The first light of dawn crept over the horizon, transforming the clinging smoke into a brilliant, frigid sunrise. A haphazard collection of overcrowded fishing boats and skiffs had gathered in the central channel of the Taedong, all nestled around a half-filled river barge. The flotilla was barely under power, thick with huddled people, and held together with cargo nets as the ships fled downstream.
Jonah closed his eyes as the yacht’s bow struck, the hull barely shuddering as the futuristic ship sliced through the ramshackle fleet. Dozens were hurled into the yacht’s ice-laden wake, helplessly tangled in the ropes and wreckage that rocked in the churning waves. Men and women thrashed in the water as they tried to pull themselves atop floating debris. Jonah forced himself to watch as his skin went cold and a rock-like lump grew in his throat.
Himura had shed his grossly overweight form and robes, leaving them piled on the floor like a moth emerging from the chrysalis. He stretched before pulling a simple pair of slacks and an expensive shirt over his well-muscled body, carefully adjusting his collar as his men looked on with disinterest. The conflict map stretched further with every passing moment as North Korean tanks, foot soldiers, fighter planes, helicopters, and bombers clashed in nearly every far-flung corner of the tiny country.
“I thought I’d die in my own clothes,” he said with a sort of half-smile. “It won’t be long now—just a few more hours until we reach Pyongyang.”
“You’re making a mistake,” said Jonah, his eyes glued to the monitors and the wreckage in their wake.
“What mistake?” “Treating people like numbers on a ledger sheet, assuming they can be reduced to behavioral algorithms. The fate of men and women can’t be written by a grotesque computational abomination, or a bureaucrat with an inflated sense of his own historical importance.”
“Tell me, Jonah,” said Himura, his voice soft as he spread his arms in acceptance of the proclamation, “if people are not numbers, what are they?”
Jonah pointed to the screen, eyes narrowing. “They’re variables.”
The Scorpion’s periscope rose from the yacht’s wake like a scythe as Himura stared in paralyzed surprise. The submarine’s angular bow split the surface a heartbeat later as it charged from the waters, angry stacks bellowing thick diesel smoke and propellers whipping icy river into violent froth. The submarine slammed into the glass greenhouse, throwing Himura to his knees as the superyacht pitched and shook. Beside him, Meisekimu began to flash in deep, crimson reds. She was scared.
Alexis sprinted across the heaving deck of the Scorpion. The submarine’s tilting bow was deep into the yacht’s greenhouse like a lance in a charging elephant. Hot, moist air flowed from the shattered glass, sticky against her face. Dalmar plunged into the mist first, leaping through the newly created hole and onto the jungle terraces below. He landed softly atop the thick ferns and wet soil, instantly invisible within the thick canopy.
She held her breath and leapt, sailing through the air beside Hassan as the two tumbled into wet vegetation. Sun-Hi threw a backpack over the side and slid after it a moment later, both landing on soft soil. The Scorpion’s bow began to retract, hull sliding backwards with an ear-piercing shriek of glass against steel.
Dalmar charged forward between massive trees. Black-suited security personnel poured from the interior of the yacht, weapons already shouldered. Aiming from the hip, Dalmar released a long coil of thick fluid, the stream erupting with roiling fire. The black-suited men recoiled from the explosive heat, but it was too late. The searing liquid broke across their ranks like a wave of flame. Dalmar’s booming laughter was audible even over the screams of burning men as they rolled in the dirt, trying to extinguish the sticky blaze. The jungle had become a raging inferno in mere seconds, the crackling heat sucking moisture and oxygen from the misty air as the licking flames crawled up the thick canopy.
Alexis sucked in a big breath, coughing against the choking, acrid smoke, her eyes burning in the haze. Sun-Hi pointed at the yacht’s tall bridge looming over the greenhouse, her electromagnetic detector chiming as she aimed it at a grouping of antenna and satellite dishes high in the superstructure.
Hassan, Alexis, and Sun-Hi stepped over still-smoldering bodies and into the impenetrable artificial jungle. Dalmar emerged from a cloud of smoke as the party advanced on a single open bulkhead hatch. More screaming rang out as Dalmar discharged another burst of flame into the darkened interior.
Alexis charged in first, her shotgun trained on the gantry stairs as they moved upwards towards the transmitter, careful to not brush against the flaming walls. Coughing, Hassan kicked open the door to the first level, revealing a softly-appointed lounge with two dead security guards on the floor. They’d been beaten to death with bare hands, the perpetrator already vanished.
