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Part 27: Lycoris radiata

"Say, Hagino..."

"Yes?"

"What's your planet like?"

Dark eyes briefly flicked up from the scissors grasped between the long-haired girl's fingers. "Our planet?"

"Commander – "

Hagino raised a hand before Tsubael, perched ephemerally atop Mari's desk, could launch into another righteous lecture on the perils of sharing sensitive information with a mere barbarian. "Fundamentally speaking, it's not very different from yours," she said thoughtfully. "Our population is small compared to the forime, so there is less pollution..."

"But it wouldn't look strange to us, right?" Mari wasn't even pretending to cut her own sheet of construction paper now. "I mean, you have roads and cities and farms... Stuff like that?"

"Yes, we do. Why do you ask?"

The schoolgirl shrugged. "Just curious, I guess."

"We have Ferris wheels, too," Tsubael chimed in smugly. "But since we invented them first, they should really be called Libadil's skywalkers."

"Pfft..!"

"Hey, I'm serious!" The Arume navigator scowled as Mari began to snicker, matched by a most unrefined giggle from Hagino. "We also invented roller coasters, laser tag and the phased-plasma pulse – ack!"

"Ooh!" Mari needled, grinning ear-to-ear. "Who's giving away secrets now?"

"Why, you little... Humph!" Tsubael folded her slim arms. "Commander, I'm going back to the ship."

"As you wish," Hagino replied unconcernedly, snipping away at her paper once more.

Tsubael phased out with no further remarks, leaving Mari and Hagino alone in their dorm room. Hagino went on cutting, but Mari's mind seemed elsewhere. "Hey," the latter prompted after a span of maybe three or four minutes.

"Yes?"

"Do you think we could ever... visit your planet? Together?"

"Perhaps." To Mari, Hagino sounded reluctantly noncommittal. "Would you like that?"

"Yeah..."

"Then maybe someday we will." Snip-snip-snip! "Mari-san, you aren't working."

"Of course I am! I was just, uh, taking a break, that's all!" Snatching up her own scissors, Mari tried to hastily chop through a length of her material and succeeded only in inflicting a jagged, zigzagging gash. "Uh oh..."

Her situation was not improved by the boisterous entrance of Funatsumaru Hiroko. "Haigno!" the dorm chief boomed cheerfully, the wide span of her favorite KEEP WEIGHT shirt filling the doorway. "How are the templates coming along?"

"I'm very sorry," the disguised alien answered modestly. "We need a little more time."

"Sure, sure." Hiroko nodded sagely, eying Mari's mangled sheet. "I know just the thing to motivate you. Be right back!" She hustled away as quickly as she'd arrived, her lumbering footfalls resounding along the corridor.

"We can still use that," Hagino advised when Mari seemed poised to crumple up the damaged paper. "Just set it aside."

"Okay..."

"Oi, oi." Akane, meanwhile, had arrived under cover of Hiroko's exit. She leaned against the doorframe, the swizzle stick in her mouth twitching as she surveyed Mari's progress. "You're sure you don't want any help?"

"I'm fine," the shorter girl declared. "Anyway, aren't you supposed to be fitting your costume?"

"The bard had a brainwave," Akane explained dryly, inclining her head to the side as Michiko could be heard fussing to herself in the distance. "When we go for the next group session, don't say I didn't warn you."

"Nah... It can't be that bad, right?"

"We'll find out soon enough." The culinary brawler straightened. "I'd better go make sure she isn't working herself into another faint."

Mari was just picking up her scissors again when Akane let loose an outraged cry somewhere near the stairs: "Where are you going with my biscuits?"

Present Day – April 27th

Sixteen years had now passed, and the dreams still frustrated Mari. The bad ones robbed her of rest and the good ones filled the hunter with resentment for all that she had been unjustly denied. The innocuous ones were, if anything, worse: it was becoming hard to reliably tell memory apart from fantasy. Had she actually asked Hagino about the Arume homeworld back then, or was her subconscious treacherously inserting anachronistic details into the setting she most longed for?

