"History is neither written nor made without love or hate."
-Theodor Mommsen
Author's Note: Thanks to my brother, a member of ARMA, for advising me on the combat of this chapter. And, of course, my co-author and editor, my husband.
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All she noticed were his eyes. She had never seen them in the real world, and it had been too dark and hectic in the courtyard. In that moment, she understood that there would be no other chances, no fleeing or hiding, no more waiting. This wouldn't end until one of them could no longer fight. Her borrowed body felt exhausted at the very thought. All her bruises and tired muscles throbbed in unison, the exertion of the night a foreign and unwelcome visitor.
"Batou . . , " she tried one last time, knowing it was useless.
"Silence, dog," he spat at her. "The breath you expend on your words pollutes the air far more than the stench of death from those you annihilated. Tokugawa may have won through your trickery, but you will perish here." He spoke with the fey emotionlessness of futility, the rage subsiding and giving place to diamond-hard concentration.
Such hatred . . . For a moment she wanted to weep - another nuisance of this human shell! - but instead she pushed aside all her pain as an irrelevant annoyance, drawing up more adrenaline and determination from the bottomless well of her soul. She also used her off-hand to draw open a small pouch at her waist.
Then he rushed at her, drawing his katana and slashing down in one smooth motion like a diving hawk. He changed direction as she dodged, trying to follow her movements. She threw a fistful of black powder into his face from the pouch, and pulled the cord free. As he sputtered, and rubbed at his eyes, slashing blindly, she rushed behind him, looping the cord from the bag around his neck in an attempt to bring him to unconsciousness.
She tightened the cord, muscles straining, but just as she realized it was caught on his neck guard, he bent down forward suddenly and she toppled over his head and onto the ground. Thinking quickly, she snatched his wakizashi, attempting to slash his bent face in one swift stroke, but he jumped back and the sword met only air. As he dodged, however, he swung his katana upwards, and though she flung her head backwards, the tip sliced her chin up to her cheek. He blinked a few times, the powder still affecting his eyes.
I'm not going to be able to knock him out, not with that armor. And it's way too risky to log him out conscious. She held both her own sword and his, one in each hand, her cyberbrain calculating intercept vectors and torque points so that she could catch and block his blade.
His slashes were fast and unpredictable, like a swarm of bees, and it took all her concentration to parry them away. She saw a several places where she could follow through on her block with a potentially lethal blow, but if she killed him here, he might die outside the system as well. Her lack of armor was also a disadvantage; soon she was decorated with small cuts from glancing blows. Finally she saw an opening down low, and she slashed at his unarmored Achilles tendon.
Batou grunted in pain, but the chance she took left her open. He brought his blade up like a metal wing catching the wind, severing her outstretched right arm. For a moment she saw only blackness as she staggered backwards and felt a bizarre explosive pain of emptiness where her forearm used to be. Feeling sluggish, she watched as her own lifeless, disconnected hand spiralled away. The ninja sword she had used only moments earlier spun with it, only to come slicing through an innocent arrangement of chrysanthemums and scattering their petals to the floor. She looked down at her other hand, still clutching the wakizashi she had stolen from Batou. Blinking, she looked up, trying to focus.
Batou didn't wait for her to recover. Even as she backed away, he charged at her, katana aimed for her heart. Stumbling, she lurched away, and instead the blade pierced her right shoulder, further rendering her arm useless. He yanked his blade out and prepared to strike again.
Gasping for breath and clutching her shoulder, she futilely turned off pain reception in her cyberbrain, but it had no effect on her body within the system. Shoving away shock, she pulled up the admin interface. I don't have any other choice. As she logged him out of the system, she rolled away and jumped to her feet, waiting for Batou's avatar to crumple to the floor.
But he only paused long enough to hiss at her,
"What are you waiting for? Come at me, and die!"
Even Motoko was surprised. She had been worried about his Ghost not being able to find its way back amidst the stream of memories from the past, but she hadn't expected that it wouldn't even try to return. He was too attached to the system, the memories, the emotions . . . She turned and ran to buy herself some time, something he would never expect. It put her back to him, but she doubted he would take advantage of that. The samurai who controlled him was too used to "fair" fights.
"Ishikawa!," she yelled over the comlink as she ran, "Unplug Batou from the system, and plug him into my secondary link!"
"Major, are you sure?," he asked, "An unprotected peer-to-peer connection when he's in that state . . . what are you trying to do?"
"Do it now!," she ordered, hearing heavy footsteps behind her. His newly-acquired limp wasn't slowing him much. She leapt over a futon, kicked a table up behind her to block the path, and toppled a shoji screen with her sword to try to slow him down.
"All right, it's done," Ishikawa reported, sounding uncharacteristically worried. There was only one way that would surely release his Ghost from its imprisonment here.
She let go of her sword to snatch up a down blanket from a nearby futon. Turning, she threw it at him as he stumbled over the screen. His katana sliced through the blanket, tearing the silken cover, and down feathers gushed out like blood. Through the swirling feathers she rolled, grabbing her sword from the ground, and dashed, past his katana. She held the sword outstretched, but it met only empty air, and soon they were face to face, her wrist level with his chin.
She brought the blade in, under his neck guard, pulling back with a long, deep slice to his neck where it would surely be fatal. His eyes, once grim, widened in surprise, and she sidestepped a spurt of his blood from his neck that threatened to drench her.
Batou's weapon clattered to the floor, no longer needed, and he fell forward. Instinctively, she tried to catch him, but instead her legs wavered and they both crashed to the ground. She could barely breathe under his weight.
A thin layer of pure white feathers drifted down to cover him like a shroud. Motoko exhaled, and a few feathers danced shyly away, the rest weighed down by his blood.
"Follow me," she whispered, knowing his Ghost was still nearby.
She logged out.
The obsession to kill the ninja was still there, but his body refused to obey his will. He watched her try to stop his fall, and it didn't make sense at all. What kind of ninja kills someone, and then tries to lower them gently to the floor? Is this just a final mockery of my weakness? He tried to bring up his hands to throttle her, but his body, fickle at the end, simply ignored him. He could no longer stay in this shell.
As he watched her eyes, pained and intense, his hatred began to recede like the tide. And beneath the receding waves, remained that compulsive desire to seek. Somehow, now, he wasn't angry at the woman who just slit his throat. Well, a part of him was, but that part seemed to be separating from him, like an amoeba undergoing mitosis -- where was it going? He felt an urge to follow, but he felt a stronger urge to find her . . .
Like a nesting bird, he wandered, disembodied, searching, but he was totally lost. He had no mental map of this non-place, there were no landmarks, just collections of electrons and other . . . essences was the best word he could figure out. They weren't unfriendly, and he thought about stopping, but he knew that he was looking for something else. Someone else.
In a world of GPS coordinates and downloadable maps and building schematics and infallible visual memory replay, being lost was not a common occurrence. There was no one to ask for directions; just flows and nodes in all three dimensions. But, when he stopped to listen he felt a slight instinctive pull, like a gentle breeze at his back, that nudged him in one direction or another. He paused, listening to the breeze, and it spoke to him,
"Follow me."