Sword of Shiva (For fans of Tom Clancy and Dale Brown)

by Jeff Edwards

  Silva sighed, and nodded toward the stone. “Sorry it’s taken me so long to make it around to see you, Jim. But you know how it goes when your ship is in the yards. The Towers is going to be just fine, by the way. When the yard birds are finished sprucing her up, you won’t even be able to tell where the missile hit.”

  Silva felt a yawn coming on, and covered her mouth. “Sorry about that. Fourteen hours in the air, not counting layovers, and I never sleep worth a damn on airplanes.”

  She glanced up and down the rows of white markers. “I see there are a bunch of old-time Indian fighters buried here. Scouts, cavalry soldiers, maybe even some of the boys from the Alamo. You should look them up. I’ll bet some of those guys are relatives of yours. The hero streak in you runs pretty deep, so it’s probably in your bloodline.”

  Silva reached into her pocket and fished out a folded sheet of paper. “I hope you don’t mind that I didn’t bring flowers. You never struck me as the kind of guy who goes for floral arrangements. But if I’m wrong about that, you let me know, and I’ll get you some begonias, or something.”

  She unfolded the sheet of paper and spent a few seconds smoothing out the creases. “I did bring you something, though. Maybe you’ll like it better than a bunch of daffodils. I’ll just read it for you, and you can decide for yourself.”

  She cleared her throat softly. “From: Department of Defense Public Affairs, Washington, DC Naval News Service. Secretary of the Navy Alexander Fields announced today that the Navy’s next Arleigh Burke class guided missile destroyer will be named USS Bowie, in honor of Navy Captain Samuel Harland Bowie who was killed during last year’s naval combat action in the Bay of Bengal. The USS Bowie will be the first ship to bear the name…”

  Silva folded the paper. “There are four or five more paragraphs, but the rest is mostly about the capabilities of the modified Arleigh Burke class, and you probably know more about that than just about anyone. There’s also a section about your military career, and the heroic actions of the Towers on her last three deployments, but—again—none of that is news to you.”

  The folded slip of paper went back into her pocket. “The keel laying ceremony is in May at Bath Iron Works. The Navy is inviting everyone who ever served under your command, so it’ll be a much bigger dog and pony show than usual. Under the circumstances, I doubt they’ll send you a direct invitation. I thought I’d tell you myself, in case you decide to swing by and watch the fun.”

  Silva’s voice took on a more serious tone. “I don’t know if you can hear me, Jim. I don’t know if you’re in heaven, or floating in some ethereal afterlife, or even if there is an afterlife. Maybe you’re just gone now, and I’m talking to myself. But whether you can hear me or not, there’s something I have to say to you.

  “The world will probably never understand how much it owes to you, and to the men and women who fought under your command. The average person on the street has no idea that you dragged America—and maybe the entire planet—back from the brink of catastrophe at least three times. Most people will never know how much you did for this country, and how much you sacrificed to give us all a second chance.”

  She was surprised to find that her eyes were beginning to get misty. “But some of us know. We remember what you did, and we know the price you paid. And we’re grateful, Jim. I can’t even begin to tell you how much.”

  Silva tried to continue, but her voice had gone husky with unexpected emotion. “I guess that’s really all I came to say.”

  She came to attention, and her right hand performed a slow, deliberate salute. “Thank you.”

  Her hand came back down to her side. She executed a precise about-face and walked away, leaving the headstone to stand among the ranks of its brothers and sisters under the gray Texas sky.

  _________________________

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Anyone with an understanding of orbital mechanics (or a working knowledge of physics) will spot the fact that I’ve taken some literary license with the orbit of the Chinese surveillance satellite known as Redbird One. The flight path I’ve described for the satellite is at too low an altitude, and too far from the famous “Clarke belt” to support a geostationary orbit. I haven’t attempted to calculate what the duration of such an orbit might be in the real world, but it’s a safe bet that it would not remain stable for the ten days predicted in the story.

