by Ari Bach
“Alf, thoughts?” asked Vibs.
“Sounds sound. You may be heading off planet again, and in a hurry. See that Eric loads you up for space, and get backups made.”
They nodded. Backups were always an ominous precaution. And not much of one, as if they died, the backups would be of little consolation to the deceased. V team headed to med bay. They’d done it before. Any time a team headed off planet on a mission, it was standard to have their memories backed up on the med bay computer. The lipid polarity drives could store several brains apiece, but it was only raw data, memories like so much video. If they were to die permanently on Earth, Valkyries would generally try to recover what they could of the brain and keep the memories on file. In space losses, bodies were rarely recoverable so they backed people up in advance.
Skadi ambushed them on the way to the med bay. She jumped out and hugged Veikko full force, and one of their usual matches ensued. Skadi always won. She was simply stronger, and Veikko would have to tap out before breaking a rib. She snuck in a kiss as he squirmed.
“Getting backed up?” she asked.
“Everything but you, I’d rather forget,” he coughed.
Violet walked on, having heard their flirtations before. Skadi kissed him again.
“You can try,” she said, squeezing him tighter. He couldn’t speak. Finally a snap resounded through the air. Skadi let go.
“Damn it, Skadi,” he wheezed.
She just laughed. “Well, you’re going to med bay.”
She sauntered off.
“God, I love that woman,” he said genuinely, though clearly in pain.
Niide fixed his ribs—she’d broken three—with only a two-minute delay, having had his scans prepared from the last time she did the same. He quickly turned to the backups.
“Over to mmmm, Basher,” mumbled Dr. Niide. Violet thought it was peculiar to name the medical backup drives Bonecrusher and Basher or why three drives had two names. Vibeke could read the text labels on the machines but didn’t get the names Bones, Crusher, and Bashir either. In any case they hooked into the third drive and started uploading. It only took a few minutes but always carried an unpleasant flicker of the old images, more often than not ones that they didn’t consciously remember seeing. A disorienting feeling.
Once finished they headed out to the pogo pads. Their uniforms turned black, standard for unknown territory. With their memories safely stored away behind them, they and their brains headed out to Espana, well aware at how much couldn’t be transferred. A person’s mind is a great deal more than the raw data that could be uploaded, more than memory alone. Their thoughts, feelings, consciousness, whatever made them who they were couldn’t be logged on lipid chains. The transfer always reminded Violet of that, always made the mission to come feel like it would be the one on which she’d lose them.
SHIKA SAID nothing for the entire ride. She found small talk unbecoming of assassins. For the two years she’d worked for the Yakuza, she’d conducted herself with the utmost respect and professionalism. Usagi on the other hand was running out of fingers. There were soldiers, and there were fools. Shika was a soldier. Shika hated working with fools. She wouldn’t give Usagi the chance to blow a mission. She made it clear; Usagi was the pilot and nothing else. Shika would do the job.
Shika did the job. Ten seconds landing. The target saw them but didn’t flee. Shika played it calm. Scanned for detectors, none. Touched the door, let it go clear, introduced herself. Confirmed the target, are you Suhoor? Sorry, Zuhoor. No, I didn’t know it meant rose, that’s very sweet. What was that? I can’t hear you with the door closed, ah, thanks! One shot to the link, one to the forehead, one to the heart. Quick local scan, no detectors, no police links. Departure, back to the pogo. Job complete, send confirmation. Code Seikou. Take us back. We don’t want to miss the meeting.
Wunjo Team intercepted the confirmation link. Common Yakuza coding to the Zaibatsu hub. Yakuza cryptography was simple enough for Alopex and carried no internal detective algorithms. Nobody working for Zaibatsu ever paid for that extravagance. Widget stuck a burr onto the provider log and let it go to work. It passed five rerouters in the Zaibatsu mainframe, then passed on to their I/O port. The I/O port had caught one of their burrs a few months prior, so they had Alopex time some cloaking code to activate at just the right time. The burr deleted itself as it entered the port. The port sent it out. The burr recovered itself immediately and followed the last transit protocol: Ukiyo City delivery daemon.
