by Victor Milán
His bookends were a different tale as well. Unlike Sumiyama's bodyguards they were compact, neither one as tall as the redhead, a man and a woman, faceless in head-to-toe black and opaque transpex faceplates. Each carried a compact Shimatsu-42 assault rifle. Each had a sword strapped across the back.
These were Death, too. Cassie had never seen those get-ups before in the flesh—only in intelligence digests and maybe a hundred action holodramas. That was Draconis Elite Strike Team drag, there. The suits were ballistic-armor cloth, sealed against chemical and biological agents. They carried a wide array of sensors, including infrared, and like BattleMechs had a view strip at the top of the inside of the faceplate, which condensed a three-sixty field of vision. Members of the Dragon's special forces were hard to sneak up on.
But DEST members didn't need the suits to make that claim. They were masters of martial arts, stealth, and every weapon system known to man. They were trained to the raw edge of psychosis, and ready to die right now if the Dragon demanded. Or should he feel even a passing whim.
Unless they were fakes—no. Cassie could feel the redheaded man from here, burning from the floor like a star of menace. If he willed it, he could down both of Sumiyama's men in the time it took them to blink, without his own guards have to so much as shift their weight. Such a man wouldn't even bother with guards who weren't fully qualified to wear DEST commando gear.
Cassie was reassessing her plans as she aimed her little 'corder through the crack between crates. Such a man would not bother with guards at all—visible ones, anyway—unless he wished to make an impression. He was wearing these two like a display handkerchief, but they were almost certain not to be the only ones on hand. The others were, presumably, doing what DEST operatives were supposed to do: not being seen.
And looking for her. Oh, they didn't know she was here— not yet, or they'd be crawling in her ears already. But they would be sweeping the warehouse with motion sensors and IR scanners and particle-sampling people-sniffers. Nor would they forget to look up. In fact, they were fairly sure to think of patroling the tops of the crate-stacks ...
Peering through the sight, she tracked the little 'corder left, from Sumiyama's group to the redheaded man, then back, just to make sure she had identifiable pictures of both. The little unit had a highly directional sound pickup on it. She couldn't monitor it; she wasn't going to run around enemy territory with a plug in her ear interfering with her hearing if she could help it. Cassie wasn't much of a lip reader, and Kazuo Sumiyama didn't have much in the way of lips, anyway, but she was morally certain she caught his mouth framing the syllables "Chandrasekhar Kurita."
Then she was gone. Back toward the side door whose lock she had picked, not the way she had come, but close. She was quiet, but mainly she was fast. No art at her disposal could hide her long from the faceless men and women in black.
Twice she glimpsed black suits. Once down below her, ghosting along with assault rifle ready, once twenty meters away, spidering over the stacked crates. Both times she ducked away from the line of sight as quickly as she could.
The DEST faceplates provided a full circle of vision, but the images weren't very clear. Cassie had seen mockups of such miniature displays; it took a fair amount of training to make visual sense of what they showed you. They were wonderful for preventing anyone from slipping up and shanking you from the rear, but they were rather less motion-sensitive than the unaugmented peripheral vision of a trained, alert person.
And while the DEST operatives were as close to superhuman as might be fond outside a Clan Wolf or Jade Falcon sibko, even Kerensky's tube-born bastards had human limitations. These commandos were far more alert and observant than normal folk—definitely including Sumiyama's club-footed patrols. But they weren't really expecting anyone to be spying on this little confab. So they didn't stretch their awareness that tiny extra fraction that might have alerted them to the flitting passage of the eyes of the Seventeenth Recon.
Cassie reached a point from which she could overlook the door through which she had entered. It was still closed, and there was no one nearby. She let out a relieved breath, and slipped noiselessly down to the cement. I'm out of here ...
Not yet, apparently, for a DEST operative chose just that moment to stroll around the corner toward her.
In a millisecond Cassie evaluated her options. The frightened little girl within her screamed to turn and flee into the inviting maze of the warehouse, away from the bad man in black. But that was death. Once alerted, it would take the rest of the DEST team no longer to find her than it would take all the wine to spill from an upset bottle, and there was nothing even the finest scout in the Inner Sphere could do about the fact.
