Finally the private incoming light on the VidPhone flashed. “What is it, Keene?” Yoriku’s face filled the screen, wavering with static. Despite MedTech’s force field, the phones had done that intermittently since the Atmosterilyzer was put into use, something in which Keene took secret, perverse pleasure.
“It’s about Damon Eddington, sir.”
On the screen, a corner of Yoriku’s mouth turned up slightly. “He is an amusing man.” The emotion disappeared as quickly as it had come, and Yoriku’s broad face smoothed out again.
Keene made himself smile in return. “Yes, sir. He is funny, very funny. In fact, after our conversation you may think he’s even funnier. It seems that Eddington has come up with an… unusual idea concerning the project he’s working on. You remember that. I’m sure—his Symphony of Hate? He visited me a short while ago with a request. It’s quite original—I don’t believe anyone else has ever asked for this.” And Keene recounted everything about his conversation with Damon, embellishing where he felt it was necessary to ensure he maintained Yoriku’s attention.
At the end of Keene’s narrative, Yoriku shook his head. His voice grated through the VidPhone speaker, like old rust being wire-scrubbed off a steel beam. He had been in the United States for decades, but his words still carried a heavy Japanese accent. “It is impossible to get Eddington this alien for what I am willing to spend on him.”
Keene let himself grin widely. He was quite pleased with the scheme he had come up with practically as Damon had been speaking. Not many people would have been so quick on their mental feet. “Not necessarily, sir. I believe I have a solution. It will be risky, but…” Yoriku started to shake his head again and Keene risked interrupting him, trusting that his next words would instantly smother any annoyance his poor manners raised. “Of course, it would involve… ah… MedTech.”
Yoriku’s image froze for a moment. “In what way?” His voice, not particularly pleasant to begin with, dropped lower as his thin eyes narrowed all the way to slits.
So Keene told him his plan, in all its exquisite, deceitful detail: setting times and listing the equipment required, what other things and who would be needed to see it through, fine-tuning the details as he went. “So that’s it,” Keene finished a short while later. “What do you think, sir? Are we in a position to… humiliate MedTech?”
The answer was obvious as Yoriku’s mouth spread in a smile that reminded Keene of the dangerous, toothy grin of a hyena. Keene had heard the rumors but hadn’t dared call attention to himself by acknowledging the stories or asking anyone else in the company if they were true. Now Yoriku’s black expression confirmed them all: one of the most powerful men in the world, yet he had lost the thing most precious to him… his exquisite, legendary lover. It had taken so long to happen that Keene had begun to believe that the woman had lied to him, but, finally, the whispered stories said that Mina now graced the bed of a younger, high-powered executive at MedTech.
“We are indeed in such a position, Keene.” Yoriku unexpectedly pushed his face close to his vidscreen; on Keene’s end, it looked as if the man had snatched up the phone and pressed his nose against it. Keene could see the pores in the man’s skin: it was totally disgusting. “And I want them to know it was Synsound. Not right away, but eventually. Is that clear?”
“They will, sir.” Keene tried to make his voice as soothing as possible. “When Eddington’s Symphony of Hate is released, there will be no mistaking the origin of the sound.” Yoriku backed away from the screen, looking pleased. As the Japanese man leaned back and rested his hands on the arms of a chair that was no doubt real leather, Keene was again reminded of the hyena, this time with a full belly. “I will need assistance,” Keene hinted slyly. “Someone to—”
“You may send for Ahiro. I will instruct him to be at your disposal in all respects.”
“Excel—” But Yoriku had already disconnected, leaving Keene to glare at the static on the vidscreen and grit his teeth for a moment before he buzzed Marceena again. Up and down, he thought. We all play the game. Problem was, he hated being the one spinning on the end of Yoriku’s yoyo.
“Yes, Mr. Keene?”
“Find Ahiro and send him up.” He didn’t give her a chance to question the order, taking his cue from the way Yoriku had cut off their own conversation. He didn’t want to listen to her whine anyway. Perhaps she’d been with him too long, with Synsound too long. All she did was complain about having to do things she didn’t like or thought were beneath her job duties. Did she think he should hire an assistant to work for her as well? Not likely.
