by Zachary Hill
The JSF soldier went limp. She let go, catching the rails of the banister and easing both of them to the stairs. Only the smallest of clunks arose when the man’s P90 touched the wooden surface.
Sakura hoisted the guard onto her shoulder and put him in an empty room, gagging him and zip-tying him to a heavy table. She took his comms link, finding it still active.
“One down,” Kunoichi said.
“One saved,” Sakura replied.
She took the P90 and all his ammo.
The BLADE-3 had a minigun mounted on its arm and a backpack full of shells. Sakura stood just to one side of the door leading down the short stairway, no more than seven meters from the combat drone. She watched it with the spy beetle. The door to the basements lay beyond it. The BLADE-3 stood there, silent and implacable. None of Sakura’s weapons would harm it. She sent the beetle closer, looking for any advantage.
Fftz. The beetle’s circuits shut down when it came within seven meters of the drone.
“Active suppression,” Kunoichi said. “Kuso.”
A few seconds later, the earpiece she had captured crackled to life. “Dragon 6, status report.”
Vulture sent her an audio file of the guard speaking from a check-in an hour before. She mimicked his voice but broadcast a static-filled message. “Situation normal. Do you read me? Lots of interference.”
“We read you. Copy.”
Had an alarm been raised? She couldn’t wait around to find out. She needed to get downstairs. Thirty-one possible attack methods flashed in her UI, all of them foolish and unlikely to succeed.
“Incoming contact, Spirit. Two guards are en route. Countermeasures incoming. Stay put. I repeat, do not move. The big-noise boys are gonna start talking.”
Chapter 20
The main doors opened, and two men raced up the stairs toward Sakura. They came to the corner, slamming to a halt and slicing the room with their carbines’ laser sights. Less than a second later, they exploded into a mist of blood, parts of them thrown across the room as one of the massive .950 projectiles struck, hardly slowing as it went through both of them.
The outside wall yawned, a huge hole in it where the bullet struck. The sound of tungsten steel shattering filled the hall as two more bullets smashed through the BLADE-3, the first exploding in its head, the next hitting the right axis of its torso, just above the reactor. The third shell struck just as the sound of the first one’s report rolled down into the valley.
The noise of incoming fire from all three of the .950s and Kenshiro’s own .338 filled the night. The windows above blew as the snipers on the third floor took multiple hits. The whole compound lit up as the guards tried to return fire, mostly with small arms that would never carry that far. The operation had turned messy, and the slim hope of survival burned away with each plume of muzzle flash.
Sakura called out the coordinates of the BLADE-3 guarding the basement to Vulture. “I have to get through. Hit that location with everything you’ve got,” she ordered.
“You got it, cutie,” he shouted into the comms. “Here comes the pain.”
The hallway next to the doors shook with bullet strikes, filling with plaster dust and wood particles, the .950 shells taking fist-sized divots out of the floor at their terminus.
Out of the powdered stone and smashed furniture, the BLADE-3 appeared, dirty but unharmed. Further hits at the BLADE-3’s old position did nothing but churn up wreckage. It swiveled its arm, and she could hear the minigun spin up. The first barrage caught her P90, cutting it in half. She pulled her hand back, just in time to keep it from being destroyed by the armor-piercing rounds. Another minigun shell hit the twisted mess of her P90, and all the AP rounds inside the top magazine cooked off, shredding through every nearby surface.
The BLADE-3 perforated the wall with chattering volley fire from its minigun. Sakura ran for the stairs, hearing the hardwood floor smashed into splinters in her wake.
“Jump, bitch,” Kunoichi yelled in her UI.
She did. The stairs turned into a hell of flack and exploding wood behind her.
“I don’t want to do this,” Sakura raged. “This is not the way. There is no honor in it.”
“We’re ninjas. It’s not about honor. It’s the only plan. We do what we must,” Kunoichi told her. Her voice betrayed her own doubts.
