by Greg Keyes
“Where is it?” Suyin asked, as they circled, slowly, trying to see in all directions at once.
“We have it moving away from you, Rogue,” Tendo reported.
“Toward the mainland?”
“No, it’s headed almost due south. Wait – there’s something down there, too. Something big, under water.”
“A submarine?”
“It’s not metal,” Tendo said. Ming-hau thought he detected an odd tone in the controller’s voice.
“Another Kaiju?” he asked. That was a terrifying thought. The Kaiju were coming more and more frequently, but there had never been a double event.
“Can’t be sure,” Tendo replied. “Too much Kaiju blood in the water to get a clean signature.”
“We’re giving chase,” Suyin said.
“That’s going to use a lot of power,” Tendo said. “If it’s not headed toward Shanghai right away, best wait for Typhoon.”
“I don’t like this,” Suyin said. “It’s up to something. We’re going.”
“Agreed,” Ming-hau said.
The hole in Huo Da didn’t seem to have slowed it down much, and soon the trail of blue blood played out, the visible part of it anyway. But they had a lock on it, and soon the thing Tendo was picking up on his instruments was on their sonar. Like Huo Da, it had a long silhouette, but it was less than half of the Kaiju’s size. As they watched, approaching on turbines, the two signatures came together.
When they finally caught up, ten minutes later, it was already clear what was happening.
The water was dark with blood – not the blue blood of a Kaiju but the iron-based blood common to earthly vertebrates.
Huo Da was eating a whale.
A wave of anger and revulsion swept through Minghau. They were far too late to save the poor beast, that much was clear.
Huo Da looked up at them warily.
“Let’s hit it with shooting stars,” Suyin said.
“Excellent suggestion.”
They hadn’t tried the stars earlier because they had been too close, but now they had a motionless target a fair distance away. They fired both shooting stars at once. The torpedoes must have looked insignificantly tiny to the Kaiju, just two little fishes swimming its way. It didn’t make any effort to avoid them and they both hit the creature head on. Their magnesium-laced warheads detonated and shone very briefly like the meteorites they were named for, so bright that it overwhelmed their sensors.
“Two direct hits,” Suyin said.
Now they couldn’t see anything, and the sonar was confused as well, as chunks of whale and hopefully Kaiju expanded out and away from the twin explosions, pushing Shaolin Rogue back like a breaking tsunami.
So they didn’t know Huo Da was there until the instant before impact. It knocked them over, backed up, rammed them again. It seemed to be missing a limb or two, but that didn’t appear to deter it very much.
“We just made it mad,” Ming-hau said. At least the poor whale was no longer suffering. That in itself had been worth spending them.
“Let’s make it madder,” Suyin said.
17
2035
MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
CHINA
MAKO GLANCED UP AS VIKTORIYA MALIKOVA came into her office for the second time. As usual, she seemed to have a look of slight irritation on her face.
“Malikova,” she said. “Please have a seat.”
The girl settled in the chair and placed her hands on her knees. She looked very stiff.
“I hear you had a difficult first Drift,” she said.
“I suppose, Secretary General,” the girl said. “I have nothing to compare it to. But I would not call it an enjoyable experience.”
“Don’t make too much of it,” Mako said. “You’re Drift compatible – that’s what counts. Things will smooth out.”
“Thank you, Secretary,” she said. “I hope you’re right.”
Mako nodded. “I’m looking at your records,” she said. “You’re very persistent.”
The girl looked defiant. “You mean I failed the entrance exam two times,” she said.
“I mean you failed it twice and took it again anyway,” Mako corrected.
The girl made a little face. “That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”
“You were determined. Persistent. I expect you to show the same qualities now that you have actually arrived here.” She cocked her head. “Do you know why you failed?”
“I do not, Secretary General,” Malikova said. “That information is not available to us.”
“You passed the written tests,” she said. “It was in the practical that you lost ground. For lack of control.”
Malikova reddened, but didn’t say anything.
“You failed the third time, as well,” Mako said. “I intervened.”
For the first time, the girl’s guard slipped enough to show how utterly astonished she was.
“I… I didn’t know that, ma’am. And… I don’t understand.”
“No, how could you have known? But I make a point of personally reviewing anyone who applies more than twice. Sometimes it means the applicant is delusional. Sometimes it turns out that the persistence comes from their parents, rather than the applicant. But sometimes it shows true resolve. In your case I felt you had potential. Was I wrong?”
“I like to think you were not,” the girl said.
“Have you ever met any Kaiju worshippers, cadet?” Mako asked.
That caught her by surprise, too. For a moment she seemed frozen, unable to speak.
But then she nodded her head.
“Yes,” she said. “Yes. When I was a little girl, in Yuzhno Sakhalinsk. There was a dead Kaiju there, so there were some who hung around. I met some of them.” She shifted from looking uncomfortable to angry. “I didn’t like them,” she said. “I hate Kaiju. I would never be like them.”
“It’s okay, cadet. I wasn’t trying to imply anything. But there were some things in your Drift record that I was curious about. A woman, talking about Kaiju.”
