Black dragon

by Victor Milán

  Theodore had since reconstituted the collection, and even improved on it. But he had never been able to lay hands on another copy of Hoffman's understated "April Morn," revered by cognoscenti as the crown jewel of the short-lived movement.

  "Tetsuhara-jensei taught me never to ask questions I didn't want to know the answers to," he said, "so I won't ask where you turned this up, you old pirate."

  The Old Cat produced a sound like pebbles being stirred into a cement mixer. "Your wisdom does honor to your teacher."

  "I thank you, Yamaguchi-ran. You know how I'll treasure this gift. But why tonight? My birthday's not for almost another week." And how glad I'll be when it's passed.

  "Mujo," the old yakuza said with a shrug, signifying the transience of life.

  Theodore frowned. He knew about the gang war going on in the back alleys of his capital city. But his compact with seimeiyoshi-rengo, the confederation of yazuka gangs, was explicit: as long as the underworld kept its own house in order, the Coordinator did not meddle in its affairs.

  But still, he thought, this is friendship, not politics. "He is a poor lord who neglects the interests of his subordinates," Theodore said, "or who believes that giri is a sword that cuts one way only."

  "The way of the oyabun is hard," Yamaguchi said. "One must never be seen to favor."

  "Kimochi ga tsujita." The feeling is understood. Theodore recalled all too well his father's tendency to favor toadies—and disfavor his own son. He thought, with a sense of internal impact, of the son he had had arrested today.

  Not arrested, he told himself. Detained for his own good. At once he was ashamed and angered at himself for such a clumsy swipe at self-deceit.

  "Besides," the old man went on, "while one may love one's subordinates as one's own children, in the end it is on the basis of how they serve the uchi that they must be judged. If one cannot bear his weight, is it not best for all that he be pruned, like a withered branch, instead of being propped up to draw nutrients from the more productive limbs?"

  For answer Theodore gestured to a faldamon tree by the path, stout and gnarled, whose trunk rose half a meter from the ground before diverging into limbs thick as a man's leg that ran parallel to the soil before rising sharply upward. One branch was supported by a discreet scaffold.

  Yamaguchi laughed. It was a bold, uproarious laugh. One overly concerned with punctilio might find it boisterous and vulgar, not at all basho-gara, appropriate to the circumstances. Theodore found his old friend's laughter elemental, like the force of wind and rain.

  "If only the world beyond was as simple as our Japanese gardens, Theodore-sama!" the old outlaw proclaimed.

  "But isn't pruning a fruitful branch the hallmark of an inept gardener?" Theodore asked, a little desperately. He felt weary, disgusted with this game, disgusted with himself, disgusted with the limitations wound like unbreakable, adamant kelp from Luthien's Silver Sea around the limbs of the man who was, all things accounted for, one of the most powerful individuals in the whole Inner Sphere. He could not help his friend unless his friend asked his aid. In his marrow he felt the need of the sleep denied him by his dead father's reproaches in dreams.

  Yamaguchi smiled. His battered old face looked beatific in double moonlight. "Only the Dragon is forever, Theodore-sama."

  Theodore opened his mouth. Before he could speak, the old yakuza leader bowed to him, and walked calmly but purposefully away into the perfumed night.

  * * *

  It was the next morning and in a place very different from the fragrant gardens of the Imperial Palace that a tray hit the restaurant's floor with an emphatic plastic thump, followed in a beat by the secondary clatter of used dinnerware hitting tile. The patrons' heads turned from their rice balls and hummus. The big man in the loud jacket, whose neck was wider than his head and sat nearest the hapless pot girl, jumped as if he'd heard a gunshot. Precisely as if he'd heard a gunshot.

  "Chikusho!" he bellowed, rounding on her. "Stupid beast. I don't know why the owner employes such fools. She's probably Korean."

  The pot girl, who was small, skinny, and snub-nosed, abased herself, crouching on all fours and bouncing her forehead off green and white tiles. "Apologies for this poor one's inexcusable clumsiness!" she wailed in abominably accented Japanese. "It won't happen again. Please pardon this poor one, merciful sir!"