But when the frightened child inside screamed, Cassie's reflex was to snap into kill mode. She was sprinting toward the black-clad agent even before she was aware of what she was doing.
The black suit would stop a slug from her pistol even if she'd had time to draw it Ballistic cloth was notably less effective against bladed weapons than bullets, however, and she might be able to jam Blood-drinker through to flesh. But she didn't have a lot of time to poke around looking for weak points. She would have to do this bare-handed.
Two meters from the DEST man, Cassie left the floor in a flying leopard leap over the Shimatsu's rising barrel. This was modi-style pentjak silat, most difficult and demanding of arts. Only a perfect acrobat with drawn carbon for nerves could make the technique work.
Cassie was that. And motivated too.
Her leap was enough to actually clear the man's left shoulder. As she passed over, she seized his head in both hands. Slight as her body weight was, her momentum was more than enough to whip the head far back on the neck.
She twisted her body as it arced toward the floor, put a knee into the small of the man's back, and heaved.
The man's neck broke with a sound like a pistol shot.
Cassie landed on her feet, skidded, fetched against the ramparts of crates. She reached up and grabbed a protruding edge, pulling with all the might adrenaline lent her fine-tuned muscles. Crates tumbled with a crash, falling across the motionless figure in black.
She was out the door before the last crate came to rest. The night was her friend, folding her into its arms.
* * *
The midnight streets of the Floating World were thronged with pleasure seekers, a river of souls between neon-lit banks. The passing Masakko and the odd offworlder turned to stare unabashed at the four women who stood on the sidewalk peering at an unusually discreet neon sign beside a flight of steps headed down. Especially the tall blonde in the tight-fitting trousers.
"What's "Torashii Gyaru' mean?" demanded Janine Esposito. Her callsign was Mariposa. Her 'Mech, Iron Butterfly, was the Valkyrie Cowboy's Wasp had attacked after Macho got called for unnecessary roughness. By now, though, the bruises and disappointment of the afternoon's exercise were equally forgotten. Tomorrow after Mass she would be marrying Lonny Ortega, a Stalker pilot from Infante Company. She was determined to celebrate her final night of freedom to the max.
"Trashy Girls," Lady K supplied.
"How'd you know that?"
"Abtakha's been giving me pointers in Japanese."
"She's spooky. Where is she, anyway?"
"Working," said Raven O'Connor. She was a wiry, acerbic blonde married to John Amos "French Fry" Ames, who like her, was an Adelante Mech Warrior. He took his nickname from what he used to stick up his nose at parties, back in his wild bachelor days when he ran with the usual suspects: Buck, Reb, and the archetypal Cowboy, Cowboy. His Phoenix Hawk had been "killed" by Navajo Wolf that afternoon, and he had gotten pretty banged up himself in the process. He was in no position to begrudge his lady her night on the town.
"Doing those weird exercises of hers," said Mercedes "Misty" Saavedra, a giggly, round little MechWarrior from Bronco who was Janine's best friend and maid of honor-to-be.
"Dancing in there, for all I know," Kali said.
"O
oh, look," Misty said, peering at a sign on the dark door at the end of the half-flight of stairs. "It's ladies night. They've got male dancers too!"
"Let's go in!" Janine declared. "It's my party, and I'm ready to howl."
"Lonnie's probably in there himself, with Macho and the boys," Misty said. "Don't you know it's bad luck for you to see him the night before your wedding?"
"Oh, who cares? C'mon, let's go."
"Y'all go ahead, girls," Lady K said. "I'll amble on."
"What's the matter?" Janine demanded. "Chicken?" She'd already gotten a bit of a load on.
Smiling, Kali shook her head. "No. Just not in the mood to have some total stranger dangling his participle in my virgin Mai Tai."
Raven laughed. "You oughta come in with us, Cap'n," she said. "They'd probably recruit you. They love leggy blondes in these parts; you could pick up some easy C-bills."
