House of the Sun

4

Traditionally, the screamsheets and datafaxes have absolutely nothing good to say about the many short-hop carriers in the Sioux Nation. Too many companies, too little inspection, too many cases of pilot error, too few meaningful after-incident investigations, drekcetera. So when I boarded the Federated-Boeing Commuter VTOL, all shiny in its Sioux Skybus livery, and strapped myself into the window seat, I was expecting a hairy ride.

No flap, chummer, smooth as synthsilk. Okay, it's true, I could see past the little bitty curtain into the flight deck, and it did disturb me a tad to watch the pilot and copilot-jacked into the flight systems via fiberoptic cables-playing a heated game of crib while we were climbing out. But other than that, no problems.

We put down at the commuter terminal of Casper International at oh-four-forty-five, which gave me fifteen minutes to collect my baggage and hump it over to the international terminal. According to the signs, there was an automated people-mover to carry passengers the klick or so from one terminal to another. But, according to other signs-hastily hand lettered-the people mover was down for maintenance, and should be back up and running three days ago, thanks for your patience. There were shuttle-buses too, but the one I tried to catch was full-or so the big, burly Amerind driver told me, even though I could see a dozen empty seats-and fragging near rolled over my toes as it pulled out. Well, it was a nice morning for a brisk walk anyway.

Not only did I get my exercise, but I also got a good view of the international terminal that I would have missed if I'd ridden the underground people-mover. It's a sight I wouldn't have missed for anything… null! In the darkness of predawn, under the harsh glare of arc lights, it looked like an overgrown bomb shelter or missile bunker: prestressed ferrocrete with less aesthetic appeal than a brick.

The suborbitals, though-they were a different story. As I hiked my way beside the access road-cursing silently at the two shuttle-buses that blazed on by me without even slowing-I could see three of the things out on the apron beyond the terminal building. Gleaming white under the carbon arcs, they were beautiful-geometrically precise, like the crystalline purity of mathematics itself somehow made tangible. Okay, I admit it. I copped that last line from a trideo talking head. But he was right. The suborbitals were unbelievably striking, unbelievably beautiful in a kind of heart-stirring way. They don't belong here, on the ground- that's the thought that struck me. Any time they spend down here in the dirt is just waiting, just marking time before they can re-enter the element for which they were born…

That heartwarming feeling of awe lasted until I'd entered the international terminal, and vanished precisely one microsecond after I'd laid eyes on the hard-case customs and safety inspectors waiting for me at the security gate. Sigh. You'd think the fact I was carrying an open corp ticket would give me some kind of clout with the inspectors, wouldn't you, would guarantee me some special treatment? No luck there, chummer. (Or maybe-and this was a scary thought-what I went through was special treatment…) In any case, as a gaggle of technicians poked and prodded and X-rayed and assensed and MNR'ed my bag, a couple of hard-eyed and horny-handed trolls in undersized uniforms did much the same thing to me. Metal detectors to analyze the composition of my dental fillings. Chemsniffers to check if I was wearing clean underwear. Magical examinations to make sure I wasn't actually a fire elemental trying to fool them. The whole enchilada. Finally-and only after the fine uniformed gentlemen had made a detailed manifest of every speck of lint in my possession-was I gestured on.

Then came Immigration Control or Emigration Control, or whatever the frag the Sioux government's calling it now. Once again, I was looking up at a couple more uniformed Amerind trolls while their 'puter whirred and clicked and tried to decide whether it liked the passport data on my credstick. And I was trying not to sweat; it was supposed to be the best fake datawork (a lot of) money could buy, but you never really knew how good this kind of drek was until it was put to the test. My sphincter contracted as the 'puter went brack sharply. But the trolls handed my credstick back without a word and gestured me on. Signs directed me to the departure gate, so I followed them.

And almost had a childish accident when a heavy hand landed on my shoulder. I spun, and I think I stopped myself from yelping aloud. I looked up, expecting another troll… then quickly down when the slag who'd stopped me cleared his throat rattlingly. A dwarf, he was, even stockier and more dour man most of his metatype, still on his toes after reaching up for my shoulder. He was wearing me nondescript black suit I've come to associate with government agents, and a cold fist squeezed my stomach. Somehow, I managed to force a well-meaning smile onto my face. "Is mere some problem?" I asked genially.

