Specter Protocol

by Eddie R. Hicks

  “And so, you linked up with Piper’s group?”

  “I ran into some trouble. The messengers from Nexus told Piper and Theo about it, so they came and saved me. I thought the honorable thing to do was return the favor and support them. It gave me the chance to further travel the world.”

  “What did you do before you left the Dominion?”

  His face showed hesitation. “I’d rather not say…”

  What the fuck was I thinking…?

  Estrella was in her washroom now, standing in front of its mirror, and glancing at the reflection that shot back. She wore the dress minus the shoes and didn’t know if she should smile to make herself look like the projection she saw in the shop, or frown. This wasn’t her. At all.

  Was it not your plan to attend Lady M’s party and seek Dennis Patterson?

  It was, just, fuck. I hope this won’t take long.

  Have you decided on how to handle Patterson when you find him?

  Nothing new outside the ‘get him drunk and talking’ plan. Yeah, I know, it’s a shitty plan, got a better one?

  I have seven; however, six involve kidnapping and imprisonment.

  And the other?

  Requires you to have sexual inter—

  No! Fuck that noise. She glanced at the mirror again, grinning at the newfound sex appeal the dress gifted her. But… I’m young, looking good, and have a past, and unwanted, history of performing in adult content. If he’s a sick fuck, that might get him excited, and talking.

  I am detecting elevated levels of stress within you.

  Yeah, that kinda happens when I think about stupid shit like that.

  Should I discover an alternative plan, I will let you know. One that will not bring discomfort to you, Estrella.

  Thanks, I’d appreciate that.

  Estrella’s phone rang, its sounds echoing from her living room. She left the washroom, eyeing her flashing phone resting on the glass coffee table, the edges of the dress rippled behind like her long hair. Ray’s number displayed.

  “Yo, sup,” she said answering the call. Ray’s face appeared on the screen still wearing those shades and a baseball cap.

  “That’s what I called to ask you. What’s up?”

  “Well I got…” she said, lifting the phone high up, giving Ray on the other end a better glance at her outfit. “The dress… And boy does it fucking suck.”

  “Understood, I’m scouting M’s palace of a mansion now.”

  “Wait, what?” She lowered the phone again and then placed its screen closer to her face. Palm trees were blowing in the winds behind Ray, he wasn’t home. “What the fuck are you doing there?”

  “You and Bashiir were taking too long. Which meant you weren’t getting a good lay of the land. So, I went on ahead, and did it for you—”

  “Ray!”

  “I’m fine, been keeping track of where all the cameras and security is and staying out of sight.”

  “M’s place is in district one!”

  “I know, and I’m familiar with this place. Arianna’s parents lived not too far away.”

  “It’s also the district you’re most likely to be ID’d. You said so yourself, didn’t you? A shady looking motherfucker like you is gonna get all those rich folks calling the cops. And when the cops show up…”

  “Good thing nobody’s done that yet. Look, I’m almost done here; I’ll send you the photos and places of interest I found on my way out. And let’s face it, the whole ‘show some leg and get Patterson drunk’ thing probably isn’t going to work.”

  “Don’t remind me, Geoffrey already did.”

  “So, with that said, if we have to take him by force, you can thank me later for scouting the house and neighborhood out.”

  “Call me if something comes up.”

  “Will do. Let me know when you plan to arrive tomorrow.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m going to be your back up.”

  “Fuck off, you need to stay back.”

  “I got the lay of the land, nobody else does. If shit hits the fan, I’m running over to help you.”

  “Bashiir, Theo, and Piper could.”

  “Bashiir and Theo might have fake profiles but are still IWs. What if they get discovered for who they are? M will call for the nearest RW to take them out. Guess who that’s gonna be?”

  She grumbled. “Me…”

  “And when was the last time you heard from Piper? Besides, she’s wanted, and people will figure out eventually mind control was used if it came to that.”

  “And so are you, wanted that is. Which is why you hanging out there is fucking stupid.”

  “Estrella, for fuck’s sake, trust me on this.” He chuckled. “Been here for hours, nobody caught me now, and they won’t tomorrow.”

  “Fine.”

  “Anyways, I got to get back to this. Don’t forget to call or text me.”

