Grey Ronin (The Awakened Book 3)

by Matthew S. Cox

  Innumerable men in suits swarmed around the data cabinets, raising pistols. Before any of them could shoot, eerie lime-green flames filled the sky. A column of inferno blasted from the dragon’s mouth. Mamoru crossed his arms over his helmet and sent a psionic spike to his deck that forced it to disavow all I/O processes. The samurai winked out of existence as several hundred dark suits broke apart to pixilated ash. When he reappeared, the jet walls and floor smoked. Cyberspace, so often devoid of any sense of smell or temperature, felt hot and stank of burned flesh.

  “Fool!” thundered the AI. “You know not the error of your arrogance.”

  Mamoru leapt to his feet, drawing the katana as he sprang upward at the descending bite. Nightwing blurred sideways, plucking him out of the air with ease. The katana glanced away without cutting the hardened scales. Conical teeth sparked against white enamel. Mamoru gurgled, crying out as chip after chip inside the deck burst with mini geysers of smoke. The enormous head and neck swung side to side in an agonizing thrash. Mamoru’s face warmed in the drip of a gushing nosebleed while he battled with his deck to obey him. This time, the I/O channel refused to turn off. Rather than attack with viruses or precision Black ICE, the dragon tried to flood his uplink path with raw voltage. Fortunately, the Oni connected via wireless link. Frustrated, Nightwing whipped his neck, flinging Mamoru to the ground. After a snarl, the dragon spat to the side. A glop of black tar hurtled forth, growing to a spherical mass with a squid’s beak and four tentacles tipped with toothy paddles.

  A Devourer soft.

  The white samurai armor shattered like porcelain on impact, fragments skidding as far as fifteen feet away. The Devourer’s beak opened, and it cried out with an avian screech. Virtual air rushed in to the orifice, and the fleshy mass descended on the broken warrior.

  Mamoru groaned in the real world as the hostile construct invaded his deck. It went right for the neural memory, intending on eating every piece of software and burning out every addressable portion of neural-memory it could find. He seized one of the flopping tentacles, dragging the meaty sphere to the floor in the non-space of his deck. Its other toothy paddle walloped him in the back, face, and chest, but he refused to let go. Blood seeped through a spiderweb of cracks in his armor, stark crimson against enamel white. Mamoru growled as he held the struggling, shrieking blob down and forced his will over it. Its beak clapped closed inches from his hollow helmet. The Devourer’s skin rippled, flesh replaced by shiny lamellar armor as he rewrote it. Inside the P-SEC, the shattered bits of white samurai slid back together, stacking with a ring of glass chips until he was once again whole.

  Nightwing leaned up, raising an eyebrow at the sight of him holding the Devourer as though it were some immense medieval flail. He whirled it overhead and flung it at the dragon. The AI scooted away from the armored tentacle beast, its motion reminiscent of an enormous cat that wanted nothing whatsoever to do with the object flying at it. While the altered Devourer proceeded to chase Nightwing around the room, Mamoru fell over sideways.

  Ouch. This deck is almost gone.

  He crawled to the nearest storage cabinet, reaching into it in an effort to sneak the data he came for while the dragon was distracted. File after file shot through his mind, shimmering squares of silver and blue. Before he could locate what he needed, the tremendous crash of bending metal overhead announced the end of the Devourer.

  “For that, you will suffer long!” boomed a voice, shaking the entire chamber.

  Blinded by desperation, Mamoru leapt the data cabinet and struck out with the katana. Nightwing raised an arm, the blade sparking against scales time and time again with little effect. It is rebuilding itself as fast as I delete it. He lunged for its belly, hoping to find a backdoor that would give him access to the core of the program’s code. For an instant, he thought he had a clear shot at the weaker scales of the underside, but another claw stroke caught him from the left and launched him airborne.

  Flaming samurai armor sailed in a comet’s arc, landing in the onyx ground and gouging a twenty-meter trench with a spray of shards. Mamoru smelled fire and smoke, in the real world. His deck had reached the point of no return. Only his psionic power held it together, forcing a machine pushed beyond its limits to function. Lines of static banded over the samurai armor as it threatened to vanish if he so much as sneezed. Nightwing stomped after him, swatting more men in dark suits out of his way.

