Void Star

by Zachary Mason

  In the afternoons the centipedes come out, thick, black and glossy, falling from the cloth canopy under which they train. The heavy bags, soft from innumerable blows, are more duct tape than leather. The trainers are cheerful Thais, most of them little bigger than children, all retired pro fighters. The farang are mostly Australian, with a smattering of Europeans. Bulging, steroidal muscle is the rule; there’s a Belgian who looks like a small bull, who must have had that gene mod that makes your muscles keep growing till they run out of protein. For all their tattoos and attitude, Kern considers them mere bruisers—sloppy, bulky, angry and untechnical. The Thais are better, but he has the sense that fighting does not comprise their beings, that they’re no more than mere professionals.

  Once a week the farang pile into the camp’s van and make the ten-mile trip to town for the fights. Kern went once, but there had been too many westerners taking video on their phones and it made him nervous, his image going out there into the ether, so since then he’s stayed in the camp. It’s warm enough that he can lie on the beach at night and lose himself in his sense of distance and the unexpected profusion of stars.

  * * *

  He sits by the ocean and counts his money, which is going fast; there’s enough left for another month, if he’s careful. He wonders if he could pay less if he slept on the beach, but can’t bring himself to ask.

  Bo comes down from the hotel, surfboard under his arm. He has a tattoo on his ribs that at first Kern had taken for spiky tribal symbolism, but finally recognized as a violently energetic cursive spelling out Genesis 1:2. Kern thinks of the nocturnal revivals in the favelas, the celebrants manic with the holy spirit, babbling and frothing at the mouth until, glazed and spent, they finally trickled out into the morning. Kern had seen Bo on his knees on the beach at dawn, praying next to his surfboard as the sun came up, but whatever variant of Christianity Bo espoused was apparently consistent with a life centered on surfing, muay thai and women. Bo’s said he’s been on the bum for a long time, moving between Southeast Asia’s fight camps and its gnarlier break points.

  Bo drops the board, sprawls on the sand beside him. “You sure you don’t want to learn to surf? I’ll teach you,” he says.

  “No thanks,” says Kern. “People don’t go in the water where I’m from.” Then, “You fighting tonight?”

  “Nah. I like to train but I don’t get in the ring. No point.”

  “Don’t you get paid if you win?”

  “Here? Sure—somewhere in the vicinity of sweet fuck-all.”

  “So if I needed to make money fighting, how would I do it? And say maybe I didn’t want to show up on image searches.”

  “Someone trying to find you, mate?”

  Kern hesitates, says, “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend!”

  Bo laughs and says, “If you want to fight for money, you could try Bangkok, or, better yet, outside of Thailand altogether—all they have here is boxers and poverty. If you’re really game, you could try the interior—Kuan Lon, or someplace like that.”

  “Is that in Thailand?”

  “You might say it’s between sovereignties at the moment. So if a person wished to avoid notice, or the rule of law … A lot of money there, and it’s the kind of place where discretion is encouraged.”

  “What’s it like?”

  “War zone,” says Bo. “From what I hear. Markets black and grey. I’ve always wanted to see it but you can’t surf if you’re dead. Think you might actually go?”

  “Might. Might stay here a little longer.”

  “You watch your ass, mate. Me, I’m going surfing,” says Bo, and does.

  * * *

  His laptop’s encyclopedia has an article about the tsunami. He watches satellite footage of the sea receding, then rising, washing over the land, some of which never broke the surface again, leaving empty water where islands were.

  After thunderstorms, sometimes, the wireless comes in. He puts the earpiece in and tries to show the ghost things—the hotel, the coastline, the glowing, mountainous clouds—but she says nothing.

  He knows he has to go but in the heat of the sun, the sigh of the water, he can find no urgency. He seems to have found an eddy in time where everything has stopped. When his money runs out he can live on the beach, eat coconuts, learn to fish, disappear into the somnolent life of the villages.

