Black dragon Page 20

  And then the Hunchback pilot paid the price for turning his back on a foe.

  The Raptor was not a very formidable opponent; it had been used as a test platform for bigger, more powerful 'Mechs and was not considered a fully operational model. But the Luthien Armor Works' first OmniMech had a versatility and newness that lent it a certain authority. And the old Hunchback's thin back armor had already been breached by the now-deceased Jenner's first salvo.

  The ruby beam of the Raptor's small pulse laser stabbed, and found the ammo storage for the big autocannon in the Hunchback's left side. The ammunition went off with a giant flash and a mind-jarring sound.

  The existing hole in the armor acted like the modern-day CASE system the Hunchback was too elderly to have, venting much of the force of the explosion out the BattleMech's back. It wasn't enough. The Hunchback's torso split open,' venting sheets of yellow flame. Its right arm flew off. It toppled into the rubble with billowing black smoke obscuring whatever was left of its upper half.

  Cautiously, the Raptor circled out into the street to cover its fallen foe. The Inagawa-kai gunmen began to emerge from their hiding-places, and to winkle the surviving Yamaguchi soldiers out of theirs.

  Then, incredibly, a hatch opened in the Hunchback's head. A stocky, bandy-legged figure hauled itself painfully out of the cockpit. Flames rushed up behind. It slid down the side of the 'Mech's chest, which had great fissures in it, venting fire and smoke like fumaroles.

  The helicopter touched down in the middle of the street, just far enough from the Raptor for its rotor-tips to clear the 'Mech. Benjamin Inagawa got out, walked forward in a bent position until he was out of the rotor's lethal circle, and straightened to brush imaginary lint from his fur lapels.

  The figure that had emerged from the destroyed Hunchback staggered to the sidewalk and stopped. Its clothing was torn, blackened by smoke and flame. Slowly it removed its helmet to reveal the grizzled face of Hiroo Yamaguchi.

  "What now, Yamaguchi-san?" Inagawa asked.

  The Old Cat waved a hand at the knot of his men being herded together under the guns of the Inagawa kobun. "If I surrender," he said, "will you let my people go?"

  "Of course," the tall, muscular oyabun replied. "I give you my word."

  Yamaguchi threw down his neurohelmet. The transpex visor, already cracked, shattered on the pavement. He drew himself as straight as age, bow legs, and injuries permitted.

  "I surrender."

  Benjamin Inagawa held out a hand. One of his foot-soldiers handed him an assault rifle. He raised it to his shoulder and cut Yamaguchi down with a burst that continued long after the Old Cat had fallen.

  When the bolt clicked on an empty chamber Inagawa held the weapon out to his side. "Another," he commanded, without taking his eyes off his fallen enemy. A soldier hastened to exchange a rifle with a full magazine for Inagawa's.

  "It is important to make a clean sweep," he told Hiraoke Toyama, who had also alighted from the VTOL. The Dieron boss's skeletal appearance seemed more appropriate than ever. "Just as I did when I took down Seizo DuBonnet and made myself oyabun of Benjamin."

  Inagawa turned and, laughing, began to mow down the Old Cat's captured men.

  18

  Imperial City, Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  27 June 3058

  Smoke still trailed from the wreckage of buildings and machines. The early morning was cool, the sky veneered with thin gray overcast. It had rained between midnight and dawn, and the light of the rising sun turned the pools of water that had gathered in shell-holes a soft pink. Lines of Friendly Persuaders in their candy-striped uniforms kept curious crowds beyond yellow tape cordons strung at either end of the street. Criminal investigative Bureau plain-clothesmen in trench coats poked through mounds of rubble in blasted buildings'and peered at the fallen BattleMechs.

  Lieutenant Tzu-Chien McCartney stood in the street with his hands in his coat pockets and his hat crammed down on his round head. He was positioned almost exactly between the feet of the abandoned UrbanMech and the shattered Hunchback. It gave him the eerie feeling that both huge shapes should be covered in sheets, like the human corpses strewn all over the streets and rooftops. He was used to investigating murders. This had been a battle.