"You're Brian Tozer?"

I nodded; that was the name on my fake datawork. "That's me, er… sir. Is there a problem with my ticket?"

"Follow me, please." And he turned his back on me and walked off without looking back, fully expecting me to follow him blindly.

Which I did, of course-not that I had much choice. I followed him through an unmarked door into a small, bare room, and I braced myself for a cavity search or worse.

The dwarf didn't say anything once he'd shut the door behind me. He just scrutinized me, dark eyes narrowed beneath beetling brows. If he wasn't going to say anything, neither was I. If we were going to play the old "who speaks first" waiting game, some years from now an airport employee would open the door and find two desiccated corpses in this bare room, still glaring at each other.

Finally, he frowned, and his brows merged into something that looked like a road-killed squirrel. "You are Brian Tozer?" he asked.

And that's when I got it. I pulled out my credstick-the one with the digital signature on it-and extended it to him. He sneered-"Fragging twinkie," I could hear him thinking-and he slipped it into the oversized chipjack mounted in the base of his skull. His eyes rolled up in their sockets for a moment. Then, with a quick movement, he clicked the stick free from his slot, tossed it back, and held something out to me. An optical chip: a tiny sliver of impure silicon the size of a pen-point, in a plastic chip-carrier the size of my first thumb-joint.

'That's your payload for our mutual friend," he grunted, already starting to turn away.

"Hold it," I said quickly. He turned back, and one of his eyebrows tried to crawl up into his hairline. "Look," I told him, "I don't have any of the details on where I'm going, who I'm supposed to give this payload to, and when. Don't you mink it might make my job a little easier if-"

He cut me off with a sharp, "You'll be met." And again he turned his back on me and strode off. This time I let him. I glanced down at me chip-carrier in my hand, and for just a moment I had the impulse to throw it to the floor, grind it under my heel, and just run like hell. The pleasant fantasy didn't last long. I sighed, opened the door, and re-emerged into the concourse.

In the course of following the dwarf, I'd lost track of my gate. Fortunately, some airport employee-a flackish looking slot with a carcinogenic tan and plastic smile noticed me looking lost. He was actually polite to me-a first for the day-and he led me directly to me Global Airways departure lounge.

That's when things started to look up a tad. I'd expected the usual barren, sterile-looking holding pen with its plastic seats designed to make it categorically impossible to find a comfortable position in them. The usual stained, institutional gray carpet. The usual boarding and departure announcements that might as well have been made in Urdu, for all the meaning they conveyed. The usual crush of (meta)humanity, where you try to avoid having your toes stepped on while you play the old game of "Spot the Hijacker."

Buzzz, thanks for playing! This was where the open corp ticket came into play big-time. The flackish kind of guy led me right through me holding pen where the hoi polloi were contained, past an armed sec-guard who actually touched his cap to me as I passed, and through a pair of double doors that could have been real mahogany. As we stepped through, me and my flackish shadow, I saw arrays of tiny LED ripple and flicker on both sides of the doorway. Yet another weapon-detector of some kind. I congratulated myself once again for deciding to travel completely unarmed except for my rapier wit.

The Global Priority Class Stand-By Lounge-that's what the nameplate on the door identified it as-looked like a cross between a gentleman's club in Edwarthan London (or, at least, the BBC rendition thereof), and a high-tone computer dealer's showroom. Heavy wood paneling, burgundy plush carpets, wingback leather chairs, crystal decanters on mahogany sideboards… and everywhere, suit-clad travelers tapping away on palmtop computers, babbling into cell phones, or staring off into space with fiber-optic spider webs trailing from their temples. Of the fifteen or so people in the lounge, the only people who weren't engaged in some form of electronic or verbal intercourse were me, the flack-who, with one final unctuous comment, made himself scarce-and a particularly shapely bartender (bartendress? bartendrix?) whose smile hinted she really needed my patronage to make her day complete. Out of the goodness of my heart I obliged her, and spent the next ten minutes savoring the best of all possible kinds of single-malt Scotch whiskey-free single-malt Scotch whiskey.

