EPISODE 4-2: Delusions of grandeur
The building we stopped in front of looked like an ancient Japanese shrine or temple, if ancient Japanese shrines and temples had been built of frosted glass and steel. The shape was right, but instead of wood panels and beams there were these ink-black metal spars and multi-meter tall sheets of semi-transparent stuff, through which you could see vague shadows moving and somber lights flickering.
The door was opened by liveried footmen dressed in black and white, with the three bird of paradise crest on either shoulder. Two armored guards, similarly monochromatic, watched us disembark from a respectable distance, auto shotguns slung over their shoulders.
One footman guided us inside, around mossy rock gardens and carp-filled pools, through a seeming funhouse maze of mirrored walls and floors, to an inner courtyard where a young man dressed in loose white robe and billowing navy pantaloons held a two-meter long bamboo bow. At the other end of the courtyard, a small target—flanked on either side by the three-bird crest—was already pin-cushioned with half a dozen arrows.
Behind the archer, on a raised veranda that ran around three sides of the courtyard, a man lay face-down on a table positioned in the middle of an intricate Turkish rug, while a female masseuse worked on his shoulders and back. The man was gray-haired and wore only a towel about his buttocks; the masseuse was completely naked, save for silver jewelry about each wrist and ankle, and a stud in her belly button. Armed guards stood at each corner of the courtyard.
“My Lord: Mister Adolphus Tracey and associate,” the doorman announced with a bow, then quietly shuffled backwards.
The man with the bow looked up and frowned, then back down at his bow. He fitted an arrow to the string, lifted both bow staff and arrow over his head. Brought the two down and apart at the same time, held the arrow near the cheek for an instant, and loosed. The bow twirled in his fingers as he released the arrow, spinning so that the string faced away from him.
Thwack. The arrow hit the edge of the target.
There was a moment of quiet, interrupted only by the tinkle of jewelry and the rhythmic, liquid slap of the masseuse’s hands on the old man’s bare back.
“Ah, Adolphus, success I take it?” said a muffled voice from the massage table. “A little lower, my dear. A little more. Ah, just there. Harder, now, don’t be shy.”
Tracey was frowning at his feet, a little embarrassed by the skin on display, I think. “My Lord, the gentleman in question is present,” he told his shoes.
“Howdy,” I offered. “Nice rug.” I winked at the masseuse. She blushed.
“Ah, thank you dear, that will do for now.” The old man sat up, wrapping the towel around himself as the nude woman bowed and padded from the courtyard. Got a good look at the man’s face: Angular features, black hair gone to steel. “Thank you Adolphus, efficient as always. Have you told him who I am?”
“Figured that out for myself,” I replied before Tracey could. “Wish I could say it’s nice to meet you, Mister Paradis.”
Thwack.
“My Lord,” hissed Tracey.
“What?”
“You’re supposed to call him ‘My Lord.’”
“Well, I doubt he’s supposed to kidnap people from spaceports, but here we are,” I said, crossing my arms.
Tracey tensed but Lord Masayuki Paradis, Count of Toyokawa, owner of half of Ozawa just smiled and chuckled. “You will see, in due course, why such secrecy was necessary, Mister Glass,” he said, a small smile still tugging at his lips. He snapped his fingers and a servant rushed forward with a Japanese-style robe. He held out his arms as the servant fitted the robe and cinched it shut, then let his arms fall. “I take it you can guess why I wish to speak with you?”
“Reina Paradis.”
“In part,” he said. “My wayward third child and second daughter. Tell me, Mister Glass, do you know where she is?”
“Yes.” Well, I knew where she had been several weeks ago: splattered across a sidewalk inside a SHEL space habitat at the New Avalon L3 Lagrangian point. Where she’d fallen, shortly after being abdominally perforated at point-blank range with a needler pistol.
“Is she with you now?”
“No.”
“Is she dead?”
“Yes.”
He sighed. “I suspected as much. Did you kill her?”
“No.” Might have helped a bit, but didn’t actually pull the trigger, so technically not a lie.
“A wild child, she did rather seem destined for an early end. And the woman commanding your unit, she is impersonating my daughter?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to answer every question with just ‘Yes’ or ‘No’?”
I thought about that for a second. “No.”
“Glass,” Tracey rumbled threateningly.
“Oh back off, Fozzy,” I told him irritably. “Lord Peacock Feathers wants something, he can get right to the bloody point.”
Thwack.
Paradis sat down on the edge of the massage table with a sigh, beckoned a servant who brought a tray with a wine bottle and half-filled glass. Paradis took the glass, then told the servant, “Leave the bottle. I have a feeling I’ll need it.” He took a sip, swilled it around his mouth a moment, savoring it, before swallowing. “Mister Glass, anyone who learns of our meeting will assume I wished to talk to you solely about the whereabouts of my daughter. Well, consider my curiosity assuaged.”
