“Think about what?”
Jonah stared at the floor, not sure how to answer her.
“How we ended up in this goddamn mess,” he said finally. “It’s all so absurd. One minute we’re taking on a few refugees for some quick cash, the next we’re blamed for a war that’s about to spark off. Worst of all, it’s not even our fault. We’re just a pawn in a scheme that dates back generations. We’re the revolver in Gavrilo Princip’s hand. We’re the stray dog on the boarder of Greece and Bulgaria. We’re Jenkin’s goddamn ear. And now all we can do is flee with our tail between our legs.”
“You say Jenkins… ear?”
“Uh, I guess it’s kinda hard to explain that one.”
“It’s okay. I think you will change your mind. You will not be Jenkin’s Ear. This will be the War that Jonah Stopped.”
Jonah laughed, long and bitter. “It’s not up for discussion. I talked about it with the crew, and none of us have a notion of stopping anything, much less a no-shit shooting war.”
“You will stop it because you are good captain, good man.”
He stared at her for what seemed like ages before saying anything. “I killed two human beings in this very room,” said Jonah, voice barely above a whisper. “The fight was getting down to loose bullets and bare knuckles. I couldn’t beat them fairly, so I burned them alive with a white phosphorous grenade. Closed the hatch door so they couldn’t escape, held it tight while I listened to them die. Ever seen what white phosphorus does to the human body?”
Sun-Hi shook her head.
“I don’t care what terrible things you’ve seen in your life. You’ve never witnessed anything like the shit that went down in this very room. I didn’t think twice about it at first. Didn’t even give them a proper burial, just blasted what was left of their bodies out of the garbage chute. So I don’t know where you get this ‘good man’ horseshit from. Maybe you still don’t know a goddamn thing about me — other than the fact that I’m tall.”
Sun-Hi silently leaned over and placed a hand against the side of his face before running it down his neck, across his chest, over his broken ribs. She closed her eyes as she felt every scar, every pain-wracked bruise and broken bone, the accumulated damage of a short, brutal lifetime. But he couldn’t let it matter, couldn’t let it change his mind — her touch was only a fresh layer of pain atop the old.
Hassan hunched over the command compartment’s chart table and scowled at the splayed mechanical carcass before him. He repositioned his carefully arranged surgical tools and smoothed the plastic beneath them for a third time. The doctor sighed; fussing over organization and sterilization only served to put off the inevitable. This thing, whatever it was, resembled nothing he’d ever seen before, and the task of dissecting it was exhilarating and troubling in equal portions.
The doctor closed his eyes, silently retreating to a calm deep within his mind, an oasis where fear and emotion evaporated before his twinned pillars of medical rationality. The first pillar was patience and understanding the needs thereof. The second was that he was a surgeon, and his performance was measured by the blade of a scalpel.
Hassan snapped on a pair of clean latex gloves and slid a surgical mask over his mouth and nose. He doubted any disease could be transmitted from a thing so strange, but his training and convention demanded the familiar ritual. The protective glasses in his kit had broken at the bridge, the plastic snapped too cleanly to glue, so instead he’d borrowed a pair of mechanic’s goggles from the engine compartment. They worked, barely. The low quality plastic lenses were badly scratched, and condensation had already begun to form in the corners.
But the old goggles were still in better shape than the organism. Its viscera was a mess of now-withered organs rapidly decomposing in the stagnant air of the command compartment. The doctor sighed a second time. He could see the collection of parts, but not yet their purpose. Jonah’s hands had done rough work, his prying fingers had left behind a jagged mess of bent metal and torn flesh, offensive to the surgeon’s eye.
Hassan twisted a small carbide tip into a handheld electric drill for use as a cutting tool. With precision, he drew it along the exoskeleton, grinding away at the seams until the metal casing parted to reveal the dead flesh within. It was all quite gruesome, a thick, stinking pile of flaccid organs and stretched membrane atop metallic components, medical tubing, and electronics. The doctor fixated on a moist, disk-like depression barely larger than a pencil eraser, almost indistinguishable amongst the viscera. He realized with a start that he was looking at a tympanum, a sort of evolutionary precursor to an eardrum most commonly found in amphibians.
This thing could hear.
He shivered, steadying himself as he adjusted his grip on the scalpel. Moving away from that alarming discovery, Hassan began to cut away at the thin layers of muscular tissue around the organs. The device clearly used them to articulate its exoskeleton, and they were integrated into a serpentine matrix of intricate hydraulics at each intersection between segments. The musculature parted easily, retracting to reveal the web-like peritoneum membrane that encased and protected the larger organs.
Now deep within the carapace, Hassan pulled back a flap of tissue to reveal a pair of vestigial lungs. They were collapsed, inelastic, bearing little resemblance to the velvety texture he’d anticipated. The nearby heart was no larger than a golf ball, and was connected to a carbon-fiber gas bottle and inflatable bladder by a system that strongly resembled a scaled-down version of Jonah’s dive re-breather. The hybridized design circumvented the biological lungs entirely, leaving them to wither.
Drat — he’d accidentally sliced an artery. A tiny jet of white liquid spurted from the unintentional cut, splattering across the table.
“Of course! Hyberbranched polymer-protected porphyrins,” he whispered in awe.
“You say what?” said Vitaly. The Russian emerged from beneath his dead computer console just long enough to cast a disgusted glance at the partially dissected device.
Hassan cleared his throat. “It utilizes an artificial blood replacement. The cells are oxygenated with an iron-rich porphyrin bonded to a polymer shell. Really quite fascinating. Early clinical research has suggested a myriad of potential medical applications.”
Vitaly crossed his arms. “And Jonah say Vitaly use bad English. I cannot understand nothing you say.”
“It’s… plastic blood.”
“Why you play with dead thing? Jonah already say we leave Japan, never come back.”
Hassan pondered the question for a moment. “I suppose I was simply curious.”
Vitaly just ducked his head under the navigations console once more, muttering to himself in irritation.
Hassan returned his attention to the dissection. With a few more cuts, he had carefully removed the device’s delicate stomach and digestive tract. The organs had been similarly hybridized with medical tubing and unfamiliar mechanical components. Beneath them were long bundles of convoluted neural tissue knotted into familiar, human-like ridges. He shivered again. Accounting for nearly a third of the total interior, the volume of brain cells would nearly match those of a ten-year-old child. Only these bundles were discrete, encased in an infinitely delicate weave of silk-like threads that connected the tissue to an array of computer processors and communications antenna. The potential of such a device was astounding, limitless in potential—
“So this plastic blood,” said Vitaly as he absentmindedly swung a small wrench in his hand. He’d been pulling the wiring out of his console, almost as though conducting his own dissection. “Why it use this? Why not regular blood?”