Finally, the boarding call came-delivered in person by a shapely, and decidedly mammalian, flight attendant-and we started to make our way through the priority boarding tube. This was a transpex cylinder-scrubbed so clean you could see the walls only by the way they diffracted lights outside-which extended from the terminal building to the first-class passenger door of the suborbital. Twenty meters away was another, similar tube-which suddenly reminded me of those "HabiTrail" things kids use to incarcerate gerbils-used by the declasse from the economy-class holding pen.

I took a couple of steps into the HabiTrail, and then stopped dead, earning a bad look from the shaikujin-still jacked into his portacomp-who tripped on my heel and collided into my back. I couldn't help it; I'd never had a chance to look at a suborbital from this close up before, and I certainly wasn't going to pass it up so he could get to his complimentary pretakeoff gin and tonic a couple of seconds sooner.

The thing was huge, much larger than I'd expected. Hell, suborbitals only carry about 150 people. How much space do you need for that? But of course, there's a lot more to a suborbital than the passenger compartment. There's all the stuff that goes into any standard civilian transport: turbojets, fuel, landing gear, navigation drek, baggage bays, and that place up front where the crew and the flight attendants have their parties. And then there's the extra stuff needed when you're flying at altitudes of 23 klicks (75,000 feet, for the metrically challenged) and speeds of Mach 20+. SCRAMjets to get you to cruising altitude and speed. Fuel for those SCRAMjets… and lots of it (SCRAMjets aren't known for their fuel economy). Cooling systems to keep your hull from melting under the air friction. And on and on. All in all, the suborbital was longer than a football field, a big integral lifting-body with tiny stub wings bolted on apparently as an afterthought. The body lines followed some complex-and very beautiful-multiple-recurve pattern, making the thing broad and high at the nose, but narrower and thinner toward the tail: something like an asymmetrical teardrop, maybe.

Finally, the pressure of shaikujin behind me got too much to ignore any longer, and I had to move along. Once I was inside, I could just as well have been in any plane-row upon row of seats in a three aisle three arrangement-except for one detail: no windows. The entertainment suite mounted in the seatback ahead of me made up for that lack, I decided quickly once I'd found my spot. As well as the usual selection of mindless movies, and even more mindless "classic tri-V" reruns, several of the program selections offered views from various microcams mounted on the hull. While the cabin attendants handed out free drinks and flavorless snacks-to the first-class passengers only, not to the great unwashed flying cattle-class, which started one row behind my own seat-I thoroughly enjoyed watching the baggage handlers conduct torture tests on people's suitcases as they threw them aboard.

Then we got the standard safety lecture-what to do in an emergency, like if the galley runs out of Bloody Mary mix- then we were rolling, and then we were climbing out. On my seatback screen I saw the ground drop away behind us, becoming a detailed scale model, then a contour map. Speed and angle of climb seemed-in my limited experience, at least-pretty extreme. But then the SCRAMjets kicked in- the pilot actually warned us before he lit them off-and I got a taste of what "fast" and "steep" really mean. Some ridiculously short time later, a voice came over the intercom, telling us we were at cruising altitude-23,000 meters, give or take-and flying at a mind-buggering 29,000 klicks per hour.

"We're on course and on schedule," the friendly voice announced, "and we should have you on the ground at Awalani a couple of minutes shy of four-fifty A.M. local rime. Have a good flight." I checked my watch, which I'd already adjusted for Hawai'i time: a couple of minutes past four in the morning. That put total flight time at something under one hour, gate to gate, Casper to Honolulu. Ain't progress wonderful?

With some regret, I wiped the external view-a distant horizon, showing some definite curvature-from the seatback screen, and tried to concentrate on biz. I'd never been to the Kingdom of Hawai'i before and knew next to squat about it (apart from what I'd seen on trid pabulum actioners like Tropical Heat). Sure, some of the runner wannabes who hang out in low-life bars copping a 'tude will tell you that the shadows are all the same, no matter where in the world you are. But I've never bought into that. Hell, from my own experience, not extensive, I know it's not true.

