by Victor Milán
"Is she really so formidable, then?" he asked. "She seemed mainly interested in avoiding confrontation. Wise, under the circumstances."
"Lieutenant Senior Grade Suthorn would do nothing before witnesses that might shame her colonel," the redhead said. "But, never fear, if that fool had succeeded in manhandling her, he'd have been found come morning floating face-down in some canal, neatly folded."
"Folding" was one of the numberless yak euphemisms for murder.
He nodded his narrow head. "So ka? Our brigadier was really in danger of reenacting the climax of Inherit the Shadow!"
She gave him a quizzical look.
"A twenty-ninth century Davion adventure holovid. You're not a fan of classic movies?" The redhead shook. He shrugged and asked, "She's really that good?"
"You should be well aware of that already, Deputy Director Migaki."
Takura Migaki gave her a world-weary smile. "I'm a propagandist, not a secret policeman. I don't have endless access to intelligence dossiers—'need to know' and all that. I did get to read the condensed version of her file, I will admit, as I did for all our more important gaijin guests. The better to spin tales of their deeds to the greater glory of the Dragon and our illustrious Coordinator. May I offer you this fine brandy? Spurning it was not the least of Sho-sho Donaldson's unwisdoms this night."
"I'd be honored to drink the Coordinator's health in your brandy, Migeki-sama." She accepted the glass, raised it, drank. All the while her eyes held his. Her eyes were maroon, with highlights of flame within.
"I read enough of her file to suspect I was doing the man a favor, even though my Helping Hands won't coddle him," he said. The redhead was several centimeters taller than he. Truly magnificent, he thought.
She laughed low in her throat. "Sewanuki," she echoed. "That's good."
"Helping Hands"—sewanuki—was yakspeak for a strong-arm man, but its main, arch sense was "drunk-roller."
"You use our thieves' talk with panache, Migaki-sama."
"Takura, please. And considering its source, I cherish that compliment, Tai-sa Shimazu."
She arched a narrow brow. "You know who I am?"
"Your file also happened across my desk, since your Heruzu Enjeruzu were invited here to be honored too. Fascinating reading. And I'm enchanted and honored to make your acquaintance at last, Tai-sa."
"So ka?" The eyebrow stayed arched.
"Indeed." He took her hand, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.
She made a low sound in her throat and smiled, an expression half-ironic, half-predatory. "Such a very Occidental gesture," she murmured, "from the man charged with preserving our Combine traditions."
He held her hand an extra heartbeat before releasing it. Then he shrugged. "Our culture's evolving, thanks to the Coordinator's reforms. For the better, I think—and not just because it's my duty to say so. And it's always been the Dragon's way to assimilate the best from other cultures, iie?"
She laughed. "You're a glib scoundrel, Takura Migaki." It was his turn to laugh. "That's my job description, Colonel."
He looked up and down her considerable length, and noted the way she stiffened. He finished his scan, then looked back into her eyes. His relaxed posture and slight self-mocking smile said that while his appraisal was predatory, it was not demanding. Seeing that, she unbent— slightly.
"Lainie," she said. "Aren't you afraid of losing face by being seen with me, Migaki? A yakuza, the next thing to eta?"
He didn't blink at the use of the forbidden word. "Not at all. At worst it can only enhance my iki, my rakehell affect. I more expect my reputation to be enhanced, consorting with a war hero of your stature."
She made a non-committal noise and leaned her back against the railing, studying the crowd through the invisible barrier with a hunting-cat's eye. "You don't flatter easily, then," he said matter-of-factly. "So it goes, although I meant what I said. Do you like movies?"
She gave that a moment's thought. "Chambara," she said, referring to hack-and-slash sword operas, usually but not invariably historical. "And vids where things blow up."
"You're not a three-handkerchief woman, then?" Vids that induced weeping—their effectiveness measured in handkerchiefs—were just as popular among Combine men as women.
She shrugged. "What about mujo?" It was a Buddhist term for the transience of life, and colloquial for the cinema of cruelty.
"Too pretentious."
He pulled a mouth. He was a mujo fan himself, although even under Theodore's more permissive rule the making of such films was a fairly subterranean enterprise.
