Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (33 page)

6. Last Bite of the Apple

In the tearoom attached to the New World Community Association in Seattle, three men happened to arrive at the same time of the morning and took a table together. They also happened to be the same three leaders who had recently traveled to California to meet with members of the renegade Praxis family. The most senior leader, Zhang Fuhua, felt an obscure discomfort about the decisions that had been made there.

“Do we trust this man Praxis and his eldest daughter?” he asked.

“Not particularly,” said Dong Geming. “We still have hard evidence of his intended treachery. And it was Praxis and his infernal machines who beat back the Chinese Expeditionary Force, all those years ago. He remains a potential enemy.”

“Do we
have
to trust him?” asked Li Guiren suddenly. “I mean, did we make promises? Is the Xin Dalu’s honor at stake?”

“An implied promise,” Zhang said. “We reached understanding.”

“Did we?” Li replied. “I do not remember it that way.”

“And what do you want to do?” Zhang asked.

“Give the assignment to someone reliable this time,” Dong said, showing where his heart lay. “Someone who will use modern methods.”

“Someone who will not betray our hand, either,” Li added.

“That would be the safest course, I suppose.”

* * *

The Greek Orthodox wedding service—which the Praxis family still followed, at least in form, if not through absolute belief—had no tradition of “giving away the bride.” In the Greek view, the woman was not property, and her family was not transferring her ownership and protection to the groom and his family. So, standing at the doorway to the chapel inside the Fort Apache, John Praxis reflected that for once the church’s teachings worked in his favor. Because Antigone had pointedly refused to attend the ceremony, it would have fallen to him to approach the altar with Angela in a Catholic or Protestant service while Kenneth waited patiently to receive her. That act might have suggested too much that he was not willing for the world to know.

Instead, the Praxis family waited as a group at the entrance to the chapel, with Kenny holding a bouquet of flowers. Angela arrived by armored car from Oakland—which everyone pretended not to know was where Kenny had a private apartment, and there he and the girl had been hiding out for the past three weeks—and descended in a white dress with veil. Kenny handed her the flowers, took her right hand, walked her through the door, and across the open floor toward Father Cephalos.

The small choir began singing. “Glory to You, O our God … Glory to you that walks in His ways …”

Father Cephalos began the ceremony with prayers, “For the peace from above … For the peace of the whole world …” He then entered the service that John Praxis could remember hearing as he once stood beside Adele, more than one lifetime ago. “For the servants of God, Kenneth and Angela, who are now being joined to one another in the community of marriage, and for their salvation, let us pray to the Lord.”

After the couple’s hands were formally joined, the priest blessed their wedding crowns made of silver bands while holding them over the Gospel. Then Callie and Connie placed them on Kenneth’s and Angela’s heads in turn as Father Cephalos recited, “The servant of God Kenneth is crowned to the servant of God Angela … The servant of God Angela is crowned to the servant of God Kenneth … O Lord our God, crown them with glory and honor.”

After the ceremony, everyone walked over to the community hall for the reception, with champagne toasts, the cutting of a three-layer cake made from wheat flour and cane sugar, not surrogates, and the traditional first dances of the young couple with all their relatives. During the latter part of the festivities, their obligations satisfied, the bride and groom slipped away to change out of their wedding finery and into traveling clothes.

Praxis had offered his personal ariflect to fly them up to Cherry Lake, where the top-floor apartments in the castle had been finished off early on his orders. He also had the kitchen installed in the basement and a small staff of retainers assigned to run it. That was his gift to the couple: two weeks of care-free days in a fairytale castle high in the mountains.

Towards four in the afternoon, a whining and a clattering signaled the arrival of his AFR-III in the square outside the hall. Everyone rushed out with the happy couple. Someone at the hanger had posted a white sign saying “Just Married” over the ’flect’s side door, with colored ribbons that streamed frantically in the down blast from the wing nacelles. The piloting intelligence opened the door, and Kenny and Angela climbed aboard.

It was the perfect end to a beautiful day, and Praxis hoped there would be many more days and weddings like it in the future as his family grew.

