by Zachary Hill
Sakura keyed the comms unit. “Vulture, this is a suicide mission.”
“Affirmative, Spirit. It’s going to take a lot of skill and some damned good luck to keep your narrow backside intact.”
“But you are also in …” Sakura started, then released the connection on the comm unit.
“Nothing kills the Vulture.”
Chapter 17
Certain doom.
Sakura scanned the rough terrain. An owl watched her from a tree branch high above, moving its head in parabolic motions to capture a better stereoscopic image of the strange intruder. Perhaps the bird would see her again, blown apart by armor-piercing bullets, the last of her voltage arcing weakly toward the nearest grounding point. The dawn light would kiss her broken and inert chassis, the scorched semblance of humanity blown away and burned to black gelatin.
Like a passenger on a hyperrail train, she hurtled toward her demise and couldn’t veer away from the danger. For once, Kunoichi didn’t attempt to bully her into a more positive mood. She would speak to the soldier, Vulture, and find out what she could before attempting to flee from the suicide mission.
Sakura crept down the slope toward the rendezvous point. Vulture had gone silent on the comms. Looking for a trap, she put her hearing on maximum and cycled her optics to detect every wavelength available. She would see land mines, trip wires, laser motion sensors, physical booby traps, temperature variations, and ground disturbances. Any human-made objects glowed brightly in her display.
Her black stealth suit cost several million yen and merged her with the shadows and the forest. The suit and hood made her invisible to motion sensors and heat signatures, as the outside of the suit changed temperature to match the surroundings.
She was a ghost in the night.
“Except to that owl,” her sister teased. No categorical statement went unchallenged with her listening in.
“Spirit, Daddy’s getting short on patience. Where you at?” Vulture asked in her earpiece. The signal routed directly to her audio channel, so it made no noise as he communicated with her.
“Vulture, I’m fourteen meters from you.”
“Crawl the last eight meters, get dirty, and keep your ass low.”
“Message received.” Sakura’s status grid indicated several task sequences tagged for Kunoichi had kicked off, but she couldn’t easily determine what they were doing. Vulture’s familiar way of speaking confused her. The shape and size of her backside had come up multiple times, though it seemed to have no importance to the mission.
She moved slowly on all fours through the bushes toward him. Vulture had set up three antipersonnel mines in the trees on remote detonators that would annihilate anyone within twenty meters in a wide arc. Microcameras and motion sensors that looked like knotholes attached to the trees scanned the area, but she avoided them with her suit and precise movements.
Vulture lay on the ground, deep inside the shadows of a well-constructed blind. Trees, bushes, and fallen logs surrounded him. Sandbag-sized pieces of granite had been arranged on the lip of the shallow pit. If they were fired upon, the blind would repulse small-arms fire. The blind provided camouflage from above and in front. Mottled temperature-adjusting netting with branches and vines sewn into it made the firing position invisible to the microdrones or any optic sensors from down the mountain.
“This must have taken him days to set up,” Kunoichi told her. “They knew they needed this guy dead before we …”
“Yes. And if we hadn’t survived this long, who would be holding the guns?”
Sakura wondered if her sister had any better idea of that than she did.
She slid into the darkness of a shallow pit, her thigh and calf sliding against Vulture’s prone form. Kunoichi had turned her skin sensitivity all the way up again, and even beneath the stealth suit, her sensors picked up more tactile stimulus than she was accustomed to.
He didn’t flinch or look away from the scope of his Model 120 Japanese sniper rifle. She noted the .338 Lapua armor-piercing bullets would put her out of commission with one hit to a vital area. Gyrostabilizers and recoil dampeners would allow for accurate follow-up shots to finish the job. He carried a sidearm on his right hip, a 10mm Glock 55, and a combat knife on his left. The sniper’s nest smelled like healthy sweat, testosterone, and warm titanium alloy to her. Kunoichi’s processes spiked in system utilization, and Sakura felt something distracting in her biosynthetic systems—not discomfort, but an unsettled feeling she had never experienced.
“What’s wrong with you?” Sakura asked.
“He’s my type,” Kunoichi said. “A bad boy with a big gun.”
“What?”
The unfamiliar sensations carried on from her sister, but Sakura did her best to ignore them. Kunoichi’s process logs indicated she played “Follow Me Down” by The Pretty Reckless. Sakura scanned the lyrics and found overtly sexual themes. Typical.
“Sister,” Sakura said. “We do not have to seduce this soldier. Focus on the mission.”
“He might answer your questions if you’re extra friendly.” Kunoichi shared a data folder filled with seduction techniques.
Sakura ignored the data folder, cut the song, and scanned the terrain.
Two hundred meters below their position lay the villa of Logistical Support Minister Ichiro Watanabe. Built in the style of the Edo period, the compound looked like a small Tokugawa shogunate castle. It sported high walls, multiple-level buildings, and decorative peaked roofs in the old style. The villa sat on a promontory of rock surrounded by an open meadow on the upper three sides. A winding road below entered the castle’s gatehouse.
