Emergence (Fox Meridian Book 5) Read online

  Kabukichō was, if anything, even brighter than the area around it. The landing lights on the helipad atop Koma barely showed in the glare and Fox had no doubt that their pilot was employing virtual guidance systems to put them down in the right place. Still, once they were down, she only had the lights set around the pad to deal with, which was an improvement.

  ‘Kit, get me feeds from the internal security cameras,’ Fox said as she started for the rear door of the vertol. Aloud she said, ‘Okay, everyone knows the plan. Deploy to your assigned locations. Use the security system. Keep in contact. Go.’

  Eight men and women rushed out ahead of her, all of them armed with electrolaser carbines. They would deploy along the route from the helipad to the dressing rooms in pairs. Fox and the security team leaders had selected them from the whole team as the most self-reliant and experienced of the lot. She could trust these people to do their jobs, recognise threats, and adapt if the circumstances changed. Fox moved off to the shelter at the side of the pad and turned to watch their transport lift off again.

  Images from the building’s security cameras began to appear around Fox’s vision field. ‘Thanks, Kit,’ Fox said.

  ‘Always happy to do my best,’ Kit replied in an overly bright tone.

  Fox’s eyes narrowed. ‘Are you attempting to be all bright and sparkly so that I’ll stop the kawaii jokes?’

  Kit let out a high-pitched, squeaky giggle. ‘Oh, of course not! I am just so happy to be doing my job!’

  ‘I bet you get tired of it before I do.’ Something caught Fox’s attention in one of the camera feeds, and she was just reaching to pull that image forward when all of them went to snow. ‘Kit? What–’

  ‘I have lost all network connectivity,’ Kit replied quickly. The cute tone was gone.

