SWITCHBLADE (Choi Ziyi Book 1) Read online

  He lit his third Ultra of the day. The breakfast of champions. He sucked in as much nicotine as he good, ignoring the rawness of his throat and lungs. He was still wavy after the slice, as if everything was just out of step with the rest of the world. He knew he'd had too much. Again. He'd woken up, sprawled half off the couch, with fifteen minutes to get out the door if he was to stand any chance of not being late. Enough time for a shower, a clean set of clothes and not much else.

  The entrance to Control was located halfway down the Western side of the Peak at Level One Forty-One. The fastest way for Wing to get there was on the Mass Transit Escalator, which started at Eighty-Eight and headed up to One Nine Nine. It was already jammed with bodies travelling up and down. But that wasn't anything new. It didn't matter if it was night or day, during the week or the weekend. The escalator was always choked up with people. The whole of Hong Kong seemed to use it.

  Platforms were situated every five levels for people to get on or off, with queues at each and every one. Waiting varied from five to thirty minutes, but the escalator was still quicker than fighting the Hong Kong road traffic. And it was free. That was a major plus.

  Some parts were enclosed and air-conditioned, but other areas were open to the elements with nothing between you and a hundred-level drop to the Zeros. Wing wasn't great with heights, but as long as he didn't look, it wasn't enough to put him off using the escalator. He just made sure he stood in the centre of the steps and he held onto both railings.

  He pulled his shirt from his skin, already wet with sweat. Barely light and yet it was uncomfortably hot already. The air was heavy with humidity, something to be swallowed instead of breathed.

  The escalator went under a monorail, carrying cars through the city. The cars going up-level were a mixture of taxis, sports cars and executive people carriers. The private cars gleamed with the shine of money as they zipped by. Those heading down-level were another story. Taxis again, working cars, all worn and battered, plus the odd minibus were hooked into the rail. Working stiffs heading home after a night shift or to a shitty job down level. All the glamor of life in the big city.

  Wing yawned and rubbed his face. God knows how he was going to get through a shift plugged into the Pod. All he wanted to do was go home and sleep for another day or so. He should've called in sick. He dragged hard on the Ultra, filling his lungs with as much smoke as he could manage. At least on the escalator he could smoke. The city council had tried banning it once, but everyone just ignored it. They should've realised you can't come between a Chinese man and his right to smoke. Anyway, the pollution was so bad that cigarette smoke was the last of your worries if you spent any time outside. There was no way the council would do anything about that though. Too much money was tied up in keeping everything the way it was. The Empire prided itself on keeping everything running perfectly. One of the first things Wing learned when he signed up for service was you don't disrupt the system.

  The entrance was in Central on Level One Eight Eight. It wasn't marked Control. The Government wasn't going to advertise its whereabouts. In the old days, every public building was signposted and lit up like beacons, attracting every crazy in the world. At the end of the twenty-first century, most of them had been bombed or burned to the ground. Some more than once. The Empire liked to keep things more out of mind since then. They only used the old iconic buildings for state events when the public needed some theatre. The Politburo in Beijing or the White House in Washington or the old Parliament building in London would get dusted off before the cameras were turned on.

  Wing stepped off the escalator and wandered towards the entrance. It was as nondescript as you could get. The glass doors only opened following a successful retina scan. Behind those, a simple foyer with one reception desk waited in front of another set of barriers, unlocked by another retina scan. A few guards were visibly on duty but a whole brigade was on standby, lurking out-of-sight. Good luck to anyone foolish enough to try to get into Control.

  The thought stopped Wing in his tracks. He hadn't considered Control being a target. He scanned the faces in the crowd and lingered over the gweilos in particular. One man caught his eye and held it while he walked past. The man had an intense look about him and his cropped hair screamed military. Why did he look at Wing like that? The gweilo only wore a t-shirt, so at least he wasn't rigged to explode or carrying a weapon. Unless he was meked up. Wing froze at the thought. If that was the case, his whole body could be a bomb.

