Benjiro's End
by Kakita Kaori
A story of the Space Ronin, Shinwa, in an age of Space Travel
Benjiro’s End. The Ikoma used to say, given enough cups of sake and sufficient prior knowledge of the place, that Benjiro’s End was where the Hida went to find enlightenment. That wasn’t true. Even if you could find enlightenment at the bottom of a cup of sake, the sake on Benjiro’s End was so bad and the value of the place so pitiful that even the Hida couldn’t be bothered with searching for enlightenment there.
Benjiro’s End was a small orbital mining station around a sizable asteroid in a system formed mostly of rubble, debris, and whatever flotsam of spaceships the tides of commerce would wash in. It had only a couple of Hida samurai to enforce the law, but most of the inhabitants were heimen who worked as laborers, mining, processing and shipping ore from the asteroids to be turned into mid-grade steel for starship hulls and garbage scows.
The Hida had better things to do than monitor the day-to-day comings and goings of the heimen. A few simple detectors for tetsukami…a harsh beating, or worse, to anyone found carrying such things, and making sure the heimen followed the rules, and it was enough for the Hida guardsmen. A few koku or the latest Scorpion Summer Court vids, and small mistakes could be easily overlooked. Even if those being overlooked were making things very difficult for the heimen that worked the asteroid.
Requests for aid were numerous in the work listings of the Clanless Today Internet site. Plenty of heimen with unsuccessful bids for attention from their lords, in bases and stations and small planets too isolated for the Champion’s interest to help. They were more numerous now, as the clans were still recovering from the Seogeku of Water’s devastating attacks, and many such bases fell in Crab territory. Many opportunities, and many far richer than this. Still, the Ronin only ever took on very specific assignments. He’d only take opportunities where he judged the cause righteous. He’d only take opportunities along his ‘Path’, though he never divulged what that path actually was to M’thac’kir. And he only took assignments where those seeking help had specified: Radiant Weapons Forbidden.
He rarely had competition for his assignments.
One such request had led him to Benjiro’s End, but not to enlightenment. Instead his path of investigation led him to this seedy sake bar, air thick with the smoke of illegal herbs, that had become the headquarters of the smugglers using Benjiro’s End as their base of operations. The heimen of Benjiro’s End were used to smugglers, but these thought nothing of using force, and the weapons they’d paid for the Hida guards to overlook, to terrorize the miners, eat through the provisions and supplies of the small base without paying, and having their way with the miners’ daughters. In civilized lands, the samurai would be outraged. But Benjiro’s End had not been civilized for a long time.
Shinwa was kneeling quietly at a table, a cup of sake in front of him, though he didn’t touch it. His katana, an antique not fit for much more than a reenactment in this day and age, lay on the ground beside him. He looked around the busy sake bar, focusing on controlling his breathing and evaluating the situation.
Nearby, a lean samurai with Dragon mons leaned against the bar, taking a pull from a tall glass of flavored milk and ignoring anyone who approached. A middle-aged samurai-merchant in the colors of the Tortoise lined up a row of small cups in front of her as she explained to one of the heimen overseers the benefits of her Rokugani-made pottery over the lesser quality stuff the bar was using.
I’d rather they weren’t here, but they don’t look like they would interfere, he thought.
His targets were…all the other samurai in the bar.
With Kiru’s help, Shinwa had tracked down the smugglers to their headquarters and determined when they would be meeting. Now it was just a matter of solving the problem for the miners.
Three at the table. Two at the doors. One in the back. Six radiant blades. The chief and his lieutenant have firearms...fortunately, they are both at the table. Shinwa took one more deep breath. Now.
“Hozan-san,” he called out to the leader of the smugglers, who was laughing over his sake with his companions. “A moment of your time.”
The lead smuggler, Hozan, turned. “You have a problem, ronin?”
Shinwa held up a datapad. “Just a list of all the ore you’ve stolen from the Hida. Considering the war effort, I thought I would offer this opportunity to allow you to return it.
I am certain the Crab would be very understanding.” The datapad was dead…but Hozan didn’t have to know that.
