Close quarters

by Victor Milán

He nodded briskly. "Very well; it's my turn not to apologize. I could say that I was set up by our mutual friend Lord Kerai-Indrahar. But the fact is I welcomed a chance to take action against your employer. You've heard my reasons."

  When Cassie didn't reply, he said, "I suppose you'll try to tell me, now, how mistaken I am about Chandrasekhar Kurita."

  She shook her head. "All I came here to tell you was that I was sorry for hurting you," she said. "We have different perceptions of Uncle Chandy, though. I give you that much."

  "You're an icy little bitch, aren't you?"

  She looked up briskly at that, but her eyes were their normal gray. "If you were my friend," she said quietly, "would you see me the same way?"

  He rubbed his cheek. "No," he said musingly. "No, I don't suppose I would. I rather think I'd feel the world was an altogether safer place if you were on my side."

  They were on the crushed-shell path that led up past the stables to the big house. "I have to go," she said.

  "Wait."

  She stopped, turned.

  "Is this your real appearance, Ms. Suthorn?"

  She spread her arms and grinned. "As real as I get."

  "I think you look lovelier this way than before."

  She frowned, slightly, reflexively wondering what he wanted from her. Then she recalled long talks with Lady K in the gloomy aftermath of battle.

  "Thank you," she said.

  He held out his hand. She didn't move.

  "Come on," he said, "give me your hand. My touch didn't poison you before, did it?"

  "No," she said, and took his hand.

  "I'm probably as big a fool as Ninyu Kerai and the late Marquis Hosoya and all the others took me for," he said, "but what I said earlier is perfectly true. I would feel safer if I could call you my friend. And I must confess, safety is not my only concern. You are by a respectable margin the most remarkable woman I've ever been privileged to meet. You possess—despite your deadly and deceitful ways—a substantial amount of charm. I think I should enjoy getting to know you better."

  Cassie leaned toward him enough to raise his hand to her lips and brush the back of it very lightly with her lips. Then she let it go.

  "Perhaps," she said, and walked away.

  At the top of the path she turned back. "The people who think you're a fool think the same of Uncle Chandy," she said slowly. "But they're the real fools. Think about that, Percy Fillington."

  And then she was gone.

  * * *

  Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu leaned back in the leathercovered chair and put her boots on the broad desk before her, next to an insulated canister half a meter tall and only slightly less wide. I could get used to this, she decided, suddenly glad the penthouse office hadn't taken more battle damage.,

  She was a hero after all, as were her surviving Ghosts. So were the Caballeros. The media were still buzzing with it, how saboteurs from some unspecified power—read the Federated Commonwealth—had attempted to assassinate the Coordinator's beloved cousin in stolen BattleMechs. Only heroic joint action of the Combine's glorious Ninth Ghost Regiment and the foreign but almost equally glorious Seventeenth Recon had saved the day.

  It was a remarkably thin story. A critical press and public would have torn it gleefully to shreds. But the Draconis Combine didn't have a critical press and public. The media swore the story was true; the public obediently believed.

  The power of the press was something that might bear study, in light of her new responsibilities.

  Sadly, Kazuo Sumiyama had been discovered to be party to the heinous plot against Uncle Chandy. Since he wasn't so obliging as to climb into an airplane and dash himself to pieces in the Trimurti foothills, it became the sad duty of the Ninth Ghosts to call him to account for his crimes.

  Lainie had never seen sad soldiers grin so hugely as her Ghosts had when she led them against Sumiyama's skyscraper. They hadn't even seemed to feel the fatigue of the terrible battle the day before.

  The telephone chimed, and the image of Miss Rajit, former receptionist to Sumiyama, appeared above the desktop.

  "The oyabun of Kuranosuke and Hawthorne just called, Colonel," she said. "They wish to know when to come to pay their respects."

  That was expected. Most of the planet's other yakuza bosses had already checked in. The oyabun of Masamori was oyabun of Hachiman. That was one of Sumiyama's institution she intended to keep.

  "They can come to the meeting on Thursday, like everybody else."