He nodded towards the young archer. “Hiroyuki is my heir, his sister Mina is set to be wed to one of the Devries. Reina was always a bit of an afterthought. A marriage for her to one of the lesser Sandovals or Sorteks might have helped cement our position, but perhaps this new woman can be persuaded to fulfill that role—after all, I hardly mind if she’s my blood or not. It’s the alliance that matters, not the children that come from it.” He set down the glass. “However, all this is smokescreen. I have another reason to speak you, one which coincidentally, is also related to marriage.”
I looked sidelong at Tracey, but his face betrayed no understanding of where Paradis was going with this. “I’m very flattered,” I said. “But you’re not really my type.”
Paradis harrumphed, clapped his hands twice, sharply, the sound ringing out like gunshots in the courtyard. The servants and guards bowed and made themselves disappear. The archer—Hiroyuki—looked up at the old man questioningly. “You too,” Paradis said. “The less you know of this, the better.” The young man scowled, threw the bow down on the ground and stomped off, bare feet slapping against the hard glass flooring.
Tracey took a step back, before being halted by a raised finger. “Not you,” said Paradis. “You’re my insurance in this.” Then he turned back to me. “Now, Mister Glass. You are from the Free Worlds League, are you not?”
I nodded. “Oriente.”
“What if I told you there was a threat, a very real threat, to the continued existence of that League?” Paradis asked. “Wouldn’t you want to do something to warn your homeland?”
There was clockwork calculation there, the same dead voice that had spoken so casually about replacing his own daughter. There was a shape behind those words, hidden between the steel planes and knife-edged panes, what I was hearing was a blurred reflection of his real intentions.
I moved past him, down the three shallow steps from the veranda to the center of the courtyard, bending down to pick up the bamboo bow. It was huge, taller that I was, but surprisingly light. The wood felt strange in this place of glass and metal, a single living thing amid all this millimeter-precise architecture, the hard surfaces and ambition, the cold calculation. I frowned to myself, thumb rubbing across the bow, holding it crosswise in front of me, parallel to the ground.
The old lecher had asked a good question though. Well, would I want to warn the League? But as soon as I asked myself that question, I saw it was the wrong one. “Depends on whether I believed the threat was real,” I said. There was a long quiver of arrows leaning against a bow stand. I took one and fitted it to the string, feeling Tracey’s eyes intent on my back with every motion. “Depends on why a Federated Suns nobleman would want to give such a warning.”
“You’ve heard of the alliance between the Lyran Commonwealth and Federated Suns?”
“Well, that’s no secret.” I stood, arrow still against the string, holding the bow vertically now, straight out from my body. “Hardly seems worth a secret meeting to tell me that.”
“There is a secret clause in the alliance.”
Feet slightly apart. Raised both hands high above my head, bow still held perfectly straight. “One that lets you kidnap space tourists?”
“One that promises Melissa Steiner in marriage to Hanse Davion.”
The arrow slipped from my fingers then. I fumbled for it, caught it before it hit the ground. “Not just an alliance then,” I said. “A union.”
I nodded to myself. It made sense, from Davion’s point of view anyway: access to an industrial base capable of supporting his patently unsustainable military spending. Seemed like political suicide for Steiner though, instantly making an enemy of every Commonwealth Duke, Margrave, Baron and Earl who’d hoped to marry whatever spotty, greasy, inbred heirs they’d produced to the Archon-Designate.
All seemed kind of academic, though, especially for a second-rate nobleman from a third-rate world. I fitted the arrow back to the string. “Still, can’t see how that harms you, unless you’d been planning to marry Reina off to him? In which case, you’d have to get in line.”
“What will happen, once this clause becomes known, do you think?”
“For the happy couple? A few years of bliss, followed by long decades of slow realization that you can never truly know another person and we are all ultimately alone in the universe. Oh, and three to five kids, who may or may not contribute to the aforementioned existential dread thing.” Drew the bow and arrow down and apart. Arrow to my cheek, just below the eye. “For the rest of us? The usual: War.”
Release. Bow spinning in my hand.
Thwack.
“No, not the usual war, Mister Glass. Something quite different.” I turned, to see Paradis smiling thinly down at me.
“You missed,” observed Tracey.
At the other end of the courtyard, my arrow jutted from the eye of the top right bird of paradise on the crest painted on the wall. “How careless of me,” I murmured.