  The yakuza kobun sneered and turned back to trying to impress the waitress, a pretty, vacant-eyed young woman with dark roots to her blonde hair and a way of rhythmically snapping her chewing gun that the yak evidently found irresistible.

  "Like I was saying before that clubfooted animal interrupted, I got a big job tonight. The Top Number has a big meet tonight."

  "How exciting," the waitress said through her nose.

  "I can't tell you anything about it," the gangster said, not at all furtively. "It's a big secret. Let's just say there's gonna be a few changes around here."

  "How exciting."

  The proprietor Luko, a large man with an impressive expanse of apron, came out to berate the pot girl in a loud voice for her clumsiness. The pot girl babbled apologies, still on hands and knees, grabbing at plastic bowls and trays. These eluded her grasp as if alive, skittering like small animals across the smooth glazed surface of the floor.

  And all the while she listened to the yak footsoldier running his face to impress his little waitress, missing nothing. Cassie Suthorn was adept at tuning out noise. She was, after all, the Perfect Scout.

  * * *

  She had thought about calling Ninyu Kerai about yesterday's encounter with the ISF. They had history, after all. She wasn't foolish enough to believe that her brief liaison with him back on Hachiman would gain her anything now. But she knew he had learned to respect her, as opponent and ally. He would be likely to take her seriously, not dismiss her as a hysterical gaijin woman, or yet an agente provocateuse. She could not expect that from anyone else in the Internal Security Force, especially not Ninyu Kerai's adoptive father, the enigmatic Smiling One.

  And there was the problem of reaching Ninyu directly. She had no direct line to him. She could hear the conversation with the ISF receptionist in her mind: "Hello, I'm a foreign mercenary woman in town for Theodore's birthday party, and I'd like to talk to the Assistant Director. Yeah, he and I go way back. We did it on Hachiman...."

  Resorting to authority figures usually bugged her. Even friendly ones. But with the Coordinator's Birthday bearing down like a Texas Class battleship plummeting from orbit, she had no time for niceties. As soon as she was sure her tail was clean of pursuit the day before, she'd hustled it out to Eiga-toshi for a talk with the Mirza Peter Abdulsattah, Uncle Chandy's head of security.

  "You want me to try to set up a meeting for you with Ninyu Kerai," the tall man asked. "And you can't tell me why."

  "Right," Cassie said.

  "But this concerns your assignment."

  "I don't know." Cassie was never sure why she felt such an urge to speak frankly to the Mirza. Perhaps because, like his employer, he had never yet abused it when she did. "I believe it does. And that's all I can tell you."

  He sat and looked at her a moment with his heavy-lidded gaze, his eyes the kind a Kurita would have called Arkab, that being their linguistic corruption of the word "Arab." She felt that chill in her bowels that she often did with him, the conviction he was seeing more than eyes should, more than she wanted anyone to see.

  "Very well," he said. "I'll see what I can do."

  For a moment she just stood there before the desk in the modest office Migaki had assigned the Mirza for his stay on Luthien. Perhaps because of her long association with Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Baird, the Seventeenth's late S-2, she wasn't used to a security chief acting more like a security agent—one who understood that he only needed to know what he needed to know—than a boss. Nor was it the sort of demeanor generally expected from a Drac boss, but then, Cassie and her companions had long since learned not to expect much orthodoxy from their rotund empl
oyer, or anyone connected with him.

  "Thank you," she said, and left.

  As far as she was concerned the matter was out of her hands,. She knew the Mirza would do what he could, and she respected his ability. So she went back to trying to find a handle whereby she could pry loose information on the Black Dragons—and whether Benjamin District Inagawa's power play on Luthien was connected to some bigger Black Dragon scheme, or purely personal.

