by Nyx Smith
And that means the deckers are lying. There's no auction. Gordon looks to the screen, the image of the Serpent, Machiko. She is the key. The warrior. The selfless defender of Chairman Honjowara and Nagato Combine. She's talking to the deckers, probably inside the Neurocomp facility, but why? Has she followed the clues Gordon offered her to their final destination? Has she deduced the identity of the parties behind the buy-out of Nagato debt? Could she be even now confronting the deckers? accusing them of corporate treason? preparing to, what? cut them off from the Matrix?
What in Christ is she thinking? What will she do when faced with the imminent destruction of the very foundation of her whole world?
It means taking a gamble.
Gambling that the deckers will play Machiko-san the same way they're playing him. "I need authorization from my director," Gordon says. "Two minutes."
"Two minutes may be too long," Janus-face says.
Gordon rises and walks through the door to his outer office. His entire exec protect detail is waiting on the far side of the doorway. His deputy and his deputy's deputy and the chief of his special operations staff and the rest of his senior staff are all standing there, obviously tense and alert, and they all seem about to start talking at once except Gordon immediately slashes a hand across the front of his throat.
No one says a word.
Gordon looks to his watch. He waits for one minute and fifteen seconds to tick past, then returns to his private office and sits at his desk. Janus-face is still on-screen.
"You've got a deal," Gordon says. "I'm authorized by the chief of Fuchi America to negotiate an immediate transfer of every property involved. Money's no object."
"You're got a quick mind, omae."
"I know a sweet deal when I see it."
40
"I don't think so," says SmoKe.
Machiko looks back to the wall-sized display screen. "What you think is of no significance. You will be detained. Your access to the Matrix will be eliminated. In due course, you will be questioned by the Security Service. You would be wise to consider the likelihood that ultimately your fate will be determined by Chairman Honjowara."
The decker's neochromatic icons on the display darken and fade into blackness. They give no reply. Machiko puzzles over this, but then the deputy VP turns to the GCP project director, saying, "See that Machiko-san's instructions are carried out at once."
The project director bows, looking pale, and turns to the door. Only the door does not open. The man, hastening to exit the room, impacts the door with surprising force and staggers back, wobbling. Machiko takes three steps and catches his arm. The others, the deputy VP, the two Security Service guards, help to maneuver the man into a nearby chair. He is bruised and unsettled, but not seriously hurt. In another few moments he and the others are all wondering about the door.
The guards make a cursory inspection. A small red bulb beside the door indicates that it is locked. The deputy VP himself works the lock's keypad, but the door remains locked. One of the guards keys a telecom, but that is not working either. Machiko opens the commlink on her left vambrace, keys the code for Nagato Corp operations center, but is answered only by static.
The deputy VP checks several of the consoles lining the room. His expression rises from puzzlement to disbelief to apparent amazement. "It would appear that nothing in this room is working."
"How is that possible?" Machiko asks.
The project director, frowning intently, looks from the consoles to Machiko, then to the wall-sized display screen at the head of the room. "The entire facility is computer-controlled."
"Are you saying that the GCP deckers—"
"Good guess, orruie."
Machiko looks to the display at the head of the room. The deckers' neochromatic icons are back. "You will surrender control of this facility's systems at once."
"I don't think so," says SmoKe.
"Do not compel me to take extreme measures."
"You don't want to do that," says NodeBoy. "You wouldn't like the results. We've got all the hole cards. We own the game. Here, check it out."
A secondary window opens on the display screen, presenting an image of Gordon Ito. He sits in a tall-backed chair, a wall of windows behind him, the lights of Manhattan and the Jersey shore clearly visible. "I'm authorized by the chief of Fuchi America to negotiate an immediate transfer of Neurocomp," Ito-san says. "Money's no object."
The image freezes. Machiko holds herself motionless. Why do the deckers show this sequence involving Gordon Ito? Does it mean that Ito-san has been manipulating events, the true force behind the deckers' revolt, since the beginning? "Please explain yourselves at once," Machiko says lowly.
