House of the Sun

22

We stood shoulder to shoulder, the ex-Ali'i and I, our noses millimeters from room 1905's picture window. None of the respectable media had said word one about the Corporate Court's scheduled demonstration, but the word had certainly gotten out nonetheless. Part of that, was due to the fact that a media lockdown simply isn't possible when parties with a vested interest in getting the word out-in this case, the corporations-can beam their message directly down from the high ground of low Earth orbit. Ground-based pirate stations had done their part, too, gleefully reporting on the Hawaiian government's attempts to muzzle the commercial media outlets. Back in the Dark Ages-the nineteen-eighties and nineteen-nineties, for example-it might have been possible to keep this kind of genie in the bottle. These days? No fragging way, hoa, as the government was finding out.

I knew the word had gotten out thanks to reports that filtered in to the Ali'i from his few trusted assets still on the streets. Even without that source of data, though, I'd have guessed that people were getting the message. Normally Kalakaua Avenue, stretches of which I could see from my window, was two ribbons of slowly moving car lights until two or three in the morning. Tonight, at a couple of minutes to midnight, Waikiki's main drag was next to deserted. Idly, I wondered where everyone was. Holing up, terrified that the sky was going to fall on their heads? Or doing what Gordon Ho and I were doing, finding a good vantage point from which to watch the show.

"Twenty-three fifty-eight," Pohaku announced quietly from behind us. As if driven by the same mental impulse, both Ho and I took one big step back from the transpex of the window.

It was a perfect night for it. Since sunset dark clouds had been piling up along the southeast horizon. Now they hung heavy over the ocean, black on black, flickering with lightning bolts, a dozen klicks offshore. An impressive background for what would probably be a bloody impressive show. Directly over Honolulu and Mamala Bay, the sky was clear. A couple of stars burned against the blackness.

At a signal from Ho one of the bodyguards killed all the lights in the apartment. Outside, along Kalakaua Avenue, other people had gotten the same idea. All along the shoreline, lights were going out. I blinked a couple of times, to help my eyes night-adapt faster.

"What's the reaction going to be?" Ho asked quietly. His voice was so soft, I wasn't sure if he even knew he'd spoken.

The question was an important one in both our minds, of course. The megacorporations' little demonstration was like a cop's warning shot. As I'd been taught at the Lone Star Academy, a warning shot's always going to provoke a reaction. Sometimes it's the one you want-abject surrender, when the perp you're chasing realizes you could have put a round into his ten-ring. Sometimes it's the exact opposite-a kind of "Oh yeah? Well, frag you!" response that turns into a blazing firelight. I couldn't shake the worry that the high muck a mucks of the Corporate Court hadn't given much thought to the second possibility.

"Thirty seconds," Pohaku announced. I felt movement behind me as the bodyguards pressed as close as they dared to their ex-sovereign's august presence, staking out their own view-spots. Mentally, I counted down.

T-minus three, two, one, zero… Nothing. Plus one, plus two, plus three…

I'd reached T-plus five when Gordon Ho gasped softly beside me and pointed toward the sky. A new star burned in the heavens, harsh and brilliant. It flickered, it moved. For an instant it had dimension, more than a perfect geometric point…

And then the Thor shots rained down, perfectly parallel bars of light, lancing down from the zenith to the black ocean a couple of klicks offshore. They were impossible to count, they were there and gone so fast, an impression of unbelievable speed. Like a burst of tracer fire from God's own machine gun, but faster than any tracer bullet I'd ever seen… and immensely larger. There was a flash of light where they hit, a single strobe pulse-like a secondary explosion, but without the fireball. I think that was the most chilling part of the whole demonstration. There'd been nothing under those descending bars of light, nothing but water. Still, the impact from the Thor projectiles had been enough to strike sparks off the ocean itself.

