//Busted lip, right eye swollen shut. Bruises on the neck, indicators of
attempted strangulation...\\ One perverse benefit of being trained in how to
Nah. Perverse is when you are trained to patch people up and use it to
create a market for your skills.
inflict a variety of injuries, some fatal, was the ability to recognize the
evidence they left behind. It was no substitute for formal foresnics
"forensics", except that's the wrong word anyway. Forensics is the skill
of gathering and evaluation crime scene evidence. Pathology is closer to
the mark, but actually "medical" would probably do best of all.
training, but it did have its uses...
The flash of white-hot anger and revulsion he experienced on seeing what
lay under Ukyo's shirt was something of a surprise. Having the blacker, more
sickening experiences her life described to him was one thing. Seeing the
evidence, however, was another matter entirely. These weren't wounds that
had been accrued in the chaos of battle, but the result of systematic,
calculated malice. //How could anyone do this?\\ His next words, as
natural and... right?... as they seemed, were another surprise.
"Whoever you are, hope I never find you." Chance didn't know whether he was
talking to the intruder, or to those who had done this to her over the
course of her life. Ukyo groaned just then, putting an end to further
vocalized thoughts of retribution. "Help's on the way," he continued.
"We'll have you back on your feet in no time."
He then got back in touch with Ops, requesting a direct line to the
enroute medics. It couldn't hurt to let them know what to expect, after all.
"medics enroute"
========================================
Ranma Saotome stared at what few stars managed to pierce through the garish
lights of the city, twinkiling duly as they competed with the harsh
"twinkling dully"
electrical illumination below.
The outer surface of the holo-trainer was smooth and slightly cool through
the thin material of his shirt. Car horns and muffled shouts echoed through
the menagerie of metal-and-glass structures, little more than background
noise. Nerima was actually pretty quiet at night, since not many ever came
through after dark.
It was times like this when he began to look back on his life an wonder
"and"
just what had brought him here. Sure, life with Genma wasn't a picnic, but
he had Ranko there. They would also bump into Ryoga from time to time, who
travelled with his cousin Koji. Unlike Ryoga, Koji's sense of direction was
infallible. It seemed that the whole navigational thing managed to skip a
generation once in a while.
But here, he had no family. Since Ranko's death, he had been more or less
on his own. He had pretty much disowned Genma as his father a long time ago,
the first time he hit Ranko. He would hit Ranma as well, who was too small
to fight back, whenever either of them did anything whatsoever to displease
him. Life with Genma wasn't a picnic, it was almost hell.
As Ranko began to grow and mature, something began to change. Some nights,
Genma would send Ranma out of wherever they were staying at the time,
sometimes for hours on end. When he returned, he often found Ranko shivering
in a corner with a blanket drawn up around her, tears running down her
cheeks. Ranma's heart would threaten to tear itself apart at the sight, and
he would try to talk to her. Unlike before, when she would allow herself to
break down in his arms, she would remain silent and distant. If he tried to
put a comforting arm around her, she would flinch as though he were trying
to hit her and even draw away. Puzzled, he would just sit there, unsure of
what to do for her.
Now, however, he cursed himself for not putting things together sooner. On
the eve of their fifteenth birthday, she let it all out. It had been her,
Ranma, and Ryoga alone in a decrepit wreck of a building somewhere south of
Osaka. There, sitting around the light from an electric lantern brought by
Ryoga, she told them of just what Genma had done to her.
She had sounded so ashamed, as if it had all been her fault. Ryoga, his
face pale and drawn, had moved to comfort her. Ranma, however, sat there in
the cold light of the elecctric Coleman lantern, rage burning in his veins
"electric"
like a living flame intent on consuming him whole. He would see Genma pay
for what he had done, and would make sure that his sister would never go
through anything like that again.
So why didn't he try to kill Genma?
A few scant days later was the fateful accident which robbed him of his
only family. The following year was one of the lonliest of his life. Then, a
"loneliest"
little more than a month ago, Genma had sold his contract to Ryu-Ken. The
rest, as they say, is history.
