by Victor Milán
To her right a road wound up out of the southwest from the company village where most of the lower-ranked employees lived. Behind lay ranks of neat houses with neatly manicured tiny yards, white stucco gleaming in the morning sun, and she was struck again by their resemblance to white playing stones on a go board, each holding its nexus of the grid. Do black stones surround them, unseen? she wondered. Instantly she dismissed the notion as paranoid and sought shelter in cynicism: the computerized huts of the happy modern serfs. That’s all.
She made a wry face as the little passenger chopper angled right for its landing approach. She knew that her family’s corporation treated its employees better than most, with honest if paternalistic concern. Still, the whole arrangement left a sour taste in her mouth.
To her eye, castle and compound had changed little since she’d last seen it, shortly after the war. The Citadel itself rose from the center of a flattened hilltop, a kilometer by about a kilometer and a third, rising perhaps thirty meters above a mountain valley that lay between two folds of the mountain range. Most of the compound looked like grassy parkland surrounded by a four-meter fence topped with barbed-wire tangles, concrete guard towers with glassed-in tops scattered around the perimeter. Like a great stone tree, the castle cast its roots deep below the surface.
Wheeling below the chopper, the bunkered entryway to underground employee parking held its immense blastproof doors shut, awaiting late-afternoon shift change. To the right the stressed-cement clamshell halves of the hangar bay yawned open, ready to gulp down the cargo hanging in the swollen orange belly of the dirigible nuzzling Takara-yama like an affectionate baby whale, bearing consumables from the great port of Hiroshima. Past it lay the black patch of a surface parking lot for visitors; part of it was marked off in orange as a helipad, destination for the compact executive helicopter in which she’d ridden up from the historic seaport town of Hagi, on the coast to west and south.
And, finally, the castle itself: six stories tall, a hundred meters square, gray stone pierced by windows that could be covered by massive steel and concrete shutters at the flick of a button or even a voice command, a monolith saved from blockiness by a slight taper and concavity of the walls and the sweeping skirts of the pagoda-style roofing that fringed its top.
Movement took Michiko’s eye as the copter swept low, leaving a bow-wave ripple in the lake of spring-green grass. A squad of heavily armed men, bulky in camouflage gear over bulletproof vests, waded through the green in a curving skirmish line. They glanced up incuriously as Michiko’s helicopter and its Gazelle escort beat past; Cuban mercenaries of the YTC security platoon out on some kind of field exercise. Michiko smiled faintly. She no longer found such antics as amusing as once she had; the world had grown a harsh place and strange since the war, and what once had seemed paranoia now seemed the height of common sense. Miguel, she thought. It’s been five years, with barely a thought. Do we still have anything to say to each other?
As the Gazelle hovered above like a watchful dragon, the passenger craft set down on the helipad next to the citadel. A rooftop pad would have been logical, and was in fact all but de rigueur for Japanese corporate offices. But that was out of the question; the roof was entirely taken up by the garden.
Miguel had told her that if anyone meant to break in on a large scale, a roof landing, a concerted armed rush on the stairway and elevators concealed in the little pavilion of the garden would be an excellent way to gain entry to the castle. Or appeared to be. In fact, the slanting, shingled roofing that rimmed the wall was studded with hidden emplacements for small antiaircraft missiles, both heat-and radar-guided. Additionally, the roof was equipped with what had been dubbed the Swallow Trap Air Defense System. It was almost painfully simple; at a vocal command, several dozen rockets would leap out of concealed ports in the tops of the wall, playing out strong steel cables behind them as their shortlived motors lifted them to a height of several hundred meters. The missiles’ casings would then split open, deploying balloons filled with helium from small pressurized canisters, to hold the cables aloft. It was no more than a variation of the old barrage balloons used in London during the Blitz—but against helicopters, with their wide-sweeping main rotors, lethally effective. The missiles and the Swallow Trap were but a few of the computer-coordinated, high-tech devices shielding the citadel from the vicissitudes of modern life.