  The Voice of the East Syndicate—Lainie's friends the Tosei-kai—had come through again. She learned that Ina-gawa had brought a battalion-sized entourage with him to Luthien, as had his pal Hiraoke Toyama from Dieron. And all those hungry yaks needed a place to feed, not to mention places to stay and to hang out. For obvious reasons these would not be the same hangouts frequented by, say, the Old Cat's bully boys. Cassie's Tosei-kai informers had identified this part of Luthien's Pascal District, on the fringes of the Yoshiwara ukiyo, as a favored rookery for the Inagawa-kai bachelor males.

  Because the Tosei-kai served much the same function for the Combine's Water Trade, and for the yaks themselves, as the yaks did for government and what passed for the private sector in Drac industry—providing cheap grunt labor—they had little trouble sliding Cassie into her current employment as junior pot girl at Luko's Rice Ball Palace, Home of the Hummus Burger. Despite their traditional neutrality in the intramural squabbling among the predominantly Japanese yakuza orgs, the Tosei-kai were devoted to Theodore Kurita—and hostile to Kokuryu-kai, which regarded ethnic Koreans as dogs, whether straw or otherwise, and thought they should be treated accordingly. Should Inagawa's power struggle with Yamaguchi be nothing more, the Koreans would maintain their neutrality. Should it be connected with the Black Dragons, however, they would be only too happy to help Cassie shaft Inagawa six ways from Sunday.

  In any event, getting Cassie a job at the Rice Ball Palace wasn't prejudicial to Inagawa's interests, as far as Voice of the East was concerned, since if Inagawa wasn't involved in any Black Dragon conspiracies against Teddy or the Seventeenth she had no interest in him. She had not mentioned her purely private undertaking to avenge the murder of concierge Jinjiro Coleman. But unless Inagawa had throttled the old man with his own hands, that matter didn't concern him either.

  * * *

  "I really shouldn't be telling you this," the foot soldier was saying to the gum-chewing waitress, "but you look to me like the sort of woman who knows how to keep her lips sealed. It's at a mansion in Paschal—"

  Luko's abuse against his employee reached a crescendo of vilification. The yak soldier's ears turned red and he twisted in his seat. "Bakayaro!" he thundered. "The Korean bitch only made noise a little while. Will you shut up?"

  The shop-owner dissolved into near-tearful apologies. The pot girl gathered up the last of the errant dishes and scuttled for the safety of the rear.

  16

  Imperial City, Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  26 June 3058

  The villa where the Big Meet was taking place was an imitation Japanese castle of black teak, rising five stories among lofty capylar trees in the northwestern Upper Middle Class suburb of Paschal. It had been built by an ambitious courtier to Coordinator Martin McAllister after McAllister ended the previous regime with a coup and the usual atrocities more than five hundred years before. The neighborhood had since declined, in terms of standing within the hierarchy of Combine society, if not in terms of wealth. It was still a favored locale for high-level executive types angling to win a patent of nobility and, barring that, hoping a bit of the district's buke legacy might rub off. As was standard for the district, a three-meter-high stone wall surrounded the grounds, which sprawled down the side of a low ridge. The wall was topped with the usual array of broken bottles, motion sensors, and photo cells.

  Flanking the traditional-style horned-lintel gate stood two large men with necks wider than their heads. Their suits were dark, as opposed-to garish, as was appropriate to the circumstances. That notwithstanding, and despite the fact that the button-down collars of their white shirts thoroughly concealed their irezumi, few observers of Combine origin would have trouble pegging them instantly as yakuza. They were, like the similarly clad—and sized—foot-patrol men walking leisurely around the perimeter, armed only with wakizashi, shortswords, sheathed discreetly beneath their coats. It was assumed that their presence would suffice to warn off all but the most determined ill-wishers. For those there were heavy machine guns and portable short-range missile launchers tucked away in hardpoints within the pagodalike structure.

  Through the eye of an ambient-light enhancing scope mounted on a Zeus heavy sniper's rifle, the gate guards looked vaguely green. The DEST operative, dressed in the classic black infiltration suit, who lay on her belly on a wooded ridgetop seven hundred meters from the gate, looked them over without interest. Then she continued tracking her heavy bipod-mounted weapon along the front of the compound.

  * * *

  Cassie was sixty meters from the junkyard entrance when she sensed something wrong.

