Black dragon

by Victor Milán

  She lifted her hand from the water. "And then—" She flicked droplets from her fingertips. They caught and split the morning sunlight, so that they glittered like fragments of shattered rainbows. "—Gekokujo. Those below rising against those above. A trusted lieutenant thought the old man was losing his touch. So he went for it. There's another dark secret we inherited from our Japanese ancestors: loyalty to one's lord is absolute—unless you figure you can topple him and get away with it. If you can, everyone figures you're entitled to the job."

  She shrugged. "So the treacherous lieutenant became a respected and powerful oyabun. Daddy became dead. And the tomboy became a fugitive, and suddenly life wasn't a game any more."

  Silence came down like premature evening. For a while they let the lake's voice have the floor, the bubble and swish of water on the hull, the hiss of wind.

  "Incredible story," Migaki said, shaking his head, when it became apparent he wasn't going to have any more of it just now.

  She looked at him with a lopsided grin. "Just like a movie. You like it that way, Iie?"

  He laughed. "Hai. I do. Real life is never so sweet as when it imitates the holovids."

  "We've led different lives, honey."

  "So we have. I'd love to make your story into a movie. Except—"

  "Except the yak lifestyle isn't exactly an aspect of Combine life the Voice of the Dragon is supposed to be glorifying, is it?"

  "It would be controversial," he admitted. "Still, if you'd be willing, Lainie-chan, I could—what is it?"

  Something like a look of pain had flashed across her face. She waved him off. "Nothing. Just—can we talk about something that isn't me for a while?"

  "To be sure." He rubbed his chin and thought furiously. Nothing for making one's mind go blank like having someone demand a topic change. "I know: I've come up with a way to solve two problems at once, and I'm very proud of myself."

  She clasped hands, steepled her fingers before her mouth, and grinned. "Okay. Impress me."

  He tipped his hat sardonically. "First of all, our guests— Voice of the Dragon's guests—are getting bored. They can only sit still for protocol lessons for so long and I for one can't blame them. After a year on Hachiman our Luthien society doesn't have much novelty for them, except what amusement comes from us being five years behind Hachiman trendwise. And when they get bored, they act as if they were raised to our old proverb, that one has no shame away from home."

  "The Seventeenth? A bunch of total maniacs." Lainie spoke matter-of-factly. If there was inflection at all, it was a touch of admiration.

  "To say the least." Most recently a water fight that had erupted in the dorm's communal baths—the Caballeros scrupulously segregated the men's bathing hours from the women's, which even a sophisticated man-of-the-Inner Sphere such as Migaki found startling—had escalated into a running battle up and down the corridors and stairwells, involving water-balloons, waste baskets filled with water, fire hoses, and eventually flying fists and furniture as noses got bumped and tempers spiked. Fortunately the yohei officers had restored order before too much damage was done. Then there was the incident in which the gaijiri's wild-woman scout poked a hole in the prodigiously insured hide of the star Migaki had moved heaven and earth—which not only regarded all things as straw dogs, but were damned heavy—to get on his lot. At least the she-demon had the decency to puncture him where it wouldn't show.

  "The other problem has been realism in the new holovid I'm making with Johnny Tchang. Dragon Phoenix. The ruse of Theodore's that Sho-sho Hideyoshi pulled on the Clanners beside this very lake is looking a little too threadbare in our version of it. The Smoke Jaguars might fall for LoaderMechs tarted up like Thunderbolts and Archers, but our Combine viewing public is much too discerning."

  "You're going to hire the Caballero 'Mechs to be in your movie?"

  "With them inside, of course. From what Ernie Katsuyama tells me, they're very good."

  "They are that," Lainie told him. "But watch out for that natural exuberance of theirs. Otherwise you could wind up with a real mess on your hands."

  Migaki nodded self-assuredly. His companion watched him with lids low over those magnificent amber eyes, as if she suspected his ego was getting the better of him.

  "Meanwhile," he said, "we're near completion of our shooting schedule on my other big project. Costume dramas present their own layers of complexity, but they tend to be less expensive than the ones for 'Mech operas. In my own cineaste I'm more thrilled with it than with landing the Inner Sphere's biggest action star. There hasn't been a good Chushingura vid for better than two centuries, more if you discount the ones updated to contemporary Kurita society ..."

