by Greg Keyes
She returned to a position of attention, feet apart, fists down in front of her.
Sensei walked over to her, frowning. He was a short man, not much taller than her.
“You knocked the wind out of him,” Sensei said.
“Yes, Sensei.”
“I asked you to spar with control. You could have made your point by hitting him half as hard.”
“Sensei, I did hit him half as hard as I could have.”
“Don’t be insubordinate,” he snapped back. “You know what I mean.”
“Sensei, if his roundhouse kick had connected, it would have knocked my teeth out.”
“So you think Pavel’s shortcomings excuse your own? You know better than that.”
She glanced over to where Pavel was finally managing to stand back up.
“I’m sorry, Pavel,” she said, although she didn’t mean it. She knew it was what Sensei wanted to hear. “It won’t happen again, Sensei.”
Pavel grimaced, but he put his feet together and bowed. She did the same.
“It’s okay,” Pavel said. “I was stupid. I let myself get mad.”
Sensei didn’t seem as forgiving.
“Clean up,” he said. “Get dressed. Then I want to see you in my office.”
* * *
The dojo was a tiny place. It had once been a shop of some sort, and Sensei had done very little to give the place atmosphere. It was, as he liked to say, purely practical. If you want a koi pond and water running through bamboo, he’d once told her, go to the botanical gardens.
His office wasn’t much different, but it had a little more personality. On the wall behind his desk hung an old photograph of himself as a much younger man, with his own sensei. A glass jar on the corner of his desk held a collection of pebbles, and he had a picture of his wife and children on his desk, although she suspected that the children in the picture – two boys – were now much older than they appeared in the photograph. Sensei himself was about sixty, clean-shaven with short, bristling hair that according to the picture on the wall had once been reddish-blonde. His name was Alexander Kamaroff, but no one ever called him anything but “Sensei”.
By the time the door closed behind her, he was at his desk. She started toward the chair.
“Remain standing,” he said.
She stood.
“Your anger is doing you no good,” he said, “and it’s hurting my other students. If I ask you to hit someone full force, I expect you to do it. If I ask you to use control, I want them to think you stroked them with a feather, do you understand? In this place, it’s what I say that matters, not how you feel. I won’t say this again. Next time, you’re out.”
She took a breath. “Yes, Sensei, it’s only…”
“Tell me.”
“What if I’m in a real fight, and I don’t hit hard enough?”
“If you’re in a real fight, you’ll hit what you need to hit, how you need to hit it. That is what control is about. Why were you able to beat Pavel?”
“He was too eager, and came at me too fast. I backed up just a little faster to encourage him, and he overbalanced.” She dropped her head. “He was out of control, I guess.”
“Correct,” he said. He clasped his hands together in front of him on the desk.
“You’ve been coming here for what, two years?” he asked.
“Almost three, Sensei.”
“That long,” he mused. “You think you’ve learned all I have to teach you?”
“No, Sensei.”
He nodded. “Do you still work for Andrei?”
She hesitated.
“I thought so,” he said.
“We need money, Sensei,” she said. “My grandmother barely makes enough to get by. Working for Andrei, I’m able to pay you for lessons.”
“And what if I were to tell you I would teach you for free?” he said. “Would you still work for him?”
She considered that, but not for long.
“Yes, Sensei,” she said. “I was delayed almost two years getting into school, so I have tutors to pay, as well.”
“How old are you?” he asked.
“Eleven,” she said.
“And you’re still digging in the Kaiju?”
She held her chin up. “Yes. But I supervise four others, and I get a cut of what they make, too.”
“You know for every ruble he gives you, he is probably making a hundred from your labor.”
She shrugged. “That’s how it is.”
“If you keep doing it, you’re going to get sick,” Sensei said. “You know that those suits they give you are so worn out they’re hardly any protection at all.”
“With respect, Sensei,” she said. “You say that in here, in the dojo, it is what you say that matters. But what I do out there is my own business, yes?”
“It is,” he said. “I am advising you, not commanding you. But if you find a way to survive without Andrei, I will teach you for free.”
“I could still use the break,” she said.
“I know you could,” he replied. “But I won’t feed your habit, or help to feed Andrei,” he said. “You must understand that.”
“Thank you for your wisdom, Sensei,” she said.
By the time she was back on the street, the anger she’d kept bottled steamed fully to life. Who was this old man who thought he could judge her? If he wanted to teach her for free, fine, but putting conditions on it made him just like Andrei. Everyone had an idea about what she should be doing, and no one seemed to understand that it was none of their grobanyy business.
So she was in no mood to deal with Andrei, who today of all days was at the site, and yelled at her for being late.
“What do you care?” she told him. “As long as I meet my quota? I could be an hour late and still hit my mark.”
She knew as soon as she said it she’d made a mistake. She was just so angry.
“Is that true?” he said. “You’ve been robbing me, then. Your quota has just gone up.”
“You can’t do that, you cheat,” she snapped.
She saw the blow coming before it landed. She almost blocked it, but he was fast, and standing way too close. His open palm slammed into the side of her face. She staggered back, stunned.
