Close quarters Read online

  Lainie ignored him. The other bodyguard, a round-eye named Sutton who was almost as tall as Emma and of a more conventionally athletic build, caught her eye and winked. Lainie ignored that, too.

  I'm long past having to yield myself to the likes of you, little man, she thought. And that was just one more obligation she owed the Coordinator.

  No sooner had she sat than the oyabun rose and went to stand looking out the window-wall. "Ah, Masamori," he breathed, "precious jewel of the Combine. Yet how much you have changed since this young woman first came to you as a kyakubun." The word meant "guest member." As in, of a yakuza gang.

  He turned back to face her. "Not all the changes have been for the better. Don't you agree, Lainie-chan?"

  The skin seemed to stretch itself almost to the bursting point over Lainie's high cheekbones. Adrenaline sang in her ears. I will not let him see me react. The suffix meant treasure, a phrase similar to saying, "my dear." Its use in this context implied possession.

  "The reforms of the Coordinator, and his father before him, have been a blessing to us all," she said in a neutral voice. "But the changes brought by the Clans have not been favorable, surely."

  It was Sumiyama's turn to swallow his reaction. For all that Theodore Kurita had legitimized the yakuza as never before by making them partners in the fight against the Clans, the reforms begun by Takashi and continued by his son did not sit well with the underworld.

  Lainie's politics began and ended with loyalty to Theodore Kurita, though her understanding of politics was rather broader. She knew full well that criminals tended by nature to be intensely conservative. If anything, the yakuza were even more so. The status quo suited them wonderfully, and had for over a millennium, since long before any of them had left Terra.

  Theodore Kurita had pressured his father to loosen the strictures on Combine society, and had himself continued the process. Of all the powers that be, the yakuza were the only ones likely to oppose such measures. The army adored Theodore, the former Gunji no Kanrei, or Deputy for Military Affairs. The Order of Five Pillars was serenely confident in its ability to hold the souls of the Combine's populace, at least in the face of temporal change. The dreaded ISF, headed by that master of expediency, the Smiling One, knew just how damned difficult it was to maintain the harsh controls on Combine life. And both organizations were run by personal allies of Theodore's.

  Yakuza influence, iceberg-like in its proportion of seen to unseen, was enormous. By embracing the underworld in a qualified way, Theodore had opened to the Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery an enormous pool of badly needed funds and manpower from the Unproductive class, to which all yakuza technically belonged. To most, that was sufficient explanation for the act. But Lainie knew that perhaps equally significant had been Theodore's desire to make it difficult for the yakuza bosses to interfere with his political agenda.

  That didn't mean they all had to like it. Kazuo-sama certainly didn't. Which was why Lainie liked to rub his nose discreetly in it whenever possible.

  It was her subtle way of reminding him that he no longer owned her. Because she wasn't a kyakubun anymore, wasn't the same terrified teenage runaway who had fled across a quarter of the Combine to escape the men who'd murdered her father. Back then she'd been forced to throw herself upon Sumiyama's mercy, and he had not hesitated to avail himself of the opportunity.

  Theodore-sama freed me from you, Lainie thought. And that's why I'll follow him till I die.

  "You have met with some of these new gaijin mercenaries Chandrasekhar Kurita has imported," the oyabun said. "What do you think of them?"

  This was Sumiyama's way of reminding her he had spies in her outfit, which was no surprise. "They are seasoned troops," she said. "The ones I met seemed competent enough. Still, they're foreigners."

  He nodded, pleased by what he took for her dismissal of the Seventeenth's abilities. "It is a scandal that he should import such trash," he said. "As if you and the Regulars were not enough to defend against any possible threat! Truly, it is a slap in your face, my child."

  "Perhaps Uncle Chandy—"

  "Do not refer to him that way! He is a Kurita."

  Lainie bowed her head. "Yes, oyabun." Her eyes had gone the color of blood. "Perhaps Chandrasekhar-san intends them as playthings. Ornaments to his ego."

