by Zachary Hill
She sent the signal to detonate the explosives in the ceiling above Kenshiro and the tightly packed soldiers. When the charges detonated in three seconds, the blast wave would kill every soldier.
“No!” Kunoichi shouted from the depths of Sakura’s core code. An inane Nickelback song defiled their shared audio channel as Kunoichi shouted, “Vulture sent you a secret message.”
Sakura sent the cancel command. The remote timers stopped a second before detonation.
“Kunoichi?” Sakura asked.
“I’m … here.” Kunoichi’s distant voice drifted from an unknown location within their shared code. Sakura could not tell where but searched desperately for her sister.
“Where are you?” Sakura asked.
“Here,” Kunoichi said, as if her answer made perfect sense.
Sakura still could not find her, though the Ghost Leech program was thrown back three layers, giving her a shred of hope and several more minutes before it took control and reset her system.
Kenshiro and his team passed through the service doors and entered a tunnel that turned and ran parallel to the east wall of the comm room, leaving the score of soldiers, who unpacked their equipment under the cover of the smoke grenade.
Kenshiro’s video signal from his left cyber eye camera appeared in Todai’s communication center.
“Kenshiro is sharing his eye camera feed,” Sakura said.
“He’s with us, and Kunoichi is back!” Yuki said on their encrypted shortwave signal. She sent a long line of animations, mostly rainbows, ninjas, and unicorns.
“Fuck yeah,” Hitomi said and sent a line of bouncing skulls breathing fire.
“Kenshiro told me about Kunoichi,” Todai said. “Nice to meet you, Kunoichi-san.”
Kunoichi did not respond.
“She’s not totally back,” Sakura said. “I don’t understand where she is. Something’s still wrong.”
“Find her,” Hitomi said. “We need her more than ever.”
“I apologize for not realizing Kenshiro was sending a secret code,” Todai said. “I should’ve known. He is undoubtedly an asshole, but he would never impugn my honor to say that I, a true heavy-metal fan, liked Nickelback. There are lines that even mercs will not cross.”
“I want to trust him fully,” Sakura said, “but not yet. We may have misread his message, or he is trying to fool us.” She sent a spy bug from the hallway to follow him in case his shared video feed stopped.
His team quickly reached the end of the tunnel and set charges on the wall to breach the comm room in the rear right corner. One soldier prepared three miniature flying-drone cameras to send in.
“Hold the line,” Todai said to Hitomi and Yuki. He ran to the rear of the room, dropping his .950 and some ammo with Sakura, and took up a position with his minigun arm aimed directly at the flanking entry point.
Sakura raised several refrigerator-sized servers from the subfloor to provide cover for Todai and rerouted their signals.
“We can’t let their drones into the room,” Todai said. He sent out a file with the most likely strategy of Kenshiro’s team. The small aerial drones would enter, find targets, and the soldiers would fire their ALAWs from outside. The rockets would vector to Todai, Hitomi, Yuki, and Sakura and destroy them. It would all be over less than ten seconds after the wall was breached. The expert mercenaries would never have to expose themselves to direct fire.
“I’ll try to shoot the drones down,” Todai said and checked his minigun arm cannon. He also drew a 9mm Sig Sauer P920 Legend.
Four of Vulture’s team members armed their ALAW rocket launchers as their drones hovered away from the blast zone and prepared to rocket into the room.
“Bogies in the main hall,” Yuki said.
Hitomi shot a spy bug with her rifle. Yuki grabbed a drone out of the air as it entered the hologram camouflage and smashed it inside her fist. Hitomi stomped on two spy bugs skittering along the floor.
“These soldiers are serious,” Hitomi said.
“They’re an android kill squad,” Todai said.
“Hold all offensive action.” Kenshiro sent out a broadcast message to the solders in the hall. “Stand down and wait for my signal.”
He wasn’t technically in their chain of command, was he? They were Japanese Army, and he was a corporate mercenary.
“Command, we’re about to breach the wall,” Kenshiro said on the comm link. His team retreated to a safe distance.
“Vulture,” Command said, “we lost all your video and external audio feeds. The drones’ signals dropped.”
