by Victor Milán
The broadcast demoralized the remaining Black Dragon force. And though Teddy could not be seen to involve himself openly in the Towne mess, the Combine had managed to slip the Caballeros a measure of covert help. When Ernie Katsuyama was smuggled onto Towne, he brought two prerecorded holomessages. One, by none other than Theodore Kurita, called upon the invaders to lay down their arms, and granted full amnesty to all those who did so. This was broadcast to all Black Dragon forces. A second message had been recorded by the Smiling One explaining in graphic detail what would happen to anybody who tried to hold out, not to mention their families and associates back in the Combine. It was delivered to the renegade DCMS and Black Dragon commanders by various covert means.
All told it added up to a devastating double left-right combination: shocking defeat followed by the disgrace and death of the commander, Teddy's carrot and Subhash's stick. The Black Dragons folded.
Uncle Chandy was smiling at her. "You finished two regiments of the troops Kokuryu-kai had somehow managed to recruit and train," he said in his serene way, "and in doing so you richly earned the honor my cousin has seen fit to bestow upon you." With plenty of prompting from you, I'm sure, Cassie thought.
"But you are aware of what the yakuza call their-soldiers?"
Cassie nodded. The usual term was kobun—literally "child figures," as the word for "boss," oyabun, meant "father figure." She knew that wasn't what Chandy meant.
"Teppodama." Bullets.
"Just so. Expendables, meant to be used, used up, without thought No, along with these 'bullets' you and your comrades also accounted for destroying a whole regiment of BattleMechs. In this you struck a mighty blow at the Black Dragons' purse, which for all their pretense of patriotic selflessness, is their most cherished organ. However..."
He spread pudgy palms. Floating there in mid-air, crossed legs concealed by his rich scarlet kimono, he looked more like an absurd jovial Buddha than ever.
"The Black Dragons' roots run very deep. You did not destroy the Kokuryu-kai on Towne. You only injured it, and so aroused its fury."
She stared at him.
"So what now?"
Then she sucked in a breath and squeezed her eyes tight shut. When she opened them again, she answered her own question.
"So that's why you sweet-talked your cousin into inviting us to his birthday celebration! I've been trying to figure that angle. I mean, you're a good employer, you give us the kind of reward that means something: cash. You don't waste a whole lot of energy stroking your own ego, though, so I couldn't make out why you'd be so concerned with ours."
"Do not underestimate the effect of honors—empty though they be—on your fellow humans, Cassiopeia. Your adopted family puts nearly as much store in such things as those among whom you and I alike were born."
"You're sticking us right back on the bull's eye, aren't you?" she said, ignoring his interjection. "You think the Black Dragons are going to make a move against Theodore at his own birthday party."
"Of course," Chandrasekhar Kurita said. "I promised you lucrative employment, and have, as you were gracious enough to acknowledge, delivered. I never said anything about easy employment. Besides, these Southwesterners are never so happy as when they're faced with some desperate challenge—and you so much more than they." Galisteo, Cerillos, and Sierra, the so-called Trinity or Southwestern Worlds, in the Free Worlds League, were the planets from which most of the regiment hailed.
"Don't you ever do anything without ulterior motives?"
"Granddaughter, you dishonor me. No man in the Combine has motives more exterior than mine: to serve the Dragon, in the person of my cousin Theodore, as best I humanly can. With the corollary motives of turning a handy profit and gaining such amusement as I may along the way. Can you name a single occasion on which I have concealed those motivations—or acted in the least way counter to them?"
She couldn't, and the fat, smug old fart knew it. "Don't you do anything—" She floundered for a moment like a newbie in zero-g. "—simple? Don't you ever take an action that has just a single purpose?"
"My child, I am but one man. The Draconis Combine is vast, and so is the Inner Sphere, and so are the menaces that confront them. I can do only so much, especially if I am to allow myself to steal the occasional moment to savor the pleasures life offers us. I am a rich man, and stint myself nothing, but the one luxury I cannot afford is to do things simply."
Cassie turned to stare out the wide viewport. The stars didn't comfort her. They really were just so many little lights, still and cold.
Her head whirled. What else did you expect?
