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

‘Yes. Whether it’ll happen soon enough is another matter.’

Nodding, Sachiko looked around at her room for a second. ‘Uh, want to stay for a bit? Relieve the boredom and some stress, you know?’

‘Sounds great, but I need to go home and sleep. I’ve got about eight hours before I’ll need to be out there again.’

‘Another reason to hate the mafia then: they’re messing up my love life.’

Tatsu turned and picked up her rifle. ‘You and me both.’

9th September.

Tatsu spotted a van pulling up outside a small factory in Kamagaya and immediately started toward it. By the time she got there, Yamauchi and Suzuki were climbing out, both wearing ballistic vests. The reporter’s vest was over the top of one of her ubiquitous summer dresses, and it looked a lot like they were planning to do a report.

‘Make sure you get the cordon in shot,’ Yamauchi said. Then she spotted Tatsu closing on her and said, ‘Oh shit.’

‘What are you doing here, Yamauchi?’ Tatsu asked. ‘Do you have trauma plates in those vests? Because I’m guessing not, so they’re going to do squat to stop an armour-piercing round from giving you a really bad day.’

‘What’s a trauma plate?’ Yamauchi asked. She shook her head. ‘Not the point. The channel finally agreed to let me come out and shoot some extra footage for my report. You’ve got a siege going on here.’

It was, in fact, mid-afternoon and there was indeed a siege. A large number of Shiroi gangsters had been traced back to the factory. The police had surrounded the place and were being held off with assault weapons, a few heavier pieces, and a lot of grenades. A number of anti-personnel mines had been identified at the entrances. It was something of a standoff, and it was not that far from the boundary between Chiba and Tokyo which ran through the Kamagaya district. At least it was daylight, even if that meant Tatsu was running on minimal sleep.

‘You can hear the gunfire from the apartment buildings over the border,’ Yamauchi went on. ‘It’s a matter of public interest that–’

‘I’m more concerned about your interest,’ Tatsu said. ‘They have at least two sniper railguns in there. They see a van from TNM out here, they might decide to bag themselves a wild reporter.’

In Tatsu’s ear, one of the squad leaders was reporting. ‘… signs of movement. One of the loading bay doors is opening.’

‘I’ve a right to risk myself for a good story if I want to,’ Yamauchi said. ‘This is going to make a great– What the fuck is that?!’

Tatsu could see it in the view from the squad leader’s helmet camera. A massive, blobby shape was moving out into the factory’s loading yard. Its body seemed to have been constructed of a number of interlocked, metal spheres. Then someone had bolted blocky robotic arms and legs onto that. The arms were holding a big gun, probably a gauss minigun, an electromagnetic machinegun. There was no sign of a faceplate, but there were things which looked like eyes mounted on the uppermost sphere. It stood a good two and a half metres tall and had to weigh a tonne or so. ‘Down,’ Tatsu said, dropping to the ground just before the weapon the thing was holding opened up like a firehose of mass destruction.

Yamauchi demonstrated that her reflexes were fairly good. ‘What is it?’ she asked again, now from a position on the tarmac beside Tatsu.

‘It’s a repurposed D-DOPS,’ Tatsu replied. She went on before Yamauchi could ask the obvious question. ‘That’s a deep-dive operations suit. They’re used to work on the sea floor out beyond the continental shelf. Heavily armoured, obviously. The limbs are motorised so it can handle that minigun well enough. Normally, those things are mounted on vehicles. The suit’s clumsy, but with the rate of fire that gun has, it doesn’t really matter, and our rifles aren’t going to penetrate that armour.’ She reached behind her back and pulled her pistol out of its holster.

‘So, you’re going to shoot it with a pistol?’

Tatsu dropped the magazine. ‘Not yet.’

‘What do you mean, not yet?’

A second magazine was slotted into position. Tatsu checked the load. ‘Whoever’s in there is firing at the full cyclic rate and hosing the place down. We’re probably going to need new riot vans after this. However, at that rate, he’s going to run out of ammo after only about–’ Silence, or a near approximation, fell. ‘That long.’

Rolling into a crouch, Tatsu raised her pistol and took aim. Across the parking lot, the bulky suit was busy swapping the massive ammo cassette slung beneath its weapon. Tatsu pumped out three rounds from her pistol as the replacement cassette was being lifted into position. Three explosions blossomed on the blobby suit’s torso, if it could be said to really have one. Masked by the small outer detonations, each round became a sphere of superheated gas which lanced through the hull of the monster machine and into the body within. The arms stopped moving. First the ammo cassette and then the minigun dropped from the metal hands. The pressure suit listed forward, seeming to refuse to fall for a second or so before gravity delivered the final verdict. With an almighty clang, the D-DOPS crashed to the ground.

‘With a pistol!’ Yamauchi squeaked. ‘Tell me you got that, Shisen?’

‘I got it,’ Suzuki replied. Tatsu hoped that he had got up into a kneeling position when she had. Otherwise, the man was a bigger idiot than she thought. ‘Not sure how good it’ll look on-screen, but I got it.’

‘That was amazing! Does every cop have one of those pistols? I mean, nothing could stand up to that. You–’

‘I’m glad they didn’t get their hands on some real military hardware,’ Tatsu cut in. ‘D-DOPS