“She was sort of a preacher,” Vik said. “She was crazy, and I did my best to avoid her.”
“Very well,” Mako said. “You may return to barracks, cadet.”
When Malikova was gone, Mako sat back and rubbed her eyes. She was tired, but she had been having trouble sleeping.
Malikova still wasn’t telling her everything. There was something she was keeping buried, possibly even from herself. But she didn’t want to push too hard, not yet. Better to keep an eye on her.
* * *
Sleep eluded Jinhai – his mind kept replaying the Drift obsessively, trying to tease out what was him and what was Vik. Even the memories he knew for a fact were his weren’t exactly how he normally recalled them: they had been refracted through the lens of Vik’s mind, been turned at a different angle, gotten tangled in a different point of view. He was not entirely him anymore. He’d thought that was what he wanted, that thing his parents had, where they knew each other so well they hardly needed to talk. Instead, he felt like he had swallowed someone else’s illness when he was already sick with his own disease. Some of the stuff in Vik’s head was pure horror show.
Except for him that was sort of a dark pun now; in Russian, horosho meant “good”.
He was really starting to wish Ryoichi hadn’t said anything. What if Vik wasn’t who she seemed to be? What if he wasn’t? Once you accepted the possibility that a whole other personality might be implanted in you, insanity was already breathing down your neck.
No, it was ridiculous. He was just confused, and frightened. And let down.
And worried. Did this mean he wasn’t even Drift compatible? Was he going to wash out?
* * *
“Hey, Ranger.”
Lambert turned at the familiar voice and saw Jules standing outside of the door of his little office. He pushed his chair back and quickly stood. Too quickly, he realized. It made him seem over-eager.
“Is this a b
ad time?” she asked.
“No, no, not at all,” he replied. “How can I help you?”
“I think I have something you might be interested in,” she said.
He froze up for an instant.
“Umm,” he finally said.
“Here,” she said, handing him a pen drive. “It’s tracking data from Mechspace. I think we’ve figured out how someone got inside Chronos Berserker’s Conn-Pod without being surveilled.”
“Oh,” Lambert said. “Great. That’s great.”
“Now you owe me twice,” she said. “Don’t forget.”
As she left, Burke stuck his head out of his office.
“You know,” he said. “This is not a situation where you ought to drag your heels.”
“I get that,” Lambert said. “And now, kindly shut up about it.”
He synched the drive to his station and started looking at the contents. When he understood what he was seeing, he grinned. He had a meeting with Mako Mori in an hour, and now he had something to tell her.
* * *
“That’s interesting,” Mori said, after he’d finished his explanation. “It certainly opens up new possibilities, as far as suspects are concerned.”
“It makes it less likely that a cadet sabotaged Chronos Berserker,” he said.
“True,” Mori said. “It does seem to lead away from the cadets. Or at least not toward them. But then, there is Ou-Yang’s pen drive.”
“What about Sokk?” Lambert said. “If you ask me, he’s our man.”
“Sokk certainly seems guilty of something, but that doesn’t rule out Vik or Jinhai or both of them being involved, whether they are aware of it or not.”
“How could they not be aware they were committing sabotage?” Lambert asked.
“A few years ago, we found one of the nastier corners of the criminal underworld was using Pons technology to implant commands into people. Something like hypnotism, but far more effective. They used one such person to assassinate a corrupt police official. We managed to get custody of him – he had no memory of what he’d done. We think it might be possible to plant an entire hidden personality in someone, a personality which would emerge at predetermined times.”
“You think this might have been done to Vik and Jinhai?”
“They both have gaps in their pasts, Vik more than Jinhai. In fact, much of her childhood is a black box to us. She grew up on Sakhalin, where records were sketchy after the Kaiju Wars. But what little we do know points to a rough childhood. And you saw from their attempt to drift that both have something walled away, hidden. I don’t know what a repressed personality would look like in the Drift, but it might look like that.”
“Are you going to question them?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I think it would be better to watch them for a while. Let them continue training. Move Mock-Pod work up; the more they drift, the more likely we are to see if something’s not right with either or both of them.”
18
2035
FUDING CITY
CHINA
LAMBERT WATCHED THE STUDENTS BOARD THE transport helicopter. They were excited, as any group of cadets were before their first liberty, but they also were understandably subdued due to not only the tragedy of Braga’s death, but also the realization they must have all come to by now – that they were suspects. The way this played out varied from one cadet to the other; Suresh and Renata played several variations of a slap-fighting game; Tahima, Ryoichi, Meilin, and Ilya made nervous jokes, laughed a little too loudly, and engaged in horseplay. Jinhai and Vik avoided each other. He let a few things go by he might ordinarily have put a stop to. They had been through a lot for first-trimester cadets.