"Sierra Foxtrot, baby doll, what're you trying to do to me?" MacDougall laughed. "If Cabrera ever found out I was shucking my skivvies in a Floating World dive, she'd skin me out for a lampshade for true."
"Aw, you're not afraid of la Dama Muerte," Misty exclaimed.
"You betcha I am. Anybody sane's afraid of that witch."
"HDLC," Janine sneered. "She's barely even a MechWarrior."
"Satan don't ride at all," Lady K said. "You reckon his breath won't melt your refrigerated 'Mech-jock panties to your butt?"
"I'd like to go in."
Everybody shut up and stared at Diana Vásquez. The Catapult pilot was so quiet people often tended to forget she was there.
"I've never been in a place like this before," she said shyly. "I'd like to see what goes on."
Diana was so retiring as to be often overlooked, but a case could have been made that she was the most beautiful woman in the Regiment. Like Kali, she had an engineering degree, but her manner had an incredibly childlike, innocent purity. As the joke in the Regiment ran, she had a two-year old son, so she probably wasn't a virgin—but no one was making bets.
"Will you join me, Captain?"
Kali sighed. "Sure, Di."
"You gonna drink with us for real?" Janine suddenly demanded.
"Say what, Mariposa?" Kali answered evenly.
"You gonna have a real drink, or are you just gonna keep sucking down that fruit juice?"
"Janine," Raven said in a warning voice.
"Sokay, Rave," Lady K said. "You do what you like, Janine. I got no problem with that. But I walk my own path."
"Think you're too good to drink with me, bolilla?"
"Shut the foxtrot up, Janine," Raven said, pushing in between them. Janine started to cock a fist.
Then Diana was standing next to her, smiling sweetly. She laid a hand on Janine's drawn-back arm, and suddenly the tension just flowed out of the scene.
The artillerywoman looked a question at Lady K. "Don't worry about my anonymity, Di," Kali said. "I don't mind people knowing I'm drying out. I just don't go advertisin'."
Janine's truculent manner dropped right in the gutter at her feet. "Hijo la," she moaned. "I'm sorry, Cap'n."
Lady K gave her a dazzling grin. "Never happened, Butterfly. Let's go ahead on in."
Part Four
Razor Games
19
Masamori, Hachiman
Galedon District, Draconis Combine
7 September 3056
Mirza Peter Abdulsattah appeared entirely awake, entirely collected, and entirely unsurprised at having been— presumably—roused from sleep in the belly of the night. He arranged his brown and black striped robes around his gaunt body and settled in behind his desk. "Yes?" he said.
Cassie waited a few heartbeats, still braced. Dignitaries in the Combine were not notorious for their forbearance toward underlings. Neither was brass anywhere else, in Cassie's experience. But the expected blustering about what would happen if she had disturbed him without damned good reason never materialized.
She nodded briskly to herself. Need to focus. The night's events had shaken her in a way she did not truly understand.
"There was a meeting in Sodegarami tonight, in a warehouse down on the waterfront," she said. Still dressed in her anonymous spacer's outfit, Cassie pulled the palmcorder from an inner pocket of the jacket, popped out the disk, slid it across the desk toward him. "Guy I'm pretty sure was Kazuo Sumiyama played host. I was an uninvited guest. The guest of honor was somebody I didn't make, but I figure he has to be big."
Abdulsattah cocked an eyebrow at her. "And how big is 'big,' Lieutenant?"
"If his guards weren't DEST, then some holo-production company's missing a bunch of costumes."
Abdulsattah picked up the disk in forceps fingers. "Holo producers do not make movies about DEST in the Draconis Combine," he said. He fed the disk into a slot on the desk, manipulated a keypad inset in the wood.
The lights dimmed further. Images sprang up where the desert scene had been. Abdulsattah nodded. "Sumiyama, indeed. And the other—"
The scene panned back to the redheaded man. Cassie, who knew what was on the disk, was watching the Mirza. Even in the darkness she could see that he paled.
On the sound-track, the slash-mouthed man's words were clearly audible: "—sekhar Kurita shall get what he has had com—"
Abdulsattah ran the brief sequence through three times, then froze the redheaded man upon the wall and turned up the lights.
