From the Ashes Page 7

Brisco Woods Bio

  Brisco Woods is a new author, and this is his first attempt at something worth reading. He spent 23 years in the US Air Force, Air Force Reserve, and TN Air National Guard. This career began with him working on technical stuff and changed, toward the end, to him doing command and control stuff that he could tell you about, but then he would have to kill you. In 2015, he retired to the simple, easy life of being a Realtor. Brisco currently lives in East TN and spends his immense amount of off-time fishing, woodworking, and reading.

  * * * * *

  Daimyo by Jamie Ibson

  A long shadow in the doorway caught the corner of my eye. The sun was coming up, framing the floor of the shop in blinding sunlight for the first time in months. You could only get drizzled on for so many weeks before it got old.

  “You didn’t sleep again, huh?”

  “I don’t like to sleep when she’s got an op going on,” I replied. I hadn’t needed much sleep for a long time, and I had more important things on my mind.

  “Everything alright?”

  Mikael Grimstaadt nodded and came into the shop where I’d spent the night, forging ingots out of jet parts. I showed him my latest project, a proper katana, nearly three feet long. I didn’t have the proper steel or mix of clay, ash, and powder to make it in the traditional fashion, so I went with the next best option—pattern-welded “water” steel made of layered alloys and hammered until the blade shimmered like ripples in a pond. The hilt and guard were ready to go; they’d already been sized and were waiting to be pinned onto the tang.

  “That’s fuckin’ cool, old man,” he said, taking a closer look at the pattern in the steel. “I’ll take two. Oh, and, they’ll be arriving soon.”

  “Right,” I said and began packing away my materials. Everything had a place, everything in its place. Our little island nation on the Pacific coast was a small slice of order in a world of chaos.

  “Let’s go greet our traitorous saboteurs, shall we?”

  * * *

  The sandy beach had a single dock jutting out into the water, and the low tide exposed plenty of seaweed, bull kelp, starfish, and crabs. Rotten fish and sea salt permeated the air, both repugnant and delicious. I’d grown up in the SeaTac sprawl and had never appreciated the outdoors as a kid, but now that this was all we had left, I’d found an appreciation for this simpler life. Twenty years ago, I’d stepped off the Ship Happens at this very same pier.

  Twenty years ago, Kael and I were veterans of the Obsidian War. I was training a new recruit, Ayame, and the three of us were death on six legs. “Specialists,” we were called. We were Corporate’s heavy hitters, delivering high-velocity bullets and hostile takeovers with extreme prejudice. If you thought intraoffice politics were bad, intercorporate warfare was bad on toast. Alliances shifted. We’d worked with anyone and everyone—criminals, cops, even rival corps, if it meant getting the goods before someone else. Before Teledyne went to war against Obsidian, I’d even teamed up—and I use that term loosely—on a solo project with one of their pet psychos, a guy named Gaunt, to take down a major JalCom facility in Salt Lake City. That was back in the good ole days, when we intensely disliked each other, before we hated each other’s guts enough to destroy the world. These days, I’m the Daimyo, the War Leader, the best professional warrior we’ve got in a world full of desperate amateurs.

  Dan Nobunaga tossed Kael the stern line from the Seas the Day while his thirteen-year-old apprentice tossed me the one for the bow. Derek’s mother had died in a Victorian raid a year or two ago, if I remembered correctly. Ayame stood at the helm, barking orders, her crew snapping to with a ‘make fast’ this and ‘belay’ that. Much of sailing is minute adjustments for long hours, then a rapid series of major adjustments after tacking or a shift in the winds. In this case, she’d had to gauge the winds, resistance, tide, and waves, then guess when to drop the sails and coast in unpowered. If she’d been too early, they’d have had to break out their enormous oars until they got within rope-throwing distance. If she’d been too late, they’d have crashed into the pier and maybe damaged the sailboat. I lashed the bow line to a cleat, then ran back to Kael, and we hauled on the stern rope to slow the boat’s final inertia. As the ship came to a halt just past us, I got my first look at our four prisoners.

