Stackpole, Michael A - Dark Conspiracy 02 (30 page)

Sin tossed himself forward onto his stomach and started working backward. As he did so, he glanced back behind himself, then forward again. He brought his gaze up to sweep the edge of the wall just as another of the Galbro guards gained the top of it, crouched and pointed her AKM at him.

Their fingers tightened on triggers at the same moment.

Sin’s first shot hit the wall about a foot below her, but the second blew through her right thigh. The third hit the magazine on her AKM and skipped down to punch through her stomach. She toppled back off the wall, her gun’s flaming muzzle making an arc through the evening sky.

Her aim had likewise started low, but the automatic rifle’s recoil walked the line of fire right across his legs.

Only one bullet hit, and Sin screamed as it shattered his shinbone.
Minor wound, you can survive it!
he told himself in between the waves of pain rippling up his spine and into his brain. In their trough, he found his whole lower body had gone numb.

Shit. Oh, shit.He grit his teeth against the pain and watched the dark stain spreading across his pant leg.
Five
bullets left, an infinite number of guards, a hole in my leg anda wallthatmightas well be a mile high. He swallowed hard and tasted fear in his suddenly dry mouth. It can’tget worse.

From the Galbro building he heard Mr. Handy shouting orders. “Get that bunkerbuster over here and use a high-explosive round. He’s hunkered down behind that barbeque. That’s where he’s chosen to die, so roast him.”

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The echoes of distant malevolent laughter shook Rajani awake. Instantly, one of Hal’s half-jest warnings about earthquakes sprang to mind, and she rolled off her bed and stumbled to a doorway. Bracing herself halfway in and out of the bathroom’s door frame, she felt a sharp pain in the palm of her left hand. Slumping to the right, she opened her hand saw blue-black blood welling up around a pair of gold cufflinks.

She slid down the door jamb to the floor and shifted the pieces of jewelry to her right hand. She sucked at the blood from the wound, then looked at it again.
Little cut.
She concentrated, and the hole sealed itself over. She smiled and stood again, tugging the fabric of her one-piece bathing-suit back down to cover the sides of her buttocks.

Hal had asked her to stay behind in the hotel, ostensibly to answer the phone if Sinclair MacNeal decided to return any of the calls for him. Hal himself went out to help the Daizaimoku Ospreys in a workout—firming up their cover—while Bat took Natch with him to prowl the Tokyo underworld. Jytte had locked herself away in her room with all sorts of electronic equipment, and Rajani had been given strict orders not to disturb her.

Tired of staring at the phone for hours, she arranged for her calls to be transferred down to the hotel’s pool. As it was early on Sunday evening, she had the pool all to herself and swam laps to burn off the frustration she felt.

She had left her stasis tube to warn Coyote of the danger from Fiddleback, but she found herself unable to get that message to him. While she knew she was unsuited to any of the jobs the other members of Coyote’s cadre had undertaken, the fact that she was left behind angered her.

Feeling exhausted, she returned to her room and fell asleep with Sinclair’s cufflinks in her hand. Sitting down again on the edge of the bed, she closed her hands on them and opened her mind.«
Please, Sinclair, call me.»

She looked at the phone expectantly, but she knew that without a solid clue as to where he was, the chances of her message getting anywhere close to him was nil. She concentrated and listened for the echoes of her message, then let her mind drift out and, in imitation of the crystalline seeker drones, she tried to match the sensations in the cufflinks with those of a person in Tokyo’s concrete heart.

She did not find Sinclair, but another message blasted
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through her brain for agonizing seconds before she swung her defenses into place. She recognized the thought patterns instantly and knew it had been his laughter that so rudely woke her up.
Fiddleback is here!
Worse yet, the frggment of message she got from him was tinged with Sinclair’s aura: “Kill him, and dispose of the body.”

She closed her eyes and instantly willed herself to look at things from an empathic point of view. The walls surrounding her exploded outward, and her viewpoint rose like a rocket through the roof of the hotel. Tokyo became reduced into a neon vector-graphic maze with millions and millions of glowing lights to mark every living creature in it.

