It's hot. Fluid seeps out of my body continuously, its plain of evaporation a permanent slick sheen between me and all surfaces. My clothes are raggy sponges, soaked, stinking like a dead pond. Everything I touch becomes wet, minute oily bubbles beading on anything suitably hard and flat. It's as if my body is slowly bleeding into the surrounding air, molecule by greasy molecule.

Furthermore, there is this huge blowfly buzzing lugubriously around my tent like some miniature cruise missile insectilely targeted on my somewhat precarious (these days) sanity.

I am tense. I am waiting for something, a particular event, to occur, and when one is waiting in this heat the only thing to do is doze.

But not with that fly around.

Slowly, carefully, but still managing to send rivulets of sweat sliding down my torso like industrial waste down a riverbank, I push myself up onto one elbow and reach across for the fly swat. It is bright yellow molded plastic, and busted. Its thin spine is broken, but I've taped it up with silver duct tape, and utilised with an acquired skill of flicking the wrist, it can still do the job.

The fly buzzes tantalisingly close, as they always do just before one lays his hands on the appropriate technology to off them. With a grunt I grab the swat and concentrate on divining a pattern to the seemingly complex aerobatic maneuvers of this particular insect. "You little shit," I growl quietly as an aid to concentration.

It lands on my pistol, on the butt where it says ‘Smith & Wesson'. I experience a brief, mad vision of the fly picking up the pistol in impossibly spindly legs, aiming it at my face, cursing me in some squeaky cartoon voice, and blowing my head right off.

I bring the swat down crisply to forestall this eventuality, surprising myself with the energetic execution. It's amazing what the threat of death can do, I muse, as I flick the tiny, still twitching body onto the dirt floor beside my bunk.

Then I pick up my pistol by the barrel, lean over and grind the tiny body into so much unrecognizable red-brown shit.

Triumphant but exhausted, I let out a gut sigh and fall back onto my bunk and it squeaks like the amplified protests of a dying cartoon fly. I lay still, feeling the sweat find new levels after the disruption of exertion. Energised, it boils viscously out of my skin, drips down through my eyebrows and onto my eyelids, and finally trickles into my ears to pool there for a moment before it evaporates away. Elsewhere, lower down, I feel a sudden sting as fresh sweat flows into the ugly rash in my groin.

By some ballistic process of thought association, I think of a woman, and more flies. The last woman I saw, some weeks back now, was dead, crumpled next to a burnt out Toyota four-wheel-drive, a splayed protective hand over exposed cheek, palm out, light on dark.

I didn't know her well; she was just a business contact. Now she is another statistic in a Federal Police data base somewhere, filed under ‘Contraband Interception'.

There had of course been other women, before, who I did know well. With nothing else to do, I lay back in a languid stupor and see Miko. Lovely, tiny Miko, on the day we first met.

"And this is Miss Tanaka," Saito says in that bullshit avuncular manner they adopt when they are playing nice; carrots, not sticks.

"She is here to make you feel more at home." He smiles, ceiling fluorescents reflecting off glasses and teeth, making him seem even less human than usual. I feel like saying something obscene, but then Miko also smiles, and I feel like smiling back at her.

Another drowsy vision though: the last time I saw her. Lying naked on her side on a tatami, a woven raft in a sea of teak and cherrywod parquet. She is still, bright blood is seeping from her nose, mouth, other orifices, and pooling on the straw-coloured mat, beginning to soak in, dissolving the tatami back into the dark wood.

Warfarin. Rat poison.

Even dead she is perfect, as if she's carefully positioned herself, each perfect limb, every careful digit, to resemble some flawless alabaster doll stained with cherry red lacquer.

A geisha dies for love. So Japanese, in a way.

It was cool then.

Sometimes, the artificial, humming coolness of climate-controlled corporate towers. But sometimes the crisp, silent cold of the Canadian Rockies, the Swiss Alps, the Australian Snowys. Places of ice and snow that had become the ultimate symbols of luxury in a fast warming world. Those were clean, clear, cool days for me, and I luxuriated in the cold climate; the Italian-made clothes and English shoes with their mixture of pure comfort and centuries of hard-won practicality; the select global cuisine, each succulent morsel a gastronomic register of threatened species; the muted ambience of calm, controlled surroundings too high or cold or remote to be touched by anything without the right connections.

I recall a perfect moment, warmed by a roaring pine log fire and drinking good Russian vodka out of two-hundred-year-old crystal, with Hans and Jeremy. We gaze contented out at crisp Georgian snow where we've not long before beaten some rods from Matsushita in a team race. Just before that race we'd stitched together a deal that would bust Olivetti once and for all, and wreck the Latvian economy in one of those eggs and omelettes situations. And Miko waits for me in my room, decorous, wet for me.

And then it wasn't quite so perfect. Hans turned to me, eyes pellucid as the blue-white crystal we drank from, but thin lips and perfect teeth transparently carnivorous in the feral glow of the flames.

"What's this I hear about Johnson?" he says. He has the slightest Bavarian accent, just the merest clue, and he studies me, sipping icy vodka, jawline as sharp and flawless as the fine-edged blade of some Teutonic hero. Breeding, he'd claim; knife, I'd suggest.

