Endgame

End Game

By Phegan

All characters and thematic elements belong to Bandai and Sunrise Inc. Please review!

Chapter 1

Julia

It was the shortest skyscraper in the only city on an asteroid called Yakana. It was topped by a perpetually marching zebra-striped teddy bear, and the neon sign indicated the building was just a toy store. Not a likely front for the Komodo Syndicate. By 15:00, it was surrounded by snipers with heat-seeking rifles. By 15:23, the second team was entering the building to make sure no one was left. Kyt Harley went in himself. He wanted to make sure the man who’d killed his mother was dead.

He found him on the top floor, the only floor that wasn’t crowded with stuffed toys, stacks of games, and corpses. He was alone in the room, slumped over a computer, hair splayed over the keyboard. Kyt noted this to Agent Delaware over his communicator, then dismissed his troops.

“So Komodo’s dissolved. This is gonna change all the syndicates, you know. Komodo had its fingers in most of the syndicate pies,” Delaware crackled in his ear.

“You never know with an organization like Komodo. The syndicates weren’t even aware Komodo was the controlling hand. It passed itself on as a weak syndicate located in West Bumfuck, Aurora Borealis. They could have prepared for something like this. I hear they’ve got uncanny cloning techniques these days.”

“So run an HPB on the bodies.”

“I’ve got a couple of avenues I’m gonna cover before I’ll consider this over,” Kyt said. “Then I’ll consider your offer to close in on the Red Dragon syndicate. As for now, I want to be alone. Harley out.” He turned off the communicator and turned to the body slumped over the keyboard. Slowly, he walked to it, grabbed a handful of hair, and pulled the man up so he could get a good look at his face. Ideally, he should have had a more creative death. Realistically, chasing the perfect grudge usually got both parties killed.

Only a second after he became aware of a presence behind him, he felt a brief shock at the base of his spine and lost control of all his muscles. He fell face-down and didn’t even feel the floor’s sucker punch to his face, though he was sure there would be some damage in the morning. Slowly, the floor rotated into a fixed perspective of the ceiling as he was rolled over. He couldn’t even feel the pressure of the person’s hands on him, and he certainly didn’t have the wherewithal to shout for help or make an alert on his communicator, which of course was the point of a shocker.

An infinitely sad face framed by a tumble of moon-dimmed blonde hair floated into view. It drifted up as the girl stood; she had a gun.

“I don’t want to hurt you, but I will,” the girl said. “You have to understand, they had my brother. They said they had a kill switch. I saw you coming a couple months ago- I found the kill switch… I’m not making much sense, I know.” The girl ran a hand through her hair. She nodded towards the figure of Dios Pyrrh, leader of the Komodo syndicate. “He tried to recruit me, years ago. I used to fight for money. I was the best in Aurora Borealis. But I wouldn’t join. My father was a syndicate man. That’s why my brother and I were orphaned… But he took him, my brother, and told me that as long as I would work for him he would live. He said if I tried anything funny, if he died, that there was a chip in my brother’s brain that would explode if anything went wrong. I… I think I disabled it. I knew you were coming.” She leaned down again, put the gun to his temple. “I’m telling you this so you understand that I will kill you if you don’t tell me where my brother is. If you shout for help, I’ll shoot you. I know I’ll die. I’m okay with that. Blink three times if you’re ready to talk.”

He did.

She placed the shocker at the point where his neck and jaw met. A surge of electricity awakened his face to sensation. Everything below it was still paralyzed. “So?”

“I don’t know where your brother is… But the Komodo syndicate uses this sort of recruiting tactic a lot. They always kill the victims right away.”

“No- I saw—“

“They have visuals and information and he writes you every week, right? But they fake visuals all the time. They can age a face, and they’ve got psychologists trained to get all the background possible out of the victims before they die. They’re the ones who write the letters. And I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t need to be told this if you weren’t so intent on believing your brother’s not dead.”

