by Victor Milán
"What of the traitor Migaki?" he asked in a voice like acid etching steel. "He works in lies like a master calligrapher in ink and rice-paper, and he controls all media. And all we hear is what heroes these murdering gaijin are, ever and again." He didn't raise his voice, but by the time he finished, spittle was flying from his mouth and his thin limbs were shaking so violently his aides began to stroke his arms as if trying to gentle a frightened horse.
For once the Shadowed One showed reaction: a sort of head jerk, like a horse trying to shed a fly. "Migaki is soft, inconsequential," the altered voice said. "He cannot control what's said in the streets of Imperial City."
"Why do we squander time and effort on street gossip?" asked a man with eyebrows almost comically thick and high on his forehead, like those painted on a traditional geisha. He was a local industrialist. To avoid having to concern himself with the opinions of the rabble was a primary reason for him becoming a primary guiding light—not to mention financial supporter—of the Black Dragon Society.
"By the time we act," the Shadowed One said, "everyone from high to low will have heard enough to believe that the yohei are guilty. Our actions will be perceived as those of rescuers of the Dragon and his people—as indeed they are.
And after the fact, we will control the media as thoroughly as Migaki does now. But seeds seldom take root in un-plowed soil."
"What has the ISF to say about all this?" the desiccated man asked.
"Not everyone in ISF is a traitor," the Shadowed One said. "But the Smiling One is, and so is his whelp Kerai. Which is why we must be careful to exercise the fullest caution." As the figure spoke, it turned its hidden face directly toward the man in the pinstriped suit.
"We shall be cautious as cats walking a fence," the pinstriped man said piously.
* * *
His wingtip shoes crunching the gravel of the circular drive that ran before the mansion's white-pillared portico, Benjamin Inagawa stopped to let an aide drape a caped trenchcoat over the broad shoulders of his pin-striped suit. Then he turned to look off over the high wall at the wooded ridge across the road.
"Undoubtedly our Internal Security Force friend has snipers placed up there, watching us through powerful scopes at this very minute," he said.
"Undoubtedly they can read your lips as well, oyabun," said the aide, a young man much too harried to put on weight.
Inagawa laughed. "Of course they can." He put a cigarette between his lips. Another aide materialized to light it.
The harried aide kept casting apprehensive glances at the ridge. "How can you be so sure the Shadowed One is ISF, Inagawa-Mwrea?"
"Not just ISF, but a highly placed official. He made it clear at the very outset," Benjamin Inagawa didn't doubt for an instant that the Shadowed One was male. Women were too inconsequential. Returning them firmly to their places was one reason he was in Kokuryu-kai. "Indeed, that's the only reason to put up with the way he talks to us, as if we are his underlings."
The nervous aide opened the rear door of the long, low black Shodan limo. "Surely it will please the oyabun to sit and rest his legs."
Inagawa laughed at his assistant's transparent discomfort. He threw the cigarette down, and leaving its ember aglow in the gravel, got into the car.
The aide slid in across from him. The other aide sat up front, beside the sewanuki driver. As the car tires began to crunch down the drive, the harried aide—emboldened by windows specially tinted to discourage lip-readers, and double-paned and polarized to prevent a laser from reading conversation within from vibrations on the glass—said, "Surely you will not proceed with your plans for the night, oyabun."
Inagawa gave him a look. "Surely I will. Why not?"
"But you told the Shadowed One you'd walk carefully as a cat on a fence!" the aide almost wailed.
"And have you never seen two tomcats fighting on a fence?" Inagawa asked.
* * *
It began with a move traditional as a chess opening: a wheeled, panel van roared over the top of a rise on Canal Street, bottomed on the pavement, throwing out a bow-wave of sparks as its frame scraped, and riding quite low on its suspension hurtled down the block as if it had a cinderblock taped to the accelerator. Which it did. The van came to a sudden stop in front of the main entrance of a warehouse, which happened to be Hiroo Yamaguchi's residence and stronghold.