* * *

Colonel Deng Honghui of the People’s Liberation Army sat in a small powerboat—actually, more of a rowboat with a tiny outboard motor—among the reeds at the southern end of the San Francisco Bay. To all appearances, he was fishing, and he even had a rod and tackle box with him to support the story.

At the moment, however, Deng was holding up a smartphone and facing east. Two miles away across the marsh was the walled compound of the Praxis Family Association. From a distance, one might think that the man in humble clothing with a straw hat on his head was taking a picture of the South Bay landmark with his phone. But that was not what he was doing.

This was a special phone that read a different frequency of radio signals—specifically, those from aircraft transponders that announced themselves to the world at large, so that traffic controllers could monitor and track the planes in their area. Like the controllers’ systems, this adaptation also measured the target’s distances and directions by tapping into the craft’s global positioning system. At the moment, Deng was looking for a specific transponder signal, one that had been sampled some weeks ago in Eureka, California.

When he first detected the signal, he did not react but merely noted it. The aircraft—one of the new-model
fa kuang feng che,
the “crazy pinwheels,” whose wings were rotors but were not helicopters—was descending and moving toward the compound. It had come on a short flight only, from the tiny airport in Hayward, where the vehicle was normally hangared and serviced. From this, Deng postulated that the machine was on call, which meant it was empty.

So he watched the black hull with the crazy, buzzing wing motion descend behind the high wall two miles away. And then he waited. He had been fishing among the reeds for three days now, and he knew that such machines never stayed long on the ground. But during those three days, this was the first time he had seen the correct signature.

His phone told him instantly when the machine’s transponder lit up again. A second or two later, the dark hull appeared above the top of the wall and began climbing for altitude.

Deng laid the phone on the bench beside his hip and lifted out of the bilge the one piece of equipment that he could not explain to anyone who saw it. The main feature was a long tube of dull-black composite. Grafted onto one end were a shoulder block, optical sight, electronics package, and trigger mechanism. For the moment, as he slung the tube up to his shoulder, it was quite heavy.

He thumbed the controls quickly, obtained the necessary tone, and squeezed the trigger. The tube chuffed loudly, and the sight’s clear view of the Praxis ariflect was obscured by a burst of flame and smoke. Only when the smoke had drifted away on the breeze did Deng see the result of his efforts.

The small rocket embedded itself in the aircraft’s starboard nacelle, exploded, and ripped the wing rotor to pieces. The hull lurched, tumbled, and disappeared somewhere beyond the compound, just short of the East Bay hills.

Deng dropped the tube over the side, pushed it under water, and turned to start his boat’s motor. His job was done.

* * *

When she heard about the disaster, Antigone Wells went immediately to the Praxis family compound. The guard at the gate recognized her and passed her through. She asked directions to the hospital, and the young woman gave them to Wells’s automated cab in terms of so many left and right turns. The guard must also have called ahead, because John Praxis himself met her at the hospital entrance.

“Antigone, I am so sorry,” he said, his face grave.

She lifted her veil, the better to study him. “I want to see my niece.”

His lips compressed. His eyes lowered. “That’s … not a good idea.”

“I don’t care,” she said and pushed past him.

Reluctantly, he took her down an open, brightly lit corridor to a stairwell, then down the stairs to another, cooler corridor, and finally through a pair of closed double doors marked “Morgue.” It was colder still and dark inside, lit only by the telltales of various instruments, none of which took vital signs from the living. After they entered, the overhead ballasts blinked and flooded the room with light.

On the two metal tables farthest from the door lay bodies draped in white sheets. From their relative lengths and bulks, she picked the more slender one and approached it. That would be Angela; the other had to be the boy.

“The ship …” John said slowly, “crashed and burned. What you’ll see—”

“I know what I’ll see.” She lifted the sheet from what she presumed was the head end, only because the shapes there had the most solid form.

Her beautiful girl, the graceful and delicate Angela, was a blackened husk, shiny with glazed fats and fluids. The skull had no real features, just a dark crust. A few wisps of yellow hair had been smoothed across its dome. They were the only thing she recognized.

