RED SUN ROGUE

by Taylor Zajonc

  “And yet she smile,” said Vitaly. Hassan looked closer. The Russian was right—Alexis was smiling.

  “I suppose there’s a certain poetry to it,” she admitted. “Maintaining the engines by how they sound, how they smell. I figure the Scorpion is more than just a sub. She’s our home. She’s always whispered to us. Now we have to learn to listen.”

  “You speak nonsense,” said Vitaly. “Computer invented for reason. Very annoying that metal worm thing with plastic blood crash all my system.”

  “So, you make any progress on your little science project?” asked Alexis, wrinkling her nose as she pointed to the mechanical organism.

  “I’ve actually learned a great deal,” said the doctor. “As we suspected, it’s a hybridized organic and mechanical device capable of interfacing with, learning from, and manipulating an impressive variety of computerized systems. Once a connection is made, its ability to subvert electronic programming is all but unlimited.”

  “Same device that destroyed the Japanese fleet? Killed all those people in the underground North Korean contraband base?”

  “I believe a similar organic payload was launched by air from the island to reach North Korea. The Japanese fleet was undoubtedly attacked under nearly identical circumstances. But as you can see from Jonah’s electronic dive watch, simple proximity to a wireless interface is all the device requires to infiltrate and rewrite existing software.”

  “And it’s designed to kill.”

  “Indeed. An ‘asymmetric weapon’ as Jonah might say. And perhaps as destabilizing to the regional balance of power as the newly-invented atom bomb of 1945.”

  Alexis lowered her head, absentmindedly scratching at her chin as she thought out loud. “This is all going to blow up, isn’t it? It’s bigger than the ambitions of a single man. Yasua Himura built a powder keg, and now, he’s going to light it.”

  “An outbreak of war does appear all but inevitable.”

  “That’s what I figure, too,” said Alexis. “I just hope we won’t be anywhere near the area when it all goes off.”

  CHAPTER 23

  Jonah stepped into his cabin. The entire knob had been all but wrenched off the thin, wooden door. Freya sat up in his bed, smoothing the sheets before pulling her long, blond dreadlocks back over her shoulders with one hand. She held the blanket up to her neck with the other, covering her entire body. Only her bare arms were exposed. She stared him down without saying a word, tilting her head slightly as though considering a meal.

  “Don’t bother getting up,” Jonah said, pointing to his filthy shirt and pants. He’d been helping Alexis with the messy job of checking the propeller shaft, a task that required pulling apart half of the engine compartment. “Just here for a change of clothes.”

  Freya slouched back down in the bunk without responding, as though already losing interest in the nonexistent conversation.

  “You never told me how it happened,” said Jonah without looking up from the drawer. “When you learned Himura had been lying to you.”

  “What’s it to you?”

  Jonah shrugged. “Call me curious.”

  “He told me to hurt people who didn’t deserve it.”

  “Who?”

  “A group of graduate students onboard a research vessel. Marine biologists from Japan and the US. He wanted me to take over the bridge and steer to intercept a North Korean spy ship, and escape before I was taken hostage with the rest. It was all a setup. But I couldn’t go through with it.”

  “Well, good for you for taking a stand.”

  “No,” said Freya. Fire leapt into her eyes, a fury he’d only seen before when she was sinking one bloody fist after another into his ribs. “Not good for me. Not good for anybody. Himura said if I didn’t finish my mission he’d be forced to take many more lives, to do something much more terrible. I have no idea what he’s going to do—but I think we both know what he’s capable of.”

  Jonah’s clean shirt dropped to the floor as he slammed a single fist into the bulkhead. The smacking impact rang out through the tiny cabin. He leaned forward, pressing his forehead hard against the cold metal surface, clenching his eyes shut.

  Freya didn’t so much as flinch at the sound of Jonah’s hand against the wall. “Whatever he was going to do—he already did it, didn’t he?” She stared at him with her full attention.

