Some of you might know of a guy by the name of Craig A. Reed Jr., a writer of Battletech tie-in...
Vigilante's Run - Continuation (Bubblegum Crisis)
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Introduction: Bubblegum Crisis and Vigilante's Run
- Location
- Megatokyo
Some of you might know of a guy by the name of Craig A. Reed Jr., a writer of Battletech tie-in novels. A significantly smaller chunk of you might know that before his big break, he wrote Bubblegum Crisis fanfiction, and that one of those fanfics, known as Black Knights, Steel Hearts - wound up on the TVtropes recommended fanfic list.
What I bet even fewer of you know is that he wrote a sequel.
I first found Vigilante's Run on a Geocities archive while I was on a big BGC fanfic binge, excavating ancient webpages from before the dawn of time, trying desperately to uncover another hidden gem. I found a few really interesting fics - Together Again 2937, Drunkard's Walk II - but for whatever reason Vigilante's Run just kind of stood out to me. It had a relatively interesting set up, a very well-written fight scene, and... that was it. It just ceased to finish, just when it was getting good.
Now, I've been struggling to write fanfiction for years on end, but this time around something just clicked. Before I knew it, I had a whopping (for me) 10k words written down, an AO3 account, and I figured, fuck it, might as well post.
That was about a year ago. Since then, I've gotten written permission from Mr. Reed to keep on writing it, and I've put down about 35k words more, and so now I've decided to bring the continuation of Vigilante's Run to SV, where (hopefully) I'll get some more feedback so I can fine-tune this thing into the BGC fanfic about a guy who's totally not the Punisher we all deserve.
But wait! I hear you say. What is Bubblegum Crisis, anyhow? So glad you asked. With this little pseudo-prologue, I plan to answer that as well as outline the events in the original Vigilante's Run.
Bubblegum Crisis
The year is 2036.
It is the future, but not quite as we know it. Japan is still a techno-economic superpower, China is basically an oversized North Korea, the EU and Russia are part of the same Eurobloc, the US has been kicked out of NATO over the Russian thing. But so many things are familiar to us in 2019. The networked technology which connects us. The endless minor wars divide which us.
The megacorporations which rule us.
Eleven years ago, the Second Great Kanto Quake struck the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. A 9.5 with its epicenter in the heart of the city, it leveled the megalopolis, killed hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The economic crash which followed the world's largest and richest city's collapse killed even more. The world's pundits predicted that this was it for Japan, that no nation could withstand such a disaster, and for a brief few months looked to America as a pillar of stability again.
They predicted wrong.
Tokyo did rise again - bigger and stranger than ever before, in a timeframe measured not in years, but in months.
But it was not the government who restored Tokyo, who engineered the Megatokyo Miracle. It was a corporation.
General Nippon Organic Manufacturing - GENOM for short - had once been a puny mid-sized corp competing for the scraps left behind by the big keiretsus, the Mitsubishis and the Sonys and the Toshibas of the world. But those corps were gone now, their assets and headquarters destroyed in the quake, and GENOM rose to take their place with the help of an invention so important that those same pundits compared its impact on human civilization to the steam engine.
BioMechanical Analogues, known colloquially as Boomers. Living machines formed out of nanotech 'cells', grown into forms that not only met, but exceeded the capabilities of carbohydrate-based life. Boomers, working without rest or pay, rebuilt Megatokyo. Boomers, replacing billions of jobs, automated away nearly three-quarters of the global labor force. Boomers, to put it bluntly, made GENOM a new superpower. And no one dared to oppose them, even if from time to time Boomers went 'rampant' and took innocent lives in their madness. Advanced Police forces were formed, but kept underfunded and chained to the corporate yoke. And no one dared to lift a finger.
No one, that is, except one woman: Sylia Stingray.
Her father was one of the geniuses behind Boomer technology, betrayed by GENOM, murdered when his purpose had been served. She was his revenge, her intellect enhanced by a mysterious datatape which rewired her brain, her hatred honed to a razor's edge. Inspired by the super sentai shows of her childhood, equipped with prototype 'hardsuits' capable of taking on even the mightiest of Boomers, she put together a team to combat the megacorporation and its abuses:
It's been almost five years to the day since the Knight Sabers' founding. During that time, they've killed GENOM's head of Internal Security, stopped a sentient racecar, squared off with a vampire Boomer, killed GENOM's head of Internal Security two more times (it's complicated), and generally caused GENOM no small amount of trouble. But - But! - they have not defeated GENOM. Sylia has accepted, in part, that it may not be possible to destroy such a superpower.
But times change, technology accelerates, everything becomes more unpredictable, and the Knight Sabers, once the conquering heroes, find themselves ever more immersed in a society blindly trundling towards its own suicide.
This is the story of four remarkable women, at the edge of the end of history, at the periphery of Kurzweil's Singularity, fighting for what they believe, in true rock n' roll superheroic fashion.
This is the Story of the Knight Sabers.
This is Bubblegum Crisis.
Vigilante's Run
While the Knight Sabers have fought GENOM with great strength and gusto, much to the Advanced Police's joy, they have, by and large, left the city's other great scourge to be. The name of that scourge is the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza, the biggest organized crime syndicate in Megatokyo. It has operated without rebuke, out of fear that its collapse would destabilize the city's underground, send it into a firestorm of violence and destruction. It thought itself safe.
It thought wrong.
In the wee morning hours of February 10, 2036, a Sleeping Dragon shipment of arms and its security detail was obliterated - all yakuza dead but one, the ship sunk, the arms lost, the backup taken out by landmines. The Sleeping Dragon was no longer invincible.
This was the work of the hardsuited vigilante known as Nemesis. American in origin, he had been tearing up organizations of criminals and other threats to society for years, striking from the shadows, killing mercilessly, only leaving civilians alive to tell the tale. Needless to say, both the AD Police and the Knight Sabers were caught off guard, both by his sudden appearance and his ruthless methods. Sure, he kept civilians out of it, but was his taking of human lives entirely justified? And if he pressed Shichiki Sato, leader of the Sleeping Dragon, any further, who could say how many innocents would be lost?
Nemesis struck again that night, targeting the Fu-Shui Nightclub and its secret drug lab, just as Priss and her ADP boy-friend Leon McNichol attempted to visit it for fun. For a brief moment they were face-to-face with Nemesis, just as he was finishing up his slaughter with a heavy Anti-Boomer rifle. Needless to say, he encouraged them to stay out of his way, as otherwise he could not guarantee their safety.
But neither of them did, as Nemesis found himself being chased by a mercenary platoon of K-11 Jaegers, advanced mecha similar to those used by the ADP. Priss returned to her Knight Saber comrades, whose VTOL had been downed in an abandoned apartment complex by a stray missile from one of the Jaegers. Meanwhile Leon returned to the ADP to throw together a blockade to minimize collateral damage from Nemesis's fight.
Nemesis lured the Jaegers into the apartment complex, where his truck, and his support team, was waiting. He switched into a heavier hardsuit, then engaged the Jaegers alongside the truck - and its phosphorus mortar launcher. Nemesis managed to wipe most of the mercenaries out, but several escaped to engage the Knight Sabers. The Sabers, despite being relatively underarmed for powersuit-level combat, managed to wipe out most of the Jaegers with the help of Nene's Pulse-Striker EMP cannons. All but one, that is, who would have killed Nene had Nemesis not saved her. Once again, Nemesis demanded the Sabers stay out of his way, then vanished into the night.
His strike was not without its negative aftereffects, however. Sato deployed his stable of tank-grade Battle Boomers to hunt down Nemesis; meanwhile, an alliance of rival crime syndicates formed to snap up Sato's territory. With a gang war on the horizon, Leon resolved to hunt down Nemesis, no matter what it took, but not before leaning on Nene for some information on the vigilante. They found out that Nemesis had once been part of the US Special Forces, had served in South America under something known as Operation Templar, and had resolved to go to Megatokyo after the death of a fellow veteran's sister at the Sleeping Dragon's hands.
What they didn't know, what they couldn't know, was that Nemesis had once been Gavin Belasko, Army Ranger. After his discharge, he had watched his parents be gunned down by mobsters in New York, and swore an oath of vengeance upon the entire criminal class. They were all dogs, he said, monsters who only understood brute force, something which law-abiding society could not easily apply to them. After taking down the Russian Mafia branch which killed his parents, his little sister, one Maria Belasko, joined his team. Soon, he had a hardsuit developed by Dr. Roland Vicain, and began to embark on his cross-country crusade against crime.
But here in Megatokyo, things are different. Nemesis has a plan to take down the Sleeping Dragon, but only the vaguest of plans to take down the rest of the gangs, or even GENOM if it becomes involved. The ADP, as strapped for equipment as ever, must defend the entire city before it becomes a battleground. The gangs have summoned their own private armies to lay waste to their common enemy, and each other if it becomes necessary.
And of all people, the Knight Sabers are caught right in the middle…
So, yeah, that's it. If you have any questions, comments, insults, death threats, whatever, post em' - I'll take what I can get at this point.
What I bet even fewer of you know is that he wrote a sequel.
I first found Vigilante's Run on a Geocities archive while I was on a big BGC fanfic binge, excavating ancient webpages from before the dawn of time, trying desperately to uncover another hidden gem. I found a few really interesting fics - Together Again 2937, Drunkard's Walk II - but for whatever reason Vigilante's Run just kind of stood out to me. It had a relatively interesting set up, a very well-written fight scene, and... that was it. It just ceased to finish, just when it was getting good.
Now, I've been struggling to write fanfiction for years on end, but this time around something just clicked. Before I knew it, I had a whopping (for me) 10k words written down, an AO3 account, and I figured, fuck it, might as well post.
That was about a year ago. Since then, I've gotten written permission from Mr. Reed to keep on writing it, and I've put down about 35k words more, and so now I've decided to bring the continuation of Vigilante's Run to SV, where (hopefully) I'll get some more feedback so I can fine-tune this thing into the BGC fanfic about a guy who's totally not the Punisher we all deserve.
But wait! I hear you say. What is Bubblegum Crisis, anyhow? So glad you asked. With this little pseudo-prologue, I plan to answer that as well as outline the events in the original Vigilante's Run.
Bubblegum Crisis
The year is 2036.
It is the future, but not quite as we know it. Japan is still a techno-economic superpower, China is basically an oversized North Korea, the EU and Russia are part of the same Eurobloc, the US has been kicked out of NATO over the Russian thing. But so many things are familiar to us in 2019. The networked technology which connects us. The endless minor wars divide which us.
The megacorporations which rule us.
Eleven years ago, the Second Great Kanto Quake struck the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan Area. A 9.5 with its epicenter in the heart of the city, it leveled the megalopolis, killed hundreds, then thousands, then millions. The economic crash which followed the world's largest and richest city's collapse killed even more. The world's pundits predicted that this was it for Japan, that no nation could withstand such a disaster, and for a brief few months looked to America as a pillar of stability again.
They predicted wrong.
Tokyo did rise again - bigger and stranger than ever before, in a timeframe measured not in years, but in months.
But it was not the government who restored Tokyo, who engineered the Megatokyo Miracle. It was a corporation.
General Nippon Organic Manufacturing - GENOM for short - had once been a puny mid-sized corp competing for the scraps left behind by the big keiretsus, the Mitsubishis and the Sonys and the Toshibas of the world. But those corps were gone now, their assets and headquarters destroyed in the quake, and GENOM rose to take their place with the help of an invention so important that those same pundits compared its impact on human civilization to the steam engine.
BioMechanical Analogues, known colloquially as Boomers. Living machines formed out of nanotech 'cells', grown into forms that not only met, but exceeded the capabilities of carbohydrate-based life. Boomers, working without rest or pay, rebuilt Megatokyo. Boomers, replacing billions of jobs, automated away nearly three-quarters of the global labor force. Boomers, to put it bluntly, made GENOM a new superpower. And no one dared to oppose them, even if from time to time Boomers went 'rampant' and took innocent lives in their madness. Advanced Police forces were formed, but kept underfunded and chained to the corporate yoke. And no one dared to lift a finger.
No one, that is, except one woman: Sylia Stingray.
Her father was one of the geniuses behind Boomer technology, betrayed by GENOM, murdered when his purpose had been served. She was his revenge, her intellect enhanced by a mysterious datatape which rewired her brain, her hatred honed to a razor's edge. Inspired by the super sentai shows of her childhood, equipped with prototype 'hardsuits' capable of taking on even the mightiest of Boomers, she put together a team to combat the megacorporation and its abuses:
- Priss Asagiri, a wannabe rockstar and ex-gangster, whose heart burns with a need for revenge the way a star burns hydrogen.
- Linna Yamazaki, a yuppie aerobics instructor with a near-superhuman talent for martial arts.
- Nene Romanova, Russian immigrant, ADP mole, adorable teenager, master hacker.
It's been almost five years to the day since the Knight Sabers' founding. During that time, they've killed GENOM's head of Internal Security, stopped a sentient racecar, squared off with a vampire Boomer, killed GENOM's head of Internal Security two more times (it's complicated), and generally caused GENOM no small amount of trouble. But - But! - they have not defeated GENOM. Sylia has accepted, in part, that it may not be possible to destroy such a superpower.
But times change, technology accelerates, everything becomes more unpredictable, and the Knight Sabers, once the conquering heroes, find themselves ever more immersed in a society blindly trundling towards its own suicide.
This is the story of four remarkable women, at the edge of the end of history, at the periphery of Kurzweil's Singularity, fighting for what they believe, in true rock n' roll superheroic fashion.
This is the Story of the Knight Sabers.
This is Bubblegum Crisis.
Vigilante's Run
While the Knight Sabers have fought GENOM with great strength and gusto, much to the Advanced Police's joy, they have, by and large, left the city's other great scourge to be. The name of that scourge is the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza, the biggest organized crime syndicate in Megatokyo. It has operated without rebuke, out of fear that its collapse would destabilize the city's underground, send it into a firestorm of violence and destruction. It thought itself safe.
It thought wrong.
In the wee morning hours of February 10, 2036, a Sleeping Dragon shipment of arms and its security detail was obliterated - all yakuza dead but one, the ship sunk, the arms lost, the backup taken out by landmines. The Sleeping Dragon was no longer invincible.
This was the work of the hardsuited vigilante known as Nemesis. American in origin, he had been tearing up organizations of criminals and other threats to society for years, striking from the shadows, killing mercilessly, only leaving civilians alive to tell the tale. Needless to say, both the AD Police and the Knight Sabers were caught off guard, both by his sudden appearance and his ruthless methods. Sure, he kept civilians out of it, but was his taking of human lives entirely justified? And if he pressed Shichiki Sato, leader of the Sleeping Dragon, any further, who could say how many innocents would be lost?
Nemesis struck again that night, targeting the Fu-Shui Nightclub and its secret drug lab, just as Priss and her ADP boy-friend Leon McNichol attempted to visit it for fun. For a brief moment they were face-to-face with Nemesis, just as he was finishing up his slaughter with a heavy Anti-Boomer rifle. Needless to say, he encouraged them to stay out of his way, as otherwise he could not guarantee their safety.
But neither of them did, as Nemesis found himself being chased by a mercenary platoon of K-11 Jaegers, advanced mecha similar to those used by the ADP. Priss returned to her Knight Saber comrades, whose VTOL had been downed in an abandoned apartment complex by a stray missile from one of the Jaegers. Meanwhile Leon returned to the ADP to throw together a blockade to minimize collateral damage from Nemesis's fight.
Nemesis lured the Jaegers into the apartment complex, where his truck, and his support team, was waiting. He switched into a heavier hardsuit, then engaged the Jaegers alongside the truck - and its phosphorus mortar launcher. Nemesis managed to wipe most of the mercenaries out, but several escaped to engage the Knight Sabers. The Sabers, despite being relatively underarmed for powersuit-level combat, managed to wipe out most of the Jaegers with the help of Nene's Pulse-Striker EMP cannons. All but one, that is, who would have killed Nene had Nemesis not saved her. Once again, Nemesis demanded the Sabers stay out of his way, then vanished into the night.
His strike was not without its negative aftereffects, however. Sato deployed his stable of tank-grade Battle Boomers to hunt down Nemesis; meanwhile, an alliance of rival crime syndicates formed to snap up Sato's territory. With a gang war on the horizon, Leon resolved to hunt down Nemesis, no matter what it took, but not before leaning on Nene for some information on the vigilante. They found out that Nemesis had once been part of the US Special Forces, had served in South America under something known as Operation Templar, and had resolved to go to Megatokyo after the death of a fellow veteran's sister at the Sleeping Dragon's hands.
What they didn't know, what they couldn't know, was that Nemesis had once been Gavin Belasko, Army Ranger. After his discharge, he had watched his parents be gunned down by mobsters in New York, and swore an oath of vengeance upon the entire criminal class. They were all dogs, he said, monsters who only understood brute force, something which law-abiding society could not easily apply to them. After taking down the Russian Mafia branch which killed his parents, his little sister, one Maria Belasko, joined his team. Soon, he had a hardsuit developed by Dr. Roland Vicain, and began to embark on his cross-country crusade against crime.
But here in Megatokyo, things are different. Nemesis has a plan to take down the Sleeping Dragon, but only the vaguest of plans to take down the rest of the gangs, or even GENOM if it becomes involved. The ADP, as strapped for equipment as ever, must defend the entire city before it becomes a battleground. The gangs have summoned their own private armies to lay waste to their common enemy, and each other if it becomes necessary.
And of all people, the Knight Sabers are caught right in the middle…
So, yeah, that's it. If you have any questions, comments, insults, death threats, whatever, post em' - I'll take what I can get at this point.
Last edited:
Chapter 21: Answers At Last
- Location
- Megatokyo
Chapter 21: Answers at last
District 7
February 11, 2036
9:31 am
Sho's room had barely been altered from the starter kit of white-paint-cinderblock-featureless-cot-with-no-blanket-plastic-dresser-carbon-fiber-rug in all the years Priss had known the kid. The first few years, he didn't play with toys while the other boys had fought for any Gundam figure they could lay their hands on. When the other boys got into gamesofts and spent hours playing FFXXV, he sat in his room and read the same book fifteen times over.
And now he was almost fourteen, and he'd only just started thinking about girls. There was one Priss and The Replicants poster directly opposite his bed, and she'd only managed to have him put it up after getting him to admit that yes, he was a fan, so of course he should act like one.
Four years. Four fucking years since everything happened.
It would have hurt less if it had been to get at her, if they'd crushed Kaori-chan for explicit 'refrigerating' purposes. The sheer cliche would have made it more bearable, for one, easy to understand, and it would have been something unique to that family, for another. But no: Sho was just another kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so revenge was useless, guilt a luxury.
Priss knocked on his open door, and he looked up. He was sitting on his bed reading something. She slipped in, leaving Harohata to her business, and sat on the bed right next to the boy.
"Hey," she said. "What's up."
"Hi, oneesan," he said, looking up. "Not much, I guess."
"Aw, c'mon, you got a new book, right? That's gotta count for something. Big one, too… is that No Longer Human?"
"Uh-huh."
She knew that Sho was this quiet even when she left, the staff had told her so, but was this predestined? Would he have grown up this way, normally? Or had PTSD or another one of Sylia's acronymical disorders spirited away the part of his brain that made someone excited, willing to talk?
Because conversations with him were always like this: fumble around for the thing that Sho had been thinking about lately, snag on it, then watch as his verbal faucet was yanked to open, so to speak. Trust was what mattered, or so went her theory. Sho trusted her enough to talk, but not to open. Sho didn't trust anyone enough to do that.
"Who's that by again?"
"Osamu Dazai."
"Huh." She brought her hand to her chin in an imitation of deep thought. "Yeah, I remember him. He killed himself, right? Kinda autobiographical, that."
"No. He killed himself way after he wrote the book."
"Oh."
Silence again. "You know what would be funny? If they had Osamu Tezuka and Osamu Dazai do something together. Like, Astro Boy considers suicide or something, maybe-"
"Oneesan."
"Right, sorry." She thought that would be the end of it, but then Sho spoke again:
"Oneesan, are you okay?"
Priss's eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. "W-what do you mean? Of course I'm fine. Good as I'll ever be."
"Oh." Sho put his book down and swung his legs down over the edge of the bed. "Herohata says that there will be a gang war soon. I thought that'd hurt you really bad."
"What? Do you really think your oneesan is a gangster?" She laughed. "Do I walk around with a heavy Kansai accent wearing suits two sizes too big?"
"Yokosawa says you used to be one, and that you have a 'degenerate criminal mentality'. Is that true?"
"Well," she said, sighing, "I'm not a gangster, and Yokosawa hated me deeply. so don't worry about me kidnapping you or whatever."
"But you ran away from the home, right?"
"I guess. Things were way worse back in the day, and I never got along well with the other kids, so it was different. You're not gonna run away, though, are you?"
"Nope. No place to go, anyway."
"That's good. It's nice to know my lil' Sho-kun's being responsible."
"But are you gonna be okay? I mean, everyone's been talking about this whole gang war thing, ever since Nemesis-"
She cut him off. "Nemesis is just another Knight Saber. He wants to help people, so sooner or later he's going to realize that it's for the best if he leaves town, and then there won't be a war."
"Are you sure?"
"C'mon, Sho. If you were Nemesis, what would you do?"
"I'd want to help people, not get people killed, but he probably thinks he is helping people, right? Because they're criminals, so if he kills them he saves innocent lives."
"Fair point." She kicked her legs back and forth. "With the Yakuza it's always so hard to tell. Guess he must be from out of town."
"But that won't stop the gangs fighting!" Sho cried. "It's one of those foot-in-the-door things we learned about at school where once you start something you can't stop. And what if one of them attacks us? What happens then?"
Priss cradled her head in her hands. Sho didn't know that she'd come face to face with the motherfucker just a few hours ago, and she was going to keep it that way. Very few things could seriously rattle her the way his stint with the Gerlitch had, and now on top of that she had to look forward to Megatokyo's slums burning as every criminal syndicate in the city called in their out-of-town private armies? And Mister Skullface couldn't care less? It'd been bugging her ever since she'd woken up that morning, and she needed to shake it off, but Sho wasn't going to shake it off, and she couldn't blame him…
"Oneesan?"
"I don't know, Sho. I wish I did."
"Sorry. Seriously, did something happen?"
She could tell him the edited version of the story, the one with a Knight Saber-shaped hole in it, but what would be the point? It wouldn't make him feel safer. It wouldn't get anything off her chest.
"Well, no. Truth is, pretty much everyone's scared, even the grownups."
"I'm thirteen, oneesan, I know that grownups get scared."
"Not what I meant. There's - adults, who just get older, and grownups, who get wiser. Now, all the adults are scared, but the ones who really grew up? They're even more scared, because - because they know the gloves are off. I guess you saw it in the papers, but even the most grownup of grownups like Sato don't take having nearly three hundred of their people killed in cold blood well. And Nemesis didn't stop the last couple of times in America, so he won't stop now, and neither will Sato. So - yeah."
"Should I worry?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess. The thing about grownups is that they always will have something to worry about, whether they want to or not, because they're grown up, so everything is, is their problem. They even worry when they can't do anything about it. But you - well, you can worry, but Sho-" here she reached out to him, put a hand on his shoulder, tried to be the best big sister she could-
"Yeah."
"Don't be afraid."
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
9:43 am
"Operation Templar? Doesn't ring a bell."
So said former Lieutenant Jeff 'Jeffy' Holland, once a decorated Marine, now running a psychotrauma clinic for the few hundred vets of the world's militaries in Megatokyo.
"You sure?" Daley said. "I think it was an Army op stationed in South America, that help any?"
He could practically hear Holland shrug over the phone. "I don't actually get a lot of landlubbers in the clinic. There's no regular detachment in Japan - Okinawa's a naval base, that's all squids, and USSD is - well - it's USSD. So there just ain't enough washed-up army boys with a support network to make them not turn to drugs n'chrome."
"Well, shit. Thanks for your time anyway."
"No problem, Wong. Where're you gonna check, anyhow? Got American buddies?"
"Let's just say I know a guy."
9:45 am
"Operation Templar… templar templar templar… what breed of op?"
Sergeant Carmen Lobelia was a public-facing officer stationed at the USSD base outside of Megatokyo. She'd met Daley during the Killer Doll scandal, she'd barely begun to hit on him before he crushed her nascent dreams, and they were now people who would periodically recognize one another at parties, or crime scenes.
"Army. SpecFor. South America."
"And you're sure it's not public knowledge? Plenty of stuff gets leaked all the time, you know. Paperclip, Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm, Blue Lampoon, things like that."
"Positive. I just checked the Rangers' veterans website, and they don't even list cookouts without an account."
"Ahhhh, ohkayyy. Yeah, USSD prefers to run their ops alone, but we've coordinated once or twice. I can send you a couple of files at my clearance, but I don't think you'll get much. If they didn't have mesospheric aerial support, we've got nothing."
"Okay. Thanks."
Daley hung up. He hadn't expected much, but it was always good to confirm little details like this. No navy, no spacers, just Army Rangers in the pits of South America, doing… what exactly? He barely remembered where he'd heard it from, remembered a scandal, but it was a headline in some paper years ago at most, just another thing the Americans did that the Japanese government wanted no part of.
Let them have their endless proxy wars against Brazil and China and Iran, they figured. GENOM could sell to all sides in that case while relying on US muscle to protect it in case the Chinese or Koreans got too antsy. Daley had accepted this logic for the most part. Now, he wished he hadn't.
10:05 am
"Wong, I would if I could, but Operation Templar is currently considered a Level-5 Security Asset, which means that under no circumstances are we to even admit that it exists to civvies. I get to tell you it happened because you're a cop, but-"
"It was under your jurisdiction, right? Didn't you used to do some big moving and shaking in SOUMERCOM?"
"Can't tell you."
Captain Dave Harp had, in fact, been an Asset Coordinator within the South American Command of the Army, which meant he had the good fortune of coordinating supply airlifts to soldiers stranded in trackless Venezuelan jungles in such a manner that they wouldn't get shot out of the sky by loyalist forces. After Caracas was secured by the Colombians, he got himself transferred to a cushy post in Megatokyo, occasionally disturbed from his tobacco-fueled self-immolation by shifting priorities in the Polar War. His was the domain of the armchair tactician, and as such if he could help allied forces like the ADP out, he would.
That he was playing the 'we-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny' game with Daley didn't bode well, suffice to say.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"You know, but you're not telling me."
"I know of it, Wong, and everything I know tells me no sane officer would be telling you anything about Operation Templar. Just stay out of this one, okay? In any case-"
Daley hung up before Harp could ask him why he was calling. After all, he'd gotten the info by having a college-age girl hack into one of the most heavily protected databases on the planet - it just wouldn't do to tell the owners of said database that.
Okay, but no sane officer would tell him anything. In that case, it was probably time to start checking the insane cases. Three more calls, at most, and then he'd leave this for tomorrow and get to Anderson's warrants.
10:18 am
"Operation Templar, huh?"
Philip Bourne was a drill instructor at a camp in Panama known among Army grunts as "The Gauntlet", where greenhorns learned rough terrain maneuvers hacking their way through the Central American jungle. He knew Daley by a friend-of-a-friend relationship, where Leon's cousin on his mother's side had helped cover Bourne's rear from a dishonorable discharge involving the packing of human feces around the decoy landmines on Training Course #8.
"No, I knew, like, one guy who was in it, a pretty elite Ranger even though he was a petty officer. He got killed in the San Rafael arcology bombings, though - don't tell anyone, but I think he might have actually carried them out."
"Seriously?"
"Oh, yeah. He was a demolitions expert, actually. They called him 'Arnold Airburst' because he knocked out a whole damn missile battery with just a few well-placed flechette grenades. Really weird dude, too, definitely unhinged enough to do something like it. Wouldn't speak to anyone below his rank, preferred lone-wolf operations, that sort of thing. Couldn't believe they let him work with explosives for a living."
"How did you find out he was a, um, Templar, so to speak."
"He was showing recruits how to pack in sand around supercombusters to make glass shrapnel and let slip that he'd first done it in there, so I grilled him after all the greenhorns were done out of curiosity, and he said it was classified."
"Anything else?"
"Well, he said he wouldn't tell me even if he could, just kinda growled, you know? The next time I asked him about it all he said was that it 'was a mistake', and I didn't get anything else out of him. Like I said, real weirdo."
"That's not much to go on."
"Oh, I dunno. It's like a big game of elimination: An Army Special Forces operation in South America around the middle of the '20's that was a big fuckup. Type that into a database, you get Operation Templar. Bing bang bong."
"...That doesn't help me at all…" Daley sighed.
"Well, excuse me. You're the one who asked."
"Yeah, I guess I did. Bye now." He hung up.
Arnold. It probably wasn't the guy's real name, but it was a name, something Nene could cross-check with the rest. And yet, he still felt hollow, as though Bourne had sucked his will to make another call out with a straw.
No, that wasn't quite true. Operation Templar was a mistake, he knew that much. And maybe… maybe Nemesis had been in it? Maybe the reason he was so damn good at killing, better than even the Sabers, was because he'd gotten stuck in some heart-of-darkness op in… where? South America was an entire goddamn continent, an assortment of ex-colonies run by rigged elections and corporate juntas with plenty of uninhabited space to get lost in.
But urban training would be necessary to augment his skillset. The Brazilians wouldn't let Americans into their favelas, not a chance. Lima, then, or maybe Caracas. Or maybe Nemesis had never been inside a city larger than six million and that was just him making wild assumptions. Two more calls, then.
10:24 am
"Where the hell did you hear about Operation Templar?"
For once in his life, Staff Sergeant Cody Zhang actually sounded nervous, as though he'd been caught by a military tribunal with his finger up a West Point cadet's rear end. He didn't know Daley, of course, but Daley had checked a shortlist of Hong Kong expats in the military that he, as one himself, had a right to, and Cody Zhang, miracle of miracles, was a middle-manager for SOUMERCOM's Resource Management Operations.
"Well, I'm with the Megatokyo ADP, and we have reason to believe that a former operator may be responsible for homicide and reckless violence against the citizens of our fair city, and we figure a motive might not hurt, you know? What can you tell me?"
"It was a regional stabilization operation. The United States of America saw freedom and liberal values being suppressed across the Amazon basin by non-national actors, and so we had no choice but to act. It shouldn't have been traumatizing to any real soldier, if that's what you're implying."
"Really? It went well?"
"I'm not at liberty to say."
"Well, what exactly happened? How bad was it?"
"The United States of America, with international permission for all of its actions, moved to provide islands of stability as the Amazonian region was being developed for new investment opportunities by multiple misaligned factions. That some factions misinterpreted this as an act of hostility was an unfortunate occurrence which the United States of America is under no obligation to correct under the present doctrine of self-determination."
Self-Determination? Sure, and Vision was his bitchy ex-girlfriend. When Americans used that word, Daley always mentally tacked on "so long as the government in power is an ultraconservative business-friendly pseudo-democracy, and god help the guy who elects otherwise".
"Alright. Thank you for your time." He hung up - that was probably all he was going to get out of Zhang.
But things were getting interesting, now. 'Islands of Stability?' What in God's name did that mean? And why Operation Templar? The Knights Templar had established monasteries in the Holy Land, something akin to 'Islands of Stability' - maybe the operation was supposed to be some sort of guerilla fortress-building exercise? It seemed possible, maybe even probable.
But he'd hit a dead end, and he needed to recognize that. No phone call could squeeze out the juicy details of Nemesis's identity. Nor, for that matter, could any phone call provide him with the insight needed to translate information into arrests.
At least Nene could help him with that first part - hopefully.
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
10:15 am
The cake was good.
There really was no way to describe it. Adjectives, adverbs, nouns, all assailed the summit of Mount Chocolate Cake with verbal pickaxes and conjunctive sherpas and long-syllable dynamite, but none could reach the descriptive summit. The cake itself melted in her mouth like Hawaiian lava, slicked her salivary glands with pottery glaze; the frosting was cool and moist like a Canadian glacial lake on a summer afternoon, but still sweet with prokaryotic life. Every simile ended up sounding pretentious and overwritten. The cake was just that good.
Yeah, yeah, she needed to cut back. But if Sylia was right, she'd be out in her suit so much over the next few days she'd probably lose weight from all that exercise. Being a Knight Saber was, without a doubt, one of the best workouts a girl could get!
That being said, she didn't have much else to do. The database had a separate search engine which she hadn't downloaded, but of course she had spiders of her own to shuffle through the personnel list to find anything related to Operation Templar. Sure, it took awhile, but far less time than actually doing any hacking, so who was she to complain?
Bing!
Ah, there it was now, Operation Templar's secrets (hopefully) laid bare before her. Nene tossed the paper plate in the trash, then swiveled back over to her computer.
The results weren't encouraging at first glance. She had a list of personnel who had served operation about a thousand names long. Most of them, on closer inspection, were in auxiliary positions of some kind - there were a lot of names marked for 'Convoy Support', she noticed. A whole bunch of non-combat engineers, too, most with technical expertise in secure facility construction. Probably not Nemesis. So she scrolled up to the search terms and clicked a few check marks to narrow things down to those members of Operation Templar who had seen direct combat.
Bing!
Four hundred results. Awesome. Way more than expected, a pretty substantial chunk of the Army's special forces for a military maneuver she hadn't heard about until today, but she could work with that. Lots of veterans of previous operations, practically an entire battalion cut out of the Central African Republic brushfire wars and transplanted to 'South America', at a number of different 'Monasteries'. But still, not good enough. She put in Jackson Ng to check his profile again...
Bing!
Okay… where'd he serve in South America? Monastery 14. Huh. That was all it said, but on some of the other profiles she clicked on they usually had specific locations or regions. Still, though, now all she had to do was specify combatants of Monastery 14…
Bing!
Awesome. Twenty-eight of SpecFor's finest, all (hopefully) connected to Nemesis. She pulled out the photo of Leon's 'army guy' and began opening profiles. First off was Staff Sergeant Shepard Cent, who had first served in the Philippine Interdiction around 2026, underwent training to become an Army Ranger in 2028, and, oddly enough, had no photo attached to his name.
Fine then. Corporal Andrea Iglesias, joined 2029, ping-ponged from Syria to Sri Lanka over the course of a few years until serving in Templar. She had a picture, a plain-looking Latina woman with two cybernetic eyes that seemed to move with her photo. Her role was… what, exactly? It didn't say. In fact, it hadn't said for Cent either despite the text field being right there. Something was wrong.
Okay, try guy number three. Jordan Piscitello, Lieutenant, served in Mexico from '24 to '30, dishonorably discharged. No picture, no training, no nothing.
What the hell?
Sergeant Matthew Hemmer. No picture, no training, no nothing. Private Hu Qianlong, no records, no nothing. Corporal Ben Adams, nothing. Captain Gavin Belasko, nothing. Private Kim-Su Park, nothing. Captain Philip Barnes, nothing. Lieutenant America Hussein, nothing, nothing, nothing.
This wasn't happening. This wasn't possible. Someone had gotten into the database before her. Nemesis knew how to cover his tracks.
Nemesis was a really good hacker.
She screamed.
Daley was walking down the hallway to Nene's office when he heard an awful screech emanate from its general direction. Training took over and he broke into a run, then a dead sprint, skidding to a halt outside her office, throwing open the door - and finding nothing but a very, very sad Nene.
"Um," he said, "you called?"
She told him about the database issue, and in the telling, watched his brow furrow and his hand go to his chin. Then he told her about his own calls to military intelligence folk, and watched her face scrunch up and her head droop down in frustration.
"So," Daley mumbled. "That is, well, that."
Nene pressed her fingers against her temples, rubbing them in circles. "Fleet Hermes. It's gotta be."
"I'm sorry?"
"The hacker who popped up on the net right around the same time Nemesis showed up in town. His support team, probably. Punched holes in every database which could lead to incriminating information. Left us with forty names and no faces. Deleted stuff from the Pentagon archives without an automated scan picking up on it."
"Could just be classification."
"Not a chance," Nene smirked. "I went in on a low-level request and picked up even Eyes Only-clearance stuff. Either Operation Templar was such a matter of national security they expunged the data without telling anyone or, well, they deleted everything."
"So he's better than you at hacking, huh?"
That set her off. For a brief moment Nene paused, her fingers clenched into claws over the keyboard. Then, with a forceful kick against the floor, she spun around with an expression on her face like she'd just seen Daley kill a puppy, and a glare that spoke of hatred hotter than suns.
"No one," she said in a low voice, "is a better hacker than Nene Romanova. Not in this city. Not in this country. Not in the whole damn world."
"I think it might be hard to gauge-"
"I said. No one. Is a better hacker. Than Nina 'Nene' Ushankavnya Romanova. No one."
"I'm just saying-"
"No."
"Isn't that going-"
"NO."
Daley had always assumed Nene was a good target for teasing, even about the things she obviously took great pride in. It was as though she had internalized Naoko's dumb jokes and accepted that people saw her small figure and bubbly personality as an easy target. She was moe, there was no denying it, and that was something she was just going to have to live with.
But something about her demeanor now wasn't moe at all; the hair on the back of his neck wasn't standing up or anything, but he had this nagging feeling that if he disputed her skills even Leon wouldn't be able to find the body.
So Daley Wong, fearless AD Police Vice Inspector, the man who had faced down rampaging Boomers with disturbing frequency and yet continued to survive, spoke the meekest phrase he could imagine:
"Well, if you say so."
"Weeell, I do." And she was Nene again, sticking her head out and shaking her head in rhythm with each syllable, all but wagging her tongue, as though she hadn't just revealed that her ego was more fragile than that of a US President.
Daley decided to change the subject. "We've still gotta cross-check the immigration database. Like Leon said, if at least one of our Templars came in through the front door…"
"Sure, sure, fine, whatever. And Fleet Hermes probably punched holes in that, too. Or he went under a fake name or something." She clearly was moping now, her head slowly angling downward. "We're at a dead end. We're flying blind."
"Leon'll probably turn up some results, though. All the desk jockeying in the world can't compare to some real on-foot detective work, yeah?"
"That's assuming he can survive Anderson, and arresting half the damn Yakuza while he's at it…"
Daley snickered. "Yeah. I don't know which one scares me more."
District 7
February 11, 2036
9:31 am
Sho's room had barely been altered from the starter kit of white-paint-cinderblock-featureless-cot-with-no-blanket-plastic-dresser-carbon-fiber-rug in all the years Priss had known the kid. The first few years, he didn't play with toys while the other boys had fought for any Gundam figure they could lay their hands on. When the other boys got into gamesofts and spent hours playing FFXXV, he sat in his room and read the same book fifteen times over.
And now he was almost fourteen, and he'd only just started thinking about girls. There was one Priss and The Replicants poster directly opposite his bed, and she'd only managed to have him put it up after getting him to admit that yes, he was a fan, so of course he should act like one.
Four years. Four fucking years since everything happened.
It would have hurt less if it had been to get at her, if they'd crushed Kaori-chan for explicit 'refrigerating' purposes. The sheer cliche would have made it more bearable, for one, easy to understand, and it would have been something unique to that family, for another. But no: Sho was just another kid in the wrong place at the wrong time, and so revenge was useless, guilt a luxury.
Priss knocked on his open door, and he looked up. He was sitting on his bed reading something. She slipped in, leaving Harohata to her business, and sat on the bed right next to the boy.
"Hey," she said. "What's up."
"Hi, oneesan," he said, looking up. "Not much, I guess."
"Aw, c'mon, you got a new book, right? That's gotta count for something. Big one, too… is that No Longer Human?"
"Uh-huh."
She knew that Sho was this quiet even when she left, the staff had told her so, but was this predestined? Would he have grown up this way, normally? Or had PTSD or another one of Sylia's acronymical disorders spirited away the part of his brain that made someone excited, willing to talk?
Because conversations with him were always like this: fumble around for the thing that Sho had been thinking about lately, snag on it, then watch as his verbal faucet was yanked to open, so to speak. Trust was what mattered, or so went her theory. Sho trusted her enough to talk, but not to open. Sho didn't trust anyone enough to do that.
"Who's that by again?"
"Osamu Dazai."
"Huh." She brought her hand to her chin in an imitation of deep thought. "Yeah, I remember him. He killed himself, right? Kinda autobiographical, that."
"No. He killed himself way after he wrote the book."
"Oh."
Silence again. "You know what would be funny? If they had Osamu Tezuka and Osamu Dazai do something together. Like, Astro Boy considers suicide or something, maybe-"
"Oneesan."
"Right, sorry." She thought that would be the end of it, but then Sho spoke again:
"Oneesan, are you okay?"
Priss's eyes went wide for a fraction of a second, but it was enough. "W-what do you mean? Of course I'm fine. Good as I'll ever be."
"Oh." Sho put his book down and swung his legs down over the edge of the bed. "Herohata says that there will be a gang war soon. I thought that'd hurt you really bad."
"What? Do you really think your oneesan is a gangster?" She laughed. "Do I walk around with a heavy Kansai accent wearing suits two sizes too big?"
"Yokosawa says you used to be one, and that you have a 'degenerate criminal mentality'. Is that true?"
"Well," she said, sighing, "I'm not a gangster, and Yokosawa hated me deeply. so don't worry about me kidnapping you or whatever."
"But you ran away from the home, right?"
"I guess. Things were way worse back in the day, and I never got along well with the other kids, so it was different. You're not gonna run away, though, are you?"
"Nope. No place to go, anyway."
"That's good. It's nice to know my lil' Sho-kun's being responsible."
"But are you gonna be okay? I mean, everyone's been talking about this whole gang war thing, ever since Nemesis-"
She cut him off. "Nemesis is just another Knight Saber. He wants to help people, so sooner or later he's going to realize that it's for the best if he leaves town, and then there won't be a war."
"Are you sure?"
"C'mon, Sho. If you were Nemesis, what would you do?"
"I'd want to help people, not get people killed, but he probably thinks he is helping people, right? Because they're criminals, so if he kills them he saves innocent lives."
"Fair point." She kicked her legs back and forth. "With the Yakuza it's always so hard to tell. Guess he must be from out of town."
"But that won't stop the gangs fighting!" Sho cried. "It's one of those foot-in-the-door things we learned about at school where once you start something you can't stop. And what if one of them attacks us? What happens then?"
Priss cradled her head in her hands. Sho didn't know that she'd come face to face with the motherfucker just a few hours ago, and she was going to keep it that way. Very few things could seriously rattle her the way his stint with the Gerlitch had, and now on top of that she had to look forward to Megatokyo's slums burning as every criminal syndicate in the city called in their out-of-town private armies? And Mister Skullface couldn't care less? It'd been bugging her ever since she'd woken up that morning, and she needed to shake it off, but Sho wasn't going to shake it off, and she couldn't blame him…
"Oneesan?"
"I don't know, Sho. I wish I did."
"Sorry. Seriously, did something happen?"
She could tell him the edited version of the story, the one with a Knight Saber-shaped hole in it, but what would be the point? It wouldn't make him feel safer. It wouldn't get anything off her chest.
"Well, no. Truth is, pretty much everyone's scared, even the grownups."
"I'm thirteen, oneesan, I know that grownups get scared."
"Not what I meant. There's - adults, who just get older, and grownups, who get wiser. Now, all the adults are scared, but the ones who really grew up? They're even more scared, because - because they know the gloves are off. I guess you saw it in the papers, but even the most grownup of grownups like Sato don't take having nearly three hundred of their people killed in cold blood well. And Nemesis didn't stop the last couple of times in America, so he won't stop now, and neither will Sato. So - yeah."
"Should I worry?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess. The thing about grownups is that they always will have something to worry about, whether they want to or not, because they're grown up, so everything is, is their problem. They even worry when they can't do anything about it. But you - well, you can worry, but Sho-" here she reached out to him, put a hand on his shoulder, tried to be the best big sister she could-
"Yeah."
"Don't be afraid."
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
9:43 am
"Operation Templar? Doesn't ring a bell."
So said former Lieutenant Jeff 'Jeffy' Holland, once a decorated Marine, now running a psychotrauma clinic for the few hundred vets of the world's militaries in Megatokyo.
"You sure?" Daley said. "I think it was an Army op stationed in South America, that help any?"
He could practically hear Holland shrug over the phone. "I don't actually get a lot of landlubbers in the clinic. There's no regular detachment in Japan - Okinawa's a naval base, that's all squids, and USSD is - well - it's USSD. So there just ain't enough washed-up army boys with a support network to make them not turn to drugs n'chrome."
"Well, shit. Thanks for your time anyway."
"No problem, Wong. Where're you gonna check, anyhow? Got American buddies?"
"Let's just say I know a guy."
9:45 am
"Operation Templar… templar templar templar… what breed of op?"
Sergeant Carmen Lobelia was a public-facing officer stationed at the USSD base outside of Megatokyo. She'd met Daley during the Killer Doll scandal, she'd barely begun to hit on him before he crushed her nascent dreams, and they were now people who would periodically recognize one another at parties, or crime scenes.
"Army. SpecFor. South America."
"And you're sure it's not public knowledge? Plenty of stuff gets leaked all the time, you know. Paperclip, Iraqi Freedom, Desert Storm, Blue Lampoon, things like that."
"Positive. I just checked the Rangers' veterans website, and they don't even list cookouts without an account."
"Ahhhh, ohkayyy. Yeah, USSD prefers to run their ops alone, but we've coordinated once or twice. I can send you a couple of files at my clearance, but I don't think you'll get much. If they didn't have mesospheric aerial support, we've got nothing."
"Okay. Thanks."
Daley hung up. He hadn't expected much, but it was always good to confirm little details like this. No navy, no spacers, just Army Rangers in the pits of South America, doing… what exactly? He barely remembered where he'd heard it from, remembered a scandal, but it was a headline in some paper years ago at most, just another thing the Americans did that the Japanese government wanted no part of.
Let them have their endless proxy wars against Brazil and China and Iran, they figured. GENOM could sell to all sides in that case while relying on US muscle to protect it in case the Chinese or Koreans got too antsy. Daley had accepted this logic for the most part. Now, he wished he hadn't.
10:05 am
"Wong, I would if I could, but Operation Templar is currently considered a Level-5 Security Asset, which means that under no circumstances are we to even admit that it exists to civvies. I get to tell you it happened because you're a cop, but-"
"It was under your jurisdiction, right? Didn't you used to do some big moving and shaking in SOUMERCOM?"
"Can't tell you."
Captain Dave Harp had, in fact, been an Asset Coordinator within the South American Command of the Army, which meant he had the good fortune of coordinating supply airlifts to soldiers stranded in trackless Venezuelan jungles in such a manner that they wouldn't get shot out of the sky by loyalist forces. After Caracas was secured by the Colombians, he got himself transferred to a cushy post in Megatokyo, occasionally disturbed from his tobacco-fueled self-immolation by shifting priorities in the Polar War. His was the domain of the armchair tactician, and as such if he could help allied forces like the ADP out, he would.
That he was playing the 'we-can-neither-confirm-nor-deny' game with Daley didn't bode well, suffice to say.
"You sure?"
"I'm sure."
"You know, but you're not telling me."
"I know of it, Wong, and everything I know tells me no sane officer would be telling you anything about Operation Templar. Just stay out of this one, okay? In any case-"
Daley hung up before Harp could ask him why he was calling. After all, he'd gotten the info by having a college-age girl hack into one of the most heavily protected databases on the planet - it just wouldn't do to tell the owners of said database that.
Okay, but no sane officer would tell him anything. In that case, it was probably time to start checking the insane cases. Three more calls, at most, and then he'd leave this for tomorrow and get to Anderson's warrants.
10:18 am
"Operation Templar, huh?"
Philip Bourne was a drill instructor at a camp in Panama known among Army grunts as "The Gauntlet", where greenhorns learned rough terrain maneuvers hacking their way through the Central American jungle. He knew Daley by a friend-of-a-friend relationship, where Leon's cousin on his mother's side had helped cover Bourne's rear from a dishonorable discharge involving the packing of human feces around the decoy landmines on Training Course #8.
"No, I knew, like, one guy who was in it, a pretty elite Ranger even though he was a petty officer. He got killed in the San Rafael arcology bombings, though - don't tell anyone, but I think he might have actually carried them out."
"Seriously?"
"Oh, yeah. He was a demolitions expert, actually. They called him 'Arnold Airburst' because he knocked out a whole damn missile battery with just a few well-placed flechette grenades. Really weird dude, too, definitely unhinged enough to do something like it. Wouldn't speak to anyone below his rank, preferred lone-wolf operations, that sort of thing. Couldn't believe they let him work with explosives for a living."
"How did you find out he was a, um, Templar, so to speak."
"He was showing recruits how to pack in sand around supercombusters to make glass shrapnel and let slip that he'd first done it in there, so I grilled him after all the greenhorns were done out of curiosity, and he said it was classified."
"Anything else?"
"Well, he said he wouldn't tell me even if he could, just kinda growled, you know? The next time I asked him about it all he said was that it 'was a mistake', and I didn't get anything else out of him. Like I said, real weirdo."
"That's not much to go on."
"Oh, I dunno. It's like a big game of elimination: An Army Special Forces operation in South America around the middle of the '20's that was a big fuckup. Type that into a database, you get Operation Templar. Bing bang bong."
"...That doesn't help me at all…" Daley sighed.
"Well, excuse me. You're the one who asked."
"Yeah, I guess I did. Bye now." He hung up.
Arnold. It probably wasn't the guy's real name, but it was a name, something Nene could cross-check with the rest. And yet, he still felt hollow, as though Bourne had sucked his will to make another call out with a straw.
No, that wasn't quite true. Operation Templar was a mistake, he knew that much. And maybe… maybe Nemesis had been in it? Maybe the reason he was so damn good at killing, better than even the Sabers, was because he'd gotten stuck in some heart-of-darkness op in… where? South America was an entire goddamn continent, an assortment of ex-colonies run by rigged elections and corporate juntas with plenty of uninhabited space to get lost in.
But urban training would be necessary to augment his skillset. The Brazilians wouldn't let Americans into their favelas, not a chance. Lima, then, or maybe Caracas. Or maybe Nemesis had never been inside a city larger than six million and that was just him making wild assumptions. Two more calls, then.
10:24 am
"Where the hell did you hear about Operation Templar?"
For once in his life, Staff Sergeant Cody Zhang actually sounded nervous, as though he'd been caught by a military tribunal with his finger up a West Point cadet's rear end. He didn't know Daley, of course, but Daley had checked a shortlist of Hong Kong expats in the military that he, as one himself, had a right to, and Cody Zhang, miracle of miracles, was a middle-manager for SOUMERCOM's Resource Management Operations.
"Well, I'm with the Megatokyo ADP, and we have reason to believe that a former operator may be responsible for homicide and reckless violence against the citizens of our fair city, and we figure a motive might not hurt, you know? What can you tell me?"
"It was a regional stabilization operation. The United States of America saw freedom and liberal values being suppressed across the Amazon basin by non-national actors, and so we had no choice but to act. It shouldn't have been traumatizing to any real soldier, if that's what you're implying."
"Really? It went well?"
"I'm not at liberty to say."
"Well, what exactly happened? How bad was it?"
"The United States of America, with international permission for all of its actions, moved to provide islands of stability as the Amazonian region was being developed for new investment opportunities by multiple misaligned factions. That some factions misinterpreted this as an act of hostility was an unfortunate occurrence which the United States of America is under no obligation to correct under the present doctrine of self-determination."
Self-Determination? Sure, and Vision was his bitchy ex-girlfriend. When Americans used that word, Daley always mentally tacked on "so long as the government in power is an ultraconservative business-friendly pseudo-democracy, and god help the guy who elects otherwise".
"Alright. Thank you for your time." He hung up - that was probably all he was going to get out of Zhang.
But things were getting interesting, now. 'Islands of Stability?' What in God's name did that mean? And why Operation Templar? The Knights Templar had established monasteries in the Holy Land, something akin to 'Islands of Stability' - maybe the operation was supposed to be some sort of guerilla fortress-building exercise? It seemed possible, maybe even probable.
But he'd hit a dead end, and he needed to recognize that. No phone call could squeeze out the juicy details of Nemesis's identity. Nor, for that matter, could any phone call provide him with the insight needed to translate information into arrests.
At least Nene could help him with that first part - hopefully.
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
10:15 am
The cake was good.
There really was no way to describe it. Adjectives, adverbs, nouns, all assailed the summit of Mount Chocolate Cake with verbal pickaxes and conjunctive sherpas and long-syllable dynamite, but none could reach the descriptive summit. The cake itself melted in her mouth like Hawaiian lava, slicked her salivary glands with pottery glaze; the frosting was cool and moist like a Canadian glacial lake on a summer afternoon, but still sweet with prokaryotic life. Every simile ended up sounding pretentious and overwritten. The cake was just that good.
Yeah, yeah, she needed to cut back. But if Sylia was right, she'd be out in her suit so much over the next few days she'd probably lose weight from all that exercise. Being a Knight Saber was, without a doubt, one of the best workouts a girl could get!
That being said, she didn't have much else to do. The database had a separate search engine which she hadn't downloaded, but of course she had spiders of her own to shuffle through the personnel list to find anything related to Operation Templar. Sure, it took awhile, but far less time than actually doing any hacking, so who was she to complain?
Bing!
Ah, there it was now, Operation Templar's secrets (hopefully) laid bare before her. Nene tossed the paper plate in the trash, then swiveled back over to her computer.
The results weren't encouraging at first glance. She had a list of personnel who had served operation about a thousand names long. Most of them, on closer inspection, were in auxiliary positions of some kind - there were a lot of names marked for 'Convoy Support', she noticed. A whole bunch of non-combat engineers, too, most with technical expertise in secure facility construction. Probably not Nemesis. So she scrolled up to the search terms and clicked a few check marks to narrow things down to those members of Operation Templar who had seen direct combat.
Bing!
Four hundred results. Awesome. Way more than expected, a pretty substantial chunk of the Army's special forces for a military maneuver she hadn't heard about until today, but she could work with that. Lots of veterans of previous operations, practically an entire battalion cut out of the Central African Republic brushfire wars and transplanted to 'South America', at a number of different 'Monasteries'. But still, not good enough. She put in Jackson Ng to check his profile again...
Bing!
Okay… where'd he serve in South America? Monastery 14. Huh. That was all it said, but on some of the other profiles she clicked on they usually had specific locations or regions. Still, though, now all she had to do was specify combatants of Monastery 14…
Bing!
Awesome. Twenty-eight of SpecFor's finest, all (hopefully) connected to Nemesis. She pulled out the photo of Leon's 'army guy' and began opening profiles. First off was Staff Sergeant Shepard Cent, who had first served in the Philippine Interdiction around 2026, underwent training to become an Army Ranger in 2028, and, oddly enough, had no photo attached to his name.
Fine then. Corporal Andrea Iglesias, joined 2029, ping-ponged from Syria to Sri Lanka over the course of a few years until serving in Templar. She had a picture, a plain-looking Latina woman with two cybernetic eyes that seemed to move with her photo. Her role was… what, exactly? It didn't say. In fact, it hadn't said for Cent either despite the text field being right there. Something was wrong.
Okay, try guy number three. Jordan Piscitello, Lieutenant, served in Mexico from '24 to '30, dishonorably discharged. No picture, no training, no nothing.
What the hell?
Sergeant Matthew Hemmer. No picture, no training, no nothing. Private Hu Qianlong, no records, no nothing. Corporal Ben Adams, nothing. Captain Gavin Belasko, nothing. Private Kim-Su Park, nothing. Captain Philip Barnes, nothing. Lieutenant America Hussein, nothing, nothing, nothing.
This wasn't happening. This wasn't possible. Someone had gotten into the database before her. Nemesis knew how to cover his tracks.
Nemesis was a really good hacker.
She screamed.
Daley was walking down the hallway to Nene's office when he heard an awful screech emanate from its general direction. Training took over and he broke into a run, then a dead sprint, skidding to a halt outside her office, throwing open the door - and finding nothing but a very, very sad Nene.
"Um," he said, "you called?"
She told him about the database issue, and in the telling, watched his brow furrow and his hand go to his chin. Then he told her about his own calls to military intelligence folk, and watched her face scrunch up and her head droop down in frustration.
"So," Daley mumbled. "That is, well, that."
Nene pressed her fingers against her temples, rubbing them in circles. "Fleet Hermes. It's gotta be."
"I'm sorry?"
"The hacker who popped up on the net right around the same time Nemesis showed up in town. His support team, probably. Punched holes in every database which could lead to incriminating information. Left us with forty names and no faces. Deleted stuff from the Pentagon archives without an automated scan picking up on it."
"Could just be classification."
"Not a chance," Nene smirked. "I went in on a low-level request and picked up even Eyes Only-clearance stuff. Either Operation Templar was such a matter of national security they expunged the data without telling anyone or, well, they deleted everything."
"So he's better than you at hacking, huh?"
That set her off. For a brief moment Nene paused, her fingers clenched into claws over the keyboard. Then, with a forceful kick against the floor, she spun around with an expression on her face like she'd just seen Daley kill a puppy, and a glare that spoke of hatred hotter than suns.
"No one," she said in a low voice, "is a better hacker than Nene Romanova. Not in this city. Not in this country. Not in the whole damn world."
"I think it might be hard to gauge-"
"I said. No one. Is a better hacker. Than Nina 'Nene' Ushankavnya Romanova. No one."
"I'm just saying-"
"No."
"Isn't that going-"
"NO."
Daley had always assumed Nene was a good target for teasing, even about the things she obviously took great pride in. It was as though she had internalized Naoko's dumb jokes and accepted that people saw her small figure and bubbly personality as an easy target. She was moe, there was no denying it, and that was something she was just going to have to live with.
But something about her demeanor now wasn't moe at all; the hair on the back of his neck wasn't standing up or anything, but he had this nagging feeling that if he disputed her skills even Leon wouldn't be able to find the body.
So Daley Wong, fearless AD Police Vice Inspector, the man who had faced down rampaging Boomers with disturbing frequency and yet continued to survive, spoke the meekest phrase he could imagine:
"Well, if you say so."
"Weeell, I do." And she was Nene again, sticking her head out and shaking her head in rhythm with each syllable, all but wagging her tongue, as though she hadn't just revealed that her ego was more fragile than that of a US President.
Daley decided to change the subject. "We've still gotta cross-check the immigration database. Like Leon said, if at least one of our Templars came in through the front door…"
"Sure, sure, fine, whatever. And Fleet Hermes probably punched holes in that, too. Or he went under a fake name or something." She clearly was moping now, her head slowly angling downward. "We're at a dead end. We're flying blind."
"Leon'll probably turn up some results, though. All the desk jockeying in the world can't compare to some real on-foot detective work, yeah?"
"That's assuming he can survive Anderson, and arresting half the damn Yakuza while he's at it…"
Daley snickered. "Yeah. I don't know which one scares me more."
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Chapter 22: Waking The Dragon
- Location
- Megatokyo
Chapter 22:Waking the Dragon
In retrospect, February 11, 2036, would be remembered as a day of peace. Of course, it was no such thing - there was never a day in Megatokyo when the city could be said to sleep, or even to rest, or even to stop seething with pent-up resentment spilling over into strange acts of violence in places best forgotten by the body public.
And really, public figures would later observe, February 11 was drenched in even more violence than usual. People would forget in time, but Nemesis's first strike had set a good half of the city on a monofilament's edge. Fists were clenched. Nails dug bloody into palms.
For the addicts, the unemployed once-salarimen and the pseudoepinephrine- injecting executive alike, found themselves without the supply of certain stimulants they had reorganized their lives around.
For the lesser hardmen who manned Shikichi Sato's legitimate businesses closed their shops without so much as an explanation - Nemesis had gone after Fu-Shui, yes, and there was a drug lab there, yes, but who was to stop him from going after the clean operations? Would he even care to tell the difference? Better to lock up, then, grab some guns, and wait it out. If anyone came in looking for a fix, and they wouldn't leave - well.
For the man on the street heard of one man killing two hundred in a single night, and innocent or not, they knew that such a monster - such a killing machine - could snuff them out without resistance if it desired their deaths. The Knight Sabers only killed Boomers, which meant they were safe from them by virtue of being fleshy, but now there were no guarantees.
Still, though, the same public figures would agree that memory had done its job, synthesizing February 11 into a nostalgic past against which to compare everything else. And memory did not deceive, for once, if one thought of it in relative terms.
After all, everyone knew that what came after February 11 was nothing short of a time that would live in infamy.
District 15
February 11, 2036
2:30 am
To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, the trouble began with Boomers.
Then again, anything that could be classified as 'trouble' in Megatokyo probably began with Boomers. In fact, anything with a distinct beginning, middle, and end would probably somehow begin with Boomers.
But these were not regular Boomers, they might say. But that was a useless statement. There was no such thing as a regular Boomer, just as there was no such thing as a regular human. Like life, they mutated, adapted, specialized, were inconsistent. But they did not live, of course. Everyone knew that.
So why these Boomers? To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, after several shots of something with more than 10% alcohol, it was the tankmen.
Tankman. Bu-12b Battle Boomer, product of the GENOM Corporation. Tankman. Made explicitly to replace the ageing MBT's of armies across the world, but just a little more agile, a little more clever, a little better at urban encounters, turning armored tactics into infantry ones. Tankman. 46mm railcannon, purposefully underpowered to about mach 1. The explosive was supposed to be the killer, not the sheer force of impact and overpenetration. 12.7mm quadbarreled gatling cannon to wipe up whatever was left. Tankman. Sold incredibly well, especially to the JSDF, considering they were illegal to possess within Japan's borders. Tankman. Not just a harbinger of bad news, but bad news in and of themselves.
In 2032, two 12b units - Tankmen - en route to the harbor for export to some obscure corner of the Philippines had spontaneously activated, broke free of their restraints, and proceeded to enact search-and-destroy protocols without a definite target to search for. Old Shibuya, a stretch of old Tokyo metropolis which had barely survived the quake as a shadow of its former self, ripped itself apart at the teasing of their railcannons, as glass scabs were ripped off of skyscrapers and hyperdense asphalt capillaries shattered and bled into one another.
System shock, the rippling of information across invisible nerves, meant that even the forty million who lived outside of Shibuya heard about the rampage as it was happening, watched through opticam livestreamers, felt the same hindbrain-liquefying terror they did, reacted all at once.
How had this happened? Shibuya was one of the nicer districts, one of the ones GENOM wanted to actually preserve. It was supposed to be safe, it was supposed to be a place where Boomer attacks or rampages or rampancies didn't happen period. Where were the ADP? Oh, they were there alright, but even an APC with a full squad of officers in full body armor with short 10mm machineguns couldn't do much more than be part of the burning scenery. They brought in the K-12's, those beautiful angular clusters of polygons that somehow fit together into a human form, and those were supposed to be invincible. And for a while, they had been.
Then the city traded two powersuits for two Boomers, and it understood.
Forty-one died.
Two days later, ostensibly as a response to the destruction of a public housing project minutes after mass eviction, the Knight Sabers had a response. None of them died, but the morning after Brian J. Mason, Head of Internal Security for GENOM, was found on the top of the Tower in an outdated powersuit with his throat cut and the Sabers' logo burned into the concrete. The implications were clear: The ADP will die with you, the saying went, but the Knight Sabers will make someone else die for you.
And for a while, the city went on with its affairs, unconcerned by Tankmen, jolted into that same state of fear by particle-beam strikes and quadrupedal crab-mecha, hoping something like that wouldn't happen again.
It was, of course, too much to hope for. The city burned again in '34, and again in the corporate skirmishes of '35, and every time the hammerhead specter of the Tankman was there, railcannons ripping open the city so Labor Boomers could heal it again. In those days, the most prosperous city on earth was content to think of itself as a war zone, a manmade natural disaster to be responded to with a Japanese sort of tenacity. The Ring of Fire would grind against itself, the sea would rise and surge across the earth, particle-beam satellites would burn streaks of hypercombusted material as though Amaterasu herself had taken a sword to the islands, and the hammerheaded Tankmen would, demon-like, appear ex nihilo to fulfill bloody purposes they did not understand themselves.
Which was why when Shinji Takemori, age thirty-five, stumbling piss-drunk to his coffin home in the Fault, saw something which looked like a horizontal tumor made out of sensory equipment fused with a four-meter anthropomorphic crab emerge from an unmarked building, red eye clusters glimmering, he promptly relieved himself, after a fashion, screamed two octaves higher than normal, and ran.
In Yokohama, Fujiko Minne, hostess at the Wilted Blossom Bar, beat on her neighbor's door screaming incoherency. When the landlord finally woke up and dragged her down, she told him that she'd been walking home after a long night of attending to customers in an absolutely legal way, she swore, the marks on her arm were just mosquito bites, and she'd seen Tankmen, Tankmen! It looked like one of them had been praying, somehow, kneeling down and grasping the foundation of a yet-to-be-finished apartment building like it was a god, and then the others had just looked at her, didn't shoot her but just looked at her. And there were Tankmen.
In Chinatown, Chu Sen-Sheng, perpetually bedraggled insomniac, left his sleeping wife to check the shop, and his safehouse for the Hou Bang underneath said shop. The shop was fine. The safehouse had an odd-looking Boomer in it, rifling through his storage like it was looking for something, which turned and bolted the minute he raised his sawed-off shotgun, scrambling cockroachlike through a hole in the ceiling. Sheng looked through the hole, and there were Tankmen.
In Chiba, Kaori Tendoh woke up early to take the monorail over to the fish market, when she heard what she would later describe as a 'horrible scraping noise, followed by a loud rattling, like someone was throwing something about'. She went out onto the street, hours before the sun was to come up, and saw two tall shapes ripping her car into pieces before setting it on fire, then, as one, hurling it into a nearby storefront. She looked at them, and they did not look at her, and there were Tankmen.
In Shinjuku, Sylia Stingray woke up hours after all the commotion, and found that her trawler program had picked up multiple mentions of Tankmen on Megatokyo social media. She grabbed the paper and a coffee, and decided that it would be wise to close the Ladys633 for today.
After all, if Sato was bringing out tankmen, she needed to scramble those fourth-gen upgrades soon. Mallory and Nemesis had brought missiles and miniguns and Hind gunships to the table, had turned superheroism into out-and-out warfare.
Now it was time for her to play catchup.
Holton Junkyard Co.
District 5
February 11, 2036
5:26 pm
Their existence had become almost nocturnal, and who could blame them? By day, they slept, hid from investigators and predators, let the Boomers sniff infrared somewhere else, repaired the hardsuits, made purchases. At night, Nemesis did his work, and they watched and hoped that this time, he'd walk out unharmed, no cracked ribs or twisted ankles or any of the dozen little ways the body could warp out of its desired proportions, betraying the conscious mind's will. They had three more days, ideally.
Sarge hadn't gone back to Gamble; the cops likely already had the arms dealer set up to look out for him. But Nemesis needed arms all the same. So at oh-six-hundred he had laid out a shopping list on a sheet of scratch paper, and had woken Gavin up to get his cooperation.
"First off," he had said, "no more minigun rounds. We've still got something like fourteen thousand rounds left, and the only man in the city we can reach who sells the antipersonnel types is Gamble."
Okay. Railgun rounds?
"I don't see myself using that many flechettes anymore - Maria says that Sato's got enough Boomers to take on a third-world nation and win, and we know now that he is using them. It may be time to mount the big railgun on the heavy hardsuit, probably swap out the plasma torch to compensate for the power load."
Ah, now there was the question. Was his second strike going to be against targets which required a heavy hardsuit exclusively? 'Cause that would mean he could just cross out grenades on the list...
"Not sure yet. I've got a target in mind, one which will undoubtedly have some heavy security but also some cramped spaces. But… no, I'll need some serious demolitions to sink it."
Sink it?
"Which means I'll need the Heavy Hardsuit's missile batteries plus the satchel charges… I'll explain later. We definitely need a refill on minimissles, maybe flechette grenades, heavy railgun spikes. I don't plan on showing off any of the other weapons until tomorrow night - we need to keep them guessing. Now can I get a little more sleep?"
Sarge left.
Now, the sun was setting early, as winter's dry grip dragged it down in a matter of minutes, and they were all back at the table, ammo restocked, hardsuits repaired, funds spent, Starbucks distributed evenly among them. Maria didn't drink coffee, of course - she was more a hypercaffeinated lychee tea girl.
"Today," Gavin said, "is Day Two of Operation Susanoo. As before, we seek to utterly dismantle the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza within the span of four days, before they can arm up and before this becomes a full-blown gang war. We have already woken our Yamato-no-Orochi, and removed his lesser heads. Yet it is now that we must face our most vicious target."
"Oh, man," Doc said, exasperated. "We're doing the day-two plan again? I hate to be the asshole in the room, but I always felt it was too risky."
"Which is why we do things like this, Doctor," Maria said. Taking a sip from her light green beverage, she continued, "Sato has bulked up his defenses significantly, installing combat and battle Boomers in almost all of his operations. In addition, he has a roving group of strike-force Boomers in play, even heavier than his defense forces, which will probably perform a function similar to the Jaegers; respond to any immediate threats to any of his major businesses, let smaller strikes pass, and maybe retaliate against any incursions by the other gangs. And to be honest, I don't see even my bro here handling that strike force super well, especially if they try to bog him down in a firefight. And we can't exactly ask for backup ourselves."
"So," Gavin said, "Just as we did with Yvon Heuse, we need to catch our opponent off balance. He's prepared for several smaller strikes, perhaps taking out a lieutenant or two, but he's not prepared for a high-stakes decapitation strike where he thinks he is already invincible. If we pull this off, Sato may donate more Boomers to the Strike Force, weakening defenses for days three and four - we're essentially sending contradictory messages in terms of tactics."
"Awight," Smitty said. "So I assume you've got some really big-shot second-in-command or something you want to smash up a bit?"
"I do." Gavin got up, tapped a button on the side of the table, and leaned over as the screen bathed his green eyes in blue light.
The holoprojection was a conical white wireframe structure, rotating solemnly, revealing progressively more detail as the rendering software did its work. It looked like four hexagonal mountains with legs, arranged in a triangular pattern with the largest one at the center, all connected by fragile tubes, all rent by deep gouges in their superstructure.
"The Underbelly," Gavin intoned. "It used to be part of Aqua City, a land reclamation project designed as one of the world's first self-contained megastructures. Designed after Abe-san's successors needed a project to top the Olympics, supposed to essentially serve as a city within Tokyo which would house up to three million residents out on the Bay."
"The quake caused the project to be abandoned, even though the contractors built the actual megastructure independently of the seawall and pilings which were supposed to help reclaim the land, as GENOM would not accept competing construction companies in its monopolization of the rebuilt Tokyo. Most of the platforms were sunk by a particle beam strike in 2032, but these four, designed as a massive desalinization plant and stacked agricultural facility, were out of the way and thus survived."
"So where's the Yaks come in?" asked Sarge.
"Good question," Maria piped up. "Basically, it turned out the folks who built the thing were still getting stipends from the Japanese government, even though they'd been bought out by a Taiwanese private equity group right after the quake, since the quote-unquote land was still usable. After the particle beam, strikes, the group panicked and sold the rights to the first bidder, and that was none other than Shichiki Sato."
She flicked the wireframe upright, looking directly into the hole in the center of the main platform, dragged her fingers outward to zoom in, then tapped something in its innards to cut the platform in two; it revealed a massive concrete amphitheater with a sunken arena.
"The main platform was built around a 75-million-gallon water holding tank with a nanopore membrane around the bottom. It was supposed to filter seawater passing through, as well as desalinize it, and then provide the city with cheap water with the passing of the tides." She highlighted parts of the amphitheater-tank in red: benches, loudspeakers, food stands.
"Of course, Sato turned it into a coliseum where Boomeroids from the outer districts and re-purposed Boomers beat the snot out of one another. It's far and away his single largest operation, probably brings in as much money as the Coliseum in Rome did back in the day. Pretty typical for a Yakuza."
Doc shrugged. "He's a businessman. Considering they've got that nanomembrane tech all over the place now, it stands to reason he'd try to find an untapped market, and hey, violence sells."
Gavin's face was grim. "I'd appreciate you not attempting to sympathize with the enemy. Regardless, the offices of the Underbelly will undoubtedly have a great deal of free cash and potentially direct access to incriminating evidence, something I was not able to grab from the Fu-Shui's safe. Which brings us to the strike."
He tapped the button again, and wireframe stickmen stuttered into existence alongside the bulky forms of Boomers patrolling the ring.
"While the underbelly's manager, a man by the name of Senjuku Inoue, has received personal protection in the form of a 55C and a pair of 35C's, Sato apparently has made no motions to upgrade the security of the arena; there was no need. The Underbelly apparently already has not only dozens of modified Boomers equipped for melee combat, plus a neverending stream of cyberpsychotics from the Outer Districts and heavily armored Yakuza to keep them in line, but seven 55C's, which were not counted in Sato's greater strike force."
"So they're hiding something," Smitty mused, "Something big enough that they wouldn't divert those resources towards the strike-force plan. I'd bet that the agricultural blocks are growing drugs, maybe even bioweapons. Rest of it doesn't sound so bad though."
"...And they've lined the underwater portion of the superstructure with Point Defense Turrets."
"Eeesh."
"No, that's good," Sarge said. "It means there are underwater entrances worth protecting, and if Gavin can slip past those turrets, he doesn't have to enter via the land entrances and might be able to remain undetected even while using the Heavy Hardsuit."
"Exactly," Maria said. "The automated security down there only scans in periodic sweeps, so my big bro's gonna dive past a sweep, squeeze in through some ruined corridor, work his way up through the greenhouses, and then-" here she traced a yellow ring around the top of the half-cone "-break into Inoue's penthouse, grab whatever he can find, off everyone he sees, then come back out the way he came. Easy-ish."
Gavin sighed, leaning back. "Maria, you neglected to mention that there's no direct route from the greenhouses to the penthouse - and once I step into the central block, it'll be nearly impossible to move without triggering an alarm. My plan is to set charges around the support pillars holding the whole thing up, which I can periodically detonate as distractions for the security forces. Then, once I have what I need, I blow enough charges to sink the Underbelly for good, and head out the way I came, ideally before Sato's strike force comes to back up the security."
Maria and Sarge nodded sagely. "Sounds good to me," Sarge said. "I'll go and get the truck loaded."
Smitty got up. "So we're done, then? I can get back to my work?"
Gavin and Maria rose. "You can," he said, and walked out without a word, heading to the hardsuit bay.
Only Doctor Roland Vicain remained, lost in thought.
He'd always been against the whole idea of the 'mega-strike', as Maria had once called it, even after it saved his ass from Heuse, but he could never give a rational reason why. It worked, it had worked almost every time before, even up against what he thought would be more distributed networks like biker gangs. Maybe it was just his disposition towards the least risky outcome, his almost pathological need for certainty, that kept him from endorsing these strikes wholly.
But he knew where he stood. He had nowhere to go, no corp to take him on that wouldn't also lock him up with another experimental powersuit for years on end. Gavin didn't take questions well, but at least he took questions, so who was he to complain?
And yet, and yet. The plan wasn't airtight, it wasn't supposed to be, just flexible enough for improvisation and Nemesis's trademark ruthlessness. You had to give a guy like Gavin space to cut loose, and that was good.
But there was one thing he couldn't shake: the sinking of the platform. Even if the Underbelly's support platforms had survived the quake, he knew they wouldn't survive if Gavin used the right explosives against them. And then the Boomers and the Yakuza would desperately scramble to get off the thing and avoid him entirely. Maybe the land entrances would hold, maybe they wouldn't. But he hoped they would.
Otherwise Nemesis would have killed innocents for the very first time.
In retrospect, February 11, 2036, would be remembered as a day of peace. Of course, it was no such thing - there was never a day in Megatokyo when the city could be said to sleep, or even to rest, or even to stop seething with pent-up resentment spilling over into strange acts of violence in places best forgotten by the body public.
And really, public figures would later observe, February 11 was drenched in even more violence than usual. People would forget in time, but Nemesis's first strike had set a good half of the city on a monofilament's edge. Fists were clenched. Nails dug bloody into palms.
For the addicts, the unemployed once-salarimen and the pseudoepinephrine- injecting executive alike, found themselves without the supply of certain stimulants they had reorganized their lives around.
For the lesser hardmen who manned Shikichi Sato's legitimate businesses closed their shops without so much as an explanation - Nemesis had gone after Fu-Shui, yes, and there was a drug lab there, yes, but who was to stop him from going after the clean operations? Would he even care to tell the difference? Better to lock up, then, grab some guns, and wait it out. If anyone came in looking for a fix, and they wouldn't leave - well.
For the man on the street heard of one man killing two hundred in a single night, and innocent or not, they knew that such a monster - such a killing machine - could snuff them out without resistance if it desired their deaths. The Knight Sabers only killed Boomers, which meant they were safe from them by virtue of being fleshy, but now there were no guarantees.
Still, though, the same public figures would agree that memory had done its job, synthesizing February 11 into a nostalgic past against which to compare everything else. And memory did not deceive, for once, if one thought of it in relative terms.
After all, everyone knew that what came after February 11 was nothing short of a time that would live in infamy.
District 15
February 11, 2036
2:30 am
To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, the trouble began with Boomers.
Then again, anything that could be classified as 'trouble' in Megatokyo probably began with Boomers. In fact, anything with a distinct beginning, middle, and end would probably somehow begin with Boomers.
But these were not regular Boomers, they might say. But that was a useless statement. There was no such thing as a regular Boomer, just as there was no such thing as a regular human. Like life, they mutated, adapted, specialized, were inconsistent. But they did not live, of course. Everyone knew that.
So why these Boomers? To hear the average Megatokyonite tell it, after several shots of something with more than 10% alcohol, it was the tankmen.
Tankman. Bu-12b Battle Boomer, product of the GENOM Corporation. Tankman. Made explicitly to replace the ageing MBT's of armies across the world, but just a little more agile, a little more clever, a little better at urban encounters, turning armored tactics into infantry ones. Tankman. 46mm railcannon, purposefully underpowered to about mach 1. The explosive was supposed to be the killer, not the sheer force of impact and overpenetration. 12.7mm quadbarreled gatling cannon to wipe up whatever was left. Tankman. Sold incredibly well, especially to the JSDF, considering they were illegal to possess within Japan's borders. Tankman. Not just a harbinger of bad news, but bad news in and of themselves.
In 2032, two 12b units - Tankmen - en route to the harbor for export to some obscure corner of the Philippines had spontaneously activated, broke free of their restraints, and proceeded to enact search-and-destroy protocols without a definite target to search for. Old Shibuya, a stretch of old Tokyo metropolis which had barely survived the quake as a shadow of its former self, ripped itself apart at the teasing of their railcannons, as glass scabs were ripped off of skyscrapers and hyperdense asphalt capillaries shattered and bled into one another.
System shock, the rippling of information across invisible nerves, meant that even the forty million who lived outside of Shibuya heard about the rampage as it was happening, watched through opticam livestreamers, felt the same hindbrain-liquefying terror they did, reacted all at once.
How had this happened? Shibuya was one of the nicer districts, one of the ones GENOM wanted to actually preserve. It was supposed to be safe, it was supposed to be a place where Boomer attacks or rampages or rampancies didn't happen period. Where were the ADP? Oh, they were there alright, but even an APC with a full squad of officers in full body armor with short 10mm machineguns couldn't do much more than be part of the burning scenery. They brought in the K-12's, those beautiful angular clusters of polygons that somehow fit together into a human form, and those were supposed to be invincible. And for a while, they had been.
Then the city traded two powersuits for two Boomers, and it understood.
Forty-one died.
Two days later, ostensibly as a response to the destruction of a public housing project minutes after mass eviction, the Knight Sabers had a response. None of them died, but the morning after Brian J. Mason, Head of Internal Security for GENOM, was found on the top of the Tower in an outdated powersuit with his throat cut and the Sabers' logo burned into the concrete. The implications were clear: The ADP will die with you, the saying went, but the Knight Sabers will make someone else die for you.
And for a while, the city went on with its affairs, unconcerned by Tankmen, jolted into that same state of fear by particle-beam strikes and quadrupedal crab-mecha, hoping something like that wouldn't happen again.
It was, of course, too much to hope for. The city burned again in '34, and again in the corporate skirmishes of '35, and every time the hammerhead specter of the Tankman was there, railcannons ripping open the city so Labor Boomers could heal it again. In those days, the most prosperous city on earth was content to think of itself as a war zone, a manmade natural disaster to be responded to with a Japanese sort of tenacity. The Ring of Fire would grind against itself, the sea would rise and surge across the earth, particle-beam satellites would burn streaks of hypercombusted material as though Amaterasu herself had taken a sword to the islands, and the hammerheaded Tankmen would, demon-like, appear ex nihilo to fulfill bloody purposes they did not understand themselves.
Which was why when Shinji Takemori, age thirty-five, stumbling piss-drunk to his coffin home in the Fault, saw something which looked like a horizontal tumor made out of sensory equipment fused with a four-meter anthropomorphic crab emerge from an unmarked building, red eye clusters glimmering, he promptly relieved himself, after a fashion, screamed two octaves higher than normal, and ran.
In Yokohama, Fujiko Minne, hostess at the Wilted Blossom Bar, beat on her neighbor's door screaming incoherency. When the landlord finally woke up and dragged her down, she told him that she'd been walking home after a long night of attending to customers in an absolutely legal way, she swore, the marks on her arm were just mosquito bites, and she'd seen Tankmen, Tankmen! It looked like one of them had been praying, somehow, kneeling down and grasping the foundation of a yet-to-be-finished apartment building like it was a god, and then the others had just looked at her, didn't shoot her but just looked at her. And there were Tankmen.
In Chinatown, Chu Sen-Sheng, perpetually bedraggled insomniac, left his sleeping wife to check the shop, and his safehouse for the Hou Bang underneath said shop. The shop was fine. The safehouse had an odd-looking Boomer in it, rifling through his storage like it was looking for something, which turned and bolted the minute he raised his sawed-off shotgun, scrambling cockroachlike through a hole in the ceiling. Sheng looked through the hole, and there were Tankmen.
In Chiba, Kaori Tendoh woke up early to take the monorail over to the fish market, when she heard what she would later describe as a 'horrible scraping noise, followed by a loud rattling, like someone was throwing something about'. She went out onto the street, hours before the sun was to come up, and saw two tall shapes ripping her car into pieces before setting it on fire, then, as one, hurling it into a nearby storefront. She looked at them, and they did not look at her, and there were Tankmen.
In Shinjuku, Sylia Stingray woke up hours after all the commotion, and found that her trawler program had picked up multiple mentions of Tankmen on Megatokyo social media. She grabbed the paper and a coffee, and decided that it would be wise to close the Ladys633 for today.
After all, if Sato was bringing out tankmen, she needed to scramble those fourth-gen upgrades soon. Mallory and Nemesis had brought missiles and miniguns and Hind gunships to the table, had turned superheroism into out-and-out warfare.
Now it was time for her to play catchup.
Holton Junkyard Co.
District 5
February 11, 2036
5:26 pm
Their existence had become almost nocturnal, and who could blame them? By day, they slept, hid from investigators and predators, let the Boomers sniff infrared somewhere else, repaired the hardsuits, made purchases. At night, Nemesis did his work, and they watched and hoped that this time, he'd walk out unharmed, no cracked ribs or twisted ankles or any of the dozen little ways the body could warp out of its desired proportions, betraying the conscious mind's will. They had three more days, ideally.
Sarge hadn't gone back to Gamble; the cops likely already had the arms dealer set up to look out for him. But Nemesis needed arms all the same. So at oh-six-hundred he had laid out a shopping list on a sheet of scratch paper, and had woken Gavin up to get his cooperation.
"First off," he had said, "no more minigun rounds. We've still got something like fourteen thousand rounds left, and the only man in the city we can reach who sells the antipersonnel types is Gamble."
Okay. Railgun rounds?
"I don't see myself using that many flechettes anymore - Maria says that Sato's got enough Boomers to take on a third-world nation and win, and we know now that he is using them. It may be time to mount the big railgun on the heavy hardsuit, probably swap out the plasma torch to compensate for the power load."
Ah, now there was the question. Was his second strike going to be against targets which required a heavy hardsuit exclusively? 'Cause that would mean he could just cross out grenades on the list...
"Not sure yet. I've got a target in mind, one which will undoubtedly have some heavy security but also some cramped spaces. But… no, I'll need some serious demolitions to sink it."
Sink it?
"Which means I'll need the Heavy Hardsuit's missile batteries plus the satchel charges… I'll explain later. We definitely need a refill on minimissles, maybe flechette grenades, heavy railgun spikes. I don't plan on showing off any of the other weapons until tomorrow night - we need to keep them guessing. Now can I get a little more sleep?"
Sarge left.
Now, the sun was setting early, as winter's dry grip dragged it down in a matter of minutes, and they were all back at the table, ammo restocked, hardsuits repaired, funds spent, Starbucks distributed evenly among them. Maria didn't drink coffee, of course - she was more a hypercaffeinated lychee tea girl.
"Today," Gavin said, "is Day Two of Operation Susanoo. As before, we seek to utterly dismantle the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza within the span of four days, before they can arm up and before this becomes a full-blown gang war. We have already woken our Yamato-no-Orochi, and removed his lesser heads. Yet it is now that we must face our most vicious target."
"Oh, man," Doc said, exasperated. "We're doing the day-two plan again? I hate to be the asshole in the room, but I always felt it was too risky."
"Which is why we do things like this, Doctor," Maria said. Taking a sip from her light green beverage, she continued, "Sato has bulked up his defenses significantly, installing combat and battle Boomers in almost all of his operations. In addition, he has a roving group of strike-force Boomers in play, even heavier than his defense forces, which will probably perform a function similar to the Jaegers; respond to any immediate threats to any of his major businesses, let smaller strikes pass, and maybe retaliate against any incursions by the other gangs. And to be honest, I don't see even my bro here handling that strike force super well, especially if they try to bog him down in a firefight. And we can't exactly ask for backup ourselves."
"So," Gavin said, "Just as we did with Yvon Heuse, we need to catch our opponent off balance. He's prepared for several smaller strikes, perhaps taking out a lieutenant or two, but he's not prepared for a high-stakes decapitation strike where he thinks he is already invincible. If we pull this off, Sato may donate more Boomers to the Strike Force, weakening defenses for days three and four - we're essentially sending contradictory messages in terms of tactics."
"Awight," Smitty said. "So I assume you've got some really big-shot second-in-command or something you want to smash up a bit?"
"I do." Gavin got up, tapped a button on the side of the table, and leaned over as the screen bathed his green eyes in blue light.
The holoprojection was a conical white wireframe structure, rotating solemnly, revealing progressively more detail as the rendering software did its work. It looked like four hexagonal mountains with legs, arranged in a triangular pattern with the largest one at the center, all connected by fragile tubes, all rent by deep gouges in their superstructure.
"The Underbelly," Gavin intoned. "It used to be part of Aqua City, a land reclamation project designed as one of the world's first self-contained megastructures. Designed after Abe-san's successors needed a project to top the Olympics, supposed to essentially serve as a city within Tokyo which would house up to three million residents out on the Bay."
"The quake caused the project to be abandoned, even though the contractors built the actual megastructure independently of the seawall and pilings which were supposed to help reclaim the land, as GENOM would not accept competing construction companies in its monopolization of the rebuilt Tokyo. Most of the platforms were sunk by a particle beam strike in 2032, but these four, designed as a massive desalinization plant and stacked agricultural facility, were out of the way and thus survived."
"So where's the Yaks come in?" asked Sarge.
"Good question," Maria piped up. "Basically, it turned out the folks who built the thing were still getting stipends from the Japanese government, even though they'd been bought out by a Taiwanese private equity group right after the quake, since the quote-unquote land was still usable. After the particle beam, strikes, the group panicked and sold the rights to the first bidder, and that was none other than Shichiki Sato."
She flicked the wireframe upright, looking directly into the hole in the center of the main platform, dragged her fingers outward to zoom in, then tapped something in its innards to cut the platform in two; it revealed a massive concrete amphitheater with a sunken arena.
"The main platform was built around a 75-million-gallon water holding tank with a nanopore membrane around the bottom. It was supposed to filter seawater passing through, as well as desalinize it, and then provide the city with cheap water with the passing of the tides." She highlighted parts of the amphitheater-tank in red: benches, loudspeakers, food stands.
"Of course, Sato turned it into a coliseum where Boomeroids from the outer districts and re-purposed Boomers beat the snot out of one another. It's far and away his single largest operation, probably brings in as much money as the Coliseum in Rome did back in the day. Pretty typical for a Yakuza."
Doc shrugged. "He's a businessman. Considering they've got that nanomembrane tech all over the place now, it stands to reason he'd try to find an untapped market, and hey, violence sells."
Gavin's face was grim. "I'd appreciate you not attempting to sympathize with the enemy. Regardless, the offices of the Underbelly will undoubtedly have a great deal of free cash and potentially direct access to incriminating evidence, something I was not able to grab from the Fu-Shui's safe. Which brings us to the strike."
He tapped the button again, and wireframe stickmen stuttered into existence alongside the bulky forms of Boomers patrolling the ring.
"While the underbelly's manager, a man by the name of Senjuku Inoue, has received personal protection in the form of a 55C and a pair of 35C's, Sato apparently has made no motions to upgrade the security of the arena; there was no need. The Underbelly apparently already has not only dozens of modified Boomers equipped for melee combat, plus a neverending stream of cyberpsychotics from the Outer Districts and heavily armored Yakuza to keep them in line, but seven 55C's, which were not counted in Sato's greater strike force."
"So they're hiding something," Smitty mused, "Something big enough that they wouldn't divert those resources towards the strike-force plan. I'd bet that the agricultural blocks are growing drugs, maybe even bioweapons. Rest of it doesn't sound so bad though."
"...And they've lined the underwater portion of the superstructure with Point Defense Turrets."
"Eeesh."
"No, that's good," Sarge said. "It means there are underwater entrances worth protecting, and if Gavin can slip past those turrets, he doesn't have to enter via the land entrances and might be able to remain undetected even while using the Heavy Hardsuit."
"Exactly," Maria said. "The automated security down there only scans in periodic sweeps, so my big bro's gonna dive past a sweep, squeeze in through some ruined corridor, work his way up through the greenhouses, and then-" here she traced a yellow ring around the top of the half-cone "-break into Inoue's penthouse, grab whatever he can find, off everyone he sees, then come back out the way he came. Easy-ish."
Gavin sighed, leaning back. "Maria, you neglected to mention that there's no direct route from the greenhouses to the penthouse - and once I step into the central block, it'll be nearly impossible to move without triggering an alarm. My plan is to set charges around the support pillars holding the whole thing up, which I can periodically detonate as distractions for the security forces. Then, once I have what I need, I blow enough charges to sink the Underbelly for good, and head out the way I came, ideally before Sato's strike force comes to back up the security."
Maria and Sarge nodded sagely. "Sounds good to me," Sarge said. "I'll go and get the truck loaded."
Smitty got up. "So we're done, then? I can get back to my work?"
Gavin and Maria rose. "You can," he said, and walked out without a word, heading to the hardsuit bay.
Only Doctor Roland Vicain remained, lost in thought.
He'd always been against the whole idea of the 'mega-strike', as Maria had once called it, even after it saved his ass from Heuse, but he could never give a rational reason why. It worked, it had worked almost every time before, even up against what he thought would be more distributed networks like biker gangs. Maybe it was just his disposition towards the least risky outcome, his almost pathological need for certainty, that kept him from endorsing these strikes wholly.
But he knew where he stood. He had nowhere to go, no corp to take him on that wouldn't also lock him up with another experimental powersuit for years on end. Gavin didn't take questions well, but at least he took questions, so who was he to complain?
And yet, and yet. The plan wasn't airtight, it wasn't supposed to be, just flexible enough for improvisation and Nemesis's trademark ruthlessness. You had to give a guy like Gavin space to cut loose, and that was good.
But there was one thing he couldn't shake: the sinking of the platform. Even if the Underbelly's support platforms had survived the quake, he knew they wouldn't survive if Gavin used the right explosives against them. And then the Boomers and the Yakuza would desperately scramble to get off the thing and avoid him entirely. Maybe the land entrances would hold, maybe they wouldn't. But he hoped they would.
Otherwise Nemesis would have killed innocents for the very first time.
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Ao3 links
- Location
- Megatokyo
Aaaand the forum's not letting me space out my first post or put links in it. Says it's too spamlike. I'm new to this, so... yeah. I have no idea what the hell's going on.
Regardless, here's the links to Reed's work, reposted on AO3 for your convenience, and my own stuff:
Black Knights, Steel Hearts
Vigilante's Run Original
Vigilante's Run Continuation
Chapter 23: The Enemy of my Enemy is also my Enemy
- Location
- Megatokyo
District 10 - Pier 334
February 11, 2036
6:26 pm
The sun had already set by the time Jimmy Chee's personal Rolls-Royce, a red limo with a gaudy silver dragon pattern running along its side, pulled out of his private garage in southern Shinjuku. He began the long and arduous drive to Megatokyo's eastern waterfront district. He sat through the nightly rush hour on the city's streets, crossed over highways strained to their limit by the destruction of the coastal thoroughfare, towards a part of the city the Triads had, admittedly, very little control over.
Well, the Russians were old hands on most of the western waterfront, in old Kawasaki, but they weren't familiar with Chiba, and the Red Willow stuck to their guns in the old city. It was to be a meeting on neutral ground, where nobody had enough sway to set up some dumbass trap in advance. It was Chung's idea, but even he preferred to stick to his haunts in Little Manila. And it wasn't Karns' territory, either. They weren't that stupid.
Actually, if one were to carve up Megatokyo into gang territory, District 10 would be marked as belonging to the Sleeping Dragon. Once, they would have treaded lightly through there, but now Chee had brought his loudest gang colors to the edges of Sato's turf. He knew, now, that he could get away with it.
It should have been a time for celebration, and yet the so-called Master of Vice sat alone in the back of his limousine, without women or drugs or even any good booze except for a lone can of warm banana daiquiri. He figured he would cut his best deals while sober, but the concept of sobriety itself was proving more difficult than he thought it would.He said nothing to his driver, and his driver said nothing to him. Instead, Jimmy Chee looked out the window over the highway and thought.
How badass did he want to be tonight? Clearly, he had to go a little overboard, but how overboard? He hadn't brought a cigar because the intimidation factor was useless in the open air, but now he was thinking maybe he should have brought something , or maybe not, maybe the whole idea of putting aside his vices for a business meeting would make it clear he was not to be fucked with. Yeah, he'd go with that. Chung would think it odd, Iwasaki would be impressed, maybe Smirnovski would think him too eager to please others, that could be problematic.
Well, really, just spending time thinking about all this shit was being too eager to please others. He was Jimmy Fucking Chee. He ran the whole goddamn Suan Tou Fung Triad. He cut people's fingers off as part of a daily routine, pulled teeth when he got bored. He didn't need to panic. He was looking his best, in a red suit with a classic Chinese palace scene embossed in gold across the jacket, and jet black Afghan leather shoes with little golden ornamental spurs. This wasn't the kind of suit he put on for girls, this was his suit for dealing with men .
Now the car pulled off the highway, and eased down a road where there were almost no cars at all. When they came behind a nondescript eighteen-wheeler carrying a large cargo crate marked DESCENT FROM HEAVEN IMPORTS, Chee nodded, and his driver signaled to the other truck. Soon, the behemoth was following his car at a leisurely pace, slipping through the all-but-abandoned roads with all the stealthiness of a grizzly bear.
The buildings became larger and more nondescript as they approached the waterfront, before finally morphing into sprawling warehouses packed with thousands of shipping crates, wall to wall. He could see other headlights, shapes moving behind warehouses on other roads, but let his driver continue.
Finally, the eighteen-wheeler still trailing behind, they came to a stop at the docks, the car just barely edging into the open space. From three other directions, other headlights approached. As in Chee's case, each pair of headlights hid a miniature convoy of luxury car and high-capacity truck. Wordlessly, he stepped out, his heels clicking on the grey concrete.
He leaned against the car and looked around. The big black van which looked like it could ram a tank off the road was Smirnovski, definitely, ever the brutalist. The big GMC 2500 pickup opposite him with all the guys huddled in the back was Chung. Bastard had to bring his security detail with him everywhere he went, or he was just trying to show off. Which left Iwasaki in the silver Mitsubishi Daimyo, a low-riding luxury car with ball tires, whose curves somehow reminded Chee of his old mistresses naked together in the shower.
One by one, they got out and saw one another, the Pacific lapping against the pier in the background. No one wanted to be the first to speak; that would be a sign of weakness.
Chee looked at Smirnovski. Smirnovski looked at Chung. Chung looked at Iwasaki. Iwasaki made a face, and then said:
"Well, that escalated quickly."
Chung snorted, then laughed, doubled over. Iwasaki snickered, chuckled, then made a keening sound that was supposed to be laughter but evidently wasn't. The shady men in the back of Chung's pickup giggled, but it was obvious their hearts weren't in it.
"What the everloving fuck is so funny?" Smirnovski barked.
"You know. 'Gee, things sure have es-cal-ay-teed quickly,'" Chung said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. Iwasaki smiled a tight smile. "It's understatement, it's hilarious."
"I don't think that making light of our situation at this stage in the game will improve it any," Smirnovski deadpanned. "Sato has deployed the full extent of his forces, practically an invading army bent on pacifying Megatokyo. He has over a dozen BU-12b units, each with the fighting power of a main battle tank. If we do not take his actions seriously, those 12-b's will have our heads on pikes. I hope, for all your sakes, you have armored vehicles at hand."
"Regrettably," said Chung, "My friends and I are a little lacking in the 'tank' department. We've simply been suffering under the delusion that we operate in a dense urban environment where a tracked vehicle could easily be hindered, slowed down, made an easy target - whatever - and simply put out of commission with a well-placed RPG."
"Ah," Smirnovski grunted, "to simply think of a tank displays a lack of creativity which suits you, Billy. An APC or hovercraft can take on just a smidge less armor and still maintain the agility you fear is so necessary. I understand, of course, if such devices are not within your means currently-"He trailed off, letting the silence speak for him.
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa," said Chee. "Ease off of it Adrik. We're all friends here."
Chung snorted and motioned to the men in the back of the truck. They lept to the ground as one. Chung could see that they were all wearing hoods, and carrying what looked like Magnum AR's, blocky monster guns that served as compact LMG's to a regular human and small carbines to the average Boomer. They had to be somewhere in between, then. Most likely Boomeroids.
"We are not friends ," he said. "We are enemies with a common cause. No more, no less. And I do not tolerate those who doubt my people's capability, enemy or friend ."
"No one is doubting your backup, Chung," Chee replied, stepping with his arms out like a boxing ref. "Smirnovski brought heavy armor, you brought, uh, infantry . Our little anti-Sato army needs both."
"Quite correct," said Iwasaki. "If he has so many 12-b's, Sato will likely have even more 55-C's and 35-C's, plus a few other small surprises he hasn't shown yet. An APC with a machinecannon can easily engage a 12-b, but let us not forget that multiple 55-C's grouping up with their mouth cannons active could pose just as potent a threat."
Jimmy frowned. He hadn't thought of that, but by God he was going to capitalize on it. "Exactly. Brilliant. Couldn't have said it better myself, Iwasaki. We're scrambling, here, anyway. We'll mop up the Terminator-dudes, then let Nemesis and the Sabers handle the tanks until we can call in enough out-of-town resources."
"So you mean to say you have no anti-armor resources at all? That seems somewhat impractical," Iwasaki said.
Backstabbing bastard. "Oh, come on. I tried to buy a mecha or two from the Chang Group years ago, and every time I thought I was gonna talk to a representative one of Sato's goons popped up and told me he'd take my purchase as an act of war. Of course I backed off. What would you have done?"
Iwasaki smiled again, but instead of the aw-shucks grin he had before, this was a wicked smile, a watch-as-I-prove-my-inherent-superiority-to-you-scum smile. "I would have just used a bit more subtlety in my work. It is difficult to move armor under the Sleeping Dragon's snout, but it is not impossible for the diligent criminal."
"What the fuck do you mean, diligent?"
"I mean exactly what I say, O Master of Vice."
"Well, excuse me for not running my triad like some dead-eyed salariman. I like to have fun , you know?"
"I like to have fun too, Mister Chee, I simply am willing to put aside what I want for what is good."
"Oh please. You wouldn't know a beautiful woman if she bit your c-"
Shack-chick .
All eyes fell on Smirnovski, who had just audibly jammed an extended magazine into a chrome-plated AKM assault rifle, and was now pointing the weapon skyward.
"While," he intoned, taking a breath, "I appreciate a bit of man-on-man dick-waving as much as the next hot-blooded Russian man, I believe we were to meet, first and foremost, to display our elite units, what we have collected besides gangsters and middling Boomers, and to plan a strategy around their strengths and weaknesses. If you are unable to do this, I would be more than happy to fire several rounds into the air to alert an ADP unit as to our location. While I might be arrested, the simple cosmic justice of the thing would be more than satisfactory. Do I make myself clear?"
Silence. "Okay, then. Since Chee is so agitated tonight, let us allow him to display his wares first to relieve tension. I will go second, Chung third, Iwasaki fourth. I believe there should be no objections to this plan."
Jimmy shrugged. "Fine by me," he said. It wasn't, of course, but Adrik had a point. Arguing over the order of reveals was ultimately useless, even if he would have rather seen the armor the Russian seemed to be humblebragging about before he showed of his own stuff.
He fished a cigarette out of his jacket (he kept at least a pack in every one of his suits as a precaution), then went back over to the truck, where his driver had a lighter ready. Ciggie in hand, he banged on its side, just below the M in IMPORTS, and watched as several dozen shadows whispered out of the back and passed him by. Then, all slow and smooth, he strolled back to face the others.
They were Boomers, that much was clear. The red fish-eyes and grey, rippling bulk of their musculature were distinctly Boomer. But they were smaller than 55-C's, anthropomorphic in posture but animalian in countenance, their limbs sticking out starkly, as though they'd been twisted back from the position they were supposed to have, their faces dominated by short, snarling snouts and twin fangs the size of daggers. Clutching guns of various sizes in their not-quite-paws, they twitched restlessly, clawed the ground with their not-quite-feet.
"We call 'em Werecats," Chee smirked. "Took thirty-nine K-9 Boomers, swapped out the heads and brains for cats, and tweaked the musculature and skeleton so they can swap from quadrupedal to bipedal in a millisecond without sacrificing power, agility, or speed in either form. They've got pack hunter's instincts and a supersoldier's gunfighting prowess, completely silent-"
"Anything else ?" said Chung.
"The usual handful of 55 and 35-C's, a whole bunch of those Fire-Bee minicopters I bought surplus after the ADP cancelled their contract in '33,and I might be able to bring in some even better air support given time. Hell, if you guys chip in, I can lean on the Hou Bang, see if they'd be willing to sell me a GD-42. Pretty impressive, yeah?"
Iwasaki slicked his hair back. "Certainly a creative use of the K-9s, I will give you that. I am not certain how well they'd perform against fully armed 55-C's, but you could overwhelm them with numbers if you were to produce a few more. The Fire Bees were abandoned for a reason, though, and I fear for the wellbeing of your associates if you were to strap them into those aerial deathtraps."
Chee shrugged. "I'd say the ADP just fucked up when they used synchro-helmets instead of proper implants, but okay, you can be a pussy about it. What've you got, Adrik?"
The grin which broke across Smirnovski's face should not have belonged to a human being.
"Watch and learn, kitty-boy."
From the shadows behind him, two, three, four, five pairs of floodlights slammed into existence, steadily growing, as the contours of two, three, four, five broad shapes grew behind them, formed into the shapes of five trucks that were at once massive, angular and ominous, and at the same time just a little smaller than Chee thought they would be.
His shadow long under their headlights, Smirnovski gestured openly. "You see?" he said. "Five UralVagonZavord Perun Urban Fighting Vehicles. A lovely hybrid between a big-rig with armor on it and a bigass tank, scaled down explicitly for long-term urban conflicts where you don't want something so big it cracks the pavement. A second cousin of mine works in UVZ, he knows a guy who does smuggling on the Trans-Eurasian rail, and my boys dressed them up for some," here he paused, clearly struggling with a word he would not normally use, "badassery."
Jimmy looked them over. They did look like some sort of ungodly hybrid between a dekotora and a T-72, angular plating done up with LED spraypaint in rainbow-oil patterns, two pairs of headlights glaring out over a spiked front. The contrast was startling, especially when one considered what looked like short machineguns poking out of the sides, plus the bigass twin turret on each truck's top. One cannon, he noted, had a strand of Christmas lights wrapped around it, but switched off; evidently Smirnovski had his limits.
Actually, Chee thought, this was very interesting. From what he knew, Adrik Smirnovski ran his mafia like a goddamn zaibatsu, with little to no money to spare on his members' exotic tastes. They were Russians, after all. Their sense of luxury could be satisfied with flavored vodka, and so what Chee would have spent on nineteen-year-old girls Smirnovski spent on buying AK's from his buddies on the mainland in bulk. To not only buy very expensive armored vehicles, but to allow his men to put Stalin's face on the side of one in pulsating light, rays of sun alternating off the Great Leader's forehead - was this really 'badassery', or just Smirnovski's underlings trying a bit of stress relief? Either way, Chee had to give him some credit, to bring out armored cars that looked like gay pride murals and act totally serious, so he kept his trap shut - as did everyone else.
"Let us make haste," Iwasaki snapped off at last. "Chung, did your associates provide you with anything besides a guard force?"
Chung did not recoil at that, though his security detail did.
"They did," he drawled. "And my men are no mere guard force. Boys, show them."
At once, like a trained army, they stepped, or shambled forward. His security detail or whatever it was had to be at least ten men – except they weren't men, not really. Each one of them was horrifically unique, and yet all the same, all amalgams of metal and plastic jammed into puckered flesh, some Japanese, some Filipino, some barely identifiable as anything. One in particular had a sheen of faded plastic covering his face, like a superhero mask, and two gleaming green eyes that were pinpoint dilated; he toyed with what appeared to be an M202 grenade launcher, randomly pointing the monstrous weapon at nothing, as though it were simply a large pistol.
"Boomeroids," Iwasaki said haltingly. "Y-you hired Boomeroids ." He reached into his pocket for what looked like a remote, took it out, fondled a red button without pressing it.
For the first time that night, Chung looked more at ease. "I believe the term they prefer is cyborgs," he said. "It turns out that there are many cyborgs in the Outer Districts and near the Fault who are too proud to submit to society's definition of their subhuman status, and too wise to accept Sato's offer to be ripped limb from limb by construction Boomers in the Underbelly's rigged fights."
"Can't they speak for themselves?" Smirnovski asked. The green-eyed one nodded, then raised its middle finger in his direction.
"Stage fright," the cyborg rumbled in a smoker's voice. "They are afraid, for the dramatis personae rise to take the stage, and they are of such dirty flesh, like they hoped to forget."
"Are you calling me dirty-"
"Such is the way of the half-pure, to be tempted by the smoothness of the meat! How we yearn to return to the way of dignified tumors in the system of the Great Machine!" The cyborg swung its arms out, eyes to the sky, stumbling backwards. He was clearly reciting something from memory, the way his actions seemed to stiffen up, become more than barely restrained twitching. "Flesh calls, and we must descend, ascend, to answer! O Virgin, grant me strength against this dunderhead! Grant me the cleanliness of patience!"
Smirnovski opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. "The Virgin?"
"Not important. The point is, I have enough cyborgs working with me, and enough heavy weapons to equip them, that we will be able to handle Sato's legions of humans with little effort. The Boomers will be isolated, forced to work without support, and even Boomers need support, do they not?"
"Need I remind you I was the one who came up with the infantry idea first?" Chee hissed.
Chung looked at Chee, lips pursed. "We'll see how well your Werecats do against proper Combat Boomers. My boys ain't Knight Sabers, and they ain't trying to be."
It was at this point that Jimmy Chee began to lose patience with his partners. He didn't trust them, of course, but he hadn't anticipated that they would be so annoying. His Werecats were badass and no one could tell him otherwise.
Maybe… Maybe the fourth member of their little party would appreciate his genius? After all, it wasn't as though the Red Willow had much to offer. They took their vows of bodily purity pretty seriously. Except…
Tomasuki Iwasaki was smiling. Scratch that, he was grinning .
Jimmy knew Iwasaki well enough, and he knew that the head of the Red Willow Yakuza smiled for nothing. Once, before the Kanto Quake, before Japan had opened its doors to anyone who could help them restore everything that had been lost, Iwasaki's father had been fighting a losing battle against the slightly more ruthless Sleeping Dragon. It had been a war of tradition versus modernity, so they'd said, and Megatokyo was a city which wore its modernity on its sleeve. So Tomasuki Iwasaki didn't just have a stick up his ass, clinging to tradition like a Kyoto restaurateur, he wore tradition like a twelve-layered kimono in a desperate attempt to hide his fundamental disappointment with the world.
Yeah, and he was smiling like one of those kids in the GENOM commercials who just got their first Boomer. It was unnerving.
"Well," Iwasaki said, "I think that we have all contributed to our alliance… sufficiently. But it has always been my habit, when doing these sorts of things, to contribute more than I should. It really is a quite disconcerting flaw of mine. Nonetheless, I think it safe to say that tonight… we should save the best for last."
And then he clapped. Once, twice, thrice, hands raised to head height.
And then something, some things clapped behind him in the darkness. Once, twice, thrice, metal smashing against metal in the back of storage truck.
And then he saw them.
Five mecha, each about twice as tall as a man, stomping into view. Humanoid, barely, with a single cyclopean camera mount jutting out of a boxy cockpit that reminded Chee, somehow, of his Uncle Wang's pot belly. Two pairs of arms, one practically fused to the cockpit, clutching a man-sized submachine gun, ammo belt dangling from the gun's feed. The other pair of arms were each as long as a car, and were mounted on what appeared to be some sort of circular rail system. And that, in turn, had two double missile tubes mounted on a second rail, which swiveled back and forth, resting on each of the other three men present before moving on.
"For your consideration, gentlemen," Iwasaki boomed, "Five Type-9 battlemovers, freshly shipped from our dear friends in Seacouver. They're highly modular, can convert between a wheeled mode or walking mode, and have some of the best pilots in the mercenary market piloting them. I daresay these will be our cavalry, the armored frontline, what we'll use to repel Sato's Boomer assaults so that all of your men can do the easy work of mopping up the remains."
Now it was Smirnovski's turn to get pissed off. " Easy work. You think I brought these very expensive UralVagonZavrod Perun fighting vehicles – the finest of good Russian engineering, might I add – to do the easy work? I fear it is now you who underestimate our enemies, Iwasaki. Your battlemovers may be intimidating, but in the end a walking vehicle is just a bigger target with less armor."
"You know," said Chee, "You've really gotta chill on these things, Adrik. I'm sure your Oral-vagina-zappers will definitely be serving the very important role of psychological warfare."
He had never seen Smirnovski go red in the face like that before. Actually, he'd never seen the nebbishy little dude change his skin tone beyond polar bear white before. But the joke had just popped into his head, and the Type-9's were freaking him out, and he made lots of bad jokes under stress, and now he was thinking about his Uncle Wang and his big ol' pot belly. What had happened to that poor bastard?
Oh, right, he'd fed him to a Boomer K-9 for sleeping with one of his mistresses. That had not been one of his better moments, admittedly.
"This from the man who brought us a bunch of fucking kitties?"
And now he was this close to feeding Adrik to a Werecat. "Yeah, kitties with machineguns. Way better than a handful of gay pickup trucks, but hey, that's just me."
"You know what, Chee? Sometimes you cannot chose how you look, and you roll with it. Perhaps you should try wearing cheaper suits more often, instead of going for that 'male prostitute' vibe, but hey , that's just me."
"Really, because you know what a male prostitute looks like. Why am I not surprised?"
"If I did, would it make a difference? In the end, you look like you are dressing up to impress your betters, not to intimidate your inferiors. Take my advice, chink, and wear clothing befitting your rank."
"You want rank? Rank? Motherfucker I'll give you-"
BWOOM .
It was only one round, only a lone report from a gun which wasn't even meant to penetrate armor, and yet the whole lot seemed to wobble and shatter as the 17.5mm explosive round smashed into the asphalt. Ears only slightly ringing, Chee realized that he'd drawn his gun; he'd barely been aware he'd done it, and yet there it was, his gold-plated, mother-of-pearl-handled peashooter clutched in his hand, about to blow Smirnovski's head open and end any chance of taking Sato down with it.
He looked toward the foremost Type-9, saw that its gun was still smoking. He had no idea who the pilot was, but he had to admit the guy knew how to make a point.
It felt like no one spoke for aeons. The wind came in, a cold wave of air coming off the ocean, and no one moved. In the end, it was Willie Chung who spoke first.
"I suppose we had better disperse, then, before the police round us all up. We'll keep in touch via phone."
And as he drove away, his Werecats having glumly packed themselves back into what seemed like a very conspicuous truck in retrospect, Jimmy Chee found himself dwelling on that dumbass ancient Chinese proverb his Uncle Wang used to say: "The enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine."
Yeah, well, fuck that noise. There was another proverb, one he liked much more: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
____________________________________________________________________________
Life Is Fit Wellness Center
February 11, 2036
7:01 pm
"Okay, everybody! It looks like that's our time for today, so everyone hit the showers and have an awesome night!"
And with that, Linna Yamazaki's Advanced Pliates class vanished from the workout room, exhausted but, she hoped, in good spirits. They would shower up, change back to regular work clothes, and presumably return to households where the kids loved the Boomer nanny more, and maybe the husband did too. That last part wasn't just suspicion, either. Put middle-aged middle-class women in a room together, and even if they're burning 500 calories in thirty minutes (which was Linna's informal motto) they will gossip, and Linna had heard the same handful of stories from enough different people that she was fairly confident of that assumption.
She, on the other hand, had just worked a full day and a half of classes, ten hours from nine to seven with only a lunch break and a few swigs of water to keep her from collapsing. Now, well now she was so exhausted she could just collapse. But in a good way. Definitely in a good way. Linna had done long stints like this before, when she knew they were going out a-Saber-ing that night, so she could just crash the day after and she wouldn't be berated for skipping a few classes.
Okay, it wasn't the best idea for her long-term health, and it probably raised a few flags on whatever government surveillance feed was watching her ass right now. But it sort of helped her get psyched up for beating the guts out of Boomers twice her size. And it was pretty much guaranteed they were going out tonight.
She'd read the news, kept up with the stream – Nemesis wasn't going to stop at two hundred dead. It was a pretty big body count to rack up in one night, even in a hardsuit, but it was only the latest record from the vigilante; he'd racked up a hundred one night in Denver, then a hundred thirty-five in New Miami a month later, and so on. The guy wasn't going to be fazed by his own ruthlessness, and he'd made a point of striking consecutively every night until his 'work' was done. He'd strike again tonight.
And the Knight Sabers, the champions of Megatokyo, were going to do something about it. Any minute now, Sylia would page her, she'd meet up at the Silky Doll with the rest of the gang, and Syila would have a plan all laid out, and they'd suit up and do it.
What would they do, exactly? She didn't know. She hadn't even seen the bodies. But the number kept on blaring in her mind.
Two hundred dead. Two hundred sons and daughters of two hundred mothers and two hundred fathers. Even GENOM's preordained Boomer rampages took a good six months to kill
that many people. Sure, they hadn't exactly been innocents, but the sheer magnitude of the thing! It was like slaughtering cattle. At least a Boomer could put up a reasonable fight against a hardsuit. Something had to be done, she didn't know what.
But right now that didn't matter. Linna went to the women's shower room, gossiped past her coworkers (Yes, Inoue-chan was having another baby! Her third, too! Oh, no, she couldn't chip in for her class when she was on maternity leave, at least not for the next three weeks, she had a corporate wellness class booked solid, but after that she'd love to help her keep that salary!) and casually stripped, making sure that her eye would idly catch the dim red LED embedded in her bra which told her, It's go time, Linna Yamazaki-
The LED wasn't on. Her bra was completely, utterly, beige.
She almost yelped in shock, right in the middle of everyone, then caught herself. She'd have to check it out later – it was probably some sort of technical glitch, her sweat short-circuiting some key component in the quantum-entangled spinitronic chip. She quickly stripped, showered almost as quickly, then tried to scramble out of the shower without looking like she was in a hurry, failed miserably, and spent the next ten minutes having to chat-slash-listen-to a coworker she didn't really like chat about idol culture (She did? Wow, really. I know, right? What a slut!).
Night had fallen hours ago, yet the streets of Megatokyo still glowed with the faded light of massive adscreens blasting LED nonsense through the darkness alongside holograms making their rounds, 3-d images flickering through six-second routines on the tops of buildings, or floating between them. Linna left the building, and wondered how Sylia would see this, what with those augshades she wore all the time; would algos compensate, wipe out the holograms, or would her connection to the AR holocloud make the semi-hallucinations be ever more present? Would they speak to her, too? Knowing Sylia, she probably custom-fabbed her own set with no internet connection. Speaking of which, she had a call to make.
She strolled down the street, fitness bag slung over her shoulder, to the LIF center's parking garage where she'd left her minivan, a boxy little green hydro-cell that Priss had once called 'the most street-legal thing in existence'. After Sylia's paranoia modifications, though, that wasn't quite true, what with the tinted windows and the window vibrators and the quantum-encoded satellite uplink and at least a half dozen upgrades she'd probably forgotten about. Still, though, it wasn't exactly a speed machine like one of Priss's bikes, but that had never been the point, she thought as she hopped in the driver's seat and turned the paranoia mods on. She'd bought it to have a little bit of freedom, to be able to move stuff around without relying on an autotaxi, to be one of the few middle-classers who still owned that luxury known as a personal automobile.
Oh! She probably should call Sylia, just to make sure they were still on. She whipped out her phone, a razor-thin slab of computational graphene and nanoscale LED's, plugged it into her car's uplink, and pressed a little button on her car door. Her phone's screen flickered, went black, then a white pixelated image of her Knight Saber helmet appeared on screen, vibrating with the dial tone.
The first time, Sylia didn't pick up, and this being her Saber phone, Linna didn't even go to voicemail, just got the sound of the call being dropped followed by the blaring deetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeet of an unconnected line. The second time, Sylia didn't pick up, and Linna hung up immediately afterwards. The third time, there was the sound of a phone being picked up, followed by the sound of a breath, and Linna cut loose-
"HiiiiiiiiiiisorrybutmytranspondermustaconkedoutandIranafewextraclassesbutI'mstillrarin'togostillfeellikeabillionyencouldpunchaBoomerbareknuckledatthispointsoI'mallgoodtogojustcheckingto makesurewe'restillonfortonightIknowPrissisinabadpartoftownandtheyputupsecuritycheckpoints soIcandriveherifthatworksforyoudoesthatworkforyouofcourseitworksforyou"
"Um."
