From Evening Isles Fantastical Rings Faint the Spanish Gun

“No, Tim, Mexican nationalism as a movement has been dead in the water for at least a century. Nobody is seriously talking about reviving the Estados Unidos Mexicanos of Santa Anna’s day, any more than the Republic of Texas or the Holy Roman Empire.”

“So what are all the protestors in Mexico City asking your government for? Not to mention the guerillas attacking U.S. Border Patrol over on our side in Puebla and Veracruz.”

“Many of the guerrilla factions are just smugglers and gangsters with an ideological pretext to hide behind. But what the sincere agitators want… well, they just see the grass as greener on the other side of the fence. In the Shogunate’s southern hans, La Ciudad and southwestern Mexico generally, the perception of the Shogun as a foreign conqueror has stuck around, generation after generation, no matter how many ethnic Mexicans are raised to the samurai caste. Some of them just like your democratic system better. Meanwhile, some Mexican-Americans feel Washington is too distant, at least in a cultural sense, to really understand their needs or let their elected representatives get a foothold. They’d feel better with a local lord they could hold to account more easily, not a centralized, bureaucratic republic. Some want to jump ship from you to us, some from us to you, and unfortunately, some buy into Gran Colombia’s pan-Latino propaganda. Nevermind they’re inviting the vampire of Communism in through the back door of North America.”

–Interview with Juan Diego Otomo, Daimyo of Jalisco, conducted by Timothy Walsh, Fox News Channel correspondent. Aired live in the United States and the California Shogunate, March 11th, 2028.

The San Lázaro Palace might have seemed ostentatious for the private residence of a man who was not a head of state, even for a lord as important as the Daimyo of Mexico City. On its nearly two million square foot downtown lot sat a building ten stories tall at most points, with multiple elevated courtyards and the endless slants and curves of the California Neo-Colonial architectural style, evocative at once of Japan’s great castles and pagodas and the missions of New Spain. In truth, the residential apartments reserved for the daimyo and his family were hardly more spacious than some mcmansion in an upper-middle-class American suburb.

Luis Habsburg-Lorraine had more subjects living in his direct demesne than any other samurai in California, including the Shogun himself. La Ciudad was the world’s largest border town, with its farthest suburbs sprawling out of his lands into the state of Puebla, USA to the east and the Guatemalan People’s Republic, Gran Colombia to the south. Consequently, he maintained an enormous warrior retinue– the old system of samurai retainers and ashigaru peasant militias had been phased out of military usage in favor of a modern standing service, but had survived in a mutated form to serve as the Shogunate’s version of regional police forces– and an even larger personal staff of bureaucrats and administrators toiling to introduce some order to the city that seemed Chaos embodied as a crowded patch of land.

San Lázaro was, therefore, over half office space, with a goodly portion of the remainder being armories and barracks for the Mexico City Ashigaru and the California Gendarmerie.

One room of particular note was on its south side– a long conference room with large windows and murals depicting the earliest meetings between the indigenous peoples of the Americas and explorers from Spain, England and Japan. This had been the site of more diplomatic talks than anywhere else outside of a national capital in the Americas, the traditional meeting place for ambassadors of the Shogunate, the United States, and Gran Colombia to resolve matters of grave importance to all three powers.

At least, it was a place where they tried.

Gran Colombia’s ambassador to the Shogunate stood staring out those windows. She had tried. But she had told the Politburo from the outset that the Shogunate was simply not interested in changes to its borders– they would not sell Mexico City for money, they would not trade it for access to Venezuelan thorium deposits or for a port in the Gulf of Mexico, they would not give it if Gran Colombia withdrew its support for the Communist Party of Cuba and recognized the Shogunate-backed monarchist rebels as the island’s legitimate government.

She knew it was coming, but that only did so much to make a grim task easier. Well, all she had to do personally was turn around when this recess ended and her Californian counterpart walked back in, recite a challenge according to a formula put down in the Treaty of Budapest, and walk out of the talks. But that treaty had been penned in order that this challenge might replace a declaration of war, and as such needed a casus belli strong enough to justify the shooting war this Duel would stand in for. If the Ministry of State Intelligence station chief for Mexico City was keeping his local contacts on the timetable he had gone over with her this morning, she was about to get it.

Her eyes followed a dusty white van as it pulled in below, at the side gate leading to the palace's heliport.

The driver scanned an employee badge. El Movimiento Rojo hadn’t managed to get a mole in deeper than the daimyo’s Parks and Recreation Department, but for their agent simply to “lose” his badge on an opportune day was a valuable enough service to the cause.

“Two guards in the shack,” the driver reported to the men in back, “no long guns visible. Glass doesn’t look bulletproof.”

Mario Rodriguez, captain of this cell of their Marxist-Leninist revolutionary movement, nodded and turned to his team. “Jorgito, you’ll follow Andrew out and deal with them.” Andrew Turner had been flattered during the mission briefing when Mario had designated him the team’s point man. Everyone else had realized Mario simply preferred that the clueless American student be shot first.

