by Linda Nagata
PACIFIC STORM
Linda Nagata
Published by Mythic Island Press LLC
Kula, Hawaii
Mythic Island Press LLC
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This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious or are used fictitiously.
Pacific Storm
Copyright © 2020 by Linda Nagata.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
ISBN 978-1-937197-32-2
Cover art by Bukovero.com
Cover art copyright © 2020 by Mythic Island Press LLC
Mythic Island Press LLC
PO Box 1293
Kula, HI 96790-1293
MythicIslandPress.com
chapter
1
It was early December, two-fifteen AM, and the chill of KCA Security’s operations center had sunk into Ava Arnett’s bones. She stood at the observation window, forty-nine stories above the beach, hands resting in the pockets of a quilted vest—non-regulation, but an essential defense against the room’s unchanging climate.
Adapt or die—or find an excuse to get outside again.
Beyond the glass, the night air stewed, sticky and warm, unseasonable weather even for Honolulu—because a monster was on the way. The heavy, humid air, its exhalation.
Behind Ava, a chair creaked in the near-dark. Fingers pattered a faint arrhythmic beat against a computer screen, and the dispatcher softly murmured to an officer on patrol, “Stay strong, Sugar. We’re not at the hard part yet. You know it’s gonna be crazy-town, the next few days.”
An unwanted burst of adrenaline—signature of lurking anxiety—sent Ava’s heart into a flurry of shallow beats. Without turning around, she murmured, “That is the understatement of the year.”
Out of habit, she conjured a scene in her head: A brief dancing flame, a lit cigarette, its dry feel between her lips and the burning taste of tobacco smoke—a drug that both soothed and sharpened the mind. Ava had never smoked in her life, but the mental exercise stymied the rise of real memories she did not wish to revisit and, like the action heroes in century-old movies, it let her bleed off her anxieties in a long, soft exhale of imagined smoke.
With Hurricane Huko churning ever closer, faithfully following its predicted path, everyone needed some means of coping—especially when the memory of round one remained so raw.
Just nine years ago Hurricane Nolo had come up out of the south. The Category 5 storm had hit the island of O‘ahu like a slow-motion bomb, decimating Honolulu. Its 215 mile-per-hour winds had shredded tens of thousands of family homes and stripped the city’s towers, tearing away their glass facings and purging their interiors. The storm surge had washed away coastal neighborhoods, redistributed toxic chemicals, and caused the collapse of highways and underground utility tunnels. But the massive rainfall was worse. As the storm churned north across the island, ridge-top neighborhoods had their foundations washed out from under them, and the densely populated valleys were swept with landslides and apocalyptic floods. Even now, much of the city remained abandoned, inhabited only by ghosts.
But not Waikīkī.
Half a trillion dollars of Chinese capital had gone into reimagining the famous coastline and in restoring it as an economic engine of tourism. Ava’s worried gaze wandered protectively over the result: an expanded shore, built on reclaimed land, fortified against the rising sea level, and designed to be resilient in storms. So different from before and yet still beautiful, still capable of rousing her sense of wonder.
All along the former oceanfront, hotels that had survived Nolo had been refurbished, others had been newly built, but they no longer stood at the ocean’s edge. Instead, they faced an earthwork reaching eighteen feet above sea level. Grassed over, planted with tropical vegetation, its wide, flat surface served as an esplanade marking the inland edge of Kahanamoku Coastal Park. Footlights illuminated the path in gold and red holiday colors.
Beyond the esplanade, clusters of coconut palms shaded a long, inland beach—a sheltered strip of sand that embraced a chain of artificial lagoons, their waters black and glassy at this hour, undisturbed by swimmers, and reflecting the gleaming lights of the hotel towers.
An embankment of tall dunes stood beyond the lagoons, their slopes stabilized by waist-high, salt-tolerant grasses, silvered by moonlight and nodding in imitation of ocean waves under the stroke of a restless night breeze. Softly lit tiled paths wound between the dunes, and out, to a wide, reconstructed beach, and the open ocean beyond. Ava watched two night surfers, tiny with distance, making their way back to the hotels with boards tucked under their arms.
Sealed as she was within thick glass walls, she could not hear the surf, but the foaming lines of breakers were bright with both reflected moonlight and a white glow generated by the pummeled carcasses of bioluminescent jellyfish.
Equally luminous, but more colorful—pink, green, blue, yellow—sea serpents up to six feet long fed on the doomed jellies, their limbless bodies gliding in sinuous threads just beneath the ocean’s surface. By design, the engineered creatures ignored the pod of twenty or so surfers sitting their boards beyond the break. Most of the surfers wore rash guards made to glow like the sea serpents. As a new swell rolled in, three moved to catch the wave.
Farther out, appearing and disappearing between the swells, a tiny but intense green beacon marked the position of DeCoite’s patrol boat.
Officer DeCoite, unhappy with his current assignment, insisted on sharing with Ava his heartfelt concerns over his future fertility. His gruff voice reiterated his main point through her earbud: “It’s not just debris out of the Pacific garbage patch, Ava. It is ra-di-o-ac-tive.” Each syllable pronounced separately to ensure she grasped the true hazard of his situation.
