[JE] [JEF #3] Photographic Memories 3/8
Title: JE Fleet III: Photographic Memories ch. 3/8
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 3
For a moment, nobody moved. The plaza was a painting, a photograph, a holostill...a single image, frozen in time. Jin felt as though his heart had stopped with that shot.
Then Kame was at his side, breathing hard and far too fast. "We need to move. Let's go."
"But Ueda..." Jin protested weakly.
"Ueda is going to be fine. I was a lot closer than you were and the shot hit his arm, that's all. The others are with him now, look."
Sure enough, Koki and Nakamaru had caught up, and were even now with Ueda and Taguchi, waiting for a medic. It was difficult to make out what was going on through the crowd of gawkers; still, Ueda was sitting up, holding his arm, and while he looked pale and decidedly unhappy, he didn't appear to be in any danger of bleeding to death.
"Either they'll pretend to be strangers or they won't - whatever they do, we'll have to wait to find out about it." Kame took Jin's elbow and steered him down an alley, keeping his voice low. "It doesn't look like the shooter stuck around for an encore, but I'm positive the shot came from over here."
"And you want to go looking for the person responsible? Are you crazy?"
The gleam in Kame's eyes suggested that he just might be. "I want to know if this was some random attack or if there's something else behind it."
Jin edged cautiously along the wall, almost tripping over the remains of a broken vending machine. "Who'd want to attack Ueda? Other than guys he's beaten in fights, of course, and then there's a certain ambassador who hates his guts..."
Without warning, Kame ground to a halt and put out a hand to stop Jin in his tracks. "More to the point," he murmured, "who else in this city has a gun? Tourists can't bring them in; the only residents allowed them are the security staff, and they all have blasters - no bullets involved."
Jin shrugged. "Does it matter? Either some local didn't bother to declare their weapons cache and has been hanging onto it all this time or somebody else did the same as us and sneaked it in."
"Or they had help." Kame's voice was grim. "The shot had to have come from somewhere around here."
"This is a dead end."
Jin looked around the cluttered and poorly-lit alley, but it was impossible to tell if any of the refuse had been disturbed recently. There were broken machine parts, old boxes, scraps of rusted metal - the not-so-shiny side of the city, lying behind the glittering front. It ended in a solid brick wall, with a long building on either side. One had a tiny window set high in the wall, but there were no other access routes.
Kame looked up at the wall at the back. "You think the shooter could've climbed over that?"
"He must've been very nimble, in that case. He couldn't have made the shot from back here, and it's not like there's much solid enough to climb on."
"True. Give me a boost?"
"You're kidding me."
"I'm serious, Jin. I want to take a look."
If it would make Kame happy and get them out of this damned dark alley and back out into the sunshine, Jin would do it. He crouched down and linked his hands to give his partner a step up, and Kame sprang lightly to the top of the wall.
"There's something on the other side," Kame called, and before Jin could stop him, he'd turned and jumped down to the ground below.
"Kame!"
"Stop imagining me lying on the ground with two broken legs, Jin."
Kame's voice was quiet but perfectly clear, and Jin thanked his lucky stars that no one was around to see the guilty expression on his face. Two broken legs had been the best case scenario, in his imagination.
"Are you all right? What's on the other side?"
There was some slight scrabbling from over the wall, then Kame appeared at the top, holding a rope in his hand. "This. You can't see it from your side, but it's attached to a ring to my right." Jin strained, and could scarcely distinguish the small, metal circle on the building wall. "It's only more gloomy passage on this side - you can just throw the rope down whichever side of the wall you want to climb up, then draw it over after yourself."
Kame demonstrated by tossing the rope to Jin, then jumping down himself. "But that wasn't what caught my attention. I also found *this*."
He held out a torn scrap of paper - coloured on one side; white, with black writing, on the other. Jin couldn't see clearly enough, not in such bad light, but he figured Kame wasn't any better off.
"There's obviously no one here," Jin pointed out. "Except us, and we didn't shoot anyone. Can we go back to civilisation now so I can actually see that paper?"
Kame grinned and tucked it away in his pocket. "Yeah, I can't see it either. There's some broken iron spikes on the other side - you have to be really careful how you go down - and it was caught on one. Maybe it's nothing, I don't know, but at least we've just proved it's possible to get in and out of this alley."
That turned out to be a blessing, as City Security had cordoned off the entire plaza and the only people left in the area were wearing uniforms and looking unfriendly. Of Ueda, Taguchi and the rest, there was no sign. Kame and Jin noticed before they reached the mouth of the alley, and were able to slip back down and use the rope before being seen.
As Kame had reported, this led them to the back of another alley, this one slightly cleaner as it was bracketed by a coffeeshop and a bakery. Jin insisted that he needed something sweet; Kame wasn't about to argue. They made use of the bathroom facilities at the coffeeshop - Kame, in particular, was quite a sight - then popped into the bakery and emerged with a chocolate muffin each.
"This isn't getting us any closer to our restaurant."
"No," Jin admitted through a mouthful of muffin, "but at the rate we're going I'd have starved to death long before we got there. I knew I shouldn't have let you talk me out of eating at the spaceport."
Kame neatly dodged a flying chocolate chip. "We'd have been late for the train."
He pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket; it didn't make much more sense in full daylight. On one side there were four printed numbers - clearly part of a larger whole, as enough remained to the left to indicate that there was at least one other figure present. The other side was a fragment of a photograph, though not enough to identify the subject. A black sweater and a few strands of red hair. Not much to go on.
Jin snatched up the paper and stared. Red hair...and those numbers...
"That can't be...Ueda, can it?" Kame asked hesitantly. "The shooter had a picture?"
The numbers clicked into place for Jin. Anger began to bubble under the surface, mingling with fear - but not for himself. He crumpled the paper, ignoring Kame's protests. "That's not Ueda.
