"Burt, Andrew - Swirling Dust" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burt Andrew)

Beijing—Workers are busily preparing the People's Protectorate of Japan for Typhoon Vinson, which is expected to traverse the four main Japanese islands with sustained winds exceeding 250 kilometers per hour. Party authorities here refuse to comment on reports that the Rising Sun Resistance have stolen several large nuclear weapons or their publicly broadcast threat to use them during the havoc caused by Vinson. In a move certain to further chill already icy relations, American officials have renewed their displeasure at China's arsenal of so-called "comet killer" class weapons, saying...


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Dust motes clogged the air, shimmering in the stark halogen glare from the ceiling's track lighting. Cleo Roquin squeezed a wall-mounted bellows with a grunt. Gobs of dust spewed from its tip into the room of cinderblock and unfinished sheetrock that was once part of a cheap, pre-millennium warehouse in a part of Oakland even seamier than the rest, but that the landlords "renewed" and now called an apartment. Cleo hung Bernardo cityscapes on the walls and called it a studio.
"Your neighbors must get ticked at all the dust. Or haven't you told them you're an artiste d'dust?" Robyn O'Reilly asked, her voice muffled by the black mask of the hazmat suit. She swirled the particles in the air with a wave of her hand; they danced like a snowglobe.
"It globs if you fan it," Cleo said, wincing behind her mask and hoping that was a harmonious way to tell Robyn to let the fine particles settle naturally. "Anyway, I'm asking the neighbors all the time I'm so worried it'll bother them. I guess the static-seals keep it in here pretty good." Cleo walked over to the rickety work table in the center of the room and picked up a meter-long business presentation pointer. Robyn watched in silence as Cleo carefully drew the tip through the mounds of gray dust framed on the table. Other, unfinished frames of "dust sculptures" sat pushed to the middle of the table.
"Do you think the Schleibaums will like it?" Cleo asked. "It's supposed to be a lotus."
"It's, ah, very zen-like." Robyn pinched a clot of dust from the air and sprinkled it about the frame. "Don't you wonder, if the dust were alive, what it would think of your coercing it into art? I mean, dust usually just settles, except when we wipe it away."
Cleo scrunched up her shoulders to relieve tension. "I don't know. I pretty much let it go where it wants. I tried using a pastry bag, but..." She waved her pointer dismissively. "I just create a void where it isn't." She carved more voids while Robyn watched.
A succession of clomping and scraping noises from the apartment above disturbed the snow-like quiet. Followed by raised voices. Both women looked at each other expectantly.
A bass hum filled the air.
"Oh, not now, Hiroshi! It's only Thursday!"
"What?" Robyn asked.
"Hiroshi, my neighbor upstairs. He was a real dear and promised he wouldn't run his thingie during the week—some experiment to do with hurricanes. He said he'd only run it on weekends since it moves all my dust around. See how dirty the ceiling is?" She looked up toward the noises. "Electric fields or whatever. Makes all my ridges lose their definition. Totally ruins them. If I could just VarniFreeze one before I start another... Oh well." Cleo looked around the room for something to cover the work, but knew only an anti-static tarp would do. If only she could make up her mind which one to buy.
She shrugged and toyed with the vacuum switch, wondering if she should flick on the vacuum to clear the air. The discordant sounds upstairs grew sharper. Just like her parents' fights when she was a girl—the kind she'd get them to stop, or at least pause, by wandering into the room all innocent-eyed. Cleo still hated the sound of arguments. "Maybe I can start over tomorrow. C'mon, let's go ask Hiroshi what's up."
"I don't know, it sounds like he's having an argument." She crossed her arms and rested against the table, leaning away from the door like the tower of Pisa.
"No, we can change in the bedroom. C'mon, you'll like him. He wants to learn to fly, like you. I went out with him for a while—okay, quite a while—but he's too book-wormish for me. And cute, too. Your type."
"No no, I remember the last time you tried to set me up. Dominic, the melon-thumper."
"Oh, don't be such a worry-frog. C'mon!" Cleo started unzipping her hazmat suit.

Robyn hung back like a wallflower at a party as Cleo knocked solidly on Hiroshi's faux-cement door. The bass staccato of the argument was plainly audible, mixed with the unmistakable sound of a little girl wailing for her mother. Cleo could imagine the flowing tears and the runny nose.
"I really don't think we want to bother them," Robyn said, eyebrow raised. She pushed chestnut hair back over an ear and straightened her dark, plaid blazer.
"Oh, posh." Cleo knocked again, louder. "Hiroshi?"
The argument stopped, to Cleo's relief.   The wailing child stopped with a last, muffled cry. Only the mechanical hum remained, and a salty, oily odor escaping the drafty door.
Then a shuffle against the door. Maybe someone looking through the peephole.
Silence.
"Hiroshi, it's Cleo. My friend Robyn is visiting from Miami, I thought maybe she could see your hurricane thing." Cleo winked at Robyn. "She could tell you all about living through hurricane Abdul..."
Muffled whispers. Clipped, angry whispers. Cleo cocked an ear.
