Ghost in the Shell Page 15

  She took a moment, then entered what was left of the pagoda. Around her were what remained of the runaways’ squat. Plant life had sprung up from the ashes, spreading green tendrils through the blackened remnants of the wooden-slat walls. The fire had spared a mosaic, some keys that had been made into a display and some handprints in the plaster along one wall. The Major reached out her own hand to stroke the prints, all that was left of the young people who had banded together and made a home here.

  An electronic voice with a buzzing echo spoke up behind her. “It is real,” Kuze said. He entered the pagoda and stood behind the Major. He sounded more than a little awed. “This place.”

  “I remember what they did to us,” the Major told him. “Cutter and his men. This is where they took us from.” She walked over to a niche and gestured at the ground where their bedrolls had been. “We used to sleep right here. We were like a family. All of us runaways. We had nothing… except each other. They took that from us.” Her voice was soft and bitter.

  She saw some graffiti carved into the niche, names of some of those who’d stayed here: Minori, Hideo, Motoko, Miya, Reika. And now she knew who Kuze was. “Your name was Hideo.”

  Kuze looked up, and spoke the Major’s real name. “Motoko.”

  She couldn’t speak. For the second time that day, tears welled in her eyes.

  “That was your name,” Kuze said tenderly. He approached her, and said her name again. “Motoko.”

  They gazed at each other, memories overlapping who they were now. The Major wondered who they would be if they had been allowed to live their lives together uninterrupted. Hideo had wanted to be an artist, Motoko had aspired to be a poet, both bringing beauty to the world. Instead, they had been transformed. Vengeance, death, destruction. This was the art they made now.

  “Come with me… into my network,” Kuze urged. The Major looked at him, not sure what he meant. “We will evolve beyond them. And together we can avenge what they have done to us.” His electronic voice buzzed. “Come… with me.” He was proposing that they exist together in a purely cyber world, from where they could strike out at humanity.

  Before the Major could answer, a mortar blast hit the pagoda, hurling both the Major and Kuze out into the plaza. She hit hard and stayed down, while he bounced, sustaining greater injuries on his second landing.

  In the Zen garden, Cutter wielded a virtual remote control, directing the real arsenal he had in place in the lawless zone. He watched the spider tank’s slow and steady advance. So much raw power, and it responded from so far away to his every gesture. This, truly, was the pinnacle of human achievement.

  “I’ll take control from here,” he told his soldiers over the comm. The intricate hologram of the spider tank glowed red, at odds with the peace of the garden.

  “Weapons system manual command,” the female operative’s voice confirmed. “Spider tank now active.”

  The Major lay on her front. Parts of her artificial skin had been obliterated in the blast, leaving her inner workings open to the night air. A tremor went through the road, echoing up through her boots, followed by another and another. Turning toward the source, she looked up and saw something that seemed to have crawled out of a nightmare, a gigantic tank that scrabbled and stomped forward on six huge metal segmented legs, red triangular lights glowing above its turret gun like enraged eyes, motors grinding as it swung its turret around, tracking her. Pistons hissed as it moved and the machine began to advance on the plaza.

  The Major got to her feet and ran to Kuze. Like her, he had been damaged by the mortar. Both of his legs were shattered. All that remained under his left thigh was part of a metal pole, which, until this attack, had been encased in sensors, artificial muscles and cyber-flesh.

  “It’s Cutter! He’s found us!” The Major grabbed Kuze as the tank started firing. Its ordnance was not machine bullets, but explosive missiles three feet in length.

  The Major dragged Kuze as quickly as she could into the cover provided by the banyan tree’s thick roots, then ran to her motorcycle and grabbed a machine gun from where she’d stashed it.

  She darted out from cover so she could get a better shot at the gargantuan metal spider that spit bombs instead of poison. Another whoosh signaled a second incoming rocket. The Major rolled to evade the blast in time, taking cover behind one of the pillars supporting the walkway overhead that engirdled the plaza.

  Shrapnel ricocheted off the stonework and the concrete pillar. The Major felt a razor of torn steel clip her arm, but she ignored it.

