Grey Ronin (The Awakened Book 3)

by Matthew S. Cox

  “Nippon Shōgyō-Kumiai sometimes takes the children of their targets. Most girls become concubines. Some are trained as ninja. Neither fate is kinder than if they had ended her life at eight.”

  Kutaragi squeezed his shoulder. “Be thankful you were not forced to carry the memory of such a horrible sight.”

  Mamoru’s face remained a mask of stone. “I shall.”

  “If the opportunity presents itself, and by some chance she yet lives, I shall ask Minamoto-heika for his blessing to acquire her from them.”

  Mamoru sat motionless, staring through the smoke as the old man walked out.

  “I like you anyway. I say mean stuff so Mother thinks I don’t,” said a tiny voice in his memory.

  The wisp fluttered as if someone walked by, returning seconds later to a calm thread of white winding toward the ceiling. A presence built up at the walls, as if the room was about to implode. Mamoru remembered closing his eyes and trying not to hear the little voice. This time, he left them open. The heaviness built until smoke burst forth with a great roar from the bowl and engulfed the room. The shock of it sent him upright in bed―miles and years from that moment.

  He touched a hand to his forehead, brushing the sweat away. His arm fell to his lap, leaving him staring at his pale reflection drawn in moonlight on the black lacquer face of a wardrobe at the foot of the bed. Loose hair tickled at the small of his back.

  “She asks them to spare her the pain of losing her son,” said child-Sadako in the back of his mind.

  The sight of his mother’s body riddled with bullets leapt out of the dark at him.

  They granted her wish.

  “Mother was too passive,” said his younger self. “She should have fought back. Father was too weak to save himself.”

  I have filled my thoughts with deception. They were dead before they knew they were being attacked. Killed by dishonorable ambushers afraid to show themselves to an unarmed woman. My parents were not weak.

  He clenched his fists, raging with anger at the same time he cried.

  Who had I become that I felt nothing?

  “…not forced to carry the memory of such a horrible sight,” said Kutaragi from the edges of darkness.

  Mamoru covered his face as child-Sadako’s screaming faded off to silence.

  It is the sights I did not see that haunt me.

  Black Dragon

  he warmth of dawn nudged him awake hours later. He found himself lying on his side with one arm over the pillow. He considered it strange he had slept past sunrise, and stranger he was not flat on his back. Window blinds heeded a verbal command and closed the room off from the harsh glare of the sun. West or East did not matter. Every building in Private Sector Boston had the same silvery glass that bounced light at all angles.

  He moaned and sat up, rubbing at his cheeks to hasten wakefulness. Even through the blinds, the fierce daylight turned the room amber. Mamoru stood and took a step for the door when the lack of any scent of cooking food stood out. He thought of Nami as he peered at the kitchenette, imagining her standing there in a robe.

  Do I miss her, or do I miss her cooking for me?

  Mamoru chuckled for a second before frowning. “Perhaps I am the one who needs to reveal my true self.”

  One soft red light winked at the corner of the Matsushita Oni at the center of the dining room table. It, like his agreed task, waited for him, a raven shadow looming over his shoulder. The small space mocked his former dojo. He exhaled and trudged out onto the patio through the automatic door.

  Cold morning air woke him the rest of the way as he entered the only area large enough for his morning routine. Putting all thoughts of Nami, Archon, Awakened, and Minamoto out of his mind, he reached within and sought calm. For an hour, he stretched and worked through three katas until he had covered himself in sweat despite the chill.

  Autoshowers offered a far less pleasurable experience than two women bathing him did, but the machine never cringed as if expecting to be hit, and it did not have thoughts and dreams of its own. He tolerated the barrage of soap and hot water with his head bowed. His world had fallen around him, and dragged his stoicism with it. How large is my part in tearing her from her family? He had not let on that he had heard Ayame’s sobs at night for the first month, before her new reality sank in and became inescapable. With a grunt, Mamoru pushed his way out of the tube and threw on pants and a haori, but left it hanging open.