  “Peasant! I tire of your insolence.”

  Nightwing’s great horned head surged forward, jaw opening for the final strike.

  This monster is too powerful… I never imagined such a thing. It is only software, yet it is too vast for me to change. A glimmer of insight flashed through his mind. But, does it know that?

  The room shifted as he used a micro teleport to close with the dragon faster than it could react and plunged a hand into the beast’s chin. Glowing eye spots appeared within the helmet and white flames burst forth from the shoulder of the samurai armor.

  Mamoru shouted, “You are nothing but a program. You are my domain!”

  He forced all the energy he could summon toward his desire to rewrite the dragon. Its self-checking routines continuously repaired it, faster than even Mamoru could change code, but the sensation of being rewritten and repaired had to be something the arrogant thing had never before experienced.

  Shiny black scales degenerated to green-line wireframe around where his arm penetrated. Nightwing groaned in agony, stumbling. Patches of exposed crude polygons swam over it as the network’s rendering engine searched for a way to represent what was happening.

  “Stop. What… are you doing?”

  “You wanted to know how I got here. I am showing you.” Mamoru turned his arm, shoving it through the beast’s hide up to the elbow. “As smart as you are, as advanced as you are, you are still nothing more than a program. I am rewriting you to serve me. I shall make you an enormous dog, fetching sticks and bounding through the grass.”

  Mamoru’s live body shook with spasmodic jerks in the chair, sweat poured over him from the toll of the concentration. In the net, he showed no outward sign of how difficult a time he had contending with such a massive piece of software. The strain of holding his deck together and doing this brought blood from his nose and fire to his nerves. This dragon was hundreds of petabytes of code, far more massive than the largest program he had ever touched.

  “No. Do not…” Nightwing moaned again, straining to pull away.

  Panic rose in the back of Mamoru’s mind as he wondered if his ruse would trigger the strongest instinct possessed by any artificial entity―survival.

  “I can create program code simply by desiring its existence. My will forms in the neural synapses of the network. I am a psionic unlike anything the GlobeNet has ever seen. Can you feel your vast intellect collapsing, shrinking to become a sub-sentient wretch capable only of urinating on trees? In minutes, you will be little more than an elaborate DataMole.”

  A blur of wireframe washed over Nightwing’s face as it screamed, pulling against him. Man-sized claws dug into the black glass floor, raking gouges amid deafening squeals. “You cannot!”

  More suits swarmed through the door. Panic in the creature’s voice was Mamoru’s signal. He released his mental hold while grunting and reaching at it. The dragon seemed to believe it had broken free of its own will and whirled away, scrambling for the node exit. In its terror, it sheared through the incoming army, shredding them to piles of glowing crystal fragments.

  Mamoru allowed himself a moment of rest. Chunks of business suit lost their texture and melted into silver nuggets as the network deleted corrupted software fragments. Laughing to himself at the ever-distancing crashes of the fleeing AI, he put both hands on one of the data towers and pulled.

  At his touch, the slab slid outward exposing an open flat tray. A series of eight-inch silver tiles rotated in harmony above it. Each represented individual data folders. Mamoru knew the one he had come for by the way it felt to loo
k at. He lifted one and held it in both hands in front of his face. The mirror-like surface did not display any reflection. He stared at it, smiling when DN-WR-393-EM appeared in glowing letters. He pulled and twisted at the sides. A bright cyan crack split it down the center, stretching to gridlines as he drew the tile apart from itself. Each half reconstituted, leaving him holding two identical copies.

  Pixie did not mention he should destroy their copy. He tossed one tile back into the drawer, closed it, and held the other to his chest until it sank through his armor. As far as the network was concerned, he had not copied it―he generated a new file in the Matsushita Oni. Mamoru fought off the weariness in his brain and checked the node buffers to verify they had not logged the file creation. With a wicked grin forming on his semiconscious face, he fiddled with the network ingress buffers, creating evidence that appeared to be a failed attempt to conceal a link trace to the private node in MI6.