  Wing shook his head. The slice had made him paranoid. Once more he reminded himself it was stupid getting so high the previous night. However, he didn't bother with the pointless routine of promising never to do it again. The slice tucked away in his apartment was at the forefront of his mind already, and he'd not even got into work. He knew the moment he got home, he'd be shooting up again. Back on the horse, with the dog that bit him.

  Having completed all the checkpoints, Wing walked through the double doors, entering the city within the city that was Control. He went into the men's changing room to swap his street clothes for his Operator's uniform; a white jumpsuit with connection points in the arms for the various drips and feeds that kept him going through the shift. Like all uniforms in Control, it had no pockets or anywhere to hide Government property. It helped keep people honest.

  Back out into the corridor as wide as most streets, Wing walked past the travellator and jumped into one of the personnel buggies reserved for high-ranking employees. He didn't bother flashing his card or showing his rank. One glance at his head was enough to tell the driver who he was. No one delayed an Operator.

  The electro-magnetics kicked in with a slight bump as the buggy lifted off the ground. They zipped down the reserved traffic lane, past the stream of bodies heading in every direction.

  They stopped five minutes later in front of another set of anonymous doors. Wing jumped off the buggy and placed his eye over the retina scanner. The doors slid open; five foot thick and pure steel. A tank would have a hard time budging them.

  Wing hated the next part of the walk to work. Below him was the Pit. Three hundred people ensured the mega-city worked in synch and without a hitch. A bridge spanned over them to the Pod at the heart of Control. Crossing it was a nightmare. His vertigo kicked in every time, and somehow convinced him he would fall the hundred and fifty feet to the floor below despite the railings on either side. It didn't matter how many times he had successfully traversed it. Mix the vertigo with his slice hangover, and at that precise moment, Wing just wanted to be sick. Instead, he put his head down, focused his vision on the immediate ground at his feet, and headed across. He ignored everything in his periphery vision. He must have looked pathetic proceeding at such a geriatric shuffle but Wing didn't care. Better to look stupid than be dead was one of his most basic beliefs.

  Two armed security guards waited, still as statues, at the end of the walkway. Wing couldn't tell if they were laughing at him or not. They wore helmets with full-face visors lowered. Body armour covered their bodies. Norinco Standard Assault Rifles rested in their hands. Everything about them said "Don't screw with me."

  Wing nodded at the guard on the right, more out of nerves than respect or acquaintance then submitted to another retina scan. He placed his hand on the scanner for a secondary ID confirmation and the doors slid open.

  Song and Bao Yu waited for him, with two more guards, in front of the final set of doors.

  Bao Yu rolled here eyes at the sight of him. "One more minute and you'd be late." Wing held his arms up in mock innocence. Song laughed.

  "We're all here now," said Bao Yu to the guard next to her.

  "Operator Team One on site and ready for duty," the guard radioed the inside team.

  The operators waited while their counterparts detached themselves from the systems on the other side of the door. Wing winked at Bao Yu but she pretended to be mad at him. He didn't envy her the extra responsibility of running the team. It was hard enough doing his job without worr
ying about everyone else. He hoped she was well paid for it.

  The central lock whirled counter-clockwise and the blast doors opened.

  The operators ending their shift stepped out and Wing, Song and Bao Yu entered the Pod, climbing down the stairs to their chairs in the base of the sphere. Their home for the next twelve hours.

  Wing sank into his chair. The seat adjusted itself around the contours of his body, ensuring maximum comfort and the waste pipes slotted into place. He shook his head. Twenty-eight years old and he wore hi-tech diapers at work. Not what he grew up wanting to do.

  He slotted the drip feeds and IVs into the permanent connection points on his arms next. The neural uplink was automated and was the last thing to plug in. He hesitated over the switch as he did every morning, psyching himself up for the data mind rush that assaulted him the moment the link-up was made. He should've called in sick after all.

  He flicked the switch.