His contact from Colombian State Intelligence had described both the helicopter their ambassador had flown in on and the car her staff had taken from the airport. “I see both vehicles,” their driver reported, “when you get out, the car will be straight to the right, and the chopper about fifty meters to the left. Two suits approaching the car, looks like we timed it just right.”

The van came to a halt, and Andrew vaulted out the rear doors. He swung his rifle about wildly before turning right, with more enthusiasm than professionalism. He, Mario, and the three others besides Jorgito and the driver carried the assault rifle the Colombian military was phasing out: the Fábrica de Armas de Medellín model of 1995 (FAM-95), the last military rifle adopted from a mutant Latin American strain of the Kalashnikov family, chambered in the 6.2mm Medellín intermediate cartridge and equipped with a hinged and dovetailed top cover for mounting optical sights. Some on their team had bare optics rails for an unobstructed view of the iron sights, some had cheap commercially-available red dots, and Mario had a holographic sight with a flip-up magnifier on a picatinny adapter. The sight’s US Border Patrol serial number was scratched off, and their Colombian MSI man had given them the rifles well-laundered of any markings that could hurt their plausible deniability– these guns were available through all sorts of black market channels, after all. All of them wore ceramic body armor wrapped all over in bits of red cloth, save the driver, who only had a kevlar vest concealed under his jacket.

Jorgito fired off the first two shots of the afternoon. His rifle, the FAM-95’s direct counterpart in that the Shogunate was gradually phasing it out, had been stripped of its full-auto capability, as it had been gotten through legal military surplus channels. It was best suited to semiauto fire anyway: the Shogunate’s licensed copy of Austria-Hungary’s Armee-Universal-Gewehr (AUG), scaled up to take the venerable 7.7mm Arisaka cartridge, kicked like a burro, but it could land accurate, penetrating hits. Two holes appeared in the windows of the guard shack by the gate, and two bodies dropped.

Mario followed on Andrew’s heels. He saw the kid freeze ahead of him as he rounded the van door to his right, and when he caught sight of the two figures approaching the car, he knew why the American was hesitating.

They had all been shown photos of the first two hostages they were supposed to take, the ones MSI had briefed to play along– the Colombian ambassador and a young male aide of hers, who would be in the parking lot when they arrived on the pretext of fetching something from the staff car. The aide was there, but the other figure was a heavier man. Another aide? Probably not, he had the build of a…

Bodyguard. And from the shocked look in his eyes, not briefed in by MSI. A hand slid under his suit coat.

As soon as the hammer of a pistol cleared the coat, Andrew dumped his magazine. Most of his shots flew wild, tearing up the body of the car and shattering windows all up the south face of the palace. But when the gun clicked empty, both the aide and the bodyguard were bloody messes on the asphalt.

Mario clapped him on the ear. “One of those was supposed to be a hostage, you stupid gringo.”

“W-what do we do now? Where’s the ambassador?”

“We work with what we’ve got. Get in, make noise, don’t kill the ambassador, get out with a few hostages, those are the strict mission parameters.”

Mario turned to face a mixed crowd of Shogunate and Colombian diplomatic staff, all standing stock-still in a designated smoking area on the edge of the heliport parking lot. He, they, and the nearest door into the palace formed a triangle about twenty-five meters on each side.

In ones and twos, they snapped out of their transfixion and made breaks for the door. Mario flipped his magnifier up, steadied himself against the staff car, and planted a bullet in the door’s card-reader. Then he vaulted onto its hood and swept his muzzle over the heads of the suits.

“Movimiento Rojo! Get on the ground! Do what I say and none of you feudalist collaborators get shot!”

Two gunshots rang out almost at once– about the same report as Jorgito’s rifle, but coming from in front of and above Mario, not below and behind. In the same instant the sounds reached his ears, perhaps marginally before, he felt a hard impact like a punch to the gut, and fell into the windshield of the car, his front plate spraying ceramic shards from a bullet impact. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw similar white fragments spraying out of Andrew, but after a split-second he processed that those had been bits of jaw exiting the back of his skull.

He saw a glint on a palace rooftop– the lens of a scope, twitching as the sniper turned the bolt handle on his Howa TSPX rifle to chamber another round of 7.7mm Arisaka.

Two snipers– Ashigaru, maybe, but more likely gendarmes or samurai retainers. He squeezed off a burst at the one who had knocked him down– missing, but the sniper stopped and dove for better cover.

Mario rolled off the vehicle, flexing his abs to confirm the shot hadn’t cracked a rib. As soon as he had caught his breath, he shouted, “Suppressing fire on those snipers! Julio, Adolfo, grab one hostage each. Nacho!” he indicated the driver, who was stepping out with an Ingram machine pistol in hand, “Get the chopper spun up!”

That was their exit plan: MSI had said the helicopter would be left unlocked, could bear the team and up to four hostages, and would be a model Nacho had flown back when he was a commercial pilot. Mario and Adolfo had been taught the basics of helicopter flying in a simulation program, hopefully enough to get them out if Nacho went down.

Adolfo charged forward and grabbed his hostage, a young Shogunate secretary or attaché whose Latina curves pushed the limits of a kimono made to Japanese proportions. Julio grabbed at a pale Colombian man with Germanic features, but his would-be hostage pulled away, and before Julio could get his rifle up to threaten the man, a sniper’s bullet shattered his collarbone and impacted on the inside face of his back plate.

