Close quarters Page 28

  "But the Colonel—" Bobby the Wolf began.

  "Listen to me, dammit! Don't you see we're in deeper than we were when up against the tigres on Jeronimo?"

  "What are you talking about?" Gavilan demanded. "The Clan beat the Snakes as easily as they beat us."

  She fixed him with eyes as clear and unyielding as blue sky mirrored in a transpex windscreen.

  "This time, Gabby, there's no pickup," she said softly. "This one we got to win. Or that's it for all of us."

  * * *

  Kali sat with her back to the wall, smoking a cigarette. The mess hall was deserted; she was alone with her thoughts. They weren't congenial company.

  Archie Westin poked his wavy-haired blond head in the door, peered around, saw her, hesitated, then came walking over.

  "Might I join you, Captain?"

  She sighed and spread her hands. He nodded, taking the chair across from her.

  "If you're looking for Cassie," Kali said, "she's busy. And she's liable to be out of circulation for a while."

  "Cassie?" he shook his head. "No. She's a lovely and fascinating creature, but I've decided I've spent quite enough time banging my head against that particular brick wall, thank you."

  Kali cocked an eyebrow at him. "Might find it worth the effort to keep on battering. Even if it is a might tough on the old coiffure."

  He grinned. "You're quite a rare specimen yourself, Captain MacDougall, if I may be bold enough to say so."

  "I'll take that as a compliment," she said. "Otherwise I reckon I'd just have to shoot you, and I got enough problems without having Davion's MI4 gunning for me."

  Archie's lips tightened beneath his pencil-thin mustache. "They'd probably think you were doing them a favor. The head of MI4 is my uncle, you know."

  "No foolin'?"

  He shook his head. "It's no state secret; I'm really Archie Westin, and my mother really is the former Leticia Cromwell. A matter of record, back in the Federated Suns."

  She looked at him, and he quickly corrected himself. "Federated Commonwealth, I mean. I'm afraid that was rather a sinister slip of the tongue, given the situation back home."

  "May turn out to be accurate enough again, though, real soon now."

  He sighed. "I hope not. I was raised to consider myself a son and servant of the Federated Commonwealth."

  "Yeah, well I was raised to consider myself a daughter of the Free Worlds League, and look how that turned out." She leaned forward. "So how the heck did you wind up on secret assignment for your uncle Ian?"

  He shrugged. "I always idolized him as a boy. Wanted to emulate him. Drove my mother crazy."

  "So when you got old enough you signed up."

  "Oh, yes." He gave his head a rueful shake. "Oh, I know I'm not too good at the cloak-and-dagger stuff so far. I started out as a rather more active type of operative, if you can believe that. Following in Uncle Ian's footsteps again; he also got his start in MI6."

  "I noticed you keep yourself awful fit for a newscaster." She took a drag on her cigarette. "So you were a Rabid Fox. What happened?"

  Archie sighed. "My mother. She's rather overprotective of me and badgered my uncle until he agreed to transfer me out. I was the only one to carry on the Westin family name, she said. A formidable woman, Dame Leticia."

  "I see."

  "This is my first go as a covert. After all, it is rather a low-priority assignment. With all due respect, the Commonwealth may be interested in where the Seventeenth Recon has been, and why it has so abruptly resurfaced in the pay of a Combine potentate, and an actual Kurita to boot. But it's not that interested."

  "NBD, Archie. No big deal. We think high enough of ourselves for the whole darn universe."

  They sat together in silence for a time. Then Kali sighed and put out her cigarette in her polymer coffee cup.

  "So what's the deal, Arch? Reckon there's a reason you stopped making yourself so scarce."

  He spread his hands. "You've caught me out again. You are a most perceptive lady."

  "Save the soft soap for later; might find it comes in handy. Now, what's really on your mind, other than that pretty blond hair?"

  He bit his lip. "I made a right ass of myself, the other day, Didn't I?"

  "Yep."

  "I accused you all of deceiving me. I know that's rather petty, given that what I was truly miffed about was my own utter failure to deceive you."

  "Which you'll notice none of us was holding against you."

  "Indeed. In any event, I wanted to look you up and apologize. Is there any way I can atone for my offense?"

