“Yeah, if I was a guy, I’d do you,” Sorano kidded.
Nariko did not find the joke amusing and the attention only made her more uncomfortable. The other members of Shiro squad came over and Ami took a few moments to boast about all of the work she had done on Nariko’s nails, which Keiko listened to politely, while everyone else ignored her.
Michi in particular was impressed with Keiko’s work.
“I think we’re gonna be able to pull this off,” she admitted, “There’s not a man on Ardura that wouldn’t want to jump her.”
“That’s exactly what I’m afraid of,” Nariko commented, crossing her arms to cover herself up a little more.
“By the way,” Michi grumbled as she walked up and slugged Nariko in the arm. “I’m mad at you for lying to me!”
“What?”
“You told me none of the men you brought were cute.”
Nariko’s brow furrowed. “What do you...”
They were interrupted by the whoosh of the side entry doors of the bay opening up and Inami entering with some of her command staff. This was the moment Nariko had been dreading and she tried to build up a wall within her mind, separating herself from her feelings. She could not let Inami see her out-of-sorts.
Inami approached with a wry smile on her lips, tucking her thumb into the pocket of the red velvet lounge jacket she was wearing. Her staff looked Nariko over intently and nodded in approval. Nariko stood there, practically trembling, feeling somewhere in between embarrassment and outrage.
“You clean up well, Gunsho Nariko-sama,” Inami said, taking the smoking briar root pipe out of her mouth.
Inami turned to Keiko and saluted her, crossing her left hand over her chest.
“Keiko-sama, you have performed above and beyond the call of duty. In your spare time, you have acquired rare and diverse expertise, which has added to the flexibility of the division, making this mission possible where it might otherwise have failed.”
Inami turned back to address Nariko.
“As you can see, our special training regime breeds strength through diversity.”
Nariko saluted Inami back, but did not accept the explanation.
“I’m impressed,” Taka whispered to Sorano. “She almost makes this farce seem legitimate.” Sorano suppressed a snort.
“Therefore,” Inami continued, “I am promoting you to the rank of Gocho.” Inami extended her hand and Keiko timidly took in the warrior’s grip, clasping forearms.
Various murmurings over this decision could be heard from those nearby. Mai tactfully leaned in toward Inami and whispered to her.
“Taisa, the Cerinţă specifies the circumstances under which promotion can occur. I do not think that this fits the requirements.” Inami dismissed the infraction with a wave of her pipe.
“Hey,” Ami protested, her cheeks puffing out in frustration. “I did just as much as she did.”
“Fine,” Inami hummed out in frustration. “Ami-sama, you are hereby promoted to the rank of...what are you now?”
“Nitohei Second Class,” Ami peeped.
“... Ittohei First Class.” Inami finished, half-heartedly taking Ami in the warrior’s grip as she puffed her pipe in irritation. The murmurings now became audible gasps of insult from those nearby.
Ami pointed a finger at Taka playfully.
“I outrank you now,” she giggled.
Taka said nothing, but deftly drew her dagger and slashed upward; slicing one of Ami’s pink pigtails clean off. The hair fell to the ground, where it disintegrated into ash. Ami shrieked and grabbed at the ruined hair.
Mai stepped forward, her body completely restored from the damage done to it without so much as a scratch remaining. She did not look at Nariko directly, but Nariko noticed that Mai was wearing the ring on her right index finger.
“Arduran courtship customs are very complex,” Mai explained, “They have ten steps, or nights, of courtship, each with its own rules and boundaries. It’s not something an outsider can just pick up from a book. So, to aid you on your mission, we have hired the services of an expert in Arduran customs.”
She stepped aside and a man stepped forward. He was resplendently dressed in Arduran formal attire with a deep red split-coat jacket and white riding pants, fitted with large black boots and a traditional fencing sword at his side. It took Nariko a minute to realize who it was, because his beard had been cropped smartly into a dashing goatee and his long hair had been drawn back and cut into a ponytail.
Don Kielter bowed deeply, carrying himself with dignity and strength. He looked much younger this way, even gallant. Nariko could only stand there dumbfounded as he smiled at her.
“It seems that I have found employment as a courtship consultant,” he said with his usual swagger.
“I promise you that you’ll get your money’s worth,” he bragged to Inami. “I’ll make sure that this Louie Faust can’t take his hands off of her.”
Nariko clucked her tongue in disgust and excused herself as she entered the shuttle. For a second she had thought better of him, seeing him dressed up properly like he was, but he had broken that spell with his usual coarseness.
“She must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed,” Don Kielter surmised.
“That would be the right side,” Mai commented as she entered updated fuel and ammunition requirements on her data slate. “You get better blood circulation if you sleep on your left side instead of your right.”
“Mai, it’s a rhetorical statement. It’s not literal,” Michi explained. “You know, like ‘slept like a baby.’”
Mai stopped working on her data slate and thought about it for a second. “By that you mean waking up every two hours to be fed and changed?”
“No, Mai, that’s not what I mean.”
“If you don’t mean what you say then why say it?” Mai asked blankly
“Never mind,” Mai said, rubbing her eyes.
