Kyoya dove forward. The three figures converged into one. With a heavy clunk, the two cyborgs smashed together and rolled on the ground and didn’t move.
The only one getting to his feet was Kyoya. He was holding Shiratori’s shinai in his right hand. When he’d leapt forward, he’d twisted his body and planted the tip of the shinai against the chest of the one while delivering three straight-fisted jabs to the other.
Except that no matter how well-struck, there was no way he should have knocked out these cyborgs—that could be blasted with a bazooka at point-blank range and still keep on ticking.
“Come out, come out, wherever you are!” Kyoya barked at the entrance to the alley. He was already breathing normally. “When the underlings screw up, the guy in charge has got to take responsibility.”
Three silhouettes appeared, lit from behind by the lights of the station beyond. A barrel-chested middle-aged man and two burly younger men that must be his bodyguards. They drew closer, revealing the startled looks on their faces. They were ordinary—human—Japanese.
“Wouldn’t have believed it otherwise,” the man muttered, glancing at the comatose cyborgs. “Rai-sensei told me about you, but you have exceeded my expectations.” He had a professorial air about him, nothing that suggested an enemy. “Commando cyborgs are a cut above space and undersea workers. A lump of electronics. I didn’t think any human could switch them off with his bare hands. You didn’t kill them, I wonder?”
“Relax. Give them an hour and they’ll be back to normal. Though they might require an overhaul. More importantly, what about my friends and the ramen stand?” Though his voice was as carefree as ever, Kyoya’s eyes glittered like cut glass.
The man nodded. “Your friends should wake up in five minutes. The owner will be compensated. I apologize for the inconvenience. I’m sure the consolation money will cover any mental anguish. However, we will take their memories of the incident in exchange.”
He pointed at the entrance to the alley. A different set of men were standing guard, keeping any passersby from coming or looking in. This middle-aged man was obviously some sort of big shot. “A car is waiting.”
“One of the things my dad told me before he died was not to get into cars with strange old men.”
The man seemed to chuckle to himself. “This does have something to do with him. Oh, I’m sorry, we haven’t introduced ourselves.”
He produced a black leather ID wallet and flipped it open. The golden badge glinted in the moonlight. Stamped into the metal was the image of a phoenix holding up the globe with flaming wings. “Dai Yamashina. World Federation Government Information Bureau, Japan section. A pleasure to meet you.”
Kyoya bristled. “I don’t care if you’re boss of the whole damned organization, I’m not going anywhere without a few answers first.”
Section Chief Yamashina nodded. “The boss of the whole damned organization was, in fact, attacked by creatures or persons unknown and is in critical condition. We have three days to search out the sorcerer and undo the damage. Specifically, with your nenpo.”
That night in Azabu, in a room at the ultra-modern headquarters of the Japan section of the World Federation Government Information Bureau, Section Chief Yamashina filled in Kyoya on the finer details of the situation.
Since his father died, his aunt and uncle had been taking care of him. He was allowed to phone them and say that school club activities would be keeping him late. He was a favorite nephew and they happily agreed.
The situation concerned the attempted assassination of Kozumi Rama, president of the World Federation.
Kozumi Rama—every child above the age of three knew that name. Born a world apart from the earth, the man whom the great sage Agni Rai had declared at his birth was a “holy man.” The man who, until his twentieth birthday, had never set foot on earth. And yet communicating with him telepathically across a quarter million miles of empty space, Master Rai conferred upon him a saint’s education.
At the age of twenty, the savant was unanimously elected the representative of the lunar colony’s governing body. At the young age of thirty-five, he achieved the presidency of the World Federation. After that, in the span of six months, he’d overseen the signing of a peace treaty between those eternal enemies, the Arab League and the state of Israel, and concluded a comprehensive atomic, biological, and chemical weapons ban between the greater NATO and ASEAN alliances. These achievements were still fresh in everybody’s mind.
In particular, with nuclear war seeming inevitable, he summoned the leaders of the two parties to the New York Federation section and in a meeting lasting only a few minutes brought into existence the only possible conclusion. The summit later came to be known as the “Five Minute Miracle.”
Since 2010, the entire world had been gripped in a dark curse. In the face of economic recession, growing regional conflicts and rising crime rates, President Rama was as resolute in his actions as he was charitable in his words. And changed the world as a result.