  It was good to see that Ayame hadn’t taken any chances with them aboard ship. Her team had taken them down, and it was safe to bet there’d be some hard feelings. They had tied the traitors up in fetal positions, then added ropes around their chests and under their arms and secured them off the back of the boat, so they were submerged up to their waists. They were gagged, utterly helpless, thoroughly soaked, and chilled to the bone. To say they looked like drowned rats was being mean to the rats.

  I stepped up onto the rear deck and began hauling them aboard, one by one.

  “Ajay,” I acknowledged the first. I’d thought he was a friend and held great potential. “I’m disappointed.”

  Rather than glare, he looked away, ashamed. That was something, at least. I dragged the other three aboard, then untied their feet and gave them a moment to regain some circulation. They would all die, of course; mercy was a luxury that died along with the old world. But how we treated our enemies was more a comment on our own moral state than theirs. Once they were fully stretched out and could walk under their own power, Dan took the lead ropes and jumped down onto the dock. One by one, they jumped down, and the eight of us made our way up the beach.

  * * *

  One parking lot, nearly a hundred yards across, had been converted into the closest thing we had to a parade square. The pavement was cracked and worn, despite our best efforts to keep it weeded. Twenty years of minimum maintenance with hand tools could only do so much. Bales of straw covered with cloth bullseyes for archery training lined one edge, and roughly shaped, loosely piled driftwood bleachers lined another. Given the seriousness of the day’s events, our Shogun had given everyone at Deception Base permission to attend the trials, then take the rest of the day off. They say barbarism is only nine missed meals away and making sure everyone stayed well-fed was one of our highest priorities. But we’d not suffer from one day’s lost labor. We had a small surplus of seafood, so no one would starve.

  Shogun Kojima worked the crowd, shaking hands and exchanging greetings. For two decades, he had been their Shogun, perched on a string of islands on the edge of the ocean. He knew everyone by name, and he knew who was troubled, who was well, who were new parents, and who were parents-to-be. He regretted that this betrayal had happened, and he took it as a personal failure that the inhabitants of Orcas Island had lost their faith in him. He may have been our warlord, but as dictators went, he was one of the good ones. He studied real wood-pulp-paper books, including a copy of The Art of War he received from his grandfather and a handful of other works on leadership. If not for the present circumstances, I would have said there was no doubt he was in charge.

  Mikael raised a battered trumpet to his lips to announce our arrival. Even Shogun Kojima respected the blare of the horn and made his way to the dais opposite the driftwood bleachers. He stood proud and erect behind a table covered in sea salt-bleached linen. Resting on top were four knives on red handkerchiefs, the bright color stark against the pale cloth. I joined him, standing to his right, and Kael stood to his left. I’ll admit there was some symbolism, but it was deliberate. The crowd quieted, and Ayame commanded the four prisoners to kneel before the shogun one last time. Their leader, a conniving bastard I knew as Tarl, refused until Ayame moved behind him, took hold of the rope still wrapped around his chest, and stomped the back of his knees, hard. The thud of his bare knees hitting the concrete was audible. That had to hurt.

  Ayame spent several long minutes stating the accused’s crimes. They were sick of being preyed upon by our neighbors to the west, the accursed Victorians, whose city had not been shattered by cluster nukes, and thus, had only fallen victim to the mildest form of lawlessness and barbarism. Tribalism had compe
lled them to turn to roving piracy, and these four felt they were being unfairly neglected. They’d schemed to betray the next ship from Deception Base, capture it, and turn it over to the Victorians as a peace offering and sales pitch. They wanted a change of flag.

  “Do you contest these charges?” Shogun Kojima asked.

  They did not.

  “Daimyo Rikimaru, the court is yours.”

  I stepped down from the dais and began my own bit of theatre. There were no courts of law here, hadn’t been even before the world fell. Corporate was all. Ayame could have drowned all four, and no one would have known any better. I could have executed them on the spot; there was no one who would or could have stopped me, but summary execution became rather gauche centuries ago. We weren’t complete tyrants, and Shogun Kojima insisted on having a protocol, so everyone knew the expectations and the consequences of not adhering to them. That, more than anything else, had kept peace among the islands. Everyone understood applied violence; no one ever thought “violence never solved anything.” Violence had solved lots of things over the years. Not everything, but it was a tool in the toolbox. Violence had kept us safe from marauders from the mainland in the days, weeks, and months after the bombs fell and in dozens of raids in the decades since. The marauders were usually mobs of ill-trained, half-starved savages who’d found or fought their way up the highway from the city, turned west at Mount Vernon, and crossed the enormous Swinomish bridge onto Fidalgo to our north. We patrolled Fidalgo but didn’t reside there—it was too vulnerable. We stayed safe beyond the cliffs and bridges at Deception Pass.

