Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1)

by Niall Teasdale

‘Blondes are more fun.’

  ‘No way. Blondes get all the fun, but brunettes do it better.’ She stepped through, not bothering to close the door.

  ‘What do you care? You’re not a brunette.’

  ‘Not now,’ she called back, ‘but I used to be.’

  ~~~

  Tatsu took her bike on the trip north. It was raining and she was not wearing a helmet, but transport was transport, and it was a long way to walk in the rain. Besides, she had a few stops to make before she tried Yachiyo, which was actually more east than it was north.

  She checked out a few gangs in Kamagaya, which was north of Funabashi. Then she went east to Shiroi. Everyone said that Burrell was somewhere else. West of here. East of here. Someone said he had holed up in Yotsukaido, which was pretty much an impossibility because the Hispanic gangs ruled most of the eastern side of the zone.

  Finally, Tatsu circled back down to Yachiyo with a heavy heart. Heavy because the Yachiyo 8 Chome Yankees were a bunch of pricks. Every gang had its own peculiar personality. The Funabashi 1 Chome were fairly laidback, even when they were not scared of you folding them into a pretzel if they stepped out of line. You could get on with the Funabashi crowd. Some pretended to be aspiring musicians. Some thought they were the biggest hoodlums on the block. Yachiyo 8 Chome were just foulmouthed louts.

  The area had been a fairly nice neighbourhood before the war. Then it had got hit by a bomb or two and there had been the need to house millions of refugees. So, Yachiyo 8 Chome and the surrounding areas had been converted into factories and low-rent apartment blocks for the cheap factory workers the cheap factory owners were expecting. And that had lasted two minutes before the workers were out of work because, whether you thought robots were utterly evil or not, they were more efficient at producing things than humans. And that had been before nanomanufacturing had largely replaced robotic workshops. There had been talk about bulldozing the area and putting in food production factories, but no one had been found to finance the operation.

  Instead, the local Yankees had set up shop in one of the old factory buildings. They ventured out primarily to extort protection money from the nearby residents and steal liquor from any shop stupid enough to open nearby. Ridding Chiba of this bunch would have made everyone happy, but they were not really enough of a problem to warrant a raid. They were loud and obnoxious, but ultimately useless. Tatsu’s opinion of Burrell was at risk of dropping significantly if he really was holed up with them.

  The factory had a parking lot, though it was doubtful many of the employees had driven to work. Tatsu pulled up in front of the main entrance and climbed off her bike, much to the interest of a fairly young man in a T-shirt and jeans, both of which had seen much better days, standing under the rain shelter over the door.

  ‘Nice wheels,’ he said, smirking.

  ‘Yeah, and it comes with a really assertive security system. Messing with her would be… inadvisable.’

  ‘Sure…’

  ‘Your funeral.’ He did not stop her from opening the door and walking inside. Likely he was too busy contemplating stealing her bike. She had warned him…

  Behind the door was what had been the reception area for the factory. If there had been a counter, it had been stripped out. The room was large enough to allow for two moth-eaten loungers, and it had been redecorated in early Gothic scumbag. Various uplifting messages had been sprayed over the bland, grey paintwork to brighten things up. ‘Death to pigs!’ was prominent, as was ‘Japs Suck Dick.’ They were nothing if not imaginative. Ignoring the two men who were presumably on guard in the loungers, Tatsu headed for the door at the back which would take her out onto what had been the factory floor.

  She was not walking fast, so it was no particular surprise when one of the two ran ahead of her, blocking her path to the door. ‘Bitch don’t get to go in there without an invite,’ he said. He was under twenty-five, wiry rather than muscled, and his hair was an orange ridge over his head. Her systems began running facial recognition since his implant returned no identification. As was to be expected, his MedStat colours came back black and orange, indicating that no data was returned from the query.

  ‘I have an invite,’ Tatsu told him, smiling as she did so. ‘It looks a lot like a police ID.’

  ‘You’re the police?’ He strung out the o into a couple of syllables. ‘You don’t look like a pig.’

  ‘I get that a lot.’

  ‘Pigs aren’t welcome here.’

  Tatsu nodded at the nearby wall, the one with ‘Death to pigs!’ scrawled across it in bright red paint. ‘I can tell. If you could read, you’d know I already knew. I need to see your boss, so stand aside. Please.’

  His smirk got wider. ‘We don’t let pigs in to see the boss. See, we’re here to make sure he isn’t bothered by the police.’ Again with the stretched o. ‘But…’ His eyes lowered to scan Tatsu’s body from the boots up. ‘You don’t look like a pig, so if you spread ’em for me and act like the good little cock-sleeve you are, I might be able to make the introduction.’

  Tatsu laughed and looked down. ‘I prefer it if I can actually feel a guy going in and… you just don’t measure up. Be like getting poked with a pencil.’

  ‘Bitch!’ He telegraphed the punch really badly. Tatsu redirected it past her face and caught his wrist, extending his arm and, in the process, swinging him around to face the wall. Catching the back of his head in her left hand, she stepped forward and slammed his face into the plasterboard with a resounding thud. She held him there as he went limp under her grip and turned her head to look at the other guard. His eyes were bulging.

