by Rick Partlow
"I am no ninja," Tanaka replied, coming to his feet and facing her. "I am just a man, and far from perfect."
"Oh, sure," she sneered cynically. "You don't seem to be too hesitant about giving me advice. You're the one that always knows the right thing to do, the right place to be."
"These lessons are harshly and painfully learned." Tanaka ran a finger unconsciously along the scar along his jawline. "Yet learned they must be for those who choose the path of the warrior, Shannon. I knew a young man once---not even a man so much as a youth, though one trained from childhood in the ways of the warrior. He was of a clan that could trace their history to feudal Japan. They had survived by evolving with the times, first marketing their skills to the Emperor, then to the yakuza, and more recently as personal bodyguards to government officials and corporate executives.
"This young man had finished his training and received his first assignment: guarding a Republic senator and his family during a trip to visit the wife's family in Czechoslovakia. It was considered a fairly safe assignment. Yet no one had foreseen the ill feelings toward the Republic among the neo-Marxist factions in Prague. A home-made bomb was thrown from the crowd. Our young bodyguard saw it, but the Senator and his young daughter were separated by several meters from the wife, and he only had time to pull one or the other to safety.
"The young man did the right thing, what was his duty: he threw the Senator and his daughter to the ground and shielded them with his body. They survived. The wife was killed instantly." Tanaka took a deep breath, the impassive expression on his face twisting into something darker for just a moment before the mask fell again.
"And what happened to the bodyguard?" Shannon asked, knowing the answer yet needing to hear the words from him.
"He lived, though badly injured. He pledged his life to guarding the Senator's daughter in hopes of redeeming himself for his failure to save the little girl's mother. And he kept one scar out of the many wounds as a constant reminder of that commitment." His hand dropped away from the white keloid along his jaw to hang limply at his side. "And as a constant reminder of the price of failure."
"That sounds like a lonely life for a young man," Shannon commented softly, moving a step closer to him. All the anger and pain were gone now, replaced by something softer and warmer...something not entirely surprising or unwelcome.
"You would be surprised what a man can adjust to over time," he replied evenly.
"Just what kind of a name is Nathan Tanaka?" Shannon wondered. "For the son of such a traditional Japanese clan, 'Nathan' seems awfully untraditional."
"My father, Heideko Tanaka," Nathan explained, a nostalgic smile playing across his face, "met and married an American girl while he was on assignment guarding a senator from Georgia. She was a staunch Southerner, and insisted that if I was to be raised in the ways of the clan, that she at least have a say in my name. So, my birth certificate reads: 'Nathan Bedford Forrest Tanaka,' if you can believe it."
"I love it." She laughed, a sound filled with more joie de vivre than she'd felt in a week. "She sounds like a strong-willed woman."
"Oh, she is." Nathan agreed. "She is a redhead like you."
"Mother," Shannon said, giving the word an Irish lilt, "said that all redheads shared the same two weaknesses. The first is a bad temper." She traced the fingers of her left hand gently over Nathan's scar.
"And what," Tanaka asked, finding himself, to his amazement, a bit breathless, "is the second?"
By way of an answer, she covered his lips with hers, feeling his strong arms slipping around her once again, but this time for a purpose far beyond comfort. Without another word, Nathan lifted her in his arms and carried her back down the darkened hallway to his room.
It was, he thought with a quiet chuckle, the traditional thing to do.
Chapter Eleven
"Manhood is the ability to outlast despair."---James Jones.
Kennedy was dead. Even as the thought passed through his mind, Jason realized the dark humor of it, but it was an accurate statement. Looking out from his rooftop perch over the burned-out, looted wreckage that was once the largest and fastest-growing city in the star colonies, McKay felt the weight of isolation pressing down on him.
He remembered the look on Valerie's face when he'd left her and the Mendoza family in the rover behind a repair garage at the outskirts of the city.
"Take this," he'd said, handing her the autorifle they'd taken off Filipe back at the farmstead. He'd decided to leave the weapon with her and keep one of the autoshotguns with him, since he didn't have too much confidence in the ability of the scattergun to take out one of the Invaders and he didn't want to leave them helpless. It was bad enough he had to leave them at all.