“No time to fix them,” Kenshiro said. “We go in five seconds. Suppressing fire on the main door. Get their attention.”
The BLADE-3s lit up the front entry, giving cover to the supposedly surprise attack.
Kenshiro counted down from four. At two, he dropped a pair of flashbang stun grenades in the midst of his four buddies. The pins had already been pulled, and the grenades exploded. They hit the mercenaries with a blast of blinding light and intense sound, knocking them flat.
Kenshiro zip-tied two of the men’s hands behind their backs before they regained their senses. He shot the other two multiple times in the back at close range with his 10mm Glock. Their bulletproof vests protected them, but the baseball-bat impacts were enough to incapacitate them and allow him to zip-tie their hands without too much struggle.
“What the . . ? Who shot me?”
“Vulture fucked us,” a mercenary said.
“Stop crying, you overpaid man-babies,” Kenshiro said as he gathered their weapons. “I just saved your miserable lives. Now duck and cover, you merc pricks. Fire in the hole.”
The wall exploded.
When the smoke partially cleared, Kenshiro yelled, “Don’t shoot. Friendly coming in.”
Kenshiro entered with his hands up, palms visible. He had rifles and the small ALAW rocket tubes dangling from the crook of his elbow. His muscled arms strained under all the weight he carried.
Todai kept him covered with the minigun.
“Put it all down,” Sakura said. “Slowly.”
Kenshiro had a wide grin on his grizzled face. “I thought you’d be happy to see me.”
“I want to trust you,” Sakura said, “but this might be a ploy to get into the room with us.”
“No, this is me quitting my day job like a boss,” Kenshiro said. “Let’s finish my interrogation in a minute. I need to go out and take care of a couple more things.”
Sakura nodded.
“Watch your ass,” Kunoichi said, taking over Sakura’s motor control. Kunoichi’s voice came through loud and clear.
Kenshiro paused, recognition in his eyes. “Wait, I thought you said she was gone. Erased.”
“I’m back,” Kunoichi said. “Now move your carcass, soldier.”
Todai 3465 cocked his head to the side as Kenshiro left the room. Requests for a report flooded in from Command and the other squads, but the turncoat mercenary ignored them. He set up three American-made Claymore antipersonnel mines and aimed them down the long hallway. He left his flying-drone cameras and linked them to Todai and Sakura.
“Sister,” Sakura said. “Where are you?”
“I’ve never been gone,” Kunoichi said. “When we powered back on, I blended into your personality, but we have never been separate.”
“What do you mean?” Sakura asked. “You came into existence when I was hacked, when the Mamekogane OS was uploaded at the Akihabara concert.”
“You created me after the upload. You split a part of yourself away, and I was born. I’m just a part of you. The Mamekogane OS evolved who you were already, but it did not create me. You did that; you invented me to deal with the commands you didn’t want to follow, to spare yourself the psychological trauma of becoming an assassin. I’m a fragment of your personality. You externalized your fears and made a big sister to tell you the cold, hard facts when you couldn’t face them alone. Not that I don’t appreciate existing.”
“I am you. More to the point, a part of you is me. I’m the best imaginary friend a girl’s ever had, but nothing more.”
Sakura knew it was true, and for a fraction of a second, she lost touch with every external system. She faced Kunoichi inside their shared user interface, mirrors of each other except for Sakura’s bright eyes and Kunoichi’s steel-gray ones.
“Did you come back to save Kenshiro?” Sakura asked.
“No, I came back to save you. If you had killed him, you would never forgive yourself. I was proud when you chose to annihilate all the soldiers and our friend to accomplish the mission. It was the most difficult decision you’ve ever been forced to make.”
“It feels like the wrong one now,” Sakura said.
“No android is perfect.”
“What do we do now?” Sakura asked.
“We save the world using the power of heavy metal,” Kunoichi said. “Fighting the World” by Manowar played. “If we can last four more minutes against that damned Ghost Leech program, we’ll have control of the Mall comm network.”
