by Victor Milán
"And you never rely on luck."
"Not rely on it, no." She took a taste of her own soft drink. "But somebody has what I'm looking for, whatever that turns out to be. And as I get my contacts out there"— she made a spreading gesture with open hands—"the chance that somebody knows a man, who knows a man, who knows what I need to know, goes right on up."
Kali laughed and shook her head. "I love to watch an artist at work. It's no wonder you're the best."
"Thanks," Cassie said, guarded again.
Kali looked at her with those sky-blue eyes. "How's reception? You getting anything?"
"Bits and pieces," Cassie said. "The yakuza boss, Sumiyama, has it in big for Uncle Chandy. The kobun talk about it a lot over their beer in the Kit-Kat."
"Could that be what's bugging you? Man like that might be able to cause a mess of trouble. Even for someone named Kurita."
Cassie gave her head a quick shake. "That's not it. And there's word on the street that the Planetary Chairman is looking to squeeze HTE down to size."
"Childe Percy," Lady K said. "Percival Uyehara Fillington, Duke of Hachiman. Still wet behind the ears, by the look of him on holo." She looked at Cassie over her glass as she drank, her eyes alive with mischief. "He's pretty easy on the eyes, though, and I understand he's the planet's most eligible bachelor. Shoot, Cass, maybe you oughta think about settling down—"
The look in Cassie's eyes made Kali stop. "And then again, maybe not," she finished smoothly.
Cassie made herself emit a sound resembling a chuckle. Sort of. "What about you?" she asked.
"That skinny little eel?" Kali shook her head. "Not enough vitamins. I don't want a man with all the edges planed off him, no way."
"Also, it seems like Marquis Hosoya, CEO of Tanadi Computers, is getting nervous about the growth of Uncle Chandy's operation," Cassie continued. "The Fillingtons have been in Tanadi's hip pocket for generations. The Earl's official line has always been that if it's bad for Tanadi, it's bad for Hachiman."
"So is that the problem?"
Again Cassie shook her head. 'If Chandy couldn't deal with bugs like that—Percy, Hosoya, even the yaks—he'd never have scraped together the money to hire us in. No matter what his last name is."
Kali nodded slowly. "Makes sense to me. Even if Chandy made most of his roll off corruption and extortion, in high old Combine style, he's got to have something on the ball." She snorted a laugh through her nostrils, and managed to make it almost refined. "He can't be quite as harmless a fat fool as he looks. 'Cause nobody is, mainly."
"Or his hatchet man, Abdulsattah. He gives me the creeps."
"You? Whoa, mamacita, hang on. He must be a stone hardcase to get to a tough little number like you."
Cassie nodded.
"What is it then? Any clue?"
"No. But it's real. I'm not imagining this, no matter what Gordo and Cabrera say. The yaks sense it too; they're all jumpy as cats with a pit-bull convention coming to town. It's on the street. Everybody sees storm clouds building over the Compound, but nobody knows anything."
"Hmm," Kali said, her mouth crumpling into an expression that suggested she didn't much like the taste of what Cassie had to say. "You think maybe old Uncle Chandy had somethin' on his mind besides buying a new toy when he signed up the old man?"
Cassie just looked at her friend.
Kali sighed. "Ah, well. Should've known this gig was too cushy to be for real. You'll give us warning when the storm's fixin' to break. I know you will."
They sat a moment in silence. The managerial types in shirt sleeves had been working themselves into a noisy argument. Finally one square-faced man with a crewcut stood up, windmilling his arms and shouting Japanese, then stalked out.
"I thought these Combine types were all supposed to be subdued and polite," said Lady K. "Cept when they're riotin', of course."
"We—they like to think of themselves that way," Cassie said.
"They put on an act for the gaijin?"
A smile. "And themselves. Self-deception is kind of the national sport in the Combine."
"Like it's not everywhere else?"
The tall blonde captain settled in with one arm slung over the back of her chair and gazed at Cassie. "So you had to waste the pimp?"
Cassie felt her jaw muscles tighten. "You think I had much choice? I figured it was drop him right then, or fight his bully boys. Or should I have just let them wax me?"
