Digital Chimera

by J N Chaney

  The same thing I was thinking about before. Organized crime as part of the system. “Got it. But not the Kagebushin?”

  “Not originally, no. It didn’t bribe its way into government and business like the Leary Group, and it didn’t use a combination of force and corruption like the Roach Syndicate. It simply cut down everyone who stood against it. Efficiently, ruthlessly, and without guns. They like to get close to you before they kill you.”

  Sasha nodded. “That’s what people say. The Kagebushin killers like to hear your heart beating before they stop it.”

  I’ve seen a lot of people die, but something about that made me shudder a little. “They sound almost mythical.”

  Jones agreed. “They are. The way people talk about them, it’s like they’re not even human. More like shapeshifting boogeymen. Immortals.”

  Veraldi scoffed. “There are no immortals. As will be clear, if any of them come within reach of my knife. They aren’t the only ones who prefer to get in close.”

  Andrew ran his hand through his hair. “Look, I’m not saying I believe everything I’ve heard about them. A lot of it must be embellishment. But I’ve spent enough time on this planet to know that if something scares the average Hellan, it’s probably the stuff of nightmares.”

  Vincenzo just shrugged. He wouldn’t believe it till he saw it himself. “Come on, the street looks clear now. It’s time to run.”

  We reached the next rooftop a few seconds later and crouched down behind a control unit. Andrew looked down at the street. “This is going to get dicey.”

  Veraldi nodded. We had reached a cross street, and it was far too wide for us to jump over. There was a ramen shop on the other side, and an alley next to it. If we went down that alley and got up the fire escape, we could get to the roof and keep going, but we would still have to cross, with every possibility of being spotted.

  As we looked down at the street, a woman walked by pushing a covered baby carriage. It was strange to think about. She had a normal life, or as normal as anyone had in a place like East Hellas. Yet here we were, staring down at her from a nearby rooftop like she was a dangerous spy. She turned her head in our direction, and I ducked back behind the control unit.

  “I hate this city,” I muttered.

  “We all hate this city, Barrett.” Veraldi’s tone was slightly harsh, like he’d heard all he wanted to hear on the topic. “If we can get across, we’ll still have a long run across that flat rooftop before we can get to the better concealment on the other side. If we had the time, I’d say we should wait for nightfall, but we don’t.”

  “Then let’s get it done. Are we going down through the building?” Jones pointed to the access door to the left of us.

  Veraldi nodded, and Jones ran across the roof and slipped inside. I followed a moment later, and Sasha and Vincenzo were right behind me. Inside the building, I was relieved to see nothing but a long hallway with closed doors on either side. Perhaps we’d make it, perhaps we’d get down to the street without anyone in this building even realizing we’d ever been here.

  Then a door opened, and an old Martian woman peered out at us maliciously. She made some sort of hissing sound then closed the door again.

  “She could be calling them now,” Veraldi warned us. “Move.”

  We sprinted down the hall then took the stairwell in a series of long jumps that cleared a landing at a time. By the time we reached the ground floor, more doors were opening, and more Martians were peering out and hissing angrily at us. If anyone ever suggests a vacation in East Hellas, trust me when I say: they don’t want visitors.

  We crossed the street at a dead run, but there was no longer any way to kid ourselves. The locals had spotted us, and if the Kagebushin didn’t know we were here yet, they would within the next few minutes. Hell, if the people in that building had been able to do it, they probably would have killed us themselves and saved their syndicate the trouble.

  Vincenzo jumped up to the alley fire escape and pulled the ladder down. He stepped aside for the rest of us, and I clambered up as fast as I could go. When I reached the rusted stairs, I already half-expected to feel a sniper’s bullet go through my neck. Not that you normally feel that sort of thing in the first place, but that’s how I imagined it in the anxiety of knowing we were hunted: a spray of blood from my throat and the world going dark as I gasped for breath. Then I remembered the Kagebushin wouldn’t use snipers. They’d get in close somehow, then stab me right between the ribs and wait until my lungs filled up with my own blood.

  I reached the rooftop above the ramen place. It was long and flat, with no cover at all until you got almost all the way to the other side. I don’t know if I’ve ever felt more vulnerable in my life, but it did seem like I should be able to see them coming in the open space. Even if they were immortal shapeshifting boogeymen.

  The sun was setting, bathing East Hellas in dark blue. The others joined me on the rooftop, and Vincenzo silently drew a knife. I wondered at first why he’d chosen that weapon when he had a powerful gun with a flamethrower attachment. If anyone attacked us, he could spray them with a blast of flame and that would be the end of that. Wouldn’t it?

  However Veraldi might feel about bladed weapons, Jones and I were not bound by his weird fixation. I drew my gun, and Andrew produced his as well. We started to move across the roof as the shadows lengthened in the Martian twilight.

  All over Fuji Section, neon lights were blinking on. They lit up the evening in red and blue, advertising everything from dancing girls to the local cuisine, a Martian fried-food delicacy I had always been fond of. It was a surreal feeling to see those signs trying to sell me one of my favorite foods while I was busy trying to slip through the neighborhood without getting stabbed somehow. Enjoy Fried Protein! Best Topless Dancers! You Should Never Have Come Here, and Now You Must Die!

