On the rooftop, the Major took a pistol out of the holster built into the side of her uniform. She cocked the weapon.
In the banquet room, Dr. Osmond felt in danger. His cherished plan was being demolished, bit by bit, with every word his hoped-for client uttered. “I’ve heard this speech before,” the president declared, “from your competitors.”
The geisha in the red kimono poured more sake into Osmond’s cup. The president gestured at the beverage.
Osmond felt something wet on his hand and looked down to see the sake had filled the bowl and was now overflowing, streaming over the sides and spilling on to the lacquered table beneath. “What are you doing?” the doctor demanded of the artificial geisha. It continued to pour as if his cup was still empty, and Osmond saw the president push back in his seat, suddenly dismayed.
“And now, Hanka Robotics serves it with milky sake,” the president finished, as though the malfunctioning geisha was making his point for him.
Osmond colored, his fury building. He had come too far to have this all ruined because of some mechanical glitch. Maintenance had assured him all the bioroids at the hotel had been in perfect working order. The geisha began to blink rapidly, and then its jet-black doll’s eyes refocused on his face. “Hey!” he snapped, aiming a finger at the errant machine. “Hey, hey, hey!”
The machine ignored him and Osmond finally put his hand over the cup to stop the overflow.
The geisha’s reaction was as fast as a striking cobra. Her pale white hand shot out and grabbed Osmond’s finger, bending it the wrong way against the joint with a percussive crack of snapping bone. He let out a high-pitched scream as the president and his retinue fell back, and the other Hanka execs scattered in surprise. Pain lanced through his arm and Osmond desperately tried to extract himself from the geisha’s grasp. He was having difficulty adjusting to the sudden change in his predicament. Just a few seconds ago he had been worried about losing the account and now it seemed that he might be about to lose much more.
The president reacted to the geisha’s actions with fear, tinged by righteous indignation. “This is what I’m talking about.”
Osmond might have replied, but the geisha struck him across the head with the sake pot and spun him around. He screamed again.
“Whoa!” the president yelled. Some of the banquet guests began to shout and rise to their feet in confused panic; others simply asked what was happening.
Dazed and half-blinded, Osmond felt the synthetic pull him into a chokehold and tighten its grip on his neck. He gasped for air as his vision swam. The three other geisha bots took hold of other guests in similar fashion. The room erupted in screams and chaos.
On the rooftop, the Major stepped forward into the yawning rush of the night and closed her eyes, embracing the wind. She plummeted like a falling knife down the side of the hotel tower, the windows flashing past her in a blur. Her eyes snapped open and she silently triggered an activation sequence. A wave of distortion seemed to envelop her, bleeding out color, turning her into a glassy apparition, a heat-haze mirage. The bodysuit’s thermoptic camouflage was power-hungry and fragile, but it was enough to render her near-invisible.
“Major!” Aramaki cried into the comms again. He got no response.
The doors to the banquet suite crashed open and the six men entered, fanning out. Before the Hanka party and the West African retinue could react, the assassins opened fire without hesitation. They mowed down members of the African delegation and the Hanka Robotics team alike, seemingly at random. Still, when the shooting stopped, both Osmond and the president were still alive, albeit they were both crouched down and cowering in terror.
In an underground bunker, where light came primarily from the flickering devices all around, a man stood on the filthy and wet floor, watching the mayhem from the surveillance provided by the echo box. He needed no screen for this; the audio and video streams both fed into him directly via a vast network of cables plugged into a large apparatus on his neck. If this was uncomfortable, he showed no sign of it.
There was no one here with the man, no one to hide from in this secret place, but even so, he wore a hooded cloak that shadowed his features and concealed his form, making him look something like a medieval monk. He gave an order, seemingly to the air, in a voice that paused at odd moments, as though it was generated by a computer. “Initiate… the hack.”
In the banquet room, the surviving guests whimpered, even more frightened now.
The red-clad geisha bot took no notice of any of them except Osmond. The synthetic leaned forward over him and, with a wet click, its delicate ceramic face split down the middle and snapped open. The bot’s inner workings had been designed for function, not intimidation, so it was simply coincidence that it now looked like a cephalopod from the worst imaginings of a psychotic. Hungry cable tentacles writhed down out of its metal jaw and lunged into the bot’s prey.
Osmond let out a pained gurgle and went limp as the geisha bot’s cable heads locked into the open quik-ports on the back of his neck. He began to twitch like someone deep in REM sleep. His eyes became an opaque blue-white, like those of a day-old corpse. The neural jack was a penetrator device, a brute force cybernetic link capable of burning through any implanted firewalls and stripping a person’s memories bare. The machine was hacking the contents of his mind.
Suddenly, gunshots smashed through a window, killing two of the gunmen and destroying one of the geisha bots. The humans spurted blood as they collapsed. The synthetic shut down in a messy, jerky heap, its body writhing and sparking, gushing thin streams of whitish liquid silicate.
The geisha holding Osmond, its face already distorted, now transformed further. Its legs twisted back against their joints in a way no human could ever have managed, and folded up around Osmond like a spider grasping its prey. The machine scuttled jerkily away across the carpeted floor, and then clambered up the wall. Hands becoming claws, the machine kept Osmond prisoner as it dragged itself and his insensate form up and out of reach, until the bot paused in a high corner of the ceiling.
More gunshots blasted through a different window, hitting and disabling another of the geisha bots. The four surviving gunmen fired back, roaring with inarticulate rage, their bullets shattering more glass and sending shards in a deadly rain to the street far below. The giant cyborg-spider was impervious, keeping its tight grip on Osmond as it continued to drain his data, even as yet other geisha bot was taken out.
Then an entire glass wall imploded. The Major smashed through it in a running leap, not slowed by the glass fragments that sliced into the room around and ahead of her, her pistol never pausing in its fire. The Major turned off her thermoptic camouflage as she entered the room, knowing that her sudden appearance would give her an added advantage by startling her adversaries. She used the momentum of her entrance to run up the wall, sprinting at a ninety-degree angle to the floor. In the moment it took the surviving gunmen to react, she acted on instinct, diving and firing, her semiautomatic pistol barking as she took down three more of the armed men with pinpoint shots to the head or the throat. An ordinary human operative would have never been able to move with such speed, but the Major was very far from ordinary. But as fast as she was, the Major could not avoid every bullet streaming in her direction and a round struck her left arm, forcing her to stifle a grunt of pain-feedback.
The two remaining intact geisha bots in black kimonos displayed more self-preservation than the human assassins by raising their arms in surrender.