Benjamin Inagawa, riding above the scene in a rotary-winged civilian VTOL, pressed a button with a black-gloved thumb. And the two tons of good ol' ANFO—ammonium nitrate doused with fuel oil—which were laying all that strain on the springs of the van, went off with a white flash and a bang like the fabled Frackencrack itself.
The explosion scooped out the stone fronts of the warehouse and the building across from it as if God had dropped His own post-hole digger into the Kado-guchi waterfront district southwest of the Palace and bit out a chunk. Normally the yaks were sensitive about collateral damage— they had been known to abandon hideouts if the neighbors complained—but Old Cat Yamaguchi owned the warehouse across the street, too.
The warehouses housed the Eastern Ocean Shipping Company, an entirely legitimate business owned by Yamaguchi that handled shipments moving up the Kado-guchi River from the Seiyo Sea to the spaceport and back. It also housed several score of his kobun—"child figures," the foot-soldiers of the yakuza. Those kobun not obliterated by the blast came stumbling out of the flames and smoke and dust, most naked or nearly so, showing off the colorful, elaborate irezumi that covered their arms and upper bodies. Once on the street the coughing men were cut down by assault-rifle fire from squads of Inagawa-kai soldiers who appeared on the rooflines of the surviving buildings across Canal Street, and spilled out of two big hovercraft that whined to a stop in the intersections at either end of the block.
Hiroo Yamaguchi had not gotten to be an old cat by taking things for granted. Not even the goodwill of his patron Theodore Kurita or even—more to the point—the truce that the seimeiyoshi-rengo had mandated for the Coordinator's Birthday celebrations. He was known to have a fast boat stashed in a special mooring beneath the docks behind the warehouse, which was why teams of Inagawa shooters were lying prone behind bolt guns and starlight scopes among the sampans and shanties across the wide, sluggish Kado-guchi. He was also rumored to have prepared other escape routes, such as secret tunnels to Imperial City's sewers and tube-way net.
But escaping was the last thing on the old oyabun's mind.
As his tattooed "children" cried out and died under the merciless rifle fire, a vast groaning, creaking, and grinding emerged from the warehouse. Out of the flames loomed a Hunchback, with chunks of rebar-fanged concrete sliding off it. The old 50-ton monster stepped forward into what had been the front half of the warehouse. The short-barreled autocannon mounted on its right shoulder snarled a brief burst to its right. The hovercraft grounded at the west end of the block exploded, rising five meters on a pillar of yellow fire. Its primary lift fan, feathered and spinning at high idle, was blasted downward into the pavement, shattering into splinters that ripped the nearby gunmen like shell fragments.
A medium laser licked from the Hunchback's center torso, probing for muzzle flashes along the roofs across the street. Riflemen began exploding into puffs of pink steam as the ruby beam brushed them. Others threw down their weapons and fled. The hovercraft to the east took off in a howl of turbines as the gunmen there sought shelter in doorways and gutters or ducked around the corner.
With a whistling scream, a UM-R60 UrbanMech emerged out of the smoke rising from the building directly opposite Yamaguchi's headquarters, its Mydron Excel auto-cannon snarling. Hits sparked on the Hunchback's chest armor. The Hunchback carried better-than-average armor for a medium 'Mech, and it could withstand the autocannon— for a while.
Its own autocannon roared a reply. Instead of aiming for a quick kill at the hard-to-hit head or comparatively well-armored torso of the UrbanMech, the Hunchback pilot blasted the UrbanMech's legs, which were descending on their
jump jets like an oversized bullet. The shells punched divots of metal from the BattleMech's shins. Their impacts knocked the UrbanMech's legs backward.
The UrbanMech's pilot was a yak kobun himself, not a highly trained DCMS Mech Warrior. Instead of pulling back slightly on the altitude controls and thrusting his gyroscope to keep the machine upright on top of the thrust-column of its Pitban 6000 jump jets where it belonged, the inexperienced yak yanked back hard. His UrbanMech leaned way back, the gyros tumbled, and the 30-ton machine slammed onto the street on its back, buckling blacktop. Well and truly panicked, the Black Dragon pilot forgot to let go of the thruster controls, and the UrbanMech started sliding back into the blown-out warehouse across from Yamaguchi's on its back, giving off an ear-shattering screech.
