Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

“So was I,” Kita answered. “You think you know someone, and then you find you didn’t know him at all.” He shrugged. “Shigata ga nai.”

“Hai.” Jiro nodded. He’d thought Morimura a friend, not an operative. Things looked clearer than they had. No wonder Chancellor Morimura had introduced him to Osami Murata. He’d wanted the radio man from Tokyo to use Jiro as a propaganda tool. And he’d got what he wanted.

If I saw Morimura now, I’d punch him in the nose, Jiro thought. He laughed at himself, even here. The younger man would probably mop the floor with him. He shrugged. Well, so what? Sometimes you have to do things like that, just to show you’re no man’s puppet. He felt as if he wore strings on his wrists and ankles.

Nagao Kita might have been reading his mind. “I am sorry to have to tell you this, Takahashi- san, ” he said. “I fear it will make you less likely to stay loyal to the end.”

He was right to fear that, too. But Jiro said only, “I’ve come this far. I can’t very well jump out of the boat now.” It’s too late. It wouldn’t do me any good. Because he had the consul at a momentary disadvantage, he felt he could ask, “How does the fighting look?”

“They push us back,” Kita answered bleakly. “We fight with great courage, shouting the Emperor’s name and wishing him ten thousand years. For all we do, though, they rule the skies, and they have more tanks and artillery.”

“This is not good,” Jiro said.

“Honto. This is not good,” the consul agreed. “I don’t know what we can do about it, though, except die gloriously, not retreating even a centimeter, dying rather than yielding the ground we have conquered.”

That did sound glorious. It also sounded like a recipe for defeat. Modern Japan had never been defeated in a foreign war. She’d beaten China and Russia. She’d sided with the Allies in World War I, and beaten Germany in China and on the seas. The idea that she could lose was unimaginable-except that Jiro had to imagine it. He asked, “What will you do, Kita- san, if, if-the worst happens?”

“I am a diplomat. The rules for me are different from the ones for soldiers,” Kita replied. “I can be exchanged.”

Jiro had an inspiration. “I am a Japanese national. Can I be exchanged, too?” If Hawaii returned to American hands, he wouldn’t want to stay here. Most people would hate him for siding with Japan. They might do worse than hate him. They might decide he was a traitor and hang him or shoot him.

Consul Kita looked surprised. “Well, I don’t know, Takahashi- san. I would have to do something like put you on my staff, I suppose.”

“Could you?” Jiro asked eagerly. Going back to Japan would mean leaving his sons behind. He knew that. But Hiroshi and Kenzo had their own lives. And they were Americans, as much as he remained Japanese. They might be glad to see him go. They’d probably be relieved if he did.

“Depend on it.” Kita scribbled a note to himself. “We will go on hoping that black day does not come. But if it should, we will see what we can arrange.”

“Domo arigato, Kita- san.” Jiro bowed in his chair. There was one thing he wouldn’t have to worry about. Of course, he still might get killed, but that didn’t bother him the same way. It wasn’t certain, and he couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other. If Japan lost, though, American vengeance was as sure as tomorrow’s sunrise. Now he’d done what he could to escape it.

WHEN MINORU GENDA PEDALED OVER TO IOLANI PALACE, something had changed. He needed a moment to realize what it was: the big, tough-looking Hawaiian soldiers who’d guarded the bottom of the stairway up to the front entrance were gone. He asked one of the Japanese guards at the top of the stairs what had happened to them.

“Sir, King Stanley sent them up to the front.” The noncom’s tone made it plain he had nothing to do with anything his superiors did. “He sent the whole Hawaiian Army to the front.”

The whole Hawaiian Army had about a battalion’s worth of men. “Did he?” Genda said. “Our officers approved it?”

“Sir, would those Hawaiians be there if they hadn’t?” the noncom asked reasonably.

“I suppose not.” Genda still had doubts, but he wasn’t about to discuss them with an underofficer. The occupying authorities had let King Stanley Laanui form an army of sorts because they’d nominally restored Hawaii’s independence, and independent countries always had armies-of sorts. At the time, nobody-doubtless including King Stanley-had imagined the Hawaiian Army might actually have to fight.

For that matter, nobody knew which side it would choose to fight on. Did the soldiers think of themselves as Hawaiians, loyal to the ancient kingdom, or as Americans on masquerade? Were there some who felt each way? If there were, the tiny army might have its own tiny civil war.

If it did that while it was holding some of the line… well, what followed wouldn’t be pretty. And yet the Japanese officers who presumably knew it best had let it go forward. Genda hoped they knew what they were doing. Too late to change it now, either way.

His ankle didn’t bother him too much when he went up the stairs to the library. He’d interviewed Stanley Laanui there, along with other possible candidates for the revived Hawaiian throne. Now the room again belonged to a distant relative of David Kalakaua, the King of Hawaii who’d had it built.

Seen from the front, the enormous Victorian desk behind which King Stanley sat seemed wide as Akagi ’s flight deck. Poor Akagi ! For a moment, pain for Genda’s lost ship stabbed at him, dagger-sharp. He bowed to the king, not least to make sure his face didn’t show what he was thinking. “Your Majesty,” he murmured.

“Hello, Commander. Nice of you to come to see me for a change.” Stanley Laanui slurred the words so Genda had trouble understanding them. Was he drunk this early in the morning? Whether he was or not, he alarmed the Japanese officer. Did he know about Genda’s visits to Queen Cynthia? If he did, what did he aim to do about them? If he kept a pistol as well as a bottle in one of those drawers… But the not very kingly King of Hawaii went on, “This Captain Iwabuchi is a lot nastier than General Yamashita ever was.”

Genda believed that. The commandant of the special naval landing forces struck him as hard and determined even by Japanese standards. “I am so sorry, your Majesty,” Genda said. “You know he has many worries.”

“Like I don’t!” the king exclaimed. “They won’t hang Iwabuchi if our side loses.”

He was bound to have that right. Genda couldn’t imagine the Japanese naval officer letting himself be captured. Iwabuchi would surely die in battle or commit seppuku before permitting such a disgrace. “Do not be hard on him,” Genda said. “Remember, he helps defend your country.”

“Oh, yeah,” King Stanley said. “He’ll defend it till everybody in Honolulu’s dead.”

Genda had no doubt Captain Iwabuchi intended to defend Honolulu just that way. “This is war, your Majesty,” he said-use was making his English more and more fluent. “This is not a game. We cannot stop and ask to begin again. It goes to the end, whatever the end may be.”

“If I’d figured the Americans were coming back, I don’t know that I would have let you stick a crown on my noggin,” Stanley Laanui said.

“Believe me, your Majesty, I do not want the Americans here any more than you do,” Genda said.

“Japan does all it can to beat them.”

“Hawaii’s doing everything it can, too,” the king said. “That’s why I sent my army up to join the fighting.”