by Victor Milán
He held up the bottle, regarded it. “I feel a great kinship with old Phlebas tonight.”
She looked at him, not comprehending. “Yamada-sama! This is terrible. People are going to be killed. You’ve got to stop it.”
He gazed fondly down at her. Too old to regard her as a sexual toy, set in seniority like a block of concrete so that he need fear no rivalry, Yamada Tatsuhide had become the young executive’s only true friend in the ministry. They had always been able to talk, but somehow he didn’t seem to hear her, here, now. “I am drunk, child,” he said, not altogether necessarily. “In many ways, it’s a pity you don’t drink as well.”
“What do you mean?”
“‘Fear death by water.’ Yes, yes.” He walked out into the clearing swinging the bottle by the neck. “A slow trickle of water can wear grooves in the hardest stone. That’s one way. But ah, this! We survived the fire, and now the water will finish us, a deluge of our own making.” He spun, arms extravagantly outflung. “Or maybe the fire killed us after all. Maybe we’re all dead and just getting ready to lie down.” Kazuko stared at him. She hated her inability to act, to do more than sit and wring her hands like a foolish woman, yet she could think of nothing to say or do.
“How smug we’ve been!” the old man said. “While the rest of the world turned on itself like a beast by the bite of a trap, we remained safe, serene, and oh so civilized. We’ve had our terrorists, of course, our competition by silent blade and callid sabotage. But we kept our center. We were a family, and we handled our difficulties as a family does.
“But no more. No more.”
He staggered back, slumped beside Kazuko on the log. “Hope that you don’t turn out like me, Kazuko. Indulge an old man’s self-pity: consider me. That to which I’ve given fifty years’ good service is a lie. And tomorrow it’s going to destroy everything it and I have worked for.”
He gazed at her, owlishly professorial. “We’ve accustomed the people to government. We dismantled the old structures of loyalty to clan and group and told them, ‘These will not stand without our hand to bolster them.’ Rule by mandate—just as in the past our leaders have attempted to impose xenophobia on our curious and outgoing family. In the long run that never has worked; would that what we tried had not. Behold, dear child, behold. We have unmade all other order than that which we impose, and tomorrow we are to abdicate that.” He held the bottle up. “The sparkle of starlight. Ah, chaos.”
“Ishikawa-san hates chaos.”
“He’s bringing it, child.” He drank deeply. “I know, now, what the thunder said.”
“But you’re on the Oversight Council,” Kazuko said. “They won’t take so serious an action without reaching a consensus of approval.”
He smiled. “Consensus, like the other customs we discarded like unfashionable clothes, is no more than a conveniences’ He shook his head on a loose neck. “They mean no harm. They’re honorable men; I was an honorable man, when I worked with the best of will to secure the ends they’ve gained. Ishikawa-san is most honorable of all. He’ll sacrifice everything for Japan.” He slumped. “Even his humanity.”
“But you’ll try to talk them out of it. Won’t you?”
To her surprise, she saw tears well from the corners of his eyes, trace a brief line of glimmer down his cheek. “No, child. There was a time, years ago, when I was low on money; my wife was very ill, requiring surgery. I accepted money, a gift from someone I should not.” He blinked slowly. “And she died anyway, my Shizuko. But I thought the incident forgotten. Until this afternoon, when Ishikawa-san reminded me.”
“But he’d never—” The word blackmail wouldn’t fit past her lips. “—never do that. He’s a good man.”
“Indeed.” Yamada nodded. “That’s why he will do it. A good man is capable of anything, in a cause he thinks is just.”
Laughter floated up from the village below like wisps of smoke blown from a campfire. “I’m too old to have any thought of my self, my child. But I have a family. A notable and noble family, you understand. And in the end, I will disgrace myself in my own eyes before I’ll disgrace the name of my family in view of all.”
She looked down at her hands. They looked so pale in the moonlight, so helpless and weak. It was a feeling she’d fought all her life to overcome, the helplessness of being born female. I too feel as if I’ve lost everything I’ve worked for.