Screw this, she told herself, her thoughts taking on the characteristic hard edge forged and tempered by a half-life of toil and misery. The clock perched on the headboard showed her that she had woken near enough to her customary time, so she rolled out of bed and pulled on her work clothes in the dark, leaving the sheets and blanket in disarray as she slipped out. A faint glow shone in the eastern sky when she left the dormitory and crossed the spread of cracked tarmac between that building and Eto Delo's main offices. As usual, there was no sentry at the door – the security staff here kept themselves out of sight unless called upon. Mari went inside and made a beeline for the employee lounge on the ground floor.

The lounge was empty, which was expected and yet made her uncomfortable. It wasn't like the canteens she'd frequented in Joensuu, Puolanka or Rovaniemi, where she could count on finding company at any hour. Those were the places, in the fleeting intervals between engagements, where one was able to put aside the strain of endless war for a little while, to sit and joke or listen to songs from faraway countries. The canteens stayed busy even in the heat of battle, as patrols coming back from the front stepped inside to rest their feet and pass along the latest developments to the offline troops.

Stop it. Mari shook her head as she went to the long counter along the left-hand wall and booted up the primary coffee maker. That's all over now.

While the machine gurgled anemically, she wandered over to the bulletin board on the wall beside the corner refrigerator. Most of the scraps pinned to it were in Russian, with a heavy flavoring of mat despite the terse prohibition of profanity which Daemon had placed at the cork panel's top. One item caught her eye among the swarm: a column clipped from an American newspaper. It was an op-ed pertaining to the present tensions in east Asia, and to call it unsympathetic to the Sino-Arumic Liaison would not do the content justice.

Someone had circled the last lines of the piece with a black ballpoint, and underlined the final sentence for good measure: The time has come to put aside our habit of comfortable, complacent saber-rattling. We must be resolute in our vigilance if we wish to preserve our God-given freedoms and uphold America's rightful place as leader of the free world. If the hydra of communism is not to be checked at the negotiating table, only one course remains open. As our forebears sang, 'underneath the starry flag, civilize them with a Krag, and return us to our beloved home.'

Below those belligerent words, the highlighter had scrawled an opinion of his own: This is why we don't get nice things.

An especially loud gurgle and a crisp buzz drew Mari back to the coffee machine. Taking a paper cup from the adjacent stack, she detached the pot from the system and commenced pouring. It was funny, she thought as she watched aromatic steam rising off the brown liquid, that she had become so accustomed to the stuff. When had that happened?

"Nnngh..." Turning around, Mari discovered Roland Schuhart blearily regarding her over the back of one of the lounge's sofas. "Morning, Sawakaze," he mumbled. "Wha'sup?"

"Nothing." The displaced woman went back to her drink. "Why are you..?"

"Locked myself out of my room again," the dealer confessed, stretching his arms. "Hadda leave early anyway, so it wasn't worth raisin' a fuss."

That's right, he's flying to Japan today. "Good luck at the summit."

"Don't bother." Schuhart stood up and went to the vending machine at the other end of the counter. "I'm not going with any great expectations." A series of clanks and tinkles detailed the course of his pocket change through the contraption's guts. "Didn't think they'd even take my application, seeing as our little enclave isn't formally recognized. I suppose I owe the good colonel for that."

Mari tested her coffee and concluded that it was inadequately sweet. "Colonel Kang is also attending, yes?"

"She is." The one-eyed man bent down and took a can of fruit juice from the wide slot at the bottom of the machine. "And you can be sure those miserable monkeys are going to throw shit at her every chance they get."

Mari considered herself to be still on the fence regarding Kang Li, but she had no stomach for smear campaigns. "Are they still fixated on those nude paintings she was in?"

"Those were just fuel for the fire." Pshhh..! "She's gay and she's a loathsome godless commie." The sarcastic tone arrived in tandem with a grimace that twisted Schuhart's facial scars. "Either one would make her an easy target by itself... Hell, just being Chinese is evil enough for some people."

The hunter's nose wrinkled. "The Americans?"