  We reached the environmental control unit, and Jones looked to Veraldi for guidance. Were we going to stop and wait here as we’d been doing? Our field commander shook his head. “Now that we’ve been spotted, there’s no point in too much stealth. We keep moving, fast but careful.”

  I was still on point, which meant I was the one most exposed in the event of an ambush—and I felt it. I couldn’t tell if I was being paranoid, but something told me I was being watched. Everyone gets that feeling every now and then, but in my line of work most guys swear by it. You can never really know why you’re getting that feeling, and it could be anything from a sixth sense to something subtle in the environment you’re picking up on. A faint sound, a faint smell. Ignore that stuff at your own peril.

  I turned my head to look around and caught a glimpse of movement out of the corner of my right eye. I spun around to see what it was and found nothing. More paranoia, a case of nerves, or something else?

  Something was definitely off, but I couldn’t identify it. There was no one on the roof but us, unless they were wearing thermoptic camouflage, and I was actively looking for any hint of a heat shimmer. What could it be?

  I slowed to a stop, trusting my instincts enough to listen to them. Sasha Ivanovich stopped just behind me and gave me a curious look.

  “What is it now?”

  Andrew saw. “What is it, Tycho? Did you see something?”

  I shook my head. It wasn’t a matter of sight, but something much more subtle. Jones signaled to Veraldi, who stopped and took up a defensive stance. I scanned the nearby rooftops, looking for anything that seemed out of place.

  When I finally saw it, I could hardly believe or understand what I was looking at. A ghoulish face, like some ancient theater mask, stared back at me in total silence. It was on the building across from us, crouched down in the shadows, and it could easily have been mistaken for some kind of grotesque decoration.

  “What the hell is—”

  It burst from the darkness, sailing across the space between the buildings with a jump so fluid and effortless it almost looked like flight. As it soared across the gap as quiet as a whispe
r, it crossed its arms in front of its body and drew two gleaming blades.

  I’ve seen a lot of things, but I’d never seen anything like that before. I didn’t even react, I just stood there staring at it with my mouth hanging open. I had my gun, but it might as well have been a chunk of plasticrete for all the good it did me. The thing’s foot hit my chest and knocked me backward so hard my weapon went flying, spinning off across the dark rooftop.

  Then the blades came in. Luckily for me, my ability to respond to what was happening around me returned around the time the assassin’s boot hit my chest. This wasn’t a thing; it was just a man. A man who was trying to kill me. I bucked so violently under him that I knocked him off me, and the blade he was swinging at me hit the rooftop as he tumbled.

  Whoever the masked assassin was, he had style and grace. I had nothing of the sort, but I was furious. As he fell sideways and rolled away from me, I dove in and kicked at him. It was a glancing blow, but it was a hard enough kick to buy me some time. He was back on his feet just as quick as I was, and we were on each other like two dogs fighting over the same bone.

  As he came in at me slashing, I had a dim understanding that the others were fighting too. There were shadows moving on every side of me, masked killers dressed up like goblins from some Asian fairytale. I didn’t know it right away, but there were only four of them—one for each of us, including Sasha. I wasn’t thinking about that right then, though. The only thing I was thinking about was those slashing blades coming in at me from what seemed like every direction all at once.

  I blocked high and to my left, trying to get his weapon over to my right so I could fight from his outside. If I could have taken that angle, both of his blades would have been pinned down on one side and I could have gone to work on making him eat all his teeth.

  No such luck, though. As I blocked high and left, the other blade slashed in from the right and I had to deal with that. I’ve had a lot of close quarters combat training and more first-hand experience than most, but two blades is nothing to joke about. I blocked as fast and furious as the masked killer could attack and stopped as many cuts as I saw him making, but he got me anyway.

  I didn’t feel the blade, but I felt the blood. It came pouring out of me, a sheet of liquid running down my chest. And he just kept coming.

  13

  Getting cut is more than shocking. It can shut down your mind, leaving you unable to do a damn thing to save your life before the guy who did it cuts you again. It’s a terrifying experience, more so than being shot for most people.

  But like I said, I was mad. When I felt the blood—despite knowing I’d blocked everything he’d thrown at me—I stopped trying to block anything and put my fist as far through that guy’s face as his skull would let me.

  Of course, that’s exactly what skulls are for—not letting things get through them, I mean—so my punch didn’t have quite the dramatic effect when I made contact. Even so, he was knocked back a good two or three feet by the impact, and his mask was cracked. He held back for a moment, a little stunned. Expert killers with dual blades don’t normally expect to eat a fist. I screamed in his face: “COME ON!”

  Unfortunately, he did. He wasn’t stunned for long, and as he attacked again it was with the caution that comes from knowing your opponent is a trained fighter. He didn’t just throw one cut after another at high speed in an attempt to overwhelm me. Instead he would throw a slash and then dodge back out again, dart in for a quick stab and then wheel away.

