Yakuza Zero
Jenny
"Oh, fuck me up my arse and call me 'Jenny,'" Oswin said as soon as they had escaped the Blacklight Society safehouse and the wrath of Oni, left bleeding out on the floor.
"Ex-cuse me!?" Jenny exclaimed, thinking that was quite possibly the most horrific sentence that had ever been said to anybody in history. Despite what she had said, however, Jenny seemed to be the absolute last thing on Oswin's insane mind.
"That dick-weed, he sent out some kind of alert while we were playing Go, the emergency services communications are talking about half a dozen recklessly-driving vehicles all heading here, from different directions – they're screwing with the pissing ambulances you called, comms say they recognise boryokudan symbols on them." Jenny was caught in the midst of a dilemma. There was no way they could get back to her ship and make a quick getaway before the yakuza showed up. Even if she didn't have a disabled hologram tagging along with her, she might not make it.
Which left only one viable option, in Jenny's mind: grand theft auto. Luckily for them, Oni had a car, parked on the roof of the safehouse building.
"Okay – you stay here," Jenny said, making a beeline for a handy ladder she had spotted. Very narrow and slick with the same damp as everything in Tokyo city's basement, Oswin hadn't a chance of getting up there any time soon.
"Me do what!?" Oswin exclaimed.
"Stay here! Or re-programme your legs so they grow back and follow me, I don't know!" she was already climbing the ladder.
"You can't leave me!"
"Trust me!" she shouted back, taking out her sonic screwdriver, Oswin monitoring the blips of pursuing vehicles on her holoscreens. How long did Oni have until the blood-loss became fatal…? Well, she thought, they were in the 52nd Century, medicine had come a long way, especially if Oswin could blow herself up and miraculously survive. He'd be fine… probably.
She sonicked the locked doors of Oni's flying car, Oswin aggressively shouting status reports from the street below. The door sprang open and she clambered inside, hitting the dashboard blindly to make it go. This worked, to her great joy, the front window illuminating with hologramatic read-outs much like those of Oswin's screens. But the problem was it was quite tricky sometimes adjusting from flying a big, complicated spaceship to flying a small, uncomplicated car, which was why she launched upwards with far too much force and almost went crashing into a wall. Within seconds, Oswin had hacked the car's built-in comms and was shouting at her.
"What are you doing!?"
"Listen – just – whoa!" She turned the wheel too hard and went into a violent corkscrew down the very cramped under-street, skidding to a halt on the ground and crashing into the front of the tattoo parlour they had walked past earlier. Oswin panicking behind her, yakuza cars and ambulances above, Jenny flung the car into reverse and it went whooshing backwards, its entire base hover-powered. She slammed on the breaks and it jolted to a sudden stop right at Oswin's side, Jenny opening the passenger door. "Get in!" Oswin didn't hesitate, as an ambulance descended from the sky above. An ambulance and its unwelcome entourage of Tanabe-kai flying motorbikes.
"'One last job', you said! 'Simple retrieval mission', you said! 'We totally won't get attacked by the yakuza', you said!"
"I think you're paraphrasing quite generously there," Jenny said, "But, er, you might want to put your seatbelt on. I've been told I'm not a very good driver." Oswin heeded her words.
"The similarities between you and your father never cease, do they?"
"So I hear – do something useful, would you?" Jenny tossed Oswin her screwdriver, which Oswin nearly dropped when she tried to catch it, "Make the car go faster. We've got to outrun this lot of-" They both yelled when the car was shot in the rear bumped by laser weaponry, which made it spin out of control again. Not good, considering they had very quickly ascended to the height of all the other traffic.
"Could you at least try to keep us alive!?"
"You're already dead! Honestly, this is my second car chase in as many weeks! If Martha gets wind of this – uh, you're not going to tell Martha, are you?" Before Oswin could respond, one of the flying motorbikes zipped past them in the air and tried the pit manoeuvre, ramming right into Oswin's door with tremendous aggression. "Oswin! Make car go fast!"
"You're putting me under an immense amount of pressure! I've never been in a car chase before!"
"There's a first time for everything!"