Quiet.
Cleo produced a key, holding it aloft with a smile.
"No! Let's go," Robyn said with a jerk of her head.
"We have an agreement, 'any time.' It's ok, honest."
Locks clicked, and a T-shirted, trimly bearded Japanese face met them as Cleo swung the door open. "Cleo—"
Cleo sashayed in, giving Hiroshi a peck on the cheek as she passed. "Hey, everyone, where's the beer?" This much noise, there had to be beer.
Another Japanese man in a baggy, gray pinstripe with his hair tied back stood behind the door. He closed it as Robyn inched through. Locks clicked.
On the wallscreen an elderly Japanese woman teetered, freeze-framed in a defiant shout, her arms pinned by two uniformed men with dour faces. Cleo recognized the uniforms of the People's Militia, so often in the news since the Chinese takeover of Japan two years ago. She frowned, preferring not to think about the Sino-American tension that the media called "the brink of global war."
Two other men stood in the room, apparently watching the screen but now turned toward Cleo and Robyn. One was a virtual clone of Pinstripe by the door. The other man, wearing crisply pressed military camouflage, was stocky for a Japanese, but Cleo could sense the bulk was muscle, not flab. He said nothing, turned back to the screen and nodded his head.
The argument may have stopped, but Cleo felt suddenly queasy at the tension penetrating the room like sunlight through squeezed eyelids. The one time her parents had stopped arguing to a dead silence like this, her father had left. For good.
A Pinstripe unfroze the picture and a muted cry rose from the woman as she was roughly escorted into a low, cement building. An announcer's voice-over continued mid-sentence. "...mother of suspected Rising Sun revolutionary leader Yasui Shimomura for interrogation." The screen flicked to a still shot labeled with the man's name. The man that stood before her in camouflage.
"Nothing more has been heard from Shimomura since his pirate transmission of a threat to use nuclear weapons unless the Chinese withdraw from Japan. In—"
Pinstripe blanked the screen at another nod from Shimomura.
No one spoke for a long moment.
"You see, Hiroshi, I have more to lose than you," Shimomura said. "But we shouldn't argue before our guests. Please introduce us."
Hiroshi looked pained, staring longingly toward a closed door that Cleo knew was the bedroom. "Cleo Roquin. She lives below. I don't know the other one. They know nothing. Let them go." Hiroshi acted like he scarcely knew her, as if they'd never spent a certain two nights together in that bedroom.
Cleo shivered.
Robyn stood, hard-faced, with her hands in the back pockets of her jeans. Far worse than her usual I-hate-it-when-you-set-me-up-with-guys look.
Shimomura smiled. "Kenji, please escort our guests away from the door. Perhaps they would like to see our demonstration. I would like to see it one more time. Then we leave."
Hiroshi opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and walked across the room with his head hung like a reprimanded dog. He stopped at a fifty-gallon aquarium, a quarter full of water and sprouting wires and tubes like an upside-down, cyborg octopus. He tapped a few keys on one of the connected computers.
A mist began to swirl in the aquarium, tightening into a central column that quickly vanished behind a larger, cloudy swirl. Accompanied by a sound like wind whistling through a crack, spray spattered onto the glass and over the top, hitting the floor near Cleo's feet. The aquarium glass blurred like a maglev windshield in a steady rain.
Cleo wrinkled her nose at the salty smell. She was glad this hadn't been here when they'd eaten salami and made love on the couch she could see forgotten beneath the worktable. She knew that thinking about the smell and the couch was only out of denial. Thinking about terrorists and yakuza wannabes was worse. What an awful smell, she thought.
"This is a typhoon," Shimomura said. "A hurricane as you call it. Our friend Hiroshi here has found an amazing trick. Fortuitously for the freedom of Japan, he announced his results on the nets. Demonstrate again, Hiroshi."
Hiroshi remained hunched, gnome-like, at a console. With his back to everyone, he seemed to forget who his audience was, and spoke in animated tones. "I discovered a way to represent a hurricane as a Fourier series—a complex sum of simple waves. Amplitudes, the power of the hurricane, are additive."
"Yes, yes, like two people shouting are louder than one," Shimomura added, replaying words he must have heard from Hiroshi. "Demonstrate, I said, Hiroshi. Demonstrate."
Hiroshi bit his lip, typed a bit, then pulled down a lever, lowering six equally spaced, stiletto-thin appendages into the miniature hurricane.
"Destructive power is shown here," he said in more clipped tones, pointing to a red bar extending a third of the way across a screen. He stepped back and pressed a key on a remote.
A bright flash forced Cleo to cover her eyes. The hurricane sound grew fiercer, like a snarling, rabid dog on a leash. Cool droplets splashed her face. When she looked, the aquarium glass looked like the inside of a carwash. The red bar extended fully across the screen.
"Those were our nuclear explosions," Shimomura said, nodding proudly. "China's precious Japan will be raked by the most devastating typhoon the planet has ever seen. Far worse than even our gigatons of bombs or Vinson could do alone. Order arises only from chaos, ladies, and our Japan will be free again. We will rebuild again from radioactive carnage."