"Some of them." Schuhart nodded towards the newspaper clipping. "Stinking hypocrites howling about the human rights record while they line up to bash our best hope for reform... But frankly I'm more worried about the Japanese ultranationalists right now."

Mari racked her childhood memories as she tore open another packet of sugar. "The kind who ride around in black vans and play loud music?"

"That crowd, yeah." The arms dealer sipped his juice contemplatively. "After Second Impact, this one outfit called the Great Sun Society absorbed most of the smaller groups... Now their militia wing outguns the Yakuza in most prefectures, never mind the police. They've got lots of political clout, so the authorities don't touch 'em. You can be sure they'll be out in force today."

"I see." The coffee finally tasted right, but it still needed a minute to cool. "By the way..."

"Hm?"

Mari wrapped a napkin around her cup and went around to the closest sofa. "I've been thinking about what you said," she announced, sitting down and placing the cup on the low table in the middle of the room. "About Hakim, I mean."

"I thought you'd bring that up sooner." Schuhart sat on the other sofa, resting the juice can on his knee. "You want your own shot at the Butcher, am I right?"

"It doesn't have to be me," Mari replied. "I just... The Butcher of Tallinn has survived several attempts already. She's a cunning one, and if this Hakim can't handle her – "

"If he can't," the arms dealer cut in, "we'll have someone else standing by... But like I said, it's too dangerous to do it here." Slurp! "Forgive me for prying, but is there something personal about this?"

"Not this one. There were others, but I... I took care of them a long time ago." Images flashed through Mari's mind. The one who tortured Headmaster Fukamachi. The one who enslaved my classmates. The one who defiled Hagino's grave. "With the Butcher, it's more like a duty thing."

"Ah..." Another slurp. "If it weren't for the delicate situation, I expect the job would be all yours."

"You're flattering me."

"I mean it." Schuhart turned the can around and squinted at the label. "Does this really have mango in it? I can't taste it at all."

"I haven't tried it." The non sequitur derailed Mari's train of thought, but it also prompted her to finally catch up on the drinking.

"In the meantime," her companion said suddenly, "our mutual acquaintance called again."

The miffed tone cinched Mari's assumption that he meant Yui. "She did?"

"Yeah." Slurp! "Do you remember a navy pilot named Azanael?"

"Yes..." The adjectives 'butch' and 'bitter' sprang to mind hand in hand. "I haven't seen her since the invasion."

"Apparently she was persona non grata for a while, but she's a friend of a friend of Renaril and the friend in the middle got her a posting in Guangzhou. Right now she's in Vladivostok, checking out a military airshow for the Liaison." The blond cyclops drained his juice and plonked the can down on the table. "She knows there's stuff going on."

"She knows about... that?"

"Maybe not by name, but she knows it exists... She was one of the hostages their strike team rescued from Yuen Long in the big brawl, and she must have heard or seen enough to start asking questions." Schuhart rolled his head around on his shoulders. "That's better... Our friend the chivalrous pervert seems to think this pilot is a potential recruit, apart from some emotional problems." He folded his hairy arms across the front of his drab vest. "No thanks to her for completely missing this in the first place."

It was certainly an unwelcome complication. "What should we do?"

"Dunno yet." Schuhart cocked his head. "I kind of think it might be better to let her know you're alive. If she recognized you in the open, she might panic and do something that would blow your cover... But telling her the truth relies on her being trustworthy. I haven't met her myself, but Phil and KK tell me she's not a fan of the party line."

"She shouldn't be," Mari replied. "Back then, her own commander murdered her lover and manipulated her into helping cover it up."

"Ouch." The man with the artificially stiffened limb pushed himself onto his feet. "Well, there you have it. If you could give me an opinion when I get back, that'd be helpful."

"Actually – " Mari bit back the words at first, but decided she might as well go through with her request. "Is there some way I could go?"

"What, today?" Schuhart blinked. "Well... Sure, why not. How fast can you pack?"

"I can be ready in ten minutes."

