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  "In God's name, Cassiopeia, don't talk that way!"

  "Look. It goes with the job. Yours and mine. I take risks. And sooner or later you lose people. Deal with it, Father. Cassie gone."

  She stood up. The bar had gone flat for her. Time for a change of venue.

  The slumming noble smiled unsteadily at her. "See that man over there?" she asked, pointing past her admirer to the red-bearded yak who now sat by the stage, steadfastly refusing to tip the entertainers. "He says he's in love with you."

  She left him blinking.

  "You're aware that Franklin Sakamoto has vanished from Sho-sho Hideyoshi's custody?" Subhash Indrahar asked.

  Ninyu Kerai Indrahar's expression didn't change. But the Smiling One marked how the pupils of his eyes expanded slightly.

  "Hai, Father."

  "I wish you to take personal charge of the search for him. It's very important that he be found and returned before the Coordinator's Birthday celebration begins."

  "I shall find him, Subhash-sama." The red-haired man bowed and departed.

  Subhash sat back in his chair and shut his eyes. He was tired. Yet he felt somehow light.

  Decades ago Ninyu Kerai had assassinated a woman and her young son. The woman was a former lover of Theodore Kurita's. The boy, however, was a ringer, substituted by the woman for her own son—and Theodore's. Not for many years after, when the identity of Franklin Sakamoto was discovered, was it realized that, for one of the very few times in his life, Ninyu had missed his target.

  Subhash, who had ordered the hit after Theodore's marriage to Tomoe Sakade had been revealed to Takashi, and reluctantly accepted by him, was philosophical about the affair. It had been an unbreakable tradition of House Kurita that if the heir apparent produced legitimate offspring, no by-blows could be allowed to live: disputes over the succession would weaken the Dragon in the face of powerful foes. But all had worked out well: Sakamoto had renounced all claim to the Dragon Throne, and had served the Combine honorably and well in the fight against the Clans, on Somerset with Adam Steiner's Strikers, and elsewhere on his own.

  But the failure still gnawed at Ninyu Kerai. He longed to tie up that loose end. Even though his adoptive father had instructed him to "return" the missing Sakamoto—presumably more or less intact—he was avid for the hunt. There were always possibilities. ~

  If he finds you, Sakamoto-saa, Subhash thought, I hope your spirit will forgive me. Unless, as he suspected, the Black Dragon Society had somehow disappeared the Coordinator's illegitimate son, in which case he was already dead and Subhash could do him no harm by setting Ninyu on him. They had old scores to settle with him. They would no more conspire to put him on the throne of the Draconis Combine than they would Prince Victor Davion.

  The Director had two reasons for sending his adoptive son down a false trail. First, if Ninyu Kerai knew there was a plot against his father, he'd simply kill both Kiguri and Jo-jira out of hand, along with anybody he remotely suspected might be conspiring with them. Once the weight of Directorship settled on Ninyu's shoulders, Subhash had faith, the boy would settle down, become less reactive, less prone to drastic impulse. Indeed that was a major reason Ninyu Kerai wished to put off his succession: the constraints it would impose. But if he perceived his father to be threatened, he would have no restraint at all. And the Combine, beset as it was, simply could not afford to lose both Jojira and Kiguri at a blow. Subhash Indrahar needed time to ensure that the proper head rolled.

  Second, if Ninyu Kerai suspected what was happening, he would interfere with his adoptive father doing what must be done. And Subhash could not permit that.

  Subhash opened his eyes to his small dim office. Time pressed. He would continue his quiet inquiries—and hope that Cassie Suthorn was as resourceful as she seemed.

  * * *

  The sun was falling toward the skyscrapers that lay between Yoshiwara and the Kiyomori Mountains and Cassie was still out with her ear to the ground on the streets of the city, it now being her third day without sleep. Time was running out, with the Coordinator's three-day birthday celebration starting tomorrow. The second day would be the actual day of Theodore Kurita's birthday, and the great parade was scheduled for then. With the big event looming so near, there were no accommodations left in Impy City, no matter how lousy, and anyway she was too strung on fear to sleep. She took a break from her fruitless searching to duck out of the exultant crowds into a chemist's shop. Her fanatical determination to safeguard the regiment—her familia—could only keep her functioning so long. There being a key distinction between awake and effective.

