Cybernetic Samurai

by Victor Milán

  “Especially everywhere, as far as I can see.”

  He laughed. She stuck her hands in her pockets and remembered, frowning ahead at the little path of grass worn thin.

  It had been unlikely enough for a TV movie. The daughter of the head of a great and powerful zaibatsu—if neither especially great nor powerful by zaibatsu standards—having an affair with the dashing young doitsu captain in charge of the corporate stronghold’s security unit. Yoshimitsu Michiko, skeptical of the culture into which she’d been born, a culture dominated by macho—an ever so useful gaijin word—males who never matured out of a basically adolescent ethic getting involved with, of all things, a Hispanic. And a professional soldier, at that.

  The military men Michiko had known, even the ones from cultures not so heavily centered on male bonding and bravado as Spain’s and Japan’s, had been pretty much of a stripe. Military service somehow seemed to retard maturation, to encourage looking to others for responsibility and direction, to reinforce the swaggering adolescent attitudes toward sex. Spain and Japan were both warrior cultures. They had the same preoccupation with honor, even at the expense of humanity, the same conception of woman as homemaker and consort, of man as a sort of a blunt instrument, ready to rush headlong against the slightest seeming challenge. Their similarity was one reason the early Portuguese and Spanish missionaries had enjoyed such success in their proselytizing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, frightening the bakufu into banning intercourse with foreigners entirely.

  Miguel was different. Though he’d been in the army since his youth—he was in his teens when he was conscripted and sent to Angola—he had picked up a certain amount of education and no little polish, despite his studiedly raffish guerrilla exterior. She sensed depths beneath that surface. He was calmer than he should have been, without that furious, driving need to prove himself. He read, and reflected, and did not automatically reject new ideas. Most of all, he was not threatened by an intelligent, independent woman. The fact that he understood not the slightest fraction of an area in which Michiko was an acknowledged expert did not seem to diminish him in the least. A thoroughgoing professional in his field, he respected her professionalism in her own. She wondered if his poise came from spending half his life on futile neocolonialist battlefields around the world.

  He was a very, very handsome man, and a very charming one, with a quick and ready wit. Nor did his near freedom from overbearing Latin masculinity mean he was deficient in Hispanic charm. And he understood, as too few people of either sex Michiko had met did, that a woman could have, be secure in and proud of, a sexual identity as well as a professional one. He’d never made any pretense that it wasn’t the latter facet he was primarily interested in. That suited her fine. They were poorly matched by temperament and interest for anything beyond a short, somewhat stormy fling.

  She’d been facing the prospect of a dry spell, anyway. Since Eileen Soames’s death in the war, the Gang of Four lacked its main cohesive force; the three survivors would at any minute go flying off in their disparate directions, centrifugal. The imminent collapse of Michiko’s relationship with Richard, her lover, her rival, would almost certainly provide the push.

  The fact that it would unsettle even a man as comparatively free of the old class consciousness as Yoshimitsu Akaji for his daughter to have an affair with a foreign mercenary was only incidental, of course.

  Their path led down to the bank of the stream. They sat down on a pair of moss-grown rocks huddled like ancient pilgrims by the stream, sending a squadron of frogs plopping into the water. Miguel looked at her, stroked her hair with the back of a hand. She pulled ever so slightly away.

  “I know it’s been a long time,” he said softly. “And neither one of us tried to keep in touch. But you’re here now, and you’re still very beautiful.”

  She smiled. That was something she didn’t hear too often. Since the final blowup with Richard she avoided entanglement with her immediate colleagues. The rest of the university faculty either distrusted, like so much of the modern world, anyone directly connected with the physical sciences, or was afraid of attracting the attention of the secret police by spending too much time with a foreigner, and a Japanese at that. Most of the foreign faculty was caught up in cocktail-circuit opposition to the regime for which Michiko had no stomach; it was pure masturbation, as evidenced by the fact it was permitted to continue. Nor did society beyond the hothouse environment of Sukarno University offer much. Despite the strident high-profile feminism of Maryam Ahmad, the dictator’s wife, the status of women in the most populous Islamic nation on earth made Japanese women look like the epitome of emancipation. Since the Gang’s heyday Yoshimitsu Michiko had known few friends, fewer lovers.

