by Ilsa J. Bick
Except this morning. He twisted the key in the ignition, pulled out the fuel petcock, thumbed down the starter and listened as the engine rrr-rrr-rrred. He checked the kill switch; he pulled out the choke; he cursed a blue streak. No go.
Then, a midnight blue hovercar—four-door sedan, tinted windows, mirror-perfect chrome—hissed to a stop alongside. The back door slid open. A ball of cold air ballooned out, followed by a man in a black, crewneck tee and gray sharkskin trousers. His skin was sallow and he had very small, almond-shaped eyes set in a flat box of a face. Another man joined him: identical in dress but much shorter, closer to McCain in height, and so muscle-bound that McCain thought the guy’s biceps would rip the seams of his shirt if the guy sneezed. McCain’s eyes dropped to the men’s right wrists, and suddenly his heart kicked into overdrive. Because there was the tattoo: gold chain-link, circlet of a black dragon against red background.
The muscled one said, “Need a lift, Doc?”
“Naw.” McCain waved him off. “Thanks. But if you’ve got jumper cables…”
“Naw, we don’t got cables,” said Muscle. “What we got is a nice cool car, good stereo. Take you anywhere you want to go.”
“I’ll be okay.”
“Naw, Doc.” And this time McCain saw a glint of blue steel. Maybe a pistol; maybe a nice, pointy torigato designed to make shish kebab out of his heart. “You really want a ride,” said Muscle.
“Well,” said McCain, “when you put it that way.”
They blindfolded him. McCain tried keeping track of twists and turns. They were climbing, and that meant they were headed east. The only thing east of the city was the lake, and ritzy estates beaded the coastline like pearls on a string, homes of the very rich and filthy rich. McCain figured this was really good, or really bad. Good, since the tattoos meant these were the right yakuza, but really bad if they’d figured out that he wasn’t who he said he was.
As soon as they let him out, and even before they tugged off the blindfold, McCain knew they were at the lake because of the smell: wet and sweet with lavender and green grass. One look at the estate and McCain knew something else: filthy rich. The mansion looked like something out of ancient history: a three-tiered wedding cake of a castle with bone white mortar walls and gray-tiled roofs edged with elaborate iron scrollwork.
Inside, two men, both in black and with the chain-link tattoo, materialized out of twin shadowed alcoves set right and left of the main entry. Muscle said something in a burst of rapid Japanese and got a reply that made his face darken. He turned to McCain. “This way.”
Muscle led McCain through a labyrinth of halls and screened rooms to a room set well back in the house. The room’s shoji was shut tight, and two more guards flanked the entrance. At Muscle’s approach, they sketched quick bows then slid open the shoji. Muscle ducked in and motioned for McCain to follow.
McCain smelled the boy before he saw him: clotted blood and sour sweat. The boy, not much older than fifteen, lay on a low futon, a sheet pulled up to his neck. His eyes were shut and he moaned periodically. A woman knelt, mopping the boy’s sweat from his forehead then wringing out the rag in water from an enameled basin by her knees, and McCain figured he didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to get this one, either. “Jesus, you’ve got to be kidding. That boy needs a hospital.”
Muscle, his voice like flint. “You got to work here.”
Tabletop surgery definitely wasn’t on McCain’s agenda. “What happened?”
“He was ambushed a day ago, coming home from school. We think it was Kabuki-monoe.” At McCain’s perplexed expression, Muscle said, “Ronin. Street punks and dealers carving out their territory. Anyway, whoever he was… he got away.”
“So why haven’t you taken this boy to a hospital?”
“No can do. He had bodyguards, but they’re dead. Anyone that good can get into a hospital, no problem. You got to take care of him here.”
“Look, I’m just an ER doc, strictly treat and street. I…”
“Look, you don’t do it, I got to kill you. You seen the place. But you put the save on him, I don’t kill you. You do for me, I do for you, you know?”
“What if he dies?”
“You got to ask?”
