House of the Sun

5

Call it the Montgomery Principle of Inverse Relationships. The faster you can get somewhere, the longer the wait for customs at the other end. Honolulu's Awalani Airport added another nice, big data-point to my mental graph.

I timed it. After spending only forty-some minutes to travel six thousand klicks, it took more more sixty minutes to traverse the fifteen meters from the end of me customs/ immigration lineup to freedom in the lobby of the airport.

The only difference between the Hawai'ian customs officials and the functionaries who'd hassled me at Casper was the tans. Other than that, it was the same trolls in undersized uniforms watching from the sidelines while humorless drones asked me questions about whether I was importing meat products in my luggage. (I've always had the perverse impulse to ask a customs drone whether a dismembered body in my suitcase qualifies as "meat products…")

As I waited in the "Foreign Visitors" lineup, I watched with growling bitterness the speed with which the returning kama'ainas-the locals, Hawai'ian citizens-were processed through. No probing questions about meat products for them, and smiles and greetings of "Aloha" instead of a cold-voiced 'Travel documentation, please."

At last I was through, though, into a pleasantly spacious and airy lobby, which suddenly struck me as packed with a disproportionate number of trolls and orks-at least in comparison to Cheyenne and even Seattle. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that the juvenile Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia had stated that the combined proportion of orks and trolls was something like thirty-three percent. What was it in Seattle? Closer to twenty-one, I thought. Well, I'd always heard that the Hawai'ians bred them big.

Through the customs nonsense at last, I started thinking about my next problem. Namely, where the frag was I going, and to do what! I'd be met-that's what the dwarf with the road-kill eyebrows had told me at Casper. By who, though, that was the question?

A question that was answered almost immethately. As I stood there looking vaguely lost, a figure separated itself from a passel of camera-laden Nihonese tourists, and approached. A large figure-an ork with a rather astounding set of shoulders and small tusks that looked impossibly white against his tanned skin-wearing a well-tailored business suit. In his big hands he held a little laser-printed sign that read "Tozer." This time I didn't have any trouble remembering that was supposed to be me, so I beckoned him over.

He gave me a broad smile that would have looked much more friendly without those fangs. "Mr. Brian Tozer?" he asked me in a voice like midnight and velvet.

I nodded. "That's me." I reached in my pocket and pulled out my credstick, the one with my digital password stored in memory, and offered it to him.

He chuckled-a sound like big rocks rolling in a fast-flowing stream-and waved it off. "I know you're you, Mr. Tozer," he said. "You look a lot healthier in person, y'know."

He'd probably seen my driver's license holo, or something like it, I figured. (If you ever actually look like your license holo, you're too sick to drive…) I shrugged. "Have it your way…" I hesitated, not knowing what to call him.

"Scott," he told me. "You can call me Scott, Mr. Tozer."

"Dirk," I responded automatically, then quickly corrected, "My name's Brian, but everyone's always called me Dirk." Frag, I had to be jet-lagged or something.

Scott's big brown eyes twinkled. "Dirk's chill with me," he said. "Let's get your luggage."

First-class passengers' luggage was routed to its own carousel, and most of my flight-mates had already collected theirs and cruised before the first bag even showed up in the cattle-class area. I pointed out my single bag, which Scott scooped up like it weighed nothing, then tossed it onto a little automated baggage cart that followed him around like a loyal spaniel. We led the spaniel-cart out of the terminal onto the road.

That's when the heat first hit me. Hell, it was only a little past oh-six-hundred, but I guessed the temperature was already around twenty-seven degrees, and the humidity was something horrendous. In seconds I felt my shirt start to stick to my back. Scott must have sensed my discomfort, because he chuckled again, and announced, "Going to be a nice toasty one, today. We're looking for thirty-one, thirty-two by midafternoon." He touched the cloth of my black shirt. "Hope you brought something a little more practical to wear, brah." I glanced pointedly at his suit, and he smiled again. "Yeah, but I'm paid to be uncomfortable."