“Think Freya got lose?” suggested Alexis. “Jonah could be with her—we should look for them.”
“Stay with the plan,” said Hassan. “The transmitter must come first.”
Sun-Hi pointed upwards. “This way!” she shouted. The four charged up the stairs to the next level of the tower. Dalmar ripped open the door to reveal to a massive, sprawling room filled with humming computer servers and autonomous communications consoles. The compartment practically crackled with electromagnetic energy, buzzing audibly as thick power lines fed massive transmitters.
“More are coming!” shouted Dalmar. He aimed his flamethrower out of the door and fired one last trickling burst, laying a patch of low flames across the stairs. Hassan slammed the door shut, bracing it with his shoulders as gunshots rang out, blasting holes through the thin metal.
“Whatever you must do, please do it now!” shouted Hassan. But Sun-Hi stood unmoving before the endless communications consoles, frozen with indecision. There were too many independent systems disable them all— and the door between them and the security forces wouldn’t last long.
Himura leaned over the mahogany writing desk, his face illuminated by a hidden computer monitor within. “Your crew has been cornered in the transmitter room,” he said, face drawn into a scowl as he waved for the surrounding security personnel to go. The final man drew a pistol and kicked Jonah’s legs out from underneath him, driving him to his knees.
“They’re pinned down,” continued Himura, turning away from Jonah. “With nowhere to run. My men will end this soon. This is not how I wished to spend my final moments. I wanted peace, contemplation, not this senseless chaos and destruction.” Himura knelt down towards Meisekimu, his fingertips brushing against her glass enclosure. The organism’s crimson colors began to subside, slowly replaced by neutral blues as she was comforted.
And then Himura looked up.
Jonah was on his feet, forearm wrapped around the aging guard’s neck, a stolen pistol in his hand. It was too late for the old guard. He couldn’t so much as gurgle through his crushed windpipe as the remaining blood and oxygen in his brain dwindled to nothing. Jonah waited until the man’s eyes rolled up and his head lolled before releasing him into an unconscious heap on the floor. Himura and Jonah began to circle each other in a slow, uneasy dance as Jonah leveled the pistol.
“Are you going to murder me now, Jonah?” Himura’s voice was amused, even sad, like a master teacher whose final lesson was left unlearned.
Jonah aimed at his feet and fired three times, the bullets ricocheting off Meisekimu’s thick glass enclosure.
“You can’t kill her,” Himura said. “You could spend a hundred years trying to smash your way into her glass womb and still fail.”
Jonah looked up and shook his head. “Ruh roh.” Himura’s brows knitted together momentarily in confusion. He took a step forward. “I ask you again—are you going to murder me? Would that somehow assuage your childish fantasy that you have any control over these final moments?”
“Speaking of childish illusions of control,” Jonah said. He jutted his chin over Himura’s shoulder, “You made a mistake thinking Freya could be harnessed to your purposes. Or that she wouldn’t immediately escape your men.”
Himura swiveled to see Freya. The tall, blood-splattered blonde was a mess of torn clothing and bruises as she stared at him with hate-filled eyes. The blade of her blood-red fire axe rattled, digging a deep furrow into the bamboo flooring as she dragged it behind her the last few steps. Jonah turned away just as she lifted it.
Alexis ducked beneath an empty metal desk as more gunshots rang out through the transmitter room. She tilted the shotgun towards the rapidly disintegrating door and fired wildly, her shots blasting through the thin metal and ricocheting down the narrow gantry stairs. “I’m out!” she shouted. “Sun-Hi—what the hell is taking so long?”
Sun-Hi desperately scanned the room, trying to find any way of disabling the endless rows of unmanned communications equipment. “I don’t know!” she shouted. “I understand none of these systems!”
Dalmar pushed Alexis out of the way, taking her position. He aimed a small pistol at the doorway, carefully rationing out his shots as he barely kept the swarming security guards at bay. More gunshots echoed from up the stairwell, faster this time and accompanied by shouts of surprise and the sound of fists landing on soft flesh. Alexis nervously glanced around the transmitter room—but none of the latest barrage had been aimed in their direction.
A voice called out. “Don’t shoot!” shouted Jonah from the other side of the door. “I’m coming in!”
Alexis and Hassan peeked over the top of the metal desk as Jonah wrestled open the blown-apart door. He limped into the transmission room with a pistol in each hand, his face and chest covered by a thick spray of blood from ambushing the aging security personnel in the stairwell below.
