Weapons of Choice

by John Birmingham

  As bitterly cold as he was, Kakuta was more profoundly disturbed by the turn of events these last few hours. Admiral Yamamoto’s fantastically elaborate plan to seize Midway Island and destroy the remnants of America’s Pacific naval power depended on exact timing. Yet here they were, behind schedule, creeping through the fog and trying to deal with a ghost ship.

  He was anxious for a report from his staff, who had boarded the vessel what seemed like an age ago. But he would just have to wait until a motor launch brought Lieutenant Commander Hidaka back with a full account.

  KRI SUTANTO, 2331 HOURS, 2 JUNE 1942

  When they had first come aboard they had been grateful for the glorious warmth of this vessel. But that had quickly soured, and Hidaka was seriously considering having the men throw open all the hatches and portholes to let in some of the freezing Pacific air. This ship reeked of human filth, of vomit and shit and urine.

  The culprits lay everywhere. Not dead, but not quite alive, either. Medics had dragged four men who showed at least some signs of life into a starboard corridor that ran the length of the vessel. There was little to do but monitor them. Nothing brought a response, not smelling salts, kicks and slaps, not even a shallow prod with a dagger.

  The casualties weren’t Americans. That much was obvious. Hidaka was unsure where they hailed from, but to his eye they resembled the savages of the former Dutch East Indies more than anything else. That couldn’t be the case, of course. This warship was simply too advanced. It was small, granted, but it was full of equipment that none of them had ever seen before. The pilothouse glowed with ethereal lights, hundreds of them burning and blinking on banks of control panels that made the Ryujo’s bridge look stark and simplistic—even though the whole world now knew that Japanese naval technology was unmatched.

  Standing on the bridge, he was tempted again to caress the large, magically glowing plate of glass that rose on a sort of stalk from the arm of what must surely be the captain’s seat. But the last time he had tried that, shrieking alarms had sounded for a full two minutes. So he stayed his hand, and kicked the man who lay unconscious at the foot of the captain’s chair, more out of spite and frustration than from any hope that it might rouse him.

  The body absorbed the blow like a sack of rice.

  “Keep an eye on things here,” he told a petty officer. “Don’t touch anything, and summon me immediately if one of these baboons decides to raise his head. I shall be in the wardroom.”

  He left without waiting for the man to acknowledge his order. Hidaka was becoming annoyed with his own inability to unravel the puzzle of this ship. He had been chosen to lead the boarding party because of his near-faultless grasp of English, but the language displayed on all the signage throughout the vessel meant nothing to him. Once or twice he had found a small plaque written in what seemed to be German, but that only served to deepen the mystery. He proceeded to the wardroom in very poor humor.

  The men in there sprang to attention when he arrived. Three of the insensate crew lay on the floor.

  “Well?” he asked immediately. “Anything to report?”

  An ensign snapped to attention and indicated a pile of books and papers sitting on a table.

  “We were just coming to get you, Commander. We have located these, we think some are written in English . . .”

  He cast a wary eye over a tall stack of magazines written in what he assumed was the baboons’ language. Most were editions of something called Detik. A lesser number were of another journal called Tempo. He ignored them in favor of the English-language publications.

  That was a thin collection, but it was nonetheless astounding. The first item was a pornographic magazine! Hidaka examined the masthead. HUSTLER, it read. He wasn’t sure what that meant. The smaller titles, perhaps representing the articles, were no clearer.

  WE TESTFUCK THE LATEST IN V3D PUSSY.

  INSIDE THE RISING JIHAD.

  and

  GET BIG AND BEASTLY WITH THE LATEST SYNTH-SIMIAN DNA.

  Meaningless. Absolutely meaningless. And . . .

  “Shit!”

  Hidaka wasn’t even aware he’d sworn in English, so great was his shock at the image that met him when he flipped open the magazine.

  “So the rumors are true,” he mused in Japanese, when he’d recovered from the surprise. “They are blond all over.”