  She shook her head. “It’s too soon,” she said, not looking at him.

  He shrugged. Pleading wasn’t his style either.

  Damn it, I do find him attractive…

  García stiffened, put one hand to his right ear. He spoke low, rapid Spanish. With a shock, Michiko realized he’d just gotten a message over the bone-conduction speaker taped behind his ear and was issuing orders in response.

  “Intruders,” he said. “Electronics picked ’em up, sneaking up to the wire.” He broke off into more quick commands, then said, “Stay here,” and ran up the hillside, drawing his big rocket-firing sidearm. Michiko hesitated a moment, then followed.

  The mercenary flattened himself behind the crest of the hill. Well below, she dropped to all fours and scrambled up beside him, keeping low. He gave her a frown that quickly slipped into an exasperated grin. She heard the snarl of a machine gun, ducked instinctively, then lifted her head to peer through the sweet-smelling grass.

  Men were running down the southern slope of the Citadel’s truncated hilltop, knee high in grass, leaping over rocks or dodging them with sprawling steps. Mercenaries in bulky battle dress fired at them from inside the wire, as well as from the reinforced guard towers; an open dune buggy-like Light Combat Vehicle was tearing out through the main gate, four doitsu jammed in back, its machine gunner spraying the hillside with bullets. Even as she watched, a Gazelle patrol helicopter popped out of its revetment, buzzing like an angry wasp, the lawnmower whir of its miniguns’ motors distinct above the rotor chop.

  García lowered the compact binoculars he’d taken out of the breast pocket of his uniform blouse. “Saboteurs, just crazies,” he said. He lowered his head and spoke briefly into the microphone taped to his larynx. “They’ve got them all. Or will in a moment.” Michiko saw one of the running men fall and roll. She gasped. She’d seen death by violence before; just about everyone had who’d survived the war and the disorder that followed. But this was so immediate—though she felt little love for the citadel, it was home. She tried to shrug off a sick premonition of dissolution.

  * * * * *

  Secure behind the leaf screen of a wild plum thicket, Colonel Tranh Vinh watched the tense little melodrama play itself out a klick and a half to the north through his Zeiss field glasses. Fancy computer-enhanced glasses of half the weight and bulk were available, but he preferred to trust in his own eyes and good Swiss optics, on his own inferences and interpretations, as opposed to those of some computer programmer. Besides, the Zeiss glasses had sentimental value; he’d picked them up as spoils of war when, as a stripling, he’d served with the elite dec cong sappers in the siege of the American marine base at Khe Sanh.

  He lowered the glasses. His eyes were protuberant, peering between thick lids through slits in Ping-Pong balls. He had a narrow head, flat nose, snapping-turtle mouth, a face composed of dramatic hollows, well sunken at the temples and under the flat flanged cheekbones. A loose knobby man, with an upright brush of short black hair dusted with gray. In arthritis-knobbed fingers he lifted a smokeless cigarette to his lipless mouth, sucked strongly to draw air through the damp nicotine-impregnated membranes. A wonderful thing, technology. It enabled him to enjoy the nerve-soothing effects of his favorite vice, without dange
r of compromising his position with a feather of smoke.

  He took a breath touched with gunsmoke and growing leaves, raised the glasses again. Thank God, as well, for radical cranks willing to die for a Communist faith that had long since become a bitter joke in the Second World. Not that you could call the half dozen bravos he’d enlisted from Rengo Sekigun, the Japanese Red Army, brave. They didn’t know fear; what they were was insane. He felt a certain kinship with them, nonetheless, even as he did with the Cubans who were massacring them with a certain aplomb. The terrorist JRA had been mercenaries long before either the Cubans or the Vietnamese got into the act. And for much the same reason: the stupefying fees leveled by the Soviets for military aid and matériel.

  A mercenary on foot inside the wire perimeter went down. A moment later he was up, scooping up his rifle and blazing away in fury. Good body armor, he noted. The 5.45mm rounds fired by the terrorists’ old-fashioned AKS-74’s wouldn’t penetrate. He nodded to himself. Another thing to be dealt with.

