CHRISTMAS EVE
It was a warm and miserable holiday in Manhattan, the worst that Ahiro could remember spending in this hellhole. In his own home country there would be clean, crisp snow on the mountaintops if not the streets themselves, and the sidewalks and buildings would be just as crowded as they were here but cleaner. Ahiro had not been to Japan in many years, but he could still remember the sweet smells of evening meals drifting from the paper-screened windows of the freshly scrubbed tenement houses that had grown like mushrooms in the neighborhood where his childhood home had once stood. Scents of sake and green tea, hot rice and fried vegetables; clean, comforting, welcoming. Not like here, where the smells of aircycle exhaust and trash rotting on heated sidewalks overwhelmed everything, ignorant of the barriers of class and property value as it drifted on the air currents.
Tonight multicolored lights blinked in the show windows of the department stores while hundreds of miniature androids in festive costumes obediently followed the commands of their loop programs to dance and make merry in the displays. In the window of the Manhattan branch of Macy’s, a four-foot-high Santa Claus belted out three-syllable rounds of “Ho-ho-ho!” as he checked off names on a list spewing continuously from a computer in a room that was supposed to be a replication of his office at the North Pole. Across the street, the Montgomery & Sears conglomerate had its own presentation going in blatant competition for the shoppers’ eyes—a full dance troupe of twenty-four-inch ballerinas and brightly dressed soldiers performing The Nutcracker Suite, complete with a synthesized version of the original musical score blaring from high-fidelity speakers.
It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that it was after ten o’clock, the end of the preholiday shopping season, and the weather was wretched; there were plenty of people on the overlit streets to hear the blasting music. Most, huddled under umbrellas or inside rain-slickers dripping crud-filled water and clutching their plastic-wrapped gifts as close to themselves as possible, paid little attention. Spurred by a slight and carefully timed upswing in the country’s economy, the crowds this year had been enormous; millions of people, cars, and aircycles choked every shopping district in the city and quickly resulted in the worst smog storm Manhattan had endured in half a decade. Now the streets were filled with the debris left by the shopping sprees of the masses, the air was clogged with dust and pollution, and Ahiro and his men were forced to wait patiently as the last of the die-hard patrons bought their wares and scuttled along the sidewalks like common mutant cockroaches in the muck.
Finally, with only a quarter hour left before midnight, they slipped out of a smelly alcove in the back entrance of the decrepit building at 103rd and Manhattan Avenue and headed into the heart of Central Park. The last refuge of grass and pigeons in the area, it was still open to the public only because of MedTech’s public relations policy; the corporation had pulled the City of New York out of yet another bankruptcy in 2075 by leasing Central Park for the next half a millennium. While they continued to allow the general public to roam its patrolled walkways during the day, the nightly rapes, muggings, and murders had ended abruptly at 12:01 a.m. on January 1, 2076, when Med-Tech’s Elite Security Force powered up the newly installed wireless fence at its boundaries and loosed several thousand GuardTech Robots within the park’s limits. Manufactured to look like Doberman pinschers and rottweilers, the robotic dogs ran on internal solar timers that followed the daylight hours from season to season. They were virtually indestructible and attacked anything that moved on two legs and weighed over thirty pounds—unless you wore a MedTech identification transmitter that was accepted by the program currently powering the internal computer in the Guard-Tech dogs… the key word being currently. Elite Security changed the program regularly, and MedTech employees were accustomed to reporting to their supervisors to pick up newly programmed transmitters at unpredictable times.
Tonight, Ahiro and his team were at once surrounded by a dozen GuardTechs drawn by their movement, red crystal eyes gleaming and metal mouths yawning wide… before they turned away and trotted off. Silent, the men crouched in the darkness and watched them go, and only the youngest showed his nervousness by fingering the transmitter Ahiro had given him earlier. Another few minutes and they continued on their way, sliding through the shadows like night mist until they reached the park’s center and the pride of MedTech—its home office building. The chromed steel and glass tower gleamed even in the midnight smog, stretching one hundred twenty-three stories into the sky to show the upper research laboratories eternally surrounded by a halo of electricity.
Ahiro did not need words to tell his ninjas what to do; handpicked, personally trained, the tiniest of nods said it all and was instantly obeyed. Entering the building was nothing, like passing through dry water for all the difficulty it gave them. Likewise were MedTech’s carefully placed security cameras useless; Ahiro knew the location of every one, the direction in which it would point at what time, which way to duck and how long to do it. So easy… but not a setup; Ahiro had a nose for those and tonight every one of his instincts was saying “GO!” Unlike the often dispassionate regime at Synsound, MedTech was a jealous employer and it guarded its employees like a mother lioness watching over her cubs. Someone was always unfortunate enough to draw holiday duty, but never would MedTech have sacrificed two of its night watchmen to the razor-edged swords of Ahiro and Yosako as it did tonight. The corporation’s choice would have been to substitute a battalion of heavily armed soldiers with instructions to shoot on sight to kill.