  Miss Rajit moistened her lips. "I beg your pardon, Colonel, but they also wonder to whom they are to pay their respects. They are not . . . accustomed to bowing to a woman."

  Lainie grinned. "Tell them that if they have any trouble with the idea of submitting to me," she said, "that they can take it up with the head on Thursday."

  Miss Rajit frowned in discreet incomprehension. "I beg your pardon, Colonel?"

  "Just tell them exactly what I told you. They'll figure it out."

  The receptionist's image vanished. Lainie scratched her ribs, where the tape that held her bandages itched her. In the heat of battle she hadn't even noticed the splinter of ferro-fibrous plate hitting her.

  She had done a little research on the former oyabun receptionist, as part of her general stock-taking. Rather to her surprise, she'd discovered that Miss Rajit was more than just an ornament; she was sharp, tough, and quick. As soon as feasible, Lainie planned to shift her into a role in which Sumiyama-kai—she had to do something about that name!— could take full advantage of her abilities. That would also permit Lainie to get some blond muscular hunk with a good ass and a small brain to answer the phones for her.

  She held up her left hand. The pink line around the base of her little finger where the neurosurgeons had grafted it back in place itched as abominably as the tape on her ribs. But she thought that a small price to pay for being whole again.

  In more than just body.

  It was a pity, she thought sardonically, that Kazuo Sumiyama would find it harder to get his missing body parts rejoined. For example, his head, which at the moment was packed in dry ice in the insulated canister sitting next to her boot.

  She laughed. When she told Miss Rajit that the lesser oyabun could take up any problems they had with her succession with the head ... that was exactly what she'd had in mind.

  * * *

  Cassie Suthorn stood amid the fleshy leaves and extravagant blooms of Uncle Chandy's greenhouse and said, "I want the truth."

  He continued to putter with his orchids. "In the Draconis Combine inferiors do not make demands of superiors," he told her.

  She stood and looked at him. After a time he began to laugh. "You should take up Zen, child; you have a knack for it."

  He set aside his trowel and scrubbed fat fingers on his apron. "Come, then. You have performed a great service to me. Enough to merit the greatest of rewards: the truth."

  * * *

  Their garb was unfamiliar, but something about the figures that seemed to sit on the holostage in Uncle Chandy's inner sanctum prickled the skin at the nape of Cassie's neck.

  "Clanners," she said.

  "Oh, yes. Jade Falcon, this lot."

  "I don't recognize their caste marks."

  "They're merchants. I see you're surprised; almost no one in the Inner Sphere has ever seen anyone from the Clan's merchant caste. Kerensky's children didn't come back to trade, after all."

  She looked at the figures again. They were much as the nameless spacer had described them.

  "Where are they?" she asked in a flat voice.

  "Upstairs, in a pleasant corner apartment on the top floor. An appropriate place to keep Falcons, don't you think, in the penthouse? They had quite a view of your glorious battle with the Ghosts. They refused to go below to the shelters; they're almost as bellicose as the Warriors are."

  Cassie looked at him. "So you're the—" She broke off, unable to voice the word.

  "Traitor?" Chandy supplied.

  She shuddered. It w
as not self-preservation that kept her from actually saying the word. It went much deeper than that.

  He shook his head. "I'm not," he said. "A traitor, that is. But there was no convincing old Subhash and that chained-leopard heir of his of that, as you can well imagine. So it became necessary to frame the hapless Marquis Hosoya. Who, I might add, richly deserved it."

  She spun away, squeezed her eyes tight shut, walked blindly forward a few paces, not caring if she blundered into a wall.

  "Cassie." The vast man's voice was quiet, and more sober than she'd ever heard it. Even when the Compound was about to be besieged, it had held its note of avuncular banter.

  "Don't tell me you didn't know, child."

  She spun, glaring. He laughed, raised a hand. "Spare me the righteous indignation. You knew what was going on by the time you got back from your first jaunt to Stormhaven."

  "How the hell can you say that?"