Ocean currents occasionally carried debris from the Mischief Reef incident into Hawaiian waters. KCA Security’s ocean patrol existed in part as a last line of defense to ensure none of it ever washed ashore.
“You wearing your hazmat suit?” Ava asked, conscious of the faint pressure of her tactile mic. It lay firmly against her cheek, a thin transparent wand curving from earbud to chin, monitoring the muscular activity of speech, its software mapping that to her audible words.
“You know it,” DeCoite affirmed.
“So you’re good.”
Ava held the rank of shift captain in Kahanamoku Coastal Authority’s limited hierarchy. Duties rotated among the four KCA patrol officers she supervised on the nightshift. DeCoite had been in the boat when a buoy alarm went off. So he’d caught the assignment—roping the debris, preventing it from being carried any closer to shore.
“If I gotta wait here any longer,” he groused, “I am never going to be a father again.”
“The navy is responding, Doug. Current ETA, fourteen minutes.” She could see the silhouette of a patrol ship to the west, either the Makani or the Ho‘olua, on its way from Pearl Harbor. “And anyway, you got three kids already.”
“Need more than that,” he growled, “to make up for what we lost . . . what we’re about to lose.”
A tightness in her chest. Another flurry of heartbeats.
“No, brother. We’re ready this time.”
She had meant to sound confident, but she wasn’t good at faking it.
Hurricane Huko had popped up out of season, spawned from summer’s lingering heat just two days before, but winding up rapidly toward Category 5 status. Its predicted track had it taking a turn to the north, with a high probability of a second direct strike against O‘ahu’s already-shattered southern shore.
In the sky out over the ocean, a new light came into sight every few minutes. Another passenger jet, come to evacuate the tourist district and to spirit away the handful of island residents who had the money for a last-minute ticket out. Ava’s ex had called from Spokane, begging her to get on a plane, “for the girls’ sake.”
“Not possible,” she’d told him. “If I step out on my duty, I won’t have a job when I get back.” That was true—and a pointed reminder that the money she transferred to him every week kept him, their two daughters, and his new wife in better circumstances than he could afford with universal basic income alone.
An alarm pulsed, soft at first, but louder with each successive beat.
Ava turned to look down past a railing into the operations center’s circular well, where screens displayed a curated selection of videos gathered from the park’s omnipresent security cameras. At this hour, half the desks were empty. Staff consisted of only Joni, the dispatcher, two communications specialists, and a solitary researcher who sat transfixed, her youthful face illuminated by the subdued light of her screen as she announced, “EP4 at the Ala Wai gate.”
Joni whistled softly.
“Another one?” Ava asked in disbelief.
“This is what?” one of the specialists demanded. “The third EP4 in nine days?”
“Number three,” Ava confirmed—and all on her watch.
“He just stepped aboard a streetcar,” Tammy, the researcher, reported. “And the streetcar is underway. No transit officer at this hour. He’s alone. Status is red, on the prowl.”
Ava grabbed the rails of a rapid access ladder and slid down into the well, the situation feeling weirdly routine.
Tammy continued to recite details: “Name of Expected Perpetrator is Robert Bell. Age forty-three. Island resident. Former real estate agent. Now basic income only. No current occupation. Estranged from family. Accusations lodged against him include sexual assault, battery, cruelty to animals. No convictions, but a minus twelve social rating in his assigned village.”
No doubt Robert had been a nasty piece of work even before Nolo blew his life out from under him.
Ava shed her non-regulation vest, dropping it on her chair at the captain’s desk while scrutinizing Robert Bell onscreen. A live feed from one of the streetcar’s surveillance cameras showed him standing on the running board, one large hand clenched around a pole as the car rolled silently east past Fort DeRussy Park. A tall man, six two, a little overweight, graying hair neatly trimmed. He’d come dressed in the local standard—aloha shirt, khaki shorts, and leather sandals. Nothing overt in his appearance to suggest a violent nature. Just hints: a slow twitch in his lips, and a sense of tension around eyes obscured by the lens glow of his rimless smart glasses.
“Have we seen him before?” Ava asked. “Maybe as an EP2 or 3?”
Like the FBI, Homeland Security, the US military, and hundreds of local law enforcement agencies including the Honolulu Police Department, KCA Security used the AI-driven HADAFA system to identify Expected Perpetrators. The acronym stood for Human Algorithmic Decryption And Forward Analysis. HADAFA kept a profile on everyone. It used a subject’s background, medical history, behavioral quirks, media preferences, social media activity, location data, Chinese social rating, and any other information it could scrape from the cloud to interpret behavior and predict a propensity to commit a crime—both in the immediate future, and over the long term. The baseline EP tag wasn’t uncommon. But EP4? That was rare.
Ava knew the names of every EP4 who had ever entered the park, and Robert Bell was not among them—though maybe he’d graduated. A propensity for violence could increase over time.
“We have not seen Mr. Bell before,” Tammy reported. “First time in our jurisdiction—but it looks like he knows where he’s going.”