He was about to say more when he saw the color fall out from behind her freckles, giving her face a greenish tint. He turned.
A broad-shouldered, square-headed specimen had made an entrance. He wore a dark Occidental-style business suit and a blue silk cravat with a knot the size of a baby's head tied around what passed for his neck. A pair of taller and even broader specimens had winged out either side and were scoping the crowd with big, dark, round-lensed shades and an air of menace so transparently stagy he would have ranked out any director who allowed any such thing to appear in one of his Eigatoshi holovids. Migaki recognized the man immediately, of course. It was Benjamin Inagawa, yazuka boss of the Benjamin District.
The host, a wispy man with a goatee and samurai topknot, tarted up in voluminous seventeenth-century ceremonial garb as if to make up for the fact that he was a blue-eyed blond, rushed up with effusive greetings. Which, for the dance mix and air curtain, Migaki could hear none of.
He felt a grip on his arm, firm as a strong man's. "Let's go," Lainie Shimazu said hoarsely. "Go?"
"To your flat."
Migaki raised an eyebrow. The broad-jawed man and his own sewanuki were moving through the crowd, Which was doing a new approachIavoidance dance: some of the partiers, the elegant buke and their escorts in particular, seemed to want to rush up and patronize the newcomers. The military types, for the most part, veered away from them as if similarly charged.
Migaki was startled to see this newcomer. This spitfire Laine Shimazu was one thing, a warrior who had shed much blood—hers and others'—on the Dragon's behalf. And he'd have had no objection to seeing Hiroo "the Cat" Yamaguchi, head oyabun of Luthien's own yakuza, for the old man was an unswerving supporter of Theodore's. Yet neither Yamaguchi nor any of his more-prominent sabu were anywhere in evidence. And there was something about seeing the cream of Imperial City nobility suck up to some off-world gang lord that turned Migaki's stomach.
Now, that's not proper iki, he chided himself semi-facetiously. Aloud he said, "Your sudden migratory impulse wouldn't have anything to do with the no-neck who just honored us with our presence, would it?"
"No questions."
The maroon eyes that met his were more hunted than passionate. "If you want me, we'll go to your place now," she said. "Otherwise, forget you ever saw me, Propaganda Man."
"That wouldn't be easy."
Migaki's mind boiled over with questions. The whole scene seemed straight out of a holovid, which in most circumstance would mean it fulfilled most of his most cherished fantasies. But his air of hard-won experience wasn't counterfeit, even though it most definitely was for show. And the experience he'd won so hard suggested that when something seemed too good to be true, it was.
Nonetheless, the true tsu courted risky romance, and knew when to shut up and go.
So he extended his arm to the tall woman, and, guiding her by a path that scrupulously avoided the newly arrived oyabun and his pet legbreakers, he shut up and went.
7
Cinema City, Outside Imperial City
Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
22 June 3058
"Look! There he is!" The gaggle of Caballero kiddos broke and streamed toward Johnny Tchang like Wasedian geese heading for a pond at the end of a hard day's migration. Their escorts followed across the hard-packed lot, no less eager but too proud to show it. Mostly.
The golden boy himself was performing wonderful evolutions atop wooden pilings randomly sunk into the ground and sawed off to various heights. He seemed to flow from one to the other like fog along the ground. The children surrounded the pilings and stood staring up adoringly. Without interrupting his fluid movements, the star flashed them a quick greeting grin.
Cassie followed at a more deliberate pace, along with twenty or so adult 'lleros, mostly but not all women. She and Raven were pulling childcare detail this morning. The rest were, like the kids, avid for a first glimpse at the Inner Sphere's favorite martial arts star in the flesh.
Much as she hated distractions when she was on the job, Cassie didn't mind babysitting. Children were her one weakness—at least the one she'd acknowledge to herself— and they loved her. Besides, it wasn't as if she was turning up anything yet.
Or maybe she was turning up too much. She was playing street games, operating in several of her stock personas, trying to draw a look from the yaks. Normally they would have been all over her; they didn't take kindly to competition. But with most of the yak orgs in the whole Draconis Combine attending Teddy's birthday party in force, the street was one big seethe of outlaws. The gangs were too busy sniffing around each other to pay mind to one little stray. She felt urgency darting around like a loose rat in her rib cage, but she could rationalize this break for the children's sake.