"Do you have to go?" she'd asked him again. He'd looked at her sitting in the front seat of the rover, his overshirt drawn around her, and a shiver had gone up his spine. The words, spoken in that context, should have been a plaintive appeal, full of the fear and apprehension he knew she felt at being left alone. Instead, the plea had been delivered in the same flat monotone she'd fallen into since the fight at the farmstead.
It was her eyes that really got to him: they'd become as dead and lifeless as one of those Invader trooper's. If he didn't find a place for them to rest soon...
He'd just said: "I've got to."
"But what will happen to us, Senor McKay?" Carmella Mendoza had beseeched him. "What if you don't come back?"
"I'll be back," he'd promised, shutting the driver's side door and turning to leave. Behind him, he could hear the quiet sobbing of Carmella's children, a haunting sound that still echoed in his mind as he leaned against the roof parapet high over Kennedy.
He'd come up there, to the highest building in Kennedy---an hotel, ironically---thinking that he might catch sight of some kind of human activity: that some of those who'd fled during the invasion might surely have returned now that the Invaders had pulled out most of their forces. But the only thing moving in the debris-littered streets were aimlessly wandering bands of abandoned Invader troopers. He'd narrowly avoided being spotted by one group of them on his way into town, and had watched from the cover of a shadowed doorway as they opened fire at a wind-blown piece of paper.
They were out of control and unguided, and he was only now beginning to appreciate the extent to which the troopers were some kind of automatons, rather than fully-sentient, autonomous beings. The fact that they weren't independently intelligent didn't make them any less dangerous if they spotted him, though. They seemed to him like maggots infesting the body of the rotting corpse that was Kennedy: moving about the dead streets, through the hulks of buildings already picked clean of anything useful, down to the holographic signs over the doors.
Feeling suddenly depressed and very vulnerable, Jason backed away from the edge of the roof in a crouched duckwalk, holding the autoshotgun across his chest. This, he thought bitterly, had been a waste of time, just like every move he'd made since the invasion. Now, they had no choice but to head for one of the other, smaller towns and repeat the process.
Far enough away from the edge to avoid being seen from below, Jason straightened and turned back toward the stairwell, mind still full of dark hopelessness. So preoccupied was he with their predicament that he nearly ran smack into the chest armor of the Invader trooper advancing up those same stairs.
"Jesus!" McKay jerked the trigger of the CAWS reflexively even as the trooper started to bring its rifle around.
The scattergun bucked wildly in Jason's unprepared grasp and he staggered backward as the three-round burst caught the Invader in the chest. Most of the charge ricocheted off the hard armor plating, but the impact rocked the Invader back, leaving it balanced precariously on the first step of the stairs.
Realizing the uselessness of his shotgun, Jason dropped the weapon and threw himself into a flying side kick that caught the trooper full in the faceplate and sent both of them careening down the first flight of stairs, arms and legs akimbo. With the h
ard surface of the first stairwell landing rushing up at them, Jason somehow managed to land feet-first on the Invader's stomach, bending his knees to absorb most of the impact. Rolling off the trooper, McKay ignored the blossom of pain in his left knee and ripped his pistol from its shoulder holster, pumping a double-tap through the Invader's faceplate before the thing could get to its feet.
As Jason was rising from a crouch, a chattering barrage of rifle fire from the landing below punched into the wall just above his head, spraying him with stone chips and sending him diving to the floor. Another pair of Invader troopers were advancing up the steps abreast, hosing the landing above them with their assault rifles as they came. Hugging the floor, Jason shoved his handgun out in front of him and fired down the stairwell, emptying the magazine at the troopers.
Two of the slugs caught the left-hand Invader in the throat, jerking it backwards down the stairs with a crash of metal, while the rest of the rounds ricocheted off the other's chest armor at an angle and tracked downward, finally impacting the receiver of the trooper's rifle and shattering the bolt assembly. Scrambling to his feet, Jason threw a body-block into the Invader, grabbing the railing at the last moment to avoid following the armored trooper down the flight. The out-of-control Invader flailed wildly as it flew head-over-heels to the landing below, smashing into the plasticrete beside the corpse of its comrade.