"And I can have the paperwork done in fifteen... Gotta warn you, we're traveling economy class and you can't bring weapons. There will be Arume."

"I can deal with that." Mari tossed the cup back and chugged down the remaining coffee. "They won't be looking for me."

"True, but on the other hand..." Schuhart thought for a second, then his face brightened. "Nah, it's fine. If you get spotted, we'll just say you're you."

"...You'll what?"

"Daemon sniffed around for me when you first arrived. The Wakatake Mari of this layer was killed in the bombing which destroyed Tokyo, along with her family. No body was ever found." The man shrugged. "It's a little gruesome, but the sky eyes can't prove you aren't her."

"Good enough." Mari also stood. "Back here in fifteen minutes?"

"We're heading out in – let's see... forty-two. Sooner is better, of course."

"I'll be waiting." The hunter offered a tired smile of appreciation as she disposed of her cup. "I assume you'll take this out of my pay?"

"Nah," the other sighed, tossing his can into the narrow recycling bin. "I know what it's like, not being able to go home." He headed for the door, cramming his hands into his pockets. "See you in a bit."

Kang Li was jolted awake by the sensation of something tugging at her nipple. The soldier tensed, hands balling into fists, then relaxed as she became fully cognizant of her situation. She had turned onto her side during the night and now Renaril was pressed up against her front, a slim leg draped over the colonel's uppermost flank. The alien slept on, still suckling unperturbed. A low noise, somewhere between a mewl and a growl, rose in her throat when Kang tried to pull away.

"Really," the Chinese woman sighed, "you're so childish."

She started to push Renaril off a second time, but a pang of unfamiliar emotion gave her pause. There were times, especially of late, when she had experienced some kind of irrational affection for the frail and frequently distressed Arume, yet this was something stronger. Kang tried to compare it with the feelings she once felt towards her brothers and sisters in arms, but it didn't fit cleanly with those. Lying confused in the dark, she was abruptly stricken by a desire to pull Renaril tight against her own body and hold her until daylight came.

The impulse ran contrary to everything she had planned when she entered into this relationship. Don't do it, Kang commanded herself. Don't give her the wrong idea.

She did it anyway, surrendering to the protective instinct. It couldn't do any harm, the fighter rationalized desperately, and it gave her a feeling of pleasurable warmth which had never manifested when she submitted to Renaril's inept lovemaking... And then the alarm clock went off. The Arume twitched, clamping down on tender flesh and propelling a surge of pain through her opposite's breast.

This indignity finally exhausted Kang's patience: she broke away, a venomous hiss passing between her teeth, and smacked the wheedling device. Renaril stirred at last when the colonel switched on the light. "Li..? What's wrong?"

Kang held her tongue until after she verified that she wasn't bleeding. "...Don't do that."

"Do what?" Squirming over to the side of the bed, the group commander saw the telltale sheen of saliva on the bruised nipple and connected the dots. "Oh no... I'm sorry!" she pleaded as her bedmate rose and began to pull garments out of the free-standing dresser. "I'm so sorry!"

"Renaril – "

"Please don't go!" Renaril scrambled to her feet, throwing her arms around Kang from behind. "I know I wasn't any good last night and now I've done something weird, but I'll make it up to you, I really will!"

"Renaril," the colonel sighed. "I have to leave for the UN summit, remember?"

There was a pitiable sniffle at her back. "...You aren't angry?"

"Of course I'm not angry." The bigger woman twisted in the smaller's embrace until they faced one another. "Honestly," she assured, planting a light kiss on her junior's forehead, "it's all right."

That pacified the distraught otherworlder, who meekly sat on the bed. "I'm sorry," she mumbled again.

"I know."

Renaril kept quiet for a few seconds, until Kang picked up her bra. "Li, wait..."

"What is it?"

No reply was given. The white-haired female rose again and placed her hands on her partner's waist. "For our parting," she murmured solemnly, then bowed low and pressed her lips against her lover's navel, sending a ripple through the muscles behind it. "For our rejoining," the Arume continued, kissing the skin between Kang's breasts, "and for our immutable bond." She concluded the ritual with a kiss on the amazonian woman's mouth and backed away. "I'll be waiting for you."

