We were well along on the glidepath by the time I'd done what I could, and the stewardess had already warned me three times to return my seat to its upright and most uncomfortable position. I had a lot to think over as I folded up the seatback system's keyboard, and tried to keep my stomach out of my mouth as the suborbital pitched over even steeper for final approach.

The on-board data retrieval system had given me some' background, but I'd soon come to the conclusion that the Columbia HyperMedia Encyclopedia seemed to be targeted at elementary-school kids who were considerably less streetwise than I'd been at that age. Sure, it was a great source for data on the kingdom's population (four million and change), its capital (Honolulu, natch), its average per-capita income (20,000?), and the other superficial drek a kid would want to plagiarize for an essay. But for the real meat, I soon realized I'd have to access sources with a slightly more mature worldview.

Fortunately, the seatback system offered a gateway to the plane's communication systems, and from mere an uplink to the Amethyste system of low-Earth orbit comm satellites. Through the Amethyste grid, I could sidelink to Renraku's DataPATH system, and then downlink to the public databases with which I'd been familiar in Seattle. Hell, returning to my old electronic stomping grounds was easier from 23,000 meters over the Pacific-once I'd figured out the gateway protocol-than it was to navigate the Sioux RTG system to get to the same nodes. (Of course, it was also a hell of a lot more expensive. When I finally logged off and the system reported my connect charges, I went pale for a moment, then thanked the fine folks at Yamatetsu-in absentia-for picking up the tab.) The only thing I'd wanted that the system couldn't give me was access to a Shadow-land server. (Well, I suppose it probably could have, but the audit trail stored in the guts of the big suborbital would have been like garish flags reading "Shadowrunner On Board.")

So here's what I managed to dig up about the independent Kingdom of Hawai'i, summarized in the inimitable Dirk Montgomery style. (Oh yeah, one quick aside. Mainlanders probably aren't used to seeing Hawai'i spelt with the apostrophe. Back in the weird old days, when the islands were actually a state of the now-defunct U.S., the name had been spelt Hawaii. No longer, chummer. An easy way to slot off an islander is to spell the name of his country without the apostrophe. An easier way is to mispronounce it, apparently: it should be pronounced ha-VEYE-ee, with a noticeable glottal stop before the last syllable. At first I thought this anal retentiveness about pronunciation was stupid, but then I considered what I'd think of someone who pronounced my city of birth as SEE-tul. Point taken.)

Okay, so anybody who's attended elementary school in the United Canathan and American States will know that Hawai'i used to be the fiftieth state of the union. What I hadn't known was that this was originally accomplished not by negotiation, but actually through the actions of a U.S. naval officer who'd placed his gunboat at the disposal of some American robber barons who considered that the incumbent national government was actually an obstacle to doing business. (Who says history never repeats itself? A corporation effectively taking over a sovereign state? Sounds like the early twenty-first century, neh?) Once the incumbent monarch, King Kamehameha III, was ousted, one Sanford B. Dole-a high corp muckamuck who'd made his fortune in pineapples, or some damn thing-named himself head of state of the entire island chain.

That was in 1893. After five years, the good old U.S. of A. decided that having a corp suit as head of state wasn't a Good Thing. So they moved in and annexed the islands from the robber baron who'd annexed them from the native Hawaiians…

And immethately started peppering the islands with military bases-naval, air force, etcetera, drekcetera. In 1959 the U.S. government decided to legitimize this shotgun marriage of an annexation, and declared the islands to be the fiftieth state. Again-judging by the historical records I could access, at least-nobody bothered to consult the native Hawaiians about this change. (Hey, they were just primitive Polynesians, weren't they? And they couldn't even vote…)

That's how things stayed, more or less, for fifty years. Oh, sure, there were occasional resurgences of nationalism, of "Hawai'i for Hawai'ians" sentiment-led most notably by a group calling itself Na Kama'aina ("The Land Children")- but nothing much happened until the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Back on the mainland, trouble was brewing. The U.S. government-and mainly the U.S. military-saw the writing on the wall, and knew that the "Inthan problem" would soon be coming to a nasty, violent head. Suddenly the military bases on the islands of Hawai'i became even more important than they were before. Here were bases and assets that the SAIM "terrorists" couldn't sabotage or infiltrate easily. (Much harder for some militant Sioux warriors to blow the drek out of Pearl Harbor than to terrorize Colorado Springs-so the reasoning went, at least.) More and more major military research projects were moved to the islands, "out of harm's way."

Hah, and again hah! Na Kama'aina, and more hard-hooped splinter factions like the whimsically named ALOHA (Army for the Liberation Of Hawai'i), started looking to the SAIM hotheads as role models. Hey, if the mainland aboriginals could kick the drek out of the Anglos, why couldn't they?

Between 2011 and 2013, ALOHA and its bomb-throwing brethren went on a rampage, car-bombing government buildings, army barracks, and military installations. During the two-year reign of terror, ALOHA claimed to have greased some 150 "legitimate" targets. (Its leaders didn't have much to say about the three hundred-plus innocents offed in "collateral damage.")

Predictably, this made it heat-wave time. At the request of the state government, the feds sent a battalion of troops to Kaneohe Bay Marine Corps Air Base, renamed the combat troops the "Civil Defense Force," and proceeded to break heads. According to my research, there was a surprising incidence of suspected ALOHA sympathizers "killed while resisting arrest" or "shot while trying to escape." Who would have thought it? (Yeah, right.)

The heat wave went on, and Na Kama'aina, ALOHA, and their fellow-travelers dropped from public ken. For a while, at least. To (mis)quote Shakespeare, the Civil Defense Force had scotched the snake, not killed it. The ALOHA boys and girls kept working, but in the shadows now rather than out in the bright tropical sun.

Some bright spark decided that a PR coup was needed, so ALOHA and the rest started looking for a legal lineal descendent of King Kamehameha I, the Ali'i ("king") who'd united the islands initially, turning a bunch of squabbling islands into a single nation. Surprise, surprise, they found one. (Well, sure they did: Look for something hard enough and you're going to find it… whether it actually exists or not.) Seems that one Danforth Ho-a twenty-four-year-old management consultant on the island of Maui, who happened to be one-quarter Polynesian by blood-was actually the direct lineal descendent of King Kam I… and hence the True and Rightful King of the Islands. Now that ALOHA and crew were able to produce-or at least talk about-a "rightful king in exile," more and more of the islanders started to swing over to their cause. (The fact that the Civil Defense Force wasn't exactly discriminating in which heads it broke couldn't have hurt.)

Now, Na Kama'aina and ALOHA apparently thought that their "Ali'i in exile" was just puppet, a mouthpiece they could use to build up support from the populace. And at first, that seemed to be the truth. Danforth Ho wasn't really what you'd call king material; both Ho himself and his "handlers" agreed on that. But then, when he saw that people were really starting to follow him, to believe in him, Danforth had something of a change of heart. He did some studying and learned more about his true heritage, about what his umpty-ump-grandfather had actually done for the people of Hawai'i. And he realized that he could actually do something about the situation. Without the knowledge of his handlers, he started to become an "Ali'i in exile," not just a figurehead. On his own initiative he started negotiating for support and funds with various megacorporate interests in the islands. (Want to take a wild guess about one of me key corporations he dealt with? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. A clue for you: the corp name starts with a Y…)