by Bruce Bethke
Colonel Vachon smiled. "Then we have nothing to fear. Once they find out that I command this battalion, my French-speaking brothers will join hands with us in solidarity!"
Major Thompson let out a deep sigh, then took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. "Liberty, equality, insanity," he muttered, so softly that only Yuji heard.
The command briefing broke up, and the majors went back to their platoons to brief them on the final details. Then it was only a matter of waiting and trying to rest while the commando teams crept closer to Lacus Mortis and the chronometer slowly ticked down to H hour.
A loud knock on the door roused Yuji Nakagawa out of his meditation. "Enter!" he called out. "C'mon in, y'all!" The door slid open, and a somewhat haggard and sleepless-looking Lloyd Thompson plowed through.
"Sorry to bother you," Thompson said, "but I couldn't sleep and I thought you—" He stopped short, sniffed the thick incense smoke in the air, and looked around the room, wide-eyed. "Jesus, Yuji, what the hell are you doing? Holding a seance?"
As always, Yuji felt a pang of irritation at the arrival of the Texas gaijin. It was hard to tell which was worse—his complete lack of manners, his braying voice, or those cloddish boots. And then, as always, Yuji shrugged off his annoyance and patiently accepted the fact that Thompson, whatever his shortcomings, was the closest thing he had to a friend. "Something like that, yes. It's a Shinto thing. You wouldn't understand."
Thompson finished looking over the room and brought his gaze back to Yuji. "And how can you sit like that? It hurts my knees just to look at you."
"Long practice," Yuji explained, as he slowly straightened out of the full lotus position. "Can I do something for you, Lloyd?"
Thompson didn't answer. Instead, he strode across the small room and dropped to his knees in front of Yuji's daisho. "Wow! Beautiful blades, man! When did you—"
"I brought them up when I immigrated," Yuji said, gently taking the razor-sharp katana from Thompson and re-sheathing it. "I kept them in storage until now." He replaced the sword on the rack.
Slowly Thompson turned around and looked Yuji in the eye. "But tonight you felt like it was finally time to pull them out?"
Equally slowly, Yuji nodded.
Thompson grinned. "Hell's bells, man! Then I'm not nuts after all! Look what I dug out!" With a wild flourish, he opened up his jacket and whipped out a fourteen-inch stag-handled bowie knife.
Yuji gently steered the point away from his face. "I take it you're worried about the mission?"
Thompson nodded. "Darn tootin'. I figure either Colonel Vac-head is right and I'm wrong, and this is gonna go down slicker'n an owl's wick. Or else the colonel's wrong and I'm right, in which case we are about to take off our trousers and jump butt first into a cactus patch."
"That would indeed be a problem," Yuji observed.
Thompson paused a serious moment and looked his friend right in the eye. "So how about it, man? Don't it bother you that we're going in without a clearly defined way of getting out again?"
"Colonel Vachon seems to think—"
"Screw the colonel! If the mission goes to hell and the feces hit the fan, what're we gonna do?"
"What we must do," Yuji answered. "Our duty, as soldiers. To follow our orders; to lead our men. To fight, if we can. To die, if we must."
Thompson took a long, hard look at Yuji. "That seems like kind of a fatalistic attitude."
Yuji shrugged. "But a traditional one. There is a song, you know. We Japanese put everything important into our poems and songs. I won't try to sing it for you—the translation wouldn't fit the melody—but it's called 'The Song of the Warrior,' and it's at least a thousand years old: 'If I go to sea, I shall return a corpse awash; if duty calls me to the mountain, a verdant sward shall be my pall; thus for the sake of my fatherland I shall not die peacefully at home.'"
Thompson waited until the last word died away, then shuddered. "Jeez. Talk about morbid. No wonder you people invented hari-kari."
"It's hara-kiri," Yuji corrected. "But never mind that. It just so happens that I've been saving something else for a day like this." He gestured for Thompson to sit on the floor, placed a tiny cloisonne cup in his hands, and turned to the cooking unit. "Sake," he said proudly, over his shoulder. "A half-liter of the absolute best, brought all the way from Earth. And it should be just the right temperature now." He lifted a steaming saucepan off the burner and turned around. "Hold your cup steady." He poured delicately, somehow managing to hit the cup and not Thompson's fingers. The potent, acrid fumes brought tears to Thompson's eyes.