V team tracked the Yakuza pogo without moving from their hiding place in the alley. Veikko had spent nearly an hour adorning their own pogo with garbage from the finest dumpsters in Barcelona. It took the Yakuza nearly a day to get off their butts and wipe out the competition, which concerned W team as Zuhoor’s last bomb components would arrive later that day. Still, all worked out, and the pogo had some truly revolting trash to disguise it beyond the normal goldtop chromatophores. Like their uniforms the chromatophores could assume any color and even some patterns, but nothing beat the rotting banana peel and crumpled Rockdelux with which Veikko had lovingly endowed the windshield.
Sadly, all things come to an end, as when the Yakuza pogo neared the edge of tracking range. They had to lift off and let the garbage fall by the wayside. After a quick hack to silence the litter detectors, Varg hit the accelerator and followed the Yaks northwest. Walter saw their course and nudged Wart, who linked to Veikko.
“Do you want us to head to Ukiyo?” asked Wart. “Looks like your mark’s going the wrong way.”
“Affirmative, my fungal friend. Head on over and see if Ukiyo’s having a Yak convention.”
Walter and Widget linked simultaneously, “You got it, Veeks.”
W headed for a pogo in Valhalla. V followed their mark toward the Golfo Vizcaya. They kept a wide twenty-kilometer distance from the Yaks, the maximum with which they could safely keep the thing in their sights. Yakuza were notoriously brutal to anyone they suspected of following them. Dr. Niide had, in total since beginning his work in the ravine, reattached twenty-nine Valkyrie heads due to Yakuza swordplay. They’d never lost a head from a Yak fight, but the second man named Borknagar, from one of Balder’s early teams, was killed permanently by a slash high up on his neck that severed his brain stem in just the wrong place.
The Yak pogo made a sharp turn at the coast and headed due west toward GAUNE. Over land a twenty-kilometer distance is filled with other craft. It’s nearly impossible to see someone tracking you. Over the ocean, twenty kilometers means nothing. If one pogo follows you and the rest follow shipping lanes, you’ve caught them. Valhalla used the trick often. The Yakuza too valued the technique. But unlike the Yakuza’s, Valkyrie pogos were fortified for extended undersea travel. They hit the water as soon as they reached it and continued to follow the Yaks.
As soon as they were deep enough to hide their wake, they could see the red lights of the Euskaldunak Cetacean colony below. At that depth, at dusk, they could only make out the shapeless glow, but Veikko explained, “It’s shaped like two crosses, lauburu crosses. One of the better-armed colonies, they had a fight with the SI before it was banned. I got in trouble for laughing about it in school once. Honestly a bloody fight between Fish and Loyolists was all good news to me. Still had to come here on a field trip from Itämeri. You’d be amazed at the language barriers down there.”
The Yaks made another course change, an about-face toward Asia. Vibeke calculated their course—Straight for Ukiyo. Varg brought the craft to a halt. Veikko linked back to W team.
“All roads lead to Rome. We’ll stay here until they’re well out of range, then head over. What’s your ETA?”
“We should get there about nine hours before your Yaks,” said Weather. “Directions?”
“Wait for us on the city. Don’t spend all your money on porn.”
“Confirmed, half on porn, half on drugs.”
W linked out. The craft slowly sank toward the colony. Violet sat back and watched a fis
h swim by the side window. They’d only need fifteen minutes before the Yaks would be long gone, but those brief pauses always hit her the hardest. It was too short to do anything but too long to hold still. She’d mastered holding still while getting stung by flies at Achnacarry. She could lie motionless for more than a day if detectors were looking for her. But there, in a pogo with no threat at all, time acted strangely.
Violet was always aware of being useless to a mission. She wasn’t often a fifth wheel, but in thinking back on the Nikkei disaster, she realized she hadn’t actually done a single thing but run away. Not that any of them had done any good, but the Spanish mission hadn’t even seen her outside of the pogo. She’d resigned herself long ago to an idea of the team with Vibeke as the brain, Varg as the muscle, and Veikko as the master of the craft. It left no question who would do what but seemed in recent projects to leave Violet as “that other girl.” Why else had she been picked to steal the Blackwing herself. Everyone else had specific roles to play. Another abysmal line of thought she was getting herself into. She looked out the portal for a distraction and found an obvious one.