Oh. Oh . That voice, hoarse with the vagaries of adolescence, clearly wasn't Sylia at all. That was definitely Mackie.
"Oh. Hey Mackie." Keep it terse. Don't give the boy any ideas. Priss was dead certain he had a porn stash of them from the changing room, no matter how much Nene tried to deny it.
"Hey Linna. Uh, sorry, but Oneesan's a little busy right now, and she told me to tell you guys that, uh, we aren't going out tonight."
What. What the heck.
"Did she tell you why?"
"She's down in the lab doing some tech work. I think she wants to get the new suits up and ready by tomorrow."
"That's great, that's spectacular, but don't we have a job to do? Do we really not have enough data to go after Nemesis?"
"No, and no. Nene-chan's checks turned up nothing, and we still haven't decided on a course of action." We, as though Mackie had participated in deciding that course of action, which in all honesty he probably hadn't. He was a sweet kid, bright enough, but no tactical genius.
"So what am I supposed to do? I kinda cleared my calendar for tonight just so we could get the ball rolling. Can I talk to her?"
"Not a chance. She's basically in a work trance right now." Then his voice dropped to a whisper: "I think if I interrupted her she'd bite my dick off."
"Mack-ie…"
"Look, I'm not making this up. Oneesan's actually worried , I think. And the only way she's not going to worry so hard she goes crazy is if she has some alone time so she can get all control-freaky on inanimate objects instead of real people. Besides, didn't you guys say you wanted new hardsuits anyway?"
"That's really not the point, Mackie. What is the point is that I want to know why we aren't doing something about the guy in a hardsuit who wants to use the tech to kill human beings-"
"Yakuza, probably guilty of a dozen felonies each-"
"And I want to hear it from Sylia." Linna let him chew on that, imagining his mental defenses crumbling as he realized for the umpteenth time how terribly infinitesimal he was in her worldview.
"Okay," he grumbled. "Look, this is as hard as it is on me as it is on you. Oneesan's been whipping me between her and Doc Raven all day long fiddling with weird stuff even I don't understand, you know, 'Mackie! Set the nanofabricator kiln temperature to 1273.5 Kelvin!', 'Mackie! Grab me a seventy-kilo canister of neural analogue from the cryochamber downstairs!' 'Mackie, do this!' 'Mackie, do that!' and I'm kind of on break right now, so just – have a little bit of faith in the ol' Mackster, okay? Cut me some slack."
She didn't really have a response for that. But silence has many meanings, all in the mind of the beholder, and over the phone Mackie couldn't exactly tell that Linna's silence was a baffled silence instead of a loathsome and resentful silence.
"Okay. Okay. Fine. I'll do it. But you owe me. ONEE-SAN!"
Linna recoiled from the phone in pain; the little dweeb had gotten her again, by not just going down to Sylia's workshop and giving the phone to her. Like a demolitions expert defusing an Afghan dirty bomb, she brought the phone back to her ear-
"ONEE-SAN, LINNA'S CALLING!" Another voice, muted. "-s but why"
This time she was ready, and kept the phone at a safe distance. "SHE WANTS TO TALK WITH YOU ABOUT NOT GOING OUT TONIGHT!"
Man, when you put it like that, it sounded really petty. "-you tell her what I told you?"
"I DID! BUT SHE WANTS TO HEAR IT FROM YOU!" "ALRIGHT, FINE, BRING IT DOWN!"
Footsteps for a good long minute. A strange hissing sound, like the sound of a snake slowed down by a synthesizer, faded into existence and rose in intensity. Finally, there was the sound of the phone being handed off:
"Hey, Sylia," Linna said, "What's going on?"
"Precious little," she replied. "Working on something. I'm very busy. We're taking the night off."
"I get that, but why?"
Sylia sighed audibly. "Look," she said at last, "I don't trust my own judgement at this point. Father gave me the hardsuits to combat GENOM and a few other megacorps, no more, no less. This is alien territory, as much for me as it is for you, and I need time to prepare a proper course of action."
"But we've killed before! I mean, Sylia, you were the one who slit Brian J. Mason's throat."
"Only after he'd directly exposed himself as an evil man to the city, and the city could only see justice in the killing. We could not retaliate before we had that link, and we do not have that sort of evidence to convict the entire Sleeping Dragon. If we were to engage in the sort of violence Nemesis commits on a regular basis, we would mar our reputation beyond recovery in the eyes of the Japanese public."
"And the mercenary contracts we use to keep the Sabers afloat," Linna moaned. "That's what you're really worried about, isn't it?"
"To an extent."
"But that's not even what I'm worried about! The ADP can handle that, that's their job, especially once Mallory starts selling them gear. I'm more worried about Nemesis! We need to get him to stop before he kills half the city!"
She could practically see Sylia put her hand to her forehead, in that highly specific way she'd only seen Sylia do. "And my arguments from last time still stand. We lack the firepower and experience to take on such a man, and even if we did, we lack sufficient reason to do so, especially since Nene's inquiries bore no fruit. We'll let Nemesis do his work for tonight, then see where we stand."
Okay, that was news for her. "Seriously? Nothing?"
"Only that some of the Sleeping Dragon's rivals seem to be working in tandem against Sato. Beyond that, nothing."
"Are you crazy?!" she shouted into the phone. "If he's started a gang war, the whole city'll be burning by daybreak! That's reason enough to get him to back down before he kills the people he's trying to protect!"
"And is that the fault of the other syndicates, or Nemesis directly?"
She gasped. "That's not the point!"
"It isn't. I was merely playing devil's advocate. The point is that I – we cannot afford to take action without a precisely executed plan, especially with the KnightWing out of action. We'll meet at twelve tomorrow morning. I'll have something then."
"Great," she groaned. "So what am I supposed to do for a whole night?"
"Anything that doesn't compromise the Knight Sabers' identity. It's really not my place to say otherwise. Go out with one of your friends from fitness club, so long as you'll be in a state where you can meet tomorrow. Now, don't call me again because I won't pick up. Goodbye."
"Wait!" Click.
Linna turned her phone off, yanked it out of the uplink, and slammed it down into her little dashboard storage compartment. Then she reclined the seat back until it was practically flat, and gazed up at the fuzzy ceiling of her car.
Sylia had evidently forgotten that, because of her 'other job', she had no friends at Life Is Fit. Irene was definitely, but Irene had been dead for – holy shit, nearly four years by now – and no one had stepped in to fill her place. No one could .
She'd begun to think. What was she without the Knight Sabers? A vapid, shallow girl who had managed to find a little middle-class niche she could hide in? A girl who had put aside her dreams of dancing and day trading and even her childhood fantasies of being a kung-fu master to play at being a vapid, shallow person? If Sylia was to disband the Sabers, where would she go? She had an itch, a sense of justice, a little nerve in the front of her brain which told her this is wrong and this must be stopped , and what would that itch do to her if she had to suppress it like the rest of Megatokyo?
Perhaps she'd snap altogether, sink into a life of vice and high crimes, play at being some Yakuza's girlfriend so Nemesis could have a reason to slit her throat. The idea of it, of cradling some tattooed body as her neck opened up, stuck in her head. She had to do something. She had friends, didn't she? She had to find someone to keep her from going crazy.
Well, she had one other real friend. She didn't always get along with her, but it was better than elaborate death fantasies.
The thought of cooling bodies looping in her mind, Linna Yamazaki picked up her phone and dialed Priss's number.
____________________________________________________________________________
Hot Legs Nightclub
February 11, 2036
7:12 pm
They asked for an early set, just to prove that The Replicants Were Back. They packed the club two hours earlier than she thought they would, because if Nemesis was around, they didn't want to be the idiot out on the streets just a little too late. They asked for an encore, and then another one. They asked for Priss, the beauty, Priss, the danger, Priss, the rockstar.
And she gave them everything they asked for.
How else could she put it? Losing herself in the dry-ice steam, the writhing of her body, the hypersonic humming of her guitar, like she was a passenger in her own flesh, the rest of the band thralls to her voice, the whole world focused on her song, and her, Priss, a ghost in the shell of Priss the Replicant, who (at least according to her posters) had come from beyond the Tannhauser Gate to capture mankind and to eat their thoughts whole. It was like possession, like transcendence, like a rock n' roll rapture. She loved every moment of it.
But the fun had come and gone, and she'd done a full set without having to run off inexplicably. It wasn't as though she worried about that too much – Mallory had been as good as his word on keeping the Hot Legs from booting her out – but it was good to keep in practice, so as not to attract too much attention.
And so now the blonde wig had to come off, and her makeup had to be washed away, and the kinda strippery outfit had to disappear into her closet, and now she was just Priss again. Still beautiful, according to all the men who knew her, but beautiful in a human way, not in a divine-revelation way. Like she'd shed the skin of God. Like the less she sang, the less she mattered.
Well, there was no use getting poetical and/or prophetical about what she did now, not after she'd been doing it for a good five years solid.
(And there was another number to remind her that she was getting old, that the quake had happened over a decade ago and that the age of GENOM wasn't a transition period like Sylia insisted, it was the past and present and future, that Sho's mother had died four years ago and they'd killed the man responsible but even now she couldn't say if he really was dead , as though the gods themselves disapproved of giving ol' Priss Asagiri a single success).
More to the point, she had another, armored skin to wear tonight, and she wasn't getting any closer to it here in her dressing room. She slung her legs off of the counter, let her chair slam back into its regular position, and grabbed her phone. Then she left, told the rest of the band that she'd be back in a bit; they didn't seem to mind. They knew she had stuff going on outside of her regular job.
She always left her bike, a glossy red '35 Yamazuki with a 110-horsepower motor and a built in quantum satellite uplink, in the alley right outside the Hot Legs. The alley was a strange place, not strange for the Megatokyo slums but strange in a more general sense, one of those spots where the sun only shone for half the time it was supposed to, slim rays of light bleached out, and where it was always hot and muggy and stank of summer, no matter even if it was the dead of winter. Someone had scrawled "God Hates Us" in old-style kanji just above the Hot Legs sign, right next to the trash bin where the lid had popped off and trash bags piled to twice the bin's height.
There in the darkness, it all felt wrong, somehow. It had been feeling wrong to her for a while, as though someone had replaced her alleyway with an alleyway somewhere else, had ripped up the asphalt and resurfaced the concrete and then sprayed on a slightly different coat of greenish algae and tacked on different worn-away posters that had melted in the rain.
She knew why. It had gone from being her alleyway to Greg Mallory's Alleyway, just as the Hot Legs had gone from being her Hot Legs to being Greg Mallory's Hot Legs.
The thing was, she thought, as she yanked out the cord for the uplink, extended the superconductive antenna, plugged her phone in, she was stuck . Her career hadn't nosedived after she'd walked out on EMI records way back in '34 so much as it had frozen in amber, or maybe formaldehyde. Offers given were dissolved into vapor, terms of contracts tightened like nooses. She'd known, on some level, that she'd be blackballed, but she hadn't expected it to be that bad.
So the only way forward was the club scene, but that dream had died when Leon had come up to her and told her Hot Legs was under new management, courtesy of Greg Mallory's boundless charity, under a corporation that was supposed to help out ADP vets, widows, their kids, shit like that. Sure, it was nice that she wasn't going to be booted out ever again, but now she couldn't leave, wasn't sure if she wanted to, she'd have to face Leon and tell him that ADP vets with no arms could suck her dick and that just wasn't her. Things hadn't changed since their first meeting – she still hated the cops – but she had her reasons, and those reasons didn't extend to the families of those clowns. So she'd swallowed her pride and stayed, and the rest of the Replicants were too glad that they had her to complain. But how long could things stay this way? Sooner or later she'd get old, and her audience hated old. She needed to make it big now , so she could make like the Rolling Stones and get ugly and bitter but still draw crowds.
She tapped a button on the undercarriage of her bike, felt her phone flicker, saw the cute little pixelated Knight Saber helmet coalesce into existence. Sylia picked up almost immediately.
"Priss," she said, in a voice that spoke of great aggravation, "We are not taking action tonight. Just so you know."
"Wait, what?" Priss replied. "How'd you know I was calling about that?"
"Linna called moments ago with the same question. She thought her bra had malfunctioned or something, it doesn't matter. You've the night off for the time being."
Well, shit. "Well, shit. I kinda played early just so I wouldn't have to run out on work, and you're telling me that was for nothing."
"I am. Are you going to assail me with a barrage of exclamations regarding how our lack of information doesn't justify a lack of action, how something must be done, in Linna's terms? Do I have to play the insult game with you? Tell you what, why don't you and Linna do something together, have a little girls' night out while Mommy gets her work done. Play with dolls, see if she has any relationship tips for you and Leon, something like that."
She said it with such a cool, even tone that Priss didn't realize she was being insulted for several seconds. Then she had no choice but her default retort:
"Go fuck yourself, Sylia."
"With pleasure." Click .
It took too much willpower to not crush the phone in her hand.
February 11, 2036
6:26 pm
The sun had already set by the time Jimmy Chee's personal Rolls-Royce, a red limo with a gaudy silver dragon pattern running along its side, pulled out of his private garage in southern Shinjuku. He began the long and arduous drive to Megatokyo's eastern waterfront district. He sat through the nightly rush hour on the city's streets, crossed over highways strained to their limit by the destruction of the coastal thoroughfare, towards a part of the city the Triads had, admittedly, very little control over.
Well, the Russians were old hands on most of the western waterfront, in old Kawasaki, but they weren't familiar with Chiba, and the Red Willow stuck to their guns in the old city. It was to be a meeting on neutral ground, where nobody had enough sway to set up some dumbass trap in advance. It was Chung's idea, but even he preferred to stick to his haunts in Little Manila. And it wasn't Karns' territory, either. They weren't that stupid.
Actually, if one were to carve up Megatokyo into gang territory, District 10 would be marked as belonging to the Sleeping Dragon. Once, they would have treaded lightly through there, but now Chee had brought his loudest gang colors to the edges of Sato's turf. He knew, now, that he could get away with it.
It should have been a time for celebration, and yet the so-called Master of Vice sat alone in the back of his limousine, without women or drugs or even any good booze except for a lone can of warm banana daiquiri. He figured he would cut his best deals while sober, but the concept of sobriety itself was proving more difficult than he thought it would.He said nothing to his driver, and his driver said nothing to him. Instead, Jimmy Chee looked out the window over the highway and thought.
How badass did he want to be tonight? Clearly, he had to go a little overboard, but how overboard? He hadn't brought a cigar because the intimidation factor was useless in the open air, but now he was thinking maybe he should have brought something , or maybe not, maybe the whole idea of putting aside his vices for a business meeting would make it clear he was not to be fucked with. Yeah, he'd go with that. Chung would think it odd, Iwasaki would be impressed, maybe Smirnovski would think him too eager to please others, that could be problematic.
Well, really, just spending time thinking about all this shit was being too eager to please others. He was Jimmy Fucking Chee. He ran the whole goddamn Suan Tou Fung Triad. He cut people's fingers off as part of a daily routine, pulled teeth when he got bored. He didn't need to panic. He was looking his best, in a red suit with a classic Chinese palace scene embossed in gold across the jacket, and jet black Afghan leather shoes with little golden ornamental spurs. This wasn't the kind of suit he put on for girls, this was his suit for dealing with men .
Now the car pulled off the highway, and eased down a road where there were almost no cars at all. When they came behind a nondescript eighteen-wheeler carrying a large cargo crate marked DESCENT FROM HEAVEN IMPORTS, Chee nodded, and his driver signaled to the other truck. Soon, the behemoth was following his car at a leisurely pace, slipping through the all-but-abandoned roads with all the stealthiness of a grizzly bear.
The buildings became larger and more nondescript as they approached the waterfront, before finally morphing into sprawling warehouses packed with thousands of shipping crates, wall to wall. He could see other headlights, shapes moving behind warehouses on other roads, but let his driver continue.
Finally, the eighteen-wheeler still trailing behind, they came to a stop at the docks, the car just barely edging into the open space. From three other directions, other headlights approached. As in Chee's case, each pair of headlights hid a miniature convoy of luxury car and high-capacity truck. Wordlessly, he stepped out, his heels clicking on the grey concrete.
He leaned against the car and looked around. The big black van which looked like it could ram a tank off the road was Smirnovski, definitely, ever the brutalist. The big GMC 2500 pickup opposite him with all the guys huddled in the back was Chung. Bastard had to bring his security detail with him everywhere he went, or he was just trying to show off. Which left Iwasaki in the silver Mitsubishi Daimyo, a low-riding luxury car with ball tires, whose curves somehow reminded Chee of his old mistresses naked together in the shower.
One by one, they got out and saw one another, the Pacific lapping against the pier in the background. No one wanted to be the first to speak; that would be a sign of weakness.
Chee looked at Smirnovski. Smirnovski looked at Chung. Chung looked at Iwasaki. Iwasaki made a face, and then said:
"Well, that escalated quickly."
Chung snorted, then laughed, doubled over. Iwasaki snickered, chuckled, then made a keening sound that was supposed to be laughter but evidently wasn't. The shady men in the back of Chung's pickup giggled, but it was obvious their hearts weren't in it.
"What the everloving fuck is so funny?" Smirnovski barked.
"You know. 'Gee, things sure have es-cal-ay-teed quickly,'" Chung said in a squeaky, high-pitched voice. Iwasaki smiled a tight smile. "It's understatement, it's hilarious."
"I don't think that making light of our situation at this stage in the game will improve it any," Smirnovski deadpanned. "Sato has deployed the full extent of his forces, practically an invading army bent on pacifying Megatokyo. He has over a dozen BU-12b units, each with the fighting power of a main battle tank. If we do not take his actions seriously, those 12-b's will have our heads on pikes. I hope, for all your sakes, you have armored vehicles at hand."
"Regrettably," said Chung, "My friends and I are a little lacking in the 'tank' department. We've simply been suffering under the delusion that we operate in a dense urban environment where a tracked vehicle could easily be hindered, slowed down, made an easy target - whatever - and simply put out of commission with a well-placed RPG."
"Ah," Smirnovski grunted, "to simply think of a tank displays a lack of creativity which suits you, Billy. An APC or hovercraft can take on just a smidge less armor and still maintain the agility you fear is so necessary. I understand, of course, if such devices are not within your means currently-"He trailed off, letting the silence speak for him.
"Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa," said Chee. "Ease off of it Adrik. We're all friends here."
Chung snorted and motioned to the men in the back of the truck. They lept to the ground as one. Chung could see that they were all wearing hoods, and carrying what looked like Magnum AR's, blocky monster guns that served as compact LMG's to a regular human and small carbines to the average Boomer. They had to be somewhere in between, then. Most likely Boomeroids.
"We are not friends ," he said. "We are enemies with a common cause. No more, no less. And I do not tolerate those who doubt my people's capability, enemy or friend ."
"No one is doubting your backup, Chung," Chee replied, stepping with his arms out like a boxing ref. "Smirnovski brought heavy armor, you brought, uh, infantry . Our little anti-Sato army needs both."
"Quite correct," said Iwasaki. "If he has so many 12-b's, Sato will likely have even more 55-C's and 35-C's, plus a few other small surprises he hasn't shown yet. An APC with a machinecannon can easily engage a 12-b, but let us not forget that multiple 55-C's grouping up with their mouth cannons active could pose just as potent a threat."
Jimmy frowned. He hadn't thought of that, but by God he was going to capitalize on it. "Exactly. Brilliant. Couldn't have said it better myself, Iwasaki. We're scrambling, here, anyway. We'll mop up the Terminator-dudes, then let Nemesis and the Sabers handle the tanks until we can call in enough out-of-town resources."
"So you mean to say you have no anti-armor resources at all? That seems somewhat impractical," Iwasaki said.
Backstabbing bastard. "Oh, come on. I tried to buy a mecha or two from the Chang Group years ago, and every time I thought I was gonna talk to a representative one of Sato's goons popped up and told me he'd take my purchase as an act of war. Of course I backed off. What would you have done?"
Iwasaki smiled again, but instead of the aw-shucks grin he had before, this was a wicked smile, a watch-as-I-prove-my-inherent-superiority-to-you-scum smile. "I would have just used a bit more subtlety in my work. It is difficult to move armor under the Sleeping Dragon's snout, but it is not impossible for the diligent criminal."
"What the fuck do you mean, diligent?"
"I mean exactly what I say, O Master of Vice."
"Well, excuse me for not running my triad like some dead-eyed salariman. I like to have fun , you know?"
"I like to have fun too, Mister Chee, I simply am willing to put aside what I want for what is good."
"Oh please. You wouldn't know a beautiful woman if she bit your c-"
Shack-chick .
All eyes fell on Smirnovski, who had just audibly jammed an extended magazine into a chrome-plated AKM assault rifle, and was now pointing the weapon skyward.
"While," he intoned, taking a breath, "I appreciate a bit of man-on-man dick-waving as much as the next hot-blooded Russian man, I believe we were to meet, first and foremost, to display our elite units, what we have collected besides gangsters and middling Boomers, and to plan a strategy around their strengths and weaknesses. If you are unable to do this, I would be more than happy to fire several rounds into the air to alert an ADP unit as to our location. While I might be arrested, the simple cosmic justice of the thing would be more than satisfactory. Do I make myself clear?"
Silence. "Okay, then. Since Chee is so agitated tonight, let us allow him to display his wares first to relieve tension. I will go second, Chung third, Iwasaki fourth. I believe there should be no objections to this plan."
Jimmy shrugged. "Fine by me," he said. It wasn't, of course, but Adrik had a point. Arguing over the order of reveals was ultimately useless, even if he would have rather seen the armor the Russian seemed to be humblebragging about before he showed of his own stuff.
He fished a cigarette out of his jacket (he kept at least a pack in every one of his suits as a precaution), then went back over to the truck, where his driver had a lighter ready. Ciggie in hand, he banged on its side, just below the M in IMPORTS, and watched as several dozen shadows whispered out of the back and passed him by. Then, all slow and smooth, he strolled back to face the others.
They were Boomers, that much was clear. The red fish-eyes and grey, rippling bulk of their musculature were distinctly Boomer. But they were smaller than 55-C's, anthropomorphic in posture but animalian in countenance, their limbs sticking out starkly, as though they'd been twisted back from the position they were supposed to have, their faces dominated by short, snarling snouts and twin fangs the size of daggers. Clutching guns of various sizes in their not-quite-paws, they twitched restlessly, clawed the ground with their not-quite-feet.
"We call 'em Werecats," Chee smirked. "Took thirty-nine K-9 Boomers, swapped out the heads and brains for cats, and tweaked the musculature and skeleton so they can swap from quadrupedal to bipedal in a millisecond without sacrificing power, agility, or speed in either form. They've got pack hunter's instincts and a supersoldier's gunfighting prowess, completely silent-"
"Anything else ?" said Chung.
"The usual handful of 55 and 35-C's, a whole bunch of those Fire-Bee minicopters I bought surplus after the ADP cancelled their contract in '33,and I might be able to bring in some even better air support given time. Hell, if you guys chip in, I can lean on the Hou Bang, see if they'd be willing to sell me a GD-42. Pretty impressive, yeah?"
Iwasaki slicked his hair back. "Certainly a creative use of the K-9s, I will give you that. I am not certain how well they'd perform against fully armed 55-C's, but you could overwhelm them with numbers if you were to produce a few more. The Fire Bees were abandoned for a reason, though, and I fear for the wellbeing of your associates if you were to strap them into those aerial deathtraps."
Chee shrugged. "I'd say the ADP just fucked up when they used synchro-helmets instead of proper implants, but okay, you can be a pussy about it. What've you got, Adrik?"
The grin which broke across Smirnovski's face should not have belonged to a human being.
"Watch and learn, kitty-boy."
From the shadows behind him, two, three, four, five pairs of floodlights slammed into existence, steadily growing, as the contours of two, three, four, five broad shapes grew behind them, formed into the shapes of five trucks that were at once massive, angular and ominous, and at the same time just a little smaller than Chee thought they would be.
His shadow long under their headlights, Smirnovski gestured openly. "You see?" he said. "Five UralVagonZavord Perun Urban Fighting Vehicles. A lovely hybrid between a big-rig with armor on it and a bigass tank, scaled down explicitly for long-term urban conflicts where you don't want something so big it cracks the pavement. A second cousin of mine works in UVZ, he knows a guy who does smuggling on the Trans-Eurasian rail, and my boys dressed them up for some," here he paused, clearly struggling with a word he would not normally use, "badassery."
Jimmy looked them over. They did look like some sort of ungodly hybrid between a dekotora and a T-72, angular plating done up with LED spraypaint in rainbow-oil patterns, two pairs of headlights glaring out over a spiked front. The contrast was startling, especially when one considered what looked like short machineguns poking out of the sides, plus the bigass twin turret on each truck's top. One cannon, he noted, had a strand of Christmas lights wrapped around it, but switched off; evidently Smirnovski had his limits.
Actually, Chee thought, this was very interesting. From what he knew, Adrik Smirnovski ran his mafia like a goddamn zaibatsu, with little to no money to spare on his members' exotic tastes. They were Russians, after all. Their sense of luxury could be satisfied with flavored vodka, and so what Chee would have spent on nineteen-year-old girls Smirnovski spent on buying AK's from his buddies on the mainland in bulk. To not only buy very expensive armored vehicles, but to allow his men to put Stalin's face on the side of one in pulsating light, rays of sun alternating off the Great Leader's forehead - was this really 'badassery', or just Smirnovski's underlings trying a bit of stress relief? Either way, Chee had to give him some credit, to bring out armored cars that looked like gay pride murals and act totally serious, so he kept his trap shut - as did everyone else.
"Let us make haste," Iwasaki snapped off at last. "Chung, did your associates provide you with anything besides a guard force?"
Chung did not recoil at that, though his security detail did.
"They did," he drawled. "And my men are no mere guard force. Boys, show them."
At once, like a trained army, they stepped, or shambled forward. His security detail or whatever it was had to be at least ten men – except they weren't men, not really. Each one of them was horrifically unique, and yet all the same, all amalgams of metal and plastic jammed into puckered flesh, some Japanese, some Filipino, some barely identifiable as anything. One in particular had a sheen of faded plastic covering his face, like a superhero mask, and two gleaming green eyes that were pinpoint dilated; he toyed with what appeared to be an M202 grenade launcher, randomly pointing the monstrous weapon at nothing, as though it were simply a large pistol.
"Boomeroids," Iwasaki said haltingly. "Y-you hired Boomeroids ." He reached into his pocket for what looked like a remote, took it out, fondled a red button without pressing it.
For the first time that night, Chung looked more at ease. "I believe the term they prefer is cyborgs," he said. "It turns out that there are many cyborgs in the Outer Districts and near the Fault who are too proud to submit to society's definition of their subhuman status, and too wise to accept Sato's offer to be ripped limb from limb by construction Boomers in the Underbelly's rigged fights."
"Can't they speak for themselves?" Smirnovski asked. The green-eyed one nodded, then raised its middle finger in his direction.
"Stage fright," the cyborg rumbled in a smoker's voice. "They are afraid, for the dramatis personae rise to take the stage, and they are of such dirty flesh, like they hoped to forget."
"Are you calling me dirty-"
"Such is the way of the half-pure, to be tempted by the smoothness of the meat! How we yearn to return to the way of dignified tumors in the system of the Great Machine!" The cyborg swung its arms out, eyes to the sky, stumbling backwards. He was clearly reciting something from memory, the way his actions seemed to stiffen up, become more than barely restrained twitching. "Flesh calls, and we must descend, ascend, to answer! O Virgin, grant me strength against this dunderhead! Grant me the cleanliness of patience!"
Smirnovski opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again. "The Virgin?"
"Not important. The point is, I have enough cyborgs working with me, and enough heavy weapons to equip them, that we will be able to handle Sato's legions of humans with little effort. The Boomers will be isolated, forced to work without support, and even Boomers need support, do they not?"
"Need I remind you I was the one who came up with the infantry idea first?" Chee hissed.
Chung looked at Chee, lips pursed. "We'll see how well your Werecats do against proper Combat Boomers. My boys ain't Knight Sabers, and they ain't trying to be."
It was at this point that Jimmy Chee began to lose patience with his partners. He didn't trust them, of course, but he hadn't anticipated that they would be so annoying. His Werecats were badass and no one could tell him otherwise.
Maybe… Maybe the fourth member of their little party would appreciate his genius? After all, it wasn't as though the Red Willow had much to offer. They took their vows of bodily purity pretty seriously. Except…
Tomasuki Iwasaki was smiling. Scratch that, he was grinning .
Jimmy knew Iwasaki well enough, and he knew that the head of the Red Willow Yakuza smiled for nothing. Once, before the Kanto Quake, before Japan had opened its doors to anyone who could help them restore everything that had been lost, Iwasaki's father had been fighting a losing battle against the slightly more ruthless Sleeping Dragon. It had been a war of tradition versus modernity, so they'd said, and Megatokyo was a city which wore its modernity on its sleeve. So Tomasuki Iwasaki didn't just have a stick up his ass, clinging to tradition like a Kyoto restaurateur, he wore tradition like a twelve-layered kimono in a desperate attempt to hide his fundamental disappointment with the world.
Yeah, and he was smiling like one of those kids in the GENOM commercials who just got their first Boomer. It was unnerving.
"Well," Iwasaki said, "I think that we have all contributed to our alliance… sufficiently. But it has always been my habit, when doing these sorts of things, to contribute more than I should. It really is a quite disconcerting flaw of mine. Nonetheless, I think it safe to say that tonight… we should save the best for last."
And then he clapped. Once, twice, thrice, hands raised to head height.
And then something, some things clapped behind him in the darkness. Once, twice, thrice, metal smashing against metal in the back of storage truck.
And then he saw them.
Five mecha, each about twice as tall as a man, stomping into view. Humanoid, barely, with a single cyclopean camera mount jutting out of a boxy cockpit that reminded Chee, somehow, of his Uncle Wang's pot belly. Two pairs of arms, one practically fused to the cockpit, clutching a man-sized submachine gun, ammo belt dangling from the gun's feed. The other pair of arms were each as long as a car, and were mounted on what appeared to be some sort of circular rail system. And that, in turn, had two double missile tubes mounted on a second rail, which swiveled back and forth, resting on each of the other three men present before moving on.
"For your consideration, gentlemen," Iwasaki boomed, "Five Type-9 battlemovers, freshly shipped from our dear friends in Seacouver. They're highly modular, can convert between a wheeled mode or walking mode, and have some of the best pilots in the mercenary market piloting them. I daresay these will be our cavalry, the armored frontline, what we'll use to repel Sato's Boomer assaults so that all of your men can do the easy work of mopping up the remains."
Now it was Smirnovski's turn to get pissed off. " Easy work. You think I brought these very expensive UralVagonZavrod Perun fighting vehicles – the finest of good Russian engineering, might I add – to do the easy work? I fear it is now you who underestimate our enemies, Iwasaki. Your battlemovers may be intimidating, but in the end a walking vehicle is just a bigger target with less armor."
"You know," said Chee, "You've really gotta chill on these things, Adrik. I'm sure your Oral-vagina-zappers will definitely be serving the very important role of psychological warfare."
He had never seen Smirnovski go red in the face like that before. Actually, he'd never seen the nebbishy little dude change his skin tone beyond polar bear white before. But the joke had just popped into his head, and the Type-9's were freaking him out, and he made lots of bad jokes under stress, and now he was thinking about his Uncle Wang and his big ol' pot belly. What had happened to that poor bastard?
Oh, right, he'd fed him to a Boomer K-9 for sleeping with one of his mistresses. That had not been one of his better moments, admittedly.
"This from the man who brought us a bunch of fucking kitties?"
And now he was this close to feeding Adrik to a Werecat. "Yeah, kitties with machineguns. Way better than a handful of gay pickup trucks, but hey, that's just me."
"You know what, Chee? Sometimes you cannot chose how you look, and you roll with it. Perhaps you should try wearing cheaper suits more often, instead of going for that 'male prostitute' vibe, but hey , that's just me."
"Really, because you know what a male prostitute looks like. Why am I not surprised?"
"If I did, would it make a difference? In the end, you look like you are dressing up to impress your betters, not to intimidate your inferiors. Take my advice, chink, and wear clothing befitting your rank."
"You want rank? Rank? Motherfucker I'll give you-"
BWOOM .
It was only one round, only a lone report from a gun which wasn't even meant to penetrate armor, and yet the whole lot seemed to wobble and shatter as the 17.5mm explosive round smashed into the asphalt. Ears only slightly ringing, Chee realized that he'd drawn his gun; he'd barely been aware he'd done it, and yet there it was, his gold-plated, mother-of-pearl-handled peashooter clutched in his hand, about to blow Smirnovski's head open and end any chance of taking Sato down with it.
He looked toward the foremost Type-9, saw that its gun was still smoking. He had no idea who the pilot was, but he had to admit the guy knew how to make a point.
It felt like no one spoke for aeons. The wind came in, a cold wave of air coming off the ocean, and no one moved. In the end, it was Willie Chung who spoke first.
"I suppose we had better disperse, then, before the police round us all up. We'll keep in touch via phone."
And as he drove away, his Werecats having glumly packed themselves back into what seemed like a very conspicuous truck in retrospect, Jimmy Chee found himself dwelling on that dumbass ancient Chinese proverb his Uncle Wang used to say: "The enemy of my enemy is a friend of mine."
Yeah, well, fuck that noise. There was another proverb, one he liked much more: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
____________________________________________________________________________
Life Is Fit Wellness Center
February 11, 2036
7:01 pm
"Okay, everybody! It looks like that's our time for today, so everyone hit the showers and have an awesome night!"
And with that, Linna Yamazaki's Advanced Pliates class vanished from the workout room, exhausted but, she hoped, in good spirits. They would shower up, change back to regular work clothes, and presumably return to households where the kids loved the Boomer nanny more, and maybe the husband did too. That last part wasn't just suspicion, either. Put middle-aged middle-class women in a room together, and even if they're burning 500 calories in thirty minutes (which was Linna's informal motto) they will gossip, and Linna had heard the same handful of stories from enough different people that she was fairly confident of that assumption.
She, on the other hand, had just worked a full day and a half of classes, ten hours from nine to seven with only a lunch break and a few swigs of water to keep her from collapsing. Now, well now she was so exhausted she could just collapse. But in a good way. Definitely in a good way. Linna had done long stints like this before, when she knew they were going out a-Saber-ing that night, so she could just crash the day after and she wouldn't be berated for skipping a few classes.
Okay, it wasn't the best idea for her long-term health, and it probably raised a few flags on whatever government surveillance feed was watching her ass right now. But it sort of helped her get psyched up for beating the guts out of Boomers twice her size. And it was pretty much guaranteed they were going out tonight.
She'd read the news, kept up with the stream – Nemesis wasn't going to stop at two hundred dead. It was a pretty big body count to rack up in one night, even in a hardsuit, but it was only the latest record from the vigilante; he'd racked up a hundred one night in Denver, then a hundred thirty-five in New Miami a month later, and so on. The guy wasn't going to be fazed by his own ruthlessness, and he'd made a point of striking consecutively every night until his 'work' was done. He'd strike again tonight.
And the Knight Sabers, the champions of Megatokyo, were going to do something about it. Any minute now, Sylia would page her, she'd meet up at the Silky Doll with the rest of the gang, and Syila would have a plan all laid out, and they'd suit up and do it.
What would they do, exactly? She didn't know. She hadn't even seen the bodies. But the number kept on blaring in her mind.
Two hundred dead. Two hundred sons and daughters of two hundred mothers and two hundred fathers. Even GENOM's preordained Boomer rampages took a good six months to kill
that many people. Sure, they hadn't exactly been innocents, but the sheer magnitude of the thing! It was like slaughtering cattle. At least a Boomer could put up a reasonable fight against a hardsuit. Something had to be done, she didn't know what.
But right now that didn't matter. Linna went to the women's shower room, gossiped past her coworkers (Yes, Inoue-chan was having another baby! Her third, too! Oh, no, she couldn't chip in for her class when she was on maternity leave, at least not for the next three weeks, she had a corporate wellness class booked solid, but after that she'd love to help her keep that salary!) and casually stripped, making sure that her eye would idly catch the dim red LED embedded in her bra which told her, It's go time, Linna Yamazaki-
The LED wasn't on. Her bra was completely, utterly, beige.
She almost yelped in shock, right in the middle of everyone, then caught herself. She'd have to check it out later – it was probably some sort of technical glitch, her sweat short-circuiting some key component in the quantum-entangled spinitronic chip. She quickly stripped, showered almost as quickly, then tried to scramble out of the shower without looking like she was in a hurry, failed miserably, and spent the next ten minutes having to chat-slash-listen-to a coworker she didn't really like chat about idol culture (She did? Wow, really. I know, right? What a slut!).
Night had fallen hours ago, yet the streets of Megatokyo still glowed with the faded light of massive adscreens blasting LED nonsense through the darkness alongside holograms making their rounds, 3-d images flickering through six-second routines on the tops of buildings, or floating between them. Linna left the building, and wondered how Sylia would see this, what with those augshades she wore all the time; would algos compensate, wipe out the holograms, or would her connection to the AR holocloud make the semi-hallucinations be ever more present? Would they speak to her, too? Knowing Sylia, she probably custom-fabbed her own set with no internet connection. Speaking of which, she had a call to make.
She strolled down the street, fitness bag slung over her shoulder, to the LIF center's parking garage where she'd left her minivan, a boxy little green hydro-cell that Priss had once called 'the most street-legal thing in existence'. After Sylia's paranoia modifications, though, that wasn't quite true, what with the tinted windows and the window vibrators and the quantum-encoded satellite uplink and at least a half dozen upgrades she'd probably forgotten about. Still, though, it wasn't exactly a speed machine like one of Priss's bikes, but that had never been the point, she thought as she hopped in the driver's seat and turned the paranoia mods on. She'd bought it to have a little bit of freedom, to be able to move stuff around without relying on an autotaxi, to be one of the few middle-classers who still owned that luxury known as a personal automobile.
Oh! She probably should call Sylia, just to make sure they were still on. She whipped out her phone, a razor-thin slab of computational graphene and nanoscale LED's, plugged it into her car's uplink, and pressed a little button on her car door. Her phone's screen flickered, went black, then a white pixelated image of her Knight Saber helmet appeared on screen, vibrating with the dial tone.
The first time, Sylia didn't pick up, and this being her Saber phone, Linna didn't even go to voicemail, just got the sound of the call being dropped followed by the blaring deetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeetdeet of an unconnected line. The second time, Sylia didn't pick up, and Linna hung up immediately afterwards. The third time, there was the sound of a phone being picked up, followed by the sound of a breath, and Linna cut loose-
"HiiiiiiiiiiisorrybutmytranspondermustaconkedoutandIranafewextraclassesbutI'mstillrarin'togostillfeellikeabillionyencouldpunchaBoomerbareknuckledatthispointsoI'mallgoodtogojustcheckingto makesurewe'restillonfortonightIknowPrissisinabadpartoftownandtheyputupsecuritycheckpoints soIcandriveherifthatworksforyoudoesthatworkforyouofcourseitworksforyou"
"Um."
Oh. Oh . That voice, hoarse with the vagaries of adolescence, clearly wasn't Sylia at all. That was definitely Mackie.
"Oh. Hey Mackie." Keep it terse. Don't give the boy any ideas. Priss was dead certain he had a porn stash of them from the changing room, no matter how much Nene tried to deny it.
"Hey Linna. Uh, sorry, but Oneesan's a little busy right now, and she told me to tell you guys that, uh, we aren't going out tonight."
What. What the heck.
"Did she tell you why?"
"She's down in the lab doing some tech work. I think she wants to get the new suits up and ready by tomorrow."
"That's great, that's spectacular, but don't we have a job to do? Do we really not have enough data to go after Nemesis?"
"No, and no. Nene-chan's checks turned up nothing, and we still haven't decided on a course of action." We, as though Mackie had participated in deciding that course of action, which in all honesty he probably hadn't. He was a sweet kid, bright enough, but no tactical genius.
"So what am I supposed to do? I kinda cleared my calendar for tonight just so we could get the ball rolling. Can I talk to her?"
"Not a chance. She's basically in a work trance right now." Then his voice dropped to a whisper: "I think if I interrupted her she'd bite my dick off."
"Mack-ie…"
"Look, I'm not making this up. Oneesan's actually worried , I think. And the only way she's not going to worry so hard she goes crazy is if she has some alone time so she can get all control-freaky on inanimate objects instead of real people. Besides, didn't you guys say you wanted new hardsuits anyway?"
"That's really not the point, Mackie. What is the point is that I want to know why we aren't doing something about the guy in a hardsuit who wants to use the tech to kill human beings-"
"Yakuza, probably guilty of a dozen felonies each-"
"And I want to hear it from Sylia." Linna let him chew on that, imagining his mental defenses crumbling as he realized for the umpteenth time how terribly infinitesimal he was in her worldview.
"Okay," he grumbled. "Look, this is as hard as it is on me as it is on you. Oneesan's been whipping me between her and Doc Raven all day long fiddling with weird stuff even I don't understand, you know, 'Mackie! Set the nanofabricator kiln temperature to 1273.5 Kelvin!', 'Mackie! Grab me a seventy-kilo canister of neural analogue from the cryochamber downstairs!' 'Mackie, do this!' 'Mackie, do that!' and I'm kind of on break right now, so just – have a little bit of faith in the ol' Mackster, okay? Cut me some slack."
She didn't really have a response for that. But silence has many meanings, all in the mind of the beholder, and over the phone Mackie couldn't exactly tell that Linna's silence was a baffled silence instead of a loathsome and resentful silence.
"Okay. Okay. Fine. I'll do it. But you owe me. ONEE-SAN!"
Linna recoiled from the phone in pain; the little dweeb had gotten her again, by not just going down to Sylia's workshop and giving the phone to her. Like a demolitions expert defusing an Afghan dirty bomb, she brought the phone back to her ear-
"ONEE-SAN, LINNA'S CALLING!" Another voice, muted. "-s but why"
This time she was ready, and kept the phone at a safe distance. "SHE WANTS TO TALK WITH YOU ABOUT NOT GOING OUT TONIGHT!"
Man, when you put it like that, it sounded really petty. "-you tell her what I told you?"
"I DID! BUT SHE WANTS TO HEAR IT FROM YOU!" "ALRIGHT, FINE, BRING IT DOWN!"
Footsteps for a good long minute. A strange hissing sound, like the sound of a snake slowed down by a synthesizer, faded into existence and rose in intensity. Finally, there was the sound of the phone being handed off:
"Hey, Sylia," Linna said, "What's going on?"
"Precious little," she replied. "Working on something. I'm very busy. We're taking the night off."
"I get that, but why?"
Sylia sighed audibly. "Look," she said at last, "I don't trust my own judgement at this point. Father gave me the hardsuits to combat GENOM and a few other megacorps, no more, no less. This is alien territory, as much for me as it is for you, and I need time to prepare a proper course of action."
"But we've killed before! I mean, Sylia, you were the one who slit Brian J. Mason's throat."
"Only after he'd directly exposed himself as an evil man to the city, and the city could only see justice in the killing. We could not retaliate before we had that link, and we do not have that sort of evidence to convict the entire Sleeping Dragon. If we were to engage in the sort of violence Nemesis commits on a regular basis, we would mar our reputation beyond recovery in the eyes of the Japanese public."
"And the mercenary contracts we use to keep the Sabers afloat," Linna moaned. "That's what you're really worried about, isn't it?"
"To an extent."
"But that's not even what I'm worried about! The ADP can handle that, that's their job, especially once Mallory starts selling them gear. I'm more worried about Nemesis! We need to get him to stop before he kills half the city!"
She could practically see Sylia put her hand to her forehead, in that highly specific way she'd only seen Sylia do. "And my arguments from last time still stand. We lack the firepower and experience to take on such a man, and even if we did, we lack sufficient reason to do so, especially since Nene's inquiries bore no fruit. We'll let Nemesis do his work for tonight, then see where we stand."
Okay, that was news for her. "Seriously? Nothing?"
"Only that some of the Sleeping Dragon's rivals seem to be working in tandem against Sato. Beyond that, nothing."
"Are you crazy?!" she shouted into the phone. "If he's started a gang war, the whole city'll be burning by daybreak! That's reason enough to get him to back down before he kills the people he's trying to protect!"
"And is that the fault of the other syndicates, or Nemesis directly?"
She gasped. "That's not the point!"
"It isn't. I was merely playing devil's advocate. The point is that I – we cannot afford to take action without a precisely executed plan, especially with the KnightWing out of action. We'll meet at twelve tomorrow morning. I'll have something then."
"Great," she groaned. "So what am I supposed to do for a whole night?"
"Anything that doesn't compromise the Knight Sabers' identity. It's really not my place to say otherwise. Go out with one of your friends from fitness club, so long as you'll be in a state where you can meet tomorrow. Now, don't call me again because I won't pick up. Goodbye."
"Wait!" Click.
Linna turned her phone off, yanked it out of the uplink, and slammed it down into her little dashboard storage compartment. Then she reclined the seat back until it was practically flat, and gazed up at the fuzzy ceiling of her car.
Sylia had evidently forgotten that, because of her 'other job', she had no friends at Life Is Fit. Irene was definitely, but Irene had been dead for – holy shit, nearly four years by now – and no one had stepped in to fill her place. No one could .
She'd begun to think. What was she without the Knight Sabers? A vapid, shallow girl who had managed to find a little middle-class niche she could hide in? A girl who had put aside her dreams of dancing and day trading and even her childhood fantasies of being a kung-fu master to play at being a vapid, shallow person? If Sylia was to disband the Sabers, where would she go? She had an itch, a sense of justice, a little nerve in the front of her brain which told her this is wrong and this must be stopped , and what would that itch do to her if she had to suppress it like the rest of Megatokyo?
Perhaps she'd snap altogether, sink into a life of vice and high crimes, play at being some Yakuza's girlfriend so Nemesis could have a reason to slit her throat. The idea of it, of cradling some tattooed body as her neck opened up, stuck in her head. She had to do something. She had friends, didn't she? She had to find someone to keep her from going crazy.
Well, she had one other real friend. She didn't always get along with her, but it was better than elaborate death fantasies.
The thought of cooling bodies looping in her mind, Linna Yamazaki picked up her phone and dialed Priss's number.
____________________________________________________________________________
Hot Legs Nightclub
February 11, 2036
7:12 pm
They asked for an early set, just to prove that The Replicants Were Back. They packed the club two hours earlier than she thought they would, because if Nemesis was around, they didn't want to be the idiot out on the streets just a little too late. They asked for an encore, and then another one. They asked for Priss, the beauty, Priss, the danger, Priss, the rockstar.
And she gave them everything they asked for.
How else could she put it? Losing herself in the dry-ice steam, the writhing of her body, the hypersonic humming of her guitar, like she was a passenger in her own flesh, the rest of the band thralls to her voice, the whole world focused on her song, and her, Priss, a ghost in the shell of Priss the Replicant, who (at least according to her posters) had come from beyond the Tannhauser Gate to capture mankind and to eat their thoughts whole. It was like possession, like transcendence, like a rock n' roll rapture. She loved every moment of it.
But the fun had come and gone, and she'd done a full set without having to run off inexplicably. It wasn't as though she worried about that too much – Mallory had been as good as his word on keeping the Hot Legs from booting her out – but it was good to keep in practice, so as not to attract too much attention.
And so now the blonde wig had to come off, and her makeup had to be washed away, and the kinda strippery outfit had to disappear into her closet, and now she was just Priss again. Still beautiful, according to all the men who knew her, but beautiful in a human way, not in a divine-revelation way. Like she'd shed the skin of God. Like the less she sang, the less she mattered.
Well, there was no use getting poetical and/or prophetical about what she did now, not after she'd been doing it for a good five years solid.
(And there was another number to remind her that she was getting old, that the quake had happened over a decade ago and that the age of GENOM wasn't a transition period like Sylia insisted, it was the past and present and future, that Sho's mother had died four years ago and they'd killed the man responsible but even now she couldn't say if he really was dead , as though the gods themselves disapproved of giving ol' Priss Asagiri a single success).
More to the point, she had another, armored skin to wear tonight, and she wasn't getting any closer to it here in her dressing room. She slung her legs off of the counter, let her chair slam back into its regular position, and grabbed her phone. Then she left, told the rest of the band that she'd be back in a bit; they didn't seem to mind. They knew she had stuff going on outside of her regular job.
She always left her bike, a glossy red '35 Yamazuki with a 110-horsepower motor and a built in quantum satellite uplink, in the alley right outside the Hot Legs. The alley was a strange place, not strange for the Megatokyo slums but strange in a more general sense, one of those spots where the sun only shone for half the time it was supposed to, slim rays of light bleached out, and where it was always hot and muggy and stank of summer, no matter even if it was the dead of winter. Someone had scrawled "God Hates Us" in old-style kanji just above the Hot Legs sign, right next to the trash bin where the lid had popped off and trash bags piled to twice the bin's height.
There in the darkness, it all felt wrong, somehow. It had been feeling wrong to her for a while, as though someone had replaced her alleyway with an alleyway somewhere else, had ripped up the asphalt and resurfaced the concrete and then sprayed on a slightly different coat of greenish algae and tacked on different worn-away posters that had melted in the rain.
She knew why. It had gone from being her alleyway to Greg Mallory's Alleyway, just as the Hot Legs had gone from being her Hot Legs to being Greg Mallory's Hot Legs.
The thing was, she thought, as she yanked out the cord for the uplink, extended the superconductive antenna, plugged her phone in, she was stuck . Her career hadn't nosedived after she'd walked out on EMI records way back in '34 so much as it had frozen in amber, or maybe formaldehyde. Offers given were dissolved into vapor, terms of contracts tightened like nooses. She'd known, on some level, that she'd be blackballed, but she hadn't expected it to be that bad.
So the only way forward was the club scene, but that dream had died when Leon had come up to her and told her Hot Legs was under new management, courtesy of Greg Mallory's boundless charity, under a corporation that was supposed to help out ADP vets, widows, their kids, shit like that. Sure, it was nice that she wasn't going to be booted out ever again, but now she couldn't leave, wasn't sure if she wanted to, she'd have to face Leon and tell him that ADP vets with no arms could suck her dick and that just wasn't her. Things hadn't changed since their first meeting – she still hated the cops – but she had her reasons, and those reasons didn't extend to the families of those clowns. So she'd swallowed her pride and stayed, and the rest of the Replicants were too glad that they had her to complain. But how long could things stay this way? Sooner or later she'd get old, and her audience hated old. She needed to make it big now , so she could make like the Rolling Stones and get ugly and bitter but still draw crowds.
She tapped a button on the undercarriage of her bike, felt her phone flicker, saw the cute little pixelated Knight Saber helmet coalesce into existence. Sylia picked up almost immediately.
"Priss," she said, in a voice that spoke of great aggravation, "We are not taking action tonight. Just so you know."
"Wait, what?" Priss replied. "How'd you know I was calling about that?"
"Linna called moments ago with the same question. She thought her bra had malfunctioned or something, it doesn't matter. You've the night off for the time being."
Well, shit. "Well, shit. I kinda played early just so I wouldn't have to run out on work, and you're telling me that was for nothing."
"I am. Are you going to assail me with a barrage of exclamations regarding how our lack of information doesn't justify a lack of action, how something must be done, in Linna's terms? Do I have to play the insult game with you? Tell you what, why don't you and Linna do something together, have a little girls' night out while Mommy gets her work done. Play with dolls, see if she has any relationship tips for you and Leon, something like that."
She said it with such a cool, even tone that Priss didn't realize she was being insulted for several seconds. Then she had no choice but her default retort:
"Go fuck yourself, Sylia."
"With pleasure." Click .
It took too much willpower to not crush the phone in her hand.
- Location
- Megatokyo
2030
Amazon Basin – [classified] miles southwest of Caracas
Morning
The water is brown, not quite black, with silt, and every few minutes you have to reach up with your suit's hand and clear your cameras with an idle thumb just so you can see in the near-darkness of the riverbed. The lenses are protected, yes, but the silt washes along with the current and against it like a shit-colored snowstorm, millions of flecks of soil following the river's little eddies in whirling dervishes, in waves which dump what feels like tons of raw sediment on your lonesome, isolated figure, to the point that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. But orders are orders, and your orders were to retract your supercavitation drives a good klick out of the convoy's radar range, and to walk on the riverbed the rest of the way – supposed to be stealthier this way. And you have passed what look like underwater minelayer drones here and there, probably rigged to kill anything moving faster than a big fish, so your orders were correct.
But God damn it! You've been ankle-deep in indescribable muck for nearly an hour now, and your passive LiDAR is no closer to picking up anything on the surface bigger than a school of catfish, nothing barge-sized. They're supposed to ride low in the water, but even then you're starting to wonder if the river itself has sabotaged your efforts to sense your target, every laser beam diffused by sand and manure flecks from the ranches upriver before it can penetrate a single damn yard. It's tempting to just swim up and check , but you didn't become a hardsuit operator by following every stupid impulse in your head.
Certainly, you'd suffered the same steel-belly syndrome as the rest of the greenhorns in your squad, believing that just because you were wearing a suit which multiplied your strength by a factor of eight and could stop 9mm rounds dead on, you were invincible. But you learned quickly enough that a hardsuit is a piece of equipment, same as an Apache or a Bradley, with limits, and you learned to respect those limits. The rest tried to take RPG's on with headbutts and the like in the sims. That's why your squaddies got stuck with the boring jobs and you got to keep your hardsuit.
Then again, you don't advance in the army unless you show a little willingness to innovate.
So you moonwalk.
You fire your jets, set for two-second bursts, and kick out of the ankle-deep muck with as much force as your hardsuit will give in endurance mode, striding downriver, letting the current carry you just a bit before the weight of your hardsuit and its canned air slams you back down into the riverbed again. Again, again you do this, and not once does a drone mine trigger and blow you into bloody chunks. Your power consumption barely flickers, your legs barely feel the strain of leaps that would make any Olympian proud – truly, this is the way to travel.
It's another ten minutes of doing this before your proximity alarm starts going off. You make one last leap, one last impact into the muck, and look up – but of course you can't see anything, only that the dark brownness looks slightly darker than it did before. You switch on your overlays, thermal, motion, even your gummed-up LiDAR, desperately trying to see what the suit's computers already know is there. And the displays oblige:
Five dark shapes crawl across your vision, red-hot with movement, and a dozen other shapes of various sizes follow in their wake. Barges, probably, with fast attack boats in between their wakes.
This is it. This is the convoy you've been tracking for a week now, the one route you thought the cartels would never take. This is God-Only-Knows how many goons hiding enough synthcoke to fund a small army, and enough guns to equip it. This is what you've been waiting for.
First, you set your power consumption to 'active'. Then you leap out from the muck, surge your jets, and breach between two barges, screaming ten, twenty, twenty-five feet into the air.
Below you a handful of men with oversized AR's, some with chrome and some without it, and they are all panicked, screaming, gesturing to the one guy near a handful of black glossy
cases to open them up and give them their heavy guns for godsakes.
But it's too late. You are here, moving too fast for them to track.
You are here, and you hit the deck with a resounding
THWOOM.
Tokyo Bay
February 11, 2036
8:33 pm
"Gavin? Gavin?"
Maria's voice over the comm shook him out of his reverie. "Nemesis here. I've hit the bottom."
"Yeah, you just went silent there for a bit. We don't want to have to fish you out of the bay or anything!"
"And I'll be maintaining radio silence until I breach Point Alpha. In the meantime, get into position and be ready to start jamming on my signal."
"You sure? You're not gonna run out of air or anything, right?"
Vicain's voice, a little reedier than usual. "The Hardsuit was purpose-built for long-term hazardous operations. Of course it has enough liquefied atmosphere mixture for him to spend a good eight hours. Granted, we could have just rigged up some gills, ran those through pulmonary implants…"
"Doctor, you should know well enough by now I don't intend to get chrome unless I absolutely have to. Real Special Forces take pride in keeping their bodies optimized without outside help."
"Fair enough. Just remember that you've got a weakspot on your back and it really shouldn't get breached."
"Will do. Nemesis out."
And then there was silence again, save the low roaring of Tokyo Bay's waters, and there was darkness again, save the blue-green glare of his HUD. It was peaceful, in a sense. Comforting.
He'd picked up some info from an urbex scuba enthusiast site which had done soundings of the bay after the quake, and picked a relatively uncluttered drop site that was still a good distance from The Underbelly, a simple drone-boat ride with his hardsuit out and back. He'd expected, at the very least, bare seabed, before he ran into anything major.
Yet with LiDAR and night vision on, it was clear that the floor of Tokyo bay was anything but bare. Nemesis couldn't even moonwalk forward without smashing into a mound of half-buried concrete pilings, the skeleton of a storefront, a dissected ATM. He'd heard whole districts had been shattered, then washed away by the one-two punch of the Second Kanto Quake and the tsunami that had followed it, but it had all seemed distant to the real Megatokyo, which thrummed with life even in its most desolate parts. Now here he was, picking across their remains like a scavenger.
As he passed a downed adscreen, the LCD display now smooth and dark, it occurred to Nemesis for the first time how little he knew the city, how little any of his team knew. He'd read once that the human brain could only hold up to two hundred specific social connections before it started making assumptions and generalizations. Maybe it was like that – maybe you could only understand so much of a megacity before the information just passed through your brain like water through a sieve.
Here, for example, loomed before him something he didn't understand: The Fault.
Somehow, he could see it even without his enhanced vision, the way the darkness of the seabed suddenly became so much darker. It stretched into the horizon, became the horizon, so that he was looking out at a shear wall of total blackness that he knew had to be only fifty meters or so across but felt as limitless as the ocean itself. There was no other way to describe it but black.
He knew that the Fault had torn the Tokyo region in two, and even now scarred an otherwise rebuilt city. Lonely Planet had told him that it was a suicide hotspot now, like Aokigahara once had been, and the highways were lined with signs begging salarimen to Please Reconsider and Think of Your Family. Gaijin social media accounts were packed with selfies next to the signs, looming large and white in the foreground.
Everything else had been restored, even improved upon by GENOM, save for a few outlying wastelands and slum districts, but every city had those nowadays.Why hadn't GENOM bothered to fill the Fault?
Sure, submarine laser scans had revealed that it went down almost as deep as the Marianas Trench, but it was practically invisible on the seaside. They would just have to dump a few thousand tons of landfill into it on land, and the problem would go away. That's what Americans would have done, at least, so why the grim idolization of a big crack in the middle of the city? Why put up the signs? Why remind themselves of what was lost? It all seemed so Japanese to him. Why, he could not say.
But he had no time to let his thoughts wander. He leaped out into the darkness, then fired his jets, feeling inertia push slowly push him through the churning waters.
He had a job to do. Four nights, and the Sleeping Dragon would be broken. He had made an oath to wipe out these scum when he'd seen Josie Ng's maimed body, and by God he would fulfill it.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Underbelly
February 11, 2036
8:54 pm
And now, The Underbelly.
They come by barge and by bridge to ramshackle docks smeared across the face of the platform, swarming over rusty sheet metal to pay the Boomer and get in. They don't care about the way the little half-mountain, a shadow of GENOM tower in shape and form, has been ripped open, scarred and slagged by angry neutrons. Most of them are repeat customers, have been for years, and who cares about a few gaping wounds in the superstructure anyway? They don't come to the Underbelly for the fuckin' architecture, or for the lack of Megatokyo's pulsing neon heartbeat. They come to watch the fights and get high.
They swarm through the doors, slap credchips in the hands of an old heavy industrial Boomer, hope it recognizes them and won't wade through the crowd to literally throw them out. As far as bouncers go, Ol' Jiisan is crude, maybe a little too rough, but effective. They writhe like a great serpent down damp hallways, squeeze off into dark side alleys to piss, storm up rickety staircases that were never meant to hold more than ten people at a time, trample over the fallen, push, push, push until they reach the viewing section.
Who are they? They are the superfluous, the hordes of meat that the rebuilt Megatokyo had no use for. Too poor to be sold to, too costly for low-level employment compared to the tireless efficiency of the Boomer, too human for corporate jobs, tired, addicted, desperate to remember what it felt like for their brains to produce endorphins independent of needles and slap patches. They are the criminals who call themselves organized, aimless tribes of angry young men built from birth for violence. There are even a few of them who are employed , who have come down here to go slumming, to rub shoulders with poverty and feel the elation of their own security.
But they are all equal, all spectators, in the arena.
It was once a water storage tank, made to augment the invisible systems which kept Tokyo's taps flowing without interruption, and even with the Yakuza's ramshackle seating bolted to the sides it's still clearly meant to be one, a smooth concrete cylinder twice as wide as it is tall.
But The Underbelly is not a place where things are meant to last. Hence the ring of black mold discoloring the concrete just where the waterline used to be, hence the way the whole structure groans, howls when anything tougher than an ocean breeze hits it, hence the way the sickly-green fluorescent lights strung up by the Yakuza have begun to break free of their emplacements, and here and there dangle like hung men, hence the way the sound system scrapes and grinds on the nerves with a metallic aftertaste lacing every noise.
The only thing that the passage of time and technology hasn't chewed up and spit back out like a stray piece of bubblegum is the floor, which is scuffed and pockmarked but tough enough, thick enough to still look out on the whispering ocean almost unaltered, and the filtration membrane. The 'brane was made to drop into the water, suck it, pump it through to fill up the tank, and despite the energy costs of having it break molecular bonds as it went through, and despite all the salt-scum that had to be collected in massive canisters lining the tank, it worked well enough. But the Yaks haven't used it in years.
Tonight it's Perfect Tommy, who has never lost a match in his six-month Ban Ji Quan career, who has arms like industrial accidents and a cybernetic voice box that makes him sound like Jeff Goldblum with smoker's lungs, versus Iwata Saenori, who has never lost a match in his eight-month Aikido career and wears old-style wooden sandals and a kimono everywhere except the ring. Neither of them have any intention of leaving the ring until the other is crippled or dead, for those are the rules, crippled or dead or worse, no substitutes accepted. Both of them are rigged with the last generation of chrome produced before the bottom dropped out of the recreational cybernetics market around 2030, fast, brutal stuff that almost brings a human up to a Boomer's level. Almost.
For humans bleed and break and weep and moan, and that's what the audience is here for. This is a world where pain is spectacle, where watching two Boomers mutely tear each other apart with mechanical precision can never be enough, where the human element is still, against all market forecasts, indispensable. But we are not here to dwell on how the latest McKinsey Institute report remarked on how little remains for humans to do, how a human-free world would see rates of growth that would make all the dead economists cum in their graves. Tonight, we are here to watch men die.
Case in point: Kashiro Yamamoto, professional thug. Thirtysomething, got first-row seats to the 2020 Olympics when his grandmother won a raffle, back when times were good, lost his family in the quake and joined the Yakuza to compensate. His job is the best thing to happen to him: he just patrols the half-submerged corridors of Greenhouse 02, checks gear when needed, waves an AR at jumping shadows when he thinks his superiors are watching. He lives in the Underbelly, sleeps in the mornings when the last of the junkies have been cleared out, eats ramen from the vending machines, dreams of going somewhere else. But where else would he go? So here he is, checking places only he's ever set foot in, hatchways and access tunnels where pre-Boomer robots were meant to swarm and flicker out of sight with nothing but an assault rifle and a motion detector.
At last he comes to the end of his patrol, where the corridor just sort of droops, bent by some chance superheating from the last particle beam strike, straight into the ocean. He shines his light down there, sees nothing but black on black, waves the motion detector around. Nothing. For a supposedly indestructible citywide crime syndicate, his employers sure can be paranoid. Do they honestly think Nemesis would strike here? Why attack a place filled with enough Boomeroids and cyberpsychos to fill a government rehab center? If he were Nemesis, he'd assume that security had been bumped up pretty much everywhere, which it had, and go for something reasonable, like-
Hold on. His motion detector just beeped. Not long enough to confirm that something was out there moving, but long enough that he had to check. Part of the job. There it is again, a little bleeeeeep running sideways on his screen, but all he can see is black on black.
Is it a big fish? Probably not - Aqua city's collapse dumped a whole bunch of toxic rare earths into the bay. If you believe the really cracked-out newsfeeds, they've still got fissionable material buried under one of the main reactor towers. Only the little guys can handle that sort of shit, and yet, there it is again! Coming forward, fast now, up, the motion detector screeching, and he raises his rifle-
But it's too late. He sees the shape of it, black with a deathshead of white in the center, and knows his time is up.
He doesn't even get to scream.
Nemesis wasted no time. He grabbed the guard by his neck, twisted until he heard the telltale sound of cartilage snapping, then tossed the man into the water. Then he switched his atmospheric intake to 'external' and began his hunt.
Night vision bathing the world in a day-glo green, he moved along an old access corridor which ringed the auxiliary greenhouse, constantly scanning the darkness ahead of him. It was large, vaulted by machinery, and dripped constantly, reminding him of a medieval monastery. The wireframe Maria had pulled from Sato's servers was in the corner of his vision, and it suggested that the optimal route would be through a light rail track to the main platform, seven floors up. That way, he'd only be dealing with the greenhouse security on his way up to the penthouse and could bypass the ground level, where security would be heaviest.
After about three minutes without a single sign of Yakuza forces, it became clear that there was no stairway up the pyramidal structure on the outer ring which hadn't been buried by debris or sheared off by particle beam. He was going to have to go through the center of the platform. Detection was inevitable; hopefully he could make it to the Underbelly's main platform, then use the charges he'd planted on the auxiliaries' support pillars as a distraction. He unsheathed his vibrosword and made for a side hatchway he'd passed earlier.
One side corridor later, he emerged into a large, dimly-lit space which definitely resembled a greenhouse, what with the thick layers of hydroponic crops stacked up like an overgrown server farm. An initial scan revealed no more than seven labor Boomers flitting between stacks, tending to the crops in place of human botanists, plus a lone guard armed with only an FN FAL. A second scan identified the plants as Papaver Somniferum Vulgaris, a genetically engineered species of opium poppy designed to resist any defoliants the authorities could throw at it.
Sick bastards . He normally didn't enjoy his work, but sinking this greenhouse specifically would feel very, very good. First, though, he had to get past the Boomers.
And in a hardsuit, there was only one way to do that. He clicked on his comm, sent the message to start jamming, and clicked it off.
Nemesis unsheathed his vibrosword, walked up to the nearest Boomer with a spring in his step, and tapped it on the shoulder; it whirled around right as he drove the blade straight into the thing's chassis, the vibrations ripping gouts of orange circulatory fluid out of its primary cardiac pump. He yanked the blade out, then slammed the Boomer's face straight into the nearest stack with enough force to knock it over.
Alarms began to sound, and he broke into a run for what his map said was supposed to be a cargo elevator. One Boomer saw him, squawked a wordless obscenity and ran at him, gardening shears swinging back and forth, and he just grabbed it by its head and pulled, not even breaking stride. Another came behind him, and he mule-kicked the Boomer in the chest before leaping a good six meters forward, vibrosword out, stabbing into the lone guard as he scrambled for an alarm panel; the thug's hand stopped just short of it before his body crumpled.
His scanner had the five remaining Boomers converging on him, and no signs of other major threats, but Nemesis had neither the time nor the patience to waste ammunition on the robots. Grasping the track on which the central cargo elevator rested, he sheathed his vibrosword and began to climb, launching himself over and over again with all the strength his suit's compressed musculature and plasma thrusters could provide. The rail strained under his grip, but he kept going.
____________________________________________________________________________
Senjuku Inoue was watching Perfect Tommy scuffle back and forth with Saenori-san, his preferred bet, from his penthouse media console when the first alarms went off, no more than a blinking light on a side panel but a threat all the same. He raised an eyebrow, then turned to one of his guard Boomers.
"Well," he said tonelessly, "he is here."
"Yes, sir."
Inoue raised his phone and switched the camera feed from ARENA to GREENHOUSE 02. Nemesis was in the process of removing one of his labor Boomer's heads from its body, but, he noted, wasn't really putting a lot of effort into it. Evidently slaughtering the biomechanical equivalent of Filipino migrant workers was not difficult for this man.
Well, no surprise there. Anyone could slaughter a smaller labor Boomer with little to no effort, especially someone wearing a hardsuit. And Nemesis certainly had already proven himself to be a relentless threat even in his smaller suit. Overwhelming force at one of The Underbelly's chokepoints, perhaps the connective tunnel on the seventh floor, would be the most prudent.
He got up and turned to the 55C, which loomed behind his chair a good head taller than the other, smaller 35C's. Then, with the authority of a man who knew just how in control of the situation he was, he began giving orders. "Get the men from greenhouses oh-one and oh-three out of there, then seal off both of them. Arm the security system for priority-two threats on the external layers, but be discreet, keep the mainland bridge open, and get a strike team of ten men and five security Boomers on rail oh-two-three. We'll want explosives – give the armory clearance to use the TOW's and the micromissile launchers. Trigger the Boomerfish and the PDC's if he tries an aquatic route. Again, be discreet. Move all the Katagi into the inner-layer areas, but do not let them know why. We cannot afford panic."
"Yes, sir," the Boomer growled. "Should I request backup from command?"
Inoue hated when people tried to second-guess him, and hated when Boomers did it even more, but he had to admit, it had a point. "Tell them we might want to send the 17-B's as backup, but no more."
"Yes, sir." It paused, eyes dilating and expanding. "Unable to send message. Suspect jammer in the area."
Of course. "Range?"
"Unknown."
"Well, we've got courier avian Boomers for this exact purpose. Send em' out."
"Yes, sir." Another pause. "Carrier pigeons launched."
"Excellent." Inoue sat back down, picked up his phone again, and set his camera feed to the cluster just outside the passageway, which was really more of a cargo railway, between greenhouse oh-two and the main platform. His men weren't there yet, undoubtedly scrambling for their guns and armor, but they'd get there in time, and when they did… well.
Watching that gaijin fucker finally get what was coming to him would be the most satisfying thing he'd ever see. Of that much, he was certain.
____________________________________________________________________________
Nemesis kicked off the cargo elevator rail, landing in a crouch on the greenhouse's upper deck. It was a bog-standard storage space, a handful of metal crates all loaded onto what looked to be an old light rail system that looped around the greenhouse, then went straight out, connecting the greenhouse and its parent platform. The track was uncovered; outside, he could hear the subaudible rush of Tokyo Bay, even see a smidgen of GENOM Tower's looming mass.
It was too open. Even if he had the heavy hardsuit, it was an obvious trap, a chokepoint so simple there was no way he was getting through it without Yakuza interference. He was almost relieved when a cluster of armored guards scrambled through the passageway at the other end, taking up combat positions in seconds.
He was less relieved when he saw what they were carrying. Two with heavy TOW missile launchers hefted on their shoulders plus a case of reloads, and three with the honeycombed cylinders characteristic of micromissile launchers.
All pointed at him. All very capable of scrapping his armor with one hit.
Nemesis sprinted forward, clearing the first thirty meters in mere seconds, but it wasn't enough; he was still a good seventy meters distant when the two missile launchers fired in tandem, screaming toward him at supersonic velocities. He didn't even have room to dodge to the sides, and the micromissiles would finish him if he were to swan-dive straight down.
Instinct took over. Without hesitating, he jumped off the side of the bridge, grabbing some exposed piping and swinging himself under it just as the first missile slammed into where he'd been moments before. Even from there, clinging by both hands to old power cabling, the impact was palpable, the shockwave bending the bridge slightly.
The second missile was luckier; its heat-seeking functions kicked in and aimed it straight into the monorail, snapping the bridge in two like a toothpick right behind where Nemesis was holding on. He winced briefly, then sprang into action. He kicked out, then hooked his legs between into the gap between an old coolant pipe and the rail proper, and then let go. The pipe bent, creaked, but held.
His arms free, hanging upside down over the black ocean, he triggered the charges designated on his HUD as GREENHOUSE 1.
There was a brief moment of silence. Then, a muffled THWUMP from below, as the RDX charges fired straight into the foamed titanium support pillars which kept the greenhouse's support platform above water. It began to take on water almost immediately, the emergency vacuum bladders meant to keep it afloat having long since shattered, and seconds later the other half of the bridge was descending down past Nemesis with an awful sucking sound.
He could hear shouting from the guards, but his audio compensators, meant to keep him from shattering his own eardrums in the presence of high explosives, were still dialing back. He couldn't tell if they thought he was dead or if they were just rattled by the loss of several billion yen worth of opioids to the salty depths of the Pacific, but a quick switch to thermal revealed that they'd made the mistake he was hoping for. They had crawled out of their doorway, were moving forward to his last known location.
Which meant their rearguard was unexposed. Perfect.
Nemesis swung his upper body to the piping, unhooked his legs, and scrambled spiderlike under the shattered bridge, occasionally tearing away a cable duct or a coolant pipe with his weight. Then, he clambered back onto the top of the bridge, letting his legs dangle once again, blindly pulling himself up, until he crawled right behind one of the guards with the micromissile launchers.
He grabbed the Yakuza wrestling-style, threw him off screaming into the ocean, then deftly plucked the 250-pound micromissile launcher out of the air before it could follow him, grabbed it one-handed, then swung around to face the remaining guards. They were still turning around, still trying to process that they'd just lost one of their guys and their target had his gun, still wrestling with the heft of their own weapons, when Nemesis opened fire.
A dozen 12mm shaped-charge explosives whistled outward as one, roared as one, punching a litany of half-meter wide holes in the four thugs. Their innards, shattered armor and fractured bones, were blown off into the ocean. He tossed the launcher, now spent, in after them; it bounced off the top of the sinking greenhouse into a mass of bloody seafoam.
Nemesis turned back towards the doorway to the main platform. Another cluster of guards had seemingly sprung out of nowhere, four assault rifles and two 40mm airburst grenade launchers, their laser sights playing over his skull-faced helmet.
He shrugged, bent his knees, and jumped ten meters straight into the air...
____________________________________________________________________________
They backpedal, raise their guns, try to form a half circle and shoot you down. Good use of tactics. Reasonable actions. If it was anyone else, say a Boomer with half its sensory array ripped out, it might even work.
You're better than that.
Your main guns, undersized offshoots of the M60 Browning stapled onto your arms' framework, roar with unmitigated glee before any of them can even squeeze off a shot. The first handful of shots catch the guy right in front of you in the chest, and he folds in on himself like origami. The others don't get the same privilege of wasting your ammo, because now you've gotten used to the way the guns buckle in your hands, and you just mow them down. One shot, one kill, seven dead.
The barge is mostly flat bottom packed with padlocked shipping crates, and a tower in the front. You scramble up the tower just as the windows shatter and assault rifle fire sputters across the deck.
Evidently even the ship's actual crew are armed. Pathetic.
You grab one of them, reaching up from under the window, pulling him through jagged shards of glass and then hurling him down to hit the deck, then throw yourself into the control room. You punch the guy in the chest, shattering the entirety of his ribcage in a single strike, then fire a five-round burst through him into three others. Which leaves you, alone, in the control room of a barge weighed down with several hundred tons of what you assume are highly illegal substances, but still surrounded by very hostile forces.
Speaking of which. You duck and roll on instinct as an RPG whistles through an open window, just past you, then airbursts near your back just before it can hit anything vital, the blast wave warping the already shattered window frames. You look up, track it, see the clown on the other barge with five different kinds of skingraft on his face alone curse, reload. That he probably had that thing pointed at his comrades just in case they failed, and probably would have killed his own if he had a clean shot, is not lost on you.
But, you think as you bring your guns up to riddle the guy with .50 caliber rounds, that's the way it's always been. Your father fought the War on Drugs before it was a real war, and even then the cartels would burn their own stock just in hopes of catching a gringo in the firestorm.
These guys are even worse: Ex-Venezuelan Army, probably ousted by the Colombian puppet government set up in Caracas, gone from mild socialist to fanatic Post-Maoists in the span of a few months. Savages with state power - take that power away, and they're savages again.
The RPG man lets go of his weapon just before he crumples and falls in the river, and another guy, who looks at least twenty years younger, grabs it, and begins to reload. You shoot him as well. In fact, for good measure, you just fire for about ten seconds into the side of the other barge and stop when something over starts to burn. No time to check if the barge will survive or not. You've got - check the radar here - three more barges to strip of their passengers, plus twelve fast attack boats with probably three men per boat.
With a suit like this? All in a day's work.
____________________________________________________________________________
And the flechette grenade bounced once before exploding in a shower of red and silver. Nemesis fired his impact compensator jets for a second, landing directly in the intestines of what had once been one of the grenadiers, before grabbing the dead man's weapon and unloading it, then jamming the magazine into one of his thigh ammo caches. It never hurt to have a few extra shots, and judging by the security presence he'd already encountered tonight, he was probably going to need it. He needed to get into Inoue's penthouse fast , before the Yakuza decided to start destroying evidence or he got swarmed by Inoue's forces.
His wireframe highlighted three elevators which wrapped around the water tank and lead up to Inoue's penthouse. He could make a sprint straight for the elevators from his current location, a loading bay for the now-wrecked monorail, climb the shaft, make his way to the penthouse, gather as much incriminating evidence as possible, blow the support pillars, then get out while the superstructure sank to the bottom of Tokyo Bay. It looked easy enough.
Nemesis broke into a run, setting his power cell's output to one hundred twenty percent for three minutes. Three minutes, forty miles an hour, the maximum strain his hardsuit's musculature and endo-exoskeleton could bear before something broke. He almost felt as though he wasn't in control of his own legs, that he was just a rider on a runaway car. The tunnel whirled by, light strobing like the decorations on a shoddy indoor rollercoaster. Men poured out of connecting corridors, blindly firing in his general direction, and he leaped over them or just plowed straight through.
He hit the elevator hard, vibroblade out, lancing through an unlucky security Boomer who hadn't even had the chance to raise its laser gun before being impaled. He pulled out, and began to climb the elevator shaft as Yakuza scrambled frantically below him. For once, it seemed as though part of his assault plan was working. He was rising rapidly, the Yakuza thugs couldn't hit him even if he stood still, and most importantly, he hadn't involved any of the Underbelly's numerous civilians in his operation.
Yet, scaling the elevator shaft, as bullets whizzed past him at not-quite-sonic speeds, he couldn't help but feel as though he was forgetting something. Something big and fast and moving up below him.
He let go, twisted in midair, and fired another flechette grenade at the rapidly approaching elevator, where five Yakuza with sniper rifles lay in wait. They scattered, and the grenade only shredded the innards of two of the men, and the other three fired in quick succession. One round missed entirely, but the second clipped his shoulder plate and the third slammed right into his chest. Nemesis hit the elevator with zero control over his reflexes and enough pain to send most normal people into unconsciousness.
The Yakuza lowered their weapons to his prone form. He remained stock-still, only holding onto consciousness by virtue of his autodoc's built-in defibrillator running piezoelectric shocks along his nerves.
The elevator climbed. They began to approach, poking at him with the barrels of their rifles.
"Think he's dead?" one of the men choked out. "Probably," said another. "All that fuss and all it took was one well-placed shot. Guess our boy was a real glassjaw all along."
He could feel the elevator slowing down. Now was his chance. One of the Yakuza, the one who hadn't spoken, stepped a little too close, his boot swinging in to kick Nemesis in the side.
His arm whipped out, catching it, and he squeezed until he felt bone give way. The scream that followed caught the other two just a little off guard, allowing the vigilante to spring forward, tackle one of the men right in the legs, roll him around before they even hit the floor, and finally bring him up as a human shield against the third guy's sniper. He felt the impact of the .336 round shatter his shield's ribcage, ping-ponging through vital organs, and threw the now-lifeless body straight at the last sniper, pinning him.
Then, as the elevator doors opened into light, he grabbed all three, even the two living, and threw them through the opening.
It was a cheap psychological warfare trick, meant to whittle down the will of whatever lesser Yakuza were in there. But the moment he did it, the blue swish of a particle beam cannon cut through the air above his head, and Nemesis had no choice but to duck and scramble back into the elevator.
Well, he'd expected he was going to have to fight Boomers. Everything else had been a warmup; now the real work began.
____________________________________________________________________________
For all the pretensions to luxury the word 'penthouse' brought with it, Senjuku Inoue's personal quarters weren't much to look at, only a large cylinder split by the three cargo elevators that lined it. The floor was concrete, riddled with holes where wiring had been ripped up, then hastily covered with an assortment of rugs that weren't antique so much as they were antique- like , hastily aged. One long screen lined the arc of the cylinder opposite him, evidently Inoue's media console. Right now it was playing a sped-up view of the Megatokyo skyline at night. There was a little interface screen right next to a big brown leather couch facing the console. An interface to the Underbelly's computer system. Nemesis's target.
Nemesis knew there were at least three Boomers, two last-generation 35C's and one 55C as a part of the basic security detail for any of Sato's men. It was the rest of them, the dozen or so other blobs of heat that his scanners could pick up through the door, that worried him. Tough though his armor was, it couldn't stand up to multiple particle beams focused in one place, and that meant he couldn't peak out the door and get concrete positioning data beyond an approximate number of forces. But he couldn't afford to stay in the elevator, either. It was only a matter of time before someone sent it back down.
He was going to have to wing it. That was why he'd brought depleted uranium spikes in place of burst flechettes for his railgun.
Nemesis pulled on the elevator doors, wrenching them just wide enough for him to toss a smoke grenade in. Black smoke vomited from the little contraption's openings, and he yanked the doors open, ducked, and rolled as a cascade of blue energy slashed through where he'd just been standing. He fired an HE grenade in their general direction before dashing through the cloud, vibroblade springing from its sheath, blindly leaping for something that looked like a Boomer on his thermal vision, and being met by an armored knee that whistled by his face; clearly at least one of the units had decided to move on his position instead of waiting for the smoke to clear.
But he could see this one, now, a moving splotch of red and orange in a roiling mass of deep blue, and he ducked under its next strike and slashed across its chest. It stumbled back, barely wounded, then let loose with a flurry of strikes that rang against Nemesis's armor, until he flicked upward, jammed his sword into the thing's throat, and pressed down. They dropped as one, just as another white-hot beam split the smoke again.
He sheathed his vibroblade, ducked behind a barely visible couch, and fired a railgun spike at the source of the heat, now fading fast into a mass of red and green. It hit, and there was a mechanical grinding noise followed by a rattling of thunderclaps as the Boomer self-destructed.
There was a whooshing noise, and the smoke began to disperse, fading from pitch black to a burnt grey. Someone in the next room over had probably turned on the vents, probably Inoue himself. As his vision became clearer, Nemesis switched from thermal to conventional and began to move around the outside of the penthouse, careful to keep the Boomers to his right. Sensors flicking out, he assessed the situation.
It was good news. The two 35C's and one 55C, true bona fide Combat Boomers, were only backed up by about a dozen modded Fighting Boomers, endoskeletory models with only soft external armor and taser knuckles for protection. Undoubtedly they probably had a few extra tricks among them - these were Yakuza Boomers after all - but practically nothing they could throw at him would be as bad as, say, that Gerlitch he'd encountered last night. Nemesis smirked under his helmet. This looked almost easy . Maybe too easy.
One of the fighting Boomers, which looked sort of like Will Ferrell if Will Ferrel had a chainsaw built into his arm, turned, saw him, and motioned with its saw arm. As one, the rest of the Boomers, temporarily disoriented by the smoke, turned, and moved. They were trying to pin him down, engaging in coordinated melee where ballistics had failed.
He wasn't going to let them get that close.
Nemesis raised his grenade launcher arm, yanked out the airburst clip he'd grabbed earlier from his thigh storage, and jammed it into his external feed, all in the span of about two seconds. The moment the Will Ferrell Boomer got within swiping range with his chainsaw, an oil-spattered monstrosity which barely looked like it wouldn't jam within the first few seconds of operation, he fired all five 40mm HE grenades point-blank into the approaching swarm.
He could feel the blast wave slam into him even under his armor, pinning him against the penthouse wall. The Boomers didn't fare much better; the first round ripped through Will Ferrell and another Fighting Boomer, and the second took out another two, lifting them off their feet and flinging them against their comrades, but by the time the next three hit two Fighting Boomers and the 55C had scrambled forward to absorb the explosions; the 55C just soaked up the blast, its regenerating flesh shedding white-hot frag as quickly as it cut across its armor, and the Fighting Boomers each grabbed long objects mounted on their backs and brought them forward.
Ballistic shields , Nemesis thought, and then the 55C was on him.
He dodged the first blow, a quick, bone-shattering right cross, but he had no room to dodge after that, desperately trying to move to the side only to be hemmed in by the shields, perfectly positioned to take a clawed roundhouse kick straight to the face.
Even under his armor, which buckled just a little bit to take the blow, it hurt . He staggered back, raised his arms on instinct, just in time to block an overhead smash from the 55C that would have caved his skull in. As it was, he could practically feel his armor warp and microfracture under the sheer force of the Boomer pressing down on him. He pushed; the Boomer pushed back with all the strength its carbon-nanotube musculature provided; his arms bent inward.
He had no choice. He let go, and just as the Boomer wound up to punch his ribcage in, he slapped his forearm control.
The Underbelly howled , polysteel and ferrocrete grinding against itself as a series of synchronous explosions ripped through Greenhouses 01 and 03, tearing them loose from the superstructure, obliterating millions of dollars of reinforcement and load-bearing structures in an instant. Invisible shockwaves rippled through the ocean, through the Underbelly itself, hard enough to overwhelm the sensitive pressure sensors on the penthouse Boomers. The 55C, formerly so intent on pulverizing his enemy, staggered back for a moment, righted itself, then refocused, just in time to receive a thruster-powered uppercut that shattered its lower jaw and carried Nemesis up, just barely out of the Boomer's reach as it staggered back once again.
Nemesis leapt over the swarm of Boomers, but his balance was just a little off and he hit the penthouse floor hard, half-rolling through a glass table and stopping on his back in front of a sofa. He pulled himself to his feet to see the 35C's rushing him, each holding vibronaginatas in their clawed hands. He fired his railgun, spiking the left 35C through the eye and out its skull, wasn't fast enough to spike the other 35C, jumped over a naginata swiped that would have cut his legs off, landed on the bladed staff, and walked up it to kick the 35C in the face before it could let go of its weapon.
From there, he grabbed the Boomer by the skull and pulled, flipping over it, then mule-kicking the machine in mid-air, propelling himself off its back, firing his jets above the swarm once more. The 55C rose up to meet him on its flightjets, but Nemesis was ready for it this time. At the last second, he cut his thrusters and let himself drop straight into the six remaining fighting Boomers, dropping an HE grenade just below him.
The blast wave did almost no damage to any of the remaining six - the ones with the Ballistic shields had figured out how to counter them pretty easily, dashing in and putting them up before any fragments could shred their outer coverings. But the grenade's blast force wumphed out in all directions, propelling the falling Nemesis into the air once again, straight under the still-moving 55C. The combat Boomer was utterly exposed, unable to cut its jets in time before Nemesis unsheathed his vibroblade and, with a spinning strike, cut a smooth, deep gash straight through it. Then, he grabbed it in midair, and swung around, piledriving the machine straight through a glass table and into the concrete floor. Orange circulatory fluid gushed from its wounds; it twitched, but didn't get up.
The remaining Boomers spread out, surrounding Nemesis as he dropped to the ground in a puddle of 55C innards. The two with the ballistic shields advanced in a pincer movement, moving in perfect synchronization for bulky objects strapped to their thighs. Before either of them could heft their weapons, he made a thruster-assisted jump over their heads, vibroblade whipping around to decapitate both of them in one strike.
But he was open, now, and the four remaining Boomers surged forward, attempting a simultaneous tackle. He fired another HE grenade point-blank, and blew them away. In two strikes, he had obliterated a good few million yen worth of hardware. It felt good .
Still, he had no time to rest. A quick thermal scan revealed a hot blob just below his feet, probably Inoue in what passed for a panic room. He'd deal with him later, ideally before reinforcements arrived. He walked up to Inoue's media console, popped open the access ports, and inserted a slim grey needle into one of them. A scroll wheel and a progress bar rezzed into existence on the lower left of his HUD, as Maria's malware began copying off anything that looked even remotely sensitive and beaming it to his suit. With luck, he'd have enough evidence to convict Sato for Kagemusha in a minute or less, and then he'd just head out the way he came.
That was when the cargo elevator behind him slid open. And that was when Nemesis turned to look into the beady eyes of a BU-12B Battle Boomer.
Amazon Basin – [classified] miles southwest of Caracas
Morning
The water is brown, not quite black, with silt, and every few minutes you have to reach up with your suit's hand and clear your cameras with an idle thumb just so you can see in the near-darkness of the riverbed. The lenses are protected, yes, but the silt washes along with the current and against it like a shit-colored snowstorm, millions of flecks of soil following the river's little eddies in whirling dervishes, in waves which dump what feels like tons of raw sediment on your lonesome, isolated figure, to the point that you can barely see your hand in front of your face. But orders are orders, and your orders were to retract your supercavitation drives a good klick out of the convoy's radar range, and to walk on the riverbed the rest of the way – supposed to be stealthier this way. And you have passed what look like underwater minelayer drones here and there, probably rigged to kill anything moving faster than a big fish, so your orders were correct.
But God damn it! You've been ankle-deep in indescribable muck for nearly an hour now, and your passive LiDAR is no closer to picking up anything on the surface bigger than a school of catfish, nothing barge-sized. They're supposed to ride low in the water, but even then you're starting to wonder if the river itself has sabotaged your efforts to sense your target, every laser beam diffused by sand and manure flecks from the ranches upriver before it can penetrate a single damn yard. It's tempting to just swim up and check , but you didn't become a hardsuit operator by following every stupid impulse in your head.
Certainly, you'd suffered the same steel-belly syndrome as the rest of the greenhorns in your squad, believing that just because you were wearing a suit which multiplied your strength by a factor of eight and could stop 9mm rounds dead on, you were invincible. But you learned quickly enough that a hardsuit is a piece of equipment, same as an Apache or a Bradley, with limits, and you learned to respect those limits. The rest tried to take RPG's on with headbutts and the like in the sims. That's why your squaddies got stuck with the boring jobs and you got to keep your hardsuit.
Then again, you don't advance in the army unless you show a little willingness to innovate.
So you moonwalk.
You fire your jets, set for two-second bursts, and kick out of the ankle-deep muck with as much force as your hardsuit will give in endurance mode, striding downriver, letting the current carry you just a bit before the weight of your hardsuit and its canned air slams you back down into the riverbed again. Again, again you do this, and not once does a drone mine trigger and blow you into bloody chunks. Your power consumption barely flickers, your legs barely feel the strain of leaps that would make any Olympian proud – truly, this is the way to travel.
It's another ten minutes of doing this before your proximity alarm starts going off. You make one last leap, one last impact into the muck, and look up – but of course you can't see anything, only that the dark brownness looks slightly darker than it did before. You switch on your overlays, thermal, motion, even your gummed-up LiDAR, desperately trying to see what the suit's computers already know is there. And the displays oblige:
Five dark shapes crawl across your vision, red-hot with movement, and a dozen other shapes of various sizes follow in their wake. Barges, probably, with fast attack boats in between their wakes.
This is it. This is the convoy you've been tracking for a week now, the one route you thought the cartels would never take. This is God-Only-Knows how many goons hiding enough synthcoke to fund a small army, and enough guns to equip it. This is what you've been waiting for.
First, you set your power consumption to 'active'. Then you leap out from the muck, surge your jets, and breach between two barges, screaming ten, twenty, twenty-five feet into the air.
Below you a handful of men with oversized AR's, some with chrome and some without it, and they are all panicked, screaming, gesturing to the one guy near a handful of black glossy
cases to open them up and give them their heavy guns for godsakes.
But it's too late. You are here, moving too fast for them to track.
You are here, and you hit the deck with a resounding
THWOOM.
Tokyo Bay
February 11, 2036
8:33 pm
"Gavin? Gavin?"
Maria's voice over the comm shook him out of his reverie. "Nemesis here. I've hit the bottom."
"Yeah, you just went silent there for a bit. We don't want to have to fish you out of the bay or anything!"
"And I'll be maintaining radio silence until I breach Point Alpha. In the meantime, get into position and be ready to start jamming on my signal."
"You sure? You're not gonna run out of air or anything, right?"
Vicain's voice, a little reedier than usual. "The Hardsuit was purpose-built for long-term hazardous operations. Of course it has enough liquefied atmosphere mixture for him to spend a good eight hours. Granted, we could have just rigged up some gills, ran those through pulmonary implants…"
"Doctor, you should know well enough by now I don't intend to get chrome unless I absolutely have to. Real Special Forces take pride in keeping their bodies optimized without outside help."
"Fair enough. Just remember that you've got a weakspot on your back and it really shouldn't get breached."
"Will do. Nemesis out."
And then there was silence again, save the low roaring of Tokyo Bay's waters, and there was darkness again, save the blue-green glare of his HUD. It was peaceful, in a sense. Comforting.
He'd picked up some info from an urbex scuba enthusiast site which had done soundings of the bay after the quake, and picked a relatively uncluttered drop site that was still a good distance from The Underbelly, a simple drone-boat ride with his hardsuit out and back. He'd expected, at the very least, bare seabed, before he ran into anything major.
Yet with LiDAR and night vision on, it was clear that the floor of Tokyo bay was anything but bare. Nemesis couldn't even moonwalk forward without smashing into a mound of half-buried concrete pilings, the skeleton of a storefront, a dissected ATM. He'd heard whole districts had been shattered, then washed away by the one-two punch of the Second Kanto Quake and the tsunami that had followed it, but it had all seemed distant to the real Megatokyo, which thrummed with life even in its most desolate parts. Now here he was, picking across their remains like a scavenger.
As he passed a downed adscreen, the LCD display now smooth and dark, it occurred to Nemesis for the first time how little he knew the city, how little any of his team knew. He'd read once that the human brain could only hold up to two hundred specific social connections before it started making assumptions and generalizations. Maybe it was like that – maybe you could only understand so much of a megacity before the information just passed through your brain like water through a sieve.
Here, for example, loomed before him something he didn't understand: The Fault.
Somehow, he could see it even without his enhanced vision, the way the darkness of the seabed suddenly became so much darker. It stretched into the horizon, became the horizon, so that he was looking out at a shear wall of total blackness that he knew had to be only fifty meters or so across but felt as limitless as the ocean itself. There was no other way to describe it but black.
He knew that the Fault had torn the Tokyo region in two, and even now scarred an otherwise rebuilt city. Lonely Planet had told him that it was a suicide hotspot now, like Aokigahara once had been, and the highways were lined with signs begging salarimen to Please Reconsider and Think of Your Family. Gaijin social media accounts were packed with selfies next to the signs, looming large and white in the foreground.
Everything else had been restored, even improved upon by GENOM, save for a few outlying wastelands and slum districts, but every city had those nowadays.Why hadn't GENOM bothered to fill the Fault?
Sure, submarine laser scans had revealed that it went down almost as deep as the Marianas Trench, but it was practically invisible on the seaside. They would just have to dump a few thousand tons of landfill into it on land, and the problem would go away. That's what Americans would have done, at least, so why the grim idolization of a big crack in the middle of the city? Why put up the signs? Why remind themselves of what was lost? It all seemed so Japanese to him. Why, he could not say.
But he had no time to let his thoughts wander. He leaped out into the darkness, then fired his jets, feeling inertia push slowly push him through the churning waters.
He had a job to do. Four nights, and the Sleeping Dragon would be broken. He had made an oath to wipe out these scum when he'd seen Josie Ng's maimed body, and by God he would fulfill it.
____________________________________________________________________________
The Underbelly
February 11, 2036
8:54 pm
And now, The Underbelly.
They come by barge and by bridge to ramshackle docks smeared across the face of the platform, swarming over rusty sheet metal to pay the Boomer and get in. They don't care about the way the little half-mountain, a shadow of GENOM tower in shape and form, has been ripped open, scarred and slagged by angry neutrons. Most of them are repeat customers, have been for years, and who cares about a few gaping wounds in the superstructure anyway? They don't come to the Underbelly for the fuckin' architecture, or for the lack of Megatokyo's pulsing neon heartbeat. They come to watch the fights and get high.
They swarm through the doors, slap credchips in the hands of an old heavy industrial Boomer, hope it recognizes them and won't wade through the crowd to literally throw them out. As far as bouncers go, Ol' Jiisan is crude, maybe a little too rough, but effective. They writhe like a great serpent down damp hallways, squeeze off into dark side alleys to piss, storm up rickety staircases that were never meant to hold more than ten people at a time, trample over the fallen, push, push, push until they reach the viewing section.
Who are they? They are the superfluous, the hordes of meat that the rebuilt Megatokyo had no use for. Too poor to be sold to, too costly for low-level employment compared to the tireless efficiency of the Boomer, too human for corporate jobs, tired, addicted, desperate to remember what it felt like for their brains to produce endorphins independent of needles and slap patches. They are the criminals who call themselves organized, aimless tribes of angry young men built from birth for violence. There are even a few of them who are employed , who have come down here to go slumming, to rub shoulders with poverty and feel the elation of their own security.
But they are all equal, all spectators, in the arena.
It was once a water storage tank, made to augment the invisible systems which kept Tokyo's taps flowing without interruption, and even with the Yakuza's ramshackle seating bolted to the sides it's still clearly meant to be one, a smooth concrete cylinder twice as wide as it is tall.
But The Underbelly is not a place where things are meant to last. Hence the ring of black mold discoloring the concrete just where the waterline used to be, hence the way the whole structure groans, howls when anything tougher than an ocean breeze hits it, hence the way the sickly-green fluorescent lights strung up by the Yakuza have begun to break free of their emplacements, and here and there dangle like hung men, hence the way the sound system scrapes and grinds on the nerves with a metallic aftertaste lacing every noise.
The only thing that the passage of time and technology hasn't chewed up and spit back out like a stray piece of bubblegum is the floor, which is scuffed and pockmarked but tough enough, thick enough to still look out on the whispering ocean almost unaltered, and the filtration membrane. The 'brane was made to drop into the water, suck it, pump it through to fill up the tank, and despite the energy costs of having it break molecular bonds as it went through, and despite all the salt-scum that had to be collected in massive canisters lining the tank, it worked well enough. But the Yaks haven't used it in years.
Tonight it's Perfect Tommy, who has never lost a match in his six-month Ban Ji Quan career, who has arms like industrial accidents and a cybernetic voice box that makes him sound like Jeff Goldblum with smoker's lungs, versus Iwata Saenori, who has never lost a match in his eight-month Aikido career and wears old-style wooden sandals and a kimono everywhere except the ring. Neither of them have any intention of leaving the ring until the other is crippled or dead, for those are the rules, crippled or dead or worse, no substitutes accepted. Both of them are rigged with the last generation of chrome produced before the bottom dropped out of the recreational cybernetics market around 2030, fast, brutal stuff that almost brings a human up to a Boomer's level. Almost.
For humans bleed and break and weep and moan, and that's what the audience is here for. This is a world where pain is spectacle, where watching two Boomers mutely tear each other apart with mechanical precision can never be enough, where the human element is still, against all market forecasts, indispensable. But we are not here to dwell on how the latest McKinsey Institute report remarked on how little remains for humans to do, how a human-free world would see rates of growth that would make all the dead economists cum in their graves. Tonight, we are here to watch men die.
Case in point: Kashiro Yamamoto, professional thug. Thirtysomething, got first-row seats to the 2020 Olympics when his grandmother won a raffle, back when times were good, lost his family in the quake and joined the Yakuza to compensate. His job is the best thing to happen to him: he just patrols the half-submerged corridors of Greenhouse 02, checks gear when needed, waves an AR at jumping shadows when he thinks his superiors are watching. He lives in the Underbelly, sleeps in the mornings when the last of the junkies have been cleared out, eats ramen from the vending machines, dreams of going somewhere else. But where else would he go? So here he is, checking places only he's ever set foot in, hatchways and access tunnels where pre-Boomer robots were meant to swarm and flicker out of sight with nothing but an assault rifle and a motion detector.
At last he comes to the end of his patrol, where the corridor just sort of droops, bent by some chance superheating from the last particle beam strike, straight into the ocean. He shines his light down there, sees nothing but black on black, waves the motion detector around. Nothing. For a supposedly indestructible citywide crime syndicate, his employers sure can be paranoid. Do they honestly think Nemesis would strike here? Why attack a place filled with enough Boomeroids and cyberpsychos to fill a government rehab center? If he were Nemesis, he'd assume that security had been bumped up pretty much everywhere, which it had, and go for something reasonable, like-
Hold on. His motion detector just beeped. Not long enough to confirm that something was out there moving, but long enough that he had to check. Part of the job. There it is again, a little bleeeeeep running sideways on his screen, but all he can see is black on black.
Is it a big fish? Probably not - Aqua city's collapse dumped a whole bunch of toxic rare earths into the bay. If you believe the really cracked-out newsfeeds, they've still got fissionable material buried under one of the main reactor towers. Only the little guys can handle that sort of shit, and yet, there it is again! Coming forward, fast now, up, the motion detector screeching, and he raises his rifle-
But it's too late. He sees the shape of it, black with a deathshead of white in the center, and knows his time is up.
He doesn't even get to scream.
Nemesis wasted no time. He grabbed the guard by his neck, twisted until he heard the telltale sound of cartilage snapping, then tossed the man into the water. Then he switched his atmospheric intake to 'external' and began his hunt.
Night vision bathing the world in a day-glo green, he moved along an old access corridor which ringed the auxiliary greenhouse, constantly scanning the darkness ahead of him. It was large, vaulted by machinery, and dripped constantly, reminding him of a medieval monastery. The wireframe Maria had pulled from Sato's servers was in the corner of his vision, and it suggested that the optimal route would be through a light rail track to the main platform, seven floors up. That way, he'd only be dealing with the greenhouse security on his way up to the penthouse and could bypass the ground level, where security would be heaviest.
After about three minutes without a single sign of Yakuza forces, it became clear that there was no stairway up the pyramidal structure on the outer ring which hadn't been buried by debris or sheared off by particle beam. He was going to have to go through the center of the platform. Detection was inevitable; hopefully he could make it to the Underbelly's main platform, then use the charges he'd planted on the auxiliaries' support pillars as a distraction. He unsheathed his vibrosword and made for a side hatchway he'd passed earlier.
One side corridor later, he emerged into a large, dimly-lit space which definitely resembled a greenhouse, what with the thick layers of hydroponic crops stacked up like an overgrown server farm. An initial scan revealed no more than seven labor Boomers flitting between stacks, tending to the crops in place of human botanists, plus a lone guard armed with only an FN FAL. A second scan identified the plants as Papaver Somniferum Vulgaris, a genetically engineered species of opium poppy designed to resist any defoliants the authorities could throw at it.
Sick bastards . He normally didn't enjoy his work, but sinking this greenhouse specifically would feel very, very good. First, though, he had to get past the Boomers.
And in a hardsuit, there was only one way to do that. He clicked on his comm, sent the message to start jamming, and clicked it off.
Nemesis unsheathed his vibrosword, walked up to the nearest Boomer with a spring in his step, and tapped it on the shoulder; it whirled around right as he drove the blade straight into the thing's chassis, the vibrations ripping gouts of orange circulatory fluid out of its primary cardiac pump. He yanked the blade out, then slammed the Boomer's face straight into the nearest stack with enough force to knock it over.
Alarms began to sound, and he broke into a run for what his map said was supposed to be a cargo elevator. One Boomer saw him, squawked a wordless obscenity and ran at him, gardening shears swinging back and forth, and he just grabbed it by its head and pulled, not even breaking stride. Another came behind him, and he mule-kicked the Boomer in the chest before leaping a good six meters forward, vibrosword out, stabbing into the lone guard as he scrambled for an alarm panel; the thug's hand stopped just short of it before his body crumpled.
His scanner had the five remaining Boomers converging on him, and no signs of other major threats, but Nemesis had neither the time nor the patience to waste ammunition on the robots. Grasping the track on which the central cargo elevator rested, he sheathed his vibrosword and began to climb, launching himself over and over again with all the strength his suit's compressed musculature and plasma thrusters could provide. The rail strained under his grip, but he kept going.
____________________________________________________________________________
Senjuku Inoue was watching Perfect Tommy scuffle back and forth with Saenori-san, his preferred bet, from his penthouse media console when the first alarms went off, no more than a blinking light on a side panel but a threat all the same. He raised an eyebrow, then turned to one of his guard Boomers.
"Well," he said tonelessly, "he is here."
"Yes, sir."
Inoue raised his phone and switched the camera feed from ARENA to GREENHOUSE 02. Nemesis was in the process of removing one of his labor Boomer's heads from its body, but, he noted, wasn't really putting a lot of effort into it. Evidently slaughtering the biomechanical equivalent of Filipino migrant workers was not difficult for this man.
Well, no surprise there. Anyone could slaughter a smaller labor Boomer with little to no effort, especially someone wearing a hardsuit. And Nemesis certainly had already proven himself to be a relentless threat even in his smaller suit. Overwhelming force at one of The Underbelly's chokepoints, perhaps the connective tunnel on the seventh floor, would be the most prudent.
He got up and turned to the 55C, which loomed behind his chair a good head taller than the other, smaller 35C's. Then, with the authority of a man who knew just how in control of the situation he was, he began giving orders. "Get the men from greenhouses oh-one and oh-three out of there, then seal off both of them. Arm the security system for priority-two threats on the external layers, but be discreet, keep the mainland bridge open, and get a strike team of ten men and five security Boomers on rail oh-two-three. We'll want explosives – give the armory clearance to use the TOW's and the micromissile launchers. Trigger the Boomerfish and the PDC's if he tries an aquatic route. Again, be discreet. Move all the Katagi into the inner-layer areas, but do not let them know why. We cannot afford panic."
"Yes, sir," the Boomer growled. "Should I request backup from command?"
Inoue hated when people tried to second-guess him, and hated when Boomers did it even more, but he had to admit, it had a point. "Tell them we might want to send the 17-B's as backup, but no more."
"Yes, sir." It paused, eyes dilating and expanding. "Unable to send message. Suspect jammer in the area."
Of course. "Range?"
"Unknown."
"Well, we've got courier avian Boomers for this exact purpose. Send em' out."
"Yes, sir." Another pause. "Carrier pigeons launched."
"Excellent." Inoue sat back down, picked up his phone again, and set his camera feed to the cluster just outside the passageway, which was really more of a cargo railway, between greenhouse oh-two and the main platform. His men weren't there yet, undoubtedly scrambling for their guns and armor, but they'd get there in time, and when they did… well.
Watching that gaijin fucker finally get what was coming to him would be the most satisfying thing he'd ever see. Of that much, he was certain.
____________________________________________________________________________
Nemesis kicked off the cargo elevator rail, landing in a crouch on the greenhouse's upper deck. It was a bog-standard storage space, a handful of metal crates all loaded onto what looked to be an old light rail system that looped around the greenhouse, then went straight out, connecting the greenhouse and its parent platform. The track was uncovered; outside, he could hear the subaudible rush of Tokyo Bay, even see a smidgen of GENOM Tower's looming mass.
It was too open. Even if he had the heavy hardsuit, it was an obvious trap, a chokepoint so simple there was no way he was getting through it without Yakuza interference. He was almost relieved when a cluster of armored guards scrambled through the passageway at the other end, taking up combat positions in seconds.
He was less relieved when he saw what they were carrying. Two with heavy TOW missile launchers hefted on their shoulders plus a case of reloads, and three with the honeycombed cylinders characteristic of micromissile launchers.
All pointed at him. All very capable of scrapping his armor with one hit.
Nemesis sprinted forward, clearing the first thirty meters in mere seconds, but it wasn't enough; he was still a good seventy meters distant when the two missile launchers fired in tandem, screaming toward him at supersonic velocities. He didn't even have room to dodge to the sides, and the micromissiles would finish him if he were to swan-dive straight down.
Instinct took over. Without hesitating, he jumped off the side of the bridge, grabbing some exposed piping and swinging himself under it just as the first missile slammed into where he'd been moments before. Even from there, clinging by both hands to old power cabling, the impact was palpable, the shockwave bending the bridge slightly.
The second missile was luckier; its heat-seeking functions kicked in and aimed it straight into the monorail, snapping the bridge in two like a toothpick right behind where Nemesis was holding on. He winced briefly, then sprang into action. He kicked out, then hooked his legs between into the gap between an old coolant pipe and the rail proper, and then let go. The pipe bent, creaked, but held.
His arms free, hanging upside down over the black ocean, he triggered the charges designated on his HUD as GREENHOUSE 1.
There was a brief moment of silence. Then, a muffled THWUMP from below, as the RDX charges fired straight into the foamed titanium support pillars which kept the greenhouse's support platform above water. It began to take on water almost immediately, the emergency vacuum bladders meant to keep it afloat having long since shattered, and seconds later the other half of the bridge was descending down past Nemesis with an awful sucking sound.
He could hear shouting from the guards, but his audio compensators, meant to keep him from shattering his own eardrums in the presence of high explosives, were still dialing back. He couldn't tell if they thought he was dead or if they were just rattled by the loss of several billion yen worth of opioids to the salty depths of the Pacific, but a quick switch to thermal revealed that they'd made the mistake he was hoping for. They had crawled out of their doorway, were moving forward to his last known location.
Which meant their rearguard was unexposed. Perfect.
Nemesis swung his upper body to the piping, unhooked his legs, and scrambled spiderlike under the shattered bridge, occasionally tearing away a cable duct or a coolant pipe with his weight. Then, he clambered back onto the top of the bridge, letting his legs dangle once again, blindly pulling himself up, until he crawled right behind one of the guards with the micromissile launchers.
He grabbed the Yakuza wrestling-style, threw him off screaming into the ocean, then deftly plucked the 250-pound micromissile launcher out of the air before it could follow him, grabbed it one-handed, then swung around to face the remaining guards. They were still turning around, still trying to process that they'd just lost one of their guys and their target had his gun, still wrestling with the heft of their own weapons, when Nemesis opened fire.
A dozen 12mm shaped-charge explosives whistled outward as one, roared as one, punching a litany of half-meter wide holes in the four thugs. Their innards, shattered armor and fractured bones, were blown off into the ocean. He tossed the launcher, now spent, in after them; it bounced off the top of the sinking greenhouse into a mass of bloody seafoam.
Nemesis turned back towards the doorway to the main platform. Another cluster of guards had seemingly sprung out of nowhere, four assault rifles and two 40mm airburst grenade launchers, their laser sights playing over his skull-faced helmet.
He shrugged, bent his knees, and jumped ten meters straight into the air...
____________________________________________________________________________
They backpedal, raise their guns, try to form a half circle and shoot you down. Good use of tactics. Reasonable actions. If it was anyone else, say a Boomer with half its sensory array ripped out, it might even work.
You're better than that.
Your main guns, undersized offshoots of the M60 Browning stapled onto your arms' framework, roar with unmitigated glee before any of them can even squeeze off a shot. The first handful of shots catch the guy right in front of you in the chest, and he folds in on himself like origami. The others don't get the same privilege of wasting your ammo, because now you've gotten used to the way the guns buckle in your hands, and you just mow them down. One shot, one kill, seven dead.
The barge is mostly flat bottom packed with padlocked shipping crates, and a tower in the front. You scramble up the tower just as the windows shatter and assault rifle fire sputters across the deck.
Evidently even the ship's actual crew are armed. Pathetic.
You grab one of them, reaching up from under the window, pulling him through jagged shards of glass and then hurling him down to hit the deck, then throw yourself into the control room. You punch the guy in the chest, shattering the entirety of his ribcage in a single strike, then fire a five-round burst through him into three others. Which leaves you, alone, in the control room of a barge weighed down with several hundred tons of what you assume are highly illegal substances, but still surrounded by very hostile forces.
Speaking of which. You duck and roll on instinct as an RPG whistles through an open window, just past you, then airbursts near your back just before it can hit anything vital, the blast wave warping the already shattered window frames. You look up, track it, see the clown on the other barge with five different kinds of skingraft on his face alone curse, reload. That he probably had that thing pointed at his comrades just in case they failed, and probably would have killed his own if he had a clean shot, is not lost on you.
But, you think as you bring your guns up to riddle the guy with .50 caliber rounds, that's the way it's always been. Your father fought the War on Drugs before it was a real war, and even then the cartels would burn their own stock just in hopes of catching a gringo in the firestorm.
These guys are even worse: Ex-Venezuelan Army, probably ousted by the Colombian puppet government set up in Caracas, gone from mild socialist to fanatic Post-Maoists in the span of a few months. Savages with state power - take that power away, and they're savages again.
The RPG man lets go of his weapon just before he crumples and falls in the river, and another guy, who looks at least twenty years younger, grabs it, and begins to reload. You shoot him as well. In fact, for good measure, you just fire for about ten seconds into the side of the other barge and stop when something over starts to burn. No time to check if the barge will survive or not. You've got - check the radar here - three more barges to strip of their passengers, plus twelve fast attack boats with probably three men per boat.
With a suit like this? All in a day's work.
____________________________________________________________________________
And the flechette grenade bounced once before exploding in a shower of red and silver. Nemesis fired his impact compensator jets for a second, landing directly in the intestines of what had once been one of the grenadiers, before grabbing the dead man's weapon and unloading it, then jamming the magazine into one of his thigh ammo caches. It never hurt to have a few extra shots, and judging by the security presence he'd already encountered tonight, he was probably going to need it. He needed to get into Inoue's penthouse fast , before the Yakuza decided to start destroying evidence or he got swarmed by Inoue's forces.
His wireframe highlighted three elevators which wrapped around the water tank and lead up to Inoue's penthouse. He could make a sprint straight for the elevators from his current location, a loading bay for the now-wrecked monorail, climb the shaft, make his way to the penthouse, gather as much incriminating evidence as possible, blow the support pillars, then get out while the superstructure sank to the bottom of Tokyo Bay. It looked easy enough.
Nemesis broke into a run, setting his power cell's output to one hundred twenty percent for three minutes. Three minutes, forty miles an hour, the maximum strain his hardsuit's musculature and endo-exoskeleton could bear before something broke. He almost felt as though he wasn't in control of his own legs, that he was just a rider on a runaway car. The tunnel whirled by, light strobing like the decorations on a shoddy indoor rollercoaster. Men poured out of connecting corridors, blindly firing in his general direction, and he leaped over them or just plowed straight through.
He hit the elevator hard, vibroblade out, lancing through an unlucky security Boomer who hadn't even had the chance to raise its laser gun before being impaled. He pulled out, and began to climb the elevator shaft as Yakuza scrambled frantically below him. For once, it seemed as though part of his assault plan was working. He was rising rapidly, the Yakuza thugs couldn't hit him even if he stood still, and most importantly, he hadn't involved any of the Underbelly's numerous civilians in his operation.
Yet, scaling the elevator shaft, as bullets whizzed past him at not-quite-sonic speeds, he couldn't help but feel as though he was forgetting something. Something big and fast and moving up below him.
He let go, twisted in midair, and fired another flechette grenade at the rapidly approaching elevator, where five Yakuza with sniper rifles lay in wait. They scattered, and the grenade only shredded the innards of two of the men, and the other three fired in quick succession. One round missed entirely, but the second clipped his shoulder plate and the third slammed right into his chest. Nemesis hit the elevator with zero control over his reflexes and enough pain to send most normal people into unconsciousness.
The Yakuza lowered their weapons to his prone form. He remained stock-still, only holding onto consciousness by virtue of his autodoc's built-in defibrillator running piezoelectric shocks along his nerves.
The elevator climbed. They began to approach, poking at him with the barrels of their rifles.
"Think he's dead?" one of the men choked out. "Probably," said another. "All that fuss and all it took was one well-placed shot. Guess our boy was a real glassjaw all along."
He could feel the elevator slowing down. Now was his chance. One of the Yakuza, the one who hadn't spoken, stepped a little too close, his boot swinging in to kick Nemesis in the side.
His arm whipped out, catching it, and he squeezed until he felt bone give way. The scream that followed caught the other two just a little off guard, allowing the vigilante to spring forward, tackle one of the men right in the legs, roll him around before they even hit the floor, and finally bring him up as a human shield against the third guy's sniper. He felt the impact of the .336 round shatter his shield's ribcage, ping-ponging through vital organs, and threw the now-lifeless body straight at the last sniper, pinning him.
Then, as the elevator doors opened into light, he grabbed all three, even the two living, and threw them through the opening.
It was a cheap psychological warfare trick, meant to whittle down the will of whatever lesser Yakuza were in there. But the moment he did it, the blue swish of a particle beam cannon cut through the air above his head, and Nemesis had no choice but to duck and scramble back into the elevator.
Well, he'd expected he was going to have to fight Boomers. Everything else had been a warmup; now the real work began.
____________________________________________________________________________
For all the pretensions to luxury the word 'penthouse' brought with it, Senjuku Inoue's personal quarters weren't much to look at, only a large cylinder split by the three cargo elevators that lined it. The floor was concrete, riddled with holes where wiring had been ripped up, then hastily covered with an assortment of rugs that weren't antique so much as they were antique- like , hastily aged. One long screen lined the arc of the cylinder opposite him, evidently Inoue's media console. Right now it was playing a sped-up view of the Megatokyo skyline at night. There was a little interface screen right next to a big brown leather couch facing the console. An interface to the Underbelly's computer system. Nemesis's target.
Nemesis knew there were at least three Boomers, two last-generation 35C's and one 55C as a part of the basic security detail for any of Sato's men. It was the rest of them, the dozen or so other blobs of heat that his scanners could pick up through the door, that worried him. Tough though his armor was, it couldn't stand up to multiple particle beams focused in one place, and that meant he couldn't peak out the door and get concrete positioning data beyond an approximate number of forces. But he couldn't afford to stay in the elevator, either. It was only a matter of time before someone sent it back down.
He was going to have to wing it. That was why he'd brought depleted uranium spikes in place of burst flechettes for his railgun.
Nemesis pulled on the elevator doors, wrenching them just wide enough for him to toss a smoke grenade in. Black smoke vomited from the little contraption's openings, and he yanked the doors open, ducked, and rolled as a cascade of blue energy slashed through where he'd just been standing. He fired an HE grenade in their general direction before dashing through the cloud, vibroblade springing from its sheath, blindly leaping for something that looked like a Boomer on his thermal vision, and being met by an armored knee that whistled by his face; clearly at least one of the units had decided to move on his position instead of waiting for the smoke to clear.
But he could see this one, now, a moving splotch of red and orange in a roiling mass of deep blue, and he ducked under its next strike and slashed across its chest. It stumbled back, barely wounded, then let loose with a flurry of strikes that rang against Nemesis's armor, until he flicked upward, jammed his sword into the thing's throat, and pressed down. They dropped as one, just as another white-hot beam split the smoke again.