  She looked him up and down, a smile winching itself slowly across her face. "You could buy me dinner at the executives' lounge. Real steak. Drac mucky-mucks don't care a hoot what these half-converted Hindus think about eating cows."

  Archie blinked. Then he grinned. "Dear lady," he said, "it would be my pleasure."

  28

  Masamori, Hachiman

  Galedon District, Draconis Combine

  21 October 3056

  "Whos the ravishing creature with the Fat Boy?" the Right Honorable Percival Fillington, Earl of Hachiman, asked his trusted aide Gupta Yoritomo.

  Without turning his sleek round head—temples shaved to the tops of the ears, the heavy brown hair above worn long and gathered into a ponytail—the shorter man glanced across the salon of the Citadel's penthouse suite toward their host. Decked out in his usual gaudy scarlet robe, Uncle Chandy had a huge brandy-filled snifter of Srinagar crystal in one hand and a gorgeous woman on his arm.

  "His newest play-pretty, one presumes, milord," Yoritomo murmured, in a voice precisely calculated to carry above the burble of cocktail conversation to his master's ears, but no farther. Members of his family had served as personal aides to the Earls of Hachiman for generations; like so many of his kind, he had been bred for his post as well as schooled in its skills since birth. "One in a long line, but not one I'm familiar with."

  Percy grinned with a schoolboy's frank enthusiasm. "One well worth knowing, I'd say." The stern detachment of the samurai did not come naturally to Hachiman's young Planetary Chairman. It hadn't come with long and grueling training, either, though he could fake it for state occasions.

  It was widely accepted that Percy was a twit. His twithood, however, was considered beneficial to the State. Despite the centralization of state power on Luthien, which had been one of Theodore Kurita's less-publicized reforms, the Combine's individual Planetary Chairmen still enjoyed considerable autonomy. It therefore served the interests of the Dragon that the Earl of a planet as important as Hachiman be a twit.

  Even a non-twit might have agreed with the young Earl's assessment, though. The woman was of slightly above average height for a Combine female, 165 centimeters or so, and almost boyishly slim—a far cry from the leggy, top-heavy blondes traditionally beloved of Kurita dignitaries, though her stiletto-heeled boots added to the apparent length of legs that were already long for her height, and immaculately sculpted. But there was a sinuous grace to the figure defined by a sheath of incomparable emerald silk from the Hachiman city of Kuranosuke. Her hair was a bold metallic red that clashed rather horribly with her escort's robe. Her eyes matched her dress. Her skin was pale, ivory rather than alabaster, which had the effect of setting off the distinctly Asian cast of her fine features in a way Percy found most fetching.

  She caught him looking at her, then glanced up at her escort. Uncle Chandy was engaged in swapping insincerities with some of the lesser local nobility, completely oblivious to her; she was nothing but a woman, after all. It was almost surprising to see the bumptious Chandrasekhar displaying such classic Kurita virtue—and Percy felt a twinge of something akin to envy that the man could remain apparently indifferent to such a woman.

  She looked back at Percy and smiled. It was a smile to induce arrhythmia. He swallowed hard.

  "I shall run a check on her, if your Excellency desires," Yoritomo said.

  Percy waved him off. "Not just n
ow; can't be making indiscreet inquiries in the midst of mine host's castle." He shook his head regretfully. "Appalling to think of such a lovely young woman bound to such a gross pig as Chandrasekhar."

  "Indeed, lord." Yoritomo gave him a quick tsu's smirk. Percy swallowed a sigh. His aide was a Kurita to the marrow; he was only thinking of the waste of such pretty meat, not the deeper tragedy of a beautiful soul such as Percy thought he saw in the brief flash of those eyes—green as the hardwood forests of the Trimurti foothills in May—trapped in the clutches of a despoiler like that slug of a Kurita.

  For a moment, in his mind, the Planetary Chairman was a knight in armor—not a horn-helmed samurai in colorfully lacquered steel on a scrubby little island pony, but a medieval European armored in articulated plate and chain astride a mighty white charger. It had been one of the dangerous romantic visions of his youth, and quickly suppressed. There was no place for dragon-slaying chivalry in the Dragon's realm. Besides, his childhood tutors—who were quite sophisticated, as was appropriate for a cosmopolitan world such as Hachiman—had made sure he read what Miguel de Cervantes had to say about the ancient ideal of knight-errantry.