“Since war is inevitable, the Commonwealth and Suns will launch preemptive invasions of the Draconis Combine and Capellan Confederation, respectively, and once they fall the League will surely follow,” Paradis said, refilling his glass. “However. The Draconis March will be denuded of men to reinforce the strike against the Capellans. Now do you understand why this insane plan must be stopped?”
I nodded, slowly, feeling again that the bow was the only natural thing down there in the room. Standing with a man who’d sell not just his own daughter, but his own realm if it served his interests. “You are worried you will lose your fief to a Combine attack while the AFFS concentrates on the Capellans.”
“Sono toori, Mister Glass. Ex-act-ly. This is where our interest align.” Paradis took a long drink of wine. “Conquered Capellan worlds will be given to the Lyrans—to those weak-kneed bankers while ancient Marcher families stand to lose everything. What does Davion care if he loses a world here and there if he conquers a score from the Confederation?” He suddenly flung the wine glass away, shattering it against a wall. “He will abandon all of us in the Draconis March to serve his own grasping ambition!”
There was irony in this man criticizing ambition, but I somehow doubted he would see the humor. “Why tell me?” I said, placing the bow carefully in the stand. “I doubt the Combine or Confederation are going to take the word of an ex-League mercenary.”
“Because we have obtained a complete, detailed copy of Operation Rat, the plans for the invasion of the Capellan Confederation,” Paradis said, triumphantly. “Troop movements, timetables, targets, everything. With this you have all the evidence you need to warn the other realms and prepare them. Find someone you can trust, and give them the plans. Once it becomes clear his enemies are alerted, Davion will have no choice but to call off his damn-fool invasion and protect our borders—all our borders.”
“Why me?” I asked. “Why not ComStar, say?”
“Who do you think arranged this treaty?” Paradis scoffed. “ComStar is in this up to their necks. With you, as I said, I have a cover for arranging a meeting. You’re a League citizen—even with the stakes involved, I’m not sure I could stomach giving this information to a Kurita or Liao—and I trust that motivates you to do your best to pass on the information. And, let’s be honest, you are deniable—if you are caught or attempt to betray me, I can expose your complicity in the impersonation of my daughter, and discredit anything you might say.”
I chewed my lip a little, looked up, watched the sky. Still too perfect, not quite believable. “Okay, so you cancel the invasion and get to hold onto the family mansion.” I glanced around the courtyard. “Or mansions, as the case may be. What’s in it for me?”
“Other than the warm patriotic glow of knowing you are helping to save your homeland?”
“Yeah. Other than that.”
Paradis’ jaw twitched a little. “Very well, I undertake not to expose your commander’s charade and allow the two of you to live unmolested. How does that sound?”
“You undertake, do you?” I raised an eyebrow, looked at Tracey. “Hear that? He ‘undertakes’. What fancy words you have for blackmail.”
“Ever man has their price, Mister Glass,” Tracey said slowly. “Just not every man gets to choose it.”
I sighed. “No, I guess not.” I was starting to regret not letting the spaceport security just shoot me. Unity, I needed a drink. I walked back up the steps to the veranda. “What’s your angle in all this, A-for-Adolph Tracey?”
“He will continue to represent my interest in this.” Paradis had a confident smile again. “He will be your escort and bodyguard, until the information is delivered. He will keep you from harm, in other words, meaning both the suffering and the causing of. I trust him, because I know he is loyal to whoever pays him the most. And I do not doubt for a moment I can pay him far, far more than you can ever offer.”
“I try not to let things get complicated.” Tracey spread his big hands wide, and gave a little shrug.
“All right,” I reached over, picked up the wine bottle still beside Paradis, lifted it to my lips and took a swig. Dry, very dry. “This from Ozawa?”
“No, Mister Glass. All the vineyards on Ozawa were irradiated during the First Succession War. On my world, we know how terrible the price of war can be.”
“Yes, so terrible, the damage it can do to wine,” I deadpanned, and put the bottle down. Looked around. “Okay. So, where are these plans?”
Paradis rubbed fastidiously at the neck of the bottle with the sleeve of his robe. “Oh, I’m not so foolish as to keep anything so grossly incriminating around here,” he tutted primly. “You will meet our courier in the Optimates Lounge at the spaceport.”
“The spaceport?” I groaned, dragging one hand across my eyes. “You mean you drove me all the way out here just to have this little chat, and now you’re going to ship me all the way back again. Doesn’t this strike anyone as a touch. You know. Inefficient?”
“Well, I’m certainly not going out there,” Paradis said, brows furrowed in puzzlement like the very concept was unimaginable. He flapped a hand dismissively. “Run along now, Mister Glass. Adolphus knows the way. I do so very much hope we shall never meet or speak again.”
