Girl Fights Back (Go No Sen) (Emily Kane Adventures) Read Free Page B

was. She
had enormous energy, much more even than could be expended in running the
kitchen of a large and socially active household. She must have vast, secret
hobbies, Emily sometimes mused. How else to account for all that energy, that
vitality? Sometimes she teased her about it, needling her to find out what she
really did with her spare time. But she could only push Yuki so far before she
would turn a withering glare her way. Then it would vanish, and those familiar
warm, dark eyes would reappear, smiling at her. Had there really been that much
menace in her eyes? Or was it just a trick of the light? Emily was not really
sure. Of course, she never doubted Yuki loved her, or that she was as close to
a mother as she would ever have.
    Emily did not know her real mother.
She had never met her, never even seen a picture of her. According to her
father, she came from Taiwan, the youngest daughter of a merchant family living
in Taipei. She had been sent to school in Japan, where she met Emily’s father,
who was in the navy and stationed there at the time. They were married and she
returned with him to the states over the objections of her family. The marriage
was apparently turbulent, and she left shortly after Emily was born, her father
told her. He never heard from her or her family again. All she really knew
about her mother was her name, Mei Li. Her father said her own name was a sort
of anagram for her mother’s name.
    For all anyone outside of the
family knew, however, she was just Emily Kane, daughter of George Kane,
chauffeur to an important family. Of course, anyone who saw her could not help
but take notice. Her long, straight black hair was unusual, though she mostly
kept it tied up in some sort of braid. Her eyes were black as coal, and very
hard to read. But what really caught one’s eye was her posture and her
confident gait. And she might smile at you. Was it just you, or does she smile
like that at everybody? This girl is the very picture of balance and control.
Everyone is her equal, no one her superior. But was there something else in
those smiling, dark eyes, something perhaps even darker? Perhaps it was
nothing, a trick of the light.
    Emily finished
her soup, kissed Yuki good night, and went up to the apartment to finish her
homework and go to bed. Yuki watched her walk across the compound to the garage
and shook her head. “What’s going to become of that girl?” she wondered aloud.
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Chapter 3:
Software
    “Mike, you’re gonna have to turn
‘em over to us. You know that, don’t you?” the voice on the other end of the
phone said.
    Michael Cardano reflected on the
quality of the tone of that voice. Several million lines of code and a few
hundred miles of fiber optic cable lay between him and the man on the other
end. The code was written to ensure the security of the connection, dissolving
the vocal noises made at either end of the connection into miniscule bits,
whirling them into a billion randomized patterns and then, at the last moment,
reconstituting them into a facsimile of the original vocal intonations. Most of
the code was actually tasked with recreating as accurately as possible the
sound of the original voice. The voice from the phone sounded like the man
Michael knew him to be. He could hear the tonal indicators of his emotional
veracity. The sound was true to the voice. He hoped his own voice would sound
as true at the other end of the line. He felt the need to be able to control
the shading of his voice, to shape the way he was perceived, and he didn’t want
the nuance he aimed to create to get lost in the code.
    “You gotta be kidding,” he snorted.
    “Nope.”
    “You realize this is just more of
Meacham’s bullshit, don’t you?” he needled.
    Silence.
    “He’s gonna flog this turkey all
over the hill, and we both know it’s bullshit. That’s not how real soldiers
work.”
    “Maybe you’re right. So what?” the
other man said.
    “He’s gonna get us all