by Victor Milán
It was a sanctum Theodore seldom had cause—excuse, maybe—to retreat to. It was one more reason to enjoy a visit from his so-called Uncle Chandy, who lay like a great smug bullfrog amid a splendor of silk cushions swilling wine and stuffing his face with fruit from a green lacquered tray.
"Courtly manners and rituals have never come easy to me," he said. "You of all people know that. It would be fatuous to say I prefer the rigors of campaigning, but I truly would rather ride a BattleMech into an honest fight than face the rigmarole."
"Masterly misdirection has long been numbered among your many skills," Chandy said. "You used to feel you could confide in me, long ago."
"You were often the only one," Theodore admitted in a wistful tone.
"Then why not level with your Uncle Chandy?"
" 'Uncle.' " Theodore vented a quiet laugh. "You're what? Two years older than I am?"
Chandy showed his Buddha smile. "Something on that order. Though I haven't aged with so much grace as you."
This time Theodore laughed out loud. "Now you are soaping me, you old fraud. What is it you want?"
"To help."
Theodore looked away.
"You're letting the past eat at you, aren't you?" Chandy asked in a quiet voice.
"It's nothing."
"You're a brave man, Theodore-san. I've been saying that longer than almost anybody else, and it's still true. But part of being brave is facing what's in here." And he tapped his capacious hara.
Theodore shook his head. "I've never been able to get mad at you, exasperating though you can be. And I know full well you're anything but the self-indulgent fool many still believe you to be—just as you always believed I was not the worthless wastrel the court once thought me. Especially my father."
"Ah, your father. We both know what your father was, so I need not risk incurring your anger by speaking ill of the dead. Throughout your life he played a game with you, the single rule of which was: you lose."
"So ka?" Teddy asked frostily. Almost at once his expression softened, and he said, "Very well. You're right. But what would you have me do? The past is as it is. I cannot hide from it either."
"You can leave the past in the past, though. You might forgive your father. More to the point, you might even forgive yourself."
Apparently still relaxed, Theodore studied his cousin through narrow eyes. How much does he know? While he had not been terrifically close to his so-called uncle for decades, he had for a fact never discounted him as thoroughly as Subhash Indrahar had. And in the wake of the ISF's failed attempt to destroy Chandy, the Smiling One had come to an entirely new appreciation of both the man and his operation. Particularly the skill of Chandy's intelligence service, run by the enigmatic Mirza Peter Abdulsattah.
"It's come to my ears, that rumor says I killed my father," Theodore said in a lazy voice. "Do you believe that?"
"Iie, Theodore-sama. Although I hope you'll forgive me if I say I would not think less of you if you had. But the truth of the matter is immaterial: you yourself are the only one who can know what it is you make yourself suffer for."
For a time they sat in silence. Theodore wanted to let his cousin's words slide off his back like water down a turtle's shell, but he could not. At the same time, he wanted to ask Chandy, What am I to do? But he would not.
"One way you might find to make peace with your past," Chandy said, "is to make peace with your son."
"My son?"
"Franklin Sakamoto. He renounced his birthright; you allowed the opportunity to quietly do away with him after you became aware of his existence to lapse. The two of you can start on equal footing; no reason not to. And yet you keep him under virtual house arrest."
No point wondering how he learned about that, Theodore thought. Aloud, he said, "It's for his own protection."
"Mu," Chandy replied.
Flash irritation: "That was said to negate the asking of a fatuous question: 'Can a dog have Buddha nature.' Not in response to a statement."
"Ah, but you knew what I was driving at."
Theodore reared back in exasperation, shook his head, laughed. "If you turn out to be some kind of Zen master, it will be too much for me to take."
"Small danger of that," Chandy said. " 'A roshi is an arrow aimed at Hell,' and I'm a man who likes his comfort. But to get back to the matter of your son—"
A chime announced someone at the door to the chamber. That the visitor dared interrupt one of the Coordinator's rare breaks meant that his or her business was by definition urgent. "Come in," Theodore called, both annoyed and somehow relieved.