  His words ran like water down a storm drain. The healthy wheat-color of Lainie's skin had drained right out from behind her freckles, and her eyes looked like holes punched in a shoji door.

  "Lainie-chan! What's the matter? If I've said something—" On the Observing Self level he was amazed and amused to hear himself contrite as a stripling. Or maybe a seventeenth-century artist who feared he had offended his favorite courtesan.

  "It's ... nothing." She gave her head a terminating shake. "Can we just not talk about that historical drama of yours?"

  "Certainly," he said, blinking. Maybe that was what drew him to her, as much as her beautiful body, exotic face, and untamed samurai spirit (although she'd react to that suggestion with the same vehement contempt a real samurai would): she was capable of surprising him. Few people of any gender could make that claim. "What would you—?"

  She looked him in the eye. Her amber eyes were maroon in the sunlight. They reminded Migaki of an animal's eyes. A hunted animal.

  "Take me somewhere," she said from low in her throat, "and make me forget the whole damned universe."

  * * *

  "So what's this here say?" Cowboy Payson asked, leaning down to squint at a discreet brass plaque set into black marble next to three steps leading down from street level to a door. The writing was in kanji, Chinese ideograms. .

  "Oh," said Mishcha. "It's the entrance to a night club. Nothing to interest you here."

  Cowboy hiked up an eyebrow at him. "You got that tone of voice again says you're trying to keep one of us round-eyes outta trouble, Mishcha old pal." He straightened slowly. "Maybe I should mosey in and check out the action."

  Mishcha rolled his eyes up in his head. They were slightly sunken into a face that was noticeably paler than when the 'lleros first encountered him. Even the overamped colors of his shirt looked wilted. Cowboy started down the steps.

  "It says, 'gei boi-san-tachi to enjoi shite kudasai,' " said Buntaro Mayne, Cowboy's one-eyed friend from the Ninth Ghosts.

  "What's that mean?"

  " 'Please enjoy the Mr. Gay Boys.' "

  Cowboy stopped dead, then backed up the short flight. Buck Evans slapped him on the back of his tattered chambray shirt as the other six or seven Caballeros out taking in the sights burst into laughter.

  "Not so fast, mijo," Buck said. "State you're in now, a body can't afford to be choosy."

  Cowboy batted his hand away. They moved along. A park opened up to the right. The sidewalks were lined with kiosks, selling items for the impending celebrations: strings of firecrackers and origami cranes, paper kites, banners with patriotic slogans painted on them. The 'llero party trolled along in the gutter, risking stinking buses emitting belches of formaldehyde fumes from the alcohol fuel they burned.

  "What are we looking for here, anyway?" Raven asked.

  "I'm hunting souvenirs, myself," Cowboy said, examining a figurine of pot-bellied Hotei, the jovial Stick-and-Sack Priest. The Caballeros were very familiar with that particular one of the Seven Fortunate Gods; the most popular brand of whiskey on Hachiman was named for him. "Always kind of hoped to loot Luthien someday. I'm sure as heck not going home empty-handed."

  "Hey, these folks are big on giving presents, cuate," Jesse James Leyva said. "We'll get something out of this when we go meet the big gu
y."

  "Yep. A two-bit rice bowl and a pat on the fanny. 'Good job, boys and girls. Thanks for coming. Next.' "

  "I'm after diversion at any cost," Risky Savage said. She had relaxed enough about being a mother to be able to leave her son Bobbi at the nursery with the other kids and go off on her own for hours at a time. "If I spend any more time being lectured on how to behave by someone I can barely understand, I think I shall go mad."

  Just then a hovercar appeared from down the block in a cloud of litter blown up by its road fans. It settled in the middle of the street with a dying whine as five youths in mock-Clan costume vaulted over the sides. They came strutting up to a rickety stand selling paper lanterns with chests thrown out, conscious of the nervous stares turned their way.

  "My, my," Buck Evans said. "What have we here?"

  "Nothing," Mishcha Kurosawa said nervously. "Let us be moving along now. We have to be back at Eiga-toshi before it gets too late. You have a shoot this afternoon."