She studied the villa, built on three different levels on the steep slope, each separated by high walls. The lowest courtyard provided garages, the second held several structures, and the top held the sprawling main house. All were connected by enclosed walkways that passed through the walls. Faded blue solar roof tiles, disguised to look like traditional tiles, covered all the buildings. Many windows were visible from the sniper position, but all of them were blacked out. No lights shone inside or outside the villa.
Sakura took note of the stream meandering across the open meadow in a deep cut before entering a grate in the compound’s high wall. Beyond, the water flowed through a Zen garden and crashed down three small waterfalls into koi ponds at the three distinct tiers of the castle.
She switched her attention to the observation post created by Vulture. A second firing position lay hidden four meters to his right, also extensively camouflaged with top cover, preventing aerial detection. She was surprised to see a gigantic SSK .950 JDJ rifle, which fired a 24.1mm round capable of penetrating light-tank armor. The .950 would wreck a BLADE-3 drone.
One shot could also tear her in half and compromise all her systems. If the Phantom Lord wanted her to die here, she would. Even if she managed to complete the impossible mission, he could call for her demise at any moment. He hunched over the battlefield like an evil and all-powerful god. She found that, somewhere within her cortex, she had begun to be capable of hatred.
The .950 rifle featured a robotic system, a square contraption with an electronic aiming and firing mechanism that bypassed the trigger. It would reload the magazines. She suspected the rounds were depleted uranium with around 350 grains of powder in each gigantic cartridge. She didn’t recognize the targeting device atop the long, fat barrel.
She lay beside Vulture in the shallow firing pit. He wore a full thermal-blocking camouflage suit with a hood and a dark wrap-around visor. All she could tell about him was that he was tall, slender, and lay perfectly still. From his smell, she knew he had to be at least partially human, but something about him seemed different, altered.
With the tactile sensors in her skin turned up so high, Sakura could feel places along Vulture’s body where the slight give of muscled flesh changed to the hardness of metal. The distracting feedback from Kunoichi only increased. The proximity, even with her sister’s new test, felt better
than she thought it might. She lay still, feeling his breathing, the slow pendulum of his left heel swinging back and forth, maintaining blood flow. Another minute went by before she asked on their comm channel, “Have you seen movement tonight?”
“Quiet as bodies in a tomb, little mama. After you killed Kagawa, they’ve been on complete lockdown. No one appears at the windows. No lights. Nothing.”
He knew the truth. He knew she was a killer. He knew she had murdered Toshio Kagawa. Sakura accessed the seduction data folder and studied it. With her new knowledge, she turned, pressing herself hard against him, putting her lips just above his ear so she could whisper out loud. Fear, confusion, and tiny, stubborn sparks of hope shot through her systems as she tried her new ploy.
“Who hacked into my system? Who turned me into an assassin?”
Vulture turned his face away from the scope on his rifle. He pulled off his hood, revealing the rugged face of a human soldier. Cybernetic eyes met hers. She could hear the faint whirring of the optic motors as they focused. He was a cyborg. Kunoichi’s program nearly overloaded her systems as their faces came within a few centimeters, so near that she could see individual follicles of hair within his eyebrows. Her body shivered slightly. Thankfully, the processes cycled down, and her tactile sense turned back down to its normal range.
She studied him, trying to deduce any other information about enhancements he had undergone. His hair was cut military style, the sides shaved, and short on top. Stubble on his face told her he had been in the field for at least two days. She gleaned no other clues about his potential enhancements, other than a guess that he might have a partially cybernetic knee.
She removed her hood and kept the brightness of her eyes on zero luminosity. “You know who I am.” Her voice was a faint whisper. “But please tell me who you are.”
He leaned closer, his eyes locked on hers. “I’m just another soldier. Another rifleman. What else matters?”
Kunoichi sent a coded message to Sakura. “We’re being monitored closely right now. Everything you do and say is being evaluated. Tread carefully, little sister.”
“I need to know why I’m being sent to kill Ichiro Watanabe, especially if it is so likely I will not survive. I need to know why you are here with me. I need to know who is directing this mission.”
He turned away and looked through the scope again. “Vulture. Invisible and silent. That’s all you need to know. Anything more, and neither of us survives the night, little mama.”
“Apologies, but I must request more information. If I’m to end my existence, I wish to know some truth before the end. It’ll help me accept the sacrifice I’ll have to make.”
He shook his head, ever so slightly. “This ain’t a manga about samurai. We don’t get to be the heroes here. We …” He touched her cheek with his rough hand. “We’re just the hand that reaches out of the dark and takes.”
She tried to dislike his touch but couldn’t. A human had reached out to her, and she accepted the contact. She wanted to connect with him. He might be the last person she ever spoke to, and perhaps he could be a friend. He withdrew his hand, and she sensed she might lose any chance of forming a real bond.
“Please, I will begin again. My name is Sakura. I have been active for five years. I play music, and I write songs that no one may ever hear.”
“I know who you are and where you came from. It’s a hell of a thing, hiding all that power underneath that pretty face of yours.” A smile hovered on his lips for an instant before he pulled his hood back on. He put his cheek back against the stock of the sniper rifle and looked down the scope. The silence stretched to half a minute. Her cheek, the place where he’d touched her, still resonated in her cortex. A few of her otaku fans had pawed at her during a photo op, but never something so personal, so assured.