The shadows of Cheyenne are very different from the grungy underbelly of the Seattle sprawl. Maybe not if you take a big enough, abstract enough view, I suppose. If you think in terms of dynamics, there's much that's similar. The sex trade, the chip/drug industry. Organized crime and iconoclastic freelancers. Gangs of various stripes and flavors. Grifters and abusers, stalking the grifted and abused.

But when you get down to the personal scale-where it matters from a practical, rather than academic, point of view-There's a world of difference. In terms of dynamics, the threats are the same: the cops, the corps, the competition. In personal terms they wear different and unfamiliar faces. In the shadows sometimes the only way to win the game-whatever it happens to be at the moment-is to cheat. That's much harder when you don't know all the rules, and when to bend or break them.

Leaving Seattle for Cheyenne, I left familiar territory behind. I left behind my support network and many of my resources. I left behind my personal knowledge of the way the underbelly of the city worked-where to go to buy a piece of cold iron, what alleys not to flop in at night, what bartenders will swear up and down that they haven't seen you for weeks while you hide behind the beer fridge. Now I was doing it again, and it made me very uncomfortable.

I folded out the membrane keypad from the seatback entertainment unit and started checking out the system's data retrieval function. Not bad for a mobile unit. Somewhere deep in the plane's electronic guts an optical chip contained the latest editions of the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia, plus the World Almanac and Book of Facts, plus some fairly funky search algorithms. All for the convenience of Global Airways' cherished passengers (and to keep them occupied so they wouldn't drink too much and hit on the stewardesses). As the suborbital hurtled on, five times as fast as a rifle bullet, I started working out some search strings.

We were well along on the glidepath by the time I'd done what I could, and the stewardess had already warned me three times to return my seat to its upright and most uncomfortable position. I had a lot to think over as I folded up the seatback system's keyboard, and tried to keep my stomach out of my mouth as the suborbital pitched over even steeper for final approach.

The on-board data retrieval system had given me some' background, but I'd soon come to the conclusion that the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia seemed to be targeted at elementary-school kids who were considerably less streetwise than I'd been at that age. Sure, it was a great source for data on the kingdom's population (four million and change), its capital (Honolulu, natch), its average per-capita income (20,000?), and the other superficial drek a kid would want to plagiarize for an essay. But for the real meat, I soon realized I'd have to access sources with a slightly more mature worldview.

Fortunately, the seatback system offered a gateway to the plane's communication systems, and from mere an uplink to the Amethyste system of low-Earth orbit comm satellites. Through the Amethyste grid, I could sidelink to Renraku's DataPATH system, and then downlink to the public databases with which I'd been familiar in Seattle. Hell, returning to my old electronic stomping grounds was easier from 23,000 meters over the Pacific-once I'd figured out the gateway protocol-than it was to navigate the Sioux RTG system to get to the same nodes. (Of course, it was also a hell of a lot more expensive. When I finally logged off and the system reported my connect charges, I went pale for a moment, then thanked the fine folks at Yamatetsu-in absentia-for picking up the tab.) The only thing I'd wanted that the system couldn't give me was access to a Shadow-land server. (Well, I suppose it probably could have, but the audit trail stored in the guts of the big suborbital would have been like garish flags reading "Shadowrunner On Board.")

So here's what I managed to dig up about the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i, summarized in the inimitable Dirk Montgomery style. (Oh yeah, one quick aside. Mainlanders probably aren't used to seeing Hawai'i spelt with the apostrophe. Back in the weird old days, when the islands were actually a state of the now-defunct U.S., the name had been spelt Hawaii. No longer, chummer. An easy way to slot off an islander is to spell the name of his country without the apostrophe. An easier way is to mispronounce it, apparently: it should be pronounced ha-VEYE-ee, with a noticeable glottal stop before the last syllable. At first I thought this anal retentiveness about pronunciation was stupid, but then I considered what I'd think of someone who pronounced my city of birth as SEE-tul. Point taken.)