  “Yeah. Sunk an entire Japanese carrier group. Using their own guns. It was the most inhuman thing I’ve ever seen. Most of the sailors were barely out of their teens, and they never had a chance. Civilians, too. Sun-Hi’s people.” Jonah gritted his teeth with every word, the faces of the dead sailors flashing behind his closed eyes. “It was a massacre. Hell of a backup plan.”

  A lull fell between the two for a few moments before Freya spoke again. He could feel an almost imperceptible shift in the room’s energy as she sat up a little higher in his bed. It was as though she’d revealed too much of herself and was determined to take back any whisper of lingering vulnerability. She was sitting up fully now, letting the blanket fall just below her collarbone, revealing the bare skin beneath, the hem still lightly clutched in her fingers. She’d been sleeping in the nude. “Can I tell you something?” she asked.

  “Depends.”

  Freya slowly lowered the blanket a millimeter at a time, revealing the soft crease between her breasts. His skin went cold, unconsciously knowing that the action wasn’t for his benefit, but for hers. She reached out, gently brushing against the back of his hand with her fingertips, beckoning him closer.

  “I thought maybe you’d want to know about the last man I slept with,” she said, her voice low, inviting.

  Jonah leaned over her, gently placing a thumb on her cheek, his fingers on her chin, physically willing himself to not look down. She closed her eyes and parted her lips ever so slightly.

  “Why do I get the sense that things ended badly?” Freya let the blanket drop entirely as she stood. She wrapped both arms around the back of Jonah’s neck, nipping at the lobe of his ear before whispering into it.

  “I snapped his spine with my bare hands.”

  Hassan looked up to the sound of Jonah slamming his cabin door. “She tell you anything else of value?” he called out.

  “Not particularly.” He looked down, suddenly realizing that he hadn’t retrieved a change of clothes from the cabin. Muttering, Jonah ducked his head and tried to hurriedly limp past the doctor in the narrow corridor. But Hassan held up a hand, stopping him from escaping. “What do you want, Doc?” demanded Jonah, irritated at the halt. “I don’t have time for twenty questions.”

  “Are you quite alright?” asked Hassan. “You look exceedingly flushed—I’d like to look at your ribs again, take your temperature for good measure. You may be having an inflammatory reaction to the antibiotics, or perhaps you’ve attempted to wean yourself off the painkillers too soon.”

  “I’m fine,” Jonah said with a grimacing, slightly embarrassed smile. “Really. I don’t need medication. I just need a very cold shower. And a good psychiatrist while we’re at it.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Never mind; forget I said anything.” Jonah awkwardly shuffled past the confused doctor before stopping dead and staring up at the hull above. Something had changed, a nearly imperceptible shift in the ambient noises swirling around the sunken Scorpion. “You hear that?”

  The doctor looked up, cocking his head. “Yeah. What is it?”

  “The fleet’s leaving. It’s time to go.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Adjusting his grip on the Scorpion’s controls, Jonah exhaled and watched his breath crystallize within the damp chill of the command compartment. The yoke felt loose now, almost drunkenly unresponsive. Each nudge to the course was accompanied by an anxious delay before the rudders shifted, the stalk rattling in his hands like it was about to snap. He sighed and stretched before glancing at the glowing green dials of his analogue dive watch, the only timepiece to survive its encounter with the biomechanical
parasite. The hour he’d waited had finally expired. It was time, again, to check the haphazard collection of gauges and instruments atop Vitaly’s dead navigations console.

  He stood and stuck a penlight in his mouth as he went from gauge to gauge, tapping each one with an extended index finger to verify the needles hadn’t frozen. The onboard energy discipline they’d resorted to was extreme— every light bulb extinguished, heat off, ventilation systems disabled. The resulting stillness made the dark interior feel smaller somehow, the Scorpion’s cold walls dripping with condensation as they closed in. Jonah could smell the mold already developing in every hidden seam and recess of the ship; a flowering black rot infecting the already stagnant air.

  Vitaly slept on the deck in a shared bedroll. The freezing temperatures had brought the two men closer with each passing day, the Russian curled at Jonah’s feet, and each change in shift swifter than the last as they conserved the lingering body heat within the blankets and single pillow. The rest of the crew sheltered with a small heater in the bunks alongside five air-scrubbing calcium hydroxide canisters salvaged from less critical compartments.