  * * *

  She emerges from the cool of the bathroom into the dim light of false dawn, padding across the dorm’s filthy linoleum in grey underwear and a sweat-stained army T-shirt, mussed and slit-eyed and smelling of sleep. He pulls back the sheet to let her in, relieved, wondering at his good fortune, and then he remembers that Kayla’s gone, and not coming back, and so he wakes to the grey light of a new day, the stertorous breathing and rank flesh of the heavy, graceless foreigners who’ve washed up at the training camp. The sheet, twisted, won’t tear in his hands. What discipline, he thinks, what practice, could be proof against this. That day he leaves the camp for the interior.

  40

  In the Palm of Her Hand

  Silent silver pulses of fireworks in an empty black sky, sparks sifting down as the smoke drifts away, and then the detonations touch her and rumble by. She wakes to find Fabienne leaning over her, shaking her shoulder. “Wake up,” Fabienne says, voice hushed. “We’re under attack. Missiles are landing, and their strike teams are three minutes away.”

  “Your father’s defenses?” Irina asks as she sits up, head spinning, willing sleep away.

  “Overwhelmed,” Fabienne says. “There’s a VTOL waiting—leave everything and come now,” and though Fabienne is probably younger Irina feels like her mother is waking her for a long trip. Another explosion and the villa shakes as dust falls from the ceiling but Fabienne’s poise is flawless, like some undauntable heroine of the Blitz.

  “Your children?” asks Irina, following her through the corridor. Iliou had anticipated a counterattack but not one so fast or so decisive.

  “They went ahead.”

  “And your father?”

  A little catch, and then, “He’s dead. The first strike. I think they targeted his room. It was in a tower. A mistake, in retrospect.”

  The power is out and Irina keeps stumbling in the almost dark. Armed men run past, exchanging a few words with Fabienne in Greek, and then at an intersection Fabienne says, “I have to make sure the au pair is out. Just keep going straight—the VTOL is on the small beach just south of the property. Hurry. I’ll see you soon,” and then she’s gone.

  Nightmare continuum of rooms, courtyards, passages. Now and then there are distant explosions—missile strikes, presumably—but they seem to be getting farther away. She’s never heard of private militaries using cruise missiles, had thought it went beyond what was tolerated, but guesses Cromwell is pulling out all the stops, and she wonders if this action will merit a footnote in some future history of war. She hears men shouting in the distance, then gunfire and a sustained cry of raw animal pain that goes on and on, is then silenced abruptly. She’s more frightened, with Fabienne gone, though this is obviously absurd.

  She’s getting close to the beachward door when she turns a corner and almost runs into a soldier in power armor, the lighter kind that makes him look more like a medieval knight than a man-shaped tank, and some inane part of her wonders if this is Iliou’s man, but through his faceplate she sees his surprise, and that he looks somehow American, and then he backhands her into the wall.

  Lost in fields of quiet and grey, she remembers that there’s something important that she has to do, something truly pressing, and she comes back tasting blood, and it’s pouring from her nose and dripping down her chin, and she’s worried that her jaw might be broken, but for all that, her thinking is surprisingly clear. The blow knocked her out but she knows that even so he must have pulled it—lots of stories about soldiers in armor killing civilians with a slap—so he must have orders to take her alive, and yes, he’s now fumbling in the webbed pouch on his thigh for what seem
to be syringes, but his gauntleted hands are clumsy and this gives her a moment to turn on her wireless.

  The villa’s machines impinge on her awareness and there’s the armor and its security is as dense as she’d expect for military hardware, and to break in would take more time than she has, so that’s it, now she can wait and later she can suffer, but no, there are the servers Iliou got her, still there, idle, awaiting her word. Her gratitude is overflowing, and she thinks, Sorry, boss, and then she eviscerates the armor’s security.

  The soldier is opening his mouth to speak into his comm so she burns it out and as she does it strikes her that this is too easy, that by now they should know what she can do and be forearmed, but on the other hand they’ve had little time to prepare—the Cloudbreaker attack was just yesterday—and she remembers a documentary about the storied fiascos of the Persian War in which a weathered Marine colonel straight out of central casting made aggressive eye contact with the camera and barked, “A mediocre plan violently executed is better than a brilliant plan delayed,” and in any case they’re probably willing to lose soldiers.