He expected her to cry, but her expression didn’t change. She rose and stood, as if in deep contemplation, for a moment. “Will you find his body for me?” Her voice broke at the end, knowing it was a request unlikely to be granted.

“There’s a card in the inside pocket on the left hand side of my coat. It has my contact information.” She wavered, looked at the window and back at him, and he knew she didn’t trust him, so he said, “He did the same thing to my mother. My father was Uri Harley.”

Her eyes widened in recognition, then relaxed back into their half-lidded sadness. She bent down to retrieve the card, which she pocketed. She lifted his head and placed the shocker at the base of his skull and let off a pulse of electricity that sent his body screaming with pins and needles. He sat up shakily.

“What’s your name, anyway?” he asked.

“Julia,” she said. She pulled the hood from her cloak over her head and disappeared. Thermoptic camouflage. He supposed it was how she had avoided the heat-seeking rifles.

Chapter 2

It was a few weeks before Julia came to Kyt Harley’s office in Yakana. He was closing the chapter on the Komodo syndicate, having run HPB’s on the bodies. The only people to have escaped the sniper attack on the headquarters, besides Julia, were two lackeys running a mission on Mars and a liason to the Red Dragon syndicate. Kyt was still deciding what to do with the leftovers of the Komodo syndicate when Julia came to visit him.

Kyt didn’t even hear the door open. He looked up and she was just standing there, noiseless as a ghost and looking as pale as one. He tapped his pen against his teeth, looking at her half-lidded eyes.

“We found a body.”

“I know.”

“We ran an HPB on it.”

“I know.”

“So you’ve been breaking into the morgue and tracking our files, huh?”

She shrugged. “That’s not why I’m here.”

He sighed. He’d hoped she would go her own way after all this. Agent Delaware wanted him to take care of all the loose ends, no matter how they’d gotten mixed up in the Syndicate.

“After my parents died, I started doing the fights. To make money, but… I needed something to do, you know.” She turned her head to a window beside him. He realized it was something his father always did. It was the habit of someone always on their guard against possible attack. “I can’t really think of anything to do besides Syndicate work. I was thinking you could help me. I overheard you talking to Delaware. I know he’s trying to reinstitthe the law as an effective force by disassembling the syndicates. I’ve been looking at all the files he has, most of which the White Tiger syndicate has already accessed, by the way. It’s an ineffective campaign. I can make it more effective. I can be a spy.”

Kyt just tapped the pen against his teeth.

“You know how I feel about the syndicates. You feel the same way. We can work something out… I can’t just walk away from this.”

“Yeah,” said Kyt. “I know.” He leaned back in his chair. “I don’t want you to walk away.”

Chapter 3

Mars’s two moons floated in the sky like pennies thrown in a wishing well. The Syndicate skyscraper was the highest in the city, and had the best view. Stray fliers flickered over the cityscape of Persepolis like particles in a pulse of blood. Spike leaned back and inhaled a puff of smoke, one hand resting in his pocket.

“They still don’t know who did it, huh?”

“No,” said Vicious. “There’s no indication the hit came from the other syndicates, and the weapons they used were strange.”

“I thought heat-seeking rifles were pretty standard,” Spike said.

“Not these ones,” Vicious replied. His figure was utterly still, except for the tepid breeze across his moon-colored hair. “The bullets don’t match any known prototype. They were manufactured by a sleeper company.”

“Oh, who cares. The Komodo syndicate’s been fading fast anyway. They would have been hit any day now to relieve the Syndicate of their burden.”

Vicious smiled thinly. “For someone who lacks any expertise in informatics, you sure presume to know a lot about Syndicate politics.”

Spike waved him away with his free hand. “What’s to know? Kill strategically, blah blah. The art of War, so on and so forth. Let the rotting contingents go.”

“The Komodo syndicate is the most important syndicate, Spike. They only appear weak to remain strong. The Art of War, so on and so forth.”