The door slid aside. Sho-sho Hideyoshi entered, knelt, dropped his forehead to the floor mat.
Theodore looked at him in surprise. "What's this, Oda-san! Why the formality?"
"It is my regretful duty to inform the Coordinator that Franklin Sakamoto has disappeared from my residence."
" 'Disappeared?' "
"Perhaps 'escaped' would be a better word, Lord: he is gone, and there is sign of neither intrusion nor struggle. Apparently he has fled. The fault is entirely mine. I beg you to accept my resignation, in atonement for my failure."
Theodore rose to his feet. "Enough of that. No one expected he'd try to leave your custody, so there's no fault— or if there is, it's mine. I did not order you to treat him as a prisoner."
His eyes were hard as he glanced at Uncle Chandy. The fat man shook his head sadly, and sighed.
* * *
The dekigoro-zoku and their flashy hovercars had fallen off the face of the planet by the time Cassie hit the Impy City streets. There was absolutely no sign of their existence. Perhaps an official warning had come down to lay lower than low. Or perhaps they'd had all they wanted of the enraged Caballeros. The Caballeros had vanished too, chivvied back to Eiga-toshi by threats and pleas from unit commanders, iced by a personal appeal from Don Carlos. Some had also found their ways into local lockups and hospitals. But none was on the festive crowded streets of the Combine's first city.
What were in evidence were Friendly Persuaders, by the drove. The Civilian Guidance Corps already stripped the provinces—Amori, Yeovil, Haratston, Takaoguchi in the Nijunen Desert, seemingly everyplace this side of Tsu Shima, the innermost moon—of Persuaders to handle the influx of celebrants from all over the Combine into Imperial City. In the wake of the Caballero eruption it seemed the police authorities had mobilized everybody they could stuff into the candy-striped uniform—had canceled leaves and called back the off-shift patrolmen. By the way certain extremely well-developed hara bulked out the fronts of quilted uniform jackets, the skittishness of eyes beneath red-trimmed white helmets and the uneasy way gloved fingers caressed stunner firing-studs and the safeties of stubby riot shotguns fed from side-loading magazines, a good many Persuaders had been sent out onto the pavement after spending a lot of years behind the back of a desk.
Predictably the Candy-stripers were torqued-off and on edge, and looked generally inclined to zap and then beat to bean paste anyone who looked at them with both eyes simultaneously, to make sure of maintaining their moral ascendancy. Cassie had been warned that they were under orders to restrain any Caballeros they came across—"restrain" meaning, "Don't kill them, but if they fall down a few times on the way back to teruho, it'll give them more to meditate upon inside." Teruho being a yak inversion of hoteru, "hotel": that time-honored Cross-Bar Hilton.
The pairs or packs of cops Cassie encountered didn't give her any more than the hard-eyed scrutiny they gave every citizen—or if it was, it wasn't because they suspected her of being one of the yohei. She was dressed as a tech from Eiga-toshi, with papers to match. Cinema City Workers kept irregular hours, so even if, for some reason, she was singled out of the crush of humanity to be rousted, she would be able to account for being off work in the middle afternoon. At the same time, she got to wear a durable garment that didn't restrict her movements, unlike the more feminine finery an offworld visitor or even local office lady would be expected to
affect.
While the plague of cops didn't cramp Cassie, the dekigoro-zoku drought did. Her simplest approach was to catch herself a Sudden Impulse tribeskid and squeeze him till he popped; she was no fan of subtlety for its own sake, and as far as she was concerned this whole mish was a sideshow, something to be gotten out of the way as soon as possible, so she could get back to the real business of saving her regiment, if not all civilization. But there was no game moving out in the open.
Discreet inquiries quickly pinpointed favored dekigoro-zoku hangouts, vidgame parlors, and youth clubs. She found them all locked down tight and under Candy-stripe guard. That added mass to the theory that the thrill gangs had been told to make themselves scarce. In the Draconis Combine even Youth Defiant tended to defer to the voice of Authority. And when Authority was in its present savage mood, with the Coordinator's Birthday just days away and the eyes of the whole Inner Sphere turned to Imperial City, if you acted up you were due for an advanced course of hurting, no matter whose son you were.