  I could attempt to justify my departure from Keplerian motion by pointing out that Redbird One could be an experimental statite (static satellite), a hypothetical satellite which employs a solar sail to modify its orbit. Theoretically, a properly-configured statite could hold itself in a geostationary “orbit” at much lower altitudes and with inclinations far different from the traditional equatorial orbits used for geostationary positioning. I could make such a claim, but I won’t. The simple fact is, the story called for a satellite at a lower altitude, and well out of the geostationary belt, and I followed the needs of the plot.

  Purists and aficionados of space technology are advised that my criminal misuse of orbital mechanics was premeditated, and carried out with malice-aforethought. In other words, it wasn’t an oversight. I done it on purpose.

  — Jeff Edwards

  DOME CITY BLUES

  (Sample Chapters)

  Most readers know me best for my naval warfare thrillers, but I do sometimes wander outside the boundaries of military fiction.

  I’m a huge fan of detective novels, and I also happen to be interested in speculative fiction, so it was probably inevitable that I would eventually start dabbling somewhere on the border that separates the two genres.

  The result was a sci-fi detective novel called Dome City Blues. I like to think of it as a cross between two of my favorite authors, Mickey Spillane and Philip K. Dick. That’s almost certainly self-aggrandizing, but I have to find some way to describe the book to people who’ve never encountered such a thing, and that’s my way of thinking about it.

  The following pages contain the first three chapters of Dome City Blues. If you choose to peruse them, you’ll find a book that bears very little resemblance to my naval warfare novels. There’s a lot of cutting-edge hardware for my fellow technophiles, and plenty of action (once things start to heat up), but no missiles, no minefields, and definitely no military chain of command.

  I invite you to give it a shot. Maybe you’ll like it. Maybe you won’t.

  There’s only one way to find out…

  CHAPTER 1

  The City Planners called it Los Angeles Urban Environmental Enclosure 12-A. Those of us who lived there called it the Zone. By either name, it amounted to a geodesic blister of translucent polycarbon fused to the east side of LA Dome #12 like a Siamese twin joined at the hip. It lacked the graceful sweeping arcs of the domes that covered the rest of the city. It was ugly, but then it was never designed to be pretty. It was an afterthought, thrown together after the inhabitants of East LA had made it violently clear that they didn’t appreciate being left outside under a sky that pissed acid rain and streamed dangerous levels of solar ultraviolet.

  I leaned against a wall and pried a Marlboro out of a squashed pack. The lettering on the box said, “crush proof.” It wasn’t. The box, like the cigarettes it contained, was a Brazilian knockoff—one of a hundred offshore counterfeit brands that had sprung into existence after the collapse of the American tobacco industry.

  I stroked the wrinkled cigarette a few times to straighten it. It was still pretty rumpled, but it didn’t look too mangled to be useable. I touched the tip against the black circle of the ignition patch on the bottom of the box. It took two or three seconds for the catalytic reaction to light the tobacco. I took a longish drag, and blew a gout of smoke into the air.

  The last rays of the sun were starting to crawl up the tops of the buildings. Night was coming to the Zone. I watched as it crept over the decaying structures, hiding the sandstone texture of crumbling cement and rusting steel under a humid cloak of shadow.

 
Holographic facades flickered and appeared across the faces of most of the buildings: glamorous mirages that concealed graffiti-covered walls behind idealized projections of fairy tale palaces and pirate ships under sail. Here and there, enough sunlight still filtered through to weaken the holograms, leaving patches of drab reality visible through the bright fabric of illusion. In a few minutes, when the sun dropped a little farther, the holographic facades would become seamless, and the illusion would be perfect.

  Above the street, triggered by the failing light, holosigns winked into phantom existence. Neon colored lasers woke up and began painting nightclub logos on the underside of the dome.

  Two meters above the main entrance to Trixie’s, a hologram of a naked woman crackled to life. The woman writhed suggestively through a ninety-second loop of canned video data. A glitch in the software caused the dancer’s left leg to vanish in a smear of video static for the last few seconds of the loop. Lately, the glitch seemed to be spreading to the upper slope of her right breast.

