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Ghosts	By : Odon Category: +G to L > Gunslinger Girl Views: 1137 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: Gunslinger Girl is the creation of Yu Aida. No profit is intended in the writing of this story. The Italian government denies using cyborg children to assassinate enemies of the state.

Chapter List
- 1-Ghosts
- 1
GHOSTS
Frustrated with the slow pace of her handler, Triela forged ahead under the guise of reconnaissance, using the ancient mule trails that threaded through the pine forest cloaking the sides of the valley. She kept to a steady jog despite the weight of the rifle and ammunition hidden in her knapsack, biomechanical limbs and superoxygenated blood giving her an endurance beyond any alpine climber; Triela slowed only when her cyborg senses detected others ahead. She answered their cheerful greetings in Italian or German or French, comparing skin texture and facial construction against blurred images captured on CCTV in the aftermath of bomb atrocities, their acoustic pattern to voices plucked from the airwaves by the AISI. Every fifteen minutes Triela stopped to drink from her canteen and check in with Hilshire on the encrypted radio. Her handler's voice seemed harsh and impersonal, encoded and decoded over the electronic circuits. Always the same message: no contact.
She couldn't hear the Carabinieri roadblocks or the units sweeping the valley below. They operated on different frequencies. There was no sign of the UAV either; only flashes of red from a paraglider riding the thermals, the sun filtered through green foliage, the blue-grey tinge of distant mountain ranges. The war against Padania seemed far away, an obscure conflict existing only on television between game shows and crass advertising.
A hiking trail led to the summit, with marker posts to tempt a city-born Padanian used to signs and sealed roads. If the terrorists had the endurance they could climb the mountain and come down in the next valley, bypassing the dragnet. Triela turned up the path without stopping to consult the tourist map painted on a nearby board. She already knew every trail and contour; not in confusing multi-coloured graphics overlaid on her cyborg vision like in American sci-fi movies, but a perfect recall of the survey maps she'd studied during their hasty briefing in a speeding Agency van. An eidetic memory that mocked her futile attempts to remember the names of her bears, heroics in Amsterdam, the look on Hilshire's face when he first laid eyes on her.
But she encountered no-one on the path as it zigzagged up the slope through tangled undergrowth, pierced by outcrops of black limestone and triangular wooden stanchions sinking into the leaf mould, the rotting remnants of cableways built a century ago. The air grew thinner and the gradient steep as she gained height; Triela slowed her pace but did not stop. Eventually the growl of trucks on the highway and the murmur of hikers and climbers faded even from her enhanced hearing. There was only the crunch of pebbles under her boots, branches creaking against one another, the sound of her own breath - cold and clear in her throat unlike the polluted taint of the cities. Perhaps after the mission was over she could talk Hilshire into staying a while, act the tourist like normal people. Find something to share besides work and bouts of awkward silence.
She stopped to drink from her water bottle, then clicked the bone-induction earpiece hidden under one of her twintails. "Triela to Hilshire, radio check, over."
The hiss of static was her only reply. Triela slid off her knapsack, her sweat-soaked back cooling in the mountain air. She opened the side pouch and removed the TETRA set - checked the frequency, battery charge and headset connection.
"Triela to Hilshire. Radio check, over!"
A growling rustle - the wind blowing through millions of pine needles - swept over the forest in an invisible wave. The world faded, trees and bushes vanishing into a grey fog. Triela gazed about in surprise, shivering from the sudden drop in temperature. She had climbed so high that clouds were sweeping around her, breaking on the mountain like a silent floodtide. The effect was surreal; the thin air combined with her superoxygenated blood made Triela feel light-headed. She seemed suspended in this formless void, drifting free in time and space.
Sound brought her down to Earth. Distant but distinct; the staccato thud of a heavy-calibre machine gun. Triela knew the audio signature of every weapon in the Carabinetti arsenal. This wasn't one of them.
Contact.
"Triela to Hilshire! Can you hear me, over!"
No response. She switched channels, hoping to pick up one of the other fratello. Just static.