He sheathed his vibroblade, ducked behind a barely visible couch, and fired a railgun spike at the source of the heat, now fading fast into a mass of red and green. It hit, and there was a mechanical grinding noise followed by a rattling of thunderclaps as the Boomer self-destructed.
There was a whooshing noise, and the smoke began to disperse, fading from pitch black to a burnt grey. Someone in the next room over had probably turned on the vents, probably Inoue himself. As his vision became clearer, Nemesis switched from thermal to conventional and began to move around the outside of the penthouse, careful to keep the Boomers to his right. Sensors flicking out, he assessed the situation.
It was good news. The two 35C's and one 55C, true bona fide Combat Boomers, were only backed up by about a dozen modded Fighting Boomers, endoskeletory models with only soft external armor and taser knuckles for protection. Undoubtedly they probably had a few extra tricks among them - these were Yakuza Boomers after all - but practically nothing they could throw at him would be as bad as, say, that Gerlitch he'd encountered last night. Nemesis smirked under his helmet. This looked almost easy . Maybe too easy.
One of the fighting Boomers, which looked sort of like Will Ferrell if Will Ferrel had a chainsaw built into his arm, turned, saw him, and motioned with its saw arm. As one, the rest of the Boomers, temporarily disoriented by the smoke, turned, and moved. They were trying to pin him down, engaging in coordinated melee where ballistics had failed.
He wasn't going to let them get that close.
Nemesis raised his grenade launcher arm, yanked out the airburst clip he'd grabbed earlier from his thigh storage, and jammed it into his external feed, all in the span of about two seconds. The moment the Will Ferrell Boomer got within swiping range with his chainsaw, an oil-spattered monstrosity which barely looked like it wouldn't jam within the first few seconds of operation, he fired all five 40mm HE grenades point-blank into the approaching swarm.
He could feel the blast wave slam into him even under his armor, pinning him against the penthouse wall. The Boomers didn't fare much better; the first round ripped through Will Ferrell and another Fighting Boomer, and the second took out another two, lifting them off their feet and flinging them against their comrades, but by the time the next three hit two Fighting Boomers and the 55C had scrambled forward to absorb the explosions; the 55C just soaked up the blast, its regenerating flesh shedding white-hot frag as quickly as it cut across its armor, and the Fighting Boomers each grabbed long objects mounted on their backs and brought them forward.
Ballistic shields , Nemesis thought, and then the 55C was on him.
He dodged the first blow, a quick, bone-shattering right cross, but he had no room to dodge after that, desperately trying to move to the side only to be hemmed in by the shields, perfectly positioned to take a clawed roundhouse kick straight to the face.
Even under his armor, which buckled just a little bit to take the blow, it hurt . He staggered back, raised his arms on instinct, just in time to block an overhead smash from the 55C that would have caved his skull in. As it was, he could practically feel his armor warp and microfracture under the sheer force of the Boomer pressing down on him. He pushed; the Boomer pushed back with all the strength its carbon-nanotube musculature provided; his arms bent inward.
He had no choice. He let go, and just as the Boomer wound up to punch his ribcage in, he slapped his forearm control.
The Underbelly howled , polysteel and ferrocrete grinding against itself as a series of synchronous explosions ripped through Greenhouses 01 and 03, tearing them loose from the superstructure, obliterating millions of dollars of reinforcement and load-bearing structures in an instant. Invisible shockwaves rippled through the ocean, through the Underbelly itself, hard enough to overwhelm the sensitive pressure sensors on the penthouse Boomers. The 55C, formerly so intent on pulverizing his enemy, staggered back for a moment, righted itself, then refocused, just in time to receive a thruster-powered uppercut that shattered its lower jaw and carried Nemesis up, just barely out of the Boomer's reach as it staggered back once again.
Nemesis leapt over the swarm of Boomers, but his balance was just a little off and he hit the penthouse floor hard, half-rolling through a glass table and stopping on his back in front of a sofa. He pulled himself to his feet to see the 35C's rushing him, each holding vibronaginatas in their clawed hands. He fired his railgun, spiking the left 35C through the eye and out its skull, wasn't fast enough to spike the other 35C, jumped over a naginata swiped that would have cut his legs off, landed on the bladed staff, and walked up it to kick the 35C in the face before it could let go of its weapon.
From there, he grabbed the Boomer by the skull and pulled, flipping over it, then mule-kicking the machine in mid-air, propelling himself off its back, firing his jets above the swarm once more. The 55C rose up to meet him on its flightjets, but Nemesis was ready for it this time. At the last second, he cut his thrusters and let himself drop straight into the six remaining fighting Boomers, dropping an HE grenade just below him.
The blast wave did almost no damage to any of the remaining six - the ones with the Ballistic shields had figured out how to counter them pretty easily, dashing in and putting them up before any fragments could shred their outer coverings. But the grenade's blast force wumphed out in all directions, propelling the falling Nemesis into the air once again, straight under the still-moving 55C. The combat Boomer was utterly exposed, unable to cut its jets in time before Nemesis unsheathed his vibroblade and, with a spinning strike, cut a smooth, deep gash straight through it. Then, he grabbed it in midair, and swung around, piledriving the machine straight through a glass table and into the concrete floor. Orange circulatory fluid gushed from its wounds; it twitched, but didn't get up.
The remaining Boomers spread out, surrounding Nemesis as he dropped to the ground in a puddle of 55C innards. The two with the ballistic shields advanced in a pincer movement, moving in perfect synchronization for bulky objects strapped to their thighs. Before either of them could heft their weapons, he made a thruster-assisted jump over their heads, vibroblade whipping around to decapitate both of them in one strike.
But he was open, now, and the four remaining Boomers surged forward, attempting a simultaneous tackle. He fired another HE grenade point-blank, and blew them away. In two strikes, he had obliterated a good few million yen worth of hardware. It felt good .
Still, he had no time to rest. A quick thermal scan revealed a hot blob just below his feet, probably Inoue in what passed for a panic room. He'd deal with him later, ideally before reinforcements arrived. He walked up to Inoue's media console, popped open the access ports, and inserted a slim grey needle into one of them. A scroll wheel and a progress bar rezzed into existence on the lower left of his HUD, as Maria's malware began copying off anything that looked even remotely sensitive and beaming it to his suit. With luck, he'd have enough evidence to convict Sato for Kagemusha in a minute or less, and then he'd just head out the way he came.
That was when the cargo elevator behind him slid open. And that was when Nemesis turned to look into the beady eyes of a BU-12B Battle Boomer.
Chapter 25: Ring of Water
- Location
- Megatokyo
Okay, everything's spaced out, and the links are threadmarked. The only thing I've gotta do now is post... and post... and post.
Chapter 25: Ring of Water
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
9:02 PM
The call came at the moment when Daley Wong had been silently hoping it wouldn't, at the precise second when he allowed himself to entertain the notion of a smidgen of hope that he would have a night off. There was no other way to describe it; he'd been hassling the dispatch operators for hours, to see if something or another was being set on fire, and aside from a report from surveillance mics of a single gunshot being fired somewhere in the labyrinth of the warehouse district, there was nothing. Loud enough to be somewhere in the anti-battlemover range, but he had no intention of sparing more than a patrol for things like that, not tonight. And yet the second he thought to himself that the Fu-Shui was a fluke, Naoko-chan had patrol chopper #047 online screaming bloody murder into her phone. He dashed across the office to the girl, who was patiently explaining to the man on the other end that she needed a coherent explanation, grabbed the phone straight from her hands, and half-shouted into the receiver, "Say again, Oh-Four-Seven?"
"Daley! Thank God! You're not gonna believe this, but the Underbelly just lost one of its greenhouses! Damn thing's diving faster'n a submarine on crack!"
Daley strained to the voice coming over the phone, trying to place it. He'd definitely heard the guy before - who was he? Ah, yes, Private Rokemazawa. Nice enough guy, a little quiet, prone to using humor in place of authentic charm. Case in point-
"What the hell does that mean, private?" Daley barked.
"The Underbelly! Someone just blew one of the greenhouses' support pillars! It's sinking into the fucking ocean! I don't know what else to tell you, sir!"
"Okay, okay. Finish your patrol, don't get any closer, come back ASAP, you know the drill. Daley out." He passed the phone back to Naoko, and sprinted for deployment.
The first thing he did was try to raise Leon on his phone, but it was just the usual The ADP officer you are attempting to reach is not available at this time, for more information please call - which was troubling enough. Leon had gone to search for Nemesis while Daley went through the paperwork that would undoubtedly follow Anderson's separate crusade, trying to throw together enough evidence on various personalities in the city who looked suspicious enough that an unwarranted arrest would, in retrospect, look reasonable enough. Suffice to say that the last dregs of his doubt that there was somebody in the evidence lockers who was on the Yakuza take had been all but wiped away.
But where the hell was Leon? He got in the nearest elevator, smashed the Deployment button, and tried his civilian phone number-
Hi there! This is Leon McNichol. I'm a little busy right now, but if you've got red eyes and brown hair I can make the time, so just leave me a message after the beep, babe!
-Yeah. No. He was going to have to bug him about that later. For now, he had to rustle up three heavily armored Tac Squads and get them moving, or else the situation was going to go out of control fast.
The Underbelly Penthouse
February 11, 2036
9:07 PM
It was one of those unforeseen downsides of converting an abandoned security center into a luxury apartment; you could never really rely on the amenities of a modern luxury apartment to always be there. Sure, Senjuku Inoue never wanted for freshwater, which was more than half the world's population could say, and he had food brought to him personally by a series of faceless thugs, but the internet was crap half the time, the shitty old tidal generators meant that he had to deal with brownouts when the weather was nice and pleasant, and worst of all, he had no panic room. There was nowhere he could hide if security failed enough that someone actually got to the elevators. Nowhere nice, at least.
Which was why he was cowering in an uninsulated cable duct under the floor as his Fighting Boomers were being indiscriminately butchered by a madman in a hardsuit. Which was why he'd asked to keep a 12B, just one, in reserve, in case the rest of the Underbelly's prestigious security forces failed. Sato had not taken to that one lightly. It seemed he was very committed to a mobile strike force of Battle Boomers which could jet across the city wherever Nemesis went, no matter how large or small the target was, no matter that it was that same strategy which had let the Fu-Shui Nightclub fall to their hated enemy.
He had said nothing of the sort at his meeting with the oyabun, of course. Otherwise he wouldn't have gotten anything in the first place.
It was a shame he had to lose his penthouse to such a brute, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Aside from him being stuck in a cable duct, with the 12B now present, things were going well.
Things were not going well.
Nemesis barely had room to move away from the console before the 12B's chaingun opened up and vomited several hundred rounds in a single motion. He didn't dodge the deluge of lead so much as he scrambled away from the field of fire, and even then he felt his suit rattle as two dozen 12.4mm rounds pinged off his armor or, if they were lucky, cut quick sparking slashes across it. There was a brief pause as the Boomer seemed to admire its work, the console utterly scrapped, his dataneedle feed cut out at 63%, and then it was firing again, punching finger-sized holes in the wall just behind Nemesis as he sprinted around the outside of the cylinder. Then he kicked off of the wall and rolled towards the Boomer just as it fired its explosive railcannon where he'd been only a second ago. It whipcracked over his head and slammed into the opposite wall, and he was only a meter ahead of the shockwave as his scanners picked up the subaudible click as another shell was cycled into the cannon's chamber. He took his chance; sliding on his knees towards its hulking form, he raised his railgun and fired a barbed depleted uranium spike right where its hammer-shaped head met its body in a rough approximation of a neck.
But the Boomer was fast, faster than expected for a light tank's worth of armor crammed into two meters of bulk. It twitched just to the side, and instead of decapitating it the spike clipped its right shoulder, the superheated plasma aerosheathe around it blasting away about a quarter of the shoulder's mass before the spike drilled into the concrete wall. Eyes dilated, the Boomer looked almost amused.
Nemesis didn't have time to reload before it hefted its railcannon, using its free arm to support its damaged one, and fired again. He rolled forward, then scrambled on all fours as the deafening shockwave was punctuated by chaingun fire. He blindfired an HE grenade at the Boomer's legs, followed by a smoke; thankfully, one did not dissipate the other, and the whir of its chaingun died down as it scanned for targets. That gave him time to reassess.
He was close to the Boomer, close enough to see some of its form in the billowing smoke which had enveloped the room again, too close. It was upright, but unsteady, so his little covering maneuver had clearly done some damage. He made a quick scan, aimed where it looked like there was motion, and fired. There was the cracking sound of the projectile breaking the sound barrier, followed by the crunching and squealing of armor and flesh failing to slow it down, and then a sort of thwump as the spike drilled a hole through the Boomer and embedded itself in the far wall. All good sounds for a single shot to make.
Nemesis closed in, unsheathing his vibroblade for the final strike. He jabbed into the smoke, hit air, then danced back as the 12B swung its gun arm right into the place where he'd been moments ago. It overextended, shattered exoskeleton allowing just a few more degrees of movement than necessary, then followed up with a strike from its other hand before he could get inside its guard. But now it was poorly balanced, staggering under the weight of its own body, and now Nemesis had an opening. With the smoke beginning to disperse, he leaped onto the back of the Boomer, hooked his legs around its neck, and rammed his vibroblade into the side of its neck. Electricity arced around the blade as he twisted it deeper, the vibrations sawing through the thing's armored flesh with measured ease, circulatory fluid gushing from the wound in a tangerine spray. He pulled back, and the 12B's head, sensory hammerhead and all, succumbed to its own weight and fell to the floor.
But the Boomer wasn't dead yet. It shuddered once, then leapt to its feet, throwing Nemesis off, then swinging its gun arm in a long arc behind it. Chaingun rattling, it followed its arm's momentum, stumbling around in a circle, firing just above its enemies head, faster, faster, bullets ripping through the screens, through the concrete, through everything, until finally there was the clickclickclick that told the world its weapon was empty. Nemesis watched from a crouch, then got up and prepared to stab the Boomer somewhere that would silence it for good, when it angled its railcannon at the floor and fired
straight
down.
It wasn't the shockwave that got him this time. It was the way the concrete floor was smooth and even one moment, and an ocean of grey dust the next, cracks spiderwebbing out from the detonation. He sprinted forward just as the Boomer fired again, burying itself in a cloud of debris, and this time the entire floor seemed to shift. He cleared the Boomer's attack range, whipped his vibroblade up to cut its left arm off, and it fired again, and the floor sagged, then shattered.
Oh, right. What exactly had the penthouse been built on top of? Probably nothing which could take three consecutive HEAP shells moving at around Mach six hitting it without breaking. And what was that built on top of? Probably the big water tank.
And what was he doing now? Judging by the way light plummeted past him in a tunnel of blurred vision, probably falling right into it.
Kyushu Place, Apartment 52D
February 11, 2036
9:02 PM
Power on. There are three. More will come.
The first advances, whips out a knife. Dodge the first three swipes, let them stab, overreach, then grab his arm, pull him close, twist it till it breaks, throw him aside.
"Some boys hate themselves, spend their whole lives resenting their fathers…"
The next two come in at the same time. Change stances. Silat Melayu, toes turned in. Duck under the first one's high kick, back away from the other one's follow-up grab, rise up, fist into number two's jaw, let them stagger back so you can deal with Number one, who's shifted into a sweeping kick. Stomp their sweeping leg, pin him to the ground, but don't forget about the other two, who are already getting up despite discouragement. That's fine.
"Some girls hate their bodies, they stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback…"
Another good kick breaks the guy's leg, and he dissolves in a blizzard of particle effects. A whirling punch, a total pivot, drives one enemy into the other, or should, but they're fast, and number two dodges out of the way, circles in again for a grab, and haptics pick up its arms shooting in under your armpits to hold you back-
"Sayin' GOD MAKE ME FAMOUS!-"
"Will you stop that?!" Linna popped off the AR goggles she'd borrowed from the Sabers' training room, and the world faded back to her apartment, lit through the blinds by the glow of the city outside. Yellow stripes played across Priss's smirking face as she turned off her phone's music player.
"Gomen. I thought you wouldn't notice."
"Of course I would notice!" Linna huffed. "You blast your music so loud it's a wonder the landlord hasn't come up here to give you the business!"
"Hey, this was your idea. I thought we should stop by Sylia's place, but you said that you didn't want to have her pitch a bitch fit at us."
She hmphed. "What I said was I'm worried about her. We were all thrown off balance by Nemesis, especially you-" here she paused in hopes of an agreement, and continued when she did not receive one "-and her. She's overplanning again, that's all, and she's shutting us out because she knows it's bad for her."
"Overplanning?" Priss leaned back on the couch. "Who are you to judge Sylia? I never took you for the kind of person who complained about her boss, especially behind her back."
"Yeah, well," Linna said, slipping her headset off and walking over to the couch opposite Priss, then sitting down, "I'm not always the person you think I am. Besides, the Sabers are a team, not a hierarchy."
"Right. Sylia only provides the funding, the technology, the hideout, the mission, the jobs, the salaries, the connections, et cetera. We have absolutely no reason to listen to her except the goodness of our hearts."
"None of which means she shouldn't listen to us!"
"There's a pretty big difference between 'should' and 'will', Linna."
"Moouuu," Linna moaned, rolling her head back. "What's gotten into you anyway, Priss-chan? Aren't you the hardened bosozoku who never takes orders from anybody?"
"You're the one who's making a big deal out of one little thing-"
"Little! A crazy American's about to murder half of Megatokyo, Sylia's trying to ignore the problem right in front of her, and you call it little!"
"Oh for fuck's sake," Priss growled. "This is all about Nemesis again, isn't it."
"I don't see what else it could be about!" Linna all but shrieked.
"Look, I don't trust Nemesis any more than you do, but there's nothing we can do about him, okay? Get in his way, he'll put us down like rabid dogs."
"So you're afraid of him?"
"I'm not-" Priss stopped, finger raised to make a point. "Okay, fine. I'm a little scared of the kind of guy who blows people in half with Gerlitch rifles before they can even raise their guns. Is that enough?"
"There's more to it than that, I think."
Rarely, if ever, did Priss admit she was wrong about her own emotions. Linna had long intended to capitalize on the opportunity to constructively criticize her should she confess her flaws, and now she had no intention of letting this chance pass by. "Mallory came in with helicopter gunships, GENOM has enough firepower to level the city stashed in the Tower, and you're telling me you're afraid of just one guy in a hardsuit? That's not like you at all."
"Yeah," she said, her voice fading. "Yeah, I guess. I keep looking back at that point where I was trying to get to you guys, and - and he was so fucking close to me, you know? If he hadn't caught me with a cop before, what would he have seen?" She slouched, seem to shrink by a good meter or two.
"Four years difference and he would have seen a gangster, right?"
"Yeah. Yeah, and all he saw was Inspector McNichol's girlfriend. And he… fuck, I don't know. I don't want to let this get to me, but here I am unloading to you of all people. I'm sorry."
Priss almost never apologized, something Linna knew usually made bad situations worse. Even her, the resident money-grubber, knew when to back down. If she was really this rattled… well.
"It's okay. We're friends, right? You can tell me whatever you want. I won't judge."
That earned her a glare. "Yes you will. You're Linna Yamazaki. Everytime you break it off with another boyfriend, it's always 'he needs too much support' or 'he's got mommy issues' or whatever the fuck. You judge."
The walls were coming back up. Soon, Priss wouldn't listen to her at all.
Was it wrong to pry so deeply into her teammate's life? Linna didn't think so. Sylia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery shrouded in an enigma, and she knew well enough not to approach her. Nene was transparent in the way only a half-adolescent-half-adult trapped in the doldrums of post-puberty could be. But the more time she spent with Priss, the more she saw that the singer was for the most part a spinning ball of uncut pain. She needed help, the kind of help that she wasn't going to get left to her own devices. More likely she'd inject a milligram too much of poorly cut heroin into the wrong vein, and that'd be that.
So she did her best to play unpaid therapist to an aspiring rockstar, of all people. If you asked her why, she'd probably say it was because she liked the challenge. But now it looked as though she'd failed again.
Priss looked out toward the window. She cocked her head, like she was listening to something. And then she said something remarkable:
"It's too easy to kill people, you know."
Linna paled. "No, I don't know."
"Really? I thought all that martial arts stuff you did was about killing people as easily as possible. One-inch punches and all that."
"They're called martial Arts for a reason, Priss. They're meant to be a way of optimizing the body's motions to better understand yourself. The killing or disabling isn't the focus most of the time."
"That's bullshit and you know it. Sylia didn't hire an instructor to teach you Krav Maga and Panzerkunst for fucking body optimization, she did it so you could play your role in the team better."
"True. But it keeps me in better shape than you."
Silence. Priss didn't even glare at her. She just - looked. Like she was in a museum and Linna was some post-contemporary bronze sculpture.
"Okay," she said at last, "that would have worked on Nene, but it ain't gonna work on me. I appreciate the effort, though." She clapped a few times. "But you're missing the point."
"Well what is the point."
"The point is it's too easy to kill people. I said it already." Somehow Linna expected her to be grinding her teeth, but she wasn't. It dawned on her that somewhere along the line, Priss had started leading this conversation in her place. It wasn't a good feeling.
"I mean, think about it. Compared to a Boomer, our bodies can't take shit before they just break down and stop working. Knives and bullets and lasers are so easy to make these days, yet they can all shatter our protective skeleton, tear through our soft tissue, drain us of blood, rip open vital systems, all before we even get the chance to respond. It's easier to kill a person than it is to stop them from being killed. Has been since the beginning of time."
"What?" Why was she going on this tangent? "What difference does it make? We don't go around killing each other randomly, so why does it matter?"
"We don't? Shit, Linna, where were you when the quake hit? Every part of this city that isn't company town's an out-and-out warzone, and it's been that way for a good ten years now. We fucking kill each other all the goddamn time and it's - it's not even skill that keeps people alive, you know? It's luck. The only reason I'm still here, you're still here, is 'cause we're lucky. We got jobs, we got money, we got houses to hide in when winter comes, but it wasn't 'cause we were good. I mean, fuck, I knew a half-dozen people who used to play at the Hot Legs who were better than I was, and they just… disappeared. The whole lot of em'."
"Are you drunk?"
Priss shrugged. "A little. Not a lot. Anyway, death is bullshit, Nemesis kills people, therefore Nemesis is bullshit. All part of the same thing. Tee Ell Dee Arrrrr."
Something clicked in the back of Linna's mind.
She was so, so casual, about taking people and undoing them. The way she described the nation's biggest natural disaster in recorded history - No.
She was cynical. That meant something. And it was so obvious, so blatant.
So Priss.
"...You've killed before, haven't you?"
"Yeah."
Nemesis fired his flightjets almost on instinct three seconds from smashing into the transparent floor of the arena, but still didn't halt his momentum enough to land on his feet. Instead, he tucked, rolled, got to his feet, and looked around.
There were four other bodies in the arena, two living and two dead. A white suit who he assumed must have been Senjuku Inoue was a gory stain on the floor, a smear of blood and shattered bone and something that looked like his large intestine. The 12B hadn't done much better. Its armor had kept its general shape intact minus its head, but there was so much orange goop spraying out from its neck that Nemesis felt comfortable no longer counting it as a threat. The other two were a pair of cyborgs, beaten and bloody, and they were looking right at him. One, who had part of his cheek torn off to reveal skull plating stained red, growled, and the arena seemed to light up with joy. The spectators cheered, screamed, howled for Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy.
He didn't have time for this. He needed a way out, preferably one that wouldn't put him so close to an idiot mob. His grenade launcher was almost dry, his railgun wasn't doing much better, and while he wasn't expecting backup to come too soon, the ADP would be a problem he wasn't equipped to deal with either. In retrospect, he should have brought his heavy hardsuit - but then again, the heavy hardsuit would have ripped that connecting rail into little pieces and he would have taken a TOW to the face.
Such was life.
He unsheathed his vibroblade just as the Jeff Goldblum lookalike with no cheek ran at him screaming, then whipped it around to cut through a weakpoint in his skeletal plating right at the hinge of his jaw. The other one, the more Japanese one, rushed him with a flurry of enhanced punches that he brushed aside with his free arm, then drove the blade into the man's gut. He pulled it out, let his body drop to the floor, and looked up at the crowd. Then he spoke.
"Go. Now."
They looked at him, and he could see the glimmer of cohesive thought in at least some of their eyes, fear being weighed against anger.
Then anger won out.
"I was thirteen, I think, and there was this drug dealer who was selling DreamTime dataneedles down in Chinatown, where we rode some of the time. It wasn't exactly our turf, but that was before that pimp asshole Chee took over so I guess you couldn't say it was Triad turf, either. Anyway, we're stopping for a recharge when Tetsuo-kun-"
"Tetsuo-kun? Wouldn't you be younger than him?"
"Yeah, I guess. But he was kind of a scrawny little prick anyway, and I was a good head taller, so yeah, Tetsuo-kun. Anyway, he hears from the lady selling pork rolls that you can buy virtual porn and shit from this guy, and he gets really excited, 'cause he had an AR headset he'd conned off some mid-class from Nerima. So he goes to the dealer in this old underground mall that somehow hadn't collapsed, power's out and everything, real spooky, the sick fuck calls himself Morpheus, was all-" here her finger traced up along her skull "-shaved, here. A big stripe of bald, and red hologram eyes. Had a bit of a lisp."
"So Tetsuo-kun buys a Fan Bingbing ero dataneedle, a sort of companion thing - you know companions?"
"Those are those AR constructs that are people that only the wearer can see right? Do they still sell those?"
"Probably. Having a trophy wife you could carry with you on the go is a pretty great idea, if you ask me. I never saw her, of course, but Tetsuo-kun was so infatuated with the damn thing he could barely ride back to our hideout. He'd tell us what it was doing, carry on these one-sided conversations with it, about other Shanghollywood starlets he had a thing for, that sort of thing.
"And you never saw it?"
"Of course not. Even when we pried the gogs off of him she just disappeared, locked down the whole headset and refused to come out. We would have had to hire an AI whisperer to get her out, and none of us wanted to spend that kind of yen, so me and Kaneda were all, you know, what the fuck. Plenty of gangs had the one dumbass who was a total junkie but still managed to pull his weight. What was the harm in having a guy like that?"
First came half-empty plastic tea bottles, unfinished styrofoam ramen bowls, harmless debris hurled at Nemesis in a liquid current of illogical rage, signs that no, nobody was going to get out anytime soon. He didn't flinch, confident in his armor. Inside, he was seething. Did these people not understand what was going to happen to them? No, probably not. His father had made a point of never underestimating the stupidity of the common man, and neither would he. He would proceed with his original plan, and if any civilian idiots got in his way, he would do his best to just cripple them.
Then came the Fighting Boomers.
There were no real entrances into the arena on the floor level, mere centimeters from the raging ocean. There was, however, an elaborate network of pumping stations and smaller tunnels hooked up to the sides of the water tank, which would flip open to drain it and pump its precious cargo into other parts of Aqua City. And it was from those little holes that the Boomers gushed out from, flowing over one another in a sequence of lithe movement to surround him, to crush him with the sheer weight of their bodies.
He rolled to the right, whipped his vibroblade around in a long arc to slash open the first wave, then found his motion cut short. One of the Fighting Boomers, its pectoral fans still half-deployed, had the blade in a death grip, and was twisting, pulling, trying to break it. He pulled back, slipped through its grasp, sheathed the blade before someone else could make a grab for it, and stepped into the waiting arms of another fighter. Before he could even move its arms whistled under his armpits and practically wrenched his arms out of their sockets. Nemesis grunted in pain just as another Boomer rammed its elbow into his chest, his armor flexing with the blow. An alert for potential microfractures on the breastplate popped up on his lower HUD. He blinked, and dismissed it just as the Boomer punched him again.
The third time it approached, he triggered his leg jets and kicked straight up, decapitating the Boomer in another spray of tangerine, brought his leg straight down, then pivoted on his foot, rolling, flipping the Boomer that was holding him straight into another approaching challenger. He completed the roll, got to his feet, and drove his head into the chin of another Boomer. It staggered back, gurgling orange from its mangled jaw, synthetic skin torn off by the force of the impact.
A beer bottle nailed Nemesis in the side of the head. He did not feel it, but it was enough to encourage him to break free of the melee and take in his surroundings.
In seconds, his HUD and 360-degree camera display had told him what he needed to know. There were at least twenty Fighting Boomers in various stages of redress, more than enough to beat him to death. There were still civilians in the stands, mostly out of ammunition or being restrained by security Boomers, a few less than before, but still too many. And there was a remarkable lack of armed Yakuza everywhere he looked.
He turned to a Boomer trying to charge him, sidestepped, then grabbed its outstretched elbow and, overcharging his musculature for a brief moment, flung him across the arena into the concrete wall. The other Boomers didn't react, slowly circling him again, probably trying to predict his movements. He didn't know and didn't care. GENOM didn't build them smart enough to figure him out.
He jumped over the circle of Boomers, popped his vibroblade, then aimed straight at one Boomer which jumped out to meet him. He inserted and removed the blade from its face in the span of seconds, then kicked off its flailing corpse and slid right behind another Boomer, the tip of his blade trailing in and out and along the length of its spine. The shadow of another loomed over him, and he hopped backwards, firing his boot jets and smashing his elbow into its neck, then stomping one of its legs into the ground. Three rushed him at the same time, and he went low, before coming up for a thruster-powered uppercut which shattered the central Boomer's skull, then whipped around with his vibroblade to decapitate the other two.
Nemesis turned around, saw at least ten Boomers getting ready to charge him. Before they could rush him, his grenade launcher coughed out its last flechette grenade point-blank, a garden of silver points blooming before his eyes. He didn't think, just rushed in the moment his HUD pinged a BLAST RADIUS CLEAR, slivers digging into his armor but never penetrating it, drove his vibroblade into the first dark shape he could find, then slashed to the left, then the right. He pushed forward, and stumbled past the tangle of stunned, shredded bodies into open air.
He'd slaughtered something like five of the Fighting Boomers, which amazed even him. These ones seemed stupider than usual, taking seconds to recover from the blast of shrapnel instead of milliseconds - but then again, they were meant to be solo fighters, unsuited for working in groups the way Combat Boomers were. Obviously the Yakuza hadn't set up a coordinative hivemind quick enough.
But he wasn't fooled. The only reason they were even bothering with fighters was to distract him, keep him pinned down so something a bit bigger could arrive. He knew something was coming, he just didn't know what.
The last handful of Fighting Boomers, all generic musclemen with shredded skin, rallied, charged. He sighed, cracked his hardsuit's knuckles, and charged back into the fray.
She sighed. "One night I hear this muffled thumping sound coming from his room. I can't sleep, it's the middle of the fucking night, it's raining in sheets, but I can still hear him going thumpthumpthumpthump and I'm all, what the fuck is his problem? At this point I'm young and stupid, and I don't understand idoru culture, the way people turn these imaginary half-people into fetishes and sacrifice their virginity to shit which can't love them back, so I go out, run through the rain, past the big open courtyard where they used to have a garden, and I see Tetsuo-kun just - humping."
"His knees are buckling, his pecker's poking up, and he's got a full-blown haptic suit, and he's humping the air. So obviously he figured out how to unlock the full features of the needle, but what's bugging me, looking at him, my shadow cast over his jerking features, is that haptic suits cost like sixty thousand yen used. Tetsuo-kun was a dumbass, but he wasn't enough of a dumbass to spend two months' worth of food on good sex. So of course I interrupt, ask where he got it from, and he just goes all fucking feral on me. None of your business, why are you up, this and that and privacy rights and shit. I don't think much of it, 'cause Tetsuo-kun's kind of a weird guy anyway. And it's a really dirty suit, and I'm thinking to myself, where the fuck did he get this thing?"
"Let me guess. He killed someone for it."
"Exactly. See, I heard from a 'whisperer in the Fault that they used to put subliminals in direct-neural stuff, have the needle whisper shit in the buyer's ear while they were sleeping. Harmless stuff. You know, buy the accessories, buy other needles, that sort of thing. But Tetsuo-kun didn't have that kind of money, and so he got desperate. In the end, we had to tie him down before he tried to hold up a surgeon so he could get AR lenses and a stemplug."
"Wouldn't the surgeon just call the police if he had to knock him out?"
"Yeah, Tetsuo-kun wasn't willing to take anesthetic. Simple as that."
"But he'd have to get his eye cut open!"
"Yep. We told him that. He wouldn't listen. Said it'd be worth it. Said he wanted her."
"Ew."
He had just finished killing off the first of the stragglers when the 17B's hit. Too big to squeeze through the pipes, they dropped headfirst from the hole in the tank where the penthouse had been, swooping in on precisely timed jet-firings to surround him in a perfect triangle.
As one, they rose to their feet. As one, they aimed their 10mm miniguns at the thicket of scattered Fighting Boomers where even now their target attempted to hide. As one, the crowd roared with the unadulterated glee of predators watching their prey kick and struggle and die. As one, the barrels whirred for milliseconds before the firing mechanisms, as one, kicked in-
Except they didn't, because Nemesis slapped his forearm control one last time, triggering the last cluster of RDX explosives he'd set up on the Underbelly's support pillars. There was a roaring sound, so loud it overwhelmed the eardrums and came away as painful silence, and then the floor cracked, caved in, and dropped Nemesis and the 17B's ten meters into Tokyo Bay.
Which suited the Battle Boomers just fine. They'd been designed for underwater search-and-destroy missions, after all. This just made killing their target a little easier.
"So Tetsuo-kun's basically lost his shit at this point. We take the headset away from him, and he's just thrashing around, keeps trying to bite people, not even hit them. And he bites Kaneda-kun-"
"Again with the -kun's!"
"You know what Linna? They were my friends. Real friends, not work friends. Just roll with it."
"Fine."
"I was getting to the good part anyway."
"You don't have to finish, Priss. I've heard enough."
"What, you think I killed Tetsuo-kun? No, I just broke his headset and he killed himself. Jumped out the fucking window I threw the thing out of. Not my fault."
"That's…"
"Now, we went back to Morpheus, 'cause everyone's righteously pissed. Kaneda-kun brings the one gun we had, a cop revolver he stole from a body in Timex city, the rest of us make do with pipe and snapped-off rebar. We basically armed ourselves with whatever we could find outside the mall.
I don't know why we didn't see it coming, but we get there, Morpheus isn't there, and we don't split up, 'cause it's dark and seedy and we're not stupid, but before we can do anything he steps out of the darkness with a motherfucking M16 and no backup. So he hams up the creepy pedo drug dealer act, going on and on about how he's disappointed in us, how he figured us for return customers, how he hates being double-crossed but he needed a bit of security and oh isn't it just a pity a bunch of forgotten children and and…"
She took a deep breath. "And I just snapped. I grabbed Tetsuo's gun arm, yanked it up and shot him. Bam. Right in the guts, too."
"Oh my god."
"I know, right? That was what he said, too. He was so busy pointing the gun at us, waving it around like it was a goddamn samurai sword, he forgot to actually be ready to shoot us."
"It was kind of funny, really. He was lying there, kicking, moaning something about shitty kids, being a general whiny bitch, and he just had this little hole, about the size of your thumb, in his stomach. There was this yellow goop burbling out of it mixed with blood, but it was funny, somehow, because I kept thinking to myself, how the hell could this kill a person? One little hole and that's it? So I walked up to him and I kicked him right in the guts. I never knew a guy could scream like that. I kicked him again, and then something gave in, and he rolled over onto his front, and he just kind of died."
It was not the first time Linna Yamazaki had absolutely nothing to say in front of Priss. She had the feeling it would not be the last.
"But, you know what? He had it coming. He sold my friend something he knew was bad shit, and he didn't care. He killed Tetsuo-"
"You killed Tetsuo!" Linna shouted. "You fucking killed two people and you're just acting like it was nothing!"
"Because it was!" Priss said, pounding the coffee table with her fist. "It was nothing, goddammit! Hell, it was easy! That's the point I'm trying to make!"
Linna's hands clenched into fists. "I don't believe this. You're making this up just to win an argument."
"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't. That's not the point. The point is-"
"Yes! Okay! People kill other people all the time!" Linna stood up. "But to just accept that as a fact of life is to make the problem even worse! That's why we have laws, the police, that's why we have the Knight Sabers!" She pointed at Priss. "We're not just a mercenary outfit, we're allies of justice, who save the innocent from the clutches of death! And for you to take the ending of lives so lightheartedly, it's, it's sick! You have to stop!"
Priss bristled visibly. "Don't kid yourself, Linna." Now she, too, rose. "The Knight Sabers are a mercenary outfit that just doesn't advertise as wetworkers. But let's not bullshit around with mahou shoujo catchphrases. Sooner or later, we're gonna be killing GENOM execs for profit, and then where'll you be? You gonna pussy out?"
"I don't have to-"
"I said are you gonna pussy out on me Linna? Because I can call up Sylia and tell her you don't have what it takeeeurghhh!"
She never finished the sentence, because suddenly Linna's fist was smashing the air out of her lungs and she went down hacking for breath. The martial artist stepped back, unclenched her fist, clenched it again.
"All I'm saying," she said at last in a quiet voice, "is that every ruthless Yakuza thug has a family, a mother and a father and maybe siblings or kids or something. And as much as you want to kill the first thing that points a gun at you, we owe it to their families to save them from themselves, and we can't do that if they're dead."
Priss sucked in a breath.
"I'm going to bed. I want to be well-rested for tomorrow's work. Because I actually have a sense of morals, I'm not going to kick you out. You get the couch."
And then she was gone.
For a sliver of a moment, he was adrift, waves slamming him back and forth, back and forth, dragging him half-assedly in the direction of the shore; then they swallowed him up and he was in the black again. His suit was, despite looking like it was ready for the scrapyard, still intact, still keeping water out and air in, even as he plunged deeper, deeper into the icy water.
It was not the first time he had been terrified beyond rational thought. Once, twice, thrice when his father beat him, but never after that. Once when he'd first had a stream of minigun fire whiz a meter over his head, fighting ISIS remnants in Mosul, and once when he'd watched those same remnants crush his commander's body with a bulldozer. He'd been afraid countless other times, but for a man like Gavin Belasko, model soldier, terror had been a luxury he could ill afford.
Now, though? Now, he had plenty of good fucking reasons to feel terror. He had five railgun shots left for three custom-built Boomers who were already closing in on him already optimized for fighting in an environment where he and even though his LiDAR overlay wasn't picking up anything, he could feel them, their sinister, liquid presence flickering through crumbling concrete to hunt out their prey.
He didn't hit the bottom. Instead, something massive smashed into his side, grabbing him by the torso and dragging his face along the seabed. His railgun arm was still free, though, and he wrenched it in the general direction of his captor and fired. There was a thumping sound, and then he was free, kicking up a cloud of murk before instinct kicked in and he fired his jets, skimming low over the seabed to the rendezvous point he'd agreed on with Maria what felt like lifetimes ago.
Then something detonated in front of him, the shockwave sending him sprawling. He was ready, though, and managed to push himself off the seabed before something else blasted a three-foot gouge right next to him. He rose towards the surface, just slow enough that he wouldn't get the bends, as another something whooshed by him, leaving a contour trail of bubbles in its wake.
Of course. Out in the open, the 17B's would just spam their subrocs to take him out. Either he went back to the Underbelly, where there were civilian targets that they might hesitate to fire upon, or he shimmied into the remains of Aqua City and played cat-and-mouse with three hunter-killer type Boomers who had been purpose-built for that sort of thing.
Or he could ask for some help.
"Sarge? Nemesis here. I've blown the primary objective, but I've got three 17B's on my tail and I'm running low on ammo. I need ideas, fast."
"Sarge here." The voice on the other end was surprisingly clear. "We're still at point Blackout. You sure the truck can't shake them?"
"17B's are usually armed with submarine rocket launchers and loaded with enough shots to crack a bunker." He flipped a good hundred meters below the water line, then fired his jets, running parallel to the distant seabed. His radar was coming up with the contours of three massive shapes just behind him, or was it four now? "They'll fire before they breach, take out the truck before they get me. You won't have time or room to mortar them. I need to shake them before I reach home."
"If you say so. One second. Maria says she'll check the bay for anyplace you can lose them."
"I don't think that-"
Minigun fire to his left in a sweeping arc, his HUD overlaying it in a flurry of green ballistic trajectory lines. He fired his jets and dove, turning back towards the Underbelly. The water was thick with streams of dirt, clusters of bleached plastic like spirits.
Three seconds later, the first 17B rose out of the blackness, minigun firing day-glo green streaks of death. Nemesis altered his trajectory slightly, firing his side jets to flip to the side, but not until seven rounds shattered his left shoulder armor completely. Diamene woven underneath the plate strained, stiffened, catching the fifth round and the two that followed in molecular straitjackets, but the damage was done. He wouldn't be able to use his
vibroblade with anything close to his usual dexterity, and with that in mind he dived straight down before the Boomer could follow up.
"Sarge, I need-"
"Maria says the Chiba TransAgricultural Complex usually has a runoff outflow thick to enough render most forms of tracking useless. It's across the bay, but it's got its own pier, so if we're quick-"
"You're telling me to hide myself in water saturated with animal shit?"
Maria's voice, slightly muted. "Technically most of the meat grown there isn't actually animals, but big slabs of vatgrown tissue, but yes, they do excrete-"
The Boomer crashed down on top of him, kicking up a cloud of murk, pinning his stiffened arm. He swung his right arm out, hammering at its head carapace. "Save the explanations for later. Will it -argh- get them off of me?"
"It might, but I'm relying on-"
"Good enough." With that, Nemesis jabbed his railgun, loaded with its third-to-last projectile, right between the eyes of his captor, and fired. It died instantly, orange mist billowing out in the pitch black, then detonated,
slamming him against the seafloor one last time, cracking his chestpiece. He felt cold, all of a sudden. Incredibly cold.
He was running out of options. He turned himself right side up, brought up a map of the bay, and blasted off just as another subroc obliterated the storefront where he'd been slammed. His supercavitation drives accelerated him out, down, past a scrubland of overturned pilings, past collapsed buildings smoothed out into mounds with rebar poking out like steel coral, beyond the debris field that had once been called Tokyo, along the smooth floor of an ocean floor untouched by-
Minigun fire lit up the night with streams of bubbles inches to the right of his head. Evidently the two remaining 17B's were still following him, and if his rear radar display was right, they were faster than him.
Chalk another one up to GENOM's boundless ingenuity.
More minigun fire, this time over his head. Nemesis spun to the side. He sped up, pushing the supercavitation drives to their limit, then fired his maneuvering jets to drive himself upward, then stopped just below another torrent of fire. He dove down, but the other Boomer had angled its fire to trap him. He spun to the side again, desperately firing his maneuvering thrusters to jet left before they caught him in a cage of bullets, then cut everything as three subrocs whistled by his drifting figure. He started up again, straining against his own suit, but they were closer now, his radar system figured maybe two hundred meters behind him, and that distance was dropping.
But he was rising, now, and the blackness of the ocean was tinged with the yellow of light pollution. One fifty meters. He was still accelerating, straight into a pier perched over the abyss, and he had no idea; would his team make it in time? One twenty five.
The van could go fast, and it could do it legally on a drone-only highway, but how many of those reached all the way to Chiba? Was the Coastal Highway even intact over there? Seventy five. The worst part of it was putting his faith in luck, in God, not his own skills. Fifty.
He'd fought his way through the worst hellholes on his planet without ever invoking deities or casting charms, and he didn't want to start now. He'd seen Las Vegas at high noon, as hot as Death Valley had been at the beginning of the century, and he'd survived that. Twenty-five.
If he looked back, turned his head, maybe he could see their dim outlines - but that would just slow him down. He had to rise faster. He was approaching the outflow now, which his thermal overlay of Megatokyo showed as a smear of red set against blue and green, his little yellow arrow approaching it.
Twenty.
Seventeen.
Eight.
They were so close, and the ocean was getting brighter, but it was too late, and then, and then-
And then the world was a blaze of red, and so much - thicker. Like, and he couldn't believe he was using this metaphor, like he was encased in jello.
Nemesis's supercavitation drives stalled, then cut out entirely. Something in the turbines was gumming them up. Algae, probably. Red tide was everywhere these days.
Which meant his pursuers were in the same situation. Considering he hadn't had his spine snapped by cold mechanical hands in the last three seconds, that was the most likely scenario anyway. He wasn't going to stick around to find out.
He fired his maneuvering jets at full thrust, burning propellant with abandon, and shot up towards the surface. Above the waterline, he could see the CTAC stretch up above the low skyline, and in front of him the algae bloom, fueled by the CTAC's endless torrent of biowaste, practically glowing red. He looked back for a moment, saw the way the skyline seemed to rise along the waterfront until it peaked in GENOM tower, saw the pillar of smoke rising on the other side of the bay, tried not to think about the people who had thrown ramen boxes at him struggling to get out of the sinking megastructure, and kicked off, freestyling till he reached the loading dock adjacent to the stackfarm megaplex, letting his suit's musculature do most of the work in place of his exhausted body. The van was already there. They picked him up without a word.
And then he was gone.
Chapter 25: Ring of Water
ADP Headquarters
February 11, 2036
9:02 PM
The call came at the moment when Daley Wong had been silently hoping it wouldn't, at the precise second when he allowed himself to entertain the notion of a smidgen of hope that he would have a night off. There was no other way to describe it; he'd been hassling the dispatch operators for hours, to see if something or another was being set on fire, and aside from a report from surveillance mics of a single gunshot being fired somewhere in the labyrinth of the warehouse district, there was nothing. Loud enough to be somewhere in the anti-battlemover range, but he had no intention of sparing more than a patrol for things like that, not tonight. And yet the second he thought to himself that the Fu-Shui was a fluke, Naoko-chan had patrol chopper #047 online screaming bloody murder into her phone. He dashed across the office to the girl, who was patiently explaining to the man on the other end that she needed a coherent explanation, grabbed the phone straight from her hands, and half-shouted into the receiver, "Say again, Oh-Four-Seven?"
"Daley! Thank God! You're not gonna believe this, but the Underbelly just lost one of its greenhouses! Damn thing's diving faster'n a submarine on crack!"
Daley strained to the voice coming over the phone, trying to place it. He'd definitely heard the guy before - who was he? Ah, yes, Private Rokemazawa. Nice enough guy, a little quiet, prone to using humor in place of authentic charm. Case in point-
"What the hell does that mean, private?" Daley barked.
"The Underbelly! Someone just blew one of the greenhouses' support pillars! It's sinking into the fucking ocean! I don't know what else to tell you, sir!"
"Okay, okay. Finish your patrol, don't get any closer, come back ASAP, you know the drill. Daley out." He passed the phone back to Naoko, and sprinted for deployment.
The first thing he did was try to raise Leon on his phone, but it was just the usual The ADP officer you are attempting to reach is not available at this time, for more information please call - which was troubling enough. Leon had gone to search for Nemesis while Daley went through the paperwork that would undoubtedly follow Anderson's separate crusade, trying to throw together enough evidence on various personalities in the city who looked suspicious enough that an unwarranted arrest would, in retrospect, look reasonable enough. Suffice to say that the last dregs of his doubt that there was somebody in the evidence lockers who was on the Yakuza take had been all but wiped away.
But where the hell was Leon? He got in the nearest elevator, smashed the Deployment button, and tried his civilian phone number-
Hi there! This is Leon McNichol. I'm a little busy right now, but if you've got red eyes and brown hair I can make the time, so just leave me a message after the beep, babe!
-Yeah. No. He was going to have to bug him about that later. For now, he had to rustle up three heavily armored Tac Squads and get them moving, or else the situation was going to go out of control fast.
The Underbelly Penthouse
February 11, 2036
9:07 PM
It was one of those unforeseen downsides of converting an abandoned security center into a luxury apartment; you could never really rely on the amenities of a modern luxury apartment to always be there. Sure, Senjuku Inoue never wanted for freshwater, which was more than half the world's population could say, and he had food brought to him personally by a series of faceless thugs, but the internet was crap half the time, the shitty old tidal generators meant that he had to deal with brownouts when the weather was nice and pleasant, and worst of all, he had no panic room. There was nowhere he could hide if security failed enough that someone actually got to the elevators. Nowhere nice, at least.
Which was why he was cowering in an uninsulated cable duct under the floor as his Fighting Boomers were being indiscriminately butchered by a madman in a hardsuit. Which was why he'd asked to keep a 12B, just one, in reserve, in case the rest of the Underbelly's prestigious security forces failed. Sato had not taken to that one lightly. It seemed he was very committed to a mobile strike force of Battle Boomers which could jet across the city wherever Nemesis went, no matter how large or small the target was, no matter that it was that same strategy which had let the Fu-Shui Nightclub fall to their hated enemy.
He had said nothing of the sort at his meeting with the oyabun, of course. Otherwise he wouldn't have gotten anything in the first place.
It was a shame he had to lose his penthouse to such a brute, but it was a necessary sacrifice. Aside from him being stuck in a cable duct, with the 12B now present, things were going well.
Things were not going well.
Nemesis barely had room to move away from the console before the 12B's chaingun opened up and vomited several hundred rounds in a single motion. He didn't dodge the deluge of lead so much as he scrambled away from the field of fire, and even then he felt his suit rattle as two dozen 12.4mm rounds pinged off his armor or, if they were lucky, cut quick sparking slashes across it. There was a brief pause as the Boomer seemed to admire its work, the console utterly scrapped, his dataneedle feed cut out at 63%, and then it was firing again, punching finger-sized holes in the wall just behind Nemesis as he sprinted around the outside of the cylinder. Then he kicked off of the wall and rolled towards the Boomer just as it fired its explosive railcannon where he'd been only a second ago. It whipcracked over his head and slammed into the opposite wall, and he was only a meter ahead of the shockwave as his scanners picked up the subaudible click as another shell was cycled into the cannon's chamber. He took his chance; sliding on his knees towards its hulking form, he raised his railgun and fired a barbed depleted uranium spike right where its hammer-shaped head met its body in a rough approximation of a neck.
But the Boomer was fast, faster than expected for a light tank's worth of armor crammed into two meters of bulk. It twitched just to the side, and instead of decapitating it the spike clipped its right shoulder, the superheated plasma aerosheathe around it blasting away about a quarter of the shoulder's mass before the spike drilled into the concrete wall. Eyes dilated, the Boomer looked almost amused.
Nemesis didn't have time to reload before it hefted its railcannon, using its free arm to support its damaged one, and fired again. He rolled forward, then scrambled on all fours as the deafening shockwave was punctuated by chaingun fire. He blindfired an HE grenade at the Boomer's legs, followed by a smoke; thankfully, one did not dissipate the other, and the whir of its chaingun died down as it scanned for targets. That gave him time to reassess.
He was close to the Boomer, close enough to see some of its form in the billowing smoke which had enveloped the room again, too close. It was upright, but unsteady, so his little covering maneuver had clearly done some damage. He made a quick scan, aimed where it looked like there was motion, and fired. There was the cracking sound of the projectile breaking the sound barrier, followed by the crunching and squealing of armor and flesh failing to slow it down, and then a sort of thwump as the spike drilled a hole through the Boomer and embedded itself in the far wall. All good sounds for a single shot to make.
Nemesis closed in, unsheathing his vibroblade for the final strike. He jabbed into the smoke, hit air, then danced back as the 12B swung its gun arm right into the place where he'd been moments ago. It overextended, shattered exoskeleton allowing just a few more degrees of movement than necessary, then followed up with a strike from its other hand before he could get inside its guard. But now it was poorly balanced, staggering under the weight of its own body, and now Nemesis had an opening. With the smoke beginning to disperse, he leaped onto the back of the Boomer, hooked his legs around its neck, and rammed his vibroblade into the side of its neck. Electricity arced around the blade as he twisted it deeper, the vibrations sawing through the thing's armored flesh with measured ease, circulatory fluid gushing from the wound in a tangerine spray. He pulled back, and the 12B's head, sensory hammerhead and all, succumbed to its own weight and fell to the floor.
But the Boomer wasn't dead yet. It shuddered once, then leapt to its feet, throwing Nemesis off, then swinging its gun arm in a long arc behind it. Chaingun rattling, it followed its arm's momentum, stumbling around in a circle, firing just above its enemies head, faster, faster, bullets ripping through the screens, through the concrete, through everything, until finally there was the clickclickclick that told the world its weapon was empty. Nemesis watched from a crouch, then got up and prepared to stab the Boomer somewhere that would silence it for good, when it angled its railcannon at the floor and fired
straight
down.
It wasn't the shockwave that got him this time. It was the way the concrete floor was smooth and even one moment, and an ocean of grey dust the next, cracks spiderwebbing out from the detonation. He sprinted forward just as the Boomer fired again, burying itself in a cloud of debris, and this time the entire floor seemed to shift. He cleared the Boomer's attack range, whipped his vibroblade up to cut its left arm off, and it fired again, and the floor sagged, then shattered.
Oh, right. What exactly had the penthouse been built on top of? Probably nothing which could take three consecutive HEAP shells moving at around Mach six hitting it without breaking. And what was that built on top of? Probably the big water tank.
And what was he doing now? Judging by the way light plummeted past him in a tunnel of blurred vision, probably falling right into it.
Kyushu Place, Apartment 52D
February 11, 2036
9:02 PM
Power on. There are three. More will come.
The first advances, whips out a knife. Dodge the first three swipes, let them stab, overreach, then grab his arm, pull him close, twist it till it breaks, throw him aside.
"Some boys hate themselves, spend their whole lives resenting their fathers…"
The next two come in at the same time. Change stances. Silat Melayu, toes turned in. Duck under the first one's high kick, back away from the other one's follow-up grab, rise up, fist into number two's jaw, let them stagger back so you can deal with Number one, who's shifted into a sweeping kick. Stomp their sweeping leg, pin him to the ground, but don't forget about the other two, who are already getting up despite discouragement. That's fine.
"Some girls hate their bodies, they stand in the mirror and wait for the feedback…"
Another good kick breaks the guy's leg, and he dissolves in a blizzard of particle effects. A whirling punch, a total pivot, drives one enemy into the other, or should, but they're fast, and number two dodges out of the way, circles in again for a grab, and haptics pick up its arms shooting in under your armpits to hold you back-
"Sayin' GOD MAKE ME FAMOUS!-"
"Will you stop that?!" Linna popped off the AR goggles she'd borrowed from the Sabers' training room, and the world faded back to her apartment, lit through the blinds by the glow of the city outside. Yellow stripes played across Priss's smirking face as she turned off her phone's music player.
"Gomen. I thought you wouldn't notice."
"Of course I would notice!" Linna huffed. "You blast your music so loud it's a wonder the landlord hasn't come up here to give you the business!"
"Hey, this was your idea. I thought we should stop by Sylia's place, but you said that you didn't want to have her pitch a bitch fit at us."
She hmphed. "What I said was I'm worried about her. We were all thrown off balance by Nemesis, especially you-" here she paused in hopes of an agreement, and continued when she did not receive one "-and her. She's overplanning again, that's all, and she's shutting us out because she knows it's bad for her."
"Overplanning?" Priss leaned back on the couch. "Who are you to judge Sylia? I never took you for the kind of person who complained about her boss, especially behind her back."
"Yeah, well," Linna said, slipping her headset off and walking over to the couch opposite Priss, then sitting down, "I'm not always the person you think I am. Besides, the Sabers are a team, not a hierarchy."
"Right. Sylia only provides the funding, the technology, the hideout, the mission, the jobs, the salaries, the connections, et cetera. We have absolutely no reason to listen to her except the goodness of our hearts."
"None of which means she shouldn't listen to us!"
"There's a pretty big difference between 'should' and 'will', Linna."
"Moouuu," Linna moaned, rolling her head back. "What's gotten into you anyway, Priss-chan? Aren't you the hardened bosozoku who never takes orders from anybody?"
"You're the one who's making a big deal out of one little thing-"
"Little! A crazy American's about to murder half of Megatokyo, Sylia's trying to ignore the problem right in front of her, and you call it little!"
"Oh for fuck's sake," Priss growled. "This is all about Nemesis again, isn't it."
"I don't see what else it could be about!" Linna all but shrieked.
"Look, I don't trust Nemesis any more than you do, but there's nothing we can do about him, okay? Get in his way, he'll put us down like rabid dogs."
"So you're afraid of him?"
"I'm not-" Priss stopped, finger raised to make a point. "Okay, fine. I'm a little scared of the kind of guy who blows people in half with Gerlitch rifles before they can even raise their guns. Is that enough?"
"There's more to it than that, I think."
Rarely, if ever, did Priss admit she was wrong about her own emotions. Linna had long intended to capitalize on the opportunity to constructively criticize her should she confess her flaws, and now she had no intention of letting this chance pass by. "Mallory came in with helicopter gunships, GENOM has enough firepower to level the city stashed in the Tower, and you're telling me you're afraid of just one guy in a hardsuit? That's not like you at all."
"Yeah," she said, her voice fading. "Yeah, I guess. I keep looking back at that point where I was trying to get to you guys, and - and he was so fucking close to me, you know? If he hadn't caught me with a cop before, what would he have seen?" She slouched, seem to shrink by a good meter or two.
"Four years difference and he would have seen a gangster, right?"
"Yeah. Yeah, and all he saw was Inspector McNichol's girlfriend. And he… fuck, I don't know. I don't want to let this get to me, but here I am unloading to you of all people. I'm sorry."
Priss almost never apologized, something Linna knew usually made bad situations worse. Even her, the resident money-grubber, knew when to back down. If she was really this rattled… well.
"It's okay. We're friends, right? You can tell me whatever you want. I won't judge."
That earned her a glare. "Yes you will. You're Linna Yamazaki. Everytime you break it off with another boyfriend, it's always 'he needs too much support' or 'he's got mommy issues' or whatever the fuck. You judge."
The walls were coming back up. Soon, Priss wouldn't listen to her at all.
Was it wrong to pry so deeply into her teammate's life? Linna didn't think so. Sylia was a riddle wrapped in a mystery shrouded in an enigma, and she knew well enough not to approach her. Nene was transparent in the way only a half-adolescent-half-adult trapped in the doldrums of post-puberty could be. But the more time she spent with Priss, the more she saw that the singer was for the most part a spinning ball of uncut pain. She needed help, the kind of help that she wasn't going to get left to her own devices. More likely she'd inject a milligram too much of poorly cut heroin into the wrong vein, and that'd be that.
So she did her best to play unpaid therapist to an aspiring rockstar, of all people. If you asked her why, she'd probably say it was because she liked the challenge. But now it looked as though she'd failed again.
Priss looked out toward the window. She cocked her head, like she was listening to something. And then she said something remarkable:
"It's too easy to kill people, you know."
Linna paled. "No, I don't know."
"Really? I thought all that martial arts stuff you did was about killing people as easily as possible. One-inch punches and all that."
"They're called martial Arts for a reason, Priss. They're meant to be a way of optimizing the body's motions to better understand yourself. The killing or disabling isn't the focus most of the time."
"That's bullshit and you know it. Sylia didn't hire an instructor to teach you Krav Maga and Panzerkunst for fucking body optimization, she did it so you could play your role in the team better."
"True. But it keeps me in better shape than you."
Silence. Priss didn't even glare at her. She just - looked. Like she was in a museum and Linna was some post-contemporary bronze sculpture.
"Okay," she said at last, "that would have worked on Nene, but it ain't gonna work on me. I appreciate the effort, though." She clapped a few times. "But you're missing the point."
"Well what is the point."
"The point is it's too easy to kill people. I said it already." Somehow Linna expected her to be grinding her teeth, but she wasn't. It dawned on her that somewhere along the line, Priss had started leading this conversation in her place. It wasn't a good feeling.
"I mean, think about it. Compared to a Boomer, our bodies can't take shit before they just break down and stop working. Knives and bullets and lasers are so easy to make these days, yet they can all shatter our protective skeleton, tear through our soft tissue, drain us of blood, rip open vital systems, all before we even get the chance to respond. It's easier to kill a person than it is to stop them from being killed. Has been since the beginning of time."
"What?" Why was she going on this tangent? "What difference does it make? We don't go around killing each other randomly, so why does it matter?"
"We don't? Shit, Linna, where were you when the quake hit? Every part of this city that isn't company town's an out-and-out warzone, and it's been that way for a good ten years now. We fucking kill each other all the goddamn time and it's - it's not even skill that keeps people alive, you know? It's luck. The only reason I'm still here, you're still here, is 'cause we're lucky. We got jobs, we got money, we got houses to hide in when winter comes, but it wasn't 'cause we were good. I mean, fuck, I knew a half-dozen people who used to play at the Hot Legs who were better than I was, and they just… disappeared. The whole lot of em'."
"Are you drunk?"
Priss shrugged. "A little. Not a lot. Anyway, death is bullshit, Nemesis kills people, therefore Nemesis is bullshit. All part of the same thing. Tee Ell Dee Arrrrr."
Something clicked in the back of Linna's mind.
She was so, so casual, about taking people and undoing them. The way she described the nation's biggest natural disaster in recorded history - No.
She was cynical. That meant something. And it was so obvious, so blatant.
So Priss.
"...You've killed before, haven't you?"
"Yeah."
Nemesis fired his flightjets almost on instinct three seconds from smashing into the transparent floor of the arena, but still didn't halt his momentum enough to land on his feet. Instead, he tucked, rolled, got to his feet, and looked around.
There were four other bodies in the arena, two living and two dead. A white suit who he assumed must have been Senjuku Inoue was a gory stain on the floor, a smear of blood and shattered bone and something that looked like his large intestine. The 12B hadn't done much better. Its armor had kept its general shape intact minus its head, but there was so much orange goop spraying out from its neck that Nemesis felt comfortable no longer counting it as a threat. The other two were a pair of cyborgs, beaten and bloody, and they were looking right at him. One, who had part of his cheek torn off to reveal skull plating stained red, growled, and the arena seemed to light up with joy. The spectators cheered, screamed, howled for Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy, Perfect Tommy.
He didn't have time for this. He needed a way out, preferably one that wouldn't put him so close to an idiot mob. His grenade launcher was almost dry, his railgun wasn't doing much better, and while he wasn't expecting backup to come too soon, the ADP would be a problem he wasn't equipped to deal with either. In retrospect, he should have brought his heavy hardsuit - but then again, the heavy hardsuit would have ripped that connecting rail into little pieces and he would have taken a TOW to the face.
Such was life.
He unsheathed his vibroblade just as the Jeff Goldblum lookalike with no cheek ran at him screaming, then whipped it around to cut through a weakpoint in his skeletal plating right at the hinge of his jaw. The other one, the more Japanese one, rushed him with a flurry of enhanced punches that he brushed aside with his free arm, then drove the blade into the man's gut. He pulled it out, let his body drop to the floor, and looked up at the crowd. Then he spoke.
"Go. Now."
They looked at him, and he could see the glimmer of cohesive thought in at least some of their eyes, fear being weighed against anger.
Then anger won out.
"I was thirteen, I think, and there was this drug dealer who was selling DreamTime dataneedles down in Chinatown, where we rode some of the time. It wasn't exactly our turf, but that was before that pimp asshole Chee took over so I guess you couldn't say it was Triad turf, either. Anyway, we're stopping for a recharge when Tetsuo-kun-"
"Tetsuo-kun? Wouldn't you be younger than him?"
"Yeah, I guess. But he was kind of a scrawny little prick anyway, and I was a good head taller, so yeah, Tetsuo-kun. Anyway, he hears from the lady selling pork rolls that you can buy virtual porn and shit from this guy, and he gets really excited, 'cause he had an AR headset he'd conned off some mid-class from Nerima. So he goes to the dealer in this old underground mall that somehow hadn't collapsed, power's out and everything, real spooky, the sick fuck calls himself Morpheus, was all-" here her finger traced up along her skull "-shaved, here. A big stripe of bald, and red hologram eyes. Had a bit of a lisp."
"So Tetsuo-kun buys a Fan Bingbing ero dataneedle, a sort of companion thing - you know companions?"
"Those are those AR constructs that are people that only the wearer can see right? Do they still sell those?"
"Probably. Having a trophy wife you could carry with you on the go is a pretty great idea, if you ask me. I never saw her, of course, but Tetsuo-kun was so infatuated with the damn thing he could barely ride back to our hideout. He'd tell us what it was doing, carry on these one-sided conversations with it, about other Shanghollywood starlets he had a thing for, that sort of thing.
"And you never saw it?"
"Of course not. Even when we pried the gogs off of him she just disappeared, locked down the whole headset and refused to come out. We would have had to hire an AI whisperer to get her out, and none of us wanted to spend that kind of yen, so me and Kaneda were all, you know, what the fuck. Plenty of gangs had the one dumbass who was a total junkie but still managed to pull his weight. What was the harm in having a guy like that?"
First came half-empty plastic tea bottles, unfinished styrofoam ramen bowls, harmless debris hurled at Nemesis in a liquid current of illogical rage, signs that no, nobody was going to get out anytime soon. He didn't flinch, confident in his armor. Inside, he was seething. Did these people not understand what was going to happen to them? No, probably not. His father had made a point of never underestimating the stupidity of the common man, and neither would he. He would proceed with his original plan, and if any civilian idiots got in his way, he would do his best to just cripple them.
Then came the Fighting Boomers.
There were no real entrances into the arena on the floor level, mere centimeters from the raging ocean. There was, however, an elaborate network of pumping stations and smaller tunnels hooked up to the sides of the water tank, which would flip open to drain it and pump its precious cargo into other parts of Aqua City. And it was from those little holes that the Boomers gushed out from, flowing over one another in a sequence of lithe movement to surround him, to crush him with the sheer weight of their bodies.
He rolled to the right, whipped his vibroblade around in a long arc to slash open the first wave, then found his motion cut short. One of the Fighting Boomers, its pectoral fans still half-deployed, had the blade in a death grip, and was twisting, pulling, trying to break it. He pulled back, slipped through its grasp, sheathed the blade before someone else could make a grab for it, and stepped into the waiting arms of another fighter. Before he could even move its arms whistled under his armpits and practically wrenched his arms out of their sockets. Nemesis grunted in pain just as another Boomer rammed its elbow into his chest, his armor flexing with the blow. An alert for potential microfractures on the breastplate popped up on his lower HUD. He blinked, and dismissed it just as the Boomer punched him again.
The third time it approached, he triggered his leg jets and kicked straight up, decapitating the Boomer in another spray of tangerine, brought his leg straight down, then pivoted on his foot, rolling, flipping the Boomer that was holding him straight into another approaching challenger. He completed the roll, got to his feet, and drove his head into the chin of another Boomer. It staggered back, gurgling orange from its mangled jaw, synthetic skin torn off by the force of the impact.
A beer bottle nailed Nemesis in the side of the head. He did not feel it, but it was enough to encourage him to break free of the melee and take in his surroundings.
In seconds, his HUD and 360-degree camera display had told him what he needed to know. There were at least twenty Fighting Boomers in various stages of redress, more than enough to beat him to death. There were still civilians in the stands, mostly out of ammunition or being restrained by security Boomers, a few less than before, but still too many. And there was a remarkable lack of armed Yakuza everywhere he looked.
He turned to a Boomer trying to charge him, sidestepped, then grabbed its outstretched elbow and, overcharging his musculature for a brief moment, flung him across the arena into the concrete wall. The other Boomers didn't react, slowly circling him again, probably trying to predict his movements. He didn't know and didn't care. GENOM didn't build them smart enough to figure him out.
He jumped over the circle of Boomers, popped his vibroblade, then aimed straight at one Boomer which jumped out to meet him. He inserted and removed the blade from its face in the span of seconds, then kicked off its flailing corpse and slid right behind another Boomer, the tip of his blade trailing in and out and along the length of its spine. The shadow of another loomed over him, and he hopped backwards, firing his boot jets and smashing his elbow into its neck, then stomping one of its legs into the ground. Three rushed him at the same time, and he went low, before coming up for a thruster-powered uppercut which shattered the central Boomer's skull, then whipped around with his vibroblade to decapitate the other two.
Nemesis turned around, saw at least ten Boomers getting ready to charge him. Before they could rush him, his grenade launcher coughed out its last flechette grenade point-blank, a garden of silver points blooming before his eyes. He didn't think, just rushed in the moment his HUD pinged a BLAST RADIUS CLEAR, slivers digging into his armor but never penetrating it, drove his vibroblade into the first dark shape he could find, then slashed to the left, then the right. He pushed forward, and stumbled past the tangle of stunned, shredded bodies into open air.
He'd slaughtered something like five of the Fighting Boomers, which amazed even him. These ones seemed stupider than usual, taking seconds to recover from the blast of shrapnel instead of milliseconds - but then again, they were meant to be solo fighters, unsuited for working in groups the way Combat Boomers were. Obviously the Yakuza hadn't set up a coordinative hivemind quick enough.
But he wasn't fooled. The only reason they were even bothering with fighters was to distract him, keep him pinned down so something a bit bigger could arrive. He knew something was coming, he just didn't know what.
The last handful of Fighting Boomers, all generic musclemen with shredded skin, rallied, charged. He sighed, cracked his hardsuit's knuckles, and charged back into the fray.
She sighed. "One night I hear this muffled thumping sound coming from his room. I can't sleep, it's the middle of the fucking night, it's raining in sheets, but I can still hear him going thumpthumpthumpthump and I'm all, what the fuck is his problem? At this point I'm young and stupid, and I don't understand idoru culture, the way people turn these imaginary half-people into fetishes and sacrifice their virginity to shit which can't love them back, so I go out, run through the rain, past the big open courtyard where they used to have a garden, and I see Tetsuo-kun just - humping."
"His knees are buckling, his pecker's poking up, and he's got a full-blown haptic suit, and he's humping the air. So obviously he figured out how to unlock the full features of the needle, but what's bugging me, looking at him, my shadow cast over his jerking features, is that haptic suits cost like sixty thousand yen used. Tetsuo-kun was a dumbass, but he wasn't enough of a dumbass to spend two months' worth of food on good sex. So of course I interrupt, ask where he got it from, and he just goes all fucking feral on me. None of your business, why are you up, this and that and privacy rights and shit. I don't think much of it, 'cause Tetsuo-kun's kind of a weird guy anyway. And it's a really dirty suit, and I'm thinking to myself, where the fuck did he get this thing?"
"Let me guess. He killed someone for it."
"Exactly. See, I heard from a 'whisperer in the Fault that they used to put subliminals in direct-neural stuff, have the needle whisper shit in the buyer's ear while they were sleeping. Harmless stuff. You know, buy the accessories, buy other needles, that sort of thing. But Tetsuo-kun didn't have that kind of money, and so he got desperate. In the end, we had to tie him down before he tried to hold up a surgeon so he could get AR lenses and a stemplug."
"Wouldn't the surgeon just call the police if he had to knock him out?"
"Yeah, Tetsuo-kun wasn't willing to take anesthetic. Simple as that."
"But he'd have to get his eye cut open!"
"Yep. We told him that. He wouldn't listen. Said it'd be worth it. Said he wanted her."
"Ew."
He had just finished killing off the first of the stragglers when the 17B's hit. Too big to squeeze through the pipes, they dropped headfirst from the hole in the tank where the penthouse had been, swooping in on precisely timed jet-firings to surround him in a perfect triangle.
As one, they rose to their feet. As one, they aimed their 10mm miniguns at the thicket of scattered Fighting Boomers where even now their target attempted to hide. As one, the crowd roared with the unadulterated glee of predators watching their prey kick and struggle and die. As one, the barrels whirred for milliseconds before the firing mechanisms, as one, kicked in-
Except they didn't, because Nemesis slapped his forearm control one last time, triggering the last cluster of RDX explosives he'd set up on the Underbelly's support pillars. There was a roaring sound, so loud it overwhelmed the eardrums and came away as painful silence, and then the floor cracked, caved in, and dropped Nemesis and the 17B's ten meters into Tokyo Bay.
Which suited the Battle Boomers just fine. They'd been designed for underwater search-and-destroy missions, after all. This just made killing their target a little easier.
"So Tetsuo-kun's basically lost his shit at this point. We take the headset away from him, and he's just thrashing around, keeps trying to bite people, not even hit them. And he bites Kaneda-kun-"
"Again with the -kun's!"
"You know what Linna? They were my friends. Real friends, not work friends. Just roll with it."
"Fine."
"I was getting to the good part anyway."
"You don't have to finish, Priss. I've heard enough."
"What, you think I killed Tetsuo-kun? No, I just broke his headset and he killed himself. Jumped out the fucking window I threw the thing out of. Not my fault."
"That's…"
"Now, we went back to Morpheus, 'cause everyone's righteously pissed. Kaneda-kun brings the one gun we had, a cop revolver he stole from a body in Timex city, the rest of us make do with pipe and snapped-off rebar. We basically armed ourselves with whatever we could find outside the mall.
I don't know why we didn't see it coming, but we get there, Morpheus isn't there, and we don't split up, 'cause it's dark and seedy and we're not stupid, but before we can do anything he steps out of the darkness with a motherfucking M16 and no backup. So he hams up the creepy pedo drug dealer act, going on and on about how he's disappointed in us, how he figured us for return customers, how he hates being double-crossed but he needed a bit of security and oh isn't it just a pity a bunch of forgotten children and and…"
She took a deep breath. "And I just snapped. I grabbed Tetsuo's gun arm, yanked it up and shot him. Bam. Right in the guts, too."
"Oh my god."
"I know, right? That was what he said, too. He was so busy pointing the gun at us, waving it around like it was a goddamn samurai sword, he forgot to actually be ready to shoot us."
"It was kind of funny, really. He was lying there, kicking, moaning something about shitty kids, being a general whiny bitch, and he just had this little hole, about the size of your thumb, in his stomach. There was this yellow goop burbling out of it mixed with blood, but it was funny, somehow, because I kept thinking to myself, how the hell could this kill a person? One little hole and that's it? So I walked up to him and I kicked him right in the guts. I never knew a guy could scream like that. I kicked him again, and then something gave in, and he rolled over onto his front, and he just kind of died."
It was not the first time Linna Yamazaki had absolutely nothing to say in front of Priss. She had the feeling it would not be the last.
"But, you know what? He had it coming. He sold my friend something he knew was bad shit, and he didn't care. He killed Tetsuo-"
"You killed Tetsuo!" Linna shouted. "You fucking killed two people and you're just acting like it was nothing!"
"Because it was!" Priss said, pounding the coffee table with her fist. "It was nothing, goddammit! Hell, it was easy! That's the point I'm trying to make!"
Linna's hands clenched into fists. "I don't believe this. You're making this up just to win an argument."
"Maybe I am, maybe I ain't. That's not the point. The point is-"
"Yes! Okay! People kill other people all the time!" Linna stood up. "But to just accept that as a fact of life is to make the problem even worse! That's why we have laws, the police, that's why we have the Knight Sabers!" She pointed at Priss. "We're not just a mercenary outfit, we're allies of justice, who save the innocent from the clutches of death! And for you to take the ending of lives so lightheartedly, it's, it's sick! You have to stop!"
Priss bristled visibly. "Don't kid yourself, Linna." Now she, too, rose. "The Knight Sabers are a mercenary outfit that just doesn't advertise as wetworkers. But let's not bullshit around with mahou shoujo catchphrases. Sooner or later, we're gonna be killing GENOM execs for profit, and then where'll you be? You gonna pussy out?"
"I don't have to-"
"I said are you gonna pussy out on me Linna? Because I can call up Sylia and tell her you don't have what it takeeeurghhh!"
She never finished the sentence, because suddenly Linna's fist was smashing the air out of her lungs and she went down hacking for breath. The martial artist stepped back, unclenched her fist, clenched it again.
"All I'm saying," she said at last in a quiet voice, "is that every ruthless Yakuza thug has a family, a mother and a father and maybe siblings or kids or something. And as much as you want to kill the first thing that points a gun at you, we owe it to their families to save them from themselves, and we can't do that if they're dead."
Priss sucked in a breath.
"I'm going to bed. I want to be well-rested for tomorrow's work. Because I actually have a sense of morals, I'm not going to kick you out. You get the couch."
And then she was gone.
For a sliver of a moment, he was adrift, waves slamming him back and forth, back and forth, dragging him half-assedly in the direction of the shore; then they swallowed him up and he was in the black again. His suit was, despite looking like it was ready for the scrapyard, still intact, still keeping water out and air in, even as he plunged deeper, deeper into the icy water.
It was not the first time he had been terrified beyond rational thought. Once, twice, thrice when his father beat him, but never after that. Once when he'd first had a stream of minigun fire whiz a meter over his head, fighting ISIS remnants in Mosul, and once when he'd watched those same remnants crush his commander's body with a bulldozer. He'd been afraid countless other times, but for a man like Gavin Belasko, model soldier, terror had been a luxury he could ill afford.
Now, though? Now, he had plenty of good fucking reasons to feel terror. He had five railgun shots left for three custom-built Boomers who were already closing in on him already optimized for fighting in an environment where he and even though his LiDAR overlay wasn't picking up anything, he could feel them, their sinister, liquid presence flickering through crumbling concrete to hunt out their prey.
He didn't hit the bottom. Instead, something massive smashed into his side, grabbing him by the torso and dragging his face along the seabed. His railgun arm was still free, though, and he wrenched it in the general direction of his captor and fired. There was a thumping sound, and then he was free, kicking up a cloud of murk before instinct kicked in and he fired his jets, skimming low over the seabed to the rendezvous point he'd agreed on with Maria what felt like lifetimes ago.
Then something detonated in front of him, the shockwave sending him sprawling. He was ready, though, and managed to push himself off the seabed before something else blasted a three-foot gouge right next to him. He rose towards the surface, just slow enough that he wouldn't get the bends, as another something whooshed by him, leaving a contour trail of bubbles in its wake.
Of course. Out in the open, the 17B's would just spam their subrocs to take him out. Either he went back to the Underbelly, where there were civilian targets that they might hesitate to fire upon, or he shimmied into the remains of Aqua City and played cat-and-mouse with three hunter-killer type Boomers who had been purpose-built for that sort of thing.
Or he could ask for some help.
"Sarge? Nemesis here. I've blown the primary objective, but I've got three 17B's on my tail and I'm running low on ammo. I need ideas, fast."
"Sarge here." The voice on the other end was surprisingly clear. "We're still at point Blackout. You sure the truck can't shake them?"
"17B's are usually armed with submarine rocket launchers and loaded with enough shots to crack a bunker." He flipped a good hundred meters below the water line, then fired his jets, running parallel to the distant seabed. His radar was coming up with the contours of three massive shapes just behind him, or was it four now? "They'll fire before they breach, take out the truck before they get me. You won't have time or room to mortar them. I need to shake them before I reach home."
"If you say so. One second. Maria says she'll check the bay for anyplace you can lose them."
"I don't think that-"
Minigun fire to his left in a sweeping arc, his HUD overlaying it in a flurry of green ballistic trajectory lines. He fired his jets and dove, turning back towards the Underbelly. The water was thick with streams of dirt, clusters of bleached plastic like spirits.
Three seconds later, the first 17B rose out of the blackness, minigun firing day-glo green streaks of death. Nemesis altered his trajectory slightly, firing his side jets to flip to the side, but not until seven rounds shattered his left shoulder armor completely. Diamene woven underneath the plate strained, stiffened, catching the fifth round and the two that followed in molecular straitjackets, but the damage was done. He wouldn't be able to use his
vibroblade with anything close to his usual dexterity, and with that in mind he dived straight down before the Boomer could follow up.
"Sarge, I need-"
"Maria says the Chiba TransAgricultural Complex usually has a runoff outflow thick to enough render most forms of tracking useless. It's across the bay, but it's got its own pier, so if we're quick-"
"You're telling me to hide myself in water saturated with animal shit?"
Maria's voice, slightly muted. "Technically most of the meat grown there isn't actually animals, but big slabs of vatgrown tissue, but yes, they do excrete-"
The Boomer crashed down on top of him, kicking up a cloud of murk, pinning his stiffened arm. He swung his right arm out, hammering at its head carapace. "Save the explanations for later. Will it -argh- get them off of me?"
"It might, but I'm relying on-"
"Good enough." With that, Nemesis jabbed his railgun, loaded with its third-to-last projectile, right between the eyes of his captor, and fired. It died instantly, orange mist billowing out in the pitch black, then detonated,
slamming him against the seafloor one last time, cracking his chestpiece. He felt cold, all of a sudden. Incredibly cold.
He was running out of options. He turned himself right side up, brought up a map of the bay, and blasted off just as another subroc obliterated the storefront where he'd been slammed. His supercavitation drives accelerated him out, down, past a scrubland of overturned pilings, past collapsed buildings smoothed out into mounds with rebar poking out like steel coral, beyond the debris field that had once been called Tokyo, along the smooth floor of an ocean floor untouched by-
Minigun fire lit up the night with streams of bubbles inches to the right of his head. Evidently the two remaining 17B's were still following him, and if his rear radar display was right, they were faster than him.
Chalk another one up to GENOM's boundless ingenuity.
More minigun fire, this time over his head. Nemesis spun to the side. He sped up, pushing the supercavitation drives to their limit, then fired his maneuvering jets to drive himself upward, then stopped just below another torrent of fire. He dove down, but the other Boomer had angled its fire to trap him. He spun to the side again, desperately firing his maneuvering thrusters to jet left before they caught him in a cage of bullets, then cut everything as three subrocs whistled by his drifting figure. He started up again, straining against his own suit, but they were closer now, his radar system figured maybe two hundred meters behind him, and that distance was dropping.
But he was rising, now, and the blackness of the ocean was tinged with the yellow of light pollution. One fifty meters. He was still accelerating, straight into a pier perched over the abyss, and he had no idea; would his team make it in time? One twenty five.
The van could go fast, and it could do it legally on a drone-only highway, but how many of those reached all the way to Chiba? Was the Coastal Highway even intact over there? Seventy five. The worst part of it was putting his faith in luck, in God, not his own skills. Fifty.
He'd fought his way through the worst hellholes on his planet without ever invoking deities or casting charms, and he didn't want to start now. He'd seen Las Vegas at high noon, as hot as Death Valley had been at the beginning of the century, and he'd survived that. Twenty-five.
If he looked back, turned his head, maybe he could see their dim outlines - but that would just slow him down. He had to rise faster. He was approaching the outflow now, which his thermal overlay of Megatokyo showed as a smear of red set against blue and green, his little yellow arrow approaching it.
Twenty.
Seventeen.
Eight.
They were so close, and the ocean was getting brighter, but it was too late, and then, and then-
And then the world was a blaze of red, and so much - thicker. Like, and he couldn't believe he was using this metaphor, like he was encased in jello.
Nemesis's supercavitation drives stalled, then cut out entirely. Something in the turbines was gumming them up. Algae, probably. Red tide was everywhere these days.
Which meant his pursuers were in the same situation. Considering he hadn't had his spine snapped by cold mechanical hands in the last three seconds, that was the most likely scenario anyway. He wasn't going to stick around to find out.
He fired his maneuvering jets at full thrust, burning propellant with abandon, and shot up towards the surface. Above the waterline, he could see the CTAC stretch up above the low skyline, and in front of him the algae bloom, fueled by the CTAC's endless torrent of biowaste, practically glowing red. He looked back for a moment, saw the way the skyline seemed to rise along the waterfront until it peaked in GENOM tower, saw the pillar of smoke rising on the other side of the bay, tried not to think about the people who had thrown ramen boxes at him struggling to get out of the sinking megastructure, and kicked off, freestyling till he reached the loading dock adjacent to the stackfarm megaplex, letting his suit's musculature do most of the work in place of his exhausted body. The van was already there. They picked him up without a word.
And then he was gone.
Chapter 26: After the Aftermath
- Location
- Megatokyo
Chapter 26: After the Aftermath
Formerly The Underbelly
February 12, 2036
12:18 am
"What do you mean we don't have clearance?
"I mean exactly that, Inspector Wong. Handling maritime affairs and disaster recovery is the Coast Guard's job, not the ADP's. And they can't go onto corporate property until we get an emergency meeting of the Diet to give permission."
"Oh, come on! It's only, like, a few hundred meters offshore! I could swim onto it, for godsakes! That should still count as under Megatokyo jurisdiction!"
"Well, it isn't, Inspector Wong. You understand that this is a very unexpected situation, and that we need to ensure that any potential disagreements are accounted for before we take action, not after."
"So, that Diet meeting, is that happening? Like, right now?"
"It's after midnight. Give it an hour or two and they should be able to pull something together."
"Well, I'll just, uh, wait here, then. Tell Leon I said hi if he shows up."
"I'm giving you twenty minutes to withdraw your equipment, and twenty to return to headquarters. If I don't see you by then things could get very difficult for both of us, do you understand?"
"Understood. Goodnight, Chief."
And with that, Daley Wong put the phone back in its cradle, swung his chair over to the command truck's monitor array, and watched the Underbelly die.
It was a death played out in moments, seconds of catastrophe sandwiched between long stretches of silence, as the megastructure surrendered to the downward pull of gravity and the sucking inevitability of the sea. Emergency flotation bladders burst, tungsteel girders bent and snapped, concrete crumbled away under the weight of even more concrete, and then it was silent until the next little structural failure. VTOL's wheeled around above its peak, searchlights playing across its outer shell. It reminded Daley of that beached whale he'd seen on vacation in Okinawa, how the animal seemed to deflate, slumping in on itself until it no longer could draw breath.
And he would have been happy to leave it at that. It was another pre-quake relic whose time had come. Hell, no one had batted an eye when GENOM had bought up all of District 3's public housing, evicted everybody, and leveled the place minutes later. That happened all the time.
Trouble was, no one had cleared out the Underbelly. For every section that died, people died with it. And what could he do? Nothing but watch, unless he wanted to lose his badge and limp back to Jeena Malso and Greg Mallory. Not that that wasn't an appealing idea, but still.
There was an awful tearing noise, loud enough that he could hear it through the walls of the truck, and half of the structure's right side crashed in onto whatever was left of its floor. VTOL's swooped down, illuminated the way its face had cracked and warped, ran whispering laser fingers along its side to create a hologram overlay that weaved itself into existence on the monitor to his right. When this was all over, they'd run the various phases of the collapse through a neural net to analyze its anatomy, dissect how and when everything had broken down. From there they could determine the structural weaknesses where the charges had been set, from that the force necessary to violate them, and from that the kind of explosives that had been used, and from that potential sellers Nemesis had bought. RDX, probably, classic controlled-demolitions stuff. GENOM bought so much of it in their urban renewal crusades it would be child's play to whisk a bit of surplus away from the manufacturer.
All very interesting data. All completely useless. People were dying.
Fuck it. He had to do something, even if it meant he'd be sidelined for the rest of this nightmare. He popped up the audio feeds for the VTOL's, tapped PEREGRINE_05, picked up the phone, and sucked in a breath.
"Peregrine-oh-five, this is Daley. What's your status?"
Female on the other end. "Peregrine-oh-five here. Doin' just fine, sir, just trying not to hit the rest of the flock." Now came the big question.
"Any signs of survivors?"
"Not really. Thermal's a mess, so's sonar, and I can't send in any drones for LiDAR. I won't be able to tell unless I get closer, but…"
"In that case, get closer. If you see anybody, hail one of the Albatrosses and start sending folks in for pickup."
"Sir, with all due respect, I don't think that was cleared…"
"Nonsense. We're the ADP, we do whatever the fuck we want. There's a clause in our charter somewhere, I'm sure of it."
"You want me to bring that up and check it?"
"I want you, Peregrine oh-five, to go in and start saving people like we're supposed to. Does that make sense?"
A pause. Then: "Yeah, I guess. I don't know if the brass will like this one, though…"
"Leave the brass to me, Miss…"
"Ashura. Corporal Padma Ashura."
"Alright, Corporal Ashura. I want you to do your job, and I want you to not lose sleep over this one. That's my job."
"Understood. Peregrine oh-five, making the dive."
On the monitor, one of the smaller one-mans dropped down suddenly, as the heavy VTOL's continued their looping patrols. Daley's stomach dropped with it.
He'd redirected all responsibility to himself, as was his habit. So why couldn't he shake the feeling that he'd fucked up again? Why couldn't he help but feel that this was a tipping point for, well everything?
Probably because it was. Direct defiance of the chief's orders? Mass insubordination in a borderline paramilitary organization that was supposed to be under government charter? All to help a whole bunch of people who probably weren't mostly ethnic Japanese? All in the middle of a gang war that would, given time, set the world's greatest megacity against itself? All when GENOM was watching, waiting, the urban ecosystem's apex predator?
Something was going to give. He didn't want to know what.
What the hell was Leon doing anyway? He'd been off the grid for nearly a day, now. Nevermind the Underbelly, losing the ADP's good luck charm to some gangbanger would be a blow the city would not recover from. He picked up the phone from its cradle one last time, and dialed a number he knew all too well...
Pacific Harmony Hotel, Floor B5, District 14
February 12, 2036
12:22 am
"-Y! M-C-A! It's fun to stay at the Y! M-C-A! They have everything, for you men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys-"
It echoed in the dark room the way a lighthouse illuminated the ocean. Leon fished around in his jean's pocket, grabbed the vibrating slate, and brought it to his ear before any of the troopers with him could ask why the hell he had an American disco song for his custom ringtone.
"Moshi-Moshi?"
He knew who it was. "Jesus Leon," Daley said, "you scared the shit out of me. Where are you?"
"In an abandoned hotel near the Fault. We've been sending drones all over the place near here 'cause Nene thought there'd been activity in some of the abandoned parts of this district, but so far-"
"That's not what I meant! The Underbelly's been blown up by Nemesis, for godsakes!"
"Oh," Leon said, "so that's what that was. Yeah, me and the Fourth Division kinda had to go radio silent for a bit after something blew up our truck in District Fourteen. Saw the smoke coming off the Bay, and I figured something was up."
"Thank God," Daley breathed, "I thought you were dead, or worse."
Leon sat down cross-legged on the cool concrete floor of the basement and looked around, waved his phone around to light up the room. The three other officers with him, Seldon, Davis, and Watanabe, had all taken their armor off and laid it down by their guns. They were sprawled out on the floor, sleeping, only moving when his dim beam of light swept across their faces. There was only one door, and they'd stacked
plastic shipping crates against it, in the blind hope that the sweepers would leave them alone and assume the door was blocked.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm gonna go with 'or worse'."
"Oh fuck. What happened?"
"We got pinned down by cyberpsychos, a pack of at least thirteen with heavy weapons. We're in the old Pacific Harmony hotel in district fourteen, but I've only got three other guys with me. I don't know where the rest of them are. I think one of the psychos has a transmission interceptor. It's the only way they could have found us. Look, I really shouldn't be calling you, okay?"
"I'll recall the other divisions we sent out for the search and send them your way. Just, uh, hold out as long as you can, and give me the whole lowdown when you get back, alright?"
"Alright." And then it was dark again.
Leon fumbled around for his Earthshaker, found it still fully loaded. All three shots, which meant he could probably take out at least three cyberpsychos when it was needed - leaving ten more behind them. They'd probably be on him before he'd get a chance to reload.
God, how had things gone so wrong?
Formerly the Underbelly
February 12, 2036
2:24 am
There were more than thirteen of them, apparently.
Cyberpsychos, Boomeroids, whatever you wanted to call them, were drawn to each other in strange ways, so the legends went. Daley had heard something about how the neural uplinks in Boomer-based cyberware could sense each other, call to each other, group up in parodies of real gangs. Hives, they were called.
The divisions were doing okay against them, not as good as he would have liked. Twelve were badly wounded, two had already died, but the rest of them pushed forward into Pacific Harmony with the chutzpah Daley expected from all his men. His gaze flickered between their helmet feeds as they went from firefight to firefight, breaking open their enemies' chrome shells with 10mm caseless rounds, and Peregrine-05's scans, which was going less well.
He was definitely going to put in a good word for Corporal Ashura when he got back, assuming he kept his job. But she wasn't exactly the bearer of good news: her scans indicated at least a hundred-fifty lifesigns huddled in the last part of the Underbelly that had stayed above water, in the upper parts of the arena cylinder. They had no way to get to them, no way to even carry a hundred fifty people with the heavy aerodynes they had scrambled, and even now the Underbelly was still sinking bit by bit.
They'd managed to find around two thousand people leaving the structure on inflated lifeboats, overcrowded beyond belief, and had arrested the lot on whatever pretense they could find - but the Underbelly could, on average, hold something like twenty thousand people. It probably wasn't filled up on an average day, but that didn't change the fact that Daley didn't know, couldn't know, how many people they'd already lost. He went back to looking at the ADP feeds.
One squad was trying to bring down a heavily armored 'roid, almost a Billy Fanward grade motherfucker, that had pinned most of them down with an automatic grenade launcher. The thing, he couldn't even call it a person anymore, howled in inarticulate rage as rounds slammed into its armor over and over again, driving it back even as it began firing point-blank at its feet before stumbling back into a staircase and tumbling down the stairs, leaving a trail of orangish-red as it fell.
Another squad had its night vision jammed by a bald woman with meter-long climbing claws, and he grimaced as she sliced open one trooper's jugular, and text overlaid the unfortunate man's feed: LIFE SIGNS TERMINATED, seconds later. The rest of his squad pinned the woman down with minigrenades, then took turns kicking her head into the floor as their night vision came back online, and Daley couldn't help but pump his fist a little as her skull cracked open.
This was what the AD Police was good at. They'd been trained for shit like this all through the 2020's, and now they could take down boomeroids and light labor boomers without breaking a sweat. It was only when you factored in the military combat machines walking the streets, the 55C's and the Jaegers and the Tankmen, that doctrine broke down and the average ADP officer got his ass handed to him separately from the rest of his body. Weapons grew more advanced every year, technology marched on, and now they were behind the curve. It didn't feel fair.
And now the chief had dealt the coup de grace to their PR by letting that last handful of undesirables die with the Underbelly. No doubt in a few hours GENOM media would be all over how the police had stood idly by while poor people drowned. No doubt in a few hours after that the op-ed pundits of the world would be demanding action. No doubt in a few hours after that the Diet would put the blame on regular officers like him and he'd lose his job and his dignity with it. He couldn't see any other way.
Ah, well. Somehow Daley just couldn't summon the resolve to give a shit. Things had been like this ever since they'd kicked out Chief Todo, who actually cared about his men and what he was trying to do, and replaced him with a goddamn advertising exec. They'd been living on borrowed time since early 2034 at least.
He left the feeds running and stepped out of the command trailer for a smoke. The sky above the city was the color of a dead screen, vacant and lifeless, and the minute he thought of that metaphor he cringed visibly. How long had it been since he'd read Gibson, anyways? He looked up, past the ruins of the coastal highway, to the skyscrapers which stretched on in every direction, to GENOM tower which made them all look like ant colonies by comparison. He leaned back, took in the view.
It had taken the ancient Egyptians twenty years to build their pyramids, leveraging the might of what had been the world's greatest civilization to build the final resting place of their Pharaoh. It would not be until for thirty-eight hundred years, when the industrial revolution kicked into high gear, that their size would be matched.
It had taken GENOM's Boomers five years to build the Megatokyo tower. GENOM's pyramids were bigger.
The sight, and its implications, never failed to amaze him. How could one corporation build something so big so effortlessly? What did they use all of that space for? How could you even hope to oppose something so big, so powerful, so inevitable? How did the Knight Sabers survive without this massive beast of a megacorp destroying them? How did they sleep at night?
What were those two darker shapes emerging from midway up its flank, and getting bigger every second?
He watched for a good two minutes, squinting into the darkness, and then he had his answer. They were planes. Bigger than any scramjet, bigger than any cargo aerodyne, just… big. They had big fat cargo bellies and big wide wings and big rows of VTOL turbofans built into each wing.
He threw the door open, scrambled back to the feeds, watched as the two enormous planes decelerated, switched to VTOL mode and began to wheel above the aerodynes. One fired some sort of cable from its cargo bay, which split like a flower stalk as each little head attached itself to the sunken remains of the Underbelly. The other began to slowly drop, its shadow growing over the ocean. Fingers hammering at his keyboard, Daley ran a scan and search on the planes.
Kabegumo Megatransports, the computer said, built mostly for medium-range superheavy cargo. Whether said cargo was a platoon of battlemovers or an entire disaster relief effort was of no concern to a Kabegumo. Hell, they could probably fit a few hundred people on the cargo bay floor without any effort.
He watched as the cable, which had to be as thick as his trailer, grew taut, and began to haul a detached piece of the Underbelly's peak away from the sinking wreckage. At the same time, the other plane dropped half its altitude in seconds and opened its cargo bay. He could see the antlike figures of civilians swarming at a major breach.
The cavalry had arrived. And the cavalry's name was GENOM.
Shichiki Sato's home, District 4
February 12, 2036
7:41 am
"Allow me," the Oyabun said, "to make something clear."
"You are some of the world's most dangerous killers. Men are petrified with fear when they hear that you are coming. They shit their pants when they hear the sounds of your passing. You are the apex predators, the top of the cybernetic food chain. And your opponent was one man - one man - in women's clothing."
"By all accounts, he should be dead. So why is my most prized possession at the bottom of the Bay, and Nemesis still alive!?"
The 17B's fishlike eyes dilated into great black pits rimmed by red. It made a long grating sound like whimpering.
"Well? Haven't you anything to say for yourself?"
"Apologies," the Boomer rasped. "Difficulties were not anticipated. Motive systems were impaired. Sensor feedback was delayed. Many failures in cohesiveness occurred. Loss of one unit-"
Smack! "Enough!" The 17B flinched, but only a little. "I will not take excuses from any killer, least of all a machine! By attempting to absolve yourself, you bring dishonor upon your product line and the dogs who made you!"
"Apologies. I have failed you, Master." Its pupils narrowed to pinpricks. "Arming self-destruct."
Sato's eyes went wide. "What! No! Don't you dare self-destruct you shameful machine!" Dammit, why was he chewing out a Boomer? It couldn't even feel shame; it was just going through the motions in an attempt to obey commands given! "Deactivate your self-destruct immediately! That is an order!"
"Understood." Its eyes unfocused again. "Great shame. Incredible dishonor. Have pity upon me, Master. On all levels, physiological and psychological, I have failed to live up to the standards set by my makers. I have been given gifts, and arrogantly I have failed to utilize them. I desire naught but the-"
"Shut up. That is an order."
"Understood." And with that, Shichiki Sato turned on his heel and stalked out of the garage, leaving the algae-soaked Boomers to the care of his mechanics.
He left via an underground passage back to the rest of his estate, went back to his office, and sat down to review the damage reports one last time. The Underbelly was unsalvageable, despite their best efforts through its shell holding company. Nemesis had clear knowledge of just where to put his RDX to collapse the structural supports, knowledge he had taken great pains to remove from the public record. Now he was left with around seventy billion yen worth of megastructure sitting at the bottom of the bay, not to mention the multimillion-yen opioid growhouses. It was worse than financially unsustainable - it was dishonorable. The crown jewel of his empire, and he had just left it sitting there to be snatched away by a foreigner's clutching hands.
What would Iwasaki and Smirnovski and all the rest think?
No, he knew exactly what they would think. And he would let them think it, let them see weakness until he was ready to use strength. He could deal with them when Nemesis was good and dead, but he would not underestimate the vigilante again. He had to find him now.
Sato switched his tablet over to reports of the reconnaissance squads, and was similarly disappointed. The reward on Nemesis had been doubled, as per his promise, and between Megatokyo's mercenary class swarming across the city and his own forces, they'd turned over warehouses, safehouses, flophouses, slaughterhouses, bathhouses, and found nothing. Promises of nonaggression had been violated, things assumed private had been uncovered, protection rates had been raised, and all of it was useless. His Boomers had even covertly scanned a few known GENOM weapons stockpiles, on the theory that the megacorporation had turned against him, and that had nearly ended in disaster. Somehow they'd known about it and sent him a letter advising that 'our mutual partnership requires the withholding of information on both sides'. What mutual partnership? He'd bought Boomers from one of their divisions that technically didn't exist. How was that a partnership?
Oh, and to top it off, because he just had to drive himself deeper still into the asshole of his misfortune, he checked the report he'd had his IT guy run on his systems. It wasn't good; his tactical coordination systems had so many backdoors littered throughout the meat of its programming he could have hacked it himself. If nothing else, he knew how Nemesis had figured out where to plant his explosives. And how long would it take for them to patch the redundancies, the spaghetti code that stained the dignity of his computer? Oh, about a week, and the servers would have to be down for the whole time. He did not have the time or the patience for that, but he couldn't just keep using compromised servers to store intel knowing that Nemesis would read it. So it was back to the 1980's, then, back to relying on a platoon of office ladies to manage his finances and personal meetings to keep his lieutenants in line. Back to hiding the records of his illegal deeds in a sealed bunker, instead of just keeping his dirty stuff in airgapped servers in… The Underbelly.
"FUCK!" Sato shouted into the depths of his office. Immediately he heard the guards outside move to open the door. "Don't bother," he said, his voice grating. "I'm fine." His guards were guards, not trained therapists. They did not press the issue and let him be.
Maybe he was thinking about this too much. He kept on trying to pin Nemesis down, and the gaijin kept slipping away. Why not send just his recon Boomers out? Let Nemesis have his blitz, then have them follow him back to wherever he hid during the day. Then wait a few hours, amass a strike force, and - yes. He could just see it.
He smiled.
Formerly The Underbelly
February 12, 2036
12:18 am
"What do you mean we don't have clearance?
"I mean exactly that, Inspector Wong. Handling maritime affairs and disaster recovery is the Coast Guard's job, not the ADP's. And they can't go onto corporate property until we get an emergency meeting of the Diet to give permission."
"Oh, come on! It's only, like, a few hundred meters offshore! I could swim onto it, for godsakes! That should still count as under Megatokyo jurisdiction!"
"Well, it isn't, Inspector Wong. You understand that this is a very unexpected situation, and that we need to ensure that any potential disagreements are accounted for before we take action, not after."
"So, that Diet meeting, is that happening? Like, right now?"
"It's after midnight. Give it an hour or two and they should be able to pull something together."
"Well, I'll just, uh, wait here, then. Tell Leon I said hi if he shows up."
"I'm giving you twenty minutes to withdraw your equipment, and twenty to return to headquarters. If I don't see you by then things could get very difficult for both of us, do you understand?"
"Understood. Goodnight, Chief."
And with that, Daley Wong put the phone back in its cradle, swung his chair over to the command truck's monitor array, and watched the Underbelly die.
It was a death played out in moments, seconds of catastrophe sandwiched between long stretches of silence, as the megastructure surrendered to the downward pull of gravity and the sucking inevitability of the sea. Emergency flotation bladders burst, tungsteel girders bent and snapped, concrete crumbled away under the weight of even more concrete, and then it was silent until the next little structural failure. VTOL's wheeled around above its peak, searchlights playing across its outer shell. It reminded Daley of that beached whale he'd seen on vacation in Okinawa, how the animal seemed to deflate, slumping in on itself until it no longer could draw breath.
And he would have been happy to leave it at that. It was another pre-quake relic whose time had come. Hell, no one had batted an eye when GENOM had bought up all of District 3's public housing, evicted everybody, and leveled the place minutes later. That happened all the time.
Trouble was, no one had cleared out the Underbelly. For every section that died, people died with it. And what could he do? Nothing but watch, unless he wanted to lose his badge and limp back to Jeena Malso and Greg Mallory. Not that that wasn't an appealing idea, but still.
There was an awful tearing noise, loud enough that he could hear it through the walls of the truck, and half of the structure's right side crashed in onto whatever was left of its floor. VTOL's swooped down, illuminated the way its face had cracked and warped, ran whispering laser fingers along its side to create a hologram overlay that weaved itself into existence on the monitor to his right. When this was all over, they'd run the various phases of the collapse through a neural net to analyze its anatomy, dissect how and when everything had broken down. From there they could determine the structural weaknesses where the charges had been set, from that the force necessary to violate them, and from that the kind of explosives that had been used, and from that potential sellers Nemesis had bought. RDX, probably, classic controlled-demolitions stuff. GENOM bought so much of it in their urban renewal crusades it would be child's play to whisk a bit of surplus away from the manufacturer.
All very interesting data. All completely useless. People were dying.
Fuck it. He had to do something, even if it meant he'd be sidelined for the rest of this nightmare. He popped up the audio feeds for the VTOL's, tapped PEREGRINE_05, picked up the phone, and sucked in a breath.
"Peregrine-oh-five, this is Daley. What's your status?"
Female on the other end. "Peregrine-oh-five here. Doin' just fine, sir, just trying not to hit the rest of the flock." Now came the big question.
"Any signs of survivors?"
"Not really. Thermal's a mess, so's sonar, and I can't send in any drones for LiDAR. I won't be able to tell unless I get closer, but…"
"In that case, get closer. If you see anybody, hail one of the Albatrosses and start sending folks in for pickup."
"Sir, with all due respect, I don't think that was cleared…"
"Nonsense. We're the ADP, we do whatever the fuck we want. There's a clause in our charter somewhere, I'm sure of it."
"You want me to bring that up and check it?"
"I want you, Peregrine oh-five, to go in and start saving people like we're supposed to. Does that make sense?"
A pause. Then: "Yeah, I guess. I don't know if the brass will like this one, though…"
"Leave the brass to me, Miss…"
"Ashura. Corporal Padma Ashura."
"Alright, Corporal Ashura. I want you to do your job, and I want you to not lose sleep over this one. That's my job."
"Understood. Peregrine oh-five, making the dive."
On the monitor, one of the smaller one-mans dropped down suddenly, as the heavy VTOL's continued their looping patrols. Daley's stomach dropped with it.
He'd redirected all responsibility to himself, as was his habit. So why couldn't he shake the feeling that he'd fucked up again? Why couldn't he help but feel that this was a tipping point for, well everything?
Probably because it was. Direct defiance of the chief's orders? Mass insubordination in a borderline paramilitary organization that was supposed to be under government charter? All to help a whole bunch of people who probably weren't mostly ethnic Japanese? All in the middle of a gang war that would, given time, set the world's greatest megacity against itself? All when GENOM was watching, waiting, the urban ecosystem's apex predator?
Something was going to give. He didn't want to know what.
What the hell was Leon doing anyway? He'd been off the grid for nearly a day, now. Nevermind the Underbelly, losing the ADP's good luck charm to some gangbanger would be a blow the city would not recover from. He picked up the phone from its cradle one last time, and dialed a number he knew all too well...
Pacific Harmony Hotel, Floor B5, District 14
February 12, 2036
12:22 am
"-Y! M-C-A! It's fun to stay at the Y! M-C-A! They have everything, for you men to enjoy, you can hang out with all the boys-"
It echoed in the dark room the way a lighthouse illuminated the ocean. Leon fished around in his jean's pocket, grabbed the vibrating slate, and brought it to his ear before any of the troopers with him could ask why the hell he had an American disco song for his custom ringtone.
"Moshi-Moshi?"
He knew who it was. "Jesus Leon," Daley said, "you scared the shit out of me. Where are you?"
"In an abandoned hotel near the Fault. We've been sending drones all over the place near here 'cause Nene thought there'd been activity in some of the abandoned parts of this district, but so far-"
"That's not what I meant! The Underbelly's been blown up by Nemesis, for godsakes!"
"Oh," Leon said, "so that's what that was. Yeah, me and the Fourth Division kinda had to go radio silent for a bit after something blew up our truck in District Fourteen. Saw the smoke coming off the Bay, and I figured something was up."
"Thank God," Daley breathed, "I thought you were dead, or worse."
Leon sat down cross-legged on the cool concrete floor of the basement and looked around, waved his phone around to light up the room. The three other officers with him, Seldon, Davis, and Watanabe, had all taken their armor off and laid it down by their guns. They were sprawled out on the floor, sleeping, only moving when his dim beam of light swept across their faces. There was only one door, and they'd stacked
plastic shipping crates against it, in the blind hope that the sweepers would leave them alone and assume the door was blocked.
"Yeah," he said, "I'm gonna go with 'or worse'."
"Oh fuck. What happened?"
"We got pinned down by cyberpsychos, a pack of at least thirteen with heavy weapons. We're in the old Pacific Harmony hotel in district fourteen, but I've only got three other guys with me. I don't know where the rest of them are. I think one of the psychos has a transmission interceptor. It's the only way they could have found us. Look, I really shouldn't be calling you, okay?"
"I'll recall the other divisions we sent out for the search and send them your way. Just, uh, hold out as long as you can, and give me the whole lowdown when you get back, alright?"
"Alright." And then it was dark again.
Leon fumbled around for his Earthshaker, found it still fully loaded. All three shots, which meant he could probably take out at least three cyberpsychos when it was needed - leaving ten more behind them. They'd probably be on him before he'd get a chance to reload.
God, how had things gone so wrong?
Formerly the Underbelly
February 12, 2036
2:24 am
There were more than thirteen of them, apparently.
Cyberpsychos, Boomeroids, whatever you wanted to call them, were drawn to each other in strange ways, so the legends went. Daley had heard something about how the neural uplinks in Boomer-based cyberware could sense each other, call to each other, group up in parodies of real gangs. Hives, they were called.
The divisions were doing okay against them, not as good as he would have liked. Twelve were badly wounded, two had already died, but the rest of them pushed forward into Pacific Harmony with the chutzpah Daley expected from all his men. His gaze flickered between their helmet feeds as they went from firefight to firefight, breaking open their enemies' chrome shells with 10mm caseless rounds, and Peregrine-05's scans, which was going less well.
He was definitely going to put in a good word for Corporal Ashura when he got back, assuming he kept his job. But she wasn't exactly the bearer of good news: her scans indicated at least a hundred-fifty lifesigns huddled in the last part of the Underbelly that had stayed above water, in the upper parts of the arena cylinder. They had no way to get to them, no way to even carry a hundred fifty people with the heavy aerodynes they had scrambled, and even now the Underbelly was still sinking bit by bit.
They'd managed to find around two thousand people leaving the structure on inflated lifeboats, overcrowded beyond belief, and had arrested the lot on whatever pretense they could find - but the Underbelly could, on average, hold something like twenty thousand people. It probably wasn't filled up on an average day, but that didn't change the fact that Daley didn't know, couldn't know, how many people they'd already lost. He went back to looking at the ADP feeds.
One squad was trying to bring down a heavily armored 'roid, almost a Billy Fanward grade motherfucker, that had pinned most of them down with an automatic grenade launcher. The thing, he couldn't even call it a person anymore, howled in inarticulate rage as rounds slammed into its armor over and over again, driving it back even as it began firing point-blank at its feet before stumbling back into a staircase and tumbling down the stairs, leaving a trail of orangish-red as it fell.
Another squad had its night vision jammed by a bald woman with meter-long climbing claws, and he grimaced as she sliced open one trooper's jugular, and text overlaid the unfortunate man's feed: LIFE SIGNS TERMINATED, seconds later. The rest of his squad pinned the woman down with minigrenades, then took turns kicking her head into the floor as their night vision came back online, and Daley couldn't help but pump his fist a little as her skull cracked open.
This was what the AD Police was good at. They'd been trained for shit like this all through the 2020's, and now they could take down boomeroids and light labor boomers without breaking a sweat. It was only when you factored in the military combat machines walking the streets, the 55C's and the Jaegers and the Tankmen, that doctrine broke down and the average ADP officer got his ass handed to him separately from the rest of his body. Weapons grew more advanced every year, technology marched on, and now they were behind the curve. It didn't feel fair.
And now the chief had dealt the coup de grace to their PR by letting that last handful of undesirables die with the Underbelly. No doubt in a few hours GENOM media would be all over how the police had stood idly by while poor people drowned. No doubt in a few hours after that the op-ed pundits of the world would be demanding action. No doubt in a few hours after that the Diet would put the blame on regular officers like him and he'd lose his job and his dignity with it. He couldn't see any other way.
Ah, well. Somehow Daley just couldn't summon the resolve to give a shit. Things had been like this ever since they'd kicked out Chief Todo, who actually cared about his men and what he was trying to do, and replaced him with a goddamn advertising exec. They'd been living on borrowed time since early 2034 at least.
He left the feeds running and stepped out of the command trailer for a smoke. The sky above the city was the color of a dead screen, vacant and lifeless, and the minute he thought of that metaphor he cringed visibly. How long had it been since he'd read Gibson, anyways? He looked up, past the ruins of the coastal highway, to the skyscrapers which stretched on in every direction, to GENOM tower which made them all look like ant colonies by comparison. He leaned back, took in the view.
It had taken the ancient Egyptians twenty years to build their pyramids, leveraging the might of what had been the world's greatest civilization to build the final resting place of their Pharaoh. It would not be until for thirty-eight hundred years, when the industrial revolution kicked into high gear, that their size would be matched.
It had taken GENOM's Boomers five years to build the Megatokyo tower. GENOM's pyramids were bigger.
The sight, and its implications, never failed to amaze him. How could one corporation build something so big so effortlessly? What did they use all of that space for? How could you even hope to oppose something so big, so powerful, so inevitable? How did the Knight Sabers survive without this massive beast of a megacorp destroying them? How did they sleep at night?
What were those two darker shapes emerging from midway up its flank, and getting bigger every second?
He watched for a good two minutes, squinting into the darkness, and then he had his answer. They were planes. Bigger than any scramjet, bigger than any cargo aerodyne, just… big. They had big fat cargo bellies and big wide wings and big rows of VTOL turbofans built into each wing.
He threw the door open, scrambled back to the feeds, watched as the two enormous planes decelerated, switched to VTOL mode and began to wheel above the aerodynes. One fired some sort of cable from its cargo bay, which split like a flower stalk as each little head attached itself to the sunken remains of the Underbelly. The other began to slowly drop, its shadow growing over the ocean. Fingers hammering at his keyboard, Daley ran a scan and search on the planes.
Kabegumo Megatransports, the computer said, built mostly for medium-range superheavy cargo. Whether said cargo was a platoon of battlemovers or an entire disaster relief effort was of no concern to a Kabegumo. Hell, they could probably fit a few hundred people on the cargo bay floor without any effort.
He watched as the cable, which had to be as thick as his trailer, grew taut, and began to haul a detached piece of the Underbelly's peak away from the sinking wreckage. At the same time, the other plane dropped half its altitude in seconds and opened its cargo bay. He could see the antlike figures of civilians swarming at a major breach.
The cavalry had arrived. And the cavalry's name was GENOM.
Shichiki Sato's home, District 4
February 12, 2036
7:41 am
"Allow me," the Oyabun said, "to make something clear."
"You are some of the world's most dangerous killers. Men are petrified with fear when they hear that you are coming. They shit their pants when they hear the sounds of your passing. You are the apex predators, the top of the cybernetic food chain. And your opponent was one man - one man - in women's clothing."
"By all accounts, he should be dead. So why is my most prized possession at the bottom of the Bay, and Nemesis still alive!?"
The 17B's fishlike eyes dilated into great black pits rimmed by red. It made a long grating sound like whimpering.
"Well? Haven't you anything to say for yourself?"
"Apologies," the Boomer rasped. "Difficulties were not anticipated. Motive systems were impaired. Sensor feedback was delayed. Many failures in cohesiveness occurred. Loss of one unit-"
Smack! "Enough!" The 17B flinched, but only a little. "I will not take excuses from any killer, least of all a machine! By attempting to absolve yourself, you bring dishonor upon your product line and the dogs who made you!"
"Apologies. I have failed you, Master." Its pupils narrowed to pinpricks. "Arming self-destruct."
Sato's eyes went wide. "What! No! Don't you dare self-destruct you shameful machine!" Dammit, why was he chewing out a Boomer? It couldn't even feel shame; it was just going through the motions in an attempt to obey commands given! "Deactivate your self-destruct immediately! That is an order!"
"Understood." Its eyes unfocused again. "Great shame. Incredible dishonor. Have pity upon me, Master. On all levels, physiological and psychological, I have failed to live up to the standards set by my makers. I have been given gifts, and arrogantly I have failed to utilize them. I desire naught but the-"
"Shut up. That is an order."
"Understood." And with that, Shichiki Sato turned on his heel and stalked out of the garage, leaving the algae-soaked Boomers to the care of his mechanics.
He left via an underground passage back to the rest of his estate, went back to his office, and sat down to review the damage reports one last time. The Underbelly was unsalvageable, despite their best efforts through its shell holding company. Nemesis had clear knowledge of just where to put his RDX to collapse the structural supports, knowledge he had taken great pains to remove from the public record. Now he was left with around seventy billion yen worth of megastructure sitting at the bottom of the bay, not to mention the multimillion-yen opioid growhouses. It was worse than financially unsustainable - it was dishonorable. The crown jewel of his empire, and he had just left it sitting there to be snatched away by a foreigner's clutching hands.
What would Iwasaki and Smirnovski and all the rest think?
No, he knew exactly what they would think. And he would let them think it, let them see weakness until he was ready to use strength. He could deal with them when Nemesis was good and dead, but he would not underestimate the vigilante again. He had to find him now.
Sato switched his tablet over to reports of the reconnaissance squads, and was similarly disappointed. The reward on Nemesis had been doubled, as per his promise, and between Megatokyo's mercenary class swarming across the city and his own forces, they'd turned over warehouses, safehouses, flophouses, slaughterhouses, bathhouses, and found nothing. Promises of nonaggression had been violated, things assumed private had been uncovered, protection rates had been raised, and all of it was useless. His Boomers had even covertly scanned a few known GENOM weapons stockpiles, on the theory that the megacorporation had turned against him, and that had nearly ended in disaster. Somehow they'd known about it and sent him a letter advising that 'our mutual partnership requires the withholding of information on both sides'. What mutual partnership? He'd bought Boomers from one of their divisions that technically didn't exist. How was that a partnership?
Oh, and to top it off, because he just had to drive himself deeper still into the asshole of his misfortune, he checked the report he'd had his IT guy run on his systems. It wasn't good; his tactical coordination systems had so many backdoors littered throughout the meat of its programming he could have hacked it himself. If nothing else, he knew how Nemesis had figured out where to plant his explosives. And how long would it take for them to patch the redundancies, the spaghetti code that stained the dignity of his computer? Oh, about a week, and the servers would have to be down for the whole time. He did not have the time or the patience for that, but he couldn't just keep using compromised servers to store intel knowing that Nemesis would read it. So it was back to the 1980's, then, back to relying on a platoon of office ladies to manage his finances and personal meetings to keep his lieutenants in line. Back to hiding the records of his illegal deeds in a sealed bunker, instead of just keeping his dirty stuff in airgapped servers in… The Underbelly.
"FUCK!" Sato shouted into the depths of his office. Immediately he heard the guards outside move to open the door. "Don't bother," he said, his voice grating. "I'm fine." His guards were guards, not trained therapists. They did not press the issue and let him be.
Maybe he was thinking about this too much. He kept on trying to pin Nemesis down, and the gaijin kept slipping away. Why not send just his recon Boomers out? Let Nemesis have his blitz, then have them follow him back to wherever he hid during the day. Then wait a few hours, amass a strike force, and - yes. He could just see it.
