by Lee Bond
Kouki nearly faltered.
He’d never done an interrogation before, had never even seen a Specter before now and so rationally understood that he was –technically speaking- at a disadvantage; everyone in office knew just what sort of people were in the employ of Special Services –and about forty other organizations that could theoretically wind up on your doorstep on any given day- but … it was difficult to comprehend how a man with so many guns pointed at him, a man guilty of destruction and violation of Emperor-for-Life-controlled sanctions, could stand there, so quietly, doing nothing more than sweating.
The Minister made a great show of reading data from the handheld when he was, in fact, thinking fiercely on what he should do next. He wasn’t even a proper Minister yet! He’d been wearing the robes for less than five years. Dealing with unwanted strangers on Delicate Heron was a veteran’s job!
The only reason he was here at all was because he’d foolishly taken NorthAMC language studies in school, and even then, only because his future wife, the lovely Shinobu Noa, had been a teacher’s assistant! Kouki suddenly wanted one of the sweets tucked into a pocket right then, a powerful desire that almost saw him break with protocol.
Almost. There was a job to be done, the Elder Ministers were watching. Everyone was watching. He nodded. “And how do you come to be in possession of a Shriven vessel, Specter?”
Babel sighed, relieved that the man in the fancy black and silver robes had finally gotten around to asking a question that required more than a nod. Miming writing on a piece of paper and wiggling his eyes suggestively at the Minister’s handheld, it nevertheless still took the guy a solid minute of looking this way and that to figure out just what was being asked of him.
“My handheld?” Kouki paused, confused. That didn’t seem like something he should do.
Babel clenched his jaw tight. This was awful. Making eye contact with the over-dressed and oddly frightening samurai soldiers holding rifles that shot electric death, Babel psychically willed them to understand that he while he was going to be moving his hands, he was not nor would he ever –at least in these circumstances- be doing anything that might even remotely be considered threatening. The guards nearest him –which was all of them- tracked the motion of his hands were relentless accuracy.
Great. First they were going to blow his hands off, then they were going to turn him into a well-ventilated corpse. Dire Specter humor had him hoping none of the blood got on the pretty silver parts of the Minister’s robes. Stuff like that could ruin a man’s career, accidental or otherwise.
“What are you … I don’t …” Kouki was very well pleased that the guardsmen knew what to do. After today, he was going to pretend he didn’t speak NorthAMC at all. In fact, he planned on using his connections to erase that particular bit of information from his personal files. He couldn’t be expected to do this kind of thing again! It was beyond uncomfortable. “Ah … I … no, I …”
Guardsman Oshiro –close to Minister Kouki’s left ear- whispered gently. “I believe he means to say he cannot speak, Honorable Minister Kouki. He asks for your handheld so he might write things down in his terrible mother language.”
Minister Kouki dipped his head once, very discreetly. Oshiro was a good fellow. Taking some time to remove any and all levels of access –he was a Minister, after all, which meant his handheld carried very sensitive information- Kouki handed the slender device over to the Specter, who looked so relieved to receive it, it was positively indecent. He watched the short man write something down, then accepted the machine back.
Kouki read the request over and over, turning the possibilities over in his head. The handheld –driven remotely by an AI mind- had already provided an easy-to-understand phonetic pronunciation of the phrase, only … the Minister wasn’t certain this was a thing he should do; Babel Sinfell had gone out of his way to imply that he was physically incapable of speech, yet he was asking how to ask for help in proper EuroJapanese?
It made no sense!
Minister Kouki took a mental step back. It was a trick he’d learned from his father, a holy man, one he used almost every day when a moment in time seemed to be too overwhelming to handle on one’s own. Generally he deployed the tactic when dealing with his eldest son, Ryuko, and his increasingly insane dreams of becoming a Yellow Dog footsoldier, but the technique did come in handy from time to time when dealing with the dull minutiae of his job.
From a vast mental distance away, Kouki considered Babel Sinfell.