The display of sincerity brought back that affectionate feeling. "And I'll come back as soon as I can," Kang promised. "Go back to sleep. I'll call you when I get there."

Tokyo-2 (formerly Matsumoto)

Nagano Prefecture, Japan

"Heavy traffic around here."

"It's always like this," Kang remarked. "The capital subway network requires major expansion."

"No kidding." Schuhart downshifted. "You know, I'm starting to miss the Moscow Metro."

Eripol peered around the back of his seat curiously. "Why's that?"

"Never seen the way Muscovites drive? They're second only to Bostonians for sheer ferocity." The arms dealer leaned forward a little, squinting through the rain-streaked windshield. "Is this our exit, Mariko?"

"Yes." Mari took a hand off the sheaf of maps in her lap and locked it around the arched pipe welded to the dashboard, feeling a sideways tug as the vehicle pulled off the expressway.

Schuhart hadn't been joking when he said they would be traveling economically: their flight from the south coast of China over to Japan was made in an ex-Belarusian air force transport with no luxury fittings of any kind. It was already raining hard when the Antonov touched down, dropped its tail ramp and discharged a drab UAZ with chipped paint and a soft roof. The subsequent journey into the heart of the city was old hat to Mari, who couldn't count the number of times she'd ridden shotgun in Soviet jeeps, but Negadael and Eripol spent most of the trip looking downright terrified. Kang, wedged between them in the middle of the rear seat, seemed indifferent.

It had proven a good idea to bring Mari along: Schuhart had a lot of trouble with the kanji he encountered on signs everywhere, and needed her to navigate. His spoken Japanese was passable, though he tended to run his syllables all together and put his stresses in strange places. The difficulties were not lost on him: "At this rate," he'd grumbled on the way out of the airport, "they'll be calling me 'The Man Who Said Everything Twice'!"

Mari sympathized, though she faced the opposite problem: her command of the written language was still useful, but her accent had become so convincingly Finnish that it validated her cover story all by itself. To the world she was Sawakaze Mariko, raised abroad and coming back to her ancestral country after a long absence.

"There's another one." Schuhart pointed to the left as the jeep passed a black Toyota parked on the edge of the street. The sight was complimented – or rather exacerbated – by a blast of tinny patriotic music from the loudspeakers atop the stationary van.

"'Expel the foreign parasites'," Mari recited, translating the slogan painted in white on the van's flank. "Who are the parasites?"

"Resident aliens," the driver explained. "Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, et cetera." He glanced in the rear-view mirror as the van shrank into the distance. "Ten to one odds those punks have a pile of M-Sixteens in the back."

"Seriously?"

"Wouldn't be the first time."

Wow...

Yanami Shouta had experienced Japan under Arume occupation in a way which the fugitive Mari fortunately evaded. Standing here, in the capital of a free and prosperous Japan, he couldn't shake the profound sense of surreality which clung to him ever since he got off the transport. The closest analogue he could think of was the brief time of hope when the Arume Streets were abolished under Mariel's rule, though even that fell short as a comparison.

Truth be told, he wasn't entirely sure what to think of it. He was nominally part of the entourage representing the Arume home government at the coming sessions of the third layer's United Nations, but that wouldn't begin for at least another couple of hours. The delegation's first stop was the capital convention center, a wide, low building which faced the west side of the sprawling capital gardens. Looking across the gardens, he could see the monolithic UN headquarters on the north side and the edifice of the Diet Hall towering in the east. In the next few days he would visit both, and hopefully come away with the story to jumpstart his budding career.

He owed it all to Razael, and the circumstances still mystified him: the scientist had not only remembered Shouta's awkward attempt to interview her, but even put in a word for him with someone in a high place. He couldn't guess at her motives, except that he was sure the self-righteous Arume wouldn't do it out of remorse or reparation, and he wasn't going to look the gift horse in the mouth at a time like this.