He wasn’t sure liberty was a good idea, if someone out there was looking to hurt the PPDC. But the city of Fuding was no Hong Kong, rather a modest place of about three hundred thousand people. A port city that had escaped major depredation by the Kaiju, connected to Shanghai and other centers by high-speed rail, it was otherwise in the middle of nowhere. The city itself was in the mountains but laced through with inlets from the sea. It reminded him of Seattle in its situation, if not its climate. Like any city, it had an underbelly of crime: black market and general nastiness, but because of the Shatterdome and its quick response time, Fuding was a pretty safe place – and security had been stepped up in the wake of the sabotage at Moyulan.
A boat ride could get them there, but it would take most of the day, and first-trimester cadets did not get overnight liberty. So, they flew.
* * *
They landed at a PPDC helipad at the port, where everyone was imaged, scanned, and provided with pass badges before entering the city itself.
A few moments later Lambert had them line up.
“Groups of two or more,” Lambert told them. “Keep your pass badges with you at all times. I will also remind you that some parts of the city are off-limits to you. If you go into any of the restricted areas, your liberty will come to a swift and certain end. Are there any questions?”
“Yes, Ranger,” Renata said. “Where’s the closest decent pizza?”
“New York,” he replied. That drew a chuckle from a few of them.
“But, if you’re not too picky, there’s some pretty good pie on Haikou Road, just south of the big circle.” He looked at them a little more seriously. “Be careful,” he said. “And behave. Cadets are generally liked around here, because they don’t cause trouble. Remember what you represent and uphold our standards. If I hear poor reports of you, I will not be pleased. Above all, be respectful – this is their city, not yours. I’ll meet all of you back here at 2100 for the chopper ride back. Remember, early is on time, on time is late, and late is unacceptable. Do you all understand?”
“Yes, Ranger,” they all answered.
“Good,” he said. “Have fun.”
With that he walked off, leaving them there.
“I’m after the pizza,” Renata said. “Who’s with me?”
“Tahima and Ryoichi and I are going to the art museum, and to see one of the old temples,” Meilin said. “But we can meet up with you later.”
“What about you, Vik?” Renata asked. She sounded as if she wasn’t that enthusiastic about the Russian tagging along, but was being polite.
“Another time,” Vik said. “I’m going to hunt for dumplings.”
“You need a buddy,” Renata said. “Who’s going with you?”
“Dumplings sound good,” Jinhai said. “I’ll be her buddy.”
“Just don’t stand too close,” Vik said.
Jinhai could feel the suspicious gazes of the other cadets as they left, and knew that he and Vik were maybe digging themselves in a little deeper with them – making themselves look guiltier. But the two of them needed to talk, and this seemed like a good time for it.
Once they were clear of the group, Vik, who was in the lead, glanced back at him.
“You don’t have to babysit me,” she said. “I just said the dumpling thing to get away from the others.”
“To do what?” he asked.
“Meet up with my Kaiju-worshipping friends,” she snapped. “What do you think?”
“Hey,” he said. “Hold on. I wasn’t saying –”
“No,” she said. “No one is ‘saying’. No one is implying anything. Not you, not Mori, not Lambert.”
“Look, they suspect me too,” he said. “Somebody stole my pen drive. I think it must have been involved in the sabotage.”
She stared at him.
“Were you?” she demanded.
“No!” he said.
“Well, neither was I,” she said. “Now shove off.”
He touched his badge. “These are tracking devices,” he said. “They’ll know if we split up. Look, why don’t we just get some dumplings, like you said? Now that you’ve brought them up, I can’t get them out of my mind. And I’m starving.”
She didn’t exactly look happy with the idea, but she nodded. “You know w
here to go?” she asked.
“I speak the language,” he said. “I’ll ask somebody.”
A nice-looking man directed them to a market square where several street vendors had set up; one was hawking pork-and-cabbage dumplings. They bought some, found a bench and began gobbling them down.
“These are pretty good,” he said. “Not exactly what I’m used to. Some different ingredient.”
She nodded. “I’ve never had this. It is good.”
“You’ve never had jiao-tse?” he asked, incredulous.
“No,” she said. “We had something like this back home called pyanse, but it was more of a bun – puffy.”
“Oh yeah,” he said. “I remember. In the Drift. And that weird old lady…”
She frowned. “We’re not going to talk about it,” she said.
“I just want to know what happened to you, Vik. I feel like it was something awful.”
“It was something I got through,” she said. “Okay?”
“But –”
“I guess my English sucks, or yours does,” she said. “Because I’m really sure I already said I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“Fine,” he said. “Okay, wait here a minute.”
He went back to the vendor and bought two spicy fried rolls made with tofu sheets wrapped around pork, fish, and water chestnuts, generously seasoned with five-spice and mustard. He also purchased two zongzi: sticky rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves.
“As long as you’re trying new things,” he said. “You can get dumplings anywhere. These are sort of regional specialties.”
“Thanks,” she said.
They munched for a bit in silence.
“How do you know the badges are tracking devices?” she asked.
“One of my hobbies,” he said. “I’ve had a microchip transponder in me most of my life, so my caretakers and teachers and bodyguards – or the police – would always be able to find me. So I’ve gotten creative about this kind of stuff over the years.”
“Why do you have an implant?” Vik asked.
“You really want to hear about this? It involves my parents.”