  Feeling peckish, the Chairman drifted toward the buffet. It was of course a masterpiece of extravagance, a sumptuous assortment of foods arranged with impeccable taste. Though the cult of the Dragon preached austerity, the nobility were supposed to live well, with a certain ostentation, to demonstrate the superior position they enjoyed in society. That was one responsibility attendant upon his name that Chandrasekhar Kurita did not shirk.

  Fat Chandy's parties were the talk of all Hachiman— whose standards for festivity were themselves legendary. To celebrate surviving the raid on his corporate headquarters, the CEO of HTE had decreed a humdinger.

  Percy was using a pair of ornately engraved silver tongs shaped like crane wings to place a purple crescent of melon next to some marinated sea scorpion when the scent of a perfume wafting toward him like a nightingale's song made him look up suddenly.

  Standing beside him was Chandrasekhar Kurita's lovely guest. "What amazing fruit," she said. "Does it taste as lovely as it looks?"

  "Indeed it does," he said, feeling his heart beat faster. "It's Tamerlane melon, imported from New Samarkand. Quite the delicacy."

  He glanced at her sidelong. Up close she was breathtaking. "When one speaks of beauty, though, one might do worse than begin with you. And end as well."

  She smiled, dropped her eyes. Long black lashes fluttered in pretty consternation.

  "Your Excellency is much too kind," she said.

  "My Excellency is merely truthful," Percy said. "Understating the case, if anything." He grasped her hand, lifted it to his lips.

  She flicked a wary glance over a bare shoulder. Her escort was still holding forth in the corner.

  "I'm Percival Fillington," he said. "It is my honor to serve the Dragon in the capacity of Planetary Chairman of the world of Hachiman."

  "I recognized your Lordship," she said, lowering her eyes respectfully. "Only you are much more handsome than you look on holovid."

  For a fact, Percy thought he cut quite a dashing figure, his rapier-slim form draped in the dark purple robe of his station, over a ruffled white shirt and bottle-green breeches, his wavy red-highlighted hair caught in a queue at the nape of his neck. He realized it was quite absurd to feel so flattered. Careful, lad, said a voice inside his head. Don't fall too fast. She's only a woman.

  He had trouble accepting the latter part. Someone so lovely could never be only anything.

  "Here, allow me," he said, and tonged a slice of melon onto the woman's carven-quartz plate.

  She opened her mouth in a pretty "O" of surprise. It was an almost unheard-of gesture.

  "Come, child, tell me your name," Fillington urged gently.

  "Jasmine, my Lord," she said. "Jasmine Mehta, at your service. I come from the city of Srinagar."

  "Many precious things come from Srinagar," he murmured with the air of one quoting ancient wisdom. "Come, sit with me and tell me about yourself."

  Her face brightened, and as quickly clouded again in a look of alarm and consternation. Percy sensed a presence behind his right shoulder, turned.

  Two obvious gaijin from Uncle Chandy's hireling regiment stood there. One was white and gangly, with ill-groomed dark hair and an adenoidally open mouth. The other was black and immense, a good two meters tall and at least that large around the middle. His bald head gleamed like polished mahogany in the light of the crystal chandelier. A furious frizzy black beard framed his moon face.

  "The boss ast us to keep an eye on Miz Jasmine, here," the black thug rumbled in an earthquake voice.

  "Yep," the skinny one affirmed, bobbing his head and chuckling as if his partner had made a joke. Percy suspected he might be slow-witted.

  "Come along, little lady," the fat mercenary said. He enveloped the girl's upper arm in a giant black paw.

  She went readily enough, but the single look she cast the Planetary Chairman over her bare shoulder spoke volumes.

  "Your Excellency appears perturbed."

  Percy jumped, turned. His aide had materialized at his elbow. "Dragon's blood, man, don't sneak up on me like that!"

  "As your Excellency wishes," murmured Yoritomo, who had done it before and would again. "Is there something your Lordship wishes?"