  His face on the screen dissolved to a call ended notification. Somehow, Estrella couldn’t stay upset at Ray for what he did. It might have been the fact that Yoshida played a role in the disappearance of his girlfriend Arianna and sitting in the IW district locked up in his apartment for the past month wasn’t yielding the results he was looking for. Had things been different, and Estrella knew Yumi was alive and lost, she’d be putting herself out there to find her just like Ray. Even if it meant crawling on her hands and knees in front of an enemy.

  So, we might kidnap a Yoshida executive. Any suggestions on how we can do that without looking like criminals?

  By not kidnapping him.

  Funny. Except, we might have to.

  Not necessarily. Upon further analysis, we just need to extract all the intel he has and then leave him. Kidnapping should be the last resort.

  And we do that how?

  A psychoactive drug may encourage him to reveal details and potentially forget he had done so.

  Basically, a truth serum.

  Here is a list of drugs to use that we can nano print.

  A small list of drugs Estrella couldn’t pronounce lined up in the center of her vision. She glanced at the list viewing the chemical compositions and what it would require to nano print them.

  Hmm, let’s go with flunitrazepam, it shouldn’t be hard to get the materials required. Carbon, oxygen, helium and… what’s FN3?

  Triazadienyl fluoride.

  So, fluorine and three nitrogen atoms. Toothpaste got fluorine, so we can extract it from that and get nitrogen from the air just like the oxygen.

  No, toothpaste contains fluoride, not fluorine. However, with our nanites, I should be able to convert toothpaste fluoride into fluorine.

  So… I was right. Kinda. All right so we drug him and get him talking.

  Yes. However, we should have Piper’s help on this as risky as it would be to bring her out there.

  Agreed, her telepathic powers might be useful too. Her mind control range was fucking insane, risky yes when people snap out of it, but it’d make this easier.

  And the more Estrella thought about it, the more she realized she hadn’t seen or heard from the pixie kiwi for the last month. Checking her phone text and call log confirmed that. The last time she saw Piper, Robbie had given the crew the keys to their new place in the IW district.

  She dialed her number. The phone rang and rang. She sent a text message.

  Me: Hey, you busy? Some shit came up, could use your help.

  And there was no reply. She held the phone, up, high up, making sure her cleavage was in perfect view of the phone’s camera. Estrella snapped a selfie in hologram mode and then sent it as an attachment to the follow-up text.

  Me: Gonna be crashing M’s party, I’ll be looking like this :)

  There wasn’t a reply to that either, and Estrella knew a woman like Piper would have loved to receive a holographic selfie like that. Something felt wrong. Estrella hoped it was just paranoia. She’d pay her a visit, but the clock on her phone drew her attention to the current time. It was getting late, an
d Piper was probably asleep. Something Estrella needed to do. Tomorrow she needed to spend time practicing how to create the drug with nanites. She had a feeling it’d take all day.

  Piper had twenty-four hours to reply.

  Seventeen

  Miyuki

  Miyuki Matsuoka paused for a few seconds, allowing her racing chest the chance to catch up. The climb to the top of the freighter’s multi-story high shipping containers wasn’t an easy one, despite her cyborg grip giving her the advantage. She blamed cigarette smoking for the short breath. She blamed not having one within the last four hours on her aggravated thoughts.

  She was prone, holding the Ghostface 115 sniper rifle, aiming its scope and barrel down at a clearing on the deck. Her eyesight became what the camera on her rifle’s scope scanned when her cyberware synced with it once again. She wasn’t ghostwalking, no need to when she was so high up, under the cover of the darkness and the tight black catsuit hugging her skinny frame.

  Yanmei, however, was a different story. She watched her through the scope, ghostwalking and stepping into the middle of a crowd of Yakuza men. Gaijins that spoke a language she couldn’t understand were among them. Was it Spanish? Maybe. And the gaijin men, they had shaved heads with tattoos of skulls on them. Yanmei was safe for now until she entered cooldown, and when that would happen Miyuki didn’t know. Every IW was unique for gathering MEP. Some could absorb more than others resulting in longer windows for ability usage. Others weren’t fast to collect the particles, meaning longer cooldown times.