Kali patted her hand. "Easy, sister. You did what you had to, and frankly, it sounds as if Rikki-boy needed killin' anyway. But—" She shrugged. "But maybe it shouldn't get too easy, you know?"
"You've killed people," Cassie said tautly.
She expected to get back the usual 'Mech-jock line about fighting the man but killing the machine—how injury or loss of life was an unpleasant by-product, just collateral damage. But Kali nodded and said, "I have. And reckon I'm going to again. All I'm sayin' is, I don't know as it should ever be easy."
"What I'm doing, I do for the Regiment."
"Yep. And you do real well by us, and everybody with three functioning brain cells or better appreciates it. Shoot, even Cowboy does, and I'm none too sure he's got three still firin'. But maybe you might think about what you're doing for yourself once in a while."
Cassie shook her head. "I don't know what you mean."
Lady K's smile was sad. "No. Reckon you don't."
She stood, stretched, picked up her gym bag. "Well, we rotate out to the Sportsplex in the morning, give Second their turn in the barrel. Gotta get some sleep. Walk me back?"
Cassie nodded. She still felt wired and wary from what she took as MacDougall's inquisition. But Kali seemed willing to let it slide.
As they headed out, Archie the FCNS reporter strolled in with Father Doctor Bob, his friend and self-appointed liaison officer. Westin caught sight of the two women, his face brightening visibly behind his pencil-thin mustache.
"Ladies," he said. "How delightful—"
"Later, Archie," Kali said with a weary wave. "We're hitting the rack." Then she and Cassie hustled out even before his face finished falling.
"Thanks for getting us out of there," Cassie said as they walked down the short corridor to outside.
Kali shook her head. "I don't know why you work so hard at dodging Archie. He's a nice boy, not to mention terminally cute."
Cassie's response was more shudder than headshake. "He bothers me."
"Might not hurt you to loosen up and live a little, hon. Been a while since you had a gentleman friend, isn't it?"
"I'm not hurting," Cassie said briskly.
"Maybe not," Kali said. "But I sure don't mind looking at young Archie. Only he doesn't seem to know I exist."
Cassie made a noncommittal sound in her throat as they stepped out into the crisp autumn night. From across the broad Yamato came a crackle. Cassie paused, listened to the cadence, nodded.
"Firecracker strings," she said, walking toward the barracks. "Having another street festival in Sodegarami, not a riot. Yet."
"How can you tell the difference?" Kali asked.
"When you hear those automatic shotguns the candy-stripers carry," Cassie said, "that's when you figure it's a riot."
Kali grinned. "These Dracs sure know how to party," she said.
* * *
Cassie's room came first. She unlocked the door, started inside.
"Hold on a sec," Kali said, bending down to rummage in her bag. "I got something for you."
Cassie stood there, wondering. Kali turned and stuffed something soft and fuzzy and pink into her arms.
"Surprise," the Captain said.
Cassie looked down to see that she was holding a toy animal shaped like a plump polar bear with a big, friendly smile. Cassie jumped, made as if to throw it away.
"Whoa, there, girl," Kali said. "Settle down. She won't bite you."
Cassie held the thing out. "What is this?"
Kali bent over and pretended to examine it. "It's a teddy be
ar," she said. "Less somebody sneaked a bomb into my bag when I wasn't looking."
"Take it back," Cassie said firmly.
Kali shook her head. "Sorry. Can't. Against the rules. She's your teddy bear now. Deal with her."
Cassie opened her mouth, shut it. She felt as if her limbs and body had become hollow tubing and that cold condensation was seeping down inside her.
"You don't have to thank me," Kali said. "Just keep the bear." She leaned forward, gave Cassie a sisterly kiss on the cheek, and shooed her into her room.
* * *
The needle tip of Blood-drinker hovered a millimeter from the stuffed bear's button right eye. Cassie sat on the end of her bed, holding the thing in her lap. The hand that held her kris quivered with an emotion she couldn't begin to name.
She wanted to plunge her dagger into the thing, rip it apart and strew its innards around the room. Instead she pitched it away with a convulsive heave.