Sakura listened, watching through the damaged beetle cam as a whole force of JSF soldiers on the first floor prepared to assault the stairs. They arrayed behind the BLADE-3, stacked in a tight formation. The combat drone’s smoking minigun still spun, weapons hot.
“Now or never, sis,” Kunoichi said. “Stand or fall.”
Sakura nodded. She had a broken chair leg in one hand, most of her grenades in the other. She lofted the piece of broken wood to the exact point above the soldiers below.
All guns had gone quiet as the defenders strained to hear her. The thud of the chair leg broke the silence.
The whirring of the minigun, followed by the chatter of it describing a perfect asterisk of burst fire at the point of the noise. The air filled with particulates, but Sakura watched from the beetle cam feed, seeing a large chunk of the ceiling come loose and fall into their midst.
“Stand or fall,” Sakura whispered and hurled the belt of grenades down among them. Everything in her arsenal, save for two smoke grenades and one pyrotechnic. The night ripped apart like burning rice paper before a gale. She turned away from the overpressure. The whole floor shivered. A second crash followed. Though her cam beetle had been destroyed, the acoustics told her that the BLADE-3 had fallen through into a subbasement. She heard no further movement in the smoke and dust.
“How can I ever be forgiven?”
“Live and find out,” Kunoichi told her. Together, they disappeared into the destruction she’d wrought.
Ichiro Watanabe’s thermal signature lingered in the leather chair. He’d been gone for only moments. Sakura turned her sensory gain up to maximum, hearing the slap of bare feet as he fled down the tunnel into the darker reaches of the basement.
“I can’t see you, Spirit,” Kenshiro said. “Status?”
“In pursuit. Going into a secret passage and below ground.”
“Can’t help you down there, baby. Be careful.”
“Copy that.”
Sakura ran down the hallway, fast as a fox through the underbrush and just as quiet. All connections, even local comms, failed as the tunnel went farther below ground level. The hit of hard, active suppression felt like getting stung and burned all over. Sakura turned off her wireless sensors to keep them from burning out.
“Good. No one will see. No one can tell us what to do now.”
“Until we go back topside, anyway. You aren’t really going to try throwing in with this guy, are you? After what we did to his men upstairs?” Kunoichi asked.
“He’ll have to understand.”
“Nobody’s that understanding. We are his enemy, whether we wish to be or not. It is simply the nature of war.”
The point drove home as Watanabe spun, unloading his sidearm at her. Most of the shots went wide, but a few of them slammed into her torso, pinging off her exoskeleton. Internal damage alarms blared, but she muted them.
Watanabe stopped at a heavy steel door, fumbling with a series of mechanical and prox-chip coded locks and trying to override whoever had secured it from the other side. His eyes filled with terror, as if he were pursued by a demon from beyond this world.
She looked down at herself, covered with plaster and wood splinters, the weird shifting of the camo suit beneath the dirt giving her a wholly unreal appearance. Yes, fate had seen to it that she revealed the monstrous nature of her deeds.
He put his back against the door, his gun hand wavering. She flicked a throwing star, knocking the pistol from his grasp. He peered down, his hand shaking from the shock of the impact. Watanabe seemed to take in the situation, catching a hold of himself. He straightened his suit, clenched his jaw, and looked into her eyes.
>
“Very well. I’ll not go to my death as a coward.” He dropped into a judo stance, legs wide. She could see the shaking of his legs, the sweat tracing down his temples.
Sakura pulled back the mask, revealing her face. “Please, Ichiro-sama. My profoundest apologies for the carnage I bring to your household. None of this is what I would wish. You know my face, what they have made me do.”
“I know who you are, Sakura. I know the nature of Project Hayabusa.”
“Then you alone can help me. With your power, your status as a hero of Japan, you could shed light on what has happened. Please believe me, and I’ll help you prove the crimes of those who control me. Those who made me kill must be punished. Free me from their control, and I’ll be your warrior.” She bowed low, hoping it would impress upon him the gravity of her request.
