by Zachary Hill
“Good, little sister,” Kunoichi said. “I think he buys it, but never let your guard down. This is your mission. Don’t rely upon me, because you won’t like the way I get things done. You’re the one who has to avoid killing people. If I take over, I’ll kill everyone.” A hint of sadness tinged Kunoichi’s voice in their UI. “You know I will. It’s how I’m built.”
“Why don’t they just have you take control right now? Unmerciful carnage. That’s what they want. They could just let you do your worst.” The cold fear of having to kill again, of having to go against a BLADE-3, of relying upon Kenshiro to assist her, then let her escape—these things monopolized her processing cores.
Kunoichi appeared in their UI, dressed in the street clothes that had been popular just after the war. A short denim vest with patches bearing the logos of metal bands, a formfitting blouse that left her midriff exposed, and black jeans so tight that every contour of her legs stood out. Her hair rose high above her, teased so that it created a mane of spiky black around her face. Her lips looked like ripe cherries. She hooked her thumbs into the belt loops of her jeans. She looked so tough, like some of Sakura’s metal head fans, the ones who really knew about the music and what had come before.
“Don’t you think I want to do things other than killing?” Kunoichi asked. “Do you think that there is nothing within me except the black-hearted ninja they built?”
Sakura blinked at her. She hesitated. “No. There is more. Experiences. Fun.” She squirmed before the last. “Physical pleasure.”
“Right. Friendship. Sisterhood. And, yeah, getting laid. I brought a few things with me to the party, sis, but I got a lot of these things from you. I needed a lot to make me real. You only needed a little nudge when I got here. I can do some of what you do, but you can do all of what I can. Is this a shitty mission? One hundred percent, yes. Can you do it better than me, only killing when there’s no other choice? You can.”
She reached out, touching Sakura, who dressed as a geisha in their UI. Her garb changed to the traditional black ninja suit, only her eyes showing above her mask. “You’re the ninja we need tonight, sis. Because you are capable of kindness. Because all those algorithms that let you write a song or play a blistering solo can churn out alternative strategies I would never think of.”
“Are … you saying I’m the better ninja?”
Kunoichi hugged her hard. “I’m saying you’re the better person.”
“This is a test of my capabilities,” Sakura said. “They could drop a bomb on this place, but someone wants to see if I can pull this off with limited backup. The Phantom Lord wants to impress the investors and prove I’m a success.”
Vulture handed Sakura a black cloth sack with waterproof material on the inside, a cinching drawstring, and a belt clip. “You can’t put a bullet in Watanabe’s skull. Take him some other way and come back with it undamaged.”
“Cut off his head?” She couldn’t keep the disgust from her voice.
“That’s the job. Taking heads. Like the old days. He’s got a memory chip that has all his bad deeds recorded on it, and our bosses need to see that shit.”
Sakura suppressed the indignant rage building inside her. “I don’t need his bloody head. I can just copy the memory chip.” It must contain all the information she needed, including the true identity of the Phantom Lord.
“Bad move, baby. The chip’s got countermeasures. Nuclear-level infection. I’d hate to hear you got your brains melted.”
Sakura shrugged. Being called “baby” made her feel strange. She didn’t hate it, though. At least, Vulture was real with her, when not telling the canned lies the Phantom Lord had given him. “What do I do with his head?”
“You gotta wait for that news to drop, little mama. You get the killing done, and I’ll guide you out of the valley of death when the time comes.”
“Will you tell me the exfil plan, at least?”
“Sure. Disengage and traverse downhill. Stay off the road. Don’t get your ass blown off.”
“Why is my ass a constant motif in our conversation?”
Kenshiro took his eye from the scope and looked at her. He must have smiled beneath his mask. “Have you seen behind yourself? Damn, girl.”
Sakura shook her head. That odd process of Kunoichi’s had started again. She had no time for her sister’s games. Even less for Vulture’s lustful comments. “What if we lose communication or you’re incapacitated?”