  ‘Are you going to try to stop me?’ she asked. Slowly, he shook his head. ‘Good boy. You’ll want to lie him on his front when I let go. Otherwise, he’s going to drown in blood and snot.’ Letting her victim go, she continued on. Behind her, there was the sound of a body hitting the floor.

  The machinery had been pulled out of the factory as soon as it was declared defunct. There would be a lot of metal involved and metal was always recycled. With most of the world ruled by Rasputin, the supply of metals to Japan had got sparse and expensive. There had been some expansion in the supply thanks to deep-sea mining operations opening up, but metals of all sorts were still expensive, and recycling was ubiquitous. Replacing the machines were scrounged tables and chairs, a boxing ring someone had to have stolen in its entirety from a gym, and various people, men and women, who looked like the cat had considered dragging them in but had concluded they were not worth it.

  Right at the back of the room, where you had to go through the whole gang to get to him, was Rupert Macauley Carter, also known as Bear. He was a big man who shaved his head and wore a leather vest and jeans a lot. Tatsu’s image recognition software picked him out of the crowd easily as a person of interest. He was not actually wanted for anything, but Tatsu was sure she could find something to arrest him for if she spent thirty seconds looking. She prepared herself for the delightful task of getting across the room to him when a voice she recognised piped up from one of the nearer tables.

  ‘That you, Yamada?’ The speaker was a slight man, a little shorter than Tatsu and definitely not as well-built. He looked intelligent, partially because he wore glasses with square frames. His hair was mid-brown, his eyes were mid-brown, and he was as white as a sheet. He wore T-shirt, jeans, and a leather bomber jacket, all in black. Well, the shirt had a band motif on it, though Tatsu had never heard of the group. There was a bottle of domestic beer in his hand and it looked like he was playing cards, which was not a smart move with this bunch. This was Dexter Burrell.

  ‘God, Dex,’ Tatsu said, starting toward him, ‘what possessed you to hook up with this gang of iyarashī?’

  ‘I figured no one would come looking for me here,’ Burrell replied. ‘Should’ve known you would.’

  ‘Is this pig bothering you, Dex?’ The rumble came from Carter who had come over to check on things. He had a voice like gravel going through an industrial comp
actor.

  ‘Sergeant Yamada is okay, Bear,’ Burrell said. ‘She won’t be a problem unless you make her a problem, and then it’ll be your problem that she’s feeding you your spine.’

  Carter looked down at Tatsu, who looked up at him with a sanguine smile on her face. ‘She don’t look much… And that’s the worst kind. Okay, Dex, but I don’t like having pigs in my place.’

  ‘She won’t be staying long. She’s come about the ViraShield story, right? I heard you were assigned to the case after that thing in The Hole.’ From inside his jacket, Burrell produced a data stick, holding it out. ‘I am only giving you this because whoever made it wanted the cops to have it after I aired the story.’

  ‘Whoever made it?’ Tatsu asked.

  ‘I got handed the stick in the street by a kid. Kid got five thousand yen to hand it to me, no questions asked. Said he was given it by “some old man,” but I got the feeling anyone over sixteen was old to him. Has to be someone in ViraShield though. No way someone outside it could get this data.’

  Tatsu took the stick. ‘I’ll look it over. You’re sure it’s accurate?’

  ‘I’m convinced. There’s stuff on there that could only have come from the ViraShield corporate servers. Emails. Code from their PIN! I’m no programmer but–’

  ‘I am. One of my many talents. Okay, Dex, stay safe. Considering you have just broadcast the fact that ViraShield may have knowingly let dangerous code out to their customers, it might be harder to stay safe than you think.’

  ‘That,’ Burrell said, ‘is why I’m here.’

  Tatsu glanced at Carter. ‘Right. I’ll see myself out.’

  On her way to her bike, she stepped over the unconscious form of the kid who had admired it. He was lucky he was just unconscious. ‘Well, I did warn you…’

  24th July.

  Whoever was behind the data stick, they had collected a lot of data. At one in the morning, Tatsu was still working through it.

  What it came down to could be covered by a report written by an anonymous auditor indicating that there were several issues with the authentication mechanism employed by the monthly update software, an email sent to Hideki Fukui bringing his attention to the problems, a second email from Fukui indicating that the issues would be investigated and fixed in the next patch release, and a third stating that this was insufficient. Tatsu had checked the code provided and confirmed several of the listed problems. Someone had badly rushed the implementation. Or maybe the initial design had been faulty. It was quite possible that both were true. Whatever, it should never have got through testing like this, which likely meant they had knowingly released bad code.

  The name of the security auditor had been redacted in all of the documents involved. They could have been fakes, but they did not look like it to Tatsu. If she had to guess, the anonymous auditor was the source of the leaked data, but there was no way to be sure. What was sure was that Fukui had said there were no disgruntled employees at ViraShield. Someone was certainly displeased by the attitude of the CEO.

  Tatsu dispatched the entire package off to HQ with her comments, and then she went to bed, intent upon talking to Hideki Fukui first thing in the morning.