“All I know is, this whole to-do with the Komodo branch is cutting into my mission time, and my cash flow is waning.”

Spike didn’t respond, only turned to the view of the city. Spike finished his cigarette and stomped it to death under the toe of his Destroismaison shoe.

“Let’s go to this thing, huh?”

As usual, Spike and Vicious were late to syndicate meeting, but as the favored golden boys they got away with it. The elders didn’t break their monotone speechmaking as the two took their seats at the Round Table.

“The last of the survivors is perhaps the most valuable,” one of the indistinguishable elders was saying. “The highest-rated apprentice of the Komodo syndicate, she was in the building at the time of the attack, which she managed to escape by using thermoptic camouflage and shielding her body with a fallen comrade’s. Her expertise lies in informatics, hand-to-hand combat, and the piloting of several different kinds of vehicles. She has been us on Yakana, researching the bodies, and has already come up with some leads.” He gestured to his side, where the four Komodo syndicate members stood. Three, the men, were dressed in formal suits. The woman was dressed in white. Spike’s eyes narrowed. She looked awfully soft for someone whose expertise was hand-to-hand combat, which was his own expertise. Her bare arms revealed no defined musculature, and her face was that of a china doll’s.

The elder who had been speaking gestured dismissal at the gathered table. “Tomorrow I’d like to meet with the munitions experts. Otherwise, you’re free for the next few days. Missions will resume Monday.” Spike groaned in response to this.

Beside his, Vicious snorted, and Spike looked over to him. His eyes were fixed on the woman. “Doesn’t look like the hand-to-hand combat type, huh, Vicious?”

“She was the best fighter in Aurora Borealis,” Vicious responded without humor. “Shin fought her once, before she was a syndicate girl.”

“How’d he do?” Spike asked.

“How do you think?” Vicious responded. He looked at Spike a moment before turning and exiting to the main hall. “Feel like food?”

Spike grinned. “When don’t I?”

* * *

There didn’t seem to be any women at all in this branch of the Syndicate, Julia noted to herself as she was led through the room on the arm of Mao Yenrai. Just men, all of them the brash and braggart type, walking like their dicks led them. Everyone who looked at her seemed to be either making plans to seduce her, or, knowing her reputation, making plans to one-up her. It was going to be a few days before she could talk to Kyt without seeming suspicious. They were going to have to come up with a decoy operation they could put the blame on for the fall of the Komodo syndicate. She didn’t notice when Mao Yenrai stopped and introduced her to two more members of the Red Dragon syndicate. One of them was waving his hand in front of her face.

“Oh- what? Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. She looked at the green-haired man the hand belonged to. He looked unimpressed by her inability to focus. “It’s been a busy couple of days,” she said as a way of explanation.

He sucked on his cancer stick. “Isn’t it always busy when you’re in the Syndicate? Or are things different on Yakana?”

“Don’t mind him,” his silver-haired companion put in before she could respond. “He’s grumpy because there’s no missions for the next few days.”

“Well, no missions for a few days is better than no missions at all if we don’t catch whoever did this,” Julia said. The green-haired man rolled his eyes, and her own narrowed. The other one was looking at her steadily. There was no judgement in his eyes, or else she couldn’t tell what it was. She noticed there was no movement to his figure, that his posture was ramrod straight, but not in a stiff way, as if he was practicing meditation on the spot, whereas the green-haired man was leaning on one leg and was leaning back into the hands crossed behind his head, cigarette dangling Bogart-style between his lips. “What were your names again?”

“Spiegal,” the green haired man said, thrusting his hand out. “Spike Spiegal.” Julia put her hand in his and he shook it vigorously, almost throwing her off-balance. She turned to the other man.

“Vicious,” he said, his lips pressed into a wan smile. He took her hand and gently squeezed it in greeting.

