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

‘Okay,’ Sachiko said, ‘you’ve convinced me. I won’t go out even if I had anywhere to go.’

‘Good girl.’

~~~

Someone had decided that handing out gas masks would be a good idea. It had probably been a matter of time, but that time had come, and it seemed that it was just the yakuza who had them.

Tatsu could not really blame them. Riot gas induced nausea and was very unpleasant to be caught in. The drones had been throwing it around like party favours for hours. Breathe too much of the stuff and you could be left puking your guts up and unable to get out of the cloud. Very rarely, someone choked to death before they could escape the effects. The problem was that masks made the yakuza immune, and they were using that immunity to keep fighting when the others had given up and fled.

In this particular case, a group of yakuza were holed up in an apartment building previously owned by the Funabashi gang. Across the street, the mafia had taken over some shopfronts in an attempt to retake the apartments which they had been using to run an illegal brothel. The drones had arrived, as directed by the riot squad sent to the scene, and dropped riot gas rockets in through the windows on both sides, but that had only cut the fire from the shops.

Tatsu watched all this unfold from behind a temporary ballistic barrier the riot team had erected. She was tired and irritated. The sound of coilgun needles hitting the barrier was just making things worse.

‘Enough of this,’ she muttered.

‘What?’ asked the riot team leader crouched beside her. ‘Sergeant? Did you say something?’

‘Not important,’ Tatsu replied as she swapped magazines on her carbine’s grenade launcher. ‘Stay here until I order you in.’

‘Sergeant?’

Ignoring the question in the man’s tone, Tatsu swung out from behind the barrier and started marching toward the apartment building and the yakuza.

‘Is she crazy?’ someone asked behind her.

‘No,’ the leader replied, ‘she’s bulletproof.’

Needles hit Tatsu’s vest to no effect. She kept on walking. Someone had the bright idea of aiming at her legs; a good idea if she had been human. Two needles punched through her suit over her left thigh, stopping against the armour under her skin. She kept on walking.

At ten metres, she stopped and levelled her carbine at the nearest window. A hypervelocity, twenty-five-millimetre projectile left the barrel of her grenade launcher, zipped through the shattered window, hit the ceiling of the room behind it, and exploded. Shifting her aim, she repeated with the next window, and the next. Then she was moving again, walking at a steady pace toward the first room she had hit. There was still fire coming from the window; Tatsu raised her weapon to her shoulder and fired back. A single round hit the gunman in the forehead, punching through his skull and dropping him instantly. A second later, she jumped in through the window and shot a second man as he raised his weapon to fire at her.

The last man in the room was still shaking off the explosion. He let out a yelp as Tatsu grabbed the front of his suit and lifted him bodily off the ground before slamming him into a wall. ‘Listen up, dickhead,’ she said in a far too cheerful voice, ‘it’s your lucky day.’

‘I-It is?’

‘Yeah, you’re not getting shot or arrested, and the same cannot be said for the other yakuza pricks in this building. You are going to deliver a message for me.’

He looked at her as if she was insane, though the effect was somewhat diminished by the blood running into his right eye from a shrapnel wound. He was probably lucky he was still conscious. ‘What message?’

‘You go back to Ichikawa and you go see Yukiko Shiratori. You tell her that Tatsu Yamada says hi, and that if she doesn’t pull her troops out of Chiba within the next two hours, I will come over to her house and put a bullet between her eyes.’

‘You are police, you–’

‘It will be worth the prison sentence just to get some sleep. Are you going to give her the message, or am I going to break your neck and find another idiot to take it?’

‘I will take your message. Kaichō will destroy you for–’

‘You’re new, I can tell. Shiratori will do precisely nothing to me. Now…’ Tatsu tossed him toward a door at the back of the capsule apartment they had been using as a foxhole. ‘… get out of here before I change my mind.’ Lifting her rifle, she dropped the magazine out of her grenade launcher and slotted a new one in. ‘I have work to do.’

11th September.

The fact that Tatsu could not use drugs was something of a design flaw. Obviously, it was not a design flaw most of the time; nothing much could affect her, so she could not suffer from gases, diseases, and anything short of corrosive chemicals. However, it also meant that she could not benefit from modern chemistry either. Right now, she would have done anything for the ability to use stimulants. Pretty much everyone else operating from the Chiba police HQ was taking something to keep them going; Tatsu was staying on her feet thanks to power naps and willpower.

But it was looking like things were calming down. The tactical network had reported no major outbreaks of fighting for over an hour as one a.m. clicked over. The yakuza appeared to have left the area, though reports indicated that they were watching the border from the Tokyo side. The Funabashi gang was in a state of total chaos, but the Shiroi gang seemed to have stopped trying to press their advantage so strongly. Fatigue was setting in on all sides of the conflict.