"It's you."
Kame didn't want to believe him. "Jin, there are thousands of people who could fit that picture."
"Yeah, but only one who was in the line of fire *and* has that ID number. Ueda's ends in a five, not a one."
They weren't carrying their real identity documents with them, of course, but every soldier in the United Solar Navy, even those in the JE Fleet, had an ID number assigned to them upon joining. They also had their photos taken.
Kame, who'd been the last of the KAT-TUN crew to sign up, hadn't paid much attention to the details. Being under shipboard arrest, especially when the ship in question was the least military in the entire fleet, had allowed him to ignore the technicalities. Consequently, his mind hadn't made the same leap that Jin's had.
"Those numbers do look sort of familiar," he allowed. "I can't check right now, but-"
"You don't have to - I know it by heart." Jin was certain enough for the both of them. "That's your number and this is a copy of the photograph in your file. Kame, whoever shot Ueda was after you, and what's more, they have access to military records. I really don't like this."
Kame shrugged and strangled the tendril of fear that was beginning to creep round his digestive system. "So much for being undercover. I knew I should've said no to all this playing detective stuff - do I look like that Kindaichi guy?"
"Maybe a little..."
Just as Kame swallowed the last bite of muffin, his cellphone beeped at him. He took one look at the message, furrowed his brows so tightly that his facial muscles screamed, and handed it to Jin.
"Here, it's from Koki. I think he meant to send it to you."
"What makes you say that?"
Kame grimaced. "It's written in rap."
Jin, who'd acquired a fair knowledge of rap from eavesdropping on Koki in the shower, translated the message with relative ease. "He says Ueda's okay, the bullet just grazed him and he's being patched up now. If we send our location, they'll catch up with us.
"Oh, and he says something really colourful about one of the medics, but I can't make it out."
Kame peered at the tiny screen. "Those are system characters, Jin."
"Right. I knew that." Jin returned the phone to its (temporary) owner. "If we move now, they'll never find us. Should we send a reply and wait?"
While Jin amused himself by toying with the windchimes hanging from the bakery's front door, Kame mulled it over. By the time Jin had managed to tangle two of his bangles in the twisted mess, he had an answer.
"They know our destination," he murmured as he helped his partner free himself. "They can catch up. Even if someone knows who we are, it's not going to hurt us to just go and *look* at the restaurant, is it? There'll be other customers - it's not like no one will notice if anything happens. What did you *do* to this thing?"
Jin looked balefully at Kame from beneath his lashes. "I didn't do anything! It got tangled by itself."
"Let's just get going before the owner kills us for destroying his windchimes."
-----
As it turned out, the much sought-after restaurant was a mere five minutes away, though in completely the opposite direction. Kame contemplated deleting the guidebook from his datapad and reclaiming the disk space, but decided against it on the grounds that it contained reviews of the city's restaurants and he figured those would come in handy later. The last time he and Jin had eaten out had been nearly two and a half years ago, and they had a lot to make up for.
Jin squealed with delight when he saw the red, white and green flags, momentarily forgetting to be apprehensive. "You didn't tell me this place was Italian!"
Kame pretended he'd known all along. "I wanted to surprise you," he said smoothly.
In truth, he hadn't noticed, not having read the review. It wasn't as if the name gave it away, after all - there was nothing Italian about 'The GOLD Butterfly'.
Although it was between mealtimes, the restaurant was open and packed with customers - the side-effect of only being able to serve tourists for one week a year - and business looked to be brisk. Brightly-dressed staff darted between tables with practised ease, balancing plates stacked in impossible combinations. Soothing instrumentals played in the background - classic jazz from Earth, a few numbers from Saturn's brief swing revival, and the odd Venusian lullaby.
Jin didn't need to ask whether they should sit inside or outside. If there was snooping to be done, inside it was.
"Table for two, please."
They were initially shown to a table by the window, but Kame wanted easier access to the 'staff only' areas, over by the kitchen, and got it by claiming that his partner got panicky by windows after a traumatic childhood incident involving a soccer ball, a rainbow and an awful lot of broken glass.
Five minutes later, a mortified Jin was taking his seat, facing away from the window, at a small table in the back of the room. Fortunately, the lighting was tinted red enough to cover his embarrassment. He waited until they'd ordered before making an issue of it.
"Why'd you have to say the story the story was about *me*? Did you see the look on that girl's face? She probably thinks I'm going to start screaming any minute now."
Kame grinned. "Nope, I'm pretty sure the only thing she's thinking about is how cute you are when you blush. Good work on the distraction, Jin."
Jin heaved a sigh and gave up. "Thanks..."
Once both men had been served and Jin had made an excellent start on appeasing his hunger - the muffin had been very small - the conversation naturally turned to their next move.
"We can't just ask for Kotani, or whatever her name is," Kame reasoned, pitching his voice to carry to Jin's ears alone. "She'll take off again if she knows someone's here for her."
"She might be long gone by now." Jin stared gloomily into his water glass. "Hiding out somewhere else, where we'll never find her."
Kame twirled a strand of spaghetti around his fork and watched it slip back into the sauce. If he wasn't careful, he'd let Jin's pessimism affect him too. His partner was ordinarily cheerful, but he'd been uneasy about their mission since the very beginning and the possibility that someone was targeting Kame had done nothing to lift his spirits.
"We can't ask but we can check the place out for ourselves," he ventured at last. "I showed you the pictures, we both know what she looks like, and maybe we'll find something here. She can't leave before Sunday any more than we can, and she'd have to be an idiot to try the codes while she's here. Scanning the photograph wouldn't do her any good - the transmission would be blocked.
"And I don't think this woman's an idiot, Jin."
Jin's penne arabiatta suddenly didn't seem quite so appetizing. "Neither do I...though I wonder if someone thinks *we* are."
"What?"