  Sumiyama nodded. He liked that thought. "Chandrasekhar is a Kurita," he said, turning away again, "but he is a fruit that has fallen a very great distance from the tree. He was exiled from court in his youth for being a wastrel—yes, and a fool." He regarded her with hands clasped behind his back, giving her time to appreciate that he could speak of Chandrasekhar Kurita in any tone he wished.

  "A fool," he said again. "And he has continued to play the fool on Hachiman."

  He's such a fool that he built HTE from nothing until it threatens to rival your pals at Tanadi, Lainie thought, but she said nothing.

  "You are undoubtedly aware that his security forces have taken to chasing our people from the vicinity of his Compound," Sumiyama went on. "Suddenly we are deprived of licensing and protection fees across a vast area of the city!"

  Lainie had to drop her eyes then. The image of her new acquaintance Captain MacDougall in her 100-ton Atlas confronting Sumiyama's soldiers out extorting protection money from the small shopkeepers was almost too much. A sight she'd most definitely pay to see. She liked the mercenary officer, recognizing that the other woman was in her own way nearly as formidable as Lainie herself. Then again, the tall blonde didn't seem half so dangerous as her quieter, smaller friend. A coiled ball of malice, that one.

  "But worse than that," the oyabun continued, caught up in his righteous indignation, "he has cut the hours of his workers. Again!"

  This time Lainie had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. "Now he has them working ten hours a day. Ten! As if twelve was not a sufficiently scandalous indulgence! The other six hours of the proper workday he gives to them."

  He shook his head as if trying to clear it of water before hauling it back inside his shell. "Oh, he says that his employees are still at work during those additional hours. "The Dragon's time,' he calls it. He claims it is to be used by his workers to improve themselves or to bolster their bonds with their broods of squalling brats or otherwise work to strengthen the Dragon. Nonsense, I call it, and nonsense it is! I know these Laborers. A pack of lazy louts, all of them. The whip is all they understand. They will fritter the time away, mark my words. Fritter!"

  He rounded on her furiously. "A man such as that eats away at the very foundations of our society. No matter how noble a family name he bears!"

  Because they were speaking Japanese—which allowed Sumiyama to maintain the self-delusion that he was an important businessman, and not a thug who was virtually eta, a casteless pariah—Lainie was able to pass that off with a brief mutter that sounded like agreement. Aimai, that built-in ambiguity of the Combine overculture's tongue, had its definite advantages.

  He took a deep breath, faced the window, placed his hands on it. Several kilometers away a barge chugged up the Yamato with the giant manlike form of a mercenary Battle-Mech strapped supine to its deck. Lainie wondered if it might be Lady K's Atlas. The pollution-haze made it impossible to tell. Hachiman was a clean world by Combine standards, but Masamori was not a very clean city.

  "But there is a fresh wind blowing, Lainie-chan," Sumiyama said. "A wind that will blow the weakness and corruption from the streets of our city as the autumn wind off the Yamato dispels the smog. I can tell you no more now, my child—only that you and your men will have your part to play."

  He smiled smugly at her. "I have every faith that you will continue to serve me as loyally as in the past."

  Lainie rose and bowed to him. "I live only to fulfill my duty, oyabun."

  And if you believe I owe any of that duty to you, you shriveled degenerate, she thought, perhaps you will one day get what's coming to you.

  * * *

  "There, there, little bird," said
the man in the sports jacket with the extravagantly padded shoulders. "Why do you weep?"

  The girl sat on a crate with a squawking blue-furred native heath-hen inside. Her dress-robe, cobalt blue with dark blue figuring, clinging to a slim but definitely unobjectionable figure, was typical of what a country girl might buy to wear to the big city for the first time. What a bumpkin might think fashionable without being too risque.

  The man knelt down next to her. He almost put a hand on her knee, but somehow managed to resist the impulse. He was large and blond and ungainly, and younger than he tried to come across.