The man had arrived in a Shriven vessel. Not necessarily stolen; the young Minister didn’t even want to contemplate the methods or sheer effort required to steal a ship belonging to one of the Emperor-for-Life’s chosen few. He wasn’t even entirely certain such a feat was possible, not when everything surrounding what a Shriven was, was taken into account.
So. Had the Shriven given Sinfell the craft? A likely enough possibility.
Kouki was given to understand that, elsewhere in the solar system, difficulties were being had. Something about an invader or pirate or generally evil organization specifically targeting Yellow Dog Clans, which neatly explained why there was a Shriven here in the first place, and why –only in the broadest of strokes, mind- a Specter, also presumably here to deal with that same problem. From there, it wasn’t too much of a stretch for the Specter to acquire the Shriven’s ship.
Kouki dipped his head. Yes, that made sense.
Yes. A convergence of forces, out there in the darkness, both sides seeking to deal with the Yellow Dog Menace. A voluntary merger, then? With Babel Sinfell as the only man left standing, the only one capable of fleeing whatever the threat was, to come here, to Delicate Heron?
Given the man’s physical appearance, the obvious hunger, the bags under the eyes … now that he took the whole of the man’s sudden and inexplicable arrival, everything was beginning to make sense.
And in order to make certain his needs were well and clearly understood, Babel Sinfell wanted to ask for help in EJ.
Fantastic. Excellent.
Minister Tsubasa Kouki extended the handheld back to Babel Sinfell, who took the device with a grateful smile on his extremely weary face.
Babel read the phonetic phrase a few times over, working his tongue around some of the trickier vowel combinations. It was a wonder anyone not born to the language could speak it with anything approaching fluency! The damned thing was a mishmash of gobbledygook.
“Well, Babel Sinfell of Special Services? What have you to say for yourself?” Minister Tsubasa Kouki leaned in close to bear witness to the man’s formal request for assistance from the government and peoples of Delicate Heron.
Babel opened his mouth.
***
“I literally cannot believe this idiot.” Eddie looked around for something to throw at the wall and failed. He manifested an old school television remote control for the express purpose of doing just that, hucking the cheaply made plastic tool at Minister Kouki’s broad and pleasant looking face so hard it broke into shards. “Goddamnit! He’s in a fucking Yellow Dog system. Even if he didn’t do anything, his samurai guards should’ve shot Babel dead! He rolled up in a Shriven ship, for fuck’s sake.”
“Just look at the way those people are being affected by that simple request!” ADAM couldn’t contain the mystified sense of awe that rolled through him. “I mean, come on. It’s hard not to argue that the EuroJapanese language is the second most complicated Human tongue in existence. The only one more difficult is IndoRussian. In comparison to a NorthAMC request made with Babel’s powers, the simple phrase ‘help me’ in EJ has somewhere in the neighborhood of … eighteen thousand different implicative demands. Ah, look there, that guy, Guardsmen … Rokuro … yeah, his head exploded. All over Kouki’s robes. Haha. That’s awesome. Oh, there goes another. And wow … five guys all at once. I never expected that. That’s … you know what I just realized? The whole ti
me I was busy trying to dominate the human race and I was doing all those awful experiments and everything, I never once really stepped back and, you know, just took in how … goopy you people are. The whole of your insides are just, like, goop. How do you get around when you’re all so … sloshy on the insides? Now that I’m back in charge, I might really seriously look into this! Without Trinity’s dogged support, I just … I just can’t see it. Annnnnd there goes the young Minister. Throwing up what appears to be a lifetime supply of glutinous rice cakes. Man, if he survives this and continues eating that stuff like that, he’s just gonna be so, so fat. Hah! They’ll call him Minister Rice Cake behind his back.”
“Would you shut up?” Eddie watched the screens intently, trying to piece together why this … carnage … was unfolding before him, asking the machinery to assist when he found nothing in his own experiences that might explain it all.
The results came back a few seconds later. Negative. ADAM was transmitting a completely neutral data feed, audio and visual only, meaning these events had actually occurred some time ago. The artificial intelligence had taken the time to scrub every single useable iota of underlying data free from the recordings.