  The tank continued to fire. The hologram wasn’t showing Cutter the Major’s present position, but that was all right. Time was on his side. He would, if necessary, raze the entire plaza until no two bits of concrete larger than his thumb remained intact and nothing organic or inorganic survived.

  Cutter turned the tank’s muzzle toward the banyan tree where Kuze was concealed. The Major leapt away from her own hiding place to draw his aim away. She fired at the monstrous arachnid weapon, then ducked back behind the column as the tank blasted at her again.

  The next rocket looped down at her, tracking her thermal signature, and slammed into the column. Concrete splintered as the pillar broke apart halfway up its length. Suddenly robbed of any support, a section of the elevated pedestrian pathway collapsed, smashing into pieces amid a cloud of choking grey dust. The spider tank maintained its barrage, destroying one pillar after another. The pedestrian bridge collapsed section by section.

  The Major jumped onto the bridge, keeping ahead of its fall, and used it as a launch to get herself to the plaza’s second-story balcony. She took cover behind a V-shaped post. The tank’s next blast missed her body, but it blew the gun out of her hand, wounding her arm. She had to find a different approach, circle around, and get closer to the tank. If she couldn’t find a way to defeat the machine, this fight would be over in moments.

  She sidled over into the shadows cast by what remained of the bridge so that she was more fully concealed, then inspected the damage in her arm. There was no time to do anything about it—the tank was again marching toward the banyan tree, closing in on Kuze’s position. The Major lunged out, seized her gun from where it had fallen, and began to reload.

  Below her, the tank finally found Kuze. The machine aimed its multiple guns directly at his head. Kuze, ever defiant, pointed his finger as if it were a gun back at the tank and pretended to shoot. Cutter smiled at the futile gesture.

  The Major sprang out into the open and fired at the spider tank. The tank turned from Kuze to resume its assault on the Major. She ran along the balcony, keeping ahead of it as the tank spun, exchanging fire with her as both of them moved.

  Cutter watched the thermographic outline of the Major as it flashed between the cover of the pillars. He couldn’t figure out what she hoped to achieve. There was no way out now, surely she understood that.

  The spider tank extended the scope for its mortar cannon and locked onto the Major. Over the tank’s speaker, a female voice announced, “Target acquired.”

  The spider tank fired a missile at the Major, hitting the balcony. A second hit caused the balcony to collapse.

  “No!” Kuze shouted. The single word echoed into the night.

  The female voice announced placidly, “Target eliminated.”

  Cutter exhaled in satisfaction. No experiment had ever been so vexing in its results, or so hard to eradicate, but now he and Hanka were done with 2571. The only task remaining was to get rid of Kuze. Using his VR control, Cutter aimed the spider tank. When Hanka had disposed of that failed prototype, even though it was in pieces, they should have made sure it was truly extinguished; they should never have assumed the Kuze iteration of the project would fail on its own and become inert. Instead, it had literally, if imperfectly, rebuilt itself and very nearly brought down the entire corporation out of an implacable need for vengeance. It was a mistake Cutter would ensure was never made on future projects. Although Kuze could not hear him, the Hanka C
EO conceded, “You came close, you freak.”

  Cutter manipulated the holographic controls, which caused a claw to extend from the spider tank. The huge mechanical appendage seized Kuze by the head, lifted him into the air and pressed him against the banyan tree’s trunk, where it began to crush him.

  Kuze trembled as his cybernetic systems struggled through a kind of pain-shock, teetering on the edge of shutting down.

  This would be death then, he thought. True death, not the moment of flawed rebirth that has made me what I am now. Regret washed over him. He would perish never knowing the full truth of who he had been. But at least he had found her before it had come to this.

  The Major, the thermoptics on her suit engaged, rippled transparently in the light cast by the fires still burning from the explosions. She ran out from the rubble behind the tank and leapt up onto the back of the massive spider. As she landed, the thermoptics in her suit disengaged, leaving her fully visible again. The turret ground its gears and swiveled as the remote operator attempted to unseat the Major, but she was already moving.

