Best Of The Best
E.A. Tokyo, Upper Levels, 2131
“Mistress?” Came a soft voice from nearby.
The woman the servant had addressed blinked and focused, brought out of her meditation. “Hai?” she said, without turning around. She remained kneeling on a small foam pad in the center of her meditation room, which was large and mostly bare, except for a small bubbling water feature with a pond full of fish at one end, and a small sand garden at the other. Otherwise it was all just bare wood, done in the style of an old Edo period temple, or some modern approximation thereto. She was wrapped in a loose fitting black silk robe and sash, and had her long hair cascading down her back in a loose ponytail, hair which didn’t quite cover some of her cyber jacks in the base of of her skull.
The maid bowed and spoke towards the floor. “There is a guest to see you, Mistress.”
The mistress of the house remained motionless in her meditation pose but replied. “Very well. Send them in.”
The maid bowed again and stepped out. A few moments later, the paper door opposite slid open and a man in an extremely fine suit stepped in. The woman’s purple artificial eyes looked him over quickly, taking note of his caucasian features, the extremely fine material of his clothes, and the slight bulge of a concealed pistol rather cleverly placed precisely up his sleeve so that a pat down would never find it but could be close to hand in an instant.
He stood in the doorway and hesitated, walking in once the maid had bowed and gestured him inside. He glanced at the paper door and then walked in towards the woman, noticing a little cushion a few feet away from her and stood before it, looking down at her. “Are you madam Kanpeki?” He asked directly.
She gazed at the spot on his wrist with the concealed gun and said nothing. He followed her gaze and then cracked a small grin. “Oh, that. I’m not here on an assassination attempt. It’s just kind of part of the dress code in a job like mine. Here.” He slid it out, and then carefully using his left hand and without touching the grip itself popped out the magazine onto the floor and then dropped the gun itself as well, gesturing with open palms. “Better?” he asked.
The woman, more of a girl really, gazed at the ornate pistol with her violet eyes, which like his suit was black with silver filigree, and finally cracked a small smile herself. Finally she spoke. “Better. Yes, I am she.”
The man hesitated for a moment as though trying to remember something and then knelt on the pillow and bowed to touch his forehead to the floor in front of her. “Kanpeki-sama.” He said, and then straightened up. “I come as a messenger.”
The young woman known as Kanpeki shifted her weight slightly into a more comfortable position. “From a Western Union corporation, no doubt.” She said, looking at his caucasian face and western style suit. “Given your excellent grasp of asian etiquette.”
He grinned, despite the mild insult. “Your prowess at deduction are understated, my lady. That was amazing. How could you tell?” He quipped back.
She laughed, a sweet, cute laugh very unlike her utterly cool exterior of moments before. She enjoyed someone who could verbally spar and was unafraid of her, and this man seemed to fit the bill for the time being. “Very well. You have my attention for the moment. What is it?”
“Well, we have a contract for you, of course.” He said simply, and did the typical western thing of shifting to sitting cross legged on the pad instead, his knees not used to the idea of kneeling like that for more than a few moments. He opened his hand, and a holographic screen was projected into the air between them. “There is some data we are quite anxious to get our hands on before our friendly competitor here in Tokyo uses it in their new product.” He said, and the screen showed her a corporate factory structure. “We would like you to retrieve it. Immediately, if possible.”
Kanpeki tilted her head slightly. “I’m curious. How did you manage to actually find me? Even the best Special Agents and enemy assassins have never actually found my home without my telling them where to find me. How did you manage that trick?” She asked, dodging his statement for the moment.
The man grinned, and put on a salesman’s voice. “We at Atlas corporation pride ourselves on recruiting the very best of the best in computer science from all worlds to provide the ultimate in customer technical satisfaction.”
Kanpeki snorted. “So, you have the best hackers in the business. Fine. I will have to upgrade my security yet again it seems. Very well. But if you have such good hackers, why don’t they steal it over the net? Surely you have neural net hackers, ah, brainers, I believe the west calls them?”
