap of tissue to reveal a pair of vestigial lungs. They were collapsed, inelastic, bearing little resemblance to the velvety texture he’d anticipated. The nearby heart was no larger than a golf ball, and was connected to a carbon-fiber gas bottle and inflatable bladder by a system that strongly resembled a scaled-down version of Jonah’s dive re-breather. The hybridized design circumvented the biological lungs entirely, leaving them to wither.

  Drat—he’d accidentally sliced an artery. A tiny jet of white liquid spurted from the unintentional cut, splattering across the table.

  “Of course! Hyberbranched polymer-protected porphyrins,” he whispered in awe.

  “You say what?” said Vitaly. The Russian emerged from beneath his dead computer console just long enough to cast a disgusted glance at the partially dissected device.

  Hassan cleared his throat. “It utilizes an artificial blood replacement. The cells are oxygenated with an iron-rich porphyrin bonded to a polymer shell. Really quite fascinating. Early clinical research has suggested a myriad of potential medical applications.”

  Vitaly crossed his arms. “And Jonah say Vitaly use bad English. I cannot understand nothing you say.”

  “It’s . . . plastic blood.”

  “Why you play with dead thing? Jonah already say we leave Japan, never come back.”

  Hassan pondered the question for a moment. “I suppose I was simply curious.”

  Vitaly just ducked his head under the navigations console once more, muttering to himself in irritation.

  Hassan returned his attention to the dissection. With a few more cuts, he had carefully removed the device’s delicate stomach and digestive tract. The organs had been similarly hybridized with medical tubing and unfamiliar mechanical components. Beneath them were long bundles of convoluted neural tissue knotted into familiar, human-like ridges. He shivered again. Accounting for nearly a third of the total interior, the volume of brain cells would nearly match those of a ten-year-old child. Only these bundles were discrete, encased in an infinitely delicate weave of silk-like threads that connected the tissue to an array of computer processors and communications antenna. The potential of such a device was astounding, limitless in potential—

  “So this plastic blood,” said Vitaly as he absentmindedly swung a small wrench in his hand. He’d been pulling the wiring out of his console, almost as though conducting his own dissection. “Why it use this? Why not regular blood?”

  Hassan thought about the question for a moment before answering. “Well, I suppose the primary function of blood is to ferry oxygen to tissues. Mammalian blood uses iron as the oxygen-transporting metalloproteinase within the hemoglobin of red cells, as do all vertebrates, whereas crustaceans and the like use a copper-rich haemocyanin—”

  “Maybe you skip to interesting part now?”

  “Yes, of course. Blood also supplies cells with nutrients, removes waste, passes hormones, regulates temperatures, assists the immune system, coagulates around broken vessels, and even engages in certain hydraulic functions.” The words spilled from his mouth as though he’d been asked to recite for his medical examination board.

  “What is this hydraulic function?”

  “I imagine the best human example is the male erection. But that’s rather beside the point. What is most key is that all of these functions could be supplemented—even replaced—with an enhanced artificially derived liquid compound. Imagine an Olympic runner who is never short of breath, a mountaineer on the Himalayas who need not carry oxygen bottles. The applications for trauma victims alone could be revolutionary. Artificial blood may prove superior to our own in virtually every way . . . at least in theory.”

  Vitaly nodded, but Hassan was unsure how much the Russian really understood. Besides, he was probably distracting the man. Vitaly had been in the process of rigging a ramshackle collection of gauges to his former workstation, a sort of analogue reproduction of his now-disabled computer console. “I have last question. Why you cut here and not in cabin?”

  Hassan winced, phrasing his response almost as a question. “Because it all smells quite badly?”

  “I know this,” said Vitaly, now waving the wrench aggressively. “And I have much important work. Smell is v
ery distracting.”

  Hassan heard the sound of shuffling feet interrupting him before he could respond. Alexis and Dalmar entered the command compartment, the pirate looking decidedly worse for wear with Alexis propping him up. The engineer carefully helped him into a chair before casting a sideways glance towards the partially dissected organism.

  “That is so nasty,” she said, wrinkling her nose. “Every time I see that thing, it’s somehow worse.”

  “Because of smell?” suggested Vitaly.

  “No, it’s not just the smell. It’s everything about it. That thing defies all I know and love about machines. And now its guts are all over the compartment—disgusting.”

  “It is a dead metal snake,” agreed Dalmar. “No true warrior would use such a weapon.”

  Hassan shook his head. He could see past the rot, past the stomach-churning amalgamation of flesh and technology to the underlying elegance, the beauty of the design.

  “It’s more than just a mechanical snake,” said the doctor. “It’s perhaps the most sophisticated and revolutionary technology of our generation.”

  “So, you’re saying Jonah just killed the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen by jamming a crowbar up its ass?” teased Alexis.

  “In so many words, I suppose,” said the doctor, trying not to scowl. “Some days I feel my entire function aboard this ship is to clean up after that man. He’s a walking tsunami of unmitigated chaos.”

  “You also cook things for me,” said Alexis, gently kissing him on the cheek. “So you have at least two functions.”

  “Lest I forget,” said Hassan. “And how are things coming in the engine compartment?”

  “Crappy,” she said. “But it could be worse. I’ve pulled out every single wire connected to a computer. The problem isn’t the engine—she runs—it’s everything else, the thousand ways any single cog can break down without warning. Normally, I’d just have the onboard software tell me when a subsystem is operating outside usual parameters. Now I’m stuck monitoring everything visually.”