White Under the Summer Sun

Come to Gangwon-do this summer — where cool sea breezes and pristine nature still breathe free.

A painfully transparent tourism commercial for some regional government was playing on the television. Row Gibson, however, had no attention to spare for it. He was buried under a backlog of work that refused to clear.

"Tetra Anax has biotech locked down tight. I feel bad for the staff, but we'll just buy the equipment, strip the place, and dissolve the lab."

"I'll pass that along."

In twenty seconds flat, Row Gibson decided the fate of a research institute being spun off by its parent company after a politician's scandal, and handed the file to his secretary.

By now, everyone knew that Phantom's secretary was a mysterious blond child. Few knew the child was a vampire. To avoid the sun, he employed a human secretary during daylight hours.

Tetra Anax recommended mind-controlling any humans needed for daytime work, the better to prevent ugly rumors. Phantom preferred a different method: do favors for people, then hire them.

"It's not as if I'm flying around in full-body tights," he muttered. "How bizarre can the rumors get?"

He sighed, scooped up his car keys, and decided that since the work was more or less finished, a drive might do him good. He stepped up to the elevator.

Ding.

The doors parted with that distinctive chime, and a Southeast Asian man in an aloha shirt came barreling out. They nearly collided, and for a moment both of them simply stared, at a loss for words.

"Ow."

"What do you mean, 'ow'? Agni! You! Why didn't you show when we went after Sarhyuk? Do you have any idea how much grief that cost me?"

"Ah, well… I was going by electric scooter, and the battery died halfway there. I was charging it at a gas station convenience store, so…"

"…"

Hearing that Agni had planned to reach Gangwon-do by electric scooter drained Phantom of any desire to stay angry.

"Showing up in broad daylight — you ought to think about how it looks."

"What, worried people will start saying you're gay?"

Agni grumbled as he strode past him and planted himself in front of the air conditioner.

"Ahh. That's better."

"I feel the heat myself, but not like that. You work with fire and you still mind the heat?"

"Of course I do. Don't discriminate against people — or vampires. Got any cold beer?"

"…"

Phantom covered his face with one hand. Agni, unbothered, charged into the kitchen and let out a delighted cry.

"Whoa! Killer fridge. Loaded with fruit, too. Hey, hey — you're a vampire. You're not supposed to eat this stuff."

Even as he said it, he pulled out fruit, blood packs, and beer, dumped the lot into a blender, and whirred them into a deeply peculiar beer cocktail. To Phantom it looked like nothing more than the wanton destruction of perfectly good food, but if the world had six billion people, it presumably had six billion tastes. Phantom considered himself an open-minded man and preferred not to care what Agni put in his mouth — except that what Agni was putting in his mouth had come out of Phantom's own refrigerator, and that made indifference impossible.

Agni dropped himself onto the luxurious living-room sofa without the slightest hesitation and flipped the wall-mounted PDP television to satellite. He drank that bizarre beer cocktail and cranked the air conditioning to maximum.

"Ahh, perfect. Money really does make everyday life more fun. Damn ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠bourgeoisie."

"Why am I taking that from you?"

Phantom muttered the words as he went to the fridge himself, pulled out a can of beer, and sat down beside Agni. He cracked it open.

"Nothing beats a cold beer in summer. Wouldn't you say?"

"True enough. Now — care to tell me what you're here for?"

"Nothing major. Just… don't you think Tetra ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠Anax's control is starting to hit its limit? Do you know how many Jinma are already dead? If this keeps up, we'll all end up in an FFA, killing each other."

Agni opened the subject casually. It was not the sort of conversation one had while watching television and drinking beer, but Phantom simply raised the can to his lips.

"Tetra Anax cares about nothing but Lilith. Our old enemies — the lycanthropes, the mages — they're insignificant in his eyes. The reason he ignores us is that his attention is fixed entirely on her."

"But that's just rumor, isn't it? No one really knows. He barely shows himself these days, and if he has the power and still refuses to use it, I find that even less forgivable."

"Fair point. But are you prepared to stake your life on that kind of conjecture?"

"It's not like that."

Agni scratched his head with a frustrated noise.

"By the way — what about Jeong-ya and Chang-young?"

