‘Why don’t you come in and get him then?’ Tatsu called back. The man had a point. Her pistol simply did not have sufficient penetration against modern combat armour. The suits were probably powered, providing additional strength to the wearer. This was not good. If she could stall until help arrived…
A shape appeared in the doorway, a ghost of a man looking around for a target. Trying a different tactic, Tatsu lifted her pistol and fired. She got lucky, and she knew it: one of the ten needles punched right through the man’s arm, shredding the muscle. His rifle dropped from his dead hand and he fumbled the catch with his good one. Tatsu dived across the space between them, grabbing the rifle before it could hit the ground, rolled out of the dive, and jammed the muzzle of his weapon into his gut. She pulled the trigger. Five rounds of very-high-velocity ammo punched through his suit and he crumpled to the ground. Dead was, perhaps, unlikely, but he was out of the fight.
There was a moment of shock on the other side and Tatsu took the opportunity to find out what the underslung grenade launcher was loaded with. She had assumed it was capture webbing since they had never used it against the Yankees. She hit the leader of the group in the chest and discovered that it was not capture webbing. The grenade exploded, slamming the man backward into the vehicle behind him. Twenty-five-millimetre grenades were not big enough to have a large explosive force; you were better off loading shaped-charge warheads into them really. The leader fell as the dual impacts shook his balance, but he was probably only bruised, and five metres away, Tatsu felt little more than a waft of hot air against her skin. Still, that explained why they had not used the grenades in Yachiyo.
The mercs were starting to respond now, lifting their weapons to open fire. Tatsu got in first, putting two rounds into the head of the man on the leader’s left. He dropped and so did Tatsu, rolling away from the doorway as five people opened fire. Then she turned, vaulted the counter, and dropped down beside Kawaguchi. The man looked scared, and he had something of a right to be. If it were Tatsu out there, the next thing she would have tried was grenades. Sure enough, the gunfire stopped and Tatsu pushed Kawaguchi further into the corner, shielding him with her body.
In the confined space of the lobby, the four explosions were loud, but the counter took the brunt of the force; Tatsu turned as soon as the sound died away, lifting her rifle to her shoulder as she rose to aim at the doorway. The two men who appeared there took too long to figure out where she was. Both of them dropped as Tatsu punched darts into their chests as she swept her aim across them. She had a pile of three bodies on the floor in the doorway. One of the ones outside was definitely out of the fight. She was armed just the same as they were too. Things were definitely more even than they had been.
‘I need a bigger handgun,’ she muttered.
‘What?’ Kawaguchi asked.
‘I need a pistol that can take on armour. My machine pistol is fine against unarmoured targets, but if I’m going to have to take on corporate goons, I’ll need something bigger.’
‘You s-seem to be doing fine at the moment.’
‘Because I stole one of their rifles. If I was still using my pistol, I’d run out of ammo before I stopped them.’
‘O-oh.’
Raising her voice, Tatsu yelled, ‘Half of you down. Leave while you can still walk.’
The response she got was one of the ones left running in through the doorway. She put three rounds in the man’s chest from a burst of six, and he fell face first onto the concrete floor. She could not bring her aim around in time, however, as the second man stepped into the doorway and fired. Four needles from his burst hit her in the chest, the remainder peppering the wall behind her. A report appeared in her sensorium indicating that her armour had been penetrated without significant damage.
‘Bastard,’ she said, ‘now I’m going to have to recycle another suit.’ She fired back, putting four rounds into his skull. ‘Next!’ she yelled at the top of her voice.
‘What are you?’ Kawaguchi asked from below her.
There was the sound of an engine starting outside and Tatsu relaxed. ‘What am I? I’m the winner.’
Part Three: Rapture
Chiba Refugee Zone, Japan, 29th July 2099.
Even before the announcements of arrests at ViraShield, their stocks were falling and their customers were jumping ship. At this early stage, it was only the rich who were getting their PIN product replaced. It cost somewhere around three million yen to get a brand-new PIN installed, plus you had likely paid upfront for the update subscription and you would lose that. Most people could not afford that kind of expenditure at a moment’s notice. ViraShield had issued an emergency patch at the start of the week; it would solve the immediate problem for those stuck with their product, but it had not been enough to restore customer trust.