“You haven’t answered my questions.”
“I didn’t. I’m not going to either. That’s not how any of this works, baby. The whole point of an android is that they do what they’re told.”
Chapter 18
“I’m not like other androids. I’m something different.”
He paused for a long moment. In the quiet of the foxhole, he let out his breath, coming to a decision. “My name is Kenshiro. Can we go back to being quiet little assassins now?”
“That’s a good name. Thank you, Kenshiro-san. Now please answer my other questions.”
Kenshiro reached back without taking his eye away from the scope. “Mask on. You’re distracting the hell out of me.”
“Tell me what you know.”
“Here you go, then.” He sent a neural text through the earpiece. “Ichiro Watanabe is the man who ordered the hack on your system. He is the one who ordered you to kill Toshio Kagawa and Jiro Yoritomo. He is responsible, but his treachery has been discovered. The Ministry of Defense and the Miyahara Conglomerate have broken his hold on you. They have sent you on this mission. Tonight, you’ll eliminate the man responsible for the assassinations of innocent patriots. You will regain your honor and the honor of the entire Miyahara Conglomerate. This will be justice. When this is over, you’ll return to your career as a vocaloid. The events of the past few days will never become public.”
Sakura read the message several times and calculated how quickly he sent it to her. He could have composed the text in the time available, but it was too fast, too perfect, and all wrong coming from a man like him. The message had been written long before, and he merely sent it at the right moment. It was obvious subterfuge to make her go along with the mission. Why would anyone think she would believe such obvious lies? Was that the point? To let her know she was being lied to and see how she responded? Would she follow orders? No. She refused to play along. She needed more information.
“Why did he need Toshio Kagawa killed?”
“That information is classified.”
She glared at him, the light in her eyes flashing devil red.
After a moment, he whispered to her, “Kagawa and Yoritomo were going to expose his illegal research with Quantum 3 programming in military androids. Watanabe took them out. This, tonight? Think of it as vengeance—for the people of Japan and for the Miyahara Conglomerate.”
The Phantom Lord had fed him this lie as well. It fit too well, tied everything up into a convenient bow. The wording and sentiment were crafted to appeal to her nature. A lie, told secondhand. The sort of simple palliative they would give to a child. Something that her hard-won understanding of the world now revealed to her in sharp contrast. She suspected some of it was true. She was an illegal Quantum 3 experiment. Truth inserted into lies made them more believable. It was a solid tactic.
“Vulture, what’s the strategy?” She would not betray her true thoughts openly. It was time to show obedience and let whoever was monitoring her think that she, too, was a good soldier.
“You go in silent, no alarms, no shots. Slick as a blade in their kidneys. I’ll cover you from here. You get sunk in as deep as you can get, and I’ll give ’em a taste of the .950 on your go. We take out the security in a combined effort. Place these along the way; it’ll help me see what’s going on and help with targeting.” He handed her a small sack of microcameras.
“Once you’re in, ghost Ichiro Watanabe as quickly as possible. We have to hit them harder than they ever thought possible. No warning, no mercy. I have two other SSK .950 rifle emplacements aimed at the house on the ridges.” He motioned his head toward the slopes of the mountain on either side of the villa. The rifles would fire down from three different directions. “Even without the cameras you’re going to put in place, the Vulture sees everything. I’m already over them. I know when a mouse sneezes down there.”
Vulture’s plan was brutal and well designed, but she needed more information. “What about the BLADE-3s? Where are they?”
“One is in the guard room above the entry gate at the lowest level of the house. One is at the front door of the main house on the upper level. Another may be in the middle level,
and I assume the fourth is with Watanabe.”
“How do you know the location of the two?”
“Magic, little mama. That, and the minidrones have ground-penetrating radar.”
Sakura hadn’t heard of this apparently top-secret technology. She extrapolated how it likely worked and believed him. “What of the noncombatants present?” She had reviewed the dossiers of Watanabe’s majordomo, cook, cleaning woman, gardener, and his mistress. All were in the villa, and she knew where they slept.
“It’s a free-fire zone,” Kenshiro said. “Watanabe may attempt to disguise himself as one of them and try to escape. Terminate all of them. No witnesses.”
Sakura bristled. She would not kill innocent people again, but if she played along and learned the entire plan, despite her moral and tactical qualms, she might find a way to escape and save lives.
“If you won’t think it,” Kunoichi said in a coded message to Sakura, “I’ll say it. This is bullshit. Another bullshit mission we are both being forced to do.”
Commands from an external source integrated themselves into Sakura’s processors. She had to go into the villa and could not see a way to resist.
“We have to find a way not to do this,” Sakura told her sister. “There are fourteen humans in the house. And four BLADE-3s.”
“If you do not follow orders,” Kunoichi said, “I will be forced to take over the mission. I will kill everyone and follow every order. Neither of us want that.”
“Understood, Vulture,” Sakura said on their audio link. “I will eliminate all targets. The criminal Ichiro Watanabe will be executed.” Sakura thought her lie compelling and believable. She would go in, but she would save everyone’s lives.