Steel Rain (41 page)

"
Nnnnnnnoooooohhhhhh!
" rises one voice.

Machiko sees the humanoid shape still hanging suspended in the ruptured tank—amid arrays of tubes and wires—twitching and shaking under the assault from her SCK.

She has just enough time to see the murky fluids that gush from the sides of the ruptured tank flickering with spectral blue flames.

Then, she lands.

She lands badly, amid crashing console screens and cables that fill the air around her with blazing showers of sparks. She tumbles to the floor and seeks shelter beneath the front ledge of a console. The facility's computer-automated weapons systems pursue her even here, to the white-tiled floor of the lab.

Off to her far right another door stands open and another ceiling-mounted weapon tracks her, and now she feels the pounding against her feet, her legs, her hips. She rolls backwards onto her feet and flips herself bodily over a console that appears lined with nothing but row after row of touch-sensitive keys. Shards of metal and shattered plastic shower the top of her head as she lands on toes and fingertips behind the console.

Two meters to her rear a man in a white coat slowly spins and spins, wounds erupting like red puckered sores in a line from his right shoulder down to his groin.

Machiko rams a fresh clip into the SCK. The pain is getting more insistent. She is aware of at least half a dozen minor wounds that will eventually require medical attention. The impact of her fall, the electrostatic barrier, the bullets—it is all adding up. How much more she can take is not a calculation that matters. She will go on till either the enemy is crushes or she is dead.

Without warning, a new enemy attacks. Machiko feels their paranatural power filling her belly with the frigid chill of fear even as their sudden, shocking howls seize at her limbs and body, trying to slow her down.

Then the hounds are upon her. Barghests. Like Neapolitan mastiffs, but larger, heavier. Barghests are used by the Security Service in many Nagato facilities. Why they come into this lab and attack her, Machiko does not even attempt to guess.

The beasts impact her side. Mass and momentum combine to drive her sideways against a console burning with graphic displays. Machiko's katana sword flashes downward, cleaving the neck of the beast that rips at her right thigh. She twists and heaves and flips the beast gnawing at her left arm over the ridge at the rear of a console, snapping its spine.

Blood streams from her wounds like veins of death.

She breathes deeply, harshly.

Spirit settled, she skirts a line of consoles and drops to a crouch at one corner of a large boxy unit disgorging thick white smoke. She unleashes another clattering barrage of autofire. The second tank ruptures. The norm male within bucks and jerks beneath her barrage. The murky fluids that shower the floor and surrounding consoles rage with bluish fire. Wherever the fluids fall, plastic evaporates like steam and metal runs like water. Floor tiles bubble and sag.

The entire installation supporting the first ruptured tank abruptly crashes, dropping a meter beneath the level of the lab floor.

As Machiko moves to the third and final tank, she becomes aware of the console displays flashing around her. "Stop shooting," the display reads. "I don't want to fight any more."

Machiko understands. Tai No Sen, it is called. A tactic of the ancient masters. Feign weakness, then attack.

She rises fully to her feet, discarding the empty SCK and extending the Beretta 200ST out before her. She pulls the trigger rapid-fire, unleashing three-round bursts till all twenty-six rounds have shattered the panes of the tank and pummeled the norm female twitching within.

And now a whirlwind arises, a glimmer in the air that evolves into a mass of churning black and affects the lab like a cyclone. A handcomp is snatched from the floor and driven into the metal wall of the lab like a nail into wood. A woman is hurled five or six meters through the air. Machiko risks a glance into the astral and sees a firestorm of raging mana, some elemental force, some creature of the arcane, swelling to fill the space around her as if to overwhelm her.

She lets the Beretta fall. Guns are useless against astral beings. She takes two swords in hand, sword and companion sword, katana and wakizashi. With these two extensions of her force of will, her settled spirit, she will defeat even this creation of the astral. She does not know how this creation came to be, but she assumes it is a product of the arcane blend of magic and science used on the GCP project.

The whirlwind grows stronger. The mass of churning black draws near, then fades. It vanishes from sight. The whirlwind dies away.

On the astral, nothing remains.

The installation supporting the third ruptured tank crashes beneath floor level. Machiko watches the body inside it wither, shrinking into a blackened lump not even vaguely resembling a human or metahuman. The other two are the same. They are dead. Her enemy is defeated. Nagato Combine may yet be crushed or divided, but she has done all that a warrior may ever do.

She finds a chair beside a dead man, a dead man in a white coat, and sits, and breathes. Her commlink works now. Works perfectly. She puts through a priority call to Honjowara
-sama
and explains all that she knows briefly and succinctly, and concludes, "The GCP project has been terminated. The traitors are dead."

Honjowara
-sama
says he understands.

Machiko doubts this is possible, but breaks the link and closes her eyes, wanting only rest.

Epilogue

The sound brushes her ears like the soft rustle of leaves on a cool night in the spring: the flutter of silk, the whisper of a footstep against varnished wood flooring.

Machiko wakes, but does not open her eyes. She listens to the night, the quiet. Soon, the sliding wood door at the rear of the house softly grumbles, slipping open, and the subtle footsteps go on, moving to the back porch, then finally into the garden at the rear of the house.

Machiko waits a little while, then rises, draws on a short jade green robe, and ties the belt tight. She dismisses the twinges and aches of injuries still healing. She reaches for her katana, not because she may need it, but because it is as much a part of her as the green serpent tattoos twining around her body.

She finds the night outside pleasantly cool and still. She finds her mother at the rear of the garden, as expected. Mother sits on a small stone bench beside a small artificial pond, ringed by fragrant flowers and flowering forsythia. Her long robe is so pale a pastel pink it seems white, a luminous white, lit by the crescent moon just visible through the trees at the rear of the property. That same light makes mother's jet black hair seem lush and glossy. She once had hair as long as Machiko's own. Now she wears it close by the shoulders, softly styled.