The man looked smug. “Legions of them, madam. And we’ve been trying. Our friendly rivals have developed some sort of new firewalls that even we cannot breach. So we need you to go in and actually steal the hard drive itself.” She did not react, merely looked at the floorplan layout his holographic hand screen was now displaying. “And we hear you’re the best of the best. Best of the best has always been an Atlas corporate tradition.”
She smiled at the compliment. “I am, yes.” She said without a trace of modesty, for it was certainly true. She frowned. “You need this immediately?”
“As my grandfather would say, ‘I need this yesterday,’ yes.”
“Hmm.” She mused, considering the task. “Payment?” She asked flatly.
“We are willing to pay three billion WU dollars, plus expenses up to three-point-five.” He said just as flatly, watching her face.
Kanpeki tried to remain stoic but couldn’t help her eyes widening in surprise. “Well. You are aware at least my services do not come cheap, but you… REALLY want that data, don’t you?”
The man smiled faintly. “We would be very grateful to receive the data before our lovely friends over here are able to implement it, yes. We estimate this price point for you to be a fair evaluation of the difficulty of the task, our projected profits from our possession of the data, and added incentive to do so in a timely manner, as the offer expires in eight hours.”
Kanpeki studied the images before her for a moment, and then nodded. “Very well. Consider it done.”
The man stood up and she rose as well, and they shook hands. “Excellent. I shall await your report of success with happy anticipation. Incidentally, do you have a suggestion for how to kill the time here in Tokyo while I wait for you?”
Kanpeki opened her mouth to give him a typical tourist destination, and then burst out laughing. He arched an eyebrow at her and said nothing. She calmed herself and smiled at him. “Why don’t you take Suzuka out for a date? My maid. She has been cooped up in here for too long anyway, and I’m sure she’d love it. Damn girl needs to cheer up and have some fun once in awhile.” Behind her, the man could see the maid kneeling in the corner blush and look at the floor.
The man smirked and bowed slightly. “I’d be honored to show her a good time.” he said, looking Suzuka up and down.
Kanpeki turned to look at the maid, now very red in the face, and snorted. “I bet you would. Well, you two have fun, it seems I have three billion dollars of work to do. See yourselves out.”
Suzuka quickly rose and ushered the man out, her face still quite red, but flashed her mistress and coy little grin of thanks as she went past. Kanpeki smiled, and then hurried off to get ready.
A short while later Kanpeki was standing on on the street outside the rather mundane looking factory building, a great steel and concrete monster that squatted over a train yard and various heavy industrial machinery. She looked quite normal, her hair pulled back into a ponytail and a baggy jogging outfit covering herself. To any onlooker, she was just one of any number of late night exercise enthusiasts. She had already gone over her route and plan a thousand times in her head, and steeled herself for the mission to come. She set her face and body language to one of mildly tired ignorant commoner, and jogged up to the front door where two people stood outside. “Sumimasen!” She called out, and they turned to look at her with disinterest.
“Hai?” One of them, the male of the two, said, taking a long draw on an electronic cigarette and blowing the vapor out in a stream.
She gave them a sheepish smile. “Gomen. But I’m lost. I saw a sign a few blocks back saying this is 37th street, but I’m looking for 39th. You know, the train station? Do I go north, or south?” She asked breathily, exaggerating her heaving chest from running. She smirked internally when she saw the man’s eyes glance down at her chest for just a fraction of a second. Men. She also noticed the girl suspiciously and subtly adjust her grip on her rifle.
The man gave her an odd look for a moment but then gave a tight-lipped polite smile. “You must go south.” He said in a deadpan voice, pointing in the direction.
Kanpeki slid next to him as though to look along his arm at what he might be pointing to. “South? Really? You sure?” Inside her own head, she had brain hacked the camera to loop the two of them talking for a few minutes. Hooray for cyber brains, she thought.
