Coup d'Etat: The War That Came Early, Book Four by Harry Turtledove

Author:Harry Turtledove [Turtledove, Harry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780345524676
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-07-31T00:00:00+00:00

HAD CORPORAL HIDEKI FUJITA stood any straighter and stiffer, anyone seeing him would have thought he’d been carved from wood. But would a sculptor have included a saluting mechanism of such mechanical perfection?

“Requesting permission to speak to you, Captain-san!” Fujita said, his voice an emotionless rasp.

Captain Masanori Ikejiri returned the salute. “Hai? Nan desu-ka?” He could have just told Fujita to dry up and blow away. That he asked him what it was instead showed he didn’t despise the very ground on which the demoted noncom walked. That was something, anyway. It was more than most of Fujita’s superiors seemed willing to admit.

“Please excuse me, sir, but I am not useful here now that my bungling has made me lose face.” If Fujita was going to grovel, he’d grovel as hard as he could. No sense to half measures, not here, not now. And he was sure groveling was his only chance to escape this humiliating situation—unless he killed himself, of course. That was always a possibility, but he didn’t want to die, not yet. “Let me serve the Empire somewhere else in some different way. Please, sir, let me go forth with my rifle and kill the Empire’s enemies.”

Ikejiri eyed him. If the captain wasn’t from a noble family, Fujita would have been amazed. He had the air of effortless ease and style plenty of people tried to imitate, but rarely with much luck. You needed to be born to it, to take it for granted, to bring it off as you should.

He also had any Japanese officer’s uncompromising attitude. “If you fail, you must take the consequences,” he said coolly.

“Yes, sir. But here at this place I don’t have much chance to make up for failing,” Fujita replied. “Put me in front of the enemy, Captain-san, and I’ll show the Emperor what I can do.”

“There are more kinds of courage, Corporal, than the one it takes to charge a machine-gun position,” Ikejiri said.

“Captain-san?” All Fujita really heard was his new, reduced rank. Corporal was a grade a man should hold on the way up to something better. Holding it again, on the way down from something better, burned like lye.

“You have to be brave, don’t you, to do your job in spite of any trouble you had?” the captain said. “Yes, other people will know what happened. But your duties here at Pingfan are still important.”

“Sir, I want to kill something!” Fujita blurted desperately. “Even the maruta laugh at me.”

“Hard to be laughed at by a log,” Ikejiri said in musing tones. “Can’t you make them afraid to open their mouths while you’re close enough to hear them?”

“Oh, yes, sir. And I do.” Fujita’s hands folded into reminiscent fists. “But the sons of assfucked whores go on laughing at me behind my back. I know they do.” You couldn’t pound a man into the ground for an amused glint in his eye, even if the man was also a log. American maruta were too scarce and too valuable to let guards smash them around for the fun of it.

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