  Our final ‘appeal process’ was trial by combat. That was the spectacle the crowd was here to witness. As Daimyo, I had granted defendants the right to appeal directly—if they could take my position from me by violence, they could have it. My ultra-dense, nanite-enhanced muscles, reinforced bones, redundant organs, and the training I’d suffered through at Teledyne made that an unlikely outcome. I conceded that, perhaps, single combat between me and an unarmed accused was unfair. It wasn’t meant to be fair, but there was no justice in watching me pummel someone to death.

  Thus, the knives.

  Getting stabbed tended to ruin my week, so I took it seriously. I picked up the first blade and weighed it in my hand. It was one of the first I’d fashioned in the smithy, back when I was still learning how to pattern-weld.

  “Ryu, you were born after the world fell. In fact, you were one of the first to be born here, on Deception Base. Your mother was pregnant with you when we fled the city. This knife is just as old as you are.” I yanked the trailing end of the slipknot that bound the young man’s wrists, and his hands came free. He disentangled himself from the ropes and laid them on the broken concrete next to him. “This knife has power, the power to resolve this matter, once and for all. Say your piece, then turn it on the one you believe responsible for the predicament you are in.”

  “Honored Daimyo, I failed you,” Ryu began, tears streaking his cheeks. “I failed Deception Base and my friends on Orcas Island. I was dissatisfied with life as a ‘mere’ fisherman and thought I could do more by raiding the Victorians, which the Shogun forbid. When Tarl came to me, dissatisfied with the Shogun’s leadership, I leapt without looking. It was a mistake. I hope my shame can be forgiven.”

  I handed him the knife, hilt-first. He took a breath and drove the chisel-point of the tanto into his heart. He gasped once and crumpled forward. As he lay there bleeding out, I looked him squarely in the eyes and whispered, “It is forgiven.” He nodded once, before coughing up a mouthful of blood and going still.

  The knives had another purpose, as well.

  “It is forgiven!” I announced to the crowd, much louder than before. Life is cheap in this Fallen World, and sometimes the best one can hope for is to be well remembered by their loved ones. Sometimes, fear of being forgotten is worse than the fear of death.

  We did not practice seppuku or hara-kiri, which are kind of the same thing. There was no need to ritualistically disembowel oneself, then be beheaded by one’s second. Jisatsu was perfectly acceptable, and by choosing that out, Ryu regained his lost honor. His name would be listed on one of the near-holy stone tablets where we etched the names of our lost and fallen.

  The second accused was another young man, Carlos. He’d been a babe in arms when his mother, a VP of Business Development, had fled the sprawl. Now, she was a seamstress on San Juan, maintaining sailboat sails and fishing nets. I untied Carlos’ hands, but he just knelt there, shivering and weeping.

  “Carlos Rodrigues, you were just an infant when we fled the city for the islands. Commander Grimstaadt tells me you were slated for NCO classes in the Komainu, our guardians. When men and women are given weapons and training, there is always a risk they will use the power it gives them for ill. Discipline and willpower are just as important in a warrior as strength and cunning. I give you the same power I gave Ryu.”

  He took his time, gathering himself, and the crowd grew restless.

  “I…can’t,” he finally whispered, then looked up at me with pleading eyes. “I’m scared.”

  “Tell me what you were thinking,” I commanded. I’d thought he was a good kid.

  “Daimyo…I’m not…smart.” He stared down at the knife in his hands, as if he didn’t know what to do with it. “Growing up, here, in the islands, I always felt dumb, and my friends would tease me. Eventually, I started doing stupid shit for laughs and entertainment. It was better laughing with them, than being laughed at. I have always known better than to do some of the stupid stuff I did, but their encouragement was all I needed. I joined the Komainu because I thought I might get a chance to do something right.” Now, he was angry. He rose to his feet. His voice grew stronger, and he pointed the knife accusingly at the man next to him. “I wish, at New Year’s, I had listened to my inner voice, rather than listening to his. Tarl was our leader, Daimyo, but I knew better. I lacked the discipline and willpower to do what I knew was right.”