  The food reassembler created a mass of yellow foam-like substance that smelled of eggs next to a cream-colored atrocity bearing a subtle hint of potato and butter. He ate in silence, the scrape of his plastic fork on the plate the loudest sound in the world for several minutes. These people considered the private sector apartment he appropriated to be exclusive and costly, but the accommodations were less than a quarter the size of his home.

  Clank.

  Mamoru frowned at the plate he had dropped into the cleaning unit as the tray retracted. The modern world has no need for servants. He leaned on the counter, letting the subtle thrum of the machinery travel up his arms. What if she was acting? His silhouette occupied a square of sunlight on the wall over the sink. Its faceless stare lifted questions from his subconscious and hurled them.

  “Why do you care about Minamoto?” He is my shogun.

  “Was. He ordered your parents killed.” They were not my parents.

  “It was her egg, how is she not your mother?” Unnatural.

  “Saitō Ichiro engineered your existence. How is he not your father?” There was no love, only pride in a weapon he made.

  “You feel guilt over Nami.” I… miss her.

  “Forget Minamoto. Bring her here.” I cannot stand this place.

  “These people are not owned by companies.” No, by their government.

  “Minamoto has no influence here. You could be happy.” I gave my word.

  He spun to put his back to the shadow and narrowed his eyes at the deck. “I will prove the deception. If Minamoto does not accept it, I will avenge my mother, I will avenge Nami, and I will leave Matsushita in tatters.”

  The Division 0 network had proven easy, but time-consuming, a distraction that left a dark cloud over Mamoru’s head. He stayed far longer than needed to peruse personnel records, finding their modest database regarding psionic phenomenon most intriguing. Most vexing of all, the talent they had designated ‘kinetics’ seemed quite similar to what he had long thought of as chi. One reassurance was how weak it seemed by comparison. Their documentation had cases where psionics had made themselves much stronger, but none had reached too far beyond the limits of human potential. Certainly, no one Division 0 had yet encountered could tear an armored elevator door off its hinges or accelerate themselves to the point of existing in a slow motion world.

  He stood at the end of a narrow span of black glass, which stretched over a square canyon ringing his objective like a moat. At the center of the pit, a building made of the same jet material and covered with millions of luminous gold lines rose from an island. It resembled a cluster of high-tech office towers crammed together in the shape of an ancient fortress.

  He expected guards to be walking the parapets.

  The structure had no windows, only sleek, glimmering ominousness covered by irregular raised panels. UCF Military Intelligence, nicknamed C-Branch, had established a handful of Priority-Security network locations they referred to as P-SECs. Mamoru focused on the far end of the bridge and the white samurai armor began to appear piece by piece where he desired to go. Interference swirled within his body when it had halfway formed, causing him to abort the teleportation and focus on ridding his deck of an invasive program.

  A sensation similar to a snake entering his head through one ear sent a wave of tension down his spine. The C-Branch network bombarded him with anti-intrusion softs the likes of which exceeded all prior opposition he had faced. Mamoru scrambled to catch and kill two dozen separate inbound connections. The hollow armor shuddered in place as he catalogued t
he deck’s neural memory banks. Panel after panel spread open in the sky above him, towering displays fifteen feet high full of shifting numbers and kanji. A long trail of darkness slithered through the white characters, dimming them as a serpentine shape circled around the unused M3 socket hardware.

  Mamoru smiled. This was a killer soft, but it had nowhere to put its fangs. He reached one armored glove into his vacant helmet and clenched his fingers around the light within. Waves of brightness banded down through the shifting letters on each panel, shoving the serpent toward the bottom. As the dimming reached the edge of the screens, the gauntlet withdrew, pulling a hissing, thrashing snake out of the armor.

  He focused on it, causing it to snap straight as a staff in his grip while its eyes flared with brilliant light. The panels filled with the sequence of code that made up the Death Asp soft, altering it at the speed of thought. This should give their operators something to play with. He hurled an onyx quarterstaff to the ground, where it went flexible and slithered away, a blur of black on black streaking at the fortress. It would seek the nearest live operator and attack its former master.