“Yes, I’m–HEY!” he said as she slid her hands along his body and with practiced ease snapped the shoulder sling clasps of his gun. He grabbed for it as it began to fall, but she slapped it away and then snapped her hand back to slam into his neck in one blur of movement, crushing his throat. Hidden blades surgically implanted in all her fingertips slid out and sliced open his neck for good measure as he went down.
The female guard was quick to react, raising her rifle and taking aim, but Kanpeki was faster. She ducked low, slid forward and then shot up, raking her clawed hands along the arm of the woman and even slicing through her body armor. She shrieked, but was silenced almost instantly by a quick finger strike jab to the neck which went so far in as to sever her brain stem.
In an instant, both guards lay dead. Internally, Kanpeki checked that the camera loop was still going, and that no one had reacted to the noise. All good. She then looked around to see if there was anyone else within eyesight, her modified eyes looking for any heat signatures or any other signs of life. She was alone. She then took a moment to strip off the jogging outfit, revealing her specially made armor beneath. She had bought an old Necral assassin suit off the black market. Old because even with her vast wealth and connections, the incredibly paranoid aliens never let any outsiders have any of their modern technology unless they already had something vastly better. Still, this was the type of outfit they had used to win their war of revolution against occupation, meaning though it may be more than a century old, it clearly worked. It was made of hundreds of interlacing plates that could withstand most kinds of modest damage, be they bullets, fire, blades, you name it. They also had an amazing coating apparently based on on an animal from that world which had ink sacks all over its body which opened and closed like pixels on a screen, to make her fairly obfuscated, just a weird smear in the vision. In the dark, she would be quite invisible. She had also collected a number of weapons from all over the Terran worlds and other alien worlds, not being particularly xenophobic and always open to a new clever idea, wherever it came from. And edge is an edge, as the saying goes, and she certainly had quite a few, not just the artificial claws in her hands. She checked her gear, and then stood in the shadows of the doorway, looking through the walls with her augmented eyes and internally with her cyber mind at the same time. She saw three more people inside, two guards and some sort of desk clerk. then she looked at other floors, considering the multiple routes she had designed along the way here. She paused to consider her options for a moment, and then smirked, and pulled the face plate down over her head. Time to go.
The clerk hadn’t been working here long, and even in that short time he had become very uncomfortable. So many guards, so many security checkpoints… somehow having them all made him feel less safe, not more so. As though an attack was imminent at any moment. This was a thought he frequently had, the thought left his head as quickly as parts of his brain left it as well as the bullet ripped through the back of his skull.
The two guards bolted to their feet as they saw blood and gore cake the inside glass of the clerk’s station, trying to see through the splatter at what had happened. One reached for his headset to call in for support when a sword suddenly appeared as though from thin air and sliced his hand and head off in one chop. the other guard stared, open mouthed, then then fell with a gurgle as knives were thrown into his forehead and open mouth with incredible precision. The visual smear he could barely see as he fell to the floor dying left bloody footprints for a moment. then a cloth appeared from nowhere, and wiped off the blood on the bottom of the blur, and crept on silently.
Kanpeki waited in an alcove, scanning ahead with her eyes and cyberbrain again. The somewhat direct route was actually working, to her mild surprise. She had considered using the ducts or some other such nonsense, but knew from a previous only barely successful mission that they were either incredibly uncomfortable, too small, or made far too much of a racket to be of any real use. she saw four guards this time, patrolling back and forth up and down the hall. She considered her options rapidly, trying to keep her cool while they drew nearer. She may be nearly invisible, but she could still be seen by a sharp eye, especially an augmented one, and her own eyes showed these guards were much tougher, with heavier armor and some cyberaugs in their muscles and heads. She made up her mind, and ducked out from cover for an instant to place two tiny devices on the wall at about head height on either side of the doorway and then ducked back into cover behind the wall.