He shook his head. "Forget it. You stay here; I'll go take a look around."
"You're forgetting something."
It was Jin's turn to be puzzled. "What? Do I have sauce on my chin?"
"Actually, you do, but that's not what I meant." Kame picked up Jin's serviette and dabbed gently around his partner's mouth, prompting a pair of elderly female diners at the next table to start fanning themselves with the menu. "Right now you're blocking me from view. If someone really is targeting me, the moment you get up they'll have a clear shot."
"Why bother, when they could just poison your food?" Jin said carelessly, then gasped and tugged Kame's plate away from him. "You could already have been poisoned!"
"Jin, I've already eaten half of this and I'm pretty sure it's not going to kill me." Kame retrieved his meal. "But if I suddenly keel over and and die, feel free to tell me you told me so."
"Fine," Jin sulked. "You go. I'll stay here and...chat up the waitresses or something."
He was expecting Kame to make a jealous objection, but to his surprise, his partner actually seemed to like the idea. "Good plan. Get them talking, see if anyone new's shown up lately, that sort of thing. There's bound to be a gossipy one."
Girls were something of an unknown quantity, these days. There were none in the JE Fleet - plenty of make-up and cross-dressing, of course, but no actual girls. Consequently, Jin was over two years out of practice at talking to them, and Kame's most recent experience had been playing war games with the Fahngarlians. Jin didn't want to contemplate what sort of gossip *that* involved.
Kame downed the remainder of his water, rose to his feet and looked around for the bathroom. He knew perfectly well it was behind him and to his left, but he had to at least appear to give legitimacy to his wandering off from the table mid-meal. Giving Jin an apologetic smile, he headed down the back. Nobody paid him any heed.
If they had, they'd have noticed him bypassing the men's room altogether in favour of a small staircase, visible only through the tiny window of an emergency door.
Left to his own devices, Jin slowly chewed another couple of mouthfuls of pasta, not really tasting it despite the spicy sauce, and tried to look innocent. Innocence was a relative term, and in the legal sense, Jin hadn't been innocent since he and Yamapi had first started working for old man Kitagawa.
But innocence, as an abstract concept, was something Jin had never lost. It had been tempered by experience, maybe - fired in a forge of cynicism, shaped by his trials - but never lost. For all that he'd spent nearly half his life working on the opposite side of the law, had his heart broken into tiny pieces by Kame, and dreamed of a cracked, diseased computer bulging with human flesh, he'd managed to cling onto his innate purity.
That purity, that childlike wonder, was what drew people to him. Mostly. Everyone else just came to admire the pretty.
Had the restaurant been less crowded, that alone might have brought Jin some conversation without the necessity of movement. As it was, talking to waitresses (or even waiters) was out of the question; every server was bustling, no time to stop. If anyone even looked his way, it was only to check that he was still eating and therefore probably not yet interested in being presented with his bill.
Since his back was to the majority of the restaurant, Jin watched the servers using the mirrored band on his watch strap. There were plenty of dark-haired women, but none who even remotely resembled his quarry.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then another five. Kame's food grew cold, and Jin polished off his own with considerably less enthusiasm than usual. To outward appearances his frequent glances at his watch were merely a sign of his impatience as he waited for his dining companion to return from the bathroom.
What could Kame be doing up there? Had he been caught poking around in forbidden areas, and escorted out the back door by a pair of heavy hands? Had he accidentally locked himself in a hidden room and was even now waiting for Jin to rescue him? (Jin dismissed that thought on the grounds that if Kame was simply stuck, he'd surely have sent a text message.)
"Your friend's been gone a long time," one of the elderly ladies from the next table commented, leaning across the gap to speak to Jin. "You don't think he's stuck you with the bill, do you?"
"And he looked like such a nice young man, too," the other woman clucked sympathetically. "Never mind, dear. I'm sure you'll meet someone better soon."
It figured that the only people in the whole damn restaurant who even noticed Kame was gone were two old dears; Jin thought perhaps he and Kame had gone overboard with the paranoia.
He leaned across to meet the women halfway. "He's got a delicate stomach," he murmured, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the bathroom and relishing the opportunity to get his own back on Kame, even if it was only a little. "He knows he shouldn't eat such rich foods but he insists on coming here for me, isn't that sweet?"
"Charming," one of the women agreed.
"Delightful," the other chimed in.
Jin clapped one hand to his mouth and gave them a 'just between you and me' look. "To be honest, I wish he wouldn't bother. He knows he'll be in the bathroom all night now so it's not like we can enjoy the meal together anyway..."
He heaved an enormous sigh, eliciting further sympathy - though he had to turn down an invitation to join the women at their table, claiming that Kame was also insanely jealous (which was not, Jin felt, much of an exaggeration) and would be furious if he emerged from the men's room to find Jin dining with such beautiful young ladies.
It was obvious flattery, but it worked. The women retreated to their own table, blushing and giggling, and Jin congratulated himself on his ingenuity.
He was just trying to decide whether or not to go ahead and order dessert when a stray glance at his watch strap chased all thoughts of food from his head. They hadn't discussed, he and Kame, what to do if Jin found something interesting while Kame was snooping around. That, Jin thought grimly, was something they were going to have to recify as soon as humanly possible.
Because Ashiya Mizuki, or Kotani Nobuko, or whatever her name was, was about to walk out the restaurant door.
Jin made a rough mental calculation of the bill, threw down what he hoped would be enough, and began to follow her.
They weren't cut out for this - none of them were, he knew. They were good on ships, on space stations, around ports. Confined spaces, limited worlds designed and measured, made of metal and full of recycled air. In the old days, they could make an crystal run to Alpha Centauri faster than any other ship out there, easily avoiding the authorities. They'd been able to stop and strip cruisers from Ganymede in less time than it took their pilots to recover from being stunned. They'd even, during one particularly impressive month, broken through a planetary blockade to deliver a shipment of weapons.