  Somebody tried to tell me once that the dancer was Trixie herself, the hologram built up from video footage shot when she was young. I’ve seen Trixie up close. I don’t think so.

  When half of the cigarette was gone, I ground it into the cracked sidewalk with my shoe and started walking again.

  The strip was still mostly deserted, people just beginning to filter in. Four or five early-bird whores staked out their turf. A small knot of sailors cruised the bar fronts, waiting for the action to start. The inevitable sprinkling of tourists wandered around goggle-eyed, too ignorant of street-level protocol to realize that their chances of making it home safely were dropping with the sun.

  A nocturnal creature, the Zone hibernated during the day and came to life when the sun went down. After sunset, even LAPD Tactical didn’t venture through in less than squad strength.

  I passed a pair of muscle-punks leaning against the carcass of a vandalized police car. They were decked out in the severely retro fashion popular in the Zone: black jeans, Gestapo boots, and synthleather jackets with too many zippers.

  Both had peroxide white hair shaved close on the sides, left long on the top, and combed into crests like exotic birds. Their well-used leathers reeked of old blood and chemical reflex boosters. They watched me closely as I walked by, predatory eyes sizing up my potential as a target. Some signal passed between them and they decided to leave me alone.

  I crossed Santa Fe Avenue, and walked in the front door of Falcon’s Nest. I waited a few seconds for my eyes to adjust to the dim illumination, and then scanned the room. I was looking for John Hershell, a friend I was supposed to be meeting for drinks.

  John and I were technically cousins on my mother’s side, through some geometry that had been explained to me once and then promptly forgotten. We had been buddies right up through our teens. We’d even ended up in the Army together.

  John wouldn’t be hard to spot. He was strapped into a powered exoskeleton, compliments of a perimeter defense laser that our squad had tangled with in Argentina. The laser had sliced through his spinal cord, leaving his body pretty much null and void from the chest down. Turns out, he was one of those lucky one-in-a-million people who are allergic to the DNA modifying retrovirus that stimulates growth of spinal ganglia.

  John wasn’t here yet.

  Unfortunately, Preacher was here, sitting at the bar, and he was in full cry. I slid into the booth farthest from his stool and signaled for my usual: Cutty Sark on the rocks.

  Preacher’s real name was Robert Treach, and he was an expert on everything. As usual, he was talking loudly to everyone within earshot.

  “Natural selection,” he was saying. “You can’t wipe out disease. You just can’t do it. They tried it in the Twentieth Century, right? Antibiotics, vaccines, miracle drugs, all that. Wiped out polio, smallpox, measles, and a bunch of other diseases.”

  Someone in his general area must have asked the obvious question.

  Preacher squeezed a swallow from his tube of beer and shook his head. “Hell no it didn’t work. It can’t work. Not in the long run. Nature always figures out a way to restore the balance. When the population gets too high, natural selection kicks in and a new disease shows up, usually something real ugly. Where do you think AIDS came from? And then AIDS II, and AIDS III? Too many people bumping into each other, that’s where. It’s not healthy. Nature had to cull the herd. Worked too, didn’t it? Culled the hell out of the human race.”

  I ran his words around in my head for a second: “Culled the hell out of the human race.” Only Preacher would choose such a banal phrase to describe the disease that had ultimately wiped out a third of humanity.

  “It’ll happen again too,” Preacher said. “Nature will keep on weeding out our weak bloodlines until we wise up enough to do it ourselves.”

  He downed another squirt of beer and nodded in response to something I couldn’t hear. “That’s what I’m telling you,” he said. “Compassion is not a pro-survival characteristic.”

  I tuned him out just as he was spouting some nonsense about Darwin.

