Private Ghost

[Cato Fett]

[Denon]
[Seven Corners]
[48th Floor Highrise – Baker’s Row]

“The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
-William Gibson

~Opening~​

Mind of No Mind.

Cato exhaled wafts of fogged breath, disguised by shadow in the lee of a two-man-tall air-con unit. Behind him, giant polymer synthsteel fan blades oscillated slowly on a rod axle. Overworked compressor machinery hummed, compressor coils rattling discordantly in their casing. Before him, the breadth of luminous Seven Corners and jagged city-spires biting up from the murky horizon beyond, infant coronal belches of fire-light venting from industrial refinery fields operating at peak output. The twilight static sky had swollen and purpled to black, now deluging. Cato wiped beads of rainwater and salty perspire off his brow, then fixed on his T-visor helm.

Mind of No Mind. He exhaled breath, exhaled intrusive thoughts, reducing his attention to the immediate present with razor-sharp focus. His armour and armament were accounted for, thrice-checked over and repaired and readied. It’d taken weeks for the casement’s weight to become familiar but now, he could move as quickly and easily if he were dressed in jacket and hakama. Cato stepped to the edge of the landing, peering down. Bright lanes of blistering speeder traffic criss-crossed about the high-rise. The noise was a drone note, engine howls melding with holo-neon advert voices and product jingle-tones, with whip-crack wind sheer smashing over the face of the high-rise and the deeper, groaning notes of passing air roiling through artificial canyons. What held his attention was a light-swamped balcony on the eight floor, forty levels below. A semi-fashionable party was raging in full-swing.

Rain water pattered off his helm and pauldrons. Forty floors, he thought. Cato held out a hand, manually gauging wind-speed and direction. An ocular command awoke spectrum suites in his visor glass. The world became overlaid in AR information feeds. He cycled off all but the most pertinent and readied. Reinforced tabi-soles toed over the landing’s edge, then clenched down. Cato leapt forward and out into empty air. And fell.

And fell.

 

[Cato Fett]

Fell, hurtling fast down the high-rise face, fast enough to catch up beside storm droplets that seemed to hang momentarily suspended. Time dilated almost to total stillness. Cato was plummeting, shearing through buffets of inner-city wind ribbons, fearless and contentedly counting the moments in time with his slowed heart rate. The light and sound-pulsed apartment balcony rocketed up at him through his visor. Cato swung out his arms and legs, catching the drafts, twisted about to bring his feet beneath him. The jetpack nozzles anchored to his spine flared on and flared brightly. The sudden halt in velocity yanked up his stomach and viscera.

In spite of reduced speed, Cato still landed hard. Ferrocrete spider-cracked under his plunging weight, motor mechanics instinctively redistributing his weight so the foot and knee taking the impact didn’t shatter on landing. The balcony barely registered the jolt. So did the pair of hired muscle in black rain ponchos, hefting modular SMG’s, guarding the balcony entrance outside in the deepening midnight downpour. From his staid crouch, Cato gripped his daisho, long and short swords flashing free in silver arcs. The guards fell, cut through bone and gut. Arterial spray hosed onto Cato’s armour, immediately diluted and washed with rainfall. His swords replaced across his belly-plate, he retrieved the secured carbine-rifle waiting behind and leaned into the stock, stalking hunched through the balcony doors into the apartment proper.

The interior had been dimmed to accommodate an impromptu dance function. Bodies, clothed, half-clothed, and otherwise, bobbed, stamped, gyrated, and cavorted, to remixed tracks thundering from hastily bolted speaker boxes and immense, nearly six-foot sub-woofers. Fog machines clouded the wide living space, skeins and ribbons of breaking mist, that caught planes of strobing laser-light projecting from a raised DJ dais. Helm-sensors battled to get a headcount; Cato loosed a hand from the carbine to free a long tanto knife before returning the grip. Somehow, the sheer heady musical blare and bass-thumps rocking through the air and flooring had done wonders masking his entry. What eyes that managed a peek his way were glassy and enormous, dilated. To them, a darkly outlined silhouette lined in shifting hues of red appeared out of the corners of their dreams. Just a figment of the dance and the drugs. Cato edged forward and began easing around the edge of interlocked partiers, still scanning over perspiring faces. He looked for a pair of human faces; young, square-jawed, their handsomeness a product of extensive black market vat-work, expressions immovably vapid, smug, and arrogant. Arrogant enough to flaunt their due bounties and maintain lifestyles of near-constant, hedonistic appointments. Their rap-sheets scrolled down in the margins of Cato’s visor-feed.

