Chapter 41

“Why”

Sam’s final words, or rather word, rang through Sachiko’s head as she submitted her report. The entire affair had ended badly, and she mostly blamed Satou’s incompetence for that. International Body for Rig Science had organised the operation to end cleanly, but he blundered three times and tried to cover for his mistakes. Had she known someone so incompetent would be involved, she probably wouldn’t have gone to the Body with what she knew in the first place. That was hardly relevant, as she now had to clean up after his messes.

Sam had been a friend of hers, and it was true that they trusted each other, but Sachiko was brought up in the Kaya household and using friends as a sacrifice to success was a part of her upbringing, a part of her family legacy since before the Horas became the Kayas. Her great grandmother, Homi, sacrificed her team, that she had worked with for decades. Her grandmother, Erin, sacrificed her connections in military development, that had taught her everything she knew. Her mother, Alicia, betrayed her pilot, using her as a research subject and blackmailing her in and out of retirement. Now Sachiko, herself, had betrayed her mechanist, selling out her plans after encouraging her to go through with them. Also, she killed her. Somehow that felt like the lesser evil.

The betrayal was what she felt bad about, not the killing. After all, the killing was necessary. Had Sam successfully revealed the Kaya family secrets, worse still released the shutdown code into the public, then it could very well have caused an outbreak of war.

As things stood, rigs were too powerful for any of the remaining countries to launch a war successfully. They also gave those with ambition a means to advance through calculated gambling and match-fixing. Armies throughout the world were steadily shrinking as money was diverted to rig programs; it was predicted that within another three generations even self-defence-based armies would be non-existent. Rigs were achieving humanity’s long held dream of world peace. There were still terror attacks and violence caused by individuals and criminal groups, but nothing even remotely like a war.

Sam’s upload would have changed that. With the knowledge that cores were naturally found and not made, the Kaya right to be sole distributer would be lost, especially since they would be the proceeds of crime. With the shutdown frequency, rigs could be effectively disabled, and they would end up as just another piece of military hardware as a tank would be equipped with shutdown pulses and soldiers could be given pulse-guns. An army equipped with such things could easily take the core mine for themselves. Even if they cores weren’t used to control rigs, they were still the most advanced power generators around, and countries would fight for control of the mine. All the progress they had made would be over in an instant.

That was why she took what she knew to the Body and let them organise an operation. The Body would use that knowledge to leverage control over her family and the company, but that was better than a new world war.

They had acted much faster than she thought they would, immediately using Satou to dispose of the drivers and their copies of the footage. He used his rig to dig out an ice-shelf and drop the car and bikes into it. The Body seemed to have filled his head with ideas of justice and righteousness, that the driver who was doing a job unaware of what he was involved with was a villain that needed to be eliminated for the sake of world peace. It was a shame that he wasn’t as competent as he was fanatic.

His first mistake was not waiting in the hanger to make sure the particles did the job and killed them off. A couple warning shots through the chamber would have been enough to make sure they didn’t try to escape. She didn’t necessarily hold him to blame for being blinded by Jeff’s intervention when he had Sam cornered, no one had expected him to have weapons stashed in the hanger, but there would have been time to recover if he had contacted her and asked for advice, rather than flying to guard the door.

When he was guarding the door, he made his second mistake. He chased after Jeff without first confirming that there was anyone else with him, going after an obvious distraction. Moreover, an airport car riddled with holes was not something that could easily be explained as an accident. Would an investigation accept “the car was already like that” as an excuse?

That just showed how little he knew about using a rig against anything other than a rig, which also contributed to his third mistake; letting an unarmed person slip by mankind’s greatest weapon. He knew that the flash grenades were in play, he could see Sam had the goggles, yet he somehow didn’t think she would use a flash. He then just let he run by him as he flailed wildly to the sides.

His biggest mess was when he panicked. He could see that she had made it to a computer and opened the canister of particles into the airport. Had Sachiko not been monitoring the situation from a nearby office, he would have succeeded in killing everyone accept Sam and still failed the mission. The airport was a property owned and built by the Kaya family, and their family made a great many enemies over the years. As such, their publicly accessible buildings had shield generators built into them that protected family members from assassination attempts. That shield covered her as she walked through the bloody bodies, towards where her close friend was live streaming the event. Any hope of making it look like an accident was blown, and worse Satou’s name was already made public, so Sachiko just shot Sam, the hard drive and the computer.

Seeing her friend’s look of hurt disbelief did cut her a little, but she hardened her resolve and made a call to the Body. They in turn contact the Kaya company and both groups came together to quickly run a cover up. That night, a story ran on the news about Satou who, ashamed of his public and humiliating defeat at the hands of his mother, plotted to assassinate the heir to the Kaya family with the aid of an anti-rig radical group. Fortunately, when he tried to escape, current world champion Savannah Luca and former world champion Wu Xiaoxuan were able to assist police in apprehending him. Unfortunately, two of Savannah Luca’s close friends were killed in the assassination attempt.

The two pilots were obviously not told the truth, though convincing Savannah Luca that a random victim’s body was Jeff’s was a little worrying. If she had noticed that something wasn’t right, then they may have stirred up more problems. Not having a retrievable body was another thing that Satou screwed up, with the shot-to-hell car catching fire.

The events were filled out in a non-descript rig maintenance report to be filed with the International Body for Rig Science, only a close inspection would reveal that it was a report about a mechanist being fixed rather than a rig. With the file sent, she took a walk outside. She rarely had late nights and filling out reports was something she would normally leave for Sam to do. In the cold breeze she saw the first sunrise in weeks; a good omen for someone protecting world peace. Hearing a faint buzz, she looked about. ‘How unusual,' She thought to herself, 'postal drones don’t normally fly so low.’

~ Fin ~