  Three hundred terabytes of data a second flooded his brain instantly. It was like being reborn, leaving the comfort and isolation of the womb and experiencing sight, sound, touch, smell and taste all at once. The neural uplink activated the unused ninety per cent of the human brain, creating the processing power of a super-computer with the ability of independent thought.

  Wing swam with the data current, sensed Song and Bao Yu joining the uplink, and the three assessed everything that happened on the previous two shifts since they were last on duty.

  Control's own mek engineers were trying to reverse engineer a cybernetic eye capable of beating the scan, but without success so far. Xiao was still in lock down in the Imperial Residence, but the dinner at the ICBB was only four days away and the clock was ticking. Preparations were underway to secure the location, vetting all guests and planning routes to and from the venue plus alternate escape routes for emergency evac situations.

  Wing was tempted to look in on Ziyi, but it was too soon in his shift for him to have a good enough reason to do so. He set a reminder for later on.

  "Okay people. We're going to start going house to house to find these bastards," said Bao Yu. "Start with the Western District, levels Zero to Eighty and work your way across the island and Kowloon before moving up to higher levels. There's a reason we've got cameras in every home. Time to put them to good use."

  Wing groaned. They were looking for needles in haystacks. What a job. What a life.

  He'd still not made it past level two and was trying to work out a way of processing everything faster when an alarm went off. A drone in Aberdeen, on the other side of the island had picked up something. A man had refused a retina scan.

  Wing pulled the details up onto a screen, including a head shot. The man wore a cap and glasses but there was still enough available information to run facial recognition. Confirmation came a second later. Wing stared at the picture of Jonathan Sato, Japanese American and an AFA suspect. "We've got one," he told the others.

  Bao Yu looked over. "Pull the drone back and give him some room. Let's follow him and see where he leads us. Maybe we'll get lucky and he'll lead us to the others."

  "The target is in Aberdeen," said Wing. "Level One Forty-Five, Sun Tat Road." Once separate from the main part of Hong Kong, Aberdeen had long since been absorbed into the greater urban sprawl as buildings had claimed every available piece of land and spread out into the surrounding ocean as well.

  "Pulling up all nearby CCTV," added Song. "Mobilising an assault team."

  "Keep them back for now," said Bao Yu. "Let's not get carried away just yet."

  Sato jogged through traffic on multiple screens, head down, with a duffel bag in hand. Being Japanese made him doubly motivated in harming the Empire as far as Wing was concerned. He'd not seen a true Japanese for years now. They were an endangered race ever since the nuclear strikes at the end of the last century turned their country to an irradiated wasteland.

  It had been a harsh move by the last Emperor, but one seen as necessary at the time. The Japanese would never have accepted Chinese rule or even the growing global dominance of the Empire. Their threats of nuclear strikes against Beijing grew with every new country acquired, to a point where there was no other option but for the Empire to remove the threat once and for all. Twelve missiles flew into Japan. Just over four hundred million people died a minute later.

  Citizens in Chinese colonies turned on any Japanese living in their countries to show solidarity with the Empire. Between genuine arrests and victims of lynch mobs, the number of the dead grew each day. Survivors were sent to concentration camps. Others went into hiding. By the time the security measures were repealed fifty years later, there were too few Japanese still alive for any of them to be considered a threat.

  Excitement burned inside Wing. Finally they had the advantage on the terrorists. "He's heading towards the harbour."

  "Maybe he's scoping out the Space Port?" suggested Song. "Is there a weapon in his bag."

  Wing scanned the bag's dimensions to see if it matched anything on their database. "They'd be insane to try their luck there. The air defence systems would stop any missile before it got close enough to interfere with a launch."

  "They’re terrorists. Nothing they do makes sense," replied Song.

  "Target's moving into a hotel overlooking the harbour." It was a small, family run business and it took Wing barely a second to access the building's interior cameras. "He's walked straight through the lobby. Into the second elevator." The images switched to an overhead shot of Sato as he pressed a button for the eighth floor. He felt close enough to touch. Close enough to catch. "Song, bring the troops in."