That left Cassie flat. The dekigoro-zoku ran in a whole different continuum from the one she operated in, too. She was accustomed to working the Water Trade and the underworld, on one end of the spectrum, and polite society at the other. She had never had occasion to cultivate spoiled rich kids out for nasty kicks, at least not in the Combine. She could work them too; it was her proud belief that she could scam any people of any culture, sub or otherwise, given time to find their handles. But time she didn't have, and her usual tools and contacts—like the invaluable Tosei-kai Koreans Lainie's kids had set her up with here on the Pearl— had no links to that world either.
That left old-fashioned investigation. Cassie had no formal training in modern police techniques. Then again, neither did most of the Civilian Guidance Corps, so with a little luck she'd find that the waters hadn't been muddied yet.
* * *
"I saw it, all right," said the old woman who worked in the restaurant slantwise across the alley from Sexy Lady Yes. Her gray-shot hair was wrapped in a tight bun. She wore a black smock that reached almost to the dirt of the alley. "I was just bringing out a load of trash—wrappings and such, you understand; we keep all the rinds and radish ends for mulching our garden. No farmers on Luthien, no indeed, but billions of gardeners. I was bringing it out, I say, and had just opened the door when I saw two men come out of the dress shop dragging the young woman."
"What did you do, Oma-san?"
The old woman continued to scrub her hands with the dish towel she held. "Oh, I shrank back. I was very afraid they would see me. They looked like very hard young men. One was wheat-colored, one was black."
"You were wise, Grandmother. What did they do then?"
"They carried her to their car, parked right down there, at the end of the alley." She leaned forward to gesture. There was no car now, just some deep tire-ruts in the mud, beside a stack of crates.
"She was very still, unnaturally still. At first I thought she had taken ill, poor child. But the way the men were acting, it was wrong. I could feel it here." She touched herself over the hara.
"Did you tell the police anything of this?"
"Oh, no. They never asked."
It figures, Cassie thought. She could see why Lieutenant McCartney was losing his hair and slamming stomach meds. The CGC was not an elite investigatory outfit.
She didn't bother asking why the old lady had not volunteered the data to the Candy-stripers. The Dictum Honorium called on the citizenry to promptly inform the proper authorities of anything suspicious they might happen to witness. And by the time you were fourteen-fifteen you learned, one way or another, -just what that got you. As in police states in every time and every clime, drawing the heat's attention to yourself for any reason was a high-risk proposition.
"Did you happen to see the registry?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"The registration plaque. On the rear of the car."
"Yes. Yes I did."
"Do you remember what it was, Oma-san?"
"No. Why should I? Why do you wish to know that, young woman?"
"Perhaps the car is registered to one of the men. Or perhaps the person to whom the car is registered can tell me who they are." She did not bother to add that whoever the car was registered to would tell her what she wanted to know.
"So ka? What a clever idea! Just like 'Spy Hunter' on the holo."
Cassie swallowed. "Very much like that, Oma-san."
"Well, I certainly don't remember the number. But Ervil the pot-boy came out to see what was going on. He'll know. He has a trick memory, you see. He can barely remember his name from one moment to the next, but he can glance at a telephone-directory screen and recite all the numbers on it without an error days later."
She put her head back in the door and yelled, "Ervil!" Then she looked back at Cassie and showed her a reassuring grin, set with a couple of steel teeth.
"Everybody is saying the gaijin started attacking people for no reason," she said. "I don't believe that for a moment. If they let people kidnap one of them without fighting back, they wouldn't be gaijin, but animals."
In the course of cruising the Impy City streets Cassie had picked up that rumor half a dozen times in a couple of hours. That bothered her, but then the pot-boy appeared. A lumpy boy somewhere in adolescence, he had tow-colored hair and a face like a pie pan. He grinned absently at both women.
