Well, here's chapter 9 for your purusal and amusement; let me know what you think, huh?
Leon and Ami sped down the progressively more battered streets in the unmarked that both of them had had the sense to check out from the motor pool before entering the Canyons. As flamboyant as Leon normally was, even he knew better than to go where they were going in a marked car.
There was a strained silence between them as they drove, the result of their earlier disagreement and Leon's stubborn refusal to entertain any other notion than his kit-bashed boomer theory. For her part, Takashi remained uncertain of what was really going on, but had begun to suspect that whatever it was, it would be far stranger than a tastelessly rebuilt and reprogrammed boomer.
Eventually they reached environs with which Leon was unfamiliar, and, slowing, he said, "So which way now, Takashi?"
"Depends," she said. "Where do you want to try first? The Pits or The Asshole?"
Leon snorted and said, "Sounds like a damned anatomy class instead of an investigation."
Ami shook her head and said, "Cute, McNichol. So which is it?"
"The Asshole, I guess," Leon said. "That's where Delilah bit it, so I guess that's as good a place to start as any."
Ami nodded and said, "I suppose so. I just hope, after all this time, I still have a little pull left in there. If not, this could be a real short night."
Leon grunted and said, "Well, it's a little late to be getting cold feet, Ami."
She frowned and said teasingly, "Cold feet? Me? You been smoking something when I wasn't looking, McNichol?"
Leon shook his head and said, "Always gotta be the tough girl, huh Takashi? Don't you ever give that shit a rest?"
Ami laughed and said, "Shit Leon, that's a case of the pot calling the kettle black! I'll hang up the act if you do!"
Leon sighed loudly and said, "Yeah, I can see why they shipped you off to Kobe, Ami. You fit in with the 'new ADP' just about as well as I do."
She nodded slowly, and said, "I guess you're right, Leon. Both of us are just left-overs from the days when the ADP was about doing shit, not talking about doing shit and then doing nothing. The damn politicians and corporates have us by the balls, and the brass are part of the problem, not the solution."
"Kinda' makes you wonder why we bother any more, doesn't it?" Leon said dispiritedly.
"The same reason we always have, Leon," she said. "Because there are people out here who need cops like us, now more than ever. There's gotta be somebody out here doing something to counter balance all the political bullshit going on upstairs. If not, the whole damn thing will fall down around our ears, and the corporates will be able to do whatever the hell they want."
Frowning, Leon said, "Don't they already?"
"More or less," Ami agreed, and then said, "But at least they have to sneak around to do it, and that means we're still doing something." Shaking her head, she added, "Todo understood all that shit. That's why they replaced him with the bastard that they did."
"Huh!" Leon said. "I never thought about it that way." And then, frowning, he said, "Uh, Ami?"
"Yeah?" She replied.
"You think you could give me some directions before we end up in the damn bay or something?"
She rolled her eyes and said, "Sure McNichol."
As she explained the directions to Leon, her eye was momentarily caught by a large black Cadillac as it passed them heading in the opposite direction. It was impossible to see through the illegally mirrored tint that covered all the vehicle's windows, but something about the car nagged at Ami. There was something familiar about it. Unable to place it, however, she finally dismissed it. As Leon had said before, not everything was a conspiracy, after all. Still, there remained just a tiny hinky feeling she couldn't entirely talk herself out of.
As they rounded a corner, Moe pointed to a mostly intact building a few blocks ahead, and said, "That's it. Regional headquarters for the Hong Triad. But don't tell any of them I told you that."
Nene shook her head, and said, "I don't think you'll need to worry about that, Moe. Drive. Faster."
Frowning, Moe said, "What the hell you mean, drive faster? We're almost there."
Nene nodded and said, "I know." And then, suddenly, her left foot shot out and pressed the accelerator to the floor.
"What the hell!" Moe yelled as the Detroit monster shot forward.
Nene smiled darkly and said, "Just sit back and enjoy the ride, Moe. It's almost over."
By the time Moe got around to trying to wrest Nene away from the gas, they were almost even with the Hong building and traveling at nearly a hundred-thirty kph. Giving ground in the face of Moe's vastly superior strength, Nene nonetheless grabbed the steering wheel as he shoved her away, yanking it sharply to the right. This sent them headlong on a collision course with the Hong building, with no chance of stopping before impact.
As Moe turned toward Nene, shocked, she rolled back toward the passenger door, her left hand darting to the latch. The door popped open, and as she tumbled out, Nene gave Moe a final sweet smile, gazing into his horrified eyes as she fired the pistol grenade towards his face.