"All right," she said. "All right. I'll keep it. Kali will be mad at me if I tear it up."
She went over and picked the bear up from where it had fallen next to the little dresser, hearing a voice in her head say, What do you care what she thinks?
"I don't know," Cassie said, sitting down again. She tapped the dagger against her thigh. The bear continued to beam fatuously at her.
Maybe if I just poke it some ...
A knock at the door. She jumped, instantly twitching the stuffed toy behind her rump. The thought that somebody might peek in and catch her holding the thing horrified her—irrationally, since the door was locked, and not even Bobby the Wolf was crazy enough to bust down Cassie's door in the middle of the night.
"Who is it?" she called, surprised and appalled by the quaver in her voice.
"If you call her Snuggles," came Kali MacDougall's voice through the door, "I bet she'd answer. 'Night."
"Ooh!" The squeal of outrage burst out of Cassie as if she'd been punched in the gut. She wheeled and threw the toy bear against the wall, but it merely bounced back to land on the pillow, where it lay smiling with uninterrupted love and acceptance.
Cassie threw herself facedown on the bed and, entirely to her surprise, dissolved in hot and helpless tears.
17
Masamori, Hachiman
Galedon District, Draconis Combine
6 September 3056
From the north a company of 'Mechs advanced along the Yamato as if bent on invading Masamori. Backs to the city skyline, a second company stood waiting to receive them. Diagonal blue stripes had been painted on their arms and legs.
"A lovely day for an exercise," said Uncle Chandy, who filled to overflowing a folding chair set beneath a pavilion erected in the shade of cottonwoods by the river. He was sipping an exotic rum drink served in half of a head-sized Vindhaya nut from the southern continent of Deolali. A tiny orange parasol peeped up from the frothy mix.
The sky was hurting-bright blue and cloudless, the sun hot enough to sting unprotected skin. The river smell rose thick and cool around them, and every now and again a breeze from the lordly, distance-blued Trimurti Mountains in the east took the edge off the morning heat, reminding the clumps of spectators strung along the riverbank that, no matter how warm and bright the day, fall was definitely bearing down on the Shakudo coast.
Seated on the Kurita's right, Colonel Carlos Camacho nodded gravely but did not speak. "You're absolutely right about that, Excellency," Gordon Baird said, leaning over the Colonel's shoulder. He was always ready to get a word in with the highly placed. "It's a lovely day."
The magnate ignored him. "I am not unappreciative of a pretext for an excursion out-of-doors on such a day, Colonel," he said. "Yet I am curious as to why you were so insistent that I come to watch what I gather is an entirely routine drill."
Camacho looked at him. "I wish the senor to see just what it is he's paying for," he said.
* * *
The young samurai with the purple topknot poked at his white polymer plate with a disposable fork and eyed the contents with suspicion. "What is this?" he asked, indicating a thick, finger-length cylinder wrapped in a corn husk and covered with brownish sauce.
"Dead rats and ground sewage," Gandaka said, unwrapping his tamale and taking a lusty bite. "Good, too."
The samurai shuddered fastidiously.
"What do you care?" asked Moon. "It smells edible enough. You'd have eaten worse if you'd been with us when we fought the Clans."
"Of if you'd been born in the same place we were," Gandaka said. He was a long, lanky type with a prominent Adam's apple and sideburns down to his jaw. His name literally meant "tall wild goose," and figuratively referred to what he proudly considered his most prominent physical trait.
The youth colored clear to his hairline, which had been shaved up to the crown in traditional fashion. These eta scum dared take him to task for his own exalted birth. And there wasn't one damned thing he could do about it.
"What about him?" he asked to cover his own discomfiture, pointing at Buntaro Mayne with the butt of his fork. The one-eyed Mech Warrior stood away from the serving tables with his hands in his pockets, watching Cochise Company advance to the attack. Out front of him children and dogs ran about, chasing and playing, oblivious of the impending clash of titans.
"I'm waiting for the goat to be done," he said, jerking his head toward where several burly Aztechs, stripped to the waist, were turning a goat carcass on a spit above a pit full of coals.