The sky was still dark-that's right, it was the tropics, wasn't it? Dawn would be later and more sudden than I was used to in Cheyenne-but the sodium lights were almost as bright as day. Under their yellow glare. I saw where Scott was leading me: a metallic charcoal gray limo, a Rolls-Royce Phaeton, or some close cousin. A huge, low-slung thing that looked like it was doing Mach 2 while still parked at the curb. I let out a long, low whistle to show I was impressed.

Scott shrugged those massive shoulders. "Yeah," he acknowledged. "I still feel like that sometimes." From his pocket he pulled a little remote and pushed a button. With a silky whine like a high-speed turbine, the engine lit, and a moment later one of the oversized doors into the passenger compartment swung silently open. As the ork-chauffeur retrieved my bag from the spaniel-cart and tossed it into a trunk big enough for a game of Urban Brawl, I climbed into the back of the Phaeton.

Mental note: I must acquire myself one of these things at some point. Not to drive. To live in.

The passenger compartment looked bigger than some lower-class dosses I've rented; a huge, overstuffed couch where you'd expect there to be a rear seat. No, I corrected instantly, it wasn't a couch… unless you consider four-point harnesses to be standard equipment for your living room furniture. I settled down and felt the opulent upholstery wrap itself lovingly around my fundament. (Did the limo come with some device-a crane, perhaps-to pry passengers out of the deep seat again as an optional extra?) Impulsively, I pulled off my shoes and made fists with my toes in the deep-pile carpeting. (One of my favorite flat-film movies from the last century recommends it as a cure for jet-lag, and who am I to disagree?)

From the outside the big wraparound windows had been opaque, charcoal mirror-finish to match the coachwork. From inside they seemed to totally disappear… except for the fact that some subtle polarization removed the glare from the brilliant sodium streetlights. Between me and the driver's compartment was an array that looked like a waist-height entertainment wall unit: trid set, various formats of optical players, a stereo system that would give my technophile buddy Quincy wet dreams for the rest of his life, and something that looked like a scrambled satellite uplink commo unit. And, oh yes… a small liquor cabinet/wet-bar arrangement. Above the entertainment suite was a transparent kevlarplex screen. Through it I saw Scott slide into the front seat, push back a hank of hair, and slip a vehicle control line into his datajack. He turned around and grinned at me through a centimeter of reinforced kevlarplex. "Ready to go, Mr. Dirk?" His voice came from a hidden speaker somewhere behind my left ear.

"Only when you get rid of this thing," I told him, leaning forward to rap on the bulletproof screen. "I feel like I'm in an aquarium."

His chuckle sounded clearly from the hidden speakers as the screen whined down into the top of the entertainment suite. "Better?"

"Much." Another couple of centimeters of my anatomy was engulfed by the upholstery as Scott put the Phaeton into gear and pulled out smoothly. "Scott," I said after a moment, "your call. Do I need the four-point?"

"Hey, I know some tourists pay to be strapped down." I saw his large head shake. "You can get by with the lap-belt if you like, but you want something to keep you from rattling around if I have to do any heavy evasion."

As I fastened the lap-strap, I asked the next logical question. "Is that particularly likely? Evasion, I mean?"

My chauffeur shrugged. "Likely? No. Possible? Yeah." He snorted. "We've had a couple of wild moves against corp higher-ups this year, and the shooters might not bother to find out who's in the limo before they start busting caps, y'know what I mean?"

"Who's behind the wild moves?"

"ALOHA, who else?"

I blinked. "ALOHA? They're still around?"

"They're always around, brah. Some people are never satisfied with what they got. Yanks out, Japs out, haoles out…"

I cut him off. "Howlies?"

"Haoles." He spelled the word. "Anglos, brah. White folk. Foreigners… like you, okay?" The smile I could hear in his voice robbed the words of offense. Then he continued, "Like I said, haoles out, corps out…" He snorted again, letting me know what he thought about that attitude.