"What have you heard, Hans?" I ask.

"Well," he says, glancing at Jeremy, who isn't noticing, "the word is he shot his sensei five times in the chest, enough to kill him evidently, and took some rather sensitive information to the media, who sensibly notified NipponSystems immediately and handed it right back to them. But he got away, and, I heard, is loose somewhere in southern Africa."

Hans studies me carefully, but obliquely. I feel then as if a snake is uncoiling in my stomach, scale over papery scale...

Despite the training, despite the pharmaceuticals.

Because Johnson had talked to me before he'd acted. He told me what he'd found out, and asked for my advice: "Sam, what the fuck do I do?" he'd said in that slow cowboy drawl of his.

"Do they know you've got it?" I asked. It occurred to me I could kill Johnson, expose him. They'd approve, honourable corporate loyalty.

"I don't think so. But they will soon," he said.

I stared at Johnson's long, earnest face. He was actually from Texas, parents ran a dude ranch outside of Abilene. One of the Jap tourists had taken a shine to the boy and sponsored his entry into NipponSystems. Well, the lone cowboy had just found out the mayor was a crook, that he'd been selling the indians disease-ridden blankets. I wondered how the fuck he'd got this far in the business - he was as wide open as an wildcatter's wallet in a brothel.

"Let me think about it, Joe," I said. "I'll get back to you by tonight, okay?".

I saw the disappointment in that long face. But he grabbed my gloved hand, held it for a moment, then turned and walked briskly away. His heavy coat was already dusted with snow at the shoulders.

It had been cold then; the coldest August day, in fact, New York had ever known.

By the time I got back to him Johnson had shot his handler and disappeared, although all I got was some message about him being off the net for a few days. There was nothing on the net about his boss being killed; and there was certainly nothing about a plan by elements of the corporate elite to introduce a particular virus into the African subcontinent, a neatly-engineered disease that would only kill blacks. Very fucking clever it was: sound accounting practice in a global economy where cheap resources still mattered but cheap labour didn't. Liquidate non performing assets - not racist, just rational.This is what the Texan had told me they were going to do.

I didn't think Johnson would have compromised me, but I started taking precautions anyway.

A few days later, right after we make love, Miko tells me something interesting. We are just lying there listening to each other's breathing. She rolls onto her side, carefully - she does everything carefully - and places the arch of her foot on my ankle and the palm of her hand on my arm. Her foot gently massages mine. I gaze at her like a fool, breathing in her physicallity, her beauty; which is marred - for me at least - only by the small NipponSystems corporate logo tattooed on the almost translucent skin of her inside upper left arm.

Suddenly she is frowning, making small, careful creases in her perfect forehead.

"What's the matter?" I whisper, maybe a little worried. She never frowns.

"Suzy Shimada, Mr Saito's girl, is my friend."

"Yes, I know."

"Suzy told me Mr Saito suspects you of anti-company attitudes." She is perfect, as if she is the one confessing some terrible crime. I never loved her more than then.

The night before, after a boozy, late night with my superiors, me and Miko had argued. As much as Miko could argue, anyway. I'd raged drunkenly against their superior Japanese attitude, said it was rooted in a genuine and abiding racism.

"But why do you hate us so?" Miko had asked, deep hurt so obvious in her face. "Are we any worse than the Americans when they were the strong ones? Or the British?".

"Or the Romans when they called the shots?" I said bitterly, regretting it even as I said it. Miko's dark eyes mutely pleaded for understanding. She was, after all, Japanese. And complicit.

"I don't know," I said, the anger draining out of me. "But the fact is it's the Japanese who are on top right now. The winners. Unassailable. Arrogant. Self-righteous. Maybe they're no worse, but they're no better either."

It was ironic, I had to admit. To an outsider I had it made: one of the comparatively few gaijin senior execs, I wheeled and dealed at rarefied levels on behalf of my Japanese masters. But I knew two things which soured any sense of complacency, or real satisfaction. The first was that as a gaijin I could never make it to the top in a world dominated by Japanese corporations. The second thing I knew was that even the jobs I could do were being eaten from below as flat management policies ground through their inexorable programmic logic.There were fewer faces each month, men in the prime of business life abandoned to the ever shrinking job markets. Maybe that part was not Japanese, the logic being determined by the imperatives of efficiency in ultra-competitive global markets, but who else would carry it out with such ruthless efficiency? And every time one of those Todai clones gave me a polite, unquestionable order, the resentment grew in me like a cancer, cell by diseased cell.

I don't know if I took my growing anger out on Miko. I do know that when I decided to go she couldn't come with me, and ate rat poison instead.

My pocket phone chimes: "Yep," I say.

"He's on the scope, Reed. All according to plan." Punctual fucks, always on time.

"Okay, I'm on my way."

I climb out of my bunk and step through the tent flap. After the dark and relative cool of the tent, the light of the too blue sky and the heat of the too red desert break over me like some electric tsunami and I stand for a few seconds fighting dizziness.