Okay, this had not been the plan. Kneeling, McCain peeled the sheet from the boy’s body. A swath of rust-colored gauze the size of McCain’s hand covered the boy’s right side. Gingerly, McCain lifted away tape and then groaned. The bullet had punched a ragged, fleshy hole just above and to the right of the boy’s navel. The boy writhed just then, and a squirt of plum-colored, half-clotted blood dribbled down the boy’s flank. McCain looked at Muscle. “I suppose it’s too much to hope there’s an exit wound.”
“Naw. Bullet’s still in there.”
“Great. How long has he been out?”
“Since last night.”
“Ah, Jesus.” Oily sweat slicked the kid’s face and chest. He felt the boy’s forehead. Burning up, but when McCain pressed down on the kid’s cold, white-gray nail beds, they were slow to refill with blood. “Look, this is bad. You guys waited too long.”
“That’s why you operate here.”
“Yeah? With what? My trusty pocket knife?”
“Anything you need, we got. We got a clinic.”
“So where’s your doctor?”
“Dead,” said Muscle in a flat tone that suggested McCain really didn’t want to know how. “You’re the runner-up, Doc.”
“Well, now’s the perfect time to just say no.” McCain pushed to his knees. “At the risk of sounding hackneyed, I have no intention of running, and I will not run if nominated.”
Muscle’s face was grim. “Look, you don’t do it, I kill you. You do it, and he dies, I won’t be dancing in the aisles, but you stay alive.”
“I thought you said you’d kill me.”
Muscle shrugged. “I incentivized.”
McCain didn’t like it. But he did it anyway. Like he had a choice.
Two Forks, Junction
27 December 3134
Viki Drexel swayed along in a hoverbus. The vehicle was jammed with too many people crammed into too small a space, the overheated air smelling of cigarettes, sour rice and sweaty feet. Drexel inhaled, regretted it, thought: Oh, man, what can go wrong next? McCain was gone; snatched, but by whom and where to? She sure didn’t know, and unless someone dropped a helpful clue or two her way, she was stuck.
Nothing was going right. They’d slipped across the border between Prefecture III and the Combine, their JumpShip winking in and out at a pirate point. They had a mission and even kind of a plan. So far, other than McCain working himself catatonic and her pushing paper all day, their time hadn’t been particularly well spent.
On Junction, she was just Dixie Lever, catchy anagram, because she couldn’t afford to be anyone but Lever. Viki Drexel wasn’t notorious, but she wasn’t exactly unknown. Anyone with half his brain on life support would’ve put it together eventually, even if she had dyed her hair red from her God-given brown. All those stories about how her Shockwave had made short work of a munitions battery on Ancha. She could just see it now: someone giving her a double take and then, Oh, that Viki Drexel.
Matt McCain was just Matt McCain: doc and all-around stand-up, gutsy, nice guy. He’d wielded a scalpel; she’d done all the complicated stuff: securing the cutout, contracting the hit man, specifying the target. She’d thought for sure they’d nailed it a month ago when McCain pulled the save on that one kid who had gotten, well, aerated. And had McCain give her an earful about that one: I’m a doctor, not a gangster! Well, maybe, except they were dealing with gangsters, and monkey see, monkey do. They couldn’t very well go knock on the oyabun’s door: Excuse me, but we’re from Dragon’s Fury, and we’re making a tour of your neighborhood and wanted to know if you and the missus had anything you’d like to donate, say, a couple of ’Mechs, maybe some troops… She wanted to meet the idiot who’d dreamed up this harebrained scheme, maybe shake his hand, buy him
a drink. Problem was: She was the idiot.
Face it, toots. You blew it. So what you going do now, wiseass?
A little less than a klick from her place, she got off, squirting like a wet watermelon seed through the bus’ open doors. She always walked the last part, keeping her eyes peeled, the tick-tick-tick of her heels against cracked concrete keeping time. As she rounded the corner toward her building, she glanced left—and froze. There was a street vendor, a woman by the looks of it, hawking noodles and fresh tamago. But it’s the wrong time of day unless…
At Drexel’s approach, the vendor, a short lumpy woman with a flat face, gave her a pleasant smile. “Help you, miss?”
“Yes,” said Drexel, heart fluttering in her throat. “Are your eggs good?”