  He saw the fire team dismount the LCV, saw the fleeing terrorists scatter, one falling, as the vehicle’s gunner sprayed them with bullets. Of course, the terrorists would fight to the death. It was one of the reasons he employed them. Though he was still a little bemused that they’d actually consented to make a probe in daylight against the perimeter of so strongly held a position as Yoshimitsu citadel. All it took were a few well-chosen words, a few glowing amber drops of socialist solidarity poured into ready ears. A beautiful thing, revolutionary fervor.

  Bent low, the fire team moved downslope. The bullpup design of their rifles, banana-shaped clip set behind handgrip and trigger, still sat strangely in Tranh’s eyes. He was more used to the conventional lines of the JRA’s weapons, with the clip before the trigger guard. The Cubans’ rifles were adapted from a design by the Finnish Valmet Company, which in turn had been built on the classic Soviet Kalashnikov gas-operated system. So the circle turned.

  Information supplied by his principals—which really meant MITI, though he wasn’t supposed to know that—indicated the weapons had been manufactured at a Soviet-licensed plant in northern Mexico, one of many arms plants that had sprung up around the fringes of the United States after private ownership of firearms was outlawed in that country. A seemingly trivial piece of information, but it was on foundations composed of just such apparent trivia that Tranh built the strategies that had made him the world’s foremost expert in siege warfare.

  Like a man examining tea-leaf dregs at the bottom of a cup, Tranh read significance in the fact that the security platoon used weapons originally earmarked to be run into the States in the face of the new prohibition, which had then been warehoused for a year after the Third World War had drastically reduced the American population, and hence the absolute (if not relative) demand for heavy-duty firepower. In the fact that the patrol choppers, like the one swooping on terrorists hidden at the foot of the hill near a culvert where the causeway crossed a brook, were superannuated French models, instead of radical modern designs, or even more reliable Brit, West German, or American contemporaries of the Gazelles, like the Messerschmitt-Bolkow-Blohm BO105. Or the mercenaries themselves: Cubans, retreads from a series of lost colonial wars. Not Hessians, as conscript mercenaries invariably were called; exiles in point of fact, as he knew from the dossier Toda had given him. But neither soldiers of a nationality noted for skill, discipline, or staying power. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of Israelis, SAS veterans, even American Special Forces troopers still wandering around at loose ends—but they cost money. On the evidence, Yoshimitsu Akaji didn’t like to spend a yen more than he had to on the distasteful necessity of security.

  The mercenaries’ skirmish line had gone to ground halfway down the slope. The Gazelle darted in for a run, miniguns howling from their pods. From the top of the hill came the distinct took of a grenade launcher fired by a merc inside the wire. An instant later earth and smoke geysered briefly from the foot of the hill. Tranh Vinh sucked his cigarette, bobbed his head, and smiled, He’d always found Cubans overbearing and basically stupid, but he was acquiring a definite respect for his opposite number in the Yoshimitsu citadel. Major García had molded a fairly strak outfit from unprepossessing material.

  The JRA team had infiltrated the valley in predawn darkness, escaping visual observation by the regular helicopter sweeps. But as they’d crossed the base of the hilt scattered sensors had detected movement the security computers analyzed as human; the Cubans had been waiting when the terrorists approached the wire. Not that the intruders had been ready to make their move. They’d halfway baked some scheme to wait until the late-afternoon shift change, then rush in openly through the midst of the traffic stream at the main gate, apparently crediting their capitalist foes with enough sympathy with the working classes that the security team wouldn’t open fire on Yoshimitsu employees. That wrinkle amused Tranh; old Yoshimitsu probably wouldn’t permit endangering his employees, but the Cubans wouldn’t give a damn.

  The colonel adjusted the plug in his ear. The French chopper crew was arguing in broken English with a Cuban corporal claiming two kills down by the road. The Cuban said bullshit, his team was still taking fire from down there. Good ground/air coordination, that was what Tranh Vinh liked to see.

  He shifted his skinny butt on the outcrop of gray and black rock and reached down to brush a branch with shiny purplish bark from the dials on the instrument resting in its open suitcase beside him. It was a “black box” electronic intelligence-gathering unit, very state-of-the-art, and it was for its benefit that this little morality play had been staged. It had recorded much data concerning Yoshimitsu security’s communications, voice and datalink, as it had earlier discovered very sophisticated miniradar arrays set well up on the surrounding peaks to sweep valley approaches, with excellent look-down and ground-return clutter-filtering capabilities, to ward against nap-of-the-earth approaches by helicopters. A very useful unit indeed—many of whose more recondite components bore the distinctive YTC logo.