  The youths had gathered around the lantern-stand and were fondling the merchandise. The tallest of the five, a lanky fellow with a green-dyed scalplock, picked up a ribbed orange lantern on a stick and began to poke holes in it with gauntleted fingers. The kiosk woman, an elderly lady in black, came teetering out from behind the counter on stick legs, expostulating wildly. The boy sneered and pushed her down to the pavement."

  Cowboy set down his idol. "Now this kind of thing just torques my nuts," he said, and strode toward the lantern stand.

  "Looks like Risky's going to get her wish, iqui no?" Jesse James said.

  The youths were playing keepaway with a stick with seven lanterns tied to it, laughing at the market woman's efforts to snatch it back and the way she limped heavily on her right leg. Cowboy walked up behind the ringleader. "Hey, man, don't you think you're getting a little out of hand?" He grabbed the boy by a padded shoulder-piece and turned him around.

  The boy wheeled into him, leaping up to deliver a stiff-legged spinning kick aimed at Cowboy's head. Cowboy bobbed his lean body out of the way and took a step back. The boy dropped into an L-stance, hands stiffened into shuto blades.

  "Hey, man," Cowboy said, holding up his hands. "I don't want no trouble—"

  The ringleader grinned like a shark. The gaijin was showing throat. This was going to be fun. He made ready to destroy.

  About then Cowboy looped an overhand right into his face, slamming down at just the right angle to break the kid's nose. The kid squawked and went down, blood spurting between his fingers. Cowboy commenced to kick him in the ribs with the pointed, steel-reinforced toes of his lizard-skin boots.

  A second kid whipped his hand, which suddenly held a gleaming half-meter of extendible brass baton. He advanced on Cowboy. Without breaking the rhythm of his stomping, Cowboy whipped open a lockback folding knife and pressed the blade up under the base of the kid's nose.

  "Don't go sticking it into other people's business, Sparky," Cowboy said, "unless you're looking to get it cut off."

  The other rough boys started to wing out to take Cowboy in a pincers movement. The other Caballeros suddenly sprouted an astonishing array of knives. Mishcha had discouraged them from carrying firearms, banned to private citizens in the Combine, and word had come down from the Colonel himself to respect their hosts' wishes. On the other hand, carrying edged weapons reinforced one's status as a warrior. The Caballeros loved guns. But they liked knives too.

  Brandishing a Bowie with a 25cm blade in one hand, Buck Evans reached out to pull Cowboy back by the collar with the other. The hard boys scooped up their fallen warrior and fell back toward their vehicle. Just before they got there, the boy with the broken face shrugged off his pals' helping hands to point his finger at Cowboy, his blood-bearded mouth twisted in fury.

  Cowboy strutted forward a couple steps. "Any time, pinche," he called. "I'll be waiting."

  "Come. We go now. This very bad," said Mishcha, whose grasp of English was slipping like a speeding 'Mech that had suddenly found itself on a frozen lake. "Their fathers very big men. Very important."

  "Well, you just tell 'em my Daddy's a tornado and my Momma's a, uh—"

  "Volcano," supplied Jesse, slapping Cowboy on the shoulder. "That's why you're so full of hot air."

  From an alcohol-burning sedan parked just around the corner, two men watched what was happening through dark polarized vitryl as the gang boys retreated to their hovercar, hurling Parthian insults like a pack of apes. Both men were compact and tightly muscled. Both wore dark, nondescript clothes and black wraparound sunglasses that hid most of their features.

  "Fools," said the man behind the wheel. He was the broader of the two, in face and shoulders, and had the good fortune that his skin showed the wheat-colored tone popularly associated with strong Japanese ancestry. "These gaijin with their silly notions of chivalry. Predictable as a ball rolling down a chute."

  "I wouldn't be so sure, boss," said his partner, whose skin was black. Like his superior he had thick black hair planed off in an abrupt flat-top like a slab of basalt. "Might turn out they're as predictable as pachinko balls."