“Come on, dad, be real. You honestly think I’d leave you anything?” ADAM tsked. “I’m showing you all this so you can understand something very important, and it is this; you gave this guy up for a daughter you one hundred percent know is gonna have to die, and pretty fucking awfully at that. Let’s be seriously for real right now. She got hacked by the ‘Priests, was whammied by the N’Chalez Effect and has fucking brain damage from when what’s his tits beaned her in the melon with that fucking massive chunk of whatever, which is doing who the hell goddamn knows what to her insides! If they were giving out prizes for The Most Insane Person in the Unreal Universe, it’d be a tie between her, Chadsik al-Taryin, Kith Antal and herself. Yes. She’s in there twice. Because she’s that batshit.”
Eddie had nothing to say. There was nothing to say. Babel Sinfell had a power that was immediately and instantly effective on whoever heard him speak. Naoko Kamagana was intent on rewriting the entire Universe and was hellbent on discovering the actual code of existence.
One was an asset of unlimited potential. The other was a grisly corpse waiting for the grave.
He’d made his choice. Obviously, he’d chosen poorly, because in hindsight, the efficacy of Babel’s powers struck the Emperor as the kind of thing that might even work against Garth N’Chalez.
Just one more jot of blame to dump on N’Chalez. If he wasn’t so angry at the man, Eddie knew he would’ve seen Sinfell’s value much more clearly than he had.
“You said this was going to get interesting? All I see are a bunch of people trying out for a Scanners remake and one fat Minister projectile vomiting all over the place.” Eddie tried sounding dismissive of the event, accepting that he’d failed.
“Oh yeah, no, it does, because, you see…”
***
Babel tried getting over the accidental carnage his simple request had created, wondering as he gazed moodily on gently steaming brains why no one in Ha’s camp had gone the head-explosion route. It took no time at all to come to grips with the fancily dressed samurai soldiers going the way of all things, because that’s how life went, especially these days, but figuring out the hows and whys of Ha’s survival was another thing coming.
Kouki fought the revulsion bubbling through his guts a third time and failed yet again. Thankfully, everything he had ever eaten in his entire life –including mother’s milk- had been violently released from his traitorous stomach some time ago, so the only thing that came out of his mouth was a pitiable whine and just the tiniest bit of bile.
The only reason he wasn’t busy falling on his sword that moment was the reality that many of the surviving samurai had also thrown up an entire lifetime’s worth of food, and they, too, weren’t doing the honorable thing.
Babel’s clumsily worded plea for help. That was why. Kouki couldn’t figure out why, but those words curled through him, whispered to him, made certain that everything he thought, did and said had the small, sorrowful-looking Specter’s best interests at heart. Already, samurai were moving to form a protective barrier around the man.
Kouki could feel the cast set to their faces. The newfound resolve they all shared was certainly on display. So with this command blazing away into every part of his life, making a simple Minister feel as if he’d been bred for this moment and this moment alone, Minister Kouki moved to stand beside Babel, saying, “More men will be coming. There are cameras everywhere.”
Babel typed something into the handheld; his new best friend Minister Kouki’d dropped it during the reprogramming process, and the slender Specter had immediately scooped it up, seeing a perfect –well, not entirely perfect, but good enough for the time being, thank you very much- method of communicating with his new army.
The machine’s default voice wasn’t warm honey on the ears, but until they had the time to do it properly, Babel didn’t care how he sounded. “How many?”
“Rokuro?” Kouki looked around, cursing when he found Rokuro amongst the dead. He didn’t know these answers, and the AI coming through the handheld wouldn’t respond to such a request. “Anyone? Makoto? Taichi?”
Taichi stepped forward. “There are one hundred more guardsmen on duty in this area, Minister Kouki. They will begin converging on this location in under five minutes. There are one thousand guardsmen currently deployed across the planet, with another fifteen thousand held in reserve. The active and local men will be here in a few minutes. The thousand will arrive within the hour. The reservemen will be here shortly after that. Local government officials will not even bother sending in policemen. The situation is beyond them.”