Mario snarled and charged forward himself, bobbing, weaving, and shooting wildly at the palace rooftop. He grabbed the first civilian he could– a plump, middle-aged tía with no distinguishing marks on her pantsuit– and pulled her bodily toward the helicopter, keeping his muzzle against her temple and her body between him and the palace. He hazarded a glance back at their getaway vehicle.

He recognized the model from one of Nacho’s crash courses in the simulator. MD520. Only room for a pilot, copilot, and three passengers. Nacho was jerking on a clearly locked pilot’s door, bringing his machine pistol up to try blasting the thing open.

Their plan was falling apart, too acutely to point to bad luck alone. MSI had lied to them.

He knew it, rationally, but didn’t believe it at a deeper level until he glanced up. In the largest windows on the building’s south face, there was the ambassador, staring down at him darkly.

He didn’t know what the Colombians’ true script was, but his part in it was to die.

Maybe it was bourgeois sentimentality to resent them for that, if their overall goal of bringing a Mexican People’s Republic into the fold was still the same, but at the same time… he had seen the news stories coming out of Bolivia when he was young, when Gran Colombia had liberated it from the capitalists. He had dismissed the shipping away of whole towns to labor camps as a fabrication by the capitalist-run and feudalist-backed news outlets, a propagandistic exaggeration of a few kulaks getting their just desserts. Now, he didn’t feel so sure.

He let go of his hostage, and pulled up the remote trigger programmed into his phone, disguised as a music app. This was a contingency they hadn’t discussed with their MSI man: the back of their van, besides six armed men, had come with a multi-kilo brick of plastic explosives. Additionally, they had made a highly illegal modification to the vehicle’s hydrogen fuel cell.

When Mario activated this trigger, the vehicle’s hydrogen tanks began venting into its cabin, bringing its whole interior to a dangerous ratio of hydrogen to oxygen. At the same time, the detonator on the plastics was set on a ten-second timer. Damn them both.

The ambassador couldn’t guess what he had done with his phone, but she saw on his face that he had figured it out, that he knew he was being made an unwilling martyr. The shout that followed didn’t carry through the palace walls, but she could read “viva la revolución” on his lips, before he gunned down all the staff members in front of him. Yes, wittingly or not, he was playing his part perfectly.

The door out to the heliport lot, now hardly ten meters from him, burst open. As a black-clad man of the California Gendarmerie’s counterterrorist team in Mexico City leveled the Shogunate’s new spaceship-esque service rifle at the revolutionary, he ignored the threat and aimed his Colombian gun up at the ambassador.

The window in front of her went spidery as a burst impacted its bulletproof glass, but she could still see enough to spot the tight burst of 5.15mm Steyr-Howa Caseless ammunition passing from the rifle through the revolutionary’s already compromised armor.

She then saw a brief, bright flash of yellow-orange, before every window in the room went opaque, the glass panes between the layers of polycarbonate disintegrating under the explosion’s shockwave.

Then all was silent.

She breathed deeply, then strode out of the room, where the Shogun’s representative was being rushed deeper into the complex by the local daimyo’s men. A TV crew followed them closely as she fell into step, the local consulate correspondent for Gran Colombia’s state news agency and his cameraman.

Good. They had made the well-tested, if unoriginal, move of giving their intelligence station chief for this consulate diplomatic cover as a newsie. The very man who had manipulated that revolutionary into giving her the ammunition she needed was behind her now.

“Sir,” she said as they were ushered toward some saferoom in the palace interior, “might I speak to you for a moment? In an official capacity.”

The representative, a samurai with the Anglo-Japanese features common to the north of the Shogunate, looked at her with surprise. “I can’t promise I’m prepared to respond in an official capacity at the moment, but you are welcome to give a statement.”

“This will, I suppose, be the sort of statement that merits an unhurried, carefully considered response, in any case. Your Lordship, I have just witnessed an act of revolution by the disaffected proletariat of Mexico City. Your feudal state has failed to preserve harmony, order, and contentment among all classes, and several members of my staff were caught in the crossfire of the inevitable result. My government’s intent to take this city under the red flag of Gran Colombia is no longer a simple desire; it has become an ethical imperative. I invoke the Treaty of Budapest, and waive the right to a declaration of war, pending the honorable conclusion of a Duel between champions of the California Shogunate and the People’s Republics of Gran Colombia. We demand as the prize of victory that the han of Mexico City be dissolved and its constituent lands ceded to us. We offer as indemnity for defeat a sum of gold bullion equal in present value to twenty-five billion United States dollars, and our withdrawal of materiel support and diplomatic recognition from the Republic of Cuba. You have until this time in seven days to propose changes to these terms, and to set a time and place for the first of three rounds. Per the standard practice outlined in the treaty, the place must be within your borders or those of an assenting third-party nation, and the time must be no sooner than eighty days, but no later than one hundred and twenty days, from the issuance of this challenge. Bogotá will await a response from your embassy.”