Mind of the Martinet

By Niall Teasdale

Tatsu Yamada believes that politics and policework should not mix.
Sometimes, there isn’t any choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Niall Teasdale
• Release date: Nov 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215635667

Niall Teasdale

I'm a computer programmer who has been writing fantasy and sci-fi since I was fifteen. The Thaumatology series is, therefore, the culmination of 30 years work! Wow! Never thought of it like that.

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Mind of the Martinet

A Tatsu Yamada Novel

By Niall Teasdale

Copyright 2023 Niall Teasdale

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Part One: Tremors

Part Two: Bones

Part Three: Thrill

Part Four: Absolute Law

Epilogue

About the Author

Part One: Tremors

Chiba Refugee Zone, Japan, 9th January 2100.

The Hole in the Wall was heaving, as it generally was on a Saturday night. Things had not entirely calmed down from the New Year celebrations, which had been rather more enthusiastic than most thanks to the turn of the century. Well, technically, the start of the twenty-second century was next year, but that was not stopping people from celebrating it now. After all, they could do it again in twelve months this way.

The Hole was a cyberpunk, techno, ultramodern, semi-industrial sort of place in the Chiba Refugee Zone, but not too far into the zone that tourists out of Tokyo did not go there, especially on a Saturday, to slum it with the locals. You could always tell the difference; distressed-by-design was not the same as worn and shabby, and for the locals actually able to afford designer clothes, there was still some quality about them personally which signalled to those who knew where they called home. You did not have to live in poverty to know its effects; living beside poverty was often enough.

Tatsu Yamada, Sergeant, TYMPD, came to The Hole to unwind, mostly. She was off-duty, but she would have jumped in if she had spotted illegal drugs changing hands or any other serious infringement of the law. And she was never entirely off-duty so far as the Tokyo–Yokohama Metropolitan Police Department was concerned. They were generally nice about it; she would only be called in to deal with something happening in the club itself, should such a thing transpire. So, she got to relax and keep an eye on things at the same time. And, of course, her girlfriend worked there. Sachiko was currently dancing in a cage on the top floor, dressed in nothing but a pair of stacked pumps and some body glitter. Tatsu would be up there soon, watching from a discreet distance.

Walking through the place meant doing so through a sea of various chemical vapours and also one of linguistic turmoil. You could be listening to Japanese one second, English the next, and Russian the one after that. What she was listening to right now was Mandarin Chinese; not one of her best languages, but she knew it well enough to recognise some far from subtle insults. Her head turned and she began running facial recognition as soon as she laid eyes upon the two primaries in the colourful argument.

One of them came up immediately: Lei Chen, a member of the Císhàn Tong. It would have to be that group given that Tatsu had demolished the only other tong in Chiba. The second man was Tai Jin, and he came up as unaffiliated. That was odd, given his attitude. He did look kind of young…

Tatsu stepped between them as fists were drawn back. ‘Gentlemen,’ she said in Mandarin, ‘let’s not get started. You should both know the management here takes a dim view of brawls.’

‘He is–’ Chen began, his tone belligerent, but then he faltered, his eyes widening a little.

‘We don’t take orders from women!’ Jin snapped. His arm continued the backward swing and began to move forward.

‘No!’ Chen yelped. ‘She’s–’

Jin’s fist connected with Tatsu’s jaw. It was a good, solid blow which Tatsu did not react to at all. Jin, on the other hand, winced and pulled his hand back. ‘What?! What are you made of?’

Tatsu glanced over her shoulder at Chen. ‘New member?’ she asked.

‘He joined recently. We have yet to … fully educate him in the ideals of the Císhàn Tong.’ His eyes narrowed and he raised his voice. ‘Do not compound your error by drawing a weapon on Sergeant Yamada. We will not seek revenge for what she does to you.’ His voice dropped somewhat, and he added, ‘But it would be a valuable learning experience.’