Jenny pushed the wheel forwards and the car turned into a nosedive, and she felt much more like she was flying a plane than driving a car. That was probably a good thing though, because she was known in certain circles as an exceptional pilot. She threaded the needle through another two cars and was suddenly in the middle of oncoming traffic, which was exactly where she wanted to be. Oswin, meanwhile, was using the sonic on the car's control systems.
"This is quite hard without actual access to the engine, you know!"
"Well feel free to climb out and have a look under the hood!"
"Urgh! You're so frustrating!"
"Uh-huh! Hang on!" She dove again, another layer of traffic down, steering them through the centre of a floating intersection. Really not the sort of place you wanted to be when you were in a high-speed chase; it was beginning to look inevitable that they'd get into a fatal collision, though she really wasn't in the mood to regenerate again. But the other complication was the cast on her hand, which made it quite hard to make the sharp turns and near-misses she was being forced to execute as another bike slammed into the car's roof, leaving a dent in it.
That was when Oswin managed to trick the car into lifting its speed limit restrictions, which were remotely enforced on all vehicles in the future to try and mitigate accidents. It did work, though not quite as well when there were a handful of vehicles cheating the rules (herself now included).
"God, they really don't want you getting your hands on their asteroid, do they?" Oswin said.
"Oh, do you think!? Look, try and find out where this Nobukane Tanabe actually lives so we can drop in for a nice, friendly chat about why he suddenly wants to kill me so bad," Jenny ordered her.
"Of course, Major Jenny," Oswin grumbled, annoyed at being ordered around. Jenny rolled her eyes. In her pocket, her phone started buzzing in her back pocket.
"Could you get that?" she asked Oswin.
"For – do this, do that – I'm not your bloody slave!"
"Just get it! I think it's Helix!" She knew it was Helix because, over the sound of the chaos and the car engine, she could just about here his muffled voice trying to say something. Oswin groaned with frustration and leant over to get the phone. Jenny swerved to miss another car which was honking at her, the owner sticking his middle finger up out of the window.
"What's up, Helix?" Oswin said to the phone once she'd unlocked it, adding to Jenny at the last moment, "By the way, totally felt your arse." Jenny ignored her.
"The rudimentary short-range scanners in this device indicate that your pursuers are being controlled remotely and possess absolutely no life signs."
"Wait," Jenny said, "You mean to say they're all just robots?"
"More like remote control cars," Oswin said, "In fact, that literally is what they are, if Helix is right."
"Great! In that case," she jerked the wheel and slammed them, hard, into one of the bikes, so hard it smashed into another car, denting the door but leaving the occupants unharmed, and went spinning out towards the ground. Peering out of her window, she said, "I hope that doesn't land on anybody…"
"Can you be a bit more careful!? I'm trying to hack into this city's entire population database to find the address of this one mob boss you've decided to piss off, and it's a bit tricky when we're flying all over the place."
"You're not very good in the field, are you?" Jenny questioned, ignoring her completely and rear-ending the first yakuza-bot-bike that tried to get in front of them, causing its engine to stutter so they shot passed it as it stalled.
"My whole thing is that I don't want to be in the field, especially not with an adrenaline junkie like you!"
"You know you love me really. I'm fun!"
"This is the opposite of fun! You're crazy!"
"Well – so're you! Now find me the address before-"
A particularly suicidal robot bike had sped head-on for another vehicle, a civilian van, coming at such an angle that the shocked driver was forced to make a sudden turn right for them. Jenny tried to swerve but it clipped the tail-end of their car, mid-turn, with such force that the already-struggling engine suddenly died. For a split-second, they were suspended in the air with absolutely no propulsion system. And then they started to plummet, all the way past the gigantic, Tokyo skyscrapers towards its rotten ground-level.
"FUCK!" Oswin shouted.
"Don't panic!" Jenny told her. Oswin gave her a look which seemed to say if the incoming crash didn't kill Jenny, she certainly would. With all the force she could muster, Jenny punched her unbroken hand through the glass control panels of the cars, plunging her fingers into the wires beneath.
"WE'VE GOT SECONDS!"
