Miss Ill-Intent

[Cataphrak]

Military Factory No. 21, Outside Kunming, Yunnan
May 5th, 1958

Hong Tianhu looked at the notes spread all over his desk, and resisted the urge to scream.

He'd been working on this project quietly for the past year and a half, ever since the Army had started getting some inkling of what was out there beyond the quarantined territories. At first, it was almost a lark. Given what they had to work with and what was expected of them, it wasn't as if they were going to work any miracles. A working prototype in four, maybe three years if they were lucky. Surely, that was more than enough?

Then, two months ago, the Chief of the General Staff himself had cabled him. He had said that this project was now top priority, that the resources of the whole Republic were at his disposal.

And that he wanted a model ready for service by the end of the year.

The fact that the Chief of the General Staff had then removed by the Military Affairs Commission a month later in what looked an awful lot like a cloud of disgrace had not helped matters.

Still, the vast supplies of rare earth metals, and crystals, and even imported Korean transistors kept coming. Someone had upstairs had to still be approving it.

At first, progress had accelerated immeasurably. In a month, they'd accomplished more than they had in the past year. They even had a partial prototype working on a testbed. It had almost seemed that they'd be able to make General Du's impossible deadline.

Then they'd hit a wall, and its bricks were now spread out on Hong Tianhu's desk, staring back at him.

"Tianhu Shushu! I'm heading home!"

Li Xiaobao was far too old to be calling Hong uncle, but it was an idiosyncrasy that the head of research had learned to accept. If nothing else, she was a superb secretary, devoted to her job. They had worked together since the bad old days of the war against the Japanese, when she had appeared at the gates of Military Factory No. 21 as a scruffy refugee from Changsha, looking for anything that might get her a bed and a warm meal.

"Take care," Hong called in reply, more than a little relieved to receive some respite from the utter mess he was dealing with on his desk. "There's so many cars on the road these days."

"Don't worry about me!" Li replied with a grin. "With the hours you work, your health is in a lot more danger than mine!"

Hong shook his head as his secretary walked out. Li was fifteen years or more his junior. From anyone else her age, such insolence would have been intolerable, but they had worked together so long, it was almost as if they were married, especially since Hong's wife had died in the German Plague, and Li, for all her good looks, had apparently never had a husband. Some had said that it was because of whatever her previous occupation had been, or some horrible abuse at the hands of the Japanese. Hong didn't pry. She was a superb assistant, and that was what mattered.

Especially now that he was expected to do what had been considered impossible two years ago, in the space of about three months. The equations on his desk all made sense individually, but there was little chance of them working together, not without trial and error which would have to be done on the test bed. That meant prototypes, perhaps hundreds of them, years of field testing, even-

Wait a minute, was that stack of files there before?

Hong untied the string holding the stack together, and flipped through the documents: they were reports, flow charts, even diagrams.

The first thing he noticed was that they were exactly what he needed, data which would allow him to bypass years of tests.

The second thing he noticed was that every single document was in German.

[Cataphrak]

Military Factory No. 21, Outside Kunming, Yunnan
May 28th, 1958

Hong Tianhu returned from the testing yard in a state of shock.

He had expected the prototype they'd built from the data he'd found on his desk to do something, sure. Explode, possibly. Malfunction? Almost definitely. If his time working with experimental equipment had taught him anything, it was that nothing functioned correctly on the first try. That was the whole point of the prototyping process in the first place.

Yet out in the yard, when they'd started their first test prototype up, it'd done the impossible. It'd worked. There were a few hiccups, of course. Probably because of the difference in humidity and temperature, but it had worked, almost perfectly.

In Hong Tianhu's experience, the chances of that happening were just slightly slimmer than his chances of besting Lu Bu in single combat.

Yet that's what happened. He had the readouts in his hand, stuck together with his nervous sweat but still very much readable. A copy had been sent off via the appropriate channels the instant the test had concluded. The copy he had was supposed to be for his own use. After all, even if this test had been successful, there was still so much left to do. They still had to run the thing under field conditions, outside the confines of Military Factory No. 21's walled yard.