Jin had been reaching under the jacket he was wearing, whether for a gun or a knife, Tatsu did not care. He withdrew his hand, slowly. ‘She is Lóng Biǎo Zi?’ He looked like he was about to wet himself. He might not recognise her, but he did know of her. Not, apparently, enough to avoid using that particular nickname in front of her…

Jin and Chen were not alone at the tables they had been sitting at. All of the men sitting there winced as Tatsu’s knee connected with Jin’s groin. His eyes rolled back and his mouth folded up as though he had just sucked on a lemon, and then he crumpled to the floor at Tatsu’s feet.

‘Just to show I’m not a dragon bitch,’ Tatsu said, ‘that’s all you’re getting for using that title.’ She looked back at Chen again. ‘I don’t see him lasting. He is not the brightest star in the heavens.’

Chen looked down at his colleague. ‘You may be right…’

10th January.

Almost as commonplace as the Saturday night atmosphere in The Hole: earthquakes. When the windows started to rattle on Sunday morning, not long after Tatsu and Sachiko had crawled – far later than was usual – out of bed, neither of them were very concerned.

When the building gave a little shudder, Sachiko looked up at the ceiling high above her and said, ‘Whoa.’

‘Mm,’ Tatsu said. ‘Not such a minor one.’ But the shaking was not that big and, with the base isolation in the basement, was more of a slight sway than anything alarming.

After a minute, the shaking stopped entirely, and an alert appeared in Tatsu’s sensorium:

Information! Magnitude 5.1 earthquake affecting Tokyo, Yokohama, and Chiba. No indications of damage. No indications of services failure.

‘Five point one,’ Tatsu said.

Sachiko sniffed. ‘Barely worth mentioning. I mean, it’s more than a blip, but… Hey, did you check the earthquake mitigation measures here before we–’

‘I went over the records. The building has all the mandated design features, and the inspections came back clean during construction. It wasn’t built right after the war, so it’s pretty likely that they actually installed everything they were supposed to.’ Tatsu pointed toward the corridor from the front door to the lounge, passing by the kitchen. ‘If we get something worth paying attention to, that’s the best place to shelter. It’s basically a reinforced concrete box and there’s nothing there that’ll fall on you. The bathroom is pretty safe, but you might get things falling off shelves.’

‘Good to know. I heard, back before the war, the biggest killer in earthquakes was fire.’

‘Because they used to use gas stoves for cooking. No gas in this building, or more or less anywhere else. No broken gas mains. The biggest killer now is corruption.’

‘Huh?’

‘Buildings that are supposed to be up to standard which aren’t. Even a five point one could drop your roof on your head if someone paid off an inspector and used substandard materials.’

‘Did that happen?’

‘So far, this time we’re safe. I wonder whether we’ll see a few new cracks in some buildings, however.’

Sachiko gave a shrug, wandering over to the huge window which looked out over their grey, semi-industrial city. ‘It’s Chiba. How are you going to tell?’

11th January.

January in Chiba was generally pretty sunny. Not particularly warm, for sure, but sunny. At the start of the last century, the area could expect to see a bit of snow over January and February. Climate change had made things a little warmer and reduced the amount of snowfall, and that was not always a good thing.

Tatsu was riding her bike through Funabashi in conditions where she turned off her sense of touch to avoid feeling the lousy weather. Snow would have been a nice thing. Instead, what they had was stinging sleet which was hitting cold road surfaces and freezing. Traffic Control was posting warnings and reducing speeds, which just added to the annoyance, even if it was safer. Tatsu was driving manually, but this close to the Funabashi transport hub, the traffic of conveyors and private vehicles was dense enough that she needed to take proper note of what Traffic Control was saying. And then, just to add injury to insult, the ground rippled.

An aftershock. It probably did not register on some people’s perceptions, but there was a slight lateral shift which caused Tatsu to slow her ride in anticipation of Traffic Control. And it caused Traffic Control to issue an immediate reduction in speed. Alerts indicating the speed reduction were sent out to anyone with an implant who was driving their own vehicle, though it arrived around half a second after Tatsu applied the brakes.