"I'M DOING MY BEST!" She bit two of the wires apart, one blue and one black, and carefully pushed their ends together right as she and Oswin were about to smash into the pavement. The car engine returned to life and she pulled the wheel back so that they were shooting upwards like a rocket, heading straight towards the sun. She was dimly aware that her hand was now bleeding, but for the time being just shrugged it off.
"Miss Oswald, I have discovered the home address of one Nobukane Tanabe, would you like me to import this data into the current vehicle's navigation system?" Helix asked, completely oblivious to the fact they'd literally almost gone splat; Jenny did not have high hopes for regenerating if that had happened.
"Yes," said Oswin hoarsely.
"Helix – forget the roads, just point me in the direction, we'll cut through and go straight there."
"You know, they have road safety for a reason!" Oswin argued.
"I'm perfectly safe! I'm wearing a seatbelt!"
"Oh, great! Because that'll totally save us if we crash into a solid object at two-hundred miles an hour!"
"It might do! Never give up hope! Helix – route the location to my OCF," she requested, since she was still wearing the glasses by some miracle considering how much the car had been spinning around.
"Affirmative, Major Young." Within seconds, a little, blue circle appeared in her peripheral vision, digital and pulsating: the apartment of Nobukane Tanabe.
"What is it that attracts you to organised crime so much?" Oswin muttered, peering out of the window, but their sudden dive towards the ground appeared to have shaken the yakuza-bikes for the moment. And they didn't need much time to get to their destination, not with the speed boost of the hacked, stolen car (she really hoped Oni wasn't dead now she'd also wrecked his ride.)
"It just works out that way, I don't know. I'm good at it. Besides, I have normal jobs too, sometimes. I'm getting this job in a bakery in Hollowmire; Oc'thubha has the best recipes," she explained, things calming down slightly now the immediate danger appeared to have passed – though, the car engine was stuttering in a way which made her very uneasy, and she wasn't sure her hot-wiring solution was going to last for long.
"How are you planning on confessing to Clara that you're taking your life in your hands again? Or are you going to lie?"
"We'll cross that bridge when we come to it…" Jenny said, her eyes fixed on that blue waypoint in the middle-distance. The glass dashboard – at least, the parts of it she hadn't smashed to pieces – lit up in a very angry red and started flashing at them: catastrophic engine failure. "If we come to it…"
"What!? 'If'!?"
"I'm sure we will!" Jenny lied. Oswin was horrified and clutched the car seat, awaiting their inevitable demise. "Just, um, not that I'm thinking anything bad might happen…" She pushed the accelerator as far as it would go; maybe they'd be able to make it before the car gave up the ghost for good? "You have backups of yourself, right?"
"Yes, but that doesn't mean I want to get torn to pieces!"
"We're not gonna get torn to pieces! You're being melodramatic," Jenny said, and then the engine began to smoke in front of them.
"FUCK!" Oswin shouted, again.
"You know," Jenny began, "Some people might think you swear too much."
"FUCK YOU!"
"I'm just saying…" Nobukane's skyscraper came fully into view, the blip in her line of the sight indicating they were heading straight for it. Behind them, the yakuza-bikes returned in full force; he must have some kind of defence system, she assumed, if he was important as Oni had said. "Uh… hang on. This is going to be a bit bumpy!" Finally, the car hit top-speed, just staying ahead of the flying bikes behind them.
"WHAT ARE YOU DOING!?" Oswin yelled, "WE'RE GOING TO CRASH INTO THE WINDOW!"
"Yep!" Jenny confirmed, "That's the plan!"
"THAT IS NOT A PLAN!"
Jenny ignored her; it was a plan, it was a great plan, and it would absolutely work – provided the engines held on for just a few more seconds…
At the last moment, the yakuza-bikes were forced to veer out of the way, clearly having more preservation instincts than Jenny, and she and Oswin braced themselves to shatter the window – which was much stronger than the windows of the 21st Century she was used to. That was probably why, after they broke through it, the engine finally exploded for good. Because of that they lost the majority of their momentum instantly, and then collided with another wall before the car came to a halt in a now-destroyed room full of dust, debris, and smoke. The airbag burst, delayed, and hit Jenny in the face, which didn't do much good for her sore and swollen black eye. Then Oswin punched her in the arm.
