by Victor Milán
"Were there other matters for discussion?" he asked.
The Marquis cleared his throat. "Coordinator, there remains but the trifling issue of how we are to handle Franklin Sakamoto upon his arrival."
Theodore shut his eyes.
10
Ukiyo District, Imperial City
Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
24 June 3058
"People here are nervous," Usagi said, slurping pickles and noodles from a bowl held right under what passed for his chin.
"They don't know how to have fun," added his partner Unagi, working his own chopsticks like an eggbeater.
Cassie sat at the outdoor table with legs crossed, trying not to bob her right pump too conspicuously from impatience. The two were doing her a favor. She couldn't rush them.
The noodle shop was in the ukiyo quarter far enough from the palace that everything wasn't gloomy black. The buildings ran to cheap stucco and an odd orange brick that seemed to be made of native clay. The passing pedestrian hordes gave Cassie as much eye as indirect Drac manners permitted. As usual she was worth it. She wore a dusty burgundy skirtsuit over a dove-gray blouse, something a receptionist for a forward-looking zaibatsu might wear in place of the dowdy traditional robes. Her abbreviated hair was done blonde with a rinse that would come out with a simple application of solvent and not strip her hair and make it stand out like straw—or so Raven had assured her. The Mech jock's true mane was perhaps not exactly the shade of ash-blonde she herself preferred to show the world. Cassie topped the ensemble off with a pair of sunglasses with red horizontal grooves across the tops—very now on Luthien, which meant they'd gone out of fashion on Hachiman before the Seventeenth ever set foot there.
But her skirt hit her well-turned thigh a little too high above the knee and was slit too high up the sides. That gave her away as a prostitute, specifically one kitted out to attract a mark with a fetish for OLs, Office Ladies. The noodle shop lay on the outskirts of the ukiyo—in its own subdued way, Imperial City's lowlife district—but so situated that Middle Class types who wanted to feel daring without real risk to person, purse, or face could lunch here and did. But the short, officially prescribed lunch hour had passed. The specialty streetwalker routine was a charm to avert evil eyes, specifically the ones belonging to the Friendly Persuaders of the Civilian Guidance Corps rolling by in twos in their candystripe unis, fondling their omnipresent stun guns.
Cassie's companions launched into a disquisition on how boring the local Water Trade was in contrast to Hachiman. Too many gei-boi-san clubs and hostess bars, it seemed, and no good jazz. Usagi and Unagi: the Rabbit and the Eel. "Eel" meant "rope" in ingo, signifying a second-story man. "Rabbit" was a petty thief. The names described their civilian occupations before being welcomed into the Ninth Ghost Legion, by way of the Drac penal system; they also hinted at their roles in the regiment.
The two were scouts, so-called. What they were was recon 'Mech pilots. As far as Cassie was concerned, scouting from a BattleMech was like trying to do it from inside a hundred-story air-conditioned high-rise with double-paned transpex windows. But they considered themselves her peers if not her equals, and because they did know the streets, she was willing to go along with the gag.
Besides, they were real tattoo men, no-mistake yaks. They could pass where even she could not.
Finally she couldn't hold back any longer. "Did you learn anything?" she asked.
"Sure," Unagi said, sucking down his final noodle like a baby bird with a worm. "Gang war."
"Outsiders're putting the moves on old Cat Yamaguchi," Usagi said.
"You're kidding," Cassie said. "Nope," Usagi said.
"Why should we be kidding?" Unagi asked. He pushed forward his empty bowl. "You wouldn't care to shell out for a little more?"
The two ate like starving Ghost Bears—the real thing, not the Clanners. They somehow still looked like washboards with pipestem legs. Even Cassie, who packed away a fair amount herself, wondered where they put it. She crooked a finger. The proprietor, a little wrinkly blond man, came out bowing and hissing as if they were slumming nobles— which first off they might have been. But even if they weren't, yaks and streetwalkers made up a respectable, at least in terms of volume, share of his customers.