The sound of crumpling plastic from behind Tatsu and to her right caused her to look around. What she saw was a conveyor pod skewed at an angle Traffic Control would not have approved of due to the rather more sporty vehicle which was rammed into the pod’s rear, its hood obviously crumpled.

‘Damn,’ Tatsu muttered. She activated an Incident Exclusion Zone, flagging it as a traffic accident which would cause Traffic Control to divert everything else around the stricken vehicles. Then she stopped her bike, climbed off, and started through the stationary traffic to where the accident was.

MedStat data for the occupants of the two vehicles came back. In the pod, two people were entirely unharmed. Both were showing two greens, so it was unlikely they had even received a bruise. The collision could not have been very high velocity, so that seemed pretty reasonable. In the sports car, the occupant was entirely invisible, though the thrashing behind an airbag suggested that whoever it was was alive. MedStat was returning yellow and lime. The airbag was possibly responsible for the physical trauma suggested by the yellow indicator; Tatsu dug deeper to check. The lime mental indicator was, under the circumstances, quite possibly an indication that this person drove their own vehicle regularly. Or that they did not use Kannon.

That last option became more likely when the door burst open and a figure struggled clear of the car. Facial recognition immediately picked out Gorō Maekawa, a member of the Shiratori-rengō. Yakuza tended to avoid using Kannon because the software would report anything illegal they did to Izanami as soon as they did it. Sometimes, Kannon would work out they were going to do something illegal, and the report would go out before a crime had been committed. And it would then nag its user about staying within the law until the crime was avoided or committed. Maekawa was unlikely to be running Kannon on his implant. Which did not mean that he had not been using Traffic Control to drive his mechanical penis extension, however.

As Tatsu closed the distance, Maekawa let out a shriek of anger and began kicking the pod he had run his car into. ‘What did you stop for?! What kind of idiot stops their car in the middle of the street?! Get out! Get out so I can–’ It was kind of amusing. The man had bruising all across his face from the airbag. His nose was bleeding. He looked like a man losing a fight to a conveyor pod.

‘That’s enough, Mister Maekawa,’ Tatsu said. ‘Traffic Control stopped the pod. You saw the alert about the tremor, I’m sure. You know full well it was not the fault of the passengers. If you had not been driving yourself, this would not have happened.’

‘It stopped for no reason! How can I be expected–’

‘You can’t. Human reflexes–’

‘My reflexes are excellent!’

‘Humans take around a quarter of a second to respond to any unexpected external stimulus, Mister Maekawa. That is why Traffic Control is suggested to anyone driving in dense traffic. Calm down and–’

‘Calm down! Look at my car! Stupid cop, calm this!’

Tatsu tilted her head a little to let his fist pass by her face. Then she caught his extended arm, twisted, and slammed his face into the crumpled hood of his car. ‘While self-driving in these conditions is foolish at best, it is not illegal. There would have been no charges. Assaulting a police officer is another matter.’

‘I am Shiratori-rengō.’ His voice was a bit muffled from the position he was in, but he still sounded outraged. ‘You can’t charge me with some trumped-up–’

