by Victor Milán
Still ... Cassie could almost see the little logic-gates clicking behind Kurosawa's anthracite eyes. Here was Johnny Tchang, the most famous martial artist in the known universe. And here on the other hand was a little near-eta scrap of fluff, who had a mean rep but couldn't mass more than 45 kilos in a wet bathrobe and was, after all, only a girl... He stepped back.
The Caballero crowd had stepped back too, leaving their-scout hanging in the breeze. Little Marc Vasquez was staring worriedly up at her as if she'd got into the Jimson weed. He was small and not talking, but he wasn't stupid.
"I've never known you to let your mouth write checks your body can't cash, honey," said Raven out the corner of her mouth, as she scooped the little boy up into her arms, "but I reckon there's a first time for everything."
"You're probably right," Cassie said under her breath. She stripped off her heavy aerojock jacket and let Raven take it. Then she unfastened the web belt holding Blooddrinker in its scabbard and handed that off too. Raven faded back with Marc into the mob.
Cassie stood facing Tchang. She was dressed in a khaki Marik-issue undershirt, baggy trousers camouflaged in Ghost Bear gray-on-gray pattern, and black athletic shoes. She felt vulnerable and small as she and her opponent bowed ceremoniously to each other.
No. She told herself. You've got nothing to fear. Combat isn't a sport. You've done it for real. He does it for show.
But maybe the advantage wasn't hers, she realized. Because her opponent was used to sparring, to launching attacks without deadly intent. She was not.
She began to shift her weight left and right, moving her hands supple before her. Her movements were pretty dancelike themselves—like Balinese temple dances, Guru Johann told her. Johnny Tchang stood in neutral posture, watching. His eyes widened. He nodded, barely perceptibly, and dropped into a low, wide stance of his own, bringing up his hands.
So ka. Whether he was a fighter remained to see, but a martial artist he unquestionably was. Cassie's sinuous, soft-looking motions offered no opening, and their softness was sheer illusion. He had realized that at once.
She let her motions become broader, slower, it was the pentjak way to invite attack. She saw that Golden Boy was bright enough to realize that too. But he was bigger, he was male, and he had the interstellar-badass reputation to protect.
He did her the favor of making the first move, sliding in with a quick-flick Phoenix Eye strike for the face. She deflected it with a backhand flip. The hand recoiled, snake-quick, and snapped back in a jab. She ducked her head aside.
Having focused her attention on his hands, he spun around with his left leg stiffened for a sweeping heel-kick to her head.
She sat down cross-legged. The straight leg passed harmlessly over her head. She grinned up at him.
His pupils expanded the way your eyes do when they take in something hot-damn irresistible—a sumptuous banquet, a gorgeous naked woman, or an opponent who has just made an unrecoverable error. Johnny Tchang might have held the Black Pantyhose in half a dozen flavors of chop-sockey, but he didn't know pentjak.
He raised a straightened leg to drop on her in an axe kick—a blow that's almost as impossible to defend against as it is to get yourself into position to deliver it without setting yourself up for a testicle-crushing countershot. But Cassie was planted on her cute little fanny, her legs neutralized, the length of his leg putting her out of range to retaliate with a hand strike.
He thought. Cassie came up off the packed yellow dirt as if God had hit the Rewind button on the reality recorder. She was half turned to his right when the kick whiffed harmlessly down her back, just brushing her fanny. She sidle-stepped into him and flicked her fingernails against his cheek.
He jumped back up onto the pilings like a startled cat. Then he smiled.
"You're good," he said. "I've never seen that move before."
"I'm full of surprises."
He nodded. Then he launched himself in a forward roll right over Cassie's head.
She gaped. Too late she came out of it, started to turn. He touched down on his feet behind her, gave her a shoving back-kick in the posterior that sent her sprawling.
She didn't think the watching Caballeros should applaud quite so vigorously.
She came up quick enough, spun to face him in a deep stance. "You're full of surprises, too," she said. He gave her a big old grin.