  Around them the street-market crowd flowed like a river. Graceful women balanced baskets of fruit and fowl-crates on their heads. Men cried wares from containers slung to carrying-poles braced across their shoulders. It was a side of Masamori that might strike a stranger as incongruous, this village-market activity in the shadow of hundred-story bronze towers. But it was as vital a part of the city as the underground maglev trains and the glittering nightclubs.

  It was also an area the Friendly Persuaders didn't like to enter. Even in pairs.

  "Come on, now, missy," the blond young man said. "Why're you crying like that?"

  The girl stopped and looked at him. Her mascara had run down her cheeks. The effect would have been comical had she not been quite so lovely, with her sculpted-mahogany features and slanted smoke-gray eyes.

  "I ... I'm from offworld," she said, her words so full of glottal stops from swallowed sobs that she might have been speaking some exotic language. "From Kawabe, in Matsuida Prefecture. I used up all my money to come and stay with my aunt because she was sick. And then I got here and find she's dead, and now someone has stolen my bag, and my papers are gone, and annhh—"

  Sobs overcame her. She buried her face against his biceps. He clumsily patted her back, becoming aware of the smooth, sweat-damp skin left bare above the neckline of her robe and the way the garment molded itself to her body, which was trembling against his. Somehow he did not mind that her makeup was staining his coat, with its jags of color against a white background.

  "There, there," he said. "Surely it's not so bad as all that."

  "But I have no money and no place to stay and I can't even work if I don't have papers!" She had raised her head to suck in a ragged breath, then let it all out again in a tumbling exhalation of words. She inhaled once more, like a swimmer beached after nearly drowning. "I don't know what I'll do!"

  A thought began to form in the mind of the man in the sports jacket. He tipped his snap-brim hat back from his forehead with his thumb. "Well," he said, drawing the word out long, "you don't always need papers to work."

  She raised her head and looked at him. Another sob ran through her body like a temblor. "But the police—"

  He chuckled. "The police don't know everything. Lots of things the police don't even want to know."

  She stared at him, practically gaping. She really was a total potato, and what could you expect from a backwater hole like Kawabe? But the girl was truly stunning, in spite of that.

  Suddenly she jumped up, tried to bolt. He caught her by the arm. "You're an agent of the ISF," she said, struggling. "You're trying to trap me. I know!"

  He threw back his head and laughed, being careful not to slacken his grip. "Little bird, you watch too much holovid. I'm not with the Dragon's Breath—not even a Friendly Persuader. Though I do have connections. Here, sit down. People are staring."

  People weren't—it didn't do to look at anything too directly in the twisty byways of Masamori—but the girl allowed herself to be drawn back down to sit on the crate. Its occupant shook its wings and muttered to itself, miffed that its cries of outrage weren't heeded.

  "My name's Peter," he said. "What's yours?"

  "M-Mitsuko."

  "There, Mitsuko." He chucked her under the chin. "Like I said, not every place is so picky about papers. You just have to know the right people."

  She sniffed. Her nose was snubbed. Her eyes were very large, rimmed by smeared dark makeup. "But I don't know anybody!"

  "That's not true." He rose, held out a hand to lift her to her feet. "You know me."

  15

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  4 September 3056

  The girl with the dress slit up to here and the lustrous black hair piled atop her head slipped through the mob at the Kit-Kat Klub like an eel through water. She dropped her tray on the bar, turned around, and gave the young blond man a smile as dazzling as his sports coat. "Peter-san," she said, "I have something for you."

  His dull blue eyes lit briefly, before it dawned on him that she would hardly give him that here, in the middle of a crowded bar. "Oh," he said.

  * * *

  Spotting a mark is an arcane art. Cassie could not articulate exactly how she did it, though she'd tried once or twice for the benefit of the occasional confidante she'd picked up and kept as a pet back on Larsha. Nowadays she wouldn't try. It was too personal a revelation.

  The two main considerations were straightforward, though. The mark had to a) have something the scammer wanted; and b) show signs that the scammer could get it away from him. It was spotting those signs that had made scamming an art and a challenge to Cassie as a child. Playing on them had always been the easy part.

