I do not own Ghost in the Shell or any of its characters.
Investigation
"I'm worried about why Sagawa's digging up the old soviet base," Boma, a large, bald member of Section Nine who had red-lensed eye augments, said.
They were investigating the recent expansion of Sagawa Electronics Incorporated, who had expanded their facilities into a long-buried soviet base where the soviets had been manufacturing cyberbrains. Cane was a little fuzzy as to why this was their jurisdiction, but he wasn't about to complain.
"Okay, Boma, you and Togusa take the underground factory," Kusanagi ordered. "Cane and I will handle the head office. And I want fiber-op comm lines run! No RF from now on, understand!?"
"Yes, Ma'am!" Togusa, the only other person who wasn't highly augmented besides Cane, said.
He had neatly combed brown hair that was starting to get long in the back and an obsessive need to use a revolver styled after the old Chiappa Firearms Rhino Revolver, shooting from the lower side of the cylinder in place of the upper side.
"Right!" Boma nodded.
"Nope," Cane said.
Kusanagi groaned, resting her face in her hand. "You just talk to me only, and only do it using telepathy."
Boma and Togusa both snickered at him, only for him to punch Boma lightly on the jaw, Boma passing it down for him.
"Alright, this is the drop off," Kusanagi said, glancing at Cane. "Got all of your gear?"
Cane nodded, glancing down at himself. For this mission, he had on a black jacket with his two handguns in their usual harness against the sides of his ribs, and a few dozen spare magazines lining the inside of his jacket. He would have preferred to bring a rifle, but the Aramaki and Kusanagi had both forbidden it. So, instead, he had a special surprise they didn't know about. A carbine kit for one of his guns was against his back, his own personal one which could be unfolded, and the pistol placed inside, in five seconds, six if he was in questionable cover. They had argued that a shootout wasn't the goal, but he was of the mind that even if it wasn't the goal, it was best to be prepared for it.
He walked into a market behind Kusanagi, both looking around carefully. He wished he had his new visor. It was a thin headset that would wrap around the back of his head to hold onto both sides, and which had an arm on the front of the left side to follow the contours of his eye socket before it would project a holographic screen in front of the eye. It had facial recognition software, a mobile link to the Net, and a laundry list of functions that he couldn't remember the specific names for that basically meant that if he focused on it, the screen would identify the object from up to five hundred feet, the data about it so specific as to include serial numbers for individual items, and it could highlight silhouettes in a group a different color based on whether or not they had weapons and highlight the weapons. The only reason he didn't have it on currently was that the one thing it lacked was a self-charging battery, so he'd had to pay for a custom self-charging function to be added to it, which wouldn't be finished for a few more days. He'd have gone without it if the battery life in it wasn't about thirty minutes.
He sighed to himself as Batou began to yell over the communicators that Yano, a new member's, death was Aramaki's fault.
"Damn Batou," Kusanagi growled under her breath. "He's getting too edge lately."
"He needs to get laid," Cane muttered. "Blow off some steam."
Kusanagi shook her head. "You're projecting your feelings onto your assessment of Batou again. He gets laid more than you do. Hell, the last time we all went to the strip club, you were the only one in the section not to get laid."
Cane grimaced, both at the reminder of everyone but him having chosen to have sex with a stripper, and at the reminder of Kusanagi having had sex with someone who wasn't him. "I happen to have standards about where I stick certain parts of my body. I happen to enjoy having fully organic parts, and I'd rather not have to get it chopped off and replaced with a high-tech vibrator."
Kusanagi laughed. "If you got a vibrating one, you'd have to fight off girls right and left. They're expensive, unless you get a cheap one, and those have a tendency to break or catch fire."
Cane rolled his eyes. Just as he opened his mouth to speak, however, someone beat him to it.
"Death to the military-industrial complex!" someone behind them shouted.