“Oh, yes. Very good, very fresh. I make up nice tamago.” Drexel watched as the woman cracked eggs, whisked them with soy sauce and sugar, drizzled the mixture on a rectangular, cast-iron omelet pan, and deftly flipped the omelet three times before sliding the piping hot treat onto foil. “There,” she said, sealing the packet. Then, reaching beneath her cart, she brought out a paper sack. “And maybe you like some good eggs for later on, nice hard-boiled eggs.”
Drexel practically ran up the stairs, the bag of hard-boiled eggs in her left hand, the slim, still-warm foil packet in her right. A quick glance at her door confirmed that the red hair she’d placed on the knob that morning was still in place. Satisfied, she pushed open the door, flipped on the light—and stopped, cold.
Her holovid was on. A disk was squared on the table.
Carefully, Drexel put the foil packet and sack of eggs on a square, rickety chair by the entrance. Then she fished a pistol from her purse, screwed on a silencer, thumbed off the safety. Slipping out of her heels, Drexel edged down a short hall in stocking feet, high-stepping over the creaky floorboard near the bathroom. The bathroom door was half open, and she wasn’t sure if she’d left it that way or not. At the jamb, she dropped to a low crouch, straight-armed her pistol, kicked open the door. The door banged open on squalling hinges, and Drexel was through, whipping down and around, sweeping with the pistol from side to side. No one there. But—her eyes narrowed—the shower curtain was pulled, and she knew that was wrong. Maybe someone there …
A slash of shadow, and then she was firing, bap-bap-bap! Curtain dancing, shredding, and she kept expecting a scream, but all she got was the crack-crack-crack-thwack of metal splintering tile.
Oh, for heaven’s sake. Disgusted, Drexel pulled the curtain aside, and the mystery of the shadow was solved. It was her own, thrown in stark relief by the bare bulb just behind and above her head. There was no one in the bathtub, and a whole lot of smashed tile. The bathroom reeked of burned cordite and singed rayon. “Good work, Drexel,” she said. “You killed the shower curtain.”
She searched the rest of the apartment, didn’t kill anything else, went back to the holovid and stared at the disk for a full three minutes. The Knave blew away a bunch of police, and all of it wired to a playing card. Probably whoever’d been here could do the same with a holodisk. Only one way to find out… She slid the disk across the table with her right index finger until one corner jutted over the desk. Gingerly picked up the disk. Waited to blow up. When nothing happened, she slipped the disk into her player, still expecting a ka-boom.
What she got was a click, and then audio. “Good afternoon, Miss Drexel.” The voice was smooth, male, sensual. “Lovely doing business with you. You know how to reach me again if needed, but I doubt that now. Your friend, Dr. McCain, likely has his hands full. Only a word of caution, Miss Drexel: Watch out for those eggs. Most are fresh, but every now and again, you get one that’s gone a bit off. A little… bad. And the funny thing is… you just can’t predict when a bad egg might turn up.” The machine clicked again, and then silence.
He called her Drexel. She’d never given her name. That means he knows who I am. But how? No one in the Fury knows we’re here; Katana’s the only one…
And what was that weird stuff about eggs? Drexel retrieved the sack, took it to her sink, opened it, and peeked inside. There were six eggs. After a brief hesitation, she plucked one out and tapped it against the edge of her sink. She waited again for ka-boom. Instead, there was a crisp snap-crunch, and then she was peeling eggshell away from hard white.
It was on the third egg, done in black; an ancient Terran trick with alum and vinegar. Two words: He’s in.
McCain, in! Finally, a break. Still… a bad egg: Every now and again, you get one that’s gone a bit off…
“Gone bad,” she said aloud. “And no telling when, or where. Or who.”
Junction Nadir Jump Point
Benjamin Military District, Draconis Combine
4 January 3135
Marcus said, “And don’t we look like the cat that ate the canary?”
Oh, Marcus was peevish again. Understandable. He’d badgered Marcus to accelerate enough so he could have a proper shower and wash away Junction’s filth. Now, weightless once more, Jonathan felt wonderful. His hair was still wet, and as he turned a lazy somersault, water pearls drifted like beads from a broken necklace. “What’s the matter, Marcus? Jealous?”
“Absolutely not,” said Marcus, stiffly. “But when I killed, it wasn’t a game.”
