CHAPTER SEVEN

When Thalia arrived at the Vice-Chief’s office dressed in Yamamoto’s old uniform, she found the Chief, Captain Okada, and Yamamoto all present in the office as well as Harada. She cursed silently to herself, but went in anyway. There was no helping it, she supposed.

“Thalia-san, how is the uniform worki—” Kato stopped and stared. No one else spoke for what felt to her like a small eternity, although she was sure it was actually no more than a few seconds. She felt her blush deepen.

It could not be said that the clothes did not fit; Yamamoto had been quite slender in his youth, and still was – Thalia was also slender, but she was a woman. This had never been more obvious – not even when she had been wearing her form-fitting blue jumpsuit the first time they met her.

The grey uniform pants were slightly loose around her waist, though she had the black leather belt on a small setting; the white linen shirt was tucked in, and the matching grey jacket with black piping was only slightly long in the arms and loose in the shoulders. The pants were rolled up twice, but they would do for now.

The problem lay in the places where female anatomy diverged from male. The shirt that was perfectly respectable at her waist became pornographic at her chest, buttons near bursting. The pants that were loose in the waist looked painted onto the curves of her hips, and the short jacket did nothing to hide them. She looked, not like an officer of law and order, but much more like a porn star cosplaying a cop for someone’s uniform fetish.

“Wow,” Chief Kato said, his tone full of stunned admiration. “If they won’t talk to you, it’s time to bury them!” he said.

Thalia laughed, getting over her embarrassment in amusement, but the Vice-Commander and Captain were not pleased.

“She can’t go in there like that!” Harada said, blushing even more than she had herself. “What a way to introduce our first female officer! Kato-san, this would disgrace the Shinsengumi.”

“Do we want people to mistake one of our own for a Yoshiwara hostess?” Okada agreed with deep disapproval, referring to a local underground haven of prostitution.

“Yamamoto, don’t you have anything … else for the Lieutenant?” Harada demanded, scowling. Yamamoto was trying to stay out of it; the Vice-Commander made him nervous when he got like this.

“N-no, Vice-Chief,” he stammered, blushing. “She said the larger size fell off, and the smaller size won’t fit at all,” he explained.

“Don’t yell at him, it’s not his fault I didn’t bring spare clothes and don’t have my own uniform yet,” Thalia intervened, irritated. “I was going to suggest that I borrow someone else’s coat. If you have any alternate suggestions, I’m listening,” she added, arching a slender brow at the Vice-Commander and the Captain.

“Yes, borrow a coat! Or a bigger shirt. Anything. If nothing else, there’s a potato sack in the kitchen,” Okada said.

“Good, you can put it over your head so you don’t have to see what offends you so much,” Thalia snapped, her irritation growing.

Kato laughed. “Ahh, Thalia-san, you’re already fitting in around here,” he said, nearly knocking her down with a friendly blow to her shoulder. He directed his attention to his chief officers, saying, “If you guys have suggestions, make them. Otherwise, stop complaining.”

Thalia noticed Kato’s more familiar style of addressing her, and was pleased. It indicated acceptance, and that meant a great deal to her.

Harada went to his drawer and fished out a spare cravat, then took off his jacket. He handed them both to Thalia. She wanted very much to wear Harada’s jacket, since it smelled like him, but found to her chagrin that she looked like a child in it. The sleeves flapped and the shoulders drooped like a tent.

She laughed at her mirror image, then slipped it off and handed it back to him. “No one could take me seriously in this, Harada-san,” she said, “not even me. Thank you, but I’m afraid even the other one is preferable.”

“You can at least put the cravat on,” he said, acknowledging she was right. Then it occurred to him – Okada was smaller than he but bigger than Yamamoto, and one of his vests might work very well over that shirt. Along with the cravat it should take care of her frontal effect; in back, the vest would hang a little lower than the jacket, but that couldn’t be helped for the moment.

“Seizo, go get one of your vests for the Lieutenant to borrow,” he said. Okada looked relieved and agreed. This unusual solidarity between them made Kato raise his eyebrows.

While they awaited Okada's return, Thalia put the cravat on and knotted it. She and the Vice-Commander then proceeded to have a spirited disagreement about what constituted an appropriate knot.

It ended with both of them annoyed, she standing stiff and indignant while he retied her cravat in his preferred manner, trying hard not to see the swell of her breasts beneath the thin fabric of the shirt. He failed to the point that he messed up the knot and had to start again, cursing under his breath while Thalia’s eyes flashed blue lightning at him.