"That Chang-young turns out to be ex-special forces. His skill is growing at a terrifying rate, and he's gotten very good at covering his tracks — just like Sarhyuk. I have no idea what that woman was thinking when she made him a Jinma, but she picked a man with monstrous potential. Or maybe this country called South Korea is simply strange."

Phantom crushed his beer can flat and stood. Sarhyuk had been methodically killing his pursuers and vanishing without a trace. The humans and vampires he had already consumed were beyond counting. And the truly terrifying part was this: as a werebear by origin, his regeneration was so efficient that the same wound cost him almost no VT.

"But Agni — wasn't your goal to drink as much blood as possible and grow stronger? You ought to be in sympathy with what Sarhyuk is doing."

"I agree with the method… but if it isn't me, it doesn't mean anything."

"Is that so."

Phantom laughed, half in disbelief. A creature this blunt. Everything he did was unmistakably wicked, and yet somehow he was hard to hate.

"Well then — thanks for the meal."

Agni pressed his palms together, left only the empty pitcher behind, and ambled toward the door.

"Oh — Tetra Anax has been leaning hard on the vampire hunters. Did you know?"

"I did."

"And that hunter? The one they say is Silvester's disciple?"

"…How do I put it? Hmm. Let's just say he's cool."

Phantom answered with a thin smile, already lost in some private thought.

Se-gun had pulled a baseball cap low over his eyes and stacked his belongings outside the house. Even a rough estimate put each box between forty and a hundred and twenty kilograms — far more than a man who lived by motorcycle could ever haul. So he had called a moving truck.

"…Hauling weapons and explosives by delivery truck. I've lost my mind."

Hands in the pockets of his jeans jacket, he leaned against the wall and waited, humming under his breath.

Tetra Anax had applied pressure the way the powerful always did. That left Se-gun no choice but to strike back like a guerrilla. And after that, there would be no future.

A guerrilla fighting for an ideal might die, and his death would still pass something forward. Se-gun's case was different. If he died, that was the end of it.

A future with no room for improvement. A happiness that no amount of effort would ever put back within reach. What a miserable situation. If Se-gun had been a ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠rapper, the flood of images would have worn his tongue to nothing.

The truck arrived at last, and Se-gun began loading. The movers frowned at the mountain of boxes; when they tried to lift them, their faces twisted as if they had bitten into something foul. Mortar rounds, grenades, rifle ammunition — boxes like those had a truly vicious weight. At a hundred and twenty kilos, even two grown men struggled to get one onto the bed.

"Move."

Se-gun stepped between them and hauled the cargo up as if it weighed nothing. His body, remade by drugs and vampire blood, already surpassed human strength per unit of mass. How much longer could he still call himself human at this rate? He despised himself as he worked, and could do nothing about it.

When everything was loaded, he climbed into the back of the truck.

"Clear day."

Clear was an understatement. The summer sun blazed from a cloudless sky with merciless force. Wearing a jeans jacket under sunlight hot enough to melt asphalt — any ordinary person would have believed he had leprosy.

Se-gun drew his hand from his pocket without thinking. The hand that emerged into the burning sun was white beyond white, as if scorched by moonlight. He froze as if nailed in place and stared. That pale forearm, so white it threw back the light, no longer looked like living human flesh. How long he stood there, he could not have said.

"Kh—"

Unable to bear the pain, he shoved the hand back into his pocket. And that fact hurt him more than the burn itself. He covered his face with a gloved hand and laughed.

"Kh… kkhkhkhkhkh. Aahahahahaha! Ahahahaha!"

The two men driving the truck glanced back. He paid them no mind and went on laughing like a madman.

The beneficiary of Western Trading Company's arms-smuggling case — the man identified as the buyer of that enormous cache of weapons — was a young man named Han Se-gun who had only just passed twenty. The file stated that he was almost certainly an associate of Sarhyuk, already named as a suspect in the casino bombing a month earlier.

The problem was that, though his resident registration had been cancelled, he was still Korean. If Western Trading had diverted weapons, the U.S. Military Police could take them in. A Korean national was another matter. Even if they argued a hundred times that a cancelled ID made him stateless, jurisdiction still belonged to the Korean police. All they could do was hand over the investigative materials and request cooperation — which would slow everything to a crawl.