From above and behind her she saw bolt after bolt of green energy lancing down into a glowing malachite sphere in the heart of the island in Tokyo Bay. She looked back up to the energy’s source and saw a shiny black pearl with a fiery green corona surrounding it. A hot green spot whirled through the middle of it, flashing out the beams that shot down into the city.

Looking at it, she saw a companion sphere halfway across the sky from it, then another above it and another below it. Barely visible against the black sky, she caught the faint outline of an oval, and she suddenly realized the spheres were eyes and the oval a head.

A weak green signal from below rose up to the image of Fiddleback, then the monster’s icon vanished. Looking back toward the island, she saw the green sphere begin to dull. As its color faded, she saw a light that matched the cufflinks.
Sinclair isthere, and they are going to kill him.

Fighting the wrenching sensation of nausea, she forced herself back into her body. She tugged a pair of jeans on, stepped into some sneakers and darted out of her room without giving thought to calling the others or even taking the new leather jacket Natch had talked her into buying.

She hit the button summoning the elevator, but after waiting impatiently for 15 seconds, she took the stairs and raced down five floors to the street level.

Dashing through the lobby, she turned sideways and squeezed through the slowly opening automatic glass doors. A liveried doorman stared at her with surprise on his face, then composed himself. He turned and pointed to a taxi, then summoned it when Rajani nodded.

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The taxi pulled up beside her, and the doors slid open on a cushion of air. The little green light on the dashboard turned red as she climbed in. From the back seat she pointed out toward the bay. That way, the island, go!”

The old driver look at her, then off where she was pointing.
“Kimpunshima, hai?
“

“Go, go!” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a handful of crumpled yen-notes and dolmarks and threw them down into his lap. “Go!”

She barely noticed the wave of happiness pouring off the man as the taxi lurched forward. She didn’t hear the squeal of rubber as he took off, nor did she feel the beaded seatcovers as the G-forces pressed her back into the seat.

The garish neon lights strobing past made no impression on her because she had retreated deep inside and had deadened her external senses to concentrate on the cufflinks and their connection to Sinclair MacNeal.

Holding them in her hands, and pressing her hands tight between her knees, she focused her consciousness down and pushed it through the cufflinks and out again. As she did so, she visualized an ethereal thread winding aimlessly through the city. Shooting energy into it, she brightened it and forced it to become more substantial. Like an empty hose with water being pumped through it, the thread plumped and straightened out.

Filling it full, she made contact.

At once she felt elated and frustrated. The link worked to let her know where he was and what he was feeling, but she could not communicate directly with him. She remembered one time when Dr. Chandra had showed her how to build a telephone with two paper cups, two buttons and string. While the makeshift device did transmit sound, it was not sturdy enough for serious communication.

At least he’s safe right now!She took heart in that and anchored her end of the link in the back of her mind.

Opening her eyes, she looked out and, between shoreline warehouses, saw the brooding island that dominated the harbor. “There!”

“Hai, Kimpunshima, hai.” The driver steered his hack to the right, cutting off a lane of traffic and popped down a side street. Turning to the left, he raced through rows of warehouses. He deftly dodged weathered crates and
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trashpiles. All the while he laughed aloud and kept up a running commentary of which Rajani caught little and understood even less.

A feeling of doubt, of hesitant confusion, shot down the link. Too little information came through for her to decipher it, but she did pick out the image of a telephone.
Yes,
call.
Then it struck her that even if he did call, there would be no one there to answer it.

She pounded her fist on the top of the front seat. “Faster, faster.”

The cab took a right on two wheels and merged via the shoulder lane onto the Kimpunshima bridge. Tall sodium lamps sank the whole bridge into a pinkish-gray. The cabbie shouted curses at other drivers and swerved wildly in and out of traffic. Finally, he broke clear of the pack and punched the accelerator. Reaching the far end of the bridge, he hit his brakes enough to bring his speed back into the low hundreds of kilometers per hour and steered into the heart of Kimpunshima.