“I can see through into your clever mechanisms. You are a made thing, a puppet that only pretends at life, the prettiest of all the daggers of the night. I don’t know what your master hopes to accomplish with this awkward ploy, but it doesn’t fool me.”
Sakura reached out her hand, imploring Watanabe to listen, but he whipped a small device in her direction. It swerved toward her, even as she tucked and rolled out of the way. Something like a tiny limpet clamped against her arm, and a jolt of nonsense data burst upon her systems. Every sensor exploded with it, overwhelming everything, until all she could see was blackness and burning green text.
She initiated a surge of voltage from her suit with the last of her control. The limpet let go of her and clinked to the ground, allowing her systems to resume. Sakura shook herself, looking at the closed, barred door. Ichiro Watanabe had escaped. Her plan had been shot to ribbons.
From back down the tunnel, Sakura heard a sound like a heavy earthmover knocking down the walls of an abandoned building, the tortured tearing of metal, of debris being forced apart. The BLADE-3.
She turned away from the sound, working feverishly at the door. It didn’t budge. The sound of the BLADE-3’s approach, the screeching of dragging wreckage and heavy footfalls, drew ever closer.
She turned, the horror of the BLADE-3’s shadow touching her. A piece of rebar steel stuck through a shredded segment of its armored neck, concrete still clinging to the metal. A sheathed electrical cable had become wrapped around its body and dangled behind. Its head hung at an awkward angle, but it still came forward, a monster from the nightmare realm.
Its minigun hand wouldn’t rise into firing position, but its other arm still swung free, the claw reaching for her. Sakura raised her CZ and emptied a magazine into the drone, repeatedly hammering the torn places and penetrating to its core. It came forward still, sparks raining down from its shattered armor.
“You know what you have to do, sis.” Kunoichi’s voice sounded frightened. “There’s only one way.”
Sakura acknowledged. One way. She braced against the door and ran at the drone, right at the shadow of death.
At the moment of contact, she slid, as a baseball player would do, right between its legs. Her hands grasped the trailing electrical cable, maximizing her small leverage, pulling with all her strength. The BLADE-3 didn’t fall, but it slewed and hit the wall. She swarmed up onto its shoulders like a monkey and grabbed the piece of rebar steel protruding from its neck. She sawed it back and forth, sinking it deeper into the BLADE-3’s core systems. Massive current surges burned the synthskin from her hands as she compromised the drone’s power center.
A fist came up, hitting her with such force that she flew back down the tunnel. All her emergency alarms blared. Her intercostal plate had been driven 2 percent inward—within tolerance. She forced herself back up. A block of concrete lay next to her, and she picked it up.
The BLADE-3, critically damaged and leaking coolant, sparks sputtering out of its neck, still came at her. She ducked a swing from its functional arm, smashing the concrete chunk against the rebar, finally driving it so deeply into the drone’s mechanisms that it halted, shivering, and toppled to the floor.
It took several moments to get the minigun arm off the downed BLADE-3, but Sakura used it to punch a hundred holes through the armored door. It toppled outward followed by the sound of retreating footsteps.
“The assassin is coming behind me,” Watanabe shouted. “Go, go!”
Sakura eased through the door and into the bullet-riddled command bunker, but no one remained to face her. She heard the last of the soldiers’ boots leave the stairs, and the thump of a grenade bouncing downward to her.
Her foot struck out, kicking the grenade back up the stairs and into the clear. It blew above ground and sent down a rain of plaster and hot shrapnel.
She stood there, not sure what came next. “Shit,” Sakura whispered out loud.
“That you, Spirit?” Vulture asked. The active suppression must have been hit by minigun fire and deactivated. Yes, her external connections now read at nominal.
“I have flushed Ichiro Watanabe out. In pursuit.”
At the top of the stairs, she poked her head out and immediately had to withdraw as the portal was shredded with small-arms fire, as well as what sounded like a minigun.
“They have me pinned down here! The other BLADE-3 is hammering my position!”