"Ranma!" The sound of Akane's voice brought him out of his reverie. He
looked over to his left to see her approaching his position, a palpable air
of determination emanating from her. Akane's face was obscured by the
shadows, but her posture and voice told him that he was in for some trouble.
"Yeah?" he asked noncomittaly.
"We have to talk," she said, coming to a halt less than a meter away from
him. She remained standing over him, as though she intended to keep control
of whatever was about to take place.
"What about?"
"You."
"Why ain't I surprised?" he asked sarcastically. He just wished Akane would
get on with it.
"Now listen, and listen well," Akane said in a warning tone, "because I'll
only say this once. I'm the lead pilot here, understand?"
"I know you're the lead pilot," Ranma said, his ire beginning to rise. If
this was just about the team pecking order... "What's your point?"
"My point is," Akane said, "that ever since you got here, you've been a
pain in the ass!"
//More like I've been showing you up,\\ he thought. It wasn't HIS fault
that he was the better pilot.
"Akane, you've given me this song before," Ranma said irritably, "would ya
just skip to the refrain?" She just stood there, sputtering in surprise and
anger.
"Let me tell you something, Ranma," she hissed, "for the past five years,
I've been the only pilot for this team. We were doing just fine then, and..."
"Listen to me, Akane," Ranma said quietly. "I ain't your enemy, and I ain't
tryin' to steal any of your thunder. You're lead pilot, and that's just fine
by me. I just wanna race for a real team for once."
"Real team?" Akane asked, some of her righteous indignation fading. This
wasn't the Ranma she had come to know over the past month. He wasn't firing
back with verbal barbs of his own this time, nor was he trying to start a
shouting match. "What are you talking about?"
"I don't usually talk about this," Ranma said, a note of sadness in his
voice, "but if we're gonna live together, we gotta get a few things out in
the open."
"All right," Akane said slowly. Was Ranma really about to open up to her?
Or was he just trying something to get her off his back? She mentally
slapped herself for assuming the latter so quickly, kneeling down so as not
to seem like she towered over him.
"The last time I've ever lived in a real house was when I was five years
old," Ranma began, "it wasn't much, but it was home. When me an' Ranko were
about five, Mom left us."
"She...?"
"Nah, she just up and left us. Then Genma took us on the road."
"Why did your mother leave you?" Akane asked, unable to believe that a
mother could abandon her own children.
If I were Ranma I'd speculate that she ran away because she was afraid of Genma.
"I dunno," Ranma said, his shoulders sagging. "Genma never talked about
it." The tone in Ranma's voice was full of confusion, pulling at the strings
of Akane's heart. She had no idea he had also lost his mother.
"Where did you go from there?" Akane asked.
"Just about everywhere," Ranma replied offhandedly, "we never stayed in one
place for too long."
For the first time, Akane was beginning to understand a little about Ranma
as a person. While Akane had a home all her life, Ranma had stayed wherever
he, his father, and his sister could.
"So you never had a home," Akane said softly.
"Home was wherever we laid down to sleep that night," Ranma said with a
hint of regret.
"And then you lost Ranko," Akane said in the hopes that he would talk about
that as well. He was obviously carrying a good deal of pain, and he had to
let it out.
"Yeah," he said shortly, literally slamming himself shut before her eyes.
"Listen, Akane, let's just say that we have to learn to at least get along
on the track. You don't have to like me, it ain't like people expect us to
get married or somethin', but we gotta work together." On that note, Ranma
rose gracefully to his feet and began to walk back toward the house. Akane
remained there for a few moments, mulling over the conversation before
folowing him.
===================================
Waiting. It was one of the things Chance hated most in life. As a soldier,
he was trained to be patient, but the cossack in him craved action. Just
sitting on one of those damned uncomfortable benches in a hospital waiting
room was almost too much to bear, the fact that Ukyo was in the emergency
room down the hall notwithstanding.
He called up his mind's picture of the intruder who had put Ukyo here,
anything to keep it busy. Something seemed off about him, but what? First,
Chance recalled the outfit the intruder wore.