He smiled.
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Chapter 27: Under New Management
- Location
- Megatokyo
Chapter 27: Under New Management
Electronics Store, District 5
February 12, 2036
8:28 am
It was the kind of store that was too cheap to have a real name, that had a tattered LED banner looping advertisements for its services - Boomer repair, Boomer parts converted into cybernetics, even surplus Boomer brains from the Ebisu Mechatronics factory, still fresh in their plastic casing.
It had once done old-style electronics, AR goggles and smartphones and the like, until a representative of the local Sleeping Dragon branch visited the store's manager and politely pointed out how many competing old-style stores there were in the local area. It was inharmonious, the representative said, and it hindered Electronics Store's ability to pay the necessary protection fees on time, something which the manager was consistently failing to do. With a rate hike due in the next few months, the store had thrown out its oldstyle merchandise, bought some grey-market Boomer modification equipment and a forged license from the same Sleeping Dragon representative on a loan, and that had been that, in a sense. What choice did they have?
So Keiichi Itoh, who had just been looking for a side job to pay his way through a GENOM trade school, was now the cashier for a Yakuza-run Boomer fencing operation. He did his best to not know what the new employees did, tried very hard to look the other way when they came in with some raggedy looking android-type and made short work of it with a plasma saw. It wasn't his place.
And yet the manager still wasn't happy with him. The protection fees kept on getting higher, the nice representative with the ponytail and three fingers on his one hand kept on visiting and making suggestions, and the manager just sweated, went red in the face, and said he'd get on it. There was a pretty good chance, the manager said, that he was going to have to go without pay for the next few months, which he… didn't want to think about. They'd already paid their dues the very day after that Nemesis bastard had shown up in town, so they were safe for the time being.
Which was why, when he saw a man in an ill-fitting leisure suit with three fingers on one hand and sunglasses, but no ponytail, approach the shop entrance, he immediately dashed to the back room, to let the manager know that someone important was coming.
Which was why he didn't see the man, who was Red Willow, draw a little Russian machine pistol out of his jacket and run a stream of bullets up his back.
Which was why he died instantly, and didn't get to watch as the man killed his manager, the other employees, and then blew up the shop with a handful of Semtex.
District 7
February 12, 2036
8:32 am
Kazuma Kotaru was a pimp. And he was damn good at it, too, or at least that was what he told himself to sleep at night. It was a managerial job like any other, really. You had your entry-level employees, they did work, you made sure they got paid their due and didn't whine about it. God, half the time the girls didn't do real sex; their customers had Boomers for that. It was all about pay-by-the-minute intimacy, heads in laps, the girls stroking sad little hikikomori's greasy hair, that sort of thing. It wasn't totally legit, but it was close enough.
But still, being a pimp had its risks. Once or twice a lonely boomeroid had tried to off him so they could run off with a girl, and he'd had to rely on Philip, the old security Boomer he rented out from his Yakuza bosses, to tear them apart very publicly. Gross spectacle like that presented a dilemma to him: it made clear Kazuma Kotaru and the people who put him up were not to be fucked with, but it also meant Philip had to clean up the mess for hours afterward, effectively shutting his little business down. He had a sixth sense for that sort of thing, a pimp's intuition for when someone was trying to kill him, and it was itching now, bad. But he couldn't figure out why.
Sure, Nemesis had wrecked the Ja-sia the night before last, but that was a pretty big brothel as far as things went, an obvious target. That skull-faced douchebag wouldn't go after him, would he? He was just another small business owner under the Sleeping Dragon umbrella, that's all he was. He was just walking home from the liquor store with a crate of cheap champagne, completely not worth bothering. That was what he told himself, but he walked a little faster anyway.
When he got to the brothel, his pimp sense stopped itching and started burning. He slipped through the open door, found Philip decapitated on the tiled floor, then turned and ran, right into the chrome-plated grip of a snarling cyborg.
"Oh fuck," he said, and then the 'borg threw him across the room and killed him.
District 13
February 12, 2036
8:43 am
Once, Chieko Toyoda had it all planned out. She would get up at 5:30, buy a breakfast from the vending machine outside her apartment in District 5, then hail an autotaxi to take her along the coastal highway down to where Yokohama where she worked as a hairdresser, and be there just as the shops opened just before 7. It was pitiably simple, and she knew she could do it, had been doing it for years.
And then, just a few days before Christmas, something involving the Knight Sabers and their American counterparts blew up the entire coastal highway. Now, the autotaxi she took had no direct route through the city, so it had to take an indirect one. Most of the time, the roads would be clear, and her taxi would only reorient itself a few times before finding the optimal route around the Fault and through the ugly sprawl that seemed to reorganize itself daily in the southern part of the city.
And then there were days like this one, where rivers of traffic blocked her from going anywhere in under two hours. She was probably getting fired today, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was get there, to have something besides traffic happen to her.
Well, whatever. She'd called to let the shop know she was late and everything, but they didn't pick up, which was odd in and of itself. They pretty much always had a Boomer manning the counter. So she had done what she was supposed to do. She couldn't do anything but watch the the storefronts inch by and hope the 'taxi would get on a highway soon. She was going to sleep, because she had been out partying with the girls last night and only gotten four hours of the good stuff. What harm could twenty minutes do?
Chieko leaned her seat back, shut her eyes, and waited for the arrival tone to sound and the door to open…
And jerked awake as something shattered the window right next to her.
The passenger door whirred open. Chieko grabbed her bags and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. She smelled smoke, heard flames crackling, and saw her shop burning.
It wasn't a small fire, either; it was a flare reaching up into the morning sky, its own funeral pyre. Some rational part of her told her that this wasn't happening, that no building could burn this high and bright, and then that rational part smelled the mixture of burnt flesh and electronics and then that rational part of her retreated into the same paralyzed fear that had taken the rest of her mind. She didn't see her boss outside, realized she was probably still inside… which meant someone had set this to kill them.
Chieko heard rumbling behind her. She turned around, saw a blur shaped vaguely like a motorcycle, an arm outstretched, and took a sharpened piece of rebar moving at fifty kilometers an hour to the gut. Momentum spun her around, and then she hit the sidewalk and died.
And in a penthouse in southern Shinjuku, Jimmy Chee watched his wall, rigged up to a police scanner, refresh, refresh, refresh, seemingly every second a new report, and smiled.
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
9:15 am
"Well," said Leon, watching the scanner's reports pile up, "Shit."
He tried to say more, but the lack of sleep had dulled his thoughts, left him fumbling for words. He took a sip of coffee, which turned into a swig of coffee, and within seconds he'd emptied the whole cup. He still didn't feel any better, and went back to his office, cup clenched in his hand.
Daley was there, leaning up against his desk and looking beleaguered. Leon looked him up and down. "What?"
"We've got a meeting with the Chief."
"I know that. I was just-"
"No, I mean, right now. I had to haggle him on the phone to get him to delay the meeting up till now, but he's not gonna have it anymore. C'mon, let's take the elevator."
"Mmm."
They went over to the elevator, one of three glass cylinders locked into the outside of the ADP building. You could see a pretty big section of the city, especially from the upper levels. Leon supposed the idea was to remind officers and staff of what they were doing all this running around after psychotic vigilantes for, to help them harden their resolve in the face of great danger.
Well, it wasn't working right now, because he could see the city, and he could see the Tower dominating it, but he also saw one or two big plumes of smoke, all with Fire Department VTOL's hovering around them spraying water. It gave the illusion that the city wasn't completely out of control.
He knew better, of course. The attacks were scattered, random, varying in violence, but they all had one thing in common: The targets all either paid protection money to the Sleeping Dragon or were owned by them outright. He had no idea when they'd retaliate, or how, but rumors were circulating about battle Boomers, full-blown Tankmen, showing up in strange places, like a Megatokyo version of Mothman, their beady red eyes glistening in darkness.
It was the worst-case scenario, full stop. Civil war, basically. The only way it could get worse - no. It was best not to think about that.
"Hey," Daley said as the elevator began to climb. "You don't look so good."
"I don't feel so good, man. We're probably about to lose our jobs because of this mess."
"Huh." Daley sounded as though he hadn't considered that. "I mean, I can see why it'd happen to me, but you didn't disobey any of his orders, so he's got no pretext."
"Doesn't matter. The guy was an advertising exec, remember? When things go bad, corps fire at will just to make it look like they've done something. Seniority matters, but not by much, and that guy doesn't like either of us, so we're hosed."
"And you're sure you didn't figure anything out regarding Nemesis? You can't just exaggerate some clue you found, make it look like you're still worth something?"
"No." Leon almost glared at Daley, then glared out the window.
"Because you seem angrier than I think you'd be if you hadn't found anything. You found something, didn't you?"
"No. But I thought of something."
"What?"
"I'll tell you later." The elevator doors slid open to reveal the twenty-sixth floor in all its nondescript glory, its staff packed into cubicles arranged to create a hallway of sorts leading down to the chief's office. As he walked forward, Leon felt every pair of eyes behind him lock onto the back of his neck, their gazes accumulating like sweat. It was, he figured, probably intentional that the chief made things work like this.
And then he was opening the door, holding it open for Daley, and then they were inside.
There was something strangely empty about the office's decor. It wasn't that anything was out of place, there weren't anime posters tacked on the walls or something like that, and yet what was there all felt cheap, tacky, put there only for the sake of taking up space. The little tropical plant, one of those spliced variants that had gone extinct in the wild a decade ago. The bobblehead of the former prime minister, smiling, something Leon knew the politician almost never did. The paper map of Megatokyo, three years old, probably already obsolete.
And the man himself was as empty and somehow offensive to Leon's aesthetic sensibilities as the rest of his office. It was fitting, in a way, the way he looked almost but not quite like a dead American president, with the big bulky glasses, the hairline which seemed to recede faster than the Arctic under global warming, the way he wrung his hands with every statement he made.
Like now: "Please. Sit down." It was like having a cheese grater dragged over his nerves. He did not sit down. Daley did.
The chief looked to Leon, to Daley, then to Leon again. "So," he said, "we seem to have a problem."
No.
No.
No.
Fuck no.
His mouth moved faster than his brain.
"A PROBLEM? A FUCKING PROBLEM! THE BIG MAN SAYS WE HAVE A PROBLEM! WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A CITYWIDE GANG WAR THAT MAKES THE BOOMER RIOTS OF '34 AND THE CORPWAR OF '35 LOOK LIKE FUCKING SMALL POTATOES, LIKE FUCKING SANDBOX SCUFFLES, AND YOU'RE DOING NOTHING, AND YOU SAY WE HAVE A PROBLEM! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! LET US DO OUR JOB FOR GODSAKES!"
Daley cringed. The chief raised an eyebrow. Leon slammed his hand down on the desk, almost as an afterthought, and exhaled.
"Exactly," the chief said at last. "That's what I like about you, McNichol. You're, um, a real straight shooter. Really able to see what's going on. Yeah."
Daley scooched his chair closer to the chief's desk. "I think what my dear friend Leon is trying to say is that you're being a little vague. Just what is it that is our problem? The impending gang war?"
"Erm. Yes. The gang war. Exactly what I was going to say. It's a real problem, isn't it. Could really disrupt the business environment. Redevelopment will stall for sure. We definitely need to do something."
Leon ground his teeth. "Do you have a plan? Because if not, I'm walking out. For real this time."
"Relax, Mr. McNichol," the chief said. "I'm nothing if not receptive to your feedback. We do, in fact, have a plan. Not just to take out Nemesis, not just to end this gang war, but to pacify this unruly city once and for all. Gentlemen, we are going to get tough on crime ."
Yeah, that's what they said about the war on drugs, Leon thought, but kept it to himself. The chief had already taken too many jokes about his resemblance to that particular president from him already. Instead, he sat down and said, "I'm listening."
"It's become increasingly clear to me ever since I took the position over from Chief Todo that the AD Police is no longer capable of handling the crises which regularly plague Megatokyo today. I believe this is due to the outdated weapons and strategies which make up the backbone of ADP doctrine. We currently operate as an enhanced SWAT team more than anything else, relying on riot-suppression tactics and blockades to handle rampaging Boomers. We use assault rifles against armor meant to stop railgun rounds and expect it to work. Meanwhile, the Knight Sabers operate with military-grade hardware in a single four-woman cell with no defined leadership. They are dynamic, entrepreneurial, and they are per person several dozen times more effective than a fully armored ADP Tac Squad. Despite my best efforts to simply have the forces I oversee work more effectively with the already considerable resources they have, we clearly are constrained by old ways of thinking. We need a new kind of police, one which doesn't suffer the morale problems of our current force."
"Well, that's a problem easily solved," said Leon, sitting down at last. "I put those MALCORP press reports from the Dubai Arms Expo on your desk months ago, and they're very eager to sell to us. Motoroids, coilguns, the works. You're telling me you didn't read those fancy little pamphlets?"
"I didn't. We're a Japanese law enforcement organization, not an American one. Any military-grade gear we get must, under the Industrial Espionage Protection Act, be purchased from a Japanese-based supplier. MALCORP may have growing presence in Japan, but Greg Mallory is still an American. Thus, we need to turn closer to home."
Daley groaned. "So we're buying new gear from GENOM?"
"Where else would you get the knowledge and gear needed to take down Boomers, but from the manufacturer themselves?" The Chief smiled. Obviously he thought he was being clever. Leon's stomach dropped. "Their heroic work assisting our rescue efforts put them a notch above MALCORP in my book, at least. In fact, I've been thinking about bringing in strategic advisors from their Security Division. We work toward the same goals, so between their know-how and our dynamic, can-do task forces, we'll be even better equipped to handle the urban warfare which is plaguing our streets."
Leon's stomach dropped even further, to metaphysical space outside of the confines of his body. He glanced over to Daley, who appeared unshaken. "I suppose you could think of it that way," the redhead said. "I just worry that most of the ADP won't see it like that. After all, it's GENOM's devotion to having even the lowliest of labor Boomers being superhumanly tough and strong that has maken routine police work in what is supposed to be one of the safest metropolises on the planet akin to active duty in the JDSF, and some more hardened officers who've seen their compatriots die in the wake of Boomer crimes might be inclined to pin blame on GENOM. And some of those more hardened officers might be highly influential among the recruit population, and that could be troublesome."
"Yes," said the chief, "You're absolutely right. We'll have to get rid of them, of course. Can't have the new doctrine being negatively disrupted." He looked downward. "Probably better to just automate them, anyway."
"Excuse me?"
"What I mean is that we'll have to bring in Boomers to augment the force, maybe even supplement it in those departments with a deficiency of necessary manpower. It'll help us cut costs, keep the balance sheet look even while we shell out for more advanced equipment. Better to optimize with what we have than beg the city council for a bigger budget."
"Yeah, god forbid we actually get the money we've needed for nearly ten years now-"
"What was that, McNichol?"
"Nothing. Sir."
"Look, McNichol, we all have to make sacrifices. We need to trim the fat from the ranks, make this operation leaner and meaner, and if that means removing superfluous human labor and replacing it with something that can do the job better, then so be it. We aren't running a charity, here."
"In fact," the chief continued, "I don't really think you have room to complain, McNichol. The amount of insubordination I've gotten from you two would be grounds for firing in any corporate environment, but I recognize that you both have talent this organization needs."
"Oh," Daley said. "So we're not getting fired."
"Provided you don't pull another stunt like you did last night, Wong. The last thing I need is more bad publicity strangling our rebranding. If you slip up again…" He drew a finger across his neck.
"Understood. Sir."
"Well," he said, "I think that's about it. We'll be bringing in GENOM's head of internal security this afternoon, so, uh, try to be accomodating. She'll be working with us on redesigning the building's defenses, so we need to make her feel at home."
Leon deflated visibly. "Will do. Sir."
And then they were outside the chief's office, with the whole floor looking at them. It was very uncomfortable.
They crossed the gauntlet of stares in silence. Only when they finally got to the elevator back down to their floor did Leon finally speak.
"Well," he said in a strained voice, "that was fucked up."
Daley shrugged. "Neither of us are getting fired. Considering the situation, I'd say that was the best we could hope for."
"Really?" Leon growled. "The chief's gonna turn us into a GENOM puppet so we can't do anything they don't like? This is fucked up. This is wrong, Daley."
"We knew this day was coming. They've wanted to make sure we can't prosecute them for years, they just needed a pretext. I mean, when Chief Todo got the axe the writing was on the wall. I'm amazed it took them this long to pull it off."
"Yeah, but it still isn't fair…"
"Was it ever fair? I thought it was you who told me that the city council hasn't given us the funding we've needed ever since Billy went psycho."
"True." And now they were at their floor, at their offices, and Leon hoped to leave it at that, but then Daley said, "So what was that thing you were gonna tell me about?"
"I told you, it wasn't anything."
He tried to walk off, but then his partner grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. "Uh- uh . If there's one thing I can't stand in movies, it's those asshole action heroes who always growl 'I work alone' and then don't tell anyone about their problems so they can stew in them. You're better than that, Leon, and you know it. Get it, whatever it is, off your chest, before it consumes you and turns you into an asshole."
"You sure you want to hear this?"
Daley tightened his grip on his shoulder. "Positive."
"In that case, step inside." He gestured towards his office door, and they went in.
"So?"
"So I looked for Nemesis all last night before that ambush, and I didn't find jack shit. I ran lidar drones down the Fault, mapped out the outer city, probably went further out to the border near Saitama than any ADP officer in the past few years, and still no dice."
"Because you figured he'd go for some abandoned corner of town like Mallory did?"
"Mallory bought that warehouse, as best as I can figure, but yeah, something like that. I was trying to think like Nemesis to find him. But the longer I searched, the less my hunch made sense. He would have known we'd have started searching for him within days of his first attack, would have known that between us and Sato most of the city would be overturned. So he wouldn't have just picked some random abandoned warehouse and hoped that we wouldn't find it in four days. Sleeping Dragon's too big. He would have picked somewhere we would make a point of not going."
"And that doesn't rule out the Fault?"
"People are desperate there. He couldn't trust anyone. So I started thinking, and it occurred to me that it would make the most sense if Nemesis was actually hiding behind someone, so to speak."
"Behind someone?"
"A patron or something like that. I mean, look, the man bought his ammunition local, but he clearly didn't just buy that hardsuit from Gamble or some other low-life. He would have brought it over from America to here, and he would have had to have help getting it past customs, and help stashing it in a city he didn't know. Then that group, or person, or whatever, would need to serve as a deterrent, a great big hole in Sato's vision, someone he'd never think to touch. Finally, if push came to shove, they'd need to be someone who'd have Nemesis's back if Sato did start closing in on his hideout. So: someone well-armed, well-connected, well-funded, and with enough of a beef with Sato to actually take up the job of shielding our man in the first place."
Comprehension began to dawn on Daley's face like the slow light of winter. "And there's nobody in Megatokyo who matches that description besides-"
They said it together. "-Skeeter Karns."
Daley was silent for a moment, listening to the whir of the fan to his left. Then he spoke:
"So he was leading us on when we met at the Ri-san? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised, but why tell us to find Nemesis when he's protecting him?"
"Because," Leon said confidently, "he doesn't expect us to suspect him, or at least for us to catch Nemesis, by the time Sato's dead."
"Well, that just makes everything even worse. So not only do we have another miniature army ready to jump into the fracas at the slightest provocation, but it's the motherfucker who made an example of Ronnie Yee by-"
"Yeah yeah yeah. You see why I didn't want to tell the chief?"
"He'd drive a platoon of K-suits into the heart of his territory and they'd be wrecked within thirty minutes." Daley hung his head. "And Sato's probably figured this out by now. So no matter what we do this war's going to get even more complicated. We're powerless."
Leon shrugged. "I don't know about that. We're not gonna get anything done normally, that's for sure, but if we do a little freelancing, something could come up."
Daley perked up. "Like what? The bad parts of the city are gonna be a virtual war zone in a few hours. We can't just go up to the Ri-san and go 'excuse me, could we meet with a certain armored vigilante you've been harboring', especially since all either of us have is circumstantial evidence."
Leon frowned. "Well…"
"Oh no. No no no. Under no circumstances do I want to get on that man's bad side, okay? That's not a risk I'm willing to take."
"Daley, we may not have a choice. Either we stay quiet and let GENOM turn this city into a police state-"
"You think that's what they'll do?"
"I know that's what they'll do. They've got the pretext to put tanks in the streets, don't they? And then they can just… do whatever it takes to bring investors back. Like Chile in the 70's. If anyone complains, tries to organize, they'll have combat Boomers in the streets to shoot them."
"Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. I got it. Doesn't change the fact that I don't want to see you throw your life, or mine, away just to prove Karns is working with Nemesis. We go into District 3 without official clearance or heavy equipment, we'll lose our jobs at the least, and our lives at the most."
Leon sighed. "You're right," he said. "We can't go in there without help."
"Yeah, and it makes no sense either way. Skeeter's all about protecting his people, so he wouldn't expose the city to something like Nemesis unless he was absolutely certain he wouldn't be caught in the crossfire hold on did you just say without help?"
"I did." There was a twinkle in his eye now, a glimmer of hope almost entirely alien to the past few days. "What say we lean on MALCORP a little?"
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:07 am
Priss tried, and failed, to sleep on Linna's couch for about an hour before leaving the apartment in the middle of the night and biking back to her uninsulated trailer. It was colder there, the winds of winter ripping along the Fault and up into her little vacant lot, but no way in hell was she sleeping in the apartment of a woman who had punched her in the gut over an ideological disagreement. The morning after would have just been too awkward.
She and Linna had never really fought like that before, but then again she hadn't expected the most mercenary of the Sabers to be so… idealistic when it came to human life. Linna had always been in it for the money and the chance to train her martial arts skills, always whining about how this job or that Boomer rampage wasn't actually bringing anything in.
Which was understandable, but even Priss knew that if the Knight Sabers were supposed to be mere mercenaries, then they weren't cut out for the job. A bunch of civilians with minimal combat training and day jobs who were fitted into some of the most advanced combat hardware on the planet, painted gaudy colors that actually stood out against the murky backgrounds of the urban jungle? Mercenaries who had a fucking code of ethics? Who were supposed to 'protect peace and justice, and rid the world of evil'? Please. In the long run, the Knight Sabers were a loss-taking venture, had been designed that way from day one. Sylia had told her as much five years ago, and Linna didn't get that.
Or did she? This new, justice oriented-side of her teammate was something Priss had never seen before, and it bothered her. She didn't know much about Linna's past, hadn't really bothered to dig deep into it, and in turn Linna had only asked a few really prying questions about what happened to her. So where had it come from, this desire to save the lives of a bunch of armed thugs? She couldn't say.
And now she was back on a different couch, Nene knocking back swigs of hot chocolate next to her (she was taking an extended lunch break, but had heard rumblings from Leon and Daley about some sort of massive restructuring), Linna perched opposite the two, and Sylia just standing there, waiting for her moment to speak. They didn't look like the tight-knit team of superheroes they were supposed to be in urban legend. Priss sure as hell didn't feel like it, either.
"Now that we are all assembled," Sylia said at last, "It is time to review our situation. We have a gang war which threatens to tear Megatokyo apart, a rogue vigilante using similar technology to our hardsuits to hasten the desecration of this city's old balance of power, and a police force unable to deal with either of these threats."
Nene pouted.
"The trouble is that a gang war, once started, is not easily stopped. Sato perceives control of Megatokyo's underworld as his birthright, despite much of his power having been won in the vacuum that occurred after the quake. Any concession of influence to his enemies is a personal failure on his part, and so he will war with his rivals until they are destroyed or until he is killed. He will not push for a return to the status quo, now knowing that it is a position of weakness. Further, we have no reason to believe the alliance of rival gangs will submit quietly should Sato gain the upper hand once again. They have been cut out of this city's extremely profitable criminal markets, forced to rely on support from other branches of their respective syndicates, and they will undoubtedly view a peace offering, no matter how favorable, as a failure. Nemesis may have started this war, but his elimination will not end it. There is a power vacuum now, girls, and every gang in the city wants to fill it."
"Except Skeeter Karns," Priss said.
"Actually, Nene tells me that she heard from a bug in Inspector McNichol's office that Karns is probably working with Nemesis, and Fargo has given me no reason to doubt that. I have shipping records and camera feeds from Pier 109 which indicate two hardsuit-sized cryocoffins were moved off of a Korean tanker which was supposed to be only carrying Chinese-made sportswear. It was fast-tracked through inspections after an order from the harbormaster to smooth things along, according to an informant's report. And, of course, the harbormaster is a longtime resident of District 3."
"So he's in Karns' pocket."
"Most likely. He's managed to avoid external review for quite some time, despite having expedited several shipments of metallic-object printers with the capacity to manufacture firearms. That indicates someone is keeping him safe if nothing else. Unfortunately, while we have the shipping manifest of the tanker, the crew manifest was corrupted days after its arrival. Whether or not Nemesis or his allies were on the ship is unknown, and I suspect Fleet Hermes has something to do with that. Nene has not had the luxury of confirming my suspicions, though."
"So what has she come up with?" Priss grinned. "Not a lot, huh?"
"That Nemesis was most likely involved in a US military operation codenamed Templar. I've asked Fargo to reach out to Mallory, since he has several high-level contacts in the Pentagon, and I hope he will provide us with an unedited personnel list. In the meantime, Nene has been attempting to contact Fleet Hermes, who I suspect will be a goldmine of potential information."
"Yeah, about that," Nene said, leaning forward. "Why are we doing all this? You said we wouldn't take action until we had new intel, but now we do, so what exactly is the plan?"
"Why, to deduce Nemesis's secret identity, of course."
Priss grabbed the couch as best as she could, and swung around to glare at Sylia.
"I'm sorry, did you just say you want to deduce the identity of a guy who explicitly told us to fuck off and stay out of the way? A guy who even you admit is better trained and armed than all of us put together? A guy who probably doesn't even have a fucking 'secret identity'" - here she highlighted the phrase with raised fingers - "because he spends all his time either in a hardsuit or in a bunker somewhere eating canned beans? Do you have a death wish or something?" she half-shouted.
Sylia was unmoved. "Not quite," she said. "And I believe your assessment of Nemesis is inaccurate, tainted by fear-"
"I ain't scared!" Priss hissed. "Okay, maybe a little, but it's a pretty fucking reasonable fear to be afraid of a guy who can pull landmines and other exotic heavy munitions out of his ass anytime he wants!"
" As I was saying , records of Nemesis's strikes indicate that he is not as deranged as you make him out to be-"
"Oh fuck off. Anyone in the hardsuited crime-fighting business has to be a little unhinged, or else they'd-"
"PRISS." Sylia's stare could have cut steel.
"Okay, okay. So he's not crazy, he's-"
"Dedicated. Honorable, in his own way, dedicated to minimizing civilian involvement in his strikes while maximizing criminal casualties. This is why I believe he will not come after us if we approach him in a more reasonable way."
"More reasonable?" asked Linna.
"If I approach him in an environment where we are both outside of our hardsuits, I believe he will listen to my offer. In essence, I would like to pull a Greg Mallory on him, if you will." She smiled. Clearly she thought she was being
funny.
"And a Greg Mallory means?"
"In essence, I want Nemesis to cooperate with us. Or rather, I want to cooperate with him."
Silence. Linna stuttered incoherently. Priss gasped.
"But - but but but cooperate with him?! As in, start killing people left and right?"
"I know it seems hasty, but hear me out." Sylia's eyes drifted upward, and her posture shifted slightly.
"We have passed the point of no return, girls. This war will either tear Megatokyo apart or force GENOM to intervene in a tanks-on-the-streets fashion. The sooner Megatokyo's underworld is immobilized, unable to fight itself, the better. That means not only that Shichiki Sato must die as soon as possible, it means that his rivals must go with him."
"I suspect Nemesis understands this. We know he is competent at tactical combat at the most, and he probably isn't some sort of idiot savant. He will find himself forced to not only destroy the Sleeping Dragon in his usual four nights, but to continue attacking the Triads, the Red Willow, the Russians, the Koreans, and so on and so forth. And the sooner he completes his mission, the fewer people die. But if he slips up, he's wounded or even dead, and the war continues until GENOM puts its own 12B's on the streets. And GENOM is the greater evil here, make no mistake."
"So we'll help his team out. We'll expedite intelligence gathering, hunt down heavier targets in our motoslaves, just generally streamline the whole process. Then he can leave, and human blood on our hands notwithstanding we can go back to fighting GENOM and the rest of the megacorporations. We have no choice."
"That's all," Sylia said at last. "That's my logic. Feel free to complain, but I can see no faults with it."
No one, not even Linna, said anything. Nene sipped her chocolate, the sugary drink trickling past her lips and down her gullet. Priss looked downward.
Then Nene, of all people, spoke in a soft voice.
"Um, I mean, I think that's okay, but…" she trailed off. "I think I might have a better idea?"
Sylia's gaze locked onto Nene. "Well, then, let's hear it."
The redhead sucked in a breath. "Okay, so, uh, Nemesis always makes a point of sending a whole bunch of evidence to the police right before he goes for his killing blow, as I like to call it. He sends it, it's enough to convict a whole bunch of people, but by then it's irrelevant because most of the heads of whatever organization he's after are dead anyway. Honestly, he might as well not send it at all, for all the good it does." She breathed. "So why don't we change that? Get enough evidence to convict Sato off of his system, maybe steal some from Nemesis if we have to, and send all of it to the police, so they can convict Sato before he gets his brains splattered on his bedroom wall. The bad guys are rendered harmless, the N-Police gets their dignity back, the other gangsters know to back off so they don't meet the same fate. Everyone's happy."
"Except Nemesis," Priss quipped.
"Yeah, but who gives a shit? He's the one going around killing people like it's going out of style. Under Japanese law he's as much of a criminal as Sato is."
"And so are we, remember?" Sylia said. "Surely you haven't forgotten the Asahi Shimbun front page where we were described as terrorists seventeen separate times. I counted that very precisely."
Nene hesitated. Priss saw an opening. "Yeah, and what makes you think the police are even going to do anything about Sato if they get all that evidence? What makes you think they can do anything if he doesn't go quietly? They'll be calling in the JSDF the minute their K-suits can't handle real Combat Boomers."
"So you're taking Sylia's side now?" Nene said, turning back to face her.
"I'm not on anybody's side! I just want to not die. All I'm saying is that we've never relied on the Normal Police or the AD Police for help before, and this is a terrible time to start. They're both corrupt, they're both underarmed, they'll both just expedite GENOM control."
Nene's eyes narrowed. "First off, you have a death wish and everyone knows it, so I don't believe you. Second, you can complain about the N-Police all you like, but the ADP are the ones who clean up all the minor Boomer rampages, the ones with berserk Mannequins and Labors, so don't talk shit about them, especially to an actual cop."
Priss rolled her eyes. "Leon's a cop, you're a desk jockey. I can tell the difference. And you only joined the police 'cause Sylia told you to. So don't give me this high-and-mighty bullshit. You're a Knight Saber first, desk jockey second."
Linna jumped in. "Whichever one she is, neither the Knight Sabers nor the ADP are indiscriminate killers. So we don't need to argue about this, do we?"
"What're you talking about? The cops kill people all the time. They don't need shit for justification, or did you forget about the Little Manila riots? 'Cause I sure didn't."
"I'm not going to argue every bit of history with you, Priss. You know that was different, they did what they had to do…"
Priss crossed her arms. "Fuck off. You both think the cops are just people trying to do good? A bunch of heroes who just need bigger guns? Then you need to spend some time outside of Shinjuku and actually live in this fucking city."
Nene ground her teeth. "You take that back."
"I ain't takin' shit back, Little Miss Cyberpunk. You guys are delusional."
"I said , you take that back." She put her hot chocolate down and stood up, hands balled into fists.
"Or what? You wanna fight? You know I will fucking wreck your little girl's ass, so what's your plan? You gonna try to hack your way out of this one?"
Nene almost moved, but stopped herself. "What if I was to do that? Like if, say, I was to add a couple dozen parking tickets to your record, fifty thousand yen each? What would you do then?"
"You little-" Priss moved, practically kicking off of the couch, but found herself held back by Linna, arms expertly locked behind her back. Nene took a step forward, and found Sylia holding her arms too.
"Don't," Linna said. "We're a team, remember?"
"Indeed," Sylia said dispassionately. "For all your bickering, I would have thought you two had just joined the team. It was remarkably immature of you to say such things about the police, Priss, no matter how true they may be to you, and it was almost as immature, Nene, for you to rise to the occasion. I expect better of you both."
An instant passed, slow as the sea eating the shoreline. Priss wiggled a bit, but Linna's grip held steady. Nene stuck out her tongue at Priss, and felt her arms get slightly bent out of place, at the threshold between mild discomfort and excruciating pain. She drew her tongue back, and Sylia's grip slackened.
Why, Priss thought, should she apologize to Nene? She'd never been one to bury conflict for the sake of friendship. She wasn't even really friends with Nene. She respected the work she did as a Saber, but that was about it. It was gangster logic: let this go and it'd just come up at a later date. Better for Nene to get a history lesson now than on the battlefield.
But Linna wasn't moving, and there was that impassive look on Sylia's face, the one that could be taken to mean just about anything she wanted. It was funny, because on some level she felt as though she understood her stoic leader's feelings best. They had both killed before, understood how easy it was to start and to never stop, to never look back. What did Linna and Nene know about what was necessary? She didn't like Sylia's plan, or the way it seemed to brush too close with that skull-faced shadow. But she understood it, at least. It was the kind of plan she would have come up with before coming face-to-faceplate with that motherfucker.
But then she thought of how Nene was openly advocating stealing from a man who'd saved her life. That took balls, more balls than she'd thought Nene could ever possibly have. Moreover, she believed in the police even when they'd failed her. She believed in an ideal in the face of reality. That took balls, in its own way. Little Nene Romanova, the Knight with no Saber, was shaping up to be kind of a badass in Priss's head.
Sylia spoke. "I know you are afraid of what this mission means for our future. It is not easy for me, either." She sighed. "I still think about the way Mason's throat opened up, how much blood there was behind that little resistance, the way his eyes bulged out in shock. But all the same, I am willing to do this, because I know that something must be done, or we will have failed this city. I expect the same from all of you. To fight for this city's sake even when you are afraid, to kill even when it goes against what you believe, to sacrifice oneself on the altar of the greater good - that is what it means to be a Knight Saber. And you all know this."
She did know that. She loved Megatokyo as much as she hated it, but to fail it - to fail Sho's mother and Sylvie and Irene and Cynthia and Pops and Sho - who had nothing to do with any of this - she couldn't do that. Sylia was right. She had no choice.
Linna's grip loosened enough for Priss to wiggle her arms out. "I'm in," she said. "Yeah, Nemesis is a crazy, but like I said, you have to be a little crazy for this kind of job. I just hope you know what you're doing, Sylia."
"I do. Linna, Nene, what I ask of you is difficult, but it is not insurmountable. We have new hardsuits and motoslaves, we will have plenty of mechanical targets if my intel is correct, so there is a good chance very little blood will be on your hands directly, but it will be there nonetheless. But inaction will lead to innocent blood being shed, and you will be responsible for that, in your own way, and I know that is what neither of you want."
Linna sighed behind Priss. "I can do it," she sighed. "I can do it once, but never again. We're superheroes, not assassins."
Nene wiggled a little in Sylia's grip; then she let go, and the redhead bounced back over to her hot chocolate, taking a long swing of it. Finally, a little brown mustache on her upper lip, she spoke, turning to Sylia:
"Okay, but if we can talk Nemesis into just letting Sato get arrested, we go for it. We don't kill if we don't have to."
Sylia smiled. "Alright. I'll see what I can do. But I won't make any promises."
Then the smile was gone, and she was all business again. "We don't have much time. Nene, Linna, get back to work as soon as you can. I'll meet with Fargo and Mallory, see what they've turned up, and once you all are ready we'll go over the new hardsuits and motoslaves. Priss, you stay with me. I want to have a talk with you."
Nene and Linna looked at her funny as she slumped back down in her seat, but left anyway. When they were gone, she spoke.
"Okay. What's all this about?"
"Honestly?" Sylia said, and that smile was back. "Everything."
And that's it. That's all I've published so far.
The next chapter's currently in beta, but probably not for much longer, so I'll have an excuse to post here again soon enough. In the meantime, feedback would be greatly appreciated - I don't expect people to go out of their way to watch BGC and read Reed's original work, so I'd be more than willing to answer questions about the series and the original fics if need be.
Electronics Store, District 5
February 12, 2036
8:28 am
It was the kind of store that was too cheap to have a real name, that had a tattered LED banner looping advertisements for its services - Boomer repair, Boomer parts converted into cybernetics, even surplus Boomer brains from the Ebisu Mechatronics factory, still fresh in their plastic casing.
It had once done old-style electronics, AR goggles and smartphones and the like, until a representative of the local Sleeping Dragon branch visited the store's manager and politely pointed out how many competing old-style stores there were in the local area. It was inharmonious, the representative said, and it hindered Electronics Store's ability to pay the necessary protection fees on time, something which the manager was consistently failing to do. With a rate hike due in the next few months, the store had thrown out its oldstyle merchandise, bought some grey-market Boomer modification equipment and a forged license from the same Sleeping Dragon representative on a loan, and that had been that, in a sense. What choice did they have?
So Keiichi Itoh, who had just been looking for a side job to pay his way through a GENOM trade school, was now the cashier for a Yakuza-run Boomer fencing operation. He did his best to not know what the new employees did, tried very hard to look the other way when they came in with some raggedy looking android-type and made short work of it with a plasma saw. It wasn't his place.
And yet the manager still wasn't happy with him. The protection fees kept on getting higher, the nice representative with the ponytail and three fingers on his one hand kept on visiting and making suggestions, and the manager just sweated, went red in the face, and said he'd get on it. There was a pretty good chance, the manager said, that he was going to have to go without pay for the next few months, which he… didn't want to think about. They'd already paid their dues the very day after that Nemesis bastard had shown up in town, so they were safe for the time being.
Which was why, when he saw a man in an ill-fitting leisure suit with three fingers on one hand and sunglasses, but no ponytail, approach the shop entrance, he immediately dashed to the back room, to let the manager know that someone important was coming.
Which was why he didn't see the man, who was Red Willow, draw a little Russian machine pistol out of his jacket and run a stream of bullets up his back.
Which was why he died instantly, and didn't get to watch as the man killed his manager, the other employees, and then blew up the shop with a handful of Semtex.
District 7
February 12, 2036
8:32 am
Kazuma Kotaru was a pimp. And he was damn good at it, too, or at least that was what he told himself to sleep at night. It was a managerial job like any other, really. You had your entry-level employees, they did work, you made sure they got paid their due and didn't whine about it. God, half the time the girls didn't do real sex; their customers had Boomers for that. It was all about pay-by-the-minute intimacy, heads in laps, the girls stroking sad little hikikomori's greasy hair, that sort of thing. It wasn't totally legit, but it was close enough.
But still, being a pimp had its risks. Once or twice a lonely boomeroid had tried to off him so they could run off with a girl, and he'd had to rely on Philip, the old security Boomer he rented out from his Yakuza bosses, to tear them apart very publicly. Gross spectacle like that presented a dilemma to him: it made clear Kazuma Kotaru and the people who put him up were not to be fucked with, but it also meant Philip had to clean up the mess for hours afterward, effectively shutting his little business down. He had a sixth sense for that sort of thing, a pimp's intuition for when someone was trying to kill him, and it was itching now, bad. But he couldn't figure out why.
Sure, Nemesis had wrecked the Ja-sia the night before last, but that was a pretty big brothel as far as things went, an obvious target. That skull-faced douchebag wouldn't go after him, would he? He was just another small business owner under the Sleeping Dragon umbrella, that's all he was. He was just walking home from the liquor store with a crate of cheap champagne, completely not worth bothering. That was what he told himself, but he walked a little faster anyway.
When he got to the brothel, his pimp sense stopped itching and started burning. He slipped through the open door, found Philip decapitated on the tiled floor, then turned and ran, right into the chrome-plated grip of a snarling cyborg.
"Oh fuck," he said, and then the 'borg threw him across the room and killed him.
District 13
February 12, 2036
8:43 am
Once, Chieko Toyoda had it all planned out. She would get up at 5:30, buy a breakfast from the vending machine outside her apartment in District 5, then hail an autotaxi to take her along the coastal highway down to where Yokohama where she worked as a hairdresser, and be there just as the shops opened just before 7. It was pitiably simple, and she knew she could do it, had been doing it for years.
And then, just a few days before Christmas, something involving the Knight Sabers and their American counterparts blew up the entire coastal highway. Now, the autotaxi she took had no direct route through the city, so it had to take an indirect one. Most of the time, the roads would be clear, and her taxi would only reorient itself a few times before finding the optimal route around the Fault and through the ugly sprawl that seemed to reorganize itself daily in the southern part of the city.
And then there were days like this one, where rivers of traffic blocked her from going anywhere in under two hours. She was probably getting fired today, but somehow she couldn't bring herself to care. All she wanted to do was get there, to have something besides traffic happen to her.
Well, whatever. She'd called to let the shop know she was late and everything, but they didn't pick up, which was odd in and of itself. They pretty much always had a Boomer manning the counter. So she had done what she was supposed to do. She couldn't do anything but watch the the storefronts inch by and hope the 'taxi would get on a highway soon. She was going to sleep, because she had been out partying with the girls last night and only gotten four hours of the good stuff. What harm could twenty minutes do?
Chieko leaned her seat back, shut her eyes, and waited for the arrival tone to sound and the door to open…
And jerked awake as something shattered the window right next to her.
The passenger door whirred open. Chieko grabbed her bags and stumbled out onto the sidewalk. She smelled smoke, heard flames crackling, and saw her shop burning.
It wasn't a small fire, either; it was a flare reaching up into the morning sky, its own funeral pyre. Some rational part of her told her that this wasn't happening, that no building could burn this high and bright, and then that rational part smelled the mixture of burnt flesh and electronics and then that rational part of her retreated into the same paralyzed fear that had taken the rest of her mind. She didn't see her boss outside, realized she was probably still inside… which meant someone had set this to kill them.
Chieko heard rumbling behind her. She turned around, saw a blur shaped vaguely like a motorcycle, an arm outstretched, and took a sharpened piece of rebar moving at fifty kilometers an hour to the gut. Momentum spun her around, and then she hit the sidewalk and died.
And in a penthouse in southern Shinjuku, Jimmy Chee watched his wall, rigged up to a police scanner, refresh, refresh, refresh, seemingly every second a new report, and smiled.
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
9:15 am
"Well," said Leon, watching the scanner's reports pile up, "Shit."
He tried to say more, but the lack of sleep had dulled his thoughts, left him fumbling for words. He took a sip of coffee, which turned into a swig of coffee, and within seconds he'd emptied the whole cup. He still didn't feel any better, and went back to his office, cup clenched in his hand.
Daley was there, leaning up against his desk and looking beleaguered. Leon looked him up and down. "What?"
"We've got a meeting with the Chief."
"I know that. I was just-"
"No, I mean, right now. I had to haggle him on the phone to get him to delay the meeting up till now, but he's not gonna have it anymore. C'mon, let's take the elevator."
"Mmm."
They went over to the elevator, one of three glass cylinders locked into the outside of the ADP building. You could see a pretty big section of the city, especially from the upper levels. Leon supposed the idea was to remind officers and staff of what they were doing all this running around after psychotic vigilantes for, to help them harden their resolve in the face of great danger.
Well, it wasn't working right now, because he could see the city, and he could see the Tower dominating it, but he also saw one or two big plumes of smoke, all with Fire Department VTOL's hovering around them spraying water. It gave the illusion that the city wasn't completely out of control.
He knew better, of course. The attacks were scattered, random, varying in violence, but they all had one thing in common: The targets all either paid protection money to the Sleeping Dragon or were owned by them outright. He had no idea when they'd retaliate, or how, but rumors were circulating about battle Boomers, full-blown Tankmen, showing up in strange places, like a Megatokyo version of Mothman, their beady red eyes glistening in darkness.
It was the worst-case scenario, full stop. Civil war, basically. The only way it could get worse - no. It was best not to think about that.
"Hey," Daley said as the elevator began to climb. "You don't look so good."
"I don't feel so good, man. We're probably about to lose our jobs because of this mess."
"Huh." Daley sounded as though he hadn't considered that. "I mean, I can see why it'd happen to me, but you didn't disobey any of his orders, so he's got no pretext."
"Doesn't matter. The guy was an advertising exec, remember? When things go bad, corps fire at will just to make it look like they've done something. Seniority matters, but not by much, and that guy doesn't like either of us, so we're hosed."
"And you're sure you didn't figure anything out regarding Nemesis? You can't just exaggerate some clue you found, make it look like you're still worth something?"
"No." Leon almost glared at Daley, then glared out the window.
"Because you seem angrier than I think you'd be if you hadn't found anything. You found something, didn't you?"
"No. But I thought of something."
"What?"
"I'll tell you later." The elevator doors slid open to reveal the twenty-sixth floor in all its nondescript glory, its staff packed into cubicles arranged to create a hallway of sorts leading down to the chief's office. As he walked forward, Leon felt every pair of eyes behind him lock onto the back of his neck, their gazes accumulating like sweat. It was, he figured, probably intentional that the chief made things work like this.
And then he was opening the door, holding it open for Daley, and then they were inside.
There was something strangely empty about the office's decor. It wasn't that anything was out of place, there weren't anime posters tacked on the walls or something like that, and yet what was there all felt cheap, tacky, put there only for the sake of taking up space. The little tropical plant, one of those spliced variants that had gone extinct in the wild a decade ago. The bobblehead of the former prime minister, smiling, something Leon knew the politician almost never did. The paper map of Megatokyo, three years old, probably already obsolete.
And the man himself was as empty and somehow offensive to Leon's aesthetic sensibilities as the rest of his office. It was fitting, in a way, the way he looked almost but not quite like a dead American president, with the big bulky glasses, the hairline which seemed to recede faster than the Arctic under global warming, the way he wrung his hands with every statement he made.
Like now: "Please. Sit down." It was like having a cheese grater dragged over his nerves. He did not sit down. Daley did.
The chief looked to Leon, to Daley, then to Leon again. "So," he said, "we seem to have a problem."
No.
No.
No.
Fuck no.
His mouth moved faster than his brain.
"A PROBLEM? A FUCKING PROBLEM! THE BIG MAN SAYS WE HAVE A PROBLEM! WE'RE IN THE MIDDLE OF A CITYWIDE GANG WAR THAT MAKES THE BOOMER RIOTS OF '34 AND THE CORPWAR OF '35 LOOK LIKE FUCKING SMALL POTATOES, LIKE FUCKING SANDBOX SCUFFLES, AND YOU'RE DOING NOTHING, AND YOU SAY WE HAVE A PROBLEM! JESUS FUCKING CHRIST, THEN DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! LET US DO OUR JOB FOR GODSAKES!"
Daley cringed. The chief raised an eyebrow. Leon slammed his hand down on the desk, almost as an afterthought, and exhaled.
"Exactly," the chief said at last. "That's what I like about you, McNichol. You're, um, a real straight shooter. Really able to see what's going on. Yeah."
Daley scooched his chair closer to the chief's desk. "I think what my dear friend Leon is trying to say is that you're being a little vague. Just what is it that is our problem? The impending gang war?"
"Erm. Yes. The gang war. Exactly what I was going to say. It's a real problem, isn't it. Could really disrupt the business environment. Redevelopment will stall for sure. We definitely need to do something."
Leon ground his teeth. "Do you have a plan? Because if not, I'm walking out. For real this time."
"Relax, Mr. McNichol," the chief said. "I'm nothing if not receptive to your feedback. We do, in fact, have a plan. Not just to take out Nemesis, not just to end this gang war, but to pacify this unruly city once and for all. Gentlemen, we are going to get tough on crime ."
Yeah, that's what they said about the war on drugs, Leon thought, but kept it to himself. The chief had already taken too many jokes about his resemblance to that particular president from him already. Instead, he sat down and said, "I'm listening."
"It's become increasingly clear to me ever since I took the position over from Chief Todo that the AD Police is no longer capable of handling the crises which regularly plague Megatokyo today. I believe this is due to the outdated weapons and strategies which make up the backbone of ADP doctrine. We currently operate as an enhanced SWAT team more than anything else, relying on riot-suppression tactics and blockades to handle rampaging Boomers. We use assault rifles against armor meant to stop railgun rounds and expect it to work. Meanwhile, the Knight Sabers operate with military-grade hardware in a single four-woman cell with no defined leadership. They are dynamic, entrepreneurial, and they are per person several dozen times more effective than a fully armored ADP Tac Squad. Despite my best efforts to simply have the forces I oversee work more effectively with the already considerable resources they have, we clearly are constrained by old ways of thinking. We need a new kind of police, one which doesn't suffer the morale problems of our current force."
"Well, that's a problem easily solved," said Leon, sitting down at last. "I put those MALCORP press reports from the Dubai Arms Expo on your desk months ago, and they're very eager to sell to us. Motoroids, coilguns, the works. You're telling me you didn't read those fancy little pamphlets?"
"I didn't. We're a Japanese law enforcement organization, not an American one. Any military-grade gear we get must, under the Industrial Espionage Protection Act, be purchased from a Japanese-based supplier. MALCORP may have growing presence in Japan, but Greg Mallory is still an American. Thus, we need to turn closer to home."
Daley groaned. "So we're buying new gear from GENOM?"
"Where else would you get the knowledge and gear needed to take down Boomers, but from the manufacturer themselves?" The Chief smiled. Obviously he thought he was being clever. Leon's stomach dropped. "Their heroic work assisting our rescue efforts put them a notch above MALCORP in my book, at least. In fact, I've been thinking about bringing in strategic advisors from their Security Division. We work toward the same goals, so between their know-how and our dynamic, can-do task forces, we'll be even better equipped to handle the urban warfare which is plaguing our streets."
Leon's stomach dropped even further, to metaphysical space outside of the confines of his body. He glanced over to Daley, who appeared unshaken. "I suppose you could think of it that way," the redhead said. "I just worry that most of the ADP won't see it like that. After all, it's GENOM's devotion to having even the lowliest of labor Boomers being superhumanly tough and strong that has maken routine police work in what is supposed to be one of the safest metropolises on the planet akin to active duty in the JDSF, and some more hardened officers who've seen their compatriots die in the wake of Boomer crimes might be inclined to pin blame on GENOM. And some of those more hardened officers might be highly influential among the recruit population, and that could be troublesome."
"Yes," said the chief, "You're absolutely right. We'll have to get rid of them, of course. Can't have the new doctrine being negatively disrupted." He looked downward. "Probably better to just automate them, anyway."
"Excuse me?"
"What I mean is that we'll have to bring in Boomers to augment the force, maybe even supplement it in those departments with a deficiency of necessary manpower. It'll help us cut costs, keep the balance sheet look even while we shell out for more advanced equipment. Better to optimize with what we have than beg the city council for a bigger budget."
"Yeah, god forbid we actually get the money we've needed for nearly ten years now-"
"What was that, McNichol?"
"Nothing. Sir."
"Look, McNichol, we all have to make sacrifices. We need to trim the fat from the ranks, make this operation leaner and meaner, and if that means removing superfluous human labor and replacing it with something that can do the job better, then so be it. We aren't running a charity, here."
"In fact," the chief continued, "I don't really think you have room to complain, McNichol. The amount of insubordination I've gotten from you two would be grounds for firing in any corporate environment, but I recognize that you both have talent this organization needs."
"Oh," Daley said. "So we're not getting fired."
"Provided you don't pull another stunt like you did last night, Wong. The last thing I need is more bad publicity strangling our rebranding. If you slip up again…" He drew a finger across his neck.
"Understood. Sir."
"Well," he said, "I think that's about it. We'll be bringing in GENOM's head of internal security this afternoon, so, uh, try to be accomodating. She'll be working with us on redesigning the building's defenses, so we need to make her feel at home."
Leon deflated visibly. "Will do. Sir."
And then they were outside the chief's office, with the whole floor looking at them. It was very uncomfortable.
They crossed the gauntlet of stares in silence. Only when they finally got to the elevator back down to their floor did Leon finally speak.
"Well," he said in a strained voice, "that was fucked up."
Daley shrugged. "Neither of us are getting fired. Considering the situation, I'd say that was the best we could hope for."
"Really?" Leon growled. "The chief's gonna turn us into a GENOM puppet so we can't do anything they don't like? This is fucked up. This is wrong, Daley."
"We knew this day was coming. They've wanted to make sure we can't prosecute them for years, they just needed a pretext. I mean, when Chief Todo got the axe the writing was on the wall. I'm amazed it took them this long to pull it off."
"Yeah, but it still isn't fair…"
"Was it ever fair? I thought it was you who told me that the city council hasn't given us the funding we've needed ever since Billy went psycho."
"True." And now they were at their floor, at their offices, and Leon hoped to leave it at that, but then Daley said, "So what was that thing you were gonna tell me about?"
"I told you, it wasn't anything."
He tried to walk off, but then his partner grabbed him by the shoulder and spun him around. "Uh- uh . If there's one thing I can't stand in movies, it's those asshole action heroes who always growl 'I work alone' and then don't tell anyone about their problems so they can stew in them. You're better than that, Leon, and you know it. Get it, whatever it is, off your chest, before it consumes you and turns you into an asshole."
"You sure you want to hear this?"
Daley tightened his grip on his shoulder. "Positive."
"In that case, step inside." He gestured towards his office door, and they went in.
"So?"
"So I looked for Nemesis all last night before that ambush, and I didn't find jack shit. I ran lidar drones down the Fault, mapped out the outer city, probably went further out to the border near Saitama than any ADP officer in the past few years, and still no dice."
"Because you figured he'd go for some abandoned corner of town like Mallory did?"
"Mallory bought that warehouse, as best as I can figure, but yeah, something like that. I was trying to think like Nemesis to find him. But the longer I searched, the less my hunch made sense. He would have known we'd have started searching for him within days of his first attack, would have known that between us and Sato most of the city would be overturned. So he wouldn't have just picked some random abandoned warehouse and hoped that we wouldn't find it in four days. Sleeping Dragon's too big. He would have picked somewhere we would make a point of not going."
"And that doesn't rule out the Fault?"
"People are desperate there. He couldn't trust anyone. So I started thinking, and it occurred to me that it would make the most sense if Nemesis was actually hiding behind someone, so to speak."
"Behind someone?"
"A patron or something like that. I mean, look, the man bought his ammunition local, but he clearly didn't just buy that hardsuit from Gamble or some other low-life. He would have brought it over from America to here, and he would have had to have help getting it past customs, and help stashing it in a city he didn't know. Then that group, or person, or whatever, would need to serve as a deterrent, a great big hole in Sato's vision, someone he'd never think to touch. Finally, if push came to shove, they'd need to be someone who'd have Nemesis's back if Sato did start closing in on his hideout. So: someone well-armed, well-connected, well-funded, and with enough of a beef with Sato to actually take up the job of shielding our man in the first place."
Comprehension began to dawn on Daley's face like the slow light of winter. "And there's nobody in Megatokyo who matches that description besides-"
They said it together. "-Skeeter Karns."
Daley was silent for a moment, listening to the whir of the fan to his left. Then he spoke:
"So he was leading us on when we met at the Ri-san? I mean, I wouldn't be surprised, but why tell us to find Nemesis when he's protecting him?"
"Because," Leon said confidently, "he doesn't expect us to suspect him, or at least for us to catch Nemesis, by the time Sato's dead."
"Well, that just makes everything even worse. So not only do we have another miniature army ready to jump into the fracas at the slightest provocation, but it's the motherfucker who made an example of Ronnie Yee by-"
"Yeah yeah yeah. You see why I didn't want to tell the chief?"
"He'd drive a platoon of K-suits into the heart of his territory and they'd be wrecked within thirty minutes." Daley hung his head. "And Sato's probably figured this out by now. So no matter what we do this war's going to get even more complicated. We're powerless."
Leon shrugged. "I don't know about that. We're not gonna get anything done normally, that's for sure, but if we do a little freelancing, something could come up."
Daley perked up. "Like what? The bad parts of the city are gonna be a virtual war zone in a few hours. We can't just go up to the Ri-san and go 'excuse me, could we meet with a certain armored vigilante you've been harboring', especially since all either of us have is circumstantial evidence."
Leon frowned. "Well…"
"Oh no. No no no. Under no circumstances do I want to get on that man's bad side, okay? That's not a risk I'm willing to take."
"Daley, we may not have a choice. Either we stay quiet and let GENOM turn this city into a police state-"
"You think that's what they'll do?"
"I know that's what they'll do. They've got the pretext to put tanks in the streets, don't they? And then they can just… do whatever it takes to bring investors back. Like Chile in the 70's. If anyone complains, tries to organize, they'll have combat Boomers in the streets to shoot them."
"Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. I got it. Doesn't change the fact that I don't want to see you throw your life, or mine, away just to prove Karns is working with Nemesis. We go into District 3 without official clearance or heavy equipment, we'll lose our jobs at the least, and our lives at the most."
Leon sighed. "You're right," he said. "We can't go in there without help."
"Yeah, and it makes no sense either way. Skeeter's all about protecting his people, so he wouldn't expose the city to something like Nemesis unless he was absolutely certain he wouldn't be caught in the crossfire hold on did you just say without help?"
"I did." There was a twinkle in his eye now, a glimmer of hope almost entirely alien to the past few days. "What say we lean on MALCORP a little?"
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:07 am
Priss tried, and failed, to sleep on Linna's couch for about an hour before leaving the apartment in the middle of the night and biking back to her uninsulated trailer. It was colder there, the winds of winter ripping along the Fault and up into her little vacant lot, but no way in hell was she sleeping in the apartment of a woman who had punched her in the gut over an ideological disagreement. The morning after would have just been too awkward.
She and Linna had never really fought like that before, but then again she hadn't expected the most mercenary of the Sabers to be so… idealistic when it came to human life. Linna had always been in it for the money and the chance to train her martial arts skills, always whining about how this job or that Boomer rampage wasn't actually bringing anything in.
Which was understandable, but even Priss knew that if the Knight Sabers were supposed to be mere mercenaries, then they weren't cut out for the job. A bunch of civilians with minimal combat training and day jobs who were fitted into some of the most advanced combat hardware on the planet, painted gaudy colors that actually stood out against the murky backgrounds of the urban jungle? Mercenaries who had a fucking code of ethics? Who were supposed to 'protect peace and justice, and rid the world of evil'? Please. In the long run, the Knight Sabers were a loss-taking venture, had been designed that way from day one. Sylia had told her as much five years ago, and Linna didn't get that.
Or did she? This new, justice oriented-side of her teammate was something Priss had never seen before, and it bothered her. She didn't know much about Linna's past, hadn't really bothered to dig deep into it, and in turn Linna had only asked a few really prying questions about what happened to her. So where had it come from, this desire to save the lives of a bunch of armed thugs? She couldn't say.
And now she was back on a different couch, Nene knocking back swigs of hot chocolate next to her (she was taking an extended lunch break, but had heard rumblings from Leon and Daley about some sort of massive restructuring), Linna perched opposite the two, and Sylia just standing there, waiting for her moment to speak. They didn't look like the tight-knit team of superheroes they were supposed to be in urban legend. Priss sure as hell didn't feel like it, either.
"Now that we are all assembled," Sylia said at last, "It is time to review our situation. We have a gang war which threatens to tear Megatokyo apart, a rogue vigilante using similar technology to our hardsuits to hasten the desecration of this city's old balance of power, and a police force unable to deal with either of these threats."
Nene pouted.
"The trouble is that a gang war, once started, is not easily stopped. Sato perceives control of Megatokyo's underworld as his birthright, despite much of his power having been won in the vacuum that occurred after the quake. Any concession of influence to his enemies is a personal failure on his part, and so he will war with his rivals until they are destroyed or until he is killed. He will not push for a return to the status quo, now knowing that it is a position of weakness. Further, we have no reason to believe the alliance of rival gangs will submit quietly should Sato gain the upper hand once again. They have been cut out of this city's extremely profitable criminal markets, forced to rely on support from other branches of their respective syndicates, and they will undoubtedly view a peace offering, no matter how favorable, as a failure. Nemesis may have started this war, but his elimination will not end it. There is a power vacuum now, girls, and every gang in the city wants to fill it."
"Except Skeeter Karns," Priss said.
"Actually, Nene tells me that she heard from a bug in Inspector McNichol's office that Karns is probably working with Nemesis, and Fargo has given me no reason to doubt that. I have shipping records and camera feeds from Pier 109 which indicate two hardsuit-sized cryocoffins were moved off of a Korean tanker which was supposed to be only carrying Chinese-made sportswear. It was fast-tracked through inspections after an order from the harbormaster to smooth things along, according to an informant's report. And, of course, the harbormaster is a longtime resident of District 3."
"So he's in Karns' pocket."
"Most likely. He's managed to avoid external review for quite some time, despite having expedited several shipments of metallic-object printers with the capacity to manufacture firearms. That indicates someone is keeping him safe if nothing else. Unfortunately, while we have the shipping manifest of the tanker, the crew manifest was corrupted days after its arrival. Whether or not Nemesis or his allies were on the ship is unknown, and I suspect Fleet Hermes has something to do with that. Nene has not had the luxury of confirming my suspicions, though."
"So what has she come up with?" Priss grinned. "Not a lot, huh?"
"That Nemesis was most likely involved in a US military operation codenamed Templar. I've asked Fargo to reach out to Mallory, since he has several high-level contacts in the Pentagon, and I hope he will provide us with an unedited personnel list. In the meantime, Nene has been attempting to contact Fleet Hermes, who I suspect will be a goldmine of potential information."
"Yeah, about that," Nene said, leaning forward. "Why are we doing all this? You said we wouldn't take action until we had new intel, but now we do, so what exactly is the plan?"
"Why, to deduce Nemesis's secret identity, of course."
Priss grabbed the couch as best as she could, and swung around to glare at Sylia.
"I'm sorry, did you just say you want to deduce the identity of a guy who explicitly told us to fuck off and stay out of the way? A guy who even you admit is better trained and armed than all of us put together? A guy who probably doesn't even have a fucking 'secret identity'" - here she highlighted the phrase with raised fingers - "because he spends all his time either in a hardsuit or in a bunker somewhere eating canned beans? Do you have a death wish or something?" she half-shouted.
Sylia was unmoved. "Not quite," she said. "And I believe your assessment of Nemesis is inaccurate, tainted by fear-"
"I ain't scared!" Priss hissed. "Okay, maybe a little, but it's a pretty fucking reasonable fear to be afraid of a guy who can pull landmines and other exotic heavy munitions out of his ass anytime he wants!"
" As I was saying , records of Nemesis's strikes indicate that he is not as deranged as you make him out to be-"
"Oh fuck off. Anyone in the hardsuited crime-fighting business has to be a little unhinged, or else they'd-"
"PRISS." Sylia's stare could have cut steel.
"Okay, okay. So he's not crazy, he's-"
"Dedicated. Honorable, in his own way, dedicated to minimizing civilian involvement in his strikes while maximizing criminal casualties. This is why I believe he will not come after us if we approach him in a more reasonable way."
"More reasonable?" asked Linna.
"If I approach him in an environment where we are both outside of our hardsuits, I believe he will listen to my offer. In essence, I would like to pull a Greg Mallory on him, if you will." She smiled. Clearly she thought she was being
funny.
"And a Greg Mallory means?"
"In essence, I want Nemesis to cooperate with us. Or rather, I want to cooperate with him."
Silence. Linna stuttered incoherently. Priss gasped.
"But - but but but cooperate with him?! As in, start killing people left and right?"
"I know it seems hasty, but hear me out." Sylia's eyes drifted upward, and her posture shifted slightly.
"We have passed the point of no return, girls. This war will either tear Megatokyo apart or force GENOM to intervene in a tanks-on-the-streets fashion. The sooner Megatokyo's underworld is immobilized, unable to fight itself, the better. That means not only that Shichiki Sato must die as soon as possible, it means that his rivals must go with him."
"I suspect Nemesis understands this. We know he is competent at tactical combat at the most, and he probably isn't some sort of idiot savant. He will find himself forced to not only destroy the Sleeping Dragon in his usual four nights, but to continue attacking the Triads, the Red Willow, the Russians, the Koreans, and so on and so forth. And the sooner he completes his mission, the fewer people die. But if he slips up, he's wounded or even dead, and the war continues until GENOM puts its own 12B's on the streets. And GENOM is the greater evil here, make no mistake."
"So we'll help his team out. We'll expedite intelligence gathering, hunt down heavier targets in our motoslaves, just generally streamline the whole process. Then he can leave, and human blood on our hands notwithstanding we can go back to fighting GENOM and the rest of the megacorporations. We have no choice."
"That's all," Sylia said at last. "That's my logic. Feel free to complain, but I can see no faults with it."
No one, not even Linna, said anything. Nene sipped her chocolate, the sugary drink trickling past her lips and down her gullet. Priss looked downward.
Then Nene, of all people, spoke in a soft voice.
"Um, I mean, I think that's okay, but…" she trailed off. "I think I might have a better idea?"
Sylia's gaze locked onto Nene. "Well, then, let's hear it."
The redhead sucked in a breath. "Okay, so, uh, Nemesis always makes a point of sending a whole bunch of evidence to the police right before he goes for his killing blow, as I like to call it. He sends it, it's enough to convict a whole bunch of people, but by then it's irrelevant because most of the heads of whatever organization he's after are dead anyway. Honestly, he might as well not send it at all, for all the good it does." She breathed. "So why don't we change that? Get enough evidence to convict Sato off of his system, maybe steal some from Nemesis if we have to, and send all of it to the police, so they can convict Sato before he gets his brains splattered on his bedroom wall. The bad guys are rendered harmless, the N-Police gets their dignity back, the other gangsters know to back off so they don't meet the same fate. Everyone's happy."
"Except Nemesis," Priss quipped.
"Yeah, but who gives a shit? He's the one going around killing people like it's going out of style. Under Japanese law he's as much of a criminal as Sato is."
"And so are we, remember?" Sylia said. "Surely you haven't forgotten the Asahi Shimbun front page where we were described as terrorists seventeen separate times. I counted that very precisely."
Nene hesitated. Priss saw an opening. "Yeah, and what makes you think the police are even going to do anything about Sato if they get all that evidence? What makes you think they can do anything if he doesn't go quietly? They'll be calling in the JSDF the minute their K-suits can't handle real Combat Boomers."
"So you're taking Sylia's side now?" Nene said, turning back to face her.
"I'm not on anybody's side! I just want to not die. All I'm saying is that we've never relied on the Normal Police or the AD Police for help before, and this is a terrible time to start. They're both corrupt, they're both underarmed, they'll both just expedite GENOM control."
Nene's eyes narrowed. "First off, you have a death wish and everyone knows it, so I don't believe you. Second, you can complain about the N-Police all you like, but the ADP are the ones who clean up all the minor Boomer rampages, the ones with berserk Mannequins and Labors, so don't talk shit about them, especially to an actual cop."
Priss rolled her eyes. "Leon's a cop, you're a desk jockey. I can tell the difference. And you only joined the police 'cause Sylia told you to. So don't give me this high-and-mighty bullshit. You're a Knight Saber first, desk jockey second."
Linna jumped in. "Whichever one she is, neither the Knight Sabers nor the ADP are indiscriminate killers. So we don't need to argue about this, do we?"
"What're you talking about? The cops kill people all the time. They don't need shit for justification, or did you forget about the Little Manila riots? 'Cause I sure didn't."
"I'm not going to argue every bit of history with you, Priss. You know that was different, they did what they had to do…"
Priss crossed her arms. "Fuck off. You both think the cops are just people trying to do good? A bunch of heroes who just need bigger guns? Then you need to spend some time outside of Shinjuku and actually live in this fucking city."
Nene ground her teeth. "You take that back."
"I ain't takin' shit back, Little Miss Cyberpunk. You guys are delusional."
"I said , you take that back." She put her hot chocolate down and stood up, hands balled into fists.
"Or what? You wanna fight? You know I will fucking wreck your little girl's ass, so what's your plan? You gonna try to hack your way out of this one?"
Nene almost moved, but stopped herself. "What if I was to do that? Like if, say, I was to add a couple dozen parking tickets to your record, fifty thousand yen each? What would you do then?"
"You little-" Priss moved, practically kicking off of the couch, but found herself held back by Linna, arms expertly locked behind her back. Nene took a step forward, and found Sylia holding her arms too.
"Don't," Linna said. "We're a team, remember?"
"Indeed," Sylia said dispassionately. "For all your bickering, I would have thought you two had just joined the team. It was remarkably immature of you to say such things about the police, Priss, no matter how true they may be to you, and it was almost as immature, Nene, for you to rise to the occasion. I expect better of you both."
An instant passed, slow as the sea eating the shoreline. Priss wiggled a bit, but Linna's grip held steady. Nene stuck out her tongue at Priss, and felt her arms get slightly bent out of place, at the threshold between mild discomfort and excruciating pain. She drew her tongue back, and Sylia's grip slackened.
Why, Priss thought, should she apologize to Nene? She'd never been one to bury conflict for the sake of friendship. She wasn't even really friends with Nene. She respected the work she did as a Saber, but that was about it. It was gangster logic: let this go and it'd just come up at a later date. Better for Nene to get a history lesson now than on the battlefield.
But Linna wasn't moving, and there was that impassive look on Sylia's face, the one that could be taken to mean just about anything she wanted. It was funny, because on some level she felt as though she understood her stoic leader's feelings best. They had both killed before, understood how easy it was to start and to never stop, to never look back. What did Linna and Nene know about what was necessary? She didn't like Sylia's plan, or the way it seemed to brush too close with that skull-faced shadow. But she understood it, at least. It was the kind of plan she would have come up with before coming face-to-faceplate with that motherfucker.
But then she thought of how Nene was openly advocating stealing from a man who'd saved her life. That took balls, more balls than she'd thought Nene could ever possibly have. Moreover, she believed in the police even when they'd failed her. She believed in an ideal in the face of reality. That took balls, in its own way. Little Nene Romanova, the Knight with no Saber, was shaping up to be kind of a badass in Priss's head.
Sylia spoke. "I know you are afraid of what this mission means for our future. It is not easy for me, either." She sighed. "I still think about the way Mason's throat opened up, how much blood there was behind that little resistance, the way his eyes bulged out in shock. But all the same, I am willing to do this, because I know that something must be done, or we will have failed this city. I expect the same from all of you. To fight for this city's sake even when you are afraid, to kill even when it goes against what you believe, to sacrifice oneself on the altar of the greater good - that is what it means to be a Knight Saber. And you all know this."
She did know that. She loved Megatokyo as much as she hated it, but to fail it - to fail Sho's mother and Sylvie and Irene and Cynthia and Pops and Sho - who had nothing to do with any of this - she couldn't do that. Sylia was right. She had no choice.
Linna's grip loosened enough for Priss to wiggle her arms out. "I'm in," she said. "Yeah, Nemesis is a crazy, but like I said, you have to be a little crazy for this kind of job. I just hope you know what you're doing, Sylia."
"I do. Linna, Nene, what I ask of you is difficult, but it is not insurmountable. We have new hardsuits and motoslaves, we will have plenty of mechanical targets if my intel is correct, so there is a good chance very little blood will be on your hands directly, but it will be there nonetheless. But inaction will lead to innocent blood being shed, and you will be responsible for that, in your own way, and I know that is what neither of you want."
Linna sighed behind Priss. "I can do it," she sighed. "I can do it once, but never again. We're superheroes, not assassins."
Nene wiggled a little in Sylia's grip; then she let go, and the redhead bounced back over to her hot chocolate, taking a long swing of it. Finally, a little brown mustache on her upper lip, she spoke, turning to Sylia:
"Okay, but if we can talk Nemesis into just letting Sato get arrested, we go for it. We don't kill if we don't have to."
Sylia smiled. "Alright. I'll see what I can do. But I won't make any promises."
Then the smile was gone, and she was all business again. "We don't have much time. Nene, Linna, get back to work as soon as you can. I'll meet with Fargo and Mallory, see what they've turned up, and once you all are ready we'll go over the new hardsuits and motoslaves. Priss, you stay with me. I want to have a talk with you."
Nene and Linna looked at her funny as she slumped back down in her seat, but left anyway. When they were gone, she spoke.
"Okay. What's all this about?"
"Honestly?" Sylia said, and that smile was back. "Everything."
And that's it. That's all I've published so far.
The next chapter's currently in beta, but probably not for much longer, so I'll have an excuse to post here again soon enough. In the meantime, feedback would be greatly appreciated - I don't expect people to go out of their way to watch BGC and read Reed's original work, so I'd be more than willing to answer questions about the series and the original fics if need be.
Chapter 27.5: Tech Specs: Hardsuits
- Location
- Megatokyo
So I updated the prologue, cutting out Madigan's sinister scheme - it didn't really gel with where I want to take the plot, and it didn't explain BGC and Vigilante's Run concisely enough. The replacement should do nicely for those unconverted to the cult of ancient anime.
But since I'm not just going to leave you with a one-liner post, here's some bonus content: Knight Saber Hardsuit tech specs, from the mind of Sylia Stingray! This was inspired by some internet archaeology that turned up This and This. I thought it was cool, so I did my own, updating the technology as best as I could, trying to bride the fantastic and the possible. The results are... decent. But hey, content's content.
WELCOME TO THE STINGRAY LUXURY GOODS MEGATOKYO DATABASE, EST. 2027. PLEASE ENTER YOUR CLEARANCE CODE.
>>xX_B1gB00tySl4y3r_42069_Xx
SCANNING BIOMETRICS…
SCANNING NEUROMETRICS…
CLEARANCE MATCH. WELCOME, MACKIE STINGRAY.
>> See Hardsuits.txt
FILE NOT FOUND. PLEASE ENTER ANOTHER QUERY.
>> THE FLAW IN YOUR CIVILIZATION HAS A NAME: IT IS COWARDICE.
ACCESSING SECONDARY DATABASE…
KNIGHT SABERS
ENTER QUERY
>> See Hardsuits.txt
FILE FOUND. LOADING…
Since the creation of the MADOX series of powersuits in the late 1980's, human-scale mechanized infantry has become an essential part of military organization - or was, anyway, until the advent of the Combat BMA. Yet today's designs, best epitomized in the ADP and JSDF's K-series, have changed little from their nearly half-century old predecessors.
While working on the BMA (BioMechanical Analogue) project at the Bioescape Corporation, my father and his associates sought to correct this by using the cutting-edge innovations of the 21st century to build "Anti-BMA Units", in essence hoping to counteract the terrifying military potential of their own creations. It was a side project, essentially combining experimental technologies from multiple fields in the hope of creating a cohesive whole, and was quickly scrapped once GENOM bought out Wiz. But the designs themselves were not lost, as my father left the designs to me as part of my 'inheritance'.
Following his wishes, I have developed and optimized these combat armor designs, bringing what was once a fever dream of high technology into cold reality. I now use them as combat suits for my allies in the Knight Sabers Initiative, realizing their potential as the BMA-killers they were made to be. I call them the Hardsuits.
Update 12/25/35: It seems as though I was not the only one to receive a datatape with the hardsuit designs on them; Greg Mallory, the son of one of my father's associates, also received the hardsuit designs alongside a cognitive enhancement package, and he has suggested that others may be in possession of the same designs. Further research is ongoing.
Update 1/19/36: The following technical information reflects the fourth generation of Hardsuit technology. While my allies and I are constantly experimenting with new materials and systems to integrate into newer generations of Hardsuit, that is not the focus of this document; please see HardsuitExperiments.txt for notes on next-generation technologies.
ARMOR: The urban battlefields of the 21st century are more deadly than ever, with an increasing variety of weapons posing an increasing variety of threats to the unarmored human body. Thus, Hardsuit armor must protect against most, if not all, of the following threats, while also being light and thin enough to not compromise mobility:
But times have changed, and the Knight Sabers find themselves going up against Battlemovers and swarms of Combat BMA's on a regular basis in place of singular 55-C's. Changes were needed. To that end, I have designed a custom composite armor plating that should be able to stand up to most combat situations for extended periods of time, consisting of a coating of Starlite (a paint-like organic nanocomposite which is capable of withstanding temperatures in excess of ten thousand degrees celsius) over an initial layer of titanium carbide. This, in turn, is followed by an inch of Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (AGDN), the hardest material yet possible with our technology.
The soft parts of the hardsuit, especially the joints, are now protected with a half-inch of buckyweave, essentially carbon nanotubes woven into a Kevlar-style weave several hundred times stronger than steel. Doping said buckyweave with Shear-Thickening Fluid was considered, but largely unnecessary. Buckyweave also provides backing for the hard plating.
In addition to the standard armor, my own hardsuit now possesses a layer of chromatic-shifting metamaterial which allows for extended periods of 'cloaking', bending light from UV to infrared around the suit, effectively rendering it invisible to most BMA systems. Radar and lidar are still a concern, which is why the metamaterial coating is currently still in its testing and optimization phase. See document HardsuitExperiments.txt for more details.
CHASSIS: The hardsuit chassis is essentially an endoskeleton of foamed titanium which supports the armor, musculature, and other systems. Padding for the interior of the suit consists of the same shear-thickening fluid contained in buckypaper pouches, which, again, dissipate the kinetic energy from a blunt impact across the suit instead of into the pilot. Each hardsuit uses a different chassis tailored to the operator's body measurements.
MOTIVATORS: The primary objective when constructing a hardsuit's motivators is to not only neutralize the weight of the suit against the operator's movements, but to amplify them, allowing an operator to perform feats of superhuman strength even while not using their thrusters. Motivators must be strong, durable, heat-resistant, non-hysteric, energy-efficient, space-efficient, and relatively cheap to produce.
The last three generations of hardsuit relied primarily on flat-actuated linear motor trusses hooked up to the chassis, what was at the time of construction considered an economic solution to the hardsuit 'problem'. However, advances in nano-assembly prototyped by myself and Dr. Raven using BMA cells have allowed for extremely cheap mass-production of coiled single-walled carbon nanotubes saturated with ferrofluid. Similar to human musculature, simple electromagnetic stimulation contracts the nanotubes, and an absence of stimulation allows them to relax. With multiple sets of 'muscles' working in tandem, a Knight Saber hardsuit can provide strength magnification of up to two hundred times normal human capabilities, which is (at least according to my most recent tests) sufficient to tear open MBT armor and punch holes in reinforced concrete.
INTERFACE: My initial plan when building the hardsuits was to use some form of Direct Neural Interface to allow the Knight Sabers to directly control them as they would their own body. Such a system would minimize concerns regarding the operator's corporeal body (pain, sweat, waste release, etc.), either by using a lucid-dream link (LDL) or by simply rendering the body comatose. However, the idea was met with significant resistance from two of the Knight Sabers. Priss has an inherent, borderline violent distrust of cybernetics stemming from her complex regarding Boomers (see PrissPsych.txt), and Linna has expressed concern that if her corporeal body was in stasis, it 'wouldn't be getting a workout in'.
Nene and myself possess no qualms about this, of course, and the fourth generation Pink and White hardsuits reflect this, requiring only inert innerwear and a DNI to operate. However, the interface system for hardsuits Blue and Green uses the same system as the last three generations, relying on special 'softsuits' with piezoelectric sensors to read the user's motions and react accordingly, with weapons and special systems triggered by haptic buttons built into the suits.
This, unfortunately, means that neither of the frontline combatants can have reaction times faster than typical neural speed, which may prove to be a hindrance in the future, where as Pink and White can use their suit's onboard computer and fiber-optic 'nerves' to boost reaction time to nearly three times the human average. In addition to the softsuits, the fourth-generation hardsuits now use VR eyecaps to directly feed helmet camera as well as a HUD to the user, minimizing the risk of faceplate damage resulting in a loss of functions.
ELECTRONICS: Each hardsuit possesses an onboard computer used to interpret and parallel the operator's movements, make sense of incoming sensory data and feed it to the optical outputs, and monitor onboard weapons and other systems - in essence, the 'brain' of the hardsuit. Mounted in the back below the powerplant, the standard hardsuit computer is a custom-built neuromorph consisting of 83 billion nanoscale spintronic neuristors (with designs stolen from DARPA-GENOM joint project AKASHA) with approximately 73 trillion possible synaptic connections between them, as well as 1 trillion other 'breeds' of nanocyte, including glial and astrocyte breeds. In 'analog' terms, this translates to about 1 petabyte of data derived from mnemonic networks, about half the mnemonic capacity of a human brain, and has a processing speed of about ten times the human average, and thirteen times the BMA average. The computer lacks true sentience, as most processes which would lead to a rise in conscious activity (ie skeletal-muscle dilemmas) are instead managed by the user, but the computer is capable of:
SENSORS: The sloped face of the hardsuit helmet contains two types of sensors. First, a film of optical-emulation compound cameras, which process the full spectrum of visible light (as well as infrared and ultraviolet) in a manner similar to an insect's eyes. It is then the work of the suit computer to transform this input into a human-readable image. Second, a simple LiDAR array, which uses laser light to scan objects in front of it.
Pink, however, possesses advanced Hyper-Sensors, which consist of three separate arrays built into the head:
The fourth generation of hardsuits now has corrected that, via a series of interlocking plates below the primary armor coated with electroactive nanoadhesive that lock into place upon activation of the hardsuit, effectively sealing the operator inside until deactivation. Air is provided to the helmet via a vacuum tank of liquefied atmosphere, which is heated up by the powerplant and released into the helmet; this provides approximately six hours of uninterrupted breathing, whereupon the suit can switch to filtering outside atmosphere via the same charcoal filters.
Extreme temperatures and pressures are also a marginal concern, to an extent. The Starlite coating on the armor protects against extreme heat and the fusion reactor can provide enough excess heat to easily counteract extreme cold. However, while the hardsuit is sealed for standard oceanic pressures (as testing off of Tokyo Bay has indicated), any pressure over about 100 atm risks cracking the nanoadhesive and causing fatal leaks. (Should the Knight Sabers end up on a deep-sea colony for a job, serious modifications will be necessary.) Vacuum is much less of a challenge, as the softsuit's myoactive nanotube clusters are able to provide .5 atm of pressure over the body uniformly without risking decompression.
MEDICAL: The hardsuit receives a constant feed of data on the condition of the user from the softsuits, which use layered microcircuitry to monitor the user's vitals as well as recognize potential wounds by reading the deformation of the suit. Meanwhile, major injuries can be counteracted by a 10-shot 'autodoc', an air-injector system mounted in the thigh which carries various types of medicine in plastic ampoules. Among the most frequently used medicines:
POWER: The hardsuits are powered by microfusion powerplants, wherein laser-ignition rams together hydrogen and boron nuclei to generate obscene amounts of heat without radioactive waste of any sort. This heat, in turn, powers a ceramic Pegasus microturbine which generates electrical energy to power the suit's systems. Excess heat is either vented out of the suit or used to power the thruster pack; see Propulsion below.
PROPULSION: One of the initial difficulties of completing the hardsuit design was that it had built-in thrusters on the legs and back to help propel the user and allow them to make boosted jumps; however, my father simply had not found a fuel source compact enough which could also provide the needed thrust.
With advice from Doctor Raven, I was able, instead, to use only a minute amount of mercury-based reaction mass which would be turned to plasma by the sheer amount of waste heat emitted by the microfusion powerplant. While this does not make the hardsuits capable of flight or hovering, it does allow them to make boosted jumps and guide falling trajectories in midair.
My own hardsuit has had, since generation one, a more capable 'flight pack' using a heavier liquid-hydrogen propellant to provide more vectored thrust from a set of wings. This allows powered flight and gliding for brief, but not indefinite, periods of time.
WEAPONRY: Each hardsuit has its own custom-built weaponry, specifically designed to serve a certain role in combat. To that end, this section will be divided into several subsections, each covering a different Saber's weaponry:
tl;dr CARBON NANOTUBES MY CARBON NANODUDE.
But since I'm not just going to leave you with a one-liner post, here's some bonus content: Knight Saber Hardsuit tech specs, from the mind of Sylia Stingray! This was inspired by some internet archaeology that turned up This and This. I thought it was cool, so I did my own, updating the technology as best as I could, trying to bride the fantastic and the possible. The results are... decent. But hey, content's content.
WELCOME TO THE STINGRAY LUXURY GOODS MEGATOKYO DATABASE, EST. 2027. PLEASE ENTER YOUR CLEARANCE CODE.
>>xX_B1gB00tySl4y3r_42069_Xx
SCANNING BIOMETRICS…
SCANNING NEUROMETRICS…
CLEARANCE MATCH. WELCOME, MACKIE STINGRAY.
>> See Hardsuits.txt
FILE NOT FOUND. PLEASE ENTER ANOTHER QUERY.
>> THE FLAW IN YOUR CIVILIZATION HAS A NAME: IT IS COWARDICE.
ACCESSING SECONDARY DATABASE…
KNIGHT SABERS
ENTER QUERY
>> See Hardsuits.txt
FILE FOUND. LOADING…
Since the creation of the MADOX series of powersuits in the late 1980's, human-scale mechanized infantry has become an essential part of military organization - or was, anyway, until the advent of the Combat BMA. Yet today's designs, best epitomized in the ADP and JSDF's K-series, have changed little from their nearly half-century old predecessors.
While working on the BMA (BioMechanical Analogue) project at the Bioescape Corporation, my father and his associates sought to correct this by using the cutting-edge innovations of the 21st century to build "Anti-BMA Units", in essence hoping to counteract the terrifying military potential of their own creations. It was a side project, essentially combining experimental technologies from multiple fields in the hope of creating a cohesive whole, and was quickly scrapped once GENOM bought out Wiz. But the designs themselves were not lost, as my father left the designs to me as part of my 'inheritance'.
Following his wishes, I have developed and optimized these combat armor designs, bringing what was once a fever dream of high technology into cold reality. I now use them as combat suits for my allies in the Knight Sabers Initiative, realizing their potential as the BMA-killers they were made to be. I call them the Hardsuits.
Update 12/25/35: It seems as though I was not the only one to receive a datatape with the hardsuit designs on them; Greg Mallory, the son of one of my father's associates, also received the hardsuit designs alongside a cognitive enhancement package, and he has suggested that others may be in possession of the same designs. Further research is ongoing.
Update 1/19/36: The following technical information reflects the fourth generation of Hardsuit technology. While my allies and I are constantly experimenting with new materials and systems to integrate into newer generations of Hardsuit, that is not the focus of this document; please see HardsuitExperiments.txt for notes on next-generation technologies.
ARMOR: The urban battlefields of the 21st century are more deadly than ever, with an increasing variety of weapons posing an increasing variety of threats to the unarmored human body. Thus, Hardsuit armor must protect against most, if not all, of the following threats, while also being light and thin enough to not compromise mobility:
- Ballistic weaponry, including armor-piercing weaponry
- Blunt trauma, ie fisticuffs and explosive shockwaves
- Cutting damage, ie shrapnel or monomolecular weaponry
- Directed-energy weapons and extreme heat
But times have changed, and the Knight Sabers find themselves going up against Battlemovers and swarms of Combat BMA's on a regular basis in place of singular 55-C's. Changes were needed. To that end, I have designed a custom composite armor plating that should be able to stand up to most combat situations for extended periods of time, consisting of a coating of Starlite (a paint-like organic nanocomposite which is capable of withstanding temperatures in excess of ten thousand degrees celsius) over an initial layer of titanium carbide. This, in turn, is followed by an inch of Aggregated Diamond Nanorods (AGDN), the hardest material yet possible with our technology.
The soft parts of the hardsuit, especially the joints, are now protected with a half-inch of buckyweave, essentially carbon nanotubes woven into a Kevlar-style weave several hundred times stronger than steel. Doping said buckyweave with Shear-Thickening Fluid was considered, but largely unnecessary. Buckyweave also provides backing for the hard plating.
In addition to the standard armor, my own hardsuit now possesses a layer of chromatic-shifting metamaterial which allows for extended periods of 'cloaking', bending light from UV to infrared around the suit, effectively rendering it invisible to most BMA systems. Radar and lidar are still a concern, which is why the metamaterial coating is currently still in its testing and optimization phase. See document HardsuitExperiments.txt for more details.
CHASSIS: The hardsuit chassis is essentially an endoskeleton of foamed titanium which supports the armor, musculature, and other systems. Padding for the interior of the suit consists of the same shear-thickening fluid contained in buckypaper pouches, which, again, dissipate the kinetic energy from a blunt impact across the suit instead of into the pilot. Each hardsuit uses a different chassis tailored to the operator's body measurements.
MOTIVATORS: The primary objective when constructing a hardsuit's motivators is to not only neutralize the weight of the suit against the operator's movements, but to amplify them, allowing an operator to perform feats of superhuman strength even while not using their thrusters. Motivators must be strong, durable, heat-resistant, non-hysteric, energy-efficient, space-efficient, and relatively cheap to produce.
The last three generations of hardsuit relied primarily on flat-actuated linear motor trusses hooked up to the chassis, what was at the time of construction considered an economic solution to the hardsuit 'problem'. However, advances in nano-assembly prototyped by myself and Dr. Raven using BMA cells have allowed for extremely cheap mass-production of coiled single-walled carbon nanotubes saturated with ferrofluid. Similar to human musculature, simple electromagnetic stimulation contracts the nanotubes, and an absence of stimulation allows them to relax. With multiple sets of 'muscles' working in tandem, a Knight Saber hardsuit can provide strength magnification of up to two hundred times normal human capabilities, which is (at least according to my most recent tests) sufficient to tear open MBT armor and punch holes in reinforced concrete.
INTERFACE: My initial plan when building the hardsuits was to use some form of Direct Neural Interface to allow the Knight Sabers to directly control them as they would their own body. Such a system would minimize concerns regarding the operator's corporeal body (pain, sweat, waste release, etc.), either by using a lucid-dream link (LDL) or by simply rendering the body comatose. However, the idea was met with significant resistance from two of the Knight Sabers. Priss has an inherent, borderline violent distrust of cybernetics stemming from her complex regarding Boomers (see PrissPsych.txt), and Linna has expressed concern that if her corporeal body was in stasis, it 'wouldn't be getting a workout in'.
Nene and myself possess no qualms about this, of course, and the fourth generation Pink and White hardsuits reflect this, requiring only inert innerwear and a DNI to operate. However, the interface system for hardsuits Blue and Green uses the same system as the last three generations, relying on special 'softsuits' with piezoelectric sensors to read the user's motions and react accordingly, with weapons and special systems triggered by haptic buttons built into the suits.
This, unfortunately, means that neither of the frontline combatants can have reaction times faster than typical neural speed, which may prove to be a hindrance in the future, where as Pink and White can use their suit's onboard computer and fiber-optic 'nerves' to boost reaction time to nearly three times the human average. In addition to the softsuits, the fourth-generation hardsuits now use VR eyecaps to directly feed helmet camera as well as a HUD to the user, minimizing the risk of faceplate damage resulting in a loss of functions.
ELECTRONICS: Each hardsuit possesses an onboard computer used to interpret and parallel the operator's movements, make sense of incoming sensory data and feed it to the optical outputs, and monitor onboard weapons and other systems - in essence, the 'brain' of the hardsuit. Mounted in the back below the powerplant, the standard hardsuit computer is a custom-built neuromorph consisting of 83 billion nanoscale spintronic neuristors (with designs stolen from DARPA-GENOM joint project AKASHA) with approximately 73 trillion possible synaptic connections between them, as well as 1 trillion other 'breeds' of nanocyte, including glial and astrocyte breeds. In 'analog' terms, this translates to about 1 petabyte of data derived from mnemonic networks, about half the mnemonic capacity of a human brain, and has a processing speed of about ten times the human average, and thirteen times the BMA average. The computer lacks true sentience, as most processes which would lead to a rise in conscious activity (ie skeletal-muscle dilemmas) are instead managed by the user, but the computer is capable of:
- Target/hazard recognition from full-spectrum sensors
- Image generation
- Near-instantaneous target acquisition
- Damage sensing and repair oversight
- Rudimentary hacking
- AR generation
SENSORS: The sloped face of the hardsuit helmet contains two types of sensors. First, a film of optical-emulation compound cameras, which process the full spectrum of visible light (as well as infrared and ultraviolet) in a manner similar to an insect's eyes. It is then the work of the suit computer to transform this input into a human-readable image. Second, a simple LiDAR array, which uses laser light to scan objects in front of it.
Pink, however, possesses advanced Hyper-Sensors, which consist of three separate arrays built into the head:
- A full-spectrum scanner able to pick up everything from radio to gamma and interpret it as an overlay on Pink's heads-up display (HUD)
- A quantum-radar 'Stealth Breaker' able to beat jamming signals and lock onto stealthy targets
- A neutrino scanner which uses energy signatures of highly energetic neutrinos to 'see' through solid objects at close range
The fourth generation of hardsuits now has corrected that, via a series of interlocking plates below the primary armor coated with electroactive nanoadhesive that lock into place upon activation of the hardsuit, effectively sealing the operator inside until deactivation. Air is provided to the helmet via a vacuum tank of liquefied atmosphere, which is heated up by the powerplant and released into the helmet; this provides approximately six hours of uninterrupted breathing, whereupon the suit can switch to filtering outside atmosphere via the same charcoal filters.
Extreme temperatures and pressures are also a marginal concern, to an extent. The Starlite coating on the armor protects against extreme heat and the fusion reactor can provide enough excess heat to easily counteract extreme cold. However, while the hardsuit is sealed for standard oceanic pressures (as testing off of Tokyo Bay has indicated), any pressure over about 100 atm risks cracking the nanoadhesive and causing fatal leaks. (Should the Knight Sabers end up on a deep-sea colony for a job, serious modifications will be necessary.) Vacuum is much less of a challenge, as the softsuit's myoactive nanotube clusters are able to provide .5 atm of pressure over the body uniformly without risking decompression.
MEDICAL: The hardsuit receives a constant feed of data on the condition of the user from the softsuits, which use layered microcircuitry to monitor the user's vitals as well as recognize potential wounds by reading the deformation of the suit. Meanwhile, major injuries can be counteracted by a 10-shot 'autodoc', an air-injector system mounted in the thigh which carries various types of medicine in plastic ampoules. Among the most frequently used medicines:
- Morphine as painkiller
- Stem-cell nanocluster carriers as promoters of regeneration and bone setting
- Anticoagulants to prevent bruising
POWER: The hardsuits are powered by microfusion powerplants, wherein laser-ignition rams together hydrogen and boron nuclei to generate obscene amounts of heat without radioactive waste of any sort. This heat, in turn, powers a ceramic Pegasus microturbine which generates electrical energy to power the suit's systems. Excess heat is either vented out of the suit or used to power the thruster pack; see Propulsion below.
PROPULSION: One of the initial difficulties of completing the hardsuit design was that it had built-in thrusters on the legs and back to help propel the user and allow them to make boosted jumps; however, my father simply had not found a fuel source compact enough which could also provide the needed thrust.
With advice from Doctor Raven, I was able, instead, to use only a minute amount of mercury-based reaction mass which would be turned to plasma by the sheer amount of waste heat emitted by the microfusion powerplant. While this does not make the hardsuits capable of flight or hovering, it does allow them to make boosted jumps and guide falling trajectories in midair.
My own hardsuit has had, since generation one, a more capable 'flight pack' using a heavier liquid-hydrogen propellant to provide more vectored thrust from a set of wings. This allows powered flight and gliding for brief, but not indefinite, periods of time.
WEAPONRY: Each hardsuit has its own custom-built weaponry, specifically designed to serve a certain role in combat. To that end, this section will be divided into several subsections, each covering a different Saber's weaponry:
- BLUE: Saber Blue has always served as the front-line heavy assault expert, taking the majority of damage in combat and dealing out the majority of killing blows. To that end, Blue's hardsuit only has two built-in 'Torchsabers', advanced plasma torches relying on magnetic containment fields for additional range, and instead equips a variety of weapon modules on each mission. These 'combat mods', as Blue refers to them, consist of:
- 1 20mm triple-barreled minigun with 3000 rounds of APEX ammunition in a back-mounted drum
- 2 electromagnetic hydraulic claw arms, with 10^15 joule laser cannons mounted on the tips
- 2 shoulder-mounted railguns firing 10 meter-long spikes each
- 1 experimental plasma 'hand cannon'
- 1 missile-launching backpack with 4 40 mm guided missiles
- 2 sets of 4 60 mm APEX 'smart' grenades mounted on thighs
- 1 monowire rifle, essentially a double-shot micromissile launcher with monowire strung between missiles
- 1 torchsaber booster, allowing ignition for up to 15 seconds and providing over 3 minutes of fuel
- 1 microlaminate armor shield with integrated arc plasma 'deflector'
- GREEN: Saber Green is the close-range specialist of the team, relying on her extensive prowess in the martial art of Panzerkunst to quickly and efficiently take apart a BMA without receiving too much damage herself. Green's weaponry is a hybrid of her second and third-generation designs in that it retains both the Knuckle Bombers of her second generation design, with plates of five mounted on each fist, and twin 'shock grapplers', electrothermally-propelled grappling penetrators attached carbon nanotube fiber arrays that can not only serve as mobility tools, but can conduct massive amounts of electricity into opposing forces. As always, her monofilament (serrated multi-walled metallic nanotubes) head ribbons remain present, which can cut through BMA armor with minimal amounts of momentum behind them. It should be noted that Green has no ranged weapons whatsoever; this is by design, as the role of ranged firepower falls on Blue and myself.
- WHITE: As the leader of the team, my hardsuit is designed for a variety of combat situations, from melee engagements to ranged encounters with the enemy. Through the generations, I have kept the same essential configuration of weaponry: two 10^10 Joule laser guns, and two laser-edged Damascus steel swords, each about 1.5 meters long. The third generation also had Knuckle Bombers, but only three on each hand, to replace the ability to contact-fire the lasers. In the fourth generation, newer heatsinks built around the lasers will provide me with approximately 5.2 seconds more of sustained fire (up from about 8.6 seconds of fully automatic fire before overheat), and the blades have been reinforced with carbon nanotubes so as to prevent breakage even under extreme duress.
- PINK: Saber Pink has never been one for direct combat, a habit which admittedly I have nurtured for far too long. While her aim is improving, the rest of her reflexes are not, making her a liability should she be engaged by a BMA she does not have time to hack. The third-generation hardsuit, then, provided her with weaponry which required minimal accuracy and allowed Pink to play a support role: namely, the Pulse-Strikers, which fire anions at a significant fraction of the speed of light via a method of acceleration similar to that used at the VVVHC (Very Very Very Large Hadron Collider). They can easily not only penetrate armor, but disrupt the complex systems armor might be protecting, such as a human or BMA nervous system. The only major downside was the unconcentrated cone of fire, which risked hitting our own hardsuits (which are EM-shielded, but still require a full system shutdown to prevent damage) in combat, and the significant time it took to accelerate the proton beams to full velocity. I've kept the Pulse-Strikers in the fourth generation unchanged, while adding a new weapon to Pink's arsenal in place of her low-power laser, cribbed from Greg Mallory's Black Knight designs. The Remote Hacking Rifle (RHR) is essentially a sniper rifle which uses electrothermal propellant to fire an armor-piercing dart containing a simple remote transmitter. Upon impact, nanomotors guide microtendrils within the dart to link up with the BMA's nervous system, allowing the transmitter to send piezoelectric impulses mimicking neural input, effectively overriding the BMA's own commands. Initial tests of this combat technique have been shown to be quite promising: with a single well-placed shot and several seconds of free time, Pink can easily induce a power overload in a BU-55C's heat cannon, causing the BMA to effectively melt itself.
tl;dr CARBON NANOTUBES MY CARBON NANODUDE.
Chapter 28: Plans and Counter-Plans
- Location
- Megatokyo
Chapter 28: Plans and Counter-Plans
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:15 PM
"Everything?" said Priss. "What the hell does that mean?"
Sylia's smile did not waver. "Well, I mean that we could start anywhere and go anywhere. I just want to talk with you, make sure you're alright. For instance, how's Sho?"
"He's… good. I mean, he's been better, obviously, but, you know, circumstances. Everyone's on edge. Why do you ask?"
"I was just curious."
"Ha! You're Sylia Stingray. You're never just curious. There's always something else. What's your angle?"
Sylia sat down opposite Priss, taking a cup of tea from the platter on the table. "I know you care about him, that he's like a little brother to you. It never hurts to keep up to date on my employees' interests for the sake of their psychological health. You still visit him regularly, right? How was he, really?"
Well, that was direct. "Scared shitless, but like I said, no surprise. Some guy visited the orphanage recently in riding armor and helmet, dropped off - Huh. Son of a bitch."
"Pardon?"
"This guy left a note and a whole bunch of money for the orphanage, said to put the money to better use than its original intent, something like that. Signed it N. I think that was probably our guy."
Sylia seemed to perk up a little. "Really. I don't suppose he'll come around again? If we could corner him out of his suit…"
"You want to turn an act of charity into a sting? No thank you."
"Oh, come on. I'm deadly certain Nemesis is working for Karns, and that's one of his little patronage operations. If it's Yakuza money, it could just be an indirect transfer of funds, putting them where Karns would put them anyway."
"You know that 'little patronage operation' was where I grew up, right?"
"I know. So did Skeeter." Sylia sipped her tea. "No offense, of course. I recall you hating it anyway. My point stands regardless."
"What makes you think he'll come back anyhow? Maybe one night it's an orphanage, the next day it's a homeless shelter."
"But they'd all be owned by Karns, and that gives us a chance to track him down. Cross-consult all of his businesses, see if any masked riders have shown up, leave a letter where he might strike next - no, nevermind. It wouldn't do any good if I didn't know his true identity. That's what will make him meet me."
Priss yawned. "Great. Are we done? I've got songs to write, and my trailer ain't gonna clean itself."
Sylia set her cup down with an audible clatter. "That brings me to my next point of discussion. You aren't going anywhere until I have the hardsuits prepped. You'll have the run of the Ladys633, but otherwise I want you to stay inside."
Priss leaned forward. "Ha ha. Real funny. You're not serious, are you?"
"I am very serious. The Fault zone is territory disputed between Skeeter, Sato, and Smirnovski - if your trailer isn't in the middle of a war zone now, it will be very soon."
Priss gasped. "Then I've gotta get down there right now, get all my stuff out before they blow the whole block!"
"What stuff, exactly?"
"All of it. Leathers, food, clothes, cash, futon, musical equipment…" Priss counted off on her fingers. "You want me to go on?
"All replaceable." Sip. "I'll pay for them, even. You, on the other hand, are not."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Sip, "that if you go out into the city, alone, armed with nothing more than your Member II and your motorcycle, you will most likely be shot and killed. Then I will have no Saber Blue, and we can't have that. I've already lost you-" She paused. There was a faraway look in her eyes. "Almost lost you, I mean, too many times."
"Yeah, but if I lose all that shit and some mysterious patron buys it back for me, what's the rest of the band gonna think? Won't that seem suspicious?"
"Say Leon or someone like that helped." Sip. "You'd be surprised at the way some people edit out sketchy details of their friends' lives just so they can stay friends. They'll miss it entirely."
That was too far. "And why would I want to give them an idea like that? It's not like Leon and I are that close, are we?"
"I wouldn't know, but considering what I heard from Greg, you two are practically an item."
"Yeah, and how is Mallory doing these days? Still trying to get into your ol' granny panties?"
If Sylia was moved by that, she didn't show it. Sip. "I'll be honest with you, he did propose to me."
"What?!" Priss was oscillating between dumbstruck and screaming mad. How dare that creep - how dare she not tell anybody-
"Relax. I told him I'd think about it, and accepted a position on his board of directors for MALCORP's Far East branch. Nothing more."
"That's a pretty big fucking deal! You can't just get married off to some megacorporate rapist! You made the rules of the Knight Sabers, so you better fucking follow them!"
"I did tell you that I said no, right? I'll not move until GENOM and the rest of the megacorporations have been crippled and humbled. You have nothing to worry about." Sip.
"You said you'd think about it. You should have kicked him in his fucking brass balls, that's what you should have done. Now you've given him an opening, and he's not gonna stop bugging you until he's got you by the lady parts and pumping heirs out!"
"You don't know Greg very well, I think. I spent much of my childhood with him, and I can safely say he's not that sort of person."
"Really. And being the CEO of a megacorp hasn't turned him into another Quincy."
"I've told you already, it hasn't. He's still very much an honorable man, still very much the knight-in-shining-armor type. Slaying dragons, erecting valiant kingdoms, doing good deeds with no expectation of recompense. He and Quincy couldn't be further from each other." Sip.
"Fuck." Priss sneered. "You don't get it, do you? You say that shit but you have no idea what it means. It means he's got to be the one who slays the dragon, not you. That's why he's setting up shop in Japan, because he can't bear to have his pretty little fuckin' princess leaving his castle now that she's caught his eye. You honestly think he's going to listen to you? To respect you? To let you make your own decisions? To let you say no? Get real."
Sylia set her teacup, now empty, on its platter. She did not move to refill it. "You seem very certain of this," she said at last.
"You're goddamn right I'm certain of it! He's the same as Leon, one of those fucking honorable types who barges into other people's business whenever they want something and dress it up in a code of chivalry."
"So you're drawing on your experience with Inspector McNichol as your primary source here."
"Yeah, because that fucker - hold up." Priss stopped herself. She could feel that Sylia was trying to make a point, only she had no idea what that point was. That annoyed her greatly. "What are you trying to pull?"
"Well," Sylia said, refilling her tea, "I think that you don't have enough evidence about Mallory either way, so you're projecting your feelings about Leon onto him. And that's incredibly interesting, because I thought you saw Leon as a close friend."
"I… do…" she trailed off.
"Well, then." The dark-haired woman made an open gesture with her off hand. "Why the sudden distaste, then?"
In the back of her mind, Priss fumbled for words. She hated being like this, verbally disarmed at Sylia's hands. It was always like this, working with her, playing these little games where you had to guess what she was really saying from her body language despite the fact that she had almost none. It was almost like the therapists they'd bring into the orphanage, only in this case she couldn't bring herself to just keep silent.
Because she had a point. What was so wrong with Leon McNichol? What was she so afraid of?
"He… he's a friend. I like to think of him as reliable. He's not a horrible person."
"You aren't answering my question," Sylia singsonged.
"And… I got pretty intimate with him while I was all banged up in the Black Knight's care. Cried into his arms and everything. I don't want him to die, you know?"
"I also recall a certain kiss…"
"Yeah yeah yeah. Of course you do. But-"
"But?"
"But then he just had to buy the Hot Legs."
"Ah, there we go. Go on. He bought the Hot Legs with Greg's money and then what?"
"And then that was it. Somehow word got out I was pals with a cop and the offers to sing somewhere that wasn't the Hot Legs just dried the fuck up. I mean, I thought it was a good offer at the time. No strings attached, he said, and I thought, fuck it, he's a friend, I believe him."
"But that's never how it works out, is it? Retrothrash fans, the kind of people I sing for, they hate cops. So now I'm gonna spend the rest of my life playing songs for half-dead cops at a cop bar, and if I complain Leon'll be all, you know, think of the cop's wives and the cop's children and the cop's dogs and what-fucking ever."
"And I should have seen that coming. I should have had backup plans, maybe a different band. I should have-"
"You didn't want to admit you needed help."
Priss slumped down into the couch. "I hate needing help. I hate hate hate it. It makes me weak."
"And when I saved you from your kamikaze death charge at GENOM tower in '31? Did you hate that, too?"
"At first, yeah." She sighed. "I wanted Quincy's head for myself. Sometimes I still do. But that was different. You didn't do it for my sake, you did it because you needed a Saber, right? You weren't trying to be my friend or anything, you were just there."
"Yes. I suppose I did." Sip. "But I'm not proud of that, Priss. If I could have done it again, I would have been kinder, more welcoming. I would have made you an offer while you were in a healthier frame of mind, but time was of the essence."
"Bullshit. If you'd waited around and I'd died all you'd need was some other gal with a beef against GENOM, and they aren't hard to find. I wasn't special then, and I'm barely special now, and you know that."
Sylia did not respond. Her expression was completely neutral. Had Priss won this particular game? She'd never won before, but the way Sylia wasn't moving, the way her teacup was held perfectly perpendicular to her body, was unlike her. She decided to check.
"Hey, am I wrong? Moshi-moshi?"
It was like watching a glacier melt, the way her hand glided down to rest her teacup on its platter, the way her eyelids slammed down and up again.
"You're not wrong, Priss," Sylia said, and her voice was slow and thick with something she couldn't quite place. "But - you are not right, either. It is not that simple, and it never has been."
"Oh?"
"Yes, you were - disposable - once." The word diss-pose-a-ble grinded past gritted teeth, every syllable given the care of a single word. "You were one contaminated needle, one stray bullet, one wobbly bike wheel away from self-immolation, the same as countless other children of the Quake. You are not wrong about that."
"But even then, you had a spark of life within you the rest of the city lacked. If you were going to combust, you were going to make sure that Megatokyo saw you burning. I saw that, and I knew that you could not be allowed to go to waste."
"What the fuck does that mean, a spark-"
"Let me finish, Priss. This habit of interrupting people isn't doing you any favors."
"Fine. Keep going, then."
She sighed. "When I first came to you, and you pulled a knife on me without hesitating, I was both surprised and excited. Surprised because you had just been in a serious bike crash, yet still had the energy to defend yourself, and excited because - well - even I would not be capable of such a feat of stamina. Here, I thought, here is an exceptional woman, someone who has boundless capabilities and yet is wasting them boundlessly. Here is someone who I could help become great. So yes, Priss, my motives weren't entirely selfish. If I only wanted a Knight Saber, I would have picked some mercenary with few compunctions. Jeena Malso, maybe, or someone even more unpleasant. But I chose you."
"So, the tale of Genji, basically. Raising me like a mother. You must feel so proud of yourself."
"Let me finish. I thought you could harness the power inside of you for better ends. I thought - well, I suppose I thought I could make you into a superhero. Someone the world would look up to. And I still do."
"But then I look at you now, and you're destroying yourself again. You provoked Linna and Nene, who are supposed to be your teammates, and to what end? To prove a point? To seem invincible? And I look at the way you regard Leon, and I fear you'll burn bridges with him too if he ever gets too close, and now you think you're disposable in my eyes, no more than human detritus, and I wonder. Why this? Why any of this?"
"Why do you give a shit?" Priss gritted her teeth.
Sylia touched two fingers to her temples briefly, sucked in a sharp breath. "Because I care about you, and I care about what happens to you. I care about what happens to you and Linna and Nene and Mackie and Fargo and Doctor Raven and even Greg Mallory. You are all my family. Why can't you see that?"
Priss seemed to sink further into the couch. She muttered something under her breath.
It was a mistake. Sylia could probably hear it. "Pardon?"
"Nevermind."
"No, not nevermind. I want to hear what you have to say."
"No, you don't. You'll hate me for saying it."
"Short of insulting me, or quitting again, I could not possibly hate you. I know you're trying very hard to make it so, just as it was with Nene and Linna. I would like you to stop."
"It's really dumb, okay? Just forget about it."
"It isn't meaningless to you, obviously. Otherwise you wouldn't defend it so vehemently." She crossed her legs. The volume of her voice dropped. "But you can trust me."
Priss looked at her, one eyebrow raised. Sylia normally handled personal relationships with the finesse of a laser scalpel, keeping her conversational partners at arm's length. She might let someone dance with her, but she would always, always, call the tune. This was different. Very different.
You are all my family. Why can't you see that?
What the fuck did that mean? The Knight Sabers were a mercenary group, a media contraption designed to shift public opinion, bend it against the megacorporate deities of their era. They were certainly not Sazae-san or some other Showa-era domestic-bliss meme-complex she'd care to name. And Sylia knew that, or at least Priss thought she did. She came up with the idea, after all.
So where was all this coming from? Had Mallory really cut her open to that extent? Had finding someone who was almost like her thawed her icy heart so badly?
Or had she always been like this? When she came to her trailer back in '32, the first time she'd ever bothered, just after she'd quit because - oh God, she couldn't crack right now-
It came out. "Because everyone who ever cares about me dies. Everyone." She felt heavy, bloated. "Every single person who has taken the time to get close - like, it's like I was born under a really unlucky star, I don't fucking know-"
"Priss, that's not true." Sylia reached out, began to get up-
"YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT!" she shouted, shooting up. "You don't know what it's, what it's like. Kaori died, Tetsuo-kun died, Kaneda-kun died, they all fucking died, that little Boomer girl died, I can't even remember her name, just, just her fear - I killed Sylvie, and Anri hated me, and she didn't even kill me like she should have fucking done, and she's dead too - and Mom and Dad, I don't-" she sobbed. "I don't even fucking remember them! I try to remember their faces, the way they held me, and I try to reach back for them, and there's nothing there! Nothing there but the way they bled and broke and, and, and, and the way their bodies weren't them anymore - that's I'll ever remember - oh God, oh God."
She was crying now, weeping without any control, choking on her own tears, shaking, shuddering, turning in on herself, her arms tucked around her chest. "And, and it was always my fault, Kaori and Sylvie and Anri and Tetsuo and and all of them, all because I couldn't see the signs, because I couldn't find some better way, like - like you would have done - because I'm so fucking weak-"
"Shh." And then Sylia was right there. Holding her, and she was - warm. Warmer than she thought was possible. "It's okay. It's okay. It's not your fault."
She tried to push out. It was no good. Sylia held her tighter. "Don't touch me. Please god don't touch me. I don't - I don't want you to go too - I couldn't stand it - not like that-"
"Shh. Shh. It's all ok, Priss. It wasn't your fault."
"You don't fucking know that-"
"Yes, I do. I do know, Priss. It's okay."
"I don't even remember their faces - just so much fucking blood-"
"I'm here for you, okay? I'm right here. Right here, Priss. Look at me, okay? Just look at me. Right here."
She raised her head just a little, and their eyes met. Sylia's eyes were pools of dark chocolate, mostly bitter with a little sweet hidden in their depths. The kind of sweet you'd look for and look for and drown to see. She could see her own eyes reflected in them, her mutant-blood-red irises a faint crimson ring inside Sylia's pupils.
"You don't know-" she breathed.
Sylia smiled. "I do know. That's why I'm here. That's why I care."
"You don't-"
"I care. Nene cares. Linna cares. We all care. That's why we're here for you, Priss."
"No-"
"Yes. If you believe one thing, Priss, please believe in that. Believe in us, because we believe in you."
Priss blinked. "Isn't that an anime reference?-"
Her smile widened. "Is it? It's quite a line, don't you think?"
"Well-" And then she got it. She snorted. "Yeah. Yeah. I guess it is. Heh. Hehe."
Sylia began to laugh. It was light, melodious, like fluted glass. "I always did like Gainax. Shame they went bankrupt after the quake."
"Gainax? You mean, you've actually seen that anime." She almost giggled. "You watch anime?"
"A little, here and there. I watched much more of it when Mackie was younger, when I was in school, that sort of thing. Not that much - I always preferred a good tokusatsu, personally."
"Holy hell." Priss laughed a little, then laughed more. Sylia's grip loosened. "I don't believe it. Sylia Stingray, the ice queen, is an otaku! Holy fuck!"
Sylia smirked. "What, you're surprised? Father only gave me the hardsuits and some loose directions. Who do you think came up with the color-coordination idea?
Priss gasped. "Noooo. Get out."
"Oh yes. I have a safe in my room with old VHS's and Laserdiscs. I could show them to you, if you like."
Priss cackled with glee, barely noticing Sylia had let go. She was bent over with laughter. "I don't believe this! You make Nene look mature! Holy shit!"
"Well now that's a cruel comparison." Sylia snickered. "There are plenty of mature people who like immature things. Nene likes immature things and is just outright immature."
"No kidding! I mean, c'mon, remember the time when she called me an ape-woman? Like that was the worst I'd ever heard!"
"I do remember that!" And then she was laughing too.
"And did I ever tell you about the time she got drunk, like after a handful of shots, and seriously tried to do a striptease-"
"Linna only told me the basics, but from what I understand, it was quite a thing-"
"Oh, it was! Okay, okay, shaddup, imma tell you right now." And she did.
____________________________________________________________________
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
12:27 PM
Nene sneezed. Hard.
____________________________________________________________________
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:28 PM
"And then, and then, she says, 'I thought that was Mackie!' Can you believe that?! She's crazy for that little lech!"
"Well, I already knew that-"
"Of course you did." Priss sucked in a breath. "Damn, that felt good."
Sylia grinned, and sat back down. "It certainly did! I haven't laughed that hard in years."
"Ohhhhh?" Priss said, hands on her hips. "You mind telling me what that was about? C'mon, I shared my story, you've gotta have one of your own."
"Oh, not right now. I've had enough fun for one day."
"Hmph." Priss pouted.
"Alright, I won't tell you it now. I'll wait till Linna and Nene get back, how's that sound?"
"Awesome." A thought came to her. "So, am I still stuck here until we go out?"
"Yes," Sylia said, her face hardening. "Tell you what, though. Dr. Raven should be down in the underground garage running checks on the Motoslaves. I'm going to go do some more intel gathering, but you can bother him if you like."
"Aww…"
"He rebuilt the Highway Star as one of them."
"Son of a bitch! I've gotta see that!" And then, quicker than the speed of thought, she was gone.
Sylia waited for a moment, then leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling. She sighed.
She should have expected something like that, behind everything. Priss was all about pain and fear, when it came down to it. Tug on one end of that seething mass, and the whole thing would unwind.
Was she manipulating her, then? Giving her a place to cry when she had brought up all those things, all that pain? Wasn't it her fault, loosely? And hadn't she failed to actually address those problems by defusing the whole thing with humor?
Damn. One thing about her internal monologue lately: It usually was annoyingly right.
Fortunately, she had no time to consider these sort of things. She'd picked the meeting place with Fargo this time, and it was a good half-hour's drive, which gave her three short hours to tune up the hardsuits one last time and get out there. Then, hopefully, the secrets of Operation Templar and the people who worked on it would be revealed.
And if they weren't? Well, she always had other plans. Plans she would hate herself for, but plans nonetheless.
With luck, it wouldn't come to that.
____________________________________________________________________
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
2:00 PM
"Okay," Nene said to herself, "time for a coffee break."
"Will do, Sergeant."
"GAH!" She spun around in her chair. Alan, still in his dust-covered suit, had somehow materialized behind her, cup of coffee in hand. "How long have you been standing there?!"
He shrugged. "About thirty seconds. I guess we had the same idea, huh?"
"Sure. Okay. Awesome. Never do that again, okay?"
He grinned. "Do what?"
"Don't sneak up on me like that! I thought you were checking the cable ducts."