Eel and Rabbit got rattling over nothing in particular again. Cassie drummed her fingers on the tablecloth and glared off at the busy street with its oddball Drac mixture of the high tech and the damned-near tribal: men with poles balanced across their shoulders with a chicken in a wicker basket at either end, marching past giant electronics-store display windows where naked zero-g ballerinas cavorted like dolphins in holovid. She was seriously torqued at herself. Here she was, the Perfect Scout, the ultimate long-range low-heat ass-in-grass operator, and she had missed a little detail like gang war in the house.
She had already gone through her self-rage routine—admitted it and talked it out with herself, the way Kali had helped her learn to do it. Her left forearm still bore a very fine network of ancient white cut-scars from her older mode of punishing herself for glitch-ups. That technique, with its strong negative reinforcement, had helped her learn to survive in the jungle, both metaphorical and actual. But now, by trial and error almost as painful as self-mutilation, she was learning ways and means of processing that didn't mean destroying herself by degrees.
One way she processed was to work out why the glitch happened. Not making excuses but trying to scan how to keep from putting her foot back in the same paint can with the nails driven inward and downward through the rim.
I've been making assumptions. For someone with her job description that was like flying on autopilot through a high mountain pass in a thunderstorm. The more so since it had been a solid, fact-based assumption.
The yakuza of the Combine had themselves a federation, seimeiyoshi-rengo. That federation had rules. The most ironbound concerned truces and no-man's land. Since Teddy the K, who had brought the yakuza into Combine society as no one had ever even thought about trying to before, had become Coordinator, no safety zone was more inviolate than Luthien during his big birthday bash.
And now—during the biggest Coordinator's Birthday celebration in history, or at least living memory—she'd expected the gang armistice to be plated in ferro-fibrous armor. It was a natural assumption.
Those are the worst kind.
She had been trying to get in with the local org, Yamaguchi-gumi. The Old Cat was the host oyabun, so his kai should have held the heart-meat of anything going down. And indeed it was so, only not in the way Cassie let herself anticipate.
Therein lay the friction-point. Yakuza society was closed society. No surprise—Drac society was closed society. But the irezumi world was even more hermetic. Unlike the realm of katagi, the squares, you could not slide inside by faking status, which Cassie was adept at, much less by having someone with mega status extend his coverage to you, the way Uncle Chandy had gotten her the interview with McCartney the tired homicide policeman. No, you had to know somebody. And not just to get into the gang. Even the people who worked the usual gang hangouts, the floating-world denizens, the waitresses and dealers and showgirls and even, yes, the prostitutes, had to have references.
There were ways to get to know somebody. Cassie knew how to do that too; she'd pulled it to perfection on Hachiman. But she found the local Luthien kai was jammed up tight as the fusion bottle in a BattleMech's belly. They were not accepting introductions today.
Unagi and Usagi had introductions in spades. Since their boss Lainie Shimazu was known for fanatical dedication to Theodore, and had no history of a negative stripe with Yamaguchi-gumi, these jokers had been able to dive right in and resurface with the data Cassie needed in hours.
But the answer was almost as puzzling as the original question. "I thought the Coordinator's Birthday was hands-off time," she said.
The two scouts looked at each other and shrugged. "Supposed to be—" Usagi began.
"—But Inagawa-san makes his own rules," finished Unagi.
"Inagawa?" Cassie looked from one junior scout to the other.
Usagi shrugged. "He's boss oyabun for the whole Benjamin District."
"And he feels big enough to take on Yamaguchi on his home ground?"
"He's a real up-and-comer in seimeiyoshi-rengo, Cassie-chan" Usagi said.
"He's got stones, and he's got muscle," Unagi added. "Maybe not so much brains, though."
"Isn't Inagawa worried what Teddy's going to do? I thought the Old Cat Yamaguchi was thick with him."
The noodle-shop owner came bustling out with two more bowls heaped with steaming noodles. "The Old Cat's got pride," Usagi said, tucking in as if he hadn't seen food in a month.
"He'd never ask Teddy for help," Unagi said through a mouthful.