“We have to stop the transmitter!” said Sun-Hi, gesturing to the long banks of equipment around her.
“You mind?” said Jonah, handing the two pistols to Dalmar. He gently took Sun-Hi’s AK-47, unslung the strap, and shouldered the rifle. Everyone stood back and plugged their ears as he fired, tracing a continuous burst across the consoles, computer systems, and electrical relays until the magazine was empty. Sparks, smoke, and electrical arcs erupted across the entire compartment as the consoles went dark.
Sun-Hi checked the electromagnetic reader as she coughed, waving away the cordite smoke drifting from the rifle’s hot barrel. “It read zero!” she said. “Transmission gone! How did you know?”
“Easy,” said Alexis. “He just aimed for the most expensive-looking stuff and got lucky, per usual.”
“Can’t argue with the results,” said Jonah, setting the empty rifle down.
Dalmar clapped a meaty hand on Jonah’s back. “It is good to see you, brother.”
“You too,” said Jonah. “Everybody OK in here?”
“We’re all fine,” said Hassan. “We’re just happy you’re alive.”
“That’s great and everything,” said Jonah. “But why the fuck are you back? You’re all supposed to be halfway to Buenos Aires by now.”
“There was a bit of a . . . mutiny,” admitted Hassan.
“You’re welcome,” added Dalmar.
“If it makes any difference, rescuing you was only a secondary objective,” said Alexis.
“I’ll deal with you lot later,” said Jonah as he jabbed the pirate in the center of the chest with an outstretched finger. “Right now we have a bigger problem—the transmitters were only half of the battle. The entire ship is automated and there’s no way to stop it, even if we somehow killed every man aboard.”
“I think Dalmar might have already done that,” interrupted Alexis.
“I have not,” the pirate stated. “Some are merely wounded.”
“You didn’t let me finish,” said Jonah. “Remember the radioactive traces we found on the U-3531? Turns out our suspicions were right. The uranium ended up in a bomb— and its on board this ship. It’s programmed to go off autonomously once we reach the heart of Pyongyang. Himura says he couldn’t stop it even if he wanted to.”
“Then we wreck his computer,” said Alexis. “The transmitters were easy enough, right?”
“It won’t work. I took a couple pistol potshots at his biological computer thingy, but it’s too armored. Nothing short of a howitzer would even make a dent.”
Sun-Hi tugged on Jonah’s arm. “I have idea,” she said. “But as you say, you will not like it.”
“Can’t be any worse than letting a nuclear weapon go off,” Jonah said.
Sun-Hi unslung her backpack, revealing a powerful handheld radio within. “I can plug into the transmitter, call in a DPRK artillery strike on this ship.”
“A fucking artillery strike? On ourselves?” said Alexis. “You’re right—I do not like this idea.”
“How are they going to know which ship to hit?” asked Jonah.
Dalmar just pointed out of the small compartment portal towards the flaming, broken greenhouse in the stern. A massive pillar of black smoke rose from the still-burning jungle within. The Scorpion trailed them from a distance, her conning tower barely above the icy surface of the river.
“Got it,” said Jonah as he scratched his head. “Tell them to aim for the burning one.”
“But they might hit the Scorpion too!” said Hassan.
“Well, the Scorpion is quite a bit smaller,” said Alexis. “So, you know, they’ll probably miss it. But we’ll have to warn Vitaly all the same, tell him to give us some extra space.”
“Do it,” ordered Jonah, already retreating as Sun-Hi plugged in the radio and began to shout orders in rapid-fire Korean. “And then get off this ship as fast as humanly possible.”
“Where are you going?” demanded Alexis. “You can’t leave again, we just found you!”
“I’m getting Freya,” said Jonah. “And then I’m leaving, too. And for fucks sake, don’t wait for me this time.”
Jonah limped back into the ornate chamber, stepping once more onto the bamboo floor as the first artillery shell hit. He shielded his face with his hand as a massive section of the glinting aluminum wall burst inwards with an ear-shattering explosion. Geysers of icy water erupted around the sleek superyacht as she hurtled through a burgeoning hailstorm of artillery fire. A second shell pierced the thin hull, detonating deep in the deck, blowing apart a glass-enclosed collection of rifles and telescopes in a cloudy shower of smoke and debris. Below him, the grotesque Meisekimu pulsated beneath a layer of still-hot debris as she flashed disorganized purples, unable to connect with her transmitters.