More waiting, but at least when he got here, Ahiro would be much more respectful than Keene’s secretary was. Keene didn’t like working with the man and would have preferred to find someone else, but he had to admit that he’d never encountered anyone like Ahiro, who damned near treated Keene’s words as God’s own. Well… not really; the top command, of course, was Yoriku. There was a connection between Yoriku and Ahiro about which Keene remained utterly clueless, and all his careful inquiries had dead-ended. The inquiries themselves had been dangerous, and he’d been meticulous in his efforts to make them appear nothing more than a healthy curiosity about the man who headed—well—owned the company for which Keene worked. Useless effort, wasted time. The slender Japanese man with the grave expression slipped around the corporate headquarters with barely a word to anyone and free access to anywhere in the building, and whatever the tie between Yoriku and Ahiro was, it would not be shared with Keene or anyone of his ilk.
Keene stood and cracked his knuckles thoughtfully as he stepped to the window and stared out. Secrets, secrets— everywhere around him. They made him nervous, curious, crazy with wanting to know them all. He’d have to work harder on this thing between Yoriku and Ahiro later on… perhaps next summer, after his first round of questions had been forgotten and a new staff was settled in place inside Yoriku’s private offices. Turnover was a constant in a company this size, especially after the raises and disappointments each spring. There were those inside who could not be bought, true—the ones like Yoriku’s personal executive assistant and file manager, who had been with him for something like fifteen years. Unlike Marceena, however, that woman had an assistant—several, in fact. When Keene had built his savings back up to speed, he would go to work on those two, as he had on Mina.
Keene didn’t know how, but the next time he glanced away from the window—a mere three minutes later—the mysterious Japanese man with the ragged scar across his right eye was standing in front of the desk.
2
CHRISTMAS EVE
It was a warm and miserable holiday in Manhattan, the worst that Ahiro could remember spending in this hellhole. In his own home country there would be clean, crisp snow on the mountaintops if not the streets themselves, and the sidewalks and buildings would be just as crowded as they were here but cleaner. Ahiro had not been to Japan in many years, but he could still remember the sweet smells of evening meals drifting from the paper-screened windows of the freshly scrubbed tenement houses that had grown like mushrooms in the neighborhood where his childhood home had once stood. Scents of sake and green tea, hot rice and fried vegetables; clean, comforting, welcoming. Not like here, where the smells of aircycle exhaust and trash rotting on heated sidewalks overwhelmed everything, ignorant of the barriers of class and property value as it drifted on the air currents.
Tonight multicolored lights blinked in the show windows of the department stores while hundreds of miniature androids in festive costumes obediently followed the commands of their loop programs to dance and make merry in the displays. In the window of the Manhattan branch of Macy’s, a four-foot-high Santa Claus belted out three-syllable rounds of “Ho-ho-ho!” as he checked off names on a list spewing continuously from a computer in a room that was supposed to be a replication of his office at the North Pole. Across the street, the Montgomery & Sears conglomerate had its own presentation going in blatant competition for the shoppers’
eyes—a full dance troupe of twenty-four-inch ballerinas and brightly dressed soldiers performing The Nutcracker Suite, complete with a synthesized version of the original musical score blaring from high-fidelity speakers.
It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that it was after ten o’clock, the end of the preholiday shopping season, and the weather was wretched; there were plenty of people on the overlit streets to hear the blasting music. Most, huddled under umbrellas or inside rain-slickers dripping crud-filled water and clutching their plastic-wrapped gifts as close to themselves as possible, paid little attention. Spurred by a slight and carefully timed upswing in the country’s economy, the crowds this year had been enormous; millions of people, cars, and aircycles choked every shopping district in the city and quickly resulted in the worst smog storm Manhattan had endured in half a decade. Now the streets were filled with the debris left by the shopping sprees of the masses, the air was clogged with dust and pollution, and Ahiro and his men were forced to wait patiently as the last of the die-hard patrons bought their wares and scuttled along the sidewalks like common mutant cockroaches in the muck.