Oh, please, Cleo thought, but bit her tongue. Little Ronny Turcot taught her that at an early age, the little fruitcake. Despite the satisfaction of bloodying his nose in repayment, her head ached in memory of where he'd yanked out her hair merely because she'd "looked at him wrong."
The bedroom door suddenly burst open and a small Japanese girl, no more than eight, scrambled out. Duct tape muffled her screams and a rope dangled behind her from her wrist like a kite dragging on the ground.
A third Pinstripe stumbled after her, lunged, and caught the rope. The girl stopped and tugged at the rope as if she were trying to walk an obstinate dog. The Pinstripe by the door glided over and grabbed the girl. He casually walked back to the bedroom with the girl kicking him and pelting his arms. The other rose from the floor, entered the bedroom, and closed the door with a curt bow toward Shimomura.
"Let's go!" whispered Robyn.
Cleo turned as Robyn bolted for the door. Cleo froze. Instinct said "run!"—but that would strand the girl. Her mind said, tackle the Pinstripe going for his gun—but they might seek vengeance on Hiroshi if she escaped. Her heart said dash for the little girl—but leave Robyn helpless? Fear for Robyn urged her to command her "Stop!" And did she imagine someone shouting "duck"? Do something! she screamed to herself. Her body refused.
Robyn fumbled with the lock. Pinstripe raised his gun. Robyn finally creaked the door open. Pinstripe fired, the silenced shot sounding more like an arrow than a bullet. Cleo heard an "ugh!" but Robyn was out the door in a blur of plaid. Pinstripe ran out and after. Cleo heard another shot.
Shimomura moved to block Cleo and Hiroshi's escape. The other two Pinstripes slammed the bedroom door open in their haste to enter the living room. At a glance from Shimomura, a Pinstripe pointed his gun at Cleo's forehead.
Cleo stood very, very still, hands open and slightly out. Cleo could see nothing but the long barrel of the silencer and the finger that owned her life.
"Take the child," Shimomura commanded the other Pinstripe, anger seething, almost surfacing. He yanked the tentacles from Hiroshi's computer and shoved the computer under his armpit. He stopped, facing Cleo.
Now Cleo dared not move, feeling the slightest breath of air could shift Shimomura's decision against her. Her world was the finger. She watched for a twitch.
"Let them go," she heard Hiroshi say. "I'll do what you want."
Part of her quailed at his words, his offer to exterminate countless souls for their two lives.
No, Hiroshi!
And part of her said: Yes! He’ll do what you want! Let us go!
Somewhere in between, her muscles locked with terror, and she couldn’t move.
Shimomura finally gestured to the door, composed. "Of course you will. But I hope you understand if I bring two trinkets of collateral. We go."
In the instant the silencer dropped from view, her life restored, Cleo vowed to do whatever she must to stop Shimomura.
With two Pinstripes behind them—the child in the arms of one, a gun in the pocketed hand of the other—Cleo, weak-kneed, followed Hiroshi and Shimomura out the door.
Cleo noticed fresh blood splattered on the cinder blocks in the hall.

Cleo and Hiroshi sat in the back of the terrorists' maglev, driven by one of the Pinstripes with another riding shotgun. The others preceded them in a second car. Hiroshi avoided her gaze.
"Who's the girl?" Cleo whispered to Hiroshi as they glided around a corner in the garage and up another ramp toward the exit.
"My niece. They held a gun to her head. If I didn't cooperate..."
And Hiroshi would sacrifice thousands, perhaps millions, for his niece, Cleo thought. She rested her duct-taped hands on Hiroshi's arm. "I understand. Shimomura is crazy."
"To him, the end justifies the means."
"But what end? Killing so many innocent Japanese helps him?"
"He thinks Japan will rise up and throw off the dragon that oppresses them; that they just wait for him to show the way."
"And do they?"
Hiroshi shook his head. "I don't know. I'm Japanese by genetics only."
Cleo could see maglevs scurrying on the Embarcadero ahead through the mouth of the garage. Across the bay a foggy smudge hid San Francisco, looking not so much like fog but as if the sky blended with the water and the city had never been there.
Cleo wondered how Shimomura planned to get the nuclear bombs into a hurricane. She shuddered, deciding she'd rather not know, but dreading that she would find out.
As the nose of the first maglev cleared the garage and accelerated toward the street, another maglev cut it off and smashed into its front fender. The first careened into the cement wall of the garage, pinned by the other. Cleo watched helplessly as their own maglev plowed into the first, lurching forward and hearing her head go whump.
Robyn darted out from the shadows and yanked open the back door of the first car, one of the few not crumpled by walls or maglev. She scooped the child from the car and ran behind a row of cars. "Let's go!" she shouted. "Cleopatra! Run!"
Cleo rubbed her forehead and felt the uniquely warm, wet viscosity of blood. Groggy, she looked at the Pinstripes, who seemed momentarily stunned. She heard plastic on plastic as someone tried to open a wedged door.
