Bullets screamed across the narrow space, filling it with shrieking supersonic death. The gloomy underground chamber was illuminated by blinding flashes as high-velocity ammunition struck metal support beams; where they hit concrete pillars they blasted fist-sized craters, releasing billowing clouds of choking dust which swam before the eyes and stuck fast to the back of the throat.
Leaning out from behind a collapsed ceiling plate, Saito tried to make sense of the chaos. Behind him lay Borma. He was bleeding heavily; a bullet had punched through their cover and scored the side of his head, severing his ear and ripping his right prosthetic eye from its socket. The shock had almost killed him and he lay motionless, his chest rising and falling sporadically. Saito hissed as the dust cleared briefly. They were pinned down; dark figures were pressing in at them from the only doorway and they were slowly moving in for the kill. They looked like wraiths, all dressed in the same dull grey-black uniform and they faded in and out of view as the dust settled before being churned up again. Only Saito's sharpshooting had kept them at bay but he was running low on bullets, and when they ran out...
"Sai...to..." Borma's voice was cracked and full of pain. He tilted his bare head so that he could use his remaining eye, its tinted glassy surface flickered with the ongoing gunfire. "We're-"
"Save it," Saito snapped, "Don't speak unless you have to, we're going to get out of this, I promise!" He ejected a spent magazine and cast around for his final clip, slamming it into place and cocking the gun in less than a second, for every moment that his attention was away from the doorway was another step towards death. He could almost see the spectre gliding slowly towards them, following the lines of flame that scorched through the dank air. He shook himself and triggered a burst that pitched one of the figures backwards into a wall, blood exploding from a gaping hole in his chest. Now was not the time to be seeing things, unless it was the light of life leaving his enemies' faces.
"Yer'almost out." Borma gave a weak chuckle and his speech was slurred. The injuries were beginning to interfere with his head and what little movement he made looked drunken and clumsy. He had stopped flinching at the near misses. A bad sign.
Despite their impending doom, Saito flashed a grin. Or perhaps it was more of a grimace. "Plenty of rocks around if you want to help out!" This time it was Borma's turn to smile, but suddenly he convulsed, crying out and clutching at his stomach. Saito had been taking aim at another assailant and the noise made him glance down. "It's not that funny you know!," he yelled over the rattle of the gunfight, "Your sense of humour is-" He went cold. There was a wet patch on Borma's uniform. Blood from an unseen wound was staining the black fabric and oozing from beneath Borma's fingers.
"Shit! Borma NO!" He flung himself out from behind the plate and charged towards the shooters, his teeth bared in a savage snarl and his finger jammed down on the trigger, raking the last of his bullets over the doorway. He saw three go down, one in the neck, one in the head and the last was caught on the leg. The man screamed with pain and wildly aimed his weapon, toppling backwards on the debris-littered ground. Saito was almost on top of him when a single bullet erupted from the man's gun. Saito stared directly into the muzzle flash and knew there was no chance of escape. Time slowed to a standstill. He could have sworn that he saw the bullet, a dark blur clawing its way into the air like a hawk, the sunlight glinting on its feathers. Then there was a searing-hot pain, a force so great that he reversed momentum in mid-air. Time sped up again as Saito stumbled and fell. The bullet had caught him on his right shoulder and jarred the now empty weapon from his grip.
It was a melee. The injured man was still formidably strong and he crashed down onto Saito and began to pound with his enormous meaty fists. In a daze, Saito tried to fight him off, however his injured arm was uselessly flopping at his side and he could no more defend himself than play an instrument. Desperately, he flung his head fowards with a blow that snapped the man's face back. By good fortune, the cover for Saito's prosthetic eye had come loose and raked the large man's face. Reflex made the attacker reach up to feel the damage, which was when he committed suicide. The moment Saito's left arm was free, he used all of his remaining strength and jabbed, the mechanical components lending him an unnatural amount of power. His fingers hooked, he drove his hand into the man's eye socket. He felt a crunch as the orbit shattered, the bone splintering under the bullet-train pressure and then he felt... brain. The man died instantly, his nervous system spasmed one final time before his entire bulk collapsed back onto Saito.
No more men were coming.
He couldn't move. Fear, pain and shock pinned him to the floor, even more so than the weight of the man he'd just killed. Then he thought of Borma lying there, dying a few feet away. His limbs found a new strength, a new resolve. He had a promise to keep. Dragging himself to his knees, he crawled towards Borma. The floor was covered with shrapnel that cut into the soft skin of his hand and shredded his legs through his uniform. After an agonizing minute, he rounded the ceiling panel once more. Borma was lying in the same position, his hands now clasped firmly over his stomach. From what Saito could tell in the poor light, the blood was no longer freely flowing. He withdrew a thin packet from his thigh pocket. It was an artificial skin graft. Fast working micromachines would gather at the edges of the wound, forming a temporary patch that would, he prayed, halt any further bleeding. Borma let out a low moan as his wound was plugged, still in a great deal of pain but no longer in mortal danger.