A simple black dogi, much in the style of old ninja movies, except a tad
tighter than it should have been. The muscletone seemed strange as well,
almost bulky and cumbersome in some respects. What else was wrong with the
picture?
The knife? No, knives were relatively easy to score in Japan these days.
The strobe? Definitely. Not many thugs and punks carry equipment like that.
Another odd point was the state of Ukyo's clothes. There had been some
minor rips in the fabric of the oversized shirt, but her undergarments had
remained relatively undisturbed. Chance was not a profiler, but he figured
most rapists to be little more than rabid animals who would tear at the
victims clothing while attempting to subdue her. Could this one have been
more level-headed than most others? From the shape Ukyo was in when he
arrived, the bastard could have had his way with her easily. He wouldn't
even have needed the knife, which he thankfully hadn't used. The bruises
"fortunately".
left on her from the fight seemed to support the level-headed rapist theory,
the placement such as to temproarily incapacitate her. But there was still
"temporarily"
something that didn't fit...
He put everything he knew together, and realized that maybe this wasn't
just some random act, but that Ukyo had been targeted by someone. But why?
Chance could only think of two possible reasons, and neither or them were at
all reassuring.
"Mr. Checkhov?" asked a man in green surgical scrubs. Chance started at the
intrusion, cursing himself for getting so lost in his own mind.
"How's Ukyo?" he asked, worry gnawing at his stomach.
"Her injuries weren't as serious as we had first thought," the doctor said.
Chance felt a great weight lift off of his heart at the news. Ukyo wasn't
too badly hurt. "We expect her to make a full recovery in a day or so."
"Is she..."
"She's asleep now, Mr. Checkhov," the doctor said in a practiced kindly
voice. "Have the police contacted you yet?"
"Yeah. I already gave a statement," Chance said. It had been a total waste
of time, but it had to be done.
"That's good," the doctor, his nametag said Kadowaki, replied. "I know
you've already answered this, but what is your relationship with Miss Kuonji?"
Abusive boyfriend?
"I'm a friend of hers," Chance said, feeding the doctor the same line he
had the police. He was more like her superior officer, but that was
something they didn't need to know about.
"Well, then," the doctor said, "since she has no immediate family, I guess
you'll do. I found some rather disturbing things in her X-rays and blood
work that I think you should know about."
The doctor turned left and proceeded down the antiseptic white corridor,
Chance following close behind. Their footsteps echoed softly on the tile
floor as they passed by assorted hospital staff and patients. Chance kept
checking his perpiheral vision, utilizing the large domed mirrors situated
on the ceiling to check behind him. It was a habit he had formed while in
the service and one that had always served him well.
They turned down two more corridors, Dr. Kadowaki keeping a brisk pace all
the while, and found themselves before a modest wooden door. The small tag
on the door identified it as the office of Doctor Kenshiro Kadowaki, M.D.
The office was almost pitifully small, bookshelves along the right wall
littered with medical journals and reference materials, the left occupied
only by a medium-sized vid screen. The back wall was covered with his
diplomas and certificates of achievment. His desk was likewise cluttered,
"achievement"
paperwork in a state of utter disarray.
"Forgive the mess, Mr. Checkhov," Kadowaki said in a tired voice, "I've
been on a twenty hour shift so far, and haven't had the time to straighten
things up in here."
"Don't worry about it," Chance replied, taking a seat opposite the desk.
"Now, what's wrong?"
"Here are scans from Ukyo's X-rays taken whe she was brought in." The
screen on the left wall flickered to life, showing a black-and-white image
of a human ribcage. In the top right corner was the name "Kuonji, Ukyo,
Pateint #234766," followed by the date and time of the X-rays. Several small
windows opened up on the scan, lines connecting the small rectangles to
various points on her ribs.
"This scan shows that Miss Kuonji's ribs hade been broken previously, and
in several places. Some even more than once." Kadowaki said, concern and
revulsion evident in his tone. "There was also evidence of the same on both
arms," he continued, the scan changing to Ukyo's left and right arms, "her
left leg," the scan changed again, "and evidence of at least one major
concussion in her life." The scan changed again to her skull. Chance's blood
began to boil at the sight of even more evidence of the hell she had been
through. "There was so much evidence of physical abuse that..."
