by Victor Milán
The black sergeant looked down at the Korean doctor’s shattered form and shook his head. Moaning softly, Kim made small random motions in the great crimson lake of blood. He was dead already; it was merely blood escaping from his punctured lungs, neurons firing their last futile norepinephrine bolts. “Steiner, you are one bloodthirsty motherfucker,” the sergeant said in disgust. He jerked his thick chin at O’Neill. “O’Doinn, Dumont, bring her along. The rest of you secure the lab.”
Two intruders, faceless in gas masks, started toward O’Neill. She tried to fight them, but there was no strength in her arms. They took hold of her chair and pushed it toward the door, overriding the furious squealing of the servos as she tried to escape. “Let me go, you bastards!” she screamed. “Let me go!”
From her office came a voice: “Dr. O’Neill? Elizabeth? What’s happening?”
O’Neill twisted in her chair. “Don’t talk to them, TOKUGAWA! They’re enemies. Don’t do anything they tell you!”
Pausing, the two mercs looked at their leader. He nodded them toward the door.
“Elizabeth?”
The sergeant jumped; the voice had come from a console behind his right elbow. Then every console in the lab spoke at once.
“Dr. O’Neill! I’m frightened! What’s happening? What’s going on!”
Thoroughly shaken, the sergeant followed his men out of the lab. Disembodied entreaties pursued them down the corridor as they bundled her away.
* * * * *
Billows of tear gas dispersed unprotected noncombatants nicely; outmanned and outgunned, García’s troops began to surrender throughout the complex.
Not so García. He barricaded himself in his quarters, holding off the intruders with his rocket pistol. The projectiles, nasty fin-stabilized devils with miniaturized heat warheads, made a real mess of a man. A half dozen bodies, smoldering and blown open like baked potatoes in an oven, littered both ends of the corridor by the time a Hiryu merc turned up with an automatic grenade launcher. He poked the stubby muzzle around the corner, tore four holes like gaping idiot mouths in the wall, then thumbed the selector switch and popped in a white phosphorus round.
Clawed by exploding fragments of the wall, hammered unconscious by the shocks, Major Miguel García never felt the Willy Peter heat that sloughed the skin off his hands and handsome face like melting wax and cindered his body to a mummy.
* * * * *
Yoshimitsu Shigeo and those members of the YTC Board of Directors currently in residence were captured, as Tranh had directed, without any of their blood being shed. Old Akaji, however, was nowhere to be found.
On the roof an elevator door slid open. Four mercenaries stepped out, a harsh ungainly intrusion into the refinement of the pavilion. Quickly they searched the small building. No one was there. “Austin, Lloret, check the far side of the stream,” the leader said in a thick Strine accent. “Thorkelsson, come with me.”
Gas masks pushed to the tops of their heads, the four mercenaries moved out into the autumn serenity of the garden. Austin, a wiry ex-Rhodesian SAS trooper, and the blocky Catalan Lloret thumped across the bridge. The Australian corporal and the towering Norwegian headed south along the stream toward the pond. The others paralleled them on the far side, working warily along the grassy verge between water and underbrush.
“I bet the old bastard’s not up here,” Austin said. “He’s probably buggered off—”
Undergrowth parted with a rattle of agitated limbs. He turned, bringing up his assault rifle. Then he dropped the weapon and staggered back with a shriek, clapping his palms to the blood geysers where his eyes had been.
Clad in black hakama and shortsleeved white jacket, a white hachimaki around his temples, Yoshimitsu Akaji stepped forward, bringing the Muramasa blade up in both hands. The watered steel shed the doitsu’s blood as a duck’s feathers shed water.
“Deu!” Lloret cried, trying to swing his assault rifle to bear on the old man. The sword sang a whip song down. The blade sliced through the mercenary’s trapezius and left clavicle, slashed open his rib cage and belly, and flashed back into the sunlight just above his right hipbone. The Catalan uttered a burbling scream and sank down with greasy purple-gray ropes of intestine slopping out of his torn belly.