They started to circle, each giving the other respectful distance. He was stronger than she was. She had no need to test that hypothesis. Men were generally stronger than women, and he was bigger.
And she lacked the weapon that had always served her best: utter all-out ruthlessness, an entire lack of hesitation. Since her training days with Guru Johann she had never gone into a fight with anything other than the intent to kill her opponent as quickly and savagely as possible, or barring that, to cause such rapid and horrific damage that not just her foe but any of his allies would lose all stomach for further confrontation.
It wasn't simply that she did not shrink from horror; when the time came, she savored it. In the popping of a joint, in the spurt of blood and bone and ruined flesh from a bullet-hit, in flesh embracing the knifelike lover's arms, a tortured child found both the promise of security and vindication. The reason she did not kill anyone who happened to cross her path was lack of motivation to do so, nothing more; and had she continued to walk the way she had until Kali took her under her wing on Hachiman, she now ruefully realized, she would in time have lost even that token inhibition.
With the help of her friend, she had become more human. But she was still unused to fighting as play.
He advanced. She sprang backward and landed on a piling, balanced on one foot with the other cocked sideways to the knee. Tchang looked her over and nodded approval. He jumped onto the pilings himself and attacked.
Jumping from stub to stub, feinting, dancing from foot to foot, they traded blocks and blows to no real effect, as much putting on a show for the onlookers as anything else. The audience had grown quiet. They were beginning to realize that, while Johnny Tchang really was that good ... their little Abtakha was holding her own with him.
Making use of his greater reach Tchang drove Cassie backward. As she backed onto the last piling, he rushed her, hoping to push her off-balance.
It didn't work. Without glancing she leapt back and landed on the ground. He hopped down and walked deliberately toward her. She stood her ground.
The actor feinted a punch for Cassie's belly, then jumped straight up, aiming an inside-out crescent kick for her temple. She screwed herself to the ground again, under the attack. When he came down, she kept her spinning motion going, lashing out with a leg in a kick meant to sweep his feet from under him just as he was landing. The sweep was a specialty of hers—and coming down from his jump kick he was especially vulnerable.
Her kick cut air. He had launched himself straight up the instant he touched down. She kept the kick going, three-sixty, hoping to catch him when he came back to earth.
Instead he jumped again, millimeters ahead of her sweep. She went around again. This time when he landed, he took off in a forward leap, over her head again.
As he passed over he reached down to snag a handful of her shirt. He tucked his head and rolled as his weight carried her over backward. They landed side by side, shoulder to shoulder with feet pointing opposite directions. Cassie had clawed fingers poised right over Tchang's eyes. His free hand, stiffened, lay like a blade across her throat.
He gave her that grin again. Boyish and infuriating. "I guess it's a draw."
She moved her other hand. He went rigid, then looked slowly down to see the tip of a 100-mm hideout knife pressed against his groin.
"When it's for real," she said, "it's never a draw." And she turned the knifetip aside and drove it five millimeters into his thigh, just enough to break the skin.
* * *
"You've done some ballsy things in your time, Abtakha," Raven remarked as they walked toward their quarters.
They had handed over charge of the children to their reliefs. "But I still can't believe you actually stabbed Johnny Tchang."
"I wanted to teach him the difference between the sound stage and the street," Cassie said darkly. She had Blood-drinker strapped back on and her jacket slung over one shoulder.
"I reckon you did that. You have to admit he took it pretty well. And it was worth every minute of it to see the look on ol' Mishcha's face when you pig-stuck the biggest holostar in the Inner Sphere."
Cassie shrugged. Raven was crowding her, though she didn't seem to realize it. She was none too sure why she'd pricked Tchang. That gave her a creepy feeling. She couldn't stand the thought of being out of control. It was one reason she'd never sought big-time solace in drugs and alcohol.
They walked up the steps and into the foyer. Someone stood up off one of the low sofas set to the left. Both women turned, hands unobtrusively slipping toward weapons, Cassie's for her kris and Raven's for some holdout piece. Cassie wasn't the only Caballera who never let her guard down—particularly when they were on the capital planet of the empire most of them had spent most of their adult lives fighting.