  Percy glanced at where Jasmine stood at the Kurita's side now, an abject and beautiful satellite to a bloated planet. She glanced his way again.

  He willed his fists to uncurl. "Yes, there is, Gupta," he said. "But there are things even a Planetary Chairman cannot have."

  * * *

  On the way from the elevator across to his personal helicopter parked on the rooftop pad of Chandy's Citadel, Percy paused to put one polished boot on the parapet and peer out over the sprawling Hachiman Taro complex. Truly it was huge, a fairy city spun of traceries of light, the bronze towers of his capital surrounding and looming over it like light-encrusted mountains. He sighed.

  It truly is grand, he thought. Pity it's wasted on Chandy, who disgraces his name and defiles everything he touches.

  "My lord," said Yoritomo from behind him.

  "I won't fall, you know," Percy said without turning.

  "Not even your Excellency's exalted position confers immunity from the laws of gravity."

  Percy grinned into the night wind, thick with the river smell, tanged with ozone from arc welders and the sting of methanol-induced formaldehyde smog. It was traditionally the prerogative of Combine majors-domo to speak bluntly, even impertinently, to their masters. It was also their prerogative to pay for that privilege with their heads when they erred—or should the whim happen to strike their masters. Percy Fillington had always enjoyed his aide's calculated snottiness. It was a game he had long mastered.

  He sighed again, dropped his boot to the graveled rooftop. "The ancient King Canute, of old England on Terra, is often held up to ridicule as an example of megalomaniac folly because he sat his throne on the beach and ordered the incoming tide not to touch him."

  "One imagines he got rather wet," Yoritomo said.

  "Indeed he did. But the scoffers miss the point: the King was surrounded by sycophants at court, who professed to believe his majesty was so great that even the tides would obey his hest. His intention was to put paid to such silly talk; and look where it got him."

  "Dead," Yoritomo said, "for several thousand years."

  Percy laughed in surprised delight. "You're right, of course," he said. "And I suppose I shall be doing rather all right if I'm still spoken of two thousand years from now, even if it's as a figure of fun."

  Before he could say more, a female cry breasted the night wind and brought his head around.

  Uncle Chandy's escort, the magical Jasmine Mehta, was flying from the elevator housing. Her auburn hair was in wild disarray, the strapless dress was torn revealingly, and blood fanned from her nostrils across her lips and chin. She had kicked off the stilett
o heels and was running for all she was worth.

  She caught sight of Percy and darted toward him. A pair of armed guards in House Fillington livery moved from watch on the helicopter to intercept her.

  "Your Excellency!" she cried. "You must help me! He's gone insane!"

  Percy started forward. Yoritomo grabbed his arm.

  The Chairman spun, face opening in shock. Even from his aide, that was a sizable breach of decorum.

  "Don't get involved, your Excellency," Yoritomo said urgently. "He's a Kurita."

  The guards were holding the distraught young woman by her fine bare arms. She struggled furiously. "He'll kill me!" she wailed. "He already tried."

  "A grotesque fat parody of a Kurita, and one long banished in disgrace from court," Percy said stiffly. He did not add, and one suspected of blackest treachery by the ISF. His aide knew that well enough; no point in the indiscretion of committing it to sound.

  "And I'm the Planetary Chairman," he added, taking his arm back.

  The door to the stairway next to the elevator housing flew open. The two gaijin thugs burst out, glaring around. The skinny one grabbed the fat one by the arm and pointed. "There she is!"

  They raced toward the girl, who uttered a despairing scream.

  Her hand moved mongoose-quick to unsnap the safety strap on the holster of one of the guards who held her. Before anyone could react, she'd hauled out his heavy sidearm and had it pointed at the charging mercenaries.

  "You'll never take me back to that monster!" she cried, and fired.

  The huge black gaijin staggered as the bullets struck the mountain slope of his chest and belly. Dark stains blossomed on the front of his shirt. He clutched himself, staggered back, and collapsed moaning as the guards wrestled the girl to the rooftop and disarmed her.

  The guard still holding his piece drew and aimed it at the nape of the sobbing woman's neck.

  "Hold!" Percy exclaimed, stepping forward. He heard his aide protesting behind him, but his ears were closed. "Let her go. This woman is seeking my protection."