"Hiroshi," she mumbled to through a cotton mouth. "Your niece is safe. Hurry!" She fumbled for the latch and swung her door open. Hiroshi seemed alert, but sat motionless, eyes forward.
"No."
"No? Are you hurt? This would be a really good time to haul ass if you can move at all." Cleo rose from the car. To her relief, there was no sign of Robyn or the girl. "Hiroshi! Get up! Robyn has your niece."
"I cannot."
Cleo pressed her lips together. She needed to run, now, to be safe. Damnit girl, leave him behind, her brain urged. But if she stayed, maybe they could escape later, or she could thwart their plan. As she wavered she knew her inaction was her action.
Shimomura was beside them. A Pinstripe from their car crawled through his window to face her, hand in pocket, glancing around nervously. At a nod from Shimomura, he punched Cleo in the stomach. Pain squeezed her bowels link a fist, and she doubled over.
They ushered their prisoners into Robyn's maglev and sped off. A block behind them Cleo could see police maglevs converge on the parking garage.

The trip in the ancient Lear jet seemed to take forever. Of course, any trip takes forever when you're hog-tied and duct-taped, Cleo thought. Her cramped muscles ached. Her new collection of bruises stabbed pain at her. Yet each blow to remind her who was in charge had only strengthened her resolve to stop them.
Through swollen eyes, she could see Hiroshi, his bonds freed as they'd added to hers, sitting silently nearby, working on his computer, avoiding her gaze.
Why didn't you run? she wanted to scream at him. Why aren't you tied up like I am? But the answer was obvious. He was one of them. He believed in their cause, their insane cause. What hurt her more was that Hiroshi wouldn't talk with her, even offer a private sign to acknowledge the time they'd shared.
The plane landed several times either to refuel, pick up passengers, or both. Counting Hiroshi, a full ten Japanese now sat in the comfortable seats before her, in assorted dress, from jeans and muscle shirts to business suits. None looked at her more than once. With each stop the air became steadily more tropical—and just plain hot—as Cleo presumed they hopped across the Pacific toward the East China Sea.
Finally a burly, would-be Sumo wrestler carried her sweat-drenched body off the plane and onto another. She glimpsed a NASA logo on the sleek, unmistakable profile of what she'd seen in documentaries as a Hurricane Lance, a long-range, US military aircraft reinforced to carry cargo or troops safely through tremendous storms. Seeing something so huge that they'd managed to steal, actually seeing and touching it, left her in awe, more so than simply hearing they'd stolen nuclear weapons.
The cabin looked like a cross between a construction site, an electronics lab and a bus: A narrow aisle separated bus-like poles and head-high handholds, dingy fold-down seats beneath fold-down counter-tops, and a number of man-sized cranes beside what looked like cargo hatches. A half-dozen huge crates lay staggered around the hatches. Lab counter-tops were pulled down at random intervals and packed with electronic equipment lashed to the wall. Dangling from the folded down counters were seatbelt harness restraints, used when the counters were raised and sat against as uncomfortable-looking backrests.
After some time lying atop one of the crates while the passengers assembled for a briefing that Cleo couldn't hear, they sealed the doors and began taxiing. As the plane lumbered off the ground, she saw Shimomura smile graciously toward her, as if to say how civil they would be if circumstances were different. He spoke to one of his lackeys, who came over and untied her. "General say you harmless now. Be so," he said threateningly and walked away.
She ripped the duct tape off her mouth, not caring that it felt like the flesh went with it.
"You assholes! You better just kill me now, because I won't let you do this!" she blurted out, not sure herself if she was addressing Shimomura, Hiroshi, or anyone in particular. As but Shimomura's first victim, she felt the pain as anger, almost relished it as a determination to prevent more suffering.
Shimomura chose to answer, stepping away from the group. "People need to be led, Ms. Roquin."
"I wouldn't call killing people with rabid, radioactive hurricanes leading."
"As you will. Without a nudge, humans wander like cattle."
"No, you want them to plod along just as much—only in your direction. People need to decide for themselves to revolt. When the yoke of oppression becomes intolerable, they throw it off all by themselves. Renaissance England. The United States. The Soviet empire. Showing them the light is one thing—dragging them into it is another."
"So your own revolutionaries, Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, Washington, they just held up a light and the people rushed to them? The Boston Tea Party was no nudge? Don't be naive."
"They didn't kill people to do it."
"The dead British soldiers might disagree. George Washington would have nuked London if he had the ability." Shimomura smiled broadly.
"Never! The American revolutionaries didn't kill the people they were trying to lead. Look, I'm no logician. I'm amazed you can't see it, but what you're doing is just wrong."
Shimomura shrugged. "And the Egyptians were great fans of Moses, no? Excuse me." He bowed and walked away.
Cleo was about to retort that he was no Moses when the floor dropped, her stomach with it, as the plane hit a pocket of turbulence. Clouds hid the wings from view out the windows, which were streaked with tiny rivulets of water. The turbulence became a bone-rattling constant, jiggles and stomach-flops noticed more by the rare moments of its absence. Cleo unrolled a harness above one of the plastic benches protruding from the cabin wall and strapped herself in. Not that it would do much good if typhoon Vinson hurled them to the ocean below.
