Ramez Naam - Crux

“Lo Prang.” She nodded to him. She could feel some of the Nexus transmissions of the club piped in here, an amalgamation of all the sex and drunkenness and partying out there. “Thank you for seeing me.”

“To what do we owe this pleasure?”

Two of the women were kissing now, touching each other’s breasts through their low cut dresses. One of the men was snorting a line of some powder off a woman’s thigh. Arousal and stimulation echoed out from them.

Battles are won in the mind , Nakamura had taught her. Throw your enemy off, and he’s yours.

Yes, Sam thought. That was Lo Prang’s game. Distraction. All just distraction. All to throw her off balance.

“I need to get into Burma,” she told him. “With weapons, transport, infiltration gear.”

Lo Prang laughed, a dry chortle. His lean leathery face wrinkled in mirth. His people laughed with him. Even the man who’d just snorted something and the two girls kissing stopped to laugh, at her foolishness, her presumption.

Sam waited for the laughter to die down. “I’ll fight for you again,” she told Lo Prang. “Once I’m back. I’ll beat the best out there. Or I’ll take dives, throw fights. Whatever you want.”

Lo Prang looked her in the eye, then shook his head. “Jade, Jade, Jade,” he said. “Or whoever you are. A few fights wouldn’t come close to covering that.”

Sam stared back at him. “What would?”

She felt his mind working, felt his thoughts reaching out to others in the room. Two women detached themselves from the groups lounging on the couches, approached her from either side. They were in their early twenties, Thai, slender and chesty, in dresses as scanty as the ones worn by the girls upstairs, but more embellished, more expensive-looking. They wore flashy jewelry and sported improbably long nails on each finger, an inch long, red for one girl, black for the other. She caught a flash of muscle on their arms, their legs.

Sam watched them out of the corners of her eyes, her attention still focused on Lo Prang.

“You’re so unhappy, Sunee,” he told her. “Always struggling for something.”

The girls moved languidly towards her, swiveling on heeled feet, until their fingers touched the bare skin of her arms. She could smell their perfumes. Thoughts of pleasure came from them, and devotion. One of them exhaled hot breath against the back of Sam’s neck.

“I could take care of whatever problem you have in Burma,” Lo Prang said. “And in exchange you could join me. You could be part of my little family.”

Sam shuddered at the thought.

“It’s so nice,” the girl on her right breathed.

“Just a little tweak to your thoughts,” the one on her left intoned.

They ran their hands over her, pressing their bodies against her now, and Sam wanted to push them away, but she needed Lo Prang, needed his help.

“You’d be happy,” Lo Prang said.

Their hands roamed over her bare arms, her back, her neck, her sides. Their touch repulsed her. Slaves.

“We chose this way,” they said in unison, in stereo. “It’s so very nice,” they finished together, voices entwined, timing perfect. Pleasure wafted from their minds. Contentment. The warm, enfolding love of Lo Prang. The security of belonging to someone else, utterly, of never having to worry again…

“No,” Sam said, fighting the revulsion. They chose this? Oh, she believed them. It still made them slaves.

“You’d be safe,” Lo Prang told her. “I treat my family well.”

“So well,” the girls harmonized, from her right and left. And she felt the truth of it from them, how they loved this life and all that came with it…

Slaves. Not her. Never again.

“No,” Sam said louder. “No deal.”

Lo Prang leaned forward, put his elbows on the desk, folded his fingers together. “There’s another way, then.”

“Tell me,” Sam said, her stomach turning as the girls continued to caress her.

“Your genes, Sunee.” Lo Prang’s eyes burrowed into hers. “Muscle biopsies. Bone biopsies. Tissue samples. I want what makes you you .”

Sam closed her eyes. She’d feared it would come to this. She could trade the most valuable thing about herself, in exchange for a chance to get back the most precious. But if she did... She’d be selling out others, signing death sentences for people she didn’t know.

“No,” she said, eyes closed.

And she knew what came next.

“Then we’ll just take it,” Lo Prang said.

She heard the snick as the girls’ fake nails extended into two-inch-long finger blades. One set raked across her back, leaving painful bloody furrows through her blouse. But by then she was dropping, one leg extended, then coming around in a blurringly fast straight-leg spin that swept the girl on her left from her feet.

Chaos exploded through the minds in the room. She saw Lo Prang reaching for the pistol on his desk, his two bodyguards reaching into their jackets for their guns.

Sam rolled away from the other razor-fingered girl, came up with a high-heeled shoe in each hand, her thumbs toggling the hidden switches as she rose. The guards had their submachine guns out, were raising them, bringing them to bear…

She spun, loosed the heels up and towards the sides of the room, felt her left shoulder groan as she did, closed her eyes tight, and let her momentum carry her back down into a right-shoulder roll towards the relative safety of the desk. More pain jolted up from her abused shoulder. Automatic gunfire exploded through the room.

Then she heard the crackle, saw her world turn red even through closed eyes, as the flash charges in her heels went off at maximum intensity, discharging all the energy of their fuel cells in an instant, burning out all their LEDs in the process. She heard a man yell as she came up and around the desk, opening her eyes to take in the scene. The guards had their hands to their faces, blinded for a few critical seconds, waving their guns around, but no longer daring to let loose without their sight. Lo Prang was in front of her, his pistol on her, she couldn’t tell if he was blinded or not.

Sam threw herself forward and to the side as he fired, felt the bullet graze her hip. And then she was inside his reach. He threw an elbow at her in the close quarters, raised a knee towards her gut. He was fast, and he was good, but he was old, and Sam was young and had the better tech in her body. She blocked his elbow with her right forearm, raised a leg and took his knee to her thigh, then spun, throwing him to the floor and pulling the gun from his hand in one brutal motion. Her shoulder ached but did as she told it.

Lo Prang rolled with the fall, came up on one knee, fast as a snake, with a knife in his hand. Sam moved faster, grabbed the knife hand, twisted it behind him, and brought his pistol to his head.

She looked up just in time to see the two girls get to their feet, trying to blink away the momentary blindness, and the two guards from outside the door push their way through the crowd, automatic weapons in hand.

They stopped when they saw her holding a stunned, blinking Lo Prang, a gun primed to blow his head off.

“Now,” she said to her prisoner. “I’m going to Burma. And you’re coming with me.”

47

NEW HORIZONS

Sunday October 28th

Kade woke slowly, head spinning, disoriented. There was static in his mind. His head ached. He cracked his eyes open ever so slightly. He was on his back, atop something soft. He saw sunlight, a ceiling with a lazily spinning fan and gold filigreed moldings. He was in a bed, giant and ornate, with elaborately carved wooden posts at the corners that towered above him.

He blinked, tried to adjust.

“Good morning,” the Indian man said. Kade looked over. The white-haired figure was dressed in white. He’d pulled back cloth-of-gold curtains from a wide picture window. Beyond it, there was blue sky and ocean. Between Kade and that ocean, there were bars on the windows, a fine mesh built into them.