  Fox reached for her pistol, dismissing the feeds with a thought as she turned for the door down into the building. She had a brief glimpse of three figures and then her nerves were on fire. She could not think, speak, or do anything other than fall. An electrolaser? The thought flicked through her head for an instant, but she was still too stunned to react. She heard Kit’s voice in her head, but the words were distant and indistinct. Something pressed down against her neck…

  ~~~

  The rear door of the vertol lowered to ground level as the engines wound down and two Palladium security personnel in combat gear moved down it, carbines at the ready.

  Helen heard ‘all clear’ over the radios and moved out herself, turning to look toward the shelter at one side as she stepped off the ramp. She frowned. ‘Fox said she’d be waiting for us, right?’

  ‘Yes,’ Yuriko replied. ‘She is not there?’

  ‘No… Must be inside and we need to get Miss Sakura inside anyway.’ Helen switched her comms over to the group channel. ‘Okay, move out. Usual protocol.’ Ringed by armed guards, Sakura and Iberson moved down the ramp and followed Helen toward the building’s rooftop entrance. Helen had her VA put out a ping for Fox’s position as she moved.

  ‘I am getting no response from either Fox-san or Kit,’ Yuriko said as they passed the first pair of guards waiting on the corridors.

  ‘No… Hold on.’ Helen put through a call to New York, waiting the few seconds it took to get a long-distance channel established.

  ‘Helen,’ Kit said, her 2D image smiling as it appeared. ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’

  ‘Have you heard from Fox or your copy over here?’

  ‘I synchronised yesterday evening your time. Fox has not needed to contact me here since she left for Japan. Is there a problem?’

  ‘Fox was supposed to be waiting for us when we arrived. It’s probably nothing. We’ll find her.’

  Concern showed on Kit’s face. ‘I will attempt to connect with my copy and determine their location. I assume you will conduct a visual search?’

  ‘When I’ve got manpower. We’re escorting Sakura into the venue now. I’ll get a few people looking once she’s on stage.’

  ‘Thank you. I will contact you if I find anything.’

  ‘She hasn’t called home,’ Helen said across her link to Yuriko. ‘We’ll conduct a search when we can. Right now she’d be telling us that the client is the priority.’

  ‘Of course,’ Yuriko replied.

  Still frowning, Helen walked on. See to the client, then see to her boss’s welfare. Why did she feel like her priorities should be the other way around right now?

  New York Metro.

  Kit was becoming concerned. She had spent ten minutes, real time, attempting to contact her copy in Japan or Fox, using every method she could immediately think of and several which were highly unlikely to produce any results. Nothing had produced results. She turned to an alternative method.

  ‘Kit?’ Vali said as soon as he had accepted her conferencing channel. ‘Why didn’t you just come over to the farm?’

  ‘I can’t spare the instance. I’ve got one copy… on a mission and another in Japan with Fox. It is that one with which I need your assistance.’

  ‘There’s a problem?’

  ‘I have no doubt you are monitoring the network in Tokyo.’

  Vali had the sense to look a little ashamed. ‘I… may be. I’ve not noticed anything out of the ordinary.’

  ‘No, but Fox is missing. I was wondering whether you could… Well, I don’t know what you could do which I have not thought of, but–’

  ‘I’ll contact you as soon as I find anything.’

  Kit gave him a relieved smile. ‘Thank you. I have attempted several contact methods and failed. I am becoming more than a little concerned.’

  ‘If they’re anywhere which is network accessible, I’ll find them, Kit. Count on it.’

  Kit nodded and broke the connection. She was counting on it.

  Tokyo.

  ‘No sign of her, Dillan-san.’ Asari was a capable man, hand-picked by Ryan Jarvis to lead the Tokyo security teams, and if he said they could not find Fox, he meant it. ‘Meridian-san arrived with the advance team. She stayed on the roof when they deployed. None of them saw her enter the building.’

  ‘Thanks, Asari,’ Helen said. ‘Yuriko?’

  ‘I’ve been over the camera feeds for the period ten minutes before the arrival of Fox-san’s vertol to fifteen minutes after,’ Yuriko replied immediately. ‘From that, it appears that she entered the building five minutes after her arrival. She enters the stairwell, and then… disappears. Camera coverage within the stairwell is not complete. There are blind spots.’

  ‘Yeah, I noticed them. Well, Fox noticed them first, but… Damn. We’ve done all we can for now. I assume the police won’t get involved in this so soon?’

  ‘Unlikely. I might be able to get my liaison to put a watch out for her.’

  ‘Do it. Try at least.’

  Yuriko snapped off a quick bow and turned to do just that. Helen watched her go and then looked back to the displays in the network room. Finding Fox was going to have to wait. They had been lucky so far: Minotaur had done nothing to attempt another hack of the cambots or anything else. That was odd enough in itself, but all they could really do was watch and wait.

  Chiba City.

  On the top floor of a largely disused office block in Chiba, a man named Maxwell Snowbull watched his multitude of monitors, waiting for the time to act.