Chief Kato watched all this with mounting amusement, and when Okada returned with his vest it was to find Thalia and Harada pretending to ignore each other. He handed the vest to Thalia. It was a vast improvement, they all agreed – except Kato, who thought she could have dazzled the suspects into confessing everything within five minutes if she’d just gone in as she was when she first arrived at the office.

“Ready, Lieutenant?” Kato asked when she had put Yamamoto’s jacket back on over Seizo’s vest.

“As I’ll ever be,” she replied. “Let me at those bad boys,” she added, laughing when she saw Okada and Harada both wince. Kato laughed also, and ushered her out of the office.

“Are we going with those fools?” Harada asked Okada.

“Can we really not go?” Okada retorted. So they followed, in a spirit of rare camaraderie.

***

They arrived a minute behind Thalia and Kato to find the Chief observing behind the one-way window as she took on one of the hijackers.

Kato was defensive. “Don’t start, Tetsu, Seizo; she insisted she could handle it better alone, and if it turns out she can’t, we can go in anytime,” he admonished when they shut the door, before either of them said a word.

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“Who’s starting anything?” Harada replied. “She can make a fool of herself if she damn well pleases. It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Of course. That’s why you wouldn’t let her come in here looking like a half-price hostess, right?” Kato replied, smirking.

“I don’t want the Shinsengumi’s image to suffer because of her,” he retorted.

“Tone it down, would you? I’m trying to listen,” Okada said, his attention riveted on the window and what was happening on the other side of it.

Thalia was hardly recognizable. Her demeanor was cold, sharp, detached, and without mercy.

“Help me understand what passes for a mind in the witless wasteland behind your skull,” she said in a voice like a rain of icicles. “Have you wasted everyone’s time so far because you think it will somehow benefit whatever cause it is of which you think you’re a champion? Or are you just anxious for a trial followed by a protracted term of imprisonment?”

In a sudden flare of violence, she knocked the table standing between them onto the floor behind her, then planted the heel of her boot on the man’s crotch. “There were children on board the ship you hijacked,” she pointed out with a dangerous smile. “I’ll make sure I put the word out at the prison that you’re guilty of a crime against children; the other inmates will soon clarify to you how most people feel about that kind of criminal.”

Harada’s jaw dropped.

“Holy shit,” Okada said in admiration.

The unfortunate hijacker began to protest. “None of this is my – you don’t know – don’t do that!” She began to apply pressure with her booted foot. “OKAAAYYYYY! Okay, just stop and let me tell you!” he shrieked.

“I’ll stop when I’m in a better mood,” she snarled.

The hijacker asserted that they had never intended to hurt their hostages. A sharp squeal of pain followed this as the boot exerted greater pressure.

“Tell that to the co-pilot lying in the hospital now with multiple gunshot wounds,” Thalia hissed. “And his family, losing sleep as they wait for him to wake up.” She removed her foot from his crotch and planted it on the floor. The man had hardly begun to gasp in relief when she bent over, arresting his gaze. “Look at me and tell me why you did it,” she commanded.

“No… please! You’re the one from the ship …” the man began to sob. “Please don’t make me feel it again,” he begged.

“Tell me what I want to know, and I’ll never haunt you again about the hijacking,” she promised.

He poured out a tale of disillusionment, of middle-class youth maturing into embittered adulthood with nothing to show for it but attitude. They despised their parents, despised the government, despised the alien invaders, despised their neighbors, despised the disenfranchised samurai. All this bitterness led them to concoct a plan to take over a spaceship and force it to bring them to a new life, a more prosperous planet in a gentler climate where they could be free at last.

“Free to do what?” Thalia demanded. “What have you ever learned to do besides despise others, as if you were somehow better than they?”

“We never had a chance, with aliens overrunning everything that should be ours,” the man protested.

“And your parents, many of whom fought in the war against the invaders on your behalf? The people you see in the street, did they have a chance? The police, nurses, teachers, all those who work tirelessly on your behalf, did they have a chance at this idyllic lifestyle you feel you’re owed? What about the people on board that ship, did they have a chance?” As she spoke, dark wisps of blue and red smoke furled out around her; the room seemed to shrink.

“I – I don’t know,” he said.

“Where did you get your weapons?” Thalia demanded.