The Hunchback pilot extended his BattleMech's arms and gave the fallen 'Mech the full treatment—autocannon us well as its two medium lasers, focused right at the juncture of the fallen 'Mech's stubby legs. The older Hunchback was notorious as a heat hog, a condition caused by the archaic Type 20 autocannon, but if it neither moved nor fired the little head-mounted Diverse Optics laser, and held off the medium lasers, it could keep up this onslaught until it ran out of ammo.
Too freaked to use the Pitban's rearward-mounted nozzle, meant to provide forward impulse during jumps, the UrbanMech pilot cut out his jet entirely. Instead, the 'Mech's legs began kicking frantically in an attempt to right itself, like an oddly shaped child throwing a tantrum. It didn't work.
In contrast to the Hunchback, the squat little UrbanMech was well-armored for its weight. But the broad metal area between widely spaced legs was not normally exposed to direct attack and was never intended to take such sustained abuse. Under the Hunchback's assault, the armor plating popped on the housing of the UrbanMech's right hip actuator, and the bottom of its barrel torso glowed red, then yellow, and finally began to run as the rain of heavy autocannon shells cratered the softening metal.
* * *
"Tono!"
Standing on a south-facing verandah of Unity Palace, Theodore Kurita turned his head from the flashing of lights to the south, over the river. Oda Hideyoshi approached, dressed in MechWarrior vest and trunks and split-toed boots, neurohelmet beneath his arm. He bowed.
"Shall we respond?" the Otomo commander asked. He looked like anything but a man who had just rolled out of his futon after a grueling day's labor.
In the darkened garden below, the Coordinator could see shadowy forms moving, quickly but carefully through the painstakingly tended foliage. Beyond the compound's high walls, tall, manlike shapes gathered. Hideyoshi's Otomo BattleMechs—including the twelve new Omnis to be revealed in the Grand Parade on the celebration's second day, Theodore's birthday proper—were preparing to resist any assault on the Palace.
Aides in various stages of dress had begun to swarm like flies on a rice-cake. From the south came the rattle of autocannon and the unmistakable snap of 'Mech-mounted lasers. "What is it?" asked a youthful courtier whose blue silk kimono didn't quite conceal the fact that he had on his DCMS dress tunic and nothing else beneath. "Have the Clans come back for more?" His attempt at bravado was brittle as his voice.
"I think not," Theodore said. "When they return to Luthien, they'll come with all the force they can bring. They remember '52 too keenly." In his gut he had a sick certainty that he knew exactly what was going on.
"I've reports from the Civilian Guidance Corps stations in the river precincts," Hideyoshi said in his voice like a file on wood. "There is fighting going on, but it's localized, and shows no sign of moving this way."
"Where exactly is it localized, Sho-sho?"
The General's brown eyes looked straight into Theodore's blue ones. "On Canal Street," he said. "At the Eastern Ocean warehouse."
Theodore drew a deep breath. He shut his eyes briefly.
"Give us the word, Tono," the trouserless aide said brashly. "We'll put a stop to it quick enough."
"lie," the Coordinator said. "Maintain a double watch as long as the ... disturbance ... lasts, Hideyoshi-san. Stand the rest of the regiment down."
"And what of the disturbance, Lord?"
Theodore looked at the commander of his bodyguard. Sho-sho Hideyoshi was DCMS of the old school; he had never approved of the devil's alliance whereby Theodore had brought the despised yakuza into the armed forces and, perforce, closer to the mainstream of Combine society. The general knew as well as he did what was going on. Yet he seemed positively eager for the order to bail out Hiroo Yamaguchi.
"Monitor the fighting," the Coordinator said. "If it shows signs of expanding, intervene with whatever force you deem necessary."
"Hai!" Hideyoshi bowed again and moved crisply off to give the requisite orders.