  "Quite easily. You asked me to 'keep Percy out of it.' Or words to that effect."

  She held her arms down stiffly by her sides and said a great deal of nothing.

  "That was a most curious turn of phrase," Uncle Chandy continued, "if you truly believed what you had done was plant a bug in order to get evidence of Marquis Hosoya committing a crime. If you suspected, however, that what your little device was actually doing was gathering images of the Marquis and his surroundings, into which appropriately skilled computer technicians could splice images of our Sumiyama and our Clan visitors, your request becomes entirely comprehensible."

  Cassie sat down among the plush cushions. "And when your bug produced such instant results," he said, "surely that must have settled any doubts you had that the whole affair was a set-up."

  He lumbered to the holostage, smiled fondly down at the Clanners, as if they were well-loved dolls. "They're really marvelous technicians, by the way. Lyran nationalists, who seem to have found it prudent to relocate in the wake of the little tiff between the Archon Prince and his sister."

  She looked up at him sharply. "Don't fret yourself, daughter; they're not dead. They're on their way to the Periphery with enough money to live like kings, or at least minor dukelings. I murder, child, but like you I try to do so judiciously."

  Her nostrils flared. She didn't say anything for a moment. When she trusted herself enough to speak, she said, "What makes you think Ninyu will let you get away with this?"

  He laughed, his usual uproarious laugh of cosmic Buddha mirth. "Dearest child, he has already let us get away with it! He and his adoptive father are now our most valuable accomplices."

  She stared at him.

  "I'm not mad, child," he said. "Or at least, I'm not delusional at this particular moment. Recall what we discussed before: the woeful state of forensic science in the Draconis Combine. Even the Smiling One would be hard pressed to prove that the evidence we concocted to hang Hosoya is false.

  "Yet consider: having accepted it, old Subhash has no interest in proving it wrong. He has averted one possible scandal—that a Kurita might be treating with the greatest enemy the Combine has ever known—which might well have brought the whole elaborate structure of our empire crashing in ruins. And the ISF has officially anointed its villains in my place: Hosoya and Sumiyama. He wanted Percy, too, but I talked him out of it—as I directed my technicians to leave our good Earl out of our cooked imagery."

  Uncle Chandy spread his hand. "We have an ... accepting public, as the official explanations of the recent trifling disturbances show. But there's a limit to how much even Subhash's media wizard Katsuyama can make the people of the Combine accept. No one knows this better than the Smiling One. Should the official explanation be discredited, not only House Kurita but the ISF would be discredited as well. And Subhash Indrahar believes, righdy or wrongly, that the Dragon's Breath is the glue that holds the Combine together."

  The explanation made sense—in a twisted way, but one that Cassie could grasp. But it left the biggest question of all.

  "Why?"

  "Your Japanese is immaculate. What does 'Hachiman Taro' mean?"

  She blinked at him.

  "Indulge an old man's folly," he said. "Answer me."

  " 'The first-born son of the God of War,' " she translated in a dull voice.

  "A name often associated with the ancient Japanese hero Yoshitsune, who was kind enough to bequeath his name to the largest of our moons. A name even our staunch traditionalists, like our late Marquis and oyabun, would have to approve for a Hachiman-based corporation. While never guessing its real significance."

  He gazed down at the Clanners. The woman was reading, the man performing some kind of calisthenics. "The risk they run by being here is as great as mine in hosting them," he said softly. "The Jade Falcons are the most conservative of Clans. Most particularly they fear such contact as this. And most of all, they fear the cargo I shall send back with these fine specimens."

  "What's that?"

  "Holographic projectors," he said, turning from the display. "Video games. Washing machines. Toasters. Holophones.

  Holophone answering machines. Consumer electronics. Labor-saving devices. Toys."

  "They're afraid of toys?" she asked. She was beginning to wonder what kind of joke her employer was pulling on her. She refused to believe he was as crazy as he sounded.

  "Absolutely. And do you know what? They're right."