Okay, so anybody who's attended elementary school in the United Canathan and American States will know that Hawai'i used to be the fiftieth state of the union. What I hadn't known was that this was originally accomplished not by negotiation, but actually through the actions of a U.S. naval officer who'd placed his gunboat at the disposal of some American robber barons who considered that the incumbent national government was actually an obstacle to doing business. (Who says history never repeats itself? A corporation effectively taking over a sovereign state? Sounds like the early twenty-first century, neh?) Once the incumbent monarch, King Kamehameha III, was ousted, one Sanford B. Dole-a high corp muckamuck who'd made his fortune in pineapples, or some damn thing-named himself head of state of the entire island chain.

That was in 1893. After five years, the good old U.S. of A. decided that having a corp suit as head of state wasn't a Good Thing. So they moved in and annexed the islands from the robber baron who'd annexed them from the native Hawaiians…

And immethately started peppering the islands with military bases-naval, air force, etcetera, drekcetera. In 1959 the U.S. government decided to legitimize this shotgun marriage of an annexation, and declared the islands to be the fiftieth state. Again-judging by the historical records I could access, at least-nobody bothered to consult the native Hawaiians about this change. (Hey, they were just primitive Polynesians, weren't they? And they couldn't even vote…)

That's how things stayed, more or less, for fifty years. Oh, sure, there were occasional resurgences of nationalism, of "Hawai'i for Hawai'ians" sentiment-led most notably by a group calling itself Na Kama'aina ("The Land Children")- but nothing much happened until the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Back on the mainland, trouble was brewing. The U.S. government-and mainly the U.S. military-saw the writing on the wall, and knew that the "Inthan problem" would soon be coming to a nasty, violent head. Suddenly the military bases on the islands of Hawai'i became even more important than they were before. Here were bases and assets that the SAIM "terrorists" couldn't sabotage or infiltrate easily. (Much harder for some militant Sioux warriors to blow the drek out of Pearl Harbor than to terrorize Colorado Springs-so the reasoning went, at least.) More and more major military research projects were moved to the islands, "out of harm's way."

Hah, and again hah! Na Kama'aina, and more hard-hooped splinter factions like the whimsically named ALOHA (Army for the Liberation Of Hawai'i), started looking to the SAIM hotheads as role models. Hey, if the mainland aboriginals could kick the drek out of the Anglos, why couldn't they?

Between 2011 and 2013, ALOHA and its bomb-throwing brethren went on a rampage, car-bombing government buildings, army barracks, and military installations. During the two-year reign of terror, ALOHA claimed to have greased some 150 "legitimate" targets. (Its leaders didn't have much to say about the three hundred-plus innocents offed in "collateral damage.")

Predictably, this made it heat-wave time. At the request of the state government, the feds sent a battalion of troops to Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Base, renamed the combat troops the "Civil Defense Force," and proceeded to break heads. According to my research, there was a surprising incidence of suspected ALOHA sympathizers "killed while resisting arrest" or "shot while trying to escape." Who would have thought it? (Yeah, right.)

The heat wave went on, and Na Kama'aina, ALOHA, and their fellow-travelers dropped from public ken. For a while, at least. To (mis)quote Shakespeare, the Civil Defense Force had scotched the snake, not killed it. The ALOHA boys and girls kept working, but in the shadows now rather than out in the bright tropical sun.

Some bright spark decided that a PR coup was needed, so ALOHA and the rest started looking for a legal lineal descendent of King Kamehameha I, the Ali'i ("king") who'd united the islands initially, turning a bunch of squabbling islands into a single nation. Surprise, surprise, they found one. (Well, sure they did: Look for something hard enough and you're going to find it… whether it actually exists or not.) Seems that one Danforth Ho-a twenty-four-year-old management consultant on the island of Maui, who happened to be one-quarter Polynesian by blood-was actually the direct lineal descendent of King Kam I… and hence the True and Rightful King of the Islands. Now that ALOHA and crew were able to produce-or at least talk about-a "rightful king in exile," more and more of the islanders started to swing over to their cause. (The fact that the Civil Defense Force wasn't exactly discriminating in which heads it broke couldn't have hurt.)

