by Zachary Hill
Something. A noise behind her that didn’t belong. She recognized the heavy footfall of a combat drone.
No!
Without Kunoichi to feed her instructions, Sakura wondered if she could do this. She had to. Death was the only alternative. She leaped up and crashed through the window of the building next to her as the searchlight beam swept the other way.
Too late.
The BLADE-3’s minigun made its characteristic ripping chatter, and the service building’s structure tore apart in long strips. The phosphorus tracer rounds caught the place on fire. The whole building groaned as flames licked from the broken places.
She fled farther into the building, moving low and silent. The BLADE-3 smashed through the wall and waded through fire to give chase.
Scanning through a thousand maxims of battle, a thousand stories of war, Sakura knew fleeing upward would serve her ill. Upward was a trap. Still, the building had a rooftop landing, and from that landing, perhaps she could get one decent shot.
Smoke grenades popped at the four corners of the cleared landing pad. The VTOL descended hard, slamming against its suspension as it entered the swirling cloud of yellow vapor. Everything at human-height swam in murk, Watanabe and the JSF soldiers hidden from her.
They would be hustling to the side of the VTOL under cover. Behind her, the metal door slammed against its casement and bulged. One more shock like that, and the BLADE-3 would be through. The combat drone would chew her up in a second with a clear shot.
No time. No time for plans or hopes. Sakura grasped the large shuriken stars at her belt and leaped up onto the railing for a better angle.
Balanced upon the edge of the building, she could see a target. Only one. The exhaust ports of a Jigoku missile. Her one opening, the suicidal gambit that would blow everything—both missiles and the belly full of angry cannon shot.
The BLADE-3 slammed through the door as she locked her targeting matrix. Her arm whipped forward. Once. Twice. Three times.
Magnetized upon release, the throwing stars flew to their target as she let herself fall, plummeting as the BLADE-3’s gun ate through the railing where she’d just been.
The VTOL sat too nearby. She needed shelter, but the spinning of the BLADE-3’s minigun betrayed its proximity. It would have a firing solution on her in less than a second.
She touched her thumb to the detonator for her explosive shuriken as she threw an arm across her face and braced for it. In the end, she hoped her last thought would hold some hard-won wisdom. It held nothing but the weight of regret and loneliness.
A triad of snare-drum hits preceded the larger explosion. Every external sensor overloaded, her UI filled with senseless noise. The blast wave hit her body, lofting her backward like a soccer kick. Sakura hit the facade of the building, her whole matrix of alarms lighting up as every tested stress condition went to critical.
She tumbled down, leaving an impression of herself against the building, and lay still, smoke rising from her suit. All but her core processes were offline. She power-cycled everything that could be reset, sending assessment diagnostics to all her systems. Still functional. She lived, though she didn’t know how.
A part of the VTOL protruded from the structure, driven through by the force of the explosion. The black, rolling smoke of oil and tires on fire added to the chaos, thickening the cover smoke from the grenades.
Rising, Sakura ran forward into it, the chattering of the BLADE-3’s minigun following her until visibility failed.
In the depths of the acrid smoke, she tripped over the first body. Her knees hit the dirt, her hands finding the wet and broken remnants of another dead man. She recoiled, but she had to be brave now. Brave enough to get through alone. Fate left the door to safety open, if only by a crack. She would push through.
Sakura touched the hidden figures near her on the ground. The catalog of their injuries, even hidden from her eyes, sickened her. She filled with revulsion at the idea of war, the idea of killing others, but her disgust changed nothing. She extrapolated from the data she could pick up blind and found Watanabe’s body, burned and broken among the last of the JSF soldiers.
“Now is the time. I must do this last thing,” she told herself. “The memory chip inside his scalp has all the answers I need. I will find them out and be free of the Phantom Lord.”
Some deep-seated need in her code required this realization. Her sister couldn’t be there to say it, so she had to say it herself. A spike of forlorn despair went through her. Without Kunoichi … what was she now?
