James Axler – Keepers of the Sun

The shogun had offered his stiff, formal congratulations to Jak, as had Hideyoshi. Yashimoto and the rest of the senior samurai had stalked off like wounded peacocks, without saying a word to anyone.

“Need a hot bath?” J.B. asked.

Jak shook his head. “Didn’t even break a sweat. Knew it’d be easy.”

J.B. AND JAK HAD MANAGED to get into the armory in the corner tower. Guessing that many of the sec men would be wanting to watch the sumo champions, they had picked their moment, talking their way inside.

Each of them had stolen three grens. Four were implodes, with the distinctive scarlet-and-blue bands around their tops, and two were burners.

“When do we go use them?” J.B. asked. “How about this evening?”

Ryan nodded. “Why not? Anyone have any doubts about taking this course of action?”

Jak cleared his throat. “How about Issie?”

“How about her? You thinking about bringing the girl with you, Jak?”

“Yeah, Ryan. And not girl. Issie’s a woman.”

“Well said,” Mildred stated. “Really about time you stopped coming the old male chauvinist, Ryan.”

He grinned a little sheepishly. “Sorry. But she seems to be a child.”

“She wants to come with us. Knows plan to leave soon. Sees hope getting away from shit air and water and stuff. Anyone object her coming?”

There was a general shaking of heads.

Ryan looked at the teenager. “You think she’ll be able to keep up with us in Deathlands, Jak?”

“Why not?”

“You haven’t talked about the idea of destroying the gateway? It’ll mean she can never get back.”

“I know. She doesn’t want return.”

“Sure?”

Jak nodded. “Sure.”

YASHIMOTO AND HIDEYOSHI both failed to put in an appearance at the lunch table, doubtless licking the wounds to their pride in their own quarters.

But the shogun was as calm and imperturbable as ever.

“The score lies with Deathlands against the warrior gods of Nippon,” he said quietly while sipping at his usual bowl of clear soup with a few shredded vegetables floating in it.

“It is the side that wins the war, not just individual battles, who is the victor over all,” Doc said, seeking to pour oil upon the troubled waters.

“This is truly said. The scars caused by the Americans during the ending of the Second World War are so deep they can never be quite overlooked.”

J.B. ran his tongue along the blade of his knife to remove the last smears of egg. “You mean when we dropped the big one?”

The baron of the ville nodded, his dark eyes fixed on the Armorer’s face. “The big one? That is your name for the atomic bomb. I had heard it called ‘Fat Boy.'”

“Did job,” Jak said. “You started it with sneaky attack on ships.”

“Pearl Harbor,” Mildred agreed. “Frankly I feel like most Americans. That what happened was terrible, but you deserved it all.”

“It was the generals who fought the war. Wanted honor of victory for the emperor. But it was the ordinary soldiers and the people in the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki who paid the final toll.”

Krysty drained her coffee mug. “I don’t know much about these things,” she said. “Uncle Tyas McCann back in the ville of Harmony told me some of it.”

Mashashige nodded. “History is written by the winners, so they say. The beautiful city of Nagasaki had something over two hundred thousand citizens. The bomb is dropped.” He clapped his hands once to symbolize the action. “In a single beat of the heart, over seventy thousand are dead. Snuffed out like candles in the wind. The same number are so badly injured that most of them will die. Over half the city is destroyed in a single flash of fire, the wretched peoples without homes.”

“The deaths were immeasurably higher in sky-dark,” Ryan said quietly. “Tens of millions. Every city in the land destroyed. The world ended, turned upside down.”

The shogun shifted his gaze to Ryan. “True, Cawdor-san. But that was rightly the ending of the world. What happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was without What is the word for something not happening before?”

“Precedent,” Doc offered. “You mean that those bombings were without precedent?”