  There’s no good way to power down the armor, which is probably by design, and she realizes it has something like an immune system, which is already trying to come roaring back and push her out, which interests her, professionally, and not knowing what to do she’s starting to be afraid again but then she finds the armor’s medical system.

  There’s been a breach, she tells the armor. There’s massive damage to the pilot’s left femoral artery, and the left leg of the exoskeleton is filling rapidly with blood. The suit considers, accepts this, and applies a tourniquet; the cam in the soldier’s helmet shows her his astonishment as his left leg goes numb, and then she starts on the other.

  Now his heart has stopped, she tells the armor.

  No, it hasn’t, replies the armor. I’ve just confirmed that it’s beating, and that his blood pressure is normal.

  But it has stopped, she says. Look again. Do you see? And the suit says, Yes, I see, and shoots him up with adrenaline. It didn’t help, she tells the suit. Do something, quick, she says, and with the first pulse of the armor’s defibrillator the soldier falls with a crash.

  In the suit’s file system she finds a photo of a pretty blond woman in denim cutoff shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt, smiling hopefully at the camera with a little girl in the crook of each arm, shot in an empty field before ancient listing telephone poles drowning in kudzu, and in a biographical file she learns that her enemy is William T. Boyd of Knoxville, Tennessee, once a lance corporal in the Army Rangers, and that he’s served in Namibia, Persia, Morocco, South Africa; he’s been wounded many times and won numerous commendations that seem like scant compensation for getting himself repeatedly blown up. There are pictures of the girls in Catholic school uniforms and she wonders if he went private to pay for that. Boyd is still fighting for control of the armor, reciting commands in a tense voice, but she’s deep in the fabric of the suit’s software and thinks, Sorry, girls, this, apparently, being her day for regret, as she starts shooting him up with the armor’s entire pharmacopoeia, all the quinine, morphine, tetracycline, meperidine, benzodiazepine, amphetamine, and she worries that some of the drugs will cancel each other out but there isn’t time to worry about it and in any case she’s pretty sure it won’t be good for him, and in fact he goes into a seizure, and voids his bladder, and as she recharges the defibrillator she finds herself hoping that his company gives good death benefits. There’s a document labeled “rules of engagement” reading:

  Cleared hot and casualty indifferent with the glaring exception of one Irina Sunden, who is to be secured, sedated and renditioned intact. Management says W&P looks like north of 90% of next year’s revenue, so don’t shoot her in the face by mistake. They also say that if you do end up killing her don’t damage her skull. Yes, her skull. Don’t ask me why, I’m just the help.

  She watches his pulse spasming and though he can no longer speak he’s still trying to issue commands with the keypads in the gauntlets and then she finally figures out how to evacuate his air supply while keeping his helmet locked down, and now he’s thrashing like a drowning fish, and she blacks out his faceplate, and the armor is recording his agony, which she can’t let his wife see, so she kills the power to his helmet cam, which makes a red light wink off, and with that he finally gives up, and she realizes that she’s taken the last light from his world.

  A second passes in which she tries to rise, fails, tries again, and then she pretends that it’s just some switched-off robot on the ground at her feet. Another second passes. Fuck it, she thinks, turning his oxygen back on.

  She scrolls a message down his heads-up display:

  Corporal Boyd:

  I have you

  in the palm

  of my hand.

  You would never

  have seen your

  daughters again

  and your wife

  would have had

  your ashes.

  Remember that.

  —IS

  She tries to burn out the motors in the armor’s legs but it doesn’t work and the suit’s immune system is resurgent and on the verge of pushing her out when she notices the twelve missiles in the pods on his back and hacks them one by one to detonate on launch instead of impact but only gets seven before the armor finally manages to shut down its wireless and by then she’s running flat out.