"Tianhu Shushu!"

Li was waiting for him in his office, with a fresh cable in her hand.

"What is it?" Hong asked, trying to push down the tide of worry rising up his windpipe. "A reply?"

The secretary handed the message over, her expression looking like how Hong felt. "You should read it yourself."

Tucking the test results under one arm, Hong reached for the message. With shaking hands, he turned it over:

1630, China Standard Time, May 28th, 1958.
From: Gen. Li Tsung-jen, Chief of the General Staff
To: Dr. (Eng) Hong T'ien-hu, Head of Research, Military Factory No. 21

MILITARY AFFAIRS COMMISSION HAS BEEN FOLLOWING PROGRESS WITH GREAT INTEREST. MOST RECENT TEST RESULTS CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION. GIVEN RECENT EVENTS, TIMETABLE IS BEING MOVED UP.

AM VISITING MF NO. 21 IN SIX WEEKS WITH HEAD OF COMMISSION FOR PERSONAL INSPECTION.

WE WILL EXPECT LIVE DEMONSTRATION.

LI TSUNG-JEN.

Hong Tianhu suddenly felt a powerful need to sit down.

Li Zongren was coming to inspect his project in person. No, worse, Sun Liren was coming to inspect his project in person, and he had less than two months to turn the skeletal testbed prototype they'd just managed to get working for the first time into something which might pass for a finished model?

That was impossible. Even if the core systems worked, there was so much left to do. Hong sank into his office chair and wished for the first time in a very long time that he'd worked in a place where a lit cigarette wasn't a catastrophic safety hazard.

"Shushu."

Hong looked up, Li was still there, waiting expectantly.

"I'll need to burn that cable. Do you need anything else from me?"

The Head of Research numbly handed the cable back, and resisted the urge to ask for a strong drink, and maybe a loaded pistol. "No, I'll... I'll be all right."

To her credit, Li had worked with Hong far too long to pry. She simply nodded, and left her boss to grapple with how the fuck he was going to build the rest of this absurdly complex project without even the slightest idea how. So quiet was her exit, and so engrossed was Hong in the figurative blade over his own neck that he did not even notice her leave...

Nor did he notice the files set on the corner of his desk, stacked neatly and bound in a manila folder marked with a few words stamped in an ink which had once been red:

"TOP SECRET - Property of the United States Army Joint Intelligence Objectives Agency."

[Cataphrak]

Military Factory No. 21, Outside Kunming, Yunnan
July 12th, 1958

"All targets acquired."

Hong Tianhu nodded at the man monitoring the readouts, before nervously looking over his shoulder to the two figures standing at the back of the observation bunker. He had seen Sun Liren before, of course. He was everywhere in the newsreels and the newspapers: "The Sword of the New China", "The Unconquered Sun", and of course, "The Rommel of the East", though given their relative prominence now, Hong Tianhu could not help but wonder if they would soon be calling that long-dead German tank general "Sun Liren of the West" before long.

But for all that Sun Liren was, it still paled in comparison to what the man next to him had been.

China had been reeling from defeat after defeat in the early days of the Japanese invasion. The fascist devils had taken Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing in rapid order. Murdering and raping and pillaging a swathe through the heart of China. They had crushed the central government's best divisions, and it seemed nothing could have stopped them.

Until they'd run into Li Zongren at Taierzhuang.

Every schoolchild knew the story now, of how Li Zongren had drawn the Japanese into a fight in the close confined streets of the city where their artillery and their tanks meant nothing, before attacking them from all sides until they were entirely overwhelmed. It had been the first real victory of the War of Resistance, and it had made Li Zongren into a legend.

And now that legend was here, looking over Hong Tianhu's shoulder as the Head of Research watched the three trucks in the testing yard with a mounting anxiety.

They had built five working prototypes, but the first had exploded during its test. Hong Tianhu did not wait for another stack of files to appear mysteriously on his desk. Instead, he got to grips with the problem almost immediately. Within two days it was fixed for the four remaining prototypes. The second test had worked perfectly.

And now the three remaining examples were rigged up on the flatbeds of heavy trucks, ready to go.