There she was. Freya knelt over the organic computer as though oblivious to the barrage. She whispered to Meisekimu, comforting her. Himura’s ruined body lay silently crumpled face-down just a few feet away. Freya’s axe was still buried in his lower spine, a pool of sticky blood growing around his prone form. There were scuff marks and smeared red splattering across the floor—he’d fought hard and lost badly in a clash Jonah hadn’t even bothered to watch.
“Come on!” shouted Jonah, his voice muted in his own partially-deafened ears.
Freya didn’t budge. “I can’t leave,” she whispered as she stroked the glowing glass, eyes fixed on the shuddering organism encased beneath it. “She’s everything I’ve ever wanted. A flawless weapon. Himura was right about one thing; she can change the equation, tip the ecological balance.”
“She’s a death machine, programmed to blow sky high with a nuclear blast as soon as we hit Pyongyang.”
Another shell landed high in the superstructure before she could answer, shaking the yacht as the lights around them flickered and winked out. Jonah grabbed Freya and yanked her to her feet, but she twisted away, easily throwing off his hand.
“Come on, she’s not worth dying over!” he shouted.
“You don’t understand,”
Freya murmured. “Freya—we’re running out of time!”
She looked at him and shook her head, refusing to leave. The salvos were landing closer now, one after another slamming into the stricken ship from stem to stern. Whatever time they had left to escape had already expired.
“Freya—!” screamed Jonah, but it was too late. The nearest bulkhead burst apart at the waterline with two near-simultaneous explosions as a great wall of icy water poured in, sweeping across the ornate chamber. Jonah was ripped away from Freya by the leading edge of the wave and dragged under freezing water, his head slamming into a glass case. His mind reeled with the impact, his body trapped in a green abyss of swirling, airless motion. Spinning uncontrollably, he clawed at the water, trying to drag himself to the surface.
Finally, his face burst free of the swirling flood, open mouth taking in one fast, gasping breath before a pair of powerful hands grabbed him by the leg, climbing up his body. Himura’s twisted face suddenly rose from the froth, inches from his own. Instinct took over and Jonah slammed his fist into the Himura’s face, once, twice, three times as the dying man threatened to pull them both under. The arcing shells were coming faster now, hitting the stricken superyacht with one deafening explosion after another.
“I . . . knew . . . your . . . father,” Himura hissed through clenched, blood-flecked teeth. Stunned, Jonah grabbed at him, trying to hold onto Himura, but they were swept under and torn away from each other by a tsunami of floating debris, dragging Jonah ever deeper into the rapidly filling chamber.
He broke the surface one last time to find himself alone. Himura and Freya vanished into the flood. Jonah sucked in a deep breath before diving into the raging waters, his broken ribs screaming in his chest. The explosions were so close and fast he could barely separate one from the other as he forced himself deeper into the darkness, clawing against the violent currents. Twenty feet, thirty feet, Jonah pushed against the violent floodwaters until his ears pounded and his lungs burned like acid. The ship’s interior was already a tomb, a chaotic maelstrom of electric discharge and zero visibility, with Meisekimu’s crimson light throbbing within the eye of the storm like a dying heart.
And then his grasping fingers caught a jagged edge, a lattice of shattered metal and carbon fiber from where an artillery shell had blown a wide fissure in the hull. Jonah held himself fast against the incredible influx of floodwaters as his joints popped and muscles flexed. He fought the subzero deluge with every cell of his being, slowly forcing his body out of the gap. Emerging on the other side, Jonah was suddenly ripped away by the river, violently sweeping alongside the exterior hull as the superyacht slid past, its sharp propellers slicing through the waters just inches from his tumbling form.
He broke the surface between sheets of ice, spitting water and coughing as he threw one shivering arm over the cold, white blocks bobbing in the choppy wake. The wounded superyacht listed in the river before him, a collapsing mass of billowing flames and ruined metal. One artillery shell after another smashed into her fragile, exposed hull as her bow and helicopter pad slipped beneath the waters for the final time. A great wave washed over her, pouring through the shattered panes of her ruined greenhouse. She groaned, hull flexing as she filled, her massive propellers suspended briefly in the air as her bridge and antennae tower went under. And then she was gone, swallowed by the Taedong, leaving only a floating patch of still-burning debris and a growing fuel slick.
Jonah treaded the freezing waters, grateful for each breath of clear air. And he watched the surface, waiting, silently begging for Freya to emerge. He treaded water until the last of his strength left him, but she never came.