Mao Yenrai was watching the three with his eyes squeezed by an overeager businessman’s smile. “Good, good!” he pronounced. “Monday, you three work together on a mission! Show Miss Julia the Red Dragon way. Now you meet the elders. Come, come,” he said, head bobbing. He took her arm and led her from the pair. She looked back at them, once.

Spike crushed the cigarette under his toe, sighing in frustration. “What’s he thinking, setting us on a mission with a woman? She’ll just slow us down.”

Vicious smirked in response. “Guess it’ll be an easy mission, then.”

* * *

Out of habit, Julia checked all the crevices of the hotel she was temporarily assigned to on the other side of town. Then she checked the locks. Satisfied, she closed the curtains and turned on the lights. Turning, she saw a scrap of paper lying on her desk. She leaned in to inspect it. It was blank. She smiled. Kyt’s work, definitely. She pulled out an old-fashioned fingerprint kit Kyt had given her a few weeks ago. She opened the jar, stuck the tip of the brush in, and worked it over the paper from corner to corner. The message emerged: Syndicate Library at 22:00. Zadig by Voltaire. Julia sighed. Just when she’d been about to get her long-needed rest.

She took her new model XT-56 motorcyle on the half-hour ride to the library. She couldn’t wait to take it apart and fiddle around with it to bring the speed up. For now it only went 150 mph. It brought on a comfortable, floaty feeling, but no real excitement. Her perfect speed was 215. She was one of ten Komodo members who could drive competently at that speed. Speed was one of the few friends she had left. It was the only thing that could induce anything akin to happiness in her any more. That and a good fight in which she didn’t have to kill yet another innocent bystander.

She pulled up next to the library, engaged the locks in her bike, and swung around off the bike. It was only 21:00, but she wanted to get to know the set-up of the Red Dragons. Whereas the most important places for the Komodo branch had always been hidden or unlikely environments, she had a feeling the Red Dragons liked to exhult in a sense of gothic romance. Judging from the stained glass encircling the library, she had a feeling she might find some interesting things here. She walked to the door and put in a member card she had swiped from a lackey into the identification system. Hopefully, he wouldn’t be penalized if upon questioning it was revealed the card had been stolen. She might keep it to plant on someone who inconvenienced her in the future. She walked through the door and looked around her. The room was circular, lit by the colored moonlight that spilled through the stained glass. Below her, an ampitheater of metallic bookshelves descended twelve levels down. Voltaire. That would be at least ten levels down. Well, at least there were a few interesting-looking doors on the twelfth level as well. She started to descend the staircase.

She found the volume on the ninth level. They seemed to have everything the guy had written. She wondered idly if this was only a literary library, and looking at the authors she recognized concluded that it was. She flipped through the volume. Another slip of paper fell from it. She bent down to read it. It read,

“There is another one. He will reveal himself to you.”

Julia stuck out her lower lip and blew her bangs off her face, wondering how Harley had managed to stick someone into the Red Dragon syndicate. She’d thought she was the first syndicate spy. She closed the volume and rose to put it back on the shelf. When she turned around, Spike Spiegal was standing behind her. She stepped back in momentary surprise. “Spike,” she said.

He cocked his head. “Julia. Odd time to be in a library. I was expecting to run into Kyle Woo, since he’s the one they sent me to find. You haven’t seen Kyle anywhere, have you?”

Julia cursed under her breath. “I—just got here.”

“Mmm,” Spike said, frowning. “According to the lock file, so did Kyle. About fifteen minutes ago, actually. So what’cha reading?” he asked, bending down to receive the slip. Julia’s blood ran cold. He rose, smiling a little. “I knew it,” he said, and turned up from the paper.

“Knew what?” She chided herself for this piss-poor attempt at covering her ass. She stopped herself before she started to say the paper wasn’t hers.

Spike drew his gun. “Well well, little miss Julia who only joined the syndicate once her brother was kidnapped and now that he’s dead doesn’t have any reason to be here—You wouldn’t happen to be a spy, would you?”