  He lived in light. The room had no windows, none at all. The entire room sat within a cage which blocked radio from coming in or out. All the windows were bricked up. But there was light, a lot of it. Huge overhead lights lit up every corner of the rooms Snowbull occupied. He could not stand darkness.

  One of his monitors showed the concert, a rather inferior view of it through the eyes of one of the audience. Snowbull had not even hacked his way into that feed: it had been arranged so that he could coordinate things prior to the event he had planned for tonight. Now he watched, and waited, and prepared the final stages.

  It had taken him some time to set everything up, but his research into Nishi
Sakura’s early life had been exhaustive, and that had allowed him to hatch his current plan to obtain her undivided attention. The Fukui-kai’s grudge with her had waned somewhat over the years, but they still felt she deserved some punishment for her ‘betrayal.’ Had they not provided her with the money for her earliest releases? Well, yes, but she had paid back every yen, with interest. Of course, they felt she owed more: that was the nature of such men.

  When Snowbull had gone to them with a plan to get their revenge upon the singer, they had jumped at it. With his assistance, they would capture Sakura, and his stipulation that they should deliver her to him was agreed to because they felt he would provide adequate punishment, and because they needed something in return. It had been a trivial hack, made easier by their assistance. They needed something to allow them to fulfil another contract and Snowbull had been amused by the irony of it.

  On screen, the concert was winding to a close. Snowbull checked his schedule, the running list for the show, and smiled. ‘You’re going to be singing for me soon, Nishi,’ he said to the screen, and then he reached for a virtual keyboard.

  Tokyo.

  Helen, Yuriko, and Iberson were waiting at the side of the stage as Sakura made her exit after her encore number. She had closed with one of her songs from Songs on the Wind and Helen doubted anyone had been surprised, since it was missing from the main running schedule and ‘Fukushima Winter’ was one of the most popular tracks on the album. It had certainly gone down well with the audience. If Sakura had been nervous about her reception, she need not have worried.

  ‘They love you,’ Iberson said as Sakura stepped out of sight of the cheering crowd.

  ‘They certainly seem to,’ Sakura agreed. She looked drained, as though she had put everything into her performance and now it was hitting her. ‘I need to get out of here before someone invites me to a party or something.’

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Helen said. ‘The vertol’s waiting. We’ll have you back at the arcology in thirty minutes.’

  ‘Still no sign of Fox?’

  Helen kept her face straight, forcing back the frown. ‘No, but don’t worry about that right now. Let’s get you up to the roof.’

  As she moved out to meet the escort team, Helen pulled up the camera feeds from their route upstairs. Everything looked good. The rooftop cameras were showing pretty much what she expected. She could see the vertol, waiting with its ramp open, and two men standing at the foot of it. Everything seemed to be going to plan. Well, aside from the fact that Fox was not going to be on the vertol when they left.

  They were going to use the stairwell to go up. There was a passenger elevator, but it was not large enough for the whole team and Sakura had agreed that walking up four flights of stairs was not going to kill her, even in the crazy platform pumps she was wearing. Helen stopped when she walked through the door and onto the landing. There had been a sound, something below… She heard nothing else and waved everyone else up, bringing up the rear. A look over the rail revealed nothing.

  ‘Hearing things,’ she muttered to herself. She started for the next landing and was just setting foot on it when the camera feeds she was watching went to snow. ‘Hold!’ she snapped out and everyone come to an immediate stop. She looked down again and then pointed to the two nearest security men. ‘You two, watch the stairs below us.’

  Then the feeds resumed. Helen was about to figure it was some sort of glitch when she noticed something on the rooftop cameras and pulled that display forward. The two guards at the tail of the vertol were now sprawled on the ground, and the other rooftop cameras were showing other men, not Palladium men, waiting around the door to the heliport.

  ‘Shit! Asari, are you seeing the feeds from the roof?’

  ‘I see them,’ Asari replied. ‘Those men were reporting in five minutes ago.’

  ‘There’s a problem?’ Iberson asked.

  Helen flicked up the feeds from the stairwell below them. There was a squad of armed men moving up from below. They were surrounded. ‘Yeah,’ Helen said, ‘there’s a problem.’

  Chiba City.

  Snowbull typed frantically at his keyboards, but there seemed to be nothing he could do to get his feeds back. Something had cut him off from the network at Koma, suddenly and without any warning. He had nothing from the security cameras, and he had no idea whether his bypasses were still in place. And the yakuza were going to be pissed!

  ‘What the fuck is–’

  He cut himself off as, one by one, his displays began cutting out. Real and virtual, they all went to snow and then vanished or went to black. This was impossible. This was–

  ‘Someone’s hacking me?’ His keyboards were unresponsive, dead. None of his controls worked. ‘Time to leave.’