Just like the other two . . .
Both prior EP4s had quickly closed in on their intended victims: melancholy women lingering in dark, unsurveilled areas among the dunes as if they knew someone would come, as if they’d made an appointment with fate.
Not on my watch.
Ava’s officers had moved in quickly, confronting the EPs before they could carry out an assault.
But no crime meant no arrest, no interrogation, no clue what was driving this unsettling new game.
Ava opened a cubby, retrieving her duty belt.
“Joni, I want you to give everyone a heads-up,” she instructed the dispatcher. “When he gets off the streetcar, have our two closest officers move in.” A moment of hesitation, of reconsideration. “Have them move in, but do not intercept. I want them to stay out of sight. Take no action unless the crime is imminent. I’ll be on-scene in a couple of minutes.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Joni said, a doubtful note in her crisp voice. But she repeated the instructions.
Ava strapped on her duty belt—a lime-green engineering marvel that held a two-round shockgun, four additional rounds, a folding knife, zipties, flashlight, disposable gloves, spray paint, do-not-cross tape, a canister of red smoke, and another of disinfectant. The belt’s color suggested fire trucks and heroic first responders. That was the theory. And it made a bold contrast to KCA Security’s all-black uniform.
The lightweight uniform was designed for sun protection in hot and humid oceanside conditions. It consisted of a long-sleeve athletic shirt with name, badge, and rank insignia embedded in the textile weave, knee-length cargo shorts, and high-top athletic shoes made of a fine mesh that resisted sand but drained water. All of it black—even the thin rim of the smart glasses she’d pushed up on her head so that they held her short golden-brown hair away from her face—because black stood out among the light colors and bright tropicals most tourists wore.
Ava liked the way the uniform provided camouflage at night.
She spoke to the specialists. “Forward me a list of potential victims in the path of this freak, especially anyone who’s disappeared into an unsurveilled area.”
“You got it, Ava.”
She strode across the well to the open elevator door, where a four-foot-tall artificial Christmas tree stood sentinel, placed there by dayshift only a day before. The soft, steady glow of its LED lights ignited sparks of guilt in her mind. She’d be working through the holidays this year and wouldn’t get to see her daughters. But she’d sent their gifts.
Stepping aboard the elevator, Ava pulled her smart glasses down over her eyes, activating them. “DeCoite,” she said as the doors closed. The comms system registered the name, automatically linking her to the officer.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Notify me when the navy takes over.”
“Oh, you’ll be able to tell, Ava. I’ll be glowing green as a sea serpent by then.”
chapter
2
Kahanamoku Coastal Authority’s security division occupied the forty-eighth and forty-ninth floors of the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower. During standard work hours, visitors could use the hotel’s guest elevators to reach KCA’s reception desk on the forty-eighth floor. But security personnel had the use of an express service elevator, out of sight of the public eye. It let Ava descend uninterrupted, at ear-popping speed, to KCA’s second-floor ready room.
There, glass doors allowed a one-way view outside onto an authorized-personnel-only deck bordered in waist-high planters holding colorful low-growing lantana. A short gated bridge linked the deck to the public esplanade, where a trio of young men wandered by on the tiled path.
Ava eyed them through her smart glasses. HADAFA tagged them as harmless, but she studied them f
or an extra second anyway, compiling her own profile based on appearance and mannerisms. They were lithe and trim, but not in the taut, coiled, contained manner of young soldiers. No, these were civilians with money to spend, dressed for a night out in voluminous slacks and tight-fitting, subtly glittering tank-tops scaled like reptile skins. Faint lines of luminous paint shone in their hair. Chinese, she guessed. Possibly Korean. They swayed a bit as they ambled on the path, looking like they’d reached the end of their evening.
Harmless, Ava decided, agreeing with HADAFA’s assessment.
She moved on to the locker labeled Arnett. A quick biometric scan, and it opened. She retrieved her helmet, strapped it on, then turned to the charging rack where nine small electric motorcycles waited, green-lit. Taking the nearest, she mounted up and switched it on.
“Dispatch, give me an update.”
Joni responded immediately: “The EP4 is still alone on the streetcar. Passing the Hotel Taipingyang as we speak.”
At this hour, with few passengers to pick up, the streetcar could roll through most of its stops and make good time. Robert Bell had already penetrated deep into the district. Another minute, and he’d pass the Pacific Heritage Sea Tower.
Ava looked forward to meeting him.
She rolled the motorcycle, triggering the glass doors to open. The movement startled one of the glamour boys. He looked back as she exited into air thick with humidity and laden with the crisp scent of salt spray cast up by the roaring surf.
“Hey, cop!” he called out in a whiskey-roughened Chinese accent. “You take good care of this Chinese property, yeah? We have big plans for when we come back after the storm.”
By interacting with her, he’d waived his right to privacy. HADAFA responded by whispering to her his identity in the gentle masculine voice she’d chosen for it: “Subject is Zhang Zhengying. Chinese passport, age twenty-eight, materials scientist with Shanghai Industrial Nanosystems, social rating +14.”