She waited, holding her breath to be as silent as possible and counted, listening to their footsteps. one… two… three… four… and then there was a small flash of light and a quite horrible smell of cooked meat, and she heard bodies fall. The devices had triggered an intense laser burst when tripped, and it sounded like it had done the trick. She ducked out from behind her cover and then fell immediately back as she got a shotgun blast to her chest. Gasping she looked out at the hallway. Her lasers had gotten three of the guards, but one merely had a burn on the side of his helmet. He leveled the weapon at her again, and she could see him squinting to make out her blurred form on the floor. Her armor had stopped the blast from killing her, but it wasn’t invincible. A couple more to the same spot and it would surely break, and then soft flesh wasn’t much defense against a shotgun blast. She thought fast, and then decided the boom of the shotgun meant the purely stealth part of this mission was over. she drew two flechette pistols and opened up on the guard, pumping rounds into him until he finally fell. He got off two more blasts before he went down, but luckily both missed, though just barely. She glanced sideways at the blown apart floor next to her head, not sure if her helmet could have withstood that. Guess that’s why they all said she was lucky.
She straightened up and drew her short sword into her right hand, putting one gun back and reloading the other, placing it in her left. The time for subtlety had clearly passed.
She ran down the halls now, slicing and shooting at anyone who got in her way. Technicians, guards, engineers, all fell to her onslaught. She heard the alarm blaring. She had to hurry.
Checking the map in her head, she found the right door and placed shape charges on it. running a few paces back and hiding behind a vending machine, stumbling slightly over a body of one of the people she had killed. She glanced around, seeing the white plastic boring hall now full of bodies and stained with blood and felt quite pleased with herself, but this was no time to gloat.
She covered her ears and hit the detonator. The big steel door caved at just the right points, swinging open. She ducked inside, and stared for a moment at the vast array of servers. The room was vast, thousands and thousands of server towers in rows upon rows, and she was glad she knew exactly which server to grab and didn’t have to go hunting for hours. she ran along the aisles until she came to the one she had been paid to grab. pulling a wire out from under her helmet that was plugged into her brain and plugged it into the hard drive, double checking it was the right one. Satisfied, she simply wrenched it out and put it in an inner pocket.
She ran out into the hall, and then ran back inside as a hail of gunfire met her appearance. A woman screamed out to her “DROP YOUR WEAPONS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR HANDS UP!”
Kanpeki snorted, and shouted back from behind the cover of the steel door. “WHY, SO YOU CAN SHOOT ME WITHOUT ME SHOOTING BACK?”
“YES. HURRY UP.” The woman shouted back, and Kanpeki heard a smattering of laughter from the mercenaries down the hall.
Shit. She considered her options, looking again at the floor plan in her head. Internal cameras told her there was a squad of twelve heavily armed and armored mercenaries down the hall, including that commander woman. She got an idea. “WELL, COME AND GET ME THEN.” She shouted, and ran deeper into the server room.
She heard them storm in after her, and one of them set off the tripwire laser she had placed. There was a flash of light and hiss of burnt meat as before, and she grinned. Okay, one down, eleven to go. As she ran along the aisles, she ripped out other servers, hoping to confuse them as to her real target.
“I’VE GOT EYES!” One of the mercs shouted, and Kanpeki ducked as a burst of bullets narrowly missed her head.
“IDIOT!” Screamed the commanding officer furiously, and there was a bang and she heard a body crumple. She must have killed her own soldier. “NOBODY DAMAGE THE FUCKING SERVERS!” She screamed at them. There was a pause as Kanpeki continued to run as hard as she could, snatching the occasional server. “TARGET IS HEADED FOR THE BACK. GO AROUND. MOVE!”
Kanpeki ran as hard as she could down the halls, slicing a few surprised late night workers in half as she went and shooting another in her quite surprised face. She then started tossing servers out of windows into bushes below and into trash cans and similar diversions, hoping their concern for their precious data would slow their chase.
