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17
Conqueror’s Pride, Proserpina
Prefecture III, Republic of the Sphere
20 March 3135
Sully James folded his arms across his barrel chest and watched as the new cook poured a concoction of beaten eggs, sugar and soy sauce onto a hot, rectangular cast-iron omelet skillet sputtering with two, and only two, teaspoons of vegetable oil. Watch him now; the blighter’ll botch it and then won’t I be giving Kat an earful. I ain’t never asked after ’nother cook and don’t want one now.
Except the new cook didn’t botch it, and when Sully forked a mouthful of tamago into his maw, he was forced to admit that the man knew his way around a kitchen. Sully swallowed, allowed: “You done it fair enough. Where you say you was from again?”
“I didn’t,” said the new man in a nasal country twang. He was sixty-five if he was a day—a sparse nest of thi
“So when did you join?”
“’Bout a year after the Fury come to town. Thing I like, Dragon’s Fury don’t seem too partic’lar about where a body’s from nor’n how old a feller is—just whether or not he’s willing to do what needs doing. Well, I’m old.” The new man fetched a smile. “But I can still sling a pretty mean hash. Mainly, though, joined up on account of the missus. Tai-sho Tormark’s a mighty fine woman. Makes a man proud to serve.”
“Ain’t no one better’n me Kat, that’s a fact,” said Sully, pleased. He offered his hand. “Sully James. Everyone calls me Sully, or bastard, take your pick.”
“Not half the bastard I am,” said the new man, taking Sully’s hand and wringing it solemnly. “But, for now, the name’s Jake.”
“Jake, you cook as well as you talk, we’ll get along just fine, Bob’s your uncle.”
Jake nodded. “Ye bet yer life.”
23 March 3135
“I’m positive.” Fusilli knocked a cigarette from a pack, screwed it into the corner of his mouth, flicked a lighter to life, inhaled. “Sakamoto will attack Proserpina,” he said, blue smoke jetting from his nostrils. He flicked ash into an empty rice bowl. “And make a push for Vega.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Scowling, Crawford plucked his chopsticks from the general wreckage of luncheon dishes and drummed a fretful rhythm on the low wooden table. “Two fronts? Without HPGs, coordination will be a logistical nightmare.”
“Not if you’ve got enough JumpShips playing tag team, it’s not.” Fusilli turned his attention to Katana. “Tai-sho, I’d give my left arm to make this untrue. But Sakamoto will invade Prefecture I, and he will strike Proserpina.”
Katana’s scowl was the mirror image of Crawford’s. “What about the coordinator?”
“No one knows where the coordinator or his son stand.”
Chu-sa Liz Magruder, Katana’s field commander from Sadachbia, grunted a laugh. She was a tall woman with close-cropped blond hair, and a snub nose that was too small for her height and made her always look disdainful. “No news there.”
“We don’t know that Sakamoto hasn’t gotten the official go-ahead,” countered Wesley Parks. The field commander, a sho-sa, hailed from Sirius. He was scrappy and compact, with a black beard liberally streaked with gray and as gnarly as a briar patch, a scar that bisected his left eyebrow and a chipped front tooth, the right. When he smiled, he looked downright sinister. “If we know, you’ve got to believe the coordinator does.”
“And doing nothing,” said Crawford. He’d progressed from drumming to rat-tat-tat-tapping his chopsticks together, ignoring the arched eyebrows from Sho-sa Ichiyo Rusch, a terminally dyspeptic man with a hatchet face who was one hell of a good MechWarrior and commanded the Dragon’s Fury contingent stationed at Irian, and Chu-sa Hampton Rhodes from Galatia III. “He’ll just look the other way, let Sakamoto do his thing then make a speech and hang a medal around the guy’s neck.”
Presuming he still has a neck to hang something around. Katana glanced at her other guests: Sho-sa Thaddeus Hiwari from Ronel and Abeda Measho. Hiwari looked undecided, and Measho was frowning. And the Old Master’s been pretty quiet. She snuck a peek at the old man who stood sentry at the shoji, but he gave no sign and she turned back to Measho. “Well?”
Measho hesitated and his dark eyes regarded Fusilli a moment before coming to rest on Katana. “I am not a commander, or a politician,” he said in his slow, deliberate way. “But isn’t the coordinator’s silence the reason you’ve pushed yourself and us so hard? When we began, we claimed nothing for the Combine, not a world, not a system. But now we claim for the coordinator. Perhaps the coordinator is silent because there are choices, but they are only ones that you can make and they must be of your free will, without influence. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we can help you with that.”
Measho was right. Katana knew it. No one said anything for the space of few seconds, and then Crawford looked at Measho. “So does that mean you don’t know?”
The rest burst out in relieved laughter. But Katana sobered quickly. “Measho’s right, as usual. But a head-to-head confrontation with Sakamoto is out of the question.”
“Yeah, we’d get squashed into grease smears.” Parks tugged at his salt-and-pepper beard. “Why don’t we join forces?”
Rusch screwed up his face as if he’d smelled something very bad. “Oh, I’m sure Sakamoto’d be happy to have us tag along, seeing as how he’s massing forces across our border.”
“Okay, it doesn’t look so hot,” said Parks. “But he’s got to worry about cutting his losses same as us, and what do we have to lose? We stay out of the fight, Sakamoto chops those Republic forces into sushi, and we’ve still got those guys across the border. Now, on the other hand, if he really intended to strike at us here, then I’d lay odds he wouldn’t leave his people underma
Rusch looked unconvinced, but Magruder slowly nodded. “Okay, I can see that.” She combed her close-cropped hair with her fingers then looked over at Fusilli. “So what about that? Those guys bait, or a warning?”
Fusilli squinted through smoke curls. “Neither. They’re going to attack…”
“Wait a sec,” said Katana, cutting him off. “Magruder’s got a point. I was stupid not to see it before. Think about it for a second. Put yourself in their place. Your commander’s just got done telling you that you’ll have one hell of a good fight and you’re so important and blah, blah, blah. But then you get stuck hell and gone, so far away that not only are you cut off from the main force, you’ve got no prospect for backup if something does happen. If they’re underma
Fusilli sucked, then stabbed out his smoke in a rice bowl. “I hadn’t considered that. But, come to think of it, that could explain something else.”
“And that is?”
“The troops across our border are underma
“Criminals?” Crawford said. Rat-tatta-tat.
“These aren’t just any old yakuza ; they’re the descendants of the old Ghost Regiments, the ones the first Theodore created a century ago. The Ghost Regiments have been disbanded, of course, along with a fair number of the Combine’s regular forces. But, don’t you get it? If Sakamoto’s turning over rocks looking for troops, then he’s got to be acting without the coordinator’s consent, maybe even his knowledge. Otherwise, the coordinator would just give him troops.”