Takahashi woke, sat up, and took a few clumsy steps away from his bed. Kane watched him with a cold, grudging respect as he forced himself to walk, his face as immobile as during his interminable hours of exercise on the ship. Lena had opened her eyes, but lay quietly, making no effort to join him.
By the time Molly came back with a tray of food,Takahashi was already sitting at the long Formica table in the next room. Kane joined him under his own power, but both Lena and Reese needed help. Molly passed around bowls of steaming chicken broth and glasses of ice water. Kane took a long drink and then let go of the glass. He watched in embarrassment as it fell to the floor, spattering his trousers.
“Gravity,” Reese said, with a weak, gray smile.“You’ll get used to it.”
Kane realized that his instincts were no longer trustworthy, had altered in free fall to the point that he was unsuited for the simplest behavior. He lifted a spoonful of soup, the muscles of his hand and arm unconsciously accelerating it as it rose, to keep it from wobbling off into space. No, he thought. He stopped his arm, watched a drop stretch downward from the spoon and fall gently into his lap.
The stock was rich with globules of yellow fat, and Kane’s hunger won out over his feelings of clumsiness and shame. He bent over the bowl and slurped it up, amazed how the reduced swelling in his face was allowing him to taste things for the first time in months.
When he looked up again someone else had come into the room.
“Don’t stand up,” the man said, walking quickly to the table.
Kane stared at him, a slow, psychic tremor moving through his brain.
“I’m Curtis, and I’m the governor here. Reese, of course, I already know,but I look forward to meeting the rest of you.Welcome to Frontera.”
Kane, paralyzed, heard something that was not quite a voice speak to him. It spoke inside his head, with the voice of authority. It said,“This man is your enemy.”
The paralysis broke, and Kane let out a trembling sigh. He continued to stare at Curtis, as if fixing his image on a photographic plate in his memory: bald, shining head, short-sleeved dress shirt with threadbare collar and seams, forearms matted with black hair, the lower half of his face darkened by a half-day’s growth of stubble.
Anybody, Kane thought, who shaves his head and doesn’t think it’s weird is kidding himself.
“I see you’ve all met my wife, Molly,” Curtis said.“I hope she’s taken care of your immediate needs.” Kane did not miss the brief glance of resentment that Molly turned on her husband.
“Now,” Curtis said.“I know you’re all tired, but I’m sure you can see our position.We haven’t had any coherent information from Earth in eight years.We don’t know what’s going on there, or what you people’s intentions are.” He knitted his hands together in front of him and waited, but none of them showed any inclination to answer. Kane looked down the table and saw his own hostility reflected in Reese’s eyes.
Curtis was sitting next to Lena, and Kane watched his right hand move within a fraction of an inch of hers.“We monitored some of your broadcasts as you came in. Kane and Reese we knew about, but I don’t know your name.”
“Lena,” she said.
Incredibly, to Kane, Curtis seemed to be taking up some sort of flirtation with Lena, within moments of having clearly branded Molly as his possession. Even more incredible was Lena’s obvious interest. She must have gone off suppressants too.
“How about it?” he said to her.“What’s the story?”
“Things on Earth,” she said, a little awkwardly.“I guess they’re okay. The big governments collapsed, and the corporations just sort of took up the slack...”
“At the same time? Russia and America both?”
“No,” she said,“not quite. Russia was worse off, with crop failures and revolts in the provinces.They must have gone down first, but nobody knew about it. Everybody was so used to not hearing about them, we just didn’t know. I guess the first time we really knew they were gone was during the North Africa thing.They would have sent troops, but obviously they didn’t have any to send.”
“North Africa thing?” Curtis said.
“Ask Kane about it,” Lena said.“He was there.”
“Kane?”
Kane shrugged.“Supposedly this un group at Biotek Afrika—that was a big lab in Luxor—had made some kind of breakthrough in implant wetware. Biological circuitry, that kind of thing, tied right into the nervous system.The Red Chinese were almost as bad off as the Russians, all their ‘modernizations’ didn’t have enough public money behind them. So they made one last grab for world power and tried to take over the lab.”
“And the US sent troops?”
“The US didn’t have any troops,” Kane said.“The corporations sent their own armies.That was when everybody figured out that the governments were gone.There was a lot of rioting and all that, and finally the big companies just stepped in. Started policing the cities, paying welfare, reopening the hospitals and all.”
“What happened in Africa?”
“Nothing happened,” Kane said.“Everybody came home.”
He didn’t want to talk about what had really happened, what it had really been like. It was still too soon, would always be too soon...
Kane had thirty men and women under his command, part of a total Pulsystems force of nearly five thousand, veterans of mercenary fire-fights from Taiwan to Ecuador, from the rescue of company personnel to the quelling of riots on company property. But this time it was different, this time they were moving into a combat theater already occupied by armed forces of the largest corporations on Earth.And none of them was really sure what they were doing there.
The decisions were all being made at computer consoles in air-conditioned offices halfway around the world, while Kane and five thousand others waited in tenuous pharmaceutical calm near the drowned city of Wadi Halfa, exposed again now since the Chinese sabotage of the Aswan High Dam.Their Mylar tents glittered between the melted mud bricks of the city like globs of mercury in a shattered sand castle.The air stank of rotting catfish and every day the enemy changed, from Hitachi on Friday to a Russian steel combine on Sunday, and still the only shots they had fired had been at cancerous Nile crocodiles where they lay stupefied in the sun.
When the order came to move it took them all the way to Luxor, five thousand of them moving downstream in anything they could commandeer, from inflatable Zodiacs to crumbling feluccas, even a World War II landing craft that had been working as a ferry between the East and West Banks.
Just before dawn Kane spotted the helicopters moving in from the west. He remembered wondering who they belonged to just before they opened fire, catching a glimpse in the sudden, harsh light of an exploding gasoline tank of the pemex logo, the Mexican oil cartel, wondering if they even knew who they were attacking, wondering if the raid had been launched by operator error five thousand miles away.
Less than seven hundred of them survived, washed up at the Temple of Amen-Mut-Khonsu just outside Luxor. Kane, in agony from a laser burn across his left thigh, clutching his M37 so tightly he thought the plastic stock might shatter in his hand, lay and stared at the high-water lines on the columns of the temple, at the stylized beard of Ramses II, shattered by a high-caliber bullet, at the compelling and unintelligible hieroglyphics stained muddy red by the rising sun.
Beyond the temple lay the fragrant, smoking ruins of the village where Biotek Afrika’s cooks and day laborers had lived, their cauterized bodies now scattered over a square mile of dmz. Beyond that lay the walls of the Biotek compound, breached by mortar fire and melted by beam weapons, manned by frightened Europeans in lab coats or street clothes, their M16s and Ingrams chattering harmlessly into the dirt.