Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

As Scott returned with my loaded plate-he'd either erred on the side of generosity or else judged my appetite based on his own-I heard a distant ripping sound. I looked up and to the west.

Two vicious little darts were shooting through the air, climbing and accelerating out over the ocean-fighters of some kind, no doubt launched from Pearl. Even though I knew they weren't any faster than the suborbital I'd ridden a few hours earlier-hell, they might even have a lower top speed-they looked much faster. Pure, violent energy, that's the way they seemed to me at that moment: volatile, apparently ready to maneuver in an instant or lash out with weapons of grotesque power.

Now mat I was looking to the sky, I noticed something else, something that I'd seen only a couple of times on the mainland. It was the contrail of a high-altitude plane, but this wasn't the geometrically perfect straight line of a highspeed civilian transport. No, this was like donuts on a rope-a central line contrail surrounded by evenly spaced torus-shaped loops. From what little I knew of aerospace technology-the kind of drek you pick up from scanning the popular press-the only kind of engine that could create that characteristic donut-on-a-rope structure was a pulse-detonation propulsion system. As far as I knew, pulse-detonation engines were used on only one kind of craft: hypersonic spy planes, Aurora class and up.

I frowned, thinking. Pulse-detonation is pretty hot fragging stuff. Even now, decades after it was introduced, it was still a touchy thing. Anybody could make a standard jet engine-turbofan, ramjet, even SCRAMjet-but only a very few engineers could design and build a pulse-detonation drive that actually worked without blowing itself into shrapnel. I wouldn't have imagined that Hawai'i had the resources-monetary and personnel-to develop something that sophisticated.

But then, I realized, maybe the kingdom didn't have to develop it from scratch. When Danforth Ho's civilian army" suppressed the Civil Defense Force and basically took over the islands, he might well have "acquired" a lot of interesting tech by default, as it were.

And that thought brought up a whole drekload of other questions. Now that I considered it, I realized that the descriptions I'd read of Danforth Ho's coup and the islands' secession from the U.S. had been pretty fragging superficial on a couple of pretty major points. The Pacific fleet business-that I could understand. A task force commander doesn't argue with Thor shots. But what about the materiel at the military bases throughout the islands? And the bases themselves? Would the U.S. government have let them go so easily, without a fight? Or had there been a fight, and the official records modified to gloss it all over?

I turned to Scott. He'd gotten his own plate of food- heaped even higher than mine-and was already halfway through it. "You're native-born, aren't you?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Oahu born and bred," he acknowledged around a mouthful of Belgian waffles.

"So tell me about the Secession."

He chuckled and wiped syrup and whipped cream-real whipped cream, for frag's sake-from his lips. "How old do you think I am, brah?" he asked. "That was back in 'seventeen. I wasn't even an itch in my father's pants."

"But your parents were around in 'seventeen, right?" I pressed. "And you'll have met a drek-load of people who were around, maybe even involved. People talk."

Scott shook his head as he finished off another gargantuan mouthful. "That's the thing, bruddah-they don't talk, not about Secession. Well, okay, they do-but, like, about the stuff leading up to it, and about the days after it. What actually went down, what the kahunas did to the CDF, all that kanike-all that bulldrek-nobody talks about it much."

"Why?"

The ork shrugged. "Don't know, hoa, really I don't. I'm just a simple wikanikanaka boy here.''

"Wikani-what?"

"You got to learn to sling the lingo around here, brah," the ork said with a laugh. "Everybody speaks a kind of pidgin- lots of Polynesian loanwords, okay? Like hoa-that means 'friend,' 'chummer.' Kanike-that means the sound of stuff clashing and clattering together, but it's used like 'bulldrek.' And wikanikanaka-that's 'ork.' You'll get used to it

"Anyway," he went on, getting his thoughts back on track, "like I said, nobody really talks about the Secession."

"Like there's stuff they don't want other people to know?"

"Maybe," he allowed, "or maybe stuff they don't want to remember."

"Like what?"

The ork shrugged, apparently a little uncomfortable. "You hear stories, sometimes," he said vaguely. "Old people talk, sometimes… but then you ask for more details, and they clam up on you." He paused. "You talk to enough people, you hear really weird stuff. Dragons, for one. Big storms- unnatural storms-rolling down out of Puowaina. That's Punchbowl crater, just north of the city. Weird drek going on in Haleakala Volcano on Maui. Kukae, some old geezer even told me once he saw something big-something real big- moving under the water in Pearl Harbor, next to the old Arizona battleship memorial. Said whatever it was, it was bigger than the battleship and it looked at him with eyes the size of fragging basketballs." He shrugged again. "Believe as much of that kanike as you want. I don't know the answers."

He folded his napkin and put it on the table. "Now eat up and let's roll, hoa, okay?"

I waited in the open-air lobby while Scott pulled the Phaeton up and out of the underground parking lot. The big Rolls sighed to a stop in front of me, and the rear passenger door swung open.

1 gestured no to that, crossing my hands edge to edge like karate chops meeting each other. Scott's voice sounded from an exterior speaker. "Problems, Mr. Dirk?"

"I don't want to ride in the playpen," I explained-feeling a touch foolish at talking to a car that was so obviously buttoned-up. "Any objection to company up front?"

I heard the ork chuckle, a slightly tinny sound through the speaker. "Your call, bruddah, but you're going to have me forgetting I'm a chauffeur here." The passenger compartment door shut again, and the right side front door clicked open. I walked around the big car, slid inside, and chunked the door shut. The driver's compartment was nothing compared to the playpen in back, predictably, but it still was more comfortable and well-appointed than some dosses I've lived in.

Scott grinned over at me. The hair-thin optic cable connecting his datajack to the control panel seemed to burn in the sun. "Okay, Mr. Dirk, anything in particular you want to see?"

I shrugged. "You're the kama'aina," I said. "You tell me what I should see?"

His grin broadened. "You got it, hoa." At the touch of a mental command, the limo slipped into gear and pulled away. "Any objection to a little music? Local stuff."

I shrugged. "Just as long as it's not 'Aloha Oe,' " I told him.

He laughed at that. "Not in this car, you can bet on that. Ever hear traditional slack-key?" I shook my head. "You're in for a treat, then." As Scott sat back comfortably and crossed his arms, the stereo clicked on and the car filled with music.

I've always had a taste for music-real music, stuff that shows some kind of talent, some kind of musicianship, not the drek that anyone with an attitude and a synth can churn out. Old blues or trad jazz preferably, but I've got a relatively open mind. Hell, I've even listened to country on occasion. Slack-key was something new-acoustic guitars, alternately strummed and intricately finger-picked. Something like bluegrass in technique, but with a sound and a feel all its own.

"You like?"

"I like," I confirmed. "I've got to get some of this for my collection. Who're the musicians?"

"An old group, they recorded back before the turn of the century. Kani-alu, they're called. None of them still alive: they all kicked from old age, or got cacked by the VITAS.