  Lifting the rifle and zooming ahead, Miyuki glanced into the freighter’s main bridge. Two men were sitting at a computer terminal, their faces didn’t take notice of the Australian hacker who cracked the door lock codes and slithered in. A bridge crew member, probably the captain, looked surprised to see Serge, and then cowered in fear when Serge drew his pistol. The bridge flashed twice, and one of the six windows turned red. The second bridge member leaped from his chair; his hands held high up. Three flashes of light and she couldn’t see the body anymore. When she zoomed more, she saw Serge place his tablet on the computer console, wiping away a splatter of red with his sleeve from its screen.

  “This man…” Yanmei’s voice spoke over the radio. “I killed him last month.”

  Miyuki was looking at Yanmei now, her rifle pointed back to the gathering of Yakuza and bald men with skull tattoos on their head. Yanmei’s hands were still glowing white. She hadn’t hit cooldown yet.

  “From the Skulls?” Serge’s voice radioed.

  “Yes,” Yanmei transmitted. “These Yakuza men are different. But the skull ones? They look the same.”

  A Bald Skull man walked to one of the many cargo containers around them, and like Yanmei, his hands glowed white; he was using telepathic powers. He typed in a code on its digital lock panel and its screen flashed green a second later. The container’s doors swung open like a barn door. She zoomed in on the opened container. It was dark inside and hard to make out what was in it, except for a pod. The pod’s glass casing showed what looked like a man inside, naked, resting like he was asleep.

  “What’s the telepath doing?” Miyuki asked.

  She saw Yanmei creep forward, peeking into the cargo container. “Maybe relaying what’s happening to another telepath—”

  “Oh, well, looky here,” Serge’s voice called over the radio. “This ship’s from the Alliance. It was contracted by Yoshida to deliver freight here. You realize what that means? I got access to Yoshida’s information database.”

  “Can this wait?” Yanmei radioed, she crept closer to the gathering of gangsters. “The Yakuza and the skulls are here to trade. I’d like to know what.”

  “I dunno,” drawled Serge. “This is some good stuff I think y’all need to know. This Bald Skull gang? They’re from the Alliance you see.”

  “Figured that part out.”

  “The gang is small, and all their members were slain in Buenos Aires last year by a mercenary group using their RW support teams. This gang made a return from the dead last month; it’s got the Alliance stumped. And hey, Matsuoka.”

  “Yes?” Miyuki radioed in reply.

  “Get this,” Serge continued. “All this happened right around the time your brother Nobuo went to the Alliance with a team of IWs from the Federation.”

  She gasped. Trembling hands made her vision shake. “Is that why my brother traveled to the Alliance? Because of these gangsters?”

  “That’s what we’re hired to find out. Now, this is where it gets crazy. The crew of this ship knew the gang was aboard. The Skulls are here talkin’ with the Yakuza because Yoshida wanted it to happen.”

  And if she were to understand it correctly, Nobuo wanted to reclaim something in the Alliance, something that would make Miyuki’s life better, something that put him in conflict with Yoshida and involved the tattooed skull gaijins below. And then Nobuo met his end when he fought in Yoshida’s Los Angeles headquarters.

  Rage manifested in her. Yoshida, in her eyes, was the enemy, and that made the Bald Skull men her enemies as well since they allied with Yoshida—

  A voice over the radio cut in. Miyuki didn’t recognize it. Panic ensued; had they been compromised? She looked about, the scope still working as her eyesight. Nothing seemed out of place. And then she zoomed in one of the Yakuza members and saw his lips move as his words came over the radio. Yanmei’s microphone was close enough to pick up their chatter.

  “Now, shall we continue where we left off from the fuck up last month?” voiced the Yakuza man.

  “Ha! That was on you, Yakuza, yo,” voiced the skull tattooed gaijin. “We told you to meet up here.”

  “We had no idea Federation State Security had recruited IWs. Perhaps the Alliance was right, our country has taken international laws into their hands.”

  Australian laughter on the radio drowned their next words. “Fuck me dead, neither of those twits know what’s goin’ on. Federation doesn’t have IWs in their ranks.”