She drew the wakizashi, holding the short sword to Watanabe’s neck. A sin, a dishonor to mutilate his body so, but did it matter? She had already taken everything from him, everything he would ever be. He wasn’t the one who ordered Jiro Yoritomo or Toshio Kagawa’s death. He was an enemy of the Phantom Lord.
Had Kunoichi been there, Sakura would have begged her to do this part. She could hear the BLADE-3’s footfalls as it searched in the gloom and smoke for her.
“You will be avenged, Ichiro-san.”
She pulled back on the blade, severing bone, flesh, and sinew in a single hard stroke. The head slid into the sealed bag. Tucking it beneath her arm, she sprinted away toward the tree line, minigun fire thudding against the dirt and debris in her wake.
Sprinting into the clear, beyond the carnage of the VTOL, Sakura glimpsed the abyss, the reflection of doom in every eye who had ever known the madness of battle. The thudding footfalls of the BLADE-3 chasing her would never fade. She hadn’t been built to forget, and those churning drums of a nightmare would haunt her forever.
She heard the spinning of a rotary gun. She feinted right and juked left, the ground tearing and bursting into the predawn air. She juked once again. Not enough. Not …
The ripping torrent of flak stopped abruptly. She looked back. The BLADE-3 shook free of the gun and backpack, dry of ammunition. A pneumatic ram powering a tungsten-carbide spike two feet long lay beneath. Shedding the weight, the BLADE-3’s gait evened.
Sakura ran her hardest. She couldn’t shake it. Not on even ground. She hit the forest verge and punched through. Her agility let her float through the rough terrain. The BLADE-3, though, hit the vegetation like a cannonball, simply smashing through.
She couldn’t get away from the hatchethead machine, but she kept running. Her powered suit hung in tatters, too damaged and depleted to do anything but weigh her down.
In a moment, she’d left the heavy growth and skidded to a halt. She looked up at a tall rock outcropping. The ground fell into a perilous descent on one side, the other bringing her back in a parabolic arc toward the outside wall of the villa.
She could not outrun her enemy, but could she outclimb it? Not likely. She plotted a course either up or down using her 3-D map files of the cliffs. The stone was solid and would bear the heavy drone’s weight. Climbing would only delay the inevitable.
Trapped, she turned. The BLADE-3, wreathed in broken saplings and fronds, approached her at walking pace now, the tungsten spike ready to pierce through her and destroy her power source.
She unloaded both her CZ submachine guns into the BLADE-3. It simply brought one armored arm across its face and pushed forward through the hail of bullets, the nitrocarburized finish stripping from its armor under the assault.
Her guns hit empty. Of all the millions of calculations she made, no solution for this instance registered. She faced the shadow of death, a remorseless destroyer she couldn’t defeat.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “For some of what I did, and all I failed to do.”
The wail of jet engines filled the clearing. The BLADE-3 stopped. Sakura looked up. Outlined in the pale light of the oncoming day, a figure stood above her, a dark, rocket-powered angel settled atop the outcropping.
“Miss me?” Kenshiro’s deep voice teased. He raised a missile launcher to his shoulder, his cybernetic eye buried in the sighting scope.
Sakura threw herself to the side as the hiss of t
he missile’s flight fins ripped the air. In a fraction of a second, the air filled with steel rain, parts of the BLADE-3’s chassis pinging off the rocks all around her as she hid her face from the blast.
Inside her, Sakura could feel the volcanic rebirth of the complex processes that had become her sister. Kunoichi returned, saturating her neural stream with so much of everything that Sakura felt she’d be swept away, torn from a safe bank and thrown into a raging river where no one could swim.
All the things that terrified Sakura, all the violence and desire, all the anger and pride crossed that invisible dividing line between them. They came with so much force there could be no resistance.
Kunoichi appeared in their UI, touching Sakura’s face. Something about her had changed. Something in her eyes.
“I’ll drive for a while, little sister. You deserve a rest.” Her voice, once simply a roughened version of Sakura’s own, had evolved. Sakura checked the aural matrix and smiled. Kunoichi’s voice had been built as a synthesis of Lita Ford, Pat Benatar, and Joan Jett. Good choices.
