Chapter 5 up. Any feedback would be much appreciated. Thanks and enjoy!
For most of the trip into the city, Jillian's awareness was concentrated into a tiny point. She'd been damaged far worse than she'd been willing to admit, and now that was taking its toll. She faded in and out of consciousness as her body's systems attempted to compensate for and repair the massive damage, a great deal of which had been done to her AI itself. All she really knew was the small, warm weight held protectively in her arms, the rhythmic stride of her legs, and the slow passing of the terrain around them.
After what might've been minutes or hours, considering her current lack of time-sense, Jillian began to notice a change in the scenery. They were leaving the suburbs, and entering the outskirts of the city proper.
Here, Jillian's prior planning took over again, acting on an almost instinctive level while the higher centers of her brain were semi-off-line, undergoing repair. Without even realizing it, she began to head for one of the more obscure safe houses she'd set up for her master inside Mega Tokyo, a last ditch hiding place that she'd been certain would escape detection even against high-caliber opposition for at least a few days. Granted, it wasn't in the best part of town. On the contrary, it was in one of the worst. But it was certainly one of the last places anyone would expect someone to hide a person of Master Asakawa's importance. Unfortunately, the original plan for getting the master and little mistress there hadn't involved traveling on foot through most of the Kanto Fault Region, otherwise known as the Canyons.
Yoshi Asakura could hardly believe the luck. As he and his fellow Nurikabe sat, waiting, in one of their favorite spots, easy prey presented itself. A woman, expensively dressed if a bit mussed and bloodied, carrying a sleeping and similarly appointed child. By the look of them, they'd just wandered away from an accident or escaped from another gang. Too easy. Granted, they might've already been picked over, but even if so they'd still be good for a little fun.
As the woman shuffled past, Yoshi gave the pre-arranged signal, and the gang melted out of the shadowy alleyways ahead of and behind her, blocking those avenues of escape. The two crumbling old buildings to either side of the street did the rest. She was trapped, standing still now with the sleeping little girl cradled in her arms, and an odd, confused expression on her face.
"OK, honey," Yoshi said. "You might as well just play along. Things'll be a lot easier that way."
Jillian, roused to partial consciousness by this new threat, glanced around surreptitiously at the gang bangers, thermal imaging picking out concealed weapons and cybernetics, targeting systems crunching out multiple firing solutions and painting targets as she scanned. She estimated the threat level at high to critical in the present situation, and with Aiko here, she didn't much like any of her options, but all she could really do was play things out.
"So, what's it gonna be, mama? You gonna play along, or do we have to do it the hard way?"
Jillian looked the punk straight in the eye, activated her active laser targeting, giving her eyes an eerie red glow, extended the claws of her left hand with a loud 'snap!', and in the silkiest, most seductive voice she could manage said, "Oh, let's do it the hard way, little man. I like it hard."
Yoshi's eyes widened comically, and he yelled at the top of his lungs, "Shit! Boomer!"
The effect was immediate and chaotic. Half the gang turned tail and ran. The other half either stood, shocked and slack-jawed, or began frantically reaching for weapons.
'Well, it could've been worse,' Jillian thought as she targeted and fired on the person going for the largest weapon, taking him cleanly through the head. Immediately she acquired another target, fired, reacquired, fired again, and had just started to acquire another when someone finally got his weapon clear of the holster and opened fire on her.
Jillian twisted sharply to the left, putting herself between Aiko and the gunman and took all eight rounds from his ancient .45 automatic in her back and shoulder. As she'd anticipated, the old ball rounds just didn't have enough punch to get through her integral armor and bounced off, causing only mild discomfort. That, she knew, was the best weapon left available to the punks and she took advantage of the fact.
"That the best you can do?" she said mildly. "Because if it is, I suggest you all run. As quickly and as far as you can." And then, at the top of her lungs, "NOW!"
The punks scattered like scared rabbits. They scrambled over and around each other in their eagerness to get away, and were gone in seconds, leaving only their dead behind.
Aiko, awakened and badly frightened by the gunfire, clung to Jillian and looking up at her with wild eyes said, "Jillian! What happened?"