  “But State Security hired us, right?” Miyuki said. “He’s not wrong in that case.”

  “The Specters and I are just independent contractors,” Serge said. “In order to catch the weaponized IWs your brother hung out with, you gotta send us.”

  Miyuki’s scope followed the lead Yakuza man, walking to a set of containers behind him and his group. He swung the doors open, grabbed his pistol, and aimed it at the darkness inside. He screamed and shouted at someone. Seconds later two tattered men limped out of the container, and then another, then three women, six children, and two more men. The Yakuza ordered the battered and weakened people in the containers at gunpoint to the middle. The white glowing hands of one Bald Skull man forced them to remain idle, mass mind control by the looks.

  “The Bald Skulls were paying money for unregistered telepaths,” Yanmei said.

  “How do you know that?” Miyuki asked. Though, she suspected the rough-looking people below were IWs, low ranked ones with minimal training. There’s no way the Yakuza, as strong as they were, had the power to capture IWs without support from other IWs or RWs.

  Yanmei’s blades sprang from her fingers, and her hands stood ready for violence, its white glow fading. She was about to hit cooldown.

  “Matsuoka,” Yanmei called out to her. “Kill them.”

  Miyuki grimaced. “Who?”

  “Who do you think? I’m about to enter cooldown and will be compromised soon. Don’t let me leave this freighter as a corpse!”

  She held the rifle and placed its targeting reticle over the head of the Yakuza gangster. She hoped Yanmei wanted the gangsters taken care of.

  “Matsuoka? Do you confirm?”

  She nodded. “Roger.”

  “Smith, start cutting the power.”

  Serge radioed. “Already on it!”

  The power went out. The freighter was dark. Her night vision kicked in, turning her HUD into a world full of various shades of green in the backdrop with white bodies, arms, and legs flailing in p
anic. She found the first target her sights locked onto, someone holding a rifle.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Red mist spewed from the back of his head, almost like magic with a single pull of the trigger. Miyuki saw another man with a weapon, its muzzle flashed. Her reticle located his wrist.

  She pulled the trigger.

  His hand spiraled away from his wrist when she released the trigger. He staggered, and his body entered a shocked state as he stared horrified at his missing hand. It made it easier to line up a headshot.

  She pulled the trigger.

  Gore plastered the cargo container behind. A new target came into view, but they didn’t have a gun.

  She didn’t pull the trigger, plus she had to reload.

  Ignoring that target, she slapped a fresh magazine in the rifle, and searched for another. She found it. A Yakuza member took aim in Yanmei’s direction, how? Glancing at Yanmei she saw why, her hands no longer held the white glow. Yanmei was in cooldown, her body was visible to all. Her reticle found the back of the Yakuza man’s head.

  She pulled the trigger twice.

  Only a headless body crashing to its knees remained. A bald gaijin pointed a shotgun at Yanmei, so Miyuki pointed the sniper rifle at him.

  She pulled the trigger.

  The bullet put a hole in the deck, she missed. She pulled again. The rifle clicked; it was out of ammo.

  Miyuki was panicking. Her vision returned to normal and she saw the blackness of the powerless freighter. In the dark, random white bursts of light pulsed. She went to reload, ignoring the screams of terror, people uttering their last words, blood spattering across the deck and cargo containers. Yanmei might have been one of them.

  Her spent rifle magazine tumbled down, and a fresh one replaced it. Miyuki’s vision became the rifle’s scope once again and zoomed in to the chaos. She couldn’t see Yanmei. A bald man aimed their weapon at someone. The panicking thoughts wouldn’t leave her. Did she fail Yanmei?

  His body slumped, five slices across his neck appeared, delivered by a figure moving so fast it was impossible to pinpoint where they went next. Two Yakuza men collapsed, and the blur Miyuki struggled to track became Yanmei standing with her finger blades dripping with crimson goo. And then Yanmei was on the move again, moving gracefully with deadly results in the close quarters darkness as her feet splashed through bloody puddles. Those out of the range of Yanmei’s blades and kicks got pricked with the nanite needle that sprang from her wrist. And those hit with the needle had their bodies shake, fall on all fours, and vomit everything in their belly, including what Miyuki assumed was their own liquified organs.