Hozan did not mess around. He slowly stood, as did the other smugglers in the sake house, probably intending to intimidate the lone ronin. The Tortoise stopped talking as the overseer turned and scrambled out the door. The Mirumoto seemed to ignore the rising tension, taking another sip of milk. The sake house owner disappeared into the back.
Shinwa set the datapad carefully on the table. “No, then?” he asked calmly.
Hozan drew his firearm.
First mistake In a single swift iaijutsu strike made from sitting position, Shinua drew his plain, steel sword from its saya and lashed out, swiftly and without hesitation or mercy. In that same motion, the blade struck at Hozan’s unarmored fist, sending the firearm and the hand to the floor, leaving Hozan with an expression of shocked horror. Shinwa sprang from behind the table following the strike and struck down with the blade on Hozan’s lieutenant’s right arm. The sword sliced through the modern powered armor under the lieutenant’s coat as if it were not even there, and the lieutenant’s arm dangled uselessly at his side. Two.
The two guards at the doors drew their katana, while the third man at the table windmilled back away from Shinwa in an attempt to escape. He found himself barreling into the Mirumoto, causing him to spill milk all over himself. The Dragon whirled, grabbed the man by the back of the head, and slamed his face into the bar. The Tortoise glanced around, and helped herself to the contents of the Heiman’s sake cup that had been on the table before her.
Shinwa leapt across the room to the door in a single jump, surprising the two guards who were going to make a dash at him. As he came down, he struck one of the guards with his blade, slashing down at the radiant armor he war. The blade again sliced it as well as any radiant sword. The other guard managed to bring his blade down in a glancing blow across Shinwa’s back. It seemed a decent blow, but the blow deflected off the steel shoulderpads and did not even scratch the coat.
The Tortoise stood and was wandering around the sake house, deftly stepping out of the way of any of the fallen and helping herself to full cups of shochu that those whose injuries had been too complete had left on their tables. She noticed one of the smuggler’s datapads lying abandoned on a table, tapped a few times on her own, and touched her datapad to the smuggler’s. After a moment, she checked the data transfer, and surreptitiously moved on to another table.
The Mirumoto had pushed the man he was fighting’s body to the floor with when he noticed another samurai emerge from the back room and draw a large handgun: a Daidoji’s Kiss.
“Look out!” he called.
Shinwa spun at the sound, the arc of his blade cutting down the guard that had sliced at him. “Kiru!” he shouted, seeing both the Mirumoto and the smuggler that had been in the back near the sake bar.
The smuggler that had been in the back did not hesitate. He shot. Shinwa went down with a welter of blood that erupted from his leg. A high-pitched squeak sounded from behind the bar and chanting in a strange, non-human tongue could be heard from behind there.
The Dragon whirled. In a single smooth motion, he drew a pair of radiant sidearms from holsters on his obi and fired twice at the smuggler that had been in the back.
The lieutenant who had been sitting at the table with Hozan and had been significantly hurt, but not killed, had successfully drawn his own sidearm with his other hand and pointed it at the Mirumoto.
The Mirumoto pivoted quickly to point his radiant pair at the lieutenant. The two stared into each other’s eyes in silence, waiting for reinforcements or authority to come, or one or the other of them to waver or fail and grant the opportunity to the single shot that could end either of their lives.
The lieutenant’s finger twitched as he started to pull the trigger of his weapon.
Shinwa launched himself into one last attack, both hands on the tsuka of his katana, plunging it into the smuggler’s back. The smuggler collapsed in a crimson spray, and Shinwa collapsed next to him in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. He closed his eyes.
From behind the sake bar, an eruption of fur and claws, twisty tail and chittering as the nezumi known as M'thack-kir burst out and raced to Shinwa’s side. “Stupid stupid. Shinwa will end up killing Kiru and Shinwa!” The nezumi chittered again angrily, and the bleeding stopped. The wound was very serious; a shot from a Kiss like that will often take off the limb from an unarmored opponent. It was amazing that the ronin still had a leg. “Get get out of here!”
The Tortoise yawned. Seeing that the bar was now vacant, she picked up her datapad and wandered behind it to pour herself a shot of the house finest.
The Dragon slid both of his guns into their holsters. “I have a bike. I can give you a lift to the spacedock, if you have a ship.”