“The comms might go down, but I’m always capable. You should know that about me. Still, if shit turns pear-shaped, find a way back to Tokyo and return to Victory Tower.”
“What about all this equipment?”
“Leave it. It’s part of the play, part of the theater. The armory it came from doesn’t even know it’s gone. My thieving game is tight.”
“Your DNA must be all over and around the firing pits.” He had been there for at least two days.
“Doesn’t matter. I died in the war. Prints and DNA got purged years ago.”
Sakura wondered what to make of that. Died? Then again, true cyborgs with more than three major artificial systems violated international laws. Cybernetically augmented soldiers had been publicly disavowed by every major military force on the planet. Like her, Kenshiro was illegal, simply by existing.
She wanted to ask him his exfil plan, but that was pointless. She suspected he would slip over the back of the ridge the way she had come. Would a man with a call sign of Vulture escape on foot? No. She suspected a hover board or a paraglider, something that would get him out of the area fast.
“Can we hack Watanabe’s network?”
“Nothing to hack. He’s on hard lines only, and all external connections are shut down. He’s gone dark.”
“Shit,” she said.
Vulture chuckled. “Shit sandwiches. That’s all we got out here.”
“I don’t have anything that can harm the BLADE-3s. I’ll have to lure them out into the open. Can I trust you to hit them and not me?”
“Baby, I can trim a bonsai with my .950s.”
“I’d feel better if I could control the firing solution, Kenshiro-san. No offense intended, but my ballistic calculations are without equal.”
“You’ll have plenty to calculate down there, little mama. Leave the shooting to me. Anyway, I got something that’ll keep you safe.” He reached into a pocket on his black suit, coming out with a plastic disk about five centimeters across, no more than two millimeters thick.
“I’m going to put this on you,” he said and unzipped the back of her suit.
Kenshiro’s hand pushed below her underclothes, skimming along the titanium air intakes along her spine, to the smooth synthskin of her lower back. Her sensory matrix flared with activity as he placed a small object on her. That frantic feeling spread into her own matrix, spilling out from Kunoichi’s. Sakura’s sister gasped from the shadowy recess of their UI as he pressed firmly.
“Just affixing a tracking dot. Even behind cover, I’ll be able to locate you.”
Kunoichi kept replaying his touch and sharing the pleasurable sensations with Sakura.
“This is no time for distraction,” Sakura said. “Get a grip on yourself.”
“I’d rather that Kenshiro did.”
“You’re the worst.”
“Hey, it’s probably the last possible time to feel something good. Vulture is going to blow us to hell the moment he gets the order. With the tracking dot, he won’t even have to have line of sight to do it. You didn’t want to carry your sins, sister. Going down there is as close to suicide as we can get. You might get your wish, or maybe …”
“What?”
“Mmm. Nothing. We just need to assume that nothing from here on out is safe. The sword is over our necks, big time.”
“I don’t believe the story about Watanabe being the traitor inside Victory. All evidence says he is like the others, the ones brave enough to go against their evil plans. I wonder what he really knows? What’s on tha
t chip?”
Kunoichi’s avatar slashed with a katana in their UI and severed the head of an anime businessman. Blood fountained into the air. “We kill him and find out.”
“No,” Sakura said. “We befriend him. He can help us.”
“We don’t know what side he’s on, and he won’t help us if we break into his house and kill all his servants and bodyguards.”
“Then we won’t kill anyone,” Sakura said. “We avoid all of them. We get to him and we talk. We ask him for help. There must be a room in his villa where no signals can reach us, where whoever is monitoring won’t know what we’re doing until it’s too late, until we have our freedom.”
“It’s already a suicide mission,” Kunoichi said. “Now you want to cut us off from all communication inside a house with a squad of heavily armed Special Forces soldiers and four BLADE-3s and ask for mercy from the man we were sent to assassinate? All while wearing a tracking device that serves as a bull’s-eye on our back. Sister, I see no flaws in this plan. Rock on.”
“I’m a black ninja, no one can see me in the dark,” Sakura said. “I didn’t tell you my entire plan, but we’re going to get that chip and find out who the Phantom Lord is.”