Next, Yuji filled his own cup, then raised it up to his face and breathed deeply. "Ah," he said, smiling broadly, "nectar of the gods!"
Thompson gulped and started to take a tentative sip.
"Wait!" Yuji called out. Thompson paused, with some relief evident. "Before we drink, a toast!"
Thompson looked into the cup, then back to Yuji. "You mean like 'Prosit'? Or 'Over the lips and through the gums, look out stomach—'"
"No. A real toast. To honor, glory, and battles that will live a thousand years in the hearts of men!" Yuji lifted his cup high. "Tenno heika, banzai!" He downed the sake in a single toss.
Thompson watched Yuji, then shrugged, and followed suit. "Remember the Alamo!"
Lacus Mortis
22 November 2069
06:30 GMT
Major Yuji Nakagawa pelted hell-for-leather down a narrow corridor inside the Lacus Mortis dome, trying to force a fresh power cell into his ACR pulse rifle as he ran. "Lieutenant Devereaux, report!" No response. "Sergeant Ganter!" Dead air.
A burst of projectile fire ripped across the plazmetal floor, and a glancing hit from behind made his shields flare. More out of instinct than thought, Yuji threw himself shoulder-first into a tiny alcove off to the right.
Ricochets spanged and spattered off the floor and walls, but the alcove offered some protection from direct fire. Yuji pulled himself up to a seated position with his back against the wall, then punched up the gain on his suit radio and tried again. "Lieutenant Devereaux! Report!" Again there was no answer beyond the faint hiss of an open comm channel.
Yuji Nakagawa swore fluently in three languages, then spared a moment for his jammed rifle. The drill was almost a reflex: clear, tap, reset, reload. All the red indicators switched to a satisfying green, and rifle hummed up to full power.
Whew. At least one thing on this mission was working right.
Yuji swung the rifle around to cover the corridor he'd just come from, then turned his attention to the suit radio. "Baker Squad!" He punched for the alternate NCO frequency. "Anyone in Baker Squad! Report!"
A hash of heterodyning signals stabbed through his ears; then the comm system signal processors sorted them out and one clear young voice emerged: "Corporal Jeffers reporting, sir. Sergeant Fong is dead." A harsh blare of static surged through, obliterating the voice. "—pinned down. Repeat: we are pinned down! Heavy full-automatic weapons fire! I count eight, possibly ten hosti—" Another blast of static; probably a side effect of Jeffers's shields taking a direct hit. "Heavy armor and at least one rocket laun—"
There was a sharp guttural noise, maybe human, maybe electronic, and then Corporal Jeffers went off the air.
"Corporal?" Yuji slammed a fist on his ACR in frustration, then punched up the Able Squad NCO frequency. "Sergeant Hegstrom! Update status!"
The Norwegian sergeant's laconic voice rolled through Yuji's helmet, speaking calmly in blatant defiance of the gunfire and screaming in the background. "It's worse, sir. Lieutenant Kirin just finished dying, and Beck and Parrant are both down. I don't think we can hold our position much longer." Something exploded with a noise that made Yuji jump, then he realized the sound had come through the comm link. "Sergeant, is that external sound I'm hearing?" he asked.
"Yes, sir, my helmet visor has been shot away. But I can still see okay out of my right eye."
Yuji sagged against wall and muted his end of the comm link. Oh,
you fickle, fickle gods of war...
He thumbed the comm link back on. "Get out of there, Sergeant. Take anyone who can still walk and head north, for the hangars. Try to rendezvous with Third Platoon."
Hegstrom sounded puzzled. "Sir?"
"That's an order! Mission scrubbed. Withdraw north and evacuate."
"But, sir, you and Baker Squad—"
"Baker Squad has been neutralized, and I'm cut off and pinned down. Save what you can, Sergeant."
There was a short, poignant pause. "Roger, sir. Hegstrom out." The link fell silent.
Yuji wasted a few moments fondling the corded hilt of his tanto knife, strapped tightly to the outside of his right boot. Then a sudden realization struck him like a slap in the face, and he sat up, all senses tautly alert.
The probing fire in the corridor had stopped.
