Pacific Shogun (The Fallen World Book 11), page 1
Pacific Shogun
Book Eleven of The Fallen World
By
Jamie Ibson
PUBLISHED BY: Blood Moon Press
Copyright © 2020 Jamie Ibson
All Rights Reserved
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Get the free Four Horsemen prelude story “Shattered Crucible”
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License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Cover Design by Elartwyne Estole
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Contents
Prologue
Part One: Daimyo
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Part Two: Ronin
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Part Three: Shogun
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Epilogue
About the Author
Looking for the Latest in Scifi Goodness?
Excerpt from Book One of The Fallen World
Excerpt from Book One of The Devil’s Gunman
Excerpt from Book One of The Shadow Lands
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Prologue
May 1st, 2065
The Ship Happens glided in on inertia alone, bumpers hanging off the side and sail already lowered. The sun was high overhead, but dust and ash from the south muddied the otherwise clear Sunday sky. A man at the rear quarterdeck vaulted over the side of the boat, trailing a rope, and the piles supporting the dock shuddered under the impact. He hauled on the line, and as his feet slipped down the wooden jetty, the sailboat came to a stop. He knelt to tie it off on a cleat, and when he stood again, three uniformed guards were glaring at him from behind submachineguns.
The first grey-clad security officer barked an order at him.
“Teledyne Security! Show me your hands!”
The man did as ordered, unworried and cooperative. He raised them above his head, palms out.
“Turn around! Now, back up until you’re off the dock!”
Used to the drill, the man did so and stopped once his booted feet touched sand.
“On your knees!”
If they were sticking to the script, one man would be covering the sailboat, the second would be covering him, and the third was giving the orders. Gloved hands snapped cuffs on one wrist and wrenched the other back, securing his hands behind him. A quick patdown and the contact officer relieved him of his sidearm. He found his ident card in the man’s back pocket and passed that off too. A moment later, the too-young NCO moved into view, comparing the ident image to the man on his knees. He glanced up at the man’s armor and read the nameplate.
“I’ll want that back, Sergeant Nobunaga,” the man said.
Sergeant Daniel Nobunaga did a double take when he read the Teledyne clearance codes on the reverse of the card.
“Specialist Hanzo?” he asked and gestured for the contact officer to remove the cuffs. Once his hands were free, Nobunaga offered Hanzo a hand back to his feet. “We didn’t think anyone made it out!”
“We very nearly didn’t,” Hanzo replied. He brushed the sand from his knees and accepted his sidearm back from the contact officer. “I have twelve VIPs in my care, including Vice President Kojima. May I bring them ashore?”
“Of course.” Nobunaga clutched at his radio—now fried by the EMP blasts that had rocked the Pacific Northwest that morning—and cursed. “Edson, run back to the CP and get everyone not doing something critical to assist.”
The contact officer, a young man with pale blond hair poking out from beneath his cadet cap, ported his TD57 subgun and ran for the command center. Specialist Rikimaru Hanzo, one of Teledyne’s top operatives, waved to the other sailboats still offshore. His teammates, Specialists Ayame Kato and Mikael “Kael” Grimstaadt, tacked east to approach the dock. The third officer requested and received permission to head out onto the pier to help secure the sailboats. Rikimaru was glad to see that, despite recent events, the Whidbey Island Air Station security troops were able to think clearly. He looked once again to the south, where the mushroom clouds had blotted out the sun that morning. They’d dissipated as the three small craft sailed northwest from Lynnwood, but their image would be etched into his memory forever.
What now? he wondered. Mikael’s ship pulled in behind his, and, once the boat was secure, he joined the uniformed troops on the dock. He took Ranjesh Kumar’s hand and helped her onto the dock; one of her stiletto heels promptly sank into a slot between the boards, throwing her off-balance, and she stumbled. Once she’d unstuck her shoe, he guided her off the dock and into the care of Teledyne’s Armed Forces.
As the rest of the senior managers filed past, Ayame and Kael joined him at his side.
“What now?” Ayame asked.
“We do our duty. We protect these people and survive.”
* * * * *
Part One: Daimyo
One
Twenty years later
Six of the makeshift fishing boats still burned, Rikimaru saw, as the Seas the Day tacked north into Deer Harbor. Rigging and sail floated on the surface, marking where other victims of the raid had already slipped beneath the waves. Master Coxswain Dan Nobunaga released a line, letting the main sail drop, and his ship coasted into the harbor. Nobunaga was tall, about 6’1”, with long black hair, now gone grey, that he kept tied up in a traditional chonmage topknot like his daimyo. The beer belly he’d had the day the nukes fell was long gone; it turned out an active lifestyle and a sushi diet were good for his health.
His young assistant, thirteen-year-old Derek Frost, barely topped five feet. He’d emulated his adoptive grandfather and tied his hair up, although Frost was so blond his hair looked bleached. He gathered up the jib sheet so it rested on the foredeck and threw the harbormaster a line of his own.