"What else did you expect?" he asked gently, displaying his unsettling gift for saying aloud what she was thinking. "You know my methods."
She gave him a narrow gaze. "What does that mean?"
He sighed like a mountain that had just shrugged off a couple climbers. "A quotation from classical literature, my dear. Really, we must see to your education one of these days. You have a fine mind, but it remains largely unformed."
"Let's worry about forming my mind another time. What are we getting into on Luthien? What did the Mirza tell you?" The Mirza was Uncle Chandy's head of security, and his efforts rivalled the best intelligence agencies in the Inner Sphere.
Uncle Chandy shrugged. "We have little specific information to go on. Shall we say we have two of the classic elements of a crime on hand: motive and opportunity?" Cassie knew Chandy had been on a binge of reading detective novels of late. She wondered if that had given rise to his earlier quote, too.
"The Black Dragons have long wanted to rid Theodore of the 'evil advisors' whom they blame for his reforms. Now they're burning for revenge. Don't you think it's likely they'll find the Coordinator's Birthday too ripe an opportunity to pass up? I should also mention that it may occur to them to seek some means of avenging themselves upon your regiment, the author of their recent misfortunes, since you happen to be conveniently at hand."
"Which means we're bait."
"Once again, your acuity does you credit. But consider, granddaughter: I do not do this lightly. It is a very dangerous tiger I'm hoping to draw out by staking a lamb. And, if I may say so—also a highly dangerous lamb?"
She frowned. Yes, the Seventeenth were mercenaries, and danger really was their business. But they were her family, and neither they nor she had had the chance to heal from the wounds incurred on Towne—as if wounds like that ever healed, as if she didn't still wake at night sweat-soaked and weeping from dreams of Patsy Camacho, who had died five years ago on other missions, other battles, on Jeronimo. Even though it was what Uncle Chandy paid them for, she felt a white-hot plasma-jet of anger at the high-handed way he'd hung them up for the Black Dragons to take a swing at like a piñata at Teddy's birthday party.
Then she clamped her mouth shut on her complaints. Because it occurred to her who was the other author of the Black Dragons' disaster on Towne. Someone who would inevitably strike the ultra-conservative Kokuryu-kai was an abomination, a disgrace to the name he bore, a festering symbol of all that was wrong with the Draconis Combine.
If Uncle Chandy was setting Camacho Caballeros out for bait, he was plopping his own broad butt down right beside theirs.
"How about Theodore?" she asked quietly. "What if the Black Dragons decide to simply forget about all this 'wicked advisor' crap and go right to the source?"
The fat man laughed uproariously. "Ah, no, my child. There you are allowing your fine imagination to get the better of you. Not even in its arrogance and folly would Kokuryu-kai act directly against the person of the Coordinator. Especially when that Coordinator is Theodore Kurita."
* * *
"Strike at me," the one-eyed man commanded.
General Hohiro Kiguri was a tall man, and not only by the standards of the Draconis Combine, whose populace ran to the diminutive. Commander of the Draconis Elite Strike Teams, he won obedience as much by stature and sheer presence as by voice. His booming baritone rolled off the
dark, oily-looking boles of the trees as the wind made the black and green leaves click like tiny hyper castanets. He alone among the two dozen men and women gathered in the clearing left his iron-gray buzz-cut hair bare to the chilly air of the Kiyomori Mountains to the northwest of Luthien's Imperial City.
He was otherwise clad the same as his audience: black from the base of his muscle-thick neck to the split toes of his flexible boots. All he lacked was the helmet-hood of black ballistic cloth with the one-way red visor obscuring the face, and the straight-bladed, single-edged sword with a square, outsized tsuba—a handguard—that the others wore strapped across their backs.
A man only slightly shorter, though considerably younger by his lighter build and the way he moved, faced the one-eyed man in a tentative crouch. His black-gauntleted hand made no move toward the cord-wrapped hilt of his own sword.
"Strike at me!" Kiguri roared. His face, which could never have been called handsome, bore the marks of long and grueling service to the Dragon, of which the black patch covering his right eye-socket was only the most immediately obvious. He was large in the belly, but that was not considered a deficiency in the strongly Japanese-influenced Combine; the fat was backed by thick, domed muscle, so that he possessed what was considered a well-developed hara, or center. Whatever extra weight he bore, he carried lightly.