Now, Na Kama'aina and ALOHA apparently thought that their "Ali'i in exile" was just puppet, a mouthpiece they could use to build up support from the populace. And at first, that seemed to be the truth. Danforth Ho wasn't really what you'd call king material; both Ho himself and his "handlers" agreed on that. But then, when he saw that people were really starting to follow him, to believe in him, Danforth had something of a change of heart. He did some studying and learned more about his true heritage, about what his umpty-ump-grandfather had actually done for the people of Hawai'i. And he realized that he could actually do something about the situation. Without the knowledge of his handlers, he started to become an "Ali'i in exile," not just a figurehead. On his own initiative he started negotiating for support and funds with various megacorporate interests in the islands. (Want to take a wild guess about one of me key corporations he dealt with? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. A clue for you: the corp name starts with a Y…)

It was in 2016 that Ho started cutting his own private deals. It wasn't until 2017-when various megacorps started throwing their resources behind Na Kama'aina plans-that Danforth's handlers realized what had happened. Apparently some hotheads came this close to icing Ho on the spot- probably by arranging for a "tragic accident"-so they could keep the reins in their own acquisitive hands. But wiser heads prevailed, realizing that having promoted Danforth Ho as me True and Rightful King and all that, now they were stuck with him. And by this time, the people were following Ho, not the leadership of Na Kama 'aina…

While Na Kama'aina's leaders were still trying to get Ho back under their control, they found out to their absolute horror that he'd cut a deal with the local yakuza, along the same lines as the ones he'd penned with the corps. (Now, this surprised me a little when I learned it. I guess I hadn't thought that there was much yak activity in Hawai'i. I should have known, though: Wherever there's a large proportion of Japanese, you're going to find yaks.) Na Kama'aina felt control really slipping away now.

By late summer 2017 the federal government mobilized its armed forces on the mainland and set forth to implement the Resolution Act of 2016-in other words, the "Genocide Campaign" against Native Americans. We all know what happened immethately thereafter: Multiple volcanoes blew their tops under the influence of the Ghost Dancers, and that was the end of the Genocide Campaign. When word reached the islands of just what kind of drek had gone down, Danforth Ho decided that der Tag had finally arrived. He issued his orders to the army of followers he'd built up throughout the islands.

Whole assault teams of kahunas-the local flavor of shamans, I think-engaged the Civil Defense Force, and tied them up real good. Where resistance was especially strong, Great Form spirits backed the kahunas. Simultaneously, the yakuza mobilized a "civilian army" which, supplemented by heavily armed megacorp security forces, closed down basically all military and government communication channels on the islands, and blockaded various key government buildings.

Meanwhile, Danforth Ho-backed by the street-fighters of Na Kama'aina (who'd finally realized on which side their bread was buttered) and by thousands of devoted civilians- marched on the capitol building next to the old Iolani Palace in downtown Honolulu. The mob broke down the doors, rousted out the government officials and functionaries, and basically installed Danforth Ho as Ali'i. On August 22, 2017, King Kamehameha IV-born Danforth Ho-officially declared Hawai'i's sovereignty.

Predictably, the U.S. government back on the mainland didn't take too kindly to a bunch of jumped-up pineapple-pickers-led by a management consultant, for frag's sake!- taking over their major military staging area in the Pacific basin. It seems that most of the Pacific fleet wasn't in Pearl Harbor in late August of 2017. In fact, it was in transit to the west coast of the U.S., presumably to provide support, if necessary, to the abortive Genocide Campaign. (And you can bet that Danforth Ho, aka King Kam IV, knew that, and planned on it. Otherwise things might have gone very differently in the streets of Honolulu.) When word reached D.C. about Hawai'i's declaration of independence, encrypted messages downlinked from military satellites to the flagship of the Pacific fleet-no doubt the military equivalent of "get your sorry asses back there, and clean this mess up."

