Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (12 page)

The first of the Three Deeds of Hikari, the small leader of the Three Remarkable Ronin, was slaying Heavenly Dragon while bringing life-saving medicine to the children of Anhui. The day of the First Deed is commemorated in Anhui with a children’s festival celebrated with wreaths of flowers cast upon the nearest river. It is considered especially good luck if the day is marked with rain.

A History of the Brief Career of Hikari and the Three Remarkable Ronin.

Ozma put my prisoner to sleep with a single puff of Oz-poppy pollen, and Zhejiang Air Control gave us a fighter-escort in from the coast so I didn’t have to return to flying watch outside. Jacky reloaded her Vulcans and then closed her eyes and stopped moving while I sat and stared at the pallets of vaccines, waiting to be warm again.

Heavenly Dragon’s blood evaporated like water on a hot sidewalk.

“Hope? You okay?” Shell had ditched the Indiana Jones outfit for her default shorts and t-shirt. She’d also covered the tee with a Rorschach pattern.

I closed my eyes. “Everyone keeps asking me that.” If I talked at a whisper, the drone of the twin props and vibration of the hull gave me at least a little privacy. “I’m alright. It’s just been an interesting couple of days.”

“You sure? ’Cause, you did just cut your way through someone. Which was
sick
, but if you weren’t incognito The Harlequin would be having to schedule medal ceremonies. Are you in your happy place? Are you thinking about bunnies?”

“Children. I’m thinking about children.”

“Ooookay…” She didn’t sound at all sure about that, and I really should have been thinking about the fight.

The fight.

The plane had been visibly escorted but they hadn’t stayed away—which was not what Mr. Konishi had suggested would happen. Had they specifically targeted the flight? For the medicine or the passenger? Who knew about Daoshi Ren’s addition to the flight? Would he be a valuable prisoner? Could they have targeted us? That made no sense unless Mr. Konishi was playing a
very
twisty game.

And the sky-pirates hadn’t acted like a
team
. Shell had only been able to identify Heavenly Dragon, but even if the saddle implied he and the leader had been working together, the other three hadn’t been coordinating at all.

I asked Shell to replay the fight in my head, watched Jacky’s side of it. Our improvised feint had only worked because they’d
sucked
. Since I’d flown out to meet them with Jacky on board, they’d assumed she couldn’t fly herself and her three had ignored us to go for the
Draw Shot
. Yes, she’d popped in on top of them riding Ozma’s pet wind and engaged two with close-in shots—starting with their aerokinetic—before they’d known she was there. But if they’d just spread out, or been supporting each other, then their mistake wouldn’t have been so immediately fatal; they’d attacked with no method, no science.

So, two from One Land, leading three local bandits with no real team training? It would be a way for the terrorist organization to leverage its remaining numbers after its losses at Whittier Base.

Was Heavenly Dragon dead as Jacky’s two? Remembering my Comparative Mythology course, Chinese dragons were elemental creatures. His elements had probably been air and water, an ice-storm personified. So could he drown? If he hadn’t, would he heal?

Zhejiang Air Control handed us off over Anhui and I returned to my outside escort station, but we touched down on HWB Anhui South’s airstrip without any more attacks. HWBAS shared their strip with a joint League-Anhui military training base, and armored trucks waited with their drivers for us to unload in the warm rain.

The base’s military police took away our prisoner, and then taking inventory and dividing up the pallet loads took an hour as the trucks pulled away one by one, headed for the towns and clinics of south Anhui. With each departing truck, my heart lifted a little. Daoshi Ren shook our hands before climbing into the last truck out.

“C’mon, girls.” Eight Ball heaved his flight bag over his shoulder. “Let’s all get something hot in us.”

“Nowhere to go until tomorrow,” Chowder seconded. “And the local cuisine is very good.”

We fell in behind them to cross the half-drowned runway to the HWB building, and I couldn’t help asking, in Japanese-accented English, “Chowder-san?”

“Ma’am?”

“I understand Eight Ball and Cue Ball’s names.” I tapped my head. “But why are you called ‘Chowder?’”

“Because in just about every storm system we fly through, I lose my chowder.”

They took our picture, a group shot of all six of us together to go on the HWB building’s crowded hero’s wall. The base was small and empty now, more a waystation than a base since the major fighting had moved elsewhere. South Anhui hadn’t seen much destructive fighting in the past couple of years; according to Eight Ball its army-stiffened militia system was standing up nicely and its regulars—breakthrough and normal—were forcibly bringing peace to the hill country and rooting the “liberating” bandits out of the mountains. Heroes Without Borders capes hadn’t been needed to help protect the civilian population centers for a while, but like the Shibushi base, Anhui South had all the amenities visiting capes might need. The food sent from town in insulated pails was tasty and filling, and the hot showers were even more welcome.

Alone in the shower, I turned up the hot water until I stood in billows of steam. Wrapped in a towel and wringing my hair out, I found a little coffee-and-cream colored cat sitting on my clothes and tongue-bathing itself. I was so tired I didn’t recognize it.

I tickled it under the chin. “Hello, furball. Are you the station mascot?”

“As if. You’re my human.” The cat stretched luxuriously, jumping down to rub against my naked calf.

“
Shell?
”

“In the fur. Ozma thinks we need more than cellphone contact when we go back. Did you know she’d packed the drone in her box? Her witchy majesty is pretty smart for royalty.”