Finally, with only a quarter hour left before midnight, they slipped out of a smelly alcove in the back entrance of the decrepit building at 103rd and Manhattan Avenue and headed into the heart of Central Park. The last refuge of grass and pigeons in the area, it was still open to the public only because of MedTech’s public relations policy; the corporation had pulled the City of New York out of yet another bankruptcy in 2075 by leasing Central Park for the next half a millennium. While they continued to allow the general public to roam its patrolled walkways during the day, the nightly rapes, muggings, and murders had ended abruptly at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2076, when Med-Tech’s Elite Security Force powered up the newly installed wireless fence at its boundaries and loosed several thousand GuardTech Robots within the park’s limits. Manufactured to look like Doberman pinschers and rottweilers, the robotic dogs ran on internal solar timers that followed the daylight hours from season to season. They were virtually indestructible and attacked anything that moved on two legs and weighed over thirty pounds—unless you wore a MedTech identification transmitter that was accepted by the program currently powering the internal computer in the Guard-Tech dogs… the key word being currently. Elite Security changed the program regularly, and MedTech employees were accustomed to reporting to their supervisors to pick up newly programmed transmitters at unpredictable times.
Tonight, Ahiro and his team were at once surrounded by a dozen GuardTechs drawn by their movement, red crystal eyes gleaming and metal mouths yawning wide… before they turned away and trotted off. Silent, the men crouched in the darkness and watched them go, and only the youngest showed his nervousness by fingering the transmitter Ahiro had given him earlier. Another few minutes and they continued on their way, sliding through the shadows like night mist until they reached the park’s center and the pride of MedTech—its home office building. The chromed steel and glass tower gleamed even in the midnight smog, stretching one hundred twenty-three stories into the sky to show the upper research laboratories eternally surrounded by a halo of electricity.
Ahiro did not need words to tell his ninjas what to do; handpicked, personally trained, the tiniest of nods said it all and was instantly obeyed. Entering the building was nothing, like passing through dry water for all the difficulty it gave them. Likewise were MedTech’s carefully placed security cameras useless; Ahiro knew the location of every one, the direction in which it would point at what time, which way to duck and how long to do it. So easy… but not a setup; Ahiro had a nose for those and tonight every one of his instincts was saying “GO!” Unlike the often dispassionate regime at Synsound, MedTech was a jealous employer and it guarded its employees like a mother lioness watching over her cubs. Someone was always unfortunate enough to draw holiday duty, but never would MedTech have sacrificed two of its night watchmen to the razor-edged swords of Ahiro and Yosako as it did tonight. The corporation’s choice would have been to substitute a battalion of heavily armed soldiers with instructions to shoot on sight to kill.
The descent was short and swift, through clean corridors that smelled of disinfectant and were lined floor to ceiling with easily sanitized stainless steel. Ahiro found the surroundings pleasing and infinitely more preferable than Synsound’s overused hallways. Down here it was clear that a limited number of people were granted access, whereas Synsound was overrun with people and dirt—performers, stagehands, marketing, sales—thousands of people went everywhere. Had his circumstances been different, Ahiro would have liked a position where he could work in an environment like this one. But life was as it was, and wanting what could never be was a waste of time.
As they moved on, effortlessly avoiding the cameras, overhead sprinklers began to regularly mark their passage. Shortly after the appearance of the sprinklers, flame nozzles began jutting ominously from the walls at random heights starting at floor level. Staggered every twelve feet on each side of the passageway were fireproof safety chambers protected by hardened steel doors and locking mechanisms that engaged automatically when the door was opened and shut a single time. After that, only a MedTech computer program would release the titanium tumblers and free the person who had shut him or herself inside.
Five levels underground, Ahiro and his men stopped in front of the final door. The massive piece of metal was three times wider than any of the escape hatches and weighed at least a ton, and this morning the card reader embedded in the wall next to it would have accepted the cardkeys of only a half-dozen people at MedTech. Tonight one of those six would be used to gain entry, and tomorrow its owner would discover in his pocket a useless plastic substitute.