By the time a joint task force was stood up and a plan formed, the suspect would either have fled the country or used more than four hundred kilograms of explosives to turn districts of Seoul into a slaughterhouse.

Major Ben Topf requested formal cooperation from the Korean police — and at the same time chose the extreme option of using his own soldiers to secure the suspect immediately. Success meant a clean capture. Failure meant Korean police outrage and, worse, the risk of provoking the very catastrophe they were trying to prevent.

"Sir, is this really all right? There's already enough noise about SOFA revisions. Running an operation in a residential neighborhood…?"

"Better than a terror attack with explosives that walked out of a U.S. base."

Major Topf stepped down from the command vehicle and surveyed the street. A quiet alley of single-family houses; the suspect's home sat at the far end, backed by a wooded hill.

"His ID is already cancelled. If necessary… lethal force is authorized."

He had chosen the extreme path. Looking at the orders from above, he was not even certain the man was guilty. Elementary-school children performing a play with a script that simply read "this man is the criminal" would have improvised something more convincing than this.

Resident registration cancelled. No prior record. No motive for terrorism. A man living like a ghost — no bank account, no ID — found in a single stroke, with every charge laid out in detail. It was suspicious no matter how you looked at it.

But if command truly wanted him removed, there was something there. A real terrorist, or something that threatened the interests of the United States. A soldier who needed to stay in favor with his superiors had no real choice.

"Begin the arrest. Evacuate adjacent residences. Sniper teams, take the nearby overwatch points. Point man Bravo, body bunker to the front entrance. Sweep for explosives. Alpha covers the rear path. Charlie holds on the hill."

The briefing ended and the soldiers moved at once. Bravo team advanced behind a body bunker, halted at the door, and ran a bomb detector over the entrance.

"Infrared alarm found."

"Okay."

While Bravo held the perimeter with the bunker, the EOD team disabled the infrared sensor mounted at the doorway. Bravo pushed forward to the front entrance.

Glass shattered. They threw a riot CS grenade through the window and stormed inside.

The house was already empty — thoroughly, deliberately empty.

"What the hell?"

The interior was stripped clean. In the middle of the floor sat something that looked like a digital scale. On the scale, a basin of water. Floating on the water, a block of Styrofoam. Resting on the Styrofoam, an 8mm camcorder tape.

"…Shit!"

Recognizing the scale for what it was, Bravo contacted the major at once. American intelligence had leaked; the target was already gone. And he had left them a beautifully constructed bomb. The neighbors had been evacuated, so a detonation would not do catastrophic damage — but the tape was the problem. If it contained a warning of further attacks, it was intelligence more valuable than almost anything else.

"What do we do?"

"Can you defuse it?"

"That's…"

The explosives experts stared at the device and shook their heads. Where the basin met the scale, a layer of RDX had been spread and electrodes planted in it. They had not yet taken X-rays, and the scale itself was aluminum alloy — even X-rays would not give them a clean look inside.

"The real question is whether the readout is linked to the charge."

If the scale's reading was wired to the explosives, the whole assembly was already an excellent vibration sensor. A water-filled tray on top of it. You could not simply lift the thing off. RDX was not as sensitive as nitroglycerin, but it still demanded care. You could not add weight to the base and ‍‍‌‌⁠​​⁠‌​​‍​​‍​‌​⁠‍‌‍⁠⁠‌⁠‌‍‌‍‌‌‌‍⁠​‌​‌​‌‍‌‌‌⁠‍​​‌‍⁠‌‌⁠⁠peel the tray free either. And you could not simply wait. Water evaporates. As the weight dropped, so would the threshold — and then detonation. A time device and a vibration sensor in one elegant package.

Major Topf pressed a hand to his forehead as the headache settled in.

"This bastard is too slippery. Without that tape, we have nothing."

"I understand, but it's too dangerous."

"We can't leave an explosive sitting here either."

"To open the scale and cut the charge from the internal wiring, we have to remove the lid — which means the water in the basin will slosh and change the reading. There could be about two kilos of TNT or C-4 inside. Possibly RDX, given that they painted the outside with it."

The explosives specialist muttered as he worked through it. Bombs were always harder to take apart than to build. In the field, the usual answer was to haul them somewhere open and destroy them in place. A device like this — left as a message — was different.