"Null sheen," says SmoKe.
"We're negotiating a change in ownership," says NodeBoy. "If you try to interfere, we'll throw the whole load of Nagato debt into the deal. And you can flush your precious Nagato Combine down the nearest squathole."
Machiko stands immobile, feeling as if rooted to the floor. She finds NodeBoy's explanation difficult to understand and all but impossible to accept. Only a few minutes ago the GCP deckers were claiming to be engaged in a bloody revolution to escape corporate control. Now they are negotiating the transfer Of Neurocomp to Fuchi ownership? To Fuchi Industrial Electronics'! She cannot believe that, cannot believe they would even suggest it, for it makes no sense. The only way that it would make any sense at all is if they are using the device of a traitor or enemy, a tactic of delay, a maneuver intended to deceive, a lie designed to forestall any action that might unhinge the deckers' plan.
Why use such a tactic? Because they need time. There is timing in everything. The timing here is especially crucial. How much time do they need? Minutes? Perhaps only seconds?
What is their true plan? What could they be doing to accomplish their stated objective of "taking control"? Could they be negotiating with Gordon Ito, with Fuchi, not for ownership of Neurocomp but for the entire body of Nagato Corporation?
Could it be anything but that, given their depraved disregard for the many lives they have spent, the blood shed, and the malice they bear Nagato Combine?
"You would destroy Nagato Combine?" Machiko asks.
"In a nanoflash," SmoKe replies.
The path then is clear. The deckers have the power and the motivation to destroy, and the blood they have shed more than proves their willingness to commit any crime, any treason, any evil, no matter how diabolic. What they are actually doing is no longer of any importance. Machiko must act. She must do as she has been trained to do. She must remember the Way, and the Way is death. Inexorable death. Stamp both feet to the earth and pass through a wall of iron. Do not consider victory or defeat. Consider only that the enemy must be destroyed.
"I will give you one chance to surrender."
SmoKe begins howling with laughter.
Machiko turns to the broad wall of windows overlooking the floor of the GCP lab. She lifts her SCK M-100 SMG from her side, tabs the safety, and squeezes the trigger.
The savage clattering of the weapon gives rise to a deafening tumult: the crashing of shattered transparex panes, shouts and screams, the sudden blaring of alarms. Machiko does not pause to look back, for she knows what she will see, knows it intuitively. She will see the two executives looking at her in astonishment. She will see the two Security Service guards watching in alarm, perhaps seizing the grips of their sidearms, but hesitating to draw, unsure of what to do. She did not take the time to explain her intentions, could not reveal her intent to the enemy, and now she must live with that and the likely consequences.
"COVER!" she shouts.
As she thrusts herself at the shattered pane before her, she hears the rapid stammering of an autofire weapon, the ruthless noise of an Ares single-barrel machine gun. She does not have to look. The sound comes from directly behind her. The door to the room has opened and the weapon pod mounted in the ceiling of the corridor outside has unlimbered and opened fire.
As she
dives through the shattered pane, toward the floor of the lab, bullets pound at the armored fabric of her overvest. An electrostatic screen that a moment ago did not exist snaps on, clawing past her waist and hips. The bullets batter her flesh even as electrostatic energy stabs through her nerves like ten thousand electrified razors.
The pain can be muted, injuries suppressed, yet the screams rising from the room at her back close around her heart like a savage crushing fist.
Forgive me .. .
She cannot let herself hear it.
The floor of the GCP lab is now two, three meters beneath her, coming up fast. She has only instants. She holds the SCK out before her, gripped in both hands. She points the weapon at the center of the three tanks filled with their murky blue fluids and dark humanoid shapes. She sees the figures in white coats scattered about the floor of the lab, some turning, looking toward her, looking terrified or filled with horror or paralyzed by shock and astonishment. The first one is just opening her mouth to shriek or shout as Machiko again squeezes the trigger.