We pulled out of the airport compound, and onto a modern six-lane freeway. Scott opened up the throttle, and the Phaeton's turbine sang. I glanced at the wet bar, thought about it, then-what the frag anyway?-cracked it open and searched through the miniature bottles inside for some Scotch. Glenmorangie, twenty-five-year-old single-malt- well, that would certainly make the grade. The limo's active suspension ate up the road vibration so I had no trouble pouring a healthy shot into a heavy crystal glass and adding a splash of water. I silently toasted the back of Scott's head, and in the rearview mirror I saw his eyes crinkle in a smile: I sipped, and let the Scotch work its magic.

"Scott," I said after a couple of minutes, "you know who I am, right?"

He paused, and I knew he was thinking about how best to answer. "Of course I do, Mr. Tozer," he said at last.

I smiled. "Call me Dirk," I reminded him quietly.

He smiled again and admitted, "Okay, yeah, I know who you are."

"And Jacques Barnard told you what I was here for?"

"Don't know any Jacques Barnard," he lied firmly. "My boss is Elsie Vogel at Nebula." He paused. "But yeah, I know you're here to deliver a message, and I know who you're going to deliver it to."

"Tell me."

He shook his head. "You don't need to know that yet," he said, and for the first time I could hear the hint of steel under the friendliness. This well-dressed ork wasn't just any corp gofer, I realized, he had some juice. "I'll drive you there when the time comes," he went on, and again his voice was geniality itself. "Don't you worry about that."

"When?"

"Tomorrow, probably. The man you're to meet-he's on one of the outer islands today-won't be back till late tonight, early tomorrow morning. Emergency trip, or something like that." He turned for a moment and grinned at me over his shoulder. "Means you've got the whole of today and tonight to see the sights, brah. And me at your disposal." He hooked a large thumb at his chest. "Number one tour guide, that's me."

I sighed and contemplated that over another sip of Glenmorangie. I didn't really want to admit it, but I was enjoying myself. I kind of liked Scott-even knowing he had corporate steel under the good-ol'-boy exterior-and I certainly liked the idea of having a chauffeured limo at my beck and call. But…

But I had to keep my level of paranoia up. Despite all the trappings, this wasn't a vacation, this was biz. And, worse, I was in the dark about a lot of what the biz entailed. I didn't know who I had to meet, or why. I didn't know what would happen to me afterward. And I didn't know who or what had any interest in getting between me and the objective. I was out of my territory-I had to keep reminding myself of that-playing in someone else's yard, and out of my comfort zone. Who knows: Everything might come off as smooth as synthsilk. I deliver the message, maybe receive a reply, then Scott ferries me back to Awalani, and I'm winging my way home to Cheyenne. But if it didn't, and I suddenly found myself rather dead because I hadn't taken precautions, then I wouldn't even have the satisfaction of being able to haunt Barnard through all eternity. The fault would be my own, not his. I was exposed-that's what I had to remember, every moment of every day. And I had to do what I could to minimize that exposure. Which reminded me…

"Scott"

"Yes, Mr. Dirk?"

"I had to leave some… personal effects… behind me on the mainland, if you know what I mean." The back of his neck wrinkled, and I knew he was grinning like a bandit. "I want to correct that problem. Can you help me out?"

"You really don't need it, y'know." He rapped on the driver's side window with a bulging knuckle. "Do you have any idea what it takes to punch through this stuff?"

I wasn't going to be put off that easily. "Even so," I pressed. "Call it a good-luck charm… like a rabbit's foot. I just wouldn't feel comfortable without it."

He laughed aloud at that. "Yeah, a nine-millimeter rabbit's foot, I bet." He sobered quickly. "Okay. It's chill, brah, I'll buff you out." He glanced back again. "And I'll get you some appropriate clothes, too. Okay?"

'I've always been partial to kevlar," I told him, "if you can get it in one of my colors."