The arrests had just made matters worse. Tatsu watched footage of Hideki Fukui being escorted out of the ViraShield building in handcuffs. He was far from the only one, but he was the one the cameras focused on. That had triggered rapid trading on ViraShield stocks. They were not so much falling as plummeting toward oblivion. ViraShield was a one-product company and that product was doomed. If they could pull their reputation out of the toilet enough to hang on to any market share, it would be a miracle.
‘It just goes to show that diversification in business is key,’ Izanami said, appearing on the street where Tatsu was watching a couple of gangs face off against each other. No one else could see her, of course, but there she was, in broad daylight, on a street in Narashino.
Tatsu kept her reply to the inside of her head. ‘They’re part of a keiretsu. I don’t suppose they considered diversification necessary when other companies in the group did other things.’
‘Perhaps. There has been no video of your arrest of Kurou Kawaguchi, but you did get your name in a number of reports.’
‘Publicity is not something I crave, Izanami.’
‘I’m aware. Three of the men you shot survived. They have been identified as belonging to a mercenary group from Yokohama. Records of their hiring by Hideki Fukui have also been found. He had them on retainer for cases where he could not use ViraShield’s own security personnel.’
‘Never a good sign when a CEO needs mercs on retainer.’
‘True. I can see that man spending the rest of his life in prison. As will Kurou Kawaguchi.’
Tatsu let herself smile. It was still raining and there were not that many people about to see her. The gangs she was watching were getting ready to kick off, so they were paying no attention. ‘Shouldn’t my superiors be telling me this?’
‘Probably, but we both know they won’t.’
‘You have a point. Listen, I know you don’t really like weapons, but I also know you’ve invented a bunch. Do you think you could find me something with a bit more punch than my pistol? Something I could actually carry, obviously. I got lucky with those mercs. I might not be so lucky next time.’
‘I’ll consider some alternatives,’ Izanami replied. ‘There’s going to be a fight over there, isn’t there.’
Tatsu pushed off from the wall she was leaning against and started forward. ‘Only a short one,’ she said.
30th July.
Arkadi Lagounov was not dead in his apartment, but he was dead all the same. His body had been found off one of the tracks in the Funabashi Municipal Sports Park. The name was meaningless now – there was no Funabashi municipality – but it was one of the few green spaces left in the area, making it popular with runners. From his clothing, Lagounov had been out for a run when he had been attacked.
‘I’d be willing to bet he had one or two routes,’ Tatsu said as she looked down at the body. ‘Not enough to make it difficult to ambush him. Just enough for him to think it would be difficult.’
Nakano also looked down at the body, from the other side and from under an umbrella. ‘Looks Russian. Another of the Funabashi gang?’
‘Arkadi Nikolay Lagounov, brigadier of the special
projects working group.’
Looking up, Nakano asked, ‘Special projects?’
‘I guess you could call them the real thieves of the gang, but mostly they’re hackers. They steal money directly, rather than extorting it out of shopkeepers or exchanging it for drugs. That mostly means hacking financial institutions. They also handled propaganda campaigns when Zima could be bothered with them. Vasilev is never going to be bothered with winning hearts and minds.’
‘Right. So, this guy was a hacker?’ Clearly, Nakano did not trust himself to pronounce the Russian name, which caused Tatsu to grin. The question itself probably stemmed from Lagounov’s appearance. People tended to think of hackers as scrawny shut-ins and, like so many stereotypes, there was a grain of truth in that, but it was not universally correct. Lagounov looked like a middleweight boxer, including the broken nose and cauliflower ears. He had, in fact, boxed semi-professionally when he was younger and now taught boxing to teenagers in Funabashi. He was fit and muscular, if not exactly handsome, especially since his throat had been sliced open prior to him getting stabbed three times in the chest.