  Moiré patterns swimming before her eyes, and she finds she’s on the ground again. She picks herself up, though the corridor is spinning, and it occurs to her that she has a serious concussion, needs medical attention, but this isn’t the time and she staggers out through a door into early morning light over the beach, the waves washing softly over the VTOL’s landing gear as its engines spin up and Fabienne is waving from its open door.

  As the plane lifts off she sees black plumes of smoke rising over the villa against the blue of morning and now to her horror the armored soldier walks out the door onto the beach. Oops, she thinks, like a child who’s made a mistake. Seven chances in twelve that he’ll just blow himself up if he tries to shoot down the VTOL. Fabienne is beside her at the window, their cheeks almost touching, and this will be a comforting near-intimacy for the last second of their lives if that’s how things go, and she notices that Fabienne’s children are strapped down in their seats in the cabin and that the au pair seems not to have made it. She wonders if she should tell Fabienne but if it’s going to happen it will happen in a moment and there’s nothing more to be done, and in any case she thinks the kids speak English.

  She can’t help flinching when the suit opens like a molting insect and Corporal Boyd swarms out and staggers away in a sweat-dark T-shirt and piss-stained shorts and falls to his knees in the sand.

  As the plane gains altitude she sees him throw off his clothes and wade naked into the surf, and he’s short and wiry, not the bulky action hero she’d expected, and large swatches of his skin are the coral pink of recently regenerated tissue. She sees the Sumerian winged lion tattooed on his back, and then has a last glimpse of him ducking his head under a wave.

  Just blue water out the windows now.

  “Why don’t you go visit the pilot’s cabin,” Fabienne says to her children. “I’m sure he’d like to show you how the plane works.” Contention, questions, complaints, but Fabienne says, “Go on, kittens. Shoo,” and behind her patience is a stoniness that makes them very somber and then she closes the door behind them.

  Fabienne sits, looks at the closed door, then breaks into wild, wracking, disfiguring sobs.

  Irina sits beside her, tentatively pats her back. “It’s okay,” she murmurs.

  “Okay?” Fabienne cries, mercifully sotto voce, and it seems a shame that the plane flies so quietly. “My father is dead. My home is gone. My family is broken, and all because of you. How is it okay? What could you possibly offer that would ever make anything okay again?”

  Irina thinks it over. “Revenge,” sh
e says.

  41

  Oublier

  Something is missing, Thales thinks, as the car carries him on into the city, and if he can’t articulate this absence then at least there’s the other car, always ahead and just in view, like a thought not quite in focus.

  A flash through the darkened window, lighting the dash and then gone. As he looks up the reverberation hits and shivers through the car. Missiles, he’s thinking—drones fighting in the air—when the next firework bursts.

  Traffic is bad, the car hemmed in and crawling. The windows reveal only the barest suggestion of the texture of the city, and the crowding shadows of people by the street. The car is unhappy here, with no room to maneuver, its targeting system saccading between potential threats a dozen times a second; he brings up its security UI and overrides protocol enough to open the window, revealing a sidewalk packed with the young and mostly inebriated, and letting in a waft of garbage, smoke, the sea. An emerald detonation paints the low clouds in the night sky and illuminates a graffito on a wall reading “THERE’S AN ENEMY IN THE CITY AND IT’S OPENING ALL THE DOORS,” and he wonders what’s being celebrated, why he has this sense both of terror and elation.

  Looking back at the road he realizes he’s lost track of the other car, and that it’s gone from his car’s display, and so probably lost for good, and for a moment he’s unmoored by frustration and regret, though he understands their uselessness, but no, there, it’s the ragged woman on the sidewalk, the crowd flowing around her as she studies the facades of the street’s ruins and bars.

  Without stopping to think he throws the door open, warnings cascading down the car’s screen, and he feels a lightness as he steps out into the night and kicks the door shut.

  She disappears through an unmarked door and he pursues her, not ten seconds behind, and the door opens onto a narrow staircase leading down between water-stained red brick walls, the product of some ancient building code, and floating in the darkness down toward the bottom are neon capitals spelling out CLUB OUBLIER.