Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

  ‘No,’ Shiratori said, ‘your business is with me. You wish to charge my daughter with the murder of Anastas Zima and others, correct?’

  ‘The initial questioning will be concerning the murder of Grigory Anatoliy Vasilev, but we are linking his death to that of Zima and a number of other members of his gang.’

  ‘Plus Yong Pan, Ariella Ray, and a number of other civilians,’ Nakano added.

  ‘I killed them,’ Shiratori stated flatly. ‘Working alone. Kaede had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘We have her print on one of the robots the killer has been using to assist in the murders,’ Tatsu said.

  ‘I amend my statement slightly. It is true that Kaede constructed those machines for me. However, she knew nothing about what I planned to use them for and cannot be held accountable. I committed the murders alone. She knows nothing about them.’

  Tatsu stared at the yakuza boss for a couple of seconds. ‘You’re not helping her. You’re not protecting her. Stop this, Shiratori.’

  ‘I am the murderer, Sergeant. I will not allow my daughter to be punished in my stead.’ Shiratori held out her arms, wrists together, asking to be cuffed.

  Nakano stepped forward, reaching into his pocket. Tatsu stopped him. ‘There’s no point, Nakano, she isn’t going to run.’

  Shiratori lowered her arms. ‘Thank you, Sergeant, for preserving some element of my dignity.’

  ‘My pleasure.’

  ~~~

  With Shiratori safely in the back of the car, Nakano turned to Tatsu. ‘If she’s lying, she’s good at it.’

  ‘She’s lying,’ Tatsu replied. ‘These murders don’t fit with her as the killer. It’s… not her style. But I can’t tell she’s lying either. If we could get a lie detector on her…’

  ‘She’ll refuse and, with her confessing, we probably can’t force her.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You said she wasn’t protecting Kaede.’

  Tatsu shook her head. ‘Kaede likes what she’s been doing. Even if her mother has taken responsibility, Kaede’s going to be unable to stop herself from doing it again.’

  ‘But the Funabashi gang are pretty much finished, right? If her aim was to destroy them–’

  ‘They’re not all dead and that gives her an excuse. Not that she’ll need one. Not really. I’ve seen this before, in the war. Men who got to like the killing. Some who started out liking it. One thing about war: there’s always another enemy. She’s not finished yet, and nothing Yukiko can do is going to stop her killing again.’

  Part Six: Killer

  Chiba Refugee Zone, Japan, 14th September 2099.

  ‘It seems to have gone pretty quiet,’ Sachiko said.

  Tatsu shifted her head so that she could look up at the dancer’s face. It was not especially easy, given her position lying in the crook of Sachiko’s arm. ‘Well, yes. I stopped sucking on your–’

  ‘I mean the fighting.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Yes, because they ran out of energy. There have been a few incidents over the weekend, but nothing big. It won’t last.’

  Sachiko frowned. ‘The Hole just reopened. Are you saying I’ll be out of work again soon?’

  ‘No… No, I don’t think so, but the Funabashi mafia is basically gone. There’s a power vacuum. That means new groups forming or the existing ones pushing in to fill the space. The dust hasn’t settled yet, and I expect that dust to be getting blown up into the air and left to settle again for months.’

  ‘That sounds like, um, fun.’

  ‘No, what we’ve been doing for the last four hours is fun. The best we can hope for in Chiba is that it isn’t not fun in a big way.’

  ‘Well, that’s what Chiba’s like at the best of times.’

  ‘True enough.’ There were a few seconds of silence and Sachiko’s breathing started to even out. ‘I think I want to hear you screaming one more time before bed.’

  ‘Huh? Did you say- Eeee!’

  ‘Yeah, just like that.’

  Tokyo.

  ‘I assume you’re still sticking to your ludicrous story?’ Tatsu said.

  Across the interview room table, Yukiko Shiratori did not raise her eyes. ‘I killed Zima and the others. Kaede’s only involvement was in building the support drones. She did not know their purpose.’

  Tatsu sighed. She had hoped that a weekend in a holding cell would persuade Shiratori to give up the pretext. It had not been a strong hope and it seemed that it was a forlorn one. ‘You’re not helping her.’

  ‘So you have said.’

  ‘You think she’ll stop. You think she’s rational, that she’ll understand your sacrifice and stop killing. The Funabashi gang is in ruins, she got what she wanted, so why should she need to go on. But she’s not rational and there are still some of the gang’s members out there she can use as an excuse. She likes killing, Shiratori. Every attack has been more violent than the last. She won’t stop because she can’t stop.’

  ‘I killed Zima and the others,’ Shiratori said, her voice flat. ‘Kaede’s only involvement was in building the support–’

  ‘Yeah, sure. She’s going to kill again, Shiratori, and the next time she does, I’ll be there. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to take her down without killing her.’

  Now Shiratori’s eyes lifted to look into Tatsu’s. There was fire in them. ‘If you hurt her…’

  ‘That’s the problem. I don’t think she’s going to give me any choice.’