  She tried firing at the tank’s motor center, but there was no result whatsoever. The Major abandoned that tactic and tossed her gun aside. She crawled closer to the motor center. She knew how this tank was powered, whether from real experience or from the implantation of someone else’s memories, it didn’t matter now. She tried punching it repeatedly with her good fist. Then she grabbed the motor center with both hands and began pulling up on it with all her cyber-augmented strength, howling from the effort.

  A camera rose from the tank’s upper regions to relay images of this attack back to Cutter. At first, he thought the Major had simply lost her mind. She had been built to be powerful, but she was no match for the components of the spider tank.

  And then the operative’s voice informed him, “Motor center compromised.”

  As Cutter watched with disbelief that became wrath, the Major continued to pull on the tank’s central power source.

  Inside the Major’s eyes, a train of red warning icons cascaded down the side of her vision, malfunction alerts from the hits she had taken from the auto-cannon and the falling rubble. This would take all her remaining strength, and even then there was no guarantee that would be enough.

  The usually invisible connections on her joints and epidermis began to reveal themselves and then come apart, a blue light from her core glowing through them. She felt the tank shudder and buck, trying to throw her off as it stumbled in a half-circle on sparking legs. Her fingers bit into the edges of motor casing and she felt it shift, dislodging but still not fully disconnected.

  Redoubling her exertion, the Major gripped the armored casing and strained with all her might as the warning grew louder. Actuators and synthetic muscles in her arms went past the red line and beyond all tolerances, stressed to breaking point as the motor center creaked and distorted.

  Then, with a sudden screeching crackle of breaking metal, the motor center ripped away from the tank. The force of the action was so powerful that the Major’s left forearm came off with the motor, jetting white fluid.

  With nothing to power it, the tank’s pincers released Kuze, who slid to the ground just before the motor center exploded, enveloping Major in the resultant fireball. The tank gave a shuddering groan and shut down, its six segmented legs trapped beneath it as it collapsed against the stonework of the plaza. Unable to arrest her fall, the Major’s ruined body rolled down the face of the machine and clattered to the ground.

  Her cyborg frame was a mess of critical damage, half-destroyed, shot through by heavy-caliber bullets and shrapnel. Pale silicate liquid pooled around her head in a shimmering white halo.

  Kuze managed to extricate himself from the banyan tree’s roots. She watched as he slowly dragged himself over. He collapsed onto the ground next to her.

  Both the Major and Kuze appeared near death, but Cutter was done underestimating his enemies. “Sniper team on site?” he asked into the comm.

  The sniper team’s hycop was en route to the lawless zone. The door opened so that the two snipers could scope out their prey and ready their long-range gun, a weapon so large that it took two of them to wield it effectively.

  “We’re approaching the targets now, sir,” the lead sniper replied into his comm.

  Kuze lay beside the Major. “Come with me.” His voice was an echoing wheeze now, but his determination was as clear as it had ever been. There was an ugly gouge in his skull trickling with sparks. Despite the terrible, damage that had been done to him, he seemed almost serene. “There is no place for us here.”

  She understood what he was offering. They could be together as they had been, Motoko and Hideo, escaping into the virtual so that no one could ever harm them, ever find them, because no one would know they were there. In their own world, they would be together and whole, and they could bend reality to whatever they wanted it to be, and it would last as long as they wanted it to last. No more lies, no more fighting, because there would be no one who needed her protection.

  “No.” She hoped he could understand. “I’m not ready to leave.” She inhaled deeply, taking in as much of the night air as her bruised lungs would accept. “I belong here.”

  Kuze looked at her with love. He would not force her, so instead he told her, “I will always be there with you… in your ghost.” Then the light went out in Kuze’s eyes and his consciousness fled.

  Above, the snipers in the hycop took aim. “Target is in view,” the lead sniper said into the comm.

  “What are you waiting for?” Cutter snapped. “Do it!”

  The snipers fired the long-range gun. The shot hit Kuze’s head, destroying the human brain within.