Ahead of us, against the blackness of the sky, I could see the lighted ziggurats of skyrakers. For a moment I had one of those moments of disorientation. I could as well have been cruising north on Highway 5 toward downtown Seattle as west on Hawai'i Route 1. In the dark most cities looked the same.

Again, Scott seemed to pick up my unspoken thought. 'Too bad you had to catch the red-eye. This is a real nice view-a good intro to the city, y'know what I mean?"

"So what's Honolulu like?" I asked him. "You live in the city, don't you?"

"Yeah, I've got a place in the Nebula complex." He shrugged. "It's a city, y'know? It's got its good points and it's got its bad points. Places you shouldn't miss, and places you shouldn't be caught dead. It's got its corporators, it's got its burakumin"-he used the Japanese term for the homeless or dispossessed, an insulting word that was gaining currency among corp suits to refer to people without corporate affiliation-"and it's got its tourists." He laughed. "Bruddah, does it have its tourists."

"High-level corps types?"

"Most of them, yeah. Whole swarms of them coming over from Asia, and some from Europe. But there's still the mom and pop types who've saved for years to get away and splash money around for a while."

"That's what drives the economy, isn't it? Tourism?"

"That's what the mainland guidebooks say," he agreed. "But most of it's corp-driven, really. Hey, Hawai'i's the biggest corporate free port going. Where do you think the money comes from?"

I thought about that for a while as the skyrakers reared up around us, constellations of electric stars in the firmament. "So what are the bad points about the city?" I asked at last.

"The politicians," Scott responded at once with a humorless laugh. "I don't know what they're like where you come from, brah, but here they're like the trees: crooked with their palms out." He chortled as he pointed out the window to a coconut palm on the street corner.

He slowed and swung the big limo around a tight corner.

We sighed to a stop, and he killed the engine. "We're here," he announced unnecessarily.

"Which is where?" I asked him a few moments later as I watched him unload my single bag from the limo's hangar-sized trunk. I looked up at the building looming over me: white as only artificial marble can be, multiple complex curves that seemed to give the building a sense of movement in the faint pink of the predawn.

"The Diamond Head Hotel," he told me, "right next to- you guessed it-Diamond Head itself."

"Open to the public?"

"You've got to be kidding, brah," the big ork snorted. "Even I don't have high enough corp connections to stay here. You pack big juju, even if you don't know it."

I nodded as I followed him up the ramp toward the lobby. There were corporate hostelries in Seattle-places open only to various ranks of corporators, regardless of their actual affiliations-but the concept hadn't really caught on there yet. (In Cheyenne? Maybe that backwater burg will catch up in a decade, chummer.) Apparently, the high-tone suits like the hostelries because they contribute even more to the separation between them and the burakumin… a class that included me, which gave the whole thing a nice touch of irony, didn't it?

We breezed right through the lobby. Scott didn't even glance at the smooth-faced slot behind the front desk, so I didn't either. Up the elevator we went-I noticed the ork had to wave a keycard at the control panel before the door would open and again before the elevator would start-and out onto the landing on the seventeenth floor. The hotel- corporate hostelry or not-had the same feel and ambiance as modem hotels anywhere in the world, all the individuality and character pressed out of them. I could just as well have been in the Sheraton in Seattle.

I followed Scott all the way down to the end of the hall and waited while he waved the keycard again at the door. The maglock snapped back, and he pushed the door open with his foot, stepping aside to let me enter first.

Well, okay, this wasn't like the Sheraton… at least, those rooms in the Sheraton I've had cause to visit. Come to think of it, it was conceptually the nonmobile analog of the Phaeton's passenger compartment: similar overstuffed couches, similar entertainment suite, similar wet-bar arrangement.

Pure, packaged hedonistic luxury, in peach and aqua. Chuckling softly at my reaction-probably a pretty good gaffed-fish imitation-Scott carried my case through into the bedroom of the suite and placed it gently on a bed big enough for one hell of a party. As he came back toward me, I had the momentary urge to slip him a tip.

"You want to grab some shut-eye?" he asked.