“Oh, Marcus, lighten up! Have a little fun!” Jonathan stretched with a catlike purr. “We have reason to be very pleased. I got in some practice, and we were nicely rewarded.”
“You know we don’t need the money.”
This was true. But Jonathan enjoyed his job in all its permutations. Oh, all right, strangling was a bit of a bore. After a few gurgles and splutters, wasn’t much to it. So, he cheated. Let up a tad to make it last. Gave new meaning to the term taking a breather.
Jonathan thought it best to change the subject. “So what’s the chatter?” Civilian JumpShip captains were the biggest gossips in the known universe. Marcus’ people knew how to exploit this because channel chatter was also a magnificent way to disseminate misinformation.
“Some gossip about Sakamoto,” Marcus began reluctantly. “Troop movements, maybe incursions into Atlas space. The only thing solid is that there are DCMS supply convoys moving in on Homam and Matar.”
“Along the border with Prefecture III and within spitting distance of Proserpina… you think he’s after our girl?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, that won’t do.”
“We’ll go around them.” Marcus outlined their captain’s plan: steer clear of Homam and go in at Sadalbari. “And since we’re headed in that general direction…”
“We’ll drop in. Excellent. But let’s muck up the works,” Jonathan said. “Have the captain slip in some comm chatter, very casual, that he’s heard Katana’s people are flitting about the Combine. But make sure he mentions Ludwig and Junction so our dear Bhatia will send agents to investigate.” Else why go to the trouble of warning the intrepid Miss Drexel? “And speaking of Bhatia, Brother, I think it’s high time we sent along that little token of our appreciation to the esteemed director.” Jonathan gave a slow, lazy smile. “Don’t you?”
10
Imperial City, Luthien
10 January 3135
What never failed to impress Emi was how well Luthien and, especially, Imperial City had been reconstructed at the end of the Jihad. The reconstruction had taken the better part of twenty years, not because of the Combine’s inefficiency but because Jabuka teak trees took half a century to reach maturity. Unity Palace rose from the ashes, elegant yet profoundly simple: a series of seven airy structures juxtaposed lengthwise in a near sawtooth. The azimuth of every structure faced nineteen degrees to the southeast as ancient Terran tradition demanded, so that the giant shoji might be pushed aside for the coordinator to view the harvest moon in autumn as well as take advantage of winter’s sunlight and summer’s cooling breezes.
The Throne Room—a hall, really—was easily twenty meters wide and thirty meters long, with the Dragon
Throne occupying the far end. Decorative scrolls, kakemono, hung on either wall, depicting idealized representations of Luthien’s landscape: snowcapped black crags, rushing waterfalls, swaying willows. There were no chairs and only scarlet tatami mats upon which a supplicant might stand or kneel. The only furniture in the room was the Dragon Throne.
She had been in this room a thousand times over but still, when she stared up at the throne resting on a raised dais three steps above a swath of scarlet tatami, Emi was awed to immobility. The Dragon Throne was carved teak done in an orange-gold-lacquered openwork lattice featuring high-relief carvings of five-clawed dragons swirling in undulating loops and curls across the back and down the throne’s arms. She knew that the five-clawed dragon had not always represented the coordinator; in ancient Terran times, the Chinese had used the dragons with five claws, the number representing nobility. Rulers of ancient Japan had favored the Chrysanthemum Throne, though no one really knew what the throne had looked like—only that the kiku was the emperor’s coat of arms, and the emperor was the high priest of the Shinto religion. Perhaps Shiro Kurita had borrowed emblems and symbols that he thought represented the power the coordinator held over the Combine; or perhaps he just liked dragons. Certainly a dragon was much more awe-inspiring than a flower.
The Dragon Throne was not very high, only one hundred and eighty centimeters, and it was perhaps half as wide as it was long. A gold silk cushion formed the seat, and a matching bolster snugged against each arm, providing a rest for the coordinator’s arms and elbows. A matching carved footstool, three steps high, allowed the coordinator to mount his throne. At either side of the throne stood two vertical censers, capped with gold; a coil of white smoke rose in a pencil-thin curl, and Emi caught the fragrance of sandalwood. In all these details, the throne was an exact replica of the original.
