Pacific Storm

by Linda Nagata

  Thwop!

  Ava’s legs tangled. She went down hard, landing on her elbows, dirty rainwater splashing into her mouth and her flashlight rolling away, its red beam dulled by mud.

  That hum. Singular now, and not so close.

  “I’ve got you covered,” Matt said.

  She groped for her folding knife. Snapped it open. Felt for the shape of the webbing that bound her feet together. Slid the blade under a strand. Jerked hard to slice through it. Once. Twice. And again. Ripped the rest of the webbing off. “I’m good.”

  The hum sounding closer now.

  “Incoming,” Matt said softly.

  Ava snapped the knife shut. Holstered it. Drew her pistol. Then looked up. A pale white light crept across a kiawe branch overhead.

  The monkey bot.

  As the quad-copter closed in, the little bot leaped at it, found a grip somewhere, and in the space of three seconds, swung itself up, over, and into one of the propellers. A horrible crunch. Debris showered the forest as the quad-copter wobbled and rotated, lifting away.

  With a whispered thank-you to Gideon, Ava grabbed her flashlight from where it had fallen in the mud. Then she picked herself up, and ran.

  Matt kept pace behind her.

  ◇

  The blue beetle lights led them on until they came to a wide break in the vegetation that turned out to be an unpaved road. Lights from the elevated freeway, two-tenths of a mile ahead, glinted against the wind-rippled pools of rainwater that filled the road’s deep ruts.

  On the other side of the road, Ava could just make out what had to be a tree nursery. Some brave soul, believing in the future, had planted rows of coconut and Alexander palms. None had yet grown even six-feet high. Their fronds thrashed and rattled in the gusting wind.

  “We’re over here!” Akasha shouted from the edge of the palm plantation.

  Ava sprinted through the open to join her. “Injuries?”

  “We’re good,” Akasha assured her.

  Ava played her light over them anyway. Akasha looked surprisingly clean. Gideon looked stone-cold angry.

  “Thank you for sending the monkey bot,” Ava told him.

  He nodded shortly. Then he jerked his chin in Matt’s direction. “I lost my moped, my trailer, and the fucking monkey bot because seal-team-six here didn’t stick to our deal and keep his comms off.”

  “There’s more at stake tonight than just your gear,” Matt said, no apology in his voice. “Have you got a status on your jellyfish?”

  Gideon gave him a dark look. “Okay, so it’s having a hard time,” he admitted. “The tide, the storm surge—”

  “But it’s still in play?”

  “Sure. It can go all night if it needs to.”

  “It needs to get inside the security perimeter before Denali leaves.”

  “I know that! I understand. I’m doing what I can. More than you’re doing.”

  “Yeah, sorry. You didn’t sign up for this, but if it doesn’t work—”

  “We find another way,” Ava said. “That’s all. Now let’s move. Navy’s not going to be in a good mood tonight, and I don’t want to be here when some stealth unit shows up.”

  “You mean real navy seals?” Gideon asked with a sneer.

  “Roger that.”

  ◇

  The rain persisted as they followed the dirt road. It washed away the mud from Ava’s face, her hands, even her clothing. But the constant wet left her skin shriveled and fragile, rubbed raw under the weight of her duty belt, with blisters forming on her heels.

  She didn’t slow down. Not until they’d gained a little elevation, enough that she could look back, out over the wind-lashed waters of East Loch. No boats out tonight. No traffic on the freeway. Everyone else had gone to shelter.

  But we’re still here! Still trying to save the world! The wretched world. My world.

  She wished to God she could get back to yesterday. But there was no way back. There never would be, no matter what happened.

  From up ahead, Gideon shouted. “Ah, fuck.” He turned around, his thin figure backlit by streetlights. “They got it! They got it!”

  Ava’s heart skipped as she turned to look again out over the Loch. Two small boats had appeared, their navigation lights on. They raced past Ford Island, heading for the peninsula.

  “How do you know they got it?” Matt demanded.

  “No signal! Signal’s gone. It’s not there.”