  The helicopter hovered over the road while the fire team worked its way forward. As the corporal said, the Cubans were still taking fire from the base of the built-up causeway. Tranh laid his glasses on one khaki-clad knee and considered. For all the corners Yoshimitsu had cut, the soft white meat of the corporation was going to be hard to pry out of its gray cement shell—especially given the restrictions imposed by Tranh’s employers. Heliborne assault was out; the little ground-sweeper radars were proof measures had been taken to guard against such attacks, and helicopters were just too damned vulnerable at the best of times. That was all right; Tranh was beginning to get an idea of how to get the main assault force in, an idea he found very elegant indeed.

  Getting the team into the compound wouldn’t be difficult. What would be was getting into the Citadel proper. Tranh had heard the Cuban major veto a suggestion that all entrances and exits be sealed, presumably with the blastproof shutters he could see poised above the windows. Tranh saw no way in the normal course of events he could get any number of men inside without having those shutters slam in their faces. Oh, they could be blasted through—he of all people knew that. But not without an unacceptable risk of damage to delicate and vital equipment inside, as well as causing higher casualties inside than were discreet. MITI wanted this handled with the shedding of a minimum of Japanese blood. Oh, well; they were paying for it.

  Besides, that was in the normal course of events. It was up to Tranh to arrange an abnormal course. Which to his mind meant recourse to the classical tool of the besieger treachery.

  Suborn a mercenary? Usually a good approach, but this time Tranh doubted it. Not for any good reason. If they had truly been doitsujin yohei, “German mercenaries,” Hessians—as he himself was—that would render the prospect less likely; a defecting Hessian would have the wrath of his own government to face as well as that of surviving employers and comrades, if any. A lot of conscript-mercs had families at home, and reprisals against re
latives of deserters and traitors were a bloody commonplace. But these were landless men, cut off from home. Why couldn’t they be bought?

  Call it a hunch. Tranh knew his brain had two hemispheres and respected his hunches every bit as much as he did his reason. Major Miguel García was a romantic figure: outlawed by Castro’s Soviet-puppet successors, then by the fascist émigrés who overthrew them, he’d kept what had started out as a true Hessian company together as attrition whittled it down to a platoon, leading it through a series of Third World adventures to this comfortable billet in a still fairly wealthy land. His men venerated him. Over half a decade of garrison duty didn’t seem to have sapped their morale overmuch. MITI had tried as a matter of course to turn the major or one of his men. It never worked, and one would-be recruiter had been found bobbing next to a Hagi pier with a great blue-black dent in his forehead and his lungs full of the Sea of Japan. Tranh didn’t intend to telegraph his punch by even trying that angle.

  Besides, he knew where to find his traitor: right here. To its unending frustration, the ministry had no real contact with the people inside the citadel. That didn’t worry Tranh. Somewhere inside that slate-gray castle was a man who didn’t feel he was getting all the rewards or recognition his honor demanded; Tranh knew the Japanese. According to the schedule laid down by Hiryu—and MITI—he had sixty to ninety days to locate him.

  A terrorist leapt up almost at the feet of the right-most Cuban, his nerve breaking at the last moment, racing along the side of the road with his elbows pumping. He didn’t make fifteen meters. That’s it, Tranh Vinh thought. He took a final drag on his smokeless cigarette and patted his black box affectionately. It was time to go home.

  CHAPTER 11

  +

  The page’s heart pulsed with forbidden excitement. The whole castle was alive with it: the taiko, ruler of all Japan, had come to visit. For months rumors of a visit had gone around the pantry, the yard where the laborers chopped wood, the huts of the servants who helped the master gardener tend the castle’s garden. The castle’s master, Tokugawa Ieyasu, lord of the han of Kanto, was the most powerful vassal of Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the peasant who had made himself ruler of the recently unified nation. And leyasu was an ambitious man. It was common knowledge in the Kanto that he had it in his mind to supplant Hideyoshi, and put the Tokugawa clan in place of the Toyotomi. Now the taiko had come into Ieyasu’s domain, to bestow on his vassal an ancient sword of great renown. Would the daimyo make his move?