That was what they were good at. Jin liked the freedom of life beyond the skies, had done since the first time he'd gone up in a shuttle, and as much as he liked spending his down-time on planets, he knew he couldn't work on one.
But that was exactly what he and Kame - all of them, really - were being asked to do now. To apply their mixed bag of skills to what was definitely not a case for regular JE Fleet personnel, much less a bunch of ex-space pirates. Yamapi, of all people, should have known how unsuited they were for the mission. Earth President Tsubasa and Admiral Takki knew it too.
So why the hell were they there?
It didn't make sense.
Jin didn't have the time to worry about it, not right then. Kotani was walking fast, with the single-minded stride of a woman who knows exactly where she's going. He found an elastic buried in one jacket pocket and pulled his hair back into a short ponytail, then donned his sunglasses. It was the closest he could get to a cunning disguise on short notice.
It wasn't the first time he'd had to tail someone. That had been a man in Lunar City Major - or 'Lunacy' for short. Some slick, smart-talking creep who'd made the mistake of trying to blackmail old man Kitagawa himself. Jin had been sixteen - he hadn't been contracted for the hit. He'd just been told to follow the guy, find out if he was working for himself or if higher-ups were involved, and get out of the way.
Things had gone horribly wrong. Jin had found himself cornered and outnumbered in a blind alley, tables turned, and if Ikuta Toma hadn't shown up - he'd been on another job, had run across the ambush accidentally - things could have gotten very nasty. After that, Jin had taken up carrying a knife at all times, a habit he held onto more than a decade later.
At least this time, he was better armed. That gave him more confidence as he weaved through the pedestrians, hanging back far enough that if Kotani stopped, he could keep walking a little and make it look natural, but not so far that he couldn't keep her in sight.
It must've been a good twenty minutes he walked. He didn't dare take his eyes off Kotani long enough to type a text message on his phone, and if he called, he might draw unwelcome attention to Kame. He didn't want to disturb Ueda, figured Taguchi was probably still with him, and Koki and Nakamaru's phones were both busy - most likely talking to each other, Jin speculated.
Their route took them further and further away from the restaurant, down unfamiliar streets, where the crowds began to dwindle and there were fewer stalls and stores to use as cover. Kotani's speed never varied, even as her steps strayed into the shadows.
Jin didn't think she'd noticed him. She hadn't glanced back over her denim-jacketed shoulder, or stolen gazes in shop windows.
But that didn't make him feel any more at ease.
At long last, Kotani drew to a halt. Jin checked out his surroundings. They'd taken a circuitous route round the back of the street, spent the last three blocks looking at fire exits and trash cans. Not much of a tourist attraction. The sun was sinking rapidly behind the buildings, and the whole area was taking on a gloomy grey cast.
Kotani had paused at a wire gate; she turned and glanced nervously behind her. Jin scarcely managed to duck round the corner in time to avoid being seen. Kotani opened the gate and slipped through into the courtyard beyond, letting the metal fall back into place with a muffled bang.
Since the fence was wire too, Jin was able to watch his quarry ring the rear doorbell of what he thought might be a club, based on the cracked heart hanging over the door and the mountain of cigarette ends, old lipsticks and broken high heels that littered the courtyard. Eros City slums?
The door opened. Kotani exchanged a few fast words with whoever was responsible and darted inside.
Jin waited a couple of minutes, but Kotani didn't seem to be coming back. He decided to risk getting close enough to peer through the lighted windows on the ground floor. Trespassing was hardly a novelty for him, given his original choice of career.
Carefully, he lifted the latch on the gate and tiptoed through, keeping a wary eye both fore and aft. Once on the other side, he moved quickly to the wall and stuck to it like Yamapi to food, losing himself in the shadow of the oncoming evening.
There were filmy curtains hanging at the windows that permitted light but little else to escape; Jin strained to catch a glimpse of the building's interior without alerting the inhabitants to his presence. The window closest to him was open, and the few inches of space allowed the breeze to ruffle the curtains enough that this wasn't completely impossible.
They also allowed him to eavesdrop.
Not much - the voices were low, and coming from the other side of the room - but enough for him to realise that hanging around much longer would be a really bad idea.
"...shot...wrong...you...Kamenashi is..." That voice belonged to a woman. Kotani? She sounded younger than Jin had expected - younger, and extremely annoyed.
"Couldn't...it...hair," a man apologised. "Next...won't..."
"Better not," a second man said. He spoke louder than the others, and clear enough that Jin could detect a familiar quality to his voice, though he couldn't place it. "We only have till Sunday. Once Kamenashi leaves here he could go anywhere in the universe."
"Then...won't...Titan," the first man complained. "What makes...think...stay?"
"He won't leave, not until he retrieves that," the second man said with evident satisfaction. "Is it still safe?"
Through the rippling curtains, Jin watched Kotani retrieve a rectangular packet from the folds of her clothing. It was about the right size, he thought, to contain the stolen photograph. She held it out for the two men to inspect, and one of the pair leaned across far enough to bring him into Jin's line of sight.
It was turning out to be quite a day for surprises. Despite the distortion caused by the fabric and murky window glass, Jin would be willing to swear he recognised the man. He knew the voice had been familiar, and the thick, bright crop of hair was no stranger to him either.
But the last time Jin had seen Ikuta Toma, over a decade ago, they'd both been on Earth and still working for old man Kitagawa. What was he doing in Eros City?
Jin didn't have more than a few seconds to speculate on the subject before the stunner blast wiped all conscious thought from his mind.
Series: JE Fleet
Fandom: KAT-TUN
Pairing: Akame (though others are mentioned)
Rating: PG-13? Maybe occasionally bordering on R?
Total word count: Approx. 37,550
Genre: AU, sci-fi, crack
Disclaimer: Not mine, dammit.