It looked rather like the fish that had just passed. A tall, thin, one-man craft. A one-man Cetacean craft. It made no contact, just looked them over. Veikko said nothing, so Violet wasn’t concerned. He had a sixth sense for when the Fish posed a danger. This one, he just watched, so she followed suit. The craft luminesced once, red, and swam away.
“Just one blink. They know we’re not broken down, probably want us to go.”
Violet asked, “In a hurry?”
“No, we can stay the full fifteen. They’re never in any hurry.”
A short time later, they lifted from the sea and started toward Ukiyo. Ten thousand kilometers. With a long wait ahead, Violet leaped into the net. A clean, polished net with full Alopex protection. Three other black avatars popped in behind her. With only hours to Ukiyo and the fate of Earth in the balance, the team made the best of their net time by watching all the funny kitten videos they could find and forwarding the best of them back to Valhalla.
A few servers south and a transfer protocol away, Shika was reading up on more pressing matters. The first real world meeting with Pelamus had gone poorly. He was offering most of the former YUP holdings but not the navy. That made sense, he was Cetacean. But the whole reason Zaibatsu wanted them in on the deal was to seize a real navy. They had the weakest sea force of any major UNEGA outfit, and general assembly was powerless or unwilling to stop predation within its companies. Zaibatsu, as part of the charter, couldn’t have any military of its own, so that fell to the less-than-legal divisions. The Yaks had beaten out the Unspeakable Darkness at the last net meeting. They had the contract, but if they didn’t get a navy out of it, Zaibatsu would replace the Yakuza as its favored knuckle. That would mean an intraconglomerate war.
Both Shiro and Ota were going to be in Ukiyo to see that it didn’t come to that. With two oyabun on the way, security was going to be as tight as possible. A new difficulty given the changes in Ukiyo. For the first time on the floating city, they had found detectors and monitoring bugs. All were cleaned out of course, but it meant someone new was onboard, someone disrespectful of Ukiyo’s blindness policies. So after Shika dropped her useless companion and rendezvoused with other security, they’d be on the hunt. If someone was planting bugs in Ukiyo, they were desperate. If they were desperate, they wouldn’t stop at the removal of their tricks. They would send agents. Spies into the next meeting. It was inevitable: before the week was through, Shika would be adding another new stripe to the dragon on her irezumi. It had thirty-five so far. A thirty-sixth for Zuhoor. If she could catch four more spies in the next day, she’d have a full dragon.
Wart linked to V, “Arrived at Ukiyo. Standing by.”
Veikko paused the kitten playing in zero gravity and linked back, “Any sign of Yakuza activity?”
“Nothing yet. We’ve put our Tiks in the air sniffing for skin dyes. So far we’ve got some temporary motion tattoos on kids, holographic tattoos on adults, mod-ink on the modified, and various other colorful insignia but nothing big under fine suits. Nothing like the Yakuza. Your ETA?”
“Nine hours now, puts the Yaks at just over eight. Likely their next event is tomorrow. Intel on any good hotels?”
“All hourly, all full. Lots of good hides, though. We’re keeping to the back of a lamp locker. Did you see the one with the guy brushing the Maine coon’s teeth? It’s all ‘yowmrowmowow.’”
“Negative, we’ll keep an eye out for it, top priority.”
W linked out, and they flew on into the night. When dawn broke, V was at the edge of the Nihonkai. They couldn’t see the sun or the sea, only a monsoon. Violet thought, growing up, that the tropical Scottish storms were as bad as skies could get, but Ukiyo was in the midst of the Arashinigatsu, a hot winter monsoon that began in the early 2100s, around the same time Kvitøya thawed out. None of the causes were of as much concern as the results—pogos try to stay a fixed height above the ground. On land, it meant they gently bounced along and absorbed most small shifts in height. Over water, they caused a light ripple beneath them. Over waves, they followed each and every wave up and down. The Nihonkai had three-meter waves, and Veikko was getting either airsick or seasick. He couldn’t tell which because the air and sea had merged.