Excluding divine intervention, that could mean only one thing: the bad guys were coming down the corridor to dig him out. If they had grenades, one of those silvery, spiky red things should come bouncing around the corner any moment now. Beads of icy sweat sprang out in Yuji's short black hair, and every muscle went tight. Ten seconds crawled by like snails.
No grenade. They must not have grenades. Slowly, Yuji drew one breath, then another, and willed his arms to relax and start moving again. They're going to do this the old-fashioned way. Carefully, deliberately, he lifted his rifle and sighted in on the place where he expected the first head to pop around the corner. So I'll get one. Maybe two.
His gaze fell on the large ventilation grate set in the wall on the far side of the corridor. One tiny detail slowly stood out. A door activator? Why would anyone put a door activator on a ventilation grate? Unless ...
He lowered the rifle a little. "No," he said softly. "That would be stupid." But insane as the notion seemed, it offered him the only glimmer of hope around. He got to his feet and stretched the kinks of out his leg muscles. "Crazy. Stupid." But what the hell have I got to lose? Rocking on the balls of his feet, he drew several deep, clearing breaths, focused on establishing a rhythm, pumped his chi until he felt as if his chest might explode, raised his rifle high, and—
"Banzai!" He burst into the corridor sprinting at top speed and firing like a madman, not at the enemy troops up the corridor—My gods, how'd there get to be so many of them?—but at that tiny bronze nubbin at the side of the ventilation grate. Some of the UN soldiers had wits and reflexes; as if in slow motion, guns opened up and lines of fire tracked across the corridor. In another instant they would catch up to him—
"HAI!" Yuji fired one last wild shot at the activator and threw himself into a headlong leap at the ventilation grate.
The shot connected. The grate flashed open to reveal the narrow secret passageway concealed behind it. Yuji hit the floor in a tuck-and-roll, came up on his feet, and slapped the door-close button as he sprinted past it. With a clang like the gates of Hell the grate slammed shut behind him.
Yuji didn't stop running. A dip in the tunnel, a left turn, a quick drop-and-roll to avoid colliding with a low-hanging beam. He hit a fork in the tunnel, took the right branch strictly on a hunch, and ran into a closed door.
The door slid open automatically, and Yuji's ACR made short work of the two enemy soldiers on the other side. He paused a second to listen for sounds of pursuit—there were none, he must have shaken them off—then knelt down to snag a spare oxygen bottle that had rolled away from one of the corpses.
Then he did a double-take. "UN troops in black uniforms?" he said out loud. "That's odd." He considered taking a moment to investigate the matter further, then decided it would be smarter to keep moving. Yuji set off again, this time at a fast jog.
The next corridor he emerged into was broader, better lit, and apparently empty. He shifted the rifle to his left hand, kept jogging, and tried the suit radio again. "Baker Squad?" No answer. "Able?" This time there was some kind of response, but the interference was too severe for it to be intelligible. "Alpha Company? Respond."
There was a burst of static, and then he could practically feel the Texan's warm grin through his headphones. "Yuji? Are you still alive?"
"So far. What's your situation, Lloyd?"
"Not good, little buddy. Not good. We're pretty much bottled up here in the hangars. The dirts can't get in, but we can't get out, either."
"The gunships?"
"Our compspecs couldn't crack the onboard computers, so we got 'em wired for demolition, but we'd kind of like to be out of here when that happens, y'know?"
"Roger that." Yuji came up to an intersection of corridors, flattened himself up against one wall, and edged along to the corner. Nothing to the left. Carefully, carefully, he tried a duck-and-peek. Nothing to the right.
Again, on a hunch, Yuji picked the left corridor and resumed his jog. "What about the Fourth Platoon?"
There was a pause from Thompson, a keyed mike, but no speech. "They're toast," he said at last. "We picked up a few stragglers, but—"
"Well, you'll pick up a few more lost sheep from me, if they make it. What about the Second and the colonel?"
"Word is Colonel Vachon came through right behind Terabi just before all hell broke loose. I haven't had any contact with the Second. Dirts've managed to jam all our long-range comm."
Yuji swore and shook his head.
His momentary distraction was almost fatal.