"Hey, I spent my half day. I'm done with the whole first floor, now. Got a couple of weird looks from the civvies in the entrance hall, and I don't think they appreciated me fumbling around in the vents near the ladies' room, but baby, I am done." He put his hands on his hips, superhero-style, then fished in his right-hand pocket for something. "Here. Thought you might want these."
"And they are?"
"See for yourself." He unclenched his hand, revealing several small disks with little spikes on them, each no larger than a fingernail. "Someone bugged the restrooms, so I unbugged them."
"The civilian restrooms, or the police ones?"
"Just the civilian ones." He glanced down. "Any ideas?"
"Probably someone who knew that their target would visit the police station? Snuck them in on their own? Stood on the toilet lid and had a drone get into the ducts?"
"Maybe. I think a mole makes more sense, but that's just me."
"W-whaaat? That's crazy talk!" Nene laughed. "What kind of mole would only bug the civilian restrooms? Who would even be a mole here?"
Alan shrugged. "Honestly? Anyone who knows the system and wants an extra buck or two from the Sleeping Dragon or some other shady organization. I want to assume it's just us who know the system, but…"
"Don't be ridiculous! I'm good, you're good, we're all clean." Her brow furrowed. "Maybe it was one of those hackers we hired?"
"Not a chance," Alan said. "Vicky's too dedicated to getting back at GENOM to sell out to them, and Rob's been with the ADP too long to go rogue. Maybe…"
"Maybe what?"
"Well, I'm just assuming it was GENOM or a criminal organization, but it could be anyone, really. You know what, maybe it was the Knight Sabers!" He laughed, as though it was supposed to be funny.
"Ha!" Nene laughed, forcing air out of her lungs. "Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! A mole for the Knight Sabers! What a concept!"
"Let's not discount it too fast. They do seem to have a certain ability to pick up intel before we do. I'll let you know if any more turn up."
"Whatever. Get yourself some coffee and get back to work."
"Will do, boss." He left the cup on her cubicle table. And then, soundlessly, he left the room. Nene sighed.
Shit. Shitshitshit. Those were her bugs.
Sylia had given them to her when she first started her job in the ADP, and over the years she'd put a few dozen on just about every floor - in the vents, in the cable ducts, in the walls - anywhere she could sneak into after hours. For one of the most advanced law enforcement organizations in the world, they really didn't mind her looping footage on the cams a couple of times. No one actually bothered to check it, anyway - why would they, when the computer was supposed to do that for them?
But now Alan was going to dismantle her system, bit by bit. And she had ordered him to do it. Very valuable intelligence on ADP movements was going to be lost within the span of a few months, and this was the worst possible time, especially considering the stuff she'd heard from her bugs in the chief's office.
If GENOM's Internal Security head was going to consult for the building's security, what would happen to her if Alan blabbed about the bugs? They'd send a whole team of Boomers to rip open the building, probably. And if they traced them back to her computer somehow…
But what could she actually do? Just straight up tell Alan? "Hey pal, I'm Saber Pink and I need info from my really illegal bugs in the ADP building to do what might be considered terrorism by some people, so if you could just not talk about them to anybody except me, that'd be great?"
Maybe. He'd definitely backed her little hacker collective, so maybe he'd understand. Then again, he was a self-described info packrat, so he'd probably take the opportunity to update his datadisc on the Knight Sabers, and maybe squeeze her for more info, and if that got into GENOM's hands…
She was beginning to wish she'd never taken this job in the first place. Too many secrets in too many places, that was her problem. And she had no way to fix it.
Well, there was one thing she hadn't done, and that was check up on the matter of Fleet Hermes. She'd told Vicky to start spreading the word to the local hacker mailing lists, to see if they'd meet IRL. It was a long shot - few pro hackers left their house for fear that some enemy of theirs would slip poison in their food while they were out - but this was an American, a newbie to the Megatokyo scene. Maybe she'd get careless, and she could just talk to them in first-person.
No arrests, of course. She wasn't that cruel.
She rummaged below her desk, pulling out a slate of black plastic about the size of a keyboard, then plugged it into her computer, and the wider ADP network. This was 'dawble', her super-secret semi-private email server she used for checking in on her little hacker collective and the hacking world at large. It wasn't very security-heavy, only used basic quantum encryption, but Nene had no intention of upgrading it. It was supposed to look like a maintenance peripheral jacked into some rando operator's desk from VR - when it was online, anyway. All the fanciest hacking tricks in the world couldn't beat a good old-fashioned airgapping.
A few clicks and a biometric scan later, she'd brought up the feed on her computer's screen. Her email was mostly empty, save for the handful of new specs on GENOM's latest combat model Maoru had pulled the last time. The armor was a little thicker, the particle beam gun a little more powerful, and the fusion-capabilities more pronounced, but at least they'd gotten rid of those godawful heat cannons. Whether or not they would add something as a replacement, like one of those gravity cannons Largo had, remained to be seen, but she doubted it. From her perspective the chest beam was too big of a power drain and took up too much space that could be used for actual armor, and if you hit it during buildup with just about anything, as she had done multiple times, the whole lens array would go out of whack and usually melt half the Boomer along with it. Well, now GENOM designers had the same ideas as her, which wasn't good from the Knight Sabers' standpoint, but was better from an external admirer's view. She hated fighting machines that were poorly made - there was just something distasteful about it.
All that aside, the only other thing in her mailbox was an automated maintenance alert. Odd, that, especially considering the subject header urged her to upgrade her firewall, which was supposed to be considered spam by her actual firewall, the one that she'd coded herself to replace the shitty one given to all police hardware. So this was either a Trojan… or it was Fleet Hermes. It made sense, sort of. The hacker would have disguised themselves as a maintenance subroutine, left a datapacket on the primary routine, remoralike, and then programmed it to go after 'dawble' the picosecond it was online. Or it could have just been some officer's infected account spewing hot shit at anything and everything it had a connection to.
She plugged in another peripheral, a sort of virtual server for anything malicious to attack, braced herself, and clicked. To her surprise, nothing bad happened. There was a message on the screen:
================================================================
To: RHH@dawble.adp.gov.jp
From: 753665589@MegaTokyo.net
Subject: Update your firewall now!
You rang? I'm not leaving my hidey-hole, but I'll gladly chat over here: @MT.7643.irc
It's a public server. I paid for it through a black account. Don't pull anything, copper.
-Fleet Hermes
====================================================================
Huh. How about that. Fleet Hermes had rented access space on a public server, which in her eyes was like taking a hostage in a Mexican standoff: she'd be hacking someone who wasn't Fleet Hermes if she tried anything. Then again, if she just accessed the payment records for the server, she'd have a lead on the hacker, but if the 'black account' thing was true, then that would be a dead end.
Alright. She'd bite. But she'd make sure it wasn't through the ADP network, first. She closed the tab, shut down her desktop, then yanked out her private laptop from her stash underneath the desk, and plugged dawble in. Now dawble technically had an ADP address, but if Fleet Hermes tried anything herself she'd find nothing but Nene's very well-secured personal stuff. She opened up her email, and clicked the link.
WELCOME TO CHAT! PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME.
Yep. It was a chat window, alright. White text, black background, nothing major changed for nearly a half century. Whoop-de-do.
There was no point in hiding herself, so she put in:
RHH
And waited. Alan came back from the coffee machine, opened up his computer, began fiddling with it, undoubtedly closing another vital backdoor as she watched. Fleet Hermes did not respond.
Ten minutes passed before she decided to make the first move:
RHH: Ok fleet I know you're in there
RHH: no use playing hide and seek
RHH: just come on out so we can talk
____________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co. , District 5
February 12, 2036
2:13 PM
Maria gasped a little as she saw that her public server had lit up. Immediately, she spun her desk chair over to her secondary monitor, letting an automatic process keep on doing the work of pulling Battlemover schematics off a Red Willow database. Finally, someone to talk to!
She read what RHH had said. It was a little standoffish, but if nothing else it spared her the annoyance of having her handle be a bunch of random numbers:
=================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Hi there!
Fleet Hermes: Sorry about taking so long, I was a little busy.
Fleet Hermes: It's nice to see you found me - from what I hear you're quite skilled.
RHH: yuh huh
Fleet Hermes: What's up?
RHH: well im w/ adp and id like to ask u some questions re: Nemesis
Fleet Hermes: What makes you think I have anything on him???
RHH: plenty of things
RHH: asking around about the architecture of Yk databases for one
RHH: most natives generally dont ask questions about that sort of thing b/c they know better or have something to lose if the Yks find out
RHH: i mean people know about that sort of thing but they dont want 2 take a long walk off a short pier if you catch my drift
RHH: also u showed up on the local hacker boards literally hours after Nemesis showed up in town so yeah
RHH: that being said im not going to ask where u are b/c i know thats dumb ur not gonna give up personal information about ur big guy
RHH: and im not out to arrest him either
Fleet Hermes: Ok, I see your reasoning. I'm *not* Nemesis, but I am involved with him.
Fleet Hermes: I have a personal stake in his work, you might say.
RHH: like blowing up the underbelly
RHH: that kind of work
Fleet Hermes: That's one way of looking at it.
Fleet Hermes: Alternatively, you could see it as Nemesis eliminating one of the Sleeping Dragon's largest revenue streams, along with a site of constant human and boomeroid cruelty and brutality.
RHH: ok
Fleet Hermes: News says that GENOM's rescue services got most people out of the water before anyone died, so it's not that big a deal.
RHH: it kind of is
RHH: they actually didn't release the numbers for how many died on the higher up networks in the adp and were supposed to get stuff like that
RHH: so it could go either way
RHH: even if theyre playing up genoms big heroic rescue adventure theres always a counterangle w/ these sort of things
Fleet Hermes: Well, Nemesis did what he had to do. And that's my take on it. Why all this skepticism?
Fleet Hermes: What's *your* angle, if you aren't going to arrest him?
RHH: im trying to get nem 2 back down b4 people start dying in droves b/c he started this dumbass gang war
RHH: imma just call him nem ok
Fleet Hermes: Ok, but is the gang war really his fault?
RHH: dude do not play dumb with me i swear to god im not in the mood
RHH: look sato ran the citys underworld for a good long while and he wasnt great but he wasnt killing people randomly
RHH: now hes lost face and everyone wants a piece of the big sleeping dragon pie and i guess the traditions of not involving civilians are kind of off the table
Fleet Hermes: Maybe. They're not going to get that piece of the pie, though.
Fleet Hermes: Even if the ADP is as underfunded and understaffed as they say it is, and I doubt it, they should have more than enough evidence to dismantle the organization once Nemesis is through with it.
Fleet Hermes: He and I have been doing this for a long time, and every time we've beaten the bad guys so badly they can't reassemble.
RHH: im not disputing that u can beat the sleeping dragon
RHH: but uh
RHH: re: that big datapacket you guys always leak to the police why not send it now
RHH: do u not have enough to convict satos ass yet
Fleet Hermes: Not the point. The point is to have your people do the legal work of crippling the organization, while we do the real legwork.
Fleet Hermes: After all, even if he's arrested, he can just pay bail, go home, and skip town.
Fleet Hermes: But if he's killed, no one wants to fill his shoes and the whole organization falls apart.
RHH: ok so we do the boring stuff got it
RHH: because the law isnt capable of handling this stuff on their own
Fleet Hermes: Be realistic, of course it isn't, otherwise people like Sato would never be allowed to exist.
Fleet Hermes: It's not your individual fault, it's just the way the system works, or rather, fails to work.
Fleet Hermes: What Nemesis does is necessary, but unavoidable.
RHH: look back to the topic at hand re: gang wars
RHH: Lets say nem can beat the Sleeping Dragon
RHH: But then can he beat the Red Willow
RHH: and the Russians
RHH: and the Triads
RHH: and the Koreans
Fleet Hermes: Alright, you've made your point.
RHH: and
Fleet Hermes: And?
RHH: even if they keep on fighting each other can nem one guy in a hardsuit beat them all before someone calls in the jsdf to restore order
RHH: if tank boomers are intentionally deployed on these streets thats gonna be on you
Fleet Hermes: You think he can't take them all on and win?
RHH: hey you know the guy im just a hacker turned cop w/nothing 2 lose
RHH:
Fleet Hermes: lol
RHH: but i think even the knight sabers would have a hard time doing all that
Fleet Hermes: Maybe. Won't know until we try, no?
Fleet Hermes: I've already hacked open most of their systems too, so intelligence gathering isn't going to be a problem. The rest is up to him.
RHH: could be
RHH: but in the end how many people will die in the crossfire b4 that happens
RHH: thats why the adp wants to arrest you guys
Fleet Hermes: Not because we're criminals in the eyes of the law?
RHH: look the ks are kinda sorta criminals and most of the adp thinks theyre great me included
RHH: the difference is that were trying to end this gang war thing b4 it goes out of control
RHH: and we cant do that unless nem is gone
Fleet Hermes: Gonna have to disagree with you on that one.
RHH: yes i expected as much
Fleet Hermes: Ha Ha very funny.
Fleet Hermes: I mean, Sato's already lost so much face, the other gangs aren't going to give up. No one's going to back down unless someone makes them, and I don't see the Knight Sabers doing that.
Fleet Hermes: Where have they been this whole time?
RHH: planning
Fleet Hermes: How would you know?
RHH: just guessing tbh
RHH: it makes sense
Fleet Hermes: How?
Fleet Hermes: If they were working to get rid of Sato too I'd understand, but what could they possibly be planning?
Fleet Hermes: Nemesis has told me they seem more content to rest on their laurels than do anything, if I can be honest.
RHH: dont u talk shit about the ks ok
RHH: im sure that theyve got a plan to hand satos ass to him on a platter w/out blowing up every repurposed megastructure they see
RHH: just
RHH: fckin
RHH: dont go there
Fleet Hermes: Why not?
RHH: dont go there
RHH: theyve saved this city from crazy dudes more times than i can count
RHH: they actually bother to fight genom even though they know they can never truly win
RHH: they do all the stuff me and the adp can't do
Fleet Hermes: If they really were heroes, they'd help Nemesis.
=========================================================================
Minutes passed. She was starting to get worried. Had she struck a nerve?
=========================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Hello?
RHH: ok
RHH: why dont i pass that along to the knight sabers and theyll get back to u
Fleet Hermes: Wait, you know them? Like, personally?
RHH: its complicated :3
Fleet Hermes: Yes or no?
RHH: yes
Fleet Hermes: And you think they'd help us take down the rest of the gangs? Even after so much inaction?
RHH: i think so
RHH: no i know so
RHH: they dont just let entire wars slide thats what im trying to say
RHH: look ill tell them if u tell him
Fleet Hermes: Hold up. How can I trust you with this?
RHH: you dont
RHH: but if the sabers come out tonight tell your guy to talk to them before he tries to kill them thats all
RHH: no trust needed
=============================================================================
… She had no response to that. Would Gavin's first response to other hardsuited heroes really be killing them? He'd probably warn them, then start shooting.
It would be best, then, to just agree and think it over. The Knight Sabers were pretty cool, and it would make sense that they would have hacker contacts - but something wasn't quite right, and she couldn't figure out what it was.
=============================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Okay. I'll go do that now.
RHH: peace
Fleet Hermes: Bye.
<RHH HAS DISCONNECTED>
____________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co.
District 5
February 12, 2036
2:37 PM
"Did you give anything away?"
"GAH!" Maria swiveled around to look up into the eyes of her older brother. "Big Bro! How long have you been standing there?"
"A few seconds." His voice was unnervingly even. "Enough to see you admit to knowing me. What else did you give away?"
"N-nothing!" Maria sputtered. "I got more out of them than they got out of me!"
"That they know the Knight Sabers?"
"Yes!" she said, pointing straight at him. "Yes! Exactly! And she says she'll pass on the prospect of an alliance to them?"
"And you believe this-" his words dragged out slowly "-person on the internet isn't just making things up?"
"Weeellll… yeah, kinda. Yes."
Gavin's glare could have melted a lesser little sister. But she was better than that. "She's definitely somebody on the big hacker mailing lists, and she's with the ADP. I mean, they haven't arrested the Knight Sabers yet, so maybe they have contacts there? I think the two are kinda in cahoots, yeah?"
"Maybe. Second, Maria, who are you to speak for me?"
"I never agreed to anything, okay? I just said I'd talk to Nemesis about the idea, and that'd she do the same. I never said yes."
Gavin seemed to ponder this for a minute. "Fair enough." He turned on his heel and began to walk back to the truck, newly arrived. "I'm not doing it, though."
"What?"
"I said, I'm not going to ally with the Knight Sabers. That is final."
Maria sprang to her feet, her computers forgotten. "Oh, come on! It's a not a bad idea! They've got hardsuits too, so we know we're dealing with pros! All you have to do is talk to them next time they pop up. That's not a big deal, is it?"
He paused, turned around slowly. "Not a chance. They're untrained, underarmed, incapable of doing what needs to be done. They're civilians in a military environment."
"Really."
"They have this pink one who is completely untrained in combat. She faced a Jaeger and would have died if I hadn't killed it. She wasn't ready."
"If you put me in a hardsuit, would I be ready?"
"No, but I don't put you in a hardsuit. I keep you safe instead of letting you play hero where you don't belong."
Maria raised an eyebrow. "That's a little mean, big bro. What about the other Sabers? The video footage I've got of them is mostly them kicking serious ass."
"They couldn't handle coordinated attacks by Jaegers, switched to dodging when they should have been counterattacking. Again, untrained, underarmed, incapable of doing what needs to be done. The fact that they never bothered to take on the Yakuza before is proof of that." He walked over to the truck and began unloading a stack of grey-green boxes. Maria scurried after him.
"I just think you might be jumping to conclusions a little too quickly, that's all." A thought occurred to her. "Maybe they don't go after the Sleeping Dragon because they're too busy fighting GENOM, or something like that. It might be some kind of Japanese prioritization thing, yeah?"
Gavin dragged a box out of the growing pile marked APEX, popped open the cover, and ran his hands through a belt of machine gun ammo. "Then they're not just unready, they're insane. The megacorps may be considered by some to by evil, but GENOM is the best of a bad bunch in that case. They rebuilt this city from the ground up when no one else would, they're doing the same to cities across the world, even in America. And they do it cheaper than any other company would." He shut the box, opened another one marked RAIL ROUNDS, and drew a spike as long as his forearm from it."You can't kill a megacorporation, anyway, not with bullets and blood." His finger glided along the spike's edge, right to the flanged tip. "But you can kill enough criminals that the rest will stay off the streets."
"So…" Maria trailed off. "So we've been going after small fry this whole time?"
"We're making changes where we can make a difference. The Sleeping Dragon has caused more direct misery than GENOM might have caused indirectly, and they've been unopposed in this city for almost a decade. That the Knight Sabers don't see that-" He sighed. "-tells us everything we need to know about them."
"Oh come on!" Maria huffed. "You might disagree with their priorities long-term, but they want to help you! You can't say no to a little bit of extra firepower, right?"
Gavin stood up, spike still in hand.
"I mean, you can't take on the whole city alone-"
"Maria, I am capable of far more than you realize," Gavin snapped. "I have no intention of expanding the scope of Operation Susanoo without calling in backup - our patron will see to that. But I do not want people who are not willing to kill when the situation calls for it slowing me down."
"You honestly think they won't help? At all?"
"I think their capabilities have been exaggerated, to say the least. And I can prove it." Hed irled on his heel to face Sarge, who was just emerging from the front of the truck. "Sarge, change of plans. We're not going after the Yakuza's arsenal tonight."
He looked surprised, to say the least. "Really? So we're going after Sato himself? I thought we were gonna save that for tomorrow."
"Situation's changed. The other syndicates appear to be pooling their resources, just as we feared. We've got no choice but to strike one of them, just to keep them on their toes, cripple coordination." Gavin turned to the doorways where the quarters were. "SMITTY! VICAIN!"
The two men scrambled from their bunks with all the grace of startled geese. Vicain, in particular, had heavy purple masses of skin under his eyes. Maria realized she hadn't seen him at lunch, or breakfast. He'd watched the news last night about the attack on the Underbelly, and hadn't said anything, just gone to bed. They'd barely made it to the truck when Gavin began to walk over to the holotable, and they followed.
When they were all there, he popped open the file registry, and began cycling through blueprints. Wireframes, motes of lights and lines connecting them, spun around, morphing into one file after another. "Maria, you've been compiling a target list for the other syndicates, right?"
"Um, sorta?" Her big brother had told her to compile a list of targets alongside a dossier of their forces, like she had for the Sleeping Dragon, and that had taken up most of her day. She'd drawn mostly from the ADP database, and that was easy enough. The Red Willow, Russian, and Triad databases had falllen with just a little more, but the distributed blockchain architecture for Chung's little gang alliance had required her to do some brute-forcing, and that had taken up most of her afternoon. So she had business lists, registries, receipts for heavy equipment, all the boring churn that any large organization produced, but what was her older brother going to do with?
"Yes or no, Maria."
"Yes - but-"
"Name the most heavily protected thing on this list. Business, safehouse, Yakuza, Triad, doesn't matter. What have these syndicates beefed up to the point that it seems to be invincible?"
"Um." Her mental landscape vibrated like an earthquake had struck it. "Well, Jimmy Chee basically runs Yokohama's Chinatown, and the whole district is built like a fortress…" She trailed off.
"Keep going."
Her brain, her voice, betrayed her. Words poured out of her mouth, tripped over themselves. "I mean, there's a lot of interesting targets. He runs a big Boomer chop shop near the industrial district, sells the parts to back alley cyberware clinics all over Yokohama. He's got a gun microfactory right next to a major recycling center." She began to count off on her fingers. "Descent from Heaven Imports is his major stash of empty warehouses, if he's got Boomers or anything big it'll be there. And then there's Tiandi Jian, big Michelin-rated restaurant where the Triads used for most of their big meetings before Chee moved to Shinjuku. There's a whole bunch of small basement drug labs and brothels and stuff, but-"
"But?"
"But the whole of Chinatown was rebuilt with Triad money, to protect Triad interests. It's got security comparable to our, uh, patron's setup in District 3. So you aren't gonna be able to do much of a blitz before they raise the alarm and the streets are swarming with thugs."
"Fine. What would you not recommend for targets?"
"Not recommend?" Something was up. Why was she answering his questions? "I mean, you aren't gonna be able to get to Tiandi Jian without the whole Triad chasing after you. So I'd go after Descent Imports, or maybe the chop shop…"
She looked up. Gavin was fiddling with the holotable some more. It was displaying what looked like a map of Yokohama, but with all of her points of interest marked by little red holographic pushpins. He traced a line between points with his finger, dragging a red line through one in the north, down through the industrial district to the south, and finally back up again to the middle.
"That's my strike pattern," he said. "Descent from Heaven, your unamed chop shop, Tiandi Jian. It should be difficult, but not impossible. If things go badly, we'll go straight for the restaurant. We move at twenty-hundred hours. Any questions?"
Silence. "In that case-"
"I have a question, big bro," Maria squeaked out. Funny, she thought, how she could unload all the information her brother could ask for one moment and be left speechless the next. "Why aren't we just going after Sato?"
"I already said why. Because his rivals are mobilizing in a coalition. If we strike one of them, they'll come into conflict with their so-called allies, slowing down said mobilization. Simple."
"Okay, you say that, but the thing is I don't believe you?" Funny how the right uncertain tone could turn a statement into a begging question. "You said that the Knight Sabers are useless and that you can prove it. Is that what this is all about?"
If Gavin was moved by the dirty glares Smitty and Vicain shot his way, he didn't show it. "To an extent. I picked a target I know will have more human security than Boomer security." He zoomed the holotable in on the pushpin in the middle of the map, a fat mock palace in the pagoda style. "Because what I am about to do, the Knight Sabers can't. If they don't show up, so much the cowards. If they do, they will be defeated, and it will be on me to save them. And when that happens, I hope I can put any notions of them being useful to rest."
"So you're going to play with the Sabers' lives to prove a point."
"I have no intention of doing so. But if it happens along the way that a point can be proven-" He smiled. On his face, it looked almost impossible, as if he had been out of practice. "So much the better."
"That's just gonna make us more enemies, mate," Smitty said. "I'd say it's better to let the syndicates do our dirty work for us so we can focus on getting in and out lightning-fast. Get Sato's head on a plate, drop it off at ADP HQ, and go back to the States, yeah?"
"Smitty, we can no longer be so precise. We have multiple enemies this time, not just one criminal organization but many. Let but a single fish go uncaught, and it will grow up into a ruthless shark. For the sake of Megatokyo, we cannot allow that to happen."
"So we take them on all at once and hope they don't band together?" Vicain said. "Like Sato's rivals already have? You're still banking on them being too busy fighting each other to fight you properly. That's a hell of a gamble."
"Not with these people it isn't," Gavin said. "The criminal mentality is all about causing the suffering of others for personal gain. Betrayal of allies if it is profitable is as easy as breathing. And Sato's enemies know this. As soon as he is gone they will turn on one another and tear this city apart between themselves. If I attack Chee, the others will not respond. He may send his forces against them in a fit of anger, but in his heart he will know he would do the same if one of them was attacked. That will destabilize their so-called alliance-"
"No it won't!" Vican shouted. "Jesus fucking Christ, listen to how full of shit you are! These people are willing to put aside their differences to get rid of the Sleeping Dragon, so how hard do you think it'll be for them to do the same thing when they realize you're gunning for them too? Not that hard, I'd say!"
Sarge clamped a hand on Vicain's shoulder. "Easy there. Easy. Gavin knows what he's doing."
Vicain looked at Sarge. Sarge looked at Vicain. Vicain made a low sound in his throat, his lips pressed together, almost but not quite like a growl. It was, Maria thought, very unbecoming of a mechatronics genius.
"If you have a problem with how I run this organization," Gavin said at last, "I'd like to hear it."
"I don't. I just think you're not making a rational decision."
"But you accept my authority?"
"Yes," Vicain grumbled.
"Then you should accept my decision as well."
"Hmm."
"If you have something to say…"
"I don't."
"You're sure?"
"Positive."
"Excellent." Gavin turned to Smitty. "How are the repairs on the normal hardsuit going?"
"Sticky," he said. "Had to scrub the whole bleedin' suit with ArmorAll for a good hour straight. And I still haven't gotten the smell out."
"I've piloted worse. How does it handle?"
"You were looking at a serious loss of dexterity in one arm from the shoulder plate breaking up, so I had to replace that, which was easy enough. But you also took quite a few rounds to the chassis, enough to cause microfracturing in certain areas, we don't have spare plating and it'll take another day in the fabricator to get all the nanodiamond to stick together. Otherwise, next time you go up against anything as big as a fifty-cal, and they get lucky…" He made a ring with his left pointer finger and thumb, then poked his right pointer through. "Bam. Internal lining might stop penetration, but it'll still fuck you up real bad."
"Fine then. I'll still be using it for my first strike, but if anything goes wrong we switch to the heavy hardsuit immediately. I don't want to compromise my mobility unless I absolutely have to."
"You may not have a choice, big bro," Maria said. "I mean, you're not gonna have the luxury of stealth if you try to go for three places at once. And if they get eyes on the truck, that's our cover blown right there."
"They won't get eyes on the truck if you do your job properly."
Maria decided to let that slide. Gavin wasn't the type to insult others, most of the time - he'd always spared his most vehement venom for his father. If something was going on, she didn't want to push him. "You sure? You won't use, say, the Venator?"
"No. The Venator only comes out when we go for Sato's mansion. I don't want to show my hand quite just yet. I can't ride it with the heavy hardsuit, anyway."
"But you'll use the heavy hardsuit for Tiandi Jian?"
"Of course. I don't intend to take undue risks."
"Isn't this whole strike an undue risk?" Vicain said. "I mean, we had a plan. We were gonna go after Sato's safehouses and arms depots, break the fangs of the dragon before we cut its throat. I thought that was a pretty cool way of doing things, but now you want to expand the scope of the strikes because Maria made a stupid suggestion? Make enemies we don't have?"
"All criminals are our enemies, Vicain," Gavin said. "I thought you understood that. And I thought you understood that plans change, too. Or did you not learn from our work in Boston that even we have to improvise?"
Vicain muttered something under his breath. "Well?"
"Fine. Fine, I'll go help Smitty prepare the suits and load up the truck."
"Thank you."
Vicain stalked off. Sarge glanced his way before looking back towards Gavin. "Man, he's pissed."
Gavin shrugged. "It was below the belt to bring up Boston, I'll admit. But you know how Vicain is. He'll come around soon enough."
Wordlessly, the two men, brothers in arms, went off to the truck. Smitty looked their way, looked at Maria, whose posture was curling in just a little bit.
"Hey, Maria?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't worry. It's Gavin, right? Things change, but he always gets out of it. He knows what he's doing."
"I hope you're right," she whispered. "Otherwise…"
No.
It was best not to think about that.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Well, I finally updated. Go me. No excuses this time.
Next chapter may take awhile - I had it written up, but as it stands I'm gonna have to rewrite a pretty big chunk of it to have it make any sense. We'll see how things go.
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:15 PM
"Everything?" said Priss. "What the hell does that mean?"
Sylia's smile did not waver. "Well, I mean that we could start anywhere and go anywhere. I just want to talk with you, make sure you're alright. For instance, how's Sho?"
"He's… good. I mean, he's been better, obviously, but, you know, circumstances. Everyone's on edge. Why do you ask?"
"I was just curious."
"Ha! You're Sylia Stingray. You're never just curious. There's always something else. What's your angle?"
Sylia sat down opposite Priss, taking a cup of tea from the platter on the table. "I know you care about him, that he's like a little brother to you. It never hurts to keep up to date on my employees' interests for the sake of their psychological health. You still visit him regularly, right? How was he, really?"
Well, that was direct. "Scared shitless, but like I said, no surprise. Some guy visited the orphanage recently in riding armor and helmet, dropped off - Huh. Son of a bitch."
"Pardon?"
"This guy left a note and a whole bunch of money for the orphanage, said to put the money to better use than its original intent, something like that. Signed it N. I think that was probably our guy."
Sylia seemed to perk up a little. "Really. I don't suppose he'll come around again? If we could corner him out of his suit…"
"You want to turn an act of charity into a sting? No thank you."
"Oh, come on. I'm deadly certain Nemesis is working for Karns, and that's one of his little patronage operations. If it's Yakuza money, it could just be an indirect transfer of funds, putting them where Karns would put them anyway."
"You know that 'little patronage operation' was where I grew up, right?"
"I know. So did Skeeter." Sylia sipped her tea. "No offense, of course. I recall you hating it anyway. My point stands regardless."
"What makes you think he'll come back anyhow? Maybe one night it's an orphanage, the next day it's a homeless shelter."
"But they'd all be owned by Karns, and that gives us a chance to track him down. Cross-consult all of his businesses, see if any masked riders have shown up, leave a letter where he might strike next - no, nevermind. It wouldn't do any good if I didn't know his true identity. That's what will make him meet me."
Priss yawned. "Great. Are we done? I've got songs to write, and my trailer ain't gonna clean itself."
Sylia set her cup down with an audible clatter. "That brings me to my next point of discussion. You aren't going anywhere until I have the hardsuits prepped. You'll have the run of the Ladys633, but otherwise I want you to stay inside."
Priss leaned forward. "Ha ha. Real funny. You're not serious, are you?"
"I am very serious. The Fault zone is territory disputed between Skeeter, Sato, and Smirnovski - if your trailer isn't in the middle of a war zone now, it will be very soon."
Priss gasped. "Then I've gotta get down there right now, get all my stuff out before they blow the whole block!"
"What stuff, exactly?"
"All of it. Leathers, food, clothes, cash, futon, musical equipment…" Priss counted off on her fingers. "You want me to go on?
"All replaceable." Sip. "I'll pay for them, even. You, on the other hand, are not."
"What the fuck is that supposed to mean?"
"It means," Sip, "that if you go out into the city, alone, armed with nothing more than your Member II and your motorcycle, you will most likely be shot and killed. Then I will have no Saber Blue, and we can't have that. I've already lost you-" She paused. There was a faraway look in her eyes. "Almost lost you, I mean, too many times."
"Yeah, but if I lose all that shit and some mysterious patron buys it back for me, what's the rest of the band gonna think? Won't that seem suspicious?"
"Say Leon or someone like that helped." Sip. "You'd be surprised at the way some people edit out sketchy details of their friends' lives just so they can stay friends. They'll miss it entirely."
That was too far. "And why would I want to give them an idea like that? It's not like Leon and I are that close, are we?"
"I wouldn't know, but considering what I heard from Greg, you two are practically an item."
"Yeah, and how is Mallory doing these days? Still trying to get into your ol' granny panties?"
If Sylia was moved by that, she didn't show it. Sip. "I'll be honest with you, he did propose to me."
"What?!" Priss was oscillating between dumbstruck and screaming mad. How dare that creep - how dare she not tell anybody-
"Relax. I told him I'd think about it, and accepted a position on his board of directors for MALCORP's Far East branch. Nothing more."
"That's a pretty big fucking deal! You can't just get married off to some megacorporate rapist! You made the rules of the Knight Sabers, so you better fucking follow them!"
"I did tell you that I said no, right? I'll not move until GENOM and the rest of the megacorporations have been crippled and humbled. You have nothing to worry about." Sip.
"You said you'd think about it. You should have kicked him in his fucking brass balls, that's what you should have done. Now you've given him an opening, and he's not gonna stop bugging you until he's got you by the lady parts and pumping heirs out!"
"You don't know Greg very well, I think. I spent much of my childhood with him, and I can safely say he's not that sort of person."
"Really. And being the CEO of a megacorp hasn't turned him into another Quincy."
"I've told you already, it hasn't. He's still very much an honorable man, still very much the knight-in-shining-armor type. Slaying dragons, erecting valiant kingdoms, doing good deeds with no expectation of recompense. He and Quincy couldn't be further from each other." Sip.
"Fuck." Priss sneered. "You don't get it, do you? You say that shit but you have no idea what it means. It means he's got to be the one who slays the dragon, not you. That's why he's setting up shop in Japan, because he can't bear to have his pretty little fuckin' princess leaving his castle now that she's caught his eye. You honestly think he's going to listen to you? To respect you? To let you make your own decisions? To let you say no? Get real."
Sylia set her teacup, now empty, on its platter. She did not move to refill it. "You seem very certain of this," she said at last.
"You're goddamn right I'm certain of it! He's the same as Leon, one of those fucking honorable types who barges into other people's business whenever they want something and dress it up in a code of chivalry."
"So you're drawing on your experience with Inspector McNichol as your primary source here."
"Yeah, because that fucker - hold up." Priss stopped herself. She could feel that Sylia was trying to make a point, only she had no idea what that point was. That annoyed her greatly. "What are you trying to pull?"
"Well," Sylia said, refilling her tea, "I think that you don't have enough evidence about Mallory either way, so you're projecting your feelings about Leon onto him. And that's incredibly interesting, because I thought you saw Leon as a close friend."
"I… do…" she trailed off.
"Well, then." The dark-haired woman made an open gesture with her off hand. "Why the sudden distaste, then?"
In the back of her mind, Priss fumbled for words. She hated being like this, verbally disarmed at Sylia's hands. It was always like this, working with her, playing these little games where you had to guess what she was really saying from her body language despite the fact that she had almost none. It was almost like the therapists they'd bring into the orphanage, only in this case she couldn't bring herself to just keep silent.
Because she had a point. What was so wrong with Leon McNichol? What was she so afraid of?
"He… he's a friend. I like to think of him as reliable. He's not a horrible person."
"You aren't answering my question," Sylia singsonged.
"And… I got pretty intimate with him while I was all banged up in the Black Knight's care. Cried into his arms and everything. I don't want him to die, you know?"
"I also recall a certain kiss…"
"Yeah yeah yeah. Of course you do. But-"
"But?"
"But then he just had to buy the Hot Legs."
"Ah, there we go. Go on. He bought the Hot Legs with Greg's money and then what?"
"And then that was it. Somehow word got out I was pals with a cop and the offers to sing somewhere that wasn't the Hot Legs just dried the fuck up. I mean, I thought it was a good offer at the time. No strings attached, he said, and I thought, fuck it, he's a friend, I believe him."
"But that's never how it works out, is it? Retrothrash fans, the kind of people I sing for, they hate cops. So now I'm gonna spend the rest of my life playing songs for half-dead cops at a cop bar, and if I complain Leon'll be all, you know, think of the cop's wives and the cop's children and the cop's dogs and what-fucking ever."
"And I should have seen that coming. I should have had backup plans, maybe a different band. I should have-"
"You didn't want to admit you needed help."
Priss slumped down into the couch. "I hate needing help. I hate hate hate it. It makes me weak."
"And when I saved you from your kamikaze death charge at GENOM tower in '31? Did you hate that, too?"
"At first, yeah." She sighed. "I wanted Quincy's head for myself. Sometimes I still do. But that was different. You didn't do it for my sake, you did it because you needed a Saber, right? You weren't trying to be my friend or anything, you were just there."
"Yes. I suppose I did." Sip. "But I'm not proud of that, Priss. If I could have done it again, I would have been kinder, more welcoming. I would have made you an offer while you were in a healthier frame of mind, but time was of the essence."
"Bullshit. If you'd waited around and I'd died all you'd need was some other gal with a beef against GENOM, and they aren't hard to find. I wasn't special then, and I'm barely special now, and you know that."
Sylia did not respond. Her expression was completely neutral. Had Priss won this particular game? She'd never won before, but the way Sylia wasn't moving, the way her teacup was held perfectly perpendicular to her body, was unlike her. She decided to check.
"Hey, am I wrong? Moshi-moshi?"
It was like watching a glacier melt, the way her hand glided down to rest her teacup on its platter, the way her eyelids slammed down and up again.
"You're not wrong, Priss," Sylia said, and her voice was slow and thick with something she couldn't quite place. "But - you are not right, either. It is not that simple, and it never has been."
"Oh?"
"Yes, you were - disposable - once." The word diss-pose-a-ble grinded past gritted teeth, every syllable given the care of a single word. "You were one contaminated needle, one stray bullet, one wobbly bike wheel away from self-immolation, the same as countless other children of the Quake. You are not wrong about that."
"But even then, you had a spark of life within you the rest of the city lacked. If you were going to combust, you were going to make sure that Megatokyo saw you burning. I saw that, and I knew that you could not be allowed to go to waste."
"What the fuck does that mean, a spark-"
"Let me finish, Priss. This habit of interrupting people isn't doing you any favors."
"Fine. Keep going, then."
She sighed. "When I first came to you, and you pulled a knife on me without hesitating, I was both surprised and excited. Surprised because you had just been in a serious bike crash, yet still had the energy to defend yourself, and excited because - well - even I would not be capable of such a feat of stamina. Here, I thought, here is an exceptional woman, someone who has boundless capabilities and yet is wasting them boundlessly. Here is someone who I could help become great. So yes, Priss, my motives weren't entirely selfish. If I only wanted a Knight Saber, I would have picked some mercenary with few compunctions. Jeena Malso, maybe, or someone even more unpleasant. But I chose you."
"So, the tale of Genji, basically. Raising me like a mother. You must feel so proud of yourself."
"Let me finish. I thought you could harness the power inside of you for better ends. I thought - well, I suppose I thought I could make you into a superhero. Someone the world would look up to. And I still do."
"But then I look at you now, and you're destroying yourself again. You provoked Linna and Nene, who are supposed to be your teammates, and to what end? To prove a point? To seem invincible? And I look at the way you regard Leon, and I fear you'll burn bridges with him too if he ever gets too close, and now you think you're disposable in my eyes, no more than human detritus, and I wonder. Why this? Why any of this?"
"Why do you give a shit?" Priss gritted her teeth.
Sylia touched two fingers to her temples briefly, sucked in a sharp breath. "Because I care about you, and I care about what happens to you. I care about what happens to you and Linna and Nene and Mackie and Fargo and Doctor Raven and even Greg Mallory. You are all my family. Why can't you see that?"
Priss seemed to sink further into the couch. She muttered something under her breath.
It was a mistake. Sylia could probably hear it. "Pardon?"
"Nevermind."
"No, not nevermind. I want to hear what you have to say."
"No, you don't. You'll hate me for saying it."
"Short of insulting me, or quitting again, I could not possibly hate you. I know you're trying very hard to make it so, just as it was with Nene and Linna. I would like you to stop."
"It's really dumb, okay? Just forget about it."
"It isn't meaningless to you, obviously. Otherwise you wouldn't defend it so vehemently." She crossed her legs. The volume of her voice dropped. "But you can trust me."
Priss looked at her, one eyebrow raised. Sylia normally handled personal relationships with the finesse of a laser scalpel, keeping her conversational partners at arm's length. She might let someone dance with her, but she would always, always, call the tune. This was different. Very different.
You are all my family. Why can't you see that?
What the fuck did that mean? The Knight Sabers were a mercenary group, a media contraption designed to shift public opinion, bend it against the megacorporate deities of their era. They were certainly not Sazae-san or some other Showa-era domestic-bliss meme-complex she'd care to name. And Sylia knew that, or at least Priss thought she did. She came up with the idea, after all.
So where was all this coming from? Had Mallory really cut her open to that extent? Had finding someone who was almost like her thawed her icy heart so badly?
Or had she always been like this? When she came to her trailer back in '32, the first time she'd ever bothered, just after she'd quit because - oh God, she couldn't crack right now-
It came out. "Because everyone who ever cares about me dies. Everyone." She felt heavy, bloated. "Every single person who has taken the time to get close - like, it's like I was born under a really unlucky star, I don't fucking know-"
"Priss, that's not true." Sylia reached out, began to get up-
"YOU DON'T FUCKING KNOW THAT!" she shouted, shooting up. "You don't know what it's, what it's like. Kaori died, Tetsuo-kun died, Kaneda-kun died, they all fucking died, that little Boomer girl died, I can't even remember her name, just, just her fear - I killed Sylvie, and Anri hated me, and she didn't even kill me like she should have fucking done, and she's dead too - and Mom and Dad, I don't-" she sobbed. "I don't even fucking remember them! I try to remember their faces, the way they held me, and I try to reach back for them, and there's nothing there! Nothing there but the way they bled and broke and, and, and, and the way their bodies weren't them anymore - that's I'll ever remember - oh God, oh God."
She was crying now, weeping without any control, choking on her own tears, shaking, shuddering, turning in on herself, her arms tucked around her chest. "And, and it was always my fault, Kaori and Sylvie and Anri and Tetsuo and and all of them, all because I couldn't see the signs, because I couldn't find some better way, like - like you would have done - because I'm so fucking weak-"
"Shh." And then Sylia was right there. Holding her, and she was - warm. Warmer than she thought was possible. "It's okay. It's okay. It's not your fault."
She tried to push out. It was no good. Sylia held her tighter. "Don't touch me. Please god don't touch me. I don't - I don't want you to go too - I couldn't stand it - not like that-"
"Shh. Shh. It's all ok, Priss. It wasn't your fault."
"You don't fucking know that-"
"Yes, I do. I do know, Priss. It's okay."
"I don't even remember their faces - just so much fucking blood-"
"I'm here for you, okay? I'm right here. Right here, Priss. Look at me, okay? Just look at me. Right here."
She raised her head just a little, and their eyes met. Sylia's eyes were pools of dark chocolate, mostly bitter with a little sweet hidden in their depths. The kind of sweet you'd look for and look for and drown to see. She could see her own eyes reflected in them, her mutant-blood-red irises a faint crimson ring inside Sylia's pupils.
"You don't know-" she breathed.
Sylia smiled. "I do know. That's why I'm here. That's why I care."
"You don't-"
"I care. Nene cares. Linna cares. We all care. That's why we're here for you, Priss."
"No-"
"Yes. If you believe one thing, Priss, please believe in that. Believe in us, because we believe in you."
Priss blinked. "Isn't that an anime reference?-"
Her smile widened. "Is it? It's quite a line, don't you think?"
"Well-" And then she got it. She snorted. "Yeah. Yeah. I guess it is. Heh. Hehe."
Sylia began to laugh. It was light, melodious, like fluted glass. "I always did like Gainax. Shame they went bankrupt after the quake."
"Gainax? You mean, you've actually seen that anime." She almost giggled. "You watch anime?"
"A little, here and there. I watched much more of it when Mackie was younger, when I was in school, that sort of thing. Not that much - I always preferred a good tokusatsu, personally."
"Holy hell." Priss laughed a little, then laughed more. Sylia's grip loosened. "I don't believe it. Sylia Stingray, the ice queen, is an otaku! Holy fuck!"
Sylia smirked. "What, you're surprised? Father only gave me the hardsuits and some loose directions. Who do you think came up with the color-coordination idea?
Priss gasped. "Noooo. Get out."
"Oh yes. I have a safe in my room with old VHS's and Laserdiscs. I could show them to you, if you like."
Priss cackled with glee, barely noticing Sylia had let go. She was bent over with laughter. "I don't believe this! You make Nene look mature! Holy shit!"
"Well now that's a cruel comparison." Sylia snickered. "There are plenty of mature people who like immature things. Nene likes immature things and is just outright immature."
"No kidding! I mean, c'mon, remember the time when she called me an ape-woman? Like that was the worst I'd ever heard!"
"I do remember that!" And then she was laughing too.
"And did I ever tell you about the time she got drunk, like after a handful of shots, and seriously tried to do a striptease-"
"Linna only told me the basics, but from what I understand, it was quite a thing-"
"Oh, it was! Okay, okay, shaddup, imma tell you right now." And she did.
____________________________________________________________________
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
12:27 PM
Nene sneezed. Hard.
____________________________________________________________________
Sylia's Apartment
February 12, 2036
12:28 PM
"And then, and then, she says, 'I thought that was Mackie!' Can you believe that?! She's crazy for that little lech!"
"Well, I already knew that-"
"Of course you did." Priss sucked in a breath. "Damn, that felt good."
Sylia grinned, and sat back down. "It certainly did! I haven't laughed that hard in years."
"Ohhhhh?" Priss said, hands on her hips. "You mind telling me what that was about? C'mon, I shared my story, you've gotta have one of your own."
"Oh, not right now. I've had enough fun for one day."
"Hmph." Priss pouted.
"Alright, I won't tell you it now. I'll wait till Linna and Nene get back, how's that sound?"
"Awesome." A thought came to her. "So, am I still stuck here until we go out?"
"Yes," Sylia said, her face hardening. "Tell you what, though. Dr. Raven should be down in the underground garage running checks on the Motoslaves. I'm going to go do some more intel gathering, but you can bother him if you like."
"Aww…"
"He rebuilt the Highway Star as one of them."
"Son of a bitch! I've gotta see that!" And then, quicker than the speed of thought, she was gone.
Sylia waited for a moment, then leaned back, gazing up at the ceiling. She sighed.
She should have expected something like that, behind everything. Priss was all about pain and fear, when it came down to it. Tug on one end of that seething mass, and the whole thing would unwind.
Was she manipulating her, then? Giving her a place to cry when she had brought up all those things, all that pain? Wasn't it her fault, loosely? And hadn't she failed to actually address those problems by defusing the whole thing with humor?
Damn. One thing about her internal monologue lately: It usually was annoyingly right.
Fortunately, she had no time to consider these sort of things. She'd picked the meeting place with Fargo this time, and it was a good half-hour's drive, which gave her three short hours to tune up the hardsuits one last time and get out there. Then, hopefully, the secrets of Operation Templar and the people who worked on it would be revealed.
And if they weren't? Well, she always had other plans. Plans she would hate herself for, but plans nonetheless.
With luck, it wouldn't come to that.
____________________________________________________________________
ADP Headquarters
February 12, 2036
2:00 PM
"Okay," Nene said to herself, "time for a coffee break."
"Will do, Sergeant."
"GAH!" She spun around in her chair. Alan, still in his dust-covered suit, had somehow materialized behind her, cup of coffee in hand. "How long have you been standing there?!"
He shrugged. "About thirty seconds. I guess we had the same idea, huh?"
"Sure. Okay. Awesome. Never do that again, okay?"
He grinned. "Do what?"
"Don't sneak up on me like that! I thought you were checking the cable ducts."
"Hey, I spent my half day. I'm done with the whole first floor, now. Got a couple of weird looks from the civvies in the entrance hall, and I don't think they appreciated me fumbling around in the vents near the ladies' room, but baby, I am done." He put his hands on his hips, superhero-style, then fished in his right-hand pocket for something. "Here. Thought you might want these."
"And they are?"
"See for yourself." He unclenched his hand, revealing several small disks with little spikes on them, each no larger than a fingernail. "Someone bugged the restrooms, so I unbugged them."
"The civilian restrooms, or the police ones?"
"Just the civilian ones." He glanced down. "Any ideas?"
"Probably someone who knew that their target would visit the police station? Snuck them in on their own? Stood on the toilet lid and had a drone get into the ducts?"
"Maybe. I think a mole makes more sense, but that's just me."
"W-whaaat? That's crazy talk!" Nene laughed. "What kind of mole would only bug the civilian restrooms? Who would even be a mole here?"
Alan shrugged. "Honestly? Anyone who knows the system and wants an extra buck or two from the Sleeping Dragon or some other shady organization. I want to assume it's just us who know the system, but…"
"Don't be ridiculous! I'm good, you're good, we're all clean." Her brow furrowed. "Maybe it was one of those hackers we hired?"
"Not a chance," Alan said. "Vicky's too dedicated to getting back at GENOM to sell out to them, and Rob's been with the ADP too long to go rogue. Maybe…"
"Maybe what?"
"Well, I'm just assuming it was GENOM or a criminal organization, but it could be anyone, really. You know what, maybe it was the Knight Sabers!" He laughed, as though it was supposed to be funny.
"Ha!" Nene laughed, forcing air out of her lungs. "Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! A mole for the Knight Sabers! What a concept!"
"Let's not discount it too fast. They do seem to have a certain ability to pick up intel before we do. I'll let you know if any more turn up."
"Whatever. Get yourself some coffee and get back to work."
"Will do, boss." He left the cup on her cubicle table. And then, soundlessly, he left the room. Nene sighed.
Shit. Shitshitshit. Those were her bugs.
Sylia had given them to her when she first started her job in the ADP, and over the years she'd put a few dozen on just about every floor - in the vents, in the cable ducts, in the walls - anywhere she could sneak into after hours. For one of the most advanced law enforcement organizations in the world, they really didn't mind her looping footage on the cams a couple of times. No one actually bothered to check it, anyway - why would they, when the computer was supposed to do that for them?
But now Alan was going to dismantle her system, bit by bit. And she had ordered him to do it. Very valuable intelligence on ADP movements was going to be lost within the span of a few months, and this was the worst possible time, especially considering the stuff she'd heard from her bugs in the chief's office.
If GENOM's Internal Security head was going to consult for the building's security, what would happen to her if Alan blabbed about the bugs? They'd send a whole team of Boomers to rip open the building, probably. And if they traced them back to her computer somehow…
But what could she actually do? Just straight up tell Alan? "Hey pal, I'm Saber Pink and I need info from my really illegal bugs in the ADP building to do what might be considered terrorism by some people, so if you could just not talk about them to anybody except me, that'd be great?"
Maybe. He'd definitely backed her little hacker collective, so maybe he'd understand. Then again, he was a self-described info packrat, so he'd probably take the opportunity to update his datadisc on the Knight Sabers, and maybe squeeze her for more info, and if that got into GENOM's hands…
She was beginning to wish she'd never taken this job in the first place. Too many secrets in too many places, that was her problem. And she had no way to fix it.
Well, there was one thing she hadn't done, and that was check up on the matter of Fleet Hermes. She'd told Vicky to start spreading the word to the local hacker mailing lists, to see if they'd meet IRL. It was a long shot - few pro hackers left their house for fear that some enemy of theirs would slip poison in their food while they were out - but this was an American, a newbie to the Megatokyo scene. Maybe she'd get careless, and she could just talk to them in first-person.
No arrests, of course. She wasn't that cruel.
She rummaged below her desk, pulling out a slate of black plastic about the size of a keyboard, then plugged it into her computer, and the wider ADP network. This was 'dawble', her super-secret semi-private email server she used for checking in on her little hacker collective and the hacking world at large. It wasn't very security-heavy, only used basic quantum encryption, but Nene had no intention of upgrading it. It was supposed to look like a maintenance peripheral jacked into some rando operator's desk from VR - when it was online, anyway. All the fanciest hacking tricks in the world couldn't beat a good old-fashioned airgapping.
A few clicks and a biometric scan later, she'd brought up the feed on her computer's screen. Her email was mostly empty, save for the handful of new specs on GENOM's latest combat model Maoru had pulled the last time. The armor was a little thicker, the particle beam gun a little more powerful, and the fusion-capabilities more pronounced, but at least they'd gotten rid of those godawful heat cannons. Whether or not they would add something as a replacement, like one of those gravity cannons Largo had, remained to be seen, but she doubted it. From her perspective the chest beam was too big of a power drain and took up too much space that could be used for actual armor, and if you hit it during buildup with just about anything, as she had done multiple times, the whole lens array would go out of whack and usually melt half the Boomer along with it. Well, now GENOM designers had the same ideas as her, which wasn't good from the Knight Sabers' standpoint, but was better from an external admirer's view. She hated fighting machines that were poorly made - there was just something distasteful about it.
All that aside, the only other thing in her mailbox was an automated maintenance alert. Odd, that, especially considering the subject header urged her to upgrade her firewall, which was supposed to be considered spam by her actual firewall, the one that she'd coded herself to replace the shitty one given to all police hardware. So this was either a Trojan… or it was Fleet Hermes. It made sense, sort of. The hacker would have disguised themselves as a maintenance subroutine, left a datapacket on the primary routine, remoralike, and then programmed it to go after 'dawble' the picosecond it was online. Or it could have just been some officer's infected account spewing hot shit at anything and everything it had a connection to.
She plugged in another peripheral, a sort of virtual server for anything malicious to attack, braced herself, and clicked. To her surprise, nothing bad happened. There was a message on the screen:
================================================================
To: RHH@dawble.adp.gov.jp
From: 753665589@MegaTokyo.net
Subject: Update your firewall now!
You rang? I'm not leaving my hidey-hole, but I'll gladly chat over here: @MT.7643.irc
It's a public server. I paid for it through a black account. Don't pull anything, copper.
-Fleet Hermes
====================================================================
Huh. How about that. Fleet Hermes had rented access space on a public server, which in her eyes was like taking a hostage in a Mexican standoff: she'd be hacking someone who wasn't Fleet Hermes if she tried anything. Then again, if she just accessed the payment records for the server, she'd have a lead on the hacker, but if the 'black account' thing was true, then that would be a dead end.
Alright. She'd bite. But she'd make sure it wasn't through the ADP network, first. She closed the tab, shut down her desktop, then yanked out her private laptop from her stash underneath the desk, and plugged dawble in. Now dawble technically had an ADP address, but if Fleet Hermes tried anything herself she'd find nothing but Nene's very well-secured personal stuff. She opened up her email, and clicked the link.
WELCOME TO CHAT! PLEASE ENTER YOUR NAME.
Yep. It was a chat window, alright. White text, black background, nothing major changed for nearly a half century. Whoop-de-do.
There was no point in hiding herself, so she put in:
RHH
And waited. Alan came back from the coffee machine, opened up his computer, began fiddling with it, undoubtedly closing another vital backdoor as she watched. Fleet Hermes did not respond.
Ten minutes passed before she decided to make the first move:
RHH: Ok fleet I know you're in there
RHH: no use playing hide and seek
RHH: just come on out so we can talk
____________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co. , District 5
February 12, 2036
2:13 PM
Maria gasped a little as she saw that her public server had lit up. Immediately, she spun her desk chair over to her secondary monitor, letting an automatic process keep on doing the work of pulling Battlemover schematics off a Red Willow database. Finally, someone to talk to!
She read what RHH had said. It was a little standoffish, but if nothing else it spared her the annoyance of having her handle be a bunch of random numbers:
=================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Hi there!
Fleet Hermes: Sorry about taking so long, I was a little busy.
Fleet Hermes: It's nice to see you found me - from what I hear you're quite skilled.
RHH: yuh huh
Fleet Hermes: What's up?
RHH: well im w/ adp and id like to ask u some questions re: Nemesis
Fleet Hermes: What makes you think I have anything on him???
RHH: plenty of things
RHH: asking around about the architecture of Yk databases for one
RHH: most natives generally dont ask questions about that sort of thing b/c they know better or have something to lose if the Yks find out
RHH: i mean people know about that sort of thing but they dont want 2 take a long walk off a short pier if you catch my drift
RHH: also u showed up on the local hacker boards literally hours after Nemesis showed up in town so yeah
RHH: that being said im not going to ask where u are b/c i know thats dumb ur not gonna give up personal information about ur big guy
RHH: and im not out to arrest him either
Fleet Hermes: Ok, I see your reasoning. I'm *not* Nemesis, but I am involved with him.
Fleet Hermes: I have a personal stake in his work, you might say.
RHH: like blowing up the underbelly
RHH: that kind of work
Fleet Hermes: That's one way of looking at it.
Fleet Hermes: Alternatively, you could see it as Nemesis eliminating one of the Sleeping Dragon's largest revenue streams, along with a site of constant human and boomeroid cruelty and brutality.
RHH: ok
Fleet Hermes: News says that GENOM's rescue services got most people out of the water before anyone died, so it's not that big a deal.
RHH: it kind of is
RHH: they actually didn't release the numbers for how many died on the higher up networks in the adp and were supposed to get stuff like that
RHH: so it could go either way
RHH: even if theyre playing up genoms big heroic rescue adventure theres always a counterangle w/ these sort of things
Fleet Hermes: Well, Nemesis did what he had to do. And that's my take on it. Why all this skepticism?
Fleet Hermes: What's *your* angle, if you aren't going to arrest him?
RHH: im trying to get nem 2 back down b4 people start dying in droves b/c he started this dumbass gang war
RHH: imma just call him nem ok
Fleet Hermes: Ok, but is the gang war really his fault?
RHH: dude do not play dumb with me i swear to god im not in the mood
RHH: look sato ran the citys underworld for a good long while and he wasnt great but he wasnt killing people randomly
RHH: now hes lost face and everyone wants a piece of the big sleeping dragon pie and i guess the traditions of not involving civilians are kind of off the table
Fleet Hermes: Maybe. They're not going to get that piece of the pie, though.
Fleet Hermes: Even if the ADP is as underfunded and understaffed as they say it is, and I doubt it, they should have more than enough evidence to dismantle the organization once Nemesis is through with it.
Fleet Hermes: He and I have been doing this for a long time, and every time we've beaten the bad guys so badly they can't reassemble.
RHH: im not disputing that u can beat the sleeping dragon
RHH: but uh
RHH: re: that big datapacket you guys always leak to the police why not send it now
RHH: do u not have enough to convict satos ass yet
Fleet Hermes: Not the point. The point is to have your people do the legal work of crippling the organization, while we do the real legwork.
Fleet Hermes: After all, even if he's arrested, he can just pay bail, go home, and skip town.
Fleet Hermes: But if he's killed, no one wants to fill his shoes and the whole organization falls apart.
RHH: ok so we do the boring stuff got it
RHH: because the law isnt capable of handling this stuff on their own
Fleet Hermes: Be realistic, of course it isn't, otherwise people like Sato would never be allowed to exist.
Fleet Hermes: It's not your individual fault, it's just the way the system works, or rather, fails to work.
Fleet Hermes: What Nemesis does is necessary, but unavoidable.
RHH: look back to the topic at hand re: gang wars
RHH: Lets say nem can beat the Sleeping Dragon
RHH: But then can he beat the Red Willow
RHH: and the Russians
RHH: and the Triads
RHH: and the Koreans
Fleet Hermes: Alright, you've made your point.
RHH: and
Fleet Hermes: And?
RHH: even if they keep on fighting each other can nem one guy in a hardsuit beat them all before someone calls in the jsdf to restore order
RHH: if tank boomers are intentionally deployed on these streets thats gonna be on you
Fleet Hermes: You think he can't take them all on and win?
RHH: hey you know the guy im just a hacker turned cop w/nothing 2 lose
RHH:
Fleet Hermes: lol
RHH: but i think even the knight sabers would have a hard time doing all that
Fleet Hermes: Maybe. Won't know until we try, no?
Fleet Hermes: I've already hacked open most of their systems too, so intelligence gathering isn't going to be a problem. The rest is up to him.
RHH: could be
RHH: but in the end how many people will die in the crossfire b4 that happens
RHH: thats why the adp wants to arrest you guys
Fleet Hermes: Not because we're criminals in the eyes of the law?
RHH: look the ks are kinda sorta criminals and most of the adp thinks theyre great me included
RHH: the difference is that were trying to end this gang war thing b4 it goes out of control
RHH: and we cant do that unless nem is gone
Fleet Hermes: Gonna have to disagree with you on that one.
RHH: yes i expected as much
Fleet Hermes: Ha Ha very funny.
Fleet Hermes: I mean, Sato's already lost so much face, the other gangs aren't going to give up. No one's going to back down unless someone makes them, and I don't see the Knight Sabers doing that.
Fleet Hermes: Where have they been this whole time?
RHH: planning
Fleet Hermes: How would you know?
RHH: just guessing tbh
RHH: it makes sense
Fleet Hermes: How?
Fleet Hermes: If they were working to get rid of Sato too I'd understand, but what could they possibly be planning?
Fleet Hermes: Nemesis has told me they seem more content to rest on their laurels than do anything, if I can be honest.
RHH: dont u talk shit about the ks ok
RHH: im sure that theyve got a plan to hand satos ass to him on a platter w/out blowing up every repurposed megastructure they see
RHH: just
RHH: fckin
RHH: dont go there
Fleet Hermes: Why not?
RHH: dont go there
RHH: theyve saved this city from crazy dudes more times than i can count
RHH: they actually bother to fight genom even though they know they can never truly win
RHH: they do all the stuff me and the adp can't do
Fleet Hermes: If they really were heroes, they'd help Nemesis.
=========================================================================
Minutes passed. She was starting to get worried. Had she struck a nerve?
=========================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Hello?
RHH: ok
RHH: why dont i pass that along to the knight sabers and theyll get back to u
Fleet Hermes: Wait, you know them? Like, personally?
RHH: its complicated :3
Fleet Hermes: Yes or no?
RHH: yes
Fleet Hermes: And you think they'd help us take down the rest of the gangs? Even after so much inaction?
RHH: i think so
RHH: no i know so
RHH: they dont just let entire wars slide thats what im trying to say
RHH: look ill tell them if u tell him
Fleet Hermes: Hold up. How can I trust you with this?
RHH: you dont
RHH: but if the sabers come out tonight tell your guy to talk to them before he tries to kill them thats all
RHH: no trust needed
=============================================================================
… She had no response to that. Would Gavin's first response to other hardsuited heroes really be killing them? He'd probably warn them, then start shooting.
It would be best, then, to just agree and think it over. The Knight Sabers were pretty cool, and it would make sense that they would have hacker contacts - but something wasn't quite right, and she couldn't figure out what it was.
=============================================================================
Fleet Hermes: Okay. I'll go do that now.
RHH: peace
Fleet Hermes: Bye.
<RHH HAS DISCONNECTED>
____________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co.
District 5
February 12, 2036
2:37 PM
"Did you give anything away?"
"GAH!" Maria swiveled around to look up into the eyes of her older brother. "Big Bro! How long have you been standing there?"
"A few seconds." His voice was unnervingly even. "Enough to see you admit to knowing me. What else did you give away?"
"N-nothing!" Maria sputtered. "I got more out of them than they got out of me!"
"That they know the Knight Sabers?"
"Yes!" she said, pointing straight at him. "Yes! Exactly! And she says she'll pass on the prospect of an alliance to them?"
"And you believe this-" his words dragged out slowly "-person on the internet isn't just making things up?"
"Weeellll… yeah, kinda. Yes."
Gavin's glare could have melted a lesser little sister. But she was better than that. "She's definitely somebody on the big hacker mailing lists, and she's with the ADP. I mean, they haven't arrested the Knight Sabers yet, so maybe they have contacts there? I think the two are kinda in cahoots, yeah?"
"Maybe. Second, Maria, who are you to speak for me?"
"I never agreed to anything, okay? I just said I'd talk to Nemesis about the idea, and that'd she do the same. I never said yes."
Gavin seemed to ponder this for a minute. "Fair enough." He turned on his heel and began to walk back to the truck, newly arrived. "I'm not doing it, though."
"What?"
"I said, I'm not going to ally with the Knight Sabers. That is final."
Maria sprang to her feet, her computers forgotten. "Oh, come on! It's a not a bad idea! They've got hardsuits too, so we know we're dealing with pros! All you have to do is talk to them next time they pop up. That's not a big deal, is it?"
He paused, turned around slowly. "Not a chance. They're untrained, underarmed, incapable of doing what needs to be done. They're civilians in a military environment."
"Really."
"They have this pink one who is completely untrained in combat. She faced a Jaeger and would have died if I hadn't killed it. She wasn't ready."
"If you put me in a hardsuit, would I be ready?"
"No, but I don't put you in a hardsuit. I keep you safe instead of letting you play hero where you don't belong."
Maria raised an eyebrow. "That's a little mean, big bro. What about the other Sabers? The video footage I've got of them is mostly them kicking serious ass."
"They couldn't handle coordinated attacks by Jaegers, switched to dodging when they should have been counterattacking. Again, untrained, underarmed, incapable of doing what needs to be done. The fact that they never bothered to take on the Yakuza before is proof of that." He walked over to the truck and began unloading a stack of grey-green boxes. Maria scurried after him.
"I just think you might be jumping to conclusions a little too quickly, that's all." A thought occurred to her. "Maybe they don't go after the Sleeping Dragon because they're too busy fighting GENOM, or something like that. It might be some kind of Japanese prioritization thing, yeah?"
Gavin dragged a box out of the growing pile marked APEX, popped open the cover, and ran his hands through a belt of machine gun ammo. "Then they're not just unready, they're insane. The megacorps may be considered by some to by evil, but GENOM is the best of a bad bunch in that case. They rebuilt this city from the ground up when no one else would, they're doing the same to cities across the world, even in America. And they do it cheaper than any other company would." He shut the box, opened another one marked RAIL ROUNDS, and drew a spike as long as his forearm from it."You can't kill a megacorporation, anyway, not with bullets and blood." His finger glided along the spike's edge, right to the flanged tip. "But you can kill enough criminals that the rest will stay off the streets."
"So…" Maria trailed off. "So we've been going after small fry this whole time?"
"We're making changes where we can make a difference. The Sleeping Dragon has caused more direct misery than GENOM might have caused indirectly, and they've been unopposed in this city for almost a decade. That the Knight Sabers don't see that-" He sighed. "-tells us everything we need to know about them."
"Oh come on!" Maria huffed. "You might disagree with their priorities long-term, but they want to help you! You can't say no to a little bit of extra firepower, right?"
Gavin stood up, spike still in hand.
"I mean, you can't take on the whole city alone-"
"Maria, I am capable of far more than you realize," Gavin snapped. "I have no intention of expanding the scope of Operation Susanoo without calling in backup - our patron will see to that. But I do not want people who are not willing to kill when the situation calls for it slowing me down."
"You honestly think they won't help? At all?"
"I think their capabilities have been exaggerated, to say the least. And I can prove it." Hed irled on his heel to face Sarge, who was just emerging from the front of the truck. "Sarge, change of plans. We're not going after the Yakuza's arsenal tonight."
He looked surprised, to say the least. "Really? So we're going after Sato himself? I thought we were gonna save that for tomorrow."
"Situation's changed. The other syndicates appear to be pooling their resources, just as we feared. We've got no choice but to strike one of them, just to keep them on their toes, cripple coordination." Gavin turned to the doorways where the quarters were. "SMITTY! VICAIN!"
The two men scrambled from their bunks with all the grace of startled geese. Vicain, in particular, had heavy purple masses of skin under his eyes. Maria realized she hadn't seen him at lunch, or breakfast. He'd watched the news last night about the attack on the Underbelly, and hadn't said anything, just gone to bed. They'd barely made it to the truck when Gavin began to walk over to the holotable, and they followed.
When they were all there, he popped open the file registry, and began cycling through blueprints. Wireframes, motes of lights and lines connecting them, spun around, morphing into one file after another. "Maria, you've been compiling a target list for the other syndicates, right?"
"Um, sorta?" Her big brother had told her to compile a list of targets alongside a dossier of their forces, like she had for the Sleeping Dragon, and that had taken up most of her day. She'd drawn mostly from the ADP database, and that was easy enough. The Red Willow, Russian, and Triad databases had falllen with just a little more, but the distributed blockchain architecture for Chung's little gang alliance had required her to do some brute-forcing, and that had taken up most of her afternoon. So she had business lists, registries, receipts for heavy equipment, all the boring churn that any large organization produced, but what was her older brother going to do with?
"Yes or no, Maria."
"Yes - but-"
"Name the most heavily protected thing on this list. Business, safehouse, Yakuza, Triad, doesn't matter. What have these syndicates beefed up to the point that it seems to be invincible?"
"Um." Her mental landscape vibrated like an earthquake had struck it. "Well, Jimmy Chee basically runs Yokohama's Chinatown, and the whole district is built like a fortress…" She trailed off.
"Keep going."
Her brain, her voice, betrayed her. Words poured out of her mouth, tripped over themselves. "I mean, there's a lot of interesting targets. He runs a big Boomer chop shop near the industrial district, sells the parts to back alley cyberware clinics all over Yokohama. He's got a gun microfactory right next to a major recycling center." She began to count off on her fingers. "Descent from Heaven Imports is his major stash of empty warehouses, if he's got Boomers or anything big it'll be there. And then there's Tiandi Jian, big Michelin-rated restaurant where the Triads used for most of their big meetings before Chee moved to Shinjuku. There's a whole bunch of small basement drug labs and brothels and stuff, but-"
"But?"
"But the whole of Chinatown was rebuilt with Triad money, to protect Triad interests. It's got security comparable to our, uh, patron's setup in District 3. So you aren't gonna be able to do much of a blitz before they raise the alarm and the streets are swarming with thugs."
"Fine. What would you not recommend for targets?"
"Not recommend?" Something was up. Why was she answering his questions? "I mean, you aren't gonna be able to get to Tiandi Jian without the whole Triad chasing after you. So I'd go after Descent Imports, or maybe the chop shop…"
She looked up. Gavin was fiddling with the holotable some more. It was displaying what looked like a map of Yokohama, but with all of her points of interest marked by little red holographic pushpins. He traced a line between points with his finger, dragging a red line through one in the north, down through the industrial district to the south, and finally back up again to the middle.
"That's my strike pattern," he said. "Descent from Heaven, your unamed chop shop, Tiandi Jian. It should be difficult, but not impossible. If things go badly, we'll go straight for the restaurant. We move at twenty-hundred hours. Any questions?"
Silence. "In that case-"
"I have a question, big bro," Maria squeaked out. Funny, she thought, how she could unload all the information her brother could ask for one moment and be left speechless the next. "Why aren't we just going after Sato?"
"I already said why. Because his rivals are mobilizing in a coalition. If we strike one of them, they'll come into conflict with their so-called allies, slowing down said mobilization. Simple."
"Okay, you say that, but the thing is I don't believe you?" Funny how the right uncertain tone could turn a statement into a begging question. "You said that the Knight Sabers are useless and that you can prove it. Is that what this is all about?"
If Gavin was moved by the dirty glares Smitty and Vicain shot his way, he didn't show it. "To an extent. I picked a target I know will have more human security than Boomer security." He zoomed the holotable in on the pushpin in the middle of the map, a fat mock palace in the pagoda style. "Because what I am about to do, the Knight Sabers can't. If they don't show up, so much the cowards. If they do, they will be defeated, and it will be on me to save them. And when that happens, I hope I can put any notions of them being useful to rest."
"So you're going to play with the Sabers' lives to prove a point."
"I have no intention of doing so. But if it happens along the way that a point can be proven-" He smiled. On his face, it looked almost impossible, as if he had been out of practice. "So much the better."
"That's just gonna make us more enemies, mate," Smitty said. "I'd say it's better to let the syndicates do our dirty work for us so we can focus on getting in and out lightning-fast. Get Sato's head on a plate, drop it off at ADP HQ, and go back to the States, yeah?"
"Smitty, we can no longer be so precise. We have multiple enemies this time, not just one criminal organization but many. Let but a single fish go uncaught, and it will grow up into a ruthless shark. For the sake of Megatokyo, we cannot allow that to happen."
"So we take them on all at once and hope they don't band together?" Vicain said. "Like Sato's rivals already have? You're still banking on them being too busy fighting each other to fight you properly. That's a hell of a gamble."
"Not with these people it isn't," Gavin said. "The criminal mentality is all about causing the suffering of others for personal gain. Betrayal of allies if it is profitable is as easy as breathing. And Sato's enemies know this. As soon as he is gone they will turn on one another and tear this city apart between themselves. If I attack Chee, the others will not respond. He may send his forces against them in a fit of anger, but in his heart he will know he would do the same if one of them was attacked. That will destabilize their so-called alliance-"
"No it won't!" Vican shouted. "Jesus fucking Christ, listen to how full of shit you are! These people are willing to put aside their differences to get rid of the Sleeping Dragon, so how hard do you think it'll be for them to do the same thing when they realize you're gunning for them too? Not that hard, I'd say!"
Sarge clamped a hand on Vicain's shoulder. "Easy there. Easy. Gavin knows what he's doing."
Vicain looked at Sarge. Sarge looked at Vicain. Vicain made a low sound in his throat, his lips pressed together, almost but not quite like a growl. It was, Maria thought, very unbecoming of a mechatronics genius.
"If you have a problem with how I run this organization," Gavin said at last, "I'd like to hear it."
"I don't. I just think you're not making a rational decision."
"But you accept my authority?"
"Yes," Vicain grumbled.
"Then you should accept my decision as well."
"Hmm."
"If you have something to say…"
"I don't."
"You're sure?"
"Positive."
"Excellent." Gavin turned to Smitty. "How are the repairs on the normal hardsuit going?"
"Sticky," he said. "Had to scrub the whole bleedin' suit with ArmorAll for a good hour straight. And I still haven't gotten the smell out."
"I've piloted worse. How does it handle?"
"You were looking at a serious loss of dexterity in one arm from the shoulder plate breaking up, so I had to replace that, which was easy enough. But you also took quite a few rounds to the chassis, enough to cause microfracturing in certain areas, we don't have spare plating and it'll take another day in the fabricator to get all the nanodiamond to stick together. Otherwise, next time you go up against anything as big as a fifty-cal, and they get lucky…" He made a ring with his left pointer finger and thumb, then poked his right pointer through. "Bam. Internal lining might stop penetration, but it'll still fuck you up real bad."
"Fine then. I'll still be using it for my first strike, but if anything goes wrong we switch to the heavy hardsuit immediately. I don't want to compromise my mobility unless I absolutely have to."
"You may not have a choice, big bro," Maria said. "I mean, you're not gonna have the luxury of stealth if you try to go for three places at once. And if they get eyes on the truck, that's our cover blown right there."
"They won't get eyes on the truck if you do your job properly."
Maria decided to let that slide. Gavin wasn't the type to insult others, most of the time - he'd always spared his most vehement venom for his father. If something was going on, she didn't want to push him. "You sure? You won't use, say, the Venator?"
"No. The Venator only comes out when we go for Sato's mansion. I don't want to show my hand quite just yet. I can't ride it with the heavy hardsuit, anyway."
"But you'll use the heavy hardsuit for Tiandi Jian?"
"Of course. I don't intend to take undue risks."
"Isn't this whole strike an undue risk?" Vicain said. "I mean, we had a plan. We were gonna go after Sato's safehouses and arms depots, break the fangs of the dragon before we cut its throat. I thought that was a pretty cool way of doing things, but now you want to expand the scope of the strikes because Maria made a stupid suggestion? Make enemies we don't have?"
"All criminals are our enemies, Vicain," Gavin said. "I thought you understood that. And I thought you understood that plans change, too. Or did you not learn from our work in Boston that even we have to improvise?"
Vicain muttered something under his breath. "Well?"
"Fine. Fine, I'll go help Smitty prepare the suits and load up the truck."
"Thank you."
Vicain stalked off. Sarge glanced his way before looking back towards Gavin. "Man, he's pissed."
Gavin shrugged. "It was below the belt to bring up Boston, I'll admit. But you know how Vicain is. He'll come around soon enough."
Wordlessly, the two men, brothers in arms, went off to the truck. Smitty looked their way, looked at Maria, whose posture was curling in just a little bit.
"Hey, Maria?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't worry. It's Gavin, right? Things change, but he always gets out of it. He knows what he's doing."
"I hope you're right," she whispered. "Otherwise…"
No.
It was best not to think about that.
_________________________________________________________________________________
Well, I finally updated. Go me. No excuses this time.
Next chapter may take awhile - I had it written up, but as it stands I'm gonna have to rewrite a pretty big chunk of it to have it make any sense. We'll see how things go.
Chapter 29: Shadow of the Templar
- Location
- Megatokyo
Your Voice Karaoke
District 11
February 12, 2036
3:45 PM
To the public, Sylia Stingray was a nobody.
Well, almost a nobody. The daughter of the man the scientific community still called the God of Boomers was well-known, of course, among certain elite circles. And there was an air of tragedy about her that the tabloid press had once eagerly milked, what with her mother missing and her father dead. "THE SORDID LIFE OF MISS STINGRAY - WHY HE'S DEAD AND WHY SHE LEFT!" Things like that. Too many people believed them.
But in the end, Sylia Stingray was no genius. She'd gone into fashion, for heaven's sake, an industry purpose-built for the vapid children of famous people. And sure, Stingray Luxury Goods was doing quite well, selling everything from clothing to cyberware for the brand-name enthusiast. But everyone agreed that wasn't the fault of the still-grieving woman. Rather, the board of trustees she'd handed the company to six months after its founding were the ones behind her fortune.
Of course, Sylia Stingray was those trustees. All of them. But the wider world didn't need to know that.
They didn't need to know, either, that she used her company's funds to prop up a certain mercenary outfit when it couldn't make it on jobs alone. They didn't need to know that she was one of the directors of MALCORP's Far East division, that she'd already warned the American megacorp off of several startup acquisitions that had failed weeks later, saving it billions of yen with a few words. They didn't need to know that she had provided much of the technology used within that same company's growing line of law enforcement products. They certainly didn't need to know that she'd bought several safehouses and minor businesses scattered across the city through an ocean of shell companies with her new stream of revenue.
And they most certainly didn't need to know that Your Voice Karaoke was one of them.
The most they'd know, as she slipped past the automatic doors into the main lounge area, was that she'd come here to have a 'discreet meeting' with an investor, and there would be some speculation as to who it was. They'd know she was wearing a lavender blouse that held her breasts up high and bared her midriff down low, along with a tight black skirt and matching high heels. And they'd draw their own conclusions, then forget about it.
Sylia went up to the bar, where the bartender, a tall, bearded Chinese man with a tattoo on his back that no one ever saw, gave her a quick salute. "Booth 12," he grunted, and that was that. She pushed her way past clusters of teenagers and salarymen to the booth, opened the door, sat down, then locked it. Immediately, electroactive soundproofing kicked in, a little bonus feature she'd had installed when the bar had first opened. No one was going to hear her and Fargo speak. No one.
"So," she said to the man sitting across from her, "How have you been?"
It was a formality, of course. He looked even worse than usual, if that was possible. His sandy blond hair was almost black with oil, his lower eyelids were purple and baggy, and he had propped his head on his hand to keep himself awake.
"Well," he said, "I talked to Mallory and a few other guys."
"And did you get the information I requested?"
"Oh," he slurred. "Fuck yeah I got the information. Got a whole bunch of other information I didn't want to hear about either. One kept on describing all the different ways Americans torture people they don't like for about a half hour."
"Good lord. Where do you find these sources?"
"Doesn't matter. Mallory was the most helpful one anyway. Still a little cagey, though. Not sure why."
"He sees you as competition, probably."
"Oh, really. For what?"
"Doesn't matter. What have you uncovered, Fargo?"
He yawned, stretched out, and seemed slightly more animated all of a sudden. "Well, it's kind of a long story, but we've got time." He paused, began to light a cigarette, then thought better of it and put his pack of Camels away. "You're fairly up to date on the Amazonian Wars, right?"
"I read the papers, so, yes. They say the Chinese want to divert resources from the Polar War to bolster United Amazonia, but the USSD is threatening to beam-strike Lima if Peru doesn't hold off on arms shipments through the port. Of course, there's a good chance the Chinese have some satellites of their own, so I doubt they'll go through with it."
"Right. So, how much do you know about how the war started?"
"The US sent in their army to back a coup against the Venezuelans, and the Venezuelan loyalists became United Amazonia. What am I missing?"
"Lots," he said. "You've got the broad strokes right, the Americans overthrew the Venezuelan government and ended up getting stuck propping up the government there, but the whole thing wasn't just about establishing democracy and whatnot. It never is."
"They wanted a place to build a space elevator, right? USSD has marked the Venezuelan coast near the equator as one of the prime locations for such a thing. They must have been thinking about megastructure construction before there were real megastructures."
"Well, yeah. Partially. But the plan, from what Mallory tells me - and he pretty much called up the Pentagon and let me see their physical records on this one, so be sure to thank him later - was always to invade Colombia while they had forces in the area. After the peace agreement fell through, they figured the only way to stop the cocaine from heading up to the US was to pull an Afghanistan. The generals figured, hey, as long as we're here, we might as well win the War on Drugs, right?"
"Really. They still care about the War on Drugs? Isn't cocaine legal over there?"
"No, just marijuana, and you have to buy it from the legal states. So yeah, dealing with drugs was still a big deal back then. But there's this big blank spot in press records, see, between when the cartels and the Maduroists formed United Amazonia, started seizing territory, and when the Chinese declared their unconditional support for the fledgling state. And that, my dear, is Operation Templar." At this, Fargo pulled out a cigarette, holding it like a pen, and pointed it at Sylia. She smiled.
"Go on."
"Okay," he said. "So the brass are having this crisis of conscience, 'cause it's like Vietnam and Iraq and ISIS rolled into one big clusterfuck and smoked through the eyes. And they don't have a good strategy to restore order, because United Amazonia has this great propaganda trick they're pulling where they're actually getting native tribes, not just Maduroists, to sign on, 'cause the first thing the Americans did when they arrived was start cutting down trees for slash-n'-burn agriculture and displacing all these Indians. So every time the Americans try to hold territory, some warrior tribe with printed AK's pops out of the jungle and causes a big pain in the ass for all the locals, and anyway the whole war's super unpopular with the President's constituents, the bible-bangers and the gun-nuts and the border patrol militias who are saying that this war's gonna cause an uptick in illegal immigrants. And to an extent they're right. So what do they do? They make it look like they've handed the whole war over to the Venezuelan and Colombian armies, and just leave a few thousand SpecFor stranded in the jungle."
"But they're not really stranded, see. The CIA's got a plan for them, and that's Operation Templar, a crusade to retake the Holy Land. So, templars, crusades, holy land, infidels. All the pieces in place."
"So the goal of Operation Templar is to literally build new cities, these impregnable fortresses along the rivers, in the Basin, which they can always fall back on. They drop the supplies from USSD orbital factories near Genaros, and then around year three they drop in construction Boomers, too. Then, they build out from there, link citadel to citadel, all for the sake of the Colombian people, so the story goes. And to defend them? Knights in mothafuckin' shining armor."
Sylia motioned for him to stop. "So our man was one of these knights. It would certainly explain his training, but why isn't he still there? You make it sound like this scheme worked."
"It did! It did. Brought in great profits for the megacorps involved. GENOM built the cities, MALCORP provided the defenses, these prototyped hardsuits as best as I can figure. You know anything about that? Mallory said he shut it down as soon as he took over the company, but that was pretty recently, so they were doing this for a while. Oh, and Gn'B provided the heavy stuff, the orbital infrastructure, the pipeline-building expertise, that sort of thing."
"Interesting." Had they been using her father's technology for this venture? The thought disgusted her. "I'll be sure to talk to Greg about this next time we meet. So what happened?"
Fargo gestured widely with his cigarette. "China happened. Our good friends in the People's Republic will do anything to fuck with the Americans, and they had friendly associates in the Shining Path, so they start shipping Battlemovers and all sorts of other heavy gear through Lima, under the Andes, and into the UA."
"One by one, the American citadels fall. They keep civilians in them as hostages, it does nothing - when the walls go down the civvies are just forced into work camps in the South. And eventually they get beaten back to Northern Venezuela, to this little citadel, one of the first, called San Ramon."
"I remember that. Wasn't that where they broke out the particle-beam satellites?"
"About that time, yeah. USSD was still in a bit of a tizzy over their existence going public, so I guess they figured it was time to use the damn things. And they used them. Wiped out every known UA hideout on the continent, irradiated half the Amazon rainforest, kicked off wildfires that burned for months. Sylia, they'd been holding back, and then they just weren't.
You could practically hear his italicization - when he got going, Sylia noted, Fargo could be very melodramatic. It was an unavoidable side effect of living in the covert intelligence world, she figured. But this was still going nowhere. "Except for some of your sources, I take it?"
"All they have is names, names of the last Templars before the whole project was disbanded and hushed up. The most your average American knows is that they kept troops in South America in contempt of Congress, and it cost the president the '32 election. That's it. They don't even know that name. Everyone who came back alive refuses to talk about it."
"Except for some of your sources, Fargo?"
"Yes, yes, except for a few people close to the operation but never actually involved in it. Satellite technicians, mostly from USSD. And they told me that the plan to use the initial particle beam strike was from a Templar on the ground. It wasn't cleared by the top brass, because the Templars already had clearance to do pretty much whatever the fuck they want, it just never got that bad. But the guy didn't actually get in trouble. He was court-martialed, everyone agreed he did what he had to do, even if it was against CIA protocol for the Templars. So he gets dishonorably discharged, and for a military man, that's a death sentence enough."
"His name, Fargo. What was his name."
"Gavin Belasko." He let the words hang there for a minute, then continued. "Days after he gets back, he's at this restaurant in New York, when gangsters rush in and start gunning people down left and right. His little sister, makes it, his parents and his CIA handler he doesn't know he has, don't. But they don't need handlers anymore, because after that, things get weird."
"Nene showed me. Drug kingpins in the city started dying off, before Ivanov got destroyed by a stolen Apache-4."
"Yep. And the kicker is, after that, he doesn't stop. People keep on seeing some dude pop up, stop muggings, fade away just as quickly. After that, well, the CIA kinda lost track of him until he showed up again with the hardsuit, which he got from a company called HiGuard that got bought out by an arms dealer, which he then proceeded to wipe off the face of the planet. After that, they record him in Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Laramie, Seattle, San Francisco, San Angeles, so on and so forth, and now here."
"So the CIA knows this man, and they know he's Nemesis. Why haven't they done anything about him?"
"Well, they don't, not really. As an ex-Templar, he was never supposed to officially exist. And the new folks at the CIA, the new president's men, rely mostly on the digital records, and according to those Gavin Belasko has been living a normal life in New York all this time. It took me and a couple of fellow spooks to actually put this all together."
"I see. That's all I need, then." She stood up, then stopped herself. Fargo had reached out and was clutching her wrist. "Is something wrong?"
Fargo sighed, let go, sank into the booth's cushions. "You told me you wanted to talk to this guy, right? After what I've heard about him, I don't think that's a good idea."
"Why not?"
"He's a military man. Born into a military family, went into a military academy, spent most of his life getting ready to be a part of the military. And he doesn't have that anymore. What does a soldier like that do when there's no war to fight?"
She could tell where he was going. "There's always another war to fight."
"Yeah."
And they left it at that.
____________________________________________________________________
District 23
February 12, 2036
9:14 pm
And now, Chinatown.
Before the quake, it had just been one corner of Yokohama, grown by handfuls of Chinese immigrants who worked in the thriving shipbuilding industry. But the quake came and went, and Megatokyo swallowed Yokohama whole. The ships are gone, now, and the industrial district is slowly being shipped out to a GENOM-owned industrial park in Ho Chi Minh City. But the Chinatown remains. Largest in the world, now.
That's because no sane Chinaman wants to live in China. The world saw its government for what it was after Tiananmen Square, cut ties with the supposedly 'liberalizing' nation, and watched as it all descended back into techno-Maoism with a smidge of neo-imperialist expansionism. The 90's saw North Korea, no longer backed by its masters in Beijing, fall in the same way East Germany had, and there lay a route of escape. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese sneak past the barely-guarded border a year. Pyongyang welcomes them with open arms, hoping for cheap labor, but they take a series of buses from Seoul to Busan, then a plane to Megatokyo.
Why Megatokyo? Why not Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or San Francisco?
Okay, maybe not Hong Kong - the '19 riots and the military crackdown that followed, the Second Coming of Tiananmen they called it, disabused anyone of the notion that the city would remain as free and open as it had been in the twentieth century.
And Taiwan's a fortress state, with every shoreline bristling with hypersonic carrier-killer missiles, every inch of sky watched over by paranoid satellite weapons. They have to be, what with the Chinese shipping troops to the Polar War through straits they conceded long ago. If some upstart PLA commander, an army at his back, gets an idea - they have to be ready. They don't take immigrants, period. Too risky.
But why Megatokyo? Why not San Fran or San Angeles, which both are mostly one big Chinatown at this point? Why not the west coast, the Middle Kingdom of the Hou Bang Triad, to whom even the old guard of Silicon Valley pays tribute? Why not America, land of opportunity?
Well, it's cheaper to fly from Busan to Megatokyo for one. For another, it's not too hard to slip past the otherwise-draconian Japanese immigration systems. Chinese are only allowed if they can prove familial relations, but the pre-Quake records are spotty, barely intact. And if you're in a Triad, you're part of one big family, right?
For the rest, the Hou Bang doesn't attract, it deters. Hou Bang is the triad to rule all triads, a cabal of blood ties and like-minded individuals whose reach stretches across continents and stock markets. They take in immigrants, alright, and set them up as disposable salarymen in the companies they funnel cash from. They demand reverence on a Confucian scale. They're so Chinese they scare other Chinese.
But Yokohama isn't run by Old Man Chang, it's run by Jimmy Chee. And Jimmy Chee doesn't give a shit about what you do so long as you don't cross him.
Which brings us back to Chinatown.
At first breath, it feels like a Chinatown anywhere, all red and gold and sloped pagoda-style roofs, and above it, a steady pulse of neon holography. The streets are empty and dark by day, but by night people stream from one building to the next like schools of tuna, packed together. The graffiti and gang signs go from kanji to a simplified Cantonese dialect, the homeless seem to disappear from the streets. There is a night market in its heart, where every scent and sound and language imaginable seems to fill the streets to saturation, where anything imaginable can be bought or sold for half its usual price or less. It is, in its own strange way, beautiful.
It's all a lie, of course.
See those plasticky terracotta warriors guarding an apartment block? Those are labor-model Boomers, bought as cheap as humanly possible, hooked up to their charging ports. When the alarms go off they grab SMG's from the little panels beside them, and go to work.
That nice old lady who sells incense in the night market? She used to work lethal injections in a Xinjiang megaprison, and she still knows her way around poisons, the kind that make you just really want to go to bed before they stop your heart. You wouldn't even notice if she rubbed a bit on your skin, at least until you dropped dead hours later.
Those little dogs that seem to run all over the place but don't seem to have any owners? They beg, sure, they eat, but have you ever looked at their eyes? Not just looked, but popped them out, seen the cameras and encrypted transmitters inside? Not what you expected, right? Neither did the last few guys who ended up having their alleyside adventures taped, who had to pay their life savings to keep the videos off the 'net.
And have you ever noticed that everyone seems to know everyone? That they're all third cousins, all missing a finger or two, all have the same funny story about how that happened with a laser welder that doesn't actually make sense if you think about it? And if you ask real nicely, and flash the right tattoos, how they'll point you to the same guy, in the same place, who sells the kind of guns even Americans in Texas can't get their hands on?
Or have you ever noticed how, for all the hype around Tiandi Jian, said to be the finest Chinese restaurant in the world, no one from Chinatown ever actually goes there? It's swarming with gwailo, and there's always a few old guys playing mahjong in the smoking lounge on the lower floors, but have you ever seen those old guys anywhere else? Where's the rest of the natives? Simple. They go in, they don't come out. They get fed to the food processors and make the meat taste funny. Those old mahjong men don't like to be fucked with.
That's Chinatown.
That's Nemesis's target.
____________________________________________________________________
Descent From Heaven Imports
There were eight guards, big men with Uzi's and night vision goggles, guarding the warehouse. Four heat signatures on the outside, one for each side, four clustered together on the inside. That was the most Nemesis had seen anywhere, and it was also where his HUD said the main offices were. That was where he would start.
The first guard tried a routine check in at 8:15, as he was supposed to. His walktie-talkie hissed static before Nemesis, clinging to the side of a shipping crate, dropped straight onto the back of his neck, slamming him into a puddle of grey slush.
He left the unconscious body facedown in the water, bubbling life away, no ammo wasted.
The second guard heard something fall in the water, but thought nothing of it, not until someone shoved something sharp into the back of his leg and pulled out. Pain sparking through his crippled limb, he went for his Uzi just as that same something flipped him around by his leg and rammed him facefirst into the asphalt. His skull cracked in three different places, and hemorrhaging took care of the rest.
The third guard heard the first guard die, then the second, just as he was about to round the corner. He hesitated, drew his weapon, and popped his night vision goggles on. The guard saw, highlighted in the shadows, something tall and black. He fired on instinct, recoil yanked his arm up, and he hit nothing. There was no way he could at that range. And then something whistled out of the darkness and caught him square in the chest.
The fourth guard saw the third one die, went for his radio, got only static. He shouted, then dashed for a side door. Something grabbed him just as he reached for the door, slammed his hand into the palmprint reader next to it, then smashed his head into it.
The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth guards were stationed around a folding table in the middle of the warehouse. They were playing an anime-style competitive card game on their phones. Number eight and six were winning the 2v2, but not by much, so they heard the third guard's gunshots, scrambled for their own weapons, and began to run for the door.
Had they been thinking, they would have spread out, to avoid the grenade that immediately followed the door as it was kicked off its hinges. But they weren't. And that cost them their lives.
In about two minutes, Nemesis had killed eight men, and had only expended one railgun flechette and a grenade.
____________________________________________________________________
The warehouse was drafty inside, currents of air whipping around the massive fans suspended from the ceiling. The guards had left a little kerosene heater next to their folding table, but it was now covered in human entrails and was probably useless. Nemesis noted all this, then looked across, past rows of shipping crates to the opposite end of the warehouse where there looked to be some unlit offices.
He figured that was the last of the human guards, but he didn't know about other kinds of security Descent From Heaven had. Boomers ran hot, but there were ways to muffle that heat signature if you had the right mods. It never hurt to be careful, which was why he made sure to stay out of the office's line of sight, before trying the door. It opened soundlessly.
There wasn't anybody inside the office, which made a certain sort of sense. Descent From Heaven Imports had no customers save other Triads, so there was no need for a public-facing front for the company. Other, more legitimate operations would still be open at this hour. There was, however, a control panel overlooking the warehouse's interior on the second floor. Nemesis booted it up, scrolling through options until he found a shipping manifest.
Again, no surprises. Weapons, K-9 Boomers, a few pieces of stolen art which no doubt were resting in Chee's penthouse right now. He plugged in his dataneedle, copying the last part down for the authorities. Then he heard the truck.
He quickly switched over to the warehouse's external mikes. From the sound of the engine, it was definitely an 18-wheeler, big enough to carry more than one shipping crate at a time, but it was unloaded. Then the mikes picked up voices, speaking in Cantonese. He didn't understand the language, but he could tell when they found the first guards. And he kept hearing another word, English, said with a finality that he found incredibly interesting: Sabertooth.
Probably the K-9's. If they meant to load those up and let them loose into the city, it would be a major escalation of Chee's gang war. Sato would probably redirect his combat Boomers to stop searching for him and to go for Triad targets. And Chee had already attacked legitimate businesses, so there was little doubt that he would respond in kind.
If nothing else, he had a good reason to be here now. He had to cripple Chee and his triad before they so recklessly escalated the gang war. He had to destroy those Boomers. He had no idea where they were.
Fine, then. He'd let the men on the truck, now seemingly arguing over something trivial, find the Boomers for him. Then he'd destroy them both.
The loading bay inched open, and the second the metal gate was almost high enough to accommodate a human, twelve men ducked under and burst into the warehouse. They spread out around the table with the quiet intensity of a SWAT team, night vision goggles glimmering in the darkness. Nemesis ducked down before they could see him, then switched to thermal vision. Following the men were an unarmed man in workers' clothes, probably the engineer for the Boomers, and something that looked like a man, but was a strange mix of warm and cold.
A Boomeroid. Damn. When had the Triads started hiring Boomeroids? Kagemusha had told him that in Megatokyo, anyone with that much Boomerflesh in them was practically a crime against society, cast out to the Fault, not allowed to so much as poke their heads aboveground unless someone owned them. Evidently, things had changed.
The Boomeroid gestured to the others, and they began to prowl the corridors formed by the shipping crates while he and the unarmed man looked over the bodies. At least three were going to close in on his position. He scanned the office, saw a skylight, shot it, then leaped straight up just as assault rifle fire filled the space where he had been.
He had gone loud.
Emerging onto the roof, he scanned for the truck below him, then made a frantic dash for it as more rounds poked through the corrugated steel under his feet. Thermal vision told him the Triads and the Boomeroid were moving back toward the truck. The one unarmed guy had something lukewarm, probably a tablet, in his hand, and was fiddling with it desperately.
Nemesis didn't think as he leapt off the warehouse roof and dropped five stories in three seconds. With a hardsuit, he didn't need to. His maneuvering jets fired automatically, dropping him down just beside the driver's cab. He got in; the idiots had left the keys inside, so he just slammed down on the accelerator and watched.
One, two, three, four Triads attempted to fire into the engine without getting out of the way first.
One, two, three, four wet thumps told Nemesis that was an idiotic course of action. Ten seconds later, he plowed into a row of shipping crates and smashed into the concrete wall of the warehouse. He kicked out the driver's door on instinct, and his foot caught another unlucky Triad in the solar plexus. Then he dropped and rolled out onto the warehouse floor, blindfiring a burst from his railgun as he did so.
He got the Boomeroid's left shoulder practically embedded his helmet for his troubles.
But his armor was tougher than that Boomeroid's ramming shoulder, and though his camera array flickered and died, Nemesis still reached out and fired his railgun right where the thing's chest was. He heard it staggering back, then reached out, yanked the flechette out, and slashed across its eyes.
He was still blind, but he knew what he had to do. Assault rifle fire whistling past him, he lunged forward, grasped the Boomeroid's shoulders, then drove the spike into its neck. The monster was dead, but rifle fire was starting to hit him. It hurt. He remembered what Smitty had said about his armor not having that much left in it. He had to finish this quick.
Then a stray round hit the truck's flaming engine block.
He didn't see the explosion so much as he felt it, the way the pressure wave threw him forward, the way a fragment of shrapnel dug into his armor plating but didn't quite pierce it, the way his audio compensators flared up to keep his eardrums from popping. He reached out for the warehouse floor, slipped, and rolled forward, bouncing on his head, then on his back, then skidding to a stop with his arm in front of him.
It hurt. He couldn't see. The rest of the Triads, wherever they were, had stopped shooting. It didn't matter. He reached up with his grenade launcher, then fired all three of his HE grenades in quick succession.
When he could hear again, there was no more shooting. When he could hear again, he tapped a button on the underside of his helmet, and his vision reset. He took in the sight of the dead, saw one Triad still breathing, bleeding from a dozen different places but still breathing.
He willed himself over to the Triad, unsteady on his feet, and drove his armored foot into the man's sternum.
His foot still embedded in what was now a corpse, he looked around, relying on his suit's gyroscopics to keep him from falling over. His head was spinning. His ears hurt so bad it felt like they were bleeding. What was he here for again?
Right. Boomers. He had to destroy the Boomers in this warehouse. How many were there? Where were they? The truck's engine was still on fire, and it looked like the fire was starting to spread. Could he just leave the warehouse to burn? Probably not.
Sarge's voice, over the comm. They must have turned off the jammer. He focused.
"Sarge, say that again?"
"Gavin, what the fuck just happened? The Triad comms just lit up like a forest fire. They're calling in reinforcements from across the city."
Shit. "To here?"
"No. Vicain knows a bit of Cantonese and he says they're all focusing on the Tiandi Jian. He thinks they had a contingency plan in place and they're just enacting it. Something about a VIP in there, too. Might be Chee."
Double shit. They'd expected him. "Gavin, do we pull back?"
He pulled his foot out of the dead Triad's innards, steadied himself. "No. Get me the heavy hardsuit and 50cc's of anti-fatigue meds. I can't let them think they've won."
He checked his HUD's map. They were minutes away at most. He had time to catch his breath.
Then, in the depths of the warehouse, thirty-nine pairs of red eyes winked into existence, and thirty-nine snarling maws unsheathed their fangs.
____________________________________________________________________
District 1
February 12, 2036
9:18 pm
Jimmy Chee had a thing for real girls.
They were expensive, nowadays. Most of the sex industry, like every other industry on the planet, was mostly Boomers with some elite super-skilled workers on the top. And it wasn't like you could tell the difference in the heat of passion.
But he'd read somewhere that using a Boomer for sex was associated with mental illness, and he didn't want to take the risk. It made a twisted sort of sense: If you knew, afterward, that the thing you were fucking wasn't real, that it didn't count as a conquest, where did that leave you as a man? It was little better than masturbation. And Jimmy Chee, Master of Vice, did not masturbate.
Which was why, when the call came in, he was busy with foreplay between him and his two 'girlfriends'. He had just finished showing them how his prosthetic wang, a whopping nine inches of vat-grown tissue and blood, could vibrate if he thought at it hard enough, when the ivory-carved rotary phone started ringing. He tried to ignore it for all of five seconds. Then the caller ID popped up, Chinese characters floating in midair. Tiandi Jian. Chee hitched his pants up and strolled over to the phone, trying to ignore the disappointed looks from the girls.
He brought the phone to his ear, remained silent for a second. "What," he growled, "is it."
"Two things, Master Chee." The voice on the other end was Yao Chen, the ancient proprietor of the Tiandi Jian, an old Hong Konger who Chee suspected didn't age the way normal people did, but had been born an old hag and would die exactly the same. He didn't like her, didn't like ugly women in general, but so many of his family members insisted that she had the proper mix of ruthlessness and pragmatism needed to run the Suan Tou Fung's unofficial headquarters. "One, your dinner with the Hou Bang's representative is in approximately fifteen minutes, and he is already here. Shall I let him know you will be late?"
Chee looked down at his pantsless self, over to his bored mistresses. "Yeah, probably," he said. "S' no big deal."
"I do not imagine the Hou Bang will take kindly to your flippancy towards one of their most august members, Master Chee. It is you, after all, who are approaching them to beg, not the other way around."
"I'm not begging, I'm politely asking to purchase heavy equipment. I've got the funds, they've got the industrial output. It shouldn't be a big deal either way. What's the second thing?"
"So you say, Master Chee. Master Shen appears most uncomfortable. He may not be willing to listen to your request."
Chee pursed his lips. "And is it your place to judge how I run this operation?"
"Perhaps it is, Master Chee. Perhaps it is not."
"Well, I'm gonna tell you right now it isn't. What. Is. The. Second. Thing."
"As you command, Master Chee. The second thing is that we will not be able to distribute the Sabertooth Boomers to key locations tonight."
He did not grind his teeth; they did that on their own. "And why is that, pray tell?"
"Because, Master Chee, Nemesis has attacked their holding location."
His eyes widened. His jaw dropped. The girls giggled.
His eyes narrowed. His teeth gritted. They kept silent.
"Okay," he said. "Fine. Okay. Have you moved our assets to a defensive posture?"
"I have, Master Chee. Master Shen is quite agitated by this, but we are now in Kunlun Position."
Which meant, at this moment, the entire district was moving to a defensive posture. Every Suan Tou Fung footsoldier was setting up the few sets of Anti-Boomer gear they had. Roadblocks and strips of caltrops were automatically sliding into place. Hell, they lent guns and ammo to the shopkeepers and landlords who paid most of the protection racket, just as a gesture of goodwill.
And he wasn't there to oversee it. And Wei Shen, representative of the Hou Bang, the mother of all Triads, was there to see how useless he was.
Son of a bitch. He had to do something.
"Okay," he said at last. "I'm gonna see if I can't get our allies to provide some backup. In the meantime, hold tight, and if anything that isn't my limo enters our turf, destroy it."
"Of course, Master Chee. Shall I move Master Shen to the saferoom?"
"Yeah. Sure. Okay. Whatever. Goodbye." He slammed the phone down before Chen could reply. Then he popped open the rotary's dial, revealing a small touchscreen, and began setting up a conference call between himself and the other syndicates.
"Jimmy?" Tina Lei, the first of his two mistresses, said. "Whas' goin' on?" She had a way of moaning for stuff in times like this that she thought was sexy, but he just found annoying.
"Nothing, Tina-baby. Everything's good."
"Really?" Shuji Yamato, the second, said. "Because it doesn't sound like it."
"Don't worry your pretty little head about it, babe. I've got everything under control."
"What's there to control, babe? Something happen over at the restaurant?"
"Bitch, if you don't just keep quiet right now, I swear I will break your-"
"Break what?" said the voice of Willie Chung over the speaker phone. "What's to break?"
"Willie!" Chee exclaimed, his tone doing a total one-eighty. "My man! How's the recruiting going?"
"Well enough. I've managed to acquire the services of several old-soul bosozoku. Very interesting people, these are. Use LSD the way we Asians use rice. Why'd you call?"
He decided to do away with pretenses. "Nemesis just attacked my people," he said. "We're playing defense, but I don't want to take any chances. Can you and Adrik and Iwasaki get your people for backup?"
"Hold up, Nemesis is after us now?" Smirnovski sounded concerned, but it was hard to tell.
"Yes. That is what I just said. Am I going to get any help or am I on my own here?"
"Well, we could just let him have his way," Iwasaki said, "and maybe he will go after just you and Sato. It is late, after all."
Chee did his best not to punch something. "Not a chance, dumbass. We thought he was going to do our work for us, but we were wrong. You all need to help me nip this in the bud for your own sake."
Silence. Okay. Fine. These were people who wouldn't know their own self-interest if it bit them in the dick. Career criminals. No big surprise.
"I'll pay you guys."
"How much?" Chung.
"Thirty million yen each." Did he have that kind of money to throw around? Yeah, probably enough. If he had to step up drug pushing when this was all over he would. "Personally paid. Straight to each of you."
"Fine." Chung.
"You make a good point." Smirnovski.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit this one out." Iwasaki. "You'll be fine, Jimmy. Don't worry about it." He hung up.
"Suit yourself." Chee hung up as well, then turned to his mistresses, who looked very bored indeed. He grabbed his wallet off of his nightstand, palmed off a few 10k-yen notes, waved them at the two women. "Here's your pay for the night. I've gotta go, but you two stay here. I'll be back. I might call. Don't buy anything unless I tell you to."
Tina sighed. "But we just started, Jimmy-baby! You telling me you don't like fun?"
"Oh, baby, I love fun. But you know, it's business before pleasure, that's my motto."
"That's never been your motto," Shuji drawled. "You always call yourself a Master of Vice, right?"
He had no good response to that.
____________________________________________________________________
District 23
February 12, 2036
9:25 pm
He had it down to a science by now. Pop open the doors, let Gavin hop on the truck, pop the armor's seals, let him breathe real air and let the smallest amount of sweat drip down his skin, then drive to the next target.
There had been a few more dangerous extractions, in the beginning. They'd had to burn rubber out of Miami after burning down Yvon Heuse's villa, for example, slipping away into the Everglades as police VTOLs scoured the swamps for any sign of them. But Gavin had gotten better at picking targets, and picking points to enter and exit. And the truck had gotten better armor, better weapons, better everything.
And, okay, maybe he'd gotten a little sloppy. No one was denying that.
But who could have prepared him for the sight of Nemesis on the run?
____________________________________________________________________
Nemesis burst out of the warehouse just as the first of the Sabertooth Boomers fired their twin laser guns his way, a quick burst followed by an avalanche of directed light. Not bothering to look at what was chasing him, he fired a burst of flechettes back into the darkness. They caught the first Sabertooth just as it reared up into bipedal mode, blowing it off its feet and sending it tumbling back into its comrades.
The other Sabertooths didn't even slow down. They were pack hunters, like wolves, and they had no time for predators who could not kill their prey. Nemesis blindfired a flechette grenade into the pack, enough to distract its foremost members, then sprinted into the shadows of the shipping crates that surrounded the warehouse on all sides. They followed.
Lasers cut streaks of slag to his left and right. The Sabertooths didn't bark or howl, but he could hear the snapping of their teeth, could feel their hunger in some reptilian part of his brain. They weren't smart enough to use those lasers in any meaningful capacity long-range, but if they caught up with him…
He'd faced dogs before. Search parties in the boiling heat of the Amazon. But they had only relied on smell and visible-light sight, and could be fooled easily enough. Not these ones.
He came to a T-bone intersection, and jumped twenty feet straight up, his maneuvering thrusters firing to set him on top of a stack of crates. Laser bolts hissed off his armor as he scrambled forward. He heard the Sabertooths scrambling around him, looked down, realized he was surrounded. They clawed at the crates, their faces unmoving masks of hate. Some began to climb up onto the others. He sprinted to the edge of his little tower, long-jumped across a gap of about ten meters, barely hit the edge, clung to it, hoisted himself up over just as another cloud of laser bolts missed him by centimeters.
"Sarge," Nemesis growled into his mic. "Where are you?"
"At the warehouse. Where are you?"
He looked over to the warehouse, got up and waved his arms. "Do you see me? I'm on top of a bunch of shipping crates and I'm surrounded by some kind of quadrupedal Boomers." He had his HUD run a few calculations: he could make it across the crates back to the truck, but it would burn through most of his fuel. I'll come to you. Stay there. Switch to combat mode, but don't use the mortars. The minigun and missile launchers should be enough."
"How many of them are there?"
He looked down, saw the seething silver-and-red mass of limbs and bodies align itself, stepped back as another cloud of laser bolts fired up into the night. "Several."
"Enough to overrun the truck if they caught up with you?"
"Probably. I don't really have time to clear them out, though-"
More lasers, but this time they fired low. "-They're probably going to bring me down to them in a few moments."
"Fine, but-"
That was all the approval he needed. He sprinted to the edge of the crates just as they started to collapse and fall upon the swarm, jumped up and out and barely made it again. He climbed up and kept going.
Vicain. Insolent little prick. "We can discuss the merits of the strike later. For now, our next target is the Tiandi Jian." Another jump, a little longer this time. His proximity sensors were still picking up the pack below him.
"Assuming you make it out of this alive."
"I will. Sarge, once I land on the roof of the truck, get moving." One more jump. He did not turn to see if the Sabertooths were behind him, crawling up and over the wrecked crates. There was no point; they were keeping pace with him anyway. He sprinted across the stack, kicked off, fired his jets for a long burn-
And dropped, as a Sabertooth behind him made a once-in-a-million jump, its jaw snapping shut over his right arm. Its teeth barely managed to get a hold in the nanocomposite plating, its elongated canines holding his shoulder in a vicegrip, but the added weight was enough to send Nemesis and the Boomer plummeting.
He grabbed onto the edge of the truck just below the backdoor with his left hand, the Sabertooth flailing about like a thing possessed, trying to shake him loose. He didn't let go, his suit's fingers digging trenches into the steel plating, but the Boomer didn't let go either. He could feel the truck start to move, and tried to pull himself up with his one arm, but the Boomer's hind limbs had a grip on the back of the truck too, and it pulled back hard, nearly wrenching his right arm from its socket.
Nemesis slammed his arm into the truck just as it inched forward, then made a sharp turn out of the loading bay. The Sabertooth was stunned, and its legs slipped, but it didn't let go.
For once in his life, Nemesis had no idea what to do. The pack was closing in, and his truck was going to drive off with him clinging on for dear life behind it.
Then one of the back doors opened, the barrel of a very large gun poked out, and the Sabertooth's thrashing lower half was blown across the loading yard with an unceremonious krack.
The Boomer's head was still attached to his arm, but there was no weight behind it. Nemesis swung himself into the truck and let go-
Just as the Sabertooth pack behind him let loose another torrent of lasers.
He landed, got to his feet, and pulled the back doors shut just as a cluster of white-hot laser bolts peppered the truck's interior. The truck began to accelerate, which was the signal for Nemesis to finally pop his helmet and take in his surroundings.
The Heavy Hardsuit was in its charging rack towards the front of the truck. Some laser bolts had knocked loose a few bits of equipment, but nothing irreplaceable. The truck was moving.
And Matt 'Sarge' Hemmer was on the floor of the truck, Barrett 50-cal clenched in his hand, and half his upper left arm was a partially-but-not-quite mess of scorched flesh.
And Matt 'Sarge' Hemmer was on the floor of the truck, Barrett 50-cal clenched in his hand, and half his upper left arm was a partially-but-not-quite mess of scorched flesh.
____________________________________________________________________
Nemesis did not panic. Nemesis did not panic under any circumstances.
Sarge's expression was strangely passive as the truck picked up speed. Was the truck on auto-drive, then? That was never good. Self-driving cars relied too much on GPS and other internet signals to navigate; it was child's play to hack them. But Sarge had done it anyway. To save him.
It was as though he'd expected this to happen.
"It hurts," the man whispered, and it sounded like his lungs were pressing up against mountains. "Gavin, help."
Nemesis nodded, tiptoed over his sprawled body, grabbed a first-aid kit from the rack on the side, tore the lid off of it. He ignored the little diagnostic tool that you were supposed to use first; he could tell pretty goddamn well what was going on with his friend. He'd taken a laser bolt to the upper arm, the beam of energy turning a bit of his own flesh into explosive plasma through sheer heat. The good news was that there weren't any pesky fragments of metal in Sarge's arm, just a whole bunch of burst vessels, fried flesh, and maybe a bit of shattered bone. All perfectly healable, with time. His arm would never work right again without the nerve endings he wasn't getting back, but there was stem-cell therapy for that.
The bad news was that lasers didn't cauterise the wounds they made. Which meant unless he sealed that wound up fast, Sarge was going to die.
"Gavin…"
"Sarge, don't talk. Just stay there. I've got you." Nemesis found a packet of synthetic Platelets-n'-Painkillers™ buried in the back of the kit, yanked it out alongside a rag, soaked the rag in alcohol, and scrambled over to Sarge. He pulled him up from the floor of the truck, cleaned the wound as best as he could-
Sarge hissed, grit his teeth. Most of his arm was barely there, vaporized by the laser, but the limb still hung together on tendons and shattered bone, poking out from under stripped skin-
And then he applied the platelet goop, and the bleeding stopped.
Seconds passed. Neither of them said anything. The truck sped on.
"M' good," Sarge grunted at last. "Can't drive like this, though. Can you get us back to base?"
"No," Nemesis said. "We're not going back to base."
If it was Vicain, he would have bitched hard enough to open the wound. If it was Smitty, he would have alternated between swearing and whimpering. But this was Sarge. He'd been wounded before, and he'd still pressed on.
So what he said was, "Okay. Got it. Get out of that damn suit and get the big one on. I can drive."
But he'd never been wounded like this, a little voice in the back of Nemesis's head said as he plugged his hardsuit into the charging rack and pulled himself out. He ignored it as best as he could, but Sarge had lost a lot of blood.
He wasn't going to die, though. That wasn't possible.
Sarge got up and stumbled over to finish up Nemesis's slapdash first aid. "Hey, Gavin," he slurred as he tried to shift his arm back into place. "When we get back, can we talk?"
Nemesis barely noticed, as the Heavy Hardsuit began to split apart. "About what?"
"Nothing. Everything. Jesus God this hurts. You sure you applied enough goop?"
"No."
"Okay." The upper torso slid up and out as the lower torso slid down, revealing the empty space where the pilot was meant to fit. Sarge began to construct a tourniquet from the gear inside the first aid it, wrapping bandages around his upper arm, over the rapidly drying platelet goop. The truck barreled onward. It was a ways until they got out of the warehouse district and back into old Yokohama proper.
"I mean," Sarge said suddenly, trying to get his wounded arm in a sling without reopening the wound, "Vicain was right. We didn't think this one through. You said we were going to stick to critical strikes, and we didn't."
"I disagree," Nemesis said, squeezing into the piloting space for the hardsuit, then sticking his arms and legs into their respective holes. "We can't allow the Sleeping Dragon's enemies to think they are safe. This will scare them off so we can finish our work." The torso closed in on him, the restraints popped off, and Nemesis was in his heavy hardsuit.
"I know. You've told me already." Tourniquet half-finished, Sarge stumbled up to the driver's cab, slinging himself into the driver's seat. "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying it may not be such a good idea to make so many enemies at once. Let them do the work, you know?"
"Maybe." Nemesis's voice was synthesized now, devoid of emotion. There was a palpable thumping sensation as Sarge disabled the autodrive, as he turned left where the autodrive would have gone straight. "But we can't back down now. That will only embolden them. What's my weapon load?"
"Maria's intel says the Triads mostly rely on microcopters and emplaced weapons alongside the usual contingent of personnel, so it's pretty much the same as before. Missiles, dumbfire rockets, vibroblade, minigun with the new APEX rounds, railgun with two regular and two Anti-Personnel magazines, eight shots per mag." He turned again. "I guess what I'm trying to say is that - ah shit."
"What?"
"They blocked the quickest route to the Tiandi Jian. Big-ass hydrogen tanker just sitting there." He braked. "I bet the moment I get within range they'll detonate charges-"
There was a bright light from the front of the truck, and a whumphing sound like a thunder god's fart.
"Or they could just detonate them right there. Either way they know we're here."
"The plan hasn't changed. Get through their defenses, get within range. Drop me off, fire the mortars at the top of the restaurant, then go."
"Yessir," Sarge barked. Under his breath he muttered, "If my arm doesn't come off in the process-"
"You say something, Sarge?"
"Oh nothing." He smiled, looked outside the truck's cab, where he could see Firebee microcopters whirling around in the sky. "We're just about to have ourselves a motherfuckin' car chase."
____________________________________________________________________
9:31 pm
It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal truck.
In its previous life, it had been a Kenworth-Oshkosh M560, the undisputed king of single-tow long-haul big-rigs. It had hauled cargo from Chicago to Houston to Denver and back again, driven by two dozen different men under the umbrella of one logistics company. Then GENOM entered the long-haul market with fully automated trucks powered on Gulf and Bradley's gasohol, and the American competition had quietly shriveled up and died. The cargo truck was a thing of the past, anyway - by the late 2020's, the promise of hyperloops linking every major continental metropolis, hauling passengers and products a thousand miles in half an hour, was too big to ignore.