  “No!” the Major screamed. They couldn’t do this—he had wanted his ghost to continue, but now…

  “Keep firing,” Cutter ordered into the comm.

  * * *

  Aramaki walked through the corridor of an expensively carpeted building, speaking over his mind-comm. “Saito, have you found Major? Is she safe?”

  Saito, the best long-distance shot in the unit, lay on his belly on a rooftop. He had eyes on the Major. A sniper’s rifle was in his hands and he had an excellent view of both the lawless zone’s plaza and the hycop hovering above it. “She will be,” Saito told the chief over the mind-comm.

  He fired a shot directly into the hycop’s rotor. The hycop spun out of control, crashing down to the plaza in a fireball that sent up chunks of the aircraft and rubble in equal measure. Saito ducked back behind the roof’s raised edge to avoid being hit by shrapnel, but had to admit to himself that it was quite a rush to bring down something so large and deadly with a single bullet.

  * * *

  Batou walked out of the darkness to the semiconscious Major and lifted her into his lap. “Hey.” He examined her. She looked godawful. Anybody else would die of such injuries, but the Major was the toughest person he knew. “Hey,” he repeated.

  The Major turned her head to look up at him.

  At least she was conscious. “Hey,” Batou said once more by way of greeting.

  After thinking it over, the Major spoke. “Say something nice.” Repeating what Batou had told her back when she’d first seen his artificial eyes.

  Instead of commenting on the ghastly injuries she’d sustained, Batou asked, “What’s your name? Aramaki told me you had a name… from before.”

  “Motoko,” the Major confided. Her breathing was very weak.

  Batou hoped she still identified as the compatriot he knew, the one he would gladly fight beside and die for. He didn’t try to hide his emotion. “Major is still in there, right?”

  “I am,” the Major assured him.

  He sighed in relief. All around them, the lawless zone burned, flames shooting and spreading in the wreckage and rubble. One of the hycop’s rotors had half-buried itself in the concrete, sticking up like a giant shark fin, a warning to any who might venture near.

  Batou helped her to her feet. The
y stood looking at one another. The Major put her hand on Batou’s chest. Life wasn’t just about what had happened in the past. It was the people who were here for her now, and Batou was foremost among them.

  * * *

  The corridor led Aramaki to an elevator, which opened onto the Hanka building’s rooftop garden. No one was expecting the old man who ran Section Nine to show up, and before Cutter’s guards could consider what Aramaki might be doing there, he shot and killed them all.

  Cutter’s horror at the Major’s survival was so absolute that at first he did not even react to the sound of nearby gunfire. Then he saw Aramaki approaching and deactivated the hologram of the plaza. The Hanka CEO had no wish to gaze on the visual report of his defeat any longer.

  “Mr. Cutter.” Aramaki’s tone was formal. “I’ve come from the prime minister. You are charged with murder and crimes against the state.”

  Cutter turned and started walking away around the rectangular perimeter of the lily pond. Aramaki followed, so the two men were circling each other.

  The CEO had guessed that, if it came down to it, Aramaki would be the one to arrest him. “I thought that it might be you.” At least, Aramaki would be the one to try to arrest him.

  Aramaki knew what Cutter would do next, but felt obliged to warn him against it. “It is unwise to resist.”

  Cutter abruptly reached for his gun. It was a much more modern, sleek weapon, but Aramaki was much faster with his .357 and shot Cutter before he could fire. The defeated man dropped to the ground.

  Aramaki walked over to the Hanka executive and kicked the gun out of his reach. His wound painful but not fatal, Cutter struggled to his feet and held his arms up in surrender. He was frightened now, whimpering, “Please.” After everything he had done, all the lives he had taken, Cutter didn’t want to die.

  “Major?” Aramaki spoke into his comm.

  In the plaza, the Major had some of her weight on Batou, but was managing to walk under her own power. “I’m with Cutter,” Aramaki announced into the mind-comm. Now that the moment of truth was here, he could only be its instrument. “Is there anything you’d like to say to him?”