“One of the guys, Kenzo, he knows someone who owns a dock down at the pier. The owner said he had a shipment coming with a few extra heavy-duty weapons that could get their lucky owners anywhere they wanted to go. He offered us second shot, because the guy he approached first didn’t take the bait.”

“And what? This humanitarian just donated them to your lofty cause of self-aggrandizement?”

“No – we … we had to pay …”

Thalia leaned over and looked him in the eyes again, causing the unfortunate thug to start shaking. “And how did you arrange to pay this upstanding businessman?” she asked, very gently.

He started to cry. Thalia repeated her question, as gently as before.

“We … we did a few robberies …” he said, avoiding her eyes.

“DID you, now?” she breathed. “Was anyone hurt?” she asked, so softly they could barely hear her on the other side of the bulletproof glass, which had begun to creak in its frame as if unable to contain the aura of her rage.

“Please … don’t hurt me,” he cried.

“If you tell me without a lot of bullshit, I may not hurt you much. If you do not tell me, I will hurt you quite a lot. Those are your options,” she informed him, her voice like an arctic wind whispering across a vast winter desert.

“We – we broke into some houses. Most of them were empty. One of them wasn’t. We got scared, I swear we didn’t mean to hurt anyone, but we got scared!” he was whimpering like a child, cowering before the petite redhead in genuine terror. The chief officers of the Shinsengumi stared in disbelief. It had begun to make sense that someone high up in government would have been impressed enough to recommend her to them.

“Yes, you were afraid,” she cooed. “So what did you do in your terror?”

“Matsu, he had a baseball bat. This old woman came out of a room and surprised him, so he smacked her. He didn’t mean any harm. And then a kid came into the hall and started yelling. We had to shut him up, didn’t we? So I – I – I made him be quiet.”

“And how did you silence this child?” Thalia purred, her voice growing ever more terrifying the more softly she spoke. The room seemed to be darkening as her anger grew.

“I punched him in the ear. Twice,” the hijacker admitted, then began sobbing. Thalia twitched, just once. Then her eyes began to change, pupils elongating like a snake’s while her incisors lengthened, sharpening to points.

"‘Behold the ripening Fury, kindled by innocent grief’,” Harada quoted from a classical source he had been reading the night before; Seizo had not been the only one to think of the Hellenist Furies in connection with the new lieutenant. “She’s getting pissed off and forgetting where she is. I’m going in.”

Before either of the other two could respond, Harada was inside the room with her. The terrified prisoner’s first instinct was to crawl toward him and grasp his leg for safe haven, but he was kicked against the wall for his pains.

“Oi, Lieutenant, what do we do with this scum?” he said. She looked at him without recognition for a moment, then seemed to shake herself out of her trance. Her teeth retracted, her pupils normalized, and she was the woman they had just hired once more.

She smiled at him in thanks, then returned her attention to the prisoner. “We throw the entire book of the law at him and his whole crew, of course,” she said in her normal voice.

“Oh, thank you,” the man cried out, incoherent with relief.

She leaned toward him again, making him cringe back against the wall. “Just tell me where those people are that you hurt. If you don’t, I will come and visit you in your dreams every single time you fall asleep, from now until you die,” she told the prisoner with a chilling smile. “And I’ll make sure you live a long, long time."

He gave them an address, wetting his pants with fear. No one knew how she could possibly make good on those threats, but somehow no one doubted her, either. The man screeched a protest of honesty as the Vice-Commander departed the room after Thalia.

“Did you get the address?” she asked Kato. He nodded, still staring at her, trying to wrap his mind around what he had just seen. “Sorry about that,” she said, looking at her boots and blushing. “I kind of lost it in there when he told me he punched a little kid. Twice.”

“No one has ever had such success as you just did, not at their first interrogation,” Kato told her.

“It’s not my first,” she assured them. “Not even close. It’s just been awhile; I shouldn’t have lost control so easily.”

“We look out for each other, Thalia-san,” Harada told her in a warm tone of voice that made her blush. “I wouldn’t have let you step over the line. You got a lot more out of him than anyone else got out of any of them. No apologies.”

“You are a goddess,” Okada told her. “No more modesty bullshit.”

“Knock it off, brat,” she said, elbowing him. “Do you want me to stay?” she asked the Chief then.

He shook his head. “You’ve done more than enough for today. I’ll just threaten to bring you back in if he gives us any more obstruction – you go get your things and get settled in. And again, thank you.”