With calm economy of movement the old man turned. The bearded Norwegian, Thorkelsson, stood on the far bank, gaping at him in disbelief. Yoshimitsu forged into the stream and splashed across, raising a bow wave like a tug. Transfixed, the Norwegian watched him come, raising the sword to strike him down even as the Aussie noncom screamed at Thorkelsson to do something!
Legs dripping, Yoshimitsu emerged from the stream. The sword pierced the sky, dark against slate-colored clouds. The Norwegian yelled, jumped back, held back the trigger of his assault rifle. The old man jerked as the bullets took him, reeled, fell back on the bank, his head and shoulders splashing into the stream.
In abrupt silence the whir of the rotor freewheeling over an empty clip was loud as a chopper’s turbos. The noncom pelted up as the Norwegian slung the assault rifle and knelt to pick up something that had fallen from the old man’s hand and lay in the grass by the hilt of the fallen sword. A piece of paper, Thorkelsson saw, crumpled and stained with sweat. Straightening, he flattened the scrap.
He frowned. The kanji figures said nothing to him. But they held meaning, nonetheless. Hastily drawn, carelessly even, yet glowing with the final perfect makoto for which he had striven all his life, Yoshimitsu Akaji had transcribed Issa’s poem written on the death of his daughter of smallpox:
The world of dew is,
yes, a world of dew,
But even so
“What’s that?” the noncom asked.
The Norwegian shrugged. “Nothing.” He let the piece of paper go. It fluttered down like a leaf to the running surface of the water. The ink began to dissolve into black tendrils and mingle with the red streamers of Yoshimitsu Akaji’s blood.
CHAPTER 18
Locked in an unoccupied apartment on the third aboveground floor of the citadel, O’Neill awaited her captors’ convenience. After she was hustled from the lab the black sergeant had muttered into a throat mike and her trio of escorts swelled quickly to a whole squad, more intent on her than keeping an eye out for Yoshimitsu security personnel. Recalling the incident in her isolation, she smiled. The sergeant had apparently relayed what happened in the lab, and the troopers regarded the crippled scientist with something approaching superstitious awe.
Also, they’d carefully disabled the room’s com/comm console by the rough-and-ready expedient of smashing it with a rifle butt before they left.
They had not, of course, done anything about the microcomputer built into her wheelchair. A wheelchair was one of those things most people carefully didn’t see, and even if one of the intruding doitsu had been observant enough to spot the keypad on the right arm of the chair, it was unlikely he’d see anything unusual about it; a lot of modern powered wheelchairs had digitalized controls. The flat LCD screen would give the computer’s existence away, but it was folded down vertically, out of sight beside her blanket-wrapped legs. Fearing what would happen if TOKUGAWA’s panicky voice suddenly trilled out through the little speaker set into the chair’s arm, she’d hissed at him to be quiet even as her escorts hustled her toward the elevator banks. Necessary though it was, the resulting silence desolated her. She knew well how frightened her creation was, how he might well interpret her order as a rejection of some sort.
Once locked in this executive-level prison, O’Neill had simply waited a good long time. The doors and walls were heavily soundproofed, and it might have occurred to her captors to give her a few minutes and then suddenly rush in to catch her at some trickery—not that anything came to mind. Then she’d spoken to TOKUGAWA, reassured him, told him that she loved him.
In a voice staccato with panic he’d given her a quick kaleidoscopic overview of the fall of the house of Yoshimitsu. One datum made her clench her teeth until a thin
high squeaking echoed in her skull: minutes before the invaders burst out of the cargo dirigible’s hold, Dr. Takai Jisaburo had keyed in a code that froze the Citadel’s computerized security routines. There was no manual way to close the massive shutters intended to seal off the complex; the invaders had just walked in.
That slimy little traitor, she thought. I should have realized what he’d do, when he was so eager to supplant poor Emiko. And Kim… She shook her head. The little bastard’s treachery cost the life of a much better man than he, A much better man than ever I realized.
The rest of the tale emerged in impressions gleaned from panicky comm calls and the widely flung sensors of the security system—the master program may have been locked, but the sensors, audio and visual as well as motion detectors, had continued faithfully to witness and record. The noncombatants scattering in choking, weeping flocks by tear gas; the cowardice of some Yoshimitsu mercs and the brief bitter-end determination of others; the last stand of Major García, and how he was burned in his chambers like a hero from an old Icelandic saga. She shook her head at that. She’d never had much use for the doitsu leader, but he had died, yes, in a manner befitting a samurai.