  Nowadays she only scammed when and as her job required it, but that didn't stop her from feeling a certain thrill of the hunt. Even when the object of the scam was to obtain a menial job as a waitress in a scummy dive.

  The key was, it was a yak dive.

  The task was not as easy as it might seem. Combine culture was very much a village culture, no less in a megalopolis like Masamori than on a hayseed world like Kawabe.

  Mizo-shobai, the water trade, tended not to look too closely at the antecedents of those who practiced it. But you still had to know somebody. You couldn't just blow in off the street and expect a job—not from a greengrocer, not from a striptease club.

  And especially not from a bar frequented by low to mid-level yakuza soldiers. The yaks had a modus vivendi with the Civilian Guidance Corps—and, on a much more tacit level, with the ISF, based on the fact that the yakuza were loudly ultra-nationalistic, big boosters of the Dragon, and Subhash Indrahar didn't care diddly about street crime. Still, the bulk of yakuza operations were against the law, and the Friendly Persuaders had a facade of absolute control to keep up. So spies happened sometimes.

  A bar was a sacred kind of place in the Combine. It was an accepted refuge where loyal servants of the Dragon, from the lowliest Worker to sararimen in their rumpled suits, could gather to relax after working their long hours. Those who didn't join their comrades for an after-shift snort were looked upon with suspicion, and sometimes even spied upon by the ISF for being insufficiently Harmonious.

  Yak soldiers had shorter hours—if they wanted to work sixteen-hour shifts, they wouldn't be criminals and Unproductives—but they still loved the easy camaraderie of the watering-hole as avidly as the shop-floor warriors and grunt laborers with sunburned necks. And they wanted to be able to gossip and talk shop, just like everybody else kicking back in a bar. So they were particular who they hired, in their own way.

  If there was one thing Cassie was good at, it was convincing people she wasn't a police spy. And she had good credentials: Peter Malloy was a rising young soldier—not rising fast, mind you, but steady, and palpably one of the boys. If he vouched for his little pal Mitsuko the Potato from Kawabe, she couldn't be a plant.

  But big-hearted as Peter liked to think he was, his vouching was a favor. And favors came at a price.

  * * *

  Before Petey-pal could manifest too much disappointment, she pressed something into his hand, then stood on tiptoe for a quick peck on the cheek. "Thank you," she whispered into his ear.

  Malloy stared down at the object she'd given him. It was a combination pen and laser pointer, made of real silver and showing fine workmanship. It was just the
sort of status symbol a soldier about to make the jump to junior management might like to flash.

  The little waitress had picked up her tray and almost blended back into the crowd when the awful truth dawned on him: she had discharged her debt. That meant she would feel no obligation to bed with him.

  Peter Malloy was in the strong-arm end of operations, and did not handle disappointment well. He tucked the pen into the inside pocket of his jacket—it was worth hanging onto, after all—then extended his arm and laid his hand heavily on the girl's shoulder.

  She spun easily, without dropping her tray. "Hey," Malloy shouted. "You think you're gonna get off just like that? You owe me, bitch!"

  "Eddie-sama!" she squealed, in a voice that cut through the babble and tinny music like a katana. "Eddie-sama, look!"

  A giant figure loomed up behind Pete Malloy. His sports coat was in as garish bad taste as the soldier's, but the shoulders were almost twice as wide, and the difference wasn't in the extravagant padding. His face was the color of native ebony, and his rust-red hair was drawn up in a samurai topknot, a fashion currently reserved in Masamori for those who had attained at least chunin—subleader—status within Sumiyama-kai. Eddie Katsumori was not a very big fish in the Organization, but he was top barracuda in the pond of the Kit-Kat Klub.

  "What?" Eddie asked in a voice like an Atlas' footsteps. He was a man of few words. They tended to put off hitting people longer than he liked.

  With deft fingers the waitress twitched open Pete Malloy's sports jacket. "That silver pen you lost, Eddie-sama," she said. "See? This chimpira swiped it!"