M’thack-kir gave the gunslinger a small bow. “Shinwa and Kiru will be thankful. Shinwa when out of shock.”
The Tortoise sipped her drink and started reading the latest article about Ikoma Tamiyo on her datapad.
The Gunslinger pulled up a hood over his bald head, and it formed into a dragon-headed helmet that settled over his features with a greenish-tinted display. “Mirumoto Nanashi.” He helped Shinwa off the floor.
Shinwa shook his head blearily, struggling to stand on his own, his face pale. He managed to long enough to flick the blood off his katana like a Sunday night vidscreen samurai from a bad B-Movie. He re-sheathed the weapon in his saya and bowed respectfully to the deceased or injured opponents. “I recommend you leave Benjiro’s End…or the Hida will have more than one person here to wring their stories from,” he said gravely. “They will be here soon.”
Nanashi made a disgusted sound as those smugglers well enough to do so fled from the bar. “The Hida ask questions like that of both sides of a fight. I’d rather not be questioned. Let’s go.”
He and M’thack-kir helped the ronin Shinwa out to Nanashi’s tetsukami bike, a magnificent piece of machinery in green and black. M’Thack-kir made a whistling noise of approval when he saw it. The two helped position Shinwa on the back of the saddle behind Nanashi. “Don’t break-break it,” he warned the ronin, but Shinwa did not respond. The nezumi eyed the bike again, deciding there were too many to ride it. “Take him to Bay Five,” he said. “Kiru will go-go another way.” With that he turned, pulled open a utility hatch into the inner workings of the station’s power systems, and disappeared. Mirumoto Nanashi twisted one of the handles. The bike lit up with green fire and he and the ronin were off.
The bike raced down the wide hallways of the space station, leaving the battle-wrenched sake house, and soon Benjiro’s End, far behind.
The Tortoise reached the end of the article and yawned, turning off the vid screen. “Interesting,” she said to the dead bodies that were all that remained of her company. She poured herself one last drink before heading out herself. Not even she wanted to entangle herself with the Hida on Benjiro’s End.
A story of the Space Ronin, Shinwa, in an age of Space Travel
Benjiro’s End. The Ikoma used to say, given enough cups of sake and sufficient prior knowledge of the place, that Benjiro’s End was where the Hida went to find enlightenment. That wasn’t true. Even if you could find enlightenment at the bottom of a cup of sake, the sake on Benjiro’s End was so bad and the value of the place so pitiful that even the Hida couldn’t be bothered with searching for enlightenment there.
Benjiro’s End was a small orbital mining station around a sizable asteroid in a system formed mostly of rubble, debris, and whatever flotsam of spaceships the tides of commerce would wash in. It had only a couple of Hida samurai to enforce the law, but most of the inhabitants were heimen who worked as laborers, mining, processing and shipping ore from the asteroids to be turned into mid-grade steel for starship hulls and garbage scows.
The Hida had better things to do than monitor the day-to-day comings and goings of the heimen. A few simple detectors for tetsukami…a harsh beating, or worse, to anyone found carrying such things, and making sure the heimen followed the rules, and it was enough for the Hida guardsmen. A few koku or the latest Scorpion Summer Court vids, and small mistakes could be easily overlooked. Even if those being overlooked were making things very difficult for the heimen that worked the asteroid.
Requests for aid were numerous in the work listings of the Clanless Today Internet site. Plenty of heimen with unsuccessful bids for attention from their lords, in bases and stations and small planets too isolated for the Champion’s interest to help. They were more numerous now, as the clans were still recovering from the Seogeku of Water’s devastating attacks, and many such bases fell in Crab territory. Many opportunities, and many far richer than this. Still, the Ronin only ever took on very specific assignments. He’d only take opportunities where he judged the cause righteous. He’d only take opportunities along his ‘Path’, though he never divulged what that path actually was to M’thac’kir. And he only took assignments where those seeking help had specified: Radiant Weapons Forbidden.
He rarely had competition for his assignments.