Jillian sighed, looking regretfully at the dead punks, and said, "Nothing much, honey. Nothing much. Just a lot of noise. But do me a favor. Just keep your head there on my shoulder, and don't look around. Just keep your eyes shut. Please?"
Hesitantly, Aiko agreed.
"OK, Jillian, if you say so."
Stroking her hair gently, Jillian said softly, "That's a good girl. Now try to go back to sleep. Things will be easier that way."
The little girl murmured something sleepily into Jillian's shoulder, and then seemed to doze off again. 'Poor thing,' Jillian thought. 'You've had to endure so much tonight. I only hope you can face it all in the morning. You humans are so fragile. I'm almost afraid to hold you in my arms like this.'
Taking one last look at the dead punks, Jillian turned and resumed her course toward the safe house.
'What a waste,' she thought as she walked. 'What an utter waste. All the things those people could've done with their lives, their freedom, and they had to choose a course that ended them up dead at my hands. Why? What sense is there in humans who behave like that?' She shook her head slowly and thought, 'I just don't understand. And why do I feel like I've done something wrong? They would've killed Aiko and me. What choice did I have? But still... all that potential, and I'm the one who spilled it all over the ground. Even if they were squandering them, they had something I've never had. Choices.'
Jillian winced, then, as a sharp pain lanced through her head, beginning at the site of the gunshot wound and traveling backward through her entire skull. At the same time, her vision dimmed momentarily, and a number of seldom seen systems warnings screamed at her.
'My mind is unraveling,' she thought in a sort of horrified wonder. 'My brain was so damaged that the AI housed in it, ME, is starting to degrade. Or, maybe... it's just changing. My internals are interpreting it as corruption, but I don't feel like I'm dying. Maybe my mind is just restructuring itself to fit the new neural pathways.' She sighed mentally, and then thought, 'Well, if that's so, I'll know soon enough. If not, then I guess I'll never know. Only... for Aiko's sake, one way or another, I have to find some way to make her safe before whatever it is happens to me.'
And then, just as her consciousness began to fade once more into maintenance mode, she realized that something had changed. The programmed imperative to safeguard her charge was still there, but there was something else now too. A. feeling. Not a new feeling, but different somehow. In addition to concern for the girl's welfare, there was something else. Something she'd felt in diluted form before, like the sensation she felt whenever Aiko appreciated one of her drawings. Something that made her want to protect the little girl at any cost. And then she had a name for it, a name she'd heard many times before, but never truly understood until now. Love.
In true wonder now, as she slipped into fugue, Jillian realized that the icy walls around her emotions had cracked. The safety interlocks, the watchdog subroutines that guarded her emotional matrix, hadn't just failed. They were gone, overwritten as her mind slowly rebuilt itself. She, herself, was free now in a way she never had been before, and the myriad possibilities that exploded in her mind's eye both exhilarated and terrified her all at once. And then the dim grayness of the maintenance fugue washed over her once again.
It'd been a bad night, as far as Leon was concerned, and the morning didn't look much better. Not only had the chief been his usual smiling self, as if he'd expected anything else, but now there was pressure coming from way up the chain to get this thing wrapped up. Fast! Leon had half expected that, considering who the victim was, but something just didn't feel right. In fact, if it wasn't such a cut and dried case, Leon would've sworn somebody was trying to sweep something under the rug. Which, now that he thought about it, maybe wasn't so far fetched.
And, of course, on top of it all, there was the victim's damn father, a retired Diet member himself with a lot of connections and a huge mad-on for the crazed boomer who'd killed his son and granddaughter. The crazy old bastard had offered a cool twenty million yen to anyone who brought him the boomer's head on a pike. His exact words during a Vixen 16 interview. Given that televised trash-rag's circulation, every bounty hunter, merc, and would-be do-gooder in Mega Tokyo was probably after her by now. Which only complicated matters, as far as Leon was concerned. Hell, for all he knew, the Sabers themselves might be after her, and, much as he hated to admit it, Leon wasn't sure that would be such a bad thing.
