BattleTech

by Loren L. Coleman

  “Aye,” said MacPhail tightly. “Ore from the mining concerns. Equipment from the factories.”

  “No.” Yamashita shook his head. “Nothing of military value. I’m talking about luxuries. Wine. Altaisian caviar. Spiced beef. Diamonds. Saltgrass.”

  Drescher leaned forward. “In exchange for…”

  “Offworld luxuries. We sell them here for a healthy markup and split the profits. I pay you in Altaisian luxuries that you turn around and sell offworld for another big profit. You win twice.”

  Drescher sat back, his face suddenly blank. Yamashita could almost see the numbers percolating through the man’s brain. “Most interesting,” he said softly.

  That was too much for MacPhail. “Gods, man,” he snapped. “This is a Combine citizen—”

  “A former Combine citizen,” said Drescher. “Altais is now a protectorate of the Lyran Commonwealth.”

  “Just so,” said Yamashita.

  “Ya canna trust ‘im. Give me a few hours with ‘im, Colonel, and we’ll see just exactly what he is.”

  Yamashita sat up a little straighter. If Drescher passed him into the Kommandant’s custody he was done. MacPhail was not a man he could keep secrets from. Yamashita knew this at some deep level, but he would not allow himself to really know it, would not reveal himself through fear.

  I am just a simple businessman, he thought. One who cannot even tell the difference between a sergeant and a corporal. Crooked, hai, but in a way you can understand and exploit.

  “What’s in the bag?” Drescher asked.

  Yamashita reached down and pulled out a bottle of wine. “A gift.” He handed it over to Drescher. “A token of good will.”

  The man studied the bottle with the gleam of avarice in his eyes. They had a deal. Yamashita could feel it.

  “What happened to your finger?” MacPhail asked.

  A shiver wriggled down Yamashita’s spine.

  “What, this?” he said as coolly as he could. He held up his left hand, revealing a pinky that had been severed at the first joint. “An accident. I used to work in a factory. It happens.”

  “Aye,” said MacPhail coldly. “Especially on this world.”

  Drescher put the bottle of wine down and sat back in his chair, a new calculation plain on his face. “This is quite nice,” he said, not even looking at the wine, “but if we are to do business, I require more.”

  Yamashita’s stomach clenched. He knew exactly what the colonel was suggesting. He wanted a name.

  If Yamashita didn’t give him one, Drescher would turn him over to MacPhail to sweat one out of him. And if he did give him one he was a spy and so, again, MacPhail.

  Either way he was a dead man. All because MacPhail noticed his finger.

  “I am not a spy,” said Yamashita stiffly. “But I have done business on this world a long time. I know who the players are. Recently, some new names have surfaced, rather, ah, rapidly.”

  “Oh,” said Drescher easily, “who in particular?”

  “Sumiko Tawara,” said Yamashita. “Junshi Nomo. Charles Hanson.”

  Tawara and Nomo were innocents. But not Hanson.

  Hanson was a Tai-i in the service of the House Kurita’s feared Internal Security Force.

  If the names were all valueless, Drescher would conclude Yamashita was an agent protecting his network. If the names were all ISF, Drescher would know Yamashita was an agent spooked into betraying his people. If there were a mix, Drescher might decide that “Watanabe” was just a businessman who’d noticed some things.

  Drescher peered at Yamashita for a long moment and then he stood, leaned over the desk, and shook his hand. “Shall we drink to our deal?”

  The wine was sweet and full-bodied with a note of ripe raspberries and a rich, leathery bouquet. Drescher seemed to enjoy it very much. MacPhail didn’t have any.

  When Yamashita stepped out of the Commissioner’s office, he knew he was lucky to be leaving with his life. This was going to be a dangerous business.

  Absentmindedly he pulled up his right sleeve to scratch an itch, revealing a dragon tattoo the color of sapphire coiled around his wrist.

  • • •

  After leaving the port, Yamashita caught a bus across town and transferred twice to lose any tail, stopped to eat at a Thai restaurant just to be sure, and then stopped at Body by M.