So the Kenworth-Oshkosh M560 was cast aside in favor of Sonoda Motor's X3000's, and when the little logistics company that owned it couldn't find a buyer, they fueled it up in Denver, set the autodrive to Night City, and watched it putter off into the sunset. In Night City, or what was left of it after the Fourth Corporate War, the truck found a new purpose as the home of a band of squatters too broke to refuel it. It stayed like this for about two years, before a fixer by the name of Maximum Mike bought it off the squatters (while simultaneously threatening them with his personal hitsquad) in exchange for shares in a capsule hotel business. Mike had been looking for wheels, you see, American-made ones, to sell to some unscrupulous band of mercenaries who thought they were cooler than they actually were. He made some upgrades. Nothing special.
Then someone left a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills and a note with an address for a separate squatter community on the door of Mike's secret safehouse. The fixer had considered the significance of this for all of thirty seconds before setting the truck's autodrive to the aforementioned address. He walked away significantly richer, never used that safehouse again, and now Nemesis had a truck.
It was this truck where he had stashed his gear during the raid on Yvon Heuse's estate. It was this truck which had carried him and his team across America. And thanks to Smitty and Vicain's work on it, it was no normal truck.
The frame was still boring old carbon nanotube-reinforced titanium steel, but that frame was armored with up to three inches of an aggregated diamond nanorod/ titanium carbide nanocomposite, the stuff used in Nemesis's armor but just a smidge thicker. The electronics equipment was expanded from a primitive autodriver to an advanced full-spectrum ECM jammer/scrambler, a set of Lidar scanner nodes, and an uplink to a live-feed satellite array in geosynchronous orbit over the US. The engine, an ancient gasohol/hydrogen burner, was swapped out for a MALCORP magnetically optimized lithium battery with an automatic gearshifter. The tires were boron carbide cermet over reactive-impact gel, able to take anything from caltrops to landmines and keep going.
The only thing missing was a good paintjob, since the variable camo paint on the truck and the modifiable license plates focused more on concealment than aesthetics. As it was, the truck was a nondescript light grey.
The Revenger, as Smitty and Sarge had taken to calling it, was no slouch on armaments either. Its primary defenses were mounted in the top of the truck, a rack of 16 laser-guided SSM's as an antiboomer measure, and a GAU-24B 5x5.56mm minigun for point defense. Between those and a 32-round automated mortar launcher, and a mine thrower mounted on the back, the truck was well-armed enough to blow its way through most criminal defenses and then some.
It was this truck that Matthew "Sarge" Hemmer had to drive through about three miles of winding streets laden with traps and swarming with hostiles. It was this truck that had to deliver Nemesis to his destination, then use the mortar launcher to set the top of the Tiandi Jian on fire so the vigilante could drive people down onto the ground floors, all the while being harried by five different Firebee minicopters armed with 20mm autocannons and a swarm of Saber-toothed Boomers, plus whatever the Triad and its allies could throw up in front of him. And he was going to have to do it one-handed.
He liked a good challenge.
Sarge settled into the cab and flicked on the point-defense cannon; a camfeed popped up on the truck's dashboard, displaying the minigun's POV, silently swiveling back and forth, tracking the Firebees. Even in the dead of night, they weren't that hard to track, painted in an animated flame pattern with idiotic-looking toothy grins on their noses. He kept his eyes on the road as the minigun identified its targets, backed up from the flaming fuel tanker, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. The truck turned down a narrow alley barely large enough to accommodate it, and the firebees vanished from view. He kept his eyes on the road, even as the Revenger tore a pair of fire escapes off their bolts and caught them square in the middle of its windshield. But the HUD overlay showed an open road ahead of him, so he floored it.
Sarge emerged out onto a four-lane road, just off of the highway, as the fire escape wreckage fell away. He swerved left just as shell fire smashed into the side of the truck. The armor held, but that was all the minigun needed to ID its targets, and it swept three hundred rounds of fire and tungsten across its field of fire in three seconds. One Firebee had begun to lower itself directly behind the Revenger, doubtlessly hoping to get a clear shot at Nemesis. It exploded unceremoniously as slugs ripped through the pilot, then the fuel tank.
Sarge would have pumped his fist in triumph, but his arm still hurt like hell. As it was, he sped through a small red light, swerving to avoid a handful of compact autotaxis, doubtlessly full of tourists here to enjoy the night market. It was a straight shot on this road to get within range of the Tiandi Jian. A few more minutes, a few more dead 'copters, and he'd be right where he wanted-
Or not, he thought as the scanners pinged up one, then two, then seemingly countless Sabertooths behind him. Laser blasts smacked into the back of the truck, the armor melting and ablating into little craters in the three-inch-thick doors. Another wave of bolts followed; the damage reports on Sarge's HUD suggested they were slightly more coordinated. They were going to burn through the door soon. He grasped the wheel with his left foot, reached down, and activated the mine launcher.
Milliseconds later, a silvery disc shot out from below the back of the truck like a frisbee, extended razor blades like a rotary saw, and cut into the foremost Sabertooth before it had a chance to shoot the thing down. Its target locked, the mine detonated, spraying frag, teflon, and napalm into the pack.
But the pack pressed onward, undeterred by the six corpses of their kin. They marked them as dead, remotely armed their self-destructs, but no more.
Sarge was not impressed by what he saw in his rearview mirrors. Americans mostly used aerial swarm weapons, quadcopters with C4 or SMG's slapped on, executing synchronized divebombs like psychotic seagulls. That was what had convinced him they needed point defense weaponry, but right now the minigun was too busy convincing the Firebees to stay just out of range with intermittent bursts of fire. But ground-based mecha? He had to give GENOM credit, it was definitely pissing him off right now.
He was about to fire the mine launcher again, then braked just short of a makeshift barricade made out of night market stalls and flaming cars. He checked his left, his right, then mentally shrugged and barreled straight through the thing.
The Revenger cleared the barricade, ramming through the rotten wood and cheap composite that made up the obstacle with ease. Then Sarge felt the truck shake, one, two, three times, and grimaced in pain as his limp arm was jostled about.
Of course. He'd run over a chain of magnetically-attaching shaped-charge landmines. Not enough to break up the undercarriage's laminated nanocomposite, much less break into the transmission, but they had definitely gotten close to fucking the whole truck up and destroying its all-wheel drive. It was a good tactic, he had to admit, just not good enough, because if it had been him he never would have put up that barricade in the first place; it was holding back most of the Sabertooths, who were rapidly receding in the distance, clawing at the structure, trying to slip past the flaming steel while still taking potshots at the truck.
He had done it. The Triads could throw up roadstrips or block him all they wanted. It wouldn't change-
K-THOOM.
Something shattered his right window. Noise filled the cabin, followed by its absence, a buzzing neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that told him his eardrums had just lost their shit. On instinct, he accelerated, just as another impact K-THOOMed into the side of the truck. On instinct, he flicked on the anti-Boomer defenses and the right side cameras.
"Sarge!" Nemesis's synthesized voice barked from somewhere in the back. "What just happened?"
Sarge looked, and Sarge saw.
Painted a soft magenta which bled into orange and yellow like a sunset, Cyrillic characters splayed across its front, a crude two-headed eagle smeared on just below it. A twin-barreled machine-turret, had to be at least 80mm by the looks of it. Cylindrical dumbfire rockets slapped willy-nilly on the squat turret's sides. Six wheels to a side. Blocky ERAD armor. Fast enough to catch up with the Revenger. Oh, he knew exactly what it was.
"A UFV happened, Gavin. Hang on." He let go of the wheel, flipped open a panel on the side of the gearshift, and pressed a little red button under it. Immediately, banks of aerogel capacitors, which collectively had the surface area of Manhattan island, fired a few terawatts of electricity into liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks on the truck's undercarriage hooked up to thrusters. The hydrogen didn't just burn, it turned to plasma within the span of picoseconds, propelling the Revenger forward at something like 275 kph. The truck shot forward, zipping past the Russian UFV with reckless abandon just as it let loose another burst of grenades.
"Sarge-" He couldn't read Nemesis's voice. Another Firebee came into range, and was promptly obliterated by an anti-Boomer missile. Fifteen more of those, then, each with the stopping power of a 60mm. "How close are we?"
"Ehhh-" He checked. "About two minutes till the mortars are in range, three and a half till I drop you off."
"Not good. We don't have the firepower to fight off another UFV in the truck."
"We could use the smart-round mortars?"
"Do you want to manually change out primed WP rounds or should I?"
"Point." The street began to narrow down from four lanes to three, then two. Sarge kept the truck steady with his good hand, checking his rear cameras periodically. The Firebees were keeping away, probably waiting till the point-defense gun ran out of ammo - but he had more than enough rounds to keep them at bay for the time being if he kept it set to periodic tracking bursts. The UFV was gaining on them, a few hundred meters distant. And the pack of Sabertooths, save a few instances sprinting alongside the tank-truck, were nowhere to be found. He didn't like that last part, but he could live with it.
The real problem, he noted, was that the UFV, in all its sunset-colored glory, had just fired a handful of its saturation rockets.
They came in hot and fast just as the turbodrive began to cut out. The minigun vomited out clouds of tungsten with wild abandon, cut out all but three of the first wave. The rest exploded on the pavement or on the sides of the street, inches away from the Revenger.
"Sarge-"
"I know! Just give me a second!" He flicked on the emergency decoy measures, and hot laser-reflective smoke began to billow out of the truck's old smoke stacks just as the second wave hit. The minigun kept firing.
The rockets, however, were mostly unguided. They followed their trajectory, arced up in the air like the fingers of an angry god, and if they had been programmed to see a heat source, they would adjust that trajectory slightly to drop right on it. Four of them followed the smoke and slammed into the pavement to the sides of the truck. The other four didn't.
They exploded as one, inches from the nanocomposite armor. The blast wave bent, then tore, the top of the truck's trailer open, exposing Nemesis to the orangish night as the smoke began to disperse behind the truck. The minigun was ripped from its housing, flipping end over end in midair, its ammo supply burning round by round like a detonation cord in an old cartoon.
"That's not good," the vigilante said. "Do you want me to do something about that tank?"
"What?" That was all Sarge had time for. He was busy trying not to panic, and trying to uplink the rear sensors to the anti-Boomer missiles.
"Open the doors, Sarge. Open them, now!"
He did, slapping a little button on the side of his seat. He heard the rear doors swing open, then a blaring, screeching sound. The rear sensors went mostly white as something shot out where the back doors were and blasted straight through the UFV, its ablative armor a glittering spray of motlen slag as the whole thing exploded.
Ah, yes. He'd forgotten that Nemesis kept a particle beam gun in the truck's armory. It was too big for him to wield effectively even with the heavy hardsuit on, but it was a handy thing to have in a pinch. "Good one," he said.
"Thanks. How much longer?"
"We're turning right about here," Sarge said, and then he threw the wheel hard to the left and engaged the parking brake.
The Revenger, the minigun mount still flaming, half of its trailer's roof a smoking wreck, cut nine streaks of burnt rubber across the entirety of the road as it turned down a side road, the trailer fishtailing about before straightening out onto the one-lane.
He could hear Nemesis stumble and swear in the back. Sarge smirked; Gavin had always said he was the best worst driver ever to walk the earth. He took it as a compliment, personally. He began to press down on the accelerator again-
Then stopped as something thumped beneath him.
What the hell? The forward sensors showed - ah, yes. That made sense. He'd wondered where the pack of Sabertooths had gone. Evidently they'd decided to take a side road. Clever girls.
Sarge hit the accelerator again, the Revenger roaring as it drove down the cobblestone street, tearing off LED signs as it went, its tires grinding against Boomerflesh.
Then one, then two, in the back of the pack, jumped forward, over their fallen comrades, landing squarely on the windshield. They clawed futiley at the transparent-alumina windshield before aiming their back laser guns at him.
He smacked another button on the dashboard, and armored shutters slammed down over the windshield. For three critical seconds, he was blind, and then emergency sensor nodes came online, showing him three Sabertooths dominating his field of vision, laser guns steadily firing into the armor. He had no idea how long they would last, and that terrified him. He had no defensive measures for the front, either. He kept the pedal down.
Then rounds whistled by his head from behind him. Nemesis's minigun. He could recognize the sound even blaring in his ears point-blank. The display flickered just as the three Boomers practically flew off the truck's cabin, torn apart in midair by hungry APEX rounds.
Sarge whooped. He could see again, even if he couldn't hear at all. Then he shut up, because he did not like what he saw.
It was the Tiandi Jian, alright. He'd taken the secondmost direct route to the golden pagoda, somehow. But what terrified him wasn't the restaurant, but what was in front of him.
It was like if a pride parade and a military parade had a baby.
Four truly massive UFVs painted ridiculously un-Russian colors stood side-by-side. Above them, the three remaining Firebees hovered at low altitude, Vulcan guns pointed squarely at the Revenger. In front of the UFV's, a mix of security Boomers and Triad hardmen in full body armor stood, LMG's and grenade launchers at the ready.
For a moment, the truck barreled forward unmolested. Sarge slammed down on the activation switch for the mortars.
Then, as one, both sides fired.
The mortars arced upward into the night, before coming back down on the roof of the Tiandi Jian's pagoda. The upper structure bent, shattered, and finally ignited in a burst of white-hot flame.
The anti-Boomer missiles weren't so lucky. Two of the UFV's fired their saturation rockets at the same time with short fuses, and the two streams of ordinance exploded against each other in midair.
But the Triads, the minicopters and the gaudily painted UFV's and the Sabertooths and, in the middle of it all, a handful of infantrymen with grenade launchers? They did just fine.
In fact, they hit the truck head on. Every last round.
The motor block lasted for all of three seconds before the lithium battery blew sky-high, a blue sun blasting away the truck around it. The wheels, already flaming, held out long enough to drive the truck straight into the line of fire. Slightly turned, they caused the truck to whip around just as emergency decouplers, which hadn't been used for years, activated, tearing the trailer loose from the doomed cabin, spinning end over end over end straight before it came to a stop at the feet of the frontline.
But the truck had too much momentum now, and it too flipped onto its side. Airbags slammed into Sarge's face and jerked him back and forth, before his neck snapped forward with an unseen impact.
And then the world cut to black.
____________________________________________________________________
9:42 pm
No.
No no no no no no no.
This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening.
The Revenger? Fine, he could deal with losing it. He had other means of extraction, he'd just have to send something like the Venator out on autodrive and take it back. He'd been through worse in Houston and New York.
But Sarge? Sarge was in that cabin.
He was not going to lose another one. Not like this.
Nemesis dashed over to the cabin, didn't think about the people not shooting at him at that very moment, yanked the door off, and pulled Sarge out - or rather, what was left of him.
His right arm was gone, but it was a clean break, just right where the upper arm fitted into its socket. He was bleeding, a trickle, really, right on his forehead where he'd whacked into the steering wheel. And his legs - they were bent the wrong way in three different places. If he wasn't dead, he would be soon.
Nemesis laid him down on the asphalt, and turned to face the world.
More guns than he had imagined possible were pointing at him, most of sufficient caliber to tear his heavy hardsuit into little bits. His weapons were raised, ready to fire the moment his brain gave the signal, but what was the point? They had more guns.
The world seemed to smirk at him. He did not close his eyes, but looked up at the burning restaurant. At least he'd done one thing right.
And then:
"LADIES AND GEEEEENTLEMEN!"
What? That voice. Even under layers of modulation, he recognized it.
It was that crazy brunette.
McNichol's girlfriend.
"IT'S SHOOOOOOWWWWTIIIIIIIMEEEEE!"
District 11
February 12, 2036
3:45 PM
To the public, Sylia Stingray was a nobody.
Well, almost a nobody. The daughter of the man the scientific community still called the God of Boomers was well-known, of course, among certain elite circles. And there was an air of tragedy about her that the tabloid press had once eagerly milked, what with her mother missing and her father dead. "THE SORDID LIFE OF MISS STINGRAY - WHY HE'S DEAD AND WHY SHE LEFT!" Things like that. Too many people believed them.
But in the end, Sylia Stingray was no genius. She'd gone into fashion, for heaven's sake, an industry purpose-built for the vapid children of famous people. And sure, Stingray Luxury Goods was doing quite well, selling everything from clothing to cyberware for the brand-name enthusiast. But everyone agreed that wasn't the fault of the still-grieving woman. Rather, the board of trustees she'd handed the company to six months after its founding were the ones behind her fortune.
Of course, Sylia Stingray was those trustees. All of them. But the wider world didn't need to know that.
They didn't need to know, either, that she used her company's funds to prop up a certain mercenary outfit when it couldn't make it on jobs alone. They didn't need to know that she was one of the directors of MALCORP's Far East division, that she'd already warned the American megacorp off of several startup acquisitions that had failed weeks later, saving it billions of yen with a few words. They didn't need to know that she had provided much of the technology used within that same company's growing line of law enforcement products. They certainly didn't need to know that she'd bought several safehouses and minor businesses scattered across the city through an ocean of shell companies with her new stream of revenue.
And they most certainly didn't need to know that Your Voice Karaoke was one of them.
The most they'd know, as she slipped past the automatic doors into the main lounge area, was that she'd come here to have a 'discreet meeting' with an investor, and there would be some speculation as to who it was. They'd know she was wearing a lavender blouse that held her breasts up high and bared her midriff down low, along with a tight black skirt and matching high heels. And they'd draw their own conclusions, then forget about it.
Sylia went up to the bar, where the bartender, a tall, bearded Chinese man with a tattoo on his back that no one ever saw, gave her a quick salute. "Booth 12," he grunted, and that was that. She pushed her way past clusters of teenagers and salarymen to the booth, opened the door, sat down, then locked it. Immediately, electroactive soundproofing kicked in, a little bonus feature she'd had installed when the bar had first opened. No one was going to hear her and Fargo speak. No one.
"So," she said to the man sitting across from her, "How have you been?"
It was a formality, of course. He looked even worse than usual, if that was possible. His sandy blond hair was almost black with oil, his lower eyelids were purple and baggy, and he had propped his head on his hand to keep himself awake.
"Well," he said, "I talked to Mallory and a few other guys."
"And did you get the information I requested?"
"Oh," he slurred. "Fuck yeah I got the information. Got a whole bunch of other information I didn't want to hear about either. One kept on describing all the different ways Americans torture people they don't like for about a half hour."
"Good lord. Where do you find these sources?"
"Doesn't matter. Mallory was the most helpful one anyway. Still a little cagey, though. Not sure why."
"He sees you as competition, probably."
"Oh, really. For what?"
"Doesn't matter. What have you uncovered, Fargo?"
He yawned, stretched out, and seemed slightly more animated all of a sudden. "Well, it's kind of a long story, but we've got time." He paused, began to light a cigarette, then thought better of it and put his pack of Camels away. "You're fairly up to date on the Amazonian Wars, right?"
"I read the papers, so, yes. They say the Chinese want to divert resources from the Polar War to bolster United Amazonia, but the USSD is threatening to beam-strike Lima if Peru doesn't hold off on arms shipments through the port. Of course, there's a good chance the Chinese have some satellites of their own, so I doubt they'll go through with it."
"Right. So, how much do you know about how the war started?"
"The US sent in their army to back a coup against the Venezuelans, and the Venezuelan loyalists became United Amazonia. What am I missing?"
"Lots," he said. "You've got the broad strokes right, the Americans overthrew the Venezuelan government and ended up getting stuck propping up the government there, but the whole thing wasn't just about establishing democracy and whatnot. It never is."
"They wanted a place to build a space elevator, right? USSD has marked the Venezuelan coast near the equator as one of the prime locations for such a thing. They must have been thinking about megastructure construction before there were real megastructures."
"Well, yeah. Partially. But the plan, from what Mallory tells me - and he pretty much called up the Pentagon and let me see their physical records on this one, so be sure to thank him later - was always to invade Colombia while they had forces in the area. After the peace agreement fell through, they figured the only way to stop the cocaine from heading up to the US was to pull an Afghanistan. The generals figured, hey, as long as we're here, we might as well win the War on Drugs, right?"
"Really. They still care about the War on Drugs? Isn't cocaine legal over there?"
"No, just marijuana, and you have to buy it from the legal states. So yeah, dealing with drugs was still a big deal back then. But there's this big blank spot in press records, see, between when the cartels and the Maduroists formed United Amazonia, started seizing territory, and when the Chinese declared their unconditional support for the fledgling state. And that, my dear, is Operation Templar." At this, Fargo pulled out a cigarette, holding it like a pen, and pointed it at Sylia. She smiled.
"Go on."
"Okay," he said. "So the brass are having this crisis of conscience, 'cause it's like Vietnam and Iraq and ISIS rolled into one big clusterfuck and smoked through the eyes. And they don't have a good strategy to restore order, because United Amazonia has this great propaganda trick they're pulling where they're actually getting native tribes, not just Maduroists, to sign on, 'cause the first thing the Americans did when they arrived was start cutting down trees for slash-n'-burn agriculture and displacing all these Indians. So every time the Americans try to hold territory, some warrior tribe with printed AK's pops out of the jungle and causes a big pain in the ass for all the locals, and anyway the whole war's super unpopular with the President's constituents, the bible-bangers and the gun-nuts and the border patrol militias who are saying that this war's gonna cause an uptick in illegal immigrants. And to an extent they're right. So what do they do? They make it look like they've handed the whole war over to the Venezuelan and Colombian armies, and just leave a few thousand SpecFor stranded in the jungle."
"But they're not really stranded, see. The CIA's got a plan for them, and that's Operation Templar, a crusade to retake the Holy Land. So, templars, crusades, holy land, infidels. All the pieces in place."
"So the goal of Operation Templar is to literally build new cities, these impregnable fortresses along the rivers, in the Basin, which they can always fall back on. They drop the supplies from USSD orbital factories near Genaros, and then around year three they drop in construction Boomers, too. Then, they build out from there, link citadel to citadel, all for the sake of the Colombian people, so the story goes. And to defend them? Knights in mothafuckin' shining armor."
Sylia motioned for him to stop. "So our man was one of these knights. It would certainly explain his training, but why isn't he still there? You make it sound like this scheme worked."
"It did! It did. Brought in great profits for the megacorps involved. GENOM built the cities, MALCORP provided the defenses, these prototyped hardsuits as best as I can figure. You know anything about that? Mallory said he shut it down as soon as he took over the company, but that was pretty recently, so they were doing this for a while. Oh, and Gn'B provided the heavy stuff, the orbital infrastructure, the pipeline-building expertise, that sort of thing."
"Interesting." Had they been using her father's technology for this venture? The thought disgusted her. "I'll be sure to talk to Greg about this next time we meet. So what happened?"
Fargo gestured widely with his cigarette. "China happened. Our good friends in the People's Republic will do anything to fuck with the Americans, and they had friendly associates in the Shining Path, so they start shipping Battlemovers and all sorts of other heavy gear through Lima, under the Andes, and into the UA."
"One by one, the American citadels fall. They keep civilians in them as hostages, it does nothing - when the walls go down the civvies are just forced into work camps in the South. And eventually they get beaten back to Northern Venezuela, to this little citadel, one of the first, called San Ramon."
"I remember that. Wasn't that where they broke out the particle-beam satellites?"
"About that time, yeah. USSD was still in a bit of a tizzy over their existence going public, so I guess they figured it was time to use the damn things. And they used them. Wiped out every known UA hideout on the continent, irradiated half the Amazon rainforest, kicked off wildfires that burned for months. Sylia, they'd been holding back, and then they just weren't.
You could practically hear his italicization - when he got going, Sylia noted, Fargo could be very melodramatic. It was an unavoidable side effect of living in the covert intelligence world, she figured. But this was still going nowhere. "Except for some of your sources, I take it?"
"All they have is names, names of the last Templars before the whole project was disbanded and hushed up. The most your average American knows is that they kept troops in South America in contempt of Congress, and it cost the president the '32 election. That's it. They don't even know that name. Everyone who came back alive refuses to talk about it."
"Except for some of your sources, Fargo?"
"Yes, yes, except for a few people close to the operation but never actually involved in it. Satellite technicians, mostly from USSD. And they told me that the plan to use the initial particle beam strike was from a Templar on the ground. It wasn't cleared by the top brass, because the Templars already had clearance to do pretty much whatever the fuck they want, it just never got that bad. But the guy didn't actually get in trouble. He was court-martialed, everyone agreed he did what he had to do, even if it was against CIA protocol for the Templars. So he gets dishonorably discharged, and for a military man, that's a death sentence enough."
"His name, Fargo. What was his name."
"Gavin Belasko." He let the words hang there for a minute, then continued. "Days after he gets back, he's at this restaurant in New York, when gangsters rush in and start gunning people down left and right. His little sister, makes it, his parents and his CIA handler he doesn't know he has, don't. But they don't need handlers anymore, because after that, things get weird."
"Nene showed me. Drug kingpins in the city started dying off, before Ivanov got destroyed by a stolen Apache-4."
"Yep. And the kicker is, after that, he doesn't stop. People keep on seeing some dude pop up, stop muggings, fade away just as quickly. After that, well, the CIA kinda lost track of him until he showed up again with the hardsuit, which he got from a company called HiGuard that got bought out by an arms dealer, which he then proceeded to wipe off the face of the planet. After that, they record him in Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Denver, Laramie, Seattle, San Francisco, San Angeles, so on and so forth, and now here."
"So the CIA knows this man, and they know he's Nemesis. Why haven't they done anything about him?"
"Well, they don't, not really. As an ex-Templar, he was never supposed to officially exist. And the new folks at the CIA, the new president's men, rely mostly on the digital records, and according to those Gavin Belasko has been living a normal life in New York all this time. It took me and a couple of fellow spooks to actually put this all together."
"I see. That's all I need, then." She stood up, then stopped herself. Fargo had reached out and was clutching her wrist. "Is something wrong?"
Fargo sighed, let go, sank into the booth's cushions. "You told me you wanted to talk to this guy, right? After what I've heard about him, I don't think that's a good idea."
"Why not?"
"He's a military man. Born into a military family, went into a military academy, spent most of his life getting ready to be a part of the military. And he doesn't have that anymore. What does a soldier like that do when there's no war to fight?"
She could tell where he was going. "There's always another war to fight."
"Yeah."
And they left it at that.
____________________________________________________________________
District 23
February 12, 2036
9:14 pm
And now, Chinatown.
Before the quake, it had just been one corner of Yokohama, grown by handfuls of Chinese immigrants who worked in the thriving shipbuilding industry. But the quake came and went, and Megatokyo swallowed Yokohama whole. The ships are gone, now, and the industrial district is slowly being shipped out to a GENOM-owned industrial park in Ho Chi Minh City. But the Chinatown remains. Largest in the world, now.
That's because no sane Chinaman wants to live in China. The world saw its government for what it was after Tiananmen Square, cut ties with the supposedly 'liberalizing' nation, and watched as it all descended back into techno-Maoism with a smidge of neo-imperialist expansionism. The 90's saw North Korea, no longer backed by its masters in Beijing, fall in the same way East Germany had, and there lay a route of escape. Hundreds of thousands of Chinese sneak past the barely-guarded border a year. Pyongyang welcomes them with open arms, hoping for cheap labor, but they take a series of buses from Seoul to Busan, then a plane to Megatokyo.
Why Megatokyo? Why not Taiwan, or Hong Kong, or San Francisco?
Okay, maybe not Hong Kong - the '19 riots and the military crackdown that followed, the Second Coming of Tiananmen they called it, disabused anyone of the notion that the city would remain as free and open as it had been in the twentieth century.
And Taiwan's a fortress state, with every shoreline bristling with hypersonic carrier-killer missiles, every inch of sky watched over by paranoid satellite weapons. They have to be, what with the Chinese shipping troops to the Polar War through straits they conceded long ago. If some upstart PLA commander, an army at his back, gets an idea - they have to be ready. They don't take immigrants, period. Too risky.
But why Megatokyo? Why not San Fran or San Angeles, which both are mostly one big Chinatown at this point? Why not the west coast, the Middle Kingdom of the Hou Bang Triad, to whom even the old guard of Silicon Valley pays tribute? Why not America, land of opportunity?
Well, it's cheaper to fly from Busan to Megatokyo for one. For another, it's not too hard to slip past the otherwise-draconian Japanese immigration systems. Chinese are only allowed if they can prove familial relations, but the pre-Quake records are spotty, barely intact. And if you're in a Triad, you're part of one big family, right?
For the rest, the Hou Bang doesn't attract, it deters. Hou Bang is the triad to rule all triads, a cabal of blood ties and like-minded individuals whose reach stretches across continents and stock markets. They take in immigrants, alright, and set them up as disposable salarymen in the companies they funnel cash from. They demand reverence on a Confucian scale. They're so Chinese they scare other Chinese.
But Yokohama isn't run by Old Man Chang, it's run by Jimmy Chee. And Jimmy Chee doesn't give a shit about what you do so long as you don't cross him.
Which brings us back to Chinatown.
At first breath, it feels like a Chinatown anywhere, all red and gold and sloped pagoda-style roofs, and above it, a steady pulse of neon holography. The streets are empty and dark by day, but by night people stream from one building to the next like schools of tuna, packed together. The graffiti and gang signs go from kanji to a simplified Cantonese dialect, the homeless seem to disappear from the streets. There is a night market in its heart, where every scent and sound and language imaginable seems to fill the streets to saturation, where anything imaginable can be bought or sold for half its usual price or less. It is, in its own strange way, beautiful.
It's all a lie, of course.
See those plasticky terracotta warriors guarding an apartment block? Those are labor-model Boomers, bought as cheap as humanly possible, hooked up to their charging ports. When the alarms go off they grab SMG's from the little panels beside them, and go to work.
That nice old lady who sells incense in the night market? She used to work lethal injections in a Xinjiang megaprison, and she still knows her way around poisons, the kind that make you just really want to go to bed before they stop your heart. You wouldn't even notice if she rubbed a bit on your skin, at least until you dropped dead hours later.
Those little dogs that seem to run all over the place but don't seem to have any owners? They beg, sure, they eat, but have you ever looked at their eyes? Not just looked, but popped them out, seen the cameras and encrypted transmitters inside? Not what you expected, right? Neither did the last few guys who ended up having their alleyside adventures taped, who had to pay their life savings to keep the videos off the 'net.
And have you ever noticed that everyone seems to know everyone? That they're all third cousins, all missing a finger or two, all have the same funny story about how that happened with a laser welder that doesn't actually make sense if you think about it? And if you ask real nicely, and flash the right tattoos, how they'll point you to the same guy, in the same place, who sells the kind of guns even Americans in Texas can't get their hands on?
Or have you ever noticed how, for all the hype around Tiandi Jian, said to be the finest Chinese restaurant in the world, no one from Chinatown ever actually goes there? It's swarming with gwailo, and there's always a few old guys playing mahjong in the smoking lounge on the lower floors, but have you ever seen those old guys anywhere else? Where's the rest of the natives? Simple. They go in, they don't come out. They get fed to the food processors and make the meat taste funny. Those old mahjong men don't like to be fucked with.
That's Chinatown.
That's Nemesis's target.
____________________________________________________________________
Descent From Heaven Imports
There were eight guards, big men with Uzi's and night vision goggles, guarding the warehouse. Four heat signatures on the outside, one for each side, four clustered together on the inside. That was the most Nemesis had seen anywhere, and it was also where his HUD said the main offices were. That was where he would start.
The first guard tried a routine check in at 8:15, as he was supposed to. His walktie-talkie hissed static before Nemesis, clinging to the side of a shipping crate, dropped straight onto the back of his neck, slamming him into a puddle of grey slush.
He left the unconscious body facedown in the water, bubbling life away, no ammo wasted.
The second guard heard something fall in the water, but thought nothing of it, not until someone shoved something sharp into the back of his leg and pulled out. Pain sparking through his crippled limb, he went for his Uzi just as that same something flipped him around by his leg and rammed him facefirst into the asphalt. His skull cracked in three different places, and hemorrhaging took care of the rest.
The third guard heard the first guard die, then the second, just as he was about to round the corner. He hesitated, drew his weapon, and popped his night vision goggles on. The guard saw, highlighted in the shadows, something tall and black. He fired on instinct, recoil yanked his arm up, and he hit nothing. There was no way he could at that range. And then something whistled out of the darkness and caught him square in the chest.
The fourth guard saw the third one die, went for his radio, got only static. He shouted, then dashed for a side door. Something grabbed him just as he reached for the door, slammed his hand into the palmprint reader next to it, then smashed his head into it.
The fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth guards were stationed around a folding table in the middle of the warehouse. They were playing an anime-style competitive card game on their phones. Number eight and six were winning the 2v2, but not by much, so they heard the third guard's gunshots, scrambled for their own weapons, and began to run for the door.
Had they been thinking, they would have spread out, to avoid the grenade that immediately followed the door as it was kicked off its hinges. But they weren't. And that cost them their lives.
In about two minutes, Nemesis had killed eight men, and had only expended one railgun flechette and a grenade.
____________________________________________________________________
The warehouse was drafty inside, currents of air whipping around the massive fans suspended from the ceiling. The guards had left a little kerosene heater next to their folding table, but it was now covered in human entrails and was probably useless. Nemesis noted all this, then looked across, past rows of shipping crates to the opposite end of the warehouse where there looked to be some unlit offices.
He figured that was the last of the human guards, but he didn't know about other kinds of security Descent From Heaven had. Boomers ran hot, but there were ways to muffle that heat signature if you had the right mods. It never hurt to be careful, which was why he made sure to stay out of the office's line of sight, before trying the door. It opened soundlessly.
There wasn't anybody inside the office, which made a certain sort of sense. Descent From Heaven Imports had no customers save other Triads, so there was no need for a public-facing front for the company. Other, more legitimate operations would still be open at this hour. There was, however, a control panel overlooking the warehouse's interior on the second floor. Nemesis booted it up, scrolling through options until he found a shipping manifest.
Again, no surprises. Weapons, K-9 Boomers, a few pieces of stolen art which no doubt were resting in Chee's penthouse right now. He plugged in his dataneedle, copying the last part down for the authorities. Then he heard the truck.
He quickly switched over to the warehouse's external mikes. From the sound of the engine, it was definitely an 18-wheeler, big enough to carry more than one shipping crate at a time, but it was unloaded. Then the mikes picked up voices, speaking in Cantonese. He didn't understand the language, but he could tell when they found the first guards. And he kept hearing another word, English, said with a finality that he found incredibly interesting: Sabertooth.
Probably the K-9's. If they meant to load those up and let them loose into the city, it would be a major escalation of Chee's gang war. Sato would probably redirect his combat Boomers to stop searching for him and to go for Triad targets. And Chee had already attacked legitimate businesses, so there was little doubt that he would respond in kind.
If nothing else, he had a good reason to be here now. He had to cripple Chee and his triad before they so recklessly escalated the gang war. He had to destroy those Boomers. He had no idea where they were.
Fine, then. He'd let the men on the truck, now seemingly arguing over something trivial, find the Boomers for him. Then he'd destroy them both.
The loading bay inched open, and the second the metal gate was almost high enough to accommodate a human, twelve men ducked under and burst into the warehouse. They spread out around the table with the quiet intensity of a SWAT team, night vision goggles glimmering in the darkness. Nemesis ducked down before they could see him, then switched to thermal vision. Following the men were an unarmed man in workers' clothes, probably the engineer for the Boomers, and something that looked like a man, but was a strange mix of warm and cold.
A Boomeroid. Damn. When had the Triads started hiring Boomeroids? Kagemusha had told him that in Megatokyo, anyone with that much Boomerflesh in them was practically a crime against society, cast out to the Fault, not allowed to so much as poke their heads aboveground unless someone owned them. Evidently, things had changed.
The Boomeroid gestured to the others, and they began to prowl the corridors formed by the shipping crates while he and the unarmed man looked over the bodies. At least three were going to close in on his position. He scanned the office, saw a skylight, shot it, then leaped straight up just as assault rifle fire filled the space where he had been.
He had gone loud.
Emerging onto the roof, he scanned for the truck below him, then made a frantic dash for it as more rounds poked through the corrugated steel under his feet. Thermal vision told him the Triads and the Boomeroid were moving back toward the truck. The one unarmed guy had something lukewarm, probably a tablet, in his hand, and was fiddling with it desperately.
Nemesis didn't think as he leapt off the warehouse roof and dropped five stories in three seconds. With a hardsuit, he didn't need to. His maneuvering jets fired automatically, dropping him down just beside the driver's cab. He got in; the idiots had left the keys inside, so he just slammed down on the accelerator and watched.
One, two, three, four Triads attempted to fire into the engine without getting out of the way first.
One, two, three, four wet thumps told Nemesis that was an idiotic course of action. Ten seconds later, he plowed into a row of shipping crates and smashed into the concrete wall of the warehouse. He kicked out the driver's door on instinct, and his foot caught another unlucky Triad in the solar plexus. Then he dropped and rolled out onto the warehouse floor, blindfiring a burst from his railgun as he did so.
He got the Boomeroid's left shoulder practically embedded his helmet for his troubles.
But his armor was tougher than that Boomeroid's ramming shoulder, and though his camera array flickered and died, Nemesis still reached out and fired his railgun right where the thing's chest was. He heard it staggering back, then reached out, yanked the flechette out, and slashed across its eyes.
He was still blind, but he knew what he had to do. Assault rifle fire whistling past him, he lunged forward, grasped the Boomeroid's shoulders, then drove the spike into its neck. The monster was dead, but rifle fire was starting to hit him. It hurt. He remembered what Smitty had said about his armor not having that much left in it. He had to finish this quick.
Then a stray round hit the truck's flaming engine block.
He didn't see the explosion so much as he felt it, the way the pressure wave threw him forward, the way a fragment of shrapnel dug into his armor plating but didn't quite pierce it, the way his audio compensators flared up to keep his eardrums from popping. He reached out for the warehouse floor, slipped, and rolled forward, bouncing on his head, then on his back, then skidding to a stop with his arm in front of him.
It hurt. He couldn't see. The rest of the Triads, wherever they were, had stopped shooting. It didn't matter. He reached up with his grenade launcher, then fired all three of his HE grenades in quick succession.
When he could hear again, there was no more shooting. When he could hear again, he tapped a button on the underside of his helmet, and his vision reset. He took in the sight of the dead, saw one Triad still breathing, bleeding from a dozen different places but still breathing.
He willed himself over to the Triad, unsteady on his feet, and drove his armored foot into the man's sternum.
His foot still embedded in what was now a corpse, he looked around, relying on his suit's gyroscopics to keep him from falling over. His head was spinning. His ears hurt so bad it felt like they were bleeding. What was he here for again?
Right. Boomers. He had to destroy the Boomers in this warehouse. How many were there? Where were they? The truck's engine was still on fire, and it looked like the fire was starting to spread. Could he just leave the warehouse to burn? Probably not.
Sarge's voice, over the comm. They must have turned off the jammer. He focused.
"Sarge, say that again?"
"Gavin, what the fuck just happened? The Triad comms just lit up like a forest fire. They're calling in reinforcements from across the city."
Shit. "To here?"
"No. Vicain knows a bit of Cantonese and he says they're all focusing on the Tiandi Jian. He thinks they had a contingency plan in place and they're just enacting it. Something about a VIP in there, too. Might be Chee."
Double shit. They'd expected him. "Gavin, do we pull back?"
He pulled his foot out of the dead Triad's innards, steadied himself. "No. Get me the heavy hardsuit and 50cc's of anti-fatigue meds. I can't let them think they've won."
He checked his HUD's map. They were minutes away at most. He had time to catch his breath.
Then, in the depths of the warehouse, thirty-nine pairs of red eyes winked into existence, and thirty-nine snarling maws unsheathed their fangs.
____________________________________________________________________
District 1
February 12, 2036
9:18 pm
Jimmy Chee had a thing for real girls.
They were expensive, nowadays. Most of the sex industry, like every other industry on the planet, was mostly Boomers with some elite super-skilled workers on the top. And it wasn't like you could tell the difference in the heat of passion.
But he'd read somewhere that using a Boomer for sex was associated with mental illness, and he didn't want to take the risk. It made a twisted sort of sense: If you knew, afterward, that the thing you were fucking wasn't real, that it didn't count as a conquest, where did that leave you as a man? It was little better than masturbation. And Jimmy Chee, Master of Vice, did not masturbate.
Which was why, when the call came in, he was busy with foreplay between him and his two 'girlfriends'. He had just finished showing them how his prosthetic wang, a whopping nine inches of vat-grown tissue and blood, could vibrate if he thought at it hard enough, when the ivory-carved rotary phone started ringing. He tried to ignore it for all of five seconds. Then the caller ID popped up, Chinese characters floating in midair. Tiandi Jian. Chee hitched his pants up and strolled over to the phone, trying to ignore the disappointed looks from the girls.
He brought the phone to his ear, remained silent for a second. "What," he growled, "is it."
"Two things, Master Chee." The voice on the other end was Yao Chen, the ancient proprietor of the Tiandi Jian, an old Hong Konger who Chee suspected didn't age the way normal people did, but had been born an old hag and would die exactly the same. He didn't like her, didn't like ugly women in general, but so many of his family members insisted that she had the proper mix of ruthlessness and pragmatism needed to run the Suan Tou Fung's unofficial headquarters. "One, your dinner with the Hou Bang's representative is in approximately fifteen minutes, and he is already here. Shall I let him know you will be late?"
Chee looked down at his pantsless self, over to his bored mistresses. "Yeah, probably," he said. "S' no big deal."
"I do not imagine the Hou Bang will take kindly to your flippancy towards one of their most august members, Master Chee. It is you, after all, who are approaching them to beg, not the other way around."
"I'm not begging, I'm politely asking to purchase heavy equipment. I've got the funds, they've got the industrial output. It shouldn't be a big deal either way. What's the second thing?"
"So you say, Master Chee. Master Shen appears most uncomfortable. He may not be willing to listen to your request."
Chee pursed his lips. "And is it your place to judge how I run this operation?"
"Perhaps it is, Master Chee. Perhaps it is not."
"Well, I'm gonna tell you right now it isn't. What. Is. The. Second. Thing."
"As you command, Master Chee. The second thing is that we will not be able to distribute the Sabertooth Boomers to key locations tonight."
He did not grind his teeth; they did that on their own. "And why is that, pray tell?"
"Because, Master Chee, Nemesis has attacked their holding location."
His eyes widened. His jaw dropped. The girls giggled.
His eyes narrowed. His teeth gritted. They kept silent.
"Okay," he said. "Fine. Okay. Have you moved our assets to a defensive posture?"
"I have, Master Chee. Master Shen is quite agitated by this, but we are now in Kunlun Position."
Which meant, at this moment, the entire district was moving to a defensive posture. Every Suan Tou Fung footsoldier was setting up the few sets of Anti-Boomer gear they had. Roadblocks and strips of caltrops were automatically sliding into place. Hell, they lent guns and ammo to the shopkeepers and landlords who paid most of the protection racket, just as a gesture of goodwill.
And he wasn't there to oversee it. And Wei Shen, representative of the Hou Bang, the mother of all Triads, was there to see how useless he was.
Son of a bitch. He had to do something.
"Okay," he said at last. "I'm gonna see if I can't get our allies to provide some backup. In the meantime, hold tight, and if anything that isn't my limo enters our turf, destroy it."
"Of course, Master Chee. Shall I move Master Shen to the saferoom?"
"Yeah. Sure. Okay. Whatever. Goodbye." He slammed the phone down before Chen could reply. Then he popped open the rotary's dial, revealing a small touchscreen, and began setting up a conference call between himself and the other syndicates.
"Jimmy?" Tina Lei, the first of his two mistresses, said. "Whas' goin' on?" She had a way of moaning for stuff in times like this that she thought was sexy, but he just found annoying.
"Nothing, Tina-baby. Everything's good."
"Really?" Shuji Yamato, the second, said. "Because it doesn't sound like it."
"Don't worry your pretty little head about it, babe. I've got everything under control."
"What's there to control, babe? Something happen over at the restaurant?"
"Bitch, if you don't just keep quiet right now, I swear I will break your-"
"Break what?" said the voice of Willie Chung over the speaker phone. "What's to break?"
"Willie!" Chee exclaimed, his tone doing a total one-eighty. "My man! How's the recruiting going?"
"Well enough. I've managed to acquire the services of several old-soul bosozoku. Very interesting people, these are. Use LSD the way we Asians use rice. Why'd you call?"
He decided to do away with pretenses. "Nemesis just attacked my people," he said. "We're playing defense, but I don't want to take any chances. Can you and Adrik and Iwasaki get your people for backup?"
"Hold up, Nemesis is after us now?" Smirnovski sounded concerned, but it was hard to tell.
"Yes. That is what I just said. Am I going to get any help or am I on my own here?"
"Well, we could just let him have his way," Iwasaki said, "and maybe he will go after just you and Sato. It is late, after all."
Chee did his best not to punch something. "Not a chance, dumbass. We thought he was going to do our work for us, but we were wrong. You all need to help me nip this in the bud for your own sake."
Silence. Okay. Fine. These were people who wouldn't know their own self-interest if it bit them in the dick. Career criminals. No big surprise.
"I'll pay you guys."
"How much?" Chung.
"Thirty million yen each." Did he have that kind of money to throw around? Yeah, probably enough. If he had to step up drug pushing when this was all over he would. "Personally paid. Straight to each of you."
"Fine." Chung.
"You make a good point." Smirnovski.
"I'm afraid I'm going to have to sit this one out." Iwasaki. "You'll be fine, Jimmy. Don't worry about it." He hung up.
"Suit yourself." Chee hung up as well, then turned to his mistresses, who looked very bored indeed. He grabbed his wallet off of his nightstand, palmed off a few 10k-yen notes, waved them at the two women. "Here's your pay for the night. I've gotta go, but you two stay here. I'll be back. I might call. Don't buy anything unless I tell you to."
Tina sighed. "But we just started, Jimmy-baby! You telling me you don't like fun?"
"Oh, baby, I love fun. But you know, it's business before pleasure, that's my motto."
"That's never been your motto," Shuji drawled. "You always call yourself a Master of Vice, right?"
He had no good response to that.
____________________________________________________________________
District 23
February 12, 2036
9:25 pm
He had it down to a science by now. Pop open the doors, let Gavin hop on the truck, pop the armor's seals, let him breathe real air and let the smallest amount of sweat drip down his skin, then drive to the next target.
There had been a few more dangerous extractions, in the beginning. They'd had to burn rubber out of Miami after burning down Yvon Heuse's villa, for example, slipping away into the Everglades as police VTOLs scoured the swamps for any sign of them. But Gavin had gotten better at picking targets, and picking points to enter and exit. And the truck had gotten better armor, better weapons, better everything.
And, okay, maybe he'd gotten a little sloppy. No one was denying that.
But who could have prepared him for the sight of Nemesis on the run?
____________________________________________________________________
Nemesis burst out of the warehouse just as the first of the Sabertooth Boomers fired their twin laser guns his way, a quick burst followed by an avalanche of directed light. Not bothering to look at what was chasing him, he fired a burst of flechettes back into the darkness. They caught the first Sabertooth just as it reared up into bipedal mode, blowing it off its feet and sending it tumbling back into its comrades.
The other Sabertooths didn't even slow down. They were pack hunters, like wolves, and they had no time for predators who could not kill their prey. Nemesis blindfired a flechette grenade into the pack, enough to distract its foremost members, then sprinted into the shadows of the shipping crates that surrounded the warehouse on all sides. They followed.
Lasers cut streaks of slag to his left and right. The Sabertooths didn't bark or howl, but he could hear the snapping of their teeth, could feel their hunger in some reptilian part of his brain. They weren't smart enough to use those lasers in any meaningful capacity long-range, but if they caught up with him…
He'd faced dogs before. Search parties in the boiling heat of the Amazon. But they had only relied on smell and visible-light sight, and could be fooled easily enough. Not these ones.
He came to a T-bone intersection, and jumped twenty feet straight up, his maneuvering thrusters firing to set him on top of a stack of crates. Laser bolts hissed off his armor as he scrambled forward. He heard the Sabertooths scrambling around him, looked down, realized he was surrounded. They clawed at the crates, their faces unmoving masks of hate. Some began to climb up onto the others. He sprinted to the edge of his little tower, long-jumped across a gap of about ten meters, barely hit the edge, clung to it, hoisted himself up over just as another cloud of laser bolts missed him by centimeters.
"Sarge," Nemesis growled into his mic. "Where are you?"
"At the warehouse. Where are you?"
He looked over to the warehouse, got up and waved his arms. "Do you see me? I'm on top of a bunch of shipping crates and I'm surrounded by some kind of quadrupedal Boomers." He had his HUD run a few calculations: he could make it across the crates back to the truck, but it would burn through most of his fuel. I'll come to you. Stay there. Switch to combat mode, but don't use the mortars. The minigun and missile launchers should be enough."
"How many of them are there?"
He looked down, saw the seething silver-and-red mass of limbs and bodies align itself, stepped back as another cloud of laser bolts fired up into the night. "Several."
"Enough to overrun the truck if they caught up with you?"
"Probably. I don't really have time to clear them out, though-"
More lasers, but this time they fired low. "-They're probably going to bring me down to them in a few moments."
"Fine, but-"
That was all the approval he needed. He sprinted to the edge of the crates just as they started to collapse and fall upon the swarm, jumped up and out and barely made it again. He climbed up and kept going.
Vicain. Insolent little prick. "We can discuss the merits of the strike later. For now, our next target is the Tiandi Jian." Another jump, a little longer this time. His proximity sensors were still picking up the pack below him.
"Assuming you make it out of this alive."
"I will. Sarge, once I land on the roof of the truck, get moving." One more jump. He did not turn to see if the Sabertooths were behind him, crawling up and over the wrecked crates. There was no point; they were keeping pace with him anyway. He sprinted across the stack, kicked off, fired his jets for a long burn-
And dropped, as a Sabertooth behind him made a once-in-a-million jump, its jaw snapping shut over his right arm. Its teeth barely managed to get a hold in the nanocomposite plating, its elongated canines holding his shoulder in a vicegrip, but the added weight was enough to send Nemesis and the Boomer plummeting.
He grabbed onto the edge of the truck just below the backdoor with his left hand, the Sabertooth flailing about like a thing possessed, trying to shake him loose. He didn't let go, his suit's fingers digging trenches into the steel plating, but the Boomer didn't let go either. He could feel the truck start to move, and tried to pull himself up with his one arm, but the Boomer's hind limbs had a grip on the back of the truck too, and it pulled back hard, nearly wrenching his right arm from its socket.
Nemesis slammed his arm into the truck just as it inched forward, then made a sharp turn out of the loading bay. The Sabertooth was stunned, and its legs slipped, but it didn't let go.
For once in his life, Nemesis had no idea what to do. The pack was closing in, and his truck was going to drive off with him clinging on for dear life behind it.
Then one of the back doors opened, the barrel of a very large gun poked out, and the Sabertooth's thrashing lower half was blown across the loading yard with an unceremonious krack.
The Boomer's head was still attached to his arm, but there was no weight behind it. Nemesis swung himself into the truck and let go-
Just as the Sabertooth pack behind him let loose another torrent of lasers.
He landed, got to his feet, and pulled the back doors shut just as a cluster of white-hot laser bolts peppered the truck's interior. The truck began to accelerate, which was the signal for Nemesis to finally pop his helmet and take in his surroundings.
The Heavy Hardsuit was in its charging rack towards the front of the truck. Some laser bolts had knocked loose a few bits of equipment, but nothing irreplaceable. The truck was moving.
And Matt 'Sarge' Hemmer was on the floor of the truck, Barrett 50-cal clenched in his hand, and half his upper left arm was a partially-but-not-quite mess of scorched flesh.
And Matt 'Sarge' Hemmer was on the floor of the truck, Barrett 50-cal clenched in his hand, and half his upper left arm was a partially-but-not-quite mess of scorched flesh.
____________________________________________________________________
Nemesis did not panic. Nemesis did not panic under any circumstances.
Sarge's expression was strangely passive as the truck picked up speed. Was the truck on auto-drive, then? That was never good. Self-driving cars relied too much on GPS and other internet signals to navigate; it was child's play to hack them. But Sarge had done it anyway. To save him.
It was as though he'd expected this to happen.
"It hurts," the man whispered, and it sounded like his lungs were pressing up against mountains. "Gavin, help."
Nemesis nodded, tiptoed over his sprawled body, grabbed a first-aid kit from the rack on the side, tore the lid off of it. He ignored the little diagnostic tool that you were supposed to use first; he could tell pretty goddamn well what was going on with his friend. He'd taken a laser bolt to the upper arm, the beam of energy turning a bit of his own flesh into explosive plasma through sheer heat. The good news was that there weren't any pesky fragments of metal in Sarge's arm, just a whole bunch of burst vessels, fried flesh, and maybe a bit of shattered bone. All perfectly healable, with time. His arm would never work right again without the nerve endings he wasn't getting back, but there was stem-cell therapy for that.
The bad news was that lasers didn't cauterise the wounds they made. Which meant unless he sealed that wound up fast, Sarge was going to die.
"Gavin…"
"Sarge, don't talk. Just stay there. I've got you." Nemesis found a packet of synthetic Platelets-n'-Painkillers™ buried in the back of the kit, yanked it out alongside a rag, soaked the rag in alcohol, and scrambled over to Sarge. He pulled him up from the floor of the truck, cleaned the wound as best as he could-
Sarge hissed, grit his teeth. Most of his arm was barely there, vaporized by the laser, but the limb still hung together on tendons and shattered bone, poking out from under stripped skin-
And then he applied the platelet goop, and the bleeding stopped.
Seconds passed. Neither of them said anything. The truck sped on.
"M' good," Sarge grunted at last. "Can't drive like this, though. Can you get us back to base?"
"No," Nemesis said. "We're not going back to base."
If it was Vicain, he would have bitched hard enough to open the wound. If it was Smitty, he would have alternated between swearing and whimpering. But this was Sarge. He'd been wounded before, and he'd still pressed on.
So what he said was, "Okay. Got it. Get out of that damn suit and get the big one on. I can drive."
But he'd never been wounded like this, a little voice in the back of Nemesis's head said as he plugged his hardsuit into the charging rack and pulled himself out. He ignored it as best as he could, but Sarge had lost a lot of blood.
He wasn't going to die, though. That wasn't possible.
Sarge got up and stumbled over to finish up Nemesis's slapdash first aid. "Hey, Gavin," he slurred as he tried to shift his arm back into place. "When we get back, can we talk?"
Nemesis barely noticed, as the Heavy Hardsuit began to split apart. "About what?"
"Nothing. Everything. Jesus God this hurts. You sure you applied enough goop?"
"No."
"Okay." The upper torso slid up and out as the lower torso slid down, revealing the empty space where the pilot was meant to fit. Sarge began to construct a tourniquet from the gear inside the first aid it, wrapping bandages around his upper arm, over the rapidly drying platelet goop. The truck barreled onward. It was a ways until they got out of the warehouse district and back into old Yokohama proper.
"I mean," Sarge said suddenly, trying to get his wounded arm in a sling without reopening the wound, "Vicain was right. We didn't think this one through. You said we were going to stick to critical strikes, and we didn't."
"I disagree," Nemesis said, squeezing into the piloting space for the hardsuit, then sticking his arms and legs into their respective holes. "We can't allow the Sleeping Dragon's enemies to think they are safe. This will scare them off so we can finish our work." The torso closed in on him, the restraints popped off, and Nemesis was in his heavy hardsuit.
"I know. You've told me already." Tourniquet half-finished, Sarge stumbled up to the driver's cab, slinging himself into the driver's seat. "I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying it may not be such a good idea to make so many enemies at once. Let them do the work, you know?"
"Maybe." Nemesis's voice was synthesized now, devoid of emotion. There was a palpable thumping sensation as Sarge disabled the autodrive, as he turned left where the autodrive would have gone straight. "But we can't back down now. That will only embolden them. What's my weapon load?"
"Maria's intel says the Triads mostly rely on microcopters and emplaced weapons alongside the usual contingent of personnel, so it's pretty much the same as before. Missiles, dumbfire rockets, vibroblade, minigun with the new APEX rounds, railgun with two regular and two Anti-Personnel magazines, eight shots per mag." He turned again. "I guess what I'm trying to say is that - ah shit."
"What?"
"They blocked the quickest route to the Tiandi Jian. Big-ass hydrogen tanker just sitting there." He braked. "I bet the moment I get within range they'll detonate charges-"
There was a bright light from the front of the truck, and a whumphing sound like a thunder god's fart.
"Or they could just detonate them right there. Either way they know we're here."
"The plan hasn't changed. Get through their defenses, get within range. Drop me off, fire the mortars at the top of the restaurant, then go."
"Yessir," Sarge barked. Under his breath he muttered, "If my arm doesn't come off in the process-"
"You say something, Sarge?"
"Oh nothing." He smiled, looked outside the truck's cab, where he could see Firebee microcopters whirling around in the sky. "We're just about to have ourselves a motherfuckin' car chase."
____________________________________________________________________
9:31 pm
It was not, by any stretch of the imagination, a normal truck.
In its previous life, it had been a Kenworth-Oshkosh M560, the undisputed king of single-tow long-haul big-rigs. It had hauled cargo from Chicago to Houston to Denver and back again, driven by two dozen different men under the umbrella of one logistics company. Then GENOM entered the long-haul market with fully automated trucks powered on Gulf and Bradley's gasohol, and the American competition had quietly shriveled up and died. The cargo truck was a thing of the past, anyway - by the late 2020's, the promise of hyperloops linking every major continental metropolis, hauling passengers and products a thousand miles in half an hour, was too big to ignore.
So the Kenworth-Oshkosh M560 was cast aside in favor of Sonoda Motor's X3000's, and when the little logistics company that owned it couldn't find a buyer, they fueled it up in Denver, set the autodrive to Night City, and watched it putter off into the sunset. In Night City, or what was left of it after the Fourth Corporate War, the truck found a new purpose as the home of a band of squatters too broke to refuel it. It stayed like this for about two years, before a fixer by the name of Maximum Mike bought it off the squatters (while simultaneously threatening them with his personal hitsquad) in exchange for shares in a capsule hotel business. Mike had been looking for wheels, you see, American-made ones, to sell to some unscrupulous band of mercenaries who thought they were cooler than they actually were. He made some upgrades. Nothing special.
Then someone left a briefcase full of hundred-dollar bills and a note with an address for a separate squatter community on the door of Mike's secret safehouse. The fixer had considered the significance of this for all of thirty seconds before setting the truck's autodrive to the aforementioned address. He walked away significantly richer, never used that safehouse again, and now Nemesis had a truck.
It was this truck where he had stashed his gear during the raid on Yvon Heuse's estate. It was this truck which had carried him and his team across America. And thanks to Smitty and Vicain's work on it, it was no normal truck.
The frame was still boring old carbon nanotube-reinforced titanium steel, but that frame was armored with up to three inches of an aggregated diamond nanorod/ titanium carbide nanocomposite, the stuff used in Nemesis's armor but just a smidge thicker. The electronics equipment was expanded from a primitive autodriver to an advanced full-spectrum ECM jammer/scrambler, a set of Lidar scanner nodes, and an uplink to a live-feed satellite array in geosynchronous orbit over the US. The engine, an ancient gasohol/hydrogen burner, was swapped out for a MALCORP magnetically optimized lithium battery with an automatic gearshifter. The tires were boron carbide cermet over reactive-impact gel, able to take anything from caltrops to landmines and keep going.
The only thing missing was a good paintjob, since the variable camo paint on the truck and the modifiable license plates focused more on concealment than aesthetics. As it was, the truck was a nondescript light grey.
The Revenger, as Smitty and Sarge had taken to calling it, was no slouch on armaments either. Its primary defenses were mounted in the top of the truck, a rack of 16 laser-guided SSM's as an antiboomer measure, and a GAU-24B 5x5.56mm minigun for point defense. Between those and a 32-round automated mortar launcher, and a mine thrower mounted on the back, the truck was well-armed enough to blow its way through most criminal defenses and then some.
It was this truck that Matthew "Sarge" Hemmer had to drive through about three miles of winding streets laden with traps and swarming with hostiles. It was this truck that had to deliver Nemesis to his destination, then use the mortar launcher to set the top of the Tiandi Jian on fire so the vigilante could drive people down onto the ground floors, all the while being harried by five different Firebee minicopters armed with 20mm autocannons and a swarm of Saber-toothed Boomers, plus whatever the Triad and its allies could throw up in front of him. And he was going to have to do it one-handed.
He liked a good challenge.
Sarge settled into the cab and flicked on the point-defense cannon; a camfeed popped up on the truck's dashboard, displaying the minigun's POV, silently swiveling back and forth, tracking the Firebees. Even in the dead of night, they weren't that hard to track, painted in an animated flame pattern with idiotic-looking toothy grins on their noses. He kept his eyes on the road as the minigun identified its targets, backed up from the flaming fuel tanker, then yanked the steering wheel hard to the right. The truck turned down a narrow alley barely large enough to accommodate it, and the firebees vanished from view. He kept his eyes on the road, even as the Revenger tore a pair of fire escapes off their bolts and caught them square in the middle of its windshield. But the HUD overlay showed an open road ahead of him, so he floored it.
Sarge emerged out onto a four-lane road, just off of the highway, as the fire escape wreckage fell away. He swerved left just as shell fire smashed into the side of the truck. The armor held, but that was all the minigun needed to ID its targets, and it swept three hundred rounds of fire and tungsten across its field of fire in three seconds. One Firebee had begun to lower itself directly behind the Revenger, doubtlessly hoping to get a clear shot at Nemesis. It exploded unceremoniously as slugs ripped through the pilot, then the fuel tank.
Sarge would have pumped his fist in triumph, but his arm still hurt like hell. As it was, he sped through a small red light, swerving to avoid a handful of compact autotaxis, doubtlessly full of tourists here to enjoy the night market. It was a straight shot on this road to get within range of the Tiandi Jian. A few more minutes, a few more dead 'copters, and he'd be right where he wanted-
Or not, he thought as the scanners pinged up one, then two, then seemingly countless Sabertooths behind him. Laser blasts smacked into the back of the truck, the armor melting and ablating into little craters in the three-inch-thick doors. Another wave of bolts followed; the damage reports on Sarge's HUD suggested they were slightly more coordinated. They were going to burn through the door soon. He grasped the wheel with his left foot, reached down, and activated the mine launcher.
Milliseconds later, a silvery disc shot out from below the back of the truck like a frisbee, extended razor blades like a rotary saw, and cut into the foremost Sabertooth before it had a chance to shoot the thing down. Its target locked, the mine detonated, spraying frag, teflon, and napalm into the pack.
But the pack pressed onward, undeterred by the six corpses of their kin. They marked them as dead, remotely armed their self-destructs, but no more.
Sarge was not impressed by what he saw in his rearview mirrors. Americans mostly used aerial swarm weapons, quadcopters with C4 or SMG's slapped on, executing synchronized divebombs like psychotic seagulls. That was what had convinced him they needed point defense weaponry, but right now the minigun was too busy convincing the Firebees to stay just out of range with intermittent bursts of fire. But ground-based mecha? He had to give GENOM credit, it was definitely pissing him off right now.
He was about to fire the mine launcher again, then braked just short of a makeshift barricade made out of night market stalls and flaming cars. He checked his left, his right, then mentally shrugged and barreled straight through the thing.
The Revenger cleared the barricade, ramming through the rotten wood and cheap composite that made up the obstacle with ease. Then Sarge felt the truck shake, one, two, three times, and grimaced in pain as his limp arm was jostled about.
Of course. He'd run over a chain of magnetically-attaching shaped-charge landmines. Not enough to break up the undercarriage's laminated nanocomposite, much less break into the transmission, but they had definitely gotten close to fucking the whole truck up and destroying its all-wheel drive. It was a good tactic, he had to admit, just not good enough, because if it had been him he never would have put up that barricade in the first place; it was holding back most of the Sabertooths, who were rapidly receding in the distance, clawing at the structure, trying to slip past the flaming steel while still taking potshots at the truck.
He had done it. The Triads could throw up roadstrips or block him all they wanted. It wouldn't change-
K-THOOM.
Something shattered his right window. Noise filled the cabin, followed by its absence, a buzzing neeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee that told him his eardrums had just lost their shit. On instinct, he accelerated, just as another impact K-THOOMed into the side of the truck. On instinct, he flicked on the anti-Boomer defenses and the right side cameras.
"Sarge!" Nemesis's synthesized voice barked from somewhere in the back. "What just happened?"
Sarge looked, and Sarge saw.
Painted a soft magenta which bled into orange and yellow like a sunset, Cyrillic characters splayed across its front, a crude two-headed eagle smeared on just below it. A twin-barreled machine-turret, had to be at least 80mm by the looks of it. Cylindrical dumbfire rockets slapped willy-nilly on the squat turret's sides. Six wheels to a side. Blocky ERAD armor. Fast enough to catch up with the Revenger. Oh, he knew exactly what it was.
"A UFV happened, Gavin. Hang on." He let go of the wheel, flipped open a panel on the side of the gearshift, and pressed a little red button under it. Immediately, banks of aerogel capacitors, which collectively had the surface area of Manhattan island, fired a few terawatts of electricity into liquid-hydrogen fuel tanks on the truck's undercarriage hooked up to thrusters. The hydrogen didn't just burn, it turned to plasma within the span of picoseconds, propelling the Revenger forward at something like 275 kph. The truck shot forward, zipping past the Russian UFV with reckless abandon just as it let loose another burst of grenades.
"Sarge-" He couldn't read Nemesis's voice. Another Firebee came into range, and was promptly obliterated by an anti-Boomer missile. Fifteen more of those, then, each with the stopping power of a 60mm. "How close are we?"
"Ehhh-" He checked. "About two minutes till the mortars are in range, three and a half till I drop you off."
"Not good. We don't have the firepower to fight off another UFV in the truck."
"We could use the smart-round mortars?"
"Do you want to manually change out primed WP rounds or should I?"
"Point." The street began to narrow down from four lanes to three, then two. Sarge kept the truck steady with his good hand, checking his rear cameras periodically. The Firebees were keeping away, probably waiting till the point-defense gun ran out of ammo - but he had more than enough rounds to keep them at bay for the time being if he kept it set to periodic tracking bursts. The UFV was gaining on them, a few hundred meters distant. And the pack of Sabertooths, save a few instances sprinting alongside the tank-truck, were nowhere to be found. He didn't like that last part, but he could live with it.
The real problem, he noted, was that the UFV, in all its sunset-colored glory, had just fired a handful of its saturation rockets.
They came in hot and fast just as the turbodrive began to cut out. The minigun vomited out clouds of tungsten with wild abandon, cut out all but three of the first wave. The rest exploded on the pavement or on the sides of the street, inches away from the Revenger.
"Sarge-"
"I know! Just give me a second!" He flicked on the emergency decoy measures, and hot laser-reflective smoke began to billow out of the truck's old smoke stacks just as the second wave hit. The minigun kept firing.
The rockets, however, were mostly unguided. They followed their trajectory, arced up in the air like the fingers of an angry god, and if they had been programmed to see a heat source, they would adjust that trajectory slightly to drop right on it. Four of them followed the smoke and slammed into the pavement to the sides of the truck. The other four didn't.
They exploded as one, inches from the nanocomposite armor. The blast wave bent, then tore, the top of the truck's trailer open, exposing Nemesis to the orangish night as the smoke began to disperse behind the truck. The minigun was ripped from its housing, flipping end over end in midair, its ammo supply burning round by round like a detonation cord in an old cartoon.
"That's not good," the vigilante said. "Do you want me to do something about that tank?"
"What?" That was all Sarge had time for. He was busy trying not to panic, and trying to uplink the rear sensors to the anti-Boomer missiles.
"Open the doors, Sarge. Open them, now!"
He did, slapping a little button on the side of his seat. He heard the rear doors swing open, then a blaring, screeching sound. The rear sensors went mostly white as something shot out where the back doors were and blasted straight through the UFV, its ablative armor a glittering spray of motlen slag as the whole thing exploded.
Ah, yes. He'd forgotten that Nemesis kept a particle beam gun in the truck's armory. It was too big for him to wield effectively even with the heavy hardsuit on, but it was a handy thing to have in a pinch. "Good one," he said.
"Thanks. How much longer?"
"We're turning right about here," Sarge said, and then he threw the wheel hard to the left and engaged the parking brake.
The Revenger, the minigun mount still flaming, half of its trailer's roof a smoking wreck, cut nine streaks of burnt rubber across the entirety of the road as it turned down a side road, the trailer fishtailing about before straightening out onto the one-lane.
He could hear Nemesis stumble and swear in the back. Sarge smirked; Gavin had always said he was the best worst driver ever to walk the earth. He took it as a compliment, personally. He began to press down on the accelerator again-
Then stopped as something thumped beneath him.
What the hell? The forward sensors showed - ah, yes. That made sense. He'd wondered where the pack of Sabertooths had gone. Evidently they'd decided to take a side road. Clever girls.
Sarge hit the accelerator again, the Revenger roaring as it drove down the cobblestone street, tearing off LED signs as it went, its tires grinding against Boomerflesh.
Then one, then two, in the back of the pack, jumped forward, over their fallen comrades, landing squarely on the windshield. They clawed futiley at the transparent-alumina windshield before aiming their back laser guns at him.
He smacked another button on the dashboard, and armored shutters slammed down over the windshield. For three critical seconds, he was blind, and then emergency sensor nodes came online, showing him three Sabertooths dominating his field of vision, laser guns steadily firing into the armor. He had no idea how long they would last, and that terrified him. He had no defensive measures for the front, either. He kept the pedal down.
Then rounds whistled by his head from behind him. Nemesis's minigun. He could recognize the sound even blaring in his ears point-blank. The display flickered just as the three Boomers practically flew off the truck's cabin, torn apart in midair by hungry APEX rounds.
Sarge whooped. He could see again, even if he couldn't hear at all. Then he shut up, because he did not like what he saw.
It was the Tiandi Jian, alright. He'd taken the secondmost direct route to the golden pagoda, somehow. But what terrified him wasn't the restaurant, but what was in front of him.
It was like if a pride parade and a military parade had a baby.
Four truly massive UFVs painted ridiculously un-Russian colors stood side-by-side. Above them, the three remaining Firebees hovered at low altitude, Vulcan guns pointed squarely at the Revenger. In front of the UFV's, a mix of security Boomers and Triad hardmen in full body armor stood, LMG's and grenade launchers at the ready.
For a moment, the truck barreled forward unmolested. Sarge slammed down on the activation switch for the mortars.
Then, as one, both sides fired.
The mortars arced upward into the night, before coming back down on the roof of the Tiandi Jian's pagoda. The upper structure bent, shattered, and finally ignited in a burst of white-hot flame.
The anti-Boomer missiles weren't so lucky. Two of the UFV's fired their saturation rockets at the same time with short fuses, and the two streams of ordinance exploded against each other in midair.
But the Triads, the minicopters and the gaudily painted UFV's and the Sabertooths and, in the middle of it all, a handful of infantrymen with grenade launchers? They did just fine.
In fact, they hit the truck head on. Every last round.
The motor block lasted for all of three seconds before the lithium battery blew sky-high, a blue sun blasting away the truck around it. The wheels, already flaming, held out long enough to drive the truck straight into the line of fire. Slightly turned, they caused the truck to whip around just as emergency decouplers, which hadn't been used for years, activated, tearing the trailer loose from the doomed cabin, spinning end over end over end straight before it came to a stop at the feet of the frontline.
But the truck had too much momentum now, and it too flipped onto its side. Airbags slammed into Sarge's face and jerked him back and forth, before his neck snapped forward with an unseen impact.
And then the world cut to black.
____________________________________________________________________
9:42 pm
No.
No no no no no no no.
This wasn't happening. This couldn't be happening.
The Revenger? Fine, he could deal with losing it. He had other means of extraction, he'd just have to send something like the Venator out on autodrive and take it back. He'd been through worse in Houston and New York.
But Sarge? Sarge was in that cabin.
He was not going to lose another one. Not like this.
Nemesis dashed over to the cabin, didn't think about the people not shooting at him at that very moment, yanked the door off, and pulled Sarge out - or rather, what was left of him.
His right arm was gone, but it was a clean break, just right where the upper arm fitted into its socket. He was bleeding, a trickle, really, right on his forehead where he'd whacked into the steering wheel. And his legs - they were bent the wrong way in three different places. If he wasn't dead, he would be soon.
Nemesis laid him down on the asphalt, and turned to face the world.
More guns than he had imagined possible were pointing at him, most of sufficient caliber to tear his heavy hardsuit into little bits. His weapons were raised, ready to fire the moment his brain gave the signal, but what was the point? They had more guns.
The world seemed to smirk at him. He did not close his eyes, but looked up at the burning restaurant. At least he'd done one thing right.
And then:
"LADIES AND GEEEEENTLEMEN!"
What? That voice. Even under layers of modulation, he recognized it.
It was that crazy brunette.
McNichol's girlfriend.
"IT'S SHOOOOOOWWWWTIIIIIIIMEEEEE!"
Chapter 30: Back On Tour
- Location
- Megatokyo
Oh, damn, I forgot to reply to this.
Yeah, one of the things that I like about Sylia is the fact that her day-to-day identity is that of a lingerie shop owner - but she's funding a multibillion-yen crusade against the biggest corporation on the planet. It's tonal whiplash par excellence.
But if Lisa Vanette, of all insignificant people, was able to compromise a Saber's identity without much foreknowledge, just a camera, it makes you wonder how many people actually know about Sylia's big secret. I personally like the fanon that Quincy actually knows what she's up to, has known from the start - it's just that even as a Knight Saber, Sylia is more useful to him alive than dead. Granted, this puts me in the territory of some pretty old and pretty terrible fics - Bubblegum Crusade and No Armor Against Fate come to mind - but it's one of those answers to the anime's many mysteries that's so great because it opens up even more questions.
Oh, right, I have to post a chapter here or this'll be marked as spam. Okay, after four months in development, hopefully it'll be worth the wait.
_______________________________________________________________________
Knight Sabers Ready Room
February 12, 2036
9:17 pm
Sylia was already in her softsuit by the time Priss got downstairs. Wordlessly, she joined Linna and Nene in the scramble to strip and slip into her own, a sort of spandex-y bodysuit lined with neural sensors that seemed to tighten around her body like a second skin."Well?" she said, looking at Sylia.
"Triad comms and ADP scans just reported Nemesis struck Descent from Heaven Imports, a shipping business long believed to be a shell company for Triad smuggling. His next target is probably the Tiandi Jian. We're going to see what he does, and see if we can help."
"Wait, he's attacking the Sleeping Dragon's rivals now?"
Softsuits ready, Sylia looked away and punched in the loading sequence for the hardsuit cryocoffins. "Why should he discriminate among criminals? If they're all a threat to the city, they all must be dealt with."
Thin tendrils of vapor reached out from the cryocoffins mounted on the walls as they unsealed, then thrust the suspended hardsuits out like limp puppets on metal railings, feet locked into place on depressed pads. Then, the suits unsealed, one after another, helmets locked in front to their armored necks. Her fourth-gen, she noted, was pretty similar to her third-gen, lacking any obvious weapons, but with a bit more blue on her pressure-sensor fins, and streaks of red that looked - faster, somehow, compared to her third-gen's racing stripes, around her (cosmetic) eye-slits.
Oh, yeah, and it didn't have high heels. None of the suits did. She wasn't sure if that was an improvement or not.
A small ladder raised itself up beside each suit; that was the cue for the Knight Sabers to board. Priss clambered around to the back of her suit, dropped into it legs-first, then stuck her arms in, letting the suit fold itself back together - weird, she thought, as the helmet and neck sealed around her, it was more like the first generation's boarding pattern than the second or third.
Then she felt the difference, as eyecaps, little eyeball-sized screens, snaked out and grabbed onto her eyeballs. "What the-" she began to say, and then the world resolved itself into the image of the ready room she had seen so many times before, HUD overlay scrolling by as the suit rapidly tested its own systems. Then she felt the press of soft armor against her face, and she understood; a HUD faceplate could break, required too much empty space where the head could bang around, but eyecaps didn't. She still had room to breathe through her nose and mouth, though, but only a little. Chalk another one up to Sylia and Raven.
The checks completed, the restraints detached, and she was free. Priss crossed over to the opposite wall, punched in another sequence on another keypad, and smirked as the wall dropped away to reveal her combat modules - 'mods', she liked to call them. Sylia had already put red highlighting on her HUD around the one she was supposed to use, a pair of railguns that looked like jetpacks when in their inactive state. She popped them onto her shoulder mounts, and magnetic locking mechanisms secured them in place.
Then it was a quick jog from one end of the Sabers' underground base to the other, where they were to ride out.
She knew immediately which motoslave was supposed to be hers. It was the biggest one, the reddest one, the meanest-looking one, the one with two different styles of rifle-style cannons strapped to each side, the one which looked like the goddamn Highway Star. The rest didn't even matter. She hailed it with a thought, and its hyper-motor hummed high and even in response. Sylia called it Supercell; all the Motoslaves had been given distinct storm-themed names, just as each hardsuit had a blade-themed name. She still had no idea why Sylia insisted on elaborate designations. It was probably the same childish spirit that lead her to make a super-sentai squad with color-themed suits.
"We'll be bringing all four motoslaves with us," Sylia said to the team. "They're faster than the truck, and I'd rather not be caught underarmed again. Our objective is to assist Nemesis, to save his life if necessary. We will kill if we must. Understood?"
There were no objections. Maybe it was Priss's imagination, but Linna looked a little unsteady. She could just chalk it up to the new hardsuit fitting wrong, but she would be kidding herself. Linna wasn't ready to do what Sylia wanted.
Indeed, the Sabers' leader seemed to sense this, for she said, "Linna, it will be your duty to disable any heavy armor we encounter, render them non-threats. The others can take care of any Triad infantry. You don't have to kill."
"Um-"
"I know this is hard. I want to talk to all of you after we are done here. We have been sucked into something we never wanted to be a part of. But we are the Knight Sabers. We will not sit by and let our city burn around our ears."
"That's not what I wanted to say!" Linna squealed. She sounded especially childish to Priss's ears, but then again she was the odd woman out. Who wanted to be the one person who actually had a moral code? Especially in
this decadent day and age?
"Then what did you want to say?" Priss cut in.
"I wanted to say that-" she swallowed "that I'm committed. We're a team, and I'm not going to give that up for a bunch of criminals. I'll kill if I have to. I won't like it, but I'll do it. But only for tonight. After we bail this guy out, if he even needs help, we go back to fighting Boomers. I know Sato must have enough of an army to keep us busy just destroying machines."
"Fair. If I get the chance to talk with Nemesis, I'll try to arrange things that way. But enough talk." Sylia walked over to her motoslave, the Monsoon, and slung her leg over the fairing. "We have a city to save."
And then, those sacred words from Sylia's lips:
"Knight Sabers, GO!"
And they did.
____________________________________________________________________
District 23
February 12, 2036
9:43pm
Which brought her to looking down on a flaming truck from the roof of a nearby building, Nemesis cradling a broken body in his suit's massive arms, a small army pointing all its guns at the armored vigilante, and her screaming, external mics strained to the limit:
"LADIEEEEEEESSSSSSS AND GEEEEEEENTLEMEEEEEEEN! IT'S SHOOOOOOOWTIIIIIIIIMEEEEEEEE!"
The whole strike force - the ridiculously painted minitanks (or whatever they were), the kamikaze-pattern Firebees (she'd been wondering where those suckers ended up after the ADP stopped using them!) the swarming kitty Boomers (that was what her HUD had designated them as - goddammit Nene), the loose clusters of heavy infantry - all turned, over the span of about five seconds, to point their guns at her.
Which was just enough time for her to eject from Supercell, launch out the back of it, and watch as the Motoroid blasted into the air just as ordnance filled the space where she and it were supposed to be, firing its machinecannon in sweeping arcs. Its gun went buddabuddabuddabudda, 40mm grenades flew flew flew flew, and heavily armed combat troopers died died died died. She pinpointed a Firebee in midair, still wheeling above her, and fired a spike straight into its chassis before it could fire its minigun at Nemesis. It exploded, raining a loose cloud of shrapnel onto the gory chaos below.
In the meantime, the other Sabers began to act. The killbox the Triads and their allies had set up was just on one side of the Tiandi Jian, blocking off the road with barricades. They hadn't had much time to funnel Nemesis and his now-wrecked truck into their makeshift blockade, so it was easy enough for Linna and Nene's motoslaves to flank the gangs' ordinance and attack. Linna, encased in her Tornado motoslave entirely, darted in, ignited her oversized torchsaber, and casually slashed off the top of a UFV turret before it could turn and fire at her, then poked a few quick holes in the quasi-tank's body. Two Firebees ran bursts of gunfire towards Linna, but then they stopped and charged straight into one another. Their rotors locked together, and they plummeted to the ground. That was Nene at work, using her EW kit to fuck up the autopilot systems. Smart girl.
Priss flipped into the air just in time to dodge another stream of shells from another UFV. Unable to target, she just watched as Sylia's Monsoon Motoslave put a 30mm spike through the crippled UFV's body at some obscene velocity via sniper railgun. She followed up by grabbing one of her 60mm incendiary grenades from her thigh compartments, and hurling it at the ground below where a dark spot was growing underneath what was now little more than scrap. The fuel puddle exploded, and the minitank burned for a few moments before exploding as well. ERAD charges strapped to the side of the thing flew at wild angles before exploding as well, blowing claymore-sized holes in what little remained of the Triad infantry.
She rolled, dodged more ordnance from more tanks, and blindfired both of her railcannons. One spike tore through a big red faux-wood column, the plasma aerosheathe leaving a hole an order of magnitude larger than the spike itself. But the other spike drilled into the body of one of the tanks. ERAD armor triggered automatically, snapped the spike in half, but the sound of ping-ping-pinging suggested that some fragments had penetrated the cabin at least.
Okay. Fine. She turned to face the other two UFV's, railcannons primed and ready to fire. They didn't fire. Were they scared? Heh.
No, actually. What they were was panicking, because Nene's Tempest Motoslave, remotely guided, had just activated its focused-output Pulse-Strikers on them, crumpling the armor, ERAD plates detonating willy-nilly, until they weren't much more than compressed composite.
Well, in just a few seconds and probably a few thousand dollars of ammunition, they'd taken down the Triad's big blockade. And they hadn't even gotten serious. She turned to look at Nemesis.
His skullface looked more pissed than surprised, but she chalked that up to the fact that it was locked in a perpetual snarl. She had no idea what he was actually thinking under that helmet.
____________________________________________________________________
9:45 pm
Nemesis didn't know what to think.
Two minutes ago he'd been prepared to die. An ignoble death, but the death he deserved all the same. He had let Maria get to him, and instead of keeping his crusade in this city singularly focused he had tried to do too much at once. This was the world's way of punishing him for doing that, for doing everything else he did.
And then the weaklings he'd been hoping to teach had shown up, in what looked like undersized Powersuits but with those bizarre turbofan turbines on their backs, and they'd saved him, cutting down the Tiandi Jian's defense lines almost effortlessly. Without hesitating, even though the targets were humans. Something he thought they could never do.
Evidently the world was not without a sense of irony.
He looked at the blue hardsuit, the one where the voice of McNichol's girlfriend seemed to originate from. Behind her, the Tiandi Jian began to burn in earnest, and the top of the pagoda collapsed in on itself.
Shit. He was getting a comm request. With a glance at his HUD, he engaged his public frequency.
"I-" What could he possibly say? "I have to go." He hefted Sarge up. "Can you look after this man?"
He could hear shouting behind him in the restaurant.
"Of course,"the one with that cool, deep voice, probably the leader from last time, said. "He doesn't look to be in good shape, though. Does he require-"
"Whatever you can get him," Nemesis barked. "If he needs cybernetics, get them, make sure they're untraceable. Just make sure he doesn't die."
She sighed. "We can't make any guarantees, but we will do our best. What do you plan to do?"
He stood up. "My job."
He turned, faced the doors of the flaming Tiandi Jian, and prepared to run straight through them-
"Hold it!"
Another voice, same frequency. McNichol's girlfriend. "You almost died, and you're just gonna run into a burning building that could collapse on you at any second? What the fuck are we supposed to tell-" here she motioned to the near-corpse that he'd left on the ground "-this dude if you die? Oh, sorry, your boyfriend has a death wish, and we had to indulge him or else he would have lost his shit? Get the fuck back here and help us before the police arrive."
He turned back around. The Sabers were all out of those mecha, facing him as one. They looked almost - annoyed? It was hard to project emotions onto those helmets, but there was something about the way whatever material they were using for armor reflected the light of the fire that reminded him of an old girlfriend he'd had in the jungles. Something primal about the way women related to men.
"Well?"
"If I let targets go," he growled, "this strike will have been for nothing. I will not turn down my only chance to pry victory out of defeat. I have to go."
Their helmets turned to another; they were talking on a private frequency. Finally, White spoke up.
"I suppose you are right. Tell you what, Gavin. I'll let you go, but if you survive, there's someplace I'd like you to be, outside of your hardsuit."
A time and a place appeared in the bottom right of his HUD. He barely saw it, barely cared.
"Gavin. You…"
"What? You're not the only one with contacts. Don't tell me you're surprised."
"How much do you know?" His breath was coming faster, shallower. He stopped, sucked in air. "How much? How much? Why shouldn't I just end you right here?"
"First, I know enough. Second, because you're an honorable man. You don't kill innocents if you can help it. And if you do decide to kill me or one of the other Sabers, you will make an enemy of all Megatokyo, which, correct me if I'm wrong, would also defeat the purpose of your work here. We are on the same side. I simply wish to make that clear soon."
He checked the address. Lunchtime at the Golden Calf Steakhouse. Steak - the real stuff, not the textured single-celled protein mush - was expensive even in America. He'd only had it once.
"Why here?"
White shrugged. "It's a safe space. Also, the food's good."
Nemesis did not respond. How could he respond to something so casual?
"So I'll be dealing with the Triads on my own."
"If you want our help with that, we'd be willing to offer it." A lighter, younger voice - maybe the short pink one? "We've got good guns."
"No. This is my fight." And with that, he turned on his heel, remotely summoned the Venator for later, and lumbered off into the restaurant.
____________________________________________________________________
9:47 pm
He didn't even look at the lobby to take in its threats and weakpoints. He just opened up with his minigun.
Perhaps that was the best course of action. After all, the lobby's twin 5.56mm minigun turrets didn't even get a chance to open fire; they were still winding up their firing sequence when he came bursting through, and survived intact for all of half a second before 15mm APEX rounds struck their magazines and blew them to bits.
Meanwhile, the few Triads who had managed to slap on MetalGear plate armor and arm themselves with minimissile launchers barely had time to fire before his opening salvo effortlessly cut through their defenses. When it was all over, the lobby, which had not succumbed to the fire on the upper levels yet, was also on fire, as the APEX rounds burned their incendiary charges into the wood paneling. Sprinklers went on, but Nemesis paid them no heed.
He brought up the wireframe map of the restaurant, checking it with his visual feed. His target wasn't the upper floors, which were probably already filled with Triad ashes, but the lower ones, where the Suan Tou Fung's inner circle held court and holed up in safehouses when necessary. There were a few breaks in the wireframe, undoubtedly where the Triad bosses had underground escape passages if their safehouses weren't so safe. And, fortunately enough, this lobby had an entrance to the underground levels of the Tiandi Jian. Beneath his helmet, Nemesis smiled, and let loose a cluster of dumbfire rockets at the reception desk.
One after another, the rockets detonated, obliterating the desk and the concealed reinforced steel door behind it. Sprinklers triggered. When the smoke cleared, Nemesis had a clear shot of what appeared to be a cargo elevator shaft, right where the wireframe said there would be one. Perfect. He clomped over to the shaft, fired a short burst where it looked like the elevator cables were, and listened intently for the sound of the dropping platform. He didn't hear it, which meant that anyone on the top floors when the mortars hit had already got to the bottom. They probably had already set up an ambush there, some last-ditch measure to pin him down as he jetted to the bottom of the shaft. Claymores, maybe. It was what he would do if he was in charge.
How many floors were there to the bottom of the shaft? Two floors, both probably with reinforced floors and ceilings. Enough that even his railgun wouldn't penetrate. And he didn't have time to wade into the flaming restaurant and figure out where an alternate route was.
But he could, at the very least, see what he was up against.
Nemesis pulled the wreckage of one of the turrets out of its emplacement, and threw it down the open shaft. Three seconds later, there was a roaring sound, and his HUD tracked about sixty different small objects filling up the shaft at high velocity. Then there was some shouting in Cantonese.
Okay. So they'd put claymores in the shaft. And he'd just detonated them. Had he jumped in there, even with his armor stopping most of the rounds, at least a few would have hit the same place at once, or hit his lightly armored neck. And he would have been very dead.
He did not have any time for feeling clever, though, because then the shaft filled up with hot smoke and the sound of ricocheting rounds. Evidently the Triads hadn't planned for what came after this. Their mistake.
Nemesis jetted out into the shaft, fired his thrusters to raise him up a floor, then manually cut his thrusters' impact-compensation routines. Blindfiring his minigun at the bottom of the shaft, he slammed into, then through the platform, crushing a few Triad soldiers before they had time to move out of the way. As the elevator crunched out of place around him, Nemesis scrambled up the bent crater of his own making, through the smoke, heavy AR rounds shattering against his armor. The elevator fell just as he scrambled out of the shaft, swiping in short motions with his vibroblade, and long motions wherever his blade met armor or flesh.
Admittedly, close-range combat wasn't his preferred mode of engagement, especially when he was in such a large suit. His HUD's motion tracker picked up something to his left, he swung his arm in a wide arc, and his elbow caught on something that made a wet snapping sound. Powersuit operators specialized, in the same way infantry squads did. He'd specialized in long-range engagements, the kind where you didn't let the UA close enough to whip out monoblades and start carving through your very expensive armor. Then, he brought his arm forward to punch a hardman he could actually see, a dude with a short beard who crumpled the moment his armored fist made contact with his ribs. It was how the conquistadors fought the Aztecs, despite being so hopelessly outnumbered - using cavalry, spears, and guns to engage at range, just out of a macuahutlil's reach, not stooping down to the level of swordplay. The smoke was beginning to clear, so Nemesis swapped mags for his railgun, jetted out into the hallway, then whirled around and fired an antipersonnel round straight into the melee that he had just been the center of.
His antipersonnel rounds could still punch through armor like a railround was supposed to. The depleted uranium composition saw to that. But the rounds were also riddled with copper impurities, which would expand in flight and break the 30mm round into smaller fragments still travelling at high velocities, not unlike a flak shell. Needless to say, the little blockade, or rather what was left of it, was shortly turned into human-flavored hamburger.
Nemesis didn't even bother to check to see if they were all dead. Instead, he turned around-
And, for the second time that night, got a fist full of cermet composite in the face for his trouble.
His HUD went wild, his faceplate cracked just a little, and he staggered back just as another blow went whistling by his head, followed by a spiked knee to his crotch. He grimaced and threw a wild haymaker, which missed, but bought him enough time to look at his attacker.
It was a Boomeroid, alright. Or maybe it was a custom-built Boomer; either way, it didn't look like one of the usual C-55. One whatever-it-was with fucking reverse chainsaw-bladed-tonfas on its forearms, which then flipped into place and began to growl. Nemesis ducked under one swipe, then another, then tried to slip inside the thing's guard for a grab - or tried to, anyway, but being encased in an oversized hardsuit meant his bulk got in the way, and the Boomer(oid) was able to grab him by the shoulder, hold him steady for a moment, then bring one of its chainblades screaming down on his head.
Nemesis blocked the strike by raising his arm, vibroblade popping out of its sheath and vibrating so fast it looked less like a blade and more like a silvery beam of light in the dim corridor. For a brief moment, the whirling spikes of the chainblade snagged, then began to snap off as his attacker upped the speed of his own weapon. Nemesis reached out with his other arm, grabbing the joint of his opponent's arm, and squeezed. Composite began to bend, then fracture, and a quick shake tore the thing's forearm loose. Not off, but loose and dangling from torn myomer was enough to make the thing make a low canine sound, an idiotic whimper.
Then his vibroblade snapped, the front few centimeters of the weapon breaking off, whirling off until it embedded itself in the side wall. Suddenly, what little remained of the chainblade slammed into his helmet and began to dig in. It was snagged on his armor, yes, but he didn't want to damage his faceplate any further. In seconds it would be digging into his skull.
So he fired his minigun. Point blank.
Even with audio compensators kicking in, the roar of the APEX rounds detonating in the ceiling was overwhelming. The Boomeroid staggered back as concrete dust and fragments rained down on it, then screamed as Nemesis grabbed its other arm by both hands and threw the monster off him.
It got up almost immediately, but it was too late. One antipersonnel railgun shot and it wasn't much more than a scattering of plastic, translucent oily fluid, and - yes - blood. So it was a Boomeroid after all.
____________________________________________________________________
"Should we go after him?"
"And violate his trust?"
"I mean, if the restaurant collapses on him…"
"Do you think that will happen anytime soon?"
Priss looked up. The entire restaurant was on fire now, with half of its upper floors collapsed into its lower ones. Nene had estimated that the ADP and the fire department would be there in five minutes, provided the syndicates didn't give them any trouble.
"Yeah. I kinda do."
"Our more immediate priority is getting this man medical care," Sylia said. "I've got the truck coming to us on autodrive, and it should be here about… Now."
The truck pulled into what was left of the plaza; it had taken a subterranean superhighway only automated vehicles were allowed to use. The back door opened, and Sylia hefted the dying man up in a fireman's carry, trotted over to the rear of the truck, and heaved him into the truck's lone human-shaped cryocoffin. All this took about another minute.
"Uh, guys?" Nene said, on watch in her Tempest. "I hate to break it to you, but I've got backdoor feeds on ADP aerodynes coming in hot. I don't think they'll be happy to see us, especially considering the context."
"We're seriously just going to leave Nemesis here, without a way home?" For her part, Priss couldn't believe she was defending the crazy bastard, but…
"I don't think that'll be a problem. Nene, check those feeds for something unmanned."
"Okay, but - wow. Huh. That's a big one."
"A big what, Nene?" Linna said?
"Motorcycle. Got some kind of cannon on it. It's almost as big as Supercell."
"Almost?"
"Almost."
____________________________________________________________________
His HUD still flashing warnings, his helmet scarred, Nemesis clomped down the corridor, following the wireframe map to the center of the underground bunker, with all the grace and poise a quarter-kiloton mech suit could provide. Which was to say, not a whole lot.
Soon, he came to a part of the bunker which actually had tiled floors and painted walls. He didn't see anyone else there. Evidently the security detail had fallen back. He switched on his thermal vision and began following some signs that looked somewhat important. Soon, he saw them. Eight figures hunched behind what looked like regular drywall, but which a quick scan told him was reinforced concrete. Three cooler signatures, female shaped. Bodyguard Boomers.
He raised his railgun arm, swapped mags, and unloaded all eight shots of armor-piercing spikes straight into the wall. The first two drilled through while cracking the concrete, sending the warmer figures scrambling for the rear of the room, while the Boomers moved towards him. He targeted them individually, almost on instinct. Watched them collapse. Watched the wall get weaker and weaker.
He reloaded more spikes. Fired again, again, again. He was going to complete his mission. It was a stupid mission, one he had made because he was stupid, but he was going to complete his mission.
Now the wall was a mess of rebar with little chunks of concrete in between them, with a massive hole drilled clean through the plating behind it. Nemesis sunk his hands into it, and began to pull.
When he had a clear shot, he stuck his head through, Jack Nicholson-like. The room was barebones, covered with pools of orange fluid from the Boomers, and eight old men huddled in the corner.
Nothing was said.
Nothing needed to be said.
He stuck his railgun arm through, loaded an antipersonnel mag, and emptied it.
He left the way he came. The Venator was waiting.
And, hopefully, so was Sarge.
____________________________________________________________________
Chang Residence, San Francisco
February 12, 2036
2:13 pm
Dr. Chang wasn't dead yet, but there were days when he felt like he was.
It wasn't anyone's fault. For all the medical marvels that science had come up with over the eighty-seven years of his life, all the diseases that the First World had cured out of existence, they had never figured out how to make man become young again.
Oh, they'd pioneered little innovations here and there. Rewinding telomeres, major organ replacements, a half dozen treatments he had personally funded. And for the young, they worked well enough, slowed the steady ticking of the biological clock to an inching crawl.
But they could not rewind that same clock. His bones became brittle, his skin sagged, his eyes clouded over, his neurons slowed down. And he could do nothing about it. Again, it wasn't anyone's fault. But until he died, the responsibilities of being the Chief Elder of the Hou Bang syndicate fell on his shoulders.
He enjoyed those responsibilities less and less as the years passed, worried more and more about who would replace him. Both of his daughters were - perhaps weak was the wrong word, but he could think of no other one. Irene had run away, and she was dead. Reika, after nearly three years since her attempt on Quincy's life, was still a major singer. An accomplished one, yes, but not playing a role that would prepare her to live as he did. He had begun to designate more and more minor tasks to worthy lieutenants, nice boys who wouldn't get the wrong idea but would do their work all the same.
Which was why, when the phone rang, Dr. Chang was settling down for an afternoon nap. The curtains were drawn, there was almost no light, and yet the phone still rang. For a moment he was annoyed - did people not know he was essentially unavailable from two till four? Did he not have underlings in the chain of command to which the call could go? What was so pressing that they would see fit to call him, personally? He rolled over and checked the number; it was from Japan.
Ah. That made sense. He motioned to one of his bodyguards, and the man picked up the receiver and put it to his ear.
"This is Dr. Chang."
The voice on the end was tinny and garbled, but still audible. "Master Chang," the voice, a middle-aged female, said. "I humbly regret to inform you that Representative Wei Shen has joined his ancestors."
What. No. Impossible. Chee would not stoop so low as to insult the Hou Bang in this way. The Suan-Tou-Fung was a sizeable operation, but it was miniscule compared to the Pacific-spanning power he possessed. Something else had happened. "May I ask who carried out this grievous deed?"
"Master Chang, we of the Suan-Tou-Fung believe it to be the work of Nemesis. He set fire to the Tiandi Jian, and then proceeded to kill all members of both our organizations within. In addition, the Knight Sabers rescued him at a time when we were certain we could kill him, and proceeded to dismantle the strike force made up of ourselves and our allies with grisly precision. Many lives have been lost today. However, my son is unharmed."
He laughed at that. Of course Chee was in his penthouse in Shinjuku, surrounded by weak-willed women, unable to command his forces. "So, this is Yi Lee Chee, correct?"
"I am she. I am honored you remember my insignificant self, Master Chang."
"I see."
Nemesis. He'd thought the vigilante to only pose a minimal threat to his operations. He'd dismantled several criminal organizations the Hou Bang supported stateside, but had never made the link between the Chang's legitimate enterprises and their support for illegitimate ones. Few Americans ever did. And when Nemesis had announced his presence in Megatokyo with the sinking of the Akagi Maru, he had felt some small amount of joy. At long last, Shichiki Sato, ever the thorn in his side, would be gone for good. And when the Suan-Tou-Fung had requested heavy weapons, he'd been more than happy to oblige them, and had sent Wei Shen from Taiwan to strike a deal. What was the harm, he had figured?
What a fool he'd been, to think Nemesis would not discriminate among his targets. He was getting rusty in his old age.
"Do you believe that Nemesis will strike your assets again?"
"We are unsure, Master Chang. It has not been but an hour since he slaughtered much of our inner circle. Perhaps he thinks that we are no longer a threat, perhaps he will finish us off after Sato is dead. I am unsure."
"It would be unwise to assume you are safe. Connect me to your son. I will deal with him personally."
"As you command, Master Chang."
He waited, listened for the clicking of the line transfer. Strangely enough, Dr. Chang found himself looking forward to wringing out the little fucker.
The line went over, and the first thing he heard was Chee screaming in the distance:
"-goddamn right I want insurance! I just got my ass attacked by the worst terrorist in the history of anything ever! No, don't you try to chalk this one up to an act of god you son of a bitch! I know the paperwork - ah fuck it. Hello?"
"JAMES." He let the word drip with menace, dragged it out as best as he could, in the deepest voice he could muster without going into a coughing fit. "Do you know who this is?"
"Um."
"I take it you do not. This is Dr. Chang."
"Oh." Silence. Good. "Do you know why I am calling you?"
"I'm afraid not, Dr. Chang."
"Then, James, you are even stupider than I thought. This is about the matter regarding my representative, Mister Shen."
"Oh. Yeah, about that-"
"I know he is dead. Your mother filled me in. My heart goes out to you in your period of mourning. Undoubtedly there will be more deaths, as I am given to understand. I expect you to shoulder those burdens with grace."
"How much did she tell you?"
"That you have lost much at the hands of Nemesis, and lost a little at the hands of the Knight Sabers." The last part was especially concerning. Had they knowingly aided in his assassination of his representative? Had they known that the Hou Bang was a proud trading partner of his? Had they cared?
It was not that he feared the Knight Sabers. But one of their members had been kind to both his grandchildren. It would be a shame if he had to destroy that woman.
"Yeah, no shit. Wiped out my Sabertooth Boomers, destroyed a whole bunch of Russian UFV's, and burned my nice restaurant to the ground. We put up our best defenses and they blew right through them. That skullfaced cocksucker's gonna pay for this shit, I promise you."
"I do not doubt that you are sincere, James. I only doubt your capability to carry through on that promise."
"What? Look, I've got forces searching for Nemesis and his whores right now, and they will scour this city if that's what it takes-"
"Of course. But in the coming war, against the Sleeping Dragon, Nemesis, the Knight Sabers, and eventually your own allies, I do not believe you are sufficiently equipped. Thus, I will send another representative of the Hou Bang, along with heavy equipment. You will treat them as you would treat me."
He could hear Chee's anger, his fear, build."Oh, no, there's no need. I'm good. I don't need anything right now. In fact, I insist. You're under no obligation to help me out."
"I agree. I am under no obligation to aid you, James. But I am under an obligation to avenge the death of one of my representatives, and to stabilize Megatokyo's underworld before more lives are lost. Therefore, I will be sending a representative, along with forces."
"Oh no. Oh no no no. I'm telling you right here, right now, I don't need-"
"I am not asking you, James. I am telling you."
"Yeah, well-"
"Since you have proven unable to lead your forces, my representative will assume direct control of both your forces and those of the other syndicates. Together, we will destroy your enemies, and assume control of Megatokyo's underworld so nothing like this ever happens again. That is all. Do I make myself clear?"
It took awhile. Then, when he thought Chee had hung up, he finally got a choked, "Yes, sir."
"Good. My representative will arrive at a private airstrip near the spaceport some time tomorrow. You know which one it is. Go there tomorrow and wait."
"Yes, sir."
And with that, Dr. Chang hung up.
Who to send? Who was capable of marshaling victory in this little shadow war he had just decided to involve himself in? He knew exactly who. He motioned to his bodyguard.
"Dial my granddaughter for me," he said. "Playtime is over. She is going to Megatokyo."
_______________________________________________________________________
Yeah, yeah. I keep on underestimating how long it'll take me to hack out new chapters. Sorry about that. I had stuff to do. If you want all the angst, you can read my notes at the end of this chapter on AO3. If you like the fic, leave a reply. If you don't like it, leave a reply and tell me why. Anything helps at this point, folks.
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- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
I have to wonder what the ADP and Genom are doing during all of this.
Nice chapter, I'm amused that Sylia's fashion designer hobby is still showing though. With her trying to decide if removing the high heels is good, as her engineer self says 'yes', but her fashion designer self says 'no'. Yes, the woman who runs a multi-billion yen operation has a hobby/obsession that not only does she run a lingerie business, but it heavily influences her power suit designs.
Followed by her sentai obsession having her spend time to design custom bikes (in addition to suits) for her team. That she has the mind to absently do what would cost billions of yen for other organizations to do, just for her sentai obsession.
On the combat side, this really shows that everyone in the team is a natural in combat, with the combined efficiency of a Spec Ops team (which given they do this as a night job is slightly horrifying). Made worse because of Sylia's sentai obsession means that each one is designed to cover the others' weakness.
Followed by her sentai obsession having her spend time to design custom bikes (in addition to suits) for her team. That she has the mind to absently do what would cost billions of yen for other organizations to do, just for her sentai obsession.
On the combat side, this really shows that everyone in the team is a natural in combat, with the combined efficiency of a Spec Ops team (which given they do this as a night job is slightly horrifying). Made worse because of Sylia's sentai obsession means that each one is designed to cover the others' weakness.
- Location
- Megatokyo
Good questions both.
GENOM - well, they have a plan. This whole 'gang war' thing isn't just something they're going to sit by and allow in their model city. They've had their fingers in the pie from the start.
The ADP - urgh. Figuring out what to do with that particular plot thread has been the source of many headaches. Obviously at some point they have to stop running around putting out fires started by everyone else Yakety Sax-style. I set up their prospects way back in Chapter 27, what with the chief laying out their new agenda (hence the title 'Under New Management'), but I never got around to giving Leon and Daley a chance to do anything about it.
Also, I wanted to work good ol' Kate Madigan in there somewhere.
So, uh, next chapter might come in the next few days before break's over? I won't make any promises, but I've got like 2/3rds of it done, and the last 3rd should probably be ADP-related.
I think it's more the hardsuits that are doing the 'natural in combat' work. In particular, where the Sabers took awhile to fight Miriam's Boomers during Scoop Chase with the second-gen hardsuits, they absolutely whooped the Illegal Army's ass in Bubblegum Crash with the third-gens. So fourth-gen hardsuits, plus the custom Motoslaves from the BGC RPG? Yeah. The powercreep is real.
But Sylia is a very driven person. I imagine her super-sentai obsession, her ability to legitimately say that her goal is to 'protect truth and justice, and to rid the world of evil' without smirking covers up the fact that she's basically her father's revenge stuffed into a human body, a meat-machine whose only purpose in life is to fulfill those last wishes that were hardwired into her brain. Painting that grim interior with a bit of four-color superheroic eccentricity almost makes her seem human, hm?
Keep in mind, too, that a bunch of minicopters and some shitty Russian minitanks are just the beginning of the Sabers' troubles. If you read Reed's original work, you might recall that Sato has four - Four! - tank-hunter 12B's guarding his residence. So I'll do my best to make the next few fight scenes a bit less steamroll-y.
Chapter 31: Good Advice
- Location
- Megatokyo
District 23
February 12, 2036
10:22 pm
"Well," Leon said, gazing at the smoldering remains of the building that had once dominated Chinatown's skyline, "Fuck."
The fire department arrived not long after the ADP, and its Firefighting Boomers had immediately set to work spraying the entire building with anaerobic cryo-foam. They made a token effort to rescue whoever was inside, saw the slaughter Nemesis had wrought in the lobby, and pressed on, even as the building collapsed around them. Boomers were persistent like that.
They were still dragging bodies out of the wreckage, nothing but Triads. Leon was waiting to see when they finally dragged someone unidentified out.
Because that would be the moment, wouldn't it? When Nemesis had finally killed an innocent.
It was a miracle nobody drowned in the Underbelly. The press certainly was treating it like one, calling GENOM's response time 'unprecedented' and their actions 'heroic'. Even the media outlets that weren't GENOM-owned were fawning over the megacorporation.
For his part, Leon wondered how they'd figured out so damn fast that the ADP and the Coast Guard weren't going to help. There was a good chance the chief had prevented them from doing anything just so GENOM could swoop in and save the day, he figured. It would be just like him to be used in such a way, and would probably push the ruling party towards further privatization or automation of public services. Typical creepy bullshit.
But still, it had been so close, hadn't it? If GENOM hadn't done something people would have gone down with the Underbelly. Hell, they probably fudged the statistics to make it look like people hadn't gone down with that damn thing. Maybe Nemesis had already killed innocents. Maybe that gave the ADP license to pursue him to the fullest extent of the law.
Which was what he wanted to do, make no mistake. There was an order to things, an ecosystem, in Megatokyo, one even the Knight Sabers were a part of. Nemesis had taken one good look at that order and decided it wasn't for him.
So here he was, fumbling with his sunglasses, trying to decide whether he wanted them on or off. GENOM's head of internal security hadn't shown up to their supposed meeting, which meant he'd wasted his afternoon instead of talking to Jeena Malso, MALCORP's head of security in Japan, like he'd intended.
Daley stood beside him, his back to their Roadchaser, and watched.
"You know," Daley said, "if anyone alive comes out of this, we could probably use them to get Jimmy Chee."
"Chee?" Leon grumbled. "Where is that obnoxious creep, anyway?"
"Reports from the locals say he showed up, yelled at some people, then got a phone call and left. He's probably at his penthouse right now."
"Mm." A thought occurred to him. "We could take him into custody. Say it's witness protection against Nemesis. See what that does to Triad organization."
"If we did that, why not just take Sato into custody under the pretense it's for his own protection?"
"Heh. True. I guess we'd need a warrant. And the chief's approval."
"Good luck getting either, yeah?"
Neither met the other's sight. Leon's gaze swept over the wreckage of what had once been a fierce blockade in front of the Tiandi Jian.
"So," he said. "I guess this means we have to go after the Sabers, too."
He hated himself for saying that. The words just came out.
"How do you figure that?" Daley said.
"They bailed Nemesis out, right? They're working with him now, might have been working with him before. So if we're going after Nemesis…"
"Who says we're going after Nemesis? We hoped to prevent a gang war by getting him and we pretty explicitly failed to do that, right? Netting him won't stop the war. Netting Chee or Sato might."
Leon glowered under his shades. "Shit, man. I guess you're right. We never went after the Sabers for blowing up Boomers, why stop Nemesis when he kills dozens of people we wanted to arrest anyway?"
"Ah, but you'll be going after the Sabers soon enough, won't you?"
"Nah, not after - wait, what?"
Daley looked at Leon. "I didn't say anything. Who was that."
"That would be me."
They both turned around, slowly, unbelieving.
There was a car, low-slung, silver, looked like speed itself. Next to that car was a woman in business dress, with long lavender hair. Her face was angular, beautiful, predatory. She was smiling a small little smile.
Leon gaped. He knew her. Well, they'd never spoken, but-
"You-" he started. "Aren't you supposed to be dead? Last I recall, you were lying facedown in a pool of your own blood after Largo. I mean-"
"That was '32. This is now."
She bowed low. "Katherine Madigan. Head of Internal Security for General Nippon Organic Manufacturing. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inspectors."
And with that, she crossed over to their Roadchaser, her pumps clacking on the asphalt, and leaned up against it. She withdrew a cigarette and a lighter from her jacket pocket, lit it, sucked in a breath full of smoke. "Rough night for you two gentlemen?"
"Oh, you bet it-"
Daley cut him off with a hand. "It sure was. The Nemesis case is wearing us down to the bone, and we were supposed to meet you this afternoon, if I recall correctly. So you'll forgive us if my dear friend Inspector Leon is a little surprised."
"My apologies," she said, before blowing out a long torrent of smoke between her little red lips. "The head of our private equity division required my help to finalize the acquisition of Samsung. Quite fascinating stuff, but it took up most of my evening."
"Oh," Daley said. "Samsung? Holy shit. Like, their electronics division?"
"No. Samsung."
"Like, all of it?"
"Yes." Her smile grew. "All of it."
Leon leaned back against the Roadchaser and tried not to scream.
"Well," he said at last, "I'm glad you could take the time out of your day to meet us, but we're a little busy-"
"Doing what?" Madigan said.
"Cop stuff. You wouldn't understand."
"Really." She took another puff on her cigarette, and let the smoke drift between her expertly manicured nails. Her Japanese was flawless, with just a slight hint of a lilting Irish accent. "I recall you were grousing about your inability to catch Nemesis."
"Well, yes, that is true. I mean-"
"I can change that."
She said it so suddenly, and shut her mouth so suddenly after that, that Leon wasn't even sure he'd heard it properly. "I'm sorry?"
"Your inability to catch Nemesis. Your inability to stop this gang war. Your inability to do anything about the Knight Sabers. I can change that."
Oh. Oh shit. "I mean, do you want to go look over the HQ like you planned, or-"
"Already did. It was depressing."
"Hey-"
"I mean, every defense you had in there was nonlethal. Even the turrets had gel rounds in them. That is not an acceptable standard of security. Our Green-level facilities, our lowest level of security, have more ways to kill invaders than your headquarters."
She smirked. "No wonder you almost lost it in '33."
"Fuck you," Leon hissed. The words came out moments before he realized who he was talking to. But on some level he didn't care. "The guy who did that was your employee, okay? So you don't get to talk about that incident. Unless, of course, you're bitter that you lost a good mad scientist."
She shrugged. "Of course we do not condone the actions of a madman like Doctor Miriam. It's simply remarkable you couldn't hold back a four-Boomer assault on what is supposed to be highly secure facilities. Modified labor-grade Boomers, to boot. What might happen if a combat class went rampant within your facilities? What would you do then?"
"Are you threatening me?"
"I'm simply making an observation. If the AD Police cannot protect itself, how can it protect Megatokyo?"
For his part, Daley had shrunk back between Madigan and Leon. "I mean," he said, "I think this is hardly the time or place to have an argument about-"
"We'd do just fine if you fuckers stopped getting the city council to cut our budget every year. Let us buy actual military equipment from suppliers who actually give a shit."
"Like MALCORP?"
Leon boggled at that for a moment, then doubled down. "Yeah. From MALCORP. Not from whatever puppet zaibatsus we buy from now. From people who actually want us to succeed in our stated mission."
Madigan sighed. "I heard you were working with them for a period of time. Quite an interesting incident, that. Your chief knows nothing about what went on there, does he?"
"Okay, see, now you're threatening me." He turned to her and pointed his big meaty pointer finger at her. "You really wanna pick a fight with a cop? You really wanna go there, bitch?"
Madigan took another puff from her cigarette. "I see. Perhaps I'm not being candid enough, Inspector McNichol. Allow me to lay my cards out on the table: You work for me now."
Daley and Leon both flinched at the way her head swiveled to glare at them. "Whoah, there," Daley said. "I think that's taking it a bit too far."
"Oh," she purred, "but it isn't, Inspector Wong. I have been assigned to revitalize the AD Police to ensure my superior's business interests remain undamaged. You must understand, Megatokyo is our flagship development. Everything that happens in it sets a precedent in the other major urban areas we are currently revitalizing. In other words, your inability to neutralize criminal threats reflects very, very badly on GENOM, the engine of this nation's continued prosperity. Do I make myself clear?"
She was at least a head shorter than him, Leon thought, even in those high heels. He so badly wanted to grab her by the neck and give her a quick shake. But that - well, if she meant it, GENOM could destroy him without trying very hard. Leon McNichol was many things, but he wasn't ready to be a martyr.
"Therefore," Madigan continued, cigarette all but burned out between her two fingers, "I have been authorized by Chief Omura to have free reign over the AD Police. That includes you. If you do not like that, you may leave the agency and work for MALCORP. I cannot guarantee they will be financially solvent for much longer, though, especially if you make that decision."
"In any case, it's in your best interests to do as I say. I have no intention to destroy you provided you are compliant. If anything, I believe I can rejuvenate your public image, provide you with needed equipment, make the ADP a generally more effective public agency. All things you have wanted for a long time but have been unable to get. All things you can have now."
Well. Shit. Those were things he wanted. Just to restore the police's dignity in the face of everything would be more than enough.
He didn't trust Madigan, of course. GENOM always had a secondary agenda, and that agenda was probably to turn the whole department into a gang of bootlickers. He was still going to meet with Jeena and see what he could get from them. Play both sides. But for now…
"Fine," Leon groused. "So where do we start."
She smiled. "Wonderful!" she said. "I'm so glad you've seen reason. We start by restoring order to this city."
She tossed her cigarette butt to the ground, and ground it into the asphalt with the tip of her right heel.
"We start with Nemesis, and we start with the Knight Sabers."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shichiki Sato's Residence, District 4
February 13, 2036
9:17 am
The Oyabun of the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza, one of the most powerful men in Megatokyo, did not sleep last night. He got out of bed at three in the morning, wandered around his compound for a few hours, then gave up and had breakfast around six-thirty, just as the sun rose.
He knew that the old Mafia dons, before they'd fallen to newer, more advanced species of criminal, ate big, fancy breakfasts in the Italian style. Whether that was from some don he'd actually met, in his childhood back in the nineties, or just some Scorsese movie he'd watched eons ago, he no longer cared to remember. All Shichiki Sato knew was that he had no intention of going out like Tony Soprano. So his breakfast was a sparse affair.
He made a point of preparing it himself, too. Let his cooks and maids handle everything else, all the invisible functions of handling his sprawling not-quite-palace on the outskirts of the city, but goddamn it, he wasn't going to forget how to work a fucking coffee machine. Rice, ImpossiBacon, eggs, and the strongest coffee he could buy. The real stuff, too, a spliced Arabica bean kept alive in a handful of exotic-foodstuff greenhouses in Okinawa (apparently he shared tastes with a USSD general or two) while the cloud forests were levelled and stripmined for whatever prospectors thought was in them.
(He'd been to Ethiopia, once, to provide some guidance to an operation in Addis Ababa to corner the shipbreaking market against third-rate Pakistani syndicates. He never once thought about going back again. Not ever.)
And so, as the sun rose over Megatokyo once again, Shichiki Sato sat in his office, tried his best not to grind his teeth, and waited as the caffeine high drained out of his body and into his bladder.
It was the news about the Tiandi Jian that had kept him up last night. It wasn't that he had any pity for Jimmy Chee or his grandparents. Pity for the swarms of Cantonese that had invaded the Japanese motherland, hoping to swamp it with their gaudy traditions and seemingly endless families? Please. At first, seeing it on the news, he had been glad. It was payback for the attacks on his businesses by his rivals, done by his new archenemy.
And then the newscaster had said the Knight Sabers were involved. And he broke out into a cold sweat.
Sato generally kept away from the Knight Sabers. In fact, he generally kept women away from his organization in general, but that was another matter entirely. Way back in early '33, after that SuperBoomer had levelled half the city with the particle beam satellites, he'd made inquiries into the nature of their operation, hoping to outline the shape of the machine that made their super-sentai antics possible. He had found a considerable network of bribed officials, some who were on his payroll to boot, freelance intelligence gatherers, supposedly abandoned pieces of real estate owned by a galaxy of shell companies, and smuggled microfabrication equipment - and no names. Not so much as a hint of which megacorp or eccentric actually controlled these supposed "heroes of justice".