The force of the explosion picked her up and tossed her through the air, and she tumbled head over heels as she hit the pavement at over a hundred kph. Finally, she rolled to a stop, bloodied, bruised and broken, but healing already. Ahead of her, there was a crash and then another explosion as the car's gasohol tank went up, most likely in the Hong building's lobby.
As her final fracture snapped back into alignment on it's own, Nene slowly stood and surveyed her handiwork. Not too bad, if she did say so herself. Certainly there'd be no way for the Hong people to overlook her arrival.
Sliding Muramasa from it's sheathe and activating it on the fly, she strode purposefully through the Hong building's new freight entrance. She ignored the burning wreck and the remnants of it's driver as she passed, but couldn't help but notice that the explosion apparently hadn't been entirely symmetrical.
She smiled with grim satisfaction as she saw that the area engulfed by flame conformed roughly in shape to the outline of a certain familiar bird.
A few blocks away, both Leon and Ami were startled by the sudden loud explosion behind them.
"Son of a bitch!" Leon said, slamming on the brakes and bringing them to a screaming halt. "What the hell?"
Ami punched the dashboard in front of her in sudden recognition, and said, "Shit! That damn Cadillac! Now I know where I saw the friggin' thing before! It was Moe's! He brought it with him from the States when he came over here!"
Jamming the unmarked into reverse, Leon whipped into a J-turn and then punched it, heading back the way they'd come.
"Well, better late than never, I guess!" Leon said. "At least now it doesn't look like we'll have to crawl all over the damn Canyons looking for her, huh?"
Ami shook her head, and said, "You've got a real talent for stating the obvious, McNichol. You know that?"
Leon just grinned and put the pedal even further to the metal.
Nene paced carefully through the building, reasoning that wherever she found the most resistance would probably be where she'd find The Tin Man. As she neared the elevators at the back of the lobby, sleek and new unlike the building's exterior and luckily untouched by the explosion or the fire that had followed, both dinged loudly, indicating that they'd stopped on this floor. Nene stood and watched curiously as the doors opened, disgorging a half-dozen armed men each.
They were dressed in business attire, but moved like soldiers. They fired as they left the elevator, but were careful to move in and confine their fire to lanes, avoiding fratricide. But homicide was another matter, and it was on this that they seemed bent.
Nene cart wheeled to the right, avoiding the first spray of bullets, and then changed direction, tumbling under the next burst to pop up in front of the surprised gunmen. She lashed out with an axe kick, disarming one of them, and used the momentum from this to bring Muramasa, again held in a reversed grip, around in an arc that tore into the gunman's chest. As he shrieked and fell, she flipped the blade over and brought it back for a strike that nearly decapitated the next hired gun in line.
Flowing with the momentum from this, she delivered a savage side kick to another thug's sternum, driving him into the wall and shattering his ribs, though not fatally. By this time, a fourth gunman had her range, and unloaded several rounds from the compact assault module he carried into her torso and abdomen.
Nene's body jarred with each impact, and she was knocked back to slam against the wall behind her. But instead of slumping down as the shooter expected, she just looked up at him and smiled as the bloody holes in her chest and stomach closed up before his eyes. Taking advantage of his shock, she lashed out with Muramasa, opening his abdomen up like a zip-loc bag and dumping the contents messily to the floor. As he collapsed with a strange strangled moan, Nene grabbed his weapon in her left hand and turned to face the other Triad enforcers.
Pirouetting to her left, she laid down a scythe of fire that cut down four of the remaining gunmen outright and winged two others. She burned up the entire magazine this way, and then tossed the weapon aside casually. The two thugs left standing, for wont of a better course of action, again laid down a hail of fire, but again she dodged, cart wheeling and twisting out of the way. Finally, she tucked and rolled under their arc of fire, ending up literally at their feet.
Flipping Muramasa to a forward grip, she stabbed out at the gunman in front of her, skewering his groin. He screamed, high and pure, and collapsed, hands clasped to his bleeding crotch, and Nene turned to the last able-bodied thug. Out of ammo, he backed away, popping the magazine release and fumbling in his jacket for a fresh one. But Nene didn't give him the chance.
In a blur of motion, her left hand darted down to the laser-edged blade in her boot and, whipping it out and activating it, she let it fly with a back-handed toss. Whistling across the room, the blade buried itself in the enforcer's forehead, killing him before his body even hit the floor.
Nene recovered her knife, and then surveyed the scene around her. Of those still alive, none of the Triad men seemed inclined to challenge her further. This being the case, she turned wordlessly and boarded one of the elevators. As the doors began to close, with a rush of wings and a rustling of feathers, the crow shot the gap between and came to rest on her shoulder, squawking chidingly.