  He slipped in the side door, strolling past a score of housewives in leotards doing aerobics to the driving beat of the latest jazzpop hit.

  Yamashita hated to give Ikeda any credit, but using the health club as a front had been a stroke of genius. It was the last place anyone would suspect of housing an anti-Lyran cell.

  The club was a brightly-lit place full of potted ferns, the smell of sweat, and frumpy people chasing after beautiful bodies. The owner, Margit Devaux, was a real fitness expert who saw it as her mission in life to help people lose those few extra pounds.

  It just happened she was also a patriot.

  The club was so far beyond reproach that two members of the occupation government worked out here. Ikeda and his three lieutenants had memberships, too, and the thought of the occupiers working out next to ISF always made Yamashita smile.

  He did not have a membership. There was no point. The elaborate tattoos that covered his back, chest, and both arms would instantly mark him as yakuza. And from there it was a short leap to the conclusion that he’d served with the First Ghosts, the yakuza regiment that had been all but wiped out at Carlingford.

  Yamashita slipped down a side hallway and tapped a six-digit access code into a keypad beside the door to the storage room. The door clicked open and Yamashita stepped inside, surprised to find himself alone with cases of power shakes and bottled water. Yamashita frowned.

  Where was Ikeda?

  Not one to waste an opportunity, he walked across the room and punched a second combination into another keypad, popping open Margit’s wall safe. He reached beneath the pile of contracts and cash receipts until he found a slim blue folio.

  He pulled it out and flipped it open.

  The ISF had broken the encryption on the black box fax machines the Federated Commonwealth used for secure comms. (The DCMS had been fortunate enough to capture one of the black boxes during the Fourth Succession War.) The folio contained the latest intercepts. Yamashita pulled the first one out.

  “You’re not cleared for those,” said a gruff voice.

  Yamashita flinched. To rifle through ISF secrets was to invite death. Or worse. Still, he looked up and said, “Kashira.”

  Ikeda scowled as he closed the door behind him. “What?”

  “’You’re not cleared for those, Kashira,” said Yamashita. “I am a Talon Sergeant of the Draconis Combine Military Service and I will thank you to address me as such.”

  Ikeda grunted.

  Yamashita would never get the respect he deserved from a man like Tai-sa Kazutoshi Ikeda, even though he and his brothers had paid for it with their blood. The colonel was an old-line conservative, unwilling to acknowledge the worth of a “gangster thug.”

  The irony was Ikeda tolerated Yamashita for the same reason he despised him: he was yakuza. Yamashita had been born on the street and he could get anything. Ikeda was happy to rely on Yamashita’s skill, but he’d never show him any sign of respect.

  It was an old issue for the yakuza, long regarded as the dregs of Combine society. The very name “yakuza” came from the Japanese words for the numbers eight, nine, and three, a losing hand in the traditional card game of Oicho-Kabu.

  No one believed in yakuza.

  Except Theodore Kurita. The Combine’s Gunji-no-Kanrei had given the yakuza the right to fight for their nation. And because of that, Yamashita would bear any burden, pay any price to justify the Kanrei’s faith.

  “You’re late,” said Yamashita.

  Ikeda stalked across the room and jerked the folio out of his hands. “Planning to sell these secrets to your friends?”

  “I have no friends on Alta
is,” Yamashita shot back, “only loyalties.”

  Ikeda shoved the folio back in the safe and slammed the door. He was a short, fireplug of a man. His iron-gray hair was cut in a military crew cut and he wore a stylish blue suit that fit him badly. He looked exactly like what he was: a military spook. It was a wonder the Lyrans hadn’t picked him up already.

  “I hear you were down at the port today,” Ikeda said.

  Yamashita nodded. “I saw some interesting things.”

  Ikeda inclined his head.

  “The rumors about the JumpShip command circuits are true. I saw them unloading military equipment from containers marked with a Lyran seal. Probably rushed here to deal with the Second Ghosts before they evacuated.”

  “So?”

  “Jigoku,” Yamashita snapped. “We have to do something.”