"Two kilos of C-4… that would definitely hit the surrounding houses."

"There is one way, though it isn't pretty."

"How?"

"Freeze the water in the basin with liquid nitrogen. Once it's ice, vibration stops being a problem. We can't pour the nitrogen directly onto it, and if the scale itself gets too cold it might fail, so we have to freeze it above about minus ten Celsius. Aside from being a nuisance, it's a primitive device."

"Fine. Do it that way if you have to."

He already knew the suspect was gone. That did not mean he could walk away from the only lead sitting in front of him.

They brought in the EOD team, dropped the room temperature with liquid nitrogen until the water froze solid, and recovered the 8mm videotape without much trouble. At that exact moment, the Korean police arrived in force. Having formally requested investigative cooperation, the Americans were obligated to share whatever they obtained — no matter how hard-won. Handing over a prize earned at this cost to the Korean police was something the stubborn Major Ben Topf found almost impossible to accept.

"You show up damned late! Cops are cops wherever you go, is that it?"

Ever since Superintendent Hwang Seok-yeong had been appointed head of the special investigation division for counterterrorism, he had been convinced his luck had run out. In this country, anyone assigned to a countermeasures committee or a special task force quietly drifted away from any path of promotion. The reason was simple: none of those cases ever got properly closed.

And the strange part — for a terror campaign on this scale, the group behind it should have been substantial. Yet they had not caught a single person. Not so much as a rat. The explosives used had been identified as TNT, but South Korea had no active black market in heavy munitions, which made anyone dealing in TNT nearly impossible to track.

Recent months had been thick with explosives cases and weapons cases, so this division had absorbed every previous special unit into one enormous joint body. If even that vast apparatus produced nothing, it would soon be time for a man of his age to think about retirement.

"Sir?"

"Hm? What is it?"

"The U.S. Military Police say they've identified a prime suspect in the terror case. They're requesting investigative cooperation."

"What?"

Hwang shot to his feet. A runaway daughter coming home could not have made him happier. He was already preparing to move out.

"Those Yankees have a gift for this. How did they find him?"

"Apparently… the explosives were diverted from a U.S. base."

"…"

The smile that had nearly split his face to the ears went cold. In Hwang Seok-yeong's view, any public servant who could be glad that Koreans had died under foreign explosives had no business wearing a badge.

"Those sons of bitches. Manage your damned inventory. Last time we asked for cooperation they swore nothing of the kind had happened, and now what?"

But this was not the moment to rage over old lies. Anyone with even a thin connection to the perpetrator had to be brought in. He drove his subordinates hard and was on the road in minutes.

In the police riot van, he passed out files to his people.

"Here. This is the face. Look at the copies."

"Huh?"

One of them startled so hard the others turned. Detective Jo was staring at the photograph as if he had seen a ghost.

"Ah — no. Just thought I recognized him from somewhere."

"Is that so? Wait — you don't mean that one?"

"No. Must be a mistake. Plenty of people look alike."

The photo was Se-gun's old student ID portrait. His face, his bearing, everything about him had changed since then, and the photocopy quality was abysmal. Detective Jo filed the doubt away and said nothing more.

"We've also scrambled the riot police and the bomb squad… Let's see. This time it won't be a dry well."

"But the estimated diverted explosives run to four hundred kilos. Isn't that enough to set Seoul on fire?"

"Which is why we take him first. Pull this off and everyone's promotion is guaranteed."

Hwang said the word "promotion" without embarrassment. Hundreds were already dead. Given the public pressure, and the number of officers who had been reduced to corpses in a single stroke, an across-the-board one-rank special promotion for the entire division was not unthinkable.

Assuming, of course, that they caught him.

"What the hell is that?"

As they turned into the alley, what met them was a street already occupied by U.S. soldiers in full counterterror kit, and a massive command vehicle directing them. A black major tall as a utility pole was shouting into a radio headset.

"I'll talk to them."

Detective Jo looked around. In front of foreigners, everyone else seemed to shrink. When he volunteered to handle the communication himself, no one objected.

With a slightly awkward expression, Detective Jo stepped forward and began speaking with the Americans.

"What the hell is he saying?"