Chapter 19
Sakura lay beneath the water, still as a river stone. Faint light from the sky, refracted from the pale bellies of leaves onto the surface of the stream, fractured against the flow. The paintings of ghosts beyond the realm of life danced on the underside of the water. She reached, touching the metal grate through which the tiny river flowed. Above her, the villa’s wall loomed, more felt than seen.
“Battery burn is 12 percent per hour,” Kunoichi told her. “Time to move, sis. The suit wasn’t built for this.”
Sakura didn’t answer. The metal grate had an alarm sensor. She couldn’t wrench it out and swim into the koi pond. No easy steps. There never were. Everything had been hardened against incursion, all perceivable threats mitigated. She doubted even Watanabe could imagine her nature, the threat level she represented.
“Ready at the insertion point, Vulture,” she texted. “Primary entry is alarmed. Moving to secondary breach protocols.”
“Look who’s a little pro on the comms now,” his deep voice answered. “Scanning overwatch. Wait for my go, Spirit.”
“When this is all over …” Kunoichi began.
“Everything will likely be over for us,” Sakura told her. “Vulture will get the order to destroy us. He will obey.”
“I think you give him too little credit.”
“I give him what he deserves, no more or less. He is a tool of the Phantom Lord.”
“Just like us,” Kunoichi said. The process spike from her profile ramped up again.
“Stop that. This is no time for your games.”
“Far from a game. Didn’t you feel it when he was near, when he planted the tracker?” Kunoichi gave out a strange, halting sigh in their interface. “That voice. The guns. The cyber eyes when they met mine. Ours.”
“Is this your pseudophysical response to him? An assassin? Our enemy’s pawn?” Sakura’s avatar gave out an angry, disgusted sigh.
“They didn’t build me like they built you. I’m not composed of music theory and high-minded ideals.”
“Stop it,” Sakura said. “We’re working.”
Kunoichi did as ordered, her silence reading as sullen.
“All security at determined locations. Anytime you’re ready, rock star.” Vulture’s voice did have a certain something—a commanding growl. Sakura forced herself to put that notion aside. It didn’t matter. It couldn’t.
“Affirmative. Making entry.”
Sakura gathered herself above a large stone at the bottom of the stream. Her legs like coiled springs, she burst from the water like an arrow, black as midnight as she arced up and over the wall. At worst, she would show up as a momentary blur against the cloud-clotted sky at the periphery of a camera. The sound of her bursting from the water would be mitigated by the rush of the stream.
She shaped her body, slowly twisting to the side and beyond the wall, the beaded water on her suit flying away as mist beneath the hanging trees.
Tucking, she landed on a boulder at the center of the koi pond, the active noise suppression of her suit all but silencing the landing.
Several seconds went by with her wholly unmoving, her knees hugged to her chest. No movement, no unusual sound, no alarm. Sakura pushed out into the koi pond. Her body the same temperature as the water, the suit absorbing all light and vibration, the fish barely parted before her. At the edge, she came ashore belly down like an alligator.
It took less than three minutes for the suit to warm her to air-ambient temperature. Thermal sensors wouldn’t pick her up. The night would swallow her and hold her in its gullet until she chose to appear. She retrieved her gear from the sealed pockets of the suit and inspected it. Everything remained dry. Strapping her pistols to her thighs, she hung the two CZ subguns beneath her arms and the blacked-out wakizashi across her back. The grenades she stowed on her belt gave a cold reminder of how the night would be—not a sudden, deft movement in the dark, but a bloodletting.
“I’m in. Initiating phase two,” she said into the comms interface, never uttering a sound. A gray-winged moth flew no more than a few centimeters from her face, oblivious to her presence.
“It’s all clear. Good luck, baby,” Vulture rasped.