  ~~~

  She had been asleep for less than an hour when an urgent message from HQ triggered her notification alarm and she woke up as an annoying chime sounded inside her head.

  Alert! Reports of gunfire on the streets in the Yachiyo area. Confirmed sighting of Burrell, Dexter among those in combat. Combatants armed with military weaponry and armour. Respond immediately.

  Sending an acknowledgement, Tatsu grabbed for her clothes and started to dress.

  ~~~

  Tatsu’s bike ran almost silently on twin electric motors which powered it along at high speed in the direction of Yachiyo. Her in-vision map was showing the approximate position of the fight she was heading for. It was approximate because surveillance in Chiba was not up to the standard of Tokyo or any of the other cities. In Tokyo, Tatsu would by now have information on every weapon in use, full identities of the combatants, and what colour their underwear was. In Chiba, she had to do it all the hard way.

  Well, not entirely. She had got an image from a street camera of one of the people chasing Burrell. That was not giving her much as far as identity went, but she had a good idea what kind of weaponry she was facing. It looked like they were some kind of hit squad. The one in the image was wearing full-powered combat armour with a helmet and carrying a magnetic accelerator carbine with an underslung grenade launcher. The grenade launcher could be bad news depending on the warhead. The armour was not good news since it was capable of stopping the rounds Tatsu’s own weapons fired. Well, she had a grenade launcher too…

  The sound of gunfire had her turning right, where she rapidly came across a burning car and found herself riding toward what had once been Iizunakinrin Park. There was neither trees nor grass there now, but there was an open expanse of polymerised concrete with various structures on it: public toilets, a skate park, a tearoom which had not been open in years, and two groups of gunmen firing at each other from the cover those structures provided.

  Burrell was not visible, but he was still hanging out with Carter and the Yachiyo 8 Chome Yankees. The gang was holding its own better than Tatsu might have expected. They were armed with a variety of assault rifles, SMGs, and pistols. It seemed unlikely that they were a major threat to the armoured goons, but they were managing to hold them off somehow. The only thing Tatsu could immediately think of was that the mercs wanted Burrell alive and had brought grenades filled with capture webbing. A couple of good hits with explosive weapons would have taken the fight right out of the gang.

  Tatsu stopped her bike on the concrete, stepped off it, and began walking toward the firefight. As she did so, she shifted her personal defence weapon with its underslung grenade launcher into her left hand. She was quite strong enough to use it one-handed. Her machine pistol went in her right hand. Both fired four-millimetre needles at hypersonic velocities. If she had to fire on the Yankees, they were going to really regret it. The men in armour… maybe not so much.

  Stopping outside the current field of fire, she lifted her head and shouted. ‘Police! Everyone put your weapons down and surrender or I will use force.’