There was still time for things to go wrong. Hong Tianhu did not want to think of the consequences if they did. He did not need to look behind him again to see the newsreel cameras running behind him. A failure this high-profile would inevitably bring investigators, and they would not have to look very far to find the stacks of foreign documents which had bridged so many gaps in the weapon's rapid development.

No doubt somebody would be asking one Doctor (Engineering) Hong Tianhu some pointed questions then.

"Platforms one through three, prime, ready..." He swallowed, hard. "Fire."

He needn't have worried. All three systems went off perfectly. One by one, the silver arrows lept off their launch rails with sharp bursts of flame, and shot high into the cloudless summer day.

Twenty thousand metres above, in the rarefied reaches of the stratosphere, three foil-lined balloons hung in the thin air a few hundred metres apart from each other, their radio transmitters beeping quietly as they floated far above the service ceiling of almost any aircraft. Below them, three silver shapes streaked up from the ground at a speed nearly three times that of sound.

One by one, silver arrow met glimmering balloon in a concussive blast of mutual annihilation, until all that remained were the black haloes of three fireballs, and a shower of charred tinsel, falling to the ground below.

Hong Tianhu felt a gnarled hand on his shoulder. The Hero of Taierzhuang was looking up through the vision slit at the falling wreckage.

And he was smiling.

[Cataphrak]

Military Factory No. 21, Outside Kunming, Yunnan
July 16th, 1958

Hong Tianhu came into work early that day, which was how he caught his secretary packing.

She looked up just as she was hurriedly dumping a set of personal effects into what looked very much like the bag she had been carrying when she had arrived at the factory all those years ago.

"Tianhu shushu! I-" The bag went behind her back. "I've been transferred. I need to go."

"Today?" Hong asked incredulously. "Who has ordered this?"

"The General Staff," Li replied readily, as if it'd been a line she had rehearsed. "The papers are on your desk."

"Li Xiaobao..." Hong began.

"I'm afraid you'll have to find a new secretary," she continued hurriedly. "I'm sorry."

"I know you were the one who was putting the files on my desk."

Li's shoulders tensed for a moment, then relaxed. "I suppose I should have known that was going to happen. You weren't selected for your stupidity, after all."

Hong's eyes narrowed. "What was I selected for?"

"Integrity, persistence, intelligence," Li replied, looking Hong Tianhu dead in the face in a way she had never done before. "And above all, loyalty to the cause of the Republic. My masters knew that new and terrible weapons were being developed by our enemies and our allies both. They believed that you could be trusted to develop one of China's answers. They were right. "

Half of him wanted to take the compliment as it stood. But he had to know for sure. "All these virtues, yet now I am suddenly to be abandoned?"

Li shrugged. "Your missiles are entering full production. My work here is done. A Xia never stays in town at the end of the story. I am needed elsewhere. You are not the only one they chose."

At this point, Hong Tianhu had absolutely no question who they were. Officially, they were an organisation of ghosts, disbanded after the end of the war with Japan. Clearly that was not the case.

That also meant that there was no point in arguing the matter.

"Then allow me to ask you one more question, Li Xiaobao, if that is your real name."

"It will be for the next half hour."

"Why let me know all this?" Hong asked. "All this about who you work for, about the fact that they still exist in the first place, even. Why tell me?"

"Because you, of all people, deserve to know that this country still has heroes," Li replied, her voice firm and fervent. "Even if they are nothing more than fleeting memories of a shadow play. The good and the loyal and the virtuous need to know that the Republic yet holds the Mandate of Heaven, even if they cannot see the evidence with their own eyes. I will leave this place for somewhere else, but Li Xiaobao will stay with you, and every time you remember me, she will speak with my voice. Do you understand?"

Hong considered the matter for a moment. Then nodded. "Yes, I think I do."

Li looked back down at the bag in her hand. "I have to go. I'm sorry."

Hong Tianhu nodded, slowly. "Farewell, Li Xiaobao. You have been a most exemplary assistant."

She replied with a soft, almost sad smile. "Farewell, Tianhu shushu."

And then, she was gone.