  “Could have been a sea serpent,” Ava said. Like it was better to lose the jellyfish to an accident of nature, than a deliberate attack? “Shit, it doesn’t matter. Can you still trigger the swarm?”

  “Don’t have to. If they lose the mothership, they go. But they’re still outside the security perimeter! And they don’t have the battery power for evasive—”

  Far away, a cluster of eight tiny white geysers silently erupted from the black water. The robot tuna had found their prey and induced the entire swarm to detonate.

  “Fuck!” Gideon screamed. “Fuck these assholes. I’m going to get the word out. Get people away from here.”

  “Sigrún is ready for that,” Matt told him. “They’ll scrub anything you post online.”

  “You think I don’t know that? I know how this works. It’s word-of-mouth. The coconut wireless.”

  “You can try, but it’ll get online in a heartbeat, and then Sigrún will issue counter rumors claiming it’s a hoax meant to start a panic so people will go running out into the storm. And which interpretation sounds more plausible to you?”

  “So what?” Gideon demanded. “What do you want me to do? Just sit here and wait for it to happen?”

  Ava groped for an answer. It was surely too late for anyone not already booked on a flight to get a seat out. If they didn’t find some way to keep Denali in port, they would all be left waiting for the light. No, not just waiting.

  She turned to Akasha. “What I want you both to do is to survive. Go with Gideon. Take him to headquarters. Convince Ivan this is all real. Convince him to convince the navy. And ride out the storm there.”

  Akasha was shaking her head even before Ava finished. “No way. I’m in until this is done.”

  “No, Ava’s right,” Matt said. “There’s nothing more you can do here. Lyric fucked up when she brought you into this. And Gideon needs you.”

  To Ava’s surprise, Gideon was agreeable. “Come on, Akasha. Let’s go. If they use a low-yield device, and Pearl is the real target, then we might be able to survive the blast over there.”

  “No, that’s not good enough,” Akasha insisted. “We can’t let it happen at all.”

  Ava answered, her voice breaking. “Then convince Ivan to persuade his navy contacts that they’re being conned into a war they don’t want and that they’re not ready to fight. The chain of command could still stop this with a word . . .” She trailed off as she wondered if that was true—or had it gone beyond that?

  Kaden was at the dock with a hand-picked skeleton crew loyal to him, loyal to his cause. If ordered to stay in port, would he obey?

  “Hell, it’s worth a try,” Ava concluded. “What time is it, anyway?” She’d left her gear powered down, worried it had been hacked along with Matt’s.

  “Two twenty-eight AM,” Gideon said.

  “Way too late for a taxi then, but you can get the train.” Ava gripped Akasha’s shoulders. “You’ll be okay. HADAFA will tag you, but it won’t matter, because there’s nothing to link you to what just went down. Navy security is not going to be looking for you, and HPD has promised to look the other way.”

  The tears glistening in the younger officer’s eyes reflected Ava’s own, and maybe they shared the same thought, too: Will we ever see each other again?

  They traded a quick hug. Then Akasha and Gideon headed off through a ghost neighborhood, where the broken asphalt streets and cracked concrete sidewalks still enforced a rough geometrical order on the brush and the small trees.

  Matt said, “I would have asked you
to go with them—”

  “Not possible. Navy security knows my name.”

  “Yeah. That, and I’m going to need you as a distraction.”

  Her pulse quickened, wary of some desperate last measure. “What are you thinking?”

  “Back to the basics. Get on the base. Sabotage the sub.”

  “You’re dreaming.”

  A bitter edge to his voice. “It’s what I should have done when we left the stadium, but Lyric wanted to be clever.”

  “No, she didn’t want to waste you on a brute force solution. A non-solution. She gave the scenario to HADAFA to analyze—”

  “And the AI said it couldn’t work! I know that. So she gambled on Gideon.” His lip curled, revealing a flash of white teeth in the dark. “But HADAFA isn’t always right—and neither is Lyric. She overestimated Hōkū Ala. It’s not often she gets played.” He wiped at the accumulated rainwater on his face, then stared down at Ava. “You willing to cause a distraction?”