I reached down and scratched behind Cat-Shell’s ears, making her purr and arch. “And how are you more than a holographic projection?”

“
Oh
that feels good. She did her bibbity-bobbety-boo on the drone after I’d powered it up and linked to it. It’s temporary and not like Nox or Nix, but for now I’m an internet-prowling quantum ghost who also
really
wants some fish. More on the ears now.”

Sometimes my life is too happily ridiculous for words. I sat on the bench beside my clothes, lifted Shell onto my towel covered lap, and proceeded to give her the kind of allover body scratching Graymalkin got if he was a good kitty. Resting my chin on her head, I let her buzzing purrs vibrate through me until the tight cold knot inside untouched by the shower loosened and fell away.

God made cats for a
reason
.

When I kissed the top of her furry head and set her on the bench she flopped into a boneless purring heap and let me dress without commentary. I picked her up again before opening the bathroom door. Sleep that night found me back on a now-familiar cloudhome, where Mistress Jenia spent the dark hours patiently drilling me on Japanese honorifics, bows, and other modes of politeness.

We didn’t return to Shibushi.

Jacky said it first the next morning—flat-out stated it. We weren’t returning to the Shibushi base with the
Draw Shot
. And we weren’t telling Mr. Konishi in advance.

“But he said he would help us!” I protested.

“Doesn’t matter. We don’t need his help now except for the plane ride that gets us back into Japan, and he could just as easily have the Eight Excellent Protectors waiting at the runway for us.”

“He wouldn’t—” I shut up; we didn’t
know
that, and like Jacky had said, we didn’t need his help now. In an operation requiring secrecy, needless trust was what Blackstone called an unnecessary point of potential failure.

“The thing that worries
me
,” Jacky went on, “is that he might be twisty and
smart
. If he is, or whoever he talks to is, then the Eight Excellent Protectors will be waiting for us when we cross into Japanese airspace.”

We still needed to get back into Japan, and if I flew us myself we’d never hit the coast without being shot down or intercepted, so we explained our problem to Cue Ball, Eight Ball, and Chowder. Chowder provided a mechanical problem he needed to fix, promising to finish the job too late for us to get back before nightfall. Which gave us time for other things; we needed to rebuild our “tourist bags.” Fortunately the military base attached to the station was a miniature town with the shops we needed; we found three sets of rolling luggage and bought more clothes, toiletries, and even cheap cellphones.

Staying beyond breakfast meant we got debriefed by Anhui Military Intelligence after all, but they followed the Heroes without Borders rule of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell regarding our identities—HWB had “contracted” us and so presumably vetted us, and that was good enough for them. The fact that we were apparently Japanese (with our chosen codenames it was hard to claim otherwise) kind of shook the two captains doing the interview—Mr. Konishi hadn’t been lying when he told us that Japanese capes just didn’t do East Asia—but they were more than grateful, and now the
Three Remarkable Ronin
(I still winced at the name) had officially come to China.

The mechanical problem “fixed,” we flew out with the
Draw Shot
in the late afternoon—timing the flight so that we entered Japanese airspace after nightfall. I flew escort along with a pair of Zhejiang fighters just in case someone was looking for retribution, but nobody popped up to trouble us. Cutter didn’t talk to me, hadn’t in fact said a word after making sure I cleaned him up. The sword gave new meaning to “laconic”—he could out-silence
Jacky
—and I came inside before reaching Japanese airspace on our pre-approved flight path.

We overflew Kyushu in the dark. Here was where anyone who was going to meet us would say hello, but as I sat in the cockpit with Eight Ball and Cue Ball watching the sky and Chowder manned the radio and radar, nobody rose to meet us or told us to land.

I sighed. “Thank you Eight Ball-san, Cue Ball-san, Chowder-san. Will you thank Konishi-san for us?”

“Sure kid,” Eight Ball laughed. “And be safe—we’ll see you around the world sometime.”

I stepped back into the cargo bay where everyone else waited. Since I was the load-master for this, I’d thought a bit and finally tied our new luggage pieces together, wrapped them in black plastic trash bags, and hung them on two lengths of rope. Jacky could do a free-drop carrying Shell, going to mist to break their speed at the end, which left me Ozma. Her majesty was fine with perching on the luggage bundle with a safety-clip to the rope. Jacky had suggested she play green jar again, but she demurred to save her magic reserves.

Hitting the button, I ignored the flashing red light as the ramp half-lowered and wind filled the bay. I stepped off to fall with Ozma and luggage held snug, turning to watch Jacky perform a very nice swan dive into the night above me before orienting to the ground and watching our horizon. When no one came for us in the air where we were most vulnerable, I released a breath I hadn’t known I was holding.

The lights of Kagoshima spread out in a hatch-pattern east of us, irregular outthrusts of neighborhoods and absorbed towns reaching into the dark wooded hills below. Our L-zone was Higashisakurajima, a little village with a big name, west of the city. I’d picked it for the proximity of forested hillside to the train station, and nobody raised an alarm when we dropped silently into the trees. At nine o’clock we boarded the train, and at nine-thirty we checked into a trackside Kagoshima hotel to sleep. The infiltration of Japan, take two.

With Shell curled up and cat-snoring on top of me, I didn’t dream of the tree.