  An aide who had been interrogating a small knot of street people, custodians, and night watchmen who had been in the district the night before approached him.

  "Nobody saw anything," he said.

  * * *

  Cassie came back to herself lying on a futon on a floor covered with tatami mats. She could feel the nearness of the walls, sense cold concrete beyond the shoji screens that covered them.

  She opened her eyes. The room was dim, lit by a single electric lamp, dialed low. An old man sat in a wheelchair nearby with a lap-robe draped over him. His skull was bare except for a scalp-lock of stringy gray hair. Round spectacles perched on a thin nose, before eyes keen as obsidian blades.

  "Did Pete shop me?" she asked.

  The old man smiled. "You do not disappoint, Senior Lieutenant Suthorn. You do not ask where you are, or what you are doing here. Nor even who I am."

  "I know who you are. That means I know where I am. As to why—" She sat up. "—I don't think I'm in much hurry to find out."

  Dizziness washed over her. She swayed and shut her eyes until her stomach decided to stay put for the moment.

  "Be careful," Subhash Indrahar urged. "The effects of the police stunner do not last long, but you were also given an injection."

  "I thought so." She swung her legs so that she was sitting sideways with her bare feet on the floor. "You didn't answer my question."

  "You are also just as impertinent as your reputation indicates," the old man said. "Please keep in mind that I am only a patient man when it serves the Dragon's ends. But to answer you, no."

  "He's dead?"

  "Not at all. My operatives stunned him, as well as his formidable pack of dogs, as they stunned you. We are not brutes—we are not the Maskirovka, Lieutenant. We do not promiscuously kill loyal servants of the Dragon simply to set up a test."

  "A test?" Cassie echoed.

  He nodded. "I had had reports of your prowess, notably from my adoptive son, Ninyu Kerai. I wished to ascertain for myself just how skillful you were. Therefore I dispatched a squad of my personal retainers—Sons of the Dragon, although some are daughters as well—with orders to apprehend you without hurting you." He smiled again.

  "I must say you thoroughly exceeded my expectations," Cassie rubbed her eyes. "How'd your people come out? I kill any of them?"

  "No," said Subhash Indrahar, "although you came perilously close in several instances. You shattered one man's jaw and broke his eardrum when you shot him, and we had to perform an emergency tracheotomy on one unfortunate young woman."

  "And what becomes of them?"

  "They heal," the Director said, "and hopefully learn wisdom. You provided a very useful object-lesson in the perils of overconfidence."

  "So what becomes of me?"

  Thin shoulders shrugged. Indrahar coughed into one hand, then gestured at the door. "You walk out of here. I should very much appreciate it if you would answer a few questions first, however."

  Cassie blinked and shook her head. "Excuse me, Indrahar-sama. The drug aftereffects must still be pretty strong. I thought I heard you say I could just walk out of here."

  "You heard me correctly. Consider: you have a very unusual psychological makeup, one which some might consider pathological. For example: you yourself are of the Combine by birth. Such heritage is not something one may simply walk away from. I might try, for example, to compel your cooperation on these grounds. I might even try to force you to use your formidable talents to serve the Internal Security Force."

  "I'd kill myself," Cassie said flatly.

  "Indeed. So I had in fact surmised. Likewise, you would almost certainly allow yourself to be tortured to death before you would divulge anything inv
oluntarily. You are of far too paranoid a nature to be amenable to chemical interrogation. These things limit my options. Now, while I may not be quite the fiendish mastermind I was portrayed in the recent FedCom holo featuring your friend Mr. Tchang," I earned and maintained my position as Director of the Internal Security Force by ruthlessly applying whatever means were necessary to gain my ends. Therefore I do not even scruple to try asking politely."

  Despite herself Cassie laughed. "Whether you believe this or not, there's not much I can think of now that I care to keep from you. In fact, I really wanted to talk to you. At least until your black-clad boys and girls landed on me at Buraku Pete's."

  "It was a message passed from your employer Chandrasekhar Kurita's chief of security, asking to set up an interview with Ninyu Kerai for you, that led me to have you brought in. Needless to say, anything you intended to say to him, you may say to me."