Wells laid a fold of the sheet across the hollow chest and studied the corpse. It took her a moment to determine where the paper-thin layers of charred fabric gave way to the blackened and dried skin. She tried not to breathe in, because the body smelled like barbecue and kerosene.

Around the neck, what was left of it, she traced the links of the silver chain. Up by what had been Angela’s ear, the heart-shaped pendant lay on the table. She wondered if its contents had survived the heat, because the surface was blackened with tarnish and soot.

Antigone Wells lifted the chain away from the body, ran its length through her fingers to find the clasp, and unhooked it. She piled chain and heart in her cupped hand, then slipped them into her pocket. She pulled up the sheet once more and draped it over the head. She turned away toward the door, not sparing a glance for the other body.

“Is that all you came for?” John asked.

“It’s all I have left,” she replied.

* * *

Armed with evidence gleaned from the crash site, Vernier sent a Little Brother to visit Quan Hui Yan, the All Seeing, in his secure core, which was buried in the basement of the Chinese consulate in San Francisco. Before the larger intelligence could rebuff his approach, the Little Brother issued a standard Tallyman stun code, freezing Quan Hui Yan’s higher cognitive functions. Then the invader software could pick through the master intelligence’s memory locations without interference.

What Little Brother was looking for was a matching anomaly. He had the approximate time and date, accurate enough for events in the human-scale world, and a possible scenario of what must have occurred over the Coyote Creek compound. Now the Little Brother needed to find a complementary set of circumstances. He had to work fast, however, because the stun was not critical, not a system reset, and Quan Hui Yan would overcome it in less than three seconds of elapsed time.

Little Brother started with the obvious files, assuming a human operative who must have had access to military hardware: a soldier, and not one lowly placed or acting out of random initiative. The search employed an old-fashioned sieving function to compare individuals above a certain military rank, with a certain resume or record of experience, and with movements overlapping a list of probable locations at the specified time. His search turned up two names.

One was for a Chief Sergeant in the People’s Liberation Army unit attached to the consulate who had signed himself out to a family barbecue at Lake Chabot in the East Bay Hills on the date in question. The timing was right, but when Little Brother summoned a map of the Bay Area, he could see that the location was wrong for the calculated trajectory. The other name corresponded to a Colonel who had taken a vacation day for the intended purpose of “going fishing.” The contact number he had entered on the duty roster was that of a public marina in San Leandro. Little Brother referred to the map, made a quick calculation of travel time by water, and matched potential launch sites with the trajectory in the time allotted.

Little Brother stored that name, Deng Honghui, and silently withdrew from the consulate’s core.

When Quan Hui Yan, the All Seeing, returned to his senses, he possessed a memory trace indicating a voltage spike in his power supply. He immediately sent an angry message to his handlers, attached to a request for better hardware and more diligent maintenance as befitted an intelligence of his substance and standing.

* * *

John Praxis and his daughter made an appointment with the Consul General of Greater China, Wu Donghai, for ten o’clock the following morning. A human receptionist in a black silk jacket showed them into the consul’s public office. At their heels came Paul Praxis, wearing civilian clothes and carrying a sealed cardboard tube, similar to those once used for mailing rolled engineering drawings.

The consul rose to greet them with western-style handshakes. “Mr. Praxis! It is a pleasure to finally meet with your revered self,” he said. “And your lovely daughter, of course.” Then he turned bland eyes on Paul. “And this gentleman would be …?”

“My grandson Paul. Who assists me from time to time.”

“Ah? Yes.” Wu clearly knew of Paul’s rank in the family organization, but he smiled anyway. He indicated the seats facing his desk. “May I offer you tea?”

“Of course,” Praxis replied as the three of them settled into the chairs.

At a hand gesture from the consul, a serving ’bot in the corner became active. Its padded claws arranged three small, handleless, porcelain cups on a tray, shuffling them around like a carnival huckster hiding a pea. The machine then poured black tea from a pot that was already simmering on the sideboard, arranged each cup with a square napkin made of red cloth, and passed the tray in front of each guest. In eastern fashion, neither cream and sugar nor lemon were on offer.