James Swallow: Jade Dragon

Not that any of those things mattered now, a morose inner voice reminded him. When the summons from Yuk Lung Heavy Industry’s headquarters had pinged into life on the LA branch office d-screen, there was a moment when Frankie’s supervisor had automatically assumed it was for him. Burt Tiplady, all one metre sixty of his arrogant, noisy self, had swaggered over to take the comm, oozing smarm. Burt had been waiting for four years to get cherry-picked by Hong Kong. The look on his face when he realised the message was for Frankie, not him, was worth every day that Lam had weathered his bellicose presence; but try as he might, Frankie couldn’t rekindle that feeling right now. The cold hollow that formed as Burt passed him the screen to read had overwritten that one moment of elation.

Alan was dead; the company expressed its deepest sympathies, and requested the presence of his brother in the Hong Kong office on the next available stratojet.

That was two days ago. Time had passed in a whirl. The forms authorising his transfer were attached with the comm, and he’d gone back to his dormplex in Santa Monica to find his gear already stowed for transit. YLHI wanted him to come home, and so he did, propelled on a cushion of numbness and faint guilt. Frankie had not spoken to Alan in a year, and even then it had only been a cursory hello-goodbye, something to do with that GenTech problem in Texas. Once, they had been inseparable. Now, the company that had parted them was all that connected them.

Frankie sighed and it came with a shudder. He felt isolated, impossibly disconnected from the young guy in the picture, his hand around his brother’s shoulder, laughing and carefree.

“Going home?”

Frankie looked up with a start and blinked. The flight attendant had materialized from out of thin air, a tray of data needles in the crook of one arm. She had ice blue eyes that matched the sliver-grey glolights in her blonde hair. The smile on her lips was utterly perfect. “I’m s-sorry?” he managed.

“Are you going home? To Hong Kong?” She indicated the picture with a gente incline of her head. “Meeting family?”

“Yes.” His throat went tight. “Can I, um, have a drink, please?”

“Of course. Glen Fujiyama on the rocks, wasn’t it?” She produced the tumbler of whiskey from a trolley at her side.

Frankie took a deep sip, feeling stupid for asking for it like a child begging for sweets. He was in the rare air of the high corporates now, and no one who travelled here had to ask for anything. They were entitled to it.

As if she saw it in his mind, the attendant asked, “Is this the first time you’ve flown with us?” She smiled again. “Congratulations on your promotion.”

“Yes,” he repeated. “Thank you.”

She indicated the tray of software, the varicoloured pins like a spread of fly-fishing lures. “Can I interest you in an entertainment programme? Something from the cinema of the Ukraine, perhaps?”

Frankie shook his head.

“We have sensual recreation automata on board, if you’d prefer. They support a wide range of romantic configurations.”

Another sip. “I’m fine. ”This time he said it with the right tone of dismissal and the attendant melted away with a final, perfectly sculpted smile. He nursed the drink as a low rumble worked its way through the liner’s airframe. Through the half-open window blind, he could see distant hazy blobs that represented the coastal city sprawls of Vietnam. With every passing second the stratojet brought Frankie closer to the point of no return, the moment looming up in front of him where finally irrevocably, he would have to face the hard reality that his brother was gone. But as much as he tried to convince himself that the churn of emotions in his gut was some ridiculous hope that this all might be some huge mistake, he knew in his marrow that Alan had perished. There was nothing arcane about it, no ephemeral spiritual bond between siblings. He just knew it; it seemed right somehow, correct in the order of things.

No, the sick dread that gathered at the corners of his thoughts had a different source. His transfer had come directly from the office of the chief executive officer of Yuk Lung Heavy Industry, from the man who ruled the corporation like a feudal warlord. Mr Tze. If he had a first name, no one spoke it. In an age when the corporate hierarchy was the new royalty of the Twenties, the master of YLHI was a reclusive, shady figure. He never left Hong Kong, rarely even ventured from the towering citadel headquarters of the company, and only then to the fortress compound he maintained along the Pearl River. The man wore his command of the corporation like a suit of ancient armour and he was as ruthless as the Mongols that some said he descended from. The mere idea of being in this man’s physical presence threatened to overwhelm Frankie if he dwelled on it too long. See, there were stories about Mr Tze. The kind that only ever appeared on viral samizdata netcasts in the instants before Datapol shut them down. To even admit to having watched such seditious material would warrant instant termination of contract for Frankie. He drained the last of the drink and lost himself in the motion of the ice cubes in the tumbler, moving over one another as the aircraft’s nose dipped toward China.

Distantly, Frankie Lam heard a soft chime and the ends of his seatbelt snaked across his waist, their steel heads meeting with a decisive click, locking him in place.

“There was this time,” began Lau Feng, fingering the unkempt stubble on his chin, “I think we were near Guilin, when this girl came up to us on the path.”

“Mmm.” Ko gave one of those nothing replies, just a noise at the front of his lips to indicate that he was hearing Feng without actually listening to him. The youth squatted in the lee of the concrete stanchion and threw a quick left-right glance about the underground car park. He knew the security drone sweep patterns better than the guys on the monitor desk.

“She had the nicest eyes. Green. Or something.” Feng’s hand drummed on the breastplate of his armour, and wandered like a bored spider down past his belly and across the threadbare strips of boiled leather that made up his battle skirt. “Anyway, she wanted to come with us. She’d stolen her father’s sword. Very emotional about it all.”

Ko peered closely at the sensor plate on the car locking mechanism. It was a retrofit, reasonable quality European manufacture, probably a Moulinex or a Krupp. He reached for the bright pink disposable cellphone that he’d picked from the pocket of a small boy in the departure terminal and levered off the back with his balisong knife. “You’ve told me this story before,” complained Ko, although not with any real strength behind it.

“So the captain, he laughs at her, because she was just a girl. And she took his head off with the blade. Just like that.” Feng mimed the motion across his neck. “Like that,” he repeated. His stray hand settled on the hilt of the lionhead sword at his hip. “I admired her for it, you know? But in the end we had to hurt her to get the weapon away. ”

Ko actually bothered to give him a look. “Will you shut up? Can’t you see that I’m trying to concentrate?” To punctuate his statement, Ko tugged on the front of his jacket and pulled the kevleather tight. He had the guts of the cellphone in one hand, the microtransmitter inside it making distressed squawking sounds as it fired off spasms of misfired signals. Lights blinked on the lock once or twice, which meant Ko was close to getting the door to open.

Feng sniffed and cocked his head. “Soldiers are coming. You won’t get that done in time.”

“Liar.” Ko glanced at the cellphone. It was overloading, getting hot in his hand. Trying to crack a microwave lock like this was always a roll of the dice; sometimes the phones would blanket the locks with enough conflicting signals that they’d run home to mama, snap back to their default settings and pop open; other times it would fry them solid. Ko was sanguine, though. It wasn’t as if the G-Mek Vista GL he was crouched by was his, after all.