Kouki bowed, then relayed that information to Babel, who took the news firmly across the chin. “We will do all we can to help you, Master Sinfell, but we will be outnumbered in a very short time. What do we do?”
The limited number of people protecting a planet the size of Delicate Heron was a fucking embarrassment! A hair over fifteen thousand men and women –probably more men or no women at all, considering the absolute ass-backwards way the planet was being run- was barely enough to get the Yellow Dogs interested in taking a look at what was happening on their ‘cultural preserve’ world!
The plan to convert the Yellow Dog Armada into something more Specterly relied solely on getting boots on the ground and within earshot, and even then, there was no telling what his range was until he tried; was it earshot, or did they need to be as close as these men before him had been? The unique way Ha connected with her troops had undoubtedly had a great deal to do with him infecting the mad hacker’s entire crew with a single phrase.
That kind of scenario wouldn’t play out here, no, not at all.
Babel sensed the frantic energy boiling from his small security detail and pulled himself out of his thoughts. Typing as fast as he could and wishing he’d spent more time working on his own legal documents when he’d been a politician so it wouldn’t feel like forever, Babel issued commands. “We need open space. Somewhere my voice will be heard. I need some kind of voice amplification device.”
The samurai detail bolted into action, pulling both Babel and Kouki along for the ride. The Specter scooped up a few of the dead men’s weapons, pleased that his retinue was no longer able to judge him for his actions.
This was no time for delicate sensibilities because no matter how powerful his voice was, Babel knew that he couldn’t –shouldn’t- rely solely upon it. Some might prove immune to the mind-controlling aspects of his power, some might react completely different, might transform into single-minded, frighteningly able assassins, there might be another round of Headsplosion Ultra …
There was just no telling.
***
Kouki beamed with pride, gesturing at Cherry Blossom Park with open arms, loving the way the long ends of his official robes swept flowingly around him. “Will thi
s do? Our very own Mai Mei, a nine year old agricultural specialist, designed this entire park! The trees blossom when the sun rises, and as the sun begins to set, the air is filled with flowering buds floating through the air. Is it not beautiful?”
It was indeed beautiful. Babel couldn’t think of a more fitting place to have a potential showdown with samurai soldiers.
It was also, in practical terms, a fucking nightmare. There were absolutely no proper lines of sight, his idiot guardsmen were all lounging against the fucking trees like, well, like proper actual soldiers before a big fight but they were supposed to be protecting him, not looking like they were going to start working on some goddamn hand-rolled cigarettes and idly chit-chatting about some cute girl that sells fruit on the side of the fucking road!
Babel spun in place, hoping against hope that there was something he could work with.
Nope. Not only could a horde of soldiers be walking their way right through the absolute blizzard of very lovely and fragrant cherry blossoms floating through the air in ways that made the scene quite, quite memorable, there was a very real chance that whoever was in charge of the hundred soldiers converging on their location would be setting snipers on the goddamn buildings ringing the square.
Babel couldn’t handle it any longer. Fingers flying across the keys of his handheld, he started griping, the awkward and mechanically distorted voice serving to rely his frustrations decently enough. “Who builds a fucking cherry blossom orchard at a fucking space port? What are all these other buildings? Why are they here? This is a terrible place for this kind of thing. This is bullshit.”
Kouki opened his mouth to respond to his new master’s angry questions, but clamped shut when Taichi pulled on the hem of his robe. Looking to the guardsmen, the Minister followed the young soldier’s pointed finger. “My master, Minister Yuudai approaches. No doubt to arrange for your surrender.”
As much as he missed talking and firing off endless sarcastic replies to the idiots in his life, Babel was finding it a lot easier to refrain from speaking than he’d originally imagined. Probably had a lot to do with all the headless soldiers he’d left in the waiting room. Fear of repeated skull explosion was a pretty fucking good motivator to be on your ‘A’ game.
