Ahiro checked on the egg once every quarter hour.
He knew the workmen on the apiary project thought he was obsessive, but that did not concern him. Yoriku’s apiary was going to be completely different from the Alien Research Laboratory at MedTech from which he and his men had stolen the alien egg, and Ahiro was amazed at the variations and committed to seeing that it was built correctly. While it was true that the end goals were nothing alike, there were a few essential things they would—or should—always have in common. Containment was the prime factor, with safety following as an equal second. Depending on your point of view, it might even be the other way around.
At the MedTech lab, everything had been made of steel coated in acid-resistant plastic. MedTech’s bioscientists must have watched their creatures with hidden video cameras; here at Presley Hall the preferred viewing method was going to be an eighteen-foot length of double-paned quartz windows that started at the floor and went two thirds of the way to the twenty-foot ceiling. Steel I-beams reinforced the glass halfway up and at six-foot vertical intervals. Beyond the glass wall extended a huge cage of titanium bars sheathed both inside and out with that same laboratory-quality plastic, pushing back a good thirty feet into an unused portion of the empty third-sublevel warehouse. The only way in was a switch-controlled door in the middle section of the glass. Soon an alien, a creature uncontrollable by humans, would pace within that windowed space. What would it think as it did so? Thoughts of freedom, no doubt, much like the dreams that Ahiro didn’t dare let multiply in his own mind.
In the meantime, within the larger cage the unhatched egg was encased in a glass case of its own that was barely large enough to contain it. With the computer clamp still closing it off and the two Synsound bioscientists monitoring it constantly, the sealed egg was again kept safely within a temperature-controlled environment anyway, incubated. There it waited, motionless inside its tiny, quiet world, lulled into dormancy by two layers of sound-insulated glass and the intensely filtered, scentless air surrounding it. Anticipating.
Work on the apiary proceeded at a steady pace, well within the schedule that Keene had outlined in his final two-hour teleconference with Ahiro and Yoriku. Technically Ahiro was on the site as a supervisor, although he wouldn’t have known a metric bolt from a piece of soldering material if any of the workers had asked him. His presence there was vital on a more subjective level: whether the laborers who hammered and bolted and welded knew it or not, it was Ahiro’s instinct that guided everything, his opinion that mattered after looking at a completed section as to whether it would serve its purpose in safely holding a fully grown alien. A single shake of his head and the entire project would grind to a halt until the problem was corrected and they could move on.
The work was completed on December 31. Only one other person in the world knew that it was Ahiro’s birthday, and other than a telephone call, no one acknowledged it. That was fine by him, and he thought the completion of the apiary was a fine gift. Ahiro did not think of it so much as a gift from Yoriku that he would be allowed to work with this off-world creature, or with the eccentric musician called Damon Eddington; Ahiro cared nothing about either. The gift was that he, Ahiro, was to be allowed to do this for Yoriku, in service to the man who had saved not only his life but that of his infant sister two decades ago and cared for them both ever since.
Most people thought that the fabled Yakuza had ceased to exist in Japan in the last years of the twenty-first century, when the sixteen largest finance and manufacturing corporations in Japan had merged into a single megacorporation. The resulting entity had narrowly missed going to war with the Japanese government over the right to self-control, avoiding a military confrontation only by neatly strangling almost all of the illegal import/export and drug operations in their country as a show of supposed honesty and good faith. Caught in the conflict because of their father—a high-powered man who trafficked in cocaine, opium, and the rarer forms of synthetic Ice—Ahiro was ten years old when he held his eleven-month-old sister and saw their father nearly cut in half by a spray of bullets. When the man wielding the machine pistol turned toward Ahiro, whose face was already split across his right eye by exploding glass, the boy hugged his baby sister tightly and stared the masked assassin full in the eye, refusing to look away from the man about to murder them.
Yoriku had saved them. There was nothing flashy about Ahiro’s memory of the man or his actions; a single soft word “No”—and the soldier had lowered the barrel of his weapon and stepped aside. Twenty years ago Yoriku had been thin and fit, and had boasted a thick head of gray hair where now there was only thinning white. To this day, Ahiro could still hear the man’s voice and the words that had changed the course of his life and that of his sister’s forever.