Suddenly she was slammed into a wall, not having seen the merc bearing down on her. It cracked as the weight of the two armored people slammed into it, and a massive enhanced fist slammed into the side of her head, twisting her neck painfully and actually cracking the helmet. The mechanical fist scrambled at her head and managed to rip off her mask, and she looked up into the concealed face of her assailant as she struggled to get free. Double shit, now they’ve seen my face. “Positive ID!” The voice shouted, garbled by electronics. “Kanpeki is here! Kanpeki is-ARGH!” the voice screamed as kanpeki struggled to get a Telha made dagger in between the plates and slice into her enemy’s torso, ripping it wide open along the gut. Kanpeki managed to slide sideways before the heavy weight of the power armored corpse crushed her.
She panted heavily, and then grunted and continued running, knowing she wasn’t out of this yet. Okay, three down though, that’s good. She heard pounding footsteps coming nearby and quickly brain-hacked the door controls to slam shut on them, her violet eyes staring out into space as she worked furiously on the net. She heard muffled swearing and commands from the other side and grinned, but knew she had to keep running. She ran down several flights of stairs into the bowels of the building, which was dimly lit concrete and quite shabby looking compared to the pristine corporate white of above. This was actually a train station meant for workers to arrive from the city nearby easily, but was fairly deserted at the moment. There was one man in a cheap suit sitting on a bench idly waiting for the train to arrive, who took one look at her blood soaked armor and sword and then looked down at his book and said loudly. “I SAW NOTHING. I WAS READING MY BOOK AND DIDN’T SEE A THING.”
Kanpeki snorted. “Good choice.”
She heard the pounding footsteps above her storming down the stairs and knew it was time to act. She took a running leap and cleared the train tracks, and stood smugly on the other side, holding her Telha knife at the ready in one hand and the server in the other, waiting.
The mercenaries poured out onto the train platform and the business man stayed fixed to his book, sweat beading on his face. The mercs slowed when they saw her standing waiting for them. They halted, and several raised their weapons.
Kanpeki raised the drive up so they could definitely see. “Shoot me, you destroy the drive. So come on.” She flicked her knife so some of the blood slid off it to splatter on the floor. “Come and get it.”
The mercenaries looked around at each other, and then drew their own melee weapons. Internally, Kanpeki gulped, hoping this would work.
They charged.
And then they exploded in a red mist of gore and bits of armor as the maglev train zoomed through the tunnel at nearly the speed of sound. her ponytail whipped in the wind of the passing train and she burst out laughing. She couldn’t believe they fell for that. “I can’t believe that actually worked!” She laughed even harder as she walked up the stairs on the other side of the platform, satisfied she had gotten away with it all now. “Rest down. I win.”
“Do you?” Asked a woman’s voice, and she glanced up to see the commander woman she had heard yelling in the hall a few minutes before. To her surprise, she was an alien, a Telha, her snow white skin and hair splattered with red human blood on one side of her face. Her overlarge silvery eyes were narrowed with hate and triumph as she pointed a huge gun right at her head, only a few feet away. The muzzle was about the size of Kanpeki’s fist, and she crossed her eyes to stare at it. The Telha woman commander looked her up and down, and an eyebrow arched slightly in surprise. “You’re Terran, just like they say. But I recognize Necral Stalker armor, and I see one of my own people’s knives in your hand. Quite the eclectic sort, aren’t you?”
Kanpeki shrugged, trying to think of a way out of this but not really seeing any options at the moment, so decided to keep her talking until she thought of something. “Yeah, I have varied tastes. Go with the best, I always say. Which usually means me, and I find the best to be the best.”
The alien woman snorted. “I guess we have that much in common, theif. Though ironically, I rather like your Terran heavy power armor, actually. Can’t move as nimbly as the armor I was raised in, sure, but it sure can take a beating. Very clever.”
“Thank you?” Kanpeki said, unsure what else she could have said to that.
“You’ve got one chance. Give me the drive. Now.”
“Um… no?” Kanpeki said, and subtly shifted her weight to leap into action once she saw an opening. She didn’t get the chance.
“Fine.” The alien woman said, and pulled the trigger. the massive two inch bore shotgun blew Kanpeki’s head apart, and her body crumpled, rolling and thumping down the stairs. The commander watched the decapitated corpse tumble down and then strode down to it, shouldering her cannon.