  "Nonsense. They were so eager to fall into our trap they scarcely waited for us to set it. Those young chimpira were supposed to work their way up to insulting the money-troopers' women, remember?" Chimpira was yak-speak for "punk," with the usual street and jailhouse connotations. Neither man would strike any but the most naive stranger as yakuza, however. They were cut from different cloth altogether.

  "It might be so," the black man said, crossing his arms and settling himself lower in his seat. Under his breath he muttered, komatta ya, "this worries me."

  The rough boys piled back into their vehicle and rushed away in a swirl of blown-up debris. The gaijin stood looking after them in postures of belligerence.

  "Don't be such an old woman," the first man reproved. "The yohei have made enemies in public. It'll be child's play to get them to step over the line. Everything will turn out just the way Big Number One says it will. Mark my words, you'll see."

  The black man grunted.

  12

  Cinema City, Outside Imperial City

  Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  24 June 3058

  The lobby of the dorm that was housing the Seventeenth buzzed like a cow carcass on a midsummer morning on Galisteo. Some of the 'lleros were dragging back from an afternoon as enemy extras in Migaki's epic. Others, having gotten off earlier, had showered and dressed and were headed downstairs in search of refreshment and recreation. All of them, whether they were too vain to show it or not, took note of Johnny Tchang, dressed in black turtleneck and dark gray blazer, loitering by a potted plant with a bouquet of flowers behind his back.

  "My, my," Captain Vanity Torres said to her entourage, pausing at the platform where two sets of stairs converged from the mezzanine to form a broad staircase leading down to the central lobby. "Will you take a look at that?"

  Her retinue, mostly younger norteñas not pretty enough to challenge the captain's namesake trait, made appropriately admiring noises and gestures at the sight of Migaki's expensively imported star, who was answering greetings with smiles and friendly nods. That won him points among the Southwesterners, who were a pretty informal bunch themselves most of the time, and liked a man who didn't put on airs. Everyone politely ignored the two immense shaven-headed ex-sumitori who flanked Tchang at a discreet remove.

  "Good thing I'm dressed for the occasion," Vanity went on. And indeed she was. She wore a form-fitting white dress that began at mid-breast and stopped at mid-thigh, with various cut-outs in between, that set off to perfection her skin, the color of cinnamon toast and smooth as a Voice of the Dragon newsreader on the Laborers-go-to-bed news vid-cast. She wore white bangle earrings that would have overwhelmed a lesser woman, and white high heels. She looked like a million C-bills wrapped around a one-up in the great holovid game of life.

  Leaving her retainers in the dust she accel
erated without showing hurry, descending the steps and approaching the waiting superstar. As she approached he got a big smile on his long, handsome face, then pushed himself off the square pillar he was leaning against to walk toward her. He brought up the flowers—

  —And cruised right on past as if she were a stand-up ashtray. "Lieutenant Suthorn," he said to the slim, dark woman who was trying to slip unnoticed past Vanity's colorful hangers-on and out the door. "You're just the person I've been waiting for."

  She stopped and got a guarded look in her eye. "Yes?" she said.

  "We seem to've gotten off on the wrong foot the other day," Johnny Tchang said. He held the flowers out to her. "I'm sorry, and I wanted to give you these as a sort of sign that I hope we can start over again."

  She accepted the bouquet warily, as if suspecting a stinging insect was concealed within. "Thank you," she said uncertainly. "I—I'm sorry I cut you."

  Vanity turned and stalked back up the stairs, plowing through her retinue like a 'Mech through a flock of sheep. One of her little hangers-on tittered behind her back. Vanity stopped, turned, reduced her to cinders with a single glare, and continued on her way. The other followers backed away from the victim as if she were radioactive.

  As oblivious of the striking captain's departure as of her existence at all, Johnny shook his head at Cassie. "I understand why you did what you did. And you didn't do me any lasting harm, although hearing about the nick gave Migaki-sama a real shock. I was wondering if you were free for dinner tonight? I've been told you've scouted the city over pretty well. I hoped you might know of a good restaurant our hosts might not be too eager to take me to. They have a pretty exaggerated outlook on my expectations, and are knuckling themselves out trying to live up to it."

  "Well, thank you, Mr. Tchang, but I've got some work to do—"

  "Cassie, can I talk to you just a minute, hon?"