I thought about it, glanced at that bed, and thought about it again. "Not a bad idea," I admitted.

"No problem." He checked his watch, a pricey Quasar chronograph (yet more evidence, if I'd really needed it, that he was more than a simple limo driver). "How's about I swing by in about three hours?"

"Make it four," I told him. "And-"

He cut me off with a grin. "Don't worry, Mr. Dirk, I'll bring you your rabbit's foot. And some real clothes."

True to form-whenever I really feel like I need sleep, it happens this way-I didn't slip into the deepest, most restful phase of sleep until fifteen minutes before I'd set the alarm to go off. So my eyes were still dry and gritty, my thoughts just a touch fogged, when I rolled out of the party-bed.

Sun was pouring through the picture window, and I was diverted for almost a full minute by the view as I stood there naked in the middle of the room. I was looking out toward Diamond Head-I assume that's what it was, at least-a huge outcropping of weathered rock. From this angle it didn't look so much like a diamond as a slightly crooked anvil, but at that moment, I couldn't have cared less. It was beautiful as all hell, wreathed around its base by lush foliage and even lusher mansions, silhouetted against a sky that was a clearer and purer blue than any I'd ever seen before. If there was any drek in the atmosphere-particulates, NO, and other miscellaneous nasties-there wasn't enough of it to take the edge off the view's clarity. Not like Seattle-in fragging spades-or even like Cheyenne. One of the advantages of being an island in the middle of the Pacific, I figured, watching the trade winds stir the coconut palms lining the shore: The prevailing winds blow all your pollution problems out to sea. Not a bad system, if you can arrange it.

I shook off my fascination with the view and headed for the bathroom to take care of the fur that had built up on my teeth, in addition to other matters. I'd thrown on a bathrobe and was debating doing something drastic with my hair- mousse, maybe or (better yet) some fragging varnish-when the suite's door signal chirped.

You know how you can tell a real luxury hotel from a wannabe? A front door intercom in the bathroom, within easy reach of both drekker and bathtub. The Diamond Head Hotel definitely fit the first category. I leaned over and hit the intercom switch. "Yeah?"

The two-centimeter thumbnail screen lit up, and I saw Scott's grinning face. "You up and around, Mr. Dirk?"

"More or less. Come on in, make yourself at home. I'll be out in a couple of ticks." I hit the key labeled Door Unlock.

When I emerged a few moments later, the big ork was standing in the middle of the living room staring out the picture windows, transfixed by the same view that had nailed me earlier. He was in mufti. He'd looked big enough in his tailored business suit. Now, the impression of overwhelming size was emphasized by the fact that he wore a Hawai'ian shirt-yes, those things were still in fashion, apparently- that made him look like a profusion of jungle flowers that had decided to take a stroll. On the couch near him were a couple of parcels.

He turned as I emerged from the bathroom. "Sorry to keep you waiting," I told him, running my hands through my hair, which still stood out in places like stickpins.

Scott chuckled and patted one of his own unruly cowlicks. "I hear you, bruddah." He gestured to the parcels on the couch. "Brought you some things. Want to try them on?"

"Did you guess at the sizes?" I looked again at the chauffeur's two-ax-handle shoulders. How good would he be at judging the size of anyone with a normal physique?

"No need, I just checked your file. One-eighty-five height, eighty-nine mass. One-oh-five regular in the chest, eighty-four centimeters in the waist. Right?"

"Not quite." I was perversely glad that he'd got something wrong. Christ… if Barnard had my fragging measurements on file, what else did he have in my docket? An itemized list of sexual conquests? An estimate of my daily calorie intake? "Closer to eighty-six in the waist these days."

Scott grinned triumphantly. "I figured they might be old figures, so I took the liberty of letting the waist out a touch. Check 'em out"

With a sigh I picked up the parcels and headed into the bedroom to change.