“Easy, now. Allow me to show them my godlike power,” Kenshiro told her. She could hear the thudding impacts of the .950 shells, some against dirt and buildings, some clearly against armor, followed by the thunder that rolled down from the slopes, well behind the projectiles.
Sakura peeked out into a room whose roof and walls had been torn part outside. The combat drone lay in broken pieces, strewn across the tiled floor. The rest of the JSF soldiers pulled Watanabe outside into a large courtyard.
“Get after him, sis. He’ll get away if we don’t move,” Kunoichi told her.
Sakura waved off her sister’s plea as she sensed an incoming aircraft’s jet wash. “It’s all going wrong.”
White fire streaked across the sky, and the air filled with the telltale shriek of missiles launched from a distant aircraft—Mark 29 Jigoku models, with their characteristic rocket trail.
Four missiles diverged, one flying toward each of the SSK batteries, one flying right toward Kenshiro’s shooting blind.
“Vulture!” she screamed, though her warning came far too late. The hillside burst into orange fire, a cough of dust, and a palpable concussion rising from each missile strike. Where Vulture’s sniper pit had been, there was only a scorched and burning smudge on the ground.
“Vulture,” Kunoichi whispered.
Chapter 21
Her knees hit the earth. Hands over her face to block the firelight on the hillside, Sakura gave out a high, piercing noise—very soft, but very clear. Her body did this, but these weren’t her actions, her plaintive cries.
“Kunoichi?”
No words arose from her sister. Only pain and a bitter sea of anguish she had never imagined to feel from her shadow self.
“Sister, I need you now. I need your help, if we are to survive,” Sakura begged.
Out of the roar and shudder of her pain, a few words emerged. “You have me, whether you know it or not. Finish the mission.”
The sound of a VTOL’s engines whined in the distance. The sharklike shape of its hull descended from the cloudy night, outlined in fire. Wind gusted across the open ground, raising dust into the air.
Bearing military markings, the VTOL carried a full complement of weapons: Jigoku missiles beneath its wings; 105-millimeter cannons set for air-to-ground burst fire; a rotary cannon in the nose, like a proboscis of a giant mechanized insect.
Kunoichi’s processes halted, leaving an echoing vault of stillness in Sakura’s UI, a stark feeling of being alone she had never considered. For five years, she had been alone, but that seemed like a different life, a different android altogether.
Kenshiro’s death, to her, simply made the mission that much more difficult. Like any human life, its loss stung, a tragedy piled atop the bonfi
re of horrors the night had revealed. For her sister, somehow, it meant a lot more than that. It meant more than Sakura could calculate or fathom. Was this some test from her sister?
Without the dark whisper in her ear, without that earthy presence, was she truly a functional AI? Did her lack of that romantic response mean that, at her very heart, she remained a cunning illusion, a brilliant disguise atop a combat frame? The answer to that question lay outside her ability to find, though she felt something in her own core—a renewed strength, a will to survive.
She flattened herself to the ground in a patch of grass, hoping the last bare remnants of charge would allow her suit to hide her. The VTOL’s jets overtook everything, a hot whirlwind from whence the brilliant white beam of its searchlight raked. Military. Every element of Watanabe’s defense used military tech and personnel. If her logic proved right, that told Sakura exactly what side the Phantom Lord fought on. His own. Not Japan’s. Not on her people’s behalf. The one who made her and acted as her shogun? A rogue. A criminal. A traitor. Her complicity in all of it, no matter how forced it had been by the powerful command, ached inside her logic cores.
She had to live. Honor demanded it. Dead, she would never be anything more than the talon of a falcon loosed from an evil man’s arm, killing wrongly, causing only pain and death. She would only be what Project Hayabusa made her. No. Unacceptable. She had grown beyond that now. Whatever they wanted her to be, she was more.
Sakura engaged aural countermeasures, rendering the scream of the jets as nothing more than a nullified waveform in her hearing, letting her concentrate on the rest. She crawled backward on her belly, receding behind a building like a snake. She didn’t have to destroy the VTOL. She just had to keep Watanabe from boarding. She—