‘And a good one,’ Tatsu replied. ‘It occurs to me that someone has killed off the two people most likely to work out who killed Zima. From the gang, that is.’
‘The spy and the hacker.’
‘The two with the greatest capacity for critical thinking, but yes. Could be that Zima’s killer is just covering his tracks…’
‘Except this is escalation. You see it too, right?’
Tatsu nodded slowly. ‘I guess you’re right. Maybe it’s just that Lagounov took more hits to kill, but this attack does seem more…’
‘Frenzied? Angry?’
‘Those words will do. Of course, we could be looking at a different killer. Maybe this isn’t the same one and the only link is the gang.’
Nakano looked at her. ‘You don’t believe that.’
‘No, not really. I think someone with a grudge killed Zima. Now they’re taking out the management structure.’
‘And they’ve got a taste for it. Zima was clinical. This is less so. If we get more bodies, they’ll probably be in worse condition.’
‘Just what we need, a serial killer on a righteous crusade.’
‘Righteous?’ Nakano asked, frowning.
‘I’m sure he thinks it is.’
31st July.
Tatsu pulled her bike up outside a building in Narashino and swung her leg off it as it settled itself down to rest its stomach on the tarmac. The massive machine looked distinctly menacing, even in daylight. At night, when the glowing panels around the bodywork shone a subtle purple and the eye-like headlamps were on, it looked like a giant, mutated insect. Now it was a giant insect settling down to wait for its mistress.
This area had commercial premises on the lower levels with apartments above. Most of the shops were empty, and a couple were now squats, but not all of them. The one Tatsu headed for looked like it was out of business, but that was mostly because the shutters were down over the windows, and that was because Pauletta had no need for window frontage for what she sold. The shutters were almost always down and, if you looked closely, you could tell they were not the same as those on the other shopfronts; Pauletta had replaced her shutters with riot shields.
The shield was up over the door and Tatsu made her way inside. Somewhere in the back, a buzzer sounded, letting the proprietor know that someone had come in. Pauletta was expecting Tatsu anyway. The front room looked a bit like a tattoo parlour – a tattoo parlour crossed with a car workshop. There was a reclining seat, like in a tattoo parlour, but it was surrounded by rolling towers of drawers full of tools and diagnostic instruments on trolleys. A lot of Pauletta’s business was routine maintenance on cybernetics, handled in this room.
Tatsu continued to the back and went through a door marked ‘employees only.’ The backroom was a bit like the front one, but without the chair. Instead, a gimballed frame sat in pride of place. If you looked at it and squinted, it became obvious that this frame was designed to hold a human via various straps and padded clamps. This was where the serious maintenance work got done, the stuff that required access to more of the body. Without waiting for the mechanic to arrive, Tatsu began undressing, laying her clothes on a table at the side of the room reserved for that purpose.
‘I just love seeing you naked.’
Tatsu glanced around at the person who had entered from another door at the back. ‘I’m aware.’ Pauletta said something similar every time Tatsu came for her monthly session. She was mid-height, about five centimetres taller than Tatsu, and slim. Her hips stopped her looking too boyish, but everything else conspired to go the other way. Her hair was mid-brown and cut short. It flopped down on either side of her face from a parting on the right. Flopped did not do it real justice; Pauletta was attractive in a very slightly masculine way. Her lips were not especially full, her nose was small and pert, and her eyes were a very dark brown. Generally, she was as white as a sheet. She was originally from California, though she had barely had time to register the fact before her parents had shipped out across the Pacific to avoid the Cyberwar. Today she was dressed in a double layer of tank T-shirts, white over black. The white one had a stylised Chinese dragon in black and red printed over the chest. Around her hips, a set of coveralls hung as though carelessly sloughed from her shoulders.
Pauletta grinned. ‘Well, get your naked butt in the cradle so I can molest you properly.’ She was a lecherous sort of girl, but she was mostly joking.