The proprietor also appeared. He was a small man with a cannonball-shaped head and dark skin. "What's this?" he demanded in a piping voice. "Why are you out here gossiping, Amanda? We have a restaurant to run!"
"This is my son-in-law, Sanjitay," the old woman said proudly. "He owns this fine establishment all by himself."
"She's helping me find a friend, sir," Cassie said. As tie opened his mouth to explode all over her, she held out a crisp new 100 H-Bill. "Please accept this gift in compensation for any inconvenience I might have caused."
The restaurateur accepted the money. "Well, Amanda! Why do you stand there gaping? Answer the customer's questions immediately!"
"You are a brave and loyal young woman, to be trying so hard to find your friend," Amanda said, ignoring her son-in-law. "Be careful. These men could be very dangerous."
Cassie smiled. "I will be careful, Grandmother. Thank you. Ervil?"
* * *
"I know you have exalted connections," the tired voice of Lieutenant McCartney said, "but believe it or not, Criminal Investigations Bureau has things to do other than answer questions for you." A meaningful pause. "We've been getting a lot more work recently...."
Cassie glanced out through the glass of the phone kiosk. Most of the people who filled the street were watching a troupe of acrobats perform down the block, which as a matter of elementary paranoia was nowhere near the restaurant or the Sexy Lady Yes boutique. Nobody seemed to be paying her any attention.
"I promised to try to get you answers," she said. "Now I can promise to get them. But it's going to take a little longer."
Another pause. It was an audio-only setup, which was standard for Luthien—Masamori on Hachiman had vid-phones in its public booths—and was just fine by her. Cassie didn't need a screen to envision a frown on the detective lieutenant's face. She reckoned McCartney was struggling with the impulse to haul her in for a little old-fashioned police-work Combine-style, the kind usually conducted in a room with drains in the floor. That was to be expected. There was a little clock running in her head, however, and when it ran out, she was going to presume that what he was doing was stalling until a patrol could get to the kiosk to arrest her—she took for granted all calls to the CGC were automatically traced. In which case she was simply going to walk out and vanish in the cheerful throng.
"Very well," the detective said just before the bell. "What do you want?"
She held up a napkin on which she had written the number Ervil provided, read it off. "I'd like you to trace this vehicle registration for me."
Still another pause. "Very
clever. Are you a trained police investigator, then?"
"I've broken laws on a dozen or so planets. I know the drill."
"Maybe I should hire you."
"If I were available," she said, "yes, you should. But my employer's satisfied with the job I do, for the moment. Don't worry—I haven't forgotten the promise I made you."
"I'll get it for you. But don't expect it soon. The request has to go through channels."
"How long?"
"Tomorrow at the earliest."
Cassie closed her eyes and slumped against the kiosk walls. "Whatever," she said, and broke the connection.
22
Imperial City, Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
28 June 3058
"Permit me to be certain I understand," said the softly sibilant voice from the videophone. "What this homicide investigator told you after he checked the registration of the kidnap vehicle was ... nothing?"
Cassie glanced away from the oxymoronically grim visage of the Smiling One and across the small room. The old granny lady heating a pot of water for tea on a hot plate by one shoji-screened wall smiled encouragingly at her. Cassie nodded abstractedly back.
"It was a real eloquent nothing, Subhash-sama," Cassie replied, looking back at his image. She kept the nice granny lady carefully in her peripheral vision. Because if the nice granny lady made a wrong move Cassie was going to light her up proper with her hideout snubby.
This was an ISF safe house whose address Cassie had been provided before her release from custody—one indication that the Smiling One took her and her allegations of corruption in the secret police seriously. It offered a supposedly secure communications link to the Director. From that Cassie inferred it was specifically a Sons of the Dragon safe house. But she didn't like to take anything for granted. Not even the harmlessness of benign old granny ladies, since she'd known some pretty formidable specimens in her time. For that matter, a lot of Caballeras were one day going to get old and retire back to the Trinity, where they'd still be as lethal as Larshan glass vipers.