  It was maybe not that needless to say; there were certain things Cassie might conceivably have said to Ninyu that would not occur to her to say to his adoptive father—except that the one encounter between her and Ninyu Kerai had been more a reaction to fear and the shock of finding herself alive after taking on three Word of Blake BattleMechs barehanded than the product of any strong attraction.

  "I have a question I need to ask," Cassie said, "and you'll probably think it's impertinent. But I need to ask."

  Subhash gestured with thin fingers. "Proceed."

  "Are you a traitor?"

  It seemed that his dark eyes grew huge as saucers, although that was largely an artifact of his spectacles. His mouth worked slightly. He swallowed visibly, twice.

  "In the normal course of events," he said eventually, "I should expect to kill anyone who asked me such a question. I am forming the conception, however, that few courses run normally where you are concerned, Lieutenant Suthorn. One presumes you have a reason beyond simple recklessness for asking that?"

  "With respect, Indrahar-sama," Cassie said, "it isn't a question you can answer with another."

  This time it took all the old man's formidable will to keep from exploding into anger. "I am many things, young woman," he said. "A traitor to the Dragon will never be one of them."

  "All right," she said, "I believe you. Maybe because if you are bent, I'm dead anyway, and so is my regiment, so there isn't much to lose." Briskly she told the story of her encounter with the female agent in Tumbledown.

  The Director rotated up a noteputer attached to the outside of his right wheelchair arm, folded it across his lap. He entered the verification code the murdered woman had given Cassie.

  "Yes," he said. "She was Metsuke."

  He turned the screen so Cassie could see the picture that had appeared. "That's her," she affirmed.

  "Engaged in undercover work," the old man said, swivel-ing the computer back to face himself, "assigned here to Imperial City. Interesting. Normally such activities are the province of the ISF's Internal Security Division proper. She appears to have been what we call a 'floater,' an agent not bound to a specific objective, but rather sent out to turn over rocks and see what lies beneath them."

  He looked up. "And she said there was treason within the ISF?"

  "Yes. And she was killed by ISF operatives. DEST."

  He raised one bushy brow. Then he plied the keyboard. In the confines of the room the tapping sounded loud as a tackhammer.

  "Here we have it," he said. "A report of a foreign agent neutralized in the Tumbledown District. One we'd been after for quite a while, supposedly working for either the Liao or Word of Blake, likely both. She was run to ground by Internal Security Division agents. One of them, a female operative, was killed."

  He raised his head. "Perhaps you were involved in a different incident?"

  "Do you have a picture of the dead agent?"

  For a moment he regarded her. Then he returned his attention to the keyboard. "There."

  "That's her. She's the one I killed. Only she was DEST. I'm sure of it."

  "What makes you so certain?"

  "They had DEST moves. They had DEST skills. They had DEST arrogance, too—just like the pack you set after me. I told you how the woman I took down got out ahead of her backup, she was so eager to rack up a kill by herself."

  The Director still looked unconvinced. "It's more than that," Cassie said. "It's something I'm certain of—" She touched her breastbone. "—here. Just a feeling. I can't explain it better than that."

  "Ahh." He expelled the syllable in a lengthy breath. Then his eyes fixed hers, and his brows drew together as in extreme concentration. She felt a sense of invasion, as of invisible fingers probing into her mind, her soul. Instantly she fought back, focusing her whole being on rejection.

  The sensation stopped. Subhash raised his eyebrows and smiled thinly.

  "Your ki is strong," he said, "the strongest I have sensed for a long time. But it is almost entirely uncontrolled."

  Cassie shook her head, as much in annoyance as denial. She didn't have a lot of interest in mysticism. "Back on Lar-sha, my guru taught me exercises, to control the breath, to channel strong emotions—to focus myself." She felt a twinge about her momentary loss of control in stomping the dead DEST woman. "That's all I did."

  "Your sensei was wise," Subhash said. "You were, after all, a street urchin, half-wild. Had he taught you more, you would be a danger to yourself and others. Still, you should consider further study, to tap the powers contained within you. Your potential is great."

  She frowned. She was annoyed at him for passing judgement on Guru Johann, even favorably. It seemed an intrusion.