Nene smiled wryly, and said, "Oh, knock it off. You know I wasn't going to leave without you." The crow cawed softly then, apparently mollified.
Studying the elevator panel, Nene muttered to herself, "Up or down? Which way, I wonder?" But as she pondered this, the crow hopped down to her wrist and, without hesitating, pecked at the very top button so that it lit up. Smoothly, the elevator began to ascend toward the conference room level.
"Ok," Nene said resignedly, "Up it is. And I sure hope you know what you're doing." The crow squawked in what could only be construed as rebuke, and then was silent again.
After a surprisingly short trip, the elevator stopped, and the doors opened. Stepping out cautiously, Nene took stock of her surroundings. Beyond the small lobby space for the elevators, there were several doors. The most impressive of these was a set of mahogany colored double doors at the end of a short hallway, and it was to these that Nene gravitated.
Striding up confidently, she threw the doors open, revealing a large conference room with windows all around and a long, low table in the middle. Seated at the head of the table was an unremarkable, middle-aged man who said nothing as she entered. To his right and left were a man and a woman, respectively, both occidentals. The man was blonde haired and blue eyed, and the woman had hair and eyes the same lustrous shade of black. All three were dressed in nondescript business attire.
Behind them, though, hands clasped behind his back as he gazed thoughtfully at Nene, stood The Tin Man. He was attired all in leather as before, but cut differently this time, more in the style of an expensive suit. And instead of all black, his clothes had an odd, subdued color scheme that Nene found both familiar and disturbing for some reason.
"Hello, Tin Man," she said in a low voice. "So let me guess. These other three must be Dorothy, The Scarecrow, and The Cowardly Lion. Or maybe those were your other friends. Delilah made a pretty poor Dorothy, but Razz could certainly have been The Scarecrow. And Moe made a great Cowardly Lion. Too bad they're all gone now, huh?"
Cocking his head slightly, The Tin Man said, "An amusing analogy, Ms. Romanova. But like all analogies, only useful to a point."
In the back of Nene's mind, small alarms bells began to ring. Something wasn't right here. Something about The Tin Man.
"Alright, let's cut through the crap then, Tin Man," she said doggedly. "You owe me. In fact, you owe four other people too, but I'm the one who was sent to collect." And then, sardonically, "Are you ready to pay up?"
The Tin Man smiled thinly, and said, "The arrogance of youth. We all go through it, I suppose. But there are some things you simply don't understand, I'm afraid. Allow me to enlighten you."
With that, The Tin Man raised a hand and waved it in her direction, unleashing a wave of compressed space-time from his upturned palm. Nene was hit by what felt like a tree trunk across her torso and abdomen, and was thrown back to slam into the wall beside the wooden double doors, her body almost imbedded there. She felt bones snap and other unidentifiable things inside her pop wetly. A gout of blood launched itself from her mouth with the impact.
Dazed despite her newfound robustness, as she felt things inside of her begin to knit, she looked up at The Tin Man in amazed horror. As she watched, The Tin Man's features began to change, waxing metallic, and finally he became a stylized sculpture of himself, wrought in dull gray.
Eyes wide, blood dripping from her lips and chin, Nene breathed one word. "Largo."
The Tin Man shook his head slightly, and, amused, said, "In a manner of speaking. But, much like yourself, Largo died. His body was utterly destroyed when he plummeted from the Genom tower over a year and a half ago. All that survived was his mind."
He paused then, turning to look out the large bay windows that surrounded them, and then continued. "That mind, hastily dumped into the Net as he fell, ended up being far from complete. There just wasn't time or bandwidth to carry it all, you see. But the essentials survived. The most important parts. And the blueprints for rebuilding the whole. I am the result of that."
Shaking her head in disbelief, Nene said, "But how? How did you get here?"
The Tin Man was silent for a moment, apparently lost in thought, and then said, "For the first few months, I was a creature of the Net. Confused, disjointed, and diffuse. Eventually, I think I might have simply dispersed altogether, just spreading out further and further until there was nothing left. But then some part of me saw you again as images of you inundated the media. The four of you, as you saved the AD Police tower from calamity. And this acted as a catalyst of sorts, re-kindling my rage to begin with, and my will to survive soon after. From there, it was a fairly short step to my reintegration and reawakening to full awareness."
Almost fully healed now, and stalling for time, Nene said, "And then?"
"And then," The Tin Man continued, "I acted. It was obvious that the four of you were a far greater threat than I'd ever imagined, after what you'd managed to do to me, and so I decided to take the obvious steps." Again he paused, smiling just slightly, and then said, "Before, I suppose I'd have tried to design some grandiose scheme to humiliate the four of you, and some unwieldy means of carrying it our. But I learned a very important lesson that day on the Genom tower. The lesson of humility."