  CSB Agent Allan Charles seemed like a good name to associate with the breach.

  Mamoru cradled his hand, blistered and red. Black burn marks traced jagged across the table from where electrical arcs had erupted from the deck’s M3 interface connector. A small fire had started at the far end of the table. He frowned at the charred material, a visible reminder of carelessness. As soon as he had stopped concentrating, the deck shut down, belching smoke. Blood oozed over his face and his body felt as though he had fallen from great height.

  He wanted to put the fire out, but his attempt to stand up sent him to the floor and triggered a coughing fit that painted the tiles with more blood. Two paper white feet appeared inches from his face.

  “Oh, dear,” said Aurora.

  The sound of running water fluttered as something passed through the stream. Out of the corner of his eye, an amorphous humanoid shape approached. Aurora tiptoed towards the table and swatted at the burning. The slap of a wet towel striking wood happened several times before the beeping of a fire sensor ceased.

  Mamoru groaned.

  Hands pulled at his arm, rolling him onto his back. She slid her arms under and lifted him. He tried to reach up to hold on to her shoulder, but managed only an uncoordinated swipe that wound up grabbing a breast.

  “Now, now, Mamoru. You’re in no shape for that.” She swung him to the side to make it through a doorway. “Wot ‘appened?”

  “Dragon,” he wheezed.

  Soft material met him from below as she set him on the Comforgel pad. A moment later, her naked torso hovered over him. Mamoru lolled his head side to side.

  “For not wanting to, you certainly think of it all the time. You’re a bloody mess, and I don’t mean that in the British sense of bloody. More urgent things to do than bother with clothes.” She tugged at his haori, opening it. “Well, Mamoru, you are one big bruise.”

  He rasped incoherently as she left him there. Minutes passed in a daze, interspersed with a beeping NetMini, a rush of cool air from an open window, the whine of a tiny hovering bot, and the bed shifting as she climbed up and sat next to him. Mamoru looked at her while she stuck a small, red cylinder in her mouth and bit a yellow cap off the narrow end.

  “Relax, luv.” She pressed cold metal against his pectoral muscles, which flooded with cool numbness in time with a soft hiss. “Looks like you could use another shot.” She repeated the process. “There, that should do it.” She kissed him on the forehead. “Sweet dreams.”

  Mamoru awoke later, unsure of how much time had passed. Aurora stretched out beside him with her arms over her head, somehow managing to sleep without touching him or falling out of the bed. For some time, he stared at her breasts, rising and falling with each breath. It was not so much that he wanted to, but it was where his head pointed when he woke up―and moving hurt too much.

  A five-count box of Stimpaks, two used, sat on the glowing gel mattress between them. The idea that she gave him two shots of synthetic adrenaline and he still passed out frightened him. With a groan, he sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed, turning his back to her. Stretching made him growl through clenched teeth and consider falling asleep once again.

  A white hand threaded under his right arm, crossing his chest and pulling him against her. He was too worn out to protest her touch. His memory drifted to a time when Nami would massage him. One clumsy arm extended back over his shoulder was a poor substitute. How stiff she had been. He let his head sag. She expected I would demand more than a back rub.

  “Are you feeling better?” Aurora slid up behind him, squeezing his shoulders as she tried to work the pain out. “I had a sense you would need some help tonight.”

  He sat there, unable to resist, making weak grunts and groans.

  “Don’t get your hopes up too much, Mamoru. I’m not going to cook for you, and the mess in the kitchen is all yours to clean up.”

  “You have my thanks.”

  Aurora let her arms fall in her lap. “You’re welcome.” She slipped past him, letting her chest linger by his face as she got up. “I’ll let myself out then.”

  Mamoru cradled his face in both hands. She arched her back and collapsed in a cloud of fog. A moment later, he felt a sense of being alone again. Two fingers parted so he could see the clock: four in the morning. With a groan, he let gravity take him over sideways.