She picked up the drive and examined it for damage. Then she peered at the corpse. She wasn’t exactly an expert on Terrans, and she knew there were several different kinds, but was pretty certain human blood was red…. so… what the hell?
“Base,” She said into her headset. “I had to kill the target, so we only get half the bounty. …Yes, I know. But she killed everyone else in here, it was a fucking massacre. I did what I had to. Fine.” She paused, and looked at the neck stump of the corpse again. “A question though… Is Kanpeki an android? …Just answer the question.” She waited for a response while base checked their records. “…No. She’s human. Flesh and blood. You’re sure. …FUCK!” She kicked the android corpse, and then checked the serial number on the server. It was the wrong one. “FUCK!”
A little distance away, outside the building, a cute young woman in a jogging outfit knelt down to tie her shoes next to a bush and surreptitiously slipped a drive into her pocket, and then winced briefly and started to jog away. A few moments later she howled with laughter. A careful observer would have seen her bobbing ponytail revealing the cyberjack in the base of her skull lit up with activity.
Back in her penthouse, Kanpeki glanced around, surprised to not see her maid Suzuka greeting her at the door as usual. She checked her cameras in her head and then chuckled to herself, and went to Suzuka’s room.
She knocked politely and the man who had given her the job called out, “Come on in!”
She slid the door open and smirked at the pair of them. Both were naked and lying on Suzuka’s bed, and Suzuka was quite ornately tied up and kneeling between his legs on the bed. she looked up from her task and smiled at Kanpeki. “Sorry, mistress, I would have come to the door but I’m a bit tied up at the moment, har har.” She said with a broad grin.
Kanpeki and the man both chuckled, and Kanpeki pulled up a chair as she handed the drive to the man who took it as Suzuka got back to work. “There you go.” She said simply.
The man studied it and then pulled a cable from the back of his head to jack into the server and check it. After a moment a huge smile crossed his face. “You really are the best of the best, aren’t you?” He asked rhetorically.
“So they keep telling me.” She said with a grin.
“You’ve certainly earned your rather enormous fee, madam. Were there any expenses?” He asked, petting Suzuka on the head idly as he gazed at the server.
“Well, for them I’m sure they’ll have to hire quite a lot of janitors, I made a bit of a mess. But for you, unfortunately yes. I lost some rather valuable property. However, Only about forty million’s worth, all told. And all replaceable. In fact, I should go place an order for those items right now. Always like to be at peak efficiency, I’m sure you can appreciate that.”
“Oh, I certainly can.” He said with a smile, still gazing at the server.
Kanpeki smiled at him. “And thank you for showing Suzuka a good time. She gets very… restless, cooped up in here.”
The man chuckled. “It was my pleasure.” Suzuka mumbled something that sounded like thanks as well. “I look forward to working with both of you again soon.”
“As do I, Mr… Come to think of it, I never caught your name.”
“Smith. John Smith, of course.” The man said, with a twinkle in his eye.
She looked at him for a moment and then something jogged her memory. “Ah. That is of course, your real name, isn’t it.” She said sarcastically.
“Of course it is! Just as your name is genuinely Kanpeki. And hers Suzuka. Who could ever doubt that?” He said, a coy grin on his face.
Kanpeki grinned back. “Well. You two have fun, you’re welcome to stay for a few days if you wish. I’m sure Suzuka wouldn’t object, and the dusting and so on can probably stand to wait for a few days. Enjoy your stay, Mr. Smith.”
“I’ll do that, thank you. And thank you.” he waved the server in his hand. “You’ll certainly be hearing from us again. Excellent work.”
“Best of the best, Mr. Smith. Like you said. Best of the best. You and I both only get the best of the best.” She winked at Suzuka and then went off to take a shower, wondering what she could do with her three billion dollar cut of this mission. Plans already whizzing through her head as she walked away. So many possibilities…