  Fatigue and frustration shortened her temper. “Like what? Steal a car? Drive it through Makalapa Gate? Do something stupid, just to do something? How is that going to help you?”

  “It won’t. I need you to go over the wire. Full stealth. Like you’re trying to make the hit yourself. My window of opportunity happens when the hammer comes down on you.”

  chapter

  20

  “This is our last shot, but we’ve still got a couple of hours,” Matt said. “So let’s find some place out of the rain. Take time to map things out. Get the details right.”

  Ava felt the tug of momentum, pushing her to sign on to Matt’s berserker plan, even if she didn’t believe in it. She eyed his waist pack. “You’re carrying explosives, aren’t you? That’s what you’ve got in there.”

  “C-4,” he confirmed. “Enough to disable the sub, prevent it from sailing. I’ll get in while security’s tied up with you.”

  She tried to imagine it, but the scene wouldn’t play. “Matt. This isn’t—”

  She broke off as a cluster of distant lights winked out behind him. Stepping around him to get a better look, she spotted a large shadow gliding fifty feet or so above the dark shoreline.

  “Quad-copter,” she whispered.

  He looked around, then motioned her down.

  The rain and the gusting wind cloaked the copter’s rotor noise, but it gave them cover too. Staying low, creeping through the jumble of elephant grass and invasive weeds, they retreated inland. The faint ambient light helped them find their way.

  After a few minutes, Matt signaled that he’d heard the quad-copter off to their right. They angled away from it.

  “Military patrols are not supposed to extend into civilian areas,” he whispered.

  “But who’s going to know tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  When they came across an abandoned shipping container, partially collapsed, they slipped inside, thinking to outwait the quad-copter. They hunkered down amid puddles of rainwater and fragile flakes of rusting metal. But nothing could be heard past the hammering rain. They had no way to know if the quad-copter was close. So after a few minutes, they set off again, still angling west, almost paralleling the elevated freeway.

  Then, past the sound of rain and wind, Ava heard a distant phoomp! followed immediately by a hollow pop, much closer.

  “Stingers!” she warned as she dropped to her knees.

  “Not in the rain,” Matt objected.

  “Trust me.”

  She’d heard that sequence of sound too many times in urban combat to mistake it now. The first beat marked the release of a hollow shell from a grenade launcher. The second was the sound of that shell popping open, to deliver a swarm of three stingers in the vicinity of the target. And Matt was wrong. Stingers could be used in heavy rain. Ava had used them that way more than once, despite what the manual said. It wasn’t ideal. Rain weighed down the little winged drones. It degraded their ability to navigate and maneuver, but it didn’t make them useless.

  She moved to protect herself. Experience told her she had three or maybe four seconds at best. She pulled up her hood, then hunched over, legs folded beneath her torso, hands tucked under her chest, her face pressed against the sodden grass as she strained to hear past the rain.

  There!

  A flutter like the sound of panicked bird wings, but played back soft and at three times the natural speed. Then a faint tug on the fabric of her jacket, near her right shoulder. Her hand darted out. She twisted and grabbed. Fifty-fifty chance the stinger’s antenna trailed down, not up.

  Got it!

  She yanked at the thin wire, pulling the stinger off her shoulder, whipping it down into the grass but not letting go. The antenna wire jerked in her hand as the stinger writhed. She got out her shockgun with her other hand and used it to pound the little winged marauder into submission. Then she pitched it away into the brush.

  “Matt?”

  “Yeah, I got mine.” He sounded chagrined. “You okay?”

  She sat up—too quickly. A wave of dizziness passed through her, accompanied by a faint stinging sensation on her shoulder, where the stinger had landed. “Touched,” she said. “Low dose, I think.” Her tongue felt thick. “But I’m feeling it.”

  She got to her feet. Matt grabbed her elbow, steadying her. “You were right,” he conceded. “Let’s go, before they decide to try a second round.”