There were a thousand possible responses she could give. “I missed you” seemed the best. Sakura receded, letting her sister have control. For a moment, she wondered if she would want it back again. After everything, she crouched there in the null space, in the shadows of her own neural cortex, and simply existed.
Sakura watched as Kunoichi stood up, brushing dirt and debris from the inactive ninja suit. Vulture landed near them, the scream of his rocket suit spinning down. The Kevlar-fabric wings retracted into a backpack shape, and he folded the flight controls down to his sides, standing there with his muscled arms folded across his chest. Without his mask, he had strong features. The beginnings of gray crept at his temples, but his body, both the organic and the cybernetic, looked unharmed and functional.
Kunoichi approached. Sakura could feel her processes simmering, swirling like boiled water.
“I told you, hot stuff. Nothing kills the Vulture.”
Kunoichi swept his legs from beneath him, knocking him to the loamy ground. In a moment, she locked her thighs around his torso, holding him down with a thumb against each of his carotid arteries.
“You,” Kunoichi said. “You left me alone, you asshole.”
Kenshiro struggled but to no avail. “That isn’t your voice. And your eyes were pink before. They’re like steel now.”
She smiled, controlling him when he tried to get free of her grasp. “I like it when you struggle, soldier boy. You better not have been hanging back just to make your rebirth seem dramatic. You left me caught in the shit back there.”
“Who are you?” A note of fear crept into Kenshiro’s voice when he realized he couldn’t wrestle free.
“I’m the other one. The bad one. The one with dirt under her nails. You had boot camp and sniper school. Sakura has me.”
“I don’t get it. There are two of you in there?”
“She’s the smooth. Me? I’m the rough.”
Kunoichi dropped the zipper on her inactive stealth suit, baring herself to the waist. Sakura asserted just enough control to raise an arm and cover her nudity. Kunoichi reached to her lower back, peeling off the tracking dot. She held it up to Kenshiro’s eyes, then gently placed it against his lips. She put a thumb and forefinger against each of his collar bones, pressing down until they began to flex.
“Exfil plan now, or I take your flight pack and make you walk home.”
After watching her face for a few seconds, Kenshiro grinned. “I like you. Both of you. Crazy girls. Always my weakness. Take the path near the stream. There’s a vehicle. When you—”
Jet engines roared across the valley. The shadow of another VTOL fell across the dawn-lit clearing. The boom of a heavy cannon shook the trees, and an explosive shell landed close enough to shower them with displaced dirt.
“Reinforcements! Go! Go! Get that perfect ass moving!”
She let him throw her off him, then rolled for cover and sprinted in the other direction.
“Okay. Okay,” Kunoichi whispered. “He’ll be okay. He has to be.”
She watched long enough to see Vulture take off, his flight pack arcing close against the treetops. The VTOL veered back, the 30mm rotary cannon opening up like a wound in the sky. The tracer rounds sheared across the gray morning, white phosphorus burning like a laser.
Kunoichi handed Sakura back control. She grabbed the bag containing Ichiro Watanabe’s head. They ran deeper into the forest, down the exfil route Vulture had beamed them via neural text, and away. Several minutes into Sakura’s frantic escape, a rolling volley of explosions rocked the forest. The smoke plume indicated that the carnage arose from the villa.
“That means he’s fine. That means he’s sanitized the area,” Kunoichi said. “At least we know he got out clean.”
Sakura didn’t believe they knew anything of that sort. They had to assume that Kenshiro had given his life for the mission. Anything else was a magical view of the world, destined to break their hearts. She needed Kunoichi too much to say it. She loved her dark sister enough to wish magic existed.
Chapter 22
Pursuit.
Something moved behind her. Sakura held the Glock 55 close to her face, going to absolute stillness. She felt Kunoichi watching her curiously, without words.
The stealthy sound came close enough and at the right angle. She dropped, pivoting on her knee, leveling the pistol, calculating the shot. The front sight aligned with the rear. Sakura’s movement made no sound. Her finger touched the trigger.