  Ikeda shook his head. “The best we can do is gather information and feed it back to the DCMS.”

  “Listen, Altais is the deepest penetration of the Commonwealth Thrust. They’re going to use this world as a jumping off point to attack Algedi and Rukbat, Alya and Shitara, maybe even Tsukude.”

  Ikeda’s eyes narrowed. “How do you know that?”

  “I can read a chart. The point is they’re going to use this world and we have to stop them.”

  “What you’re talking about is suicide,” said Ikeda indignantly. “That’s why the world government surrendered. Why the Second Ghosts cut and ran. We don’t have the forces to fight them on Altais.”

  There’s always a way to resist, Yamashita thought, if you’re not too stupid to see it.

  “Did you see anything else?” Ikeda asked gruffly.

  “They’re smuggling.”

  Ikeda offered him a contemptuous smile. “A fact I’m sure you found most interesting.”

  Yamashita said nothing, but he thought, You bet I did.

  “I also heard you made a deal with Commissioner Drescher.”

  Yamashita snorted. “Well, you don’t think I got in by politely asking for a tour, did you?”

  Ikeda’s jaw set. “Hanson was just arrested. That’s why I’m late.”

  Yamashita blinked. “What?” The lie was so good he almost believed it himself.

  Ikeda leaned in and jabbed a thick finger into Yamashita’s chest. “If I find out you had anything to do with Hanson’s arrest, I’ll turn you into the Lyrans myself.”

  And then he turned and stalked off before Yamashita could speak any of the false denials that came automatically to his lips.

  • • •

  Yamashita first noticed the tail when he was coming out of a meeting with an agent for an agrat farm, the taste of salty black eggs still heavy in his mouth. The agrat was a local pseudo-amphibian about the size of a monitor lizard whose eggs were supposed to taste like sturgeon roe.

  Yamashita didn’t know if they really did or not—he’d never tasted real caviar—but the fact that some thought so made the contract he’d signed for 200 kilos of Altaisian caviar very valuable.

  He was making a killing. Even considering Drescher’s cut, he’d made more money in the last month than he’d ever made before.

  So this was why people became collaborators.

  Yamashita watched the tail out of the corner of his eye. A young man with short, blond hair who’d tried to dress like a local, but missed the mark.

  One of MacPhail’s.

  Yamashita had taken a cab to the meeting, but he decided to walk a couple blocks and look for a likely place.

  He ambled past an open air fish market, where native blue snappers and six-legged crabs were laid out on beds of shaved ice. People crowded round the displays and called out their orders. Bills flashed back and forth.

  Yamashita pushed his way through the crowd and glanced back. He’d lost the tail.

  He sighed heavily.

  Yamashita doubled back and pretended to examine something the fishmongers called “prawns” but looked more like roaches to him. After a few moments he saw a familiar blond head in the crowd.

  He walked past the fish market, paused to window-shop in a little jewelry store and then ducked down a side street that turned out to be a blind alley.

  Perfect.

  Yamashita glanced around like he was lost. His right hand drifted down to the small of his back where he felt a little patch of slickness beneath his shirt.

  How long was this going to take?

  He heard a small sound behind him. He didn’t turn. Instead he muttered, “I’m sure she said this was the place.”

  Something hard and heavy smashed against the side of his head and the world dimmed. Yamashita lurched to one side and fought to keep his feet.

  He staggered around and threw a punch in a random direction, landing a glancing blow to his attacker’s jaw.

  It wasn’t enough.

  Another blow slammed down, the ground rushed up to meet him, and—

  • • •

  Yamashita had a nightmare about being beaten, blows raining down again and again until he curled up into a ball on the floor and just took them. Later he woke up and found out that it hadn’t been a dream.

  A tight pain in his chest told him they’d broken two, maybe three ribs. His mouth tasted like blood and the blurry vision in his left eye hinted at a detached retina.

  But the worst was his head. Whenever he moved, molten agony shot through his skull, incandescent white light filled his vision. Concussion.

  Or worse.