As Machiko sits beside her, she stiffens and catches her breath. "Oh!" she gasps. "Machiko..."

A response so familiar it is poignant. The pained smile that curves Mother's lips speaks the words Machiko has heard a thousand times before. Daughter, you move too quietly. Like a ghost. I did not hear you approaching.

"Please excuse me," Machiko murmurs.

But there is no need for apologies. Mother shifts near and embraces her about the shoulders, then joins their hands. "Couldn't you sleep?" Mother asks.

"I heard you pass by."

Mother's smile turns warm. "I'm sorry. You must be used to it by now. I could never walk quietly enough, even when you were a child. You always woke up."

Machiko nods, and says, "Why aren't you sleeping?"

"I don't know. I'm so tired. Tired but yet awake. Your father is so upset with all this business, all that's happened."

"You should take a sedative."

"I take so many pills already."

For allergies, primarily. "Mother, the Security Service investigation will go on for days, perhaps weeks. You must rest. You and father must both be rested or you will not be able to think clearly."

"I wish I could stop thinking long enough to sleep."

"You must try."

"I try every night."

But it is very difficult. Machiko knows this too well. In the weeks since the carnage at Neurocomp, Father has had two episodes of angina, brief episodes, but of concern because they came so close together. His doctors have ordered him to take a long weekend, to rest, and have prescribed tranquilizers and sleeping pills.

Nagato Corp debt still lies in the hands of Zurich bankers. For several days, Nagato Corporation has seemed to teeter on the brink of the abyss. However, Honjowara
-sama
has lodged an appeal with the Corporate Court, claiming the debt was procured illegally, and, curiously, a number of corps have come forward with evidence that their financial accounts have been penetrated, funds stolen.

Of course, none of these corps has any connection with Nagato Combine or with Fuchi. The traitors were careful to be very discreet.

Mother, as Neurocomp's VP for Research, has had to face the brunt of the Security Service investigation regarding the GCP project. Like father, she feels personally responsible for all that has happened. She feels that tighter controls should have been placed on the GCP deckers. How much worse she would feel if she knew the whole story, the truth of Gamma's origin, but this she will never know. The story will never be told.

"If my own daughter had not revealed the traitors," Mother says, softly, "I could not bear to go on living."

The words move Machiko deeply. She knows the depths of her mother's pain, the shame she feels. Machiko can only answer, "If not for my mother's many lessons, I would not have succeeded in revealing anything."

Her mother's eyes meet hers. The moment grows intensely personal. Everything they have ever meant to each other is right there between them. Neither has any doubt as to the reality of their relationship, a bond never to be broken. Again, they embrace. Mother whispers, "I go to meet Sashi-san tomorrow morning. You still have not said whether you will join me."

"I have not yet decided."

"A child should honor her genetic mother."

"I do not know if this is possible."

"I do." Mother touches Machiko's cheek, says simply, "There is nothing you could not do, if you wish to do it."

"If you want me to go with you, I will go."

Mother joins their hands again. She spends a time gazing toward the pond. She speaks in an earnest tone, saying, "Machiko, I believe that this lady cares about you very deeply. I feel it would be wrong to hold the past against her. We must at least give her the chance to show us her true feelings."

"If that is your feeling, I will go with you."

"Do you not agree?"

"I do not trust myself to agree or disagree. I know what duty demands of me. It is my heart that feels betrayed." Mother seems dismayed, even anguished. Expressively, she says, "Daughter, the heart is easily betrayed. It comprehends only the now. It does not easily make allowances. Understanding comes only with time. Acceptance comes only with time."

"There has been little time."

"When you first began at the academy, you recited a certain aphorism over and over. Something you heard from your
sensei
. I have never forgotten. It was your answer for everything. Do you remember? Who is the greater servant? you would ask. She who is talented and wise and indulges in selfish thinking? Or she who is stupid and dull, but thinks only of her lord?"

Tears as hard as steel rain rise into Machiko's eyes. She brushes the tears away, but more follow. Yes, she remembers. She could not possibly forget.

How loudly that lesson of the ancients resounds now. Selfish thinking—is that not the key to everything? It led the GCP deckers to murder and treason. It gave racism the power to scar Gamma for life. And now it brings Machiko to take umbrage with Sashi-san, and with the man said to be her genetic father, the man who has made possible everything she values: Nagato Combine, the Guard, the entire course of her life.

She should look at all she has been given. Consider the parents who raised her. Could any life have been more fortunate? more auspicious? She has been deprived of nothing. Nothing but a few scraps of truth that now seem like mere illusions.

"You are very wise," she murmurs. "You know me so well."

"I know your heart," mother says with a small smile. "The rest is sometimes very puzzling."

"My heart knows only love for you."

"And mine for you."

Again, they embrace; then, Mother rises, saying she will try once more to sleep.

With only her ears, Machiko follows her mother's steps back through the garden to the porch, then through the door and into the house. Quiet descends. She closes her eyes and draws her legs up to sit lotus-style and consider, contemplate. It is a while before she becomes aware of another presence, a new presence. She does not have to open her eyes to confirm who is there. She feels it in his presence, the sense that, once he is settled, kneeling, facing her from across the pond, he is as stable as the earth, rooted in the ground.

"You said nothing of the Tir,"
Kuroda-sensei
quietly
intones.

Faintly, Machiko shakes her head. She has said nothing to either her mother or father about alliances with Tir Tairngire, of programs of exchange, or of the man said to be her genetic father. For the sake of Nagato Combine, its Chairman, his New Way, and all hope for the future, such things must never be told. Sashi-san has already made this very clear.