The descent was short and swift, through clean corridors that smelled of disinfectant and were lined floor to ceiling with easily sanitized stainless steel. Ahiro found the surroundings pleasing and infinitely more preferable than Synsound’s overused hallways. Down here it was clear that a limited number of people were granted access, whereas Synsound was overrun with people and dirt—performers, stagehands, marketing, sales—thousands of people went everywhere. Had his circumstances been different, Ahiro would have liked a position where he could work in an environment like this one. But life was as it was, and wanting what could never be was a waste of time.
As they moved on, effortlessly avoiding the cameras, overhead sprinklers began to regularly mark their passage. Shortly after the appearance of the sprinklers, flame nozzles began jutting ominously from the walls at random heights starting at floor level. Staggered every twelve feet on each side of the passageway were fireproof safety chambers protected by hardened steel doors and locking mechanisms that engaged automatically when the door was opened and shut a single time. After that, only a MedTech computer program would release the titanium tumblers and free the person who had shut him or herself inside.
Five levels underground, Ahiro and his men stopped in front of the final door. The massive piece of metal was three times wider than any of the escape hatches and weighed at least a ton, and this morning the card reader embedded in the wall next to it would have accepted the cardkeys of only a half-dozen people at MedTech. Tonight one of those six would be used to gain entry, and tomorrow its owner would discover in his pocket a useless plastic substitute.
Without a second thought, Ahiro slid the cardkey from the waistband of his black suit and slipped it into the slot. A breathless moment as they waited for the red warning light to come on and an alarm to go off; instead there was a hum that was felt more than heard and the green light on the opposite side of the mechanism blinked. They heard a dull clang as the massive internal bolts slid free of the door and retracted into the wall. Ahiro slipped the cardkey back into his inner pocket with deliberation. Like the doors to the chambers that lined the corridor, this one would also relock automatically; without the cardkey, they would be trapped inside the inner chamber. He gave a moment’s consideration to intentionally dropping it on the way out, then changed his mind. There was no sense in destroying that connection… yet.
When the door slid quietly to the side, the seven of them spun through without a sound, swords ready. Behind them, the laser sensors in the door waited for a beat of five, then triggered the auto-close. In the space of a heartbeat, they were cut off completely from the rest of the MedTech Building. From the world.
Knees bent, weapons raised, they crept forward. They were in another corridor, wider than the one outside and made of a series of huge pipes joined to each other, like the sewer mains that ran under the city. The surfaces here were strangely slippery, not steel like the outer passageway, but coated instead with some sort of beige industrial plastic. The rounded ceiling was higher and held a tangled mass of steel-encased tubes—water, electricity, coolant, perhaps flammable gas. Barely visible behind the tubing were heavily screened air ventilation grates, each no bigger than six inches square.
As the antechamber widened again—still with those same odd sections and alcoves—Ahiro saw three, then four titanium-barred enclosures branching off the main passage—feeders. Closed now, empty of the animals that were probably periodically loaded into them. Beyond that… nothing. No robotic watchmen, no androids, no security.
This is wrong, Ahiro thought, as they moved quickly toward another door at the far end. There should be guards, men with guns—
Ten feet behind him, Higuchi gave a strangled cry and Ahiro heard the man’s sword fall to the plasticized surface of the floor. He whirled and his breath caught in his throat. Higuchi had lost his balance, slipped in a puddle of something greasy; always the slowest of Ahiro’s ninjas, now he cowered, frozen, as something huge and multisegmented bent over him.
Defense meant something different in this lab.
Shades of black cut by pools of slime the color of translucent green leaves, the alien was over seven feet tall and impossibly fast—far too fast for Higuchi. For a moment that nearly cost him his life, Ahiro saw in his mind’s eye what Higuchi saw, heard what the already dead man heard—
A mouth full of teeth like white swords, and another within that one, snapping wetly as the creature’s thick, ceaseless saliva swirled in the air. The noise of the beast blotted out everything but the gnashing of its teeth as they sank greedily through Higuchi’s skull as though it were nothing, and Ahiro thought not of swords but of spears—long and deadly and dripping with the blood of multitudes on the music of its battle cry, the sound of huge and angry gods screaming out the symphony of their rage.