Aside from her customary aplomb, Cassie's lack of haste was dictated by the short legs of Marcos Vasquez, aged four, who toddled by her side clutching a lop-eared stuffed rabbit with one chubby hand and Cassie's hand with the other. Once a voluble talker, he had not spoken a word since his mother had been executed by Howard Blaylock's firing squad on Towne.
He would come out of it in time. For a Caballero child to lose a parent was nothing new—although for one so young to have his mother murdered literally before his eyes was rare. If the former Lady K had not been raped by Blaylock, and thus gone straight to the head of the score-settling list, the other 'lleros would have been seriously torqued at her for flash-boiling his brains with her sidearm laser during the intaking of his stronghold.
But now little Marc had several hundred mommies; the support mechanism of lafamilia had kicked in. And four or not, Marc was still a Southwesterner. That meant he was a survivor. Not for nothing was the Cerillos coyote the mascot of the Trinity worlds in general and the Seventeenth Recon in particular.
The adult Caballeros were nosier than the children as they caught up. The dazzling bravura of Johnny Tchang's performance shut them up.
And then there was the man himself. Up close and personal he was no disappointment. Bare-chested, in loose white silk pants and black Chinese slippers, he was tall, 180 centimeters or so, and one of those seamless blends of Chinese and gweilu genes: smooth tanned skin, unruly crow-black bangs hanging almost in almond eyes, long features redeemed from near-effeminate beauty by a squarish jaw. He had the greyhound musculature of an acrobat, broad in chest and shoulders, flat in the gut and narrow in the hips, but rather than bulky wads of fiber, his muscles were tight as the wire windings of a magneto.
He leapt panther-like from one piling to another one half a meter higher, landed on his right foot, with his left thrusting out behind him in a back kick while he bent forward into a right-hand punch. Then, holding his pose, he pivoted slowly through 180 degrees, as smoothly as if he were mounted on a turntable.
The pattern went on, kicking, punching, lightly leaping. Cassie was not a fan of the martial arts per se, but since her speciality was close-quarters combat—against anything from alley-bashers to Atlases—she had at least a rude acquaintance with most of the Inner Sphere's major systems, there being far too many subsystems, variants, and one-off special arts in human space for any one individual to keep the names of all of them in her mind, much less know anything about them. What they were seeing here was Chinese wushu of a high order, she knew that much. While wushu, like many arts, had its lexicon of set patterns or forms, practitioners also made up their own forms, including their own original moves. She guessed that was what Johnny Tchang was performing here.
"Ooh," cooed Misty Saavedra, who had an expression on her face that norteños usually reserved for apparitions of the Virgin. "Isn't he beautiful."
Cassie caught herself thinking the same thing. He was quick and smooth, and his balance was almost as finely tuned as hers—and pentjak-silat practitioners made a religion of balance, almost, or at least her guru, Johann, had. And yes, the man himself was pretty, almost achingly so ...
She shut her eyes and shook herself. When she opened them little Marc was looking up at her with concern in his wide brown eyes, and Tchang's set was ending.
The crowd broke into wild applause and wolf-howls of approval—yipping gritos and drawn-out rebel yells. Grinning, as if he were unused to being the center of all this attention, Johnny Tchang jumped down, gave a stand-easy sign to the plainclothes security types who were starting to get visibly nervous about the mob scene, accepted a towel from a trainer and began rubbing off the coat of sweat he'd worked up in the morning sun.
"Thanks, folks," he said. "It's good to be appreciated."
"You were wonderful," Misty breathed. She was so lathered up she said it in Spanish, and Johnny did a curious take at her before she caught herself and repeated it in a language even a Davion transplant would understand.
He shrugged self-deprecatingly. "I've been doing this a long time."
"It's very pretty," Cassie heard a voice say, "but it's just dancing."
Silence fell like a knee-capped Awesome. Suddenly Cassie was primary to a whole solar system of staring faces. Belatedly she recognized the voice that had spoken as her own.