"What do the other oyabun say?"
Shrugs in stereo. "He won't take their help either," said Usagi.
"Except some from Tosei-kai," Unagi said.
"The Koreans were working with him anyway," Usagi said. Tosei-kai, The Voice of the East, was a predominantly Korean org of gangs not tied to any planet or region of the Combine.
"But isn't it a major breach of etiquette for Inagawa to be making his move right now?"
Another shrug. "If a little dog barks, he gets a kick. If a big dog barks, he gets a bone," said Usagi, quoting a common Drac proverb. Which was something outsiders didn't understand about the supposedly consensus-based culture of the Combine: if you had the status, you could be as selfish and cantankerous as you wanted, and then "consensus" would consist in everybody accommodating you.
"Inagawa-san's a major leg-breaker," Unagi said. "And he's pals with old man Toyama."
That brought Cassie up. She lowered her outrageous sunglasses and peered over the top at them. "Hiraoke Toyama? Out of Dieron?"
They smirked at her. "That's the one," Usagi said.
"The one whose only son you bent on Towne," Unagi added with malicious glee.
"I didn't put Junior to sleep. It was Red Gallegos with her rockets. He's here? On the Pearl?"
"Right here in Imperial City," Unagi said.
"Why not?" Usagi asked ingenuously. "He never went against Theodore."
"In public," added Unagi.
That was key to the Combine: appearance was everything. That was also key to the recent history of the Caballeros. It was why they'd had to fight and die on Towne without the help, say, of a couple of DCMS regiments bone-loyal to Teddy, like the Ninth Ghost Legion. Because the Combine could not be seen to be warring against itself. Because neither Theodore nor the Black Dragons cared to publicly admit they were in conflict. Kusunoki and his Black Dragon allies pretended to the Universe— and assured their own soldiers—that they were acting out the Coordinator's wishes by claim-jumping his most powerful ally. Teddy pretended he was taking no action against them. So Hiraoke Toyama had done nothing wrong.
Sometimes even Cassie found the Combine seriously weird. Almost as weird as the Caballeros.
"So Inagawa is Kokuryu-kaiT she asked.
"He doesn't advertise," Usagi said.
"No matter how big you are, the ISF will still scatter you big-time if they learn you're a Black Dragon," said Unagi.
For that matter, Hiraoke Toyama had never publicly admitted the least connection to Kokuryu-kai. The army he had helped to raise—and sent into battle and ultimate destruction on Towne—did not announce to the world that it was a Black Dragon production, although its insignia did in fact sport a dragon that was black, but then, so did the Kurita state symbol. As far as appearance went, it was just a private army of the kind which, while discouraged inside the Combine, was not illegal to raise.
Cassie sat back and folded her arms. This gave her plenty to think about.
"Did we do good, Cassie-chan?" one. of them asked plaintively. Cassie was so lost in her thoughts she wasn't sure which it was.
"Sure. You guys did great. I'm just trying to figure out where to take what you got for me. Anything I can do for you—?"
They looked at each other. "There's one thing, maybe, Cass ..." Usagi said tentatively. "Trigger it."
"Do you think you could get Johnny Tchang's autograph for us?"
She stifled a sigh. "No problem."
She started to rise. "One more thing," Usagi said. "It's about Lainie—"
"—She's been acting funny since that party the other night. Not herself."
"I heard she was posing for pillow prints with the head of Voice of the Dragon. Our host." Cassie tugged at her skirt.
"That's not unusual for Lainie," Usagi said.
"Well, Migaki must be punching some buttons she didn't know she had. He's not her usual blond bimbo with biceps bigger than his brain. Maybe it's love."
The two looked at each other and tittered. "The Red Witch in love?" Unagi said incredulously.
"Her heart's shielded like a Hermes 320 XL fusion engine," Usagi said. "That's not it. There's something wrong."