  She moved past the racks taller than she was, of incense-sticks and festive firecrackers—though only slim pickings were left of the latter—of herbs and patent medicines in their colorfully labeled bottles. The Combine frowned on recreational chemicals, with the exception of tobacco and alcohol, those staples of the true samurai. Caffeine tablets, on the other hand, were readily available. Anything to keep the Workers bright-eyed and ready to go throughout those sixteen-hour shifts.

  She had just found the right section when she heard one of the two joygirls sorting through the eye-shadow on the far side of the rack say, "Angus Kurita? I've never heard of him?"

  "Shh!" her partner hissed. "Not so loud! It's supposed to be secret."

  "And your sister says he's coming here?"

  "It's a surprise. For his cousin, our Coordinator. The Coordinator thinks he's still back at the Sun Zhang Academy on New Samarkand, hard at his studies."

  "Eee! And I bet your sister knows all about hard."

  "Hush! Don't talk that way. Teresa says he's very gallant. Also he's finished very quickly."

  "That's always a blessing. Does he bring her flowers?"

  "Sometimes."

  "Aii! And he's a Kurita? I'm dreaming!"

  "Well... he's not a very close cousin of Theodore's."

  "A Kurita's a Kurita. Are you going to—you know—?"

  "Don't be stupid. How would I meet him? Do you think my invitation to Unity Palace will be waiting for me when we get back to the house?"

  "Well... wouldn't your sister have told him about you? You're very pretty, and you always make the gentlemen happy. And he's had a long space journey...."

  "Well... maybe. But mind you don't say a word to anyone!"

  * * *

  The room was dark but for the smoky glow of a pair of paper lanterns. Outside, night had come to the little district inhabited mostly by Worker families fortunate enough to have inherited their own houses. The pleasant old granny lady had withdrawn discreetly, not to mention so silently that even with her senses sensitive as a bubble's skin, stretched wide by an adrenaline jag so intense she hadn't needed her wake-the-dead pills, Cassie heard nothing from across the tiny room. Belatedly she began to speculate as to what Sons of the Dragon did when they got too old to chase people through junkyards.

  "Angus Kurita?" the face of the Smiling One asked. "You're sure?"

  "Pretty much. It's not a name I've heard before. The one girl never seemed to've heard it either."

  "Angus Kurita is the great-grandson of Marcus Kurita, through his son Donal and grandson Graeme."

  "So he's somebody who might conceivably accede to the throne."

  Subhash's image looked at her for several seconds. "Yes."

  "So this is maybe not a false alarm? I'm not overreacting?"

  "I very much doubt that you are doing so." Cassie ran a hand through her hair. It was still red. "So what now?"

  "You return to Cinema City. Warn your people to be alert."

  "For what?"

  "For anything. I believe there is a high order of probability that some hostile action will be taken against your regiment sometime between now and the commencement of the ceremonies tomorrow."

  "But what?" Cassie almost wailed. Frustration filled her eyes with tears that seemed to scald. She felt shame at showing weakness before this man, but she was desperate. She was as unaccustomed to failure as Ninyu Kera
i, and to her mind, she had failed.

  "I don't know. You and your companions will have to rely on your famous talent for improvisation."

  "And you?"

  "I shall take what steps I can."

  "What steps?"

  "It is not necessary that you know. But be assured, when I take them, you will be aware of the fact. One more thing; If you need to communicate, use the sequence I'm about to give you. It will connect you directly to Ninyu Kerai Indrahar, my son."

  Cassie drew a deep breath, exhaled slowly through distended nostrils. "Good luck, Subhash-sama."

  "And to you, Lieutenant."

  Bringing his computer display back up on his screen, Subhash Indrahar entered a shielded query as to what parties had accessed the files on Angus Kurita most often over the last two years.

  When he saw the results he smiled with genuine pleasure.

  PART THREE

  Chanbara

  On death ground, fight.