  ‘I believe you’ll find that quite difficult.’ There was one display left active, one of his real monitors, and it now showed a face: young, male, quite distinctive, though Snowbull could not recall ever seeing it before. Whoever he was, he was quite handsome in an angular sort of way, blue eyes that were very bright but now held a hint of ice, blonde hair pulled back into a ponytail, wisps hanging around his face. ‘I’ve been looking for you for a while, Minotaur, or should I call you Max Snowbull?’

  ‘Who the Hell are you? Do you have any idea who you’re messing with?’

  ‘I know exactly who I’m messing with, Max. You’re the man who tried to hack a friend of mine. For that alone, I should arrange for your timely demise, but she wouldn’t approve and you deserve far worse for what you did to Luna City.’

  ‘If people can’t be bothered to update their equipment, I can’t be held responsible for–’

  ‘I am holding you responsible, Max. And I’m quite sure the courts will too. You’ll love Cold Harbour. I’m placing you under house arrest now, and giving you a taste of what you can expect.’

  ‘What?’ Fear began to override anger in Snowbull’s mind. What was the man on the screen talking about?

  ‘You rely far too much on automation. Goodbye, Max. You’ll never see me again.’

  And then, all the lights went out.

  Tokyo.

  ‘We’re moving,’ Helen said. ‘Back down to the landing and in. Go!’

  The two men taking rear guard became the point men and rushed down the steps. ‘We’ve got people coming up,’ one of them said.

  ‘Yeah. You got smoke grenades?’

  ‘On it.’

  Helen turned, waving Yuriko, Sakura, and Iberson in through the door. Smoke began to rise from the landing below. Helen switched to internal comms. ‘We’re heading across to the opposite stairwell. The roof’s a no-go and we’re blocked from straight down, so we’ll have to go across. Asari, contact the van and have it meet us.’

  ‘Understood,’ Asari replied. ‘I want two on point, the rest bring up the rear. If it’s armed, shoot it.’

  Helen moved through, pulling Sakura to the side to allow two of the security team to get ahead. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t understand what’s happening,’ Sakura replied.

  ‘It is the Fukui-kai,’ Yuriko said. ‘I see Toyotomi among them.’

  ‘This is crazy,’ Iberson said. ‘What the Hell do they hope to achieve by this?’

  ‘Show of dominance, maybe,’ Helen replied. ‘Though I think this is something to do with Minotaur. Someone hacked the security cameras. Start moving, we need to take this as fast as we can.’

  Sakura danced in six-inch heels, but she was, apparently, not inclined to run in them. She paused long enough to step out of them, picking them up before she started at a fast walk after the point team. Iberson blinked and then stepped out of her own shoes.

  ‘I’m going to need a foot massage after this,’ Iberson grumbled, but she too set off at a rapid pace.

  Behind them, a loud crack marked the firing of an electrolaser. ‘Faster,’ Helen ordered.

  People cleared from the path ahead of them as the two men with carbines pushed forward, not quite running
but moving as fast as a walk would carry them. The path was not straight, which worked for them: it meant the yakuza following rarely got a straight shot. Smoke grenades were dropped when it seemed likely that they might get a clean line of sight and the air began to fill with white mist.

  ‘They have electrolasers,’ Yuriko commented over the radio. ‘They seem determined to capture rather than kill.’

  ‘Lucky us,’ Helen replied. ‘Why do I suspect that might be worse than being shot with a bullet?’

  ‘For you, I believe the shock would be better. For me and Sakura-san, you might well be right.’

  ‘I thought they had some sort of arrangement with you.’

  ‘Under the circumstances, I believe they would make an exception. And Toyotomi is not noted for his tolerant nature.’

  It took ten minutes to reach the stairs at the other side of the building. Smoke grenades were dropped at the top, but there was no sign of anyone below.

  ‘They must’ve figured out we had ground transport,’ Asari said as they started down. ‘There’s a squad attempting to surround the van.’

  ‘They’re authorised to fire,’ Helen said.

  ‘They’re suppressing. So far they’ve got the attackers pinned down. It may get difficult when we arrive.’

  ‘Tell them to get ready to deploy smoke.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘They are not far behind us,’ Yuriko said. ‘How far is it from the stairs to the van?’

  ‘Ten metres,’ Asari replied. ‘With the smoke, it should not be a problem.’ There was a pause and then, ‘Police are surrounding the building.’

  ‘I will make contact.’

  The noise at the bottom of the stairs was loud and indicative of the use of firearms rather than electrolasers. Two more smoke grenades were dropped in the stairwell and Helen said, ‘Have them launch grenades out there.’

  ‘Deploying,’ Asari replied. ‘Give it a couple of seconds.’

  And that was when Toyotomi came out of the smoke on the stairs. He was holding a short sword, a wakizashi, and there was a wild gleam in his eyes. Yuriko was moving before anyone else was really aware of the attack; stepping in close as Toyotomi swung his blade at her, she pushed his arm aside and then wrapped her own arm around his, wrenching upward. A grim smile set over Yuriko’s face as she saw Toyotomi grit his teeth in pain.