The DEST trooper still hesitated. The trademark red visor hid his features. But his body language, what was called in Japanese haragei, "belly talk," was that of someone feeling trapped and indecisive. The usual reward that might be expected for striking, much less striking down, the commander of a branch of the Internal Security Force was death. Immediate, if one were very lucky, followed by the massacre of one's entire family, plus a sizable percentage of everyone the offender had talked to within the last twenty-four hours, to encourage the survivors to pick their friends better.
"Strike me right here," the General insisted, tapping himself between the eyes with a blunt-instrument forefinger. "If you can, then I don't deserve to command the Draconis Elite Strike Teams."
The DEST trooper jittered his weight from the ball of one foot to the other. "Strike!" the General roared, face going purple, "or by the Dragon's jade pillar none of your clan shall live to see another rising of their homeworld's primary! The Dragon has no use for bloodlines that breed cowards."
It was an insult and a threat worthy of a Clanner, and like a Clanner the reluctant operative was deep-stung by it. With rattlesnake quickness he seized his sword hilt and thrust it toward the General's scar-crossed face, bringing the blade free of the sheath with a singing sigh and whipping it around with his strong wrist for a pivot. It was a stroke designed to generate more speed than power— but speed was sufficient for the special DEST blades, crafted by hand according to the dictates of an art that was ancient before humankind left Terra, to sever a limb or split a skull.
Glittering like rain in a sun-shower, the ninjato arced toward the General's face.
Kiguri clapped his hands together on the blade, stopping it with the biting edge no more than a centimeter from his forehead.
For an instant they held the tableau. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath in shock. Then with a flick of his powerful wrists Kiguri snapped the weapon from his subordinate's grip and flipped it spinning into the air.
As it came down he snatched its hilt. With a two-handed crosswise stroke he severed the young operative's head. The ballistic-cloth armor at the neck gave no more resistance than cheesecloth.
The General turned to face his congregation. Behind him the torso stood fountaining blood from its neck stump for two surging beats of the heat. Then it collapsed, as the blood spray dwindled, became erratic, stopped. The General cleaned the blade with another wrist-flick. A DEST blade shed water like a duck's wing.
"The Dragon has no use for those who hesitate to follow orders, either," the General rasped in a voice as rough from comprehensive abuse as his face was. "No matter what the order may be. Wakarimasu-ka?"
He was taking a big risk here, riding the edge. He knew it, relished it—reveled in it. Despite the weak-livered reforms instituted by Theodore—over his father Takashi's strenuous objections, as Kiguri well knew—superiors in the DCMS pretty well treated inferiors as they chose; corporal punishment for minor infractions was commonplace. But these were no merc conscripts. These were the cream, the best of the best. Predators, every one.
For all the lore of bushido, gekokujo—"those below rising against those above"—was a fact of life for samurai no less than commoners. Obedience was absolute, to be sure— but when it snapped, it snapped clean. And while the penalty for failed disobedience was ignominious and generally painful death, a successful piece of usurpation was met with acceptance. Like the Japanese before them, the people of the Dragon had a keen eye for the bottom line, and a respect for evolution in action.
Indeed, one day he himself would be pulled down by one of these fine young wolves—even as it was among real Terran wolves, some of which prowled these very woods, descendants of beasts introduced by a symbolically minded Coordinator. He relished that eventual fate as well. It was the proper nature of things.
Indeed, that should have happened within the ISF, long since, he thought. Just as Theodore Kurita proved his own weakness by allowing his father to hang on so long.
But today was not to be the day upon which the General's throat would be torn out. "Hai! " his listeners shouted, signifying their comprehension—and submission—by throwing their hands in the air.
He nodded. "Good. Very good. Now, what do you learn from this demonstration, other than the need for instant and absolute obedience?"