She was never one to back down. "I know that isn't easy," she said, "and you do it very well. But it doesn't have a lot to do with fighting."
A growl rose from the mob around her. Most norteños and a certain number of the Cowboys would argue that mariachi action star Tino Espinosa was the best, but the rest, particularly the Indians who were mad for kung-fu, hailed Johnny Tchang as supreme. And even the Tino boosters acknowledged Tchang as the number-two god of the cosmos. This was pushing the envelope even for Cassie.
Why did I have to go and open my mouth?
She was no big vidbuff, but from her vernacular knowledge of stars, what she expected Johnny to do was shoot up into the air like a rocket, trailing sparks. Instead he just shrugged and kept toweling himself.
"You're right," he said. "It doesn't. It's mostly an art form. It always has been, ever since it was invented in the twentieth century. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have applications. And I have studied other arts: White Crane, wing chun, kickboxing. Migaki-san has been thoughtful enough to provide some excellent ryw-squared instructors for me since I've been here, too."
"Ryw-squared" was a nickname for ryu-bujutsu, the Dragon's Warrior-Techniques, which could also be called ryu-ryu, for Dragon School. Though they sounded identical, the two words were written with different kanji ideograms. It was a popular kind of pun among the Dracs.
Cassie didn't know why she was feeling so flustered and fluttery, but she was for once willing to swallow her skepticism and let things lie. And then Vanity, who had been undulating through the mob of adults and children like a bad actress trying to portray a stripper in a B-holovid, said, "So you think you could take him, do you, Cassie?"
Cassie looked neurotoxins at her. "I'm not saying that—"
"Oh, but you did," Vanity purred. "Back on the Jump-Ship, watching Exit the Dragon. Remember?"
Cassie remembered no such thing. She hadn't said that and never would. She thought it, but it wasn't the kind of thing she advertised.
"Yeah, that's right," Misty Saavedra chipped in. "You were saying he wasn't so hot."
The other 'lleros were agreeing, damn the lot of them. Maybe they honestly didn't remember correctly, or maybe they were trying to pay her back for her apostasy. Or maybe they just had a hankering to ind
ulge the age-old Southwestern fondness for seeing things fight.
"Don't you think this would be a good time to let us see if you're for real, or all show and no go?" Vanity asked with venomed sweetness. "Or if you're afraid—"
That showed what Vanity knew. Cassie could give a dead rat's ass what others thought of her motivations, even her familia. Just because she loved them desperately didn't necessarily mean she liked most of them.
And then Johnny Tchang said, "It would be hard to make it an even match," he said.
Something in Cassie broke like a trigger sear. She turned to face the actor. "Maybe you think so," she said, interrupting whatever he was going to say next. "But I'm willing to try. That is, if you're not afraid to risk being shown up by a mere woman."
He blinked, obviously taken aback by her hard-eyed anger. Mishcha Kurosawa had materialized on the scene, as was his wont, like a good little secret-police spy or a good fixer, whichever. He moved between the two like a teacher breaking up a schoolground fight.
"Here, now, Lieutenant, don't bother yourself," he said. "It's almost lunchtime, and Mr. Tchang has a busy shooting schedule—"
"I can wait for lunch," Cassie said.
The kuromaku looked to Tchang, who nodded. "It's all right, Mishcha. I've got a little slack in my schedule right now. They're having some trouble with the crew over at Sound Stage 5. Some new people who aren't quite broken in."
Mishcha turned from him to Cassie. His assignment was the Seventeenth, not Johnny Tchang, but obviously if the Liao-turned-Davion superstar who Takura Migaki had moved heaven and earth to get into one of his productions came to harm through anything Kurosawa did or didn't do, young Mishcha was going to find himself a combat grip on a crew making a you-are-there documentary about a kamikaze raid on Kanowit in the Smoke Jaguar Occupation Zone, and no mistake. For a secret-police bancho Migaki was remarkably human, maybe even the weakling Kiguri and Ninyu Kerai and the other koha—"hard school"—tough guys in the ISF made him out to be. But as a studio boss he was a screaming perfectionist.