The bullets smash at the center tank. The walls of the tank seem almost to bulge outward, before exploding.
"Nnnnnnnoooooohhhhhh! " rises one voice.
Machiko sees the humanoid shape still hanging suspended in the ruptured tank—amid arrays of tubes and wires—twitching and shaking under the assault from her SCK.
She has just enough time to see the murky fluids that gush from the sides of the ruptured tank flickering with spectral blue flames.
Then, she lands.
She lands badly, amid crashing console screens and cables that fill the air around her with blazing showers of sparks. She tumbles to the floor and seeks shelter beneath the front ledge of a console. The facility's computer-automated weapons systems pursue her even here, to the white-tiled floor of the lab.
Off to her far right another door stands open and another ceiling-mounted weapon tracks her, and now she feels the pounding against her feet, her legs, her hips. She rolls backwards onto her feet and flips herself bodily over a console that appears lined with nothing but row after row of touch-sensitive keys. Shards of metal and shattered plastic shower the top of her head as she lands on toes and fingertips behind the console.
Two meters to her rear a man in a white coat slowly spins and spins, wounds erupting like red puckered sores in a line from his right shoulder down to his groin.
Machiko rams a fresh clip into the SCK. The pain is getting more insistent. She is aware of at least half a dozen minor wounds that will eventually require medical attention. The impact of her fall, the electrostatic barrier, the bullets—it is all adding up. How much more she can take is not a calculation that matters. She will go on till either the enemy is crushes or she is dead.
Without warning, a new enemy attacks. Machiko feels their paranatural power filling her belly with the frigid chill of fear even as their sudden, shocking howls seize at her limbs and body, trying to slow her down.
Then the hounds are upon her. Barghests. Like Neapolitan mastiffs, but larger, heavier. Barghests are used by the Security Service in many Nagato facilities. Why they come into this lab and attack her, Machiko does not even attempt to guess.
The beasts impact her side. Mass and momentum combine to drive her sideways against a console burning with graphic displays. Machiko's katana sword flashes downward, cleaving the neck of the beast that rips at her right thigh. She twists and heaves and flips the beast gnawing at her left arm over the ridge at the rear of a console, snapping its spine.
Blood streams from her wounds like veins of death.
She breathes deeply, harshly.
Spirit settled, she skirts a line of consoles and drops to a crouch at one corner of a large boxy unit disgorging thick white smoke. She unleashes another clattering barrage of autofire. The second tank ruptures. The norm male within bucks and jerks beneath her barrage. The murky fluids that shower the floor and surrounding consoles rage with bluish fire. Wherever the fluids fall, plastic evaporates like steam and metal runs like water. Floor tiles bubble and sag.
The entire installation supporting the first ruptured tank abruptly crashes, dropping a meter beneath the level of the lab floor.
As Machiko moves to the third and final tank, she becomes aware of the console displays flashing around her. "Stop shooting," the display reads. "I don't want to fight any more."
Machiko understands. Tai No Sen, it is called. A tactic of the ancient masters. Feign weakness, then attack.
She rises fully to her feet, discarding the empty SCK and extending the Beretta 200ST out before her. She pulls the trigger rapid-fire, unleashing three-round bursts till all twenty-six rounds have shattered the panes of the tank and pummeled the norm female twitching within.
And now a whirlwind arises, a glimmer in the air that evolves into a mass of churning black and affects the lab like a cyclone. A handcomp is snatched from the floor and driven into the metal wall of the lab like a nail into wood. A woman is hurled five or six meters through the air. Machiko risks a glance into the astral and sees a firestorm of raging mana, some elemental force, some creature of the arcane, swelling to fill the space around her as if to overwhelm her.
She lets the Beretta fall. Guns are useless against astral beings. She takes two swords in hand, sword and companion sword, katana and wakizashi. With these two extensions of her force of will, her settled spirit, she will defeat even this creation of the astral. She does not know how this creation came to be, but she assumes it is a product of the arcane blend of magic and science used on the GCP project.