With a bump the copter set down. The engines’ timbre changed, faded behind the swooshing of the main rotor. Without waiting for an escort Michiko opened the side door and hopped down onto the pavement. She ran toward the edge of the apron, bent low to avoid the swooping rotor, glad that she had remembered to dress warmly in black turtleneck and jeans that morning. It was a cold April in Japan, so much different from the mind-numbing swelter of Jakarta.
A giant old man in a business suit stood waiting for her. She ran up to him and hugged him mightily, ignoring his visible embarrassment. “Aoki-san! You old dear, how good to see you.” She stood on tiptoe to kiss him, and even at that was only able to peck at his blocklike chin. As they turned and began to walk toward the building she threaded her arm through his. “At least you cared enough to come to greet me, old friend.”
“You must not talk that way, Michiko-san,” Aoki Hideo grumbled. He didn’t have to raise his voice to be heard past the chopper’s whine. “Your father is a very busy man. The corporation… MITI is applying pressure once again.”
“And Shigeo? Or is he off whoring in Kyoto again?”
“Your brother is very busy too, Michiko-san. And he is not feeling well today.”
“What’s the matter? He pick up the clap?”
Aoki blushed. She squeezed his biceps, felt reassuring granite solidity. “Forgive me, Aoki-san. I’ve never been much good at being a proper little Japanese girl.”
Aoki frowned. “I know, Michiko-san; it’s your father’s despair. No, your brother had a harrowing experience.”
“Then I suppose he’ll whine about it endlessly tonight at dinner—that is, if I’m invited.” She hugged the old man. “No, don’t protest on behalf of my family. We both know how things are.”
Sensor-controlled, the glass doors of the castle slid open before them. They passed along a short corridor, beneath a multiton portcullis of cement, cleverly concealed overheads passed a guard booth faced in armored glass. “But enough of my family, old friend. Tell me, how are things going with yours? Does your granddaughter still want to come and study physics with me in Jakarta?”
* * * * *
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“Hey, Paco,” stocky trooper Guerrero shouted from the com/comm console in the mercenaries’ barracks among the roots of the Yoshimitsu citadel. “Come look at this. Your chance for adventure at last.”
Sitting crosslegged on his bunk, trooper LaBlond looked up from jamming a cleaning brush on its rod down the muzzle of his bullpup AK. He was a kid, light brown hair held back from his face by a rag tied around his temples. Ultimately conscious of being the youngest trooper in the platoon, he was trying to grow a mustache in emulation of his comrades, only it was hard to tell. The hairs were fine, so pale as to be almost transparent.
Guerrero rapped the glowing screen with a brawler’s misshapen knuckles. “Come on, chico. This may be your chance to blow off this boring garrison guano and see some real action. Give you some stories to impress the girls with.”
Trooper Dominguin swung his booted feet off the cot next to
LaBlond’s and sat up. He was a sandy-bearded, two-meter ox who’d been with García since the old days in Angola. He reached over and tugged at the open neck of the boy’s fatigue blouse, endangering the buttons. “He won’t have no luck till he gets some hair on his chest. That’s the way the girls around here like ’em, cause their own men are so smooth. Girls like to know it’s a man holding ’em, not some flatchested broad.” He thrust forward his own huge chest by way of example, holding his fatigues apart at the top. It looked as if he were wearing a bear rug under the blouse.
LaBlond struck the big man’s paw away. Domingufn laughed. “You got balls, kid. Too bad you got no chance to use ’em.”
“Since you’ve got nothing better to do than pick on the kid,” a dry voice said from the doorway, “perhaps you want to clean his rifle for him, qué no?” They looked around. Corporal Hierra stood in the doorway. Despite having returned from conducting maneuvers only half an hour before, the compact little noncom was immaculate, every black hair in place, beard as if it had been carved from ebony, black beret tipped to a precise angle, tailored cammie shirt neat, green trousers tucked into the tops of spit-polished American-style jungle boots. At his hip he wore an American revolver half as long as he was; miracle he didn’t list to one side when he walked.
