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  As the man whipped his head around, Mr. Obata was approaching him, with his ghastly fixed smile and the suppressed rifle held at the full extension of both arms. The traffic controller jumped to his feet, throwing his arm protectively across his face even as Mr. Obata began to shoot at him.

  Blood spurted from a hit on the controller's right forearm. Shrilling in terror, the young technician turned and bolted blindly, tearing the plug of his headset loose from the console. Unfortunately, the direction he chose to run—not unnaturally, away from his hideously grinning attacker—led nowhere except into the floor-to-ceiling transpex wall, bullet-proof and polarized, that gave out onto the now-quiescent landing field. He flattened himself against the window as if hoping he might somehow permeate through it as if it were a membrane. Then he slid downward to a cowering crouch.

  Mr. Obata had never fired a weapon in his life, had never even handled one until he'd been presented with the smuggled gun and instructed what to do with it. He coped with his inadequacy as a marksman by pushing the gun at his quarry and continuing to pull the trigger until it quit making even its negligible amount of noise and recoil.

  By that point the hapless tech had quit making noise as well.

  Mr. Obata stooped and laid the gun almost reverently at the soles of his victim's cheap Srinagar shoes. He picked up the headset abandoned by the first controller, held the microphone to his lips, and spoke the words, "Climb Mount Niitake." Then he went back into the hall for his briefcase.

  Kneeling on the thin carpet in the center of the control room, he reopened his case on the floor beside him. From inside the hidden compartment he took a tanto dagger. He unsheathed it and set it down by his thigh. Then he took off his jacket and began to pull the tail of his white dress shirt out of the waistband of his trousers.

  2

  Masamori Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  24 December 3056

  As the band played on, Cassiopeia Suthorn, ace scout for the Seventeenth Recon Regiment and recently promoted to Lieutenant Senior Grade, whirled through the waltz, trying to keep her feet out from under those of her escort and silently cursing her friends.

  Christmas was a gaijin holiday, and manifestly unacceptable to the mostly unbroken generations of xeno-phobe Kuritas who had ruled the Draconis Combine for centuries. But long before humankind had ever achieved space flight the Japanese people had gotten in the habit of it. Attempts to stamp out its celebration had never entirely succeeded, especially on Hachiman. The bulk of the planet's population weren't even descended from Christians, being of Gujarati and Mah-ratta stock and resolutely Hindu beneath a thin wash of Dragon cult Confucianism. But Hachimanites, and in particular the Masakko, whether of Japanese extraction, or Hindu, or Korean, Ethiopian, Syrian, or Rasal-hague Scandahoovian, could never be persuaded to let go of a holiday devoted to parties, garish decorations, and getting presents.

  Prosperous Hachiman was the Kurita world most devoted to practicing compromise, the art of the possible. Centuries before, the insightful Planetary Chairman Isoroku Fillington had decreed that December twenty-fifth should henceforth be celebrated as Chairman's Day. It had nothing at all to do with alien, unwelcome religions. And if the effigies of Blue Boy Krishna and elephant-headed Ganesha in Hachiman's household kami shrines were pushed aside that day in favor of a stout figure with a white beard and a red suit... well, he, too, was merely an aspect of the Dragon.

  The Planetary Chairman's own Chairman's Day Eve Ball was the social event of the Masamori season. The Right Honorable Percival Fillington, Earl of Hachiman, had done himself proud. The Grand Ballroom, on the ground floor of his palace in Masamori's Assad District, was a pentagonal chamber fifty meters across and three stories high. Its floor of polished hardwoods from the Trimurti Mountains was dominated by a chandelier a full thirty meters across that consisted of a spray of millions of fiber-optic stalks appearing to gush like a fountain from a circular bronze and transpex base. At each corner of the ballroom rose a column, one of ivory, one jade, one teak, one steel, and one of solid gold, representing the five Pillars of Combine society. Along three of the walls tables had been placed between the Pillars and piled with food: steamed fish, vegetables, barons of beef, curry, rice, purple slivers of Tamerlane melon from New Samarkand, three-meter-long sea scorpions boiled scarlet. Each table displayed a man-high ice statue, one a swan, one a banth—a Hachimanite predator resembling a flattened eight-legged bear—and, of course, a Dragon. Along another wall was the bandstand, and the last was taken up by huge double doors giving out onto the palace's extensive garden.