Saito tucked his useless arm inside his jacket as a makeshift sling and strained to hook his shoulder under Borma's arm. They were still for a moment, like two legendary heroes frozen in an eternal embrace. Saito dug into the ground with his legs and heaved, lights flashing before his eyes as he slowly but surely hoisted Borma into a standing position. He was heavier than Saito expected but with a surge of sheer willpower and adrenaline, he began to slowly drag Borma towards the door and out, into the now deserted corridor.
Their plan had fallen to pieces. As the Major moved silently through a narrow hallway lined with bodies, she cursed the poor intelligence which they had used to plan the operation. It had sounded relatively straight-forward: One cell, made up of Saito and Borma, would enter the warehouse from the ground level entrance that Togusa had used only a day before. They were to go in under thermoptic camouflage and secure certain vantage points. Borma was under instructions to locate the internal communications and to sabotage it, while at the same time 'branching' key gang members to further aid the infiltration for the rest of the team.
Or so they had hoped. The schematics they had used to plan their assault were out of date. The criminals had performed a massive refit and expanded downwards, adding corridors, storage rooms and power generators. They'd even established a closed-space network, inpenetrable from the outside, which enabled them to create a rudimentary hub-cyberbrain. No-one would ever be in any doubt about what anyone else was up to. There was no chance of miscommunication when they could read each other's thoughts in real time.
Sounds of gunfire echoed up the corridor behind her as Pazu and Ishikawa stayed behind to stem the tide of attackers, leaving the Major free to find the children. They were far too organised to be a simple child-trafficking ring, their movements were cohesive and they were truly in their own arena. She had no idea of Saito and Borma's location; the traffickers had erected a jamming net, rendering their cybercoms useless. Their 'stealth operation' had become an all-out firefight against a great many more opponents than Batou's reconnaisance had suggested. It was as if there was an entire battalion of criminals holed up underground!
Their initial attempt to rescue the kidnapped children had been thwarted; upon storming the 'marketplace' shown in Togusa's memories, they had been greeted with a lethal hail of bullets. It was a miracle that everyone had survived and had they not been using their thermoptics they would have been gunned down instantly. The Major herself had hacked a flunkie and turned his own weapon against his comrades, using the ensuing confusion to take cover. It had been a running fight, the narrow corridors were dark and that only made killing the Section Nine members easier.
She stopped listening to the shouts and the explosions and concentrated on the darkness ahead. Something was leading her on, a whisper in her ghost that was so powerful and insistant that she felt compelled to follow it. The encroaching darkness was stifling; the very air seemed thick with fear. Sounds began to bleed into nothingness and she was sorely tempted to use the spotlight on the end of her rifle, even though it would risk betraying her exact position. She cupped her hand over the lens and was about to flick it on when she heard a sound. It was the sound that someone made when they were trying their hardest to be silent. The skin on her face felt the close air stirring and she knew that there was someone ahead of her. Moving away from her it seemed. Her mind began to race. Who was it? Someone trying to escape the fight? Or was it someone attempting to secure a deeper part of the facility?
Yes...
Her ghost whispered again. The silent blackness made her feel as if she were walking alongside herself, an extra set of eyes that could pierce the fog ahead. She could no longer see her own hands in front of her face. It was unnerving, as if the line between earth and the afterlife had merged, or as if she had died in her sleep and was walking the corridors as a spirit. Except there was no light to follow, no glimpse of another life, just a dark abyss of nothing. It may have been her imagination; she highly disapproved of sustained flights of fantasy, but she thought she heard children singing. Dancing in the dark.
The air stopped moving. She halted and crouched low to the floor, tensing her body, her hand on her firearm at the small of her back. She was an expert at tailing suspects, a skill that Batou was always quick to bemoan whenever she caught him doing something he shouldn't have. All of her skill was telling her that whoever she was following had not simply stopped. There was no shift in atmosphere, and although she strained her enhanced ears there was no audible breathing noise. They had vanished. There was no-one in the corridor anymore.
With a fluid grace which would have made a cat look awkward, she began to flow swiftly and smoothly, keeping as low as possible, her gun always trained on the shadows ahead of her. She traced her fingertips over the wall and was surprised to find the metal plating warm to the touch. There was heat bleeding out from somewhere and now as she continued onwards, the temperature began to rise. As she felt it peak, she also became aware of a dim luminescence; a tiny amount of murky blue light was seeping out of the air and looking ahead, she saw that the corridor had been interrupted by a sharp corner. It turned to the right. Moving along the wall towards it, her skin prickled, her ghost all but screaming to her that someone was standing right around that corner. And that person knew she was there!
She turned the corner and fired.