"Tell me everything that happened," he said. "Everything you did, everything you saw. Even everything you guessed." He did not raise his voice, but the tension in it was unmistakable.
Cassie obeyed. After a momentary hesitation, she described the killing of the DEST operative and her improvised attempt to make it look like an accident.
"You killed a DEST agent bare-handed?' the Mirza asked incredulously.
"I had surprise," she said. "Also motivation."
Abdulsattah shook his long narrow head and muttered something Cassie could not understand. He popped out the datadisk, picked it up, and rose.
"Follow me," he said, leading her through a door in the rear of his office. There was a little chamber there, paneled in dark lustrous wood, with a framed scroll covered with an intricate interlocked design in black ink. A door in the paneling slid aside, and Abdulsattah led Cassie into a small elevator.
The car descended into the depths of the Citadel. The Mirza stood as if in his own world, humming tunelessly to himself, tapping the toes of his right foot on the sole of his sandal. Cassie tried not to look at him, but inside she was fascinated. The humming, the toe-tapping, were all but imperceptible—yet for a man who wasted so little motion, they amounted almost to a nervous tic.
At a level Cassie suspected was well below ground the car stopped. The door slid open, revealing a chamber about ten meters square. The walls were most obscured by lush hangings and expensively elegant screens. In the center of the floor was a conversation pit almost filled with silk cushions. Amid them sprawled Chandrasekhar Kurita, a vast baby doll in a scarlet robe.
Though Cassie had seen Abdulsattah do nothing to signal their approach, Uncle Chandy seemed unsurprised to see them. If he had been interrupted or awakened, he gave no more sign than had his security chief.
"Lord Kurita," Abdulsattah said, "this young woman brings us most unsettling news."
Uncle Chandy nodded his shaven head. "Thank you, Peter. I shall hear her story." He gestured toward the cushions with a broad hand. "Come, child. Sit. Make yourself at home."
Cassie hesitated, eyeing her employer narrowly. My job description sure as hell doesn't include rolling around with a wad of greasy blubber, she thought. Still, she doubted a Kurita would take kindly to being refused. There was no point in causing a war over what was on the face of it a courtesy; plenty of time to fight when and if Uncle Chandy demanded something unacceptable. She sat, keeping studiously out of the fat man's reach.
Abdulsattah crossed to a small antique table, slipped the datadisk into the mouth of what seemed to be a small, fat
dragon carved from blue Proserpina jade. Then he bowed and withdrew into the elevator, which swallowed him without a sound.
Chandrasekhar Kurita sat studying Cassie for a moment. His eyes were small and black as buttons, almost lost in shiny rolls of fat. They were also hard and bright as obsidian.
"Speak, child," Uncle Chandy murmured. "Tell me your tale."
He listened raptly, without interruption. It seemed to Cassie that his eyes widened fractionally at the mention of the redheaded man.
"You are a young woman of formidable attributes," the Kurita said when she had finished, "not least of which is luck."
He clapped his hands, and said to the air, "Display the recording now."
What had appeared to be a Bokhara carpet from ancient Terra turned into a viewscreen displaying the warehouse scene. Uncle Chandy nodded when the red-haired man came into view.
"Freeze it," he said, and this was done. "The first man, as you surmise, is my old friend Kazuo Sumiyama. Do you know who this other is, young lady?"
"No. Only that he must be important."
"Important, indeed. And more than important. He is deadly."
I figured that too, Cassie thought, but bit her tongue. Chandrasekhar Kurita almost managed to intimidate her, which made it all the harder to restrain her wiseass impulses. Fortunately, the preservation instinct was running strong in her, awakened by the warehouse encounter.
"His name is Ninyu Kerai Indrahar," Chandy said. "He is the adoptive son and heir-designate of Subhash Indrahar, the Smiling One."
Cassie caught her breath. She was far from easily impressed. But the realization that she'd been within spitting range of the second most feared secret policeman in the Inner Sphere caused her limbs to quiver and a roaring sound to momentarily fill her head.