One such request had led him to Benjiro’s End, but not to enlightenment. Instead his path of investigation led him to this seedy sake bar, air thick with the smoke of illegal herbs, that had become the headquarters of the smugglers using Benjiro’s End as their base of operations. The heimen of Benjiro’s End were used to smugglers, but these thought nothing of using force, and the weapons they’d paid for the Hida guards to overlook, to terrorize the miners, eat through the provisions and supplies of the small base without paying, and having their way with the miners’ daughters. In civilized lands, the samurai would be outraged. But Benjiro’s End had not been civilized for a long time.
Shinwa was kneeling quietly at a table, a cup of sake in front of him, though he didn’t touch it. His katana, an antique not fit for much more than a reenactment in this day and age, lay on the ground beside him. He looked around the busy sake bar, focusing on controlling his breathing and evaluating the situation.
Nearby, a lean samurai with Dragon mons leaned against the bar, taking a pull from a tall glass of flavored milk and ignoring anyone who approached. A middle-aged samurai-merchant in the colors of the Tortoise lined up a row of small cups in front of her as she explained to one of the heimen overseers the benefits of her Rokugani-made pottery over the lesser quality stuff the bar was using.
I’d rather they weren’t here, but they don’t look like they would interfere, he thought.
His targets were…all the other samurai in the bar.
With Kiru’s help, Shinwa had tracked down the smugglers to their headquarters and determined when they would be meeting. Now it was just a matter of solving the problem for the miners.
Three at the table. Two at the doors. One in the back. Six radiant blades. The chief and his lieutenant have firearms...fortunately, they are both at the table. Shinwa took one more deep breath. Now.
“Hozan-san,” he called out to the leader of the smugglers, who was laughing over his sake with his companions. “A moment of your time.”
The lead smuggler, Hozan, turned. “You have a problem, ronin?”
Shinwa held up a datapad. “Just a list of all the ore you’ve stolen from the Hida. Considering the war effort, I thought I would offer this opportunity to allow you to return it.
I am certain the Crab would be very understanding.” The datapad was dead…but Hozan didn’t have to know that.
Hozan did not mess around. He slowly stood, as did the other smugglers in the sake house, probably intending to intimidate the lone ronin. The Tortoise stopped talking as the overseer turned and scrambled out the door. The Mirumoto seemed to ignore the rising tension, taking another sip of milk. The sake house owner disappeared into the back.
Shinwa set the datapad carefully on the table. “No, then?” he asked calmly.
Hozan drew his firearm.
First mistake In a single swift iaijutsu strike made from sitting position, Shinua drew his plain, steel sword from its saya and lashed out, swiftly and without hesitation or mercy. In that same motion, the blade struck at Hozan’s unarmored fist, sending the firearm and the hand to the floor, leaving Hozan with an expression of shocked horror. Shinwa sprang from behind the table following the strike and struck down with the blade on Hozan’s lieutenant’s right arm. The sword sliced through the modern powered armor under the lieutenant’s coat as if it were not even there, and the lieutenant’s arm dangled uselessly at his side. Two.
The two guards at the doors drew their katana, while the third man at the table windmilled back away from Shinwa in an attempt to escape. He found himself barreling into the Mirumoto, causing him to spill milk all over himself. The Dragon whirled, grabbed the man by the back of the head, and slamed his face into the bar. The Tortoise glanced around, and helped herself to the contents of the Heiman’s sake cup that had been on the table before her.
Shinwa leapt across the room to the door in a single jump, surprising the two guards who were going to make a dash at him. As he came down, he struck one of the guards with his blade, slashing down at the radiant armor he war. The blade again sliced it as well as any radiant sword. The other guard managed to bring his blade down in a glancing blow across Shinwa’s back. It seemed a decent blow, but the blow deflected off the steel shoulderpads and did not even scratch the coat.
The Tortoise stood and was wandering around the sake house, deftly stepping out of the way of any of the fallen and helping herself to full cups of shochu that those whose injuries had been too complete had left on their tables. She noticed one of the smuggler’s datapads lying abandoned on a table, tapped a few times on her own, and touched her datapad to the smuggler’s. After a moment, she checked the data transfer, and surreptitiously moved on to another table.
The Mirumoto had pushed the man he was fighting’s body to the floor with when he noticed another samurai emerge from the back room and draw a large handgun: a Daidoji’s Kiss.
