J.B. had watched them as they milled around in the outer courtyard, waiting to be called and given a basic fitness test. “Ten percent of them looked to be over sixty, and another twenty percent looked way below sixteen. About a third of the remainder were visibly unwell. Most had respiratory illnesses, coughing and fighting for breath, even from doing a basic series of three or four short wind sprints. Shogun’ll be lucky to eventually find himself twenty good men. And that still leaves him way short against his losses to the sarin gas.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ryan called a council for that evening.
Supper had been the usual filling mix of Oriental and American food, served by silent servants and shared with the surviving samurai. The shogun sat at the head of the table, eating sparingly at a weak soup with bean sprouts and water chestnuts, washed down with a small bowl of fragrant, bitter tea.
Doc had chosen a fiery sauce of mixed chilies with spit-roasted prawns and fried rice, with more of the ubiquitous water chestnuts. He held a slice up in his chopsticks.
“Sniff the wonderful aroma of ginger from the rice,” he said. “Do you wish to know a peculiarly interesting fact about water chestnuts?”
“Dazzle us, Doc,” Mildred said, through a mouthful of cheeseburger and fries smothered in a piquant tomato sauce, accompanied by a reasonable impersonation of the best-known cola in the world.
“The water chestnut is unique, I believe, among vegetables, in that it doesn’t matter how you cook it, the texture will always remain the same. Fry it or poach it or broil it or bake it. Doesn’t make a jot or tittle of difference. Still have the same light, crunchy texture.”
Mildred wiped ketchup from her chin with a linen napkin. “Well, if that don’t beat all, Doc. Where do you get all this wealth of useless information from? You must have been a leading trivia-meister at Harvard.”
“Knowledge is power, Dr. Wyeth.”
“Well, you could have fooled me, Dr. Tanner. You never struck me as brimming with power.”
“Shows how little you know, madam.”
THEY WERE ALL in the large room shared by Ryan and Krysty, Mildred muttering crossly to herself as she tried to remove a ketchup stain from her shirt.
Ryan clapped his hands. “All right, friends. Thought it was time we made some sort of decision.”
“Stay or go?” Krysty asked.
He nodded. “Obviously we’re moving on sometime. Don’t plan spending the rest of my life in this polluted shithole. Question of when we go.”
“Soon,” said Jak, who was standing by the window, taking advantage of what little breeze was blowing, easing the swamping humidity that had squatted down over the palace in the past couple of hours.
Doc grinned at the teenager. “Glad to hear that youth and beauty think along the same lines. This rotten air is playing Old Nick with my breathing. Tubes rattle at night like the Mary Gloster sinking in the Mindanao Trench.”
“Still wonder just what old Mashashige’s up to.” J.B. was furiously polishing his glasses. “Solved the mystery of how they plan to use the gateways?”
Ryan looked at his old friend. “Got the ace on the line there, bro. My worry, too.”
“Think they plan to take people back here as slaves?” Mildred suggested. “From Deathlands?”
Ryan shook his head at that. “No. If anything, they got too many people here and a sickly land. My personal reckoning is the opposite. Suppose we stay here another couple of days. All try to find out what we can. Jak, you might be able to ask little Issie about it.”
“Can try. Don’t want betray her.”
“You wouldn’t be. There’ve been clues. But we need to be sure. If we got the chance to pick up a few grens, they might come in useful.”
“Take out the gateway after we’ve jumped?” Krysty asked. “Dangerous?”
“Mebbe. But it’s better to have the weapons and not use them than to need them and not have them.”
“Another Traderism, lover?”
“Sure.”
There was a gentle knock on the door, and Jak opened it, smiling and bringing in Issie.
“Lord Shogun Mashashige invites his guests to witness play by visiting Kabuki troupe of actors,” she said in her whispering child’s voice.