After Inami and her staff left, Don Kielter took a moment to introduce himself to all of the remaining squad members. As Nariko glared at him from a porthole, she though he was acting awfully fortunate to be getting paid good money to spend time around such beautiful women, even though they were really half-demons who each knew at least a hundred different ways to violently end his life at any given moment.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The White Canals of Ardura
Declaring martial law on Dinafarǎ only deepened the resolve of the remaining revolutionists. Fighting spread from street to street, then from building to building and finally from room to room. Lightning storms raged across the entire surface of the desolate planet for months on end. Finally the revolutionists were reduced to a single city block. It was then that a new champion emerged among them. A man that had never been seen before, who would later be known only by his title, the Luminarch.
-Excerpt from The Fall of the Ashtari, suppressed by the Marshals 22.03.4112rl
About a week later, Nariko found herself reflecting briefly on the irony of her life. First born of the Amano family, first among the tithed to pass the trials and be accepted as a Senshi. Field promoted to Gunsho after only two years of active duty and considered to be a natural successor for Taisa of the Second Division.
Now she found herself sitting uncomfortably in an outdoor café, wearing a low-cut red dress, and a large white hat with red trim, waiting for some idiot to come out of the dance club across the street.
If there is such a thing as luck, mine must be atrocious.
Ardura was designed to be a beautiful world. Terraformed and colonized during the Chiesa Age, when the Cardinals took control of the Grey Council on Terra, it was the administrative and clerical hub for the entire Donovan Sector. It contained no factories to pollute the air and no impoverished areas or slums to darken the lower levels of its cities. Only the wealthy and elite could live there, along with their serfs and servants and thousands of transport vessels arrived daily, bringing food, wares, and materials to the planet that
ruled over the polluted and impoverished worlds that toiled daily in endlessly large factories to support it.
With such a high volume of ether traffic and with a generous donation to the personal coffers of Don Kielter’s cousin, who worked as a traffic watch at the jump gate, their insertion into the marble city of Steiermark had been wonderfully simple and uneventful.
The café tables sat in the open air, with a wondrous view of the large fountain situated in the center of the plaza. Beautiful lavender flowers had been strung onto cords and were hung delicately between the light posts that dotted the plaza. The plaza was called Heldenplatz, which meant ‘Hero Square’ in the local language.
Sitting in the center of the fountain, rendered in fine gold and platinum, were statues of Uralite soldiers, planting their flag into the ground. When the Tyrant of Sumer had invaded Ardura, it was the armies of Ural that had come to its rescue. As part of the treaty that was signed upon their emancipation, each city was required to display a statue such as this. The local people hated it. Nariko could tell by the way they quickly skirted around its edges whenever they were forced to walk through the plaza. Off-worlders were easily spotted, because they were the only ones who would even look at the things.
The city had an infectious energy about it. The people moved from place to place with intent and focus. Steiermark was built high, neatly sitting upon the peak of the Nebelhaft Mountains, giving those who lived there a truly stunning view of the verdant green plains and tall thriving forests far below.
Enormous pumping machines concealed in the roots of the mountains pumped water from clear rivers up through the mountain and into the city, where it jetted up from the thousands of fountain gardens, traveling along marble canals through the levels of the city, until finally pouring out of fashioned golden spigots, creating gentle waterfalls that floated back down into the valley thousands of meters below, becoming little more than mist by the time they reached the forest canopy. Ardura was rightly known as the jewel of the Donovan sector.
Of course, Nariko didn’t care about any of that. She was too busy fussing with the horrible corset that the women of this planet found fashionable. It crushed her waist and forced her to breathe in shallow gulps of air instead of the long deep draws she had been trained to breathe in. Of course, the main purpose of the corset was to push up and accentuate her already curvaceous figure, a fact that was not lost at all on the men seated nearby her in the café. Nariko could feel them looking at her, even from behind and it made her sharply uncomfortable.
A dapper waiter walked over to Nariko, a small cup on his tray.
“The gentlemen in the corner sent this drink over to you, my heiress,” he explained detachedly. Fortunately for Nariko, the people on Ardura found it fashionable to speak the common tongue.
Nariko sighed and took the cup, placing it by the three others that were already in front of her at the table. Nariko whispered inaudibly, being careful not to move her lips, which was picked up by the transmitter located in her necklace and transmitted to Don Kielter and Keiko, who were watching from a rooftop on the other side of the plaza.
“Just how thirsty do these guys think I am?” Nariko sub-vocalized.
“It’s an invitation,” Don Kielter explained. His voice was turned into vibrations by the device in Nariko’s earring, which was specifically attuned to her skull, so that the sound would reverberate inside her head. Even someone pressing up against her face would be unable to hear it.
“An invitation to what?” Nariko asked, afraid of the answer.
“Oh, I dunno, to come over and have wild sex with them, probably,” Kielter kidded.
Without thinking, Nariko glanced over to the corner of the café where the drink had originated. Two young police officers were sitting there enjoying a drink. Nariko noticed that they carried ceremonial fencing blades rather than the riot gear common to most worlds. The two men raised their mugs of warm beer when they saw her looking at them and gave what they probably considered to be dashing smiles. One of them motioned for her to come over and join them.