  Vitaly had completed the most recent battery recharge just three hours earlier, a hazardous maneuver that required the careful piloting of the Scorpion as she raised her exhaust snorkel and intake pipes just above the darkened, stormy surface of the Yellow Sea. The Russian selected a new site within the Japanese convoy every time, running the diesel engines hot and hard for as long as he dared before slipping back beneath the waves. Each twenty-four hour cycle required two recharging periods, one early in the night, and a second just before first light. In the meantime, their days were spent in permanent midnight, stretching each battery to the last trickle, every interminable hour moving them incrementally closer to the tantalizing promise of escape.

  Jonah glanced down at a crinkled regional map with Vitaly’s penciled notations upon it. The helmsman had traced a vague extrapolation of the convoy’s route based on compass headings and approximate speed. But dead-reckoning precise coordinates was wholly impossible as each passing hour without GPS or a stellar fix, introduced new uncertainty to his equations, slowly turning them into an exercise in futility.

  The convoy had skirted Kagoshima Province, at least as best as Jonah could tell, threading between the southernmost islands of Japan before turning sharply to the northwest. By now they were well past the East China Sea, passing Jeju Island and the western coast of South Korea. Jonah found himself wondering if the convoy was an invasion fleet—it’d make sense, given how fast the region was falling apart.

  Vitaly stirred at Jonah’s boots. “Time for Vitaly shift?” he asked sleepily, the darkness answering him with silence. The ships above had become almost comforting in their familiarity. The swish-swish of patrollers was distinct from the churning troopships and rumbling tankers. The Scorpion was a fox at the feet of elephants, concealed and protected so long as the lumbering herd overlooked the sharp-toothed intruder beneath them.

  “Your shift isn’t for another two hours,” Jonah lied. “Go back to sleep.”

  Vitaly mumbled something and turned over, the last of his frosty breath clinging to the cavern-like damp as he pulled the blanket over his face.

  They were getting close now. One more day and they’d make their move. The plan was simple: shut down the electric engines, dive deep, and drift with the abyssal currents for as long as their thinning air held out. The fleet would be far away by the time the Scorpion surfaced, leaving them free to find a quiet atoll in the South Pacific and lay low for as long as it took the coming war to end.

  Jonah lowered his head and gently touched the control yoke. The Scorpion was a good, reliable ship, even beaten to hell. But she was also a target on their backs—he’d have to scuttle her in deep waters and scatter the crew for any of them to have a chance.

  I’m sorry, old girl. It’s the only way.

  Several hours later, Jonah woke to a pandemonium of stomping feet and disorganized shouting, the bright interior lights of the command compartment blinding as he tried to open his eyes. He staggered to his feet, awkwardly kicking the bedroll underneath an unused console. Half the crew had already gathered with Sun-Hi at the center of the maelstrom, headphones on her ears as she furiously scanned the radio spectrum. He stared at the signal strength—the needle barely retreated from full red as she wrenched the dial back and forth, a hundred shouting voices transmitting simultaneously over the airwaves.

  “Who ordered us to surface?” demanded Jonah, glaring at Vitaly.

  Vitaly tapped the depth gauge at his console, verifying its accuracy. “We have not surfaced, Captain!” he shouted. “We at same depth, 400 feet!”

  “But that’s impossible,” said Jonah as he stared at the radio. “We’re too deep. We shouldn’t even get a whisper of signal strength down here.”

  “Impossible, yes,” said Vitaly. “But depth not wrong! Check yourself!”

  “I hear voices on every channel,” said Sun-Hi, dropping one of her earphones as she swiveled in her chair to face Jonah. “All coded North Korean military communications—I cannot make sense of them!” She turned the dial again as ear-popping electronic noise erupted from the interior speakers until Jonah ordered her to switch it off.

  Silence fell as Jonah glanced up at the rounded ceiling of the hull above him, trying to imagine how any transmission could penetrate the four hundred feet of water between themselves and the surface.

  “You hear that?” said Alexis, looking at the ceiling as well.