While the new King Kam was consolidating his control at home, his new allies weren't idle. A delegation of megacorps-led by Yamatetsu, it seems-was already pressuring Washington to recognize Hawai'i as a sovereign state. The feds told the corps precisely what they could do with that idea, and ordered the Pacific fleet to flank speed.

I wish I'd been there for the next act of this saga-it must have been quite a show. Mere minutes after Washington's rejection of the megacorps' "polite suggestion," a barrage of Thor shots" bracketed the USS Enterprise, the flattop that was the flagship of the Pacific fleet.

("Hold the phone," I hear you say. "What the flying frag is a 'Thor shot'?" Thought you'd never ask.

(Project Thor dates back-way back, apparently, to the middle of the last century or thereabouts-but it's an idea whose time had come. Project Thor envisioned putting a whole drekload of "semismart" projectiles in low Earth orbit, equipped with little more than a retro-rocket, some steering vanes, and a dog-brain seeker head on the tip. No warhead, because one isn't needed. Basically, they're just "smart crowbars." When you need to send a blunt message to someone, just send the appropriate commands to a couple dozen Thor projectiles. They fire their retros to kick themselves out of orbit, then plummet free toward the ground at some horrendous speed. Their seeker heads now start looking for an appropriate target, depending on their programming-a Main battle tank, maybe, or the dome of the Capitol Building… or something that looks like an aircraft carrier. Down they come, packing Great Ghu knows how much kinetic energy, and whatever they hit just kinda goes away… probably accompanied by much pyrotechnics. In essence, then, Thor shots are just guided meteorites. Elegant idea, neh?

(That was the idea, but as far as anyone knew-up to 2017, at least-nobody had actually implemented Project Thor. To this day, nobody's precisely sure who fired the rounds that vaporized a couple of tons of seawater off the Enterprise's bows.

(But I can make a pretty good guess, based on some interesting coincidences. Coincidentally, 2017 was the year in which Ares Macrotechnology took over the old Freedom space station, the one they eventually modified and renamed Zurich-Orbital. Just as coincidentally. Ares was the only megacorp with orbital assets anywhere near the correct "window" for a Thor shot into the central Pacific. And- also coincidentally, of course-Ares was one of the mega¬corps with which our friend Danforth Ho had enjoyed the longest and most intense private discussions… Quelle chance…

(End of digression.)

So that was it. Screened by Aegis cruisers or not, there was no way a carrier battle group could intercept Thor shots, or survive them if they landed. Once more, the task force reversed course, and slunk dispiritedly into San Thego harbor. The feds recognized Hawai'i's independence, and King Kam IV became the head of a constitutional monarchy that still exists today. And they all lived happily ever after…

Null! As I said before, megacorps don't give gifts; they make investments. Now they came to King Kam looking for some major return on their investments. Like special trade deals, extraterritoriality, and basically almost complete freedom to do biz as they saw fit in the islands.

The people of Hawai'i liked the idea of independence from the U.S., and they weren't convinced that immethately giving up that independence to the megacorps was such a swift idea. The leadership of Na Kama 'aina-yep, it was still hanging around-decided that this was a perfect lever to pry away King Kam's popular support (and, ideally, to put their own figurehead-a real figurehead this time-on the throne). Campaigning on the platform of cutting back-way back-on the megacorps' freedoms, Na Kama 'aina politicos won a significant number of seats in the legislature. King Kam suddenly found himself confronting a strong faction within his own government that was dedicated to tossing him out on his hoop. He managed to keep control of the majority, but it was a very close thing.

King Kam IV thed in 2045-no, the Na Kama'aina didn't off him… I don't think-and the faction of the government that had backed him retained just enough influence to put the successor he'd designated on the throne: his son, Gordon Ho. At age twenty-five, our boy Gordon became King Ka-mehameha V, and still wears the funky yellow-feathered headdress of the Ali'i.

I was still chewing over all the facts I'd absorbed and trying to make overall sense of them when the suborbital touched down at Awalani-"Sky Harbor."

"Welcome to Hawai'i," the flight attendant announced.