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Colonel Tran Pham “Spooky” Nguyen, Free Communities Armed Forces, checked the action on his well-worn P90, ensuring for the tenth time that it was ready to function: ready to pepper his opponents with Needleshock rounds, the apex of FCAF nonlethal-weapons technology.
Each tiny ultra-high-velocity discarding-sabot shell accelerated a narrow penetrator to over five thousand feet per second, able to defeat most body armor. The needle contained a highly charged capacitor that dumped enough electricity into the target to put him out cold. Combined with the ablative Eden Plague coating, it was the most effective small-arms ammunition the FCAF had. As long as the user was careful to keep his shots away from the enemy’s head and heart, it was nonlethal. Every wound would initiate the Eden Plague cascade, immediately organizing the infectee’s body to begin healing thousands of times faster than normal, making them into Edens.
This had led to the absurdity of enemy-issued body armor that deliberately did not protect the head and heart of ordinary troops; their political masters preferred a dead soldier to a converted one. As a result, enemy morale often remained low.
Spooky looked around at his team, eight people crammed into a small submersible and crated inside a standard high-cube intermodal shipping container. The carefully shielded box was designed to appear to any scanners to hold high-quality electronic cabling; in reality the material was mere camouflage that hid the men and the mini-sub from prying technological eyes.
The team felt a thump as a crane lifted their container off its stack inside the Maersk cargo ship and placed it onto a robotic carrier on shore. The spidery vehicle followed its electronic trails in a carefully orchestrated dance around the Port of Hawaii transshipment system, to join in a queue of its fellows waiting to load onto the United Governments of North America-flagged hydrofoil freighter Stetson. When the robot attained the front of the line, it placed its container gently onto the tarmac, precisely one meter from the adjacent box, and scooted back down the automated roadways to its next assignment.
Shipborne trade still flowed, the lifeblood of the world economy. Though the restrictions and checks were repeated and onerous, vessels from all over the world loaded and offloaded goods through Port of Hawaii.
The team tried to relax in the dimness of a glowstick taped to the overhead of their mini-sub. They had checked their weapons repeatedly, they had meditated and dictated family messages into memory chips, they had told stories and read or listened to books on their readers, they had watched movies, and they had slept. And twice each day they put on their virtual reality goggles, set down their weapons, picked up motion-controllers, and ran through the mission in VR space. It had been a long six days, and it would be one more before they could move.
Picking them up from the tarmac, the crane on the tender swung the metal box through the air to be deposited in the narrow hold of the Stetson. Other containers soon joined them, and any concerns about discovery evaporated.
One more day. The six men and two women wiggled in their seats, seeking comfort that would not come.
Spooky let them sleep while he ran through the mission on his own glasses once more to fend off creeping claustrophobia. It would be tricky, and it would be dangerous, but if they succeeded, they would change the course of the sputtering, back-and-forth conflict between the Free Communities and the Big Three.
After fighting one sort of war or another for many decades, first against the Communist government of Vietnam, then for the US Special Forces, the thought of peace, political or personal, had seemed just a remote dream.
Until now.
Hours later a feeling of motion alerted them to the ship’s departure, heading for New Zealand and, unbeknownst to its crew, for an open-ocean rendezvous designated by nothing more than a set of encrypted GPS coordinates.
