Nigel Findley - House of the Sun

The question was an important one in both our minds, of course. The megacorporations' little demonstration was like a cop's warning shot. As I'd been taught at the Lone Star Academy, a warning shot's always going to provoke a reaction. Sometimes it's the one you want-abject surrender, when the perp you're chasing realizes you could have put a round into his ten-ring. Sometimes it's the exact opposite-a kind of "Oh yeah? Well, frag you!" response that turns into a blazing firelight. I couldn't shake the worry that the high muck a mucks of the Corporate Court hadn't given much thought to the second possibility.

"Thirty seconds," Pohaku announced. I felt movement behind me as the bodyguards pressed as close as they dared to their ex-sovereign's august presence, staking out their own view-spots. Mentally, I counted down.

T-minus three, two, one, zero… Nothing. Plus one, plus two, plus three…

I'd reached T-plus five when Gordon Ho gasped softly beside me and pointed toward the sky. A new star burned in the heavens, harsh and brilliant. It flickered, it moved. For an instant it had dimension, more than a perfect geometric point…

And then the Thor shots rained down, perfectly parallel bars of light, lancing down from the zenith to the black ocean a couple of klicks offshore. They were impossible to count, they were there and gone so fast, an impression of unbelievable speed. Like a burst of tracer fire from God's own machine gun, but faster than any tracer bullet I'd ever seen… and immensely larger. There was a flash of light where they hit, a single strobe pulse-like a secondary explosion, but without the fireball. I think that was the most chilling part of the whole demonstration. There'd been nothing under those descending bars of light, nothing but water. Still, the impact from the Thor projectiles had been enough to strike sparks off the ocean itself.

It was over in less than a second. I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. My God, I thought dully, how fast did those things come down? I ran a quick mental calculation. Assume they were traveling at orbital velocity when they hit the atmosphere. What would that be? Something like 35,000 kilometers per hour-in other words, 10 (clicks per second or thereabouts, maybe 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. And Thor projectiles were a lot bigger than rifle bullets, of course. I'd heard them described as "smart crowbars." Assume each one massed a nominal one kilo. How much kinetic energy was contained in one kilo of mass traveling at 10,000 meters per second? If I remembered my high-school physics-and hadn't slipped a decimal place somewhere-that would be something like 100,000,000 joules of energy: one hundred megajoules. Per crowbar. And how many crowbars had been in the burst we'd just seen?

I felt cold. No wonder the Pacific fleet had turned back when the megacorps had fired a warning shot like that across their bows back in 2017.

I heard a sound behind me and turned in surprise. Pohaku was glaring out the window, lips drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of rage… and he was growling. I shrugged. I suppose if this had been my country, I'd have been pretty torqued off about the whole thing, too.

"Lights, please," Gordon Ho said softly. As a bodyguard flicked the lights back on, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and slumped down in a chair. He picked up a whiskey glass from the table beside him-mine, as a matter of fact, but I wasn't going to give him grief about it, not now- and polished off the contents in one swallow.

"What's the reaction going to be?" he asked again, and this time I knew the question was directed at me.

I shrugged. "You know your people better than I do," I pointed out.

He smiled at that. "I thought I did," he amended quietly. He paused, then went on, "It depends on how well ALOHA's managed to stir them up… and how crazy ALOHA is, when you get right down to it.

"It's possible to pull it back," he continued with a sigh. "Na Kama'aina doesn't want war with the corps. If the government can keep ALOHA under control, if it can prevent any more provocations, it should be possible to get things back under control."

I nodded. It made sense, what Ho said, but it sounded too much like Barnard's comment a day or two before that "perhaps saner heads would prevail," or whatever. They obviously hadn't prevailed yet. Was that going to change?

I turned back to the window. Now that the demonstration was over, there were cars on the streets again. Not as many as usual, but at least Waikiki didn't look like a ghost town anymore. From somewhere to the west-Sand Island? I wondered idly-a small constellation of lights was approaching, burning bright against the darkness of the sky. Choppers-two or three of them. Corp shuttles, maybe, coming downtown to pick up VIP vacationers and take them to the airport for a suborbital off-island? I didn't know, and I didn't really care at the moment. I started to turn away.

I didn't see it happen straight on, just in my peripheral vision. Without warning something flashed upward from somewhere to my left, almost like a Thor shot in reverse. The lance of fiery light transfixed one of the helicopters, blotting it from the sky in a dirty orange-black puffball. The surviving choppers broke formation, diving for the deck, killing their anticollision lights as they did so. In a second or two they were lost to sight.

I flattened my nose against the window, watching in shocked horror as burning wreckage plunged to the street or smashed down on top of buildings.

Gordon Ho hadn't seen it, but he knew something had happened. He gaped at me. "What was it?"

I didn't answer right away. Instead, I came over and fragging near collapsed into an armchair. Finally, I said, "It doesn't look like it's a good season for saner heads."

The downed chopper was a corp bird, Gordon Ho's informants confirmed an hour or so later. (I'd guessed as much earlier, but this wasn't a time when I felt good about being proven right.) The lance of fiery light I'd seen had been a Parsifal man-pack SAM, an obsolete Saeder-Krupp design. Ironic, since the chopper that ate the missile was a Saeder-Krupp bird.

Gordon Ho and I were shoulder to shoulder again, looking silently out the window of room 1905. The streets below us were empty now, except for the occasional corporate security vehicle screaming by, light-bars ablaze. There were more choppers in the air-angular, brutal-looking gunships now, instead of me more streamlined unarmed transports- buzzing around like angered hornets. Most of them were maneuvering radically in case there was another missile team out mere somewhere, jinking back and forth, up and down, randomly. Some were dropping flares just in case, sun-bright points of light. I couldn't make out colors or insignias so I didn't know whose the choppers were, but it was easy to fig¬ure out mey were from different corps. It was also easy enough to figure out mat said corps weren't talking to one another efficiently; in a fifteen-minute span, I saw half a dozen near misses when choppers fragging near slammed into one another. Every now and then I could hear the rip of autofire, muffled somewhat by the double-glazed window. Were ALOHA assault teams actually engaging the corp forces, or were the corp sec-guards shooting at one another-a ground-based version of me chaotic gavotte in me skies? It was impossible to tell.

Finally, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and returned to me couch. After a few moments I joined him. Pohaku still looked as though he wanted an excuse to rip somebody's lungs out-anybody's-but at least he still had the presence of mind to freshen our Scotches.

Ho stretched, working his neck and shoulders. He looked like he'd aged a decade in me past couple of hours, I noticed suddenly. Well, I guess getting deposed, men seeing your country stumbling toward me brink of war might do that to you.