  There was no way I could have coped with that for long even if there hadn’t been anything else going on. As it happened, there was. I blocked one hit, I dodged another, but something slashed across my left arm and blood came pouring out of me.

  This guy was hurting me, and I couldn’t even see how he was doing it. Rage turned to despair as I realized there was nothing I could do to save my life.

  That’s when I saw it. Bathed in the neon lights of the advertisements on the adjacent buildings, my opponent looked weird and ghostly. A supernatural demon sent to drag me to hell. I had heard the legend, and now here I was facing a legend in the flesh. And that’s the thing about flesh and blood opponents—they don’t shimmer in the light, and they don’t seem to be cutting one way while they’re really cutting another.

  He came in at me again, interrupting my brief flash of thought. I slipped down and to the side, successfully avoiding him. Then I came in under his attack with a vicious uppercut and somehow missed him completely, despite the fact that his face had been directly underneath my fist. My punch seemed to go right through him, and even though he dodged back like he was avoiding it, I knew what I had just seen. He hadn’t dodged at all, it’s just that his face was never where I thought it was.

  All at once I knew what was going on, and I knew the truth behind the legend of the Kagebushin. They weren’t immortal boogeymen, and they weren’t shapeshifters either. They were highly trained killers using a clever combination of thermoptics and holography.

  Back at the Arbiter Academy, a long time ago, I had a close quarters combative instructor who used to make me train blindfolded. She’d come at me with a shock knife, a training tool for edged weapon skills, and expect me to stop the attack without being able to see it. The shock knife delivers a nasty sting, but you can power through it if you have to. The idea was to get the knife away from her while getting shocked as few times as possible. I never did reach the point where I wasn’t shocked at all, and she told me I probably never would.

  “The point isn’t to get so good that you don’t get cut. That just isn’t possible when there’s a blade in play, and especially not against a skilled attacker. The idea is to survive. Get cut if you have to, but keep going and win.”

  I still remembered her words. She used them mostly to distract me, even if the advice was good. I’d be stumbling around, trying to figure out where she was despite the blindfold around my eyes. She’d be talking the whole time, a constant stream of useful fighting tips, and every now and then a painful shock as the blade whipped out along my arm or belly or sometimes my throat.

  I thought all the blindfolded stuff was crazy at the time, just an expression of that woman’s twisted sadism. As I got better at the drill, I figured out that you could use feeling to take the place of sight if you had to. You just had to get in close, get your arms out in front of you to keep the blade away from your body, then find the attacker’s arms. Once you knew where those were, you could take the attacker down.

  On that East Hellan rooftop, I didn’t have time to think about any of those things. It just came back to me, in a flash of memory and a reckless impulse. The Kagebushin assassin came in for another attack, blades slashing left and right in quick succession. I threw my arms up, closed my eyes, and crashed right into the flurry of attacks.

  I don’t know why he had picked that moment to abandon his hit and run strategy to try and overwhelm me again, but he probably just got frustrated at how long it was taking me to lie down and die. It happens to a lot of people. Fighting is exhausting, and after a certain point you just want to get it done with. Whatever the reason, his committed attacks gave me the opportunity I needed.

  One arm made contact with my opponent’s wrist. I turned my body, pivoting to my right, and jammed my other hand up under the same arm. With two points of contact, I was suddenly to my opponent’s right side and in a position to prevent him from using either of his weapons effectively. He made an attempt to adjust his weight, but I pushed back on the arm I controlled until his spine arched back. With no control over his center of gravity, he had no control over the rest of his body. I kicked the back of his heel and swept his foot out from underneath him, and he hit the rooftop hard. Then I opened my eyes, spotted him trying to get back to his feet, and kicked his head like I was trying to score a goal with it.

  That was it for him. A spray of blood shot out of his mouth when my foot met his face, and his broken mask was knocked two or three feet to the side. He dropped his weap
ons, and I grabbed one up before he could do anything to recover. The man was still moving—he was nothing if not tough—but he just couldn’t stand because his foot kept slipping out from under his body weight like he had no sense of balance. I stabbed down through his neck behind the collarbone with the blade I’d taken, a kind of short sword. He groaned and slumped down to the roof. He still wasn’t dead, so I wrapped the fingers of my left hand through his hair, pulled his head up to expose his throat, then cut it open with his own blade.

  Out of every killing I’ve ever done, that was probably the most gruesome. Killing with a blade is a disgusting business, and far more deliberate than killing in a firefight. I stood there panting, covered in my own blood as well as his, and looked around the rooftop. That fight was over, but the other three assassins were still alive. At first I thought my friends would probably need my help, but it didn’t turn out that way.

  In fact, even the guy we were supposed to be protecting didn’t turn out to need any help from me. Sasha Ivanovich, scientific researcher and incessant complainer, had somehow managed to run his attacker face-first into the environmental control unit and smash the man’s head into it until the unit’s casing buckled. As I watched in amazement, he did exactly what I had just done and killed the assassin with one of his own weapons. As he slipped the blade in between his target’s ribs, I had the distinct impression he was saying something quietly in the guy’s ear, just like when we found him talking to one of the creatures in his secret laboratory.