Rikimaru caught his first whiff of burning rubber, fiberglass, and wood. A grey haze hung over the entire marina, fed by the black smoke from the burning ships.
“Do you have any casualties?” Rikimaru demanded, and Sergeant Edson shook his head no. A lance of Komainu Guardians with their bows and arrows stood near Edson on the pier, ready to board the Day, and three more full-grown men heaved on the bowline to force the light sailboat to reverse course and point back out to sea. The six archers hopped aboard, stowed their bows, and took up long oars to paddle the sailboat back out into open water. Derek, Rikimaru, and their six new passengers paddled for all they were worth until they were clear of the dock.
“How long has it been since they cleared the south end of the harbor?” Rikimaru asked. The Komainu lance corporal wore a nametag that read “Rainier” on her uniform, and she shrugged.
“A quarter glass?” she guessed and pointed to a bare wrist where she might have once worn a watch. “Maybe more, if you didn’t see them on your way in.”
“Pour it all on, Dan,” Rikimaru ordered. “Whatever we can do to make up time.”
“You can help by giving Derek a hand with the jib.” Nobunaga pointed, and Rikimaru led Rainier forward to where Frost wrangled ropes.
“What can I do?” Rikimaru asked. Derek froze, not comfortable giving instructions to his daimyo, and then he pointed to the rat’s nest of brown, hemp ropes in a pile on the deck.
“There are four ropes, I mean, lines,” Derek stammered. “One for the, uh, port, another for the starboard side, that’s left and right in boat talk, one for raising the sail, and one for lowering it.”
“And they got all knotted up when you dropped the sail?” the senior samurai asked.
“Yes, Daimyo,” Derek nodded. Rikimaru, Rainier, and Derek picked at the jumbled mess and took a step back, allowing the four ropes to drag free so they could tell them apart. It didn’t help that there was no way to distinguish between them, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.
The Day moved infuriatingly slow, considering the rush they were in, but after a minute of careful sorting, the rat’s nest of lines came apart, and Derek flashed a triumphant smile. He glanced over his shoulder to confirm the two going back to the cockpit slid through the fairlead loops and passed Rikimaru one more rope.
“And this is the halyard. Heave!” Derek said with a hint of a grin. It wasn’t every day a teenager got to order around the second-in-command of their little island kingdom. As Rikimaru hauled on the rope—the halyard—the jib sail rose into place and began to catch the wind.
“Try to keep the ropes straight next time,” he said. “We’ve lost precious time.”
The teen’s face fell. “I’m still learning, but the important thing is not to mix up the ropes for the sails with the ropes that keep the mast upright. Halyards raise and lower sails, stays hold the mast up, and sheets hold all the sails in place where they need to be to catch the wind. Oh, and watch out for the boom whenever we tack…”
Rikimaru knew what a boom was, of course, and said so.
“Oh, uh, of course you do. I don’t think we’ll have to gybe, but if we do, I’ll warn you so you can get everyone else below decks. A bad gybe could mean someone goes in the drink or gets hurt. I’d better warn the others.”
“Perhaps you’d better, yes,” Rikimaru said. The boy excused himself and returned to the cockpit at the stern of the ship to lecture Rainier’s Komainu archers on the importance of water safety.
“I don’t know how you put up with him,” Rikimaru said.
“That’s because you never settled down to have kids of your own,” Nobunaga replied. “It gets easier. Even more so when they’re your kids’ kids.”
“I wouldn’t know,” the daimyo replied.
Nobunaga rolled his eyes. “Maybe you just need some practice.”
* * *
Their quarry, two pairs of sails, sliced through the water ahead, and Rikimaru leaned hard as the wind heeled the Seas the Day over. Hanzo was an inch shorter than Nobunaga, which the older man never failed to point out. His Specialist enhancements meant his heavily-muscled torso was even denser than it appeared. He’d been the recipient of all of Teledyne’s best nanite enhancements, including nanite-reinforced muscles and bones that made him nearly twice as heavy as he should have been. Like Nobunaga, he had obvious Japanese ancestry, but his parents and grandparents had all been born and lived in the Seattle Sprawl, a region that stretched from Olympia all the way north to Vancouver. “Rick” and Dan were both in their mid-forties now and resembled each other so closely they could have been brothers.
Their sailboat carved sharp furrows of white foam as it raced through the waves, but Vancouver Island was in sight and getting closer. Rick pounded a fist on the starboard gunwale. “They’re getting away!”
“We are closing on them, fast, but they had too much of a head start!” Dan Nobunaga nudged the bow over and heeled over a few more degrees, but it didn’t do them any good. A stern chase was a challenging prospect at best, and although frustrated they were going to escape, a quiet part of Dan’s mind was proud they had closed as much distance as they had. But even as fast as they were gaining, the raiders from Victoria were almost in range of the shore, and it was apparent the Seas The Day wasn’t going to catch them in time. Nobunaga shook his head and eased the wheel back until the deck was closer to ‘flat,’ and they could tack away, back to the east.
