Blue War: A Punktown Novel

by Jeffrey Thomas

  Praise for the Punktown series

  Punktown is on the verge of becoming one of those classic, timeless destinations for dark fantasy and SF readers.

  – Jeff VanderMeer

  Punktown is searing and alien and anxious and rich, and it is humane, and it is moving. Jeffrey Thomas has done something wonderful.

  – China Mieville

  Punktown is one of the best examples of SF horror currently out there.

  – Ellen Datlow

  All the gritty immediacy and romantic cynicism of classic cyberpunk, along with morally complex, vividly disturbing evocations of supernatural eruptions and corruptions.

  – Locus

  Thomas’s control of pacing and plot is expert, while Punktown has the chaotic immediacy and lived-in feel of a real place.

  –The Guardian

  Thomas is a master at crafting atmosphere in his writing – in the loving portrayals of his fictional town in all its seedy glory, and in the way he uses the mood he creates around his characters and their dilemmas to subvert the reader’s expectations.

  – Infinity Plus

  BLUE WAR

  A Punktown Novel

  Jeffrey Thomas

  Copyright © 2016 Jeffrey Thomas

  All rights reserved.

  Blue War was originally published by Solaris Books, 2008.

  Cover design by Jeffrey Thomas

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Truong Thi Hong

  The fuel they use for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.

  – Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad

  We could pave the whole country and put parking stripes on it and still be home by Christmas.

  – Ronald Reagan in 1965

  PROLOGUE: THE DREAMERS

  Captain Hin Yengun liked to joke to his men that he knew the jungle like he knew his wife’s body. Both were beautiful. Both were blue. His wife’s skin, and every frond and blade and leaf and vine of the jungle; ranging from pale robin’s egg, to vivid sapphire, to midnight indigo. Stalks, stems and tree trunks might vary from this monochromatic spectrum. They might be white as bone, black, or even bright purple. But the vegetation itself, the foliage – and the lizards that poised on glossy leaves large enough to wrap the bodies of the dead before they were carried into the tunnels dug for them beneath the forest floor, and the stained-glass wings of the butterflies that drank the blood of blue-haired animals like a kind of long-legged anteater – all a shade of blue. Even the light from the twin, blue-white suns, and the steam that rose from the plants as last night’s rain continued to evaporate. The very air itself, tinged with blue.

  Yengun knew his men well, too. These six fellow scouts had accompanied him on many a patrol to trace, to tease, the border of the no-man’s-land called the Neutral Zone, a thin strip of forest that separated the Ha Jiin’s land from that of the Jin Haa, like the cold space in a bed between estranged spouses. The Jin Haa’s country was very much smaller, so that the Neutral Zone nearly encircled it like a castle moat, except where it bordered the sea. In some areas, stone walls had been erected on one or the other side of the Neutral Zone. Or razor wire had been strung, mines buried, booby-traps set. The Jin Haa capital city of Di Noon had the best defense of all: a base full of Colonial Forces soldiers sent here from the Earth Colonies.

  But there were stretches of jungle where no fence marked the beginning of one nation’s land or the other’s, where it all blended and blurred into the blue-leaved limbo of the Neutral Zone. Even without explicit demarcation, however, Captain Yengun knew the boundaries as clearly as if the Neutral Zone were color-coded gray against the blue of the Ha Jiin land and the Jin Haa land in the distance were colored-coded orange. These boundaries had held for nearly eleven years now, ever since the conflict the Earth people had called the Blue War had ended. That hated war, when the Jin Haa had won their autonomy. How many good Ha Jiin soldiers, like these six beside Yengun now, had he seen cut down all around him in those days when the beautiful blue jungles had nearly turned red with blood?

  The mines and booby-traps, mostly leftovers from the war, were an anachronism in a time when Yengun’s own commander – overseeing the entire boundary between the two lands – insured that a Ha Jiin crime lord like Don Tengu could move black market products and drugs in either direction across the divide without being challenged. It more than rankled Yengun, who had fought in the war for a reason, for an ideal, and was still committed to his job even if his commander, and his leaders above him, had relaxed their sense of patriotism.

  There was an eighth member of his patrol today, and she was not something with which Yengun was familiar, or comfortable. She was a woman of eighty or more, shrunken and withered, her blue skin gnarled like the bark of a tree trunk. Her white hair had thinned to show her scalp, thick purple veins bold against her temples. The old woman made her way slowly, and one of Yengun’s men, Nha, held her arm like a doting grandson as they moved sometimes along a worn path, other times through thick brush that two of the men hacked with machetes. Impatient, Yengun wanted to scoop the woman up and sling her onto his back as he did his sons, but he had to show her respect. Not only because of her age, but because of her gifts. She was the witch of her village. Her dreams had come to the attention of the commander of border security. And if his boss took the witch’s dreams seriously, no matter how Yengun felt about the man, then he must take them seriously, too.

  It wasn’t really so hard to believe her, though. Not with what was happening lately. Not since the advent of the Blue City. He figured the Blue City must be causing nightmares all throughout the Ha Jiin nation. The Jin Haa nation, he wouldn’t doubt, too.