Not waiting to see if the trooper survived the fall, McKay reloaded his pistol on the move, taking the stairs three at a time despite the flare of agony in his leg. He knew one thing from watching the Invaders from the roof: they tended to congregate in large groups, as if searching for some purpose to their continued existence. He had to get out of the hotel before the gunfire drew dozens of them and cut off his line of retreat.
Putting speed above caution, McKay careened headlong down the stairs, left hand sliding along the railing and the right holding his pistol out in front of him. Jason was half-convinced he would run straight into any of the troopers that came along with no advance warning, but the stairwell was empty of further threats, empty of everything but the thud of his heartbeat and the wearied rasp of his breath. He hit the exit to the stairwell close to collapse, hyperventilating, his knee on fire. He had to risk a few seconds' rest at the door to bring his heart and breathing under control before he pushed it gently open and emerged into the lobby of the Kennedy City Hilton.
"Rated Finest Hotel in the Colonies by Republic Traveller's Association!" a holographic marquis splashed boastfully across a wall pockmarked by bullets. Glancing at the charred remains of the lobby furniture and the blackened holes blown in the front wall, Jason judged that the RTA would probably have to update that rating.
"Hello, room service?" he muttered softly, quickly scanning his surroundings. "Could you send up an automatic weapon?"
The lobby seemed clear, and Jason was about to make a dash for the front entrance when he caught a glimpse through the blown-out doorway of more of the Invader troopers moving about in the street outside, probably seeking the source of the gunshots.
"Damn," he hissed. Too late: they were flocking to the hotel already. He'd have to try the side exit, if he could find it. Ducking out of the stairwell door, he made a hobbling dash past the devastated reception desk and down a side hall deeper into the building.
The corridor led past a collection of conference rooms and utility closets, each blasted, picked clean and burned out as if the Invaders had harbored a personal vendetta against the Hilton chain. Jason smothered an insane giggle at the thought of the aliens travelling across dozens of light years simply to trash a hotel, like some kind of interstellar rock band. Trying hard to concentrate on the problem at hand, he followed the hallway around several twists until he finally ran smack into an emergency exit.
He pushed through the door without thinking and instantly regretted it when a hooting fire alarm sounded, still under power from integral batteries and keyed to go off when the emergency door was opened. Cursing heatedly, Jason pumped his legs as fast as his damaged knee would endure, sprinting toward the open end of the blind alley between the hotel and the connected restaurant next door. He'd almost made it to the street when an armored figure moved into the alley mouth, blocking his way, arms filled with the metal bulk of a drum-fed machine gun.
Not even hesitating, Jason brought his handgun to shoulder level and fired as he ran, emptying the magazine into the creature's head and upper torso, barely a meter away from the thing as the last slug pierced its faceplate. The Invader collapsed in a heap, and McKay scooped the machine gun from its hands, shoving his pistol into his waistband as he took off across the street. Ricochets whined all around him as the downed trooper's cohorts spotted him and opened fire from the front entrance of the hotel, nearly a hundred meters away.
McKay chopped off a burst at the group of armored figures as he sprinted across the street, the large-caliber machine-gun slugs downing two of them and peppering the front wall of the hotel with bullet holes. But the others made no move to seek cover, simply standing in open and emptying their rifles at him; halfway to the shelter of the alleyway opposite the hotel, Jason stumbled at the red-hot punch of a rifle slug in his side.
He cried out sharply and a wave of nauseating agony washed through him, but he forced himself to stay on his feet. Managing to keep hold of the machine gun, he staggered into the shadowed alley between a bank and a tailor shop, feeling the warm rush of blood soaking his right side.
Calm down, he screamed at himself, leaning heavily against the alley wall, beginning to hyperventilate. Breathe, Goddamnit, before you send yourself into shock!