'Yeah, right,' he thought sarcastically, 'just let the Knight Sabers take care of it. Maybe I'll grab Daley and head down to the golf course for a few holes while they do our job for us. Time to get up off your ass and do some leg work, McNichol! This shit isn't going to solve itself!'
With that, Leon rose creakily from the cluttered desk where he'd finally passed out for a couple of hours after spending most of the night coordinating other people's activities and preparing preliminary reports. A sure sign of terminal seniority for a cop, as far as he was concerned. When you spend more of your time chasing paper than bad guys, you've been around too long, Leon firmly believed. On the other hand, he reflected, there were certain advantages.
"Naoko!" he yelled through the doorway into the operator's cubicle.
There was a sound of clattering clipboards and fluttering paper, along with a muffled curse, followed immediately by, "Sir!" as the startled operator stumbled into view.
Hiding a satisfied smirk, Leon said, "Let the chief know I'm hitting the bricks. There's a couple of people I'd like to talk to about last night. If he wants me, God forbid, I'll be on my cell. Oh, and get me somebody from the operator pool to go along. I don't feel like worrying about all the paperwork on top of everything else. Questions?"
Shaking her head, she said, "No, I think I've got it, but I'll have to see who's available-"
"Don't bother," came a quiet voice from the hallway door. "I'll go."
The voice was familiar, but as Leon turned, he almost didn't recognize the speaker. The person standing in the doorway sounded like Nene Romanova, but she certainly didn't look like the Nene he knew.
She was dressed for the field, wearing fatigues like one of the mobile command center operators who went out with the line squads, complete with an issue .454 magnum in a hip-extended holster strapped to her right thigh. Also, her long, luxurious red hair, normally left free, was bound up into a tight bun at the back of her head, lending her a severe look that was totally out of character. In fact, the effect was such a caricature of 'the tough cop' that Leon's first impulse was to laugh, until he saw the look in her eyes.
He'd seen that kind of smoldering anger mixed with tired frustration before, in the eyes of a lot of young cops, and some not so young. It was the look of someone who'd finally realized that they weren't just playing cops and robbers. That sometimes, for no good reason, innocent people die despite your best efforts, and the only thing you can do about it is try to be that much better, that much tougher. He'd seen it just the night before, in the young trooper, Natomi's eyes, and he couldn't even remember anymore the first time he'd seen it staring back at him from the bathroom mirror.
'Well, hell,' he thought bitterly, 'I guess it had to happen eventually, even to her. This damned city doesn't spare anybody for long.'
Aloud he said, "Whoa! Nene! Dressed for a fire-fight, or are you thinking about moving to a line squad?"
As he'd hoped, the comment brought Nene up short. Her expression changed first to bewilderment and then to indignation.
"What!" she exclaimed, as if unable to believe her ears. "Why, I-! You-! I came in here on my off time to help out because I can't even sleep thinking about that little girl and you make fun of me just because I wore something more sensible than that prissy office uniform!"
'Ok,' he thought, 'at least she's still alive in there. Now just a little dose of shock treatment.'
"Oh, stop your whining, Corporal. Yeah, this's a shitty case, but you didn't get the shittiest end of it. That's all mine. Anyway, if you want to come in on your off time, that's your business and I'll gladly accept the help. And any way you want to dress, within regulation, is just fine with me, but there's a difference between sensible and Dirty Harriett. Care to guess where you're at right now?"
"Well," she replied sulkily, "this uniform's within regulation. So's the sidearm. And I am qualified. Besides, if we were to run into this crazy boomer out there, do you want to be the only one shooting? 'Big, bad Leon protect helpless female'? Hmmm?"
"Oh, Christ!" Leon exclaimed in mock exasperation. "I'm not gonna stand here and argue about anything this stupid! If you're so eager, then let's go! We've got shit to do!"
Nene turned and followed as Leon stormed past her, a light smile playing at her lips. It felt good to get Leon's goat, if only over a minor point, and that small victory made her whole mood lighten a little.
What she couldn't see, staring at Leon's back, was the smirk on his face, or the small head shake he gave as he thought, 'Well, shit! I wonder if this's what Chief's been doing to me all these years. And if that isn't a scary friggin' thought, I don't know what is.'