She analyzed the crates staggered odd-even along the walls, the nearest one across from her. Refrigerator sized, each crate carried markings that had been sand-blasted off and black-washed over, but were faintly visible by the different absorption of the black paint. She leaned forward, but couldn't make out the characters.
Hiroshi came over to inspect a pile of small circuit boards with colored wires dangling loosely, each outfitted with a keypad and LCD display. He strapped himself to the bench to stay balanced, and began tapping numbers into each board.
"Those are the timers, aren't they?" Cleo had concluded that the crates must contain the stolen nuclear bombs.
"Mm-hmm."

"Hiroshi, I thought you were a peaceful guy. I remember you couldn't even kill a spider in the hallway. What happened?"
"Shimomura is right. People are weak. You can't threaten and not follow through. Nagasaki proved that—one bomb wasn't even enough."
"But you'll be killing more innocent people!"
"I'm sorry you're involved in this, but the Japanese are not innocent. My family has lived in shame since the middle of the last century!" he hissed. "Every generation my family has passed on how cursed we are since the internment camps. They forced me to learn Japanese, and I hated them for that. I'm as American as you are. Yet my great-great-grandparents were torn from their homes—in America!—because of the slant of their eyes. My family has a debt to collect from Japan for that. I've never been allowed to forget that, and now I'm going to earn back my family's honor."
"By killing them?"
"By forcing them to stand up and fight for democracy. They've never done that, don't you realize? Never in their history. They need to grow up. Only then can they acknowledge their past wrongs." Hiroshi put the last of the timers down and walked away.
Cleo slouched back against the cabin and stared at the crates. She became aware of a staticky noise from the knot of terrorists. She unbuckled herself and picked her way forward, holding onto harnesses for balance against the turbulence. The others gathered around a radio.
"...our problem, Major Hu," said a voice with an Oklahoma drawl over the radio. "We're over international waters, and we'll take care of this. Y'all don't need to fire. If they don't break off and set down, we'll take 'em out. Y'all need to pull back so we don't hit one of you."
A Chinese-accented voice replied over the static. "We cannot permit these terrorists from executing their threat, Captain Carruthers. That plane must not proceed further. We will be watching most closely."
Cleo imagined squadrons of Chinese and American fighters homing in on them. They could be nearly at their wingtip and she wouldn't know it through the gray windows. She drew in a ragged breath.
"They've refused to reply to us, Major Hu, so we'll be firing as soon as you're safely away. With all this turbulence we don't want an accident."
"Please fire now, Captain," the Chinese commander requested, as if placing an order for dinner, not trying to vaporize a dozen people. "We already begin to losing them from radar in storm."
"Soon as you're clear, Major."
"You must fire! If you do not, we must! We lose them on radar."
"It's all right, Major. We have them five by five. We will fire in twenty seconds."
Cleo gasped as the plane hit a nasty bump, her short-circuit instinct telling her they'd been hit until her logic kicked in. Just turbulence.
She found herself counting, one-thousand-one...—and stopped.
Why didn't these idiots do anything? Beneath the surface her rational mind knew they couldn't evade a heat-seeking missile in a slow behemoth like this, but shouldn't they try? Damn them for their calmness in simply listening to the radio like a 1920s family in a Normal Rockwell picture.
She jumped up in disgust/fear and strode over to the pile of timers Hiroshi had been setting. Well, damn it, at least she could go out with her own mind at ease. She ripped the colored wires from the six small circuit boards, then began smashing one board like a berserk robot onto the fold-down plastic bench. Tears streamed down her face.
Cleo peripherally heard what sounded like "Major Hu, we're firing now and now," followed by a cacophony of angry-toned Japanese erupting from the terrorists. The daydreaming part of her mind applauded that the damn terrorists were finally riled up about something—assumedly the report that the Americans had fired—but did a double-take as Hiroshi and a Pinstripe grabbed her arms, with the others crowding around jabbering. They pushed her forward and onto a bench near the radio. Fists pummeled her, and though she saw they wielded pipes, skull-smashing rage in their eyes, the throng was so thick the worst they could do was jab her with the pipes. Shimomura finally shouted "Enough!"
Cleo offered no resistance as Hiroshi tied her hands and buckled her into a safety harness. "I stopped you," she said quietly, and smiled, looking at all of them. Suddenly calm, knowing that she'd shut down the terrorists even if the American and Chinese air forces failed, she wondered how long an air-to-air missile took to traverse the distance.
Hiroshi paused, looking sternly into her eyes as if trying to burn a telepathic message of hatred into her brain, then walked away to his computer and the crippled timers.
She wiped her eyes on her shoulders, and searched her feelings—what was the appropriate thing to think as you died?
She tried never to leave people hurting, and felt at peace with her family and friends. Then she remembered the commissioned lotus, sitting half-dusted in her studio, and wished she could only finish what she started. The Schleibaums would be so upset.