There were three aliens, and now only six men. They charged out of the alcoves where they’d been wrapped around reinforced water pipes like giant snakes. Ahiro had never fought an alien before—few civilians had— but he was a quick learner and amazingly swift with his sword. Not so for Yoshi, Ahiro’s second in command, and a detached part of Ahiro watched the battle as if he were outside himself and studying it for the future, then was surprised that his prized pupil would be so clumsy with his blade when the weapon was expected to be another appendage, a part of the warrior. But Yoshi was too slow and the alien was monstrously quick, its armored black claws slicing away the front of Yoshi’s nightsuit and taking half his chest with it, then finishing the job with those terrible, glistening teeth.
Now it was down to Ahiro and four men. Ahiro felt like he was circling an enormous praying mantis, and the feeling was intensified when Matsuo took the offensive with one of the creatures and struck—the tempered steel of his ancient sword, passed from generation to generation in his family and said to bring tremendous luck—slicing his foe from neck to hip in a single lethal cut. Matsuo paid dearly for his exuberance when the alien gave a death shriek and acid blood splashed from the gaping wound and bathed his face. His mask disappeared instantaneously… as did his lips, the skin on his face and neck, even the cartilage of his nose. He might have screamed, but no one would ever know; he had sucked in a mouthful of alien blood and burned away his tongue and vocal cords.
Four men to two aliens now, and the remaining ninjas had learned a valuable lesson. Swords flashing, they changed tactics and aimed for the joints of the legs and arms, crippling their enemies as blow after blow separated the gangly limbs and split the ridged black shells that cupped the creatures’ equivalent of elbows and knees. Even the tails whipping in the air fell victims to the merciless blades, their sharp-spaded ends twitching uselessly on the gore-splattered floor. It wasn’t long before Ahiro and his three remaining men stood over the spasming, maimed aliens, dismissing the claw-tipped fingers that clutched uselessly at the floor in agony. To Ahiro, these were nothing more than overgrown insects, not worth the measure of his time that it would take to put them out of their misery. The only thing that mattered was…
The nest.
It was beyond the doorway at the far end, and when Ahiro and his men stepped through it was like entering a place unlike anything he’d seen on this earth. As with the previous chamber, the ceiling was high and lined with industrial tubes and cables, the same ones that fed through the wall from the outer room. In here, however, they were no longer accessible, buried as they were under layer after layer of shimmering resin. Strands of it twisted and turned overhead and around the walls, forming into hundreds of knobs that looked more like human vertebrae than anything else. Miles of the stuff, encircling the room and looping back over itself to spill onto the floor until it bunched into little hills at irregular intervals. Atop each small hill, perched like an immense, obscenely bloated and elongated lump of flesh, was an unhatched alien egg.
Ahiro moved as rapidly as he dared. His men hung back, their wide, terrified eyes searching the shadows of the outer chamber for movement and flicking back to him and the half-dozen ovals of living death that faced them. Ahiro didn’t blame them; just the scent of a human within six feet of an alien’s egg was enough to make the knobby cross etched deep into its top split and fold back like the flowers of a poisonous flower. He chose as his target the closest one and sprinted over to it; on the way, he pulled a specially designed locking clamp from his belt. By the time he reached the egg, Ahiro had it unfolded and ready, and he jammed the four prongs of the clamp over the ‘X’ in the egg’s surface and pushed the white button on the device’s top. Spikes shot from each side of the four extensions and buried themselves on either side of each slit, digging deep and holding like prehensile teeth; ready to be born or not, the egg could not hatch until the proper code was punched into the clamp’s miniature keypad.
Ahiro nodded to his men, then gritted his teeth and slipped his arms around the egg’s slimy surface. A hard tug and the egg broke free of the resin with a sound like brittle plastic being torn; around Ahiro, a few of the eggs began to quiver, the smell of the nearby humans triggering their instincts. They had to leave now, before they were overrun by the scuttling, eight-legged creatures that looked vaguely like spiders but could catch a man in less time than it took to scream.
Another five seconds and they were out of the nest, stepping nimbly among the shattered limbs of the still living and hissing aliens and the bloodied, melting bodies of their comrades. Half of his men would never leave this room, but Ahiro did not stop to consider if the prize had been worth the price. Keene had told him that an egg must be obtained, and then mapped out the strategy by which Ahiro could do it; Keene was allowed to order Ahiro to do these things because Yoriku decreed that Synsound needed the alien egg and he himself wished that it be done.
The men who had died here today had died for a great cause. Ahiro would honor their memory, and he would forgive them the stupidity that had led to their wasteful demise, but only because they had died for Synsound, and in so doing, they had died for Yoriku.
And Ahiro would do anything for Yoriku.