“Just give me name, rank, serial. I’ll submit to the government for credit. DC is supposed to pay us back, and they had damn well better do so, after mobilizing us for national service the moment all the aircraft were grounded.” He eased the throttle forward, kept the engine unengaged.
“Lines away.” Greasemonkey’s shout was high-pitched and bored.
Old Man put the shafts in gear and heeled gently to port, bringing the sagging hull into a half-circle that would take her straight between the first pair of new, solar-juiced biolume buoys and into the waterway.
Trevor turned, looked back toward the Academy, at the foremast of the Maine that marked where the Yard met the Bay, briefly saw the flags before the mist closed over again, and wondered, Why does this feel like the last time I’m ever going to see them?
Caine didn’t mind the dark, or the tight crawlways, or even the smells of stagnant water and much-rotted mold. However, the rats—large and ominously curious—were somewhat worrisome. But there had been little choice regarding an escape route from the bank complex that CoDevCo had commandeered as its headquarters.
As he fled, Caine reasoned that, judging from the hasty landing field provisions, vehicle barriers, and the curtain walls fronting the plaza, the megacorporations had not had time to turn the complex into a fully self-sufficient fortress, sealed off from the outside world, both above and below ground. And there would have been little enough reason to do so immediately. It wasn’t as if foreign commandos would soon be infiltrating the warren of conduits, pipes, and localized sewer subsystems that made up a subterranean sprawl even more confusing than the street-level chaos of Jakarta.
So Caine had kept going deeper into the building, until, in the subbasement, he found what he was looking for, framed in emergency lights: a workman’s access shaft into service crawlways that joined the banking complex to the essential services and resources of the outside world.
The worst aspect of Caine’s subterranean journey was the inability to measure direction or even distance. He held as straight a course as he could, and philosophically allowed that he’d never have found side-branching passages in this Stygian darkness anyhow.
Ultimately, it was Caine’s ears that provided him with the only navigational data he received during his long crawl alongside the PVC tubing that housed the power and data lines for the banking complex. After what seemed like several hours, he heard what he first believed to be the harbinger of his demise: a siren. But a moment’s reflection made him revise that assessment. Any pursuers would be underground, too. Not exactly the environment where sirens were used or needed. And if it was above ground, it was unlikely the siren was being used by anyone pursuing him.
Another minute of crawling and listening provided further information. The siren was not sequencing through a variety of different alarm modes, as was the case with most emergency vehicles. It was a steady, repetitive sound, more like a car or a building alarm. That meant he had to be getting close to the surface, and to some opening that let in sounds from the street level. Caine felt a surge of renewed energy, and doubled the rate at which he wriggled toward the next corner.
The light and sound increased dramatically as he turned that corner and emerged into a funnel-shaped chamber roofed by a grate: a catch tank for flood control. A workman’s hard hat lay in a corner, along with several tools, a pair of shredded work gloves, and rat-gnawed candy-bar wrappers. Either the construction crew assigned to this part of Jakarta’s intermittently expanding sewer system hadn’t tidied up, or had been swept away into the same bureaucratic limbo that perpetually undermined Indonesia’s waste management efforts.
Rusted rungs fixed in the sides of the poured concrete hole led up to the surface. One of the abandoned tools, a long-handled pry-bar, was just the right lever to lift up a small section of the grate. Which Caine did, before peeking out onto the streets of Jakarta.
Burning vehicles hemmed him in, one of which was the source of the relentless alarm that he had started hearing long before. A fast patter of explosions rumbled in the distance, followed by a rush of VTOLs overhead, their fans screeching as they accelerated. In the narrow bar of gray, premonsoon sky over the street, a dozen ragged columns of smoke communed with the lowering rain clouds. Across the roadway, one storefront was burnt out, another was still aflame. The tar-stinking macadam was littered with broken glass, scorched roofing tiles, abandoned bicycles, shopping bags—and was utterly devoid of people.
Whatever else might have happened during Caine’s long underground crawl, one thing was quite clear: Jakarta was now fully and ferociously at war. Which was certainly bad for Jakarta, but might be good for Caine Riordan. Before, he had anticipated emerging into a merely turbulent city where, as a foreigner—a bule—he might still have stood out. Now, he was in an urban war zone where order was deteriorating with frightening speed. A good environment in which to stay very, very lost. He levered the grate up enough to wriggle out. He just might manage to elude the clones and soldiers and Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh long enough to get away—
But as soon as he stood up, he heard hissed exclamations from the buildings behind him:
“Look! Quick, aim at the—”
“No, don’t shoot.”
“He’s wearing gray; he’s a clone!”
“No, idiot! That’s dust!”
“Hey! He’s a bule!”
Louder: “Hey, bule! Get down! You stupid or sumthin’?”
Caine dropped, looked around, didn’t see anything, started crawling toward where he had heard the voices.
“No, bule, over here. More to your left. Yeh, that’s right. We’re in the hardware store.”
Caine glanced up, still couldn’t see anything. How the hell are they seeing me when—?
Then he saw a glint through the hardware store’s shattered display window: the fragment of a mirror, propped up on a display rack. Huh, pretty clever. And for the first time in many hours, Caine smiled. As a military analyst, he knew his history, and from this one sign—from the hasty innovation of using a mirror to watch for the approach of enemies while remaining hidden—he felt fairly certain that the invaders would soon learn just how difficult it was to be an occupation force trying to control a nation in Southeast Asia.
Of the five Indonesians in the store, the oldest, middle-aged Teguh, spoke fair English. Two of the others had a smattering of it. They were all nervous, angry, and—surprisingly—armed. The weapons were old, cartridge-firing rifles. Caine stared, frowned, and suddenly recognized the manufacture—but not due to his years reviewing international weaponry for Jane’s. Rather, he recalled the gun from images he had flipped through while researching military history. “That’s—” he said, pointing in surprise, “—that’s a, a—Kalashnikov. An AK-47. How’d you get that? Indonesia never—”
“Lissen, bule. I don’ know why you so interested in the gun, but it says ‘Type 56.’ Right here, see?”
“That’s just a Chinese AK. Where did you—?”
“Bule, pay attention. You in a war, here. Where we got these guns don’ matter—”
“Actually, it does matter.” Something in Riordan’s voice made them look at him differently, like there was now a better-than-even chance that he wasn’t crazy. “Let me guess. Someone gave the guns to you. Passed them out from the back of a truck or up from a cellar or something. Was giving them out to whoever wanted them. Am I right?”