  He reached back to touch the small of his back and found they’d stripped off his shirt, no doubt looking for the tattoos they knew had to be there.

  Hopefully they hadn’t looked too close.

  He lay there for a long time, his body and face pressed against the cold concrete floor, eyes closed, waiting for what came next.

  After a time a voice said, “It seems ya dinna lose your pinky in an accident after all.”

  “No,” Yamashita croaked. He didn’t open his eyes. Didn’t look up to confirm that today his death had dressed up like Angus MacPhail. It was enough to hear his voice.

  “You’re yakuza.”

  “Hai,” said Yamashita in a gravelly voice that hurt his throat.

  “First Ghosts or Second?”

  “First.” Yamashita slowly opened his eyes and saw a blurry shape.

  The shape nodded. “I especially liked the bit about the health club. Course it dinna do any good in the end, but no doubt you’re a clever jake.”

  Yamashita said nothing.

  “We’ve rounded up all your friends. Rest assured, ya won’t die alone, man.”

  “I can—”

  “Can what? What do ya have to trade this time?”

  “Sabotage,” Yamashita whispered.

  There was a long silence from the MacPhail-shape as he thought this through. “A nice try,” he said finally. “But before we’re done you’ll beg to tell us all about it. And even if ya dinna break, sabotage is something we can find ourselves. Have ya got anything else?”

  Yamashita fell silent.

  “That’s what I thought. You’ll never see the outside of this cell, Watanabe, or whatever your name is. I promise ya that.”

  “Drescher won’t—”

  MacPhail’s harsh laughter cut him off. “Colonel Drescher is in no position to help ya now. Trust me.” The blurry shape stood. “May as well rest. We’ll talk more later.”

  A door clicked shut and Yamashita drifted back into comforting oblivion.

  • • •

  For some amount of time that Yamashita couldn’t even guess at, the world turned off. And then someone bent over him, a dark shape blocking the bright glare of the naked bulb overhead.

  Yamashita tasted something cool and clean. The man was trickling water into his mouth.

  He grunted and rolled over onto his side.

  “Oh, so you’re awake,” said a voice.

  “Hungry,” Yamashita croaked.

  “Sure, I’ll feed you. The Kommandant says you have to be str
ong enough to talk.”

  The guard turned to pick up a tray.

  Yamashita reached down to the small of his back and felt the slickness there. He peeled back the two sheets of plastic, one from the other, careful only to touch the edge.

  “Here we are,” said the guard.

  Yamashita’s stomach growled at the thick smell of beef stew.

  The man set the tray down.

  Yamashita moved like lightning. He ripped the decal off, lunged forward, and slapped the plastic surface against the man’s face.

  The guard stumbled backwards and fell. The decal was coated with a fast-acting neural agent; the guard never had a chance. He collapsed, overturning the tray, and spilling beef stew all over the cold, hard floor.

  He lay there seizing violently for a moment and then he was suddenly, terribly still.

  Yamashita staggered to his feet and almost blacked out. He stood there for a few minutes, breathing hard, clawing his way back to reality.

  Then he bent down and picked up the guard’s M&G flechette pistol.

  An exact replica of one of Yamashita’s tattoos—an orange tiger—marked the dead man’s cheek. It was masterful work. Even looking for it, Yamashita had a hard time seeing the nearly invisible plastic.

  But he found it at last and peeled up the decal. Then he turned to go, leaving MacPhail with nothing but a dead guard and a mystery.

  • • •

  Two days after escaping from MacPhail’s safe house, Yamashita recovered enough to drag himself up the five flights of stairs that led to the top of an abandoned factory a couple klicks from the Gaines port.

  Yamashita hobbled past long-silent air handlers and exhaust fans until he reached the building’s edge.

  Today Big Smoker was silent and still. Yamashita hoped it was a good omen. Hoped all he’d paid had purchased the prize he sought.

  He raised binoculars to his face and looked out over the port.

  He was too far away to see much detail, but what he could see brought a grim smile to his lips. The Lyrans had set up a vast field of shipping containers. Box after box lined the tarmac and they were opening every single last one of them.