  The men sniggered, and he might have spent a few minutes confirming the theory if the ensign hadn’t gently handed him a small device.

  “And there is this, Commander. It glows like a lantern.”

  A strangely lit screen displayed the cover of Tempo. Hidaka checked it against the pile of paper magazines. Yes, he was certain they were same thing. What an oddity. A magazine in an electric box!

  It was apparently written in the same damnable tongue as everything else on this ship, but there in the left-hand margin of the screen was a small British flag and underneath it, the word

  English

  Progress at last! Hidaka thought.

  He had almost grown used to the magic of these illuminated plates, because they were scattered everywhere aboard the ship. Nonetheless, it was a revelation to find one he could hold in his hand and carry around. But how did it work? What did it do? There were a number of buttons in the base of the thing, but he was disinclined to press them, especially after his experience on the bridge. So he carefully placed the instrument back on the scarred tabletop while he examined the other discoveries.

  There was another magazine. Like Hustler, it was printed in rich colors on thick glossy paper. The title appeared to be People. A strange name for a periodical, he thought. An ethnographic journal perhaps.

  Most of the pages were dominated by photographs of idiotically grinning barbarians. American or British, he supposed, for the small amount of text was certainly written in English. But there were an amazing number of Negroes and half-bloods, and people of races he’d never seen before. A mud race of polyglot people, he thought, pleased with himself at recalling such an obscure term, even though it had been at least five years since he had studied at Princeton University.

  Hidaka attempted to glean some wider meaning from the photo captions, but they seemed as vacuous as the gaijin about whom they were written. The common themes seemed to be who was sleeping with whom, and who possessed the most riches. There were longer articles, but he threw the magazine aside in a fit of pique, because they were just as impenetrable. People would have to wait until he had more time.

  He picked up the next item, a much thicker magazine, with the title PC Week. Opening this to a random page and flicking through, he let go an exclamation.

  “Ah! Technical documents!”

  The crewmen grunted happily in response. If they had discovered something vital, it would bring them great honor and distinction. As Hidaka flicked through the pages, he nodded his head vigorously, though these articles, written in English, were even more unreadable than in the journal of People. At least this time, however, he felt certain his inability to decipher the text was because it so obviously dealt with top-secret technologies.

  There were many pictures of those odd floating glass plates, and boxes with wires and boards in them, and even of devices that resembled the gadget with the small British flag on its glass plate. He would dearly love to decipher one of these articles for Admiral Kakuta, but such a task might take weeks—and they had hours at best.

  “Good work, Ensign Tomonagi,” he said in a clipped, excited voice. “Good work to all of you.”

  The crewmen drew themselves up, basking in the praise.

  “Ensign, detail half of your men to search the ship again. Tell them to look for more of these devices.” He held up the portable tablet with the glowing plate. “Assign someone to drag those monkeys in here. I will run the operation from this room now.”

  “Hai!”

  Hidaka took a chipped mug—a sure sign that he was dealing with barbarians—then picked up the glowing device and walked over to a comfort
able-looking armchair. He sat with his legs crossed in a very English manner and sipped the tea while staring at the artifact. The technical magazine referred to this sort of device as a “flexipad.” The tablet was quite light, given its size, and it was constructed of a material he’d never encountered before. A sort of rubbery leather?

  Hidaka sighed deeply as he read the foreign language from top to bottom. He was still no clearer about the content of the tract. There was a picture—of a tank, and another of a venerable bearded gentleman, which he had to assume were associated with the text—but beyond that there was only puzzlement.

  For ten minutes he sat and stared at the device, hardly aware of the crewmen’s grunting as they dragged the four alien sailors into the wardroom and laid them out on the threadbare carpeting alongside their utterly senseless fellows. Try as he might, he couldn’t escape the fact that the only promising clue lay in that little Union Jack and the underlined word English. But what on earth did it mean? What did any of this mean? And how could he uncover the truth without setting off more alarms and causing possibly irreparable damage? Perhaps it was even booby-trapped.