He strutted forward, plucked the partly disassembled rifle from the boy’s fingers, stuck his thumb into the breach, and squinted down the bore to examine it by light reflected off one exquisitely manicured thumbnail. He tut-tutted and thrust the weapon back at the boy.
“Just like I thought. Looks like a decommissioned coal-slurry pipe.” The boy flushed.
“It’s that Russian shit we were firing for practice this morning, corporal,” Guerrero said. “Loaded before the war. That cheap-assed Jap must of got a good deal on a lot of it. No fucking wonder; looked to be about half charcoal, way it smoked.”
“What were you two jackoffs pestering the kid about this time?”
“Aw, corporal, we were just trying to help,” Guerrero said, grinning placatingly through gaps in his teeth. “He’s always griping about he’s never seen no real action. I was just reading him this listing in the mercenary section of the InterNet dailies. Sounds like the opportunity he’s been looking for.”
Hierra squinted at the boy as though trying to make him out through bright sunlight. “You seriously thinking about asking the major to sell back your contract so you can get your ass shot off?” The boy’s tongue tangled itself in hurried denials.
“Hey, why not?” Guerrero asked. “We’re no fuckin’ Hessians. We can walk if we please. Hell, they won’t let us back into Cuba anyway.”
“Kid just wants some fancy stories to impress the girls with,” Dominguin said.
“I’m a soldier,” the kid finally managed to say. “I want to fight.
Shaking his head, Hierra went to the console and bent down to read it over Guerrero’s shoulder. His nostrils flared in amusement. “Honey to snare fly brains,” he snorted. “No deal that sweet’s gonna pay much money—and no deal is that sweet. You can’t promise safe passage like that without the cooperation of the target country’s government. And what the hell government welcomes mercs homing in on its territory?
“Tell you what, Paco. Just let Major Miguel get a look at your weapon in that condition. He’ll give you all the adventure you want.”
CHAPTER 8
+
The hunter crouched in long grass and watched the lions worrying the striped carcass of a zebra. The sun had long since slipped off the top of the rounded hummock of the sky and would soon roll down behind the horizon. Then maybe the hunter could rush out and seize a few handfuls of cooling meat for himself his mate, and their infant son. Now there was nothing to do but wait, and hide, while the tantalizing smell of blood and the wet stink of spilled guts congealed in the air.
There were half a dozen beasts in the pride, the three lionesses who had made the kill, the big black-maned male tearing at the carcass, a pair of young. Vultures paced, expectant, ugly heads bobbing back and forth on wrinkled necks, occasionally straying too close, only to be driven off in a cloud of black wings and squawls by the jealous male. It was the hierarchy of the high hot plains: the male ate first, then the lioness and cub, and then, when they were replete, the scavengers.
Including the hunter and his small family.
It had been days since they had eaten anything but a handful of bugs. They had come here, to a small place in the plain where a spring rose, to lurk along the trails beaten down by the hippos who lived there. Hoping to catch a fish, perhaps, or share in the kill of some bigger, stronger predator. The hunter looked sideways.
His mate watched him with half-closed, hopeless eyes. Like him, she was covered all over with a sparse, fine dark brown fur, except for her face, the palms of her hands, and soles of her feet, and the shrunken, desiccated mammaries against which she huddled the infant. Like him, she had a low forehead, flat nose, a muzzle more than a mouth, no chin to speak of. He felt a great surge of warmth for her and the small life she cradled, shot through with frustration that he could not seem to provide them sustenance.
The infant hung listless, lacking the energy or awareness to brush away the fly that crawled along the ball of one half-closed eye. The fine black-brown fur at the backs of his legs grew smeared with dung. His bowels had run uncontrollably since the day before, and he was weaker with every passing minute.