  He gestured at the Clanners again. "My fine merchant friends will go back with a hold crammed full of all the decadent comforts and conveniences that mad, bad old General Kerensky wanted to shield them from. They are not the first. Thanks to the efforts of you and your friends, they won't be the last."

  He smiled like a happy moon. "We won't be strong enough to beat them when the truce expires. But if I can ship them enough goodies, by that time they may well have beaten themselves. The war god's first-born has found a way to gain by other means what the ways of war cannot, you see."

  "But if that's true," she said, "why would they go along with you?"

  "Because they have no idea what I am really doing. They don't understand the power of plenty. Who can blame them? Our own rulers have ignored it for centuries, despite the fact that they have never been able to crush the Steiners, who only in my lifetime have ever managed to field an army suitable for anything but playing the chorus in an ancient comic opera. The Lyran people have always fought like badgers to avoid coming under the benign protection of the Dragon. And why should they not? They had comfort and plenty. All we could offer them was hardship."

  "But what about the risks involved?" Cassie asked. "You said yourself they were in danger."

  "Oh, yes. The Warriors who dominate their Clan would kill them and anyone even remotely related if they so much as caught wind of this."

  "They're risking that?"

  "Oh yes, because what they do see is the enormous profit potential in the cargoes I'm selling them. And Clan merchants are every bit as obsessively goal-oriented as their Mech Warriors and Elementals."

  She sat and looked at her hands, which had gotten pretty banged up in the go-round with Ninyu's cohorts. Maybe she'd better get some cream on them before they turned into claws.

  "They suspected me of conspiring against Theodore," the huge man said, as if to himself. "But I am his most devoted servant."

  She wasn't listening. Not to him, at least. Cassie was listening to herself.

  Well, he used you, and he used the Regiment, and he took you in six ways from Sunday, a voice said in her head. It was not the hateful voice that had pursued her all her life to tell her she was dirty and wicked and wrong; didn't sound a bit like that.

  So what? You got paid. So did the Caballeros. And as for tricking you—that's the root of it, isn't it?

  You're angry because he scammed you.

  Cassie shook her head and sighed. Then she laughed.

  Chandy's great head was sunk into his chins and reverie. He raised it as she stood.

  "Child," he said, "I'm aware I've deceived you. But
I've also done nothing to hurt you. And you have, in fact, come to mean something to me, with your impertinence and your keen rapacious mind. As you know, your Colonel is entertaining an offer to extend the Regiment's contract with me. I would like to ask, whether or not he accepts, that you stay with me."

  And suddenly there was something awkward and vulnerable about him, and she realized that he was being honest with her. Not for the first time—she had to grant him that.

  "I'll think about it," she said, and left.

  * * *

  "That's it? You told what might be the most powerful man in the whole Inner Sphere you'd think about it?" Kali MacDougall's voice throbbed with wonder as they walked across the Compound. The wind off the Yamato was honed like a DEST sword.

  "Yes."

  Lady K laughed and hugged her. "Good for you."

  She had not asked for details of Cassie's meeting with the big man, and her friend hadn't volunteered them. They were a burden Cassie would bear alone, for the time.

  "So what now?" Kali asked.

  Cassie looked at her sidelong, almost shyly. "You think you might like to get away for a few days, just go camping or something before the snow really clamps down? Just go off and talk?"

  "Is the bear a Catholic? Are they lighting candles and praying to poor batty Terry de Avila Chavez back in the Trinity? Sierra Foxtrot, Cassie, I was figuring if I had to stay cooped up in here with all the ghosts, the Virgin would start appearing to me. And I'm not even Catholic."

  Cassie bit her lower lip. "What about, ah, Archie?" she said, marveling at her own hesitation. "Won't he object if you light out for a few days?"

  "Hey," Kali said, "Archie's a lot of fun, no doubt about that. And if he's more than that, he won't object to my taking some time for myself. And if he does—" She shrugged. "Forget him."

  She put her arm around the smaller woman and hugged her again. "Fun's fun, Cassie," she said, "but friends are what last."

  Cassie nodded. "Yes," she said. "Only friends last."