  As guests of Teddy the K, the mercenaries of the Seventeenth Recon Regiment were ostensibly free to come and go as they pleased. Not having any investment in them to speak of, Takura Migaki didn't see any reason to paste grunt-tech security types to them the way he had to Johnny Tchang. But the ISF was likely to bird-dog the foreign money-troopers at random, just on principle. Now was not the time Cassie wanted an audience.

  Dressed as a low-level cinetech in baggy jumpsuit and carrying a gym bag, she'd taken the new tubeway spur that had recently been run out to Eiga-toshi. There was a lot more turnover at Cinema City than at most Drac workplaces, what with new projects always starting or being wrapped up, and crews going on location. She fit in perfectly with a crowd of Workers headed for home.

  The first stop in from Eiga-toshi was Kossovo Street, on Imperial City's western outskirts. Cassie got off there. In an alley behind a closed shop that by day sold incense and images for home shrines devoted to the state-brand Shinto the Workers were allowed to practice, she shucked the jumpsuit, stuffed it into the bag, and stashed both out of sight. Then she set off north, dressed in tight black burglar's togs and a dark jacket that concealed various tools of her trade.

  It was three klicks to Buraku Pete's junkyard where she had stashed a motorbike. That gave her time to warm up and work the kinks out of her limbs, and also to keep her antennae out for signs of unwanted attention—which was any attention more committal than an alley cat's wary swiveling surveillance as she passed. She'd gotten some tingles already. Nothing concrete, no bodies following hers through muddy half-paved lanes that ran between the fenced lots and the blank blocky buildings. Just feather kisses on her consciousness. But she had learned to trust the totality of her sensory suite, from the guru and from her life as a scout. There could come those nudges—the glint of starlight off a lens from somewhere behind even the sweep of her soft-focused peripheral vision, a shift of shadow in distant shadow—too faint or fugitive for even her paranoid and practiced cerebral cortex to process, but which might nonetheless bear witness to danger.

  Twice she felt the nudge, and so twice she became one with shadow, to freeze and watch and listen and smell and feel, and then to take off on tangents, over fences, along rooflines, making no more noise than one of those alley cats in pursuit of a big surly alley rat, or vice versa. Neither time did she sense anything more overt; neither time did she sense pursuit. She kept onward, then, still making good time. She allowed for such diversions when she drew mental schedules for her nocturnal prowls.

  * * *

  Buraku Pete wasn't just Unproductive, he was actually eta, as his defiant nickname attested. Despite that, he was quite affluent by the somewhat shabby standards of the Draconis Combine. In fact, Cassie suspected he was well-off by even Steiner or Davion measurements, despite the fact that, with his perpetual squint and limp, his greasy well-holed jumpsuit, and the bone-white bristle that stuck out
all over his massive jaw, he resembled nothing so much as a slightly larger and bipedal member of the noisy, aggressive, and astonishingly variegated pack of dogs that overran the place.

  The key lay in the word eta itself. It meant, literally, "filth," and while an old-line Japanese might tell you—if you could somehow get him to discuss the subject at all— that it was usual Japanese shorthand for "gatherers of filth," the shorter definition summed up how the overculture regarded the people hung with the name. But it was the latter definition that described the eta's role: in ancient Japan good Buddhists could have no contact with items like human corpses or slaughtered animals, and to be honest, good Shintos weren't wild about it either, so to the outcast caste fell such jobs as undertaker, butcher, and garbage-man. Not glamorous jobs, but very necessary. So while they didn't enjoy any rights even the lowest peasant was obliged to respect, eta could in fact prosper. They also learned even better than the citizenry at large how to hide their prosperity, which accounted for Buraku Pete's defiant scruffiness.

  Of course no ritual impurity was attached to the "corpses" Buraku Pete handled—the hulks of wrecked or clapped-out vehicles, industrial machinery too worn or outmoded for even Drac factories, metal casualties of industrial society. But traditions died hard, especially in a nation-state that devoted so much of its resources to keeping them alive. Eta ran junkyards, and that was that.