It was over in less than a second. I let out the breath I didn't know I'd been holding. My God, I thought dully, how fast did those things come down? I ran a quick mental calculation. Assume they were traveling at orbital velocity when they hit the atmosphere. What would that be? Something like 35,000 kilometers per hour-in other words, 10 (clicks per second or thereabouts, maybe 10 times the speed of a rifle bullet. And Thor projectiles were a lot bigger than rifle bullets, of course. I'd heard them described as "smart crowbars." Assume each one massed a nominal one kilo. How much kinetic energy was contained in one kilo of mass traveling at 10,000 meters per second? If I remembered my high-school physics-and hadn't slipped a decimal place somewhere-that would be something like 100,000,000 joules of energy: one hundred megajoules. Per crowbar. And how many crowbars had been in the burst we'd just seen?

I felt cold. No wonder the Pacific fleet had turned back when the megacorps had fired a warning shot like that across their bows back in 2017.

I heard a sound behind me and turned in surprise. Pohaku was glaring out the window, lips drawn back from his teeth in a rictus of rage… and he was growling. I shrugged. I suppose if this had been my country, I'd have been pretty torqued off about the whole thing, too.

"Lights, please," Gordon Ho said softly. As a bodyguard flicked the lights back on, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and slumped down in a chair. He picked up a whiskey glass from the table beside him-mine, as a matter of fact, but I wasn't going to give him grief about it, not now- and polished off the contents in one swallow.

"What's the reaction going to be?" he asked again, and this time I knew the question was directed at me.

I shrugged. "You know your people better than I do," I pointed out.

He smiled at that. "I thought I did," he amended quietly. He paused, then went on, "It depends on how well ALOHA's managed to stir them up… and how crazy ALOHA is, when you get right down to it.

"It's possible to pull it back," he continued with a sigh. "Na Kama'aina doesn't want war with the corps. If the government can keep ALOHA under control, if it can prevent any more provocations, it should be possible to get things back under control."

I nodded. It made sense, what Ho said, but it sounded too much like Barnard's comment a day or two before that "perhaps saner heads would prevail," or whatever. They obviously hadn't prevailed yet. Was that going to change?

I turned back to the window. Now that the demonstration was over, there were cars on the streets again. Not as many as usual, but at least Waikiki didn't look like a ghost town anymore. From somewhere to the west-Sand Island? I wondered idly-a small constellation of lights was approaching, burning bright against the darkness of the sky. Choppers-two or three of them. Corp shuttles, maybe, coming downtown to pick up VIP vacationers and take them to the airport for a suborbital off-island? I didn't know, and I didn't really care at the moment. I started to turn away.

I didn't see it happen straight on, just in my peripheral vision. Without warning something flashed upward from somewhere to my left, almost like a Thor shot in reverse. The lance of fiery light transfixed one of the helicopters, blotting it from the sky in a dirty orange-black puffball. The surviving choppers broke formation, diving for the deck, killing their anticollision lights as they did so. In a second or two they were lost to sight.

I flattened my nose against the window, watching in shocked horror as burning wreckage plunged to the street or smashed down on top of buildings.

Gordon Ho hadn't seen it, but he knew something had happened. He gaped at me. "What was it?"

I didn't answer right away. Instead, I came over and fragging near collapsed into an armchair. Finally, I said, "It doesn't look like it's a good season for saner heads."

The downed chopper was a corp bird, Gordon Ho's informants confirmed an hour or so later. (I'd guessed as much earlier, but this wasn't a time when I felt good about being proven right.) The lance of fiery light I'd seen had been a Parsifal man-pack SAM, an obsolete Saeder-Krupp design. Ironic, since the chopper that ate the missile was a Saeder-Krupp bird.

Gordon Ho and I were shoulder to shoulder again, looking silently out the window of room 1905. The streets below us were empty now, except for the occasional corporate security vehicle screaming by, light-bars ablaze. There were more choppers in the air-angular, brutal-looking gunships now, instead of me more streamlined unarmed transports- buzzing around like angered hornets. Most of them were maneuvering radically in case there was another missile team out mere somewhere, jinking back and forth, up and down, randomly. Some were dropping flares just in case, sun-bright points of light. I couldn't make out colors or insignias so I didn't know whose the choppers were, but it was easy to fig¬ure out mey were from different corps. It was also easy enough to figure out mat said corps weren't talking to one another efficiently; in a fifteen-minute span, I saw half a dozen near misses when choppers fragging near slammed into one another. Every now and then I could hear the rip of autofire, muffled somewhat by the double-glazed window. Were ALOHA assault teams actually engaging the corp forces, or were the corp sec-guards shooting at one another-a ground-based version of me chaotic gavotte in me skies? It was impossible to tell.