"Hey!" she complained, fighting with the airbag to get out of the car, at which point she collapsed on the floor and broken glass and concrete, coughing into her bloodied hand. On the other side Oswin did the same. Aching, Jenny got to her feet, a trembling Sprite crawling out of the rubble behind her. She stretched and then examined at her limbs, but she appeared to be no worse for wear, except for the cuts on her other hand. "See?" she said to Oswin, who looked angrier than Jenny had ever seen her, "I told you this morning, you worry too much."
"You're a lunatic," Oswin accused, "I know I'm a lunatic, but you? Oh my god. What is the matter with you!?"
"I'm courageous!" Jenny argued, "And talented."
"You're literally a masochist." Oswin clicked her fingers near the floor and Sprite went running over to her side, around the smoking wreckage of the hover car, while Jenny staggered through the hole in the wall behind them and into the room with the now-shattered floor-to-ceiling windows. She paused, and found everything strangely silent, aside from the steaming wreck. Oswin came limping up behind her. The bikes didn't follow them inside. When Jenny strained her ears, she detected a voice coming from a different room.
It didn't make too much sense to start sneaking after she'd just crashed a car into the apartment, but she did it anyway – maybe they'd think she'd died.
"This flat's pretty cool, right?" she whispered to Oswin, glancing around at all the lavish furniture, "Are you sure you won't move to future Tokyo with Adam?"
"Do you think it's cooler with or without the gigantic hole in the wall?" Oswin snapped.
"Shh," Jenny hissed.
"But you were the one who-" Jenny put a hand over Oswin's mouth for a second and listened even further.
"You didn't say you sent some psycho to get your precious rock!" Nobukane shouted from a door to their right. Jenny released Oswin and snuck right up to the door, motioning for Oswin to keep her distance.
"Well, maybe YOU should have kept your hands off it, or given it over for free instead of hanging onto it for so long," a second voice, talking through a speaker, "I warned the Tanabe-kai that I didn't have a way to call her off." He was talking to Pasznoxo. Furious, Jenny kicked in the door and found Nobukane, alone, talking to a hologram projection of Pasznoxo, who was probably safe and sound in his ice mansion on his precious B-Earth. And there, in a modified container, was the glowing-red chunk of space rock they were all after.
"Hi," she said, "I don't know if you heard me come in. I did knock… sort of."
"You're insane," spat Nobukane. Oswin hadn't followed her in. Good.
"I've been hearing that a lot today… so, here's the thing, Pasz-san. I know that you can use that rock to make a bomb."
"A bomb?" Nobukane laughed, then repeated sourly, "A bomb!"
"Shut up," Pasznoxo ordered him coldly.
"She thinks it's valuable because it can be a bomb. You can make a bomb out of anything. This rock has much more interesting potential."
"Nobukane-san," Pasz warned, "Don't say another word or Tanabe-kai will have made a powerful enemy. You may control Tokyo, but think of what I control."
"What does it do if it's not a bomb?" Jenny asked Nobukane.
"Don't tell her anything," Pasz continued.
"You can shut up," Jenny ordered the hologram, "I'm coming for you next, don't think you can stop me. Trying to blackmail me into delivering you this rock – what does it do?"
"I'm not scared of you, Zero."
"Pasz, you don't even know who I am. You really think my only claim to fame is that I'm a good thief? A time traveller?"
"River Song didn't mention much else when she gave me your phone number." Jenny's blood ran cold. River!? River had given Pasznoxo her number!?
But she barely had time to take in the news, because Nobukane had taken advantage of her lapse. He lunged towards a decoration on the nearest wall, which turned out to not be just a decoration but actually a pair of antique swords: wakizashis. One of them he threw like a shuriken straight at her head, but his aim wasn't nearly as good as her reflexes. Jenny dodged to the side and then caught the wakizashi by the hilt in her left hand. That spooked him; he must have never seen someone catch a sword in mid-air before.
"We're doing this, then?" she said, challenging him, spinning the sword deftly in the one hand to add even more flourish, "Because you'll lose."