Rain wasn’t falling in drops. It was just a solid wall of water flowing constantly downward. Varg flew with great care, letting the auto-navigation do its work but not the autopilot, which would likely have sent them into the sea bottom with the constant lightning skewing its sensor array. They’d decelerated to a snail’s pace, and it was a relief when Varg finally spotted the Ukiyo link label.
“Three minutes and we’ll hit the Ukiyo grid. Then it’ll clear up.”
Vibeke had been reading Ukiyo specs for the last hour. She quietly added, “Then parking’s the problem….”
As promised in three minutes, they fell from the cloud bank into the crystal clarity of Ukiyo’s fake weather, drizzling lightly below the torrential rain and black sky just atop the grid’s edge. Ukiyo itself sat in the middle of the open airspace, a wooden city under a great tan canopy. At a distance it looked like a giant motionless buoy, a tall column in the center for the canopy and a stout squareish plain on which the city rested. Even from a kilometer away, they could make out the huge lanterns, banners, and mountains of apartments built atop stores atop walkways. The main street itself was completely hidden behind kiosks and side markets that hung off the sides like moss.
They unclingered their microwaves and handed them to their Tikaris. Veikko’s carried his own and Varg’s, Violet’s and Vibeke’s held their own. Sal, Bob, and Nelson flew toward the city where the weapons could be sneaked in covertly. Pokey stayed on Varg disguised as a bandolier.
“MORNING, FELLAS,” linked Weather. A large mechanical grasshopper greeted them, floating in the air in front of the pogo briefly before flying back to the city. Weather continued. “We spotted our first Yak today. Couple of them arriving, and a few coming up from subsurface condos. Security’s tight, personnel twitchy. Bugs everywhere, the Yaks have disabled a ton of devices and complain loudly to the locals every time they do. No concentrations forming yet, no Cetaceans. Looks like you didn’t miss the big show. We’re coming out of the lamp locker, gonna get some pierogi at Restaurácia Radicová. High up the center column, good view.”
“Stay high,” replied Veikko. “We’ll take the main street when we get there.”
There were few other vessels in the air, but the ocean was full of docked boats, ships, pogos, copters, hovercraft, surface skims, blimps, and spinners. Luminescent algae patterns lit their way to the valet system. Varg let the pogo down to a meter over the still water. A small hoverbot came out to scan them.
“Four persons, one craft, 900 yen. Save 250 yen by parking underwater?”
“Yes, please,” Vibs called out. An autoparker linked out to the pogo, and Varg handed over the controls. It
took them to the Delta quadrant, row 5, space Q and set the pogo down on the water where a small punt was waiting. They hopped onto the rickety little boat and locked the pogo, then watched it sink down to the Strawberry level. The boat headed for the city. The thing was terribly slow and made several detours to pick up new customers.
Vibeke ventured a subtle hack on the parking system to look for the Yakuza pogo. It came into the weather grid seconds after she began. They’d passed it in the storm. Two persons, one craft, 700 yen. Cancel parking, drop off only. Only one to drop off, 150 yen. Four-minute wait for the boat. It would call their boat. Vibs had Alopex give her a programmer signature and altered the system so the Yak would take a different boat. Best not to be seen at all. Six-minute wait for boat. Shika cursed quietly, and Vibs logged out.
The punt finally came to its dock, a small portion of the larger dock used by the massive cargo ships. One was present, towering above them, its deck almost level with Ukiyo’s. V team disembarked and began climbing the 224 steps up to Ukiyo’s main level. Their suits turned gradually to match the brown wood tones. Other tourists didn’t seem to care. Their outfits were blinking green to red and flashing skull cartoons and rainbows. The walls of Ukiyo didn’t stay wood colored either. Link windows opened along the hull of the city and began to speak.
“Irasshaimase!”
“Irasshaimase! Welcome to Ukiyo!”
“Irasshaimase! Only 200 steps to go! Do you not liking to climb so much? You can sail to Ukiyo too! Parking in Tottori is free, and we boat you! 4000 yen is you at the top!”
“Irasshaimase! You may not do drugs here!”
“Irasshaimase! The child is forbidden in forbidden child zones! You can place the child in our daycare place for 600 yen per child!”