  “Uh! Uh!” the witch grunted, pointing a trembling arm ahead, as if she couldn’t speak the same language as these men. Her animal-like sounds made Yengun wonder if maybe she was an imbecile; sometimes the gods gifted such creatures. All Yengun himself had witnessed were monosyllables, but he reminded himself that she had related her troubling dreams to others. More likely she was just senile. Whatever the cause of them, her noises irritated him, but when Yengun looked at her he felt a touch of concern to see a dribble of blood from one of her nostrils.

  “Yes,” Nha whispered to her, the good foster grandson, “the city is just ahead.”

  Did Nha intuit her meaning, Yengun wondered, or was the witch speaking directly to his mind? Was that how she had articulated her dreams? In that case, Yengun would rather stick to her grunts and cries, than to have her palsied mental fingers kneading at his brain.

  As Nha had stated, the Blue City was looming close at hand. One didn’t need a witch to tell that. A faint mist between the trunks ahead was becoming a fog that would soon swallow up the trees altogether. And there was a sound like crackling fire, or perhaps raspy static turned to an intense volume. It became louder as the fog became denser.

  This fog might have seemed natural to one who didn’t know the jungles like Yengun did. He knew it was anything but natural. It became a white cell closing around them with shadowy trunks for bars. The crackling noise was now piercing. The old witch pressed her hands against her ears, grimacing.

  Where they could see it, the jungle’s flora started to take on a look of decay, plants wilted and leeched gray, until a little further along the denuded trunks of the trees themselves were blackened as if a fire had cut a swath through the forest, and these vapors were its smoke. The machetes hacked through brittle webs of sticks. At
the same time, however, the forest floor turned marshy and wet as if soaked recently by torrential rains. This was the runoff from the Blue City. Yengun thought of it, bitterly, as the piss it gave back to the earth in return for all the nutrients it sucked from the soil and the life that rooted in it.

  Yengun knew this charred-looking strip of jungle was almost geometrically straight, as if it marked a border on a map. The Blue City began here, on the Ha Jiin side of the Neutral Zone, and spanned the width of the Zone, extending into the land of the Jin Haa. Actually, though, it was the other way around. This cancer had begun on Jin Haa land, and extended across the Zone in this direction. Whichever the case, it was as though the city didn’t care one iota about the boundaries written into a peace treaty over a decade earlier.

  One moment the seven Ha Jiin commandos and their charge were squishing mud and matted dead leaves underfoot, the next moment their shoes were clacking upon pavement, as they emerged from the wasted vegetation.

  Now that they had stepped into the open, the mist was not enough to cloak the city, the blue forest no longer camouflaging it. Through the fog, which rolled into the jungle behind them and steamed up into the air, Yengun could see how the Blue City rose against the blue, blue sky. He had seen the city from atop a mountain last week. It didn’t just rise against the sky; it soared.

  There was no other city of such size on the whole of the planet Sinan, not even the modern Di Noon. And until two months ago, there had been no Blue City at all.

  “Uh,” the old woman said, nodding vigorously and pointing the way again. This was not yet their destination. “Uh...uh!”

  They continued onward. As they left the border of the pavement, the fog started to disperse, and gradually cleared altogether. So, too, did the deafening static recede behind them to a distant, less oppressive level. The fog and noise were signs of the Blue City’s advance, the front line of its invasion.

  “This is easier walking now, eh, auntie?” Nha tried to calm her agitation, but Yengun could imagine the young soldier was feeling anxiety of his own. Captain Yengun was feeling it himself. Some people had found the city exciting, had ventured into it with enthusiasm. He was far less enthusiastic about it, and his team was one of the patrols that had orders to keep such fools from their explorations.

  At least he could understand how the scope of the city might temp them. The sidewalk they had stepped onto was wide enough for a car to drive down, let alone the river-like expanse of the street itself. A latent instinct had moved them to the sidewalk, despite their inexperience with a city of this scale, and despite the fact that there wasn’t so much as a single vehicle on the streets. And the buildings: not all of them were skyscrapers, but those that could be defined as such not only scraped the sky but lost their tops in haze; Yengun could imagine their summits crossing the boundary of the atmosphere into space itself.

  There were skyscrapers with sides so featureless that one might think they were solid stone monuments in a graveyard for dead gods. Other buildings looked like they’d been pieced together from thousands of odd-matched parts salvaged from stripped factory machines. Buildings wearing an armor of riveted plates, like retired warships looming vertically with their sterns jammed into the street. Flat roofs upon which perched smaller buildings, symbiotically. Other structures tapering to needle points that seemed to etch the clouds upon the blue glass of the sky. Stacked apartments. Stacked businesses. Rows of smallish tenement buildings, with shop windows and shop signs at ground level.

  Or at least, Yengun supposed they were meant to be shops. He couldn’t be certain, because the windows were not clear. They were opaque. And the signs did not have words upon them. That was because every surface of every building in the Blue City was – blue. The same rich but bright shade of blue. And every surface, if seen closely, had a rough texture like pumice. The window panes were of this material. Even the sidewalk under their feet, the broad boulevards. No matter how heterogeneous the buildings, representing architectural styles from countless planets and seemingly constructed from a wide variety of materials, all were the same homogenous color and texture.