"I get the point, doctor," Chance said through gritted teeth.
"I have to ask you, Mr. Checkhov," Kadowaki went on, "how much you know
about the abuse Miss Kuonji has suffered."
Most doctors would just slot this straight on to the cops.
"Not much," Chance said with a sigh. It was a lie, but what else could he
say? That yes, he had been fully briefed on the life and times of Ukyo
Kuonji? "I haven't known her for long."
"I'm sorry to have had to ask you that," Kadowaki said in a gentle voice,
"but I have never seen anything like what I saw with her. I..."
"Had to try and find out if she was still being abused," Chance finished.
"Not quite," Kadowaki said, "I haven't found anything correlating to recent
abuse. The most current signs are several months old."
No, the most current signs are about 3 hours old.
"At any rate," Chance said, anxious to be by Ukyo's side, "I have to go see
her."
"She's still under," Kadowaki said.
"I know that, but I still want to go to her."
"Okay," Kadowaki replied, "she's being moved from the ER now. I'll walk you
there."
=========================================
Nestled inside Militech's Tokyo building - specifically, three levels
belowground - was a room which never slept. Those seeing it for the first
time would often draw comparisons to spaceflight control centers, such as
those at Vandenburg and Cape Canaveral. It wasn't an unfair comparison,
although a better one would be made by naval personnel.
At any particular point in time Militech's Op-Center (Asia-Pac sector) was
staffed by anywhere from a dozen to eighteen operators, and two or three
supervisors (one of whom would be considered the 'duty officer' for
organizational purposes) - all of whom monitored and coordinated whatever
operations were going on in-theater, liaising as needed with similar
"liasing"
Op-Centers in other parts of the world. By and large, it was all rather
routine. Unless there was a crisis brewing, of course; stories still
circulated about conditions during Petrochem and SovOil's war, not that
long gone, over oil reserves in the South China Sea...
Given the long shifts and relative boredom, operators and supervisors alike
were encouraged to find small diversions to help keep awake. Different tones
denoted the various urgency levels of traffic, giving one a definite cue as
to when to sit up and take notice.
This evening - or, more fittingly, morning; it was zero-fifty Lima,
according to the strip of wall clocks - the job of duty officer happened to
fall to one Angelique Gerard. On hearing the phone ring, she put down the
old John Grisham novel she had been reading and pulled on her headset.
"Op-Center, Lieutenant Gerard. Please identify yourself."
Gerard's eyebrows shot up briefly when the caller identified himself. Less
than a minute later she was making some calls of her own.
Chance took another look around. Nothing had changed, of course: Kadowaki
had, after taking one more check of Ukyo's vitals, left the two of them
alone; she to sleep and he to think...
With burgulary and rape off the board, only two possible motives for the
attack remained, a hypothesis he had shared with the Op-Center duty officer
- Gerard, as he remembered - and his own second-in-command, Drake. One, the
more plausible one, was pure business: some corporation with a rival program
did some 'research' and decided to do something sufficient to sieze the
"seize"
advantage. The other was more unsettling.
//What if those bastards Hawkes had managed to wrest Ukyo from hadn't given
up on their prize?\\ Not impossible, except for the part about a band of
slavers having the wherewithal to circumvent operational security in their
search - not to mention complete disregard for the possible consequences of
being found out.
And could you really blame them for wanting her back? that dissonant voice
"That"
in the back of his mind wanted to know. Leaving aside the possibility of her
one day being a prosecution witness, Ukyo's a young, attractive, and
"Ukyo was"
cheerful woman - he could almost hear Robert, one of his old classmates,
Not that I find this especially plausible given her past life.
laying down his points about why she was such a great catch...
//Not now!\\ he chided the voice. //Later... maybe.\\
===========================================
"Tell me, again," Galford Connolly said tiredly to his partner, "why we're
going after this girl?"