But if the movement represented a threat, it wasn't apparent. It was a skinny young woman—girl, actually, probably no older than fourteen even allowing for the common Drac ageless genes, a brown-haired waif whose face was mostiy eyes and mouth and nose and freckles, and would likely be quite pretty when they all finally fit themselves together. Two smaller children, a boy and a girl, sheltered behind her, peering fearfully at the gaijin.
"Chu-i Suthorn?" the elder girl asked.
"That's me," Cassie said.
"I'm Sariko Corelli. These are Anna-ko and Tommy, my brother and sister."
Cassie smiled. "It's an honor to meet you," she said. The children were obviously acutely uncomfortable, more than mere fear of exotic foreign money-troopers could account for. That set all Cassie's nerves to jangling, but she knew better than to try to rush things. Whatever was spooking these kids, they'd tell of it in their own time.
"Jinjiro Coleman is our grandfather," Sariko said. "Our father died fighting the Clans with the Sixth Ghost Legion. Our mother was killed during the Clan attack on Imperial City. Our grandfather is all we have."
"I'm saddened to hear about your parents," Cassie said. "What may I do for you."
The girl glanced back at her siblings, then again at Cassie. "Our grandfather is missing. He never came home last night."
So that's why he wasn't around this morning. Cassie had figured the concierge of the Seventeenth's dormitory had the day off. Even Dracs got a weekly break.
Sariko's self-control broke. Tears poured from her eyes. "He's never done that before! I'm so afraid something has happened."
8
Cinema City, Outside Imperial City
Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
23 June 3058
"They found your concierge," Mishcha Kurosawa said. Although it was morning Cassie had just dropped off to sleep when a knock came at the door of the room she shared with the currently absent Kali. Cassie had been working late again.
The fixer was dressed in his customary loud shirt. Cassie wore only a long tee-shirt she'd pulled on after getting out of bed. She made no move to invite him in. While making her own inquiries about the missing Coleman, she'd asked Kurosawa to check with the local authorities.
"Or rather, they found his body," he said, "floating in the canal. Natural causes, the police say."
* * *
The chamber was walled in white tiles scrubbed to blinding, and the fluorescent lights overhead made the edges of her vision vibrate. Cassie looked down at the body on the rolling slab, bluish, with little wisps of condensation drifting from the compartment, and was glad the Dragon's obsession with cleanliness meant she could smell nothing but disinfectant that stung her eyes like pepper gas. Jinjiro-san had not been in the water long enough to swell too much. The dark-blue ligature mark was still inescapably visible around his throat.
"Natural causes," said Chi-i Tzu-Chien McCartney of the minuscule Criminal Investigations Bureau of the Imperial City Civilian Guidance Corps.
She turned to him with one eyebrow cocked in a question. She was dressed in a slate blue skirt-suit with black stockings, and shoes that matched the suit. Her wig was piled atop her head in a bun and held in place by polished teak sticks. Her dress and manner put her comfortably in the Executive echelon of the Middle Class.
He looked at her out of a sad wide Chinese face sagging around a cigarette. "See the tattoos? Irezumi. He's yakuza."
She nodded. McCartney was of middle height for the Inner Sphere, which put him a few centimeters above the Drac average. The weather had changed last night before Cassie bagged it, but he still wore the gray flare-shouldered Combine-style raincoat he'd had on outside, caught at the sternum by a red and white medallion displaying the insignia of the Civilian Guidance Corps. Beneath it, eschewing the customary robes of the minor functionary, he wore a baggy blue Occidental-style suit with a loosely knotted tie. Whether it was baggy because it was cheap or to fit his rather baggy physique Cassie couldn't tell. Probably both. He was what passed in the Combine for a street cop.
One of very few.
He gestured with two fingers of his right hand as if tapping the ligature marks. She noticed he didn't actually touch the chilled flesh. "Origami," he said.