Summary: Mere hours away from Earth, the crew of the JE Fleet ship KAT-TUN have their leave cut short as Commodore Yamashita sends Captains Akanishi and Kamenashi on a top secret mission to Venus. But when Kame's past as the tactical advisor for the Fahngarlians catches up with him, the planet of love becomes the planet of war...
Chapter 3
For a moment, nobody moved. The plaza was a painting, a photograph, a holostill...a single image, frozen in time. Jin felt as though his heart had stopped with that shot.
Then Kame was at his side, breathing hard and far too fast. "We need to move. Let's go."
"But Ueda..." Jin protested weakly.
"Ueda is going to be fine. I was a lot closer than you were and the shot hit his arm, that's all. The others are with him now, look."
Sure enough, Koki and Nakamaru had caught up, and were even now with Ueda and Taguchi, waiting for a medic. It was difficult to make out what was going on through the crowd of gawkers; still, Ueda was sitting up, holding his arm, and while he looked pale and decidedly unhappy, he didn't appear to be in any danger of bleeding to death.
"Either they'll pretend to be strangers or they won't - whatever they do, we'll have to wait to find out about it." Kame took Jin's elbow and steered him down an alley, keeping his voice low. "It doesn't look like the shooter stuck around for an encore, but I'm positive the shot came from over here."
"And you want to go looking for the person responsible? Are you crazy?"
The gleam in Kame's eyes suggested that he just might be. "I want to know if this was some random attack or if there's something else behind it."
Jin edged cautiously along the wall, almost tripping over the remains of a broken vending machine. "Who'd want to attack Ueda? Other than guys he's beaten in fights, of course, and then there's a certain ambassador who hates his guts..."
Without warning, Kame ground to a halt and put out a hand to stop Jin in his tracks. "More to the point," he murmured, "who else in this city has a gun? Tourists can't bring them in; the only residents allowed them are the security staff, and they all have blasters - no bullets involved."
Jin shrugged. "Does it matter? Either some local didn't bother to declare their weapons cache and has been hanging onto it all this time or somebody else did the same as us and sneaked it in."
"Or they had help." Kame's voice was grim. "The shot had to have come from somewhere around here."
"This is a dead end."
Jin looked around the cluttered and poorly-lit alley, but it was impossible to tell if any of the refuse had been disturbed recently. There were broken machine parts, old boxes, scraps of rusted metal - the not-so-shiny side of the city, lying behind the glittering front. It ended in a solid brick wall, with a long building on either side. One had a tiny window set high in the wall, but there were no other access routes.
Kame looked up at the wall at the back. "You think the shooter could've climbed over that?"
"He must've been very nimble, in that case. He couldn't have made the shot from back here, and it's not like there's much solid enough to climb on."
"True. Give me a boost?"
"You're kidding me."
"I'm serious, Jin. I want to take a look."
If it would make Kame happy and get them out of this damned dark alley and back out into the sunshine, Jin would do it. He crouched down and linked his hands to give his partner a step up, and Kame sprang lightly to the top of the wall.
"There's something on the other side," Kame called, and before Jin could stop him, he'd turned and jumped down to the ground below.
"Kame!"
"Stop imagining me lying on the ground with two broken legs, Jin."
Kame's voice was quiet but perfectly clear, and Jin thanked his lucky stars that no one was around to see the guilty expression on his face. Two broken legs had been the best case scenario, in his imagination.
"Are you all right? What's on the other side?"
There was some slight scrabbling from over the wall, then Kame appeared at the top, holding a rope in his hand. "This. You can't see it from your side, but it's attached to a ring to my right." Jin strained, and could scarcely distinguish the small, metal circle on the building wall. "It's only more gloomy passage on this side - you can just throw the rope down whichever side of the wall you want to climb up, then draw it over after yourself."
Kame demonstrated by tossing the rope to Jin, then jumping down himself. "But that wasn't what caught my attention. I also found *this*."
He held out a torn scrap of paper - coloured on one side; white, with black writing, on the other. Jin couldn't see clearly enough, not in such bad light, but he figured Kame wasn't any better off.
"There's obviously no one here," Jin pointed out. "Except us, and we didn't shoot anyone. Can we go back to civilisation now so I can actually see that paper?"
Kame grinned and tucked it away in his pocket. "Yeah, I can't see it either. There's some broken iron spikes on the other side - you have to be really careful how you go down - and it was caught on one. Maybe it's nothing, I don't know, but at least we've just proved it's possible to get in and out of this alley."
That turned out to be a blessing, as City Security had cordoned off the entire plaza and the only people left in the area were wearing uniforms and looking unfriendly. Of Ueda, Taguchi and the rest, there was no sign. Kame and Jin noticed before they reached the mouth of the alley, and were able to slip back down and use the rope before being seen.
As Kame had reported, this led them to the back of another alley, this one slightly cleaner as it was bracketed by a coffeeshop and a bakery. Jin insisted that he needed something sweet; Kame wasn't about to argue. They made use of the bathroom facilities at the coffeeshop - Kame, in particular, was quite a sight - then popped into the bakery and emerged with a chocolate muffin each.
"This isn't getting us any closer to our restaurant."
"No," Jin admitted through a mouthful of muffin, "but at the rate we're going I'd have starved to death long before we got there. I knew I shouldn't have let you talk me out of eating at the spaceport."
Kame neatly dodged a flying chocolate chip. "We'd have been late for the train."
He pulled the scrap of paper from his pocket; it didn't make much more sense in full daylight. On one side there were four printed numbers - clearly part of a larger whole, as enough remained to the left to indicate that there was at least one other figure present. The other side was a fragment of a photograph, though not enough to identify the subject. A black sweater and a few strands of red hair. Not much to go on.
Jin snatched up the paper and stared. Red hair...and those numbers...
