Wolf looked at Michi. "And what are you now, this instant, Michi Noketsuna? Alive or dead?"
"Alive."
"Think about that, too. Once, I made you the offer of a place in the Dragoons, and you said you had other things to do. I took that as a 'talk to me later.' Looks to me like all the old business is finished. If you were really going to kill yourself at the end of it, you'd have done it by now. So what is it you're looking for, Noketsuna? It isn't death."
No, Michi realized, it was not death he sought, but what it was, he didn't know.
"Well, I've got things to do," Wolf said in a sudden display of impatience. "Can't live in the past."
Wolf turned and walked away. His Dragoons gave Michi brief bows, then followed their commander.
The Kuritans watched them leave, then turned to Michi, awaiting an answer.
"Michi -sama?" Kiyomasa asked for all of them.
33
It was strange to have Kuritans aboard the Chieftain.In training I had studied their culture, perhaps a little more intensively than that of other Inner Sphere states because they were billed as high-probability opponents. But the reality was different from expectations, as it always is, I suppose. Though we were on a military ship, we were not in the midst of a military operation; perhaps that was part of the reason they did not behave as I expected them to.
Their clannishness was predictable, however. They were among strangers, some of whom had once been their enemy. Spheroids don't incorporate the losers of an operation into the winners' side like the Clans do. Well, it wasn't standard Dragoon practice, either. We had taken in Clanners, though, and in some ways they were stranger than these expatriate samurai and their families.
I wondered about those families. Not all of the Kuritans had brought theirs. Did that mean those who brought no one had no families? Might they be orphans, cast-offs, or even renegades? I didn't have the opportunity to seek out the answer because the families were billeted on the ships the Kuritans had brought with them. Since the ships were still the property of individual Kuritans, until proper transferrals could be made at Outreach, we Dragoons rarely visited them during the journey.
How many of those wives and children had voluntarily chosen to accompany their warriors? How many were forced into the journey? How did they deal with going among strangers to find a new life? I could have understood if they had all been sibkos. To see the unknown, to try new ventures together—that sort of comradeship was natural. How did families deal with it? I also wondered how similar this tiny exodus was to the departure of the oldsters from Wolf Clan.
I never worked up the courage to ask any of the officers who had regular conferences with Colonel Wolf. I just watched them come and go. Occasionally I overheard them speaking to one another of their families, but I could never be sure whether they spoke of someone on the accompanying ships or someone left behind. Maybe it was all part of the living in the present business that the Colonel had talked about with Michi Noketsuna. I didn't know.
I spent a lot of time on the bridge of the Chieftain,where I had set up my comm station to monitor Dragoon communiques and ComStar broadcast channels. The cluttered channels in space are odd: you're always having to sort out the past from the present, when it's all really the past. Since nothing arrives instantaneously, you have to put everything you get into perspective. That can be hard. Sometimes last week's news from one system is more important than today's from the system where you're sitting in a JumpShip getting its interstellar drives recharged.
Sometimes I'd look up and find Michi watching me. He never said anything, though. He'd just bow politely when I noticed him and then go wandering off about his business. I didn't really understand why he'd come aboard with the other Kuritans; he didn't seem quite the same as them. It wasn't just that he was distant and aloof—that was typical for a Kuritan. It was more that he didn't seem to be there all the time. He rarely spoke and then only when spoken to directly. There was something strange about him, something faintly dangerous. Sometimes I thought about him as an unexploded mine. An expert might handle it safely, but a green troopie would do something wrong and that would be the end of the troopie. If I was sure of only one thing when around him, it was that I was definitely a greenie. So despite my curiosity about why he watched me, I never asked. It was probably just as well.
* * *
Dechan Fraser stayed aboard the Chieftainwhen Wolf, Vordel, and Cameron accompanied the Kuritans to the surface. He had recognized the cold blue face of the planet they were orbiting the moment he saw it on the bridge monitors. He had no desire ever to set foot on its ground again.
From snatches of conversation overheard among the Kuritans, he suspected he knew why they had come here, and it only gave him more reason to stay aboard. His suspicions were proven correct when the shuttle returned, bearing Michi Noketsuna alongside Wolf. Michi greeted Dechan and Jenette with a stiff formal bow, but he offered no spoken words. Though she said nothing at the time, Jenette had complained later. Dechan couldn't decide if he cared or not. Many years had gone by without words, what were a few minutes in a shuttle bay?
They saw little of Michi after that first encounter. He always seemed to be leaving a compartment just as they were entering, or vice versa. The other Kuritans were easier to talk to. After years in the Combine, Dechan found them more familiar companions than the Dragoons.
Still, it seemed strange to see Dragoon and Kurita uniforms sitting around the same conference table again. The byplay was slow at first, but the Ryuken veterans fell into it soon enough and the other Kuritans followed their lead. Dechan was reminded of the days when Iron Man Tetsuhara had sat across from Wolf. But Tetsuhara was dead and his son—well, his son wasn't the Iron Man. Michi Noketsuna had sat at the table in those days, too. He wasn't dead, but he wasn't at the table, either.
Dechan finally decided that the whole arrangement shouldn't be surprising. Things were different now. Even the Dragoons were different. That was obvious every time he saw Pilot Grane. Her overlarge head and slight build marked her instantly as a Clan-bred aerospace pilot. None of the Clans' extreme phenotypes had been a part of the Dragoons when Dechan had worn the uniform. Hellfire, he hadn't even known the Dragoons had come from the Clans. As a recruit from the Inner Sphere, he hadn't been trusted with that knowledge.
Jenette had known, though; she was one of them.
But somehow he couldn't find it in himself to hate her. She had never really lied to him, she just hadn't told him the whole story. But he knew her. And loved her. Maybe that made it different.
Jaime Wolf, on the other hand, was an enigma. He was a man who played his own game and damned to hell anyone who got in the way. Sort of like Dechan's once-friend Michi.
Dechan was through being a pawn. Now all he wanted to do was stay out of the way and keep Jenette safe. It wasn't really possible to do anything really constructive until their journey was complete anyway. Then, well, then he'd see what could be done to build a new life.
34