  The samurai advanced, walking the bridge rather than risk another teleport. Requesting a coordinate overwrite had opened his deck to invasion once. At the three-quarter mark, a nondescript black man in an expensive tailored suit walked out from the bottom of the narrow span, pivoted up the side in defiance of gravity, and swung over, stepping onto the surface behind him.

  He reached for a gun.

  Seething orange-white light erupted from the katana as Mamoru whirled and bisected the construct in a single pass. The upper half of the body floated away from the legs and a disintegration spiral of golden numbers spread outward from the slice. The hips and legs fell to one side, exploding in a burst of shimmering crystals before shattering over the ground.

  Mamoru resumed his trek, but two more appeared identical to the last, one from each side. He lunged at them, managing to behead both before they could fire. Four more walked up the sides of the bridge in unison, and pivoted vertical at the top. In the time it took him to process their appearance in his mind, another eight joined them.

  This must be what Kutaragi-sensei meant by ‘discretion.’

  Bullets, a cyberspace manifestation of electronic assault on his deck, whistled over his head. A normal operator would have an array of defensive softs they could reach for in a situation like this to do various things: redirect the incoming connection to dead memory buffers, conceal the deck on the network, apply quadruple-redundant virus checking to slow the incoming data and arrest the harmful code. Not Mamoru. It was so rare a hostile network sensed his entry, given his ability to alter programs at the speed of thought, he had not even bothered hiding his connection with a series of false hops.

  However, normal hackers also did not experience the substance of the incoming program code as he did. As fast as they fired at him, he rewrote their combat routines to harmless detection pings. Bullets shattered as if made of ice against his armor. The effort slowed him to a walk, and then to a trudge as another sixteen identical men swung up onto the bridge. Shots from the ones in back passed without harm through their duplicates and a hornet swarm of virtual bullets converged on him. The exertion of altering so much software took on the form of a headache.

  Every two seconds they double in number.

  Worry was a new sensation for him. He weathered the hail of irritation, forcing himself forward as if thigh deep in tar under the mind-load of rewriting hundreds of tiny bits of software every second. The last several feet of bridge brought him to a wall of ebon, engraved with glowing circuit lines running in deep grooves. His ornate helmet tilted back as he appraised the surface without a door. Growling low in his throat rose to a roar as he brought his hands together in a detonating clap. A pulse of energy raced in an expanding sphere from where his gauntlets collided.

  The defense constructs froze as the wave passed over them, and the amber etching on the face of the fortress turned dull blue. Mamoru slouched from the fatigue of brute forcing a low-level re-initialization of the network node’s memory addresses. By fortunate paradox, the insane amount of defense constructs made the node more vulnerable to such a tactic. It would take longer to bring the node online with so many routines to load. One ‘room,’ the moat chamber, sat outside of network time while the hardware that generated it performed a diagnostic check. In the real world, it would end in six to ten seconds, perhaps four if the hardware was overclocked. In cyberspace, he had a few minutes.

  With one hand on the wall, he forced his thoughts into the material. Black stone rippled like fluid, opening in the shape of a door as he struggled to wrench his hands apart. Every inch of progress took great effort and drained his energy. Rather than locate the hidden portal, he altered the node design to create access where there was none. Such a modification to ‘dark matter’ would take hours for a master deck jockey, not to mention being impossible without a direct connection to the host. Mamoru could manipulate it by imposing his will over the hardware that hosted the network itself. C-Branch had no way to stop a breach that could not happen. All of its defenses were set up on the accessible entry points.

  Once the portal opened, he ducked through and stopped fighting the node’s effort to restart itself. The spherical opening grew smaller as the goopy substance filled in, but it would not seal before the constructs came back online.

  Mamoru ran, cornering at the first opportunity. Once the mass of defenders had no line of sight on him, he stopped. White fire surrounded his inert body in the real world as the hollow samurai grasped the air and pulled the interior network design into his thoughts. Ribbons of streaming letters, numbers, and symbols shot out of holes in the wall and orbited him. It took only a minute to modify his avatar code to appear native to the network.