Triela shoved the radio back in its pouch, pulled on her knapsack and yanked the straps tight. Took a step and stumbled into a pothole. She turned in the opposite direction and her boots squelched in mud. Somehow she'd gone off the trail.
'Stay calm,' Triela thought. 'You're out of range, or in a radio blind spot. Wait till the fog clears, then walk back dow-YEEARGCH!'
Triela slapped a hand to her face, choking on acrid bile. From all around her rose a putrid stench; the all-too-familiar reek of rotting flesh and human excrement magnified a hundredfold, like those Camorra victims they'd found abandoned in a mile-long mound of illegally-dumped garbage. But that was in Marigliano, where officials could be bribed and locals intimidated, not here in the Dolomites with well-heeled tourists to offend.
More distant gunfire, and the crump of an explosion. She turned towards the sound and saw the man standing a few feet away.
Despite her augmented senses there had been no warning of his approach; he'd materialised out of the fog like a ghost. She saw the gun in his hands and the SIG was in hers without having to think. Tirela aimed at his chest, staring in surprise at her target.
A man of around Hilshire's age though looking much older, his face hagged and unshaven, the eyes red-rimmed with fatigue. Grimy fingers clutched a bolt-action carbine (Triela's eyes narrowed, recognising it as an assassin's weapon. The Carcano M91 carbine, used by Lee Harvey Oswald to kill the American president). He wore a peaked cap, tunic and trousers of greyish-green wool, patched and repaired many times. A belt lined with cracked leather pouches. Strips of cloth wrapped his calves, encrusted with his boots in reddish clay. He gaped at Triela as if not believing what he saw - this fresh-faced girl-child in pigtails, pointing a weapon at him.
"Don't move, Padania!"
His reply was in an incomprehensible dialect of Italian.
"Drop the rifle, now!"
The man shook his head, rubbing his eyes as if trying to dismiss an illusion. He turned and staggered off into the mist.
"Wha- HEY! STOP!" Triela chased after him but her boots slipped from under her. She pitched forward, rolling as she instinctively tucked her pistol into her body to protect it. There was no undergrowth to break her fall; her body flailed through mud and filth as she tumbled down the steep slope, bouncing painfully on sharp rocks and splintered bone. She snatched at tree stumps only to gouge her hand on metal shards embedded in the wood, smacked her head on a half-buried cylinder, careened to a halt in a barbed-wire fence constructed by a madman - a nightmarish tangle of iron posts and zinc-coated wire gleaming through clotted gore, hung with flesh like a butcher bird's lair. Disturbed from their feast, flies attacked Triela en masse, swarming into her mouth and ears and nostrils. Cursing in three languages she struggled to free herself, her long hair caught on the barbs. Triela slid her bayonet from the small of her back, hacked ruthlessly at her pigtails. The strands snapped and she stumbled backwards, tripped over the cylinder she'd struck her head on...and froze in place.
Triela recognised the object from her IED training. An artillery shell, half buried in the mud.
'Oh...shit.'
Triela edged away from the deadly speedbump, sliding the bayonet into the ground to check for further unexploded munitions in her path. Insects bit her face and neck, feasted on the dried blood that glistened on the rocks, the sweat and foulness coating her body.
'Definitely shit.'
The fog had rolled away as she worked. Now Triela could see she'd landed in a crater-like depression slick with soapy red clay, murky water pooling at the bottom. Detritus surrounded her: the decaying carcass of a mule, a tangled mess of telephone wire, the remains of a wooden cartwheel. She tried not to think about what else might have been dumped here. Corpses from cemeteries bulldozed for Mafia construction projects, decades-old ordinance stockpiled against a Soviet invasion that never came, the toxic by-product of hospitals and factories and nuclear reactors. It wasn't as if she was going to live long enough to die of cancer. But if she got sick, how much time would it cost her off-mission? How many months would the surgery deduct from her already-rationed lifespan?
She heard it again, remembering the instructor's voice as he counted off the bursts: one-thousand-and-two-thousand... one-thousand-and-two-thousand... one-thousand-and-two-thousand. Whoever was firing that machine gun had military training. It sounded much closer now.
