Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (34 page)

The Koman with a bloodied knife to his right won the designation as primary target. Mickey merged his image with the template. Red dots covered the Koman at forehead, throat and the center of its chest, showing areas of vulnerability.
Imprint.
Mickey’s right hand contracted, fingers hooking halfway in, palm pulling perpendicular to the forearm.

Kill.

Mickey’s hand struck with blinding speed. His fingers penetrated the Koman’s flesh before the creature had a chance to realize Mickey had even begun to move.

Leaning in toward the Koman, Mickey pushed his hand through the beast’s sternum, snapping off the ends of a half-dozen ribs. As the bone fragments shredded the
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Koman’s lungs and started them hissing, Mickey mashed its heart against its spine. His hand contracted as he encountered bone, and his arm retracted, taking four vertebrae with it.

The first Koman collapsed with the upper half of his torso folding backward and blood spraying out of the hole in his chest. Mickey turned back away from him, stiffening his left hand into a spearhead.
Acquire.
Moving to the left, he spotted a Koman with a rapier. His mental template fused with the Koman.
Imprint.

Kill!

With the skill of a championship fencer, Mickey arched his back to avoid a thrust, then stabbed his left hand at the Koman’s eyes. His fingers pushed past them, shattering the bones behind the orbits.If the bone shards being driven through the Koman’s brain had not been enough to kill him, Mickey’s spearhand thrust going all the way to touch the back of the skull would have accomplished the job easily.

Mickey pulled his hand free with a sucking
thwok,
then spun. He acquired a target as he pivoted on his left leg and knotted his right hand into a hammerfist. He imprinted his target as it missed an overhead stroke with a baseball bat.

He brought his right hand through and killed the Koman by blasting its left ear beyond the midline of its skull and driving its body into another Koman.

Acquire, imprint, kill.Mickey worked his way through the axe and awl shapes, then moved to the more complex double-strike forms that required both hands, like hammer and anvil, nut and bolt and turnabout. Two elbow strikes, a kick and a ram’s-head strike finished the rest of the Koman, then Mickey resumed his original stance.

The blood dripping from his hands ran down his legs to the growing puddle at his feet.

The small man came out of the darkness surrounding the combat arena and wore a pleased smile on his face.

He snapped his fingers, and a large green orb on a leathery green stalk dropped down and hovered five feet above the ground. The scaled flesh surrounding it peeled back, and a translucent membrane slid diagonally away. It revealed a star-pupiled eyeball with a red circle iris. The eye tracked right, then down and left, then down and right, repeating the process until it had scanned him from head

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to toe.

The little man nodded appreciatively. “You did an excellent job, Mickey. Your forms were all correct. You have studied well.” He squatted down and watched the bruising on Mickey’s knee disappear. “Your recovery rate is fantastic. You are perfect.”

Mickey smiled broadly. “Now I go home? Now I see Dorothy?”

The little man rested his right elbow in this left hand and tapped his teeth with a finger. “Soon, Mickey, very soon.

There are only a couple more things you have to do, then I shall return you home.” He smiled, and Mickey’s disappointment vanished. “And, believe me, everyone will remember your homecoming for a long, long time.”

The maelstrom of emotions swirling through the room made Rajani feel dizzy. “Please, stop it, all of you.”

Sin and Colonel Nagashita both looked up from the map over which they had been arguing. Behind them, Kazuo and Bat both looked surprised at her outburst. Only Hal, standing near the street map with a Silva rolling map scaler, appeared to understand what had made her angry.

Natch looked up from cleaning her pistol, and Jytte remained at the computer terminal in the corner of the room.

Sin frowned and wiped his sweaty brow with his shirtsleeve. “What’s the matter, Rajani?”

She got a feeling of genuine concern and care from him, which made it easier for her to speak. “You are all working at cross purposes.” She pointed at Nagashita. “You resent Sin’s planning because you believe this is a problem your command should have been given to handle from the start. You also don’t like Mr. Takagi and his people being brought in on this. You are purposefully ignoring the gravity of the situation.”

Sin nodded, then froze as she glared at him. “And you, Sin, you are just as guilty. You are angry because of having been shot. You also resent Colonel Nagashita
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because you think he’s trying to take over this operation.

You are ignoring the fact that he and his people have had vast amounts of training in this sort of thing, especially after the incident in the Olympics two years ago. You are pushing the use of the Yakuza as a diversionary force for the most part because it will work, but a little because their presence needles Colonel Nagashita.”

Rajani let her own anxiety filter into her words. “You, Mr.

Takagi, want to help because of your sense of duty to the imperial family. You are also thinking that this could give your people an entréinto Kimpunshima and perhaps even a chance to destroy the
bosozoku
group that has been annoying your uncle.”

She just looked at Bat and shivered.

Sin looked down at his shoes in embarrassment.

”You’re right, Rajani.” His head came up again as he looked at the IDC leader. “Colonel, let’s table our problems until we have Ryuhito out and safe.”

“Hai.”The small, sharp-eyed man nodded curtly and unfolded his arms. Kazuo Takagi nodded in agreement, and Hal smiled. Only Bat remained untouched by her appeal.

Then, if this meets with your approval, this is what I propose.” Sin pointed on the map of the Galactic Brotherhood Institute at the patio from which he had left the grounds. “We have a wall breach here, which they’re going to have to devote a lot of attention to. Kazuo, your people need to arrive here and put on a big show of force.