Instantly, a short burst of adrenaline flooded Cane, and he turned, yanking Kusanagi to the side at the same time as making himself thin. A split second later, a hatchet flashed by in front of him from the passenger side of a truck before Kusanagi placed a handful of bullets in the person who'd tried to kill them, the man falling out of the side of the truck with his head and upper chest filled with bullets. She sighed, reloading as Cane winced, breathing heavily.
"Thanks for that," Kusanagi said. "You alright?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," Cane said, forcing his heart to slow and his breathing to even out. "I only had to use a little that time."
Kusanagi nodded. "Alright, now what the hell do you have under the back of your jacket?"
"A carbine conversion kit," Cane said.
Kusanagi groaned. "Do you have your opto-camo coat?"
"Of course," Cane nodded. "That's back there, too."
Kusanagi sighed. "Come on. Our contact should be this way."
Cane nodded, following her to an alleyway where someone was beating a pair of men. Cane readied himself to draw, only for Kusanagi to tell him to take her to a hacker named Krolden. The man nodded and turned, leading them through the city to a room crammed with computers and various machines, as well as stacks of paper. A pair of scantly-dressed robots, most likely sex-roids, lounged among the mess, and an unkempt man with long black hair in a loose ponytail sat at a keyboard in front of the main computer.
"Master Krolden, the lady from the Nemuro Landing op's here!" their guide announced.
"Where?" Krolden, Cane assumed, asked, looking over at them disinterestedly.
Their guide turned to look around, only to see both had vanished, both of them using their opto-camo to sneak over to Krolden.
As Kusanagi quietly whispered to Krolden, Cane silently drew a pistol, just in case Krolden didn't want to talk. Their former guide walked away, seeming confused and going to look for them, so once he was gone, Kusanagi began to converse with Krolden, remaining invisible. Krolden used his computer to seemingly easily hack into the cyberbrain of the Sagawa head of security. Cane was impressed. He hadn't realized the hacker they were going to see was so skilled. He gave them a map and an all-access pass, and they headed for Sagawa's main building. As they walked in, Kusanagi headed for the receptionist.
"Hi, I'm the photographer for the annual report," she introduced herself. "This is my trainee. We've got a pass for the shoot, but we just came to check out the location."
"You can go right on into the president's office," the receptionist said, handing back the pass.
Once they were through the first door, they began to run, quickly beginning to search the ground floor.
"Memory Management Center or Information Processing Center?" Cane asked telepathically.
"We should probably just access a couple of chief execs' brains directly," Kusanagi replied in kind. "It'd be faster to-"
They both skidded to a stop as a small, centipede-like security drone crawled around a corner ahead of them on the wall.
"ATTENTION PERSON EHIBITING SUSPICIOUS BEHAVIOR AT INTERSECTION NINE-NINE-SEVEN-TWO!" the drone said. "PLEASE SHOW YOUR I.D. AND PASS!"
"Well...I..." Kusanagi scrambled for a second before Cane shot the drone, which promptly exploded, more beginning to round the corners on the walls.
"I should warn you, I'm going to have amnesia about this part of the mission later," Cane said.
"I don't know which part you're talking about," Kusanagi said, both beginning to run and shoot security drones quickly. "We infiltrated without a hitch."
"Exactly!" Cane grinned, just before Kusanagi sped ahead of him and shouldered through a door a man standing at the desk inside the next room spinning toward them. "Freeze! Hands up!"
The man began to type rapidly, so Cane shot him in the shoulder, the man going down hard. Kusanagi reached him first, only to lower her gun.
"What is it?" Cane asked, walking over, then staring at the man's shattered shoulder, exposing his mechanical insides, and the blank stare he had directed at the ceiling. "Oh. A robot." His eyes followed a cable running from him to the computer, just as Kusanagi's did the same.
"What's he hooked into?" Kusanagi asked.
She pulled his plug and replaced it with her own, only to instantly freeze. Cane reached for the cord, meaning to disconnect her before she could be fried by an attack barrier, which was the only thing that would stop her from registering the real world at the flip of a switch, but Kusanagi swatted his hand away.