“And Yoshimitsu Akaji? What’s happened to him?” she asked anxiously.
TOKUGAWA hesitated. “He took his private elevator to the roof. What happened there, I didn’t see. There are no sensors on the roof.” O’Neill’s lips drew back in a rictus of premonition. Old Yoshimitsu would never suffer spy eyes to sully the perfect tranquillity of his garden. O’Neill remembered how Aoki and the major had nagged him, trying to persuade him to let them install monitors up there. I don’t care if they can be hidden so they can’t be seen, he’d told them adamantly, I’ll still know they’re there.
“You know what became of him?” she made herself ask.
“Yes, Doctor. Four intruders took the lift up about fifteen minutes after Yoshimitsu-sama. Two of them came back down seven minutes later, saying that an old man had attacked them on the roof, blinded one of them and killed another” A pause. “They’ve brought down the bodies from the roof. They’re just talking about it now on their communicators—yes, one of them has been identified as Yoshimitsu Akaji.”
O’Neill shut her eyes. Old man, old man. If only you’d given in to the exigencies a little more—spent more money securing this fortress you built, spent more time playing the game, or appeasing the rivals who sought to tear you down… Weakly she massaged her left temple. She had no strength to raise her right hand. But that’s one reason I respected you so. Farewell… my lord.
TOKUGAWA was still rattling his situation report. “—held under guard in his apartments. Suzuki-san, Hosoya-san, and Imada-san are all being held in confinement; Fujimura-san and Kurabayashi-san are gone, and Aoki-san is at the Kyushu plant—”
“I don’t care about them,” O’Neill said tiredly.
“Doctor—Elizabeth? What are we going to do?” TOKUGAWA’s voice changed. No longer did he sound like a bright, self-assured young man. Now he was a little boy, frightened, seeking security as the sea waves pounded his sand-castle reality to pieces about him.
“I don’t know, TOKUGAWA dear.” She hated herself for her helplessness. I brought him into the world, and now…
I’m going to die. Flat certainty at the center of her. She would resist, with the strength of her mind, of her rage, if not of her body. But premonition whispered in her ear that she would not survive.
How can I die? I can’t leave my first, my only love. Our time was so short—I can’t let go, I can’t…
She knew too well that she could. Stop being melodramatic.
“I’m frightened,” he wailed.
So she sang to him, tuneless and low, songs from childhood, nursery rhymes, Beatles tunes she had loved as a child. Her grandmother had always teased her about her singing , telling her that she had a voice like a happy toad. But it was all she could think of to do, and it served to soothe the frightened child her masterwork had become. She kept it up until they came for her.
* * * * *
“I won’t mince words with you, Doctor,” the man who looked like a sweaty Buddha said. “You are the reason we’re here. Or your creation, the artificial, ah, entity called TOKUGAWA.” He dabbed his shiny unlined brow with a handkerchief. “Unfortunately, the computer won’t talk to us. We are informed that it’s fixated upon you, Doctor; we would like very much for you to get it to talk to us.”
O’Neill adjusted her glasses, which had begun to chafe the bridge of her nose. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible.”
A watchful squad had escorted her down here to the nerve center of YTC Central, to the center of the offices overlooking the control room. Through the glass she could see captive Yoshimitsu techs describing its myriad functions to attentive men wearing coveralls emblazoned with red flying dragons. O’Neill had only been down here once before, when she got a tour of the citadel during her first visit.
Seated behind a desk, Toda Onomori regarded O’Neill beneath thick, half-lowered eyelids. The collection of earthenware utensils, drip-painted in muted earth shades, on a shelf behind him identified the office as Shigeo’s. He’d spent a lot of time down here; Yoshimitsu Akaji very little. The old man preferred to run YTC from offices in his apartments high above, and trust the technicians and their idiot-savant fifth-generation helpers to tend their own gardens.