Without a second thought, Ahiro slid the cardkey from the waistband of his black suit and slipped it into the slot. A breathless moment as they waited for the red warning light to come on and an alarm to go off; instead there was a hum that was felt more than heard and the green light on the opposite side of the mechanism blinked. They heard a dull clang as the massive internal bolts slid free of the door and retracted into the wall. Ahiro slipped the cardkey back into his inner pocket with deliberation. Like the doors to the chambers that lined the corridor, this one would also relock automatically; without the cardkey, they would be trapped inside the inner chamber. He gave a moment’s consideration to intentionally dropping it on the way out, then changed his mind. There was no sense in destroying that connection… yet.
When the door slid quietly to the side, the seven of them spun through without a sound, swords ready. Behind them, the laser sensors in the door waited for a beat of five, then triggered the auto-close. In the space of a heartbeat, they were cut off completely from the rest of the MedTech Building. From the world.
Knees bent, weapons raised, they crept forward. They were in another corridor, wider than the one outside and made of a series of huge pipes joined to each other, like the sewer mains that ran under the city. The surfaces here were strangely slippery, not steel like the outer passageway, but coated instead with some sort of beige industrial plastic. The rounded ceiling was higher and held a tangled mass of steel-encased tubes—water, electricity, coolant, perhaps flammable gas. Barely visible behind the tubing were heavily screened air ventilation grates, each no bigger than six inches square.
As the antechamber widened again—still with those same odd sections and alcoves—Ahiro saw three, then four titanium-barred enclosures branching off the main passage—feeders. Closed now, empty of the animals that were probably periodically loaded into them. Beyond that… nothing. No robotic watchmen, no androids, no security.
This is wrong, Ahiro thought, as they moved quickly toward another door at the far end. There should be guards, men with guns—
Ten feet behind him, Higuchi gave a strangled cry and Ahiro heard the man’s sword fall to the plasticized surface of the floor. He whirled and his breath caught in his throat. Higuchi had lost his balance, slipped in a puddle of something gr
easy; always the slowest of Ahiro’s ninjas, now he cowered, frozen, as something huge and multisegmented bent over him.
Defense meant something different in this lab.
Shades of black cut by pools of slime the color of translucent green leaves, the alien was over seven feet tall and impossibly fast—far too fast for Higuchi. For a moment that nearly cost him his life, Ahiro saw in his mind’s eye what Higuchi saw, heard what the already dead man heard—
A mouth full of teeth like white swords, and another within that one, snapping wetly as the creature’s thick, ceaseless saliva swirled in the air. The noise of the beast blotted out everything but the gnashing of its teeth as they sank greedily through Higuchi’s skull as though it were nothing, and Ahiro thought not of swords but of spears—long and deadly and dripping with the blood of multitudes on the music of its battle cry, the sound of huge and angry gods screaming out the symphony of their rage.
There were three aliens, and now only six men. They charged out of the alcoves where they’d been wrapped around reinforced water pipes like giant snakes. Ahiro had never fought an alien before—few civilians had— but he was a quick learner and amazingly swift with his sword. Not so for Yoshi, Ahiro’s second in command, and a detached part of Ahiro watched the battle as if he were outside himself and studying it for the future, then was surprised that his prized pupil would be so clumsy with his blade when the weapon was expected to be another appendage, a part of the warrior. But Yoshi was too slow and the alien was monstrously quick, its armored black claws slicing away the front of Yoshi’s nightsuit and taking half his chest with it, then finishing the job with those terrible, glistening teeth.
Now it was down to Ahiro and four men. Ahiro felt like he was circling an enormous praying mantis, and the feeling was intensified when Matsuo took the offensive with one of the creatures and struck—the tempered steel of his ancient sword, passed from generation to generation in his family and said to bring tremendous luck—slicing his foe from neck to hip in a single lethal cut. Matsuo paid dearly for his exuberance when the alien gave a death shriek and acid blood splashed from the gaping wound and bathed his face. His mask disappeared instantaneously… as did his lips, the skin on his face and neck, even the cartilage of his nose. He might have screamed, but no one would ever know; he had sucked in a mouthful of alien blood and burned away his tongue and vocal cords.
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