Siraj or Britain or the U.S.” He threw his hands in the air. “It would be a good deal easier if I could just kill them.”
“The way you killed the Nur?” Niobe asked. Noel nodded. “And look what that led to. Thousands of dead jokers, thousands of dead soldiers, a bunch of young kids playing hero with a river of blood on their hands. Please, don’t fix things by killing people anymore. You’re not the bad guy. Let the bad guys do the killing.”
And an idea began to grow. It would be tricky, but when had tricky ever bothered him? If he could pull this off there was no chance of the Nshombos becoming martyrs, or the West or Siraj being blamed for their deaths. He grabbed Niobe by the shoulders and pulled her into a long, deep kiss.
“What?” she gasped when he finally released her.
“You, my darling, are a genius.”
He loved it when she blushed.
On the Lukuga River, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Wally woke to find the fire still smoldering. The damp wood sent up a roiling column of smoke. It drifted over the jungle like an ash-grey arrow on the bright blue sky, pointing straight at Wally. He couldn’t think of a better way to announce his location, so he took his time with breakfast.
It worked. The whine of a distant motorboat echoed up the river. Wally screwed the lid back on a plastic jar of peanut butter and dropped it into his backpack alongside the bananas and mangoes Jerusha had grown as a parting gift. Then he hunkered down in the brush and waited.
Soon enough, a small PPA patrol boat zipped around the bend. No kids on this one; Wally breathed a sigh of relief. The soldiers followed the smoke straight to the edge of his makeshift campsite. They landed their boat on the riverbank not far away.
Five minutes later, it was Wally’s boat.
As much as he hated to, he left a couple guys still standing, so that they could report what they’d seen: a metal man, heading deeper into the PPA in a stolen boat.
Nyunzu
Tanganyika Province, Congo
People’s Paradise of Africa
Nyunzu stank of rotting bodies and shit. The foulness overwhelmed even the stench of burning and the river Lukuga’s primitive smell. Leopard Men and soldiers moved among smashed cages of wood and mesh. Mud-brick walls and tin roof panels fallen in on themselves and smoldering. A small forlorn-looking tractor, from which a powerful arm, probably a backhoe, had been wrenched-recently, because the steel at the break gleamed bright, rather than being crusted with rust like dried blood. And everywhere twined and stood and sprouted an inexplicable profusion of plants, as if the secret ace lab had been built by a mad gardener.
“Well,” said Tom, arms akimbo, staring eye to eye at a man’s head wedged into the fork of a branch of a mango tree that stood unaccountably in the middle of the ruined compound, “these counterrevolutionary motherfuckers are into beheading. Might be Muslims. Forty or fifty.”
“There were only two, sir,” the commando said.
Tom scowled. “Shit.” Aces. “That’s a bummer.”
At Tom’s feet Leucrotta crouched on spindle shanks, making whining sounds low in his throat. He was developing a tendency to show doglike behavior even in human form. Beside him the two spookiest little kids on Earth, Ghost and the Hunger, stood gazing at the devastation with big blank eyes. Their presence amid all this horror didn’t bug Tom. He was starting to get behind the beauty of the kid-ace trip. Terrible beauty, yeah. But beauty.
Two men in brown-and-green Simba Brigade camouflage approached, pulling a third between them. He was unarmed, bareheaded, his blouse torn open, his trousers stained. He stank of piss and shit, presumably his own. His escorts spoke to him in the local lingo.
“They say this one survived the attack, Mokele-mbembe,” one said. “He speaks of a woman who killed with plants, and a metal man that nothing could hurt.”
“Sounds like aces, all right,” Tom said. They even sounded familiar somehow. He could call Hei-lian; he carried a satellite phone, for which only she and the Nshombos had the number. A different phone and number every day. Otherwise the imperialist NSA could track him and some CIA pencil-neck in Virginia could fire a tank- busting Hellfire missile at his head from a remote-controlled drone.
The Leopard Man went on. “He says the metal man went north along the river. The woman took the young volunteers and headed east toward Tanzania. She made the jungle grow up suddenly to cover their trail.”
Nice try, thought Tom. “Ghost, you can track a fart through a feedlot. You go get the metal man.”
She looked at him with her saucer eyes and nodded, slowly, once. Tom turned to the Leopard Man. “You get hyena-boy and the Hunger. Take some soldiers along.”
“What shall I do with the patriotic volunteers?”
Tom shrugged. “They’re of no further use to the People’s Paradise, Lieutenant.” He turned to the survivor. “Oh, and as for you, numbnuts
…” He looked to the Hunger and jerked his head at the man. The soldier howled as the boy sank sharp teeth into his leg. “You have the honor of performing one last service for the Revolution: you get to show your comrades the penalty for letting it down.”
Somewhere in the Jungle
Vietnam
Billy was a joker. He looked like a desiccated monkey, thin strips of dark flesh still clinging to old bone. His eyes seemed almost deflated, and he smelled like a bowl of chicken soup someone had left out for a week.
He drove like a man on fire. “This your first time in Vietnam?” he said as the jungle whipped past their Hummer.
“Yes,” Bugsy said, his hands digging into his knees as Billy whipped around a corner Bugsy hadn’t known was there.
“Great country. Had some hard times. That what you here for? Something about Moonchild?”
“More about a friend of hers. Mark Meadows.”
“The nat,” Billy said. “I never met him. Heard about him, though.”
“He was an ace.”
“Really? What could he do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ace with no powers, eh?” Billy said. “Sounds like a nat to me.” The dead monkey spun the wheel again. The Hummer groaned and screamed like a dying animal. Bugsy closed his eyes, then opened them again. If they were clearly going to hit a tree, he could bug out. A few dozen wasps getting crushed would be a lot easier to recover from than his brainpan sailing through the windshield.
“Yeah, I was Joker Brigade right up until I was in the resistance against it,” Billy said. “That was a fucked-up scene. We all came here because we bought into the whole line about Vietnam being a haven for victims of the wild card.”
“Lot of aces?”
“Some, I guess. Mostly it was jokers and joker-aces. Place got really fucked up. Bad shit happened out there, man. Really bad shit. It was the Rox that did it. Jokers saw the Rox get wiped out, figured that was what the whole world was going to be like. Lot of angry freaks out here in the jungle with guns. No one said it, but we all kind of understood it was about revenge. All except Moonchild.”
“You knew her?” Bugsy said.
Something the size of an orange hit the windshield with a soft thump and an inhuman shriek. When it bounced off, it left a streak of blood. Billy turned on the wipers as he drove. “Saw her a few times, that’s all. She turned it all around.” Billy’s voice was almost reverent. “She was the one that pulled all the good guys together. She was the soul of this fucking country.”
“What about other aces?”
“What about ’em?”
