Ramez Naam - Crux

For that he needed more intel.

Feng raised his cuffed wrists, pointed at the surface and its annotated composite satellite maps. “OK?” the Confucian Fist asked.

Nakamura nodded. The system was locked to read-only. Feng could do no harm.

He slept as Feng zoomed and panned the display, inspecting the data they had on the house. The sub’s systems watched Feng, poised to alert Nakamura of any suspicious behavior.

He woke hours later, after dawn.

Feng was still at the display surface. He looked up at Nakamura, then gestured down at the screen. “Look here,” he said.

Nakamura looked. Feng panned the display. These were images from the recon drones now, footage they’d taken while flying around the island.

There. A rooftop. Two men. One brown-skinned, white-haired, clad in a simple white robe. Shiva Prasad. And the other, tall, lanky, with long jet black hair and tan but undeniably Caucasian skin. Kade.

The video had been taken from hundreds of yards away, by a drone in mid-flight. It was too low resolution to allow lip-reading. But the body language spoke volumes. Kade, firm, resolute. Shiva, disappointed, frustrated.

“Kade didn’t give him the codes,” Feng said.

Nakamura nodded. Good.

“Have they identified where Lane’s being held?” he asked Feng. “Security around him?”

Feng shook his head. “Terahertz imagers.” He flipped to another image, showed the distinctive antenna shape of a stand-off T-ray sensor. “Drones detected it, stayed away.”

Nakamura drummed his fingers. They still needed to know more. What room was Lane in? What security? What surveillance?

Feng held up one finger of his cuffed hands, as if reading Nakamura’s thoughts.

“Here,” he said.

The display zoomed out into satellite imagery, panned out over water, then zoomed back in on a small island, a mile from Shiva’s home. Feng zoomed further. A shape, outlined in red by the image analysis AI.

The shape was angular, broken, with weird distortions. The pieces of a boat.

No. Not pieces. It was a boat, run aground, partially covered in chameleonware. Chameleonware that had been damaged, revealing pieces of the structure underneath.

What?

“Storm did this,” Feng said. “No sign Shiva’s looking for it.”

And then he looked up at Nakamura and smiled. “Could be people,” Feng said. “Shiva’s people. Human intel.”

There was only one way to find out.

Nakamura brought the sub in close to the beach, under the waves, then waited for nightfall.

“Let me come with you,” Feng pleaded. “I can help. We’re friends now!”

Nakamura chuckled. “You’re my prisoner, Feng. Not my partner.”

“You leave me on the boat?” Feng sounded outraged. “What happens if you get killed, huh? I go down to the bottom!”

“I’m not planning on getting killed, Feng.”

“Look, our goals the same!” Feng replied. “We both want Kade free! I’ll help you. I’ll be useful!”

“No,” Nakamura said. “Now clip your cuffs to the hardpoint.”

Feng hesitated for a moment, then did what he was told, locking his ankles and wrists to floor and ceiling of the sub’s fuselage.

Feng glowered at Nakamura. “You a real bastard, you know?”

Nakamura smiled. “I know, Feng,” he said.

Then he brought the sub up, pushed himself and the inflatable boat out the hatch.

“Grandpa!” Feng yelled as Nakamura pushed himself and the inflatable away.

Nakamura smiled and sent the sub the signal to seal itself up and submerge again.

Nakamura paddled the small boat in, not daring to risk the noise or IR emissions of engines. The boat’s skin shifted color to blend in with the waves. His own chameleonware suit rendered him nearly invisible. Its goggles extended his vision into the IR, into radio frequencies.

The blood was rising in him. He was out here, alone now, his life on the line, nothing but his wits and his skills and his tools between him and death. He felt free. He felt alive. Everything around him felt sharp and vivid. A feral grin split his face of its own accord.

He scanned the beach, eagerly, thoroughly, looking for anything, a sign of human life, the radio emissions of a rescue beacon, anything.

Nothing. The surf crashed on a lonely stretch of sand, palm trees swaying behind it.

Nakamura aimed for the eastern end of the beach, as far from the wrecked boat as he could manage. He landed softly, slipped off the inflatable quietly, then dragged it up onto the sand. His assault rifle was in his hands. Dual load clip switched to tranq. He wanted whoever was here alive.

Nakamura was halfway down the beach, moving silently towards the boat, watching it for movement, when he heard a sound behind him. He turned and rolled as a voice yelled “Freeze!” He came up firing, tranquilizer rounds whishing out of his gun, moving in an inhuman blur even as he depressed the trigger. Silenced rounds struck the ground where he’d just been. His assailant was a barely seen blur, a distortion of muzzle fire and impressions in the sand. He dove low and diagonally to close the distance, came up to strike with the rifle as a weapon. Blur met blur at close range. His opponent blocked his rifle strike with a rifle block, kicked at his knee. He twisted away from the kick, came again with the rifle butt in a feint, lashed his own foot forward… And had it blocked as he would block, a counterstrike launched that he would launch.

They struck and parried, dodged and twisted. His enemy’s moves were his own! He was fighting his own ghost, here. And then the voice caught up with him, stunned him.

“Sam?” he said aloud.

He dropped his guard for an instant and the butt of her rifle struck him in the side of his head. He let it propel him into a shoulder roll, came up with his gun pointed into the sand, his off hand yanking off the mask of his chameleonware suit.

“Sam!”

The space ahead of him was just a distortion. Still now. A ghost with a gun pointed at his face, wet scuffs imprinted in the sand where their feet had moved in their fight.

“Kevin?” her voice spoke from the distortion.

“Sam,” he said. “It’s me.”

He held his breath. The surf crashed onto the beach, loud in his ears. The breeze rippled the palm fronds above. A bird called somewhere, far away. His heart pounded in his chest.

If he was wrong, he was dead… If she was Shu’s, he was dead… If she was Lane’s…

Then the gun was falling to the ground, and a ghost was wrapping her arms around him.

Sam held on tight to the ghost in her arms. Nakamura. She couldn’t believe it.

She let go, pulled off her own chameleonware hood, and looked into his eyes again. He was real. Her old mentor, the man who’d rescued her, who’d thrown himself out of a burning three-story window to save her life…

They disentangled, moved under the cover of the trees to talk.

“What are you doing here?” Sam whispered to him.

“I’m here for Lane,” he told her. “Same as you.”

Kade? Had she heard right?

“What?” she asked.

“Kade,” Nakamura repeated. “He alerted you somehow? Or Feng did?”

Sam shook her head. “Kade’s not here, Kevin. He’s…” in Cambodia , she almost said. But no. She’d sworn to protect his secrets, and he hers. “He went a different way. I’m here for the kids.”

“Kids?” Nakamura asked.

She told him. Told him the whole story. She wished she could show him instead, touch his mind and let him feel what she’d felt. But there was no Nexus in his brain, and so she settled for words. Mai. Phuket. Mae Dong. Sarai and the children. Jake. The men from the Mira Foundation. What she’d seen in that soldier’s mind.