To Rajani, the only difference between the island and the city of Tokyo itself was the intensity of feelings she had coming through the link.
Danger!
She slapped the passenger-side window. “This way! We’re close now. Hurry!”

The driver dutifully took the next right and came to a screeching halt as the dozen members of a
bosozoku
biker gang ran their big American motorcycles around in a circle in the middle of the street. Clad in black leather and chromed chains, they called derisively to pedestrians and brandished chains to threaten the cars they had stopped.

The sensation of fear sizzling down the link nearly overwhelmed Rajani. She tore at the door handle and opened the cab’s rear door just in time to flatten one of the bikers. Stepping on the stunned man’s chest, she vaulted from the cab and ran down the street. She heard people yelling at her and the sound of motorcycle engines being gunned, but they meant nothing as fear and surprise invaded her through the link.

Running as fast as she could, Rajani cut through alleys and vaulted fences. She chose her path unconsciously, letting the growing strength of the link reel her in. Through it she gained a sense of water, so she cut toward the shoreline. As she came out of an alley and into the grassy
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wedge of a park, she saw a jeeplike security vehicle pull up beside a cinderblock wall.

A woman got out of the vehicle with a rifle in hand and climbed up onto the hood. From there she stepped onto the roof, then jumped over to the top of the wall. Rajani heard gunshots, then saw the woman crouch and bring what the Blood Crips had shown her to be an AKM up to her shoulder.

“Sinclair!” she screamed as foot-long flames shot from the automatic rifle’s muzzle. Rajani saw a secondary spark, then the woman flew back off the wall. She landed hard on the car’s roof, then bounced off and lay dead in the street.
He got her!

The moment of triumph Rajani felt in that died as shock and pain crashed in on her through the link.It pounded at her. It would have driven her to her knees, but she caught herself on the security vehicle open doorway. Despair and resignation flowed through the link like blood through a sliced artery in the pain’s wake.
«No, I won’t let you die!
»

Rajani scooped up the AKM and cleared the damaged clip. She picked another one up from the ground where they had spilled from the woman’s ammo pouch and jammed it home. Cranking the charging lever back and letting it snap forward, she leaped up onto the hood, clambered onto the roof, then made the short leap to the cinderblock wall.

Gunsmoke filled the courtyard below her. Off to her left, she saw a blocky mass of bricks and Sinclair MacNeal.

Opposing him, nestled in an office building, she saw four men. One, radiating confidence like heat pouring from a bonfire, sighted down the thick tube he had resting on the windowsill.

“Clear!” he yelled. “I’m going to smoke the bastard!”

Clutching the gun at waist level the way the Blood Crips had done when talking about their combats, Rajani yanked back on the trigger. Still selected for fully automatic fire, the AKM kicked out all 30 of the bullets loaded in the clip. Impressive muzzle flashes lit the patio as the hail of bullets raked their way through the unbroken panes in the conference room window.

All the field stripping and dry firing she’d done with the Blood Crips hadn’t prepared her for recoil. The AKM’s
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muzzle tracked up through the sky and twisted her around the right, flinging her off the wall. Crashing onto her back on the vehicle’s roof, she somersaulted over her head and landed hard on the ground. Her head smacked the sidewalk and the smoking AKM bounced off toward the rear of the vehicle.

Stars burst in front of her eyes, then a secondary explosion ripped through her, complete with thunder and smoke. A red fireball shot into the air and transformed itself into a greasy black cloud, then chunks of debris started pelting her and the jeep. The windscreen cracked as half a cinderblock punched through it. Smaller pieces of concrete pinged and clinked off the vehicle, then a hissing sand-rain condensed out of the smoke and splashed gritty sheets over her.

Rajani shook her head and rolled over onto her stomach. Pushing off the ground, she stood and leaned heavily against the jeep. Two more gunshots prompted her to duck, then she saw the figure of a man limping and firing back through the hole. She started to run toward him, then stopped instantly as he shifted the gun to cover her.