Mind of the Martinet by Niall Teasdale

Author:Niall Teasdale
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-10T00:00:00+00:00

2nd February.

‘Pretty much what I thought when I saw him,’ Tatsu said as she walked into observation. ‘He’s a coward.’

‘To be expected, given his choice of weapon,’ Nakano said.

‘True.’

When Tatsu had got into the house and located the bomber in one of the upstairs rooms surrounded by a lot of computer equipment, he had been cowering in a corner, begging for her not to shoot him. Since she was a police officer and not a soldier, she had taken him into custody. She had just finished interrogating him after spending some hours going through his computers and whatever she could find on his implant.

Really, the interrogation had been a formality; she had got pretty much everything she had needed from the various computers. That included how he had got his hands on the ordnance in the first place.

‘Someone really employed this idiot to do maintenance on the security systems from a GSDF mothball warehouse?’ Nakano asked.

‘Budget cuts,’ Tatsu replied. ‘When your budget gets cut, you start using the lowest bidder for everything. He bid the lowest, and he found himself helping to keep a load of obsolete equipment from the war secure. He just … diverted a few things to a different warehouse. It was easy enough when he was the one responsible for making sure everything was secure.’

‘You’d think that running Kannon would be required for someone in that kind of position.’

‘I did mention the lowest bidder thing, right? Besides, I think there’s something in the legal statutes that precludes discrimination based on that kind of thing.’

‘Huh. I suppose he was just predisposed to this kind of thing, but you have to wonder why he suddenly decided to start blowing people up.’

Tatsu shrugged. ‘I don’t. People are whacked. That’s my explanation for just about everything.’ Though there had been something in the bomber’s implant which was a cause for concern, and maybe an indication that a predisposition for psychosis was not the only reason he had flipped out. He had not been running Kannon, so his implant was far from clean. One of the bits of malware she had found was the virus Rasputin had created to brainwash humans, except that this version had been altered. She had seen it several times now, in people who had suddenly begun behaving strangely, like the man who had started stalking Yamauchi.

Maybe, just maybe, the bomber had not been entirely himself when he had decided to start killing people en masse.

‘Well, if the prime minister has his way, this kind of thing won’t happen again,’ Nakano said.

‘Sorry?’

‘He’s come out in favour of a law making the use of Kannon mandatory for all citizens. Openly in favour. The new health minister, Hoshino, is on side with it too. I think they’re going to start pushing a bill through, and they just might get it to pass.’

‘Oh. Sometimes, I really wish I could get drunk.’

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