  Everybody who was anybody on the whole planet was here—with the glaring exception of Cassie's employer, Chandrasekhar Kurita. That was odd, since he and the Earl had recently patched up a feud that had stood since the present Chairman assumed office—a peacemaking process that had required a small war to accomplish. In fact, during the bad old days, the planet's Kurita, who was most un-Kurita-like in his sybaritic tastes and not one to miss a party—had attended religiously. Now that peace had broken out, Uncle Chandy was nowhere to be seen. The ballroom buzzed with muted speculation: was the Buddha-fat magnate sick? In hiding? Had a new rift developed?

  The truth was that Chandy got a prodigious hoot from his Southwestern mercenaries, who were so uncouth and weird—literally outlandish—that the old propaganda caricatures of barbarian money-troopers paled by comparison. Cassie only wished she were back at the HTE Compound with them.

  She caught sight of the Chairman himself, standing by the Pillar of Teak, a Srinagar crystal snifter almost as large as his head in hand. A slight man of no great strength and sickly constitution, Percy had been regarded by his grandfather—the tyrannical, reptilian, and blessedly late Rex Fillington—as irredeemably deficient, mentally and morally as well as physically. Among the huge—nobility—of the planet, as well as the military and managerial ranks of the Middle Classes, he was regarded as something of a twit.

  And yet he was a handsome man, with well-sculpted features and chestnut hair caught in a samurai topknot rather than its customary queue. He looked very dashing indeed in the white tunic, black trousers, and red boots of his Draconis Combine Mustered Soldiery uniform. The long and short-sword dai-sho he wore were not the blades he was entitled to wear by virtue of his birth into the kuge, but rather ones he had earned on graduation from the elite Sun Zhang Academy. He had been among the few to pass through the brutal Sun Zhang Academy Cadre in a single term, and the huge red disk of the Bushido Blade he wore on his breast was awarded only to those who earned it in combat.

  At the moment the Honorable Percy was giving Cas-sie his puppy-dog-lost look. Of course. An intelligent, able, courageous man who underestimated himself even more thoroughly than others did, he was that rare thing among ranking Dracs: nice. The problem was that he was, withal, too nice for Cassie's taste. She liked him a lot, respected him for the strengths she, at least, saw quite clearly in him. But as for falling into bed with him, much less into love ... no.

  "You might want to watch out for the trap of mistaking abusiveness for manliness, hon, since that's a big risk for people like us," her MechWarrior friend Captain Kali "Lady K" MacDougall had cautioned her. (How odd it still seemed to think the words "MechWarrior friend," which for most of Cassie's life would have been an oxymoron). "Still," Kali had tacked on, "poor Percy really is kind of a wimp." .

  The orbit of their dancing feet interposed Cassie's date between her and the Chairman. Cassie's escort was a strapping young man in dress uniform with the yellow shoulder bars and piping of the Armor, which was odd since as far as Cassie knew there were no tanks on Hachiman. She had been set up with him for the evening courtesy of her friend Tai-sa Eleanor Shimazu, commander of the Ninth Ghost Legion and recently acceded to the post of top oyabun over all the planet's yakuza-fczi. In fact Cassie suspected her date was one of Lainie's cost-offs, since he fit her profile: tall, blond, built, beautiful, and—so far as Cassie could ascertain by
his occasional attempt at conversation— dumb as a bagful of hammers.

  His large hand was sweat-clammy on Cassie's bare back. He muffed a step, trod on the toe of one of her stiletto pumps, and glared down at her. True Drac: the woman was always at fault. Cassie smiled dazzlingly up at him and thought about giving him a quick pentjak-silat wrist-throw, just for the pleasure of seeing him hit the floor.