The clothes fit perfectly, and I had to admit that they were a hell of a lot more practical than what I'd brought. A couple of pairs of light colored, lightweight slacks-five-pocket things, with slightly baggy legs, pulled in at the ankles. A couple of Hawai'ian-style shirts-floral prints, but a lot more muted than Scott's choice-slightly oversized, short-sleeved, cut to be worn outside the waistband of the pants. A second package contained a set of Ares Arms form-fitting body armor-short-sleeved, of course-that fit me like a reinforced second skin. I selected bone-white slacks and a dusty blue shirt with a red hibiscus pattern. As long as I kept the shirt buttoned up high, you couldn't see I was wearing armor underneath.

Scott nodded approvingly as I re-emerged. "Much better," he told me with a grin. "You look almost like a kama'aina."

"What abou-?"

"Your rabbit's foot?" he finished for me. "Here." He reached up under the waist of his shirt, pulled something out, and tossed it to me.

I snagged it instinctively and examined the object. A Seco LD-120 light pistol, in a compact, cut-down waist holster. I pulled out the blocky black macroplast weapon, dropped the clip, worked the action. Perfect condition-as I'd expected, when you came down to it. The holster had two side pouches, each holding a spare clip-thirty-six rounds in total, then. The little pistol didn't have anywhere near the stopping power of my trusty old Manhunter, but if the fertilizer hit the ventilator, I'd at least be able to give an opponent something to think about. With a nod of thanks to Scott, I slipped the holster into the waistband of my pants over the left hip, attaching the clip to the belt. I checked in the mirror, and saw that the loose-fitting shirt concealed the weapon almost perfectly.

"Feeling luckier now?" Scott asked.

The first order of business was food. I hadn't bothered with the light meal served on the suborbital flight, so the last time I'd eaten was almost eighteen hours ago. My stomach was starting to suspect my throat had been cut.

Scott led me downstairs to the restaurant-opulent, as I'd expected-and out onto an open patio where white-coated staff were tending a breakfast buffet. For a moment I wondered about the tactical wisdom of an open patio, but then I saw the little warning signs positioned every three meters along the patio rail. Notice: Protective Magic in Use, they read. I nodded in understanding. A physical barrier of some kind, I figured, backed by some kind of spell barrier. It couldn't have been a mana barrier, because birds flew unhindered between the patio and the surrounding palms.

The patio was empty, apart from me and Scott, and the serving staff… and about a dozen little beige birds that looked like some kind of dove. The big ork led me to a table by the patio rail and asked me what I wanted for breakfast.

While he went off and filled my order-I could get used to this kind of personal service, I realized-I enjoyed the view. The view of Diamond Head was blocked by some buildings from this vantage point, but I could look out to the west, toward downtown Honolulu and, beyond that, toward Awalani Airport and Pearl Harbor. The still, azure water of the bay was dotted with pleasure craft of all types and sizes. Brightly colored spinnakers gleamed in the sun, while here and there speedboats kicked curtains of spray into the air as they cut tight turns. In the distance, halfway to the horizon, I saw a high-speed craft of some kind, going like a bat out of hell but leaving almost no wake. Some kind of hydrofoil, I figured; possibly an inter-island ferry.

As Scott returned with my loaded plate-he'd either erred on the side of generosity or else judged my appetite based on his own-I heard a distant ripping sound. I looked up and to the west.

Two vicious little darts were shooting through the air, climbing and accelerating out over the ocean-fighters of some kind, no doubt launched from Pearl. Even though I knew they weren't any faster than the suborbital I'd ridden a few hours earlier-hell, they might even have a lower top speed-they looked much faster. Pure, violent energy, that's the way they seemed to me at that moment: volatile, apparently ready to maneuver in an instant or lash out with weapons of grotesque power.