“You are both too young to die.”
Ahiro had never seen her again, but he spoke to her often and knew she was treated well. Sometimes he wondered what she looked like; she never told him that or any of the finer details of her life, nor did she ask about his. It would be inappropriate for Ahiro to ask; like him, she owed Yoriku everything. In life their father had been a criminal and a drug dealer, but he had also been a traditionalist— and as was customary with ancient Japanese heritage, honor was everything. Yoriku had asked for and received a sworn oath of lifelong loyalty in return for their lives; at ten years old, Ahiro had fully understood the magnitude of what he gave. Neither he nor his sister had ever seen their mother again, and both assumed she’d been killed. That was another thing that Ahiro did not bring up; to do so would be to tarnish his promise, disgrace his word. Such a thing was unthinkable.
Brought to America soon after his father’s death, Yoriku had seen to it that Ahiro was privately tutored in those areas that the older man believed would be the most useful to him and to the boy in the future. English, reading and writing of course, basic mathematics. Beyond that the schooling turned to more down-to-earth subjects; Yoriku was not raising a corporate executive—those were available by the hundreds. Instead he wanted someone who could do nearly anything that might be required in a day-to-day world filled with jealous and dangerous competitors—work with his hands, defend him, obtain things for him that might be difficult for someone else. Ahiro learned to work with wood and metal and plaster, and how to supervise those who could construct the things he did not know how to construct himself, such as electrical and mechanical systems. Above all, he learned to be that ultimate of Japanese servants for Yoriku: a ninja.
In the years since then, Ahiro had never questioned the things he did for his savior. Again, it simply wasn’t done. Nothing mattered but Yoriku’s wishes—legal or illegal, fair or unfair—those were concepts that applied only insofar as Yoriku chose to apply them. The training Ahiro had received in the years after his father’s demise had irrevocably reinforced this thinking. He had become Yoriku’s personal soldier, and nothing could distract him from his duties. As part of a most unorthodox teaching method, his martial arts instructor had insured that the one thing that held so much danger for any developing warrior—women would remain forever out of Ahiro’s reach; at age twelve, just after his voice had deepened, Ahiro’s manhood was irreversibly eliminated.
Now he was an adult, and all that remained for Ahiro was Yoriku. He had no friends and, for the most part, no family. He lived in an expansive but sparsely furnished apartment above a dojo in the East Village that was owned by but untraceable to Yoriku. He spent the majority of his time there, training constantly and always ready to walk out the door; no matter what he was doing, Ahiro could be dressed, if necessary, and headed down the back stairs of the dojo in under three minutes.
Next to Yoriku, the dojo was the only thing to which Ahiro devoted any attention, and over the years he had made sure that his dojo gained a reputation for being among the best in the city but also the most selective and difficult. The students who applied were always illegal immigrants, honorable young men who had trained in Japan from down-on-their-luck but good families, and who were looking for a new start in America. Their minds were pliable and they desperately sought hard training and discipline, preferring a way of life closer to what they had left in Japan than the difficult-to-understand American lifestyle. Ahiro chose only those who did not speak English, and the number of applicants who spoke only Japanese was more than most people thought. While English was routinely taught in urban Japanese schools, there were still the poorer rural areas where schooling was a second priority to farming and making a living; it was from these areas that most of Ahiro’s students came.
Now Ahiro was the commander of his own small, personally trained strike force, recently down by three but with replacements already undergoing, special education. As he himself had been raised to serve Yoriku, these men would be raised to serve him… and by serving him, they would exist, in turn, for Yoriku.
No order or spoken thought that came from Yoriku’s mouth was a whim to Ahiro—it was a necessity. Charged now with guarding this apiary, the unhatched egg, and with seeing that the strange musician had anything and everything he needed to see this project to fruition and thus humiliate MedTech, Ahiro would not fail. It was not Damon Eddington’s desires or Symphony of Hate that mattered, but the desires of Ahiro’s savior. Every breath Ahiro drew, every sensation on his tongue, every color his eyes processed and sent to his brain, he owed to Yoriku. He would do anything and everything needed to see this assignment finished simply because it was what Yoriku wanted.
And to Ahiro, Yoriku was everything.