  Following the woman’s quivering finger, they cut across an intersection, and Yengun paused at a street sign on the corner. Traffic signs that should have been video screens to direct the flow of vehicles were instead featureless blanks, but this sign had letters upon it, because it appeared to represent metal embossed with characters.

  “What does it say?” asked Nha. Yengun had studied English back in the days of the Blue War. The basic language of his enemy. But Nha didn’t know a word of it.

  In a distant, distracted voice, the Ha Jiin officer replied, “‘Children Crossing.’” He turned, glanced around him, gestured at a nearby building with many opaque windows, broad but not too tall. “That must be a school.”

  “Uh!” the old woman barked, taking Nha by the arm and dragging him into motion again. The others followed along with her, as though she had become their leader.

  Another of the commandos craned his neck to peer over the wall that surrounded the school across the street. “Shouldn’t there be, what would you call it, athletic equipment? Gymnastic equipment?”

  “You mean a playground?” Yengun said. Both talked in subdued voices, as if a hidden enemy, spying on them even now, might be listening. This was also why all of the men except Nha gripped their pistols or assault engines.

  “Maybe it’s a school for older children?”

  “No. It’s the same reason there are no vehicles. Those things are not a part of the city. The Blue City is like a statue modeled after a living person. But the statue doesn’t wear the person’s clothes and jewelry; it’s just the body itself.”

  The soldier took in the blank windows all around them as though gazing back nervously at the unseeing orbs of a vast army of titan statues.

  The woman dragged Nha into an alley between two office blocks, sizable but not towers. There was no trash heaped in the alley, no trash zapper to digest it, no derelicts slept on sheets of cardboard or under makeshift shelters. No graffiti slathered on the alley’s walls. It was unnaturally clean. This was a well-kept necropolis.

  When they emerged onto the next street, there was a sign of life so incongruous here that it startled them. A flock of large birds with metallic blue feathers had gathered on one building’s high, flat roof, and the appearance of the scout party sent them bursting into flight with echoing squawks and the clapping of wings. These birds could be seen every day in their villages, scavenging for food. Here, they seemed like an ominous, alien species. Yengun himself nearly raised his gun to fire at them.

  They probed further and further into the network of streets, some of them avenues so long that their ends were lost in haze like the tops of the skyscrapers. These towers cast such deep and pervasive shadows that the hot tropical air was actually cool, almost chilled Yengun’s sweat-filmed skin. He looked back over his shoulder. He could no longer see even the tallest trees of the jungle. The Blue City surrounded him. Had swallowed them.

  “Yes?” Nha said suddenly to the woman. “One more?”

  Yengun looked at him, surprised. “What?”

  “She told me it’s one more street over.”

  “I didn’t hear her.”

  Nha crumpled his face in confusion. “No?’

  Yengun looked at the witch. The purple veins at her temples appeared fatter, darker. He thought he could even see them pulsating. She swiped her wrist across her nose to catch the blood oozing from it, only succeeding in smearing it on her cheek.

  One of the team members motioned with his gun at a building across the next street. “Why do some of these places have all their windows open, but in most the buildings they’re all closed?”

  Yengun had already spotted the rows of black holes gaping in the structure’s rough blue face. He said, “That one would probably have energy fields instead of solid panes. Like the energy wall around the Colonial Forces base in Di Noon.” He knew a lot about Di No
on because several years ago he had actually visited that city. There was a treaty, after all. But also, he had a computer in his home, and computers opened the universe and all its knowledge to him. Not to mention that another lifetime ago, he had fought as a guerilla in its streets.

  “That’s it,” Nha told them, referring to the edifice with open windows. “That’s the building she wants us to check.”

  Captain Yengun turned to meet Nha’s gaze, then reappraised the building with fresh eyes.

  “What are those on the roof?” asked the man with whom Yengun had shared the analogy about the Blue City being a statue.

  The officer noted the antennae array atop the roof, like a cluster of thin blue spires. “I don’t know. Transmitters, receivers. Maybe something to turn solar rays or radiation into energy. Not that any of it works.”

  “So those are part of the body? Not jewelry, so to speak?”

  “Apparently,” said Yengun.

  He looked both ways before crossing the empty street; again, a latent urban instinct. The town where he lived with his beautiful wife and two young sons wasn’t really all that greater than the village of shacks with corrugated tin roofs that the witch lived in.

  As they reached the opposite sidewalk, Yengun obeyed another instinct – but much older and much more developed – and checked the status screen of his assault engine, a bulky but fairly lightweight weapon that could fire a number of different solid projectiles, from jacketed bullet to buckshot, and a ray beam besides, not to mention its grenade and rocket launcher features. It was a weapon the Ha Jiin military now bought from an Earth Colonies arms manufacturer. All safeties were in OFF mode.

  “So what is it?” one of the men with machetes whispered, holding his pistol ready. “Offices? Apartments?”