And you know what? He was fine with that. Let them slow down GENOM's total takeover of this city, for the Sleeping Dragon thrived in the spaces where the quake had taken everything but GENOM hadn't given everything back quite yet. Let them save the city from Boomer riots, for the Sleeping Dragon made quite a significant sum of money just from scrapping and recycling Boomers for the grey market, especially when the rich got rid of their personal robo-butlers in droves out of fear. Let them keep this city's status quo safe, for he quite liked the status quo.
God forbid, he'd always said, they took their jobs seriously and went after him. He would win, or so he'd said in the past.
Now, though, he wasn't quite sure.
He'd thought his squad of mercenaries invincible, until they had been wiped out. He'd thought the Underbelly impregnable, until suddenly it wasn't. He'd thought the other gangs would work against him as well as each other if he showed weakness, but then they'd formed a temporary alliance. He thought that Nemesis was after him and him alone, and then the Tiandi Jian had burned. He'd thought the Knight Sabers would focus on Boomer rampages and fighting GENOM, and then they'd showed up in Chinatown.
He could no longer afford to assume things would go his way.
Especially once the ADP had ID'd the bodies in that safehouse.
Especially since he'd heard that one of the bodies was that of Wei Shen of the Hou Bang.
Fuck. Just thinking about the Chang's mega-triad and what they could do to his operations made him ill. Nevermind that the target for their inevitable revenge would be Nemesis, his own enemy. Their retaliation would be so massive, so total, that even his organization would have no hope of surviving. They would swallow him, and all of Megatokyo's underworld, whole. Of that, he had little doubt. Then they would move on to fight with GENOM, perhaps, they had been itching for that fight for a generation now, and who could say how that would turn out? What would the Japanese people lose when two arch-gods - one corporate, one criminal - chose their island as their battleground?
His only hope now was another show of strength. Find Nemesis, destroy him and whoever was backing him. Destroy the Knight Sabers if necessary. Wipe out the syndicates who thought they could intrude on his property. Not just force them to the bargaining table. Force them out of Megatokyo entirely.
That was his grand plan, formulated over nine long hours of no sleep. The tactics, he would leave to men like Satoru and Ichitaro. Good men. Men he trusted not to stab him in the back. Men who knew better than to make the situation worse.
Not, for example, the pernicious little shit who had just walked in his office without so much as an appointment, Hiroshi Kabegawa.
"Sir!" He shouted. "I bring good news."
The man, barely into his twenties, looked every bit a data-otaku. Fat, unkempt, smelling oily, if it was really possible for a human to smell that way. The kind of person he kept on the payroll because of his talents. The kind of person who could never be allowed to rise a single rank in his organization.
Sato gritted his teeth, aware of how un-menacing the looming purple bags under his eyelids made him look. "What," he grumbled, "Is it." Then, just to remind the man of his insignificance, he added, "Kabe-kun."
If the otaku was annoyed by that term of un-endearment, he didn't show it. Instead he said, "I have been working on an important piece of information in the secondary communications center, sir. I believe it is of some interest to our operations."
Kami preserve him. What had this worm figured out? How to rig fantasy football games in favor of their own brokers? "And that is?"
"The location of Nemesis's hideout, sir."
On one level Sato knew that such information should have had him whooping for joy, but on another level he hadn't quite processed the information. He didn't trust it. So he said, "Alright. Lay out, in excruciating detail, how you came to this conclusion."
"Well, sir, you recall that Nemesis lost a great deal of equipment during his most recent excursion? The truck and whatever was on it were taken into ADP custody, but-"
"Yes. One of the men I have within the police informed me that they've considered the entire wreck a loss. Plenty of advanced weapons, but the hardsuit had a self-destruct built into it."
"Of course, sir. However, he was still able to flee the scene before the police arrived using an alternative mode of transportation." He started up his tablet, flicked and tapped a few times, and then showed Sato what he had on it: a birds-eye view of a massive motorcycle with an even more massive railcannon mounted on its main fairing, with Nemesis clinging on to the sidecar, which was almost another motorcycle itself.
"I see." He was starting to see the methodology. "So you had his transport followed."
Kabegawa seemed to light up at that. "Nothing so archaic, sir. He would have noticed another vehicle, and he was mostly using unused roads anyway. We activated a few avimorph Boomers and had them follow him, and when we couldn't do that, we simply piggybacked on ADP surveillance feeds. We got that picture from a patrol aerodyne, actually."
"And where did you trace Nemesis to?" He had a hunch, all of a sudden. Could it be-
"Well-"
"You mean to tell me you didn't actually find his hideout?"
"Not exactly."
Sato's instincts kicked in, and before he knew it he had pulled out a handgun from under his desk and was pointing it at Kabegawa. The otaku looked more surprised than afraid.
"Then why would you have the audacity to disturb your Oyabun when you have nothing to fucking show."
"Sir, this is all a misunderstanding, we do actually have something-"
"Well, then start explaining. Because I'm in a very - twitchy mood this morning."
"Well, we were unable to proceed with aerial monitoring once we reached the territory claimed by Nemesis's patron, we didn't want to alert them to our operations-"
"Who. Name. Now, goddammit."
"Skeeter Karns, sir."
And then everything clicked. Sato lowered the gun.
Of course. It made so much sense. He'd thought that Karns' drug bust was a one-and-done operation, that the man didn't hate his operations enough to actually commit to a permanent war against them. It would be obvious to anyone that Sleeping Dragon forces would, admittedly with some difficulty, be able to destroy Karns' forces in a one-to-one slugfest. One side used Boomers and the other side didn't, simple as that. But if you used a proxy, made it look like it wasn't your doing - yes, of course. You could do some real damage before your enemy woke up and realized what you were doing. And if that proxy used a Knight Saber hardsuit, the odds in your favor would go up.
Significantly.
And Skeeter would do it! The holier-than-thou prick would absolutely do it if he thought he saw weakness. He had to have seen an opportunity in San Angeles. He never should have put that boy up to being the branch head. Now everything, everything he'd worked for - no. If he thought like that, he was already dead.
He was the head of the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza. He had a small army at his beck and call. It was time to use it.
"Sir?"
"Good work, Kabegawa. You've made your Oyabun proud."
"Thank you, sir."
"Now get out of here. I must act on this information."
"Of course, sir."
As soon as the other man left, Sato popped open his phone, scrolled through his contacts until he found Ichitaro. His subordinate picked up on the first ring.
"Sir?"
"Ichitaro. I was just informed by one of your inferiors that Nemesis's hideout has been found. Why was I not informed of this?"
"It has?" A pause. "Holy shit. Where is it?"
"Skeeter Karns' territory. Uncertain where."
"I can mobilize the gangs on our payroll to begin an investigation into the territory at once-"
"Do not bother. We need real manpower."
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that would wither plant life within a ten-foot radius of his person.
"Mobilize the 12B's. We are bringing maximum firepower to Skeeter's territory. We will destroy everything he holds dear. Nemesis will respond to stop us."
"And then?"
"And then, my dear wakagashira, we will have won."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co., District 5
February 13, 2036
10:06 am
"I like them," Maria said.
"Mm."
"You don't like them?"
"Not really."
"Aww. Why not? They look like they function just fine. You've been up and walking for hours now. They would have broken down by now if they weren't good 'ware."
Sarge sighed, kicked at the concrete dust on the floor. His legs, his new ones, were wrapped in black sweatpants and tall socks, to disguise their silvery color. "I'm too damn tall in these things, that's the problem. My posture's all screwy."
"True. I hear a lot of people get really freaked out when they get chrome 'cause it's mass-produced, not built to specification. Could be worse, you know. You could have gotten one cybernetic arm and one normal arm, and have an uneven reach for the rest of your life."
Sarge shrugged, then winced. He would have been fine with that, actually. They'd cut off his other arm, slapped some synthderm on it, and told him it was gonna be fine. Then they, whoever they were, had dropped him off in one of the nicer parts of the city with a bag on his head, and drove away. Simple, but effective. He wouldn't dare go to the police to track them down - he wasn't supposed to be in the country in the first place.
"Okay. And they couldn't get me a new arm because why?"
"Limits on how much of your body you can replace with one operation. Plus, Japanese law holds that if you replace more than seventy percent of your body, you're considered no longer human, so you either become a ward of the state, or a corp, or you get shot on sight. I guess they didn't want to run the risk with you."
"Well," Sarge said, "that's total bullshit. They don't have anything like that in America."
"Matt, they don't have laws about jack shit in America."
"True," he said, smiling.
And then he stopped smiling, as Gavin rose from the couch behind them.
Sarge could tell. Gavin had just figured something out.
He had a plan.
"Well?" he said, testing the waters.
"I'm not doing it," Gavin muttered, almost to himself. "I'm not doing it. They can go fuck themselves."
"What?" Then it hit him. "Ah. The Knight Sabers."
"They made me an offer, Sarge. Saved you, and now they expect me to go out in broad daylight, no hardsuit, and meet one of their members."
"And you think it's a trap."
"What else could it possibly be? But if I don't go, they'll leak who I am to the public."
"So you'll go, but with a gun, as backup."
"No. I can't go. The mission comes first. But I can't let them leak my identity." He paused. Sarge could practically hear the iron-wrought rails of his unconscious straining against his train of thought.
"If I go public, it's all over. The enemy will forget how to fear me once they know I'm just a man with a cause. But I can't trust them with that knowledge."
The train pulled into the station.
"I'm going after them."
For a fleeting moment, Sarge wasn't sure what to make of Gavin's statement. He couldn't see his face, after all. Then he saw Maria, who was on the couch opposite him, and she was visibly concerned. He meant it, then.
"What would that accomplish, besides turning everyone in this city against us?" Maria said.
"It would keep us safe." The words came out of Gavin's mouth almost automatically, like he had been waiting for that question. "It would keep us safe."
Maria ground her teeth. "I dunno, big bro. We're already pretty much off-the-grid, and it's not like they can do anything with that identity. Can't freeze your bank accounts, 'cause those are based out of Luxembourg, and they won't just hand your info over. Can't hold anyone hostage in your immediate family, 'cause everyone except me is dead-"
"What about Aunt Clara? You honestly think the mob would hesitate to kill her?"
She ground her teeth even harder. "Big bro, if they shipped Aunt Clara's head to you in a box tomorrow morning, would you do anything about it?"
He did not respond.
"I mean, I'm just saying, we both agree that she's a total bitch…"
"That's beside the point. The minute I stepped back on US soil my enemies would swarm me. I need freedom, Maria, freedom to operate. And they're getting in the way of that." He turned to Sarge. "Get the Venator powered up and ready to go ASAP. They want a meeting? They'll get one."
Sarge considered this for a second. Then he said, "Nah."
If Gavin felt anything from that dismissal - any rage, any frustration - he didn't show it. Instead he said, "Why not?"
"Because they're on our side. If they wanted to destroy you, they could have done it already, but instead they've chosen to offer you help."
"They're threatening me. How is that offering help?"
"It's a power play, man. They don't want to come to you begging for your firepower. They want to show you that it's their city, and you play by their rules. C'mon, we saw shit like that all the time in the UA."
"We saw the tribal dynamics of savages. People who didn't give a shit about anything except their own power. People who kill on idle whims."
"And your murder-boner for the ladies who saved your life and mine isn't a whim?"
"You call me responding rationally to having everything I've fought for undone by some pacifist bimbos a whim? A whim."
"Yeah. I am."
He saw Gavin's face work itself over a few times. He did that a lot when someone pissed him off, letting his face do the talking where words failed him. Finally, his lips set in a tight frown, his brow furrowed, he spoke.
"Matt," he said - and, again, he only called him Matt when things got heightened - "why aren't you seeing this? After everything we've been through together, you should see it as clear as day. How do you think we can trust these people?" He paused. "Just because they saved your life once, you turn on me?"
"You're downplaying the fact that they saved my life," Sarge - Matt - said. "Oh, and yours, too. If they were the same as Sato they'd want you out of the way, and they would have let someone else do their work for them."
"Come on, Matt. This is all some sort of messed-up headgame they're playing so we owe them favors. Then they'll have us call off a strike just when we need to, and they'll play that card. You worked in intelligence. You should be the one pointing this cloak-and-dagger shit out, right?"
Matt flipped Gavin off. His middle finger hung there like the sword of Damocles.
"Oh come on," Gavin sighed. "What'd I say? You worked-"
"Yeah," Matt said. "I did, in fact, do intel and recon in the Amazon. I played the favors game with all sorts of assholes. Cattle ranchers, rubber barons, anyone who we thought we could get on our side and against the commies. And I fucking hated it. I knew that we were the bad guys, the guys who were gonna burn that whole goddamn forest down just for a quick buck, and every night I had to talk myself into sleeping, just trying to convince myself that I didn't give a shit. I swore that after I got out of the army, I was done playing the spy game. But," and here he dropped his remaining arm down, "You already knew that, didn't you? Because you were there. Because you saved my life more times than I can count. But you're not going to play the favors game. And that's fine. I can respect that. You're going to go talk to those people because after last night, after all the shit that went down, we need their help."
"Don't patronize me. I remember you saying all those things about your job perfectly well. Didn't change the fact that you were the best at what you did. Didn't change that you still are. Didn't change the fact that you're still playing that game."
At that, Matt seemed to deflate. "Yeah," he said. "I guess I still am playing that game. Because I believe that, at the end of the day, you will do the right thing, Gavin. So when I see you acting like a petulant toddler it really pisses me off."
"Am I really being petulant? I think I'm being perfectly reasonable. At the end of the day I work alone."
"Okay, see, that's what you said to Maria when you tried to justify the strike on the Tiandi Jian. If you can't see how that principle doesn't hold water anymore - how it never did - jesus. Do I have to lay it out for you?"
"You think the strike on the Tiandi Jian last night was a mistake?"
"Yes. I think you fucked up. I'm not mad that you fucked up, even though it cost me three out of four of my limbs. I should be mad, but I'm not. I'm just mad that you won't take the fact that you fucked up like a real man."
"Yeah, well-"
"Let me finish. You fucked up, and if you want to not fuck up again you have to start by admitting you fucked up. Basic military strategy. Learn from your mistakes. Can you do that?"
"You sound like a therapist," Gavin growled.
"But am I wrong."
Time stopped.
Later, Maria would take out her sketchbook, a gift from her neurotic Auntie Clara, and draw the two most prominent men in her life in the style of Akira Toriyama. Gavin would wear his armor, but without the helmet, blond Super Saiyan hair blasting up into the heavens, and Sarge would have an overly detailed cyberarm where he had a stump but no spiky anime hair. The two men would have battle auras, big swooping masses of scribbles and spikes, around them, so big and multilayered they brushed up against one another. Little dots and short lines would jump from one man's gaze to the other's, symbolizing the sheer force of the two wills pressing against one another.
It was exaggeration. It was metaphor. It was - pretty damn close to the truth, unfortunately. She could feel the egos of the two men grinding against each other like tectonic plates, locking, slipping, but always applying pressure.
And it was funny. Unlike what happened next.
It was a low, keening alarm, the kind that sounded sort of like an air raid siren, that went breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Maria scrambled over to the computer bank faster than thought, where all the monitors were pulsing an energetic red and white, and skimmed the readouts even faster.
"Oh, fuck," she squeaked.
For once, Gavin didn't reprimand her for language. "What's 'oh, fuck'?"
"Sato figured it out!" she said. "He just sent 12B units blasting straight into Skeeter's territory! They've blown past the first few blockades he threw up and they're destroying everything in sight!"
Gavin didn't move. "They're after us?"
"That's what Skeeter thinks! He just sent an encrypted transmission to us saying we need to delay tonight's strike until he deals with them!"
"Did he say how long that'll be?"
"He doesn't know. I mean, I don't know if they can, you know? Even if a few of them are just Goblins, the rest are fully armed. I mean, I mean, it's insane! They can take on 55C's just fine, but 12B's are what you throw against a tank squad, not a bunch of dudes with a few armor-piercing weapons between them!"
"You're right." Gavin turned to her. "Is the gear prepped?"
"Yeah, but… You aren't…"
He rubbed his fingers against his temples. "I may not have a choice. The longer we all stay down here, the more innocents will die. I can't just hide away and let that happen."
"You don't think they can handle the Boomers?"
"I don't know, Maria. They might be able to handle them, but at what cost? And if those Goblins do find our base, we'll be fighting a losing battle against them. The risk, and the cost, is too great."
"So's going out there with just the Venator! Hell, so is going out there in the first place! They'll find the base and destroy everything!"
"Then we anticipate that, and work with it. Sarge," he said, the previous argument forgotten, "Make preparations for the self-destruct. Blow the computers, arm the vehicles, everything."
Sarge didn't look pleased. "Shit," he said, "We're going out there? All of us? With no place to go back to?"
"If Skeeter survives this, we'll just ask him for another safehouse. He's a gang lord with several chunks of territory with uninhabited real estate. One secret base won't be a major loss."
"And we're not going to try to contact the Knight Sabers?"
"Enough about the fucking Knight Sabers!" Gavin yelled. "We have no reliable way of contacting them. Besides - Maria, did Skeeter send a firepower report our way on what those 12B's are armed with?"
Maria scurried back to the computer bank, read the report in a little more detail. "Yes! Yes, he did. Two standard-issue 12B's, two Infantry-kit 12B's with flamethrowers, one Recon with an 80mm grenade launcher, three second-gen Advanced 12B's with missile launchers and railguns, and three 15B Goblins!"
"Yeah. See, Sarge? With armament like that, I think it won't take too long for the Sabers to find us."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yay, another chapter! And within a month, no less. I'd say that I'm cranking these suckers out fast, but that would be a lie.
Also, serious question for the few folks who are reading this trainwreck. If I were to write a different fanfic, say the one I propose Here, would you prefer to read that instead of this? I'm seriously vacillating. I know I've gotta finish this damn thing, I made a New Year's Resolution to finish by year's end, but I would also like to write something that a broader audience can access (Bubblegum Crisis is, alas, extremely obscure compared to Ranma, which has managed to survive as a prominent fic source for nearly twenty years). Also, it might be a little more fun for me to write and you to read. I dunno.
February 12, 2036
10:22 pm
"Well," Leon said, gazing at the smoldering remains of the building that had once dominated Chinatown's skyline, "Fuck."
The fire department arrived not long after the ADP, and its Firefighting Boomers had immediately set to work spraying the entire building with anaerobic cryo-foam. They made a token effort to rescue whoever was inside, saw the slaughter Nemesis had wrought in the lobby, and pressed on, even as the building collapsed around them. Boomers were persistent like that.
They were still dragging bodies out of the wreckage, nothing but Triads. Leon was waiting to see when they finally dragged someone unidentified out.
Because that would be the moment, wouldn't it? When Nemesis had finally killed an innocent.
It was a miracle nobody drowned in the Underbelly. The press certainly was treating it like one, calling GENOM's response time 'unprecedented' and their actions 'heroic'. Even the media outlets that weren't GENOM-owned were fawning over the megacorporation.
For his part, Leon wondered how they'd figured out so damn fast that the ADP and the Coast Guard weren't going to help. There was a good chance the chief had prevented them from doing anything just so GENOM could swoop in and save the day, he figured. It would be just like him to be used in such a way, and would probably push the ruling party towards further privatization or automation of public services. Typical creepy bullshit.
But still, it had been so close, hadn't it? If GENOM hadn't done something people would have gone down with the Underbelly. Hell, they probably fudged the statistics to make it look like people hadn't gone down with that damn thing. Maybe Nemesis had already killed innocents. Maybe that gave the ADP license to pursue him to the fullest extent of the law.
Which was what he wanted to do, make no mistake. There was an order to things, an ecosystem, in Megatokyo, one even the Knight Sabers were a part of. Nemesis had taken one good look at that order and decided it wasn't for him.
So here he was, fumbling with his sunglasses, trying to decide whether he wanted them on or off. GENOM's head of internal security hadn't shown up to their supposed meeting, which meant he'd wasted his afternoon instead of talking to Jeena Malso, MALCORP's head of security in Japan, like he'd intended.
Daley stood beside him, his back to their Roadchaser, and watched.
"You know," Daley said, "if anyone alive comes out of this, we could probably use them to get Jimmy Chee."
"Chee?" Leon grumbled. "Where is that obnoxious creep, anyway?"
"Reports from the locals say he showed up, yelled at some people, then got a phone call and left. He's probably at his penthouse right now."
"Mm." A thought occurred to him. "We could take him into custody. Say it's witness protection against Nemesis. See what that does to Triad organization."
"If we did that, why not just take Sato into custody under the pretense it's for his own protection?"
"Heh. True. I guess we'd need a warrant. And the chief's approval."
"Good luck getting either, yeah?"
Neither met the other's sight. Leon's gaze swept over the wreckage of what had once been a fierce blockade in front of the Tiandi Jian.
"So," he said. "I guess this means we have to go after the Sabers, too."
He hated himself for saying that. The words just came out.
"How do you figure that?" Daley said.
"They bailed Nemesis out, right? They're working with him now, might have been working with him before. So if we're going after Nemesis…"
"Who says we're going after Nemesis? We hoped to prevent a gang war by getting him and we pretty explicitly failed to do that, right? Netting him won't stop the war. Netting Chee or Sato might."
Leon glowered under his shades. "Shit, man. I guess you're right. We never went after the Sabers for blowing up Boomers, why stop Nemesis when he kills dozens of people we wanted to arrest anyway?"
"Ah, but you'll be going after the Sabers soon enough, won't you?"
"Nah, not after - wait, what?"
Daley looked at Leon. "I didn't say anything. Who was that."
"That would be me."
They both turned around, slowly, unbelieving.
There was a car, low-slung, silver, looked like speed itself. Next to that car was a woman in business dress, with long lavender hair. Her face was angular, beautiful, predatory. She was smiling a small little smile.
Leon gaped. He knew her. Well, they'd never spoken, but-
"You-" he started. "Aren't you supposed to be dead? Last I recall, you were lying facedown in a pool of your own blood after Largo. I mean-"
"That was '32. This is now."
She bowed low. "Katherine Madigan. Head of Internal Security for General Nippon Organic Manufacturing. It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Inspectors."
And with that, she crossed over to their Roadchaser, her pumps clacking on the asphalt, and leaned up against it. She withdrew a cigarette and a lighter from her jacket pocket, lit it, sucked in a breath full of smoke. "Rough night for you two gentlemen?"
"Oh, you bet it-"
Daley cut him off with a hand. "It sure was. The Nemesis case is wearing us down to the bone, and we were supposed to meet you this afternoon, if I recall correctly. So you'll forgive us if my dear friend Inspector Leon is a little surprised."
"My apologies," she said, before blowing out a long torrent of smoke between her little red lips. "The head of our private equity division required my help to finalize the acquisition of Samsung. Quite fascinating stuff, but it took up most of my evening."
"Oh," Daley said. "Samsung? Holy shit. Like, their electronics division?"
"No. Samsung."
"Like, all of it?"
"Yes." Her smile grew. "All of it."
Leon leaned back against the Roadchaser and tried not to scream.
"Well," he said at last, "I'm glad you could take the time out of your day to meet us, but we're a little busy-"
"Doing what?" Madigan said.
"Cop stuff. You wouldn't understand."
"Really." She took another puff on her cigarette, and let the smoke drift between her expertly manicured nails. Her Japanese was flawless, with just a slight hint of a lilting Irish accent. "I recall you were grousing about your inability to catch Nemesis."
"Well, yes, that is true. I mean-"
"I can change that."
She said it so suddenly, and shut her mouth so suddenly after that, that Leon wasn't even sure he'd heard it properly. "I'm sorry?"
"Your inability to catch Nemesis. Your inability to stop this gang war. Your inability to do anything about the Knight Sabers. I can change that."
Oh. Oh shit. "I mean, do you want to go look over the HQ like you planned, or-"
"Already did. It was depressing."
"Hey-"
"I mean, every defense you had in there was nonlethal. Even the turrets had gel rounds in them. That is not an acceptable standard of security. Our Green-level facilities, our lowest level of security, have more ways to kill invaders than your headquarters."
She smirked. "No wonder you almost lost it in '33."
"Fuck you," Leon hissed. The words came out moments before he realized who he was talking to. But on some level he didn't care. "The guy who did that was your employee, okay? So you don't get to talk about that incident. Unless, of course, you're bitter that you lost a good mad scientist."
She shrugged. "Of course we do not condone the actions of a madman like Doctor Miriam. It's simply remarkable you couldn't hold back a four-Boomer assault on what is supposed to be highly secure facilities. Modified labor-grade Boomers, to boot. What might happen if a combat class went rampant within your facilities? What would you do then?"
"Are you threatening me?"
"I'm simply making an observation. If the AD Police cannot protect itself, how can it protect Megatokyo?"
For his part, Daley had shrunk back between Madigan and Leon. "I mean," he said, "I think this is hardly the time or place to have an argument about-"
"We'd do just fine if you fuckers stopped getting the city council to cut our budget every year. Let us buy actual military equipment from suppliers who actually give a shit."
"Like MALCORP?"
Leon boggled at that for a moment, then doubled down. "Yeah. From MALCORP. Not from whatever puppet zaibatsus we buy from now. From people who actually want us to succeed in our stated mission."
Madigan sighed. "I heard you were working with them for a period of time. Quite an interesting incident, that. Your chief knows nothing about what went on there, does he?"
"Okay, see, now you're threatening me." He turned to her and pointed his big meaty pointer finger at her. "You really wanna pick a fight with a cop? You really wanna go there, bitch?"
Madigan took another puff from her cigarette. "I see. Perhaps I'm not being candid enough, Inspector McNichol. Allow me to lay my cards out on the table: You work for me now."
Daley and Leon both flinched at the way her head swiveled to glare at them. "Whoah, there," Daley said. "I think that's taking it a bit too far."
"Oh," she purred, "but it isn't, Inspector Wong. I have been assigned to revitalize the AD Police to ensure my superior's business interests remain undamaged. You must understand, Megatokyo is our flagship development. Everything that happens in it sets a precedent in the other major urban areas we are currently revitalizing. In other words, your inability to neutralize criminal threats reflects very, very badly on GENOM, the engine of this nation's continued prosperity. Do I make myself clear?"
She was at least a head shorter than him, Leon thought, even in those high heels. He so badly wanted to grab her by the neck and give her a quick shake. But that - well, if she meant it, GENOM could destroy him without trying very hard. Leon McNichol was many things, but he wasn't ready to be a martyr.
"Therefore," Madigan continued, cigarette all but burned out between her two fingers, "I have been authorized by Chief Omura to have free reign over the AD Police. That includes you. If you do not like that, you may leave the agency and work for MALCORP. I cannot guarantee they will be financially solvent for much longer, though, especially if you make that decision."
"In any case, it's in your best interests to do as I say. I have no intention to destroy you provided you are compliant. If anything, I believe I can rejuvenate your public image, provide you with needed equipment, make the ADP a generally more effective public agency. All things you have wanted for a long time but have been unable to get. All things you can have now."
Well. Shit. Those were things he wanted. Just to restore the police's dignity in the face of everything would be more than enough.
He didn't trust Madigan, of course. GENOM always had a secondary agenda, and that agenda was probably to turn the whole department into a gang of bootlickers. He was still going to meet with Jeena and see what he could get from them. Play both sides. But for now…
"Fine," Leon groused. "So where do we start."
She smiled. "Wonderful!" she said. "I'm so glad you've seen reason. We start by restoring order to this city."
She tossed her cigarette butt to the ground, and ground it into the asphalt with the tip of her right heel.
"We start with Nemesis, and we start with the Knight Sabers."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shichiki Sato's Residence, District 4
February 13, 2036
9:17 am
The Oyabun of the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza, one of the most powerful men in Megatokyo, did not sleep last night. He got out of bed at three in the morning, wandered around his compound for a few hours, then gave up and had breakfast around six-thirty, just as the sun rose.
He knew that the old Mafia dons, before they'd fallen to newer, more advanced species of criminal, ate big, fancy breakfasts in the Italian style. Whether that was from some don he'd actually met, in his childhood back in the nineties, or just some Scorsese movie he'd watched eons ago, he no longer cared to remember. All Shichiki Sato knew was that he had no intention of going out like Tony Soprano. So his breakfast was a sparse affair.
He made a point of preparing it himself, too. Let his cooks and maids handle everything else, all the invisible functions of handling his sprawling not-quite-palace on the outskirts of the city, but goddamn it, he wasn't going to forget how to work a fucking coffee machine. Rice, ImpossiBacon, eggs, and the strongest coffee he could buy. The real stuff, too, a spliced Arabica bean kept alive in a handful of exotic-foodstuff greenhouses in Okinawa (apparently he shared tastes with a USSD general or two) while the cloud forests were levelled and stripmined for whatever prospectors thought was in them.
(He'd been to Ethiopia, once, to provide some guidance to an operation in Addis Ababa to corner the shipbreaking market against third-rate Pakistani syndicates. He never once thought about going back again. Not ever.)
And so, as the sun rose over Megatokyo once again, Shichiki Sato sat in his office, tried his best not to grind his teeth, and waited as the caffeine high drained out of his body and into his bladder.
It was the news about the Tiandi Jian that had kept him up last night. It wasn't that he had any pity for Jimmy Chee or his grandparents. Pity for the swarms of Cantonese that had invaded the Japanese motherland, hoping to swamp it with their gaudy traditions and seemingly endless families? Please. At first, seeing it on the news, he had been glad. It was payback for the attacks on his businesses by his rivals, done by his new archenemy.
And then the newscaster had said the Knight Sabers were involved. And he broke out into a cold sweat.
Sato generally kept away from the Knight Sabers. In fact, he generally kept women away from his organization in general, but that was another matter entirely. Way back in early '33, after that SuperBoomer had levelled half the city with the particle beam satellites, he'd made inquiries into the nature of their operation, hoping to outline the shape of the machine that made their super-sentai antics possible. He had found a considerable network of bribed officials, some who were on his payroll to boot, freelance intelligence gatherers, supposedly abandoned pieces of real estate owned by a galaxy of shell companies, and smuggled microfabrication equipment - and no names. Not so much as a hint of which megacorp or eccentric actually controlled these supposed "heroes of justice".
And you know what? He was fine with that. Let them slow down GENOM's total takeover of this city, for the Sleeping Dragon thrived in the spaces where the quake had taken everything but GENOM hadn't given everything back quite yet. Let them save the city from Boomer riots, for the Sleeping Dragon made quite a significant sum of money just from scrapping and recycling Boomers for the grey market, especially when the rich got rid of their personal robo-butlers in droves out of fear. Let them keep this city's status quo safe, for he quite liked the status quo.
God forbid, he'd always said, they took their jobs seriously and went after him. He would win, or so he'd said in the past.
Now, though, he wasn't quite sure.
He'd thought his squad of mercenaries invincible, until they had been wiped out. He'd thought the Underbelly impregnable, until suddenly it wasn't. He'd thought the other gangs would work against him as well as each other if he showed weakness, but then they'd formed a temporary alliance. He thought that Nemesis was after him and him alone, and then the Tiandi Jian had burned. He'd thought the Knight Sabers would focus on Boomer rampages and fighting GENOM, and then they'd showed up in Chinatown.
He could no longer afford to assume things would go his way.
Especially once the ADP had ID'd the bodies in that safehouse.
Especially since he'd heard that one of the bodies was that of Wei Shen of the Hou Bang.
Fuck. Just thinking about the Chang's mega-triad and what they could do to his operations made him ill. Nevermind that the target for their inevitable revenge would be Nemesis, his own enemy. Their retaliation would be so massive, so total, that even his organization would have no hope of surviving. They would swallow him, and all of Megatokyo's underworld, whole. Of that, he had little doubt. Then they would move on to fight with GENOM, perhaps, they had been itching for that fight for a generation now, and who could say how that would turn out? What would the Japanese people lose when two arch-gods - one corporate, one criminal - chose their island as their battleground?
His only hope now was another show of strength. Find Nemesis, destroy him and whoever was backing him. Destroy the Knight Sabers if necessary. Wipe out the syndicates who thought they could intrude on his property. Not just force them to the bargaining table. Force them out of Megatokyo entirely.
That was his grand plan, formulated over nine long hours of no sleep. The tactics, he would leave to men like Satoru and Ichitaro. Good men. Men he trusted not to stab him in the back. Men who knew better than to make the situation worse.
Not, for example, the pernicious little shit who had just walked in his office without so much as an appointment, Hiroshi Kabegawa.
"Sir!" He shouted. "I bring good news."
The man, barely into his twenties, looked every bit a data-otaku. Fat, unkempt, smelling oily, if it was really possible for a human to smell that way. The kind of person he kept on the payroll because of his talents. The kind of person who could never be allowed to rise a single rank in his organization.
Sato gritted his teeth, aware of how un-menacing the looming purple bags under his eyelids made him look. "What," he grumbled, "Is it." Then, just to remind the man of his insignificance, he added, "Kabe-kun."
If the otaku was annoyed by that term of un-endearment, he didn't show it. Instead he said, "I have been working on an important piece of information in the secondary communications center, sir. I believe it is of some interest to our operations."
Kami preserve him. What had this worm figured out? How to rig fantasy football games in favor of their own brokers? "And that is?"
"The location of Nemesis's hideout, sir."
On one level Sato knew that such information should have had him whooping for joy, but on another level he hadn't quite processed the information. He didn't trust it. So he said, "Alright. Lay out, in excruciating detail, how you came to this conclusion."
"Well, sir, you recall that Nemesis lost a great deal of equipment during his most recent excursion? The truck and whatever was on it were taken into ADP custody, but-"
"Yes. One of the men I have within the police informed me that they've considered the entire wreck a loss. Plenty of advanced weapons, but the hardsuit had a self-destruct built into it."
"Of course, sir. However, he was still able to flee the scene before the police arrived using an alternative mode of transportation." He started up his tablet, flicked and tapped a few times, and then showed Sato what he had on it: a birds-eye view of a massive motorcycle with an even more massive railcannon mounted on its main fairing, with Nemesis clinging on to the sidecar, which was almost another motorcycle itself.
"I see." He was starting to see the methodology. "So you had his transport followed."
Kabegawa seemed to light up at that. "Nothing so archaic, sir. He would have noticed another vehicle, and he was mostly using unused roads anyway. We activated a few avimorph Boomers and had them follow him, and when we couldn't do that, we simply piggybacked on ADP surveillance feeds. We got that picture from a patrol aerodyne, actually."
"And where did you trace Nemesis to?" He had a hunch, all of a sudden. Could it be-
"Well-"
"You mean to tell me you didn't actually find his hideout?"
"Not exactly."
Sato's instincts kicked in, and before he knew it he had pulled out a handgun from under his desk and was pointing it at Kabegawa. The otaku looked more surprised than afraid.
"Then why would you have the audacity to disturb your Oyabun when you have nothing to fucking show."
"Sir, this is all a misunderstanding, we do actually have something-"
"Well, then start explaining. Because I'm in a very - twitchy mood this morning."
"Well, we were unable to proceed with aerial monitoring once we reached the territory claimed by Nemesis's patron, we didn't want to alert them to our operations-"
"Who. Name. Now, goddammit."
"Skeeter Karns, sir."
And then everything clicked. Sato lowered the gun.
Of course. It made so much sense. He'd thought that Karns' drug bust was a one-and-done operation, that the man didn't hate his operations enough to actually commit to a permanent war against them. It would be obvious to anyone that Sleeping Dragon forces would, admittedly with some difficulty, be able to destroy Karns' forces in a one-to-one slugfest. One side used Boomers and the other side didn't, simple as that. But if you used a proxy, made it look like it wasn't your doing - yes, of course. You could do some real damage before your enemy woke up and realized what you were doing. And if that proxy used a Knight Saber hardsuit, the odds in your favor would go up.
Significantly.
And Skeeter would do it! The holier-than-thou prick would absolutely do it if he thought he saw weakness. He had to have seen an opportunity in San Angeles. He never should have put that boy up to being the branch head. Now everything, everything he'd worked for - no. If he thought like that, he was already dead.
He was the head of the Sleeping Dragon Yakuza. He had a small army at his beck and call. It was time to use it.
"Sir?"
"Good work, Kabegawa. You've made your Oyabun proud."
"Thank you, sir."
"Now get out of here. I must act on this information."
"Of course, sir."
As soon as the other man left, Sato popped open his phone, scrolled through his contacts until he found Ichitaro. His subordinate picked up on the first ring.
"Sir?"
"Ichitaro. I was just informed by one of your inferiors that Nemesis's hideout has been found. Why was I not informed of this?"
"It has?" A pause. "Holy shit. Where is it?"
"Skeeter Karns' territory. Uncertain where."
"I can mobilize the gangs on our payroll to begin an investigation into the territory at once-"
"Do not bother. We need real manpower."
He smiled. It was the kind of smile that would wither plant life within a ten-foot radius of his person.
"Mobilize the 12B's. We are bringing maximum firepower to Skeeter's territory. We will destroy everything he holds dear. Nemesis will respond to stop us."
"And then?"
"And then, my dear wakagashira, we will have won."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Holton Junkyard Co., District 5
February 13, 2036
10:06 am
"I like them," Maria said.
"Mm."
"You don't like them?"
"Not really."
"Aww. Why not? They look like they function just fine. You've been up and walking for hours now. They would have broken down by now if they weren't good 'ware."
Sarge sighed, kicked at the concrete dust on the floor. His legs, his new ones, were wrapped in black sweatpants and tall socks, to disguise their silvery color. "I'm too damn tall in these things, that's the problem. My posture's all screwy."
"True. I hear a lot of people get really freaked out when they get chrome 'cause it's mass-produced, not built to specification. Could be worse, you know. You could have gotten one cybernetic arm and one normal arm, and have an uneven reach for the rest of your life."
Sarge shrugged, then winced. He would have been fine with that, actually. They'd cut off his other arm, slapped some synthderm on it, and told him it was gonna be fine. Then they, whoever they were, had dropped him off in one of the nicer parts of the city with a bag on his head, and drove away. Simple, but effective. He wouldn't dare go to the police to track them down - he wasn't supposed to be in the country in the first place.
"Okay. And they couldn't get me a new arm because why?"
"Limits on how much of your body you can replace with one operation. Plus, Japanese law holds that if you replace more than seventy percent of your body, you're considered no longer human, so you either become a ward of the state, or a corp, or you get shot on sight. I guess they didn't want to run the risk with you."
"Well," Sarge said, "that's total bullshit. They don't have anything like that in America."
"Matt, they don't have laws about jack shit in America."
"True," he said, smiling.
And then he stopped smiling, as Gavin rose from the couch behind them.
Sarge could tell. Gavin had just figured something out.
He had a plan.
"Well?" he said, testing the waters.
"I'm not doing it," Gavin muttered, almost to himself. "I'm not doing it. They can go fuck themselves."
"What?" Then it hit him. "Ah. The Knight Sabers."
"They made me an offer, Sarge. Saved you, and now they expect me to go out in broad daylight, no hardsuit, and meet one of their members."
"And you think it's a trap."
"What else could it possibly be? But if I don't go, they'll leak who I am to the public."
"So you'll go, but with a gun, as backup."
"No. I can't go. The mission comes first. But I can't let them leak my identity." He paused. Sarge could practically hear the iron-wrought rails of his unconscious straining against his train of thought.
"If I go public, it's all over. The enemy will forget how to fear me once they know I'm just a man with a cause. But I can't trust them with that knowledge."
The train pulled into the station.
"I'm going after them."
For a fleeting moment, Sarge wasn't sure what to make of Gavin's statement. He couldn't see his face, after all. Then he saw Maria, who was on the couch opposite him, and she was visibly concerned. He meant it, then.
"What would that accomplish, besides turning everyone in this city against us?" Maria said.
"It would keep us safe." The words came out of Gavin's mouth almost automatically, like he had been waiting for that question. "It would keep us safe."
Maria ground her teeth. "I dunno, big bro. We're already pretty much off-the-grid, and it's not like they can do anything with that identity. Can't freeze your bank accounts, 'cause those are based out of Luxembourg, and they won't just hand your info over. Can't hold anyone hostage in your immediate family, 'cause everyone except me is dead-"
"What about Aunt Clara? You honestly think the mob would hesitate to kill her?"
She ground her teeth even harder. "Big bro, if they shipped Aunt Clara's head to you in a box tomorrow morning, would you do anything about it?"
He did not respond.
"I mean, I'm just saying, we both agree that she's a total bitch…"
"That's beside the point. The minute I stepped back on US soil my enemies would swarm me. I need freedom, Maria, freedom to operate. And they're getting in the way of that." He turned to Sarge. "Get the Venator powered up and ready to go ASAP. They want a meeting? They'll get one."
Sarge considered this for a second. Then he said, "Nah."
If Gavin felt anything from that dismissal - any rage, any frustration - he didn't show it. Instead he said, "Why not?"
"Because they're on our side. If they wanted to destroy you, they could have done it already, but instead they've chosen to offer you help."
"They're threatening me. How is that offering help?"
"It's a power play, man. They don't want to come to you begging for your firepower. They want to show you that it's their city, and you play by their rules. C'mon, we saw shit like that all the time in the UA."
"We saw the tribal dynamics of savages. People who didn't give a shit about anything except their own power. People who kill on idle whims."
"And your murder-boner for the ladies who saved your life and mine isn't a whim?"
"You call me responding rationally to having everything I've fought for undone by some pacifist bimbos a whim? A whim."
"Yeah. I am."
He saw Gavin's face work itself over a few times. He did that a lot when someone pissed him off, letting his face do the talking where words failed him. Finally, his lips set in a tight frown, his brow furrowed, he spoke.
"Matt," he said - and, again, he only called him Matt when things got heightened - "why aren't you seeing this? After everything we've been through together, you should see it as clear as day. How do you think we can trust these people?" He paused. "Just because they saved your life once, you turn on me?"
"You're downplaying the fact that they saved my life," Sarge - Matt - said. "Oh, and yours, too. If they were the same as Sato they'd want you out of the way, and they would have let someone else do their work for them."
"Come on, Matt. This is all some sort of messed-up headgame they're playing so we owe them favors. Then they'll have us call off a strike just when we need to, and they'll play that card. You worked in intelligence. You should be the one pointing this cloak-and-dagger shit out, right?"
Matt flipped Gavin off. His middle finger hung there like the sword of Damocles.
"Oh come on," Gavin sighed. "What'd I say? You worked-"
"Yeah," Matt said. "I did, in fact, do intel and recon in the Amazon. I played the favors game with all sorts of assholes. Cattle ranchers, rubber barons, anyone who we thought we could get on our side and against the commies. And I fucking hated it. I knew that we were the bad guys, the guys who were gonna burn that whole goddamn forest down just for a quick buck, and every night I had to talk myself into sleeping, just trying to convince myself that I didn't give a shit. I swore that after I got out of the army, I was done playing the spy game. But," and here he dropped his remaining arm down, "You already knew that, didn't you? Because you were there. Because you saved my life more times than I can count. But you're not going to play the favors game. And that's fine. I can respect that. You're going to go talk to those people because after last night, after all the shit that went down, we need their help."
"Don't patronize me. I remember you saying all those things about your job perfectly well. Didn't change the fact that you were the best at what you did. Didn't change that you still are. Didn't change the fact that you're still playing that game."
At that, Matt seemed to deflate. "Yeah," he said. "I guess I still am playing that game. Because I believe that, at the end of the day, you will do the right thing, Gavin. So when I see you acting like a petulant toddler it really pisses me off."
"Am I really being petulant? I think I'm being perfectly reasonable. At the end of the day I work alone."
"Okay, see, that's what you said to Maria when you tried to justify the strike on the Tiandi Jian. If you can't see how that principle doesn't hold water anymore - how it never did - jesus. Do I have to lay it out for you?"
"You think the strike on the Tiandi Jian last night was a mistake?"
"Yes. I think you fucked up. I'm not mad that you fucked up, even though it cost me three out of four of my limbs. I should be mad, but I'm not. I'm just mad that you won't take the fact that you fucked up like a real man."
"Yeah, well-"
"Let me finish. You fucked up, and if you want to not fuck up again you have to start by admitting you fucked up. Basic military strategy. Learn from your mistakes. Can you do that?"
"You sound like a therapist," Gavin growled.
"But am I wrong."
Time stopped.
Later, Maria would take out her sketchbook, a gift from her neurotic Auntie Clara, and draw the two most prominent men in her life in the style of Akira Toriyama. Gavin would wear his armor, but without the helmet, blond Super Saiyan hair blasting up into the heavens, and Sarge would have an overly detailed cyberarm where he had a stump but no spiky anime hair. The two men would have battle auras, big swooping masses of scribbles and spikes, around them, so big and multilayered they brushed up against one another. Little dots and short lines would jump from one man's gaze to the other's, symbolizing the sheer force of the two wills pressing against one another.
It was exaggeration. It was metaphor. It was - pretty damn close to the truth, unfortunately. She could feel the egos of the two men grinding against each other like tectonic plates, locking, slipping, but always applying pressure.
And it was funny. Unlike what happened next.
It was a low, keening alarm, the kind that sounded sort of like an air raid siren, that went breeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. Maria scrambled over to the computer bank faster than thought, where all the monitors were pulsing an energetic red and white, and skimmed the readouts even faster.
"Oh, fuck," she squeaked.
For once, Gavin didn't reprimand her for language. "What's 'oh, fuck'?"
"Sato figured it out!" she said. "He just sent 12B units blasting straight into Skeeter's territory! They've blown past the first few blockades he threw up and they're destroying everything in sight!"
Gavin didn't move. "They're after us?"
"That's what Skeeter thinks! He just sent an encrypted transmission to us saying we need to delay tonight's strike until he deals with them!"
"Did he say how long that'll be?"
"He doesn't know. I mean, I don't know if they can, you know? Even if a few of them are just Goblins, the rest are fully armed. I mean, I mean, it's insane! They can take on 55C's just fine, but 12B's are what you throw against a tank squad, not a bunch of dudes with a few armor-piercing weapons between them!"
"You're right." Gavin turned to her. "Is the gear prepped?"
"Yeah, but… You aren't…"
He rubbed his fingers against his temples. "I may not have a choice. The longer we all stay down here, the more innocents will die. I can't just hide away and let that happen."
"You don't think they can handle the Boomers?"
"I don't know, Maria. They might be able to handle them, but at what cost? And if those Goblins do find our base, we'll be fighting a losing battle against them. The risk, and the cost, is too great."
"So's going out there with just the Venator! Hell, so is going out there in the first place! They'll find the base and destroy everything!"
"Then we anticipate that, and work with it. Sarge," he said, the previous argument forgotten, "Make preparations for the self-destruct. Blow the computers, arm the vehicles, everything."
Sarge didn't look pleased. "Shit," he said, "We're going out there? All of us? With no place to go back to?"
"If Skeeter survives this, we'll just ask him for another safehouse. He's a gang lord with several chunks of territory with uninhabited real estate. One secret base won't be a major loss."
"And we're not going to try to contact the Knight Sabers?"
"Enough about the fucking Knight Sabers!" Gavin yelled. "We have no reliable way of contacting them. Besides - Maria, did Skeeter send a firepower report our way on what those 12B's are armed with?"
Maria scurried back to the computer bank, read the report in a little more detail. "Yes! Yes, he did. Two standard-issue 12B's, two Infantry-kit 12B's with flamethrowers, one Recon with an 80mm grenade launcher, three second-gen Advanced 12B's with missile launchers and railguns, and three 15B Goblins!"
"Yeah. See, Sarge? With armament like that, I think it won't take too long for the Sabers to find us."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Yay, another chapter! And within a month, no less. I'd say that I'm cranking these suckers out fast, but that would be a lie.
Also, serious question for the few folks who are reading this trainwreck. If I were to write a different fanfic, say the one I propose Here, would you prefer to read that instead of this? I'm seriously vacillating. I know I've gotta finish this damn thing, I made a New Year's Resolution to finish by year's end, but I would also like to write something that a broader audience can access (Bubblegum Crisis is, alas, extremely obscure compared to Ranma, which has managed to survive as a prominent fic source for nearly twenty years). Also, it might be a little more fun for me to write and you to read. I dunno.
- Location
- Fort Worth, TX
Actually I have been a BGC fans since my teens so I would like to see this finished.
- Location
- Megatokyo
Of course. I'm not saying I'd cancel this fic, just slow down the rate of output and try to write something else.
Eh. Who'm I kidding? That little afterword was dumb. I can't beg other people to make a decision for me, that's not a decent thing to do. So... yeah.
I still have a rough idea of where I want the story to go for the next chapter or three, so why hold those ideas back in service of a fic idea where I have no idea where it might go? I'm committed, dang it. You'll see the next chapter soon, just you wait.
Chapter 32: The Battle of Skeeterville
- Location
- Megatokyo
Staff Notice
Ri-San Bar, Overwatch Room
District 3
February 13, 2036
10:13 am
Skeeter Karns looked out over his domain, the southeastern part of Megatokyo that GENOM thought of as connective tissue between Old Tokyo and the Yokohama-Kawasaki region. The massive screen in front of him displayed a bird's-eye view of his territory, flickering with updates from the murder of avimorph Boomers he had watching over it. Periodically, a bird would go down, and a little chunk of the patchwork image would freeze and stop updating.
He could track the incursions pretty easily in spite of this. All he had to do was follow the fires and the frozen panes, the emergency audio requests for backup that couldn't possibly come fast enough, and he had a clear image of where the Boomers were going. He could figure out their pattern, mark where he had to put traps and ambushes, and send the necessary orders to move his troops.
Sato's Boomers were heading for the Ri-San, that was for sure. But they were definitely taking their sweet time getting there. It was as though every time they got within a block of a residential building, they made a point of diverting from their straight-shot course to destroy said building. Why? Wasn't he the target? Why maximize civilian casualties, and run the risk of losing even one very expensive Boomer to his also very expensive anti-tank squads?
He sighed, leaned back in his chair. He knew the answer.
First, they were going after innocents because they could. Two of five anti-tank squads had already tried to set up a blockade just a few minutes ago, pumping the head Boomers full of hypervelocity squeezebore-launched spikes that could take a 55C's head in one shot.
They'd downed one 12B before the flamethrowers got them. One! One! He had men scrambling to set up another ambush, had laser-tripped claymores lining a street near the Boomers' hypothetical attack path, he'd see what that did, but how was a man supposed to have hope when tank-grade killer robots invaded his kingdom with the express purpose of taking away everything he'd done?
Two, they weren't after him. As much as he hated to admit it, he was a consolation prize if the real target didn't show his head. He'd sent a message telling his allies to hide, to stay in the Holton base as long as they needed to. He doubted any of them would listen. It was in the nature of men like Nemesis to see only one man as their superior. For him, it was probably some commanding officer back in whatever military had shat him out. The vigilante had made it very clear to him that he would be operating on his own terms. Indisputably clear.
A splattering of red crossed the screen, followed by text. Good, Skeeter thought. That was an indication that the claymores had gone off. He had no faith that they'd kill off all of the Tankmen, but maybe a one-two punch would do something. He put his fingers on the sector where the mines had spewed their lethal ordnance - they'd replaced the usual steel balls with impact-triggered shaped-charge grenades - and pinched out, zooming in, letting an avimorph know that he would like to see, in real-time, what was going on in that sector.
The feed flickered into real-time. There were four Boomers in the center of the street, their hammerheads unmistakeable. They looked - fine, actually. Shit.
One more was wrecked, smears of energetic orange and blue-grey cermet splattered and shattered across the pavement. It looked like it had the remains of heavy shields on both its arms, but they were both riddled with palm-sized holes. The other four were engaged with a firefight with his men, who had set up military-grade blockades in the street and were hosing the Boomers with LMG fire and a few grenades to boot. Neither side seemed to be at an advantage. Whenever an anti-tank gunner tried to rear up and seriously wound a Boomer with an RPG, the others would sweep their miniguns over to that blockade and turn the offending gunner into hamburger, or the other Boomer with arm shields would dive in front and take the shaped-charge shot for its comrade. It was the efficiency that he would expect from Boomers, and he fucking hated it.
He tabbed in a voice channel on the squads just as one of the Boomers seemed to lose patience. The blunt heads of rockets popped out of the left shoulder of the one with the arm shields and fired with little fanfare, and it unhooked what looked like a tank-grade flamethrower from the inside of its right arm and started spewing fire everywhere, and Skeeter started to shout "Fall back-" at the same time that the scorching magne-napalm burned through the barricades with white-hot intensity, and he barely disconnected before he heard the screaming. The avimorph's feed cut to a NO SIGNAL shortly afterward.
"Fuck," he said to no one in particular. Those were the last of his anti-tank squads. He'd spent nearly ten million yen just training and equipping the bastards. And now they were gone. Just like that. He hadn't even seen infantry-kit Tankmen pull off things like that before. They were supposed to specialize in antipersonnel work, but flamethrowers - wasn't that overkill? Then again, this entire situation reeked of Sato going for overkill.
That was concerning enough, but where were the other five? He zoomed out, looked for the telltale signs of little speech bubbles blinking in and out of existence as men died. He found them in seconds, five klicks away from the other squad, wrecking one of the few APC's he'd managed to get his hands on with mechanical efficiency. They'd turned the poor truck on its side and were wiggling the autocannon turret out of its mount. It popped loose, and one of the Boomers put its gun arm in the empty space where the turret had been and fired, unfazed by the barely-contained explosion that followed. Then they plowed on, heading for the southwest.
Skeeter zoomed out again. It almost looked like they'd managed to pinpoint Nemesis's location under the Holton and were closing in on it. Was that even possible? He zoomed in again, watching the Boomers rocket down the empty streets with no resistance, and checked their designations. Yep, there were two 15B Goblins, purpose-built urban-recon machines that could use the EM resonances in buildings to scan them. But that shouldn't have made a difference, even if they were standing right on top of the Holton's main junk pile. He'd had that safehouse shielded.
He knew, then, what had happened. Nemesis had disobeyed his request and gone out.
Skeeter swiped over to the Holton area, found that, yes, its doors had been opened in the past thirty minutes, to admit two large vehicles. They had to be evacuating, which was even worse than just bringing Nemesis out. Did they honestly think they could leave with Sato noticing? As tempting as it was to leave fools to their fate, they were, to some degree, his fools. He grabbed his phone from the side of his desk, dialed a number he knew from memory, and waited-
For about five seconds.
"Yeah?" The voice of Nemesis's in-between, the one he'd actually met, the one who only spoke English. Told folks to call him Sarge.
Skeeter decided to tell it like it was. "There's a squad of 12B's moving on your location."
Yeah. Let them parse that. Skeeter considered himself to be a lenient guy, letting his underlings suffer the consequences of their own actions naturally. Most of the time, like right now, when people didn't do what he advised they ended up screwing themselves over.
"Oh," came the response. "Good."
"Good?!" Skeeter blanched. "I'm checking now-" here he switched over to the cameras on the edge of his territory, where a small green truck was blowing past light after light, trying to get to the expressway. "-And I don't think you have the firepower to take on one Battle Boomer."
"Oh, we don't. That's part of the plan. How close are they?"
The plan? So Nemesis had a plan. That was not exactly reassuring. Few battle plans survive contact with the enemy, especially when the enemy is purpose-built to kill tanks and your side has no air support.
"About three klicks to your northwest and closing. They're coming in fast. What exactly is this plan you have?"
"The usual. Bait out the Tankmen, have my buddy come in on the Venator behind them, bang bang bang. Hey, if you have their location, do you mind sharing that data? It'd help a lot."
"The Venator."
"It's latin for 'hunter'. Our mutual pal thought the name sounded cool."
"Not the question I was asking."
"Suit yourself. Look, Skeeter, the Tankmen are in two squads, right? One for you, one for us. Barring any surprises on Sato's end, I think we can deal with our guys, but some telemetry data wouldn't hurt. That's all."
"You sound very confident about that." Which was… good?
Sarge laughed. "Oh hell no. I'm scared shitless. I've done something like this a few times already, and you'd think it'd get me used to it, but I guess I got soft. But you gotta have faith, right?"
"Right." He hung up before the American's folksy wisdom could shake him out of his state of anxious semi-panic.
Fine. Skeeter thought for a moment, then decided to tell his avimorphs to scan the surrounding area for something big and scary-looking. Whatever this Venator was, he
wanted to judge it for himself. If nothing else, it would be nice to know whether or not Sarge was bullshitting him, if he was going to have to deal with two squads of Tankmen in a few minutes instead of one.
They found it almost instantly. They were good at taking vague text-line commands and interpreting them into tactical action.
Either that, or they just saw the big scary motorcycle and assumed whatever he was ordering them to do was related to it.
It was - what the hell was it? A motorcycle, sure, one wheel in the front, one in the back, a sidecar with one wheel on its left side. But the fairing itself was dominated by a truly massive gun, facing forward, the blunt barrel almost jutting out over the front wheel. Meanwhile, the sidecar held both Nemesis - who somehow had managed to fit into the thing in his heavy hardsuit - and what looked like the blunt nosecones of four small missiles, plus a rifle-caliber minigun in the front.
It looked like an Abrams and a Harley had a child. Skeeter was amazed it didn't fall over any time it took a turn. But it didn't.
"Hm," he breathed. Maybe this could work. Yeah. Fine. The Boomers heading for the Ri-San he could deal with. If he had Doc bring out Yoshino, got Chika and the rest to the sniping posts at the top of the building, brought out those old Stomach railguns the ADP had 'misplaced' around '33 - yeah. He'd be overplaying his hand a little, but he was up against Boomers with oversized mag-napalm flamethrowers. Escalation was the order of the day.
Skeeter spun his chair around, got up, and threw open the sliding screen door with aplomb. He came upon Chika and several other sukeban girl-gangers hanging around a shared table. For once, none of them were smoking.
He cleared his throat, and the girls all swiveled to meet his gaze. It was eerily quiet in this little back room, the only sound coming from the main room across the hall where his commanders awaited.
Chika was the first to speak. "Sniping posts?" She squeaked.
"Yep."
"Barrett fifty-cals?"
"Ask Doc where the modified stomach guns are."
"We have those? And we never got to use them?"
"Got the whole stock after they discontinued them in '33, straight from ADP HQ."
"Awesome." The rest of the girls scattered. She remained.
"You have a plan, right?"
"I have the rough workings of a strategy. Not a tactical plan, but a strategy. You can fill in the blanks from there."
She sighed. "Okay. I trust you."
And for once in his life, Skeeter Karns wanted to say, "Well, you shouldn't."
Because for once in his life, he wasn't on the side with the most firepower.
Because for once in his life, he had made a horrible mistake.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There had been a great deal of debate in the early 2010's over the construction of tank guns, and the weapons used to defeat said tanks. One school of thought held that railguns were the future of all guns, everywhere. You could get more punch out of a smaller caliber; you could use inert ammunition, the kind that wouldn't explode if an enemy hit the magazine, but still get an explosive shockwave; in turn, you could have auto-loading tanks, and then eventually automated tanks using thousands of 20mm rounds to punch through even the heaviest of armor.
The other school of thought sprang up mostly in opposition to the railgun-mania. The hypercapacitors needed to power a railgun would be just as much of an ammo storage problem as regular shells; the smaller calibers could only weakly imitate true 120mm APFSDS spikes, so you were trading single-shot damage for a million piddling shots; railguns big enough to do as much damage as regular tank guns or more would just rip themselves apart with recoil and barrel stripping.
The first school wondered what new things the second school brought to the table besides a spirit that was against all innovation, to put it politely. The second school threw up its hands until electrothermal propulsion came along, and then trotted that out as the propellant of the future. The first school pointed out that railguns could do the same job as ET guns could do the same job but cheaper, opening up the tank market to any megacorp who was willing to pay another megacorp more ingrained in the local military-industrial complex; the second school politely wondered why this was supposed to be a good thing.
Meanwhile, the Neo-Soviets were using unguided missiles in their tank barrels, but the Neo-Soviets were weird and everyone kind of hated them.
Anyway, by the time the Fourth Corporate War rolled around and obliterated forty percent of global GDP in a few months, the schools of thought seemed to have settled for hierarchy over competition. Small-bore railguns would be the purvey of megacorps like Militech, for the armored platoon on a budget, and real tank guns would be for real national armies, the kind whose military tactics generally consisted of throwing taxpayer dollars at a problem until it ceased to exist. In the harsh years that followed, both sides of the debate agreed to shut up and focus more on containing the food riots, preferring to argue more about "semi-lethal" weaponry and whether having your public enemies vomit or shit themselves was a more effective use of mass-saturation ultrasound. It wasn't until GENOM nipple-shocked the global economy with plans to rebuild every city on Earth in its divine image that people started to argue about railguns again.
The point being: When Gavin Belasko went to an ex-Militech armory in Baton Rouge and said, "Get me the best anti-armor gun you can find and put it on a big motorcycle," then showed them the blueprints plus the potential payment, he found himself in the middle of a forum debate that had gone on for nearly six hundred pages, two forums, thirty banned accounts, involved security experts from every megacorp and major military on the planet at every conceivable level of clearance, and which showed no sign of stopping.
He bought a railgun in the end, one of the main guns from a decommissioned Zumwalt-class destroyer; the military wasn't exactly keeping track of their scrap in those days, and you could actually store more ammo, even if every 3cm tungsten-alloy spike cost just a little more than your average salaryman made in a month. (The armory said it was the only way the supplier could stay afloat, since all the new GENOM military hardware used different calibers.) Several million dollars of Yvon Heuse's money and three months later, Gavin Belasko had the Venator, an off-road-capable anti-armor vehicle that could actually ride on flimsy asphalt without cracking the pavement, as MBT's were wont to do in those days.
The armory's owners pocketed most of the money, and tried to buy themselves mansions in Key West, hoping the latest hurricane would have driven prices down enough that even mere millionaires could afford Florida. They tried to bribe a real estate agent who was actually a deep-cover agent for the Florida Homeowners Association. Things went badly for them after that, but that's a story for another time.
Meanwhile, Gavin used the Venator whenever heavy armor came up in his various crusades, from a raid on the D-Company-controlled shipyards of Seacouver to hunting down the last of the Clive Bundy gang and their surplus APC's. The few times he'd gone up against 12B Tankmen, it had performed admirably as well. And whenever he needed to draw out enemy forces, he'd use some disposable vehicle as bait. Then he would delete them from existence with maximum prejudice.
That was the plan. He saw no reason why it wouldn't work this time.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:17 am
Nemesis raced down the streets of District 4, clinging to the Heavy Hardsuit-capable sidecar of the Venator like it was the only thing keeping him from becoming a technologically advanced smear on the pavement, which it pretty much was. He checked his HUD's telemetry readout. The Green Dragon van was within a klick of the Boomer squad that was pursuing it. It had gotten on the freeway once, then had taken the nearest off-ramp once Vicain realized, to much cursing, that the highways were loaded to capacity in early morning. Rush hour didn't end in Megatokyo so much as it evolved, but the last thing Nemesis wanted was to have to engage the Venator's cannon in a fixed firefight where the area was nothing but civilian targets.
The Boomers had just jumped off the highway, using their flightjets to compensate for the drop, and had been seriously gaining on the poor van ever since. They were going to have a clear shot on the van, just a little bit ahead of him save a few cars, right about…
Now.
There they were, a surreal sight if there ever was one, six killing machines in the world's richest metropolis rocketing over the hoods of cars whipping around a corner in wing formation with the efficiency of birds of prey. They were big, hot, incredibly easy for the Venator's autotargeting function to lock onto. Within three seconds, he had a lock on the rear Tankman, and thumbed the trigger of the main gun.
Only for the rear Boomer to turn around and fire its twin head lasers at Nemesis. He swerved, the beams melting the pavement where he had been moments before.
Ah shit, and the other ones were starting to turn around too, cutting their flightjets and firing whatever they had on hand. Of course. He'd read something about the latest generation of Tankmen having rear optics, since surprise attacks by yahoos with IED's had cost GENOM so many units in the Tatarstan Succession. Why hadn't he remembered it?
But the plan hadn't changed. Close the distance, dodge their ordinance, and tear them to bits with all the force the Venator could provide. With a flick of his armored thumb, Nemesis activated the point-defense minigun, which began to spew 5.56.mm caseless rounds at nearly a hundred RPM, the ball-mounted barrel twitching this way and that in the blind hope that it might actually hit something. He switched over to the targeting system for the main gun - he still had a lock. He fired.
First, there was a dull buzzing, which in a millisecond escalated to a crackling that Nemesis could feel even through his armor as the rails were charged with an obscene amount of current. Then, a zzzzzneeeee-KRACK as the 10-Tesla magnetic fields surrounding the rails launched the tungsten spike at hypervelocity. The round was already moving at 2 klicks per second by the time it left the barrel, carbon-nanotube-musculature-based recoil compensators straining to keep the rails together. In less than a second, the spike shot through space, sonic shockwaves effortlessly popping open every window on the street, before hitting the head Tankman straight in the middle of what counted as its head. Abotex nanocomposite, the strongest organic substance known to man, melted and warped away from the spike in the narrow moments before impact, preparing the ground for its arrival…
And then it hit home, drilling through the Boomer's armor effortlessly and tearing through its neuromorphic central processing block even easier. The tungsten round expanded, morphed, transferring a sliver of its kinetic energy into the machine's head at white-hot temperatures; it was enough to strike, and ignite, the capacitor banks for the machine's twin head lasers. The resulting explosion blew the Boomer's hammerhead in two, taking a good chunk of its upper torso with it. The molten wreck that remained began to raise its still-operating railgun, then staggered back to let the others in its squad take its place.
Two seconds had passed.
Perfect.
Well, not really. For one thing, the Boomer was still functioning. Even without a tacnet uplink, a central processor, or anything beyond rudimentary haptic sensors, the little brick of grey matter that controlled its anti-tank arm could still blindfire the gun. Worse still, Nemesis had been counting on the value of surprise to take out at most two Boomers, something he no longer had. No, this hunter-killer squadron - two still-intact second-gen Battle Boomers, two Goblins, and a Recon with what looked like an EW kit tacked to its back carrying an oversized revolver-style grenade launcher - had seen him, and were now jet-hopping across parked cars and the low-lying sprawl that characterized this part of the city, fanning out even as he sped toward the half-wreck of the Boomer he had hit.
They were probably trying to surround him. Let him blow past them, so the hunter became the hunted. He wasn't going to let that happen.
Nemesis triggered one of his visual-homing missiles, and felt the blast of compressed gas behind him as it shot out into space, arced over the Venator, and then slammed into what was left of the already wounded Battle Boomer with pinpoint accuracy. The Boomer didn't even have time to raise its railgun arm before it exploded in a ball of fire.
One which Nemesis was still careening towards.
He shot through the shockwave, felt the rattling of supersonic shrapnel and Boomer bits as they bounced uselessly against the fairing and his armor. He emerged a second later, only to find his antimissile system squawking bloody murder. He sent the Venator into a skidding U-turn just as two large missiles shot past the motorcycle, airbursting meters away. His ballistic system traced red lines across his HUD, but he already knew Sato had sprung for missiles on his second-gen Boomers, shoulder-mounted cold-launched bastards that could probably wreck the fairing of the Venator, or at least rip the sidecar off the main body. Which it was supposed to do in case of emergencies - but Nemesis knew that the moment he tried remotely controlling the main gun, the Recon Boomer's EW kit would go online and cut him off from it completely. He was stuck to it for the time being.
Speaking of which, the barrel had finally cooled down enough that it was ready for another shot. He let the auto-targeting system work its millisecond magic, targeted the Recon Boomer way in the back, and fired.
Again, the dull buzzing that vibrated through his armor and into his bones. Again, the zzzzzzzzznnnneeeeeee-KRACK as the hypercapacitors dumped enough current to kill an elephant a few dozen times over into the rails. Again, the feeling of the sheer power of the railgun kicking back against itself as the lone round accelerated up to 5 kilometers per second and punched through the chest of the Recon Boomer effortlessly, leaving a skull-sized hole right in the gap between its breastplate and its lower chest armor. It tried to raise its grenade launcher arm, found a distinct lack of lifting muscles where that hole was, and idiotically fired the launcher at its feet. Its legs went, bending, then snapping at impossible angles as incendiary frag ripped through Abotex and synthetic musculature, and it collapsed, twitched, then stopped moving.
Okay. Fine. It wasn't as final a kill as Nemesis would have liked, but he'd take it. He revved the throttle, and shot forward just the remaining Boomers cut loose with their own railguns, dancing back and forth as the Goblins followed up with their miniguns and grenade launchers. He bumped over the Recon Boomer, crushing its hammerhead under his wheel, and kept going, away from Sarge and the truck, and into the city. Seconds later, what felt like a million years too long, the Venator's main gun came back online. He triggered the auto target, felt the gun rotate to attack the Boomers behind him, the barrel swinging out above him, the camera feed blurring-
And coming to a sudden stop, as it smacked into a Goblin in midflight. Nemesis pushed the aiming throttle to the left hard, but the gun barrel only wiggled, and despite his best efforts, the Goblin began to push the gun back into place.
Another railgun shot crackled across his left shoulder. They were getting closer, according to his camera feed, and he had no way to stop them. Clever.
He had no choice. He triggered the sidecar detachment procedure. Immediately, an intricate mechanism of sliding bolts clicked out of place, and the sidecar's secondary engine kicked into overdrive. He outpaced the struggling Venator in a second, then did another U-turn and fired another missile while remotely activating the main gun's Artillery Mode.
If the Goblin had an actual face, it would have been twisted into shock, hypothetical eyeballs bulging as the Venator's gun stopped resisting and swung back into a forward-facing position, then fired.
Instead, the Goblin pulled back almost immediately. Nemesis knew why; when the Venator's gun was in Artillery mode, the vibrations as it prepared to fire where enough to feel like your teeth were being shook loose. Also, it probably wanted to dodge the missile that was screaming it toward it.
At the zzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM sound of the round blasting out into space, accelerating to nearly three times the speed it could achieve outside Artillery Mode, the Boomer angled itself at Nemesis, then launched into a swooping charge, its explosive-tipped Bomber Ram pointed squarely at his head in the fashion a fixed-lance cavalry charge. He yanked the sidecar hard to the right in the moment before impact, but not before a hail of 10mm Long rounds shattered against his armor, leaving dents wherever they shattered, and the Bomber Ram's tip cut a long gash across his left shoulder, passing through his armor and cutting deep into the nanoweave beneath it.
Nemesis grunted in pain, then, taking remote control of the Venator, making it turn just enough to catch the Goblin in its livestreamed sights, he fired again. He felt the cold night air rubbing up against his wounded shoulder, but kept driving forward, past the Venator as it went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM.
The Venator jerked back on its rear wheel, caught between the protocols of Artillery Mode and the need to be fixed in place for said mode to actually work properly. But Nemesis's gamble paid off, as he saw on the remote camera. The Goblin took the round square in the chest, and was promptly blown to bits as the hypersonic round yanked its torso apart. The Venator kept turning till it had a position facing the remaining Boomers alongside Nemesis. Then it settled down, firing dampener spikes into the ground to lock it in place. Perfect.
Or, considering the flurry of missiles that were now pointed squarely at him, not.
He kicked off the sidecar-bike just as the first wave of impacts hit, smashed into the ground at fifty miles an hour, hit the pavement, bounced, then tucked his arms in and rolled. He heard the destruction of his sidecar, point-defense gun and all, an instant later. The moment the Venator's main gun's telemetry clicked over to his HUD, as it stopped getting signals from the fireball that had been its sister bike, he triggered it to fire with a thought.
The Venator charged up, went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM, and he felt the shockwaves as the round passed through the sound barrier a dozen times over. The other Goblin was too slow to dodge it, and the round dragged the poor Boomer back a good hundred meters before penetrating its body utterly, leaving it a smoking mess of quasi-organic material nearly a kilo distant.
The second-gen Tankmen, on the other hand, dodged it effortlessly, then, three-seconds of threat-prioritization busywork later, took aim at the Venator and fired their railguns at it.
Nemesis could barely rise to his feet as he felt his autodoc pump a cc or two of morphine in his body. Then the shockwave of the Venator exploding from a penetrated fuel cell knocked him down again; his hands flew out and smacked into the pavement. He ground his teeth in rage and pain, the feeling of his bruised ribs flaring up through the morphine like a submarine breaching the ocean surface.
He whirled around, half-blinded by the warning messages flashing across his HUD, to see the two remaining Battle Boomers walking toward him like schoolyard bullies approaching the fat dweeby kid they knew they could get away with picking on. He stood up, straightened himself, thought for a moment, then dismissed the warnings with a thought.
"Fine," he said. "You wanna fight dirty? We can do that."
And with that he fired his flightjets and leapt into the air.
Boomers got stupider the more of their tacnet went down; a full squad could outthink a human, their shared wireless links making more than the sum of their parts, but just two or just one had a nasty tendency to let their pseudo-instinct protocols override the more logical parts of their brains. They could, eventually, recognize that they were on their own and rewire themselves to ignore their blanked-out overwatch uplinks, instead of continuously trying to outsource their cognitive heavy lifting to a command unit that didn't exist, but that took time, time that left them helpless and in-stasis if they didn't have a certain GENOM-exclusive patch that let their body override their brains and fight autonomously.
The point being that, instead of simply shooting the flying vigilante, relying on their railguns or head lasers to finish their target off, the Battle Boomers tracked him for a hot second, their optics dilating in intense concentration. Then, they leapt into the air after him, reaching the apex of their powered jump just as Nemesis cut his jets and, howling bloody murder behind his helmet, went into a dive for the Boomer to his left.
He hit it, grabbed onto its hammerhead right between its eyes, then let his replaced vibroblade shoot out into the machine's braincase.
The blade was almost drilling into the Boomer's soft neruomatter by the time the Boomer grabbed Nemesis by the leg and threw him off. He was ready for that, though, and triggered his minigun on the other arm, aiming squarely for where he'd made the initial wound. In less than two seconds, over a hundred 15mm APEX rounds had hit the space between the Boomer's optics, first digging into the armor where it had been weakened, then turning its brain into so much sludge and char. The shock was enough to stun it for just a second, and then it managed to raise its railgun and fire.
Nemesis was ready for that, too, sidestepping the round just as it followed up with a sweeping attack from its head lasers. He jetted back, just out of their range, as they cut open the pavement where he had been moments ago-
Right into the other Boomer's range, just as it cut its jets and dropkicked him.
The blow smacked straight into his exposed shoulder, and he winced as the nanoweave strained and began to tear under the impact. He wasn't sure if it had broken his arm or not, but either way it hurt even worse than his ribs.
He fell back. Now the Boomer was on top of him, practically straddling him, punching him in the helmet over and over again, his reinforced neck the only thing keeping his meat one from snapping for good. It got three good blows in, just beginning to dent his helmet inward, before Nemesis's vibroblade arm shot up and lopped the machine's hand off at the wrist. It seemed to look at its wrist for a second, surprised.
Then, in a fit of sheer idiocy, it raised its railgun arm and brought it down in a double smash.
Nemesis blocked it with his own arms, got to his knees, and began to push upward. For a moment, neither man nor Boomer moved, each attempting to push the other into submission. The other Boomer, the one with a massive gouge in the middle of its head, sensed that something was amiss, and aimed its railgun. Perhaps it would hit its robot-in-arms in the process of killing its primary target. It didn't care.
Nemesis saw it. He let go, scrambling back just as the Boomer he had been locked in combat with brought its arms down, then fired his railgun straight at its chest. The spike drilled through. Tangerine gushed from the entrance wound. The Boomer moved to yank the spike out, found it had no active hand to do so, and promptly charged Nemesis.
The vigilante fired again, this time right at the base of its neck. The spike hit moments before the other Boomer's round impacted it from behind. Caught between two nearly simultaneous penetrations of its armor, it rocked back, then fell forward, right on top of Nemesis.
It would have been funny had the Boomer not actually pinned his lower torso to the ground.
Immobilized, Nemesis considered his options. His railgun arm free, he fired one last railgun spike into, then through, the fallen Boomer's left hammerhead. Then, he jammed his vibroblade into the entrance wound just to make sure. He twisted his arm as the blade entered the hammerhead's innards, felt the machine twitch and die.
Which left him stuck under one Boomer, and one drunkenly staggering toward him, wounded but still alive.
Which was fine.
This was why he had saturation rockets.
The rocket tube dropped over his left shoulder, its rear just barely scraping the ground. He fired point-blank, not bothering to conserve ammo. The Boomer staggered back under the hail of explosives; by the time he stopped firing five seconds later, there wasn't much left of it save its smoldering legs and pelvis.
And that was that. He had lost a very valuable piece of hardware in the process, but the squad sent after him, enough firepower to level a city block, was dead and gone.
Nemesis tried to kick under the Boomer corpse, hoping to at least get his right knee out. It stubbornly refused to budge. He turned on his comms and pinged Sarge.
"Nemesis?"
"Here. I'm a little - stuck right now. But the Boomers are all down."
"You mean the Boomers going after you, right? We all kinda panicked when the Venator went dark. What happened?"
"Sarge, I'd love to explain, but I need a pickup first. Can you do that?"
"Give me a bit. I'm sort of stuck in traffic. GPS says it should be about ten minutes before I get to your location."
Huh. "Is the squad sent after Karns down?"
"Um… No. Feeds suggest pretty stiff resistance, but they're still mostly all there. Five hundred meters from the Ri-San."
"If they break through, and they get Karns, and they go after me, my location will be smeared across the street. Understood?" He dragged that last part out just a little bit, to remind him who was in charge.
"Understood, sir. I'm still gonna be there in twelve minutes."
"You just said ten."
"GPS changed. Sir."
"Alright. Nemesis out."
He let his comms switch off, wriggled a bit to keep feeling in his legs, then struggled to push the Boomer off him for just a little bit longer. Within five minutes, he had moved the thing's corpse, or rather its wreckage, three inches off to his right. It was heavier than he thought, even over his massive Heavy Hardsuit.
He looked up at the winter sky, the dim sun slowly approaching its apex. He felt his opened shoulder, how the nanoweave felt almost brittle as the cold seeped into it. He thought about Sarge, and Maria, and Sato, and the Sabers, approximately in that order.
He wondered if any of Skeeter's goons were in the buildings around him. Most had been wrecked by various explosions or stray railgun shots. Would they hate him for fighting on their turf and not some other syndicate's? He hoped not. Criminals were irrational beings, for the most part. He wouldn't put it past one to try curbstomping him in his prone state. That would be humiliating, to say the least.
The thought made him unsheath his vibroblade again. He cut into the collapsed hammerhead, using what little leverage he had in his pinned state to hack away at the chunks of Boomer that remained. Within a minute, he had his upper legs free, and the hammerhead sliced into so much Tankman kebab. Getting a better look at what remained, he realized the Boomer had hooked its railgun arm around his right leg in a desperate attempt to bring him down with it. Any attempt to remove the offending limb would also mean running the risk of whacking his own leg off, at least in his current position.
Nemesis sighed, leaned back, looked up again, and let himself think.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Summer 2031
Iquitos, Peru
326m Southeast of Puerto De Productores
Midnight
You're practically in the river at this point, scrambling against the muddy banks with all the grace you can muster as rounds fly over your head.
In a K-suit, that doesn't count for much.
So the next thing you know you're sloughing it underwater, you've got about fifteen minutes of air before you choke on your own exhalations, and the Shining Path has a Chinese Battlemover named after some obscure Mongolian general with its headlights illuminating the space just above your head.
This was not how you anticipated spending your evening in Iquitos, Gateway to the Amazon.
Oh, you'd heard from your superiors that there was a pretty good chance you'd run into hostiles. Ever since the Path declared themselves a part of the UA on Peruvian national television by decapitating the President, you've been forced to assume that every town east of the Andes has some combatants in it. Now you're here in a K-suit up against a 'mover that would have been hard to take down even if the rest of your squad hadn't been ripped to shreds by its rotary cannons. As it is, you have a support weapon of sorts, a ponderous machinecannon perfect for tearing up other powersuits, but which would probably require a full clip of concentrated fire to even crack Battlemover armor. And that's it.
The Lumies - that's the shorthand for Path cultists, Lumies - are in boats now. The battlemover is still sweeping the shoreline. There's no way for you to moonwalk to a safe location because if they managed to get a Battlemover out here, there's a good chance all of Iquitos is theirs now. So you have to find a way to kill that Battlemover within fifteen minutes, then hope like hell the distress signal Matt planted will at least bring an air strike down on these communist fuckers.
You can do that. You've done worse.
You stow the machinecannon, then stomp, loud and hard, on the riverbed before promptly jetting away. It works, because in less than a second the river is filled with 20mm slugs as big as your hand, like murderous explosive schools of fish followed by a torrent of lesser rounds, 5.56mms from Norinco Type-92s and AKM's. Which is all fine and dandy, but your real prize isn't here yet.
Ah. There it is.
Six legs, a snarling maw like a short-snouted crocodile, and two rotary cannons plus a xaser in the mouth. It might be capable of flight, but you don't know. Some call Chinese Battlemovers Spidertanks, because they have multiple legs like spiders and are (supposedly) armored like tanks, but you know better.
This is a goddamn dragon you're dealing with.
You strike.
The operator barely notices, at first, as it enters the water, but then you get a really good grip on the right front leg and you pull hard, dragging the whole of the machine into the water. It's not fast, it's not even well-coordinated - but it is strong, and it thrashes like a motherfucker, trying to bring you around to the front so its cannons can render you so much meat and scrap.
You will not let it do that. You sink into the riverbed, thousands of years of sediment coming up to your chest, and yet you hold its massive paw-limb steady, dragging the 'Mover back, back, keeping the cockpit underwater in the blind hope that it isn't properly sealed.
Then the limb comes loose.
Suddenly your turbofans are pushing you back down the river, and you have nothing that you're straining against, and an emergency sweep of the lidar tells you that your opponent has its guns pointed squarely at you. It happens so fast you barely have time to draw your weapon, much less say your last rites as a glimmering light comes from the port right where the xaser should be-
Whereupon a surge of water smashes you into the muck again.
Right. It must have had some sort of - accidental discharge? Would the Chinese really make a Battlemover that didn't have its weapons sealed for underwater ops? Can xasers, which are the directed-energy equivalent of short-range flak cannons, actually fire through a medium that isn't air?
You do not ponder any of this. Instead, you dig your SAW out of the riverbed, take aim, and fire into the darkness.
Even with your head protected by a few inches of laminate armor, even with your sensors set to auto-dampen, it sounds much, much louder underwater. Not just a BUDDABUDDABUDDA, more a THWOOOOMTHWOOOOMTHWOOOOM, the kind of sound that buzzes in your skull and ricochets in the space between your ears. The recoil pushes you back just a bit, forces you to dig in as the seconds fly by and your HUD's ammo counter ticks down with it, tries to buck the gun out of your suit's hands, but you press down on the barrel with your other forearm just hard enough to keep the machinecannon on target, till finally the ammo counter goes red, and then empty.
Your HUD helpfully chirps that 87% of the rounds appeared to hit. You press forward, casually preloading another ammo drum into the gun's autoloader mechanism so it doesn't get flooded with water and muck, and that's when something snakes out of the cloud in front of you and wraps around your suit's torso.
Even with nearly six inches of laminate armor between you and the 'Mover, you still feel your ribs flex and almost begin to bend. Your off hand shoots forward to finish the loading procedure, and then another something knocks the weapon out of your hand.
You get a good look at the 'Mover seconds later. It's been battered alright, its armor cratered and fractured and in some places flapping limply like a fish's fins, but it's intact, and the two antipersonnel tentacles next to its head are very much functioning. Something cracks, a brittle sound, and a little breach alarm pops up on your HUD's rendering of your suit. Your opponent doesn't open its xaser mouth-port again, but instead just stares at you, its twitchy chameleon-eye optics unable to project any sort of menace.
Fuck this. You came out here to kill drug dealers and communists, not die to some prepubescent mechajockey high on the promise of victory for the Chairman. Besides, the bastard made one big mistake: he's only grabbing you by one arm.
So as the 'Mover pulls you closer, your gun hand free, you poke it right in the optics.
It's a simple technique, one of the first things you learn when you start doing PanzerFaust, but it works. The optic ball flexes, then shatters, and the 'Mover stupidly thrashers its head in your general direction, hoping it can whack your finger, now firmly pressing into the optic chip in the back of the wrecked sensor, out of place.
While it's doing that, the grip on your chest tightens, then loosens. You hear something clunk. Probably the rotary cannons swinging into place. It wouldn't surprise you if the operator is stupid enough to wreck his mech just to kill you.
Well, that's his mistake, because now you're free of the tentacles, and your other hand rams into the other optic, blinding the pilot for long enough that you can slip in under its guard, just below the howling of the guns, and grab his cockpit, right under the long neck of the 'Mover, and relatively unarmored.
You yank once, twice, thrice, trying to find the hinges that will yank the cockpit open and drown the pilot. The 'Mover thrashes about, then gets a grip on the riverbed, and suddenly you're on your back, still clinging to the cockpit, as the bastard tries to hump you into the ground hard enough that you'll let go. It would be funny if your head wasn't snapping back with every hump, jarring your concentration and leaving you unable to do much more than hold on. You let go with one hand, and your fingers dance across the torso looking for that magic grip on the top of the cockpit, some little handle for emergency operators to pull on-
And then you find it. You twist, and it spins. You pull, and suddenly the whole monster apparatus collapses on top of you and is still.
When the silt clears, you're looking into the desperate, bulging face of some Chinese kid, his fingers clawing at your visor, trying to do to you what you did to him. You can barely move your legs, but at least one arm is free. Your mechanical fingers grip his skull as he begins to scream, as water floods his lungs, so you do him a mercy and squeeze.
Then it's all over, you have seven minutes of air left, and you're stuck at the bottom of the Amazon River.
An airstrike comes about three minutes later, and Sarge shows up in his suit about two minutes after that to pull your barely-functional suit out of the shit. -Did you honestly run through an airstrike just to get to me? -Yes, sir. -Don't do that. K-Suits are tough, but they aren't that tough. If you got hit by friendlies we'd both be dead.
-Understood, sir.
You like Sarge. Apparently while you were dicking around on the riverbed, he managed to slip past Shining Path patrols, loot a weapon depot, and provide enough scans for individual targeting on that airstrike, so the drones weren't just firing at random. As the airlift comes to drag you and your suits out of Iquitos, you resolve to drag Matt Hemmer to one of those shitty bars at the airbase and get him shitfaced drunk.
You'll pay, hell, even if he asks for something harder than Coors. It's the least you can do.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
District 4
February 13, 2036
10:21 am
"-but worst of all is the antipersonnel Tankman. Bastard's got a tank-scale flamethrower and some kind of heavy shield on his other arm. Every time we try to press the advantage, he just puts up the shield and starts spraying mag-napalm. Then the regular Tankman and the Goblin lay down cover fire and they push forward."
"I see," Sylia said. "And is that all besides Nemesis's personal kill squad?"
"As best as we can figure. I half expect Sato to bring in his 55C's after this, but we can handle those."
"I believe you. Worse would be if one of Sato's rivals decides to contest his claim."
"Damn. You're right." A pause. It sounded like Skeeter was talking to one of his underlings, but Sylia couldn't exactly pick out what. "I don't suppose you have any records of what they have left over?"
"Iwasaki's Type-Nine Battlemovers were the only thing we didn't encounter last night, but the Red Willow is a notoriously slow-moving organization. The only way you see those in your territory is if the other syndicate heads pressure Iwasaki hard or remove him outright. That's not taking into account any spare infantry they may have drummed up from reserves-"
"Wait, Type-Nines? The trike monsters the JSDF just started using?"
"Yes."
"Where the hell did Iwasaki get those?"
"Unsure. I'll gladly have one of my contacts find out, but it will cost you."
"Always the mercenary, aren't you, Saber White?" He sounded exasperated and relieved at the same time. "Alright. Just get over here ASAP. We've got the enemy pinned down near Susanoya Plaza, but I don't think we can hold them for much longer."
"Understood. Saber White out." With that, the audio sign linked to KARNS vanished from Sylia's HUD, and she had an unobstructed view of the all-but-abandoned city streets that she and the other Sabers were rocketing down on their Motoslaves.
Priss pinged her. "Any updates from the Beefsteak?"
Sylia smirked. "I'm sure he'd love you to call him that, Priss. All we've got is that Nemesis destroyed a squad of Battle Boomers sent after him in the past few minutes, but Skeeter's people are having trouble holding off the ones sent after him."
"Figures. Everyone thinks Karns is the biggest shit in town, turns out he's just a paper tiger compared to the Sleeping Dragon. Shoulda seen that coming."
"What makes you say that?"
"Nothing. Just if those clowns try to redirect them toward Sho's place-" She trailed off. "Whatever. You know what I'll do."
"Kill more people?" That was Linna, her Tornado Motoslave growling just behind Priss and her Supercell. "Isn't that what you always do?"
The comment was meant to be cutting, but Sylia noted that her voice sounded unnaturally stressed. Evidently she still held reservations about the Sabers' more active role in things; she had apparently been on the verge of having a total breakdown after their actions last night, especially considering what she'd done to that poor UFV. Perhaps it would have been wiser to allow her to just stay out of this engagement. An emotionally unbalanced team member, unable to commit to combat, was worse than not having a member at all.
But - no. Linna was a member of the team, same as her, same as Priss. She was not going to characterize her closest associates as dead weight, because ultimately emotional distress was a solvable problem.
"Linna," Sylia said, "You may disagree with Priss, but I would prefer neither of you try to provoke each other into bickering. We should only be dealing with Boomers in this engagement, so any concerns about killing people should be relatively moot."
Linna was silent for a second; Sylia could see her Tornado begin to pick up speed. Then she spoke.
"Fine. We don't kill in this engagement, but what about the next one? And the one after that? Now that we've decided helping Nemesis is what we're doing, and knowing he kills people left and right."
Ah. So it was a longer-standing issue about the principles of the organization. Goodness, hadn't her strategy already been made clear? Minimize civilian casualties via successive decapitation strikes against the major players in this awful little war. It wasn't a foolproof plan, but it was the best option she had considering the only obvious alternative was to let the war continue.
She knew that Linna was, despite her mercenary behavior, ultimately a person with principles. Priss's idea of morality was fluid, centered around vague maxims like 'don't be a dick' and 'don't trust anyone who says they know better, 'cause they usually don't'. Nene generally believed in the ability of the ADP to determine the morally right, at least in Megatokyo. As for herself, she knew she had an objective - to fulfill her father's last wishes - and all else was subservient to that objective.
But Linna had been raised by people who saw the art of combat as just one facet of a Way, a proper code of living. Beneath the facade of a woman dedicated to money and the things it could buy, there was a woman who saw her omni-proficiency at martial arts as a way to protect the weak and humble the strong.
It had surprised Sylia that she cared so much, when they first met. But over time, she'd learned how to work with Linna. She had weaknesses like any other human. The trick was knowing how to play to them.
"Perhaps you're right, Linna," Sylia said. "But I would argue inaction will cause even more people to be killed. For better or for worse, this city is our responsibility."
"Mm."
"You disagree?"
"It's certainly a slick argument you're making," Linna said. Sylia could all but hear her frustration. "That we're responsible for everything that goes on in this city. But-"
"You don't think we can bear such a burden?"
"No! That's not what I'm trying to say at all. I just feel like there's a better way out of this mess, one which lets us save lives instead of take them, and you're not trying to find it."
"I see. You think Nene had the right idea with the datadrop."
"Look, if we can't trust the police to stop this thing, who can stop it?"
For her part, Sylia had to suppress a laugh. "Do we trust the ADP to handle rampaging Boomers and corporate excess?"
"No, but - this is different! We're not keeping anything in check, the way we do with GENOM. We're just burning it to the ground and starting from square one!" Linna huffed. "This is something the police should be able to handle. Otherwise…" She trailed off. Presumably, Sylia thought, she didn't want to offend Nene.
Speaking of which - "Hey, you can say it," she said. "I know we suck, but I have the excuse that none of our suckitude is my fault. Relax, Linna."
"You're okay with this?" Linna's head turned just a bit to regard Nene to her left. She could afford to; her Motoslave's AI was doing most of the driving anyway.
Nene shrugged. "I mean, kinda? I think I got through to Fleet Hermes last night. We save his patron's ass, maybe he'll be able to compromise."
"And if he doesn't? If he insists that to work with him we have to slaughter people?"
"Then," Nene said, serious all of a sudden, "We burn that bridge when we come to it."
"Thirty seconds till we hit Susanoya Plaza," Sylia said. "I strongly suggest we get ready for heavy combat, girls." In less polite terms: can it, we've got robots to kill.
"Fine," Linna said, but she could tell there was still a great deal of doubt inside her. Sylia resolved to have a chat with her once they got back, in private. Clearly she didn't trust Priss or Nene's judgement when it came to violence.
Then they hit the plaza.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:26 am
It had once been the plaza / parking lot for a large-ish stripmall, built after the quake on cheap land in anticipation of all the people who would surely move back into the area. People moved back, but few had small businesses to put up there, and so the development had gone from the tackiness of infanthood to the decrepit look of old age in just a few months, its storefronts never opened. It had looked like the kind of place serial killers built murder-mazes in. Emphasis on had.
Right now, it looked like it was a portal to hell.
Bodies, most mangled and charred beyond belief, were sprawled across the plaza, a testament to valiance of Skeeter Karns's men, and how little it had meant in the face of a jet of mag-napalm. There was remarkably little blood, just meters of sprayed gore and ugly masses of smoking petrol goop splayed in some inscrutable pattern on the asphalt. For once, Sylia was glad she hadn't sprung for the direct-feed olfactory sensors. Even she would have thrown up in her helmet.
In the center of the chaos, the three Boomers stood, unmoved, Buhddaesque. As one, they were tearing through the remains of a multilayered blockade of overturned armored trucks, and what looked like legitimate armored emplacements, while the few troops who hadn't fallen to the Infantry Boomer's flamethrower appeared to have hidden in the storefronts, occasionally firing sidearms into the trio of mechanical monsters. A smart mortar was puttering away behind the blockade, a little robotic arm shakily stuffing rounds into the tube; the standard 12B, the one with the coilgun shell launcher, fired, and the round punched straight through the blockade and wrecked the mortar effortlessly. The others were just standing there, looking around, presumably scanning the storefronts for more things to kill. They would have made an excellent decorative fountain in that position, just barely beginning to turn around.
Sylia saw all this, and smirked. They had the advantage of surprise, for once. Nene had already engaged her jammers. She quickly drew up a tactical plan in her head and pinged Priss and Linna with it.
"We focus on the flamethrower one. I go high, Priss goes low. Linna, mop up whatever's left or just go for the Goblin. I'll cripple the 12B's gun arm, and you two can do as you please with it.
"Got it," the others said at once. Nene pulled off to the side, while Priss and Linna transformed their motoslaves. They went in, pincer-style. Linna pulled back, transformed her Tornado into motoslave form, and unsheathed twin semirigid whip-swords, called urumi, while Priss shot forward, firing her side-mounted assault cannon on semi-auto.
And Sylia? She went high.
Her custom Motoslave, designated Monsoon, was built not as an all-rounder unit like her Hardsuit; she'd just get in the way of Priss and Linna in all-Motoslave combat, then. Instead, it was designed for aerial overwatch, its chopperlike front fairing splitting into two truly massive wings that caught the wind and yanked the Monsoon skyward. She drew her multirole railcannon and let the barrel telescope out. Then she took aim at the infantry Tankman, which, cut off from its tacnet, had turned around to look at her and was seemingly trying to decide between spraying her with its flamethrower or just using one of its short-range rockets.
She didn't give it a chance. The moment one of Priss's wild shots struck it in the knee, she unceremoniously blew its head open with a hypersonic burst of explosive gel-doped minishells. For good measure, she fired a single shot at its shield-mounted fuel tank, setting the machine ablaze in a fireball of mag-napalm. Doused in its own fuel, its organic components ablaze, it slumped to the ground, then collapsed.
The other Boomers had not been inactive, though, and the Goblin cut loose with a burst of minigun fire directed at Linna just as she juked to the side to avoid a spray of flame before launching a grenade at her pointblank. She pulled back, missing the arc of the grenade but taking a few dozen rounds in her Motoslave's armor before swiping one of her urumi across the thing's neck. A follow-up slash, and she had made a deep swipe across the Goblin's chest, following up by slipping inside the Boomer's guard just as the 12B across the way tried to sideswipe her with a shot from its coilgun and delivering a sturdy kick to its side.
Sylia swiveled up and fired a shot straight through the 12B's gun arm, wrecking it utterly, just as Priss rammed into its abdomen, knocking it over then driving over its chest and head. The Boomer went crunch, then squelch, and that was that, as Linna dealt with her off-balance and decapitated Goblin by activating the rigidizing protocols in her off-hand urumi and impaling the thing right in the middle of its heart, then pulling out as quickly as she came.
Most of the square was on fire by now, but Sylia gave it little mind as she hovered down to street level. Whereas a few years ago, her Sabers had struggled to take on two baseline 12B's on the night she took Mason's life, they had dispatched these two in a little less than thirty seconds. She was allowed a bit of pride in her girls' work.
Besides, the Starlite nanofoam painted over all Saber gear could shrug off any heat less than 10K Celsius, and mag-napalm burned at a fraction of that. The Sabers could have been doused in the stuff and they would have mostly been fine.
"Well, then," she said, touching down. "That's that. Nene, could you drop a line to Skeeter again? We should probably let him know we intend to speak with Nemesis."
Nene didn't respond, but she was clearly alive, her faceless helmet reflecting the smoky flames that dominated most of the little plaza. "Nene?"
"Yeah," she said, "That's not a good idea."
"Dare I ask why?"
"Because we've got three ADP combat aerodynes and what looks like a K-Suit squad carrier coming in fast from the ADP airport. And, uh, you're probably just gonna want to listen to this. Pulled it from their comms."
She sent a little audio file across the tacnet, and it played instantly:
"-Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. The goal is to capture the Knight Sabers alive if possible, dead if not. If mass seizure of Skeeter Karns' so-called 'territory' draws them back to us, then we need to-"
Sylia terminated the file. She knew that voice. Admittedly, not as well as she would have liked, but well enough.
"Kate Madigan," she said. "Head of Internal Security at GENOM. On an ADP comm channel. Giving orders. Of course."
"Uh…" Nene trailed off. "Okay. Yeah. I figured it was someone like that. Voice print matches at least. Uh, Sylia? What do we do now?"
"The mission hasn't changed," she responded, an edge of steel in her voice. "We find Nemesis, we talk to him, and we convince him to come with us."
"And then we run. Fast."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Well, I'm a month overdue, but obviously that's because of school. Now, what with COVID sweeping the globe, I should have plenty of time to hack out another chapter or two. So that's one bright side to this mess.
In the meantime, read Tales From The Future, the only BGC fic on deviantart. It's surprisingly good, a little indulgent, but then again the best fanfics always are. While you're at it, leave me a reply or something, I enjoy people's reactions to this thing immensely, and I have nothing better to do than reply.
-STMPD
Update: I used what was termed a slur related to the coronavirus here. I have removed it. Sorry about that.
District 3
February 13, 2036
10:13 am
Skeeter Karns looked out over his domain, the southeastern part of Megatokyo that GENOM thought of as connective tissue between Old Tokyo and the Yokohama-Kawasaki region. The massive screen in front of him displayed a bird's-eye view of his territory, flickering with updates from the murder of avimorph Boomers he had watching over it. Periodically, a bird would go down, and a little chunk of the patchwork image would freeze and stop updating.
He could track the incursions pretty easily in spite of this. All he had to do was follow the fires and the frozen panes, the emergency audio requests for backup that couldn't possibly come fast enough, and he had a clear image of where the Boomers were going. He could figure out their pattern, mark where he had to put traps and ambushes, and send the necessary orders to move his troops.
Sato's Boomers were heading for the Ri-San, that was for sure. But they were definitely taking their sweet time getting there. It was as though every time they got within a block of a residential building, they made a point of diverting from their straight-shot course to destroy said building. Why? Wasn't he the target? Why maximize civilian casualties, and run the risk of losing even one very expensive Boomer to his also very expensive anti-tank squads?
He sighed, leaned back in his chair. He knew the answer.
First, they were going after innocents because they could. Two of five anti-tank squads had already tried to set up a blockade just a few minutes ago, pumping the head Boomers full of hypervelocity squeezebore-launched spikes that could take a 55C's head in one shot.
They'd downed one 12B before the flamethrowers got them. One! One! He had men scrambling to set up another ambush, had laser-tripped claymores lining a street near the Boomers' hypothetical attack path, he'd see what that did, but how was a man supposed to have hope when tank-grade killer robots invaded his kingdom with the express purpose of taking away everything he'd done?
Two, they weren't after him. As much as he hated to admit it, he was a consolation prize if the real target didn't show his head. He'd sent a message telling his allies to hide, to stay in the Holton base as long as they needed to. He doubted any of them would listen. It was in the nature of men like Nemesis to see only one man as their superior. For him, it was probably some commanding officer back in whatever military had shat him out. The vigilante had made it very clear to him that he would be operating on his own terms. Indisputably clear.
A splattering of red crossed the screen, followed by text. Good, Skeeter thought. That was an indication that the claymores had gone off. He had no faith that they'd kill off all of the Tankmen, but maybe a one-two punch would do something. He put his fingers on the sector where the mines had spewed their lethal ordnance - they'd replaced the usual steel balls with impact-triggered shaped-charge grenades - and pinched out, zooming in, letting an avimorph know that he would like to see, in real-time, what was going on in that sector.
The feed flickered into real-time. There were four Boomers in the center of the street, their hammerheads unmistakeable. They looked - fine, actually. Shit.
One more was wrecked, smears of energetic orange and blue-grey cermet splattered and shattered across the pavement. It looked like it had the remains of heavy shields on both its arms, but they were both riddled with palm-sized holes. The other four were engaged with a firefight with his men, who had set up military-grade blockades in the street and were hosing the Boomers with LMG fire and a few grenades to boot. Neither side seemed to be at an advantage. Whenever an anti-tank gunner tried to rear up and seriously wound a Boomer with an RPG, the others would sweep their miniguns over to that blockade and turn the offending gunner into hamburger, or the other Boomer with arm shields would dive in front and take the shaped-charge shot for its comrade. It was the efficiency that he would expect from Boomers, and he fucking hated it.
He tabbed in a voice channel on the squads just as one of the Boomers seemed to lose patience. The blunt heads of rockets popped out of the left shoulder of the one with the arm shields and fired with little fanfare, and it unhooked what looked like a tank-grade flamethrower from the inside of its right arm and started spewing fire everywhere, and Skeeter started to shout "Fall back-" at the same time that the scorching magne-napalm burned through the barricades with white-hot intensity, and he barely disconnected before he heard the screaming. The avimorph's feed cut to a NO SIGNAL shortly afterward.
"Fuck," he said to no one in particular. Those were the last of his anti-tank squads. He'd spent nearly ten million yen just training and equipping the bastards. And now they were gone. Just like that. He hadn't even seen infantry-kit Tankmen pull off things like that before. They were supposed to specialize in antipersonnel work, but flamethrowers - wasn't that overkill? Then again, this entire situation reeked of Sato going for overkill.
That was concerning enough, but where were the other five? He zoomed out, looked for the telltale signs of little speech bubbles blinking in and out of existence as men died. He found them in seconds, five klicks away from the other squad, wrecking one of the few APC's he'd managed to get his hands on with mechanical efficiency. They'd turned the poor truck on its side and were wiggling the autocannon turret out of its mount. It popped loose, and one of the Boomers put its gun arm in the empty space where the turret had been and fired, unfazed by the barely-contained explosion that followed. Then they plowed on, heading for the southwest.
Skeeter zoomed out again. It almost looked like they'd managed to pinpoint Nemesis's location under the Holton and were closing in on it. Was that even possible? He zoomed in again, watching the Boomers rocket down the empty streets with no resistance, and checked their designations. Yep, there were two 15B Goblins, purpose-built urban-recon machines that could use the EM resonances in buildings to scan them. But that shouldn't have made a difference, even if they were standing right on top of the Holton's main junk pile. He'd had that safehouse shielded.
He knew, then, what had happened. Nemesis had disobeyed his request and gone out.
Skeeter swiped over to the Holton area, found that, yes, its doors had been opened in the past thirty minutes, to admit two large vehicles. They had to be evacuating, which was even worse than just bringing Nemesis out. Did they honestly think they could leave with Sato noticing? As tempting as it was to leave fools to their fate, they were, to some degree, his fools. He grabbed his phone from the side of his desk, dialed a number he knew from memory, and waited-
For about five seconds.
"Yeah?" The voice of Nemesis's in-between, the one he'd actually met, the one who only spoke English. Told folks to call him Sarge.
Skeeter decided to tell it like it was. "There's a squad of 12B's moving on your location."
Yeah. Let them parse that. Skeeter considered himself to be a lenient guy, letting his underlings suffer the consequences of their own actions naturally. Most of the time, like right now, when people didn't do what he advised they ended up screwing themselves over.
"Oh," came the response. "Good."
"Good?!" Skeeter blanched. "I'm checking now-" here he switched over to the cameras on the edge of his territory, where a small green truck was blowing past light after light, trying to get to the expressway. "-And I don't think you have the firepower to take on one Battle Boomer."
"Oh, we don't. That's part of the plan. How close are they?"
The plan? So Nemesis had a plan. That was not exactly reassuring. Few battle plans survive contact with the enemy, especially when the enemy is purpose-built to kill tanks and your side has no air support.
"About three klicks to your northwest and closing. They're coming in fast. What exactly is this plan you have?"
"The usual. Bait out the Tankmen, have my buddy come in on the Venator behind them, bang bang bang. Hey, if you have their location, do you mind sharing that data? It'd help a lot."
"The Venator."
"It's latin for 'hunter'. Our mutual pal thought the name sounded cool."
"Not the question I was asking."
"Suit yourself. Look, Skeeter, the Tankmen are in two squads, right? One for you, one for us. Barring any surprises on Sato's end, I think we can deal with our guys, but some telemetry data wouldn't hurt. That's all."
"You sound very confident about that." Which was… good?
Sarge laughed. "Oh hell no. I'm scared shitless. I've done something like this a few times already, and you'd think it'd get me used to it, but I guess I got soft. But you gotta have faith, right?"
"Right." He hung up before the American's folksy wisdom could shake him out of his state of anxious semi-panic.
Fine. Skeeter thought for a moment, then decided to tell his avimorphs to scan the surrounding area for something big and scary-looking. Whatever this Venator was, he
wanted to judge it for himself. If nothing else, it would be nice to know whether or not Sarge was bullshitting him, if he was going to have to deal with two squads of Tankmen in a few minutes instead of one.
They found it almost instantly. They were good at taking vague text-line commands and interpreting them into tactical action.
Either that, or they just saw the big scary motorcycle and assumed whatever he was ordering them to do was related to it.
It was - what the hell was it? A motorcycle, sure, one wheel in the front, one in the back, a sidecar with one wheel on its left side. But the fairing itself was dominated by a truly massive gun, facing forward, the blunt barrel almost jutting out over the front wheel. Meanwhile, the sidecar held both Nemesis - who somehow had managed to fit into the thing in his heavy hardsuit - and what looked like the blunt nosecones of four small missiles, plus a rifle-caliber minigun in the front.
It looked like an Abrams and a Harley had a child. Skeeter was amazed it didn't fall over any time it took a turn. But it didn't.
"Hm," he breathed. Maybe this could work. Yeah. Fine. The Boomers heading for the Ri-San he could deal with. If he had Doc bring out Yoshino, got Chika and the rest to the sniping posts at the top of the building, brought out those old Stomach railguns the ADP had 'misplaced' around '33 - yeah. He'd be overplaying his hand a little, but he was up against Boomers with oversized mag-napalm flamethrowers. Escalation was the order of the day.
Skeeter spun his chair around, got up, and threw open the sliding screen door with aplomb. He came upon Chika and several other sukeban girl-gangers hanging around a shared table. For once, none of them were smoking.
He cleared his throat, and the girls all swiveled to meet his gaze. It was eerily quiet in this little back room, the only sound coming from the main room across the hall where his commanders awaited.
Chika was the first to speak. "Sniping posts?" She squeaked.
"Yep."
"Barrett fifty-cals?"
"Ask Doc where the modified stomach guns are."
"We have those? And we never got to use them?"
"Got the whole stock after they discontinued them in '33, straight from ADP HQ."
"Awesome." The rest of the girls scattered. She remained.
"You have a plan, right?"
"I have the rough workings of a strategy. Not a tactical plan, but a strategy. You can fill in the blanks from there."
She sighed. "Okay. I trust you."
And for once in his life, Skeeter Karns wanted to say, "Well, you shouldn't."
Because for once in his life, he wasn't on the side with the most firepower.
Because for once in his life, he had made a horrible mistake.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
There had been a great deal of debate in the early 2010's over the construction of tank guns, and the weapons used to defeat said tanks. One school of thought held that railguns were the future of all guns, everywhere. You could get more punch out of a smaller caliber; you could use inert ammunition, the kind that wouldn't explode if an enemy hit the magazine, but still get an explosive shockwave; in turn, you could have auto-loading tanks, and then eventually automated tanks using thousands of 20mm rounds to punch through even the heaviest of armor.
The other school of thought sprang up mostly in opposition to the railgun-mania. The hypercapacitors needed to power a railgun would be just as much of an ammo storage problem as regular shells; the smaller calibers could only weakly imitate true 120mm APFSDS spikes, so you were trading single-shot damage for a million piddling shots; railguns big enough to do as much damage as regular tank guns or more would just rip themselves apart with recoil and barrel stripping.
The first school wondered what new things the second school brought to the table besides a spirit that was against all innovation, to put it politely. The second school threw up its hands until electrothermal propulsion came along, and then trotted that out as the propellant of the future. The first school pointed out that railguns could do the same job as ET guns could do the same job but cheaper, opening up the tank market to any megacorp who was willing to pay another megacorp more ingrained in the local military-industrial complex; the second school politely wondered why this was supposed to be a good thing.
Meanwhile, the Neo-Soviets were using unguided missiles in their tank barrels, but the Neo-Soviets were weird and everyone kind of hated them.
Anyway, by the time the Fourth Corporate War rolled around and obliterated forty percent of global GDP in a few months, the schools of thought seemed to have settled for hierarchy over competition. Small-bore railguns would be the purvey of megacorps like Militech, for the armored platoon on a budget, and real tank guns would be for real national armies, the kind whose military tactics generally consisted of throwing taxpayer dollars at a problem until it ceased to exist. In the harsh years that followed, both sides of the debate agreed to shut up and focus more on containing the food riots, preferring to argue more about "semi-lethal" weaponry and whether having your public enemies vomit or shit themselves was a more effective use of mass-saturation ultrasound. It wasn't until GENOM nipple-shocked the global economy with plans to rebuild every city on Earth in its divine image that people started to argue about railguns again.
The point being: When Gavin Belasko went to an ex-Militech armory in Baton Rouge and said, "Get me the best anti-armor gun you can find and put it on a big motorcycle," then showed them the blueprints plus the potential payment, he found himself in the middle of a forum debate that had gone on for nearly six hundred pages, two forums, thirty banned accounts, involved security experts from every megacorp and major military on the planet at every conceivable level of clearance, and which showed no sign of stopping.
He bought a railgun in the end, one of the main guns from a decommissioned Zumwalt-class destroyer; the military wasn't exactly keeping track of their scrap in those days, and you could actually store more ammo, even if every 3cm tungsten-alloy spike cost just a little more than your average salaryman made in a month. (The armory said it was the only way the supplier could stay afloat, since all the new GENOM military hardware used different calibers.) Several million dollars of Yvon Heuse's money and three months later, Gavin Belasko had the Venator, an off-road-capable anti-armor vehicle that could actually ride on flimsy asphalt without cracking the pavement, as MBT's were wont to do in those days.
The armory's owners pocketed most of the money, and tried to buy themselves mansions in Key West, hoping the latest hurricane would have driven prices down enough that even mere millionaires could afford Florida. They tried to bribe a real estate agent who was actually a deep-cover agent for the Florida Homeowners Association. Things went badly for them after that, but that's a story for another time.
Meanwhile, Gavin used the Venator whenever heavy armor came up in his various crusades, from a raid on the D-Company-controlled shipyards of Seacouver to hunting down the last of the Clive Bundy gang and their surplus APC's. The few times he'd gone up against 12B Tankmen, it had performed admirably as well. And whenever he needed to draw out enemy forces, he'd use some disposable vehicle as bait. Then he would delete them from existence with maximum prejudice.
That was the plan. He saw no reason why it wouldn't work this time.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:17 am
Nemesis raced down the streets of District 4, clinging to the Heavy Hardsuit-capable sidecar of the Venator like it was the only thing keeping him from becoming a technologically advanced smear on the pavement, which it pretty much was. He checked his HUD's telemetry readout. The Green Dragon van was within a klick of the Boomer squad that was pursuing it. It had gotten on the freeway once, then had taken the nearest off-ramp once Vicain realized, to much cursing, that the highways were loaded to capacity in early morning. Rush hour didn't end in Megatokyo so much as it evolved, but the last thing Nemesis wanted was to have to engage the Venator's cannon in a fixed firefight where the area was nothing but civilian targets.
The Boomers had just jumped off the highway, using their flightjets to compensate for the drop, and had been seriously gaining on the poor van ever since. They were going to have a clear shot on the van, just a little bit ahead of him save a few cars, right about…
Now.
There they were, a surreal sight if there ever was one, six killing machines in the world's richest metropolis rocketing over the hoods of cars whipping around a corner in wing formation with the efficiency of birds of prey. They were big, hot, incredibly easy for the Venator's autotargeting function to lock onto. Within three seconds, he had a lock on the rear Tankman, and thumbed the trigger of the main gun.
Only for the rear Boomer to turn around and fire its twin head lasers at Nemesis. He swerved, the beams melting the pavement where he had been moments before.
Ah shit, and the other ones were starting to turn around too, cutting their flightjets and firing whatever they had on hand. Of course. He'd read something about the latest generation of Tankmen having rear optics, since surprise attacks by yahoos with IED's had cost GENOM so many units in the Tatarstan Succession. Why hadn't he remembered it?
But the plan hadn't changed. Close the distance, dodge their ordinance, and tear them to bits with all the force the Venator could provide. With a flick of his armored thumb, Nemesis activated the point-defense minigun, which began to spew 5.56.mm caseless rounds at nearly a hundred RPM, the ball-mounted barrel twitching this way and that in the blind hope that it might actually hit something. He switched over to the targeting system for the main gun - he still had a lock. He fired.
First, there was a dull buzzing, which in a millisecond escalated to a crackling that Nemesis could feel even through his armor as the rails were charged with an obscene amount of current. Then, a zzzzzneeeee-KRACK as the 10-Tesla magnetic fields surrounding the rails launched the tungsten spike at hypervelocity. The round was already moving at 2 klicks per second by the time it left the barrel, carbon-nanotube-musculature-based recoil compensators straining to keep the rails together. In less than a second, the spike shot through space, sonic shockwaves effortlessly popping open every window on the street, before hitting the head Tankman straight in the middle of what counted as its head. Abotex nanocomposite, the strongest organic substance known to man, melted and warped away from the spike in the narrow moments before impact, preparing the ground for its arrival…
And then it hit home, drilling through the Boomer's armor effortlessly and tearing through its neuromorphic central processing block even easier. The tungsten round expanded, morphed, transferring a sliver of its kinetic energy into the machine's head at white-hot temperatures; it was enough to strike, and ignite, the capacitor banks for the machine's twin head lasers. The resulting explosion blew the Boomer's hammerhead in two, taking a good chunk of its upper torso with it. The molten wreck that remained began to raise its still-operating railgun, then staggered back to let the others in its squad take its place.
Two seconds had passed.
Perfect.
Well, not really. For one thing, the Boomer was still functioning. Even without a tacnet uplink, a central processor, or anything beyond rudimentary haptic sensors, the little brick of grey matter that controlled its anti-tank arm could still blindfire the gun. Worse still, Nemesis had been counting on the value of surprise to take out at most two Boomers, something he no longer had. No, this hunter-killer squadron - two still-intact second-gen Battle Boomers, two Goblins, and a Recon with what looked like an EW kit tacked to its back carrying an oversized revolver-style grenade launcher - had seen him, and were now jet-hopping across parked cars and the low-lying sprawl that characterized this part of the city, fanning out even as he sped toward the half-wreck of the Boomer he had hit.
They were probably trying to surround him. Let him blow past them, so the hunter became the hunted. He wasn't going to let that happen.
Nemesis triggered one of his visual-homing missiles, and felt the blast of compressed gas behind him as it shot out into space, arced over the Venator, and then slammed into what was left of the already wounded Battle Boomer with pinpoint accuracy. The Boomer didn't even have time to raise its railgun arm before it exploded in a ball of fire.
One which Nemesis was still careening towards.
He shot through the shockwave, felt the rattling of supersonic shrapnel and Boomer bits as they bounced uselessly against the fairing and his armor. He emerged a second later, only to find his antimissile system squawking bloody murder. He sent the Venator into a skidding U-turn just as two large missiles shot past the motorcycle, airbursting meters away. His ballistic system traced red lines across his HUD, but he already knew Sato had sprung for missiles on his second-gen Boomers, shoulder-mounted cold-launched bastards that could probably wreck the fairing of the Venator, or at least rip the sidecar off the main body. Which it was supposed to do in case of emergencies - but Nemesis knew that the moment he tried remotely controlling the main gun, the Recon Boomer's EW kit would go online and cut him off from it completely. He was stuck to it for the time being.
Speaking of which, the barrel had finally cooled down enough that it was ready for another shot. He let the auto-targeting system work its millisecond magic, targeted the Recon Boomer way in the back, and fired.
Again, the dull buzzing that vibrated through his armor and into his bones. Again, the zzzzzzzzznnnneeeeeee-KRACK as the hypercapacitors dumped enough current to kill an elephant a few dozen times over into the rails. Again, the feeling of the sheer power of the railgun kicking back against itself as the lone round accelerated up to 5 kilometers per second and punched through the chest of the Recon Boomer effortlessly, leaving a skull-sized hole right in the gap between its breastplate and its lower chest armor. It tried to raise its grenade launcher arm, found a distinct lack of lifting muscles where that hole was, and idiotically fired the launcher at its feet. Its legs went, bending, then snapping at impossible angles as incendiary frag ripped through Abotex and synthetic musculature, and it collapsed, twitched, then stopped moving.
Okay. Fine. It wasn't as final a kill as Nemesis would have liked, but he'd take it. He revved the throttle, and shot forward just the remaining Boomers cut loose with their own railguns, dancing back and forth as the Goblins followed up with their miniguns and grenade launchers. He bumped over the Recon Boomer, crushing its hammerhead under his wheel, and kept going, away from Sarge and the truck, and into the city. Seconds later, what felt like a million years too long, the Venator's main gun came back online. He triggered the auto target, felt the gun rotate to attack the Boomers behind him, the barrel swinging out above him, the camera feed blurring-
And coming to a sudden stop, as it smacked into a Goblin in midflight. Nemesis pushed the aiming throttle to the left hard, but the gun barrel only wiggled, and despite his best efforts, the Goblin began to push the gun back into place.