She looked up, looked at him sidelong, for the first time measuring him, measuring their friendship. “What if I warn them?” she asked, low but not hesitant. “I’ll tell the Yoshimitsu that the ministry and Hiryu are moving against them tomorrow. They can seal that fortress of theirs, hold off the doitsu for a while. The mercenaries aren’t ready for a pitched battle, and Ishi, the administrative vice-minister, is worried about public response as it is; if it drags on too long, he’ll call the whole thing off.”
His eyes didn’t meet hers. She watched him intently, wondering what she’d do if he tried to stop her. Her sudden resolve overpowered her, overpowered even the love she felt for the old man.
Slowly he raised his head and looked at her. A rumpled smile appeared on his face. “An old man’s spirit might bless you for that, child,” he said in a whisper.
* * * * *
They’d spent the afternoon in Babylon, gaping at the palaces, breasting human torrents in the marketplace, marveling at the beautiful tile work that ornamented the massive Ishtar Gate. The scale of the ancient city wasn’t exactly overwhelming to someone raised in the urban modern world, as O’Neill had been, but still, to walk those streets, under the hot Mesopotamian sun, was pure intoxication.
Yet when they returned to their cool glade she was quiet, troubled. “What’s the matter, Elizabeth?” TOKUGAWA asked, stroking her cheek.
She dropped her eyes. “Nothing.”
He frowned, sat down in the sun-warmed grass, pulling her down beside him. “Something’s clearly the matter. Won’t you tell me what it is?”
She drew her knees up, wrapped her arms around them, rested chin on knees. She gazed out across the meadow, past the rushes that marked the course of the small stream to the trees on the other side. Beyond those trees, she knew, lay anything in the world she desired to find. But what she desired most she could only find here.
“It’s this body.” She ran the backs of her fingernails down the sinuous muscles of her sides. “It’s beautiful, it’s marvelous, but it isn’t me.”
Puzzled, TOKUGAWA frowned. “But we’ve been through this, Elizabeth. All that you know of this or any world is what your senses tell you.” He smiled, shyly touched a bare tanned arm. “Why not believe them? This is the way you are.”
She shook her head. “No. In the real world I’m ugly and twisted and bloated, my body is riddled with the disease that will kill me if I miss taking my medication for even a few hours—and the medicines themselves are killing me too, in the long run. That’s real, TOKUGAWA. Not this—this beautiful dream.”
TOKUGAWA’s head drooped. “I am sorry, Elizabeth. There’s nothing I can do.”
She reached out to stroke his long black hair. So glossy, so smooth. She smiled, briefly, wanly. “I just wonder if you love me.”
“Of course I do!”
Her smile went strange and sad. “Do you? Or have you simply come to love this beautiful figment you’ve created?” Instantly he was on his knees gripping her by the shoulders, and she was astonished to see tears running down his cheeks. “How can I prove that I love you, Elizabeth?” He shook his head wildly, and tears sprang away in coruscant arcs of sunlight. “You’ve joined with me in total rapport, seen everything I think and am. How can I prove my love, if you won’t believe that?”
Hating herself, unable to help herself, O’Neill said, “Show me that you love me as I am.”
TOKUGAWA stood. She looked up at him, and suddenly she was there, the real Dr. O’Neill slumped helpless in her motorized wheelchair, blinking behind lenses thick as planks as the sunlight stabbed her tender e
yes. TOKUGAWA stooped, caught her in his powerful arms, picked her up from her wheelchair. Slowly, he kissed. Then he turned and laid her gently on the ground, and in that moment Dr. Elizabeth O’Neill was complete. The final test was passed, and final obstacle surmounted; she was, indeed, truly and totally accepted.
And he loved her there in the sun, and finally she was happy.
CHAPTER 17
The concrete hangar gaped like the shell of a giant clam. Inside cargo handlers waited with cranes and forklifts, and a platoon of technicians in bright yellow coveralls stood by to service and refuel the dirigible swelling to fill the sky above them. The smells of hot oil and wet cement mingled with a surly snarling of engines as the pilot fought the buffeting wet wind. The techs were glad that the rain had abated, at least; the electrical components to be offloaded were sealed against the weather, but when the halves of the hangar stood open they provided no more than a windbreak for the men working inside, no shelter at all from rain. When the weather really cut loose, even the yellow-fabric bulk of the gasbag provided little protection. The wind blew effortlessly between the dirigible and the cement walls.