  She herself was certifiably beautiful: a lithe, slender woman, 165 centimeters tall, with hair shiny-black as a raven's wing piled atop her head in an elaborate knot. Her face was oval and perfect, her nose slim and ever-so-slightly snubbed. Her eyes were large, classic Japanese almonds, with pronounced epicanthic folds—but smoky gray-blue, capable of changing from brushed-steel to deep slate, depending on her mood. She wore an evening gown of sapphire silk, low-cut in back, that fit her like oil. Had she been wearing anything between it and her smooth brown skin it would have stood out like a mole on her cheek.

  She was dressed to kill, was Cassie. Literally. Taped to the inside of her right thigh was a flat-handled, 20-centimeter vibrodagger, a very neat piece of equipment. It was, in fact, Rabid Fox issue, a present from Archie Westin, who probably would've been pestering her as much as Percy if he hadn't been boffing Lady K. Cassie never went anywhere unarmed. But she still felt naked, in a way merely being unclothed never made her feel, since the weapon was not Blood-drinker, the ancient Indonesian kris she customarily wore; it was too bulky to conceal beneath her sheer gown.

  She also felt like a total fool.

  * * *

  It was Kali MacDougall who'd talked her into coming tonight, of course, aided and abetted by Lainie. "Hon," the blonde MechWarrior had told her, her extravagant two-meter-tall frame sprawled like a slumming goddess across the bed of her tiny Compound quarters, "it just wouldn't strike you dead to learn to be a little more feminine. Truly."

  Cassie felt her cheeks grow hot. Kali often had that effect on her. She never said anything to hurt Cassie or make her feel small. But she was always catching the smaller woman unawares.

  "I do fine being feminine," Cassie protested. "I got Percy hooked on me quick enough." It was less than two months since Cassie and the Caballeros had saved HTE, Uncle Chandy, and the Regiment from destruction with a plan that required Cassie to get close to Lord Fillington. Which was where his interest in her originated. He seemed the more fascinated by her now for the knowledge that she had deceived him.

  "That was acting," Kali said.

  Cassie glared at her from suspicion-narrow eyes. "Is this part of your big scheme to humanize me?"

  "Yep."

  Kali MacDougall had a most annoying habit of being right. And since both she and Lainie Shimazu managed to be at one and the same time tough and feminine as hell, Cassie had let herself be talked into it.

  * * *

  And now she was repenting at leisure, as the old saw went. The waltz ended. When her escort tried to lumber off the dance floor with her in tow, Cassie dug in her heels, then simpered when he turned to glare at her. "Please," she said in a throaty voice. "I just love to dance."

  His frown melted into a nod of acquiescence. Plainly he had great plans for later on tonight. Kali, she thought as the band began another waltz, I'm going to kill you.

  Aside from being self-conscious, not to mention bored cross-eyed by her consort, Cassie was nagged by a lingering, creepy feeling of unease.

  There was no sensible reason for it. The Clans were restless, and every week or two rumors passed over Hachiman like Shockwaves from a supernova that one or another of them was about to bust the truce. But the Clans were distant, and the truce seemed to be holding. Across the border the Federated Commonwealth seemed to be on shaky ground, but the last thing Prince Victor Davion wanted to do right now was take a poke at the Draconis Combine. Though the two states had long been the bitterest of enemies, the Clan threat had made them allies. As for internal strife, while there was almost certainly at least one riot already in progress in the streets of Masamori, and possibly more, there was no real discontent to speak of—perhaps because of the pressure-vent that rioting provided.

  But the only way Cassie had managed to survive— as a street kid on the hardscrabble Liao world of Larsha; as a scout against pirates, Dracs, and the Clans; going up against the dreaded ISF itself—was by developing a keen internal danger-sense. And learning to trust it.

  She and her partner revolved past the double doors. Perhaps her uneasiness derived from the tall, solitary figure in black standing with its back to the Pillar of Ivory, opposite the doors. His hair was red and wavy, his face a brick-colored fist of almost transcendental ugliness. He wore a pistol at his waist and a wakizashi, a short-sword, slung over his left shoulder. He watched the proceedings with a dark fixity.

  Cassie had a nearly pathological fear of the giant war machines called BattleMechs, which was why she'd perfected the art of hunting them afoot. But she feared very few human beings. The man in black was one of those few.