Intrigued now, Nene said, "Humility? What do you mean by that?"
"What I mean," The Tin Man said, "is that it was hammered home to me very plainly that, while powerful beyond most men's dreams, I was not a god. Not yet, at least, in spite of any delusions I'd had to the contrary. Obviously, I was still mortal, and subject to all the ills of the mortal realm. That being the case, practicality followed on the heels of humility. I realized that some things simply needed to be done as efficiently and quickly as possible, and that all the posturing I'd so enjoyed before had only made me less effective. Hence the little tragedy in Raven's Garage."
"So you set the whole thing up," Nene said savagely. "How?"
The Tin Man shook his head slowly, and said, "It wasn't difficult, child. I already knew that Sylia Stingray was a Knight Saber, and I saw Asagiri's face when we fought at the tower. It wasn't hard to match the face with the woman from inside the Net. And then there was you. You and your little friend Lisa Vanette."
With a sharp intake of breath, Nene said, "Lisa? What do you mean?"
"Oh, come now," The Tin Man said reprovingly. "It's only obvious really. I know about the photo. After all, she had to download it from her camera in order to process it, now didn't she? And the computer she processed it on was connected to the Net, of course. It was just a stroke of luck, I suppose, but some random shard of me happened across that image, and after I reintegrated, the rest devolved from there. Now I knew the identities of three of the four Knight Sabers, and that was enough for me to act. So, in a very real sense, I have you and Lisa to thank for that. Without having that third identity, I probably wouldn't have made the moves I did."
Somewhere inside herself, Nene felt a scream building, just waiting to come out. It was her fault! If she'd been more careful, or had just been a better fighter to start with, that boomer would've never shattered her faceplate, Lisa would've never gotten that photo of her face, and Largo wouldn't have had enough information to feel comfortable in launching the covert hit that'd killed her and her friends. It was almost too much to bear.
"The rest was simple." The Tin Man said. "Just a matter of locating the right organization and dropping the bios anonymously along with very credible, if very false information leading said organization to believe that the Knight Sabers had just taken a contract to destroy them. That organization being the Hong Triad, of course, which is in all actuality, nothing more than a front entity for the trafficking of certain illegal commodities by Genom. That was the key part, you see. Naturally, with credible information that one of their important shadow operations was about to be hit, and the necessary data for a preemptive strike available, action was sanctioned at the highest levels. Hence the rather effective smokescreen after the fact."
Nene shook her head, and said, "So we never had a chance. You made sure of that."
The Tin Man nodded, and said, "Of course. You Knight Sabers taught me a very valuable lesson there on top of the tower. In many ways, I should thank you, I suppose. But really, I already have."
Fully restored physically, but sick at heart, Nene had to know just one more thing. "But how did you get here, Largo? How did you and this Tin Man-!"
"Become one?" He finished for her. "That's not so difficult either. I discovered Mr. Fukabayashi, The Tin Man, when I decided to use the Hong Triad, and I was in need of a physical focus for my new self. It was just too difficult to remain coherent inside the Net without one. And so I planted a… 'seed' of myself inside Masami through his cyberware. That wasn't difficult at all since most of what he had was recycled boomerware. Cheap, but certainly not safe. Over time, that seed grew, and intertwined with Masami, reworking his body as it did his mind, eventually forming a rather robust hybrid. And now we're both here, or neither, depending on your point of view." Pausing once more in contemplation, he continued, "And we're still out there as well. Still on the Net, still growing, changing, and interlinking with our myriad incarnations and with this body. Soon, I'll have no need for the Chairman's overrated Over Mind System. I'll have become an Overmind. Within a few more hours, a day at most, the various parts of me will finally have achieved a sort of critical mass within the Net, and a phase change will occur, like a gas suddenly flaring into an incandescent plasma. The Net will become me, and I will become the Net. Once that's come to pass, anything is possible! I'll finally pacify this unruly world and turn it's energies to more worthy causes. The enmity between man and cyberdroid will finally end, because there will no longer be one or the other. I will make them one. In fact, I will make everything one. And then we, as one, will move out to bring reason to this disorderly cosmos. I will have finally become a god in truth."
Nene blinked in utter disbelief at this. There was only one reaction she could even imagine to what The Tin Man had just said, and she made the mistake of doing it aloud. She laughed. "You're out of your recycled mind, Largo." She said scathingly.
The Tin Man smiled thinly again, absolutely no humor visible in the expression, and said mildly, "A matter of opinion, of course. But in this case, I think mine is the opinion that counts." And, motioning to the two seated occidentals, he said, "Samael? Lilith? I believe it's time our guest was taken care of."