  Hidaka became so lost in his own thoughts that without realizing it, he brushed the flexipad screen with his thumb. He flinched slightly, expecting the same blaring alarm that had startled them on the bridge. But nothing happened.

  Encouraged, he warily poked the very tip of his little finger at the screen again, touching the picture of the venerable gentlemen, and suddenly the fellow filled the whole screen and began to speak. Hidaka was caught by surprise again but managed to smother his reaction this time. The bearded man spoke for nearly half a minute in some diabolical language that sounded to Hidaka like a choking animal attempting to clear its throat. At the end of the little movie, which amazed him with its colors and clarity, the picture shrank back to its former size and location.

  Well, that was something. It took the emboldened Hidaka less than a second to tap the screen where the tiny British flag was displayed. In the blink of an eye the display transformed itself into English. A wide grin broke out on the commander’s face.

  Excellent! Most excellent.

  But his good mood turned gray again as he read the text. It seemed to relate to a struggle—a civil or maybe a religious war of some kind, he thought—being raged on a group of islands. As he read on, the bearded man was identified as the emir of the Caliphate, Mullah Ibn Abbas, and the island of Java was mentioned three times as the location of the most violent clashes.

  That simply could not be. There was no “Caliphate,” and Java itself had been wrested from Dutch control more than two months ago. It was now part of the empire. Chagrined, Hidaka squeezed his eyes shut, then returned to the article.

  There were detailed accounts of bitter street fighting between Indonesian marines and elements of the Indonesian army that had defected to Caliphate forces. Something called suicide bombers were reported to have breached the marines’ command center and killed many senior officers, gravely disrupting the secularist defenses.

  Hidaka felt as if he had picked up some sort of trashy American novel—this had to be fiction. What were Indonesians? Or secularists? Or Caliphates? Or suicide bombers? What sort of crazy man, given the alternative, would fly his plane into the enemy rather than just bombing them? A desperate one perhaps, he conjectured, but crazy nonetheless.

  At the bottom of the absurd story, beneath the words Related Links, sat four lines of blue text, underlined as he had seen before. Perhaps touching them might reveal more? Unfortunately he doubted his fingers were small enough to pick out an individual line. So he took a pencil out of his shirt pocket and tried that.

  It worked! The spirits of his ancestors were smiling on him now.

  He touched the line that had intrigued him as soon as he read it. America warns China.

  The screen changed instantly, just as before. And just as before, the result was absurdly perplexing.

  The U.S. secretary of state, a woman calling herself Jamie Garcia, had warned Chinese Premier Hu Dazhao that the gravest consequences would flow from any Chinese incursion into the Exclusion Zone around Java. She pledged that something called a “UN-mandated Multinational Force” would ensure the safety of ethnic Chinese refugees from something else called a “jihad.” And she warned China that any further expansionist moves on its part anywhere in Southeast Asia would be severely challenged.

  Hidaka rubbed his face, irritated beyond measure. There were so many things wrong with what he had just read, he wouldn’t know where to begin. Certainly, Chiang Kai-shek would like to consider himself some sort of “premier,” but in truth he was little better than a scabrous dog being hunted down by the Imperial Japanese Army. And this woman! Garcia? The American secretary of state was Cordell Hull. A vile creature known to all as an uncultivated savage who had attempted to humiliate the emperor with his outrageous schemes and demands. Even if that had somehow changed since they had sailed from Ominato, only a maniac would imagine a woman—a Mexican or an Indian one, at that, by the sound of her name—could ever attain such an important office.

  Hidaka sipped the nearly forgotten tea and grimaced to discover that it had gone cold.

  There were more Related Links at the bottom of this story—or perhaps fairy tale might have been a better name. He “linked” to a story about “Free Indonesian” warships that had joined this so-called Multinational Force. An Indonesian government-in-exile had insisted that two of its ships, the Sutanto and the Nuku, participate in the enforcement of any Exclusion Zone over the contested archipelago.