  Empty cardboard boxes littered the kitchen. The scent of new electronics mingled with the horror the reassembler tried to pass off as eggs. It had taken the better part of three hours, but Mamoru managed to get his deck repaired enough to where it would turn on. He wasn’t sure how he did it. He only even tried because of what he had found within the Division 0 archives. Most cases of individuals having similar ability displayed their talent as a knack for repairing or working with machines rather than controlling them with their thoughts. He took a chance and it paid off. Without a clue what he was doing, he poked and prodded with tools and a soldering iron at whatever felt right.

  The deck taunted him. All he had to do was touch it. In seconds, he could know how Nami felt. He replayed the memory of hours ago, of Aurora with him in bed, only he replaced her with Nami. Her scent floated across his memory. His hand pressed on the table, inches short of the device. The last image he saw of her face, broken by lines in the spider-bot’s display, flickered through his imagination. Is she safe? I could know. We could find a life here, free of Minamoto as well as this Awakened nonsense. His gaze shifted to the bed despite it being noon. Fear curled his fingers away.

  He growled and forced himself to his feet. I am still tired. My thoughts are murky.

  Solace of Stars

  ostled about in the PubTran taxi’s rear bench seat, Mamoru grumbled with each turn and sudden stop. At least the vehicle’s pathetic acceleration left so much to be desired bumping around in the seat didn’t hurt much. Nothing came between him and hard plastic aside from a thin layer of cloth bearing a pattern of grey and teal squares. He held on, digging fingernails in as much as he could as the tiny box-on-wheels skidded around a corner.

  The last vestiges of daylight slid behind the western horizon as the car squealed to a stop. Mamoru ignored the recorded voice thanking him for using the PubTran taxi service and warning him about the dangerous area around him. Clouds of mist spun in whorls as the sky-blue and silver thing scurried off. Two rows of silver fasteners glinted on the chest of his long, black coat as he strode through the glare of a street lamp.

  He stepped off the road, following the sidewalk for a half block before hooking left towards the building Pixie had requested for their meeting location. A handful of younger men and a few women loitered by what had once been a guard station at the front gate. He paid them no mind as he went straight for the fence.

  The raised voice of a cobalt-haired man focused the group’s attention on Mamoru. “Hey, upsec, you lost?”

  “I think he is, Gek. This one looks like he’s got some creds.”

  “Yo, upsec. Why not show a little charity?” A girl with short, violet hair and a glowing azure butterfly tatt
oo on her left cheek strode up to within a few feet of him.

  “You look as though you are in need of a meal. Don’t your parents feed you?”

  Mamoru clasped the padlock holding the gate closed and swiped his thumb over the chrome.

  The girl pulled at the edges of a puffy, red jacket exposing a pistol on each hip―and the lack of a shirt. Shiny, dark material clung to her breasts without any obvious means of support.

  Psionic or chi? Mamoru tilted the lock, using the chrome surface to examine the girl. “I do not find pleasure in destroying pretty things. You should return to your home.” A wisp of light danced over the back of his hand as he crushed and tore the padlock free.

  “Fuck, he’s an auggie!” shouted someone behind her.

  She went for her gun, aiming the trembling weapon in his general direction. Her eyes said ‘stay away from me’ but her mouth disagreed. “S-swipe me a t-thousand and maybe I’ll go home and be a good little girl.”

  Mamoru sent a wave of mental energy inward. He spun, drawing the katana in a swing that passed upward through the gun, missing her fingers by a blade’s width. He straightened and faced her, the sword back on his hip in its scabbard before the two halves of firearm separated.

  No one moved for several seconds. Tap. Tap. Tap. Rectangular bricks of blue caseless ammo slipped one after the next out of the gun, clattering around her boots. The young woman lowered her arm, dumping the remaining two dozen rounds onto the ground. One of the men behind her whistled and raised his hands.

  “Hmm. I must be getting old. You still have fingers.” He winked.

  One of the boys waved at her to back off. “Easy, man. We don’t want no shit with an aug. We were messin’. Thought you was some no-clue upsec.”