  Three steps and she stumbled. Her legs felt shaky. Stingers packed a paralytic. Not fatal unless the target received multiple stings, though the swarm intelligence wasn’t supposed to let that happen. A full dose dropped the target within two or three seconds, but even the low dose Ava had taken messed up her coordination.

  “Keep going,” Matt murmured. “If it hasn’t put you down yet, it’s not going to.”

  Ava wasn’t so sure, but couldn’t work her tongue enough to argue. A few more steps. Then, from out of the dark, a burst of accelerated fluttering. The third stinger!

  Ava envisioned it: loitering in the area, poised on a kiawe branch to preserve its battery, its tiny electronic mind assessing the situation, tracking their position and their direction of movement, calculating the perfect time to launch an ambush.

  She twisted free of Matt’s grip and dove again for the ground—but she wasn’t the target.

  Matt grunted. Cursed. A crackle of twigs and a thump as he went down.

  Ava groped for him. Found the hard warmth of his shoulder. A stinger’s preferred target was the neck. Her searching fingers discovered the device there. With its payload delivered, it was harmless. She grabbed it, crushed its papery wings, and pitched it away, wanting some separation from its location beacon.

  Then she hunched over, giving in to another wave of dizziness.

  Time passed—a minute? two? Maybe longer, before her head began to clear. Time enough, that she’d gotten chilled. Her hands shook with cold—or maybe that was an effect of the drug. Her stomach felt queasy, and her head ached.

  She didn’t try to raise her head. Stayed down instead, and spent another minute just listening. Heard the hiss and wash of the wind and the ceaseless patter of rain. But no hum or buzz of drones, no flutter of mechanical wings, no rustle of enemy soldiers moving through wet grass. She sat up slowly, sniffing the air, but detected nothing but rain.

  Damn it, move! she chided herself.

  The smart thing to do was to put distance between herself and the site of the stinger’s ambush—but that meant leaving Matt. No way could she drag him or carry him in her present condition.

  Leave him.

  That’s what he would do—but then what?

  She needed Matt, because she did not have his knowledge of the base, its security systems, and its vulnerabilities. No way could she get to Denali on her own. She’d be better off crashing a car through the front gate and screaming, We’re all going to die!

  Yeah, and maybe it would come to that. But not yet.

  She had to get Matt on his feet.


  “Hey.” She shook his shoulder. “Matt, come on. Come out of it.” Magical thinking. She’d never seen a captive who’d taken a full dose come around without stimulants in less than half an hour.

  But maybe Matt had a med-kit in his waist pack? A med-kit with stimulants?

  She rolled him half over, so that cloud-filtered moonlight glinted in his unblinking eyes. To save his vision, she followed procedure and closed them. His skin felt hot. His breathing was fast, shallow, and labored. She pressed her fingers to his neck.

  What the hell?

  His pulse hammered at an unsustainable pace. That made no sense. Stinger toxin put you under, it didn’t send you over the top.

  Matt definitely didn’t need a stimulant.

  She unzipped his pack anyway. Inside the main compartment, her flashlight’s red beam revealed the packets of C-4, a tiny phone, a cash card. No med-kit, but two foil packets, one already torn open. As she struggled to read the label in the dim red light, Matt stirred, lifting his hand as if to reach for the flashlight.

  “Hey,” she breathed. Matt had taken a full hit. No way should he be coming around already. She looked again at the empty packet. “What the hell are you on?” she murmured, her tongue still thick with stinger toxin.

  To her shock, he answered in a long exhale: “O– ver–drive.”

  “Ah, Matt, that stuff will kill you.”

  A pained half smile. “Feels . . . that . . . way.” His throat bobbed as he swallowed. “Help me . . . up.”

  She zipped his pack closed, then supported him as he sat up. The exertion combined with the stinger toxin still in her system to send her own heart racing.

  “Navy . . . be here . . . soon,” Matt whispered.

  “Yeah, and we need to be gone before then. Let’s see how you do on your feet.”

  With his arm over her shoulder, he managed to stand—a moment only. She flexed her knees, taking more of his weight as she felt him sag. “Do I need to carry you?”