"How could I lose to a girl with only one working hand? And that one's bleeding everywhere."
"Why don't you come over here and find out?"
Suffice it to say, Nobukane did come over there and find out. He ran towards to and manically swung his sword in a motion that was all-too-easy to counter. It was nothing like trying to best Ashildr in a fight – this guy, despite being the aniki of a powerful yakuza syndicate, was a pushover. He was so much of a pushover that she literally did push him over. She countered the first strike, moving swiftly behind him, and then kicked him sharply in the small of his back, sending him to the ground. Another kick to his hand and she knocked the wakizashi out of his reach, then held her own sword down by his neck with her foot angled carefully over his wrist and hand.
"Are you for real?" she questioned him, "Because that was pathetic, really."
"He's probably high," holo-Pasz said. Jenny frowned and squinted at Nobukane's eyes, darting around in panic which, sure enough, were dilated beyond belief. So he probably was high. "I hope he hasn't been sampling the product."
"The…" It clicked. "That rock – you're going to use it to make a drug!?"
"Well done," said Pasz dryly.
"Thought you didn't want me to know?"
"You were just about to interrogate him. And he would have told you the whole story, very proud of how he schemed to get something I want, thinks he has me under his thumb. Nobody has me under their thumb." Jenny had been about to interrogate him, she had been about to threaten to break all the bones in his hand one by one by stamping on them if he didn't tell her what was going on. "Grind it into powder and smoke it in a pipe, supposedly the high of a lifetime. I don't really care how potent it is, just how much I can charge people to buy it."
"And your exclusive crack-rock is right here, in this room, with only me. Do you really still think that this is going to fall into your hands?"
"Of course I do."
"Huh. So, River did this, then?"
"I asked her how to contact Zero."
"And she just handed over my number?"
"No. I had to bribe her, obviously."
"With what?"
"Why should I tell you?"
"Because if you don't I'll beat you to a pulp so badly that you'll only be able to eat through a straw, that's why," Jenny threatened, "And don't think I won't. I'd gladly do it to this reprobate." She indicated Nobukane, who didn't dare move. "Look, here's the thing, Pasz. The thing River didn't tell you. She'll have known that no matter what she did, I wouldn't bring you that rock, and you wouldn't best me."
"I'm listening."
"Have you heard of the Doctor? River Song's husband? Saves lives, defeats monsters, makes whole armies turn around at the mention of his name?" Pasz said nothing. "Well, he's my dad. And I'm a real chip off the old block, as it were. Except I do have a bit of a problem when it comes to violence, which he's never really approved of." She touched the tip of the wakizashi to the nape of Nobukane's neck. "But, I owed you a favour, and I'm hardly a moral beacon myself. I'm willing to just forget about all this and leave you to your business. Though you won't be getting your hands on that rock or any Fabergé Egg. If you ever come after me, it's not just me you have to deal with, it's my dad, and I don't think you want him on your case. Certainly not if you hurt his only daughter."
Pasznoxo hung up the link. That meant she had won. She'd successfully terrified him with her father's reputation – which really did come in handy. Especially now that he would actually come looking for her if something happened. As for River… well. She'd deal with that mess later, though she was desperate to know what Pasz had bribed her with.
"See that, Nobu-kun? Pasz is scared of me. He's given up. And if he's scared of me-"
"Just take the rock!" he wailed, "Have it! It's not worth all this trouble!"
"Thanks!" she said brightly, "D'you think you might call me a cab? Only, my car's a bit… scratched."
"Fine! Just don't kill me!"
She shrugged, "Whatever you say. Oh – one more thing…" she began as Oswin crept gingerly into the room now that the drama was over, "Do you know anywhere that does good takoyaki?"
AN: I'd just like to state here for the record that I LOVE the new Doctor and am actually watching the show again, which is awesome considering I haven't seen any episodes of S9 or S10 (and hopefully I never will have to see them). And again, to reiterate, there WILL be a long crossover storyline (in the 50,000 words region hopefully) in Retrograde where Beta Thirteen, Yaz, Ryan & Graham will find themselves in the Alphaverse in the 2060s and it will be totally awesome.