Finally, the ex-Ali'i turned away from the window and returned to me couch. After a few moments I joined him. Pohaku still looked as though he wanted an excuse to rip somebody's lungs out-anybody's-but at least he still had the presence of mind to freshen our Scotches.

Ho stretched, working his neck and shoulders. He looked like he'd aged a decade in me past couple of hours, I noticed suddenly. Well, I guess getting deposed, men seeing your country stumbling toward me brink of war might do that to you.

"What now?" I asked.

Ho looked over at me and smiled. (I think mat's what the expression was supposed to be, at least. It looked more like the facial reaction of a torture victim.) "I've given up on me oracle business," he said. Then his smile faded, and his eyes seemed to grow even more haunted.

"The government doesn't have much choice," he went on quietly. "They've got to act fast, before the Corporate Court does. Which means they can't do much about ALOHA."

I nodded. That made grim and nasty sense. Hunting down and neutralizing a militant policlub-a terrorist group by another name, when you mink about it-is never a short-term solution. It takes resources and it takes time. The Na Kama'aina-dominated Hawai'ian government might have the former, but Ho obviously didn't mink the corps would give it the latter… and I had to agree. Hell, when you came right down to it, stamping out a militant policlub wasn't necessarily possible even in the long term. Ask the FBI teams tasked with eliminating Humanis and Alamos 20K. "So what are the options?" I asked.

Gordon Ho shrugged. "Few." He sighed. "Negotiation- but that requires the corps to be interested in listening, which isn't a certainty at this point.

"Or a counterthreat," he went on, his voice bleak. "The corps have a gun to the government's head, Thor. The government has to draw its own gun." He shrugged again. "Mexican standoff. But at least it gives both sides a little more time to negotiate before me killing begins."

I raised an eyebrow at mat. "Bluff, you mean?"

"Bluff wouldn't work. The counterthreat has to be substantive."

"Yeah, right," I snorted. "Threatening the corps?" The idea was so ludicrous I almost laughed out loud.

But Ho obviously didn't mink it funny. "You'd be surprised, Dirk," he said darkly.

I did laugh out loud now… and then shut up so abruptly I almost swallowed my tongue. Suddenly, I'd remembered some of the weird things Scott had rattled on about during our first breakfast together, about me freaky drek that had gone down around Secession Day. Frag, now that I let myself realize it, there'd been some major questions rolling around in my head about the Secession.

For one, how come the U. S. had let Hawai'i go so easily? (Okay, the feds had tried to clamp down… once. But after the warning Thor shots on the naval task force, they'd basically rolled over and played dead. No attempts to take back their military bases.) For another, how had the equivalent of a civilian militia been able to defeat the Civil Defense Force-full-on military? The only answer that made any sense whatsoever was some kind of big stick with which to threaten the good ol' US of A.

I turned to Gordon Ho. "Spill it," I said quietiy.

"Magic, of course," he answered at once. "Nui magic. Big magic."

In the back of my mind I heard a kind of almost subliminal click. "Sites of power," I said.

The ex-king nodded. "Of course," he confirmed. "Hawai'i has some major ones."

I felt a cold wind blow through my soul. "You've got some kind of project going, haven't you? Since before Secession, you've had it going."

"Of course," he said again. "We're a small nation. We need an equalizer."

'Tell me about it."

Ho shrugged. "It was my father's idea, I think. He and his kahuna-his shamanic advisor-they came up with the details. They'd heard about the Great Ghost Dance in the States, of course," he explained softly. "The federal government wanted to suppress details, but news always leaks out. When my father and his advisors learned that another group of aboriginals, the Amerindians, had developed large-scale magic as a military tool, they figured if it could work on the Great Plains, why not on the islands?"