 

[Cato Fett]

Shapes began to converge on him through briefs parts in the dance crowd. Head-shaved thugs cut with synth-muscle grafts hurrying to intercept his intrusion. The party hadn’t paused; the mult-armed, mult-eared DJ worked obliviously, tuning the music even louder, adjusting the light show to beam even brighter. Cato tugged his carbine-stock closer against his shoulder and activated his helms synced ammunition count. Seven thugs rapidly thronged closer and closer. Again, time dilated and paused; Cato’s thoughts softly beat with the kata of bow-fighting, transferred now to his rifle: ashibumi, dozukuri, yugame, uchiokoshi, hikiwake, kai, hanare…

Finally, zanshin!

Time resumed its relentless march. Cato snapped his rifle round, not slowing to aim, viciously squeezing the trigger on single-fire mode. The first shot smacked into the nearest thug through his forehead and blew his cooked skull-cap up into the ceiling, the second catching another on his left flank through the throat and blasting away a smoking, spinning head. Third and fourth shots connected into a farther bodyguard, bursting through torso plating, under-armour, into the meat and bone of the ribcage. Cato ceased fire and stepped into directly engage; utilizing the carbine barrel as an extension, parrying a thug’s SMG aside, collapsing their windpipe with the stock. He turned and shouldered into another oncoming thug, lancing with the tanto through openings at their collar, armpit, hip, groin, and thigh, in motion still bringing his carbine to bear and thumbing the fire-rate to a three-round cluster, shooting a seventh bodyguard off their feet.

Cooked air, singed tissue and textile, and the sharp retorts of fighters dying broke the dance reverie. The crowd walled back in breathless shock, pushing away to the farthest exits to bathrooms and bedrooms. Screams overtook the thudding music. A new stink rose over the smells of charred armour and spent blaster-rounds: animal fear. His rifle followed a knot of remaining thugs ringing around a pair of young partiers dressed in garish pastels and gold jewelry. They herded toward a doorway nested beside a wide kitchen unit, knocking aside any youths that tumbled too close. One thug pulled at a comm unit, having to shout over the din. Cato sped forward, after them, dodging nimbly past whorls of frightened revelers. Spotted black mouths of blaster barrels rising to take a bead on him.

He tucked the carbine up to his belly and threw his shoulders over, jumping into a scraping roll. Blast-bolts clawed over him, splashing and bursting into the floor tiling. Coming to his foot and knee, Cato fished a pair of heavier throwing knives with curiously packed bulk in their grips. His thumbs depressed unseen triggers, hurtling the knives into the guard pack. They struck true, jutting into one unfortunate thug’s vest plating. Panicked, his cohorts tried kicking him away from their charges and the portal of the apartment entrance. A beat too late. The explosive-kunai detonated. The imperiled hood disappeared in a bloom of hot light and misty gore, a solid shock-wall of force smashing across Cato’s armour.

 

[Cato Fett]

Through the stinking cordite haze, the targets crawled their way out into the hallway beneath the bodies of their hoodlum guard. Cato stood and shouldered toward the doorway, gently patting aside dazed partiers. He toed over good corpses and some that were simply concussed and knocked out with shock. Eased to the doorway jamb, carefully peaking out. The hallway looping round the apartment floor’s circumference was a shock of sterile titanium-tiling and platinum gilding. Outside, the sound was muted. The targets’ breathing laboured and rasped, half-crawling and partially limping for their lives towards a bank of turbo-lifts. Local apartment dwellers froze to watch the two young men shamble desperately away from the armoured wraith stalking up to them.

Cato toggled his carbine’s safety off-and-on, letting the boys hear the ammo-pack’s charge whine. They froze and collapsed, one pushing over to lay on his backside as the other leaned and slid down the walling. Dark ribbons of thin blood trailed their wake. He strode to them and paused a scant handful of paces off, levelling his carbine down. Across his helmet feed, database readouts flashed the boys’ names, identifying physical descriptions, bounty payouts, and the cause for the head-prices.