Shaking himself, he forced his mind back to clarity and twisted around to see three of the armored troopers lumbering toward the alley mouth, reloading their rifles as they ran. It cost him a flare of fresh pain, but he brought the barrel of the machine gun up and hosed the approaching troops with twenty rounds, the muzzle spitting a ten-centimeter tongue of fire, a stream of brass-colored cases bouncing off the wall of the bank. The troopers went down with fist-sized holes in their armor, but McKay was already stumbling laboriously down the passage between the buildings, aiming for the daylight on the other end.
He emerged on a narrow side street, but spent little time sightseeing; instead, he ran straight across to the opposite alley, trying to make his way to the edge of town. Once he hit the outskirts, he figured he could travel more leisurely along the perimeter of the city until he came around to where the rover was parked.
As he shuffled across street after parallel street, the banks, hotels and shops slowly began to give way to the uglier, boxier shapes of warehouses and factories of the industrial district. This section of town had been hardest hit by the Invaders: there didn't seem to be a single structure left intact, and their insides looked to be as empty as a politician's promise, stripped bare by the looting aliens.
The skeletal buildings stared down accusingly at Jason, haunted corpses of a raped and murdered city, and he paused at their scrutiny, mesmerized by the anthropomorphic image his stress-fired imagination had built up. An unsettling sense of claustrophobia closed in on him in the looming shadows of the surrounding buildings, a numbing sensation that smothered the pain from his side and his knee as it threatened to smother his thoughts. Part of his mind, the small part that was still thinking clearly, was shouting at him to get moving, that he was slipping into emotional and physical shock; but the mental inertia seemed to drag at him like lead weights.
The metallic clomp of Invader boots from a side street startled him out of the fugue into which he'd been slipping and sent him scrambling through the open side door of a nearby warehouse. A fleeting glance of a dimly-lit snowfield of scattered packing foam over the stripped wreckage of offices and the overturned hulk of an industrial exoskeleton, and then he was hugging the inside wall, edging close enough to the opening to peek out at the street. There were half a dozen of the armored Invader troopers outside, milling around the empty buildings, hunting for him.
McKay watched them, trying not to let his gaze linger on any one of them, giving in to that old soldier's superstition that an enemy could feel your stare. His breathing seemed to be intolerably loud in his own ears, and he wondered that they couldn't hear it; he would have held his breath, but he knew at this point that, if he did, he would pass out. Gradually, as his gaze remained glued to the activity without, he became aware of a "tip-tap" sound somewhere in the warehouse: a persistent, nagging drip, as if someone hadn't turned a bathroom faucet quite all the way off. The noise abraded his nerves like sandpaper, and he was sure that one of the troopers would finally notice it and come to investigate.
Then, a stray glance downward revealed to him the source of the sound: it was his own blood, soaking through his shirt to drip steadily onto the metal base of the doorway. A small, crimson pool of it had gathered around his right boot, and the realization of just how badly he was bleeding sent a fresh wave of dizziness through him. He barely caught himself as he was about to pitch over sideways, had to grab the edge of the doorway for support. Unfortunately, that meant taking a hand off the foregrip of the weighty machine gun: the barrel slipped down to scrape loudly across the gnarled buildfoam of the inner wall.
Six helmeted heads snapped around as one, and Jason thought, absurdly, of an old cartoon he'd once seen about a pack of clumsy, stupid hounds chasing after an elusive, clever fox. Except he felt neither elusive nor particularly clever at the moment. As a matter of fact, he felt very much like he was about to lose consciousness. The Invaders started for the warehouse, tromping forward in an unorganized clump. He thought this was especially odd, since they'd maintained a textbook wedge formation when they'd attacked the mansion.
Gunny Stockwell, his D.I. from boot camp, would have had the old training platoon doing pushups for a year if they'd bunched up like that in a tactical situation. "One worthless motherfucker with an automatic weapon'd take out the whole worthless motherfucking lot of you!" he would have bellowed at them. He decided it was time to figure out if that sadistic old bastard was right.