  He pressed a button. The wheelchair rolled back a pace from the futon. "You have been a very busy young woman," he said. "I sense that you believe the Tumbledown incident may be connected to other matters you have been investigating."

  "Yes. I think the Black Dragons are going to try to assassinate Ted—Theodore Kurita. I'm afraid they're going to try to involve us in some way."

  Subhash steepled his fingers before his face. "Kokuryu-kail Our information is that they have become practically dormant since your people handed them such a decisive setback on Towne. Are you sure you're not obsessing on them?"

  "Are you sure you're getting the straight skinny on the Black Dragon? It seems to me you people downplayed the threat they posted to peace on Towne, too—up until they dropped five regiments and an aerospace wing in our laps."

  Subhash frowned. It seemed to be more in thought than anger. "You are correct," he said. "That failure in intelligence bothered me to a substantial degree, and bothers me still. Without seeking to excuse it, I attributed it to our preoccupation with the Clans, as well as the demands on our assets imposed by the Liao-Marik invasion of Federated Commonwealth space. Also, I must confess, we—I—have over the years become accustomed to regarding Kokuryu-kai as something of a paper tiger. They possess a certain degree of influence and a sizable membership. Yet they have not in the past been particularly effectual. Whenever they become too overt we crush them. There the matter has rested for centuries."

  He tapped a finger on the keyboard frame. "Perhaps the Towne Incident should have led me to re-examine my own mindset in greater depth. I have allowed myself to fall into a habit of thought. That is a great failing for a man in my position."

  "Look," Cassie said, "it's not as if there's any great mystery about who the Black Dragon leaders are. Hiraoke Toyama's a big one; he was the one who raised and paid for the two Dragon regiments that hit us on Towne. If Benjamin Inagawa isn't another, he does a good job of faking, plus word in the Water Trade has it the two of them have been joined at the hip since they've been on Luthien. Why doesn't ISF just make them disappear?"

  Cassie had a gut-level dislike and distrust of totalitarianism and, indeed, all authority, but she also had a very bottom-line outlook on life. She didn't like secret police, but since they were on hand she couldn't understand why they didn't act like secret cops when a touch of the mailed fist was actually called for.


  Subhash Indrahar drew in a deep breath, released it. "That's a very complicated issue. Since I hope to enlist your cooperation, I shall try to explain it to you. The glib answer would be that mere law enforcement is not our task. But that's not the whole truth. The duty of the Internal Security Force is to maintain the fabric of Combine society, which is very complex and, in some key ways, fragile. That structure is paramount to the survival of our state. While social conservatives—including, ironically, the bulk of the non-yakuza Black Dragons—would emphatically deny it, the y'akuza have a definite place in that structure. This fact predates the accommodation our Coordinator made with seimeiyoshi-rengo when he was Gunji no Kanrei. In fact, it predates the Draconis Combine itself. It is an extension of the state of affairs existing in Japan from the twentieth century onward.

  "Our culture is like an arch: no stone can safely be removed without threatening the collapse of the rest. That even applies to the Unproductives. Our role in ISF is, above all, to preserve harmony. To attack the social order, even by acting against the nominal criminal underworld, would be disharmonious and produce chaos. Even in the case of demonstrable treason—which membership in Black Dragons is not yet proven to constitute—a move against a longstanding element of society, even a covert one, is not to be lightly undertaken."

  "I know your agents have wiped out Black Dragon meetings. Why not Inagawa?"

  "From time to time we extirpate lower-level Black Dragons and their sympathizers when detected, 'to encourage the others,' as an ancient Terran literary figure once put it. But keep in mind that Combine culture accords small status to the individual."

  "Toyama and Inagawa are just individuals."

  "Not altogether. Theodore Kurita is likewise 'just' an individual. Status governs; as oyabun, Inagawa is symbolic of his group, stands for it, and so enjoys protection. I will admit that this situation is not precisely to my taste, nor am I alone. Last night while you were under sedation, Benjamin Inagawa's forces attacked Hiroo Yamaguchi's headquarters and assassinated the Old Cat."