“Ooh, I like the big one,” Keiko chided. “You should go over and talk to them.”
Nariko felt her stomach churn in disgust and returned to looking across the street.
“Keiko, what makes you think I’d want to go talk to those clowns?”
“Aww, don’t be so shy,” Keiko prodded. “They might be really nice.”
“Leave her alone, Keiko,” Don Kielter gently rebuked. “She doesn’t need to talk to those guys.”
“Thank you,” Nariko acknowledged.
“Besides, everyone knows that Nariko is my slave-girl. I bought her fair and square.”
Nariko could hear Kielter and Keiko laughing over the comm-line. She heard a mug clank against the roof-tile near them.
Are they drinking up there? She imagined how great it would be to run up to the rooftop and fire a few rounds into their big stupid faces.
Her thought was cut short by a man approaching her table and addressing her.
“Excuse me, my heiress, is this seat taken?” he asked politely.
“No,” Nariko answered, “You can have it.” She waved her hand toward his table. She could still hear Keiko and Kielter laughing in the comm-link.
The man paused, obviously a little unsure of how to proceed.
“Would you mind if I sat in it?” he asked politely.
“Why would I mind? Take it back and go sit in it,” she permitted.
The man chuckled. “No, I already have a chair over at my table,” he explained.
“Then why would you want another chair?” Nariko asked, puzzled.
The man laughed out loud and sat down next to her. Kielter and Keiko’s laughter died down as they noticed what was happening.
“Nariko, what are you doing?” Keiko asked, concerned. “We need you to move once we spot the mark.”
Nariko tipped the brim of her hat down over her face and sub-vocalized.
“It’s not my fault. He asked if he could take my chair, but then he sat down instead of taking it.”
“That’s how the men of Ardura ask if you’re interested,” Kielter explained.
Nariko looked up from underneath her hat and noticed the man smiling at her. She smiled back awkwardly.
“My name is Brannon,” he said politely. “It’s a pleasure to meet you.”
He took Nariko’s hand and kissed it. Nariko’s eyes grew wide and she nearly punched him.
“May I ask your name?”
Nariko opened her mouth to speak, but suddenly realized that she had forgotten her cover story for this mission. The whole situation was so unsettling that she couldn’t think of her name. Thankfully, Keiko realized what was going on and fed her the information through the comm-link.
“Betti Geheimnis. It’s nice to meet you,” she stammered. Suddenly the comm-line was alive with chatter. Kielter had spotted their mark coming out of the dance club. Nariko looked over and recognized the man from the mission briefing pictures. Louie Faust was heir to the Agate Crime Syndicate. He was built like a brick, with wide shoulders and large hands like a gorilla. There was strength in his movements, but from the unpolished way that he walked Nariko could tell that he had never received any formal training. He wore a black coat over a dress-suit, with gold jewelry around his neck. Everything about him said money. Nariko’s focus was disturbed by a question from Brannon, whom she had been ignoring.
“I hope you don’t mind, but you have the most unusual accent. May I ask where you are from?”
Forgetting her cover story entirely, Nariko answered without thinking.
“Correll,” she said, gathering up her purse.
“Correll?” Brannon rolled the word around in his head. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that world before.”
“Yeah, I get that a lot,” Nariko said absently as she got up and took off after Faust.
Brannon watched her in amazement as she scurried across the plaza, stumbling occasion
ally on the high-heeled shoes she was wearing. He looked over to a couple of police officers sitting in the corner, who raised their mugs and motioned their condolences to him.
The waiter walked up to Brannon, a small slip of paper in his hand.
“My heir, may I assume you will be picking up the lady’s bill?”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
The Guilded Markets of Durnstein
We cannot continue to countenance the inherent hypocrisy of our policies. The very foundations of our empire and our faith rely upon the skills and continued existence of the craft-users we are vigorously exterminating. Was not the Luminarch himself a craft-user, even the greatest of all craft-users?
-Last words of Marshall Erin Utong, Executed Heretic 21.10.6009rl
Nariko found herself standing under a delicate rug canopy in the Durnstein market district. They had been shadowing Louie Faust for six days now and they were getting quite good at it.
The technique of shadowing was really pretty simple. To keep from being noticed, the members of Shiro squad would rotate so that only one of them was actually following the mark at any given time. A really gifted bodyguard might notice a single person or even two shadowing them, but it would take a real professional to notice eight different people on rotation in the crowded market district. To add another level of complexity, the team members not actively shadowing would change clothes as often as possible.
It took a great deal of coordination, but the end result was that you could follow a mark around, even one with as many bodyguards as Louie Faust, with little real concern for being noticed. The things that you had to watch out for were choke points; less-used alleyways and t-shaped intersections where it would be easy to distinguish between people who were following you from people who just happened to be going in the same direction as you were.
When you came upon a choke point, it fell upon the spotter to keep the mark in view until a new team member made contact again. This job had unofficially fallen on Keiko, who proved to be absolutely fearless when it came to scaling the outside of the taller buildings in order to get into a good spotting position.
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