  She was in good company. His name was Ninyu Kerai Indrahar, and he was second-in-command and adoptive heir to Subhash Indraher, the Smiling One— head of the Combine's Internal Security Force, the most feared secret police in the Inner Sphere. It was not for his position that she feared him, nor even for the fact that he had come close to destroying both Uncle Chandy and the Caballeros, the only family she had known since childhood.

  It was for the fact the he was much like her. Though his career had begun as a MechWarrior, he had no need to swaddle himself in tens of tons of titanium and steel. He radiated menace black as his garb—intimate menace, personal menace, not the robot threat of a ten-meter-tall BattleMech. Cassie's defense against the monstrous machines she so feared had always been that they were easy for her to see, and she was hard for them to see.

  She had the conviction Ninyu Kerai could see her, anywhere she went.

  He was not a handsome man, not in the manner of her escort. His face was determinedly ugly, a knot of scars and anger, but it showed a rugged, implacable strength that exerted a magnetism all its own. It was the sort of ugliness that intimidated men and melted women.

  Not that Cassie was susceptible, of course. She was merely assessing him, as she might if she were out trolling for marks in her intelligence-gathering mode. He had been an enemy before, and while he was Uncle Chandy's ally now, in the maelstrom of Drac politics he could easily be a foe again tomorrow. It was as important for her to know his strengths and weaknesses as to know those of a new model BattleMech.

  His dark eyes caught hers briefly across the dance floor. Heat and cold warred within her body. Fear, she told herself. Nothing more. Her escort whirled her away.

  * * *

  It was dealing with people that Ninyu Kerai Indrahar found hard. Killing them was easy.

  It had not always been that way, he reflected as he sipped fruit juice from a goblet. In his youth he had been fluid with people, easygoing, despite his early recruitment by the ISF and his training as both Mech-Warrior and commando. In those days he had been friend and confidant of young Theodore Kurita, future ruler of the Draconis Combine, as quick with a joke as with a gun, as comfortable with his arm around a woman as with his fingers around the hilt of a katana.

  But something had happened. Now he watched the glittering high-life swirl with a disdain masked by his customary look of angry impassivity. The years of service in the Combine's secret police had taken their toll. Youth and ease had been burned from him, by constant danger, by brutality, by the hidden knowledge that he could never hope to fill the shoes of the man he was appointed one day to replace.

  Yet his adoptive father constantly urged him to renew his social skills. "The Dragon cannot afford for you to become a mere blunt instrument, or even a sharp one, my son," the old man would tell him from the powered wheelchair in which he had spent the last decade while his still-living body decayed around his razor wits and steel will. "Your task is infinitely more complex—and infinitely more demanding. You must rema
in flexible, sensitive to the slightest nuance."

  Once Ninyu would have enjoyed such a splendid party as this. Now it was meaningless to him, so much white-noise for eye and ear. But he must never forget that he was the obedient son of Subhash Indrahar, the Smiling One. Among the most dangerous and powerful men alive, Indrahar had earned that nickname for the charm with which he hid his real intentions. It was no surprise that the Smiling One deemed it important for his heir to attend such functions. So Ninyu stood alone, enduring. After all, he was about duty, not gratifying his own desires.

  The gaijin scout, Cassiopeia Suthorn, danced past, looking small and vulnerable in her escort's clumsy embrace. Ninyu Kerai knew that was an illusion. She had gotten the better of him on their first meeting, the only person to best him in a physical encounter since he was a child. Few who faced him had even survived.

  He had raged at first, shame-burned, hungering to destroy her. Political realities—those accursed pressures that samurai might disdain but commandos could not afford to—denied him that pleasure. The passion had cooled, though, and now he could watch her with stolid respect for her capabilities.

  She spun away from him, a sleek panther inexplicably harnessed to a bear. She was undeniably beautiful in the sapphire gown that clung to her like an adolescent lover. It was not that he was affected by her beauty, he assured himself. He merely noted her potential effect on others.

  It was all part of learning, once again, to deal with people.

  * * *

  The trajectory Cassie and Lainie's blond Armor officer followed brought them before the swan table just as the waltz concluded. The hand behind Cassie's back began to drift south again, leaving a moist trail. Evidently its owner thought he was going to get lucky tonight. He was wrong.