  Falcon’s Nest was a dark and cozy little blues bar. As far as I knew, it was the last one left in Los Angeles, maybe even the world. It was an anachronism, with its exposed beam ceilings, dark Portsmouth paneling, and worn leather upholstery. The owner, Rico Martinez, had kept it as true to the traditions of his grandfather as possible. It remained an island of quiet sanity in a sea of designer drinks, psycho-rock, and holo-neon.

  When Rico finished pouring my drink, he shooed the waitress away and brought it to me himself. Watching him hobble across the room made me wish I’d sat at the bar.

  His round face split into a huge grin as he slid the drink across the mahogany table. “You’ve finished a piece, haven’t you?”

  I pushed an ice cube around the top of my scotch. “What makes you say that?”

  Rico’s grin got wider. “You bastard, you have, haven’t you?”

  It was my turn to grin.

  He slapped the table. “I knew it! When do I get to see?”

  I took a sip of scotch. “I’ll probably shoot a couple of holos tomorrow. I’ll drop you a copy in a day or two.”

  “Is this piece as good as the last one?”

  I shrugged. “You’ll have to be the judge of that.”

  Demi, the latest in a long line of temporary waitresses, slipped up behind Rico and whispered something in his ear.

  He glanced back toward the bar and nodded. “Duty calls, Amigo. I have thirsty customers and the booze must flow.”

  I lifted my glass and toasted him silently as he limped back to the bar.

  Rico doesn’t talk about it, but rumor says—when he was a kid—his mother sold the musculature in his left leg to a black market organ clinic. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’ve seen the leg. From the knee down, it’s not much more than skin stretched over tendon and bone.

  I asked him once why he’s never gotten a muscle graft to replace the missing tissue. But Rico had given me a sad smile, shaken his head, and told me that you never can be sure whether organ donors are volunteers, or victims.

  Lonnie Johnson’s Low Down Saint Louis Blues found its way out of the speakers. I took another sip of the scotch and settled down into listening mode.

  “Getting started without me, Sarge?”

  I looked up into John’s grinning face.

  “You’re late,” I said. “There is scotch to be drunk, Johnny Boy, and you are not carrying your end of the load.”

  John eased himself into the booth; the servomotors that drove his exoskeleton bleated softly as they bent his unresponsive lower body into a sitting position.

  “A problem that can be quickly remedied,” he said. He waved Demi over and ordered a drink.

  John wore dark colors as usual, slate gray pants and a pleated black jacket with flyaway shoulders. The dark color scheme was supposed to hide the narrow gray ribbing of the exoskeleton. Under the dim lights of the bar, it almost work
ed; the exoskeleton was nearly invisible.

  “What’s the big news?” I asked.

  “My R&D team is getting close to a breakthrough on the neural shunt,” he said.

  The neural shunt was one of a hundred crazy schemes that John had cooked up in his drive to free himself from the exoskeleton. I didn’t understand most of the technical details, but the shunt was basically an attempt to wire around the damage to John’s spine, sort of like jumpering around a bad circuit.

  It consisted of a custom-designed microchip implanted in his frontal lobe. The chip was supposed to interpret synaptic firings from John’s brain, and transmit the signals through a fiberoptic strand that ran down his spine to a second chip implanted below the injury. It had been an ugly piece of surgery, and it hadn’t really done the trick.

  “You’re going to try that crap again?”

  “Of course I’m going to try it again. That’s why I built Neuro-Tech in the first place. Owning a medical R&D team isn’t exactly my life-long dream. If anybody else would work on the problem for me, I’d sell the company in a nanosecond. Until that happens, I’m going to have to keep trying myself.”

  I took a swallow of scotch and tried not to frown. “I thought the neural shunt was a dead-end.”

  John shook his head. “So did I, but my engineers have worked up a new angle on it.”

  “John, you told me yourself, every time you power up that chip, you go into a full-blown seizure. You’ve got to stop screwing around with your brain.”

  John tapped a fingernail on the carbon laminate ribbing of his exoskeleton. “I’ve got news for you, Sarge. My brain is about all I’ve got left to screw around with.”