Shaking her head, Tatsu climbed into position on the retractable foot plates and set about belting herself in. Meanwhile, by remote, Pauletta began positioning clamps which would hold Tatsu’s head still. Once that was set, there were straps to go around Tatsu’s legs and arms, and with all that done, Tatsu was basically immobile.
The frame tilted, lowering Tatsu’s head down to about waist height. Pauletta wheeled a tank on wheels over from the side of the room and lifted a hose. ‘If you’ve anything to say before we start, now’s the time.’
‘I’m good,’ Tatsu replied. ‘Oh, I got shot last Friday night. You might want to check my chest plate.’
‘Someone shot you with something that got through? Wow. Okay, I’ll check it. Obviously, checking out your chest is no major chore.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘No other problems?’
‘None that come to mind.’
‘Good. Open wide, said the bishop to the actress.’
Tatsu rolled her eyes – shaking her head was out given that it was clamped in place – and opened her mouth, pushing her tongue down. Pauletta pushed the pipe into it and through into Tatsu’s throat where a receiver port had dropped into position to accept it. Tatsu closed her lips around the tube when her system registered a solid lock.
‘Great,’ Pauletta said, ‘we’ll fill you up while I get the diagnostics going.’ A second later, the tube began to cool as pressurised hydrogen was piped into Tatsu’s fuel tank. In Tatsu’s sensorium, her maintenance display showed the progression to full.
Pauletta ducked under the cradle to plug a fibre-optic cable into the back of Tatsu’s neck, then the mechanic was all business as she began running diagnostic routines on a computer on a trolley. Satisfied that the automated check-ups were going, she went back to the wall and dragged over another device. This had a computer of some sort with a long, articulated arm attached. On the end of the arm was a scanning head. Working via a virtual interface, Pauletta activated the device and the arm extended out to place the head over Tatsu’s chest.
‘Okay, using terahertz radar, so you may notice something with that electronics warfare suite of yours.’
In reality, terahertz radar had almost no military value and most EW systems were not tuned to detect it. Nothing came up in Tatsu’s sensorium to say she was being scanned. Terahertz systems were used when you wanted to see through things. They could be used to see through light brush, clothes, and even thin walls. In this case
, Pauletta was using it to see through Tatsu’s skin.
‘Yeah,’ Pauletta said. ‘Got it.’ What would have been a ribcage on a human was plate armour on Tatsu. Her pelvic girdle was the same while her sternum had interlocking rings of metal with a mesh overlayer for flexibility. ‘Punched through the plate, but there’s no cracking. Coilgun round, huh? Well, it doesn’t need replacing, but I can get a new one fabricated if you think you need it.’ She glanced at Tatsu, immobile with her mouth full of fuelling pipe. ‘You can tell me later. I’m going to go over the rest of you while I have this gadget out.’ The head began to move, scanning over Tatsu’s body. ‘Might as well do something while the diagnostics run.’
Obviously, Tatsu did not answer. She closed her eyes and let her mechanic work. There was really very little else she could do.
~~~
Tatsu opened her eyes when the cable was unplugged from her neck port. The scanner head had already been retracted and the unit wheeled aside. Next came the fuelling tube which she unlocked from her throat port as soon as Pauletta had a grip on it.
‘All done,’ the mechanic said. ‘You’re looking good for a thirty-seven-year-old cyborg. I want to keep an eye on your right bicep. That might need replacing in the next month or two. Showing some signs of wear. Everything’s green for now, however.’
‘Thanks, Pauletta,’ Tatsu said. ‘If we’re going to need to order a new muscle unit, order the chest plate at the same time. If I’m going to need to be opened up, might as well get it all over with.’
‘True enough. Okay, I’ll get it done.’ Pauletta flashed a grin. ‘Want to come upstairs for a quickie?’ The door buzzer sounded and she sagged a little. ‘Rain check on that. I’ll just see what’s up and then come back to unstrap you.’
‘Don’t forget. I have work.’
‘Would I do such a thing?’ Pauletta started for the door to the front room with a broad grin on her face.
‘Yes,’ Tatsu replied. ‘Yes, you certainly would.’
7th August.
Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) Page 9