Ritsuo: The Iron Man

Kurama took a moment to look across the room. The old man was at the back tinkering with something as always. A smile spread across his face.

Rinako had expected them to be heading straight to the car. She’d stood at the vehicle bay entrance, looking at all the copper, steel and bronze rectangles that were parked like ingots in a heavily fortified vault, waiting for the blip that would transform theirs. But it never came. Instead Kurama had walked straight past and continued on down to a lift she’d assumed was reserved for maintenance.

If Chizuru’s workplace was in the basement then this was the basement’s basement. Like they’d literally buried it. She looked at the rusting sign that hung on the door.

Ballistics.

The button in the lift had barely been visible, covered in a thick patina of grime it was so barely used.

‘Hello Ritsuo.’

Across the room, sat in a rusting iron chair, the old man stopped what he was doing, and turned slowly to look at them. He adjusted a large similarly rusty visor, and two large loupes whirred up to reveal a small kindly looking face. Rinako realised with some surprise that the eyes underneath the lenses were a pale blue. A fluffy white moustache sat on his upper lip like something that would grow on food left out for too long.

‘Satoshi.’ He said, and pulled off the visor. His voice was somewhat weak but full of warmth. Red lines marked the sides of his face where the elastic had been. He was wearing a broad smile. ‘It’s a pleasure to see you.’

Kurama blushed a little. It was the first time Rinako had heard anyone use his full name. He looked at the table in front of the old man.

‘What are you working on? Got some new parts they left you with?’

Ritsuo looked back to the table for a moment. ‘Ohhh, you know…’

Rinako frowned, standing on her tiptoes to get a better look at the device on the table. It was opened up, its parts laid out on a cloth like an autopsy.

‘What is that?’ She asked, then felt a rush of embarrassment.

That smell of wood and oil…

He turned to look at her. She saw now that he was wearing a long rust coloured apron with pockets containing all manner of tools. He smiled. ‘You interested in robotics?’

She stepped back. ‘Oh—oh no—I mean… my grandfather used to show me. I wouldn’t know where to start.’

‘This is Rinako, my partner.’ Said Kurama.

Ritsuo looked to Kurama for a few seconds then back to her. His moustache twitched as he smiled, like the burden of some pack animal on the move. ‘Nice to meet you, Rinako. Try not to let this one get you into any trouble.’

Kurama looked down. He was smiling now.

‘Now, hand me that rotary driver, will you?’ Ritsuo held his hand out.

Rinako looked at a hook on the wall beside her, then took the tool and gave it to him. He turned back to the table and after a few moments the whir of the driver was replaced by the clunk of its body being set down on the table. He held something up, tilted it about a few times, then, seemingly satisfied, turned around with it on his lap.

‘This is a Takahara 620.’ He looked up. ‘But you can call him Six.’

They both looked at the object in his lap, a faceted metal cylinder with several old looking coloured lenses set into its sides.

‘In the old days, we all used to have one of them—of course, you’re too young to remember that, but some of us still prefer them to those filters you use.’ He picked up the object and turned it around again, examining his work through one of the loupes with some satisfaction. It gave a crackly bleep and one of the coloured lenses flashed.

‘It’s awake.’ Said Rinako, watching wide-eyed.

Ritsuo laughed. ‘Yes. This one got a little dinged up. Found him in one of the recyclers.’ He sighed. ‘Nowadays, about all they have to look forward to.’ He set it back down on the table.

‘Him’… Rinako’s grandfather had had the same habit of referring to machines as though they were members of the family.

Kurama was looking around the walls of the basement room, which were littered with homemade grids, on which hung a variety of tools, parts and bulbs. ‘Still can’t believe they got you down here.’

‘Ohh, I dont mind.’ He said, looking into his lap. ‘All that upstairs was never much for me.’ He gestured at a pile of machinery in the corner. ‘Besides, who’d take care of this lot.’

Kurama looked at the pile.

‘But…’ Ritsuo stood and dusted off his thighs. ‘Happy as I am to see you, I don’t expect you came here just to check up on the old man.’

A sheepish smile spread across Kurama’s face.

***

‘You know, you have to acquire a lock before you fire.’ He held a pattern breaker in his hands. Rinako had seen several other, much larger firearms hanging beside it when he’d taken it from a locker at the back of the room.

‘I know.. it was just—the situation kind of required haste.’ Said Kurama.

Ritsuo nodded after a few seconds, albeit reluctantly.

‘I mean, it’s probably still out there. We could go back and recover what’s left—‘

‘No, no point.’ Said Ritsuo. ‘Once the chamber’s blown, you’re not getting any more life out of it.’

‘Yeah, that’s what I figured.’ Said Kurama.

‘The little particles they use are particularly sensitive. When the bond between them is broken the whole medium dies.’

The concept of a liquid dying was a new one on Rinako.

Ritsuo continued, tightening the base of the breaker. ‘A weapon is really just an environment for manipulating explosions.’

An image appeared in her head of men crouching outside a cave with their fingers in their ears waiting for dynamite to go off.

‘The projectile is just the part of the machine into which the lion’s share of the explosion’s energy is channelled.’ He winced and his arms bulged surprisingly as he applied some final torque to the breaker before stopping to catch his breath. ‘The force applied to a projectile cannot exceed that applied to the weapon firing it… or the weapon itself becomes the projectile.’ He held out his hand and the breaker span around on his index finger, stopping with the handle facing them. ‘Understand?’

They both nodded. Rinako noted the practiced ease with which he handled the weapon.

Kurama took the breaker and turned it over in his hand. It felt a lot lighter than his previous one had.

‘I just didn’t really want to report a lost weapon.’ He said. ‘I’m not exactly in the chief’s good books, right now.’

Ritsuo smiled. ‘That’s probably because you’re not such a bad guy. Just don’t let it go to your head that I said that.’

He took a final look at the weapon. ‘Take care of this one, ok? No starting gunfights with underground organ harvesting gangs.’ He looked at both of them.

Rinako felt her face redden. It was like they’d been left in charge of a beloved pet and hadn’t taken care of it properly. She hadn’t had that feeling since being back home.

Why is it every time I get dragged along with him, I end up feeling humiliated?

She looked at Kurama, and felt she had acquired a new understanding of what it was to be partners.

***

The heat in the lift was brutal. That meant the grid was being strained. The old building’s power system had a tendency to run at overload which wasn’t ideal in an already overworked police department.

‘He wasn’t always an engineer, was he.’

Kurama looked up at her sharply.

‘It was the way he span the breaker.’ She explained, and after a few moments: ‘You can tell a person’s past by what they’re good at.’

Her grandfather’s words sounded in her head as clearly as when he’d spoken them.

‘He’s not the only one.’ Kurama was smiling. He continued before she could say anything. ‘Ritsuo used to be Deputy Super.’

She looked up. Kurama stared straight ahead as the lift rattled. ‘I knew he wasn’t just the odd jobs guy but.. deputy.’

‘Yeah. He would have made Super too. Around the time they had the election he was above Goda. But then—there was kind of an incident. Goda got in and not long after Ritsuo ended up down here.’ He looked at her and smiled.

Rinako absorbed the information as they walked out of the lift. The chief’s behaviour now seemed somehow different to her, like the character of a face cast in a different light.

‘He seems to like you.’ She said. She had spoken without thinking and looked at Kurama.

There was a faint smile on his face. ‘Yeah.’

Rinako sensed that if she wanted to know more, she should wait for another moment.