Be aware they’re armed with some heavy weapons, including rocket-propelled grenades, LAW rockets and even some SAWs. I don’t know where they got them, but I’ve not got a hard time imagining a network of true believers within all sorts of corporations around the world.

Be careful, and, if/when the shooting starts, you head in here.”

Kazuo nodded.
“Wakarimas.
Colonel, is that accept-able to you?”

Nagashita nodded. “Having you attract their attention is good. Your people, when they come in, will wear blue armbands so my people will not shoot them, yes?”

“Hai.”

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“Good.” Sin shifted to the front of the GBI building. “This is the weakest spot in the GBI defenses. The public lobby has lots of glass, and the auditorium is clear, so even if an alarm is sounded and help arrives, the defenders won’t have any place to hide. Aside from the book kiosks, there is no cover. We will get in quietly.

“Now this door here,” he said as he tapped the map,

”leads straight into their secure area. This is their spine, and it gives us instant access to the rest of the complex.

I can get us through the door, then we have teams locate Ryuhito, secure him and get him out.”

Colonel Nagashita’s eyes nearly closed as he frowned.

”I do not like the fact that our strike into the complex is predicated on your being able to breach this secure door.

You said it has a Tojicorp Hogosha security door and palmprint reader. I think it we will have to blow it.”

Sin shook his head. “Rajani, toss me that room service menu, please.”

She took the laminated menu from the table and brought it over to him. Sin flipped it open to the room service section and smiled. “Kobe’s finest. We’re in, trust me.”

Jytte hit a key on her console. “By retrotracing through the Lorica system, I have penetrated the GBI computer system at the most basic levels. They are in the midst of notifying the people who were scheduled to show up for a meeting tonight that it has been postponed.”

“Good.” Sin looked over at Colonel Nagashita. “This plan will work, trust me.”

“I am afraid any trust I might have had for you vanished three years ago, Mr. MacNeal.” Nagashita pulled himself up to his full height and gave Sin a stare harsh enough for Rajani to feel it. “However, I serve one who trusts you. Your plan has merit, and we will employ it.”

“We’re cooking with microwaves now. Jytte, can you access any higher computer functions from here?”

She shook her head in response, giving off waves of frustration. This level allows for some administrative functions, presumably so field representatives can make appointments and add people to schedules from remote
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locations. I have tried to gain upper-level access, but they may have a cut-out system in place to prevent tamper-ing.”

Rajani frowned. “Cut-out?”

Jytte gave Rajani a quick, mechanical smile. “Data transfers from this basic system to the higher-level system may require an operator to physically move a storage medium, like a WORM disk from one network to another.

For orders going down from higher to lower, the higher system can always call the lower on the same sort of access line as we are using.”

The blond woman closed her eyes and concentrated hard enough that Rajani caught no impressions or emotions from her at all. Jytte’s fingers drifted to the keypad, then began hitting keys in short, sharp bursts. Her whole body stiffened for five seconds, and no one in the room so much as breathed. Then she typed another, longer sequence into the machine and sat back.

The key to WORM disks is that they hold far more information than even the most busy system could ever handle. WORM means ‘write once, read many’ and this disk in the drive currently has been in use for the past month. To make their system ultrasecure, they should destroy the disk after each transfer, but financial analysts do not see that as economical. I will read all the data and see if there is a mention of upper-level access.”

“Good hunting.” Sin looked over at Hal. “You and Jytte will be our logistics coordinators. You’ll come in with the second waves of Colonel Nagashita’s men and take up a position in the GBI executive offices. You’ll have the job of keeping us all pointed in the right direction. You’ll also be the one to get Ryuhito out when we find him.”

Hal nodded, and Rajani sensed in him welcome relief at not being asked to actively engage in the assault. This did not surprise her, given his recent brush with death and the loss of his wife, but Rajani knew his abhorrence of violence ran deeper than that. Hal clearly believed violence was one of the root causes of the world’s problems and, while he might have acknowledged that some people fervently needed killing, the collateral damage done by violence was far too high a price to be paid easily.

Sin glanced at Bat, got a stony stare in return, then looked at Nagashita again. “You can have your people in
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place and pick us up here in an hour and a half?”

“Hai.”

“Is that workable for you, Kazuo?”

“Hai.”

Rajani turned away and slid the door open onto the hotel balcony as Sin escorted the two Japanese men to his elevator. She stepped out into the night and shivered, but shut the door behind her instead of returning for a coat.

The new pair of jeans and thin, white cotton blouse with short sleeves did nothing to stop the humid air from chilling her, but she didn’t care. It felt right to her to feel cold.

She tried to sort through everything she had experienced and learned over the last four hours. The shock of having sensed her father nearly overpowered everything.

She had always hoped he had survived the years, but when she was put into stasis she had been told that the chances of that were slim at best. Her father had impressed upon her the absolute necessity of what she was doing and told her how proud he was of her for accepting that burden.

Leaning against the balcony railing, feeling the cold steel against her belly, she stared out at the imperial palace and the forested oasis surrounding it. Her father, in that brief contact, reminded her much of that building. He seemed as remote as ever, but also changed. He was not the same as a medieval palace in a modern world, but he struck her as more guarded and primal. He had changed as much as she had.

She also realized she was continuing to change, but not in the focused manner in which she had during stasis or before. Dr. Chandra and his aides, even the loathsome Nicholas, had been strong personalities, but they faded to insignificance in comparison to Natch and Bat and Sin.