Triela rolled onto her chest and crawled to the rim of the crater, wishing her cybernetics would dull her olfactory system like it did her pain receptors. Someone had used this place as a toilet quite recently. Couldn't they even bury their own filth?
Triela slowly lifted her head over the edge and saw
'Hilshire!'
the aftermath of disaster - an earthquake or an atomic explosion that had scoured the entire valley. For a moment Triela couldn't process the information; the contours were those she had memorised but everything else had changed. The pine forest reduced to shattered stumps, lush greenery to a lunar landscape of craters and barbed wire and so many bodies, those dead and those still alive crawling like ants up mountainsides festooned with telephone wire and cableways, caves and mule tracks hacked into the rock, huts pinioned to narrow ledges halfway up cliffs. On the valley floor a dirt road wound through fallow fields and empty hamlets; the multi-lane highway, the pretty postcard village, the sports climbers and paragliders - all had vanished. Triela's mind teetered on a precipice, logic and emotion warring against the sociopathic clarity of her conditioning, the data crammed into her brain every millisecond by her cyborg senses.
'I'm insane,' Triela realised with terrifying certainty. She should have seen it coming: the hallucinations, the encroaching memory loss, the growing obsession with her handler. Angelica had gone the same way. She should end this now; put a bullet through her eye before her psychosis got Hilshire killed.
She looked down at the SIG 232 still clutched in her hand, smeared with clotted mud and slick gore.
Her training reasserted itself. Clean your weapon.
Triela slid off her knapsack and unzipped the top flap to give herself a clean surface on which to work. The magazine dropped into her hand. She racked the slide, catching the ejected cartridge before it rolled into the mud. The familiar routine was soothing; Triela could almost forget the squalor she crouched in, where it not for the flies and the stench and the well-gorged rats that scurried too close for comfort.
'Am I in Hell?'
She pushed down the take-down lever, drew back the slide until it detached.
'For what mortal sin?'
Then the recoil spring...
Not murder, certainly. She had only killed enemies of the State. Presumably torture and extraordinary rendition were covered too. Of the Seven Cardinal Sins however...
'Pride: the hubris behind my defeat at Pinocchio's hands. Envy: of Roberta Guellfi. Wrath: plenty of that...'
Triela threaded a cloth through the eye of the cleaning rod, pushed it down the barrel.
'Gluttony: my desire to cling to life at Hilshire's expense. Sloth: neglecting my duty to protect him. And let's not forget...'
The cleaning cloth was blackened with cordite. An accidental discharge as she rolled down the slope?
'Suicide...?'
A bugle blared its strident call. Triela doubted it was to open the Pearly Gates for her.
In sixteen seconds Triela had reassembled and reloaded the pistol, sliding it back into her shoulder holster. She took the G36K from her pack, unfolding the stock and inserting a magazine, but did not chamber a round. Cradling the rifle in her elbows, she leopard-crawled up to the rim, making sure to look over a different place this time.
Armed soldiers climbed the mountain. Shoulder-to-shoulder in a line a thousand strong, they laboured up the steep incline, slipping and falling in the mud, clutching at boulders and tree stumps and corpses for support. They wore grey-green uniforms like the man she'd seen earlier, an occasional steel helmet among the soft kepis. Bayonets were fixed to each rifle, and out in front walked an officer holding a sabre, the scabbard clutched in his other hand like an alpenstock. The blade flashed in the sun as he pointed to the summit, and gave a shout which was echoed by every man behind.
"Avanti Savoia!"
"SAVOY!"
Triela heard a distant rumble, then a whistle growing louder and louder, rising to a shrill peak. The ground boiled, then erupted in geysers of earth and fire. Triela threw herself into the muck, hearing the familiar ultrasonic signature of flying shrapnel, the screams of those torn apart yet still alive. More shells came shrieking down, bursting in mid-air, scything the mountainside with red-hot splinters. Yellow-black explosions ripped apart limestone, filling the sky with choking dust and lethal shards of rock. The line wavered then quickly reformed, men closing ranks and continuing their implacable advance. Their commander shouted encouragement, brandishing his sabre against the onslaught of death like a man threatening a hurricane with an umbrella.