  ~~~

  ‘You really think the kid is going to kill again?’ Nakano asked. He was in observation, watching Shiratori being taken back to her cell. Tatsu was standing beside him, doing the same.

  ‘Yes,’ Tatsu replied flatly. ‘I’m going to see if I can get her put under surveillance.’

  ‘The brass won’t like it. It could be seen as harassment.’

  ‘Better than letting her slaughter more people.’

  Nakano gave a small grimace. ‘Not sure slaughtering mafia gang members is going to be seen as a good enough excuse for watching a teenager twenty-four/seven.’ He held up a hand as Tatsu looked at him. ‘Not saying I agree. But they have Yukiko’s confession and they may think the charges Kaede will be facing are enough.’

  ‘I can try.’ Tatsu frowned. ‘Are you saying you don’t think Kaede will try again?’

  ‘No. Pretty sure she will. I just wanted to be sure of your reasoning. The question is: when?’

  ‘Not sure. I’m a little surprised she’s held off for this long.’

  ‘All that iaijutsu is supposed to build willpower.’

  ‘It’s a point. And she’ll want a big target. There are no VIPs left among the Funabashi gang and there aren’t many big groups of survivors she can hit. Maybe I don’t need to watch her. Maybe I need to watch them.’

  ~~~

  ‘There are only three major groupings of ex-Funabashi gangsters,’ Tatsu said. She had a virtual map display up for Superintendent Hisakawa to look at, and three flashing dots appeared on it. Two were down in the docks; the third was up in the Kamagaya area. ‘She’s going to hit one of them.’

  ‘You seem very positive that Kaede Shiratori is the killer,’ Hisakawa said.

  ‘I am. Her mother’s lying.’

  ‘But Sakurada Gate refused your request for surveillance.’

  ‘Yes. It’s all politics and public opinion over there, Superintendent. You know that. They don’t want it getting out that we’re watching a teenager who’s just about to lose her second mother. Not that she’ll be a teenager much longer, though I doubt the news channels would mention that. This way, we’re watching the remnants of a gang who may be violent. Who have been violent very recently.’

  ‘That is where my problem lies. We are already watching a lot of these people. We have too much resource deployed to spare equipment for specifically watching three locations which are, frankly, of lower priority than the Shiroi and Huádōng areas.’

  ‘Things are quiet. They’re all licking their wounds and getting r
eady to fight over the Funabashi territory. My evaluation says that those three locations are going to attract the attention of the Shiroi and Huádōng groups anyway. Concentrating on them would probably be a good way of heading off major incidents.’

  Hisakawa frowned. ‘That’s not what the analysts say, but… A week. You’ve got a week. I’ll reassign some patrol routes until Sunday morning. If she hasn’t done anything by then, you’ll have to wait for her to mess up in some other way.’

  It was not really a week, but Tatsu was not going to complain too much about that. ‘She’ll snap before Sunday. Thank you, Superintendent.’

  ‘Don’t thank me too much. If Sakurada Gate catches wind of why we’re really doing this, I’ll throw you under the bus.’

  Tatsu shrugged. ‘Seems fair.’

  17th September.

  It took until Thursday morning for Tatsu’s plan to pay off, though not in the way she had wanted. At four in the morning, she found herself in combat gear working through a supposedly disused apartment building in Kamagaya. Mostly, she was stepping over bodies, but there were still a few people in the building with some fight in them, and Tatsu and a riot squad were working on changing that.

  Superintendent Hisakawa was talking in Tatsu’s head while she worked. ‘Sakurada Gate will probably stop believing this is related to the Shiratori case now. You were right about the Shiroi gang attempting to clean up in Funabashi.’

  ‘I’ll try not to let my success go to my head.’ Heat signatures appeared around a corner in the corridor Tatsu was on – definitely one, maybe two. She could just see them through the thin walls. ‘Excuse me for a moment, Superintendent.’ Rather deliberately, she put her foot down hard on her next step.

  Two men with shotguns burst out ready to fire, but Tatsu was already shooting. Needles sprayed across the hallway in an arc and both men went down, one of them managing to blow a hole in the ceiling as he fell. Tatsu walked over and checked their pulses. The first she had hit was alive, but barely. The second was bleeding from about five new holes, but the projectiles seemed to have missed his major organs; he was just unconscious.

  ‘Are you okay, Sergeant?’ Hisakawa asked.

  ‘Yes. Two Shiroi goons aren’t. This was stupid of them. Too big. I think they’ll get more subtle from now on. Maybe even try to recruit the remnants.’

  ‘Personally, I can live with that.’

  Tatsu nodded and signalled for a paramedic team to come up to the fourth floor. ‘Yes, I suppose I can too.’

