2020 by Robert Onopa Page A

briefing—he’d been right about the source, it was the Queen Elizabeth III , a floating flophouse belowdecks, the mall above—the Long Beach fire chief showed Voorst and the Army Evac Team where the blaze had started in the video department of the Daie store, around 4  P.M. on the previous day. Someone had set off a case of Lydex, the Army’s “sticky napalm,” fragments of the original container blown out into a passageway.
    The Lydex—left over from the “police action” in Mexico—was the signature of the New Nomad Terrs, Stringer chimed in during his five minutes: Stringer was apparently something of an expert on the terrorists, Voorst was surprised to learn. Stringer’s assistant placed the disruption to the QE III’s ComNet channel at 1602 hours.
    “So they lost video uplink from this ship from the start ?” Voorst asked.
    A black firewoman from Long Beach shook her head. “No way.”
    Stringer looked annoyed. “That’s what the scum do first, blow the links, give you false signals,” he said, but the black woman only shrugged.
    Voorst waited until the briefing was concluded and Stringer and his team drifted away.
    “Show me,” Voorst said to the firewoman in the yellow slicker.
    Up forward in the old first class theater one of the Virtual News Network’s “experience” rooms was still more or less in working condition, running three walls out of four. Voorst played back the holotape of what had gone out over the Net even before they’d flown out from Malibu, cutting the volume on the anchorman Tachikara’s familiar, avuncular voice. There it was again: the QE III fire was already superimposed on the Brazilian bulk cargo carrier, the Sea Angel , anchored in the industrial harbor just northwest. He’d seen that harbor choked with live-aboards too as they’d flown over, but as he watched the walls around him projecting VNN’s three-dimensional coverage, half the residential boats were gone, erased, digitalized out. Even the odor of the fire they were sending out over the Virtual Net was different, yes, incense sweet, a hint of burning wood from the tropics.
    He supposed they had their reasons. Maybe the police had a lead on the Nomad Terrorists which would be blown if everyone knew the truth. Still . . .
    “You believe this shit, what they do nowadays?” Voorst asked the black woman.
    She seemed rapt—on the screen, against the dramatic sights and sounds of the fire, a guy wearing a red bandana was pulling a comatose, semi-nude blonde out of water so oily it threatened to ignite. “This is better than what happened, man. I like this better.”
    Behind the slosh of the water and the crackle of flaming lumber and paint blistering a hatch an announcer murmured the station ID for VNN: Here’s There! he said. You’re Here! Voorst picked up the unerased string of scow hulls as part of the background on a side screen. Without giving it much thought he called up the screen controls and instructed the virtual-reality program to zoom in.
    You could hardly see the edit lines. Blue shirts swarming near a derelict sailboat. The Swan .
    “Hey,” the firewoman said, “lookit that. Maybe those’re the guys who started the fire.”
    Voorst shrugged. “Look at their bedrolls. Folded in a hurry. Look how those two are half-dressed, how their survival packs are a mess. That bunch is clearing out like they don’t know what’s going on.”
    * * *
    The Corps of Engineers had already brought in two large cranes, and now a dredge from the nearby Naval Shipyard was stationed in the harbor mouth. The harbor looked trashed—debris strewn, littered with derelict vessels, scum on the water thicker than usual—but because the Army’d come in strength, the transients weren’t swarming back as they had in Balboa, so today his own job seemed less urgent. Voorst ate a late breakfast with the Long Beach fire crew, a druggy bunch who shared Stim tabs with their coffee. Then he worked the Alamitos end of