"Origami?" She felt a flash of annoyance at the way he was turning her into an echo. But if he was out to score points off her—a mere woman—he didn't show any triumph. His face did not look familiar with that particular expression.
"The yaks have a lot of words for killing," he told her, taking hold of his cigarette and regarding it as if he wasn't sure what it was or how it came to be stuck to his underlip. He held it in standard Combine fashion, between thumb and index finger, ember toward palm. "One of the current favorites is folding. To fold someone is to kill them." He shrugged. "Origami."
"The report says natural causes."
His face showed nothing, but she expected that. People in the Combine, like people in the Capellan Confederation, had lots of practice at showing stone faces to strangers. Millennia of practice. But he bent ever so slightly in the middle, as if taking a light shot to the gut.
Haragei. Just as the yaks had a lot of words for homicide, Japanese speakers read a lot of different meanings into this one word. It meant, literally, "belly talk." It could refer to what a Marik or Steiner would call playing one's cards close to one's chest, or to the habit of channeling one's emotions to the hara, the body's center, just as one did ki. Haragei also referred to the periodically fashionable practice—on the wane in Cassie's lifetime—of sketching the kanji characters for certain words before the stomach with the fingers as one conversed, and was used to ameliorate the confusion inherent in a language in which a single word could boast half a dozen wildly disparate meanings. Raised in an expatriate Drac community, Cassie was adept at reading haragei in most of its forms.
"We have a saying," he said, taking another hit off his smoke. "If you cross the kai and wind up floating, that is 'natural causes.' "
"You're serious?"
The tired eyes sized her up. The Gestalt of dress, manner, and word-choice told her something about what he thought about her status—or the status she was scamming for on this job, at any rate. The fact that his boss had ordered him to give her every cooperation told him even more. She was retainer to some noble; whether or not his superior had mentioned that the noble happened to have the surname "Kurita" she didn't know, but she guessed he knew anyway. One way or another, in the great totem pole that was Combine society, she was levels above him. Woman or not.
"You know we report the lowest crime rate of any Successor House," he said. "But how safe do you feel when you walk our streets? This is how we keep our face, how we keep the low crime stats the FedRats and the Mariks are so envious of. Natural causes."
"You're a brav
e man, McCartney-san."
"What? Talking like this? You think I'm afraid you might be a spy for the Eye?" He shook his head. "We're not just poor relatives to ISF. We're scarcely an afterthought. They pay more mind to the doings of the Unproductives than they do to us Friendly Persuaders. Especially the Criminal Investigations Bureau. They'd have to be pretty bored to take notice of anything I say or do."
He laid a scarred hand on the end of the drawer. "Seen enough?"
She nodded. He slid the drawer shut with an echoing final slam and started to walk away.
"Doesn't it bother you?" she called after him.
He turned. His eyes seemed to have retreated into his skull. He plucked the cigarette from his mouth, slammed it to the shiny immaculate tile floor, ground it in with his heel. For a Kurita it was a gesture akin to dropping his trousers and relieving himself on the spot.
"What do you think?" he snapped. "We're police. But they don't call us that. The vast majority of us are nothing more than glorified hall monitors, more concerned with making sure the citizens show a decorous face to Authority than whether they're cutting each other's throats in alleys. This unworthy one standing before you has the honor of being among the elite minority assigned the duty of investigating actual crimes. My specialty is murder."
He walked back and pounded a fist on Jinjiro Coleman's cold drawer—just one in a wall of such drawers. "And every day I see murders that I have to pretend are something else. Of course it bothers me!"
Cassie looked at him in genuine surprise. She had a lifetime's experience of cops. And very little of cops like this. She was used to street cops, harness bulls, like the Friendly Persuaders in their candy-striped uniforms. Drac, Davion, Steiner, Liao—it made little difference. The cops she had dealt with, as a street kid on Larsha and as scout for the Seventeenth, were mostly time-serving bullies looking to break heads and jack the straights for cumshaw. They weren't usually as bad as the Maskirovka Guardsman who had raped her when she was a child, but to her mind it was a matter of degree, not kind.