"Avanti Savoia! Avanti Savoia!"
"GET DOWN!" screamed Triela, knowing they couldn't possibly hear. "DO YOU THINK YOU'RE ON PARADE? TAKE COVER, DAMN YOU!"
Machine guns erupted from enfilade positions further up the mountain, enveloping the attackers in a deadly crossfire. The sabre fell. Men tumbled down the slope - the dead and the living, crawled about in confusion, scratching holes with their bare hands. They seemed ignorant of the most basic infantry tactics - of fire-and-movement, of how to take cover from the falling shells. Their officers struck them with pistols and the flats of their swords, driving them towards the barbed wire like cattle. They hacked futilely at the entanglement with wire-cutters and hatchets, shoved in iron pipes with sputtering fuses that failed to explode, tried to tear out the posts with their bare hands. The machine guns found them, and mortar bombs, and grenades and tear gas and gouts of burning oil that streaked from loopholes hidden in the rock.
"MADNESS!" screamed Triela.
Out of the cloud of black smoke marched another line of soldiers, and another behind them, hunched forward as if bullets and shrapnel could be shrugged off like rain.
"Avanti Savoia!"
"SAVOY!"
A rumble and the shriek of incoming shells, this time from the valley floor. Triela watched in horror as the attacking soldiers vanished in the holocaust of their own artillery fire, the line of explosions marching up the slope, smashing friend and foe with the callous indifference of an angry titan.
"STOP! STOP! STOP!"
Triela cringed at the bottom of the shell-hole, mouth wide and hands pressed to her ears. She knew carbombs and booby traps, the danger over before you had time to be afraid. This was a hell that went on and on, waves of pressure pounding on her skull that deafened her own screams; Triela soiled herself and cried for a mother whose name she did not know.

Declaring that the failure of the attack was due to a lack of aggressive spirit among the soldiers (caused by defeatist propaganda spread by Socialist politicians in Rome) the brigade commander had three of the survivors selected by lot and executed by the Carabinieri. Journalists at General Cadorna's headquarters knew better than to report the illegal decimation, but made much of the claim that an angel had been seen on the mountainside - a young maiden with beautiful hair wielding a sword, calling for the liberation of South Tyrol from the Hapsburg oppressor.

After hours of exhaustive climbing and searching, Hilshire found his cyborg curled up in a hollow sprinkled with blue gentians, her dusky skin unusually pallid and her eyes wild before they glazed over from the conditioning drug he injected into her arm.
"I slipped and fell," was the only explanation Triela gave. "I think I'm going crazy."
"Makes the two of us."
"I didn't even see the enemy. They killed so many..."
"Don't worry. Henrietta and Jose got them. Two dead, one wounded. No casualties on our side. Turns out they never left the highway."
Triela stared at him, confusion evident on her face, then said quietly, "That's good."
The air smelt of pine resin, tinged with iodine as Hilshire treated her cuts and bruises. Triela avoided his gaze, her cheeks red from the cold or the physical contact.
"What happened to your hair?" he asked, when the silence got too uncomfortable.
"I-It got caught on some branches. I had to cut myself free."
Hilshire tore the wrapper off a gauze bandage. "I was thinking...these mountains, they really are beautiful. How about when this mission's over we stay behind and do some sightseeing?"
"No."
Triela pulled free of his grasp, slung the knapsack over her shoulders. Without waiting for her handler she walked straight up the slope towards the hiking trail.
"Dummkopf!" Hilshire muttered under his breath.
He packed away the first aid kit and shouldered his own pack, following at a slower pace, using bushes and branches to haul himself up. Intent on his cyborg in case she fell again, Hilshire took no notice of the detritus churned up by their passage: a strand of barbed wire, some rusty shards of metal, and an old cartridge case.
- 1
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Ghosts