The aides clustered around, trying to look more concerned with the Coordinator's welfare than relieved that they weren't about to have Smoke Jaguar OmniMechs dumped in their laps. "Are you all right, Tono?"
"As right as any man can be when forced to choose giri over ninjo," Theodore said, and instantly regretted the lapse. If Shin were here, he thought, or my son Hohiro, with whom I share so much my father never vouchsafed me—then I might enjoy the luxury of speaking my heart.
"Now go get some rest," he ordered. Then to make up for his brusqueness, which his attendants had not truly earned: "Fatigued officers are a danger to their men, and cannot properly serve the Dragon."
* * *
Around the corner to the Hunchback's left appeared a 25-ton Raptor. The medium lasers in the center of its torso speared the housing of the Hunchback's autocannon as the Raptor picked its way down the street and around the burning hovercraft with a graceful, birdlike walk. The small lasers mounted in its vestigial-wing arms pulsed bravely.
The Hunchback pilot ignored the new threat and continued its assault on the UrbanMech. The downed machine dug both heels into the well-pounded pavement in a final spasm. Then its right leg blew off in a gush of sparks from severed powerleads, and skittered away with several awkward bounces. The cockpit canopy popped open and its pilot scrambled out, so terrified that he ran straight into the still-burning hulk of the building his 'Mech had driven itself into.
A hot spot was beginning to appear on the housing of the Hunchback's autocannon. Finally, the old 'Mech turned to confront the presumptuous little intruder.
Then, a volley of short-range missiles slammed into the warehouse from out over the river. Three of them struck the Hunchback in the rear. One gouged a crater over what would be a human's right kidney, and the others peeled away a section of plate over what would be the left shoulder blade.
The Hunchback staggered. A Jenner was just starting on the downward arc of a jump across the Kado-guchi River. The mostly intact rear half of the warehouse—and the distraction of engaging in a firefight—had kept the Hunchback pilot from spotting the 'Mech on his 360-display screen.
The Hunchback tried to turn. The four medium lasers in the Jenner's stub arms speared the larger machine. Two found the hole where the rockets had peeled back armor, burned into the Hunchback's torso. More explosions threw up pieces of burning wood from the building and brought down a seven-meter section of the second floor just as a second volley struck. Another rocket hit the turning Battle-Mech in the left upper arm, doing no visible damage.
Drooling smoke from its wounds, the Hunchback faced the descending Jenner. It fired an autocannon burst that went wide. The Jenner landed at the intersection east of the Hunchback, its impressive laser battery lighting the night sky and the building-fronts.
Having laid some hurt on his enemy with his opening strike, the Jenner jock overplayed his hand. Shaped something like a bipedal camel, the Jenner was at the upper end of the light-'Mech class at 35 tons, and reckoned a disproportionately dangerous opponent due to its firepower—at least when facing another light 'Mech. But the Jenner bought that offensive output at the cost of armor; it relied on speed for survival. And here its pilot was hanging and banging with a 'Mech weighing fifteen ton
s superior in armor. The Jenner gained some advantage because the Hunchback's pilot was running up his heat load now and didn't seem interested in letting up.
And while the Jenner's SRM volleys were slamming his ride with a noise like a giant hammer hitting an anvil, and laser glare was taxing the filters of his transpex viewscreen, the Hunchback jock was concentrating is fire on the Jenner's insectlike head.
In the meantime, the little Raptor stopped what had seemed a suicidal charge twenty meters behind the Hunchback. It began to probe the smoking gap in the armor over the left side of the larger machine's back with its vast array of medium lasers, its double heat sinks letting the small 'Mech well afford this type of attack.
The Jenner was rapidly getting the worst of the unequal slugging match. Its lasers and short-range missiles pitted and scorched the front of the Hunchback. But first the lasers in its left arm and then the SRM launcher mounted above its head were battered into useless junk, and smoke poured from its torso: Then a burst of autocannon fire struck it squarely on its triangular head, splitting it open and instantly killing the MechWarrior inside.
Like its pilot, the Jenner went dead. It rocked from the impact of the fatal shells, but its gyros, still spinning, kept it upright.