The whirlwind grows stronger. The mass of churning black draws near, then fades. It vanishes from sight. The whirlwind dies away.
On the astral, nothing remains.
The installation supporting the third ruptured tank crashes beneath floor level. Machiko watches the body inside it wither, shrinking into a blackened lump not even vaguely resembling a human or metahuman. The other two are the same. They are dead. Her enemy is defeated. Nagato Combine may yet be crushed or divided, but she has done all that a warrior may ever do.
She finds a chair beside a dead man, a dead man in a white coat, and sits, and breathes. Her commlink works now. Works perfectly. She puts through a priority call to Honjowara-sama and explains all that she knows briefly and succinctly, and concludes, "The GCP project has been terminated. The traitors are dead."
Honjowara-sama says he understands.
Machiko doubts this is possible, but breaks the link and closes her eyes, wanting only rest.
Epilogue
The sound brushes her ears like the soft rustle of leaves on a cool night in the spring: the flutter of silk, the whisper of a footstep against varnished wood flooring.
Machiko wakes, but does not open her eyes. She listens to the night, the quiet. Soon, the sliding wood door at the rear of the house softly grumbles, slipping open, and the subtle footsteps go on, moving to the back porch, then finally into the garden at the rear of the house.
Machiko waits a little while, then rises, draws on a short jade green robe, and ties the belt tight. She dismisses the twinges and aches of injuries still healing. She reaches for her katana, not because she may need it, but because it is as much a part of her as the green serpent tattoos twining around her body.
She finds the night outside pleasantly cool and still. She finds her mother at the rear of the garden, as expected. Mother sits on a small stone bench beside a small artificial pond, ringed by fragrant flowers and flowering forsythia. Her long robe is so pale a pastel pink it seems white, a luminous white, lit by the crescent moon just visible through the trees at the rear of the property. That same light makes mother's jet black hair seem lush and glossy. She once had hair as long as Machiko's own. Now she wears it close by the shoulders, softly styled.
As Machiko sits beside her, she stiffens and catches her breath. "Oh!" she gasps. "Machiko..."
A response so familiar it is poignant. The pained smile that curves Mother's lips speaks the
words Machiko has heard a thousand times before. Daughter, you move too quietly. Like a ghost. I did not hear you approaching.
"Please excuse me," Machiko murmurs.
But there is no need for apologies. Mother shifts near and embraces her about the shoulders, then joins their hands. "Couldn't you sleep?" Mother asks.
"I heard you pass by."
Mother's smile turns warm. "I'm sorry. You must be used to it by now. I could never walk quietly enough, even when you were a child. You always woke up."
Machiko nods, and says, "Why aren't you sleeping?"
"I don't know. I'm so tired. Tired but yet awake. Your father is so upset with all this business, all that's happened."
"You should take a sedative."
"I take so many pills already."
For allergies, primarily. "Mother, the Security Service investigation will go on for days, perhaps weeks. You must rest. You and father must both be rested or you will not be able to think clearly."
"I wish I could stop thinking long enough to sleep."
"You must try."
"I try every night."
But it is very difficult. Machiko knows this too well. In the weeks since the carnage at Neurocomp, Father has had two episodes of angina, brief episodes, but of concern because they came so close together. His doctors have ordered him to take a long weekend, to rest, and have prescribed tranquilizers and sleeping pills.
Nagato Corp debt still lies in the hands of Zurich bankers. For several days, Nagato Corporation has seemed to teeter on the brink of the abyss. However, Honjowara-sama has lodged an appeal with the Corporate Court, claiming the debt was procured illegally, and, curiously, a number of corps have come forward with evidence that their financial accounts have been penetrated, funds stolen.
Of course, none of these corps has any connection with Nagato Combine or with Fuchi. The traitors were careful to be very discreet.