  "Roger that." Her screens clicked onto the police broadcast frequency. Camera views, from two flyers approaching the target, an unmanned drone, the front camera of an APC, plus from all twelve men on board, arranged themselves across her monitors.

  On the other screens, Sato had exited the elevator, walked to a room at the far end of the corridor and opened the door with a passkey.

  "Who's in the room with him, Wing?" asked Bao Yu. "Give me eyes."

  "I'm trying, I'm trying." He logged into the room's CCTV but only static filled the screen. "Fuck, he must have a blocker running."

  "Send a drone to check out the window," said Bao Yu. "And move the troops in closer. Let's be ready to assault."

  Wing brought a drone down for a fly-by of the room, scanning for thermals as well as optics. "Just got one heat signature, located in the bedroom. He's alone in there."

  Bao Yu smiled. "Take him."

  The APC stopped a block from the hotel. Six troops in full assault gear ran into the main entrance. The flyers dropped down, lowering air hooks for the remaining four troops. Once they were attached, they climbed back up with the troops dangling beneath the flyers. While the ground troops assaulted the room from the interior of the hotel, the now-airborne police would gain entry via the room's windows.

  Wing opened a feed to the unit's commander. "Unit one one eight, come in please. Capture target alive if possible. Repeat capture target alive. Confirm."

  "Target alive. Confirmed," replied the commander. They'd be cursing him now. It was far easier to go in all guns blazing, killing everyone, but they needed Sato alive in order to get information on the rest of the terrorist cell. They also needed to examine Sato's eye to understand how the mek worked.

  "All units moving into place," he told Bao Yu. The six troops inside the hotel climbed the stairs to the eighth floor. The flyers hovered out of sight of the windows. The drone zipped past the target's room one more time, confirming Sato was in place.

  "Ground troops on seven, proceeding to eight." The cameras jerked around as the men raced up the stairs. Wing watched them enter the eighth floor. They turned left. Sato was in room eight nineteen at the end of the corridor.

  "Air troops move in," ordered the commander over the feed.

  The exterior of the room came into view. The flyers moved closer. Wing could see a man sitting on a chair, watching televisi
on.

  The ground troops reached his door. "Entry on five," said the commander. One of the ground troops slotted the door override into place. "Four." The flyers moved closer. "Three." Sato looked up. He grinned at the sight of the police. "Two." He reached for something to his left. "One."

  The room exploded.

  Static filled the screens of all the assault team except for the drone. On its screen, they watched flames crawl up the walls from the crater that was once room eight nineteen.

  7

  Ziyi

  "I'll not remain a prisoner in my own home," shouted Xiao. "We've pandered to these terrorists enough. We don't even know if they're still out there."

  The First Minister's face was as impassive as ever. "Your Highness, it is just too dangerous for you to attend..."

  "Don't dare to tell me what I can or can't do, Minister," roared Xiao. "If you'd done your job and got the territories under control, we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place."

  Ziyi sat on a sofa, wishing she were anywhere else. On one hand, Xiao was the Heir and could do what he wanted. It was up to Deng, Ziyi, Rui and all the security forces to ensure Xiao was safe at all times — no matter what the threat was. But, on the other, everyone's jobs would be so much easier if they stayed locked down in the Imperial Residence. Only two of the eight terrorists were accounted for, and no one had any idea where the others were or how they were avoiding detection.

  The arguing was pointless anyway. Xiao would get his way as he always did. Ziyi wasn't wearing a sheer black evening dress worth millions of yuan to stay in, nor was the flyer prepped and standing by on the launch pad outside for nothing. The only surprising thing was that Rui was not with them. Despite what he told her years before, Rui loved all the social events as much as Ziyi still despised them. And, considering the threat that they still faced, she'd expected every agent drafted in to protect Xiao on his first public appearance since the assassination attempt.