“You want to use some of your karate?” he said. “You want to show me some of that useless crap?”
She put her hand to her face. It was hot, and she thought she would probably get a black eye.
But it doesn’t hurt, she told herself. Nothing I can’t handle.
“I thought not,” he sneered. “I don’t see why you bother.”
“It’s only a few hours a week,” she said.
“Yes, plus school,” he said. “As if school will ever be any use to you. Better you stick with me.”
“I still work for you, Andrei,” she said. “I’m not working for anyone else.”
“Oh, damned right, you’re not,” he said. “If you were, you would think what I just gave you was the paw of a kitten.”
He tensed up, and she thought for sure he was going to hit her again. But then he gestured with the back of his hand.
“Well go on, get going,” he said. “They’ve opened up whole new section in the spinal column. Take Mina and Lubomir for your crew.”
“What about Hyeon?” she asked. Hyeon was tiny – he could fit into places she and the older kids no longer could.
“I’m sending Hyeon with Lucie today,” he said. “Good luck making your new quota. You talk big, now act big.”
She did make it, of course, but just barely. And he kept more of her cut than usual. But there was nothing to be done about that.
She made up another story to tell Babulya, but her grandmother hardly gave her a second glance when she came in, any more than she seemed to notice the soup had a little beef in it. She was getting worse, Grandmother. There had been some incidents at work. Her supervisor, a kindly man named Cho, had brought her home the week before.
“I want to keep her on,” he’d told Vi
k. “But if she gets much worse, it could mean my job, too. Try and make her understand.”
As much as she wanted to forget them, Andrei’s words hung with her.
I don’t see why you bother.
Sometimes she didn’t either. Even with tutors, she was struggling with school, especially with math. Her brain didn’t seem built for it. Maybe more to the point, she didn’t like school. She didn’t have much in common with the other kids – they all seemed to think everything was some sort of game, a game in which you scored points by wearing the right shoes and knowing which piece-of-crap slang phrase was current, or whether you thought K-prog sucked more than Pinoy-ScreamScream.
The teachers were no fun either, but at least some of them knew something.
But the bigger thing was that maybe she had been wrong. It had been four years since anyone had seen a Kaiju. The PPDC was building Jaegers again, a whole shiny mess of them, but what were they using them for? Keeping civil order? Putting down warlords in some godforsaken place she’d never heard of? That was not what she wanted to do. That was not what her parents had done. They had grappled with monsters the size of mountains, and they had put down six of them before they finally died fighting. She had studied the requirements to get into the PPDC Ranger training program, and she had spent four years trying to get a jump on all of that. Why? She was getting old enough to understand how stacked the odds against her were. The promise a seven-year-old made to her future self couldn’t hold its weight against that. What had she known? Nothing. Now that she had a better – a more realistic – idea of how the world worked, maybe it was time to tell the seven-year-old where to stick it.
If she had been saving her money, she could put her grandmother someplace where she couldn’t hurt herself or anyone else. Maybe she could have even gotten them out of this hell-hole to someplace decent, with better jobs. As it was, it looked like everything she’d done was for nothing.
But she couldn’t think that way. She had to get into the PPDC. She had to get through this for just a few more years.
But this time, the gloom didn’t lift. And that night she had the dream again. Familiarity made it worse, not better. And this time, there was more; she stood with her grandfather, looking down at two gravestones. And her grandfather, who never cried, was crying. And then the voice in the Kaiju Dig, the woman’s face…
She woke up, as always. She looked at the clock and realized she had only been asleep for an hour. She turned on the light, clutching at her statue of Cherno Alpha. She looked at her old poster of them, on the wall.
Then she got up. She went into the tiny living room where Babulya was still awake.
“Who am I?” she demanded.
“What?” her grandmother said.
“Who am I?” This time she screamed it, and her grandmother’s eyes widened. Vik saw she was drinking again, but she didn’t care.
“Don’t you raise your voice to me,” the old woman said.
“Am I a Kaidanovsky?” she said. “Am I really?”
That stopped Babulya. She actually stumbled a step back as if the words had made a physical impact.
“Why would you ask that?” she whispered. “Who have you been talking to?”
“No one,” Vik said. “It just doesn’t make sense. It’s never made sense. Why have you been lying to me?”
She was crying now, as despair replaced her anger.
“Vik,” her grandmother said. “I want you to be great. Like your parents. To do something with your life. Your grandfather wanted the same. So we told you –”
“So you lied to me,” Vik said. “All of these years. How stupid do you think I am?”
“You’re not stupid,” her grandmother said. “You’re special. But you have to believe you’re special.”
“Shut up,” Vik said. “I hate you.”
“Vik, your father, your mother –”
“Stop it!” she screamed. “No more lies. No more.”
She stormed back into her room, tore the Cherno Alpha poster from the wall and threw her grandfather’s carving into the corner.
She realized she had known for a long time, but had refused to face it. She wanted to be a Kaidanovsky, be someone important. After they died, it had been even easier to believe. No one could tell her she was wrong.
No one but Babulya.
And as she lay there, a new understanding began to take shape in her, all of the misgivings from earlier that evening coming into focus.