"That can't be...Ueda, can it?" Kame asked hesitantly. "The shooter had a picture?"
The numbers clicked into place for Jin. Anger began to bubble under the surface, mingling with fear - but not for himself. He crumpled the paper, ignoring Kame's protests. "That's not Ueda.
"It's you."
Kame didn't want to believe him. "Jin, there are thousands of people who could fit that picture."
"Yeah, but only one who was in the line of fire *and* has that ID number. Ueda's ends in a five, not a one."
They weren't carrying their real identity documents with them, of course, but every soldier in the United Solar Navy, even those in the JE Fleet, had an ID number assigned to them upon joining. They also had their photos taken.
Kame, who'd been the last of the KAT-TUN crew to sign up, hadn't paid much attention to the details. Being under shipboard arrest, especially when the ship in question was the least military in the entire fleet, had allowed him to ignore the technicalities. Consequently, his mind hadn't made the same leap that Jin's had.
"Those numbers do look sort of familiar," he allowed. "I can't check right now, but-"
"You don't have to - I know it by heart." Jin was certain enough for the both of them. "That's your number and this is a copy of the photograph in your file. Kame, whoever shot Ueda was after you, and what's more, they have access to military records. I really don't like this."
Kame shrugged and strangled the tendril of fear that was beginning to creep round his digestive system. "So much for being undercover. I knew I should've said no to all this playing detective stuff - do I look like that Kindaichi guy?"
"Maybe a little..."
Just as Kame swallowed the last bite of muffin, his cellphone beeped at him. He took one look at the message, furrowed his brows so tightly that his facial muscles screamed, and handed it to Jin.
"Here, it's from Koki. I think he meant to send it to you."
"What makes you say that?"
Kame grimaced. "It's written in rap."
Jin, who'd acquired a fair knowledge of rap from eavesdropping on Koki in the shower, translated the message with relative ease. "He says Ueda's okay, the bullet just grazed him and he's being patched up now. If we send our location, they'll catch up with us.
"Oh, and he says something really colourful about one of the medics, but I can't make it out."
Kame peered at the tiny screen. "Those are system characters, Jin."
"Right. I knew that." Jin returned the phone to its (temporary) owner. "If we move now, they'll never find us. Should we send a reply and wait?"
While Jin amused himself by toying with the windchimes hanging from the bakery's front door, Kame mulled it over. By the time Jin had managed to tangle two of his bangles in the twisted mess, he had an answer.
"They know our destination," he murmured as he helped his partner free himself. "They can catch up. Even if someone knows who we are, it's not going to hurt us to just go and *look* at the restaurant, is it? There'll be other customers - it's not like no one will notice if anything happens. What did you *do* to this thing?"
Jin looked balefully at Kame from beneath his lashes. "I didn't do anything! It got tangled by itself."
"Let's just get going before the owner kills us for destroying his windchimes."
-----
As it turned out, the much sought-after restaurant was a mere five minutes away, though in completely the opposite direction. Kame contemplated deleting the guidebook from his datapad and reclaiming the disk space, but decided against it on the grounds that it contained reviews of the city's restaurants and he figured those would come in handy later. The last time he and Jin had eaten out had been nearly two and a half years ago, and they had a lot to make up for.
Jin squealed with delight when he saw the red, white and green flags, momentarily forgetting to be apprehensive. "You didn't tell me this place was Italian!"
Kame pretended he'd known all along. "I wanted to surprise you," he said smoothly.
In truth, he hadn't noticed, not having read the review. It wasn't as if the name gave it away, after all - there was nothing Italian about 'The GOLD Butterfly'.
Although it was between mealtimes, the restaurant was open and packed with customers - the side-effect of only being able to serve tourists for one week a year - and business looked to be brisk. Brightly-dressed staff darted between tables with practised ease, balancing plates stacked in impossible combinations. Soothing instrumentals played in the background - classic jazz from Earth, a few numbers from Saturn's brief swing revival, and the odd Venusian lullaby.
Jin didn't need to ask whether they should sit inside or outside. If there was snooping to be done, inside it was.
"Table for two, please."
They were initially shown to a table by the window, but Kame wanted easier access to the 'staff only' areas, over by the kitchen, and got it by claiming that his partner got panicky by windows after a traumatic childhood incident involving a soccer ball, a rainbow and an awful lot of broken glass.
Five minutes later, a mortified Jin was taking his seat, facing away from the window, at a small table in the back of the room. Fortunately, the lighting was tinted red enough to cover his embarrassment. He waited until they'd ordered before making an issue of it.
"Why'd you have to say the story the story was about *me*? Did you see the look on that girl's face? She probably thinks I'm going to start screaming any minute now."
Kame grinned. "Nope, I'm pretty sure the only thing she's thinking about is how cute you are when you blush. Good work on the distraction, Jin."
Jin heaved a sigh and gave up. "Thanks..."
Once both men had been served and Jin had made an excellent start on appeasing his hunger - the muffin had been very small - the conversation naturally turned to their next move.
"We can't just ask for Kotani, or whatever her name is," Kame reasoned, pitching his voice to carry to Jin's ears alone. "She'll take off again if she knows someone's here for her."
"She might be long gone by now." Jin stared gloomily into his water glass. "Hiding out somewhere else, where we'll never find her."
Kame twirled a strand of spaghetti around his fork and watched it slip back into the sauce. If he wasn't careful, he'd let Jin's pessimism affect him too. His partner was ordinarily cheerful, but he'd been uneasy about their mission since the very beginning and the possibility that someone was targeting Kame had done nothing to lift his spirits.
"We can't ask but we can check the place out for ourselves," he ventured at last. "I showed you the pictures, we both know what she looks like, and maybe we'll find something here. She can't leave before Sunday any more than we can, and she'd have to be an idiot to try the codes while she's here. Scanning the photograph wouldn't do her any good - the transmission would be blocked.