  Something in that nagged at Hidaka. It was all as preposterous as the rest, but . . .

  The Sutanto!

  He leapt from the armchair, upsetting the cup of cold tea, which spilled onto the floor. Heedless of the accident, he rushed over to the unconscious sailors. One who had collapsed in the wardroom still sported a baseball cap on which was stitched a silhouette of a ship. And the caption 377 KRI SUTANTO.

  He had been seeing that word all over the ship, and now he knew why. This was the Sutanto, presumably of the Free Indonesian Navy.

  Without a doubt this had to be some sort of American trick, perhaps even a trap. But what could be the point? And why bait the trap so oddly? And where did the fantastic machines such as this glowing tablet come from anyway?

  A thousand questions spilled from his one small success. He was nearly overcome by a wave of hopelessness, when a crewman called urgently.

  “Commander! One of the men is waking. Look!”

  “At last,” Hidaka muttered. He moved to stand by the man’s head. The barbarian was blinking rapidly. A storm of twitches and tics ran across his features, briefly seizing his whole body at one point. Without warning he vomited prodigiously, a yellow-green geyser, which erupted vertically from his mouth only to fall back and drench him. With distaste branded into every line of his face, Hidaka used the toe of his boot to turn the man’s head to one side, lest he choke to death.

  Hidaka unshipped his revolver from its holster as the foreigner began to cough out a series of unintelligible words. He tried to lever himself up off the floor, but Hidaka placed a foot on his chest and pressed him firmly back down. Incomprehension and a touch of fear crossed the man’s face.

  Good, thought Hidaka.

  “Name!” he barked out, first in Japanese, then in English.

  The man coughed and gagged on his own bile. He appeared to be trying to answer, so Hidaka only gave him a slight nudge with his boot.

  “Name. And rank. And position aboard this vessel.”

  The man, who was dressed in soiled tropical whites and sandals, of all things, squinted at Hidaka as if trying to focus properly.

  “Moertopo,” he answered. “Lieutenant Ali Moertopo, executive officer.”

  He spoke English, then. Hidaka was quietly relieved.

  The man, Lieutenant Moertopo, finally focused on Hidaka’s pistol. He seemed genuinely surprised, and somehow affronted.

 
; “What is going on?” he demanded with more authority in his voice than Hidaka cared for. “Who are you, and what are you doing aboard this ship?”

  The demands were delivered in a weak, faltering voice, but there was no mistaking the challenge inherent in their tone. Hidaka flushed with anger that someone so obviously low-caste could think to presume upon him in such a fashion, but Admiral Kakuta had chosen him well for this mission. He swallowed his own indignation, carefully holstered the pistol, and dropped a handkerchief onto the man’s chest.

  “Clean yourself up, Lieutenant,” he said. “You look a mess.”

  Moertopo thanked him, somewhat doubtfully, and wiped the vomit from his face and neck. His movements indicated to Hidaka that he was in considerable pain. It never registered on his face, however, granting him some esteem in the eyes of the Japanese officer.

  Moertopo looked around slowly, taking in the bodies of his shipmates, laid out on either side of him. They were breathing and twitching, but would clearly offer no assistance.

  “You have not answered my question,” he said in English.

  “My name is Hidaka. I boarded your ship with a rescue party three hours ago. Your shipmates are alive, but appear to have been incapacitated. You would have to tell me how that might be, Lieutenant. I am afraid I have no idea.”

  “You are Japanese, yes?”

  Hidaka nodded, noting that the information neither alarmed nor upset his prisoner.

  “We were on station, just north of the main task force, carrying out antisubmarine drills,” Moertopo said.

  “Why?” asked Hidaka. “And which task force?”

  Moertopo gave him an odd look, as if the question had been meant to mock him.

  “Why indeed?” he said, bitterness evident in his voice. “The Caliphate has no submarines. And the Americans certainly wouldn’t trust us to protect them from the Chinese. It was laughable. They just wanted to get us out of the way.”