Lines uncoiled from the airship’s gondola were clamped to cables wound around the spools of winches, which began to reel the giant gasbag down the last few meters. With a squealing of metal under tension, the great balloon sank until the bumpers at the bottom of its graphite/epoxy gondola kissed the cement in the loading area. Technicians moved forward, drawing hoses and service carts with them. The receiving superintendent waited by the door, clipboard in hand, tapping his foot impatiently. The freight bays opened. He looked up.
Into the muzzle of an assault rifle.
“Hands up!” a voice boomed from a loudspeaker in horribly accented Japanese. The foreman staggered back, clipboard falling from his fingers, as men began to spill out of the cargo bay, faces obscured by insectile gas masks, bulky in battle dress beneath light blue coveralls with the red circle-and-flying-dragon logo of Hiryu Cybernetics Industries on the left breast. The helium-filled dirigible had a cargo capacity of thirty metric tons—more than ample to accommodate Colonel Tranh’s two hundred mercenaries and their gear.
With fluid efficiency the mercenaries secured the hangar. Two platoons streamed down the stairs, into the buried roots of the complex. The others raced across the grass toward the dark bulk of the Citadel. Alarms screamed shrilly. The guards in the observation post set into the top of the citadel’s wall opened fire with machine guns, joined a heartbeat later by the guards in the hardened perimeter towers. Several intruders fell, red blooms blossoming on blue. A noncom barked an order into the microphone set into his mask. Soldiers went to ground, aiming stubby weapons with fat drum magazines toward the towers. Automatic grenade launchers made slow bass-drum booming. A guard tower unfolded petals of flame and smoke as shaped-charge rounds ripped into it.
Rotors savaging the air, a Gazelle swept over the roof of the citadel. The dirigible sagged as the chopper’s miniguns clawed it. A doitsujin knelt, threw a tube to his shoulder, pressed a contact. A missile howled away. It took the Gazelle nose-on. The helicopter seemed to stumble in air, cartwheeled down to paint the dry grass with flame.
The two guards in the security booth at the citadel’s entrance gaped in amazement at the monitor screens. “Madre de Dios,” one yelped. He flipped up the red plastic cover marked secure and slammed down the button.
Nothing happened.
Cursing, the trooper pumped the button with his finger. Klaxons should be yammering, great steel-and-stressed-concrete shutters sliding ponderously into place, sealing the entrances to the castle. But nothing happened. Lean dark face enameled with sweat, his partner hammered frantic queries into the security computer keyboard.
A thump brought their heads up. A wad of something like dirty dough had been slapped against the armored glass of the booth. The man at the keyboard shouted in horror, and the world came apart in flame and smoke and shock as the shaped charge embedded in the adhesive putty went off. The invaders poured into the building through smoke spreading over jagged armor-glass fangs.
Conservatively dressed receptionists, male and female alike, jumped up from their desks in consternation. From the far side of the room, a mercenary in Yoshimitsu uniform swung up his Kalashnikov and triggered a burst. An invader went down. Another fired a short ear-popping burst at the Cuban.
Like the Cubans’ Kalashnikovs the invaders’ rifles were bullpups, but the similarity ended there. Tranh’s mercenaries carried 7mm caseless assault rifles. The weapons operated on a Dardick-system variant. A rotor with three radial chambers stripped triangular-sectioned bullet/propellant units from the curved feed device. Firing was initiated electronically, and the venting of gas on a bias through slits in the front of the rotor spun it to provide full automatic fire as long as the trigger was depressed. Since the rounds weren’t driven forward into a firing chamber, as in a conventional autoweapon, there was no danger of a hollowpoint catching its tip on the lip as it entered the firing chamber; not only were the points hollow, but cut with X’s at the tip: dumdums. The Geneva Conventions’ rather sanguine restrictions on the use of certain weapons had gone by the boards long since.
Bullets tore through the Cuban’s uniform blouse, blossomed into lethal metal flowers at the resistance of his skin, plowed great gaping wound channels through chest and belly. He lurched back against the wall, head shattering the glass protecting a Matisse original; he was dead before he hit the carpet. Sowing tear-gas grenades as they went, the invaders surged past the shocking scarlet smear on the muted beige wallpaper.