"And I don't think this woman's an idiot, Jin."
Jin's penne arabiatta suddenly didn't seem quite so appetizing. "Neither do I...though I wonder if someone thinks *we* are."
"What?"
He shook his head. "Forget it. You stay here; I'll go take a look around."
"You're forgetting something."
It was Jin's turn to be puzzled. "What? Do I have sauce on my chin?"
"Actually, you do, but that's not what I meant." Kame picked up Jin's serviette and dabbed gently around his partner's mouth, prompting a pair of elderly female diners at the next table to start fanning themselves with the menu. "Right now you're blocking me from view. If someone really is targeting me, the moment you get up they'll have a clear shot."
"Why bother, when they could just poison your food?" Jin said carelessly, then gasped and tugged Kame's plate away from him. "You could already have been poisoned!"
"Jin, I've already eaten half of this and I'm pretty sure it's not going to kill me." Kame retrieved his meal. "But if I suddenly keel over and and die, feel free to tell me you told me so."
"Fine," Jin sulked. "You go. I'll stay here and...chat up the waitresses or something."
He was expecting Kame to make a jealous objection, but to his surprise, his partner actually seemed to like the idea. "Good plan. Get them talking, see if anyone new's shown up lately, that sort of thing. There's bound to be a gossipy one."
Girls were something of an unknown quantity, these days. There were none in the JE Fleet - plenty of make-up and cross-dressing, of course, but no actual girls. Consequently, Jin was over two years out of practice at talking to them, and Kame's most recent experience had been playing war games with the Fahngarlians. Jin didn't want to contemplate what sort of gossip *that* involved.
Kame downed the remainder of his water, rose to his feet and looked around for the bathroom. He knew perfectly well it was behind him and to his left, but he had to at least appear to give legitimacy to his wandering off from the table mid-meal. Giving Jin an apologetic smile, he headed down the back. Nobody paid him any heed.
If they had, they'd have noticed him bypassing the men's room altogether in favour of a small staircase, visible only through the tiny window of an emergency door.
Left to his own devices, Jin slowly chewed another couple of mouthfuls of pasta, not really tasting it despite the spicy sauce, and tried to look innocent. Innocence was a relative term, and in the legal sense, Jin hadn't been innocent since he and Yamapi had first started working for old man Kitagawa.
But innocence, as an abstract concept, was something Jin had never lost. It had been tempered by experience, maybe - fired in a forge of cynicism, shaped by his trials - but never lost. For all that he'd spent nearly half his life working on the opposite side of the law, had his heart broken into tiny pieces by Kame, and dreamed of a cracked, diseased computer bulging with human flesh, he'd managed to cling onto his innate purity.
That purity, that childlike wonder, was what drew people to him. Mostly. Everyone else just came to admire the pretty.
Had the restaurant been less crowded, that alone might have brought Jin some conversation without the necessity of movement. As it was, talking to waitresses (or even waiters) was out of the question; every server was bustling, no time to stop. If anyone even looked his way, it was only to check that he was still eating and therefore probably not yet interested in being presented with his bill.
Since his back was to the majority of the restaurant, Jin watched the servers using the mirrored band on his watch strap. There were plenty of dark-haired women, but none who even remotely resembled his quarry.
Five minutes passed, then ten, then another five. Kame's food grew cold, and Jin polished off his own with considerably less enthusiasm than usual. To outward appearances his frequent glances at his watch were merely a sign of his impatience as he waited for his dining companion to return from the bathroom.
What could Kame be doing up there? Had he been caught poking around in forbidden areas, and escorted out the back door by a pair of heavy hands? Had he accidentally locked himself in a hidden room and was even now waiting for Jin to rescue him? (Jin dismissed that thought on the grounds that if Kame was simply stuck, he'd surely have sent a text message.)
"Your friend's been gone a long time," one of the elderly ladies from the next table commented, leaning across the gap to speak to Jin. "You don't think he's stuck you with the bill, do you?"
"And he looked like such a nice young man, too," the other woman clucked sympathetically. "Never mind, dear. I'm sure you'll meet someone better soon."
It figured that the only people in the whole damn restaurant who even noticed Kame was gone were two old dears; Jin thought perhaps he and Kame had gone overboard with the paranoia.
He leaned across to meet the women halfway. "He's got a delicate stomach," he murmured, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the bathroom and relishing the opportunity to get his own back on Kame, even if it was only a little. "He knows he shouldn't eat such rich foods but he insists on coming here for me, isn't that sweet?"
"Charming," one of the women agreed.
"Delightful," the other chimed in.
Jin clapped one hand to his mouth and gave them a 'just between you and me' look. "To be honest, I wish he wouldn't bother. He knows he'll be in the bathroom all night now so it's not like we can enjoy the meal together anyway..."
He heaved an enormous sigh, eliciting further sympathy - though he had to turn down an invitation to join the women at their table, claiming that Kame was also insanely jealous (which was not, Jin felt, much of an exaggeration) and would be furious if he emerged from the men's room to find Jin dining with such beautiful young ladies.
It was obvious flattery, but it worked. The women retreated to their own table, blushing and giggling, and Jin congratulated himself on his ingenuity.
He was just trying to decide whether or not to go ahead and order dessert when a stray glance at his watch strap chased all thoughts of food from his head. They hadn't discussed, he and Kame, what to do if Jin found something interesting while Kame was snooping around. That, Jin thought grimly, was something they were going to have to recify as soon as humanly possible.
Because Ashiya Mizuki, or Kotani Nobuko, or whatever her name was, was about to walk out the restaurant door.
Jin made a rough mental calculation of the bill, threw down what he hoped would be enough, and began to follow her.