Five years after his inauguration, people began to sense that the trails he was blazing were indeed leading to a brighter future.
And then several days before, on September eight at one o’clock in the afternoon, New York time, a literal hand of evil struck him down. The time difference meant it was recorded in Japan on the ninth at three in the morning.
The incident took place in the presidential offices on the fifth floor of the Federation government office building. Monitors recorded the particulars of what went on there. Section Chief Yamashina played it back.
The president was taking a break from pressing business, while his multi-purpose guard robot and secretary read through the cables and letters that had collected unread for several days.
All correspondence was electronically scanned first. As busy as he was, the president couldn’t read every message sent to him from around the world. It was simply a matter of expediency to trust such matters to the secretary’s electronic brain.
There was one other reason for this preliminary check. Ordinary letters and stationery, even the print itself, could be fashioned into explosives, poisonous gas and other assassination tools. The criminal enterprises behind international drug smuggling syndicates and the merchants of death supplying the arms trade were the president’s committed enemies.
The president set aside the longer missives and asked to start with the cables. It happened during the fourth one.
The android’s memory bank contained the files and settings for two thousand different languages. He stated that the letter was in ancient Sanskrit, the four-thousand-year-old classical language that had originated in India. It had been relayed via the “Woodpecker” communications satellite, but the originator was unknown.
It later came to light that the satellite’s router records—that archived the originating sources of all relayed messages—were blank for this particular one.
The secretary noted that from the arrangement of the characters, the message appeared to be a kind of religious ritual. It could be read phonetically, but translation was impossible.
The president indicated that he should read it.
The android secretary began to read the cable—hardly possible to reproduce with human vocal cords—and that was when it appeared.
A grotesque shadow separated itself from the president’s shadow. It was no more substantial than a shadow, had no head or limbs, but crawling and wriggling along the floor, was clearly a living thing. About six feet long, the end of the oval section that must have been its abdomen narrowed like a reptile’s tail.
Though it consisted of nothing more than that, the ghostly, unearthly aura rising from its entire length dropped the temperature in the room precipitously.
The android secretary detected danger at once, rang the alarm in the adjoining guard room, and hit the creature with an electromagnetic baton. Undaunted, it rose up from the floor. Its body wavering back and forth, it approached the president.
With every rippling movement, its body drew out thinner and thinner, until it became a single line that appeared and disappeared, a two-dimensional being. Mucus-like material dripped from the edges—or so it seemed, as these too were shavings off a shadow.
The miasma it ejected filled the room with a noxious odor. The discharge of a laser gun flashed from the android secretary’s shoulder. The bright light was sucked into the pitch-black body. The guards came running, but the beams from their large-caliber particle guns couldn’t penetrate the impossibly thin film of material.
The secretary leapt into the fray. The shadow spun and wrapped around the hardened metal body with blazing speed. Before the president or the other guards could raise a cry, with a dull roar the android’s frame shattered into pieces and crumbled to the floor like a load of scrap iron.
The shadow streaked at the president. An electromagnetic barrier flashed around his desk. The shadow cut through it with ease and attached itself to his waist. A wiry appendage grew from its tail, reached out and seized the president’s throat.
One of the guards tried to tear it away, but could find no purchase.
The president’s face grew dark and purple. Fighting for his life, he grabbed a paper knife—more like a short dagger—from the desk and plunged it into the shadow’s appendage.
The thin “arm” severed in the vicinity of the “wrist.” The shadow reared back, scattering dark sheets of its “blood” or “plasma.” It disappeared and reappeared two, three more times, then vanished.
Clutching his throat, the president lifted the barrier. The guards rushed in, amazed. From the severed arm, the silhouette of a wrist remained fixed to the president, the writhing snake-like fingers still clamped to his neck.
The president was taken at once to a special ward in the hospital attached to the Federation building. A corps of doctors set to work on him. They could do nothing. For lack of a better word, the “wound”—the shadow of the wrist was all that remained of the hand buried a micro-millimeter into the skin—proved impervious to X-rays, CT scans, ultrasound, and other diagnostic measures.
And yet, as the world’s best physicians and their instruments looked on, the president continued to weaken. His breathing grew labored. An hour after the incident, just as it seemed that all was lost, the president’s teacher, Master Agni Rai, suddenly appeared in the hospital room.