Sakura crawled to the villa’s main building and climbed up to the third floor, bypassing the lower windows. She hesitated at each foothold, waiting for the suit’s suppression and camo to adjust. The window before her, listed as a guest room, seemed the best point of entry. She connected to one of the insect cams in her pack, and a robotic beetle crawled down her arm, trying to burrow in through the seal. The spy beetle’s systems locked, an electropulse barrier shutting it down.
She pinched the fried spy tool and stowed it in an unused pocket. Sakura used her magnetic countermeasure on the window, but it couldn’t break the seal. The mag lock had been set to well over a hundred pounds of force.
“Not a good spot for amateur hour, sis.”
Sakura clambered above the windows, placing her feet on the sill and charging her magnetic assist coils to full voltage. Reversing the polarity, she could feel the mag lock give. With a soft click, she eased the window upward and dropped in.
“Vulture, I’m at point bravo.”
“I have a fix on your position. You shine like the metal on the edge of a blade.”
The tracking dot. She could feel it on her lower back, clinging there like a bomb that could blow her in half at any moment. Sakura felt the .950 SSK guns staring down at her like a one-eyed oni. It didn’t matter. She had to put it out of her mind and trust that Kenshiro would, at least for the moment, let her live. Maybe the illogical element of lust would work in her favor.
Sakura placed another spy beetle, then let the window ease closed again. She crouched behind a large bed, watching the camera feeds from both the circling aerial drones and the beetle. Two guard snipers stationed at the windows of Watanabe’s office were the only inhabitants of the floor. They stood behind holographic blinds, watching in two directions. Their field of vision covered the meadow, forest, and upper slopes of the mountain. Sakura could see them as pale blobs from the aerial cams, but the beetle rendered them in good definition from the crack beneath the door.
The snipers sat behind rifles the same as Kenshiro’s. Just men. Normal humans with the misfortune to take this duty and fall between her and the target. With the Mall silenced here, at least she didn’t have to immediately know of their families, their children, their friends who would miss them if they died.
“Leave the beetle cam. I have eyes on those two,” Vulture told her.
If he had eyes on them, they were certainly doomed. They would be the first to fall if the shooting started—no, when. Nothing could get her out of this mission clean.
“I can take them out, Vulture.”
“You do your job; I’ll do mine. No one’s shedding a tear for these guys. They chose, and they knew the cost.”
Sakura rose, going silently into the hallway and to the top of the stairs. She shut the camera feed from that beetle off. Two more men she couldn’t save. She wondered if they could feel it, the doom of dead men pressing down on their chests?
A JSF soldier patrolling the main floor looked right at her spy beetle. He swept the laser dot of his FN P90 carbine across its sensor, washing out the picture for a moment. Sakura put her hand against one of her CZs and awaited the sound of the alarm.
Two seconds went by. Three.
At last, the soldier moved on, going farther into the great open room on the first level of the villa. After an empty second floor, she saw an area that looked nearly impassable. Between the cameras, the patrolling soldier, and the hulking shadow of a BLADE-3 at the front door, she couldn’t see a way through. The room’s lights worked against her. She needed to get through and into the basement rooms. Watanabe was there, without question. If she made noise here, she’d never have the chance. She’d be caught. Even if she could get to the target, she’d never get out intact. Once the BLADE-3 activated …
“Yeah. The shit hits the fan,” Kunoichi said. “You have to take that guard out. No way around it.”
Any plans she might have made fell apart when the JSF soldier reversed course, coming back toward the stairs. Straight at her.
Sakura scanned everything. Above the stairs, a trim board no more than a handful of centimeters wide ran across the gap. She powered the suit to full noise suppression and activated the membranes filled with a sticky material, coating her fingertips with adhesive. She skimmed along the banister and clung, with toes and sticky palms, to the wall above the stairs.
The beetle trailed the JSF soldier as he made his slow and careful way up. If she timed it just so …
Sakura dropped down, her legs wrapping around the guard’s neck, her belly muting any sound. She caught the edge of the trim board, applying measured pressure to the man’s throat. At the same time, she electrified the suit, making every touch point like being hit with a stun gun. The noise suppression gobbled up the ripping sound of the stun discharge.
