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

Cutter manipulated the holographic controls, which caused a claw to extend from the spider tank. The huge mechanical appendage seized Kuze by the head, lifted him into the air and pressed him against the banyan tree’s trunk, where it began to crush him.

Kuze trembled as his cybernetic systems struggled through a kind of pain-shock, teetering on the edge of shutting down.

This would be death then, he thought. True death, not the moment of flawed rebirth that has made me what I am now. Regret washed over him. He would perish never knowing the full truth of who he had been. But at least he had found her before it had come to this.

The Major, the thermoptics on her suit engaged, rippled transparently in the light cast by the fires still burning from the explosions. She ran out from the rubble behind the tank and leapt up onto the back of the massive spider. As she landed, the thermoptics in her suit disengaged, leaving her fully visible again. The turret ground its gears and swiveled as the remote operator attempted to unseat the Major, but she was already moving.

She tried firing at the tank’s motor center, but there was no result whatsoever. The Major abandoned that tactic and tossed her gun aside. She crawled closer to the motor center. She knew how this tank was powered, whether from real experience or from the implantation of someone else’s memories, it didn’t matter now. She tried punching it repeatedly with her good fist. Then she grabbed the motor center with both hands and began pulling up on it with all her cyber-augmented strength, howling from the effort.

A camera rose from the tank’s upper regions to relay images of this attack back to Cutter. At first, he thought the Major had simply lost her mind. She had been built to be powerful, but she was no match for the components of the spider tank.

And then the operative’s voice informed him, “Motor center compromised.”

As Cutter watched with disbelief that became wrath, the Major continued to pull on the tank’s central power source.

Inside the Major’s eyes, a train of red warning icons cascaded down the side of her vision, malfunction alerts from the hits she had taken from the auto-cannon and the falling rubble. This would take all her remaining strength, and even then there was no guarantee that would be enough.

The usually invisible connections on her joints and epidermis began to reveal themselves and then come apart, a blue light from her core glowing through them. She felt the tank shudder and buck, trying to throw her off as it stumbled in a half-circle on sparking legs. Her fingers bit into the edges of motor casing and she felt it shift, dislodging but still not fully disconnected.

Redoubling her exertion, the Major gripped the armored casing and strained with all her might as the warning grew louder. Actuators and synthetic muscles in her arms went past the red line and beyond all tolerances, stressed to breaking point as the motor center creaked and distorted.

Then, with a sudden screeching crackle of breaking metal, the motor center ripped away from the tank. The force of the action was so powerful that the Major’s left forearm came off with the motor, jetting white fluid.

With nothing to power it, the tank’s pincers released Kuze, who slid to the ground just before the motor center exploded, enveloping Major in the resultant fireball. The tank gave a shuddering groan and shut down, its six segmented legs trapped beneath it as it collapsed against the stonework of the plaza. Unable to arrest her fall, the Major’s ruined body rolled down the face of the machine and clattered to the ground.

Her cyborg frame was a mess of critical damage, half-destroyed, shot through by heavy-caliber bullets and shrapnel. Pale silicate liquid pooled around her head in a shimmering white halo.

Kuze managed to extricate himself from the banyan tree’s roots. She watched as he slowly dragged himself over. He collapsed onto the ground next to her.

Both the Major and Kuze appeared near death, but Cutter was done underestimating his enemies. “Sniper team on site?” he asked into the comm.

The sniper team’s hycop was en route to the lawless zone. The door opened so that the two snipers could scope out their prey and ready their long-range gun, a weapon so large that it took two of them to wield it effectively.

“We’re approaching the targets now, sir,” the lead sniper replied into his comm.

Kuze lay beside the Major. “Come with me.” His voice was an echoing wheeze now, but his determination was as clear as it had ever been. There was an ugly gouge in his skull trickling with sparks. Despite the terrible, damage that had been done to him, he seemed almost serene . “There is no place for us here.”

She understood what he was offering. They could be together as they had been, Motoko and Hideo, escaping into the virtual so that no one could ever harm them, ever find them, because no one would know they were there. In their own world, they would be together and whole, and they could bend reality to whatever they wanted it to be, and it would last as long as they wanted it to last. No more lies, no more fighting, because there would be no one who needed her protection.

“No.” She hoped he could understand. “I’m not ready to leave.” She inhaled deeply, taking in as much of the night air as her bruised lungs would accept. “I belong here.”

Kuze looked at her with love. He would not force her, so instead he told her, “I will always be there with you… in your ghost.” Then the light went out in Kuze’s eyes and his consciousness fled.

Above, the snipers in the hycop took aim. “Target is in view,” the lead sniper said into the comm.

“What are you waiting for?” Cutter snapped. “Do it!”

The snipers fired the long-range gun. The shot hit Kuze’s head, destroying the human brain within.

“No!” the Major screamed. They couldn’t do this—he had wanted his ghost to continue, but now…

“Keep firing,” Cutter ordered into the comm.

Aramaki walked through the corridor of an expensively carpeted building, speaking over his mind-comm. “ Saito, have you found Major? Is she safe ?”

Saito, the best long-distance shot in the unit, lay on his belly on a rooftop. He had eyes on the Major. A sniper’s rifle was in his hands and he had an excellent view of both the lawless zone’s plaza and the hycop hovering above it. “ She will be ,” Saito told the chief over the mind-comm.

He fired a shot directly into the hycop’s rotor. The hycop spun out of control, crashing down to the plaza in a fireball that sent up chunks of the aircraft and rubble in equal measure. Saito ducked back behind the roof’s raised edge to avoid being hit by shrapnel, but had to admit to himself that it was quite a rush to bring down something so large and deadly with a single bullet.

Batou walked out of the darkness to the semiconscious Major and lifted her into his lap. “Hey.” He examined her. She looked godawful. Anybody else would die of such injuries, but the Major was the toughest person he knew. “Hey,” he repeated.

The Major turned her head to look up at him.

At least she was conscious. “Hey,” Batou said once more by way of greeting.

After thinking it over, the Major spoke. “Say something nice.” Repeating what Batou had told her back when she’d first seen his artificial eyes.

Instead of commenting on the ghastly injuries she’d sustained, Batou asked, “What’s your name? Aramaki told me you had a name… from before.”

“Motoko,” the Major confided. Her breathing was very weak.

Batou hoped she still identified as the compatriot he knew, the one he would gladly fight beside and die for. He didn’t try to hide his emotion. “Major is still in there, right?”