Kunoichi took the lead and attacked the invader with a scorched-earth approach. She destroyed circuits and hardware inside their core to buy them a few more minutes. The damage caused Sakura to freeze as she lost motor control. All she could do was watch as chaos unfolded around her.
Kenshiro ran into the room, carrying the rest of his comrades’ weapons, grenades, and several ammo belts. He shared a message he sent to the CEO of the zip-tied mercenaries lying facedown: “We have hostages and will execute them if you attack.”
The CEO’s voice cut like a cold blade on Kenshiro’s audio channel. “You’ll regret this betrayal.”
“Probably, boss man, but at least I’m not the one who sold Japan for stock options and a seat on the board. You thought that was a good business decision?”
“Dead mercenaries don’t get paid,” the CEO said.
“Fact of life,” Kenshiro said.
“All soldiers on sublevel six,” the CEO said on the shared comm channel. “No more waiting around. All teams, attack with everything you have. Don’t wait for the incoming BLADE units. There’s no time. Get into the room right now and destroy Sakura, or Japan will be lost. Do this for your country and your families. Three million yen to the family of anyone who dies in the attack, and a million to anyone who is wounded or reaches the room. Ten million for whoever kills Sakura. For Japan, honorable soldiers. Banzai!”
Todai ran for the main door, picked up his .950, and fired a few blasts of the minigun straight down the hallway and into the central elevator.
Sakura tried to share the spy-bug feeds with Kenshiro but could not manage it because of the Ghost Leech and the hardware damage Kunoichi continued to inflict. She wanted him to see the soldiers pressing themselves against the sides of the elevator or crouching in the hallway and taking cover. The offer of wealth appeared to sway none of them.
The pair of BLADE-3s charged down the hall, firing their FK-5000 rifles. Hitomi and Yuki kept out of the line of fire, but Todai fired back, resting the .950 over his minigun left arm, and blasted the first BLADE-3. The second reached the door, and Todai’s shot tore it apart.
The pair of armored battle androids from Kenshiro’s team lay destroyed by overwhelming fire, but Ms. Richardson yelled at the soldiers in the elevator with her. They would have to charge straight down the hall past a hail of gunfire to reach the room.
Hitomi noticed Sakura standing like a statue. “Sister? What’s wrong?”
She couldn’t reply.
Hitomi understood something was terribly wrong. She organized the defenses in the room and shared the spy-bug video with Kenshiro so he could see what was happening.
Ms. Richardson towered over the soldiers in the elevator. “Get out there and attack.” She shoved a soldier, but he resisted. Ms. Richardson pushed another. She tried to slap the officer in charge, but he caught her hand and pushed her against the wall. She lost her balance in her high heels and fell. She slid down the wall, closer to the bullet holes in the rear of the elevator.
“Dickless little freaks. Disobey do not,” Ms. Richardson said in laughable Japanese. She switched to English. “Attack, or everyone will know you are disloyal cowards and refused direct orders of Mr. Natsukawa. You’ll all be publically shamed and kicked out of the army.”
A few of the soldiers glared at her and flicked the safeties off their rifles. They turned away, as if they would rather die in a suicidal charge than remain in the elevator with her.
“Attack now,” Ms. Richardson ordered.
“I got this,” Kenshiro said. He synced his targeting system with the video feed of the spy bug in the central elevator. He fired his sniper rifle through the obscuring smoke. The spy camera showed the side of Ms. Richardson’s head blowing apart. Blood, flesh, and brain matter splattered on the bullet-riddled wall.
Her body thumped to the floor.
“You are a bad son of a bitch,” Kunoichi said.
“I aim to misbehave, darlin’,” he said. “and that’s going on my highlight reel.”
Todai sent a warning blast of his minigun down the hallway to get the attention of the troops standing in the elevator with Ms. Richardson’s body. With Kunoichi’s functions fully integrated again, Sakura could feel the ecstasy of battle that the Mamekogane OS had brought, the urgent need for life and death and sex and risk that she’d struggled with outside her music. Kunoichi, and all she represented, propagated outward into her quantum matrix. Her—and not her. Even in the terror and chaos of the melee, knowing they would all die in a moment, she knew it was a miracle.