“Lawry Rake,” Cato intoned. The point of his rifle cocked to the other boy. “Norris Ray.”

Lawyr Rake was a picturesque blonde, a hard-planed figure with a meticulously maintained complexion and garments that could cover a middle-class machinists’ yearly takings. Rake pooled the blood welling in his cheek from a shrapnel gash and spat onto Cato’s thigh plates. “Right…” Rake wheezed, holding his arms over his belly. Blood was soaking up through his once fashionable dress-shirt. “Alright… Alright, Mando. P-Point made, whatever… Just… Just make the collar and get the paramedics…”

“Feth! Feth!” Norris groaned, quilled with pieces of snapped bone blown into his ribs and hip. Norris Ray, dark curly haired, skin gene-coded to reflect the light in a metallic gloss, fashion veering towards the trendy hoodlum aesthetic. Tattoos in faux-tribal patterns webbed down his throat.

“Look what you’ve done!” A bystander at the turbolifts shrilled. Cato didn’t look up; he stood glacially, coldly still.

“Abby Gil’crist,” Cato said. “Jen-Han Fadhouin. Kylee ‘Baby’ Sun-Van. Zin Thrahn. Juda Ken-Sila. Ages between fourteen and twenty-seven. Mixture of male and female. All young, all pretty. They each liked you both, Rake and Ray. Took them from broken places, gave them a taste of upper-crust living. Then when you had their guards down and instilled a bit of trust, you took advantage. Sexually at first. Wasn’t enough. It turned into something horrifying and gruesomely violating. You destroyed them, for no better reason then you liked to play and break things – “

Cato kicked Rake over onto his shoulders. “And very stupidly recorded your escapades. And even more moronically put them up on Darknet.”

“So just… Just what? Wh-What now?” Rake mewled, still trying to kick away on the floor. “We’re… We’re worth it alive over… Over dead. Right…? That’s how it works?”

“I’m fething dying, man!” Norris Ray screeched. He was panicking observing an increasingly flat pool of red soak into the tiling around him.

“No bounty,” Cato said quietly.

Both the boys blinked uncertainly. “What… What you mean ‘no bounty’?”

“No bounty puck. No price,” Cato said. Throaty, aching silence grew.

“I don’t get it…” Lawry Rake gasped.

Cato cycled his carbine to full auto and pulled the stock up deeper against his shoulder. “Not about the money. Not anymore.”

He squeezed hard on the trigger until his finger ached. Onlookers beside the turbolift bank screamed, as Cato’s rifle disgorged a full magazine charge into Lawry Rake and Norris Ray.

 

[Cato Fett]

~Ending~​

Outside, the rainfall had eased. Swollen thunderheads lightened to overcast cloud banks shivering like holobank screens tuned to dead static. The towering holoadverts and corpo-blimps lost some sharpness of colour, flat, matte, and mundane without the magic of soaking rainfall to turn their saturation into something otherworldly.

Cato had returned to the party flat. The fog-machines still spun out mist and hazed clouds, occasionally pierced by stabs from the laser light modules. The DJ had retreated somewhere. Partiers and revellers were all fled save for handfuls locked in the bedrooms and tearfully vomiting their anxieties up in water closets and washrooms. The dead were left as they were felled, splayed brokenly, cut and slashed or explosively smashed and cauterized. He picked his way over the carnage toward the balcony. Stepping outside into the wind and dappling rainfall, sounds of scattered droplets pecking across his helm and armour broke Cato’s oneirism.

Time to go, he knew. Siren klaxons were wailing closer, red-blue-white lights staining the far city-canyon walls. For a moment, he felt for his centre. Felt for the hollow pit beneath his belly, where the light of his hara was, where he kept the worst pieces of his soul tightly knotted away. There it was… A vast hollowness rife with rage and pain. A wrath that dictated it be spent on vengeance in the hope that somehow, his own self-destruction would emerge from the carnage. He gripped his sword hilt tightly and again exhaled. Felt rather than listened to the rain.

Mind of No Mind.

He jumped to the balcony railing and flared his jetpack on, charging up into the lights and shadows of Denon’s long night.