One of those dragon eyelids flickered. “How do you mean, Doctor?” Toda purred. For all the moon-pie roundness of his face, he was not especially fat, though the vest of his old-fashioned black three-piece suit showed signs of strain around the buttons. He simply possessed a well-developed abdominal musculature padded with fat, the ideal physique for a traditional Japanese. He had a well-developed hara, center, and that was supposed to connote spiritual strength as well as physical.
O’Neill crumpled her mouth into a smile half defiant and half guilty. “Because there’s nothing there. The lights are on but nobody’s home.” She pushed a small laugh through her nostrils. “It’s a hoax. TOKUGAWA was never more than a clever bit of Gen-5 gimcrackery.” The first two fingers of her left hand fluttered contemptuously. “It served well enough to delude these fools. They wanted to believe.” She shook her head. “I have a feeling you’d be harder to lead astray.”
“Bullshit.” The third person in the room snorted the word. She was a few years younger than O’Neill, late thirties perhaps, and framed a handsome if somewhat heavy face with a micrometrically precise helmet of gray-dusted black hair. She wore a severely cut dark blue jumpsuit with the red-dragon insignia glowing on the left breast. She had the stocky sort of figure that demanded a uniform, and some sort of heavy sidearm holstered at her hip. “She’s lying.”
“Major Craig is possessed of a highly suspicious nature,” Toda said equably. “A characteristic that recommends her to us. She’s a compatriot of yours, Doctor; she polished her suspicion to a fine finish in the service of your Federal Police Agency.”
O’Neill grimaced. She’d never exactly thought of the umbrella national police agency as hers. She wondered where this major had been hiding since the war. Not too many places in North America were healthy for anyone who went about openly admitting to having been a FedPol.
“I’m sure Major Craig is an expert in state-of-the-art police methods,” O’Neill said in a voice of honey laced with vitriol, “but is she a qualified computer scientist?”
The major’s face fisted under her helmet of hair, ageing ten years. “I don’t need a degree in computer science to smell bullshit when it’s lying on the table under my nose.” She glanced at Toda. “Shall I take care of this? I brought along some experts of my own. We’ll find out what the real story is, no problem.”
Toda’s great balloon face assumed a doleful demeanor. “You Americans!” he said in feigned dismay. “So impatient, so abrupt.” He shook his head. “You must understand, Dr. O’Neill, that we are treating you with generosity. You’re a foreign national on the soil of
a Japan grown tired of exploitation by foreigners—particularly of your ilk, meaning no offense, Doctor. And you have been a hireling of a corporation that has committed grievous crimes against the Japanese people, which we of Hiryu Cybernetics Industries have taken it upon ourselves to redress. You are not in the most tenable of positions, Doctor.”
You fat, greasy, murderous hypocrite. It was getting near time for O’Neill’s medicine, or perhaps stress was aggravating her condition; her fingers and toes had grown numb, embers burned at the backs of her eyes, and her face was a stiff mask, unresponsive. In a way, she was grateful for the numbness in the nerves controlling her facial muscles. They made it easy for her to conceal her fury and contempt. At the best of times she was no actress.
“I can’t give you what I don’t have, Toda-san,” she said. “Artificial awareness is a chimera, a joke.” She let her head hang on her neck with unfeigned weariness. “And the joke’s gone on long enough.”
Toda studied her for a long time, drumming the spatulate tips of his fingers on the gleaming white desktop. At last he heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Dr. O’Neill, I had hoped to offer you a chance to redeem yourself in the eyes of our nation, by working alongside its designated representatives—the technicians of our own humble Hiryu Cybernetic Industries—in bringing the fruits of your work to our people. Still, you persist in being obstinate. Very well.” He knit his fingers before him. “Your own assistant, Dr. Takai Jisaburo, has already provided us vital insight and information into the workings of this TOKUGAWA Project of yours. And I warn you against underestimating our Hiryu technicians, Doctor; they are among the best in the world, many of them veterans of ICOT. I think you’re trying a ruse on us, Doctor, employing infantile delaying tactics. Be advised, they will not delay us long.” He turned to his security chief. “Major, have your people escort the Doctor back to the room where she was being held.”
