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

are tough, but compared to a modern battlesuit… However, enough is enough.’ She cut in her radio feed. ‘Someone get some assault drones in here and level the place. I think we’re past pissing around.’

Yamauchi’s eyes widened. Was she really calling for what amounted to an air strike?

‘Yes, I mean it,’ Tatsu said, obviously talking to someone else but answering Yamauchi’s unspoken question. ‘They’ve got too many heavy weapons to be messing around. We’ve lost… at least three AVs here and there are wounded men for sure. Get it done.’ She turned to look at Yamauchi. ‘I’d suggest backing off. We will be.’

‘You’re going to blow them up?’

‘Unless they come running out with their hands up when the drones arrive, yeah. Things around here have got way too serious. And that’s without the Funabashi gang being up to full strength. What happens when they elect a new leader is anyone’s guess.’

‘It could get worse?’

‘A lot worse.’

~~~

The Funabashi gang was celebrating. In the middle of a war for their survival, the upper ranks had put aside their guns and set up shop in a hotel they owned, and they were drinking to the health of their new leader, Ilia Viktorov. They had started in daylight, and there were a lot of guards, but Tatsu still felt it was stupid. Now, with almost no light left in the sky, it just seemed stupider.

Given that Tatsu had managed to infiltrate the building and was watching the proceedings from a cracked-open fire door, the guards were not doing an especially good job. The party was ongoing in the hotel’s restaurant, a room which afforded plenty of cover should a fight break out. It was not like the gang members were entirely unarmed; they had put down their weapons, but most of them had put them down on the tables they were sitting at. They were stupid – all gathering in one place to make it easy to end them – but not entirely brain dead.

And the cover just made it easier to listen in on Viktorov’s speeches, of which there had been more than one. He was not the obvious choice for the new boss; he had been the leader of the support group up until today. It seemed likely that he was the least worst choice, the compromise candidate, though his section did planning and resource management, so maybe they thought a strategist was a good choice at the moment.

‘We will leave here and take our territory back,’ Viktorov was saying. ‘Maybe we take some of the Shiroi territory and give those Chinese fuckers a beating too.’ He was not a big man. He looked more like a planner than a warrior. Blonde and fairly handsome. A lover, not a fighter. Until he opened his mouth, it seemed. ‘How, you ask? I am in logistics. I have a shipment of… useful items coming in in the next hour which will make things far more interesting. There are some very big fireworks in this party pack. They won’t know what has hit them.’

Great. He was shipping in some really heavy armaments. Speculation on what was pointless, but Tatsu figured it would be messy. Missiles? Missiles seemed likely, maybe with thermobaric warheads. Okay, so it was difficult not to speculate. That was going to need stopping.

‘Intelligence says that those Shiratori bastards are starting to make a play,’ Viktorov went on. That was news to Tatsu. ‘We find them and send them back across the border. In body bags, obviously.’ That got cheers. The cheers were still dying when one of the doors into the restaurant burst open and a pair of flying robots buzzed in.

The twin agents of death were opening fire before anyone could get to a weapon. Men fell, riddled with needles. Tatsu recognised the machines and pushed her door open, stepping into the room to look for the assassin. And then all hell broke loose.

‘They’re here to finish us!’ Exactly who shouted it, Tatsu was not sure, but the result was immediate and consisted of a lot of flying lead.

A shotgun slug hit Tatsu’s chest, low on the left side, stopping against the trauma plate in her vest. She turned and put a needle in the gunman’s right arm, disarming him almost literally as the bone was cleaved in two. Then she shifted her aim, raising her weapon to her shoulder and tracking one of the robots across the room. She fired a ten-round burst, hitting with three of the needles, and the bot twisted in the air as though flinching. But then it just kept on firing, so Tatsu fired again. This time it dropped out of the air, fans buzzing fitfully, and someone noticed the machine lying on the carpet and blasted it with a shotgun. One down, probably.

One of the nearby thugs had decided to take on Tatsu hand-to-hand. Well, shotgun butt-to-hand; he swung his weapon like a club at Tatsu’s head and she ducked under it before shooting him at point-blank range in the gut. ‘Get out of my way, idiots!’ Tatsu yelled. ‘She’s here for your new boss!’ No one was really paying attention and Tatsu’s focus returned to Viktorov.

He was standing where he had been, at the table he had been addressing his gang from, but now he was holding a shotgun. It was a modern weapon designed for close combat, an electromagnetic launcher with a high rate of fire and significant impact potential. It was going to do him no good. As Tatsu spotted Viktorov, she also spotted the ghostly shape coming up behind him. Viktorov seemed to sense something too since he began to turn, but it was far too late. There was a flash of movement, something being swung down with considerable force, and Viktorov’s back was slashed open from his left shoulder to his right hip. Blood flew, the newly elected boss