The plane shuddered and Cleo cringed—just another gut-flopping drop from the turbulence.
The radio crackled. "Major Hu, five seconds to impact. Do you have them on radar?"
Silence for several seconds.
"No."
Cleo tensed her muscles.
"Impact!" yelled the American pilot.
Nothing happened. Then the plane dropped the same lunch-tossing dip.
But it flew on. No explosion. No shredded metal. No scream of escaping air. Just turbulence.
"Impacts confirmed, Major Hu. The target is gone from radar. Repeat, target destroyed."
Cleo's eyes widened.
"Understood, Captain," the Chinese pilot said. "We will break off. Hu out."
Had they missed? Had God smiled on them in their moment of joining Him? Had her disabling the timers rendered their deaths unneeded, ready to fulfill some greater goal? Cleo hadn't felt religious in ages, but suddenly understood the conviction of those who'd had visions.
Cleo sat in stupefaction for many minutes as the terrorists conferred in Japanese and gestured with the hands not gripping harnesses or crates for support. The turbulence was roller-coaster incessant.
Why did the Americans think they were destroyed?
She stared idly at the blackened-out writing on the crates which the terrorists began prying open. Over the edges of the crates she glimpsed the dull metallic luster she imagined could well be nuclear bombs.
Why did the Americans think they were destroyed? Their equipment must have lost them in the hurricane.
Cleo traced the blackened crate patterns with her eye, forming a mental image of the characters that lay beneath the blackwash, only discernable by their slightly lessened absorption of the paint.
An "A", definitely an "A". Preceded by an "S". The last was an "E". SAE. No, a SAF. The first—was... an "O"? No, the top was missing. A "U". USAF.
"Midge One to Scorpion, Midge One to Scorpion," the radio crackled to life. It was Carruthers' drawl.
Shimomura gently pressed a button. "Scorpion here."
"Momma Dragon and Cubs have left the building. You're clear to proceed."
"You bastards!" Cleo shouted, straining against the harness and feeling her face redden. "You Goddamned bastards!"
"You feel betrayed by your country?" Shimomura said, gesturing to another terrorist to take over the radio. He tried to saunter over as best he could amid the turbulence, but looked like a clown on a high-wire. "Perhaps now you understand how simple-minded you've been."
"Screw you. Perhaps you've forgotten about your timers."
"No, no, in fact we were just discussing that. You see your friend there, with the timers?" He looked to Hiroshi and smiled. "The counters still work, you merely prevented them from automatically triggering the devices. He's even now adjusting them to account for the extra weight of a person. My people will manually trigger them."
Even as he said it, the others up-ended one of the bombs with a crane and set it beside a cargo hatch. She watched, slack-jawed, as a skinny Japanese boy, who couldn't be more than eighteen, hugged the gray mass. The others tied him to it with rope and duct tape. They covered the human-machine pair with an inflated plastic dome, like she'd seen in shows used to keep instrument packages dry while they dangled from the planes. It was even red and yellow, like some gigantic beach ball.
"You're insane!"
"My people believe in their cause, Ms. Roquin."
At a signal from one of the others, he bowed and walked away.
"Hiroshi!" Cleo had to stop this madness. "Hiroshi!"
He seemed not to hear. She knew better.
"Hiroshi, I know you can hear me. Come here."
He continued working but smiled. The same, eyes-unfocused smile he'd worn one time at dinner discussing some invention. "Humans are an implementation detail," he had said.
Cleo hung her head. She'd tried to be like Robyn and make things happen, she really had. She sobbed softly and watched as Hiroshi delivered the timers to five of the boys strapped to bombs and snuggled in bubble balloons. They taped the timer cards to their wrists.
One bomb remained without a human trigger.
Hiroshi walked over to it, adjusted his shirt, and hugged it like a loved-one at an airport. The one remaining "soldier," one of the Pinstripes from Hiroshi's apartment, bound him to it.
Cleo felt drained.
"Amazing, isn't it?" Shimomura said. "One would think such a heavy item would fall into the sea, but Hiroshi tells me the storm is so strong, it will float aloft like a cork, just at the proper altitude. Are you not awed?" he asked.
Cleo ignored him. He shrugged and gave a nod. The remaining soldier opened the hatch near one of the bombs. Rain and wind screamed in. Mist swirled, obscuring the air like her dust studio at the height a creation.
The crane lifted the package up, out... and it was gone.
They repeated the scene until only Hiroshi's device remained.
"I'm finally going to fly!" he shouted as the crane lifted him up.
"Hiroshi, no!" Cleo shouted unable to believe the man she'd slept with was such a psycho. No, Hiroshi, you're not this person! She struggled against the ropes he'd tied around her wrists. At first she only struggled because she couldn't sit idly by, but she quickly found the bonds weren't as impenetrable as she'd assumed. She almost had a hand loose as the crane reached its apex. The crane began the outward swing. She ripped her hand free, forcing herself not to feel the rope burn.