Cassie held up her hands. "I don't know. I'll see what I can scope out." Like I don't have enough plates in the air. She didn't feel any closet to IDing a threat to the regiment, although the certainty was growing heavier in her gut that a threat existed. And here she was committed to solving a murder and straightening out a crazy redheaded Mech Warrior's love life. It didn't help that all the women in the Seventeenth hated her for puncturing Johnny Tchang's perfect tanned hide.
A whistling roar. The tablecloth blew off as the pedestrian flow parted and a garishly painted hovercar careened around the corner, almost caromed off a building front, then shot down the street with a turbine whine. Cassie jumped up, neglecting the way the fan-blast blew her skirt up around her waist. The vehicle's occupants were four or five young males with their hair shaved to scalplocks, dressed in what looked in a flash like yellow-trimmed black and green Jade Falcon dress uniforms. They catcalled at her as they blew by. She flipped them off before it even occurred to her that was perfectly in character.
Belatedly it occurred to her that it would do her cover no good to have to litter the Impy City streets with bleeding bodies. Before they could take umbrage at her gesture, the hovercraft had rounded another corner with a noise like an Elemental-sized mosquito and was gone.
"What the hell was that?" she demanded. Around her the citizens were picking themselves us, gathering their groceries back into covered baskets or whatever. Down the block people were stepping gingerly around a snowfall scatter of broken glass where the buggy's blast had taken out a display window. The owner had emerged and was losing it in buckets, jumping up and down and hollering.
"Dekigoro-zoku," Unagi said. "Sudden impulse tribe."
"Rich kids out looking for trouble," Usagi added with a sneer.
"How rich?" Cassie asked. "Upper Middle Class," Usagi said. "And some buke," Unagi said.
"Don't remember them from Hachiman," Cassie said. "I recall the rich kids mostly riding around on crazy, motor scooters."
"They don't seem to've caught on as much there yet," Usagi said.
"For once," Unagi said, "the Pearl's ahead of the fashion curve."
11
Basin Lake, Outside Imperial City
Luthien
Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine
24 June 3058
A brisk breeze stirred the stiff leaves of the capylar trees on shore into a noise like distant applause. Lainie Shimazu let her hand trail over the graphite-fiber gunwale of the sailboat into the cool green water of Basin Lake.
"I grew up rich and spoiled," she said to Takura Migaki, who lounged in the stern with his hand on the tiller. "Daddy was determined to bring me up so no one would ever guess where I came from. Of course you know how futile that is; the stain never comes out. Everybody in our whole society might as well have their station tattooed on them, not just us yakuza."
Migaki nodded judiciously. He was wearing a plug hat, a black tailcoat, a pair of sunglasses with little tiny black disk
s for lenses, a very arch parody of the pseudo-Western dress Draconians affected for certain formal occasions. She was wearing a maroon silk shirt and issue MechWarrior noncombat trousers, dark gray with red stripes down the legs, over calf-high black boots. He thought she looked altogether exotic, dangerous, and delicious. Then again, he had a self-acknowledged tendency to romanticize the tawdry and even the depraved. It went with being a tsu.
Is she the most intriguing woman I've met? he wondered. Or is she just mad? Are they one and the same ? Does it matter? One thing was certain, she had him chasing his own intellectual tail like a freshman at university, an invigorating thing in itself. He caught himself at the brink of laughing out loud. He knew it would not be well received.
She extended a finger, watched the tiny wake spreading away from it. Servomotors made tiny whirs as they trimmed the ballistic-fabric sail to the nuances of the wind, as interpreted by the computer built into the base of the carbon-filament mast. Several boats shared the lake with them, their sails white triangles cut out of the low green line of Waseda Hills.
"I rebelled. Of course. He wanted me to be the perfect lady; I chose to be the perfect tomboy. Got thrown out of the finest private schools on half a dozen worlds—schools he spent a fortune on bribes to get me into in the first place. I wanted to learn to ride and shoot and beat people up. Well, finally he brought me home to—to the planet where we lived. He would keep me under his watchful eye. He'd even let me take lessons in the things I wanted to learn, if I promised to make an effort at being a lady. And I made an effort, even if it was half-assed."