She wasn’t born to be a Jaeger pilot. She never had been. She was just a girl with a crazy grandmother and no real prospects. Andrei was using her, but he was right. School, training, all of that really was a waste of time. Better to be realistic, to live in the world as it was, not as a little girl once thought it should be.
The next morning, she found Babulya passed out on the couch, her vodka bottle empty. She stirred at the smell of porridge heating in the stove, and rose to regard Vik with bloodshot eyes.
“Vik,” she said.
“I’m sorry I yelled at you last night,” Vik said. “I don’t hate you.”
“Did we have a fight?” Babulya asked. “I don’t remember. What was it about?”
Vik studied her for a moment to see if the old woman was serious, and saw that she looked genuinely puzzled. That wouldn’t be unusual. When she drank that much, Babulya sometimes didn’t remember the night before.
“It was nothing,” she said. “Never mind.”
She didn’t go to school that day. Instead she went to the Dig and took an early shift as well the usual one. There was still time. If she went to work full time for Andrei, set some realistic goals, she might still salvage her life, for what little it was worth.
A week before her twelfth birthday, she arrived at the Dig to Andrei waiting for her.
“Look,” he said. “I’m sorry about last month. You ticked me off. I have a bad temper. So I’m sorry I hit you. And I’m sorry for the stuff I said. Truth is, I admire you. All this stuff you’re doing, to improve yourself – that’s great. One day you’ll be somebody big, and I’ll just be some guy saying hey, I used to know her. She worked for me once upon a time.”
“I… thanks,” Vik said. It was so unexpected she wasn’t sure how to respond.
“So, look, I think I can help you out. You’ve been working real hard, and the money – for what you want, it’s not that much. Especially if you have the babushka to take care of, and everything. What I’m trying to say is – I’m promoting you.”
The way he smiled made her feel cold. Promotions were not always a good thing.
But what did she have to lose?
26
2035
MOYULAN SHATTERDOME
CHINA
LAMBERT GRIMACED AS HE LOOKED AT THE corpse.
“That’s Sokk,” he said. He had looked at enough pictures of the man,
“Was Sokk,” said Aubrey, the forensic biologist examining the dead man. She had a heavy French accent. “He’s been dead for days.”
“What killed him?” Mako asked.
“There’s no sign of a wound,” she said. “But if you look here at the edges of the eyes, in the fingers under his nails, there is some hemorrhaging. I suspect a poison of some sort. Given that there is very little putrefaction, I would guess the poison was toxic enough to wipe out most of the bacteria in his body as well.”
The body had been discovered a few hours earlier, crammed into a canister meant for toxic waste. If the techs involved had been a little less observant, he might have made it to the furnaces near Fuding where such rubbish was disposed of.
“This dust on him…”
“Probably Kaiju marrow powder.”
“Right,” Lambert said. “Wouldn’t that keep him from rotting?”
“Well, it would deter external microorganisms from entering his body, and that’s probably why it was put there. But, Ranger, surely you know that more than half of the cells in your body aren’t human, but bacteria.”
&nb
sp; “I did not know that,” Lambert said. “I’m not sure that information will improve my life tremendously.”
“It’s the case,” she said, standing up.
“If he’s so well preserved, how can you tell how long he’s been dead?”
“There are other signs,” she said. “He’s already moved into and out of rigor mortis, which tells me he’s been dead for at least two days. But there is also a good deal of dehydration – you can see it, yes? He’s well on his way to becoming a mummy.”
“So he might have died as long as a month ago?”
“Yep,” Aubrey said. She pulled off her gloves. “We get him to the lab, and I can tell you more. Very exciting. I’ve only seen a few deaths from Kaiju-related toxins, back when I was an intern.”
“You think this was a Kaiju-based toxin?”
“Oh, I would bet,” Aubrey said. She started to depart, but then she turned back to Lambert.
“And, Ranger?” she said.
“Yes?”
“That Jules business – you better move on that fast. Don’t dilly-dally.”
He watched her leave the autopsy chamber.
Damn it. Did everyone in the Shatterdome know about this?
With a sigh, he turned back to the body.
“Why Sokk?” he murmured. “What else were you up to?”
Because this all felt – incomplete, somehow.
A half hour later, Jinhai and Vik were declared missing. They weren’t anyplace they were supposed to be, and no one had seen them since before noon, when Renata and Ilya had noticed Jinhai up on the high hill the Shatterdome was built into.
Marshal Quan renewed the lockdown of the island and ordered a complete review of any comings or goings. None of that showed anything to do with the cadets specifically, but in the process, they made the discovery that one of the patrol boats was missing. They hadn’t noticed immediately because once again the security system had been subtly tampered with.
The boat was discovered a few hours later, near Fuding.
* * *
Marshal Quan paced like a caged tiger. Mako waited patiently for him to settle down.
“Malikova has no living family,” he said. “Her grandmother died last year. But Ou-Yang…”
“If his parents learn of this, it could lead to a great deal of trouble,” Mako said. “For that reason, I advise against releasing the names of the cadets. This should be handled quickly and quietly.”