Cleo squirmed out of the safety harness and rushed the crane operator at mid-ship. Neither he, with his back to her, nor Shimomura, watching from the back of the plane with the Pinstripe between, saw her break free. She didn't care if they did.
Prying a magnetized wrench from a drop-down counter, Cleo felled the Pinstripe with a crunch.
Shimomura's narrowed eyes darted from Cleo to the bubble as he gauged the best move, panther-like. Cleo assumed he'd shoot at her, then assumed not because they were in a plane, then realized if they could open the doors, a bullet hole was nothing—unless it hit hydraulics, or... So she hunkered down, and tried to figure out which control moved the crane inward. She scanned the control-pad in a panic. There! That must be it, with the arrow.
Shimomura stumbled drunkenly toward her, falling in the turbulence as he missed handholds.
Cleo swung the crane inward. She should have it inside before Shimomura reached her.
Shimomura must have concluded the same—for he leaped atop the bubble housing Hiroshi and the bomb. "You mustn't stop me!" he shrieked, and fumbled at the junction of the cable and the bubble.
Cleo urged the crane to go faster, leaning on the control.
Shimomura pounded at something out of sight with the butt of his pistol.
Then both were gone.
Cleo lunged for the cable, knowing it was futile. "Hiroshi!"
Hiroshi was gone.
And she would be too if she hung around here when those bombs went off. Stumbling toward the cockpit as Shimomura had when chasing her, she yelled at the pilot to get the hell out here. It took the beanstalk pilot only the quickest trip to survey the empty cabin to agree.
Cleo watched the airspeed dial from the co-pilot's seat, hoping that 800 kph meant they were moving fast enough to escape the coming conflagration. She'd always thought, when they taught in school about the Cold War of the nineteen hundreds, that she'd want to be at ground zero if there were any nukes thrown about. She couldn't laugh at the irony now.
The turbulence lessened and lessened as minutes passed, until each bump only made Cleo's heart skip a beat. Her fingers no longer clenched the seat like rigor mortis at each dip.
She picked up a headset and considered what words should follow "Mayday! Mayday!", then put the set down. The Midges, the Dragon and her Cubs would be the first to arrive.
Like the proverbial watched pot, boiling only at the watcher's distraction, the blinding flash caught Cleo off guard. At first she thought they'd banked into the sun, then realized what had happened.
Six scorpions had stung Vinson's tail.
Cleo shielded her eyes and ducked, but the flash was gone. When she dared peek back down the cabin and out the windows, the sky behind looked ghostly white, shimmering in the distance.
Funny, she thought, I expected it to turn black or red, like an angel of death or something.
She spat an epithet at Hiroshi.

The Malaysian officials were extremely polite. They brought her huge servings of spicy hot anchovies in sambal ikan bilis, and poured her sweetened black tea "the tarik" with a flourish, and fluffed her down pillows, and smiled, and nodded, and told her absolutely nothing. They allowed her no wallscreens. No newspapers. No phones. At least they hadn't executed her as she stepped off the plane onto the tarmac, as she suspected the Chinese would do. Nor did they whisk her off between men with dark glasses and earpieces to an underground "facility" in the middle of Nevada, as she imagined the Americans would do. Perhaps it was the lack of guards at her hotel's reproduction-bamboo door or below the window through which blew a gentle equatorial breeze that relieved her of the urge to run, run, run.
No doubt TranqGnats buzzed all the escape routes anyway.
For once, she decided with a sigh, she would sit still and let matters settle themselves. The Malaysians were fiercely independent. As likely to face down the Americans or Chinese in the U.N. as anyone. She hoped she'd been right, for the young pilot's sake, when she talked him into flying here, promising at least a fair trial.
She sipped at her tea, letting its sweetness engulf her. She relaxed to the smell of the bouquets of Anthuriums, Orchids, and Hibiscus cut from the nearby Cameron Highlands.
And felt agitated. A jail is a jail.
A knock at the door disturbed the silence.
"Come on in," she hollered from the couch.
A form appeared, backlit by the morning sun.
"Robyn!" Cleo jumped up and hugged her friend, careful not to crush the arm in a sling. "My God, look at you! I'm so glad you're ok. Hiroshi's niece, how is she?"
"Back with her mother, in Philadelphia. They'd been worried sick. But enough about her. You wouldn't believe how hard it was to convince them to release you. But with a little help from the US State Department, and a nod from the Chinese…"
"Release...?"
Robyn beamed. "I'm here to take you home! We have a debriefing at the US embassy, of course, but—"
"Home! Oh, thank God! And thank you." They hugged again, then Cleo turned serious. "Japan? Vinson? How many people did the hurricane kill?"
Robyn shook her head in disbelief. "You mean you don't know? You're a savior—the mystery savior. They have film of the storm and satellite images. It's incredible. It just... died."
"Died?"
"Collapsed. Vanished. Hiroshi's theory is all the talk. Something about two waves canceling each other out, like two tuning forks being quiet. The radiation 'rained out' or whatever, and they say it's no worse than when they were testing bombs in the Pacific in the nineteen hundreds. All the news shows are profiling you."