“Look out!” he called.
Shinwa spun at the sound, the arc of his blade cutting down the guard that had sliced at him. “Kiru!” he shouted, seeing both the Mirumoto and the smuggler that had been in the back near the sake bar.
The smuggler that had been in the back did not hesitate. He shot. Shinwa went down with a welter of blood that erupted from his leg. A high-pitched squeak sounded from behind the bar and chanting in a strange, non-human tongue could be heard from behind there.
The Dragon whirled. In a single smooth motion, he drew a pair of radiant sidearms from holsters on his obi and fired twice at the smuggler that had been in the back.
The lieutenant who had been sitting at the table with Hozan and had been significantly hurt, but not killed, had successfully drawn his own sidearm with his other hand and pointed it at the Mirumoto.
The Mirumoto pivoted quickly to point his radiant pair at the lieutenant. The two stared into each other’s eyes in silence, waiting for reinforcements or authority to come, or one or the other of them to waver or fail and grant the opportunity to the single shot that could end either of their lives.
The lieutenant’s finger twitched as he started to pull the trigger of his weapon.
Shinwa launched himself into one last attack, both hands on the tsuka of his katana, plunging it into the smuggler’s back. The smuggler collapsed in a crimson spray, and Shinwa collapsed next to him in a rapidly expanding pool of blood. He closed his eyes.
From behind the sake bar, an eruption of fur and claws, twisty tail and chittering as the nezumi known as M'thack-kir burst out and raced to Shinwa’s side. “Stupid stupid. Shinwa will end up killing Kiru and Shinwa!” The nezumi chittered again angrily, and the bleeding stopped. The wound was very serious; a shot from a Kiss like that will often take off the limb from an unarmored opponent. It was amazing that the ronin still had a leg. “Get get out of here!”
The Tortoise yawned. Seeing that the bar was now vacant, she picked up her datapad and wandered behind it to pour herself a shot of the house finest.
The Dragon slid both of his guns into their holsters. “I have a bike. I can give you a lift to the spacedock, if you have a ship.”
M’thack-kir gave the gunslinger a small bow. “Shinwa and Kiru will be thankful. Shinwa when out of shock.”
The Tortoise sipped her drink and started reading the latest article about Ikoma Tamiyo on her datapad.
The Gunslinger pulled up a hood over his bald head, and it formed into a dragon-headed helmet that settled over his features with a greenish-tinted display. “Mirumoto Nanashi.” He helped Shinwa off the floor.
Shinwa shook his head blearily, struggling to stand on his own, his face pale. He managed to long enough to flick the blood off his katana like a Sunday night vidscreen samurai from a bad B-Movie. He re-sheathed the weapon in his saya and bowed respectfully to the deceased or injured opponents. “I recommend you leave Benjiro’s End…or the Hida will have more than one person here to wring their stories from,” he said gravely. “They will be here soon.”
Nanashi made a disgusted sound as those smugglers well enough to do so fled from the bar. “The Hida ask questions like that of both sides of a fight. I’d rather not be questioned. Let’s go.”
He and M’thack-kir helped the ronin Shinwa out to Nanashi’s tetsukami bike, a magnificent piece of machinery in green and black. M’Thack-kir made a whistling noise of approval when he saw it. The two helped position Shinwa on the back of the saddle behind Nanashi. “Don’t break-break it,” he warned the ronin, but Shinwa did not respond. The nezumi eyed the bike again, deciding there were too many to ride it. “Take him to Bay Five,” he said. “Kiru will go-go another way.” With that he turned, pulled open a utility hatch into the inner workings of the station’s power systems, and disappeared. Mirumoto Nanashi twisted one of the handles. The bike lit up with green fire and he and the ronin were off.
The bike raced down the wide hallways of the space station, leaving the battle-wrenched sake house, and soon Benjiro’s End, far behind.
The Tortoise reached the end of the article and yawned, turning off the vid screen. “Interesting,” she said to the dead bodies that were all that remained of her company. She poured herself one last drink before heading out herself. Not even she wanted to entangle herself with the Hida on Benjiro’s End.