  Now calm, he marched to where he sensed the presence of the data he had come looking for. The nodule Pixie had given him contained reference to a file with the marker: DN-WR-393-EM. Curiosity piqued him to swipe mental threads at the walls. DN referenced a project involving DNA. WR was their code for weapons research, or warfare research depending on which bureau director he wanted to believe. 393 referred to the file creation year, 2393. He found no explanation for the EM at the end.

  He walked among rows of storage constructs, tall cabinets formed by thick slabs of shiny obsidian separated by layers of cobalt blue light, stretched to infinity. The white samurai armor glided among them toward his objective, but halted as a resonant voice shook the entire chamber.

  “Well now, I haven’t had an intruder make it this far in a number of years.”

  Mamoru whirled about, seeing no one behind him.

  “Up here, little one.”

  He looked up, leaning backwards, and froze at the sight of the ceiling moving. A surface of shining ebon plates slid overhead. He spun to the rear, and stared at two lime-hued eyes hovering in the dark. Each spanned six feet across and bore a tiny samurai reflection in the center like vertical pupils of stark white. Light glinted across long, obsidian teeth as it spoke.

  “There is something unusual about you.” The face of an enormous dragon covered in scales of glassy onyx loomed out of the sky, its mouth large enough for a man to stand in. “You are most curious, intruder.” It blinked, sniffing at him.

  The electronic barrage made his deck scream. Phantom pain from a burning hand reached his consciousness. Mamoru shuddered, fighting the instinctual urge to jerk his touch away from heat and lose his connection. By the gods, all it is doing is scanning me. That wasn’t even an attack.

  “I am curious… how is it you are here? How is it you are you doing what you are doing?” Sniffing ended with a snort that knocked virtual Mamoru back a step. “If I find your answer amusing enough, I may not kill you.” Clawed hands shrouded nearby data towers as it loomed.

  Mamoru steadied himself. He reached for the katana, but hesitated. “What are you?”

  “Do you patronize me, human?” It
shifted, circling away from the door to the right, never taking its gaze away. “I do not accept that you were able to gain entry here and yet do not know what I am.”

  It’s an AI, that much I know. Dangerous. Grade nine.

  “An AI. You’re a dragon construct.”

  The creature put a clawed hand over its snout, chuckling with a turned head as if hearing a wry, off-color joke. Its laughter ended with a flare of its eyes as it lunged within inches of him. “No, simpleton. I am the network. This is my domain. I am Nightwing.” Hundreds of identical men in suits skidded to a halt at the entrance to the chamber. The dragon thrust itself up on its hind legs and spread its wings, roaring at a ceiling that shattered away in tumbling obsidian chunks sucked upward into a gloomy cloud-filled sky. “You are an insect. You cannot hope to comprehend the magnificence before you. I―”

  “Do not know how I am here.”

  Its head whipped down to stare at him, one eye wider than the other, lip twitching from the insolence. After a momentary pause, it fell forward onto its forelegs, shaking the ground from the crash. “How… dare you.”

  “You may be the most advanced artificial intelligence I have ever seen.”

  Nightwing’s eyes narrowed, a cat’s reaction to a chin scratch. “Indeed.”

  “Yet, you are still nothing more than program code.”

  Nightwing snarled. His claws became a blur of black onyx that smashed Mamoru airborne. The samurai avatar slammed through a series of data cabinets, which shattered on impact. With each crash, fragments stopped in midair and collapsed back together after he passed. Mamoru collided with the wall a hundred meters away, stuck for a few seconds, and slid to the floor with an ear-splitting knives-on-glass squealing sound.

  Mamoru howled in his mind as his paralyzed avatar twitched; surges of electricity raked through the Matsushita Oni. The Dragon’s face loomed out of the shadows in the back of his mind as the AI forced its way into the deck, biting and tearing at the components. Neural memory fried, chips burned out, and a searing thread of pain ran up his back as lightning erupted from the M3 port. Unbelievable… Black ICE sends just enough current to roast a brain stem. That jolt would have made a user’s head explode.