Sign of the Dragon (Tatsu Yamada Book 1) by Niall Teasdale (e reader TXT) 📕

‘Nothing,’ Ono said, disgust in his tone.

‘Nothing,’ Tatsu agreed. She continued walking through the club, Ono trailing behind her with a scowl on his face.

It was a happening bar, now disused. There was an open room on the ground floor with a bar in the corner. Upstairs there were rooms which basically consisted of a bed and a shower. The colour scheme was late-period brothel: lots of reds and blacks. There was no light, so they were operating by flashlight, but there was nothing to see. Downstairs, beyond the bar, there were storage rooms and offices with no indications that they had been used in years.

‘Like I said,’ Ono said, ‘there’s nothing here. This was–’

‘There’s nothing here,’ Tatsu agreed again. ‘No electrical equipment and no dust.’

There was a pause. ‘But they have a power bill. Maybe someone comes in and cleans the place. Unlikely, but possible. We could have just missed their big quarterly clean.’

‘It would need to be daily and use an army of vacuums to match their power budget.’

‘So… We’re missing something. Hidden door?’ He was excited again. There was something going on here which had been concealed. That was a good sign, for his career anyway.

‘Now we look for it.’

There were obvious places to look: closets which seemed to serve little purpose, the main utility room. It turned out to be in none of those. Tatsu was walking down a corridor when she spotted some odd thermal characteristics on one of the walls.

‘It’s here,’ she said, pointing at the spot on the wall.

‘What is?’ Ono asked. ‘It’s a wall.’

‘It’s a wall with a square panel warmer than the surrounding wall.’

‘You can see heat?’

‘I can see infrared and ultraviolet light. There’s a warm spot. Also, looking at the floor plan, there’s an unexplained void at this point, right behind that wall.’

Ono nodded. ‘Okay, let’s get some men in here with crowbars.’

It took ten minutes. The plasterboard fixed over the door came away easily enough, but then they were faced with a reinforced metal door with no obvious means of opening it. There was, presumably, a control somewhere, but there was no indication of where. In the end, they used breaching charges. Behind the door was a flight of stairs leading down; four of the assault team led the way down, followed by Tatsu and Ono.

‘What is this place?’ Ono asked as they walked through the main corridor they found below. Off to each side were open bays, square rooms with one wall missing. Each had… equipment in it. The equipment varied. In several, there was just a bed, in others it was bondage furniture, a gynaecological examination seat, a dentist’s chair…

‘I’d suggest it was fetish gear they kept secret,’ Tatsu said, ‘but the simple sets don’t match that idea. Sets sounds right though. I think this might be a studio.’

‘Studio? For what?’

‘At a guess, fuser porn.’

Ono grimaced, which Tatsu could understand coming from him. Fuser – more properly FSR, or full sensorium recording – was point-of-view video taken to the next level. The process used a neural interface to record all of the senses, and those could be played back through a neural interface to anyone willing to view it. Generally, there was an editing process in between, though ‘fuser idols’ had become popular, letting people live the lives of the rich and famous vicariously and live streamed over the internet. Porn was the obvious subject matter, but fuser could be educational, therapeutic, or just escapist. There was, of course, a market for illegal fuser recordings too.

‘Fuser porn is not illegal,’ Ono said. ‘Hiding your studio behind a reinforced door suggests something… less pleasant.’

‘Yes. Yes, it does.’

That was backed up by the next set of rooms they found. There were four of them and they did not have an open wall. Or they did, but it was sealed off by bars. There was a mattress on the floor of each, a bucket to use as a toilet, and one occupant. She was lying on the mattress, naked, face turned to the wall, and she did not move at the sound of the assault team’s boots on the linoleum outside her cell.

‘She’s alive,’ Tatsu said. ‘Infrared is showing heat and her MedStat is… yellow and orange. No data.’

‘They probably hacked her implant and removed the software,’ Ono said.

At the voices, the girl turned over, squinting at the two people looking in on her. She was Japanese and fairly young. Short dark hair and dark eyes, pretty aside from the puffy, reddened eyes. ‘W-who are you?’ she asked.

‘Police,’ Tatsu replied. ‘We’ll have you out of there shortly… Ren. Facial recognition got a hit. She’s Ren Izumi, reported missing from her home in Saitama six days ago. Aged seventeen and I am going to find out who’s operating this place and string them up by their genitalia.’

‘Contact.’ The voice over the radio came from the forward assault team. Tatsu turned toward the end of the corridor, hoping for someone to shoot.

‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! I surrender. Don’t shoot, I’m just the technician!’ A different voice muffled by distance and dashing Tatsu’s hopes of a target.

The owner of the voice turned out to be a small man who looked like he should be tending the huge array of computer equipment in the last room on the floor. There were racks of it, all with lights blinking manically. The tech was sufficiently wild-eyed that he matched the manic lights well.

‘Katsuro Maki,’ Ono said. ‘Technician or not, you are under arrest. What is all this stuff?’

‘Network storage,’ Tatsu said before Maki could speak. ‘Multicast units. Network switches. Computers, obviously. Quite the setup. They have to be streaming fuser out to quite a number of clients.’

‘We’ll get their