  ~~~

  The building had been originally constructed as a short-occupancy hotel for ship crews. Sailors sometimes needed a place to stay for a few nights before they shipped out again. Of course, that had been before the docks basically closed down. So, the place had been sold and refitted for a different kind of short-occupancy hotel. It had become more of a ‘no-tell motel’ than a love hotel; love had more or less nothing to do with the activities carried out there. But even that had failed and, after a brief stint as a full-on brothel, the hotel had closed to customers.

  The Funabashi gang had run the brothel. They had left the place neglected since abandoning it, but it was structurally sound, and the power still worked, even if connecting it back into the grid was illegal since no one was paying the bill. It still had a water supply and sewerage outlet. Even the security system still operated. It was a good choice for a group of surviving Funabashi mafia to hole up in once suitable – if makeshift – fortifications had been put in place.

  Of course, the problem with using a hotel as a base of operations was that it was very difficult to secure every way in. They had barricades in the foyer, always manned by at least two people, and there was a guard on the rear door. But there was a fire escape up the rear wall and they were relying on the building’s security system to detect anyone coming in through any of the fire doors. Similarly, there was an access door onto the roof that was only protected by a sensor which detected it opening. Up there, no one had even thought to install a camera covering the stairs down to the top floor. The emergency staircase was only covered by a camera on the ground floor.

  It took her all of a minute to bypass the sensor on the rooftop door. She sent her one surviving drone in ahead of her, watching the feed from its camera on the inside of her helmet as it floated down the stairwell for a couple of levels to make sure she would not be observed before she wanted to be. Then she drew the sword at her hip and set off into the old hotel with murder on her mind.

  ~~~

  ‘I just got off,’ Sachiko said from a call window in Tatsu’s sensorium. ‘Want to hang out?’

  ‘You mean bang,’ Tatsu replied.

  ‘Well, I– We could go grab something to eat. Or watch a vid and snuggle. Or… something.’

  Tatsu grinned. ‘Snuggle. Right. I–’

  Alert! Shots fired at watch location Makuharicho 1. No intruder detected. Alert!

  ‘Something up?’ Sachiko asked.

  ‘Yeah.’ Tatsu grabbed her pistol from her desk and started for the door of her apartment. ‘You’re going to have to wait for tomorrow night. Sorry.’

  ‘When duty calls, I guess.’

  ‘Believe me when I say I’d rather be snuggling with you.’

  ‘Who in their right mind would not?’

  ~~~

  A 12-gauge shotgun slug slammed into her side just over the bottom of her ribcage and her suit instantly hardened to absorb the damage. It was the third and it added another bruise to her collection; the suit was good at stopping bullets, but the impacts still stung. So far, none of the soft-tissue damage was impairing her performance.