Cleo collapsed back into the leather couch with a whoosh.
Robyn dug in her bag, and pulled out an EarMan. "Oh, yeah, here—they found these hidden on the plane. This has copies of two messages Hiroshi left. His first one said you'd know the password to decrypt the second, and that it was really important. The Malaysians really want to know what they say. His hint was 'what's long and hard and eaten on a couch?' Here, listen for yourself." She held out the ear bud like a piece of candy.
Cleo felt a chill. She didn't like messages from the grave. She sighed, took the unit, pushed it into her ear and listened to the first message. She smirked warily at the hint, and subvocalized the password for the second message: Kosher salami.
Hiroshi spoke into her ear.
"I don't have much time—Shimomura will destroy this if he sees me. I assume if you're hearing this that Shimomura abandoned the plane, and the authorities have asked you to decrypt this for them, which you must.
"I'm very sorry to have involved you. You must think I hate you, the way I have ignored you. That was for your safety; he would hurt you to control me if he knew we were close. By the time you hear this, you will know what I have decided, and why I cannot let him stop me. What you must swear to me is to finish this. Following this message is a conversation I recorded moments ago with Shimomura. It is in Japanese, so I will condense it: I asked why the U.S. fighters did not shoot us down. He thinks I will die, so he tells me. He implicates both the U.S. and Chinese governments as his backers, but neither knows about the other. The U.S. obviously are backing insurgents as they often do in their deadly game. The Chinese agreed that his resistance fighters would gain temporary control over Tokyo, giving the People's Army an excuse to enslave the Japanese without incurring direct U.S. intervention. Shimomura negotiates a truce, and becomes territorial governor.
"However, he plans to double-cross both of them once his resistance wins Tokyo, and reveal to each that the other backed him. Neither country will want an incident, and he believes they will negotiate a stalemate that includes the unconditional withdrawal from Japan. He must be stopped! You cannot imagine how evil was his smile when he whispered how he will become Japan's elected dictator.
"I am shamed that I ever believed in his face-value resistance plan, doubly shamed now that I have uncovered his duplicity. But what I said before is true: The Japanese must fight for themselves. Shimomura's killer typhoon will not stir them. It will cause only chaos and his victory, so I must defuse the typhoon. For my shame, I will die by my discovery. Shimomura would kill me anyway when he sees what I have done, so do not grieve for me.
"With his failure, Shimomura will be a brown leaf in autumn, ready to fall from the tree. China will kill him. But his own words, they will set Japan free. Show them to the world, Cleo. Show them to Japan.
"Now I must go. I implore you to release his words. They will free Japan."
The EarMan began playing a conversation in Japanese. Shimomura's voice. Cleo subvocalized it to stop.
She pondered Hiroshi's words, sitting silently, eyes closed, unmoving. What would George Washington have done, handed a tool to cut off the feet of the Crown's power?
Hiroshi was right: The Japanese would have to rise up for themselves, but not because they were pushed or pulled; only when they decide for themselves they'd been oppressed enough. Like a dust sculpture, she thought—this needs to settle by itself. Besides, if meddling in Sino-American relations caused a war... Cleo's stomach tightened at the thought. She wanted to scream No more!
Cleo subvocalized the command to discard the decrypted copy of the message and handed the earpiece back to Robyn. Cleo shrugged, trying to act natural, but feeling dirty.
"So?" Robyn asked.
"I don't know the password."
"Huh? I— uh, you're not going to tell me you were daydreaming all this time." Robyn cocked an eyebrow that said I know you were listening to something.
"Sorry, yeah. I mean, yeah, I was daydreaming. Thinking about a lot of things." Cleo smiled, surprised at how decisive she felt. It felt good, like the sky lifting to reveal a warm, sunny day. "Thinking that things work out best when not meddled with. Thinking from now on, I'm going to finish what I start. Thinking about my next dust sculpture—after I finish the others, that is—that I'm doing a chrysanthemum. For Hiroshi."
Cleo rose from the couch to leave, and laughed. "And thinking that this is absolutely, positively, the last time I try to set you up with anyone."

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Andrew Burt spent a dozen years as a professor in the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at the University of Denver until trading up to become president of TechSoft, a custom software development company specializing in networking, operating system design, computer security, and an unusual branch of AI. Credited with founding the world's first charitable Internet Service Provider (Nyx.Net), he's been on the Internet since before it was called the Internet, and has over twenty years experience programming complex software. He can be reached by e-mail to [email protected]; or, visit his home page on the web at http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/dechaune/neverworlds/www.tech-soft.com/aburt. Science fiction, fantasy, and horror writers may be interested in Critters, the Internet workshop he runs at http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/dechaune/neverworlds/www.critters.org, or the Black Holes response time tracker he maintains. He has dozens of short fiction sales plus a wide assortment of published non-fiction. For a hobby, he constructs solutions to all the world's problems. Fortunately, nobody listens. He lives in the foothills of the Rockies with his wife and their four parrots.