Sometimes, because it is so still and deep, the sky here is like an immense inverted bowl of perfect, translucent blue china. Perhaps, I think, if I looked hard enough I'd see myself up there in tiny, distorted reflection standing on a red ball that is the earth. At night, it's very different: the air is so clear, the stars so bright, you know you are just a crummy little hominid standing on a dusty planet and facing infinity in every direction. And a few orbiting Matsushita spacefabs and NTT LEOsats in between.

Suddenly I think again of Emily Brown, the dead woman next to the Toyota. She was Aboriginal, this is really her sky. One time I asked her, "Emily, how do you feel about the Japs?" She is so dark I can only see her eyes and her teeth under the battered cowboy hat.

"My people," she says, and takes a long look up at that sky, the sunlight making her skin gleam, "my people, we seen Portuguese and Dutch and British and French and Americans and Japanese, and all you white buggers look the same to us. But me," and she looks back at me, "I trade with anyone got the money."

Around me men are already moving purposefully. Miller, who used to be director of R&D Seattle for Sony, is directing the removal of covers from the SA-10 ground-to-air missile launcher. It is bulky and ugly in the way Russian gear always is; we are inadvertent beneficiaries of the biggest military fire sale in history. Miller has replaced some of the original electronics with Jap stuff, silver duct tape marking his alterations. Martinez and Jackson, meanwhile, late of NEC and Canon respectively, sit in head sets hunched over the comm console under camo netting, the dappled shadow making them look cool even if they aren't. Elsewhere, other men, not all the detritus of corporate rationalization, scamper about carrying out last minute instructions and defying the sapping heat.

I head towards the missile launcher, catching sight of Frichot off to my right. "Hey, Henri, who owns Smith and Wesson these days?" I shout out.

He stops, staring at me in bewilderment. "Er, Mitsubishi, I think," he offers after a few seconds.

"Well, it's still a damn fine weapon," I yell over my shoulder as I move, loping in my heavy boots like John Wayne, towards the launcher.

Somewhere high above us and to the north, a top-of-the-range Kawasaki-Boeing Starflight executive jet is approaching our position. I know that plane: its polycarbon frame is painted matte black except for a modest red NipponSystems logo on the tail, and it is as sharp and clean and functional as a working samurai's katana. I'd sat in it's subdued opulence with Saito myself once or twice, discussing the takeover of some company or the dismemberment of another. I'd said something to Saito about feeling sorry for the execs of the company we were gutting. He merely looked at me as if I'd just displayed some core gaijin weakness, turned and punched up a new set of figures onto a monitor screen. He was above it all.

And then, with slow deliberation, he turned back to me. Multicoloured LEDs flickered in his glasses.

"You know, it was you Americans that made us so determined. You make us join the modern world with your black ships, then you force us into war and test your new weapons on us. Then you watch us succeed and start to get worried that we succeed too well. Then you sigh with relief when it begins to come apart for us, and unemployment, crime and social upheaval torment Japan, and you enjoy the agony of our earthquakes on prime time.And then the New Depression, and America and Europe fall apart, and China and India follow them, and at last we are really on top. So we decided to get serious, stop apologising, and do things our way. You gaijin think you invented efficiency, but we will show you what that word really means."

And he is above me now on his way to look over a promising uranium mine the company has just bought, expecting no trouble. But he is about to get it, and he will be only the first. Saito and his impassive associates are about to find out that we are not refuse to be discarded, hapless sacrifices to propitiate the gods of the market. Unlike previous generations of human economic shock absorbers, we are not helpless in our predicament. We are experts in management, we understand technology, we know how to get things done. We even have a little credit.

My phone chimes. "Optimal firing condition, Reed."

There is a catch in my throat, despite everything. "Fire away," I rasp.

One, two fast accelerating projectiles launch themselves on billowing trails of smoke and flame, the noise palpable as it washes over the desert quiet.

Up there, Saito will be sitting in his aerial office, planning another corporate coup. Maybe, away from it all, he is allowing himself the luxury of reflecting on his preeminent position at the head of the new army from the east as he flies over another country in hock to himself and his colleagues. But maybe now his pilot has picked up something on radar, maybe he's even got time to alert Saito to the danger. But maybe not, I think, as high up, very high up in the endless northern Australian sky, a brilliant light appears and just as quickly fades. And then a black smudge spirals earthward according to the inexorable laws of gravity and meteorology.

It is an omen in the otherwise empty sky - more strange weather ahead.

I sit on my bunk. A new blowfly is patrolling the airspace in the tent. Outside the boys are packing up, and I should be too. But instead I think of Saito, Miko, Johnson, Brown, and me. Somehow, I know I'm better off since I left the cool world, liberated in some way. Not like Saito, straight-jacketed by success, limited to hard options. And not like Miko, who cared too much to fit into neat, hard structures.

Maybe Johnson felt like this. He was innocent too, like Miko, but he had a way out. And what about Brown, killed by strangers in her own land? We all seemed the same to her – just more change, more trouble. We even changed the weather on her. Another blowfly breezes into the tent. The odds are moving against me, and so I get up and start to pack.

End