The aspiring journalist shivered. Give it another half-hour or so and he could safely go inside and try to snag some comments from the dignitaries who were meeting in twos and threes within the convention center at his back. Until then, he had to stand here in the meager shelter of the entrance, the weight of an Olympus camera hanging heavy against his front, and watch the rain as it fell in big fat droplets and trickled down the wide granite steps to the street below. Photography was a secondary aspect of his mission, but a contractually stipulated one nonetheless: he needed to capture at least a few interesting shots of the summit's attendees.

A black Citroen pulled up to the steps, the third limousine to arrive since Shouta had taken his position. Out of it came a hulking bodyguard in a suit and wraparound shades, then a pair of men with umbrellas and attache cases, whom the observer took to be aides. Lastly there were a second guard and a man with a lean, hawkish face and white-blond hair. Shouta recognized him from the orientation dossier: Willem Zeldenthuis, prime minister of the Netherlands.

Chance!

Shouta snatched up his camera, framing Zeldenthuis in the viewfinder as he started up the steps with his entourage. The shutter released with a soft gachak, momentarily darkening the little window through which its operator peered. His thumb snagged the advance lever, cranking an unexposed length of film into position as he adjusted the focus with his other hand. Gachak!

At least two shots of everything, that was his rule. The thirty year old OM-1 and a single lens had eaten up most of his savings, and he'd had time to expend only one roll in practice before he shipped out. Shouta snapped a third as the prime minister ascended, hoping at least a few of these pictures would satisfy requirements, and let the camera drop as the limousine drove away. Then it was back to monotony, until the next party showed up.

The next party caught his interest: it arrived in a green four-door military vehicle, with off-road tires and tow hooks fore and aft. From the front passenger side emerged a shortish woman with crew-cut hair. She wore a Russian soldier's khaki uniform of the 'Afghanka' summer pattern, an outfit Shouta well knew: Yoshimura's resistance fighters had often donned the same in order to distinguish themselves from the troops of the puppet government.

The woman seemed to care nothing for the rain as she walked around the back of the jeep and opened the rear door on the curb side. Out staggered a small Arume in standard uniform, looking rather weak-kneed but plainly grateful to be leaving the machine's confines. Behind her came a woman with a grim face and a Mao suit several shades darker than the jeep's paint, and then a second alien. Shouta zoomed in a little and photographed the group as the one in Russian clothes slammed the door and smacked her palm twice against the driver's window, whereupon the jeep pulled out and roared off up the street.

The Olympus clicked again, capturing the four as they began their ascent. The Chinese woman took the lead, with the maybe-Russian following at her elbow. Shouta was startled to see the Arume walking behind them, in an obviously subordinate manner. He pulled the advance lever, took a moment to fix his glasses, and lined up one more shot as the leader drew a mobile phone from one of her tunic pockets.

The Japanese reporter was additionally surprised to hear her speaking English: "Hello... Yes, thank you... Hello, Renaril. We've just arrived, everything is fine. We're going to try and find Keldanil... Yes, I'll tell her that... No, not yet. I'll call you if it does... Yes, you too. Talk to you later."

"All's well?" the other one asked. Now that he heard her voice, Shouta was inclined to believe she wasn't Russian after all.

"All's well," the Chinese female confirmed. She started to say something else, but it was lost as the visitors entered the convention center.

Left alone, Shouta rummaged in his own pockets for the printed list of notables expected to take part on the Arume side. So that was Kang Li, he told himself, looking at the grainy image near the foot of the page. But why isn't the Sino-Arumic Liaison's Arume leader here?

A screech of tires and a splintering crash from the right tore his attention away from the paper. The bewildered journalist looked up in time to see a large two-axle truck come barreling down the street, a piece of the barrier from the police checkpoint hanging from its grille. The driver slammed on the brakes as he came abreast of the convention center and the truck slewed to a halt, blocking the northbound street. Two more trucks of the same configuration came after it, making equally dramatic stops.

As Shouta stood open-mouthed, hordes of masked soldiers began to pour out.