  He looked up with new conviction hardening his eyes.

  “You told Ryu to turn the knife on the one who was responsible, right?”

  I nodded.

  “Does he get a knife too? Or can I just kill him and be done with it?”

  “If you kill him,” I said slowly, “you’re choosing banishment over death. You will cross the Deception Pass Bridges, and never come back.”

  He weighed that for a moment, then turned and dove on the ringleader.

  Tarl was a piece of shit, but he was a well-trained piece of shit, and he raised his hands the moment Carlos turned. The boy, on the other hand, was not well trained and, even with his hands tied, Tarl outclassed him. As Carlos slashed, Tarl used the ropes around his wrists to catch the blade and turn it aside. He was quicker too. Tarl took several light slashes, but they were superficial wounds that were ugly but didn’t rupture vital organs. To quickly kill someone with a knife, you had to stab deeply or sever major blood vessels.

  Tarl protected his face and neck and kept Carlos at a distance with front kicks to his chest and short snap kicks to his shins. Carlos wouldn’t commit to taking damage to deal damage. The two of them danced over the parade square until Carlos tripped, and Tarl leapt on him. Planting his shin across the boy’s forearm, trapping his hand against the concrete, Tarl dropped a bloody elbow smash on Carlos’ face. The boy’s head bounced off the concrete, and he went limp. Tarl hit him three more times, until he was satisfied he wouldn’t be getting back up.

  Scooping Carlos’ knife off the ground, he cut through the ropes securing his wrists, while staring daggers at me. His cutting the ropes pissed me off; they were valuable and near impossible to replace. Blood dripped from cuts on his fingers, a biceps, and a light slash across his abdomen, but that was all. Keeping the dagger extended in front of him, the ringleader crossed back to where he’d begun, and scooped the knife intended for him off the table.

  “Save the speeches, Rick, let’s fuckin’ do this, huh?”


  Okay.

  It was against protocol for me to fight him armed. Although we had rarely used trial-by-combat, most accused preferred Jisatsu. Off the top of my head, I couldn’t think of another time when someone had come at me with two knives at once.

  He closed immediately, and as the first knife whistled in, I smashed my left forearm high up on his, and my open palm into his wrist, deadening his nerves and sending the first knife flying. To stay out of range of the second, I stepped under his arm and past him, twisting his arm behind him in a chicken-wing, then pivoting hard to drive the point of my elbow into his temple. He was woozy and dazed, and he stumbled back toward the fourth member of his group.

  Ajay.

  This day was full of firsts. I was, by now, pretty certain I’d never had an accused come at me with two knives. I knew I’d never had an accused bring a friend to the fight. Ajay’s ropes fell away, and he grabbed the fourth knife off the table. Ajay moved in close, and as he did, he spoke loudly, so everyone could hear him.

  “Daimyo, I feel there’s something I ought to tell you.”

  “By all means,” I replied, circling to keep the two attackers in line, so I’d only have to deal with one at a time.

  “Carlos didn’t mention that Tarl had been coercing him, threatening his mother if he didn’t cooperate.” Ajay drove his blade into Tarl’s kidneys. Tarl screamed in pain, then Ajay tore the blade out in a spray of blood and bits, and Tarl fell to his knees.

  “And I haven’t mentioned, I’m one of the Satori.”

  I’d been cut, stabbed, shot, electrocuted, and half drowned, and I’d even had to regrow three fingers after a particularly awful torture session by an Obsidian employee (that would be after we hated each other’s guts), but I’d never been knifed in the kidneys. Sounded like it hurt.

  “You…infiltrated his group, walked into Ayame’s ambush, got dragged behind a boat for twenty miles, and waited until now to say something?” I said in disbelief. I mean, I knew the kid. He’d been part of the Komainu for a year or so and had impressed all his instructors, but still. “Are you that hardcore? Or are you that crazy?”