Eleanor Shimazu was a woman of marked appetites. She was sated for the moment, though, her subordinates having insisted that she eat first. Perhaps it was because she never claimed such prerogatives that her outlaw boys and girls always pressed them on her.
Now she stood watching a few of her female Mech Warriors shyly talking to mercenary women with babies in arms.
Several of them were MechWarrior themselves; the Seventeenth Recon struck the Tai-sa as a combination extended family, circus, and gypsy caravan.
That made the way her people and these outside-folk were beginning to take to one another seem entirely natural. Heruzu Enjeruzu were a lot like that, too.
"Which side are you rooting for?" Shig Hofstra asked No-Name the samurai. Meat and shredded cheese and lettuce cascaded down his chin from a taco as he tried to calculate the proper angle of attack to fit it into his mouth.
"White," the young samurai said primly. "Most of the people around us have white pennants."
Everybody glared at him. "What a ween," Gandaka sneered, picking up the stub of his tamale with his fingers and cramming it in his mouth.
"I'm rooting for Blue," Buntaro Mayne announced, nodding toward the defenders, who were beginning to deploy a light lance forward along the river, perilously close to the picnickers, who variously cheered or jeered and threw disposable cups, depending on affiliation. Inland a short lance of three medium 'Mechs advanced, on the right flank of the mixed heavy/assault lance waiting in reserve. "That's Adelante Company. Cowboy's in Adelante, and I'm the only one who gets to kick his butt."
"That's not what I heard," the large, shaven-headed man in the 05P robes rumbled. His callsign was Yamabushi, from the somewhat suspect suborder of warrior-monks to which he belonged. "I heard that little bitty scout girl with the bicycle busted his nose for him. More than you did."
"Where is she anyway?" Gandaka asked, wiping his fingers on his jacket and looking around.
"She's not your type, Gandaka," Lainie drawled.
"Why?" Gandaka demanded. "What's she like then? Girls?"
"Humans."
The Ghosts roared with laughter. The Caballeros nearby looked at them and grinned, none quite close enough to share in the joke. Gandaka bobbed his head and laughed with the best of them.
Lainie sipped Borstal Boy from a throwaway cup. Sunshine and satiety were working on her. Her mind was else- where, drifting backward on currents of nostalgia. She hated nostalgia.
* * *
Lainie Shimazu had spent much of her childhood and yout
h as center of attention in sporting events, which was how the 'Hero onlookers seemed to be taking this whole thing. Devoted to riding, an all-Combine class equestrienne, she possessed a facility for athletics in general and had competed successfully in various sports.
For most of her childhood she did not understand that what her father did for a living had anything unorthodox about it. He was filthy rich, to be sure, and surrounded himself and his family with husky young men with guns. But if you were rich in the Combine, that was simply what you did.
When she was about twelve, Lainie found out that her father was not just a remote yet indulgent old man who happened to be loaded, but the top oyabun on Kagoshima. She was a yakuza princess for true. Before that time she'd been inclined to be a bit of a tomboy, but was basically a good and dutiful daughter. The sense of betrayal the discovery evoked in her had given vent to a hitherto latent rebellious impulse.
Her rebellion had manifested itself mainly in getting herself expelled from several private academies, which Milos Shimazu found doubly irritating. Not only did he lose face, but he forfeited the bribe money he'd had to fork over to get the schools to accept her in the first place. Lainie was what was called an underachiever, which was to say her classes bored her; but that wasn't the real problem. The real problem was that she was a yakuza, and even though the yakuza had enjoyed a certain quasilegitimacy within the Combine even before Theodore made them his allies, they weren't considered fit for polite company.
Lainie was beginning to blossom from gangly and homely adolescence into striking young womanhood—and to consider options that would really have driven her father wild— when her world up and exploded. A coterie of five of Kagoshima's secondary oyabun decided their lifestyles would be improved if old Milos went the way of most of the planet's indigenous life-forms larger than a sparrow. Somebody—a trusted lieutenant would have been traditional, but Lainie never knew for sure—had let a squad of assassins into the family estate one pleasant autumn afternoon not much different from this one, and that had been it for Milos.