* * * * *
Sipping his breakfast tea, Yoshimitsu Akaji knelt in his room reading a printout of the day’s agenda. The communicator trilled. Mildly, he looked up. “Yes?”
The screen lit with the face of an aide, distorted almost past recognition by sheer panic. “Yoshimitsu-sama! We’re being invaded! Armed men are attacking the Citadel!”
For some reason Yoshimitsu felt very calm. “Hasn’t the citadel been secured?”
“That’s been overridden! The shutters wouldn’t close! And now they’re everywhere!”
The old man touched his chin. So it’s really come to this, he thought. I never thought the ministry would resort to measures so desperate.
“What are we to do?” the face on the screen beseeched.
“Keep out of harm’s way and offer no resistance. Let Major García’s men handle this. Out.” The screen blanked in the middle of a frantic expostulation. Yoshimitsu didn’t want to hear it.
For a moment he sat, hands at rest on thighs. It’s over. The company he’d built with his own two hands was about to be wrested from him by an act of sheer piracy. Poor Shigeo, he thought. My poor people. And then: My poor Japan.
He shook himself. There was something very important he had to do.
* * * * *
Following detailed briefings on the interior of the YTC Citadel, the invaders spread out like a virus, moving both up into the keep itself and down into the depths of the complex. García’s Cubans had been caught flatfooted. Some of them ran when the invaders burst upon them; most of them stayed and fought. But it was pairs of men against squads. They stood and died.
With three of his comrades, fuzz-bearded trooper LaBlond hunkered behind the makeshift barrier of a lab equipment cart. His breath was an encompassing oceanic surge within his helmet, his body already sheathed in sweat inside the Kevlar and metal/ceramic inserts of his battle dress. Eagerness tingled electric within him. Action at last! he thought. The intruders would have to go through his team to get into the TOKUGAWA Project lab, and they wouldn’t do that without a fight.
“Hijo la! They’re behind—” A man at his side snapped half erect and whirled round. Shot sounds hammered the boy’s coal-scuttle helmet. His comrade cartwheeled backward over the barrier as the young man spun, firing a long burst at hip level. The corridor behind was full of enemies in pale fatigues. Screams tore as one intruder went down clutc
hing a shattered knee, and another doubled over perforated guts, puking blood. The other intruders fired back.
A bullet smashed through the young man’s lightly protected right forearm and peeled away the extensor muscles like stewed meat from a chicken bone. Three more impacted against his chest and belly. Notched copper-jacketed lead slugs flattened impotently against the armor inserts in his vest. The needlelike tungsten-carbide rod penetrators inside kept right on going.
Bonelessly the young man slumped back against the upturned cart, slid to the floor. Why can’t I control my body? His chest seemed to be filling with fluid, seemed wrapped about with immovable bands; he could barely breathe, and the air gurgled as he fought it down. His shredded arm and body were a vast cottony numbness. He heard the clatter as the other two men at the barricade threw away their weapons, heard booted feet thumping closer. Unable to hold himself, he slid the rest of the way to the floor and lay watching the myriad tiny punctures in the white acoustic tiles of the ceiling until his first brush with adventure ended, and he died.
* * * * *
With a muffled bang the lab door blew off its hinges. Just inside, Kim Jhoon stood facing the squad of mercenaries pouring in. A burly noncom slid his gas mask up onto the top of his head, revealing a dark broad-nosed face. “Where’s O’Neill?” he demanded in American-accented English. His men fanned out and advanced into the lab, holding their guns on the frightened technicians.
“This is an outrage!” the Korean exclaimed. His usual diffidence had evaporated. “Leave this laboratory at once! You—”
Behind and to the right of him a door slid open. A mercenary pivoted, bringing up his gun. Face contorted, Kim lunged for him, hands clawing. The mercenary shot him from a meter away.
As a little girl in Colorado, Elizabeth O’Neill had once seen a boy shoot an aerosol paint can with a .22. Emerging from her office cubicle, what she saw was much like that. The 7mm dumdums punched through Kim with incredible violence, exploding his back into a spray of blood and tissue and bone. She screamed, feeling the soft boiled eggs she’d eaten for breakfast an hour before surging up her throat.