  “Yeah,” said Jonah. “I hear it, too.” The familiar acoustic signals of the fleet above had begun to change, once-familiar engine notes increasing pitch as they scattered. The convoy was falling apart.

  Jonah checked his watch—0340 hours, still well under the cover of darkness. “Let’s find out what we’re dealing with,” he said. “Prepare to surface. We’ll make a run for it if we find a shooting war up there.”

  Vitaly pulled back on the control yoke, the Scorpion shuddering as it climbed through the water column, steel structural members groaning as they expanded. Jonah watched the depth gauge creep up fast, too fast.

  “Easy there!” said Jonah. “They’re going to hit us with everything they got if we breach the surface like a goddamn whale!”

  “Da, I know this!” protested Vitaly between gritted teeth as he adjusted their rapid ascent. “You do your job— Vitaly do this!”

  Jonah raised the periscope just as the submarine leveled out, the lens slicing through the water like a shark’s fin. The view was in night vision, a grainy, green-tinted periscope feed duplicated on the command compartment’s one working monitor. His slow pan revealed a fleet in disarray, uncoordinated as they each turned in separate directions, a few desperately flashing signal lights at each other in a last-ditch effort to send a message of distress.

  The gargantuan, building-sized wall of a ship’s hull suddenly slid before them, blocking their view. “Hard to starboard!” Jonah shouted. The crew collectively held their breath as the turning submarine rocked in a fleeing tanker’s massive bow wave, the passing colossus missing by mere feet as it rumbled by.

  “What’s happening?” shouted Alexis. “Are they shooting at each other?” Now lost to the frothy wake of the tanker’s stern, Jonah swiveled the periscope hard to the left. A single sharp bow rose before the low horizon, a metallic-grey superyacht easily parting the storm-wracked seas as she approached the scattered convoy like a stalking hyena. She was larger than a football field, a long, seamless aluminum hull blemished only by sections of blocked-out floor-to-ceiling privacy glass.

  “It’s Himura,” Freya whispered. “He’s here.”

  “The fleet—we have to warn them!” said Hassan.

  “It’s too late,” she said. The Japanese ships had already began to power down, their onboard lights flickering and dying. Last to lose her engines and steering, the largest of the patrol boats smashed hard against the double-hull of the tanker ship, metal scre
eching against metal as the patroller nearly rolled under the larger vessel.

  “He’s leaving his pawns in play,” said Jonah. “All stations, check systems. What’s our status?”

  “Communications offline,” said Sun-Hi. “Too much interference!”

  “Engines are five-by-five,” said Alexis. “They’re here when you need ’em.”

  “Navigation and helm operational,” said Vitaly. “No worse than before.”

  Jonah stared at the passing superyacht on the monitor as he addressed his crew. “How are we still running? Himura just took out an entire invasion fleet without firing a goddamn shot.”

  “The lobotomization of our computer servers,” said Alexis. “It must have worked!”

  “You’re saying we’re too dumb to kill?” asked Jonah. “It’s practically our ship motto,” she confirmed with a grim smile.

  Yasua Himura’s superyacht slid past the Scorpion. The entire rear third of the stunning vessel was encased in clear glass; forming an immaculately terraced greenhouse complete with thick vines, trees, flowering plants and tropical canopy. Sun-Hi’s communications console squawked, overwhelmed by the sheer power of the yacht’s electromagnetic transmissions.

  As he panned the periscope, Jonah spotted a shape behind the futuristic ship; a blurry haze on the horizon almost lost to the faint green tones of the night vision display. Jonah flipped the monitor to real-color and zoomed into the darkness. Sun-Hi gasped with horror—the orange haze was a burning coastal city, with massive curling flames the size of houses leaping up into the night. Artillery shells silently detonated in the distance, lighting up the night with sudden popping flashes. Growing clouds of black smoke hung over the city, forming an eerie nocturnal sunset as the expansive fires reflected against them.

  “It is the city of Nampo,” said Sun-Hi, barely above a whisper. She deftly activated her communications console without permission. “Nampo is burning.”