Now mat I was looking to the sky, I noticed something else, something that I'd seen only a couple of times on the mainland. It was the contrail of a high-altitude plane, but this wasn't the geometrically perfect straight line of a highspeed civilian transport. No, this was like donuts on a rope-a central line contrail surrounded by evenly spaced torus-shaped loops. From what little I knew of aerospace technology-the kind of drek you pick up from scanning the popular press-the only kind of engine that could create that characteristic donut-on-a-rope structure was a pulse-detonation propulsion system. As far as I knew, pulse-detonation engines were used on only one kind of craft: hypersonic spy planes, Aurora class and up.

I frowned, thinking. Pulse-detonation is pretty hot fragging stuff. Even now, decades after it was introduced, it was still a touchy thing. Anybody could make a standard jet engine-turbofan, ramjet, even SCRAMjet-but only a very few engineers could design and build a pulse-detonation drive that actually worked without blowing itself into shrapnel. I wouldn't have imagined that Hawai'i had the resources-monetary and personnel-to develop something that sophisticated.

But then, I realized, maybe the kingdom didn't have to develop it from scratch. When Danforth Ho's civilian army" suppressed the Civil Defense Force and basically took over the islands, he might well have "acquired" a lot of interesting tech by default, as it were.

And that thought brought up a whole drekload of other questions. Now that I considered it, I realized that the descriptions I'd read of Danforth Ho's coup and the islands' secession from the U.S. had been pretty fragging superficial on a couple of pretty major points. The Pacific fleet business-that I could understand. A task force commander doesn't argue with Thor shots. But what about the materiel at the military bases throughout the islands? And the bases themselves? Would the U.S. government have let them go so easily, without a fight? Or had there been a fight, and the official records modified to gloss it all over?

I turned to Scott. He'd gotten his own plate of food- heaped even higher than mine-and was already halfway through it. "You're native-born, aren't you?" I asked him.

He nodded. "Oahu born and bred," he acknowledged around a mouthful of Belgian waffles.

"So tell me about the Secession."

He chuckled and wiped syrup and whipped cream-real whipped cream, for frag's sake-from his lips. "How old do you think I am, brah?" he asked. "That was back in 'seventeen. I wasn't even an itch in my father's pants."

"But your parents were around in 'seventeen, right?" I pressed. "And you'll have met a drek-load of people who were around, maybe even involved. People talk."

Scott shook his head as he finished off another gargantuan mouthful. "That's the thing, bruddah-they don't talk, not about Secession. Well, okay, they do-but, like, about the stuff leading up to it, and about the days after it. What actually went down, what the kahunas did to the CDF, all that kanike-all that bulldrek-nobody talks about it much."

"Why?"

The ork shrugged. "Don't know, hoa, really I don't. I'm just a simple wikanikanaka boy here.''

"Wikani-what?"

"You got to learn to sling the lingo around here, brah," the ork said with a laugh. "Everybody speaks a kind of pidgin- lots of Polynesian loanwords, okay? Like hoa-that means 'friend,' 'chummer.' Kanike-that means the sound of stuff clashing and clattering together, but it's used like 'bulldrek.' And wikanikanaka-that's 'ork.' You'll get used to it

"Anyway," he went on, getting his thoughts back on track, "like I said, nobody really talks about the Secession."

"Like there's stuff they don't want other people to know?"

"Maybe," he allowed, "or maybe stuff they don't want to remember."

"Like what?"

The ork shrugged, apparently a little uncomfortable. "You hear stories, sometimes," he said vaguely. "Old people talk, sometimes… but then you ask for more details, and they clam up on you." He paused. "You talk to enough people, you hear really weird stuff. Dragons, for one. Big storms- unnatural storms-rolling down out of Puowaina. That's Punchbowl crater, just north of the city. Weird drek going on in Haleakala Volcano on Maui. Kukae, some old geezer even told me once he saw something big-something real big- moving under the water in Pearl Harbor, next to the old Arizona battleship memorial. Said whatever it was, it was bigger than the battleship and it looked at him with eyes the size of fragging basketballs." He shrugged again. "Believe as much of that kanike as you want. I don't know the answers."

He folded his napkin and put it on the table. "Now eat up and let's roll, hoa, okay?"