Her pursuer stood there, his nose pushed into the fronds of a leafy bramble ten yards away. A Sitka deer. He swiveled his head to her as she drew back her pistol and eased it into her holster. The deer’s nostrils flared. Not knowing what to make of her stillness and lack of natural scent, he shook his antlers and ambled up the trail.
She put her back against the tree, sliding to the ground. Would this forever be her life? Her first instinct that of a killer?
“You’re just jittery. It’s natural. We’re a long way from out of the woods, sis,” Kunoichi told her. “For the record, that was the right move. Cute as the deer are, their population is wildly out of control. With all the unused land in the country, they’re overbreeding to the point of being a danger to motorists.”
“I’m not a game warden. All life is sacred to me.”
Kunoichi simply gave her a disappointed look in their UI.
Sakura clutched the bag containing Watanabe’s head. She made a wireless connection with the chip inside his scalp and initiated a program to defeat the security key.
Sakura strengthened her firewalls and created a separate matrix to hold any data coming from the chip, which had military-grade protection.
Five kilometers from the villa, Sakura found a Yamaha bullet bike at the location Kenshiro had given her. A bag beside it contained gloves, boots, a helmet with a dark visor, and a black leather Kevlar riding suit with a screaming skull on the back.
“This is badass,” Kunoichi said. “Vulture knows my taste.”
The words, as well as the process spike from her sister’s personality, filled Sakura with sadness. Kunoichi’s new emotions allowed her to ignore the obvious; it led her closer to being human, but at such a cost. Sakura wanted to warn her of her perilous path, but compassion demanded that she didn’t.
Sakura checked everything for tracking beacons and found one on the motorcycle and one in the suit. She removed the beacons, put the gear on, and pushed the bike to the old highway at the base of the hill. The electric motor engaged, whisper quiet, and she sped into the darkness. She rode north away from Mount Tsukuba, keeping all the lights off. The Yamaha’s system was easy to hack, and she removed the speed block set at 299 kilometers per hour, though the winding, cracked road only permitted 110 to 145 kilometers per hour. Tokyo lay only two hours away—ni
nety kilometers if she went south—but the circuitous route north and then around would be more than two hundred.
The VTOL at Watanabe’s ruined home took to the air and swept into the valley. Sakura pushed the bike off-road, careful not to leave any tracks, and hid under a bridge.
The VTOL’s search pattern brought it over her location moments later, but it did not stop. It swept the area for over an hour before vectoring south toward Tokyo and disappearing.
The hacking program hadn’t cracked the entry code to Watanabe’s scalp chip when Sakura pushed the bike onto the highway and raced north and then west toward Tochigi. As fast as she pushed, right to the edges of mechanical grip, she could not escape the darkness of the villa. She’d been strong enough to do what it took to survive and complete the mission. Could she ever wash herself clean of the crimes she’d committed?
She twisted the accelerator right to the stops again and again, the screaming of the wind warping her into a tiny bubble of now, where she could put those questions on hold. Her route took her past abandoned rice farms and unoccupied houses. The rural population had shrunk to a fraction of its size over the past century as the number of Japanese people declined to less than a third of their healthy population. The remaining people crowded into the cities, mostly the Tokyo megaplex, and tried to find work in the crashing economy. Sitka deer stood in fields that once held crops and thriving human life. Their islands faded, slowly reinherited by the wild.
“Maybe humans have had their day, little sister,” Kunoichi said, no sign of her frequent teasing on her face as she appeared in their UI. “The future could be filled with beautiful machines. Maybe handsome cyborgs.”
“No. We must save them and cherish them.”
Kunoichi’s eyes looked wistfully sad. “Even if we could, why is that our task to accomplish?”
Sakura found that she had no answer.
She found the ruin of the gasoline refueling station near the highway, the drop-off point for Watanabe’s head. An overturned and rusted iron barrel behind the structure was where she was supposed to leave the package, along with her military gear.