The big cat haggled a hind leg off the zebra and carried it to the shade of a thorn tree, where he began to devour it at leisure in the shade, under the watchful eye of several kites perched in the branches. The lionesses and cubs moved in for their share of the feast. Overhead vultures floated to the slow whims of air rising up off the hot veldt. The hunter felt a soft grumbling in his stomach. He hoped the lionesses would finish soon. The day was dying fast, and with night came the tawny spotted scavengers, with their massive jaws that could crack a buffalo’s femur. When they arrived he would have no chance of wresting anything for his family and himself.
Perhaps he’d rush upon the pride and try to drive it from its kill. Sometimes they gave way, if you charged them with enough determinations made enough noise. Sometimes. Yet even now the hunger and desperation did not quite outweigh the prospect of shredding death from teeth and black claws fetid with rotting meat—of leaving his mate and offspring without even the poor sustenance he’d been able to provide. Not quite.
He waited. The day grew hotter. The infant stirred in its mother’s arms, whimpered feebly. The lions lingered at their feast, rasping flesh from bone with rough strong tongues.
From the thorn tree, the kites watched. Whatever happened, they would feed.
- +
The rope chafed his shoulder, digging a raw furrow through skin and muscle, dull red stinging with the salt of sweat, ceaseless rasping against the side of his neck, as it had for endless days before and would for endless days beyond, until he had no more flesh to hold his bones from lying down and becoming one with the rank black soil underfoot. The cries of the overseers were strident, alien voices, rhythmic and strange as the calls of large insects, urging on the slaves dragging a huge block of stone to take its place in the great wat rising from the clearing in the jungle. Heavy wet air muffled his limbs like a burial shroud soaked with water, binding, weighing him down. Breathing was torture. The air clogged his lungs like wet silk, yet gave no sustenance.
His feet slipped in mud. An overseer barked at him, brought a rattan whining down on his shoulders. He knew better than to look to the side. From around him came a chorus of soft grunts, the sounds of men laboring singlemindedly past exhaustion, like the coughing of carabao at nightfall. Hard men, the Khmer kings, to make their slaves labor in the hot sun without so much as a conical straw hat to keep the sun from their shaven heads.
Left at home, in a small hut with his family and a land made fertile by canals, his lot would have been labor scarcely less grinding. But at home at least he could glean some
reward for labor. Here a day’s toil bought only the chance for a night’s fitful sleep chained in the slave barracks, then up in the sun’s red eye to do it again.
A runlet of sweat filled his eyes. He shook his head, trying to blink it away. If this was his karmic burden, he should try to bear it without complaint, without thought. But still, but still…
- +
Frothing like a rabid dog, the sea hurled itself forward, battering the jagged black lava headland with a demon roar. Naked but for a headband and wet cloth around his loins, leaning back with feet braced in pockets of the sharp porous rock, bunched muscles of thighs and calves standing forth, the young man assailed his miya-daiko with heavy polished hardwood sticks, making it roar back defiance with intensity equal to the fury of the sea.
Storm clouds slid in black from the west with the ominous ease of trouble on the way; sea birds drifted high overhead and cried out in wonder and alarm. The young man didn’t know them. There was just the sea, and the drum, and the Void, a mad exultation, the measured thunder of the drums imposing structure on the inchoate surge of the sea. The young man was the act itself leaning back so that the muscles of his back almost touched hard level stone, bringing all his leverage and power to bear to smash the drums, as if to burst the skin stretched taut across it. Here abode no will, no intention, just the sea and the drum and the beautiful interplay of form and chaos.
The storm came. The young man fought his drum until the kami who resided within came forth to greet it.
-
“Very impressive,” Elizabeth O’Neill said, when the big screen went black. “I’m tempted to run through that again, once we get the Kliemann Coil up.”
She turned around to see Nagaoka Hiroshi smiling shyly. The quiet anthropologist had designed all three scenarios. It pleased O’Neill to see that he was happy with his achievement, but she herself was troubled. I wish TOKUGAWA had been more decisive in that Tsavo hunter-gatherer scenario, she thought. He has to learn boldness.