  —Sun Tzu The Art of War, VIII:6

  24

  Cinema City, Luthien

  Pesht Military District, Draconis Combine

  1 July 3058

  The improvised hangar cobbled together outside the main compound of Cinema City to serve as a BattleMech maintenance shop rang with a war-cry as one of Zuma's Aztechs, a man waving an orange pry-bar, lunged from concealment among a stack of crates. Another man armed with a machine-pistol, the neck of his mechanic's coveralls open far enough to reveal a hint of the intricate tattoo extending downward from his clavicle, moved to intercept him. A blow from the meter-and-a-half bar caved in the side of the yakuza's face and dropped him to the grease-stained cement floor.

  Still clutching his pry-bar, the Aztech then charged directly toward a knot of men standing by the foot of Buck Evans' Orion, in the shop because the Kali Yama LB10-X autocannon, retrofit before the Seventeenth deployed to Towne, was showing a tendency to overheat. Mishcha Kurosawa, already half-maddened by the mercenaries' antics, had claimed that the weapon didn't need to work, since they weren't going to be shooting anyone in the Coordinator's parade. The proud Don Carlos, however, insisted that no machine that wasn't fully functional could be presented to the Coordinator. Takura Migaki, a stickler for both realism and detail in his holos, agreed. So Zuma and his elves were staying up all night, hard at work on a dozen malfunctioning 'Mechs.

  Where, shortly after 0415 Luthien time, a mixed force of Black Dragon kobun and Draconis Elite Strike Team commandos had surprised them and taken them captive.

  And so things stood as the tech raised his steel bar overhead to strike once more, screaming with rage. Tai-i Achilles Daw drew a Mydron autopistol from a strapped-down thigh holster and shot him almost casually through the chest, twice. The man fell, rolled back and forth coughing on the ground. Daw's assistant Saburo Nishimura drew his own sidearm and shot the tech through the head.

  Wearing his black hood and red visor down his back, as was Kashira Nishimura, Daw turned back to the Black Dragon commander next to him, who wore the blue katakana numeral "five" on the front of his MechWarrior neurohelmet, indicating he claimed the rank of captain.

  "You should keep better control of the prisoners, O'Hanrahan-ttm," Daw said, holstering his weapon. He didn't use the man's professed rank, believing the yak scum was not entitled to it. "We're on a tight schedule. We've got no time for games."

  The Kokuryu-kai company commander had a scar running from the temple of his fair-haired head to the side of his narrow jaw. In transit it hoisted the right-hand side of his mouth in a permanent sneer. The pale face showed no reaction to the slight, but the pupils narrowed in his ice-water eyes. "These doitsujin yohei are like wild beasts," he said dismissively. He omitted to name Daw at all.

  Doitsujin yohei meant "German mercenaries," and was a common term for foreign money-soldiers. The connotation was Hessian, after the eighteenth-century slave-soldiers that German princes sold to the British to help them lose their North American colonies—a nuance that would have infuriated the already-smoldering Caballero techs and Mech Warriors.

  "See that those men of yours keep tighter reins on the ones they've got locked-down in the barracks," Daw said. Around them sullen armorers worked at loading the Battle-Mechs' ammo bins under the guns of tattooed guards, while DEST operatives strapped on cooling vests and trunks over their black body armor. "And keep your 'Mechs tight on the machines we have to leave behind. These gaijin may be animals—" And so are you. "—but they're clever ones."

  O'Hanrahan raised his head and his sneer deepened. "We should be executing the usurper," he declared, "after the way he betrayed our comrades on Towne."

  "But we have to use the foreigners' 'Mechs to scatter our friend Theodore," Daw said. Scatter was yet another yak euphemism for kill. "You'll have the pleasure of butchering the chikusho once they've been blamed for the crime."

  O'Hanrahan opened his mouth to protest further. Daw stiffened the fingers of his right hand and drove them into the yak's sternum, between the foamed ceramic plates of his cooling vest. "We helped you smuggle your company of play-pretend BattleMech jockeys onto the Pearl. But we're running this play, and you'll follow our directions. Wakarimasu-ka ?"

  O'Hanrahan's eyes flamed like a wolfs. Then they tilted downward. "Hai, Tai-i."