A tall soldier in a solid black uniform seemed to come out of nowhere, sweeping his heavy weapon down in a blow that knocked the ACR out of Yuji's hands and sent it spinning across the corridor floor. He followed up with a reverse to Yuji's head that threw him back against the wall and made his helmet ring like a cast-bronze gong. Before Yuji could recover, the man brought his weapon to bear and fired a burst at Yuji's head. Yuji managed to drop beneath that, but in trying to roll away from the Blacksuit, he slammed into a wall. As the air exited his lungs, he looked up to see his ACR beckoning to him from across the corridor, and one thought flashed into his mind: It's too far away. The killer clearly expected Yuji to go for the rifle, though, and stepped aside to get a clear field of fire.
Yuji saw his one opening. In a move he'd been preparing for all his life, he drew his tanto knife and swung it up and around in an arc that slid slowly through the enemy soldier's shields, then speeded up as it ripped deep into the man's left thigh. There was a high, inhuman scream, audible even through Yuji's helmet, as the black-clad soldier staggered back and tried to bring his weapon to bear, but it was already too late. Yuji was on his feet, willing his entire body to be a weapon, a lance of unstoppable iron, and in one fluid lunge he drove the blade of the tanto through the Blacksuit's shields, his armor, his sternum, and his heart.
Suit shields flared and flashed an iridescent blue; the feedback threw Yuji back against the wall. But something worse was happening to his attacker: his shields arced and shorted out, and thick snakes of dazzling lightning danced across his body as kilovolts of shield energy took the shortest path to ground.
The shortest path to ground was through the blade of the tanto. The soldier jerked and writhed like an earthworm impaled on an electrified hook, then dropped like a nerveless bag of meat.
"Yuji!" Nakagawa shook his head, blinked away the afterimages, and realized the ringing was in his ears, not his helmet. That, and he realized Thompson had been screaming through the open comm link for at least the last thirty seconds. "Major Nakagawa! Report!"
"I'm still alive," he said. He drew a deep breath, let it out, then staggered to his feet and over to the fallen Blacksuit. The corded hilt of his tanto, still embedded in the enemy's chest, was mostly gone, and what remained was still smoking. He grabbed it, and with considerable effort, wrenched it free. The blade was partially melted.
He dropped it on the floor with a clatter and turned his attention to the corpse. Until now he'd never really had a chance to take a good look at a black-suited soldier. The fallen man's uniform and insignia markings, subtle as they were, quickly told the whole story
.
Yuji sat down heavily on the floor, and thumbed his comm link back on. "Lloyd? I've got some bad news for you about the fellows in the black suits: they're not ATFOR."
Thompson's disbelief was audible. "Say again, Yuji? I coulda sworn I heard you say—"
"The Blacksuits are not ATFOR," Yuji repeated, speaking slowly and clearly. "They are NDE—New German Unity Army. Sturmwehr."
"You sure about that?"
Yuji cast another sidelong glance at the corpse. "Yes. Absolutely."
"Oh, Jesus H. Christ on a Popsicle stick! No wonder we got our asses handed to us on a platter. We gotta get word back to—"
"Yes," Yuji said. "That would be nice. Any idea how?" Thompson fell silent a moment, then laughed. "Well, my news is better than yours. My techs've hot-wired a cargo shuttle! Sergeant Hegstrom and the rest of your boys have shown up, and we're gettin' ready to bust outta here. Any chance you could still make the party?"
Yuji laughed, sighed, shook his head, and tried to feel about six emotions at once. "Yes, you goddam gaijin! Yes! Give me about fifteen minutes. If don't make it by then, I never will. Nakagawa out."
"Roger and a big ten-four, little buddy. Thompson out." The comm link went dead. Yuji laughed once more, then staggered to his feet, found his ACR on the other side of the corridor, picked it up, and checked it out.
The primary emitter was smashed, useless. "Damn!" Yuji threw the wrecked rifle down, then turned around, scowling and looking for something to kick. His eyes fell on the heavy multi-barreled automatic weapon of his deceased adversary.
"Well? Why not?" He picked up the weapon—it was massive but not unmanageable—then retrieved a spare ammunition drum from the corpse. "Sorry about that, Uberman." After making one last check to be sure the weapon was loaded and ready to rock, he started up the corridor—
And stopped. Turned back to the corpse. "Hey," Yuji asked, "does this mean I've lost my Honorary Aryan status?"
Chapter 18