They weren't cut out for this - none of them were, he knew. They were good on ships, on space stations, around ports. Confined spaces, limited worlds designed and measured, made of metal and full of recycled air. In the old days, they could make an crystal run to Alpha Centauri faster than any other ship out there, easily avoiding the authorities. They'd been able to stop and strip cruisers from Ganymede in less time than it took their pilots to recover from being stunned. They'd even, during one particularly impressive month, broken through a planetary blockade to deliver a shipment of weapons.
That was what they were good at. Jin liked the freedom of life beyond the skies, had done since the first time he'd gone up in a shuttle, and as much as he liked spending his down-time on planets, he knew he couldn't work on one.
But that was exactly what he and Kame - all of them, really - were being asked to do now. To apply their mixed bag of skills to what was definitely not a case for regular JE Fleet personnel, much less a bunch of ex-space pirates. Yamapi, of all people, should have known how unsuited they were for the mission. Earth President Tsubasa and Admiral Takki knew it too.
So why the hell were they there?
It didn't make sense.
Jin didn't have the time to worry about it, not right then. Kotani was walking fast, with the single-minded stride of a woman who knows exactly where she's going. He found an elastic buried in one jacket pocket and pulled his hair back into a short ponytail, then donned his sunglasses. It was the closest he could get to a cunning disguise on short notice.
It wasn't the first time he'd had to tail someone. That had been a man in Lunar City Major - or 'Lunacy' for short. Some slick, smart-talking creep who'd made the mistake of trying to blackmail old man Kitagawa himself. Jin had been sixteen - he hadn't been contracted for the hit. He'd just been told to follow the guy, find out if he was working for himself or if higher-ups were involved, and get out of the way.
Things had gone horribly wrong. Jin had found himself cornered and outnumbered in a blind alley, tables turned, and if Ikuta Toma hadn't shown up - he'd been on another job, had run across the ambush accidentally - things could have gotten very nasty. After that, Jin had taken up carrying a knife at all times, a habit he held onto more than a decade later.
At least this time, he was better armed. That gave him more confidence as he weaved through the pedestrians, hanging back far enough that if Kotani stopped, he could keep walking a little and make it look natural, but not so far that he couldn't keep her in sight.
It must've been a good twenty minutes he walked. He didn't dare take his eyes off Kotani long enough to type a text message on his phone, and if he called, he might draw unwelcome attention to Kame. He didn't want to disturb Ueda, figured Taguchi was probably still with him, and Koki and Nakamaru's phones were both busy - most likely talking to each other, Jin speculated.
Their route took them further and further away from the restaurant, down unfamiliar streets, where the crowds began to dwindle and there were fewer stalls and stores to use as cover. Kotani's speed never varied, even as her steps strayed into the shadows.
Jin didn't think she'd noticed him. She hadn't glanced back over her denim-jacketed shoulder, or stolen gazes in shop windows.
But that didn't make him feel any more at ease.
At long last, Kotani drew to a halt. Jin checked out his surroundings. They'd taken a circuitous route round the back of the street, spent the last three blocks looking at fire exits and trash cans. Not much of a tourist attraction. The sun was sinking rapidly behind the buildings, and the whole area was taking on a gloomy grey cast.
Kotani had paused at a wire gate; she turned and glanced nervously behind her. Jin scarcely managed to duck round the corner in time to avoid being seen. Kotani opened the gate and slipped through into the courtyard beyond, letting the metal fall back into place with a muffled bang.
Since the fence was wire too, Jin was able to watch his quarry ring the rear doorbell of what he thought might be a club, based on the cracked heart hanging over the door and the mountain of cigarette ends, old lipsticks and broken high heels that littered the courtyard. Eros City slums?
The door opened. Kotani exchanged a few fast words with whoever was responsible and darted inside.
Jin waited a couple of minutes, but Kotani didn't seem to be coming back. He decided to risk getting close enough to peer through the lighted windows on the ground floor. Trespassing was hardly a novelty for him, given his original choice of career.
Carefully, he lifted the latch on the gate and tiptoed through, keeping a wary eye both fore and aft. Once on the other side, he moved quickly to the wall and stuck to it like Yamapi to food, losing himself in the shadow of the oncoming evening.
There were filmy curtains hanging at the windows that permitted light but little else to escape; Jin strained to catch a glimpse of the building's interior without alerting the inhabitants to his presence. The window closest to him was open, and the few inches of space allowed the breeze to ruffle the curtains enough that this wasn't completely impossible.
They also allowed him to eavesdrop.
Not much - the voices were low, and coming from the other side of the room - but enough for him to realise that hanging around much longer would be a really bad idea.
"...shot...wrong...you...Kamenashi is..." That voice belonged to a woman. Kotani? She sounded younger than Jin had expected - younger, and extremely annoyed.
"Couldn't...it...hair," a man apologised. "Next...won't..."
"Better not," a second man said. He spoke louder than the others, and clear enough that Jin could detect a familiar quality to his voice, though he couldn't place it. "We only have till Sunday. Once Kamenashi leaves here he could go anywhere in the universe."
"Then...won't...Titan," the first man complained. "What makes...think...stay?"
"He won't leave, not until he retrieves that," the second man said with evident satisfaction. "Is it still safe?"
Through the rippling curtains, Jin watched Kotani retrieve a rectangular packet from the folds of her clothing. It was about the right size, he thought, to contain the stolen photograph. She held it out for the two men to inspect, and one of the pair leaned across far enough to bring him into Jin's line of sight.
It was turning out to be quite a day for surprises. Despite the distortion caused by the fabric and murky window glass, Jin would be willing to swear he recognised the man. He knew the voice had been familiar, and the thick, bright crop of hair was no stranger to him either.
But the last time Jin had seen Ikuta Toma, over a decade ago, they'd both been on Earth and still working for old man Kitagawa. What was he doing in Eros City?
Jin didn't have more than a few seconds to speculate on the subject before the stunner blast wiped all conscious thought from his mind.