  Turning, she slashed the gunman across his right bicep. His arm dropped to the floor, followed by his shotgun and then his body. She made sure of the kill by stabbing him through the right eye, and then she turned to the door of the gaudily decorated room, seeking her next victim. She had already cleared the top floor, but there were so many more of them to eliminate. It was like cutting down wheat.

  Another slug whistled past her head as she walked out and she began running, her sword held low for an upward slash. The shooter was at the other end of the corridor, but she charged in with little care for her safety, confident in her armour. She would slash his stomach and he would die in agony. A thin, malicious grin stretched her lips. She was doing what she had always been meant to do, and she loved it.

  ~~~

  Tatsu barrelled into the lobby through the main entrance and was immediately met by a hail of shotgun pellets. Only five of the dozens of lead balls actually managed to hit her and they did not even slow her down, but they did make her annoyed.

  ‘I’m here to help, idiot! Stop shooting–’

  This time he managed to get more of the tiny slugs to hit. Her damage-control system counted nine impacts. A baton round accelerated out of her pistol and slammed into his chest. It tossed him two metres backward and into the wall behind him with a crash, and he did not get up after falling to the worn carpet. A second man emerged from a door on the left, probably something to do with reception, maybe a manager’s office. This one had an assault rifle. Tatsu blasted him back through the door he had just come through and headed for the corridor at the back of the lobby. If she was lucky, they were both unconscious, but there was no time right now for checking.

  In the core of the building, there was an elevator and an open staircase. Tatsu hit the stairs, taking them three at a time. There were six floors, each with two flights of stairs and a landing between them. There was also the sound of gunfire coming down the stairwell, which was generally a bad sign. Still, she encountered no one until she was climbing to the fourth floor, and then the people she encountered were not going to stop her. Three bodies lay on the landing between floors, all of them looking like they were victims of a rapid-fire coilgun attack. One of Kaede’s robots was up here or had been. Tatsu rounded the corner, leading with her pistol.

  A spray of needles erupted from the hovering bot; the thing had been waitin
g, covering the stairwell. Only one of the projectiles actually hit home and Tatsu ignored it as she returned fire. Three rounds rocketed out from her pistol, and the robot attempted to slide to the side to avoid her aim. It failed, but Tatsu still had baton rounds loaded. There was a horrendous whine as the robot’s fans tried to compensate for the sudden transfer of kinetic energy, and the machine slammed into the wall across the corridor before dropping out of the air. Its motors were still whining, however, and Tatsu ducked out of sight behind the staircase to change magazines.

  The bot was floating again by the time she popped back out. It opened fire immediately, scoring a couple of hits which failed to penetrate Tatsu’s body armour. They also failed to throw her aim off. The tiny missile she fired hit home and exploded, driving superheated plasma through the robot’s shell. It disintegrated, and the shaped blast went on to burn a hole through the wall behind it. Smouldering, semi-liquid plastic and cybernetic components rained down on the thin, burgundy carpet. The smell was unpleasant to say the least, and possibly somewhat toxic. Tatsu avoided the puddles as she ran out into the corridor and began searching for the bot’s owner.

  There was no stealth-armoured assassin to be found as she checked the rooms along one side. She did find a few Funabashi mafiosi hiding behind the meagre furniture. Most of them knew her and refrained from firing at her. One even yelled for her to help. One fired wildly at her as she slammed the door of his room in. Not a single bullet hit home, and she ducked back out, ignoring him as she had done the one who had asked her to help.

  It was as she was backtracking to check the other end of the floor that she found out where Kaede was. As she passed the stairwell, avoiding the cooling pools of molten plastic, she caught something in her peripheral vision and threw up her left arm. Warning indicators flashed in her sensorium as the sword bit deep, cutting through fake flesh, artificial muscle, and even the hardened metal of her skeleton. She fell, bouncing off the corridor wall before she found herself down on the carpet. Her sensorium was a confusing rush of damage messages and she had to struggle to get everything under control.