James Swallow - Ghost in the Shell - The Official Movie Novelization

At the bar, Batou snatched the pistol completely free of the bouncer’s hand and shot him, then kicked him down into a conversation pit, knocking down two more gangsters who’d been preparing to open fire.

“Get outside!” yelled one of the more sensible patrons. Many in the crowd stampeded for the exits. In the rising chaos, Batou spotted another pair of gangsters targeting him and shot them as well.

The Major used another powerful kick to send the groaning No Pupils staggering back away from her. Then she hurled Diamond Face out through the door and onto the barroom floor.

Batou looked down to see a sorry, unconscious mess of a guy with a cracked metal jaw. He didn’t know what the out-cold criminal had done to deserve the thrashing he most obviously had received, but he guessed it had something to do with underestimating the Major. That tended to happen. People looked at her and didn’t see the soldier she was, they only saw what they wanted to see, what they thought she was. Generally, it didn’t end well.

He didn’t have much time to reflect on this, though, because those goons who hadn’t died or run off kept shooting at him. Batou dropped the bouncer’s pistol and pulled out the machine gun he’d hidden under his coat. The weapon was almost the size of his torso, which made it a little unwieldy, but it had terrific punch, and it couldn’t be beat for tackling a hostile crowd.

In the private room, No Pupils pulled out a pistol. The Major was surprised it had taken him this long to try a firearm, but her speed was much better than his aim, and all his shots at her went wild. Then she kicked his gun arm up into the air. He screamed.

In the barroom, a yakuza armed with two guns gave an attack yell. This was a poor tactic, as it alerted Batou to the yakuza’s intention and position and allowed him to shoot first. The gangster fell back with a dying groan, his guns tilting upward so that their shots punctured the ceiling.

No Pupils tried to shoot the Major once more. She easily swung around the stripper’s pole, gained footing on the wall and ran around it at a ninety-degree angle to the floor as she evaded the bullets, then kicked No Pupils in the head. He dropped onto his face, insensate.

With no one left to fight, the Major took a moment to catch her breath.

Out in the club, only one gangster still seemed inclined to fight. He charged at Batou with a battle cry worthy of his warrior forebears. Batou frantically brought up his gun and fired. The gangster dropped mid-charge with a dying grunt that overlapped with the grunting holographic wrestlers and the sighs of the holographic strippers.

Tony was bleeding out, his breath coming in raspy exhalations. The Major got the handcuff key out of his pocket and released herself from the pole. Taking out her pistol, she walked into the club. As she did, she could feel the comms come back on, no longer blocked by the tech shielding the back room.

“ Back on comms ,” the Major told her team. “ I’m heading to the back room .”

Batou tried to keep his reply light, but he knew he probably sounded as relieved as he felt. “ I missed ya. I’ll meet you there .”

The Major scrambled down a damp stone staircase, deeper and deeper into the club’s gloomy lower levels. Once more she felt that strange stab of alien recollection, a fragment of the geisha synthetic’s memory merging with her perception of the moment.

The stairs opened out into a narrow, ill-lit basement corridor lined with rusty metal lockers. The Major recognized the closed door at the hallway’s end from her Deep Dive. It was stained dark with something that could have been old grease or dried blood.

She kicked the door open, but was brought up short. The ground underfoot suddenly changed from old, cool concrete to something uneven and overly hot. She stumbled, thrown off her gait. In front of her was the pagoda she’d seen at the intersection, when she’d glitched earlier. Only now the pagoda was in flames, showering her with scraps of burning timber.

The Major was disconcerted by the vision. It looked real. Worse, it felt real, like a terrible loss that she could not comprehend. The pagoda vanished.

In the pagoda’s place, framed in the gloom, she saw a shrouded figure, a man perhaps, a hood rendering his face invisible in the dimness, the black fall of a cape coming off his shoulders and outlining the rest of him in vague lines of shadow. He almost blended in with the ashes and rubble. He rose to his feet and said to the Major what he’d previously said through the geisha bot. “Collaborate with Hanka Robotics and be destroyed.”

It was Kuze. The Major unhesitatingly sent three bullets into his chest, but they had no effect. Kuze melted away into digital rectangles, before disappearing entirely. He hadn’t been there at all. She’d been fooled by a hologram. Frustrated, the Major lowered her gun.

“Major?” Batou shouted from the hallway. He’d heard the shots and burst into the work room ready for combat, but saw she was alone. “Hey.”

Seeing the dispirited look on her face, Batou put a comforting hand on the Major’s shoulder. She might have said something about Kuze, but she was distracted by a beeping noise, the kind made by a smoke alarm, or a timer.

The Major looked around. A number of tall metal cylinders were mounted along one of the walls. On closer examination, the Major thought these might be oxygen canisters. Each cylinder was equipped with a red light that blinked in time with the beeps. And on each one of the cylinders was a high-explosive grenade on a timer, jerry-rigged and primed to explode.

The Major’s first reaction was a gasp of dismay. She burst into motion, yelling and shoving Batou through the gloomy space back into the hallway, but it was too late. Inside the room, the grenades detonated with a massive concussion, obliterating everything within, bringing down the ceiling. A swirling rush of smoke and shrapnel mushroomed outward, blowing the Major and Batou down the corridor, the fire rolling over them. Batou screamed, clutching at his seared eyes. Then thundering darkness consumed them both.

Another stark transition occurred, from choking blackness to bright, blazing white light.

In one instant, the Major was being smothered by the dark, enveloping debris, and in the next, she was lying atop an operating table, bathed in the glow of sensor webs and scanning modules. She blinked, fatigue indicators flickering and dying at the edge of her vision. Her neural linkages cycled through their reboot sequence and she was aware once again of the world around her.

She forced away her dismay at the abrupt sense of dislocation and refocused. She was in Dr. Ouelet’s biomimetic lab at Hanka, being repaired. Her first instinct was to rise up, but an apparatus exactly like a ten-times-larger copy of the one that had mended her wrist was arched over her, its tools steadily working on her entire body. Her torso was open chest to hips, most of the synthetic organs and implants damaged in some way and pulsing variously blood red, white and black. There was nothing left of her right leg except the metal pole that formed its core, and her left thigh was open to its foundation. She could see Dr. Ouelet through the observation glass in her office one room over, working at a console to direct the repair machinery.

“Where’s Batou?” the Major asked. She dreaded what the answer might be.

But Ouelet’s reply over the intercom was reassuring. “In Enhancement, next door. He’s doing well.” She added with motherly reproach, “ You took most of the blast.”