"You did your own Great Ghost Dance," I said wonderingly.

Ho nodded. "In essence, yes. The details were different, of course. Hawai'ian traditions are very different from those that Daniel Howling Coyote used. But the principles were the same: massed shamans-kahunas-using their own life-force to power a great ritual.

"We had a major advantage that Howling Coyote didn't, however," the Ali'i continued. "We had those sites of power you mentioned. The kahunas were able to draw a large measure of the mana they needed directly from the land, rather than from their own life-force. Some died anyway, of course, but the cost was much less for us than for Howling Coyote."

I shivered. It was chilling, the almost casual way Ho was talking about this. The kind of rituals he was describing were "blood-magic." I'd read somewhere that the "cost" of the Great Ghost Dance was measured in dozens, maybe hundreds, of shamans who'd given their lives to power it. The same in Hawai'i, apparently: "True believers" had effectively suicided to give the islands their independence.

"Where did this happen?" I asked. "Puowaina?"

'The Hill of Sacrifice?" Ho's eyebrow quirked. "It would have been appropriate, wouldn't it? But no, the volcanic crater of Haleakala was chosen because it had a higher magical background count, which made the ritual easier."

Something else went click in the back of my mind. It was like I'd been struggling vainly with a jigsaw puzzle for the last couple of days, and suddenly somebody had started handing me the pieces I needed, one by one. "It's still going on, isn't it?"

"The Dance?" Ho shook his head. "No," he said firmly. Then, "Not as such."

I looked into his eyes and saw him trying to decide what to tell me and what to keep hidden. "Spill it, e ku'u lani," I said again.

He hesitated for a long moment, then I saw him come to his decision. "The Dance ended with Secession," he said firmly, "but there were some interesting consequences. For some reason, the background count in the Haleakala crater was higher after the Dance than it was before. Considerably higher, in fact. We wanted to know why, of course. And we also wanted to learn how to use the additional power. My father established a research station on the crater rim. He code-named the program Sunfire. A staff of kahunas were assigned to Project Sunfire to figure out what had happened to the background count…"

"And how to use it," I completed.

Ho nodded uncomfortably. "Yes," he acknowledged. "Initially. When I took the throne, though, I decided to back off from that side of things."

"Why, for frag's sake?" I wanted to know.

The ex-Ali'i looked even more uncomfortable. "She convinced me," he said, inclining his head toward Akaku'akanene who was in full lotus again, staring into space and listening to geese.

"Her?"

"She virtually raised me. Dirk," he said, almost apologetically. "Of course I listened to her when she warned me about something."

"Why?" I pressed again. "What was the fragging problem?"

He glanced away, apparently unable to meet my gaze. "She didn't know," he admitted, "not really. She just had a feeling. A premonition, you might call it." He shrugged once more. 'That was good enough for me, Dirk," he said earnestly. "I knew her, you see. I knew what her premonitions were like. If she sensed that something was dangerous… well, that was good enough for me," he repeated.

Another faint click. "That changed, didn't it?"

"Against my wishes, yes," Ho acknowledged. "Six years ago, the Na Kama'aina faction in the legislature finally accrued enough influence to basically take over Project Sunfire. They switched the emphasis of the research from simple understanding back to exploitation. They thought the kingdom might someday need the power that Haleakala represented.

"Maybe they were right," he added with a wry glance out of the window at the flying circus of "choppers over the city.

And then came the last mental click. Suddenly I felt really cold, as though somebody had hooked the room's ventilation up to an industrial freezer. "That's the big stick, isn't it?" Ho blinked in confusion, so I elaborated. "That's Na Kama'ai-na's counterthreat to use against the corps. They want to draw power from Haleakala."

"Of course," he said simply.

Oh, drek… That had to be what bug-boy was talking about, didn't it?

The horrible realization must have shown on my face, because Ho asked, "What's the matter, Dirk?"

"We've got to stop Project Sunfire, e ku'u lani," I told him. "We've got to stop it right fragging now."