  Of course, no one much was listening, but Tatsu could tell they had noticed her because one of the armoured gunmen turned her way, realigning the aim on his carbine. Tatsu lifted her PDW. A targeting solution appeared in her sensorium instantly and she fired the grenade launcher with a thought. A twenty-five-millimetre slug left the barrel at just under the speed of sound, slamming into the gunman’s stomach and spreading into a plastic blob against his armour. The slugs were designed to deform, transferring as much of their kinetic energy into the target as possible. In all probability, the man would be left with little more than a bruise but being tossed three metres across the concrete was quite enough to make sure he would not be firing on Tatsu any time soon.

  ‘I said,’ Tatsu yelled, ‘stop firing and lay down your weapons. TYMPD!’

  That was when the gunmen vanished. There was a ripple over the surface of their armour, then one, then three, then all of them, including the one Tatsu had hit, disappeared. More or less. They were using a chameleon armour coating, a pretty advanced model at that, but Tatsu’s eyes were better than most and she knew where she was looking. She saw five men, one of them clutching his stomach, running back toward the edge of the park. Ignoring them, she turned and started marching toward the Yankees.

  One of them started aiming a rifle at her as she approached and she was just about to give him the same treatment as the armoured gunman when Carter’s voice sounded out from behind a low, concrete wall. ‘Quit firing! Ammo’s expensive!’

  Tatsu rolled her eyes. ‘Dex? You still alive?’

  Both Carter and Burrell stood up from behind the wall. ‘I’m alive. Looks like ViraShield wanted to know who gave me the info too.’

  ‘And you
have proof that they were ViraShield, obviously.’

  ‘Who the hell else would it be?!’

  Tatsu came to a stop on the other side of the wall which looked as though it was meant to be some sort of backstop for a ballgame. She tilted her head and gave Burrell a quizzical look. ‘How many people have you pissed off in the past few weeks?’

  Burrell frowned. ‘Well…’

  ‘Exactly. Bear, well done keeping Dex alive, but damn, man, this is going to be a mess to clean up. An AK? Seriously? I’m looking around here and I can see so much illegal hardware it’s untrue!’

  ‘Man’s got a right to defend himself,’ Carter replied.

  ‘That was recognised in the Self-defence Ordnance Act of twenty-eighty-six. However, that limits such weaponry to ten millimetres or less with a rate of fire less than three hundred rounds per minute, cyclic, or eighteen-point-five millimetres in a shotgun format utilising baton, beanbag, flechette, or shot ammunition. No submachine guns or assault rifles. I can’t ignore this, Bear. Expect a raid in the next few days looking for illegal weapons.’

  ‘You’re not arresting us now?’

  ‘How is one woman supposed to arrest…’ She glanced around at Carter’s troops. ‘… seventeen men with assault weapons?’

  ‘Well… Okay, I guess.’

  Disturbing the balance of power among the street gangs was not, in practice, going to change a damn thing in Chiba, except get a few people killed in gang fights. And it was apparent that the Yankees had not started this one. ‘Dex, you need to lay low somewhere. Like Akashi, maybe.’

  ‘Leaving Chiba won’t stop ViraShield coming after me.’

  ‘Depends how good you are at hiding. Or I could put you in protective custody…’

  ‘Hell, no! I’ll hop some transport to Akashi for a few days. You’ve sent that data to your overlords, I assume? If they act on it, things should be good in a couple of days.’

  Tatsu turned on her heels and started for her bike. ‘They’ll act. They won’t have any choice.’

  Tokyo.