“What are we gonna do, Dan?” Rikimaru scowled. Eight archers were not an insignificant force out on the Juan de Fuca Strait, but close to shore, the raiders had buddies—buddies who might actually have firearms with ammo, or ten or twenty or thirty archers. “We can’t let them get away with this.”
Dan leaned on the wheel and pondered for a moment. He ducked as the sailboat’s boom passed over his head, a habit he had developed the hard way after several near-catastrophic incidents almost two decades earlier. The crash of waves and the mocking calls of the seagulls overhead filled the silence as each man got lost in his thoughts. Derek came back from the bow of the Day and tucked his quiver away in one of the weapons lockers. He pulled out a rusty tin of beeswax and flopped onto a cushion to rewax his bowstring.
“Lance?” The young 13-year-old offered his tin to the woman in charge of the other five Komainu archers. Melissa Rainier was a fiery redhead in her early twenties, nearing the conclusion of her initial period of service in the Komainu. She was smart, aggressive, and a good leader—that she was a lance corporal while still inside the conscription period spoke well for her capabilities.
Rikimaru was pretty sure that wasn’t what caught Frost’s attention, though. Rainier kept her red curls tied back in a long braid, and her summertime tan had faded back to freckles over the winter. She refused to be out-rucked or out-run by her male teammates and therefore worked two or three times as hard as they to maintain her strength and fitness. The Komainu uniforms were relatively shapeless and nobody truly looked good in them, but Melissa managed it better than most. The frumpy tunic and pants couldn’t disguise how fit and fierce the lance corporal was, and she moved like a panther on the hunt. Rikimaru may not have understood kids, but he’d been a teenager before he’d been a Specialist. Unless he was reading the situation totally wrong, Derek was absolutely smitten.
Rainier accepted the tin, and she followed the boy’s lead, waxing her bowstring to protect it against saltwater damage. Rikimaru watched the young teen with a bemused smile, and when Derek realized he was busted, he abruptly turned away, searching for something else to look at. He found and glared at the Buoyancé as it disappeared over the horizon.
Derek nodded but sulked nonetheless. “I don’t see why we don’t just go take some,” he complained. “The Victorians are…savages! We could take them in a straight-up fight!” The boy leaned on his bow to take the tension off and slipped the bowstring out of its notch.
“You know why not,” Nobunaga admonished. “That’s for Shogun Kojima to decide, and until he’s declared differently, we will respect his orders.”
Derek rolled his eyes and turned back to his duties after tucking the string away in the locker, muttering to himself the whole time. Rikimaru ignored his insolence. Derek wasn’t his problem, not for a couple years. Hopefully Dan would have the boy’s attitude sorted by then.
* * *
The sun had set when the Seas the Day finally coasted into the dock on the west side of Whidbey Island after dropping Rainier and her squad back home at the historic-post-office-turned-barracks at Deer Harbor. Rikimaru left Dan and his protégé to secure their ship and walked alone down the path to what had once been an inn on the base for visiting Teledyne dignitaries. Before Teledyne purchased the station from the failing US Government, it was home to visiting pilots. His feet crunched on the gravel, and he felt every sharp piece of rock through his triple-soled, boiled leather moccasins.
His first duty was, of course, to Shogun Kojima. Their venerable leader had united the San Juan islands in the aftermath of the Fall, and it certainly wasn’t his place to question him. Everyone had a place, and everyone had to remain in their place. Teledyne and Obsidian had thought they were invulnerable, and look what that had wrought. Kojima believed if they served as a peaceful example to their post-apocalyptic neighbors, they would organize themselves and naturally seek to ally. True, he and Kael and Aya had had to thump a few skulls back in the day, but extreme times called for extreme measures. They hadn’t made war on anyone in eighteen years. Those first few years they’d managed to use up the air station’s entire supply of ammunition and that of a few preppers as well. Without bullets, they’d had to revise their entire warfighting concept and make it up as they went along.
Twenty years later, if he had to admit it, Rikimaru was beginning to lose faith in Kojima’s brand of pragmatic pacifism. Kojima would never initiate hostilities, no matter the threat; they would only use their Guardians—the Komainu militia—to protect their borders and their people. Privately, he agreed with young Master Frost. If the shogun decided to throw off the fetters and allow him to prosecute hostilities as he saw fit, the Victorians would never bother them again.
He winced. To think that Canadians could ever pose a threat to his small corner of the Pacific Northwest was appalling in and of itself. Not that Canada had really existed as it had in his grandfather’s day. Canada’s east and west had been at an uneasy truce since the breakup of the ‘20s, and that gave the MegaCorps the leverage they needed to assert greater and greater independence. As it was in Canada, so it was in the United States, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere. Over subsequent decades, the significance of national boundaries and citizenship mattered less and less as corporateship mattered more and more.