"She asked for information on the Saotome case," Hanzo Hattori replied
matter-of-factly, "information from OUR files." The sun was just beginning
to rise over the tips of the skyscrapers, reaching upward as if to deny one
a glimpse of the heavens. The sky, what they could see of it, was tinged
with blazing gold that promised to soon fade into a deep blue. All in all,
it was shaping up to be a rather beautiful day in Tokyo.
"Since when did a street murder warrant the attention of PSIO?" Galford
asked. Such occurrences were often handled by local police, except in
certain instances. After all, the FBI didn't handle the run-of-the-mill
murders and neither did the Japanese counterpart.
"It was my case back in Kansai," Hanzo answered, "and it still is."
It's his hobby.
"Okay, I can buy that." Such a thing as an agent investigating an old case,
even one in the jurisdiction of the Koban, wasn't exactly unheard of. If one
just pulled the right strings and knew the right people, it could be pulled
off. "But what charges can we bring up?"
"Here I thought you were all fired up to go check this out," Hanzo said.
"Hey, man, I want to see an old case get solved as much as you do," Galford
replied, "but what grounds do we have to question her on?"
"I do see your point," Hanzo said, "until Gosunkugi actually breaks into
our systems, there is no crime." And a solicitation charge was a
misdemeanor, he didn't add.
And so they would wait. When and if Gosunkugi actually broke into the PSIO
datafiles, then they would question Nabiki. The nature of the files
Gosunkugi would look for just made steering the questions toward the Saotome
case that much easier.
==========================================================
Senior Technician Yuka Sankao sat before one of the terminals in the PSIO's
data storage room. The room, which was larger than her apartment, was lined
with sophisticated digital storage equipment on all sides, racks of routers
and internet communication equipment occupying several metal shelves in the
center. The soft hum from the running machines filled the air with a
subliminal vibration that one learned to ignore after a while.
Yuka had always been extremely proud of her software systems, being the one
who approved and oversaw every update in software and equipment gave her the
sense of being almost a mother. A mother with silicon chilren, but a mother
nonetheless. As such, she had taken great care in safeguarding each and
every program from potential hackers.
Many of the anti-virus and anti-hacker safeguards were either her own
design, or her own variation of an existing one. The woman had been known to
hack out several thousand lines of code she thought to be extraneous, even
in market software. Not that the software companies ever found out, of
course, since the Bill Gates and Peter Norton wannabes out there would throw
a hissy-fit. In essence, she was the last true pirate of Silicon Valley,
despite being in Japan.
The terminal in front of her beeped for attention, Yuka knowing the problem
before she even looked at the screen. She had been briefed about what
Gosunkugi had been planning, and was secretly excited. She knew him, having
Gee don't these hackers have wacky pseudonyms?
come up through Nippon Tech together, and she knew just how good a hacker he
really was. The thought of going up against the one student in the whole
school who could give her a run for her money was a prospect she could not
refuse.
"I don't think so." She activated Predator, a tracking program of her own
design. It was a beauty of software engineering, if Yuka Sankao said so
herself. It didn't stop until it traced the signal to its point of origin,
often times much faster than the best Norton systems. The main beauty,
however, was its resistance to switchbacks and false trails that hackers
often used to fool such systems. Predator was able to copy itself on the
fly, tracing every trail as they came while the main program kept seeking
the source. If one of the clones hit a dead end, it would automatically send
a signal back before self-deleting. Lastly, Predator also had the ability to
report geographic locations if Gosunkugi was using a cloned number nor would
it be stopped if he had spliced into another line. Predator was not on the
market, even though she could make millions off of it. If others got ahold
of it, they could find a way around it and that wouldn't be very good, would
it? The downside was that it could be detected once a lock was established
and didn't prevent the hacker from logging off and heading for the hills.
Preadator first hit the terminal of the Deputy Chief, bouncing around the
"Predator"
PSIO building from there until it reached the desk terminal of a file clerk
who happened to have an outside line.
"Wardailing," Yuka snarled, furious at herself. Wardailing was one of the
oldest tricks in the book, where one simply kept dialing number after number
in rapid succession until finding one that led from the outside in. It stung
the Senior Tech that such a simple trick had nearly been her undoing, and a
lesson had been learned. Now it was time to teack Gosunkugi one.