One of them left a hand raised. A mere woman, he noted with a flicker of dissatisfaction. It was another sign of the creeping decadence that was overtaking the Combine, that more and more women were being allowed to serve as full-scale operatives, instead of mere kunoichi, seductresses and spies. Still, he was no blind fool like the departed Tai-sho Jeffrey Kusunoki who denied that women could serve the Dragon as warriors. No one who was not fully qualified could ever hope to become one of the feared commandos of DEST.
And no one who was not entirely loyal, body and soul, to DEST commander Hohiro Kiguri joined the exclusive cohort to which the men and women gathered in the clearing belonged. It was anomalous that out of so many highly qualified operatives, no DEST agents had ever been invited to join the Sons of the Dragon, the Smiling One's own super-elite within ISF. None but General Kiguri himself.
Anomalous, but not inexplicable. Kiguri smiled. Warrior though he was to the core, he was also a spy. He understood the value of information. And while he had less use for the womanish fop Migaki who ran the Voice of the Dragon—not to mention Katsuyama, the degenerate toad to whom he was delegating so much authority these days—than he did for that self-inflated prig Ninyu Kerai, he knew as well as Migaki that one's eyes saw the world through the information they received. Whether or not that information bore more than a passing resemblance to truth.
As far as their dossiers indicated, none of these men and women quite measured up to Subhash's exacting standards. At least, the dossiers to which the Director had access.
There were many things going on in ISF these days that the Director didn't know.
The confounded woman still held her hand in the air, resolute as a sequoia in Unity Park. So be it, Kiguri thought. If even those great trees could bend with the wind, so could he. Besides, he was the one who had selected her for his meta-elite.
"So then, Hajima," he said, "what lesson do we learn?"
She turned her hand into a fist. "That even though his hands are empty, the warrior is never unarmed."
Kiguri's single eye stared balefully at her a long moment. Her own dark eyes never wavered, and her hand stayed raised.
He nodded. "Correct. You have been paying attention." The woman lowered her hand.
"And now," the General declared, "to drive home that lesson we will practice close combat,
unarmed against weapons. Then we shall run thirty kilometers to the top of Mount Baldy. May the Dragon reign ten thousand years!"
The little group threw hands in the air again. "Ryu heika banzai! " they echoed.
And may the fools in Kokuryu-kai serve their function well before I dispose of them, the General thought.
4
Takashi Kurita Memorial Spaceport, Imperial City
Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
20 June 3058
After weeks of travel time, the Seventeenth had finally reached Luthien, and the unloading of their DropShip at the Takashi Kurita Memorial Spaceport just outside Imperial City was proceeding apace. Cassie and two other members of the Caballeros stood waiting for the chopper that would take them directly to Imperial City as a kind of advance party. Standing there with her in the hundred-meter-wide blast pit next to the DropShip's landing-jack were Dolores Gallegos and Father Roberto Garcia, watching intently as the first 'Mechs descended the Overlord Class DropShip's offload ramp. The plump Jesuit was the Seventeenth's new Chief Intelligence Officer, and Red Gallegos's role was to finalize transportation and billeting arrangements. Cassie, of course, was to scout the ground in advance. "Cassie-san."
She spun, her hand reaching instinctively for the hilt of her kris, Blood-drinker, which she wore openly on her right thigh today. Public display of firearms was forbidden in the Combine to all but DCMS and the Friendly Persuaders, Luthien's planetary police, but edged weapons conferred status. Cassie was unused to being addressed in that particular way. Chandrasekhar Kurita customarily spoke Japanese to her, but didn't use that form. And while the landing zone walls were ringed with tens of thousands of Imperial Citizens, no doubt gathered here to greet the gaijin mercenaries for the purposes of propaganda, Cassie didn't think any of them knew her.
The person addressing her was Captain Sharon Omizuki, commander of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment's spanking-new aerospace lance. The taller woman was walking toward her with swinging strides of long legs encased in trousers of form-fitting black trichloropoly-ester. A stiff, cool, early-spring breeze, still smelling of pavement heated by the Dropship's drive jets, ruffled her curly chestnut hair. She was armored against the wind in a bulky aerojock's jacket made from the hide of some large and surly land creature on some unknown Drac planet. Her not-quite-pretty face was wrapped around a look of dismay.