"I'm fine," Kusanagi said. "It wasn't a very difficult attack barrier." She hummed thoughtfully. "What was he trying to do at the end?"
Cane shrugged, and Kusanagi sat down in the robot's chair. She typed for a moment before a panel opened, exposing a handful of disks.
"So, he was trying to destroy these, then," Kusanagi said. "What's so special about them?"
She pulled out a mobile disk reader, a device like a set of tongs, and jacked it into herself before running the disks one by one. As she did, she remained silent, eyes out of focus. Finally, she finished as Cane was inspecting the console.
"These disks are secret registers of transactions to use public funds for Marlov and someone identified as 'K' to line their pockets," Kusanagi said.
"That's-" Cane stopped speaking as he noticed movement behind Kusanagi as he turned to her.
Adrenaline flooded him and one of his pistols snapped up, firing past her head and making her drop and spin. Behind her, a headless, male statue's upper body had extended down from the wall and moved to attack her. Just as she ducked, the statue's hands slammed together where her head had been, though since Cane's bullets had weakened the right arm at the bicep and elbow, it shattered and spun away as the hands clapped.
"Not bad," a male voice commended from a head suddenly extending from the wall above where the statue's torso was attached. "You've got impressive reaction time. However, I'm afraid your reaction time won't save you or Lieutenant Kusanagi."
"Bring it on, Lieutenant Colonel Sohei Kagasaki, special op for the far north!" Kusanagi challenged. "And just FYI, I'm no longer a lieutenant. It's Major Kusanagi to you!"
Kusanagi and Cane both activated their cloaking tech and jumped to a pillar off to either side.
"What!?" Kagasaki shouted. "Even your pressure marks on the floor are gone! How did you-"
"Thanks for the disks, Kagasaki," Cane said. "Now your own country will be after you."
"Let's save the sparring until the next time we meet," Kusanagi said. "Stay alive until you retire, Kagasaki. That'll make our little game more interesting, and easier to wrap up."
Both fell silent, and Kagasaki looked around in bewilderment.
"You're on the wall, aren't you?" Kagasaki finally asked. "Come to think of it, I'd better scram, too."
Just then, as the head powered down, one of the naked angel statues broke free of the wall, hitting the ground at a run. Cane dropped to the ground with Kusanagi and ran after him, Cane pulling ahead slowly as he was still running off of adrenaline, and they caught up to Kagasaki's new body as it was pulling on a button-up shirt. Finally, Kusanagi looped around to get ahead of them and ambush Kagasaki.
"Well, well, well," Kusanagi spoke up, Kagasaki skidding to aa stop and spinning to her, only to also see Cane, both aiming a gun at Kagasaki. "So, you've begun hanging around and decorating the walls, eh? For a man, you'll do anything, won't you?"
"Damn!" Kagasaki growled. "Damn you Kusanagi! Listen! I've been working for the sake of my country here in the far north for twenty years! And for what!? Crap pay and no promotion!"
"Hey, life's a bitch," Kusanagi said.
"Lieutenant Kagasaki, you're hereby under arrest," Cane said. "I suggest you come quietly. It'd be annoying to have to write a death report as well as a mission report."
Kagasaki glared at him, then raised his hands. Kusanagi walked over, cuffing Kagasaki just as Cane sagged, then crumpled to the floor, panting, sweating, and two fingers against the side of his neck as he struggled to calm his heartrate.
"You alright?" Kusanagi asked.
"Y...Yeah," he panted. "Just...overused..." he shook his head. "Might...need a min...minute."
Kusanagi sighed. "Sit down, Kagasaki."
Kagasaki didn't move, so Kusanagi slammed her pistol into the back of Kagasaki's head, dropping him instantly. They waited about ten minutes for Cane to recover before Kusanagi helped him up, then kicked Kagasaki in the side to wake him. Then, they all left the facility to the rendezvous together, meeting up with the others before being extracted.
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