James Swallow - Jade Dragon

The sanctioned operative left nothing to chance. His quick communion with Papa Legba on the approach road led him off into the shallow scrub, and presently brought him to the fence at the north-west end of the airfield. Fixx removed his flexsword from its holster inside the long coat and gave the weapon an experimental twirl. It looked like a fat dagger in its collapsed state. He pushed the rocker switch in the hilt to “active” and held it horizontally in front of him. The blade warmed up and began to unfold, clicking and twitching. The memory-metal remembered the shape it had been forged in and became a long, thin streak of dull titanium alloy. It reset itself in less than ten seconds, and when Fixx was happy with that, he made two fast cuts in the fence, the blade blinking in the lacklustre starlight. No alarm bells rang; no barking e-dogs came running. He smiled and slipped into the compound, crossing the end of the runway in low, loping steps. He made a zigzag course towards the hangars, where harsh sodium floodlights bled their glare into the sultry Louisiana night.

There had been a time when a man would have been stripped and on his knees for daring to penetrate the security at Barks-dale. Forty years ago, the USAF had flown fighter planes, bombers and tanker jets out of this concrete nest, going about the business of defending the United States of America. That had been before the Fuel Crash and the Food Crash and the Welfare Crash and… well, before it had all gone to shit. In a time when it was hard enough to keep Americans secure from other Americans, the military turned their power inward and left everything they couldn’t afford to maintain rotting in the sun. Overnight, military bases became scrapyards as the government burned what they wouldn’t recycle. It was only when the corporations stepped up to bail them out that places like Barksdale went from defending the nation to being a new piece of commercial real estate.

The energy cost meant that these days only the rich had wings; but there were still things that needed shipping transglobal, still cargo that had to get to the other side of the world and not with silk napkins, glasses of champagne and dinky little meal trays. SkyeCorp made that happen. They were the company that the companies went to when something had to make it around the globe, no questions asked, no damn passport control or t-wave cameras peering into the crates. SkyeCorp made a billion a day shipping “tractor parts” to greedy dictators or “baby milk” to covert gene labs. They owned a string of decommissioned air bases across the continental United States, and with them a fleet of ex-military transport aircraft in various states of disrepair. SkyeCorp lost one flight in every thousand; but there were plenty of mothballed planes out in the Nevada desert, their clients had insurance, and it was tough to complain when the manifest said that all that got mislaid were “machine tools”.

Fixx hesitated in the lee of a rusted barn and studied the aircraft. One of them was a giant, a huge C-5 Galaxy, heavy like a pregnant albatross and low to the ground on a cluster of fat wheels. There was no cockpit to speak of, not in the sense that Fixx thought of it. Where the Galaxy had been built with a cabin for pilot and crew there was now a blank banner of plastic and steel, pockmarked with sensor pits and twitchy antennae rods. SkyeCorp didn’t use human pilots for the most part. It was far more cost-effective to engineer out that whole part of the system and replace it with cheap logic circuits and bio-matter processors-that is, brain tissue harvested from high-order primates. The four-engine plane had its nose lifted so that container trucks could drive aboard and deposit their loads. He could see from his vantage point that the last items of cargo were already being secured; soon the nose cowl would drop and the Galaxy would amble out on to the runway. The jets were already spinning at idle-this flight was running late. Fixx dropped to his knee and rolled the bones on a patch of weed-cracked concrete. The pattern brought another smile to his face. Good choice. This bird would take him where he wanted to go.

There were a few men milling around the front of the hangar, some running cursory checks on the aircraft, others smoking and drumming bored fingers on the barrels of their rifles-aging Gulf-vintage Colt M-16s, as third-hand as the base and the transport jet. Fixx kept the sword close and moved in toward the hangar. He could have killed every man here with the SunKings switched to deep reticule mode, but that would have brought the house down. No. Tonight he wanted to move in silence, leave nothing but footprints and take nothing but advantage. If he had to make a kill, it would be quiet.

The op kept to the pools of shade, shifting in and out of them under the cowl of the black long coat, a piece of the night moving here and there. He reached the back of the hangar and got in through a broken window. A hooter sounded from the front of the Galaxy, and he smothered a dart of surprise; but the alarm was only a warning as the transporter’s nosecone began to droop, yellow hazard strobes flashing across the concrete. The cargo doors at the back of the plane were already shut, but a side hatch was still half-open. Fixx frowned. Shut or open, yes, but halfway? That seemed strange, but he had no time to consider the reason. The flight would go if he dallied, and there were things unfolding in distant places that needed him to be there. His free hand dipped into his pocket and worried the bones a little. Yes, he had to act, not think. Fixx sprinted from cover and launched himself at the hatch. He was in and had it shut just as the hooting siren fell silent. The jets were growling up to power and he felt a lurch as the Galaxy taxied from the hangar.

He glanced around. Cargo modules two stories tall crowded around him, and items that were loose inside made desultory clangs against the walls of pressed steel. There was an alley between them that he could make it down if he held his breath, and with the sword leading the way, Fixx got to the front of the jet. What light there was came from the dull yellow glow of biolumes on the cargo gantries and the handful of plexiglas portholes in the fuselage. The Galaxy rattled and howled as it took up a waiting position at the end of Barksdale Field’s Runway Left.

Fixx glanced around for some corner where he could seat himself and that was when he noticed the door. The cargo container on the starboard side, yellow with a red pennant that said “Tao Ge Shipping”, made a creaking noise. The metal doors that sealed the contents in were unlocked, and one of them hung open. Each fresh vibration of the engines made the door shift a little. Fixx considered the guns again, then ignored the thought. A stray round might punch through the fuselage. Bringing the sword to guard, he approached. He was maybe a metre away when he saw that there was blood on the handle, and more in a spatter pattern on the deck. Fixx lashed out and yanked the door hard. It came toward him with a squeal of poorly oiled hinges, revealing a sea of dirty, terrified faces.

At the front of the women-and they were all females-there were two girls in prison-surplus jumpsuits. They looked at Fixx like secret lovers caught in a tryst, and between them they held on to a man whose throat leaked red, whose struggles were getting more and more feeble by the second. The man had his trousers and underwear halfway down his legs. One of the girls held a bent piece of metal in her fist, the end of it wet with gore.

Fixx lowered the sword. The container was full to bursting with human cargo, thin and emaciated girls, all of them oriental. Joshua would have said Korean, if he was pushed, but he was no expert. They stood there, the jet screaming around them, the unlucky guy bleeding out, watching each other. Fixx knew the look in their eyes well enough. These women had gone beyond the point of no return.