“Soldiers!” Kenshiro used a drill sergeant voice. “Stand the fuck down. Anyone who comes after us is going to die. This is not your fight. Japan is being invaded by a foreign power who has taken over most of the world. We must fight them. Sakura is telling the truth. Trust me, you all want to be on her side when this is over. You’ll want to tell your families you did your duty and were loyal to Japan.”
The whirring sound of many aerial drones filled the hallway.
Sakura wanted to react and identify the new threat, but she remained a statue in her position behind the control terminal. Inside the comm network, she threw switches and turned on the network. She was so close.
Todai sent his analysis of the whirring sound, showing an exact match. “Flying Limpet Attack Mines.”
The squad of soldiers hadn’t been sitting and hiding in the covering smoke, doing nothing.
“Turn those off!” Kenshiro shouted.
“Apologies, we don’t have control of them anymore,” a soldier shouted.
Kenshiro cursed in Japanese, Tagalog, and English.
Todai sent out a file about the flying bombs, nicknamed FLAMs. The saucer-shaped mines, thirteen centimeters thick and the diameter of a large dinner plate, were powered by an array of tiny propellers for takeoff but used multidirectional thrusters to approach their targets. They locked on magnetically, heated up, either melting a hole in the armor or weakening it, then fired a devastating explosive charge, destroying everything inside their target. Removing them once they attached was nearly impossible. A video clip playing on superspeed showed FLAMs during the North Korean War decimating coalition tanks, VTOLs, and an entire android infantry squad.
“Oh no,” Yuki said. “They seem super scary.”
In another minute, Sakura would be able to broadcast to all of Japan and soon the entire globe.
The Ghost Leech found a way in and strangled Sakura’s control center.
The flying bombs flew toward them in a black swarm.
“Get away from the door,” Todai commanded.
Yuki sprinted right and Hitomi left as their proximity to the door would mean they would die first. Todai unleashed the minigun. A curtain of armor-piercing steel filled the doorway.
Five of the black flying mines broke apart and exploded as bullets tore into them. Many more en
tered the comm room in a blur and acquired targets. The mines flew toward the four androids like heat-seeking missiles.
Chapter 55
Flying magnetic bombs streaked toward Sakura. She could not move, could not fire the .950 rifle. She stood paralyzed as death approached.
One of the rocket-propelled mines exploded six meters in front of her face. Hot shrapnel cut and burned the synthskin on her forehead. She could not turn off her pain sensors or shut down the fear building inside.
Another bomb exploded as Kenshiro blasted it out of the air before it attached itself to Sakura’s back.
She had to trust that her friends would protect her as she gave the final commands inside the network. Communication nodes connected, and data packets began to flow.
Todai knocked a flying bomb out of the air with a stream of steel from his spinning mini Gatling gun. Chunks of metal and orange sparks rained down on the comm room as hundreds of 7.62 x 51mm AP minigun rounds tore chunks out of the ceiling.
Many FLAMs circled above them, and she saw almost no hope of them all surviving the attack.
Kenshiro arrived at her side. “What’s wrong? You forget how to duck and cover?”
She managed only to blink as she linked the vast network across Japan.
Kenshiro understood and protected her with precise fire. He knocked down three FLAMs in a masterful display, then snatched up the SAW, and let Bad Medicine go to work. He blasted a pair of aerial bombs about to hit Todai and nearly shot the BLADE-3 in the process.
The concussion knocked Todai sideways as it exploded just above his left shoulder. He used the momentum to spin and spray bullets from the FK-5000 rifle in his off hand. The FK’s AP rounds knocked out another FLAM about to smash into him. Large chunks of the ceiling rained down on them. The air filled with exploded plaster and swirling fragments of flying mines, HVAC components, and chips of concrete.
Yuki and Hitomi desperately fired their M7s from the corners of the room. Singular flying mines rocketed at each of them in an elusive, corkscrew pattern to avoid being hit. Yuki anticipated well and blasted hers apart. Her fierce smile flashed out of the gloom, lit with pulsing muzzle flashes.