  Daw looked at him hard for a moment. Then he said, "See if you can hurry these swine along getting their junk-wagons ready. We want to be able to roll on schedule. It shouldn't be too hard, since we're taking only a single battalion of their 'Mechs."

  "It shall be done."

  Daw turned away. "Softly, Tai-i," O'Hanrahan said. "One little thing more."

  "Speak," Daw said impatiently.

  "You should have your people strip off those fine black devil-suits of theirs. Otherwise they'll be finding it a tad bit warm when the fur begins to fly."

  Nishimura laughed contemptuously. "We can take it. These are DEST commandos you're dealing with, tough as duraflex plate. Not pampered Mech Warriors."

  "I know," O'Hanrahan said.

  * * *

  A tap on the door brought Cassie awake. She rolled onto her side with her holdout pistol in hand, concealed beneath the sheets.

  The first thing she did was cover a black manlike shape, standing by the far wall of the little room. Then she relaxed.

  She was still alone. The dark shape was a gift. It had been waiting for her when she returned to the room the night before, having been ordered to get some sleep by Colonel Camacho.

  Naked she slipped from the futon, glided up to stand with her back to the wall beside the door, revolver held both-handed, snub barrel pointing up.

  "Who is it?"

  "Cassie, it's Marly," a teenage girl's voice said through the door. "I'm lonely. I want to talk. Can I come in?"

  Cassie frowned. It was natural for a fourteen-year-old girl, whose family was dead and whose homeworld lay light years away, to be lonely. It wasn't too characteristic of Marly Jones to admit it. Even less to use that tone of voice.

  "Just a minute," Cassie said. Quickly she pulled on the garment that had been left for her. Then she went to the door and unlocked it.

  Marly stood there, a coltish auburn-haired girl dressed in dungarees, a saggy jersey, and athletic shoes. At the sight of Cassie, her eyes widened. "Lord, Cass, isn't that—?"

  "Come on inside, honey, and we'll talk." Cassie grabbed her and pulled her in, shutting the door behind her. She switched on the overhead light.

  "Isn't that—T Marly asked again, still goggling.

  "Yes, it's a DEST infiltration suit. What's with the whiny act?"

  "Wh—where'd you get it?"

  "A secret admirer. Don't get weird on me. As far as we're concerned right now, there's good guys and bad guys in ISF. This is from the good guys. Got that?"

  The girl nodded. Her face was still pale behind her freckles. Even though the Combine and the Federated Commonwealth had been allied against the Clans for most of her brief life, on Towne, hard against the front
ier, the Drac Internal Security Force were frequent bedtime-story bogeymen.

  "Now what are you doing up at this hour?"

  "I couldn't sleep. So I decided to go up to the roof by myself for a while. You know how I do that."

  Cassie nodded. When she had first met Marly, the girl had been filled with adolescent ardor to fight as a sniper against the Kurita invaders and their allies in Towne's Planetary Government. Then the girl's father had been murdered by Wolf Girl, who had infiltrated the underground on behalf of Howard Blaylock, who headed the PG. So a childish fancy had turned into a serious obsession; she had served as a sniper, with eight confirmed kills, including three in the final attack on Port Howard. What she did on the roof, commonly, was pick out people and objects, practice estimating the range to them, lining up shots, and squeezing off.

  She had somehow or other made herself into Cassie's protege, which had Cassie acutely uncomfortable. She liked the girl, but did not exactly consider herself an ideal role model for youth. She was also acutely aware that Marly was showing signs of evolving into a proto-sociopafh, much like ... well, Cassie, once upon a time.

  "So anyway, you know how we got these Voice of the Dragon security guards watching us all the time ever since Misty was found, and they won't let us go out or anything?"

  "Yeah. They gave me the hard eye when I came in, told me I better plan on staying until time for the big parade."

  "Well, I was stopped by one on my way up to the roof."

  Cassie shrugged. "Maybe they figure we'll try rappelling from up there. Shoot, somebody would've probably done it by now if they weren't looking out for it. Just on principle."

  "But this wasn't one I'd seen before. None of them around this morning are ones I've seen before."

  "Good eye, girl. But still—we haven't had all that much to do with the Cinema City security types until the last couple of days. Doesn't necessarily mean anything."