Another railgun shot crackled across his left shoulder. They were getting closer, according to his camera feed, and he had no way to stop them. Clever.
He had no choice. He triggered the sidecar detachment procedure. Immediately, an intricate mechanism of sliding bolts clicked out of place, and the sidecar's secondary engine kicked into overdrive. He outpaced the struggling Venator in a second, then did another U-turn and fired another missile while remotely activating the main gun's Artillery Mode.
If the Goblin had an actual face, it would have been twisted into shock, hypothetical eyeballs bulging as the Venator's gun stopped resisting and swung back into a forward-facing position, then fired.
Instead, the Goblin pulled back almost immediately. Nemesis knew why; when the Venator's gun was in Artillery mode, the vibrations as it prepared to fire where enough to feel like your teeth were being shook loose. Also, it probably wanted to dodge the missile that was screaming it toward it.
At the zzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM sound of the round blasting out into space, accelerating to nearly three times the speed it could achieve outside Artillery Mode, the Boomer angled itself at Nemesis, then launched into a swooping charge, its explosive-tipped Bomber Ram pointed squarely at his head in the fashion a fixed-lance cavalry charge. He yanked the sidecar hard to the right in the moment before impact, but not before a hail of 10mm Long rounds shattered against his armor, leaving dents wherever they shattered, and the Bomber Ram's tip cut a long gash across his left shoulder, passing through his armor and cutting deep into the nanoweave beneath it.
Nemesis grunted in pain, then, taking remote control of the Venator, making it turn just enough to catch the Goblin in its livestreamed sights, he fired again. He felt the cold night air rubbing up against his wounded shoulder, but kept driving forward, past the Venator as it went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM.
The Venator jerked back on its rear wheel, caught between the protocols of Artillery Mode and the need to be fixed in place for said mode to actually work properly. But Nemesis's gamble paid off, as he saw on the remote camera. The Goblin took the round square in the chest, and was promptly blown to bits as the hypersonic round yanked its torso apart. The Venator kept turning till it had a position facing the remaining Boomers alongside Nemesis. Then it settled down, firing dampener spikes into the ground to lock it in place. Perfect.
Or, considering the flurry of missiles that were now pointed squarely at him, not.
He kicked off the sidecar-bike just as the first wave of impacts hit, smashed into the ground at fifty miles an hour, hit the pavement, bounced, then tucked his arms in and rolled. He heard the destruction of his sidecar, point-defense gun and all, an instant later. The moment the Venator's main gun's telemetry clicked over to his HUD, as it stopped getting signals from the fireball that had been its sister bike, he triggered it to fire with a thought.
The Venator charged up, went zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzneeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeKRACK-BOOM, and he felt the shockwaves as the round passed through the sound barrier a dozen times over. The other Goblin was too slow to dodge it, and the round dragged the poor Boomer back a good hundred meters before penetrating its body utterly, leaving it a smoking mess of quasi-organic material nearly a kilo distant.
The second-gen Tankmen, on the other hand, dodged it effortlessly, then, three-seconds of threat-prioritization busywork later, took aim at the Venator and fired their railguns at it.
Nemesis could barely rise to his feet as he felt his autodoc pump a cc or two of morphine in his body. Then the shockwave of the Venator exploding from a penetrated fuel cell knocked him down again; his hands flew out and smacked into the pavement. He ground his teeth in rage and pain, the feeling of his bruised ribs flaring up through the morphine like a submarine breaching the ocean surface.
He whirled around, half-blinded by the warning messages flashing across his HUD, to see the two remaining Battle Boomers walking toward him like schoolyard bullies approaching the fat dweeby kid they knew they could get away with picking on. He stood up, straightened himself, thought for a moment, then dismissed the warnings with a thought.
"Fine," he said. "You wanna fight dirty? We can do that."
And with that he fired his flightjets and leapt into the air.
Boomers got stupider the more of their tacnet went down; a full squad could outthink a human, their shared wireless links making more than the sum of their parts, but just two or just one had a nasty tendency to let their pseudo-instinct protocols override the more logical parts of their brains. They could, eventually, recognize that they were on their own and rewire themselves to ignore their blanked-out overwatch uplinks, instead of continuously trying to outsource their cognitive heavy lifting to a command unit that didn't exist, but that took time, time that left them helpless and in-stasis if they didn't have a certain GENOM-exclusive patch that let their body override their brains and fight autonomously.
The point being that, instead of simply shooting the flying vigilante, relying on their railguns or head lasers to finish their target off, the Battle Boomers tracked him for a hot second, their optics dilating in intense concentration. Then, they leapt into the air after him, reaching the apex of their powered jump just as Nemesis cut his jets and, howling bloody murder behind his helmet, went into a dive for the Boomer to his left.
He hit it, grabbed onto its hammerhead right between its eyes, then let his replaced vibroblade shoot out into the machine's braincase.
The blade was almost drilling into the Boomer's soft neruomatter by the time the Boomer grabbed Nemesis by the leg and threw him off. He was ready for that, though, and triggered his minigun on the other arm, aiming squarely for where he'd made the initial wound. In less than two seconds, over a hundred 15mm APEX rounds had hit the space between the Boomer's optics, first digging into the armor where it had been weakened, then turning its brain into so much sludge and char. The shock was enough to stun it for just a second, and then it managed to raise its railgun and fire.
Nemesis was ready for that, too, sidestepping the round just as it followed up with a sweeping attack from its head lasers. He jetted back, just out of their range, as they cut open the pavement where he had been moments ago-
Right into the other Boomer's range, just as it cut its jets and dropkicked him.
The blow smacked straight into his exposed shoulder, and he winced as the nanoweave strained and began to tear under the impact. He wasn't sure if it had broken his arm or not, but either way it hurt even worse than his ribs.
He fell back. Now the Boomer was on top of him, practically straddling him, punching him in the helmet over and over again, his reinforced neck the only thing keeping his meat one from snapping for good. It got three good blows in, just beginning to dent his helmet inward, before Nemesis's vibroblade arm shot up and lopped the machine's hand off at the wrist. It seemed to look at its wrist for a second, surprised.
Then, in a fit of sheer idiocy, it raised its railgun arm and brought it down in a double smash.
Nemesis blocked it with his own arms, got to his knees, and began to push upward. For a moment, neither man nor Boomer moved, each attempting to push the other into submission. The other Boomer, the one with a massive gouge in the middle of its head, sensed that something was amiss, and aimed its railgun. Perhaps it would hit its robot-in-arms in the process of killing its primary target. It didn't care.
Nemesis saw it. He let go, scrambling back just as the Boomer he had been locked in combat with brought its arms down, then fired his railgun straight at its chest. The spike drilled through. Tangerine gushed from the entrance wound. The Boomer moved to yank the spike out, found it had no active hand to do so, and promptly charged Nemesis.
The vigilante fired again, this time right at the base of its neck. The spike hit moments before the other Boomer's round impacted it from behind. Caught between two nearly simultaneous penetrations of its armor, it rocked back, then fell forward, right on top of Nemesis.
It would have been funny had the Boomer not actually pinned his lower torso to the ground.
Immobilized, Nemesis considered his options. His railgun arm free, he fired one last railgun spike into, then through, the fallen Boomer's left hammerhead. Then, he jammed his vibroblade into the entrance wound just to make sure. He twisted his arm as the blade entered the hammerhead's innards, felt the machine twitch and die.
Which left him stuck under one Boomer, and one drunkenly staggering toward him, wounded but still alive.
Which was fine.
This was why he had saturation rockets.
The rocket tube dropped over his left shoulder, its rear just barely scraping the ground. He fired point-blank, not bothering to conserve ammo. The Boomer staggered back under the hail of explosives; by the time he stopped firing five seconds later, there wasn't much left of it save its smoldering legs and pelvis.
And that was that. He had lost a very valuable piece of hardware in the process, but the squad sent after him, enough firepower to level a city block, was dead and gone.
Nemesis tried to kick under the Boomer corpse, hoping to at least get his right knee out. It stubbornly refused to budge. He turned on his comms and pinged Sarge.
"Nemesis?"
"Here. I'm a little - stuck right now. But the Boomers are all down."
"You mean the Boomers going after you, right? We all kinda panicked when the Venator went dark. What happened?"
"Sarge, I'd love to explain, but I need a pickup first. Can you do that?"
"Give me a bit. I'm sort of stuck in traffic. GPS says it should be about ten minutes before I get to your location."
Huh. "Is the squad sent after Karns down?"
"Um… No. Feeds suggest pretty stiff resistance, but they're still mostly all there. Five hundred meters from the Ri-San."
"If they break through, and they get Karns, and they go after me, my location will be smeared across the street. Understood?" He dragged that last part out just a little bit, to remind him who was in charge.
"Understood, sir. I'm still gonna be there in twelve minutes."
"You just said ten."
"GPS changed. Sir."
"Alright. Nemesis out."
He let his comms switch off, wriggled a bit to keep feeling in his legs, then struggled to push the Boomer off him for just a little bit longer. Within five minutes, he had moved the thing's corpse, or rather its wreckage, three inches off to his right. It was heavier than he thought, even over his massive Heavy Hardsuit.
He looked up at the winter sky, the dim sun slowly approaching its apex. He felt his opened shoulder, how the nanoweave felt almost brittle as the cold seeped into it. He thought about Sarge, and Maria, and Sato, and the Sabers, approximately in that order.
He wondered if any of Skeeter's goons were in the buildings around him. Most had been wrecked by various explosions or stray railgun shots. Would they hate him for fighting on their turf and not some other syndicate's? He hoped not. Criminals were irrational beings, for the most part. He wouldn't put it past one to try curbstomping him in his prone state. That would be humiliating, to say the least.
The thought made him unsheath his vibroblade again. He cut into the collapsed hammerhead, using what little leverage he had in his pinned state to hack away at the chunks of Boomer that remained. Within a minute, he had his upper legs free, and the hammerhead sliced into so much Tankman kebab. Getting a better look at what remained, he realized the Boomer had hooked its railgun arm around his right leg in a desperate attempt to bring him down with it. Any attempt to remove the offending limb would also mean running the risk of whacking his own leg off, at least in his current position.
Nemesis sighed, leaned back, looked up again, and let himself think.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Summer 2031
Iquitos, Peru
326m Southeast of Puerto De Productores
Midnight
You're practically in the river at this point, scrambling against the muddy banks with all the grace you can muster as rounds fly over your head.
In a K-suit, that doesn't count for much.
So the next thing you know you're sloughing it underwater, you've got about fifteen minutes of air before you choke on your own exhalations, and the Shining Path has a Chinese Battlemover named after some obscure Mongolian general with its headlights illuminating the space just above your head.
This was not how you anticipated spending your evening in Iquitos, Gateway to the Amazon.
Oh, you'd heard from your superiors that there was a pretty good chance you'd run into hostiles. Ever since the Path declared themselves a part of the UA on Peruvian national television by decapitating the President, you've been forced to assume that every town east of the Andes has some combatants in it. Now you're here in a K-suit up against a 'mover that would have been hard to take down even if the rest of your squad hadn't been ripped to shreds by its rotary cannons. As it is, you have a support weapon of sorts, a ponderous machinecannon perfect for tearing up other powersuits, but which would probably require a full clip of concentrated fire to even crack Battlemover armor. And that's it.
The Lumies - that's the shorthand for Path cultists, Lumies - are in boats now. The battlemover is still sweeping the shoreline. There's no way for you to moonwalk to a safe location because if they managed to get a Battlemover out here, there's a good chance all of Iquitos is theirs now. So you have to find a way to kill that Battlemover within fifteen minutes, then hope like hell the distress signal Matt planted will at least bring an air strike down on these communist fuckers.
You can do that. You've done worse.
You stow the machinecannon, then stomp, loud and hard, on the riverbed before promptly jetting away. It works, because in less than a second the river is filled with 20mm slugs as big as your hand, like murderous explosive schools of fish followed by a torrent of lesser rounds, 5.56mms from Norinco Type-92s and AKM's. Which is all fine and dandy, but your real prize isn't here yet.
Ah. There it is.
Six legs, a snarling maw like a short-snouted crocodile, and two rotary cannons plus a xaser in the mouth. It might be capable of flight, but you don't know. Some call Chinese Battlemovers Spidertanks, because they have multiple legs like spiders and are (supposedly) armored like tanks, but you know better.
This is a goddamn dragon you're dealing with.
You strike.
The operator barely notices, at first, as it enters the water, but then you get a really good grip on the right front leg and you pull hard, dragging the whole of the machine into the water. It's not fast, it's not even well-coordinated - but it is strong, and it thrashes like a motherfucker, trying to bring you around to the front so its cannons can render you so much meat and scrap.
You will not let it do that. You sink into the riverbed, thousands of years of sediment coming up to your chest, and yet you hold its massive paw-limb steady, dragging the 'Mover back, back, keeping the cockpit underwater in the blind hope that it isn't properly sealed.
Then the limb comes loose.
Suddenly your turbofans are pushing you back down the river, and you have nothing that you're straining against, and an emergency sweep of the lidar tells you that your opponent has its guns pointed squarely at you. It happens so fast you barely have time to draw your weapon, much less say your last rites as a glimmering light comes from the port right where the xaser should be-
Whereupon a surge of water smashes you into the muck again.
Right. It must have had some sort of - accidental discharge? Would the Chinese really make a Battlemover that didn't have its weapons sealed for underwater ops? Can xasers, which are the directed-energy equivalent of short-range flak cannons, actually fire through a medium that isn't air?
You do not ponder any of this. Instead, you dig your SAW out of the riverbed, take aim, and fire into the darkness.
Even with your head protected by a few inches of laminate armor, even with your sensors set to auto-dampen, it sounds much, much louder underwater. Not just a BUDDABUDDABUDDA, more a THWOOOOMTHWOOOOMTHWOOOOM, the kind of sound that buzzes in your skull and ricochets in the space between your ears. The recoil pushes you back just a bit, forces you to dig in as the seconds fly by and your HUD's ammo counter ticks down with it, tries to buck the gun out of your suit's hands, but you press down on the barrel with your other forearm just hard enough to keep the machinecannon on target, till finally the ammo counter goes red, and then empty.
Your HUD helpfully chirps that 87% of the rounds appeared to hit. You press forward, casually preloading another ammo drum into the gun's autoloader mechanism so it doesn't get flooded with water and muck, and that's when something snakes out of the cloud in front of you and wraps around your suit's torso.
Even with nearly six inches of laminate armor between you and the 'Mover, you still feel your ribs flex and almost begin to bend. Your off hand shoots forward to finish the loading procedure, and then another something knocks the weapon out of your hand.
You get a good look at the 'Mover seconds later. It's been battered alright, its armor cratered and fractured and in some places flapping limply like a fish's fins, but it's intact, and the two antipersonnel tentacles next to its head are very much functioning. Something cracks, a brittle sound, and a little breach alarm pops up on your HUD's rendering of your suit. Your opponent doesn't open its xaser mouth-port again, but instead just stares at you, its twitchy chameleon-eye optics unable to project any sort of menace.
Fuck this. You came out here to kill drug dealers and communists, not die to some prepubescent mechajockey high on the promise of victory for the Chairman. Besides, the bastard made one big mistake: he's only grabbing you by one arm.
So as the 'Mover pulls you closer, your gun hand free, you poke it right in the optics.
It's a simple technique, one of the first things you learn when you start doing PanzerFaust, but it works. The optic ball flexes, then shatters, and the 'Mover stupidly thrashers its head in your general direction, hoping it can whack your finger, now firmly pressing into the optic chip in the back of the wrecked sensor, out of place.
While it's doing that, the grip on your chest tightens, then loosens. You hear something clunk. Probably the rotary cannons swinging into place. It wouldn't surprise you if the operator is stupid enough to wreck his mech just to kill you.
Well, that's his mistake, because now you're free of the tentacles, and your other hand rams into the other optic, blinding the pilot for long enough that you can slip in under its guard, just below the howling of the guns, and grab his cockpit, right under the long neck of the 'Mover, and relatively unarmored.
You yank once, twice, thrice, trying to find the hinges that will yank the cockpit open and drown the pilot. The 'Mover thrashes about, then gets a grip on the riverbed, and suddenly you're on your back, still clinging to the cockpit, as the bastard tries to hump you into the ground hard enough that you'll let go. It would be funny if your head wasn't snapping back with every hump, jarring your concentration and leaving you unable to do much more than hold on. You let go with one hand, and your fingers dance across the torso looking for that magic grip on the top of the cockpit, some little handle for emergency operators to pull on-
And then you find it. You twist, and it spins. You pull, and suddenly the whole monster apparatus collapses on top of you and is still.
When the silt clears, you're looking into the desperate, bulging face of some Chinese kid, his fingers clawing at your visor, trying to do to you what you did to him. You can barely move your legs, but at least one arm is free. Your mechanical fingers grip his skull as he begins to scream, as water floods his lungs, so you do him a mercy and squeeze.
Then it's all over, you have seven minutes of air left, and you're stuck at the bottom of the Amazon River.
An airstrike comes about three minutes later, and Sarge shows up in his suit about two minutes after that to pull your barely-functional suit out of the shit. -Did you honestly run through an airstrike just to get to me? -Yes, sir. -Don't do that. K-Suits are tough, but they aren't that tough. If you got hit by friendlies we'd both be dead.
-Understood, sir.
You like Sarge. Apparently while you were dicking around on the riverbed, he managed to slip past Shining Path patrols, loot a weapon depot, and provide enough scans for individual targeting on that airstrike, so the drones weren't just firing at random. As the airlift comes to drag you and your suits out of Iquitos, you resolve to drag Matt Hemmer to one of those shitty bars at the airbase and get him shitfaced drunk.
You'll pay, hell, even if he asks for something harder than Coors. It's the least you can do.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
District 4
February 13, 2036
10:21 am
"-but worst of all is the antipersonnel Tankman. Bastard's got a tank-scale flamethrower and some kind of heavy shield on his other arm. Every time we try to press the advantage, he just puts up the shield and starts spraying mag-napalm. Then the regular Tankman and the Goblin lay down cover fire and they push forward."
"I see," Sylia said. "And is that all besides Nemesis's personal kill squad?"
"As best as we can figure. I half expect Sato to bring in his 55C's after this, but we can handle those."
"I believe you. Worse would be if one of Sato's rivals decides to contest his claim."
"Damn. You're right." A pause. It sounded like Skeeter was talking to one of his underlings, but Sylia couldn't exactly pick out what. "I don't suppose you have any records of what they have left over?"
"Iwasaki's Type-Nine Battlemovers were the only thing we didn't encounter last night, but the Red Willow is a notoriously slow-moving organization. The only way you see those in your territory is if the other syndicate heads pressure Iwasaki hard or remove him outright. That's not taking into account any spare infantry they may have drummed up from reserves-"
"Wait, Type-Nines? The trike monsters the JSDF just started using?"
"Yes."
"Where the hell did Iwasaki get those?"
"Unsure. I'll gladly have one of my contacts find out, but it will cost you."
"Always the mercenary, aren't you, Saber White?" He sounded exasperated and relieved at the same time. "Alright. Just get over here ASAP. We've got the enemy pinned down near Susanoya Plaza, but I don't think we can hold them for much longer."
"Understood. Saber White out." With that, the audio sign linked to KARNS vanished from Sylia's HUD, and she had an unobstructed view of the all-but-abandoned city streets that she and the other Sabers were rocketing down on their Motoslaves.
Priss pinged her. "Any updates from the Beefsteak?"
Sylia smirked. "I'm sure he'd love you to call him that, Priss. All we've got is that Nemesis destroyed a squad of Battle Boomers sent after him in the past few minutes, but Skeeter's people are having trouble holding off the ones sent after him."
"Figures. Everyone thinks Karns is the biggest shit in town, turns out he's just a paper tiger compared to the Sleeping Dragon. Shoulda seen that coming."
"What makes you say that?"
"Nothing. Just if those clowns try to redirect them toward Sho's place-" She trailed off. "Whatever. You know what I'll do."
"Kill more people?" That was Linna, her Tornado Motoslave growling just behind Priss and her Supercell. "Isn't that what you always do?"
The comment was meant to be cutting, but Sylia noted that her voice sounded unnaturally stressed. Evidently she still held reservations about the Sabers' more active role in things; she had apparently been on the verge of having a total breakdown after their actions last night, especially considering what she'd done to that poor UFV. Perhaps it would have been wiser to allow her to just stay out of this engagement. An emotionally unbalanced team member, unable to commit to combat, was worse than not having a member at all.
But - no. Linna was a member of the team, same as her, same as Priss. She was not going to characterize her closest associates as dead weight, because ultimately emotional distress was a solvable problem.
"Linna," Sylia said, "You may disagree with Priss, but I would prefer neither of you try to provoke each other into bickering. We should only be dealing with Boomers in this engagement, so any concerns about killing people should be relatively moot."
Linna was silent for a second; Sylia could see her Tornado begin to pick up speed. Then she spoke.
"Fine. We don't kill in this engagement, but what about the next one? And the one after that? Now that we've decided helping Nemesis is what we're doing, and knowing he kills people left and right."
Ah. So it was a longer-standing issue about the principles of the organization. Goodness, hadn't her strategy already been made clear? Minimize civilian casualties via successive decapitation strikes against the major players in this awful little war. It wasn't a foolproof plan, but it was the best option she had considering the only obvious alternative was to let the war continue.
She knew that Linna was, despite her mercenary behavior, ultimately a person with principles. Priss's idea of morality was fluid, centered around vague maxims like 'don't be a dick' and 'don't trust anyone who says they know better, 'cause they usually don't'. Nene generally believed in the ability of the ADP to determine the morally right, at least in Megatokyo. As for herself, she knew she had an objective - to fulfill her father's last wishes - and all else was subservient to that objective.
But Linna had been raised by people who saw the art of combat as just one facet of a Way, a proper code of living. Beneath the facade of a woman dedicated to money and the things it could buy, there was a woman who saw her omni-proficiency at martial arts as a way to protect the weak and humble the strong.
It had surprised Sylia that she cared so much, when they first met. But over time, she'd learned how to work with Linna. She had weaknesses like any other human. The trick was knowing how to play to them.
"Perhaps you're right, Linna," Sylia said. "But I would argue inaction will cause even more people to be killed. For better or for worse, this city is our responsibility."
"Mm."
"You disagree?"
"It's certainly a slick argument you're making," Linna said. Sylia could all but hear her frustration. "That we're responsible for everything that goes on in this city. But-"
"You don't think we can bear such a burden?"
"No! That's not what I'm trying to say at all. I just feel like there's a better way out of this mess, one which lets us save lives instead of take them, and you're not trying to find it."
"I see. You think Nene had the right idea with the datadrop."
"Look, if we can't trust the police to stop this thing, who can stop it?"
For her part, Sylia had to suppress a laugh. "Do we trust the ADP to handle rampaging Boomers and corporate excess?"
"No, but - this is different! We're not keeping anything in check, the way we do with GENOM. We're just burning it to the ground and starting from square one!" Linna huffed. "This is something the police should be able to handle. Otherwise…" She trailed off. Presumably, Sylia thought, she didn't want to offend Nene.
Speaking of which - "Hey, you can say it," she said. "I know we suck, but I have the excuse that none of our suckitude is my fault. Relax, Linna."
"You're okay with this?" Linna's head turned just a bit to regard Nene to her left. She could afford to; her Motoslave's AI was doing most of the driving anyway.
Nene shrugged. "I mean, kinda? I think I got through to Fleet Hermes last night. We save his patron's ass, maybe he'll be able to compromise."
"And if he doesn't? If he insists that to work with him we have to slaughter people?"
"Then," Nene said, serious all of a sudden, "We burn that bridge when we come to it."
"Thirty seconds till we hit Susanoya Plaza," Sylia said. "I strongly suggest we get ready for heavy combat, girls." In less polite terms: can it, we've got robots to kill.
"Fine," Linna said, but she could tell there was still a great deal of doubt inside her. Sylia resolved to have a chat with her once they got back, in private. Clearly she didn't trust Priss or Nene's judgement when it came to violence.
Then they hit the plaza.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:26 am
It had once been the plaza / parking lot for a large-ish stripmall, built after the quake on cheap land in anticipation of all the people who would surely move back into the area. People moved back, but few had small businesses to put up there, and so the development had gone from the tackiness of infanthood to the decrepit look of old age in just a few months, its storefronts never opened. It had looked like the kind of place serial killers built murder-mazes in. Emphasis on had.
Right now, it looked like it was a portal to hell.
Bodies, most mangled and charred beyond belief, were sprawled across the plaza, a testament to valiance of Skeeter Karns's men, and how little it had meant in the face of a jet of mag-napalm. There was remarkably little blood, just meters of sprayed gore and ugly masses of smoking petrol goop splayed in some inscrutable pattern on the asphalt. For once, Sylia was glad she hadn't sprung for the direct-feed olfactory sensors. Even she would have thrown up in her helmet.
In the center of the chaos, the three Boomers stood, unmoved, Buhddaesque. As one, they were tearing through the remains of a multilayered blockade of overturned armored trucks, and what looked like legitimate armored emplacements, while the few troops who hadn't fallen to the Infantry Boomer's flamethrower appeared to have hidden in the storefronts, occasionally firing sidearms into the trio of mechanical monsters. A smart mortar was puttering away behind the blockade, a little robotic arm shakily stuffing rounds into the tube; the standard 12B, the one with the coilgun shell launcher, fired, and the round punched straight through the blockade and wrecked the mortar effortlessly. The others were just standing there, looking around, presumably scanning the storefronts for more things to kill. They would have made an excellent decorative fountain in that position, just barely beginning to turn around.
Sylia saw all this, and smirked. They had the advantage of surprise, for once. Nene had already engaged her jammers. She quickly drew up a tactical plan in her head and pinged Priss and Linna with it.
"We focus on the flamethrower one. I go high, Priss goes low. Linna, mop up whatever's left or just go for the Goblin. I'll cripple the 12B's gun arm, and you two can do as you please with it.
"Got it," the others said at once. Nene pulled off to the side, while Priss and Linna transformed their motoslaves. They went in, pincer-style. Linna pulled back, transformed her Tornado into motoslave form, and unsheathed twin semirigid whip-swords, called urumi, while Priss shot forward, firing her side-mounted assault cannon on semi-auto.
And Sylia? She went high.
Her custom Motoslave, designated Monsoon, was built not as an all-rounder unit like her Hardsuit; she'd just get in the way of Priss and Linna in all-Motoslave combat, then. Instead, it was designed for aerial overwatch, its chopperlike front fairing splitting into two truly massive wings that caught the wind and yanked the Monsoon skyward. She drew her multirole railcannon and let the barrel telescope out. Then she took aim at the infantry Tankman, which, cut off from its tacnet, had turned around to look at her and was seemingly trying to decide between spraying her with its flamethrower or just using one of its short-range rockets.
She didn't give it a chance. The moment one of Priss's wild shots struck it in the knee, she unceremoniously blew its head open with a hypersonic burst of explosive gel-doped minishells. For good measure, she fired a single shot at its shield-mounted fuel tank, setting the machine ablaze in a fireball of mag-napalm. Doused in its own fuel, its organic components ablaze, it slumped to the ground, then collapsed.
The other Boomers had not been inactive, though, and the Goblin cut loose with a burst of minigun fire directed at Linna just as she juked to the side to avoid a spray of flame before launching a grenade at her pointblank. She pulled back, missing the arc of the grenade but taking a few dozen rounds in her Motoslave's armor before swiping one of her urumi across the thing's neck. A follow-up slash, and she had made a deep swipe across the Goblin's chest, following up by slipping inside the Boomer's guard just as the 12B across the way tried to sideswipe her with a shot from its coilgun and delivering a sturdy kick to its side.
Sylia swiveled up and fired a shot straight through the 12B's gun arm, wrecking it utterly, just as Priss rammed into its abdomen, knocking it over then driving over its chest and head. The Boomer went crunch, then squelch, and that was that, as Linna dealt with her off-balance and decapitated Goblin by activating the rigidizing protocols in her off-hand urumi and impaling the thing right in the middle of its heart, then pulling out as quickly as she came.
Most of the square was on fire by now, but Sylia gave it little mind as she hovered down to street level. Whereas a few years ago, her Sabers had struggled to take on two baseline 12B's on the night she took Mason's life, they had dispatched these two in a little less than thirty seconds. She was allowed a bit of pride in her girls' work.
Besides, the Starlite nanofoam painted over all Saber gear could shrug off any heat less than 10K Celsius, and mag-napalm burned at a fraction of that. The Sabers could have been doused in the stuff and they would have mostly been fine.
"Well, then," she said, touching down. "That's that. Nene, could you drop a line to Skeeter again? We should probably let him know we intend to speak with Nemesis."
Nene didn't respond, but she was clearly alive, her faceless helmet reflecting the smoky flames that dominated most of the little plaza. "Nene?"
"Yeah," she said, "That's not a good idea."
"Dare I ask why?"
"Because we've got three ADP combat aerodynes and what looks like a K-Suit squad carrier coming in fast from the ADP airport. And, uh, you're probably just gonna want to listen to this. Pulled it from their comms."
She sent a little audio file across the tacnet, and it played instantly:
"-Perhaps I haven't made myself clear. The goal is to capture the Knight Sabers alive if possible, dead if not. If mass seizure of Skeeter Karns' so-called 'territory' draws them back to us, then we need to-"
Sylia terminated the file. She knew that voice. Admittedly, not as well as she would have liked, but well enough.
"Kate Madigan," she said. "Head of Internal Security at GENOM. On an ADP comm channel. Giving orders. Of course."
"Uh…" Nene trailed off. "Okay. Yeah. I figured it was someone like that. Voice print matches at least. Uh, Sylia? What do we do now?"
"The mission hasn't changed," she responded, an edge of steel in her voice. "We find Nemesis, we talk to him, and we convince him to come with us."
"And then we run. Fast."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Well, I'm a month overdue, but obviously that's because of school. Now, what with COVID sweeping the globe, I should have plenty of time to hack out another chapter or two. So that's one bright side to this mess.
In the meantime, read Tales From The Future, the only BGC fic on deviantart. It's surprisingly good, a little indulgent, but then again the best fanfics always are. While you're at it, leave me a reply or something, I enjoy people's reactions to this thing immensely, and I have nothing better to do than reply.
-STMPD
Update: I used what was termed a slur related to the coronavirus here. I have removed it. Sorry about that.
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Chapter 33: Run Hard, Run Fast
- Location
- Megatokyo
District 4
February 13, 2036
10:31 am
It took a little select stimulation with a neuro-guide tool to get the Boomer's arm to stop gripping Nemesis, Smitty tracing the pathways that would unclench the ruined machine's rigor mortis with a finger, like acupuncture but with enough voltage in the needle to burst a cow's heart. It was a relatively silent job. The streets were still abandoned, and if there was anyone hiding inside the low-rises they didn't bother to stick their head out and try to get a picture of the vigilante prone on the ground.
That was all the luck they were going to have today. Maria knew, even as her brother hopped into the Green Dragon van, that they had been coasting on a streak of near-wins. Today was the day everything went to hell, she was sure of it.
She'd told Vicain as much in the back of the van. He'd replied with a smirk and a "when did a pro hacker get superstitious? I mean, there's paranoia, there's assuming things always work out badly, and then there's actually counting chances like it means something."
She'd shrugged. "I dunno. It might be an Italian thing."
He laughed at that. It was a good deflection. She was good at deflecting Vicain.
The truth was that she didn't believe in God in the Roman Catholic sense, not a big omnibenevolent thing who created man in His image and cast His creations out for sinning, who demanded her penance 24/7. It was just that sometimes she had a sense, when she was alone and trying to go to sleep, that she was being watched. Or, whenever Gavin suited up, that something was watching him. It gave him a few chances, yes, but deep down this thing, God or the Devil or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, was just waiting for him to falter, and then -
And then everything would come tumbling down on him, on her, on the life she'd tried to build helping her brother in his crusades. That was what she feared, more than anything else.
Okay, she thought as her brother wiggled his way out of the Heavy Hardsuit, maybe she was being paranoid. Anthropomorphizing her fear of getting caught? The little nagging doubts that would plague anyone in her situation made manifest in the form of something watching over her shoulder? Come on. She was supposed to be smarter than that.
And then, as they were trundling down the streets towards Skeeter's coordinates, the call came in.
It was the most innocent little thing, just a ping on the van's dashboard screen. She heard Sarge switch to autodrive, pick up the headset. "Yeah?"
He paused. "Shit. Seriously?"
He paused again. "Okay. Let me get him."
Sarge switched back to manual drive, and Smitty worked his way back with the headset, little more than some cheap headphones and a mic. Gavin had worked his way out of his hardsuit, but still had his softsuit on. "It's for you," Smitty said.
Gavin was sitting next to her; she could hear everything as he slipped the headphones on. "Nemesis here."
"This is Kagemusha. We have a problem."
Kagemusha? Their local informant? The guy who left info for them at the dead-drops?
Gavin appeared unmoved, if a little annoyed. "You aren't supposed to call me on this channel. In fact, I recall we agreed to only communicate by physical media."
"It's a big problem."
"I see. How big?"
"GENOM's got the ADP looking for you. They just scrambled the biggest aerial force they've managed since the Largo incident, and I've got audio logs of Kate Madigan of GENOM Internal Security getting the chief to agree to it. They're after your head, big man. So you may want to lay low for awhile."
"Not an option."
"Look, the bitch is cleaning house over at HQ. She's basically turned the whole department into her personal weapon in less than twelve hours. You don't have a choice, they've already got a dragnet out looking for you. You have a safehouse, right?"
Gavin paused at that. "It may be slightly compromised."
They'd set everything for self-destruct if the security system was breached. If the Boomers had found it, they weren't getting anything. Slightly Compromised was an understatement.
"Do you have a backup?"
Honestly? They'd been banking on Skeeter getting them a new one. But if there already was a dragent out for them, could they go talk to him, find a new place, and hunker down in time? For her part, Maria wasn't sure.
"Working on it."
"Working on it isn't good enough. You're in the middle of your, ah, patron's territory, I take it? Just got reports of a firefight over there, and that's where they're gonna start their dragnet."
"How big?"
"They're basically gonna cordon off District's three through five with patrol cars and APC's, then they've got combat aerodynes and a squad of K-suits ready to drop wherever they find something they don't like. Squeeze you like a noose. AP rounds, too, probably. Give them an excuse to shoot you and they'll take it. And they know you're in the area. If they don't find you, they'll just stick around. Sato's Tankmen are a dead giveaway that you're somewhere in the area."
"Kagemusha-"
"Look, I'm just assuming you have a plan. Because they've gotten really close to finding me out, so I need to go to ground. Close up shop and everything. No dead drops anymore, but I think you've got enough info. Kagemusha out."
And that was that. Gavin had his right hand to the headset's little plastic connector thing. He looked like he was about to snap it in two.
"Uh…" Maria thought she had something to say. But she didn't, not really.
Oh god, they were so screwed.
"Maria," he said, "you kept your cyberdeck, right? The one with the EW suite hooked up to it?"
"Yeah, yeah. It's not exactly as good as a direct-wire to the internet, but…"
"Can you tap ADP comms with the gear in this van?"
"Probably? I mean, I'm not exactly gonna be able to sabotage their aerodyne controls or anything fancy like that, but comms? Yeah. Yeah, I can do comms."
"Excellent. Let's just take care of one thing first." He got up. "Smitty, can you patch us in to Karns?"
"Sure can. What's the plan? We gonna bail on him? What about the Tankmen? I don't think Skeety-boy can get us a new safehouse if he and his next-of-kin are all dead."
"I'm aware of that. I want to make sure he's taken care of them so we can get out fast. If I have to deal with them, then we've no chance of getting out of the dragnet. In which case, we hunker down and get ready for a siege."
"And then what?" Vicain cut in. "Even if we hold off the cops, he said GENOM's in on this now. We can't hold them off. Karns might have been able to slow them down, but he's probably lost people by now. Either we get out of this noose now or it hangs us."
"If we leave Karns," Gavin said, "we will have nowhere to go."
"I mean, I'm sure Narita hasn't closed down-"
"We will have failed a mission," Gavin ground out. "That is not an acceptable outcome, in any sense."
Vicain shrank back. "So you'd rather-" The rest Maria couldn't hear. It had dropped to inaudible muttering.
"Say that again."
At that, Vicain seemed to stiffen. "I said, you'd rather die a martyr than live with a single failure."
"And you'd rather live a coward then do right by good people."
"Good people?" Vicain clenched his fists. "Skeeter's a goddamn criminal. Not only that, he's a con man who makes people think he's not a goddamn criminal. Yeah, I'd rather not die in association with a guy like him. If that makes me a coward, then so be it."
Gavin didn't respond. The tension inside the van was suffocating, like the haze over asphalt on a hot summer day; you could breathe it, but you knew it wasn't healthy.
Maria's eyes darted between her brother and Vicain. She'd known Vicain had always been a bit of a flight risk, but he'd mostly kept his opinions to himself except for an objection or two when it was his life on the line. Gavin had made it clear they were going to rely on Karns for protection weeks ago, and he'd made some grumbles about 'picking sides', but for the most part Gavin had been able to convince him of the necessity of things. Had he just - kept this down? She'd thought she knew Vicain well enough.
Had she been wrong?
How wrong had she been?
"I mean," Smitty said, and she could tell he was doing his best to defuse the situation, "why don't we just check and see what Skeeter wants us to do, instead of deciding now?"
"Fine," Vican huffed. "Do it," Gavin said.
They watched as Sarge pulled off to the side, and Smitty dialed Karns' code.
"Yeah?" Karns came through, all right. He sounded like he was incredibly close to reaching through the audio pickup and strangling anyone who pissed him off.
"Nemesis here," Gavin said. "We've dealt with one squad of Boomers. Do you require assistance?"
"No, actually. Knight Sabers dealt with them."
Maria's eyes bulged. They were here, again? Hadn't her big bro been pretty clear that they were supposed to stay out of his way? Even after everything in Chinatown, he wasn't going to just let some strange women jerk him around. He was not the kind to take orders from people he didn't trust. Maria knew that for sure.
"Fine," Gavin said. "Do you require any additional assistance?"
She could almost hear Skeeter shrug. "The ADP are coming, apparently. We have plans in place to deal with them, but they did not account for Sato bringing his forces to bear too."
"So you need help?"
"I can deal with the cops, kid. I'm used to it. But they're after you, aren't they? I'm just a consolation prize at this point."
"...Yes. Most likely."
"Then you better get the fuck out of here before they block off the exits. I'm serious."
"I see. Any recommendations on where we should go?"
"No. My surveillance net says they're mostly coming in from the northeast, so if you head to the northwest, you have a small chance at surviving. Down south is all Chinatown and they'll kill you if you try to hole up in one of their safehouses. But up there's the Fault Zone, and even I don't have many contacts around there. You slip the cordons, you're going to be on your own. I'm sorry."
"Fine. When should we contact you?"
"Don't. The cops'll be waiting for a call in. You just get Sato, okay? That's all I need from you. I can handle the rest."
"Understood. Nemesis out." And that was that. Sarge pulled back onto the road.
Maria's mind was a pinball in an arcade of information, juggled between the twin paddles of we're so boned and holy heck the Knight Sabers?. On one hand, yes, they were very much in trouble. They hadn't blown the Holton hideout, yet, but from the looks of things they would probably have to very soon. If they lost that, they were down a few hundred thousand dollars in spare munitions, the kind of thing they'd need if Gavin was serious about going after the other syndicate heads. They didn't even have a safehouse to stash their stuff, though, and there was no way her brother could operate out of a dinky little van like the one they were in. This was why they'd agreed to work with Karns, because he could provide backup - except now he couldn't.
On the other hand - and she knew her brother was going to get mad at her for bringing this up -
"Big bro?"
"Yeah?" Gavin was rubbing the damaged shoulder of his hardsuit, another thing that they were going to have to replace. Preferably with the exotic-diamond nanolaminate Vicain had used in place of the usual foamed-matrix armor to build the Nemesis suits. Preferably in black.
"I mean - please don't get mad at me for bringing this up, but I don't really know if we have another choice -"
"Maria, I'm not going to get mad at you. I know I've been a little on edge, but I'm okay."
"Would the Knight Sabers have somewhere we could, you know-" and Gavin hadn't cut her off yet, so she pressed on "-stash our stuff? Could they help us get Sato?"
There. It was said. She had absolutely no idea how her big bro would react. Last time he'd gone off after the Tiandi Jian just to prove to her she was wrong, only for them to bail him out. But now he literally had no choice that she could see.
Then again, her big bro was pretty good at finding the third choice no one else could…
"She's got a point," Sarge said. "They know this city better than we do, especially if Kagemusha can't get us a place."
"They want something from us," Gavin growled. "They'll offer us their hospitality, but in return they'll expect something."
"But you have no idea what that something would be?"
"Do you?"
Sarge turned off onto a side street, beginning to head north. Maybe it was Maria's imagination, but she swore she could hear the deep humming of an aerodyne. "We've been over this already," Sarge said. "They want you to not burn the entire city to the ground. Get Sato, minimize casualties, be done with it."
"Who are they to decide when justice is served?"
"Who are you to dispense justice without a badge? They're the same as you, dude."
"Vigilantes."
"Mercenaries on the side, apparently. But yeah. Vigilantes. Just like us."
Just like us.
The phrase hung there for awhile, echoing inside Maria's mind. There was nothing else to say - what could you even say to that?
That they were somehow different?
That Gavin's brand of justice was, for lack of a broader word, better?
The phrase grew implications, folded in on itself like a protein.
Just like us.
"Fine," Gavin said at last, his head in his hands. "We go, we beg them for an out, but no more. We can't afford to grow soft. Maria?"
"Yeah?"
"Get in touch with the Sabers. Tell them we need assistance. Be very specific about what you want. Turn down anything else."
She didn't respond immediately. "I don't know how," she said.
"Seriously?"
"I don't know how to contact them on this short of a notice!"
"Won't be a problem," Sarge said. "Look."
She did, peering out between the hardsuit's legs and through the window.
The Sabers were there in full battle regalia, motorcycles rumbling, hardsuits glimmering in the morning light.
"I got a location ping from something claiming to be them a few minutes ago," Sarge said, and though Maria couldn't see his face, she knew he was grinning. "Figured it couldn't hurt to find out what it was. Good thing, huh?"
Gavin didn't respond. Sarge clicked on the comms. "Good morning, ladies," he said, brimming with enthusiasm. "I don't suppose you know of any halfway houses or capsule hotels in the area for a few enterprising American tourists? Maybe an Airbnb?"
The voice on the other end was deep and rich like wine, but there was an icy, almost glacial undertone to it. It was distinctly feminine, all the same. Perfect English, too, only a hint of an accent. "Good morning, Mister Hemmer. I'm afraid most of them will be taken at this time. All sold out, what with it being Valentine's Day tomorrow."
Maria giggled.
"We do, however, know of several warehouses and that sort of thing in the dockside districts which accept customers no questions asked. Would you like an escort?"
"Yes, yes," Gavin cut in. "We would infinitely prefer an abandoned warehouse packed with illicitly-acquired munitions to a fucking love hotel. Can we cut the pretenses and just go?"
"As you wish, Mister Belasko. Our fair city is at your service. Except for its law enforcement agencies, of course."
"Exactly my point. We are out of time. We need to go."
"Well then. Put on some music and try to keep up. Keep this line open if you have any questions."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:35 am
"Patrol Echo-Six to Taskwagon Echelon. We've got signs of a firefight in District Four, designate Susanoya Plaza. Massive fire plus at least three downed Battle Boomers. Over."
"Copy that, Echo-Six. Fire department has already been notified. Gonna need more than that, though. Over."
"Switching to thermal… looks like mag-napalm from the heat pattern. Scanning… One of the Boomers has some kind of flamethrower on its right arm. Over."
"Jesus wept," Leon muttered to himself. Flamethrowers. If he could actually prove that Sato had sent out those Boomers, he'd be going straight to the local high courts for war crimes. Which would be satisfying, but he had the sinking sensation Sato didn't care at this point. Plenty of countries had thrown the Geneva Conventions out the door after the Fourth Corporate War, the logic being that if megacorps weren't bound by it, they shouldn't have been either if they needed to fight megacorps on a one-to-one basis. So he could just skip town and hole up someplace where they didn't give a shit about that sort of thing. California, maybe.
"Copy that, Echo-Six. Continue your search. We'll be watching your feeds. Over and out."
"Over and out."
Leon tabbed out the audio feed and let himself cringe. "So, uh, Boomers with flamethrowers. That's how they got so far."
For her part, Kate Madigan, on a seat opposite his in the command truck, didn't respond at first. "Let me assure you we don't manufacture such barbaric things," she said eventually. "Sato most likely smuggled them in from a third-party manufacturer."
"Mm." He wasn't sure whether to believe her or not. It didn't really change his situation in the short term; driving into the territory of someone he considered at worst a necessary evil, in full combat kit. Beside his division, in his command wagon and three others, they had another five armored infantry divisions, plus three combat patrol choppers and four-four man squads of K-17's. Madigan had been very specific about what to bring. Not just riot-control stuff, but the kind of kit they used to go Boomer hunting. Meanwhile, the THP was closing off what remained of the Coastal Highway in the area, parking patrol cars across every street large enough, mounting Gerlitch rifles and automortars and many many other exotic tools used primarily to break armor and kill people.
At any other time, Leon would have been certain it wasn't enough. Infantry troopers, even in full riot gear, would get torn to bits by claymores and flechette launchers; K-Suits were slow and flimsy enough to be stopped by a well-aimed RPG; and for every barricade the cops put up, Skeeter could probably put up two.
But now? After having his forces literally incinerated by heartless war machines? A one-two punch, as it were? No reports of guerilla attacks, no aerodynes shot out of the sky, just silence as their little convoy trundled along.
Now, he wasn't so sure. Maybe they could take on Megatokyo's second biggest crime syndicate and win.
He wasn't so sure he wanted to, though.
He spun his chair around to face Madigan. Her eyes glowed with the little speckles of an optically-embedded HUD; she wasn't really looking at him so much as through him, he felt.
"So," he said.
She blinked, and her HUD vanished. "Yes? What is it?"
"Been thinking about this plan of yours."
"And?"
"Well, you do realize it's not going to work, right?"
Madigan cocked her head to the side. "It's worked so far. What makes you think it won't?"
"Has it?" He leaned back. "Yeah, I guess it has. Still no actual armed resistance from Skeeter's guys. Still could go wrong, though."
"Really. Explain."
"I mean, where do I even start? Barging into occupied territory like we own the place, grabbing their big man out of his hidey-hole, then using him to get Nemesis and the Sabers all in one go? It's insane."
"To you, maybe. It strikes me as very sane, personally. We are all but certain Karns hired Nemesis, and a bit of enhanced interrogation will confirm that. Once we have that, we wait for the vigilantes to hop all over each other trying to rescue the poor man, then secure them, have them arrested, maybe kill one or two if they try to resist. Simple."
"Okay, first off, you're assuming Karns is where we think he is. Second, you're assuming he'll come willingly. Just because they let us in doesn't mean they'll let us out. Third, you're assuming he'll talk even if you torture him - Yes, I know what enhanced interrogation means. Fourth, you're assuming that both Nemesis and the Sabers will come after him. You could end up bagging one and not the other. Fifth, you're assuming we can actually take either group nonlethally. That's a lot of assumptions. More than I'm willing to make, at least."
Her facial expression hadn't changed at all during his little rant. It was uncanny, to say the least.
"I see," she said. Her head was still tilted slightly at an angle. "Do you have a better idea?"
He straightened up, then leaned forward. "Several, actually. Depends on what your ultimate purpose is here."
"I think I've been perfectly clear. We bring in Nemesis and the Sabers-"
"And that's where you lose me," Leon bristled. "I want, the ADP should want, even GENOM should want, to just end this whole gang war mess with minimum casualties and property damage. All the hardsuited super-vigilante types running around are just background noise. Not anyone's real objective."
"Even considering the amount of damage Nemesis has done on his own."
"Even considering that. It's hardly anything. Sato's not going to go and demand compensation for losing the Underbelly, is he? Or the Tiandi Jian? That's small potatoes compared to some of the stuff that's been on our feed just for the past day. We're talking firefights in residential blocks, kidnappings, rampant Boomeroids pouring out of the Fault like they got the all-clear from Satan himself. Three hundred dead." He got up, leaned closer to her. "Even Nemesis can't kill that many people in a single day."
"I see," she said. Leon was, for once, certain she didn't. "But surely you must appreciate the damage to your own reputation that Nemesis is doing."
"What?"
She put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his seat. One-handed. "Inspector McNichol - Leon - most of my time at GENOM has been spent managing images, both internal ones and external ones. It was not until the Uprisings of '34 - Uprisings which, might I add, did little to our companies' reputation despite their widespread destruction - that I was promoted to Internal Security's acting Director. The late Brian J. Mason took a great deal of pleasure calling me a PR whore and other similarly licentious things, but he's dead and I'm not, so…"
How the hell had she done that? She was a slender woman, not curvy and muscular like Priss. How had she moved a guy who was a good two-eighty pounds of muscle from a standing position, very much in her field of personal space, into a sitting one? For once, Leon wanted nothing more than to get back to the dispatches and see what turned up. The less time spent listening to this woman the better.
"Regardless," she continued. It dawned on Leon that, like Chief Omura, she was a person who enjoyed her little monologues. "I believe that people's perception of things is more important than any definition of reality. Your three hundred people dead, for example. You claim to see it as a great loss, a terrifying atrocity that must be stopped. But you know what? If three hundred people died in a single day in the Polar War, or in the Filipino quarantine zones, or if three hundred people died due to a particularly nasty flu season, you wouldn't care. Because you perceive it as normal."
"No," she said, "what's really going on is that you fear how your own image will be affected. Poor Leon McNichol, pride of the AD Police, good-luck charm of the Crime Wave of '29 - why can't he stop one madman in a hardsuit? People have accepted that you're powerless against Boomer rampancies, but surely a man as capable as you can stop Nemesis and the mayhem he, however unwittingly, triggered in our fair city. Otherwise, why employ humans in a high-risk, high-visibility public position? Why risk the shame that comes when they inevitably cannot handle the forces arrayed against them?"
"More importantly, why have a police force that lets vigilantes do its work for them?"
Leon could see where this was going. "Well, what's stopping you? You've got the Diet's ear. Why not replace us all with Boomers and call it a day? You guys pulled it off in Singapore, what's stopping you here?"
She laughed. "You still don't get it. Amazing. It is entirely true that if my superiors wanted you out of work, Leon, they could have removed you from the scene years ago. But, and this is important, you are useful to serving our agenda for this city."
Okay. He hadn't seen that coming. But- "It's about image, isn't it."
"Exactly." Madigan looked almost - pleased with him. Like he was a kid she'd just taught to burp the ABC's and he'd gotten it right on the first go. "Boomers are, fundamentally, a slave labor force. Civilized people rely on them to do things they have no interest in doing. When a government turns the role of public security over to automated units, it's an admission of weakness. In essence, the government is admitting it has so little control over its populace it cannot even rely on humans to uphold its laws. It's admitting that it is an unjust government. But if a few good humans are willing to uphold public order, that says something else entirely. It says that at least a few people believe in what the government is doing. It says that there is still some legitimacy to the regime. Sometimes, that's enough to maintain control."
"Then Singapore-"
"Is far less stable than it seems. There's no need to go into the details, Leon. What matters is that you understand your place in this city."
"To uphold your fucked-up vision of law and order at all costs."
"To provide a public face to the maintenance of public security."
"So we're saying the same thing."
"Only you believe that the law you are supposed to uphold is 'fucked-up'."
"Am I wrong?"
"It is not your place to determine whether or not a law is morally just. That has already been decided."
"By who?"
He was mad, now. Somehow just spending five minutes talking to this woman made him even more pissed off than dealing with Mason ever did. At least Mason was evasive when he wasn't outright threatening. Mason made sense. Mason was, at the end of the day, a small man with small ideas about power. Someone he could fight.
This was… more like getting nearly choked to death by Largo. Both Madigan and Largo had a tendency towards gloating - they knew more than him, had more power than him, and wanted to really make that clear to poor ol' Leon.
Well, fuck that. "I. said. By. Who. Who decides what justice is? Who gets to decide that for everyone? Who-"
Madigan leaned over, raised a single manicured finger to his lips, and shushed him. "I think you know the answer to that," she said. There was the faintest hint of a smirk on her face.
"Now," she said, "do the right thing and bring in those interlopers." She idly tapped a button on the console closest to her, and a map of the area popped into existence on a blank screen.
Leon sighed and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for something to save him. Daley was in one of the other command wagons; he was truly, terribly alone with a psychopath.
"They have contact now," said Madigan. "Four motorcycles and a very ugly van. And we have ten minutes before we arrive at the Ri-San. I recommend you monitor the situation before someone does something rash."
"Hey, it's your fucking takeover. You monitor the situation."
"It is your duty to do this, Leon. Your duty to de-escalate this situation."
"Fine." He turned to his console as the truck bumped over what felt like a large pothole, brought up the audio feeds of the patrol aerodynes that were swarming around a particular part of the northern streets like vultures, remotely overrode the shotgun mike on one of them, and said, in the most manly voice he could muster,
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
District 5
February 13, 2036
10:40 am
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! PLEASE POWER DOWN YOUR VEHICLES AND PREPARE TO BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY!"
Priss rolled her eyes. "Seriously? You can do better than that, Leon."
She picked up speed on the straightaway; the other Sabers, and Nemesis's van, and then the patrol choppers, followed.
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY WITH ADVANCED POLICE FORCES, WE WILL BE FORCED TO OPEN FIRE WITH LIVE AMMUNITION!"
"Nene," Sylia said, "Start jamming. If they open fire I want them to miss."
"On it."
"We're heading for the underside of a major highway heading out into where the suburbs used to be," Sylia said over the shared comms. "There's a secret entrance to a network of unused utility tunnels that leads to a safehouse in New Nerima. Don't worry, your van will fit."
"I'm a little more worried about other things," Nemesis said in his strained Japanese. "Like making an enemy of law enforcement officials with heavy military equipment."
"Don't worry," Nene said. "The ADP has a massive equipment surplus, but they've never had the budget to maintain half of it. Anything with guns mostly just gets to gather dust in the hangar."
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! WE ARE SHOOTING TO KILL HERE! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!"
"Good," Priss muttered to herself. "About fucking time."
"OKAY, I'M GONNA COUNT TO THREE! ONE!"
"We split?" said Linna.
"We split," said Sylia.
"TWO!"
"Blue, Pink, you escort the van, work as decoys. Green and I will take a more indirect route."
"Got it."
"THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! OKAY, FINE. PATROLS ECHO-ONE THROUGH THREE, OPEN FIRE!"
In a little less than a second, three pairs of 20mm guns mounted on the little aerodynes swiveled, locked onto their targets, and let loose three hose-sprays of copper-jacketed tungsten slugs, growling like living things.
Nonexplosive, they pockmarked the street around Priss with craters, but she kept going. She pushed the throttle forward a little, just enough to get in front of Nene's Tempest motoslave, as Linna and Sylia juked to the right and went single file down a side street. Her HUD pinged one of the aerodynes as following them.
"So." Nemesis, just as the first burst of slugs subsided. "Do you have a plan to shake them? If they focus on us, we won't survive."
"White?" Nene.
"Blue. Shoot to disable."
"Fine."
Priss twisted the throttle as far forward as it would go, shooting forward, then weaving through another burst of rounds. She was a good hundred meters ahead of Nene and the van now, and coming up on an overpass fast. She thumbed the switch right next to the nitro boosters and braced herself.
Supercell's full-enclosure cockpit formed around her, as the arms popped out, and the motoslave's crude AI planted an extended foot in front of its main body, lunging into flight mode as the rear wheel triggered its thrusters. Priss shot forward, Supercell's arms outstretched; she hit the overpass hard enough she could feel the impact through the mech's arms, but she re-angled the thrusters with a thought, pushed back, all but kicking off the roadway. Then she whirled around, shot skyward, and drew her assault cannon from its mount, all in the span of about three seconds.
The ADP choppers hesitated. Priss didn't blame them, because now they faced a choice; shoot the big flying thing that could hurt them, or shoot the pink motorcycle and the van that were just passing under the overpass.
She didn't give them a chance to decide. She targeted one of the aerodynes' wings, just below their massive hoverfans, and fired.
Her assault cannon was one of the meanest weapons Sylia had ever gotten her hands on, a big old 40mm Russian hypervelocity thing used more often on UFV's or other trucklike vehicles designed to play at being tanks. The minute Priss pulled the trigger, a meter-long DPU / HE-cored slug shot out of the barrel at just under Mach 1, electrothermal enhancement turning the caseless block of fuel-doped aerogel that was the round's propellant into a superheated THWUMP of plasma that launched the slug straight through the control wing, where it bloomed into a barely-contained fireball that didn't just wipe the wing from existence, but left a smoldering crater on the side of the cockpit and scorching on the main hoverfan.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:42 am
"Oh shit," Leon said to himself as he watched the pilot's vitals spike, then flatline; the remote med-monitor politely told him the poor bastard had just had his right arm blasted off and was going into shock.
He switched over to the other pilot's feed, knowing full well what would happen; without a pilot, the aerodyne would autorotate down to the ground in a fatal spiral. If they got the gunner out of there, it would be a miracle - they usually didn't.
"What is it?" Madigan said. "They're heading away from the blockades?"
"They just shot one of our guys out of the sky," Leon winced. "Blasted him like he wasn't even there."
"So much for the heroic-vigilante act," she cooed. "I've got a Hornet gunship heading their way with mounted missiles. Should take care of them easily."
"Right." Some part of him was glad for the support. He knew the Sabers, when they brought out the truly heavy weaponry, were not to be underestimated. Anything helped at this point.
But there was another, smaller part of him, screaming internally, What the fuck, Priss?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:43 am
"FUCK!" Priss roared. "Fucking APEX rounds!"
She had not meant to sent the aerodyne careening out of control, its still-alive gunner firing full-auto as the machine helixed for a few brief seconds before its hoverfan cut out and it dropped straight into the street (Aerodynes were more aerodynamic than AV's, but not by much). She had meant to blow a control wing off and send the pilot careening out of control and maybe kill him.
Not - whatever she had just done. God damn it.
The other aerodyne didn't hesitate as the two hovering machines shot over the overpass; its machineguns kicked in and raked 20mm slugs across her hull. Nothing penetrated - Supercell's armor was too thick for that - but the rounds shattering on a few inches of nanolaminate shook her around way too much for her liking. It was only a matter of time before the gunner got smart and targeted her wings.
Again, though, she wasn't going to give the cops a chance. And she'd already set a precedent as a killer, so…
Priss fired again, this time aming squarely for the gunner's seat. She hit it, alright. Blew the pilot's seat out, too, practically decapitating the aerodyne and leaving it not much more than a big spinny fan dropping fast-
Straight onto the overpass.
Double damn. She couldn't see everything through Supercell's sensors, but she was pretty sure she'd just crunched a compact car or two. She whirled around, and dropped to hovering over the street next to Nene and the van. "We good?" she said.
"Did you just kill ADP cops?" Nene said, saccharine-sickeningly-sweet, in the same tone that a toddler would use to go Mommy, how are babies made?
"Mighta." The silence that followed said everything. "It was an accident."
"First shot was, second shot wasn't." And her tone had gone from sweet to deadpan in an attosecond. "What the fuck, Pr-Blue."
"For what it's worth, they were shooting at us," Nemesis's driver chipped in. "I generally think that justifies shooting back."
"See, even the vigilante's people - wait what?"
"We try to avoid situations which bring us into contact with civilians." Nemesis's voice, but modulated and grating, like he'd gotten into his hardsuit. Oh god, he wasn't going to try something insane, was he? "Doesn't mean that we're helpless in situations where they strike the first blow."
"She just made enemies of the cops! People we're supposed to be helping!"
"Saber Pink, that distinction was made long before she shot those choppers down."
"Yeah yeah yeah whatever he said," Priss muttered. "Anything else the cops are gonna throw at us?"
"We're seriously not going to have a conversation about how you just killed like four people in cold blood?"
"You're starting to sound like Green, Pink."
"Okay, okay, fine. Fine. They've probably got a few Hornet air supremacy aerodynes near the edges of Skeeter's territory. Those are their last resort if we hit the blockades, you'll have to distract them while I use Tempest's Saber Strikes to level any ground-based opposition. What we've really got to worry about are the K-Suits, especially if they actually upgraded the hunter-killer squads to K-17's, but I never saw anything like that in the last budget so we should be good there, it should just be K-11's-"
"Do we know where they've set up blockades?" Nemesis. "I'd rather get around those than go through them."
"No! No I don't! I may be an EW super-wizard but I'm not a telepath! And no, I don't know the area well enough to just guess! Any big street, they'll have sandbags and trooper trucks on! Maybe a Gerlitch, too! We're flying blind here! Whoop-de-fucking-doo!"
They shot past a parked truck or two; they were getting into the more populated parts of the city, where the buildings were actually a little taller than a handful of stories. Priss boosted her altitude a little to keep visual overwatch. Her HUD marked Sylia and Linna at least three klicks away, a big green arrow on the edge of her vision; she could see the other patrol aerodyne over there, vanishing for moments behind the sprawl before appearing again and again.
"I mean-" and Nene was still ranting, as she often did when pushed to her personal limit "If I was them, I'd hem us in with the K-Suits then drive us towards a blockade! Get us all surrounded by heavy firepower! But they're shooting to kill, now! And maybe they'll be justified in doing that, because apparently we're cop-killers now!"
"Pink-"
"And don't tell me I sound like Green! Maybe she has a point, ever think of that, Blue? That we should generally try to avoid killing people where necessary? Especially the ADP, because then the entire city will want us dead?"
"Oh for fuck's sake. NENE! WE. HAVE. COMPANY!"
"What-"
Then she saw the blockade.
At least a full squadron of ADP troopers in riot armor, guns levelled; metal blockades and caltrop strips and even what looked like a mounted LMG; all this just four blocks in front of them; and then there were the K-Suits.
Six-and-a-half feet tall if they stood an inch - Supercell was bigger and tougher for sure - but she'd never seen them so heavily armed. One had what looked like twin railcannons plus big shoulder-mounted rockets, each as big as her underbarrel rocket launcher. Another had what looked like communications gear plus some sort of bazooka - no, now that she looked closer at it, it was some sort of minigun. The third had two clawlike hands, one minigun and one some sort of grenade launcher, and then these bizarre pods that were bristling with the flat heads of missiles, like - and she couldn't believe herself, but the metaphor worked so damn well - like ears of corn.
"Trakhni menya v zadnitsu," Nene muttered. "Hunter-killer team."
Priss didn't wait around to see what the bastards would do. She boosted up to about a hundred meters in altitude, and fired her underbarrel gun point-blank.
Sylia had said that Supercell's underbarrel was what military geeks called a Rifle Assault Weapon, which sounded like a cool acronym for what basically amounted to an underbarrel rocket launcher. In the case of this particular RAW, it had the 'stopping power' of a 90mm shell. Sylia had also said it was a last-resort weapon, better used for stopping tanks or something like that, but this felt pretty last-resort-y to her. She didn't want to see what would happen to Supercell if any of those big missiles hit it - she had grown too attached to the Motoslave already.
Then again, she thought as the rocket arced toward scrambling ADP troops, maybe this was overkill.
It was.
The rocket detonated centimeters before impact, the fuel-air explosive packed up inside it igniting in a fireball twenty meters wide, throwing its two-inch thick casing and the hardened steel pellets embedded in it out like an oversized frag grenade. The first wave of cops were by turns torched, crushed, then shredded into hunks of charred gore; the second wave, those wise enough to hide behind the armored transport trucks, didn't fare much better, as the sheer force of the blast either crumpled their cover or turned it over outright. Within seconds, the order of the blockade had been replaced by burning chaos.
Priss dropped to the street and looked behind her. Nene had powerslid to a stop just in front of the blast wave, a mere block from the center of the smoking inferno.
Nemesis's van had stopped just behind her, a streak of burnt rubber visible just behind it.
She turned back to look into the blaze, her sensors trying in vain to pick up, something, anything, because holy shit was Leon going to be pissed at her now that she'd gone
and blown up half of his buddies-
And then a K-suit, armor cratered but somehow still intact, surged out of the fire and rammed its right elbow right into her torso.
Her sensors flickered, died, then came back online as she staggered back under an onslaught of hydraulic-assisted blows. She vaguely recognized it as the one with the railcannons; those were gone now, but one of the missile mounts on its left shoulder was still intact by some unforeseen miracle. Her sensors, for whatever reason, were lip-reading the K-suit pilot, whose helmet wasn't much more than a smoldering strip of plexiglass at this point, but she honestly didn't need them to tell her that he was screaming DIE BITCH DIE BITCH DIE BITCH DIE- at the top of his lungs.
Priss backpedaled, let the K-suit stumble forward, then brought her left elbow down to smash the bastard into the ground. It worked, partially; the K-suit fell over, but it had its hands out to push itself up, and in a second it had recovered, which was just enough time for Priss to bring her assault cannon down in an overhead smash like an oversized club, right into the pilot's skull. It blocked that, too, its arm raised like it was begging not to be killed even as its other arm shot forward in an attempt to grab onto something, anything, that it could crush. She pushed down, hoping the pilot wouldn't figure out how to get his missiles to work. The K-suit pushed back.
Then a spray of what sounded like minigun fire cut into the back of the suit, and suddenly it went limp.
Priss looked up. Nemesis was there, his black hardsuit glistening in the firelight; the back doors of the van were open.
"We don't have time for this," he growled. "Did you think about how we were supposed to get over that blockade now that most of it is on fire?"
"No." Oops. "We take a side street."
"Fine. I'm getting back in the van. Cover me. If 'Nene' is right the gunships will be showing up very soon."
"Got it." Priss looked up, scanned the cloudy February sky for anything big and faintly disc-shaped. It was, she had to admit, a little nerve-wracking. If it had just been her and Nene, she would be living in the combat high, drinking from it the way barbarian kings drank wine from the skulls of their enemies. But now she was oscillating between that combat high and anxious terror; the van, as well-armored as it appeared to be, was a massive liability, the kind she didn't want to have following her.
A minute later, and she and the van were following Nene in relative silence in motorcycle mode, looking for a side street they could turn down and keep going north. It had never really dawned on her how many overly wide streets Megatokyo had out here, where GENOM had been trying to build suburban sprawl. The city had caught up to it, of course, swallowing its own borders like slime mold, but then it had just - stopped. Sometimes the city didn't feel alive so much as it felt half-alive, its innards seething with microbial humanity but its outer reaches grey and dead and empty.
Damn. Look at her getting all philosophical. She was going to need a drink after this mess was over.
They turned down a narrow street, really just two lanes pasted together, that wound in and out and occasionally doubled back on themselves. These streets were much more inhabited, small low-rises surrounding the usual forty-story housing blocks the way fungus clusters around a tree's roots. At least three times she passed different groups of old ladies and housewives, who looked at her little convoy like they were monsters. More than once, she heard someone mutter something along the lines of 'oh shit', then duck back inside before snapping a photo on their phone.
"Pink… " she said once they were a good ten minutes into this street prowling.
"We're gonna talk when we get back, okay?"
"Fine." Old Nene wouldn't have even spoken to her after something like this. It was weird when she acted more mature than Priss, and Linna had joked more than once that her burst into adulthood was all about keeping a leash on Mackie, and that maybe Priss needed a man in her life. This was usually followed by intense discussion of the merits and demerits of Leon's butt.
She sighed. That was another thing she had screwed up over the past hour or so. She'd probably killed people Leon knew on a first-name basis, but what else was she supposed to do? Let them blow her and the rest of their little alliance into giblets?
It was her or them. Her or them. She didn't believe it, deep down, but it was comforting to say on a surface level.
"We're being watched," Nene said, offhandedly, as they passed by a closed-off playground packed with cyberpunks, junkies, and more than a few cyberpunk junkies.
"Really." Nemesis's driver.
"There's no room for big gear to maneuver, and they don't want to risk civilian casualties. Soon as we get back on one of the big roads heading towards the northern highways, though, they'll probably bring in the Hornet gunships."
"You'll have to basically sprint for the underpass." Sylia, kilometers away, the big green arrow moving at the speed of a cloud, hovering in the sky. "Nemesis, if that van has any hidden capabilities you've been keeping from us, now is the time to use them."
"It does not. It was built for surveillance, not combat. An AV-4 mode would weigh it down and require more aviation fuel than I was willing to get my hands on."
"Fair enough. I suppose you'll have to just be very lucky."
"I don't believe in luck." Priss heard something heavy clamping into place in the background. "I believe in innate talent. I believe in honed skill. But I do not believe in luck."
They were approaching a broader street, near one of those old roofed-in shopping malls. Residential cover wasn't as thick there. They were getting closer.
"Then I'm sorry. Short of taking out several gunships, I suspect you'll be under heavy fire for the minute it will take, even at our motoslave's top speeds, to make it to the underpass. I wish there was a better way, but this was the closest path to a safehouse we could find."
"I said the van has no 'tricks', as you put it. I never said I didn't have anything." Again, the clamping sound again.
Even Sylia sounded startled. "What the hell does that mean?"
"We're gonna be out in the open in about thirty seconds," Nene said. It was weird, taking orders from her, but she had a point. Priss began to accelerate, slowly at first, pushing her throttle just a little further than resting. "If you have a plan, it better be ready in - twenty."
"It's ready. Sarge, open the doors. Pink, Blue, do everything you can to keep attention away from the van. Take hits if you have to."
The implication being, Priss thought, If one of my people dies, I will never forgive you.
"Ten seconds-"
"Nene," Priss burst, "shut the fuck up and drive!"
"Okay! Okay, threetwoone here wegooooooooo!"
They turned onto the road, opened up their motoslaves as one. Almost immediately, they saw them; two Hornet gunships, autocannons barely a growling noise in the distance, wheeling around their little convoy, looking for all the world like flying saucers. Tracer rounds shot by her like red anime speedlines, rounds as big as her fist warbling by and leaving little craters in the reinforced road; she drove over them effortlessly, her motoslave's boosted suspension and solid-gel tires turning what should have been bone-rattling thumps into little bounces. Priss silently thanked whatever electrowizardry Nene was pulling for screwing up the Hornet's sensors.
Then rounds started eating into Supercell's fairing, cutting dark streaks across its front, and Priss winced. They hadn't really been targeting her anyway, but now that they were, she was fucked, unless she transformed and blew those gunships out of the sky before they shot out of range. Could Supercell transform under fire without taking a hit in something sensitive? She really didn't want to find out, but what choice did she have? It was either that or end up like how that van probably was, not much more than a hunk of metal with some inert meat inside it.
She turned on her rearview cameras, just in time to see the white-hot streak of a missile arc up into the sky, then another. They passed through her peripheral vision, her HUD pinging low-priority threats before she realized they weren't aimed at her, but at the Hornets.
The gunships had anti-missile defenses, of course, but they stopped firing just for a moment to deploy them, clouds of chaff and foil strips bursting around the cockpits of the craft. Except, if these were launched by who Priss thought they were launched by, they weren't being aimed at the cockpits, but at the big heatsigs behind them.
She was right; both missiles snaked through the clouds of countermeasures without so much as slowing down, and instead lodged themselves firmly in the left Hornet's fan before exploding in white fireballs that left smoking holes where a handful of propeller blades were supposed to be. Deprived of its main method of staying aloft, the Hornet plummeted right onto the highway next to their road, slicing a huge chunk of it away like an oversized buzzsaw before getting stuck on the edge, smoking and flaming for a few seconds before the cockpit dropped loose from the fan unceremoniously.
Thirty seconds had passed. They still had thirty to go; the underpass was visible, and the flimsy bent chainlink fence around what had once been storage for the Boomer storage trucks was still shredded, with a big hole right where they could pass through. Sylia and Linna were idling at the entrance. A quick optic magnification, and she realized the two Sabers were looking at something - behind her. She smirked, and triggered her rear cameras again.
Yep. Nemesis had strapped caterpillar-tread skates to his hardsuit's feet, kicking forward with murderous gusto, and yep, that was a revolver-style cylinder on his left shoulder with enough bigger missiles sticking out of it to level a city block. The van, miraculously enough, looked fine, a few stray rounds having turned the dragon painting on its sides into a scarred mess, but it didn't look like how she'd expected it to look, namely like a total wreck. Nene looked fine, too.
"You," she said over the comms to the vigilante, "are batshit insane," just as the remaining Hornet opened up again.
Nemesis jumped, the heavy suit seemingly defying gravity as its thrusters pushed it to the other side of the road faster than the Hornet could track him, then hopped again, zigzagging just fast enough to stay ahead of its guns. His right arm shot up, and then Priss saw a small flurry of explosions pop from the side of the gunship like burst zits, tracking a scar up its flanks before shredding the connection between the body and the fan. The Hornet dropped out of sight behind the underpass shortly afterward.
Priss began to slow down, and Nemesis came alongside her. "I'm not insane," he said, and she could almost hear his smile as they pulled into the underpass. "It's the rest of the world that's lost its mind."
Nene followed them shortly afterward, followed by the van, and then she saw it.
The passenger side front window was shattered. It wasn't too hard to see the headless corpse in the seat, and the wide eyes of the driver, who - god damn it - looked kind of like the guy who had bumped into them in the Fu-Shui nightclub. Had to be him.
She saw his mouth speak at the same time as her comms lit up. "Gavin," the guy said, "Smitty's dead."
She wasn't sure what she expected, as the van slowed down, as the motoslaves rode single-file into the round tunnel that seemed to materialize out of one of the giant pillars that held up the expressway and which dropped down into darkness at a grade she would have called dangerous at any other time. Rage, maybe, grief definitely. What she would have felt if, say, Linna had been blown away before her eyes.
What she didn't expect, as Nemesis puttered along beside her, was that quiet, almost silent, "Oh."
And later, when everything had gotten worse, she would remember 'Smitty's' headless corpse, the blood long having spurt from the tatters that remained of his neck.
And she would remember that "Oh," too.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I started writing a new fanfiction! It's a crossover with the RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is based on: Right here. Nifty, eh? Don't worry, I'm still writing this one, I just needed something less weighty to occasionally shoot out a chapter of.
February 13, 2036
10:31 am
It took a little select stimulation with a neuro-guide tool to get the Boomer's arm to stop gripping Nemesis, Smitty tracing the pathways that would unclench the ruined machine's rigor mortis with a finger, like acupuncture but with enough voltage in the needle to burst a cow's heart. It was a relatively silent job. The streets were still abandoned, and if there was anyone hiding inside the low-rises they didn't bother to stick their head out and try to get a picture of the vigilante prone on the ground.
That was all the luck they were going to have today. Maria knew, even as her brother hopped into the Green Dragon van, that they had been coasting on a streak of near-wins. Today was the day everything went to hell, she was sure of it.
She'd told Vicain as much in the back of the van. He'd replied with a smirk and a "when did a pro hacker get superstitious? I mean, there's paranoia, there's assuming things always work out badly, and then there's actually counting chances like it means something."
She'd shrugged. "I dunno. It might be an Italian thing."
He laughed at that. It was a good deflection. She was good at deflecting Vicain.
The truth was that she didn't believe in God in the Roman Catholic sense, not a big omnibenevolent thing who created man in His image and cast His creations out for sinning, who demanded her penance 24/7. It was just that sometimes she had a sense, when she was alone and trying to go to sleep, that she was being watched. Or, whenever Gavin suited up, that something was watching him. It gave him a few chances, yes, but deep down this thing, God or the Devil or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, was just waiting for him to falter, and then -
And then everything would come tumbling down on him, on her, on the life she'd tried to build helping her brother in his crusades. That was what she feared, more than anything else.
Okay, she thought as her brother wiggled his way out of the Heavy Hardsuit, maybe she was being paranoid. Anthropomorphizing her fear of getting caught? The little nagging doubts that would plague anyone in her situation made manifest in the form of something watching over her shoulder? Come on. She was supposed to be smarter than that.
And then, as they were trundling down the streets towards Skeeter's coordinates, the call came in.
It was the most innocent little thing, just a ping on the van's dashboard screen. She heard Sarge switch to autodrive, pick up the headset. "Yeah?"
He paused. "Shit. Seriously?"
He paused again. "Okay. Let me get him."
Sarge switched back to manual drive, and Smitty worked his way back with the headset, little more than some cheap headphones and a mic. Gavin had worked his way out of his hardsuit, but still had his softsuit on. "It's for you," Smitty said.
Gavin was sitting next to her; she could hear everything as he slipped the headphones on. "Nemesis here."
"This is Kagemusha. We have a problem."
Kagemusha? Their local informant? The guy who left info for them at the dead-drops?
Gavin appeared unmoved, if a little annoyed. "You aren't supposed to call me on this channel. In fact, I recall we agreed to only communicate by physical media."
"It's a big problem."
"I see. How big?"
"GENOM's got the ADP looking for you. They just scrambled the biggest aerial force they've managed since the Largo incident, and I've got audio logs of Kate Madigan of GENOM Internal Security getting the chief to agree to it. They're after your head, big man. So you may want to lay low for awhile."
"Not an option."
"Look, the bitch is cleaning house over at HQ. She's basically turned the whole department into her personal weapon in less than twelve hours. You don't have a choice, they've already got a dragnet out looking for you. You have a safehouse, right?"
Gavin paused at that. "It may be slightly compromised."
They'd set everything for self-destruct if the security system was breached. If the Boomers had found it, they weren't getting anything. Slightly Compromised was an understatement.
"Do you have a backup?"
Honestly? They'd been banking on Skeeter getting them a new one. But if there already was a dragent out for them, could they go talk to him, find a new place, and hunker down in time? For her part, Maria wasn't sure.
"Working on it."
"Working on it isn't good enough. You're in the middle of your, ah, patron's territory, I take it? Just got reports of a firefight over there, and that's where they're gonna start their dragnet."
"How big?"
"They're basically gonna cordon off District's three through five with patrol cars and APC's, then they've got combat aerodynes and a squad of K-suits ready to drop wherever they find something they don't like. Squeeze you like a noose. AP rounds, too, probably. Give them an excuse to shoot you and they'll take it. And they know you're in the area. If they don't find you, they'll just stick around. Sato's Tankmen are a dead giveaway that you're somewhere in the area."
"Kagemusha-"
"Look, I'm just assuming you have a plan. Because they've gotten really close to finding me out, so I need to go to ground. Close up shop and everything. No dead drops anymore, but I think you've got enough info. Kagemusha out."
And that was that. Gavin had his right hand to the headset's little plastic connector thing. He looked like he was about to snap it in two.
"Uh…" Maria thought she had something to say. But she didn't, not really.
Oh god, they were so screwed.
"Maria," he said, "you kept your cyberdeck, right? The one with the EW suite hooked up to it?"
"Yeah, yeah. It's not exactly as good as a direct-wire to the internet, but…"
"Can you tap ADP comms with the gear in this van?"
"Probably? I mean, I'm not exactly gonna be able to sabotage their aerodyne controls or anything fancy like that, but comms? Yeah. Yeah, I can do comms."
"Excellent. Let's just take care of one thing first." He got up. "Smitty, can you patch us in to Karns?"
"Sure can. What's the plan? We gonna bail on him? What about the Tankmen? I don't think Skeety-boy can get us a new safehouse if he and his next-of-kin are all dead."
"I'm aware of that. I want to make sure he's taken care of them so we can get out fast. If I have to deal with them, then we've no chance of getting out of the dragnet. In which case, we hunker down and get ready for a siege."
"And then what?" Vicain cut in. "Even if we hold off the cops, he said GENOM's in on this now. We can't hold them off. Karns might have been able to slow them down, but he's probably lost people by now. Either we get out of this noose now or it hangs us."
"If we leave Karns," Gavin said, "we will have nowhere to go."
"I mean, I'm sure Narita hasn't closed down-"
"We will have failed a mission," Gavin ground out. "That is not an acceptable outcome, in any sense."
Vicain shrank back. "So you'd rather-" The rest Maria couldn't hear. It had dropped to inaudible muttering.
"Say that again."
At that, Vicain seemed to stiffen. "I said, you'd rather die a martyr than live with a single failure."
"And you'd rather live a coward then do right by good people."
"Good people?" Vicain clenched his fists. "Skeeter's a goddamn criminal. Not only that, he's a con man who makes people think he's not a goddamn criminal. Yeah, I'd rather not die in association with a guy like him. If that makes me a coward, then so be it."
Gavin didn't respond. The tension inside the van was suffocating, like the haze over asphalt on a hot summer day; you could breathe it, but you knew it wasn't healthy.
Maria's eyes darted between her brother and Vicain. She'd known Vicain had always been a bit of a flight risk, but he'd mostly kept his opinions to himself except for an objection or two when it was his life on the line. Gavin had made it clear they were going to rely on Karns for protection weeks ago, and he'd made some grumbles about 'picking sides', but for the most part Gavin had been able to convince him of the necessity of things. Had he just - kept this down? She'd thought she knew Vicain well enough.
Had she been wrong?
How wrong had she been?
"I mean," Smitty said, and she could tell he was doing his best to defuse the situation, "why don't we just check and see what Skeeter wants us to do, instead of deciding now?"
"Fine," Vican huffed. "Do it," Gavin said.
They watched as Sarge pulled off to the side, and Smitty dialed Karns' code.
"Yeah?" Karns came through, all right. He sounded like he was incredibly close to reaching through the audio pickup and strangling anyone who pissed him off.
"Nemesis here," Gavin said. "We've dealt with one squad of Boomers. Do you require assistance?"
"No, actually. Knight Sabers dealt with them."
Maria's eyes bulged. They were here, again? Hadn't her big bro been pretty clear that they were supposed to stay out of his way? Even after everything in Chinatown, he wasn't going to just let some strange women jerk him around. He was not the kind to take orders from people he didn't trust. Maria knew that for sure.
"Fine," Gavin said. "Do you require any additional assistance?"
She could almost hear Skeeter shrug. "The ADP are coming, apparently. We have plans in place to deal with them, but they did not account for Sato bringing his forces to bear too."
"So you need help?"
"I can deal with the cops, kid. I'm used to it. But they're after you, aren't they? I'm just a consolation prize at this point."
"...Yes. Most likely."
"Then you better get the fuck out of here before they block off the exits. I'm serious."
"I see. Any recommendations on where we should go?"
"No. My surveillance net says they're mostly coming in from the northeast, so if you head to the northwest, you have a small chance at surviving. Down south is all Chinatown and they'll kill you if you try to hole up in one of their safehouses. But up there's the Fault Zone, and even I don't have many contacts around there. You slip the cordons, you're going to be on your own. I'm sorry."
"Fine. When should we contact you?"
"Don't. The cops'll be waiting for a call in. You just get Sato, okay? That's all I need from you. I can handle the rest."
"Understood. Nemesis out." And that was that. Sarge pulled back onto the road.
Maria's mind was a pinball in an arcade of information, juggled between the twin paddles of we're so boned and holy heck the Knight Sabers?. On one hand, yes, they were very much in trouble. They hadn't blown the Holton hideout, yet, but from the looks of things they would probably have to very soon. If they lost that, they were down a few hundred thousand dollars in spare munitions, the kind of thing they'd need if Gavin was serious about going after the other syndicate heads. They didn't even have a safehouse to stash their stuff, though, and there was no way her brother could operate out of a dinky little van like the one they were in. This was why they'd agreed to work with Karns, because he could provide backup - except now he couldn't.
On the other hand - and she knew her brother was going to get mad at her for bringing this up -
"Big bro?"
"Yeah?" Gavin was rubbing the damaged shoulder of his hardsuit, another thing that they were going to have to replace. Preferably with the exotic-diamond nanolaminate Vicain had used in place of the usual foamed-matrix armor to build the Nemesis suits. Preferably in black.
"I mean - please don't get mad at me for bringing this up, but I don't really know if we have another choice -"
"Maria, I'm not going to get mad at you. I know I've been a little on edge, but I'm okay."
"Would the Knight Sabers have somewhere we could, you know-" and Gavin hadn't cut her off yet, so she pressed on "-stash our stuff? Could they help us get Sato?"
There. It was said. She had absolutely no idea how her big bro would react. Last time he'd gone off after the Tiandi Jian just to prove to her she was wrong, only for them to bail him out. But now he literally had no choice that she could see.
Then again, her big bro was pretty good at finding the third choice no one else could…
"She's got a point," Sarge said. "They know this city better than we do, especially if Kagemusha can't get us a place."
"They want something from us," Gavin growled. "They'll offer us their hospitality, but in return they'll expect something."
"But you have no idea what that something would be?"
"Do you?"
Sarge turned off onto a side street, beginning to head north. Maybe it was Maria's imagination, but she swore she could hear the deep humming of an aerodyne. "We've been over this already," Sarge said. "They want you to not burn the entire city to the ground. Get Sato, minimize casualties, be done with it."
"Who are they to decide when justice is served?"
"Who are you to dispense justice without a badge? They're the same as you, dude."
"Vigilantes."
"Mercenaries on the side, apparently. But yeah. Vigilantes. Just like us."
Just like us.
The phrase hung there for awhile, echoing inside Maria's mind. There was nothing else to say - what could you even say to that?
That they were somehow different?
That Gavin's brand of justice was, for lack of a broader word, better?
The phrase grew implications, folded in on itself like a protein.
Just like us.
"Fine," Gavin said at last, his head in his hands. "We go, we beg them for an out, but no more. We can't afford to grow soft. Maria?"
"Yeah?"
"Get in touch with the Sabers. Tell them we need assistance. Be very specific about what you want. Turn down anything else."
She didn't respond immediately. "I don't know how," she said.
"Seriously?"
"I don't know how to contact them on this short of a notice!"
"Won't be a problem," Sarge said. "Look."
She did, peering out between the hardsuit's legs and through the window.
The Sabers were there in full battle regalia, motorcycles rumbling, hardsuits glimmering in the morning light.
"I got a location ping from something claiming to be them a few minutes ago," Sarge said, and though Maria couldn't see his face, she knew he was grinning. "Figured it couldn't hurt to find out what it was. Good thing, huh?"
Gavin didn't respond. Sarge clicked on the comms. "Good morning, ladies," he said, brimming with enthusiasm. "I don't suppose you know of any halfway houses or capsule hotels in the area for a few enterprising American tourists? Maybe an Airbnb?"
The voice on the other end was deep and rich like wine, but there was an icy, almost glacial undertone to it. It was distinctly feminine, all the same. Perfect English, too, only a hint of an accent. "Good morning, Mister Hemmer. I'm afraid most of them will be taken at this time. All sold out, what with it being Valentine's Day tomorrow."
Maria giggled.
"We do, however, know of several warehouses and that sort of thing in the dockside districts which accept customers no questions asked. Would you like an escort?"
"Yes, yes," Gavin cut in. "We would infinitely prefer an abandoned warehouse packed with illicitly-acquired munitions to a fucking love hotel. Can we cut the pretenses and just go?"
"As you wish, Mister Belasko. Our fair city is at your service. Except for its law enforcement agencies, of course."
"Exactly my point. We are out of time. We need to go."
"Well then. Put on some music and try to keep up. Keep this line open if you have any questions."
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:35 am
"Patrol Echo-Six to Taskwagon Echelon. We've got signs of a firefight in District Four, designate Susanoya Plaza. Massive fire plus at least three downed Battle Boomers. Over."
"Copy that, Echo-Six. Fire department has already been notified. Gonna need more than that, though. Over."
"Switching to thermal… looks like mag-napalm from the heat pattern. Scanning… One of the Boomers has some kind of flamethrower on its right arm. Over."
"Jesus wept," Leon muttered to himself. Flamethrowers. If he could actually prove that Sato had sent out those Boomers, he'd be going straight to the local high courts for war crimes. Which would be satisfying, but he had the sinking sensation Sato didn't care at this point. Plenty of countries had thrown the Geneva Conventions out the door after the Fourth Corporate War, the logic being that if megacorps weren't bound by it, they shouldn't have been either if they needed to fight megacorps on a one-to-one basis. So he could just skip town and hole up someplace where they didn't give a shit about that sort of thing. California, maybe.
"Copy that, Echo-Six. Continue your search. We'll be watching your feeds. Over and out."
"Over and out."
Leon tabbed out the audio feed and let himself cringe. "So, uh, Boomers with flamethrowers. That's how they got so far."
For her part, Kate Madigan, on a seat opposite his in the command truck, didn't respond at first. "Let me assure you we don't manufacture such barbaric things," she said eventually. "Sato most likely smuggled them in from a third-party manufacturer."
"Mm." He wasn't sure whether to believe her or not. It didn't really change his situation in the short term; driving into the territory of someone he considered at worst a necessary evil, in full combat kit. Beside his division, in his command wagon and three others, they had another five armored infantry divisions, plus three combat patrol choppers and four-four man squads of K-17's. Madigan had been very specific about what to bring. Not just riot-control stuff, but the kind of kit they used to go Boomer hunting. Meanwhile, the THP was closing off what remained of the Coastal Highway in the area, parking patrol cars across every street large enough, mounting Gerlitch rifles and automortars and many many other exotic tools used primarily to break armor and kill people.
At any other time, Leon would have been certain it wasn't enough. Infantry troopers, even in full riot gear, would get torn to bits by claymores and flechette launchers; K-Suits were slow and flimsy enough to be stopped by a well-aimed RPG; and for every barricade the cops put up, Skeeter could probably put up two.
But now? After having his forces literally incinerated by heartless war machines? A one-two punch, as it were? No reports of guerilla attacks, no aerodynes shot out of the sky, just silence as their little convoy trundled along.
Now, he wasn't so sure. Maybe they could take on Megatokyo's second biggest crime syndicate and win.
He wasn't so sure he wanted to, though.
He spun his chair around to face Madigan. Her eyes glowed with the little speckles of an optically-embedded HUD; she wasn't really looking at him so much as through him, he felt.
"So," he said.
She blinked, and her HUD vanished. "Yes? What is it?"
"Been thinking about this plan of yours."
"And?"
"Well, you do realize it's not going to work, right?"
Madigan cocked her head to the side. "It's worked so far. What makes you think it won't?"
"Has it?" He leaned back. "Yeah, I guess it has. Still no actual armed resistance from Skeeter's guys. Still could go wrong, though."
"Really. Explain."
"I mean, where do I even start? Barging into occupied territory like we own the place, grabbing their big man out of his hidey-hole, then using him to get Nemesis and the Sabers all in one go? It's insane."
"To you, maybe. It strikes me as very sane, personally. We are all but certain Karns hired Nemesis, and a bit of enhanced interrogation will confirm that. Once we have that, we wait for the vigilantes to hop all over each other trying to rescue the poor man, then secure them, have them arrested, maybe kill one or two if they try to resist. Simple."
"Okay, first off, you're assuming Karns is where we think he is. Second, you're assuming he'll come willingly. Just because they let us in doesn't mean they'll let us out. Third, you're assuming he'll talk even if you torture him - Yes, I know what enhanced interrogation means. Fourth, you're assuming that both Nemesis and the Sabers will come after him. You could end up bagging one and not the other. Fifth, you're assuming we can actually take either group nonlethally. That's a lot of assumptions. More than I'm willing to make, at least."
Her facial expression hadn't changed at all during his little rant. It was uncanny, to say the least.
"I see," she said. Her head was still tilted slightly at an angle. "Do you have a better idea?"
He straightened up, then leaned forward. "Several, actually. Depends on what your ultimate purpose is here."
"I think I've been perfectly clear. We bring in Nemesis and the Sabers-"
"And that's where you lose me," Leon bristled. "I want, the ADP should want, even GENOM should want, to just end this whole gang war mess with minimum casualties and property damage. All the hardsuited super-vigilante types running around are just background noise. Not anyone's real objective."
"Even considering the amount of damage Nemesis has done on his own."
"Even considering that. It's hardly anything. Sato's not going to go and demand compensation for losing the Underbelly, is he? Or the Tiandi Jian? That's small potatoes compared to some of the stuff that's been on our feed just for the past day. We're talking firefights in residential blocks, kidnappings, rampant Boomeroids pouring out of the Fault like they got the all-clear from Satan himself. Three hundred dead." He got up, leaned closer to her. "Even Nemesis can't kill that many people in a single day."
"I see," she said. Leon was, for once, certain she didn't. "But surely you must appreciate the damage to your own reputation that Nemesis is doing."
"What?"
She put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his seat. One-handed. "Inspector McNichol - Leon - most of my time at GENOM has been spent managing images, both internal ones and external ones. It was not until the Uprisings of '34 - Uprisings which, might I add, did little to our companies' reputation despite their widespread destruction - that I was promoted to Internal Security's acting Director. The late Brian J. Mason took a great deal of pleasure calling me a PR whore and other similarly licentious things, but he's dead and I'm not, so…"
How the hell had she done that? She was a slender woman, not curvy and muscular like Priss. How had she moved a guy who was a good two-eighty pounds of muscle from a standing position, very much in her field of personal space, into a sitting one? For once, Leon wanted nothing more than to get back to the dispatches and see what turned up. The less time spent listening to this woman the better.
"Regardless," she continued. It dawned on Leon that, like Chief Omura, she was a person who enjoyed her little monologues. "I believe that people's perception of things is more important than any definition of reality. Your three hundred people dead, for example. You claim to see it as a great loss, a terrifying atrocity that must be stopped. But you know what? If three hundred people died in a single day in the Polar War, or in the Filipino quarantine zones, or if three hundred people died due to a particularly nasty flu season, you wouldn't care. Because you perceive it as normal."
"No," she said, "what's really going on is that you fear how your own image will be affected. Poor Leon McNichol, pride of the AD Police, good-luck charm of the Crime Wave of '29 - why can't he stop one madman in a hardsuit? People have accepted that you're powerless against Boomer rampancies, but surely a man as capable as you can stop Nemesis and the mayhem he, however unwittingly, triggered in our fair city. Otherwise, why employ humans in a high-risk, high-visibility public position? Why risk the shame that comes when they inevitably cannot handle the forces arrayed against them?"
"More importantly, why have a police force that lets vigilantes do its work for them?"
Leon could see where this was going. "Well, what's stopping you? You've got the Diet's ear. Why not replace us all with Boomers and call it a day? You guys pulled it off in Singapore, what's stopping you here?"
She laughed. "You still don't get it. Amazing. It is entirely true that if my superiors wanted you out of work, Leon, they could have removed you from the scene years ago. But, and this is important, you are useful to serving our agenda for this city."
Okay. He hadn't seen that coming. But- "It's about image, isn't it."
"Exactly." Madigan looked almost - pleased with him. Like he was a kid she'd just taught to burp the ABC's and he'd gotten it right on the first go. "Boomers are, fundamentally, a slave labor force. Civilized people rely on them to do things they have no interest in doing. When a government turns the role of public security over to automated units, it's an admission of weakness. In essence, the government is admitting it has so little control over its populace it cannot even rely on humans to uphold its laws. It's admitting that it is an unjust government. But if a few good humans are willing to uphold public order, that says something else entirely. It says that at least a few people believe in what the government is doing. It says that there is still some legitimacy to the regime. Sometimes, that's enough to maintain control."
"Then Singapore-"
"Is far less stable than it seems. There's no need to go into the details, Leon. What matters is that you understand your place in this city."
"To uphold your fucked-up vision of law and order at all costs."
"To provide a public face to the maintenance of public security."
"So we're saying the same thing."
"Only you believe that the law you are supposed to uphold is 'fucked-up'."
"Am I wrong?"
"It is not your place to determine whether or not a law is morally just. That has already been decided."
"By who?"
He was mad, now. Somehow just spending five minutes talking to this woman made him even more pissed off than dealing with Mason ever did. At least Mason was evasive when he wasn't outright threatening. Mason made sense. Mason was, at the end of the day, a small man with small ideas about power. Someone he could fight.
This was… more like getting nearly choked to death by Largo. Both Madigan and Largo had a tendency towards gloating - they knew more than him, had more power than him, and wanted to really make that clear to poor ol' Leon.
Well, fuck that. "I. said. By. Who. Who decides what justice is? Who gets to decide that for everyone? Who-"
Madigan leaned over, raised a single manicured finger to his lips, and shushed him. "I think you know the answer to that," she said. There was the faintest hint of a smirk on her face.
"Now," she said, "do the right thing and bring in those interlopers." She idly tapped a button on the console closest to her, and a map of the area popped into existence on a blank screen.
Leon sighed and looked up at the ceiling, waiting for something to save him. Daley was in one of the other command wagons; he was truly, terribly alone with a psychopath.
"They have contact now," said Madigan. "Four motorcycles and a very ugly van. And we have ten minutes before we arrive at the Ri-San. I recommend you monitor the situation before someone does something rash."
"Hey, it's your fucking takeover. You monitor the situation."
"It is your duty to do this, Leon. Your duty to de-escalate this situation."
"Fine." He turned to his console as the truck bumped over what felt like a large pothole, brought up the audio feeds of the patrol aerodynes that were swarming around a particular part of the northern streets like vultures, remotely overrode the shotgun mike on one of them, and said, in the most manly voice he could muster,
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
District 5
February 13, 2036
10:40 am
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! PLEASE POWER DOWN YOUR VEHICLES AND PREPARE TO BE TAKEN INTO CUSTODY!"
Priss rolled her eyes. "Seriously? You can do better than that, Leon."
She picked up speed on the straightaway; the other Sabers, and Nemesis's van, and then the patrol choppers, followed.
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! IF YOU DO NOT COMPLY WITH ADVANCED POLICE FORCES, WE WILL BE FORCED TO OPEN FIRE WITH LIVE AMMUNITION!"
"Nene," Sylia said, "Start jamming. If they open fire I want them to miss."
"On it."
"We're heading for the underside of a major highway heading out into where the suburbs used to be," Sylia said over the shared comms. "There's a secret entrance to a network of unused utility tunnels that leads to a safehouse in New Nerima. Don't worry, your van will fit."
"I'm a little more worried about other things," Nemesis said in his strained Japanese. "Like making an enemy of law enforcement officials with heavy military equipment."
"Don't worry," Nene said. "The ADP has a massive equipment surplus, but they've never had the budget to maintain half of it. Anything with guns mostly just gets to gather dust in the hangar."
"ATTENTION KNIGHT SABERS AND NEMESIS! WE ARE SHOOTING TO KILL HERE! THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING!"
"Good," Priss muttered to herself. "About fucking time."
"OKAY, I'M GONNA COUNT TO THREE! ONE!"
"We split?" said Linna.
"We split," said Sylia.
"TWO!"
"Blue, Pink, you escort the van, work as decoys. Green and I will take a more indirect route."
"Got it."
"THREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE! OKAY, FINE. PATROLS ECHO-ONE THROUGH THREE, OPEN FIRE!"
In a little less than a second, three pairs of 20mm guns mounted on the little aerodynes swiveled, locked onto their targets, and let loose three hose-sprays of copper-jacketed tungsten slugs, growling like living things.
Nonexplosive, they pockmarked the street around Priss with craters, but she kept going. She pushed the throttle forward a little, just enough to get in front of Nene's Tempest motoslave, as Linna and Sylia juked to the right and went single file down a side street. Her HUD pinged one of the aerodynes as following them.
"So." Nemesis, just as the first burst of slugs subsided. "Do you have a plan to shake them? If they focus on us, we won't survive."
"White?" Nene.
"Blue. Shoot to disable."
"Fine."
Priss twisted the throttle as far forward as it would go, shooting forward, then weaving through another burst of rounds. She was a good hundred meters ahead of Nene and the van now, and coming up on an overpass fast. She thumbed the switch right next to the nitro boosters and braced herself.
Supercell's full-enclosure cockpit formed around her, as the arms popped out, and the motoslave's crude AI planted an extended foot in front of its main body, lunging into flight mode as the rear wheel triggered its thrusters. Priss shot forward, Supercell's arms outstretched; she hit the overpass hard enough she could feel the impact through the mech's arms, but she re-angled the thrusters with a thought, pushed back, all but kicking off the roadway. Then she whirled around, shot skyward, and drew her assault cannon from its mount, all in the span of about three seconds.
The ADP choppers hesitated. Priss didn't blame them, because now they faced a choice; shoot the big flying thing that could hurt them, or shoot the pink motorcycle and the van that were just passing under the overpass.
She didn't give them a chance to decide. She targeted one of the aerodynes' wings, just below their massive hoverfans, and fired.
Her assault cannon was one of the meanest weapons Sylia had ever gotten her hands on, a big old 40mm Russian hypervelocity thing used more often on UFV's or other trucklike vehicles designed to play at being tanks. The minute Priss pulled the trigger, a meter-long DPU / HE-cored slug shot out of the barrel at just under Mach 1, electrothermal enhancement turning the caseless block of fuel-doped aerogel that was the round's propellant into a superheated THWUMP of plasma that launched the slug straight through the control wing, where it bloomed into a barely-contained fireball that didn't just wipe the wing from existence, but left a smoldering crater on the side of the cockpit and scorching on the main hoverfan.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:42 am
"Oh shit," Leon said to himself as he watched the pilot's vitals spike, then flatline; the remote med-monitor politely told him the poor bastard had just had his right arm blasted off and was going into shock.
He switched over to the other pilot's feed, knowing full well what would happen; without a pilot, the aerodyne would autorotate down to the ground in a fatal spiral. If they got the gunner out of there, it would be a miracle - they usually didn't.
"What is it?" Madigan said. "They're heading away from the blockades?"
"They just shot one of our guys out of the sky," Leon winced. "Blasted him like he wasn't even there."
"So much for the heroic-vigilante act," she cooed. "I've got a Hornet gunship heading their way with mounted missiles. Should take care of them easily."
"Right." Some part of him was glad for the support. He knew the Sabers, when they brought out the truly heavy weaponry, were not to be underestimated. Anything helped at this point.
But there was another, smaller part of him, screaming internally, What the fuck, Priss?
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
10:43 am
"FUCK!" Priss roared. "Fucking APEX rounds!"
She had not meant to sent the aerodyne careening out of control, its still-alive gunner firing full-auto as the machine helixed for a few brief seconds before its hoverfan cut out and it dropped straight into the street (Aerodynes were more aerodynamic than AV's, but not by much). She had meant to blow a control wing off and send the pilot careening out of control and maybe kill him.
Not - whatever she had just done. God damn it.
The other aerodyne didn't hesitate as the two hovering machines shot over the overpass; its machineguns kicked in and raked 20mm slugs across her hull. Nothing penetrated - Supercell's armor was too thick for that - but the rounds shattering on a few inches of nanolaminate shook her around way too much for her liking. It was only a matter of time before the gunner got smart and targeted her wings.
Again, though, she wasn't going to give the cops a chance. And she'd already set a precedent as a killer, so…
Priss fired again, this time aming squarely for the gunner's seat. She hit it, alright. Blew the pilot's seat out, too, practically decapitating the aerodyne and leaving it not much more than a big spinny fan dropping fast-
Straight onto the overpass.
Double damn. She couldn't see everything through Supercell's sensors, but she was pretty sure she'd just crunched a compact car or two. She whirled around, and dropped to hovering over the street next to Nene and the van. "We good?" she said.
"Did you just kill ADP cops?" Nene said, saccharine-sickeningly-sweet, in the same tone that a toddler would use to go Mommy, how are babies made?
"Mighta." The silence that followed said everything. "It was an accident."
"First shot was, second shot wasn't." And her tone had gone from sweet to deadpan in an attosecond. "What the fuck, Pr-Blue."
"For what it's worth, they were shooting at us," Nemesis's driver chipped in. "I generally think that justifies shooting back."
"See, even the vigilante's people - wait what?"
"We try to avoid situations which bring us into contact with civilians." Nemesis's voice, but modulated and grating, like he'd gotten into his hardsuit. Oh god, he wasn't going to try something insane, was he? "Doesn't mean that we're helpless in situations where they strike the first blow."
"She just made enemies of the cops! People we're supposed to be helping!"
"Saber Pink, that distinction was made long before she shot those choppers down."
"Yeah yeah yeah whatever he said," Priss muttered. "Anything else the cops are gonna throw at us?"
"We're seriously not going to have a conversation about how you just killed like four people in cold blood?"
"You're starting to sound like Green, Pink."
"Okay, okay, fine. Fine. They've probably got a few Hornet air supremacy aerodynes near the edges of Skeeter's territory. Those are their last resort if we hit the blockades, you'll have to distract them while I use Tempest's Saber Strikes to level any ground-based opposition. What we've really got to worry about are the K-Suits, especially if they actually upgraded the hunter-killer squads to K-17's, but I never saw anything like that in the last budget so we should be good there, it should just be K-11's-"
"Do we know where they've set up blockades?" Nemesis. "I'd rather get around those than go through them."
"No! No I don't! I may be an EW super-wizard but I'm not a telepath! And no, I don't know the area well enough to just guess! Any big street, they'll have sandbags and trooper trucks on! Maybe a Gerlitch, too! We're flying blind here! Whoop-de-fucking-doo!"
They shot past a parked truck or two; they were getting into the more populated parts of the city, where the buildings were actually a little taller than a handful of stories. Priss boosted her altitude a little to keep visual overwatch. Her HUD marked Sylia and Linna at least three klicks away, a big green arrow on the edge of her vision; she could see the other patrol aerodyne over there, vanishing for moments behind the sprawl before appearing again and again.
"I mean-" and Nene was still ranting, as she often did when pushed to her personal limit "If I was them, I'd hem us in with the K-Suits then drive us towards a blockade! Get us all surrounded by heavy firepower! But they're shooting to kill, now! And maybe they'll be justified in doing that, because apparently we're cop-killers now!"
"Pink-"
"And don't tell me I sound like Green! Maybe she has a point, ever think of that, Blue? That we should generally try to avoid killing people where necessary? Especially the ADP, because then the entire city will want us dead?"
"Oh for fuck's sake. NENE! WE. HAVE. COMPANY!"
"What-"
Then she saw the blockade.
At least a full squadron of ADP troopers in riot armor, guns levelled; metal blockades and caltrop strips and even what looked like a mounted LMG; all this just four blocks in front of them; and then there were the K-Suits.
Six-and-a-half feet tall if they stood an inch - Supercell was bigger and tougher for sure - but she'd never seen them so heavily armed. One had what looked like twin railcannons plus big shoulder-mounted rockets, each as big as her underbarrel rocket launcher. Another had what looked like communications gear plus some sort of bazooka - no, now that she looked closer at it, it was some sort of minigun. The third had two clawlike hands, one minigun and one some sort of grenade launcher, and then these bizarre pods that were bristling with the flat heads of missiles, like - and she couldn't believe herself, but the metaphor worked so damn well - like ears of corn.
"Trakhni menya v zadnitsu," Nene muttered. "Hunter-killer team."
Priss didn't wait around to see what the bastards would do. She boosted up to about a hundred meters in altitude, and fired her underbarrel gun point-blank.
Sylia had said that Supercell's underbarrel was what military geeks called a Rifle Assault Weapon, which sounded like a cool acronym for what basically amounted to an underbarrel rocket launcher. In the case of this particular RAW, it had the 'stopping power' of a 90mm shell. Sylia had also said it was a last-resort weapon, better used for stopping tanks or something like that, but this felt pretty last-resort-y to her. She didn't want to see what would happen to Supercell if any of those big missiles hit it - she had grown too attached to the Motoslave already.
Then again, she thought as the rocket arced toward scrambling ADP troops, maybe this was overkill.
It was.
The rocket detonated centimeters before impact, the fuel-air explosive packed up inside it igniting in a fireball twenty meters wide, throwing its two-inch thick casing and the hardened steel pellets embedded in it out like an oversized frag grenade. The first wave of cops were by turns torched, crushed, then shredded into hunks of charred gore; the second wave, those wise enough to hide behind the armored transport trucks, didn't fare much better, as the sheer force of the blast either crumpled their cover or turned it over outright. Within seconds, the order of the blockade had been replaced by burning chaos.
Priss dropped to the street and looked behind her. Nene had powerslid to a stop just in front of the blast wave, a mere block from the center of the smoking inferno.
Nemesis's van had stopped just behind her, a streak of burnt rubber visible just behind it.
She turned back to look into the blaze, her sensors trying in vain to pick up, something, anything, because holy shit was Leon going to be pissed at her now that she'd gone
and blown up half of his buddies-
And then a K-suit, armor cratered but somehow still intact, surged out of the fire and rammed its right elbow right into her torso.
Her sensors flickered, died, then came back online as she staggered back under an onslaught of hydraulic-assisted blows. She vaguely recognized it as the one with the railcannons; those were gone now, but one of the missile mounts on its left shoulder was still intact by some unforeseen miracle. Her sensors, for whatever reason, were lip-reading the K-suit pilot, whose helmet wasn't much more than a smoldering strip of plexiglass at this point, but she honestly didn't need them to tell her that he was screaming DIE BITCH DIE BITCH DIE BITCH DIE- at the top of his lungs.
Priss backpedaled, let the K-suit stumble forward, then brought her left elbow down to smash the bastard into the ground. It worked, partially; the K-suit fell over, but it had its hands out to push itself up, and in a second it had recovered, which was just enough time for Priss to bring her assault cannon down in an overhead smash like an oversized club, right into the pilot's skull. It blocked that, too, its arm raised like it was begging not to be killed even as its other arm shot forward in an attempt to grab onto something, anything, that it could crush. She pushed down, hoping the pilot wouldn't figure out how to get his missiles to work. The K-suit pushed back.
Then a spray of what sounded like minigun fire cut into the back of the suit, and suddenly it went limp.
Priss looked up. Nemesis was there, his black hardsuit glistening in the firelight; the back doors of the van were open.
"We don't have time for this," he growled. "Did you think about how we were supposed to get over that blockade now that most of it is on fire?"
"No." Oops. "We take a side street."
"Fine. I'm getting back in the van. Cover me. If 'Nene' is right the gunships will be showing up very soon."
"Got it." Priss looked up, scanned the cloudy February sky for anything big and faintly disc-shaped. It was, she had to admit, a little nerve-wracking. If it had just been her and Nene, she would be living in the combat high, drinking from it the way barbarian kings drank wine from the skulls of their enemies. But now she was oscillating between that combat high and anxious terror; the van, as well-armored as it appeared to be, was a massive liability, the kind she didn't want to have following her.
A minute later, and she and the van were following Nene in relative silence in motorcycle mode, looking for a side street they could turn down and keep going north. It had never really dawned on her how many overly wide streets Megatokyo had out here, where GENOM had been trying to build suburban sprawl. The city had caught up to it, of course, swallowing its own borders like slime mold, but then it had just - stopped. Sometimes the city didn't feel alive so much as it felt half-alive, its innards seething with microbial humanity but its outer reaches grey and dead and empty.
Damn. Look at her getting all philosophical. She was going to need a drink after this mess was over.
They turned down a narrow street, really just two lanes pasted together, that wound in and out and occasionally doubled back on themselves. These streets were much more inhabited, small low-rises surrounding the usual forty-story housing blocks the way fungus clusters around a tree's roots. At least three times she passed different groups of old ladies and housewives, who looked at her little convoy like they were monsters. More than once, she heard someone mutter something along the lines of 'oh shit', then duck back inside before snapping a photo on their phone.
"Pink… " she said once they were a good ten minutes into this street prowling.
"We're gonna talk when we get back, okay?"
"Fine." Old Nene wouldn't have even spoken to her after something like this. It was weird when she acted more mature than Priss, and Linna had joked more than once that her burst into adulthood was all about keeping a leash on Mackie, and that maybe Priss needed a man in her life. This was usually followed by intense discussion of the merits and demerits of Leon's butt.
She sighed. That was another thing she had screwed up over the past hour or so. She'd probably killed people Leon knew on a first-name basis, but what else was she supposed to do? Let them blow her and the rest of their little alliance into giblets?
It was her or them. Her or them. She didn't believe it, deep down, but it was comforting to say on a surface level.
"We're being watched," Nene said, offhandedly, as they passed by a closed-off playground packed with cyberpunks, junkies, and more than a few cyberpunk junkies.
"Really." Nemesis's driver.
"There's no room for big gear to maneuver, and they don't want to risk civilian casualties. Soon as we get back on one of the big roads heading towards the northern highways, though, they'll probably bring in the Hornet gunships."
"You'll have to basically sprint for the underpass." Sylia, kilometers away, the big green arrow moving at the speed of a cloud, hovering in the sky. "Nemesis, if that van has any hidden capabilities you've been keeping from us, now is the time to use them."
"It does not. It was built for surveillance, not combat. An AV-4 mode would weigh it down and require more aviation fuel than I was willing to get my hands on."
"Fair enough. I suppose you'll have to just be very lucky."
"I don't believe in luck." Priss heard something heavy clamping into place in the background. "I believe in innate talent. I believe in honed skill. But I do not believe in luck."
They were approaching a broader street, near one of those old roofed-in shopping malls. Residential cover wasn't as thick there. They were getting closer.
"Then I'm sorry. Short of taking out several gunships, I suspect you'll be under heavy fire for the minute it will take, even at our motoslave's top speeds, to make it to the underpass. I wish there was a better way, but this was the closest path to a safehouse we could find."
"I said the van has no 'tricks', as you put it. I never said I didn't have anything." Again, the clamping sound again.
Even Sylia sounded startled. "What the hell does that mean?"
"We're gonna be out in the open in about thirty seconds," Nene said. It was weird, taking orders from her, but she had a point. Priss began to accelerate, slowly at first, pushing her throttle just a little further than resting. "If you have a plan, it better be ready in - twenty."
"It's ready. Sarge, open the doors. Pink, Blue, do everything you can to keep attention away from the van. Take hits if you have to."
The implication being, Priss thought, If one of my people dies, I will never forgive you.
"Ten seconds-"
"Nene," Priss burst, "shut the fuck up and drive!"
"Okay! Okay, threetwoone here wegooooooooo!"
They turned onto the road, opened up their motoslaves as one. Almost immediately, they saw them; two Hornet gunships, autocannons barely a growling noise in the distance, wheeling around their little convoy, looking for all the world like flying saucers. Tracer rounds shot by her like red anime speedlines, rounds as big as her fist warbling by and leaving little craters in the reinforced road; she drove over them effortlessly, her motoslave's boosted suspension and solid-gel tires turning what should have been bone-rattling thumps into little bounces. Priss silently thanked whatever electrowizardry Nene was pulling for screwing up the Hornet's sensors.
Then rounds started eating into Supercell's fairing, cutting dark streaks across its front, and Priss winced. They hadn't really been targeting her anyway, but now that they were, she was fucked, unless she transformed and blew those gunships out of the sky before they shot out of range. Could Supercell transform under fire without taking a hit in something sensitive? She really didn't want to find out, but what choice did she have? It was either that or end up like how that van probably was, not much more than a hunk of metal with some inert meat inside it.
She turned on her rearview cameras, just in time to see the white-hot streak of a missile arc up into the sky, then another. They passed through her peripheral vision, her HUD pinging low-priority threats before she realized they weren't aimed at her, but at the Hornets.
The gunships had anti-missile defenses, of course, but they stopped firing just for a moment to deploy them, clouds of chaff and foil strips bursting around the cockpits of the craft. Except, if these were launched by who Priss thought they were launched by, they weren't being aimed at the cockpits, but at the big heatsigs behind them.
She was right; both missiles snaked through the clouds of countermeasures without so much as slowing down, and instead lodged themselves firmly in the left Hornet's fan before exploding in white fireballs that left smoking holes where a handful of propeller blades were supposed to be. Deprived of its main method of staying aloft, the Hornet plummeted right onto the highway next to their road, slicing a huge chunk of it away like an oversized buzzsaw before getting stuck on the edge, smoking and flaming for a few seconds before the cockpit dropped loose from the fan unceremoniously.
Thirty seconds had passed. They still had thirty to go; the underpass was visible, and the flimsy bent chainlink fence around what had once been storage for the Boomer storage trucks was still shredded, with a big hole right where they could pass through. Sylia and Linna were idling at the entrance. A quick optic magnification, and she realized the two Sabers were looking at something - behind her. She smirked, and triggered her rear cameras again.
Yep. Nemesis had strapped caterpillar-tread skates to his hardsuit's feet, kicking forward with murderous gusto, and yep, that was a revolver-style cylinder on his left shoulder with enough bigger missiles sticking out of it to level a city block. The van, miraculously enough, looked fine, a few stray rounds having turned the dragon painting on its sides into a scarred mess, but it didn't look like how she'd expected it to look, namely like a total wreck. Nene looked fine, too.
"You," she said over the comms to the vigilante, "are batshit insane," just as the remaining Hornet opened up again.
Nemesis jumped, the heavy suit seemingly defying gravity as its thrusters pushed it to the other side of the road faster than the Hornet could track him, then hopped again, zigzagging just fast enough to stay ahead of its guns. His right arm shot up, and then Priss saw a small flurry of explosions pop from the side of the gunship like burst zits, tracking a scar up its flanks before shredding the connection between the body and the fan. The Hornet dropped out of sight behind the underpass shortly afterward.
Priss began to slow down, and Nemesis came alongside her. "I'm not insane," he said, and she could almost hear his smile as they pulled into the underpass. "It's the rest of the world that's lost its mind."
Nene followed them shortly afterward, followed by the van, and then she saw it.
The passenger side front window was shattered. It wasn't too hard to see the headless corpse in the seat, and the wide eyes of the driver, who - god damn it - looked kind of like the guy who had bumped into them in the Fu-Shui nightclub. Had to be him.
She saw his mouth speak at the same time as her comms lit up. "Gavin," the guy said, "Smitty's dead."
She wasn't sure what she expected, as the van slowed down, as the motoslaves rode single-file into the round tunnel that seemed to materialize out of one of the giant pillars that held up the expressway and which dropped down into darkness at a grade she would have called dangerous at any other time. Rage, maybe, grief definitely. What she would have felt if, say, Linna had been blown away before her eyes.
What she didn't expect, as Nemesis puttered along beside her, was that quiet, almost silent, "Oh."
And later, when everything had gotten worse, she would remember 'Smitty's' headless corpse, the blood long having spurt from the tatters that remained of his neck.
And she would remember that "Oh," too.
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I started writing a new fanfiction! It's a crossover with the RPG Cyberpunk 2077 is based on: Right here. Nifty, eh? Don't worry, I'm still writing this one, I just needed something less weighty to occasionally shoot out a chapter of.
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