day after she had failed to return home from school. But there was no mention of any boyfriend that the police had been asked to seek out and question. Maybe just schoolyard gossip? After all, if Yuki's story about Krimson speaking over a Ouija phone could be believed, the girl was not a runaway, but more likely a murder victim. Murder victim.
Stake's next net search had him looking into the death of Yuki's mother. John Fukuda's wife. Just out of nagging curiosity.
Again, he found little. Yuriko Fukuda had been murdered four years ago. (Janice had been right; she hadn't died when Yuki was a baby, as the girl had claimed.) Shot to death in her home by an unknown assailant, possibly in a bungled robbery of their high-class apartment. Attached to the news report was a holoportrait which Stake rotated on one of the other screens. A stunning woman. He could see where Yuki had got her looks.
Stake rolled back a bit in his chair, still staring at the revolving disembodied head of the beautiful woman, and yawned. He thought he might steal a nap, then get up and head down to LOV 69 for a dinner of burgers and brews. He wondered if the Legion of Veterans Post bought its cheap hamburger in bulk from Tableau Meats.
Beautiful head. Spinning and spinning. Beautiful face. Turning away from him, then turning his way again.
She had been so beautiful. As beautiful as the monastery, with its outer and inner walls tiled in mosaics that told the story of her faith in place of a holy text. (It's a comic book, joked one of his fellow soldiers as he followed the story. Then the soldier had gunned away the brightly glazed little tiles that composed the face of their prophet in one of the 'comic book' panels.)
The monastery had been secreted away in the heart of a jungle where every frond and blade and leaf and vine was a vivid shade of blue. Blue lizards basked in the broken rays of twin blue-white suns. Lovely insects fanned their blue wings as they rested on blue flowers. Deceptively like butterflies, they were. But they drank blood, not pollen.
It was ironic that the monks themselves could not see the mosaics, but they spent hours each day reverently running their hands over the raised and contoured shapes as if reading a bible printed in Braille. It was the first time some of his fellow soldiers had seen the Ha Jiin's clerical caste, and they were horrified. Their horror made them angry and rough as they herded the monastery's ten monks together, prodding them where they wanted them to go with the muzzles of their guns.
They wore beautiful flowing robes of azure silk, embroidered with raised religious symbols also seen worked into the mosaics. On their heads, black three-cornered hats. And because the holy caste started smoking their incense as children, each of the ten monks had a whorl-like hole in place of a face. Like a huge knothole in leathery blue tree bark. The incense had cancerous properties that ate their features away over the years, obliterating their identities so that they were all identical servants of their faith. The cancer eventually reduced their fingers to nubs so that the hands they rubbed along the tiles were more like blunt flippers, fleshy mittens. They sacrificed their fingers by pinching the hot glowing incense out of the bowls of the pipes they smoked. Then, they pressed the ash to a point in the center of their chests until over time a smaller vortex wound opened there, like a window straight to their hearts. They humbled themselves this way day after day. Until they were fully transmogrified. Until they needed the incense no more.
'This is how hardcore these people are,' marveled one of the soldiers, wagging his head in awe. In fear. 'This is why they're so fucking tough to fight!'
Devoted to their faith. Devoted to win their war against the emerging Jin Haa nation. And the Earth Colonies' military forces that supported it.
It was because of this fierce devotion that Corporal Jeremy Stake was a little surprised that the two Ha Jiin fighters who had taken refuge in the monastery surrendered when the Earth soldiers surrounded it. Stake was in command by the time they captured the monastery, because their unit's lieutenant and sergeant had both been killed by sniper fire.
The captured fighters were a woman in her early twenties and a boy of maybe nineteen with a badly infected leg wound that had slowed them down and forced them to hide out in the monastery. Stake ordered their medic to see to the boy. Their guns were collected. From the woman they took a sniper rifle; a sophisticated Earth weapon she had no doubt taken off a corpse at some point.
'Let me shoot that bitch!' Private Cortez raged, aiming his own gun at the now unarmed woman, her fingers linked on top of her head. 'She's the one who killed the lieutenant and Sergeant Lindy-has to be!'
'We don't execute prisoners unless they attempt escape,' Stake intoned, quoting regulations.
'She looks like she's gonna make a run for it to me' remarked another unit member, leveling his bulky, multi- barreled assault engine.
'She was picking off our officers,' Cortez said. 'You would've been next, man!'
'I mean it,' Stake told them. 'Just get some restraints on them.'
'Sir,' said Private Henderson, calling him over to examine the sniper gun they had confiscated. He pointed to some Ha Jiin characters etched or burned into the weapon's stock. 'Can you read this?'
'What's it say?'
Henderson met his eyes gravely. ''The Earth Killer.''
Overhearing this exchange, Cortez bounced on his feet and jerked his gun at the woman, raging anew. 'It's her! She's the Earth Killer! That's what they call her! She's snuffed I don't know how many of us, Stake! We need to riddle this fucking bitch
'I told you to back off, didn't I?' Stake snapped. 'Don't argue with me or it goes in my report.'
'The corporal's gunning for general,' wisecracked another man, but he ignored it.
The Earth Killer. Her own people had dubbed her that. A legend, almost, even to them. And it had worked its way to the ears of the Colonial troopers. A cold-blooded little beauty, carrying a gun almost as big as herself, with a patient trigger finger and an instinctive eye for drilling solid projectiles and various types of ray beams into enemy soldiers at great distances, even through the intervening chaos of jungle vegetation.
But Stake wanted to know her real name, and he stepped closer to her. He asked her, in his crude fumbling attempt at the native language. She said nothing, staring at him unblinkingly. He edged closer, to intimidate her. But not too close, because he was intimidated himself, though she was five feet tall at best, slim as an adolescent boy, and had had her wrists banded together in front of her. Those cat-like eyes. He stared into them. He repeated his question.
'Thi Gonh,' she answered this time, in a voice surprisingly dark and strong for her small frame. And then she gasped. And Private Cortez broke into laughter.
'You're starting to mimic her, Stake,' he said. 'And she looks like she just saw a ghost!'
Stake realized he had been looking at her too intensely, and severed his eye contact. But he hadn't been able to help himself. The young woman was indeed a beauty, as the rumors had indicated. The shape of her face was delicate, with fine cheekbones, the mouth feminine but hard with a kind of composed arrogance. Her nose looked like it might have been broken at some point, but this-like the black mole below one corner of her mouth-rendered her beauty more individual, gave it a flawed humanity to blend with the ethereal loveliness. There was a fold of skin over the inner corners of her eyes in what is called the epicanthus, giving them the slanted look of the Asian peoples for whom Stake felt the Ha Jiin were this dimension's analogue.
The woman's flesh was the robin's egg blue that made these people so eerily lovely, like ghosts. Her waist- length hair, parted in the center and gathered loosely behind her head, stray strands hanging in her face, was midnight black-and yet, it had a metallic red sheen where the light slid across it. Similarly, the pupils of her eyes were black as volcanic glass, but when they caught the light a certain way glowed a bright, unsettling red. Demons, some of the Earth soldiers called the Ha Jiin. It made it easier to kill them.
Stake had the woman patted down for secreted communication devices or weapons, a blade or such. When he saw the soldier give her chest a double squeeze, thinking that the corporal didn't see him grin in the woman's glaring face, Stake growled, 'Show some professionalism, you stupid fuck! Put her in one of the rooms we can lock. Stand guard outside it.'
'Leave her cuffs on?'
'Yeah, for now.'
This private and, at Stake's urging, the more professional Henderson escorted the woman away. Stake thought better of it and had a third man follow them, gun ready. Even without weapons, the Ha Jiin could fight like