‘Can, will, and have. And given what I know of Yukiko Shiratori, she’s not going to step in to help you much over this, Maekawa. You need anger management classes, along with a repeat of driver’s education. Now, shut up. There’ll be uniforms along shortly to drag you in. Then we’ll tow your car. You can get it out of impound in a few months when they let you out of prison.’

~~~

‘It’s Rasputin, I’m tellin’ ya. Rasputin’s doin’ it.’

Tatsu stood across the counter from Arnold Foster, an American refugee who ran a shop selling whatever came in to be sold. Foster was a constant source of information on street gossip around Funabashi. Often, that gossip ran to the insane and conspiratorial. ‘Rasputin?’ Tatsu asked.

‘Yeah, that’s what I hear. Rasputin’s using nukes to cause the earthquakes.’

‘Well, that’s a new one.’

‘Has to be Rasputin. Who else would use earthquakes to attack Japan?’

Tatsu blinked. That was simultaneously the most logical and stupid argument she had ever heard. ‘Um, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say the Earth.’

‘Huh?’

‘Japan has been hit with earthquakes for a lot longer than Rasputin has been around. They’re random.’

‘Yeah, but these–’

‘Earthquake swarms, like we’ve been seeing recently, aren’t especially uncommon in Japan, and they never have been.’

‘Maybe, but–’

‘And how does it work anyway, Arnold?’

‘Ah ha!’ Now off the back foot, Foster could regain some ground with his brilliant explanation. ‘What he does, see, is to tunnel into the ground to where the seismic plates is sticking. And then he puts a bomb down there and sets it off. And then that frees the plates so they slip, and’ – he slapped his hands together in front of his face – ‘Bang! Earthquake!’

Tatsu’s eyes flicked over the figures she had managed to dig up, displayed on a virtual screen where Foster could not see them. ‘Seems like a waste of time, to me.’

‘Huh?’

‘Well, a five point one isn’t that big a quake. He’d get more bang for his buck if he tunnelled under Tokyo and planted the bomb in someone’s basement. I mean, like an order of magnitude more bang. Now, if he could trigger a magnitude eight or nine, then we’re talking mega-energy, but a five… Hey, maybe he was aiming to tunnel in under Tokyo and missed.’

Foster gave her a glower. ‘Now you’re just making fun of me.’ As if waiting for that moment, the windows of the threadbare shop rattled. The place was lined with basic shelves full of random assortments of goods that someone might want – and did with alarming regularity; a surprise to all. Several of the objects fell off and clattered to the floor. Foster set off to check for damage. ‘See? Mark my words, it’s Rasputin causing these quakes.’

Tatsu shook her head and headed for the door. ‘Well, if it is, I wish he’d quit.’ Except that, if the outlandish theory had any basis in fact, there was no way he would. She shook her head again. ‘Nah. It’s just not his style…’

12th January.

The quakes had largely slipped from Tatsu’s memory as she stood on a street corner watching one of the few surviving Yankees gangs milling around an abandoned apartment building in Izumichō. Actually, they were not technically a surviving gang; the people were coming up in the database as belonging to several gangs out of various parts of Miyama. Miyama was now owned by the Shiratori-rengō, and the yakuza did not have a good opinion of American street gangsters. Izumichō had fallen under the Denshitoakuma until recently. Now that that group was out of the picture, it was possibly a matter of time before the Yankees had to find somewhere else to go, but for now, this part of Chiba was safe.

For a given value of safe, obviously. The apartment building looked like it had a few new cracks in it following the quake. A couple of the gangsters were standing on the sidewalk, looking up at one larger crack and probably wondering whether it was structural. There had been no reports of medical emergencies in this area on Sunday, but it was possible that the gang would not have called in help even for the odd broken bone. Then again, the building was showing signs of shoddy construction, but it was still standing. If there was another shock, that might change, but for now…

The ground shook. Dust fell from the gap in the wall across the street and some of the gangsters yelped and backed quickly away. Others ran out from inside, some of those wearing dust in their hair and on their clothes.

‘Another one?!’ someone whined.

‘Maybe,’ another answered. ‘Wasn’t very big if it– Shit!’ He cut off as Tatsu wheeled her massive, black, insectoid bike past him at less than a metre, accelerating rapidly down the street toward the west. ‘What’s up with her? It was just a tiny quake?’

~~~

It was not a tiny quake. It was not any kind of quake, and Tatsu had recognised it as such even before the alert appeared.

Alert! Explosion detected in 4 Chome Miyama area. Locate and take control of scene. Alert!

It had felt like an explosion, one large enough to make people