... Holy crap, it does! That account was closed, like, nine months ago! I wonder if I can still FTP to it... Well, if I could, if I had anything but a PSP and an old PDA to connect with.
As usual, there's been a bunch of corrections for things that only stopped hiding when I posted the thing, and a number of continuity edits while writing Ch05EX and Ch06. I am therefore going to cut the old versions away and put in the new versions and finished(!!!) Ch05EX.
- CD
ETA: Yes, the above does mean that the versions onnthe Adelphia site should be considered depreciated, with several sets of edits since they were current. The basic plot is not changed, but there's significant qualitative difference in spelchekz and line-level continuity.
---------
Now that I'm on the library machine instead of my wholly inadequate PDA, I'll put the first section of 5 in here.
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08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05a.txt
2007-06-07 - the typical just-posted-it-why-didn't-I-see-that-before errors fixed, including a couple of fairly major continuity glitches and numerous spelchekz
2007-05-31 - split the file, as it was becoming inconveniently large.
2007-05-30 - fixed an egregious continuity error, transcribed the part of the canon beach/cat scene too important to skip.
2005-06-14 - Nene/Sylia breifing done
06-13-2005 - finished mental ward scene, driving, spelchekz
05-10-2005 - working on cops-not-in-morgue scene
01-16-2005 - now exceeds the length of Ch4, got Fargo's scene done. Yay!
01-12-2005 - still in progress
12/11/2004 - in progress
"My my, Mr. Mason, you certainly do get into the most *interesting* situations," Dr. Gero Yoshida cackled. The executive's carbonized corpse had been delivered to him within hours of its clandestine recovery at the foot of Genom Tower for dissection and a final report on the project, since the only other remaining subjects appeared to have become collateral damage in a buma attack. Even he had been amazed to discover that there was still brain activity in it, despite massive damage to the torso and the fact that destruction of surface tissues was nearly total, leaving only traceries and empty sheathes where the augmentation had run through it. Still, if the company was going to cut him off and hang him out to dry in the Production department, the least he could do was to double cross them in return. Brian Mason might have died, and the report he turned in would reflect that, but the project would not. Turning away from the vaguely humanoid charcoal briquette floating in a support tank, he studied the readings displayed on his computer screen, then continued typing in observations.
]The additional system support of a nutrient bath appears to
]have stabilized subject ZODIAC-9, and the new nanites have
]integrated perfectly with his existing set. Physical repairs
]have already begun, and scan results show that the subject's
]skeleton is again being upgraded with sturdier joints and
]muscle attachment points, as well as what appear to be nodes
]for a distributed Dykstra field system. Combined with the
]results from ZODIAC-19 in Aqua City and vivisection data from
]17 and 18, it can be concluded that the quick-conversion
]process is indeed successful; all that remains is to create
]the perfect combination of offense and defense. Further data
]samples will be required on the mercenaries who opposed #9.
Saving and closing the file for the moment, he created a new copy of the experiment template and began filling in preliminary information.
]SUBJECT ZODIAC-20
]NAME: YOSHIDA, Gero
Bewilderbeast Studios Present
BUBBLEGUM DISASTER
Season One
WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR
A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn
Chapter Five
Continuity note: The Police Motorcycle Battloid introduced in this chapter is not, repeat *not*, I say again *NOT* a MOSPEADA cycle! Nor for that matter is it a Cyclone from Robotech: New Generation, which was made from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA's raped corpse. What it is, is a motoslave that links to unpowered armor. For the full rant on why this is a significant difference and why I hate the MOSPEADA ride armor, see the end notes.
Thanks to her position as a dispatcher for the security forces of Genaros, Mina actually held a higher clearance level than most of the human staff of the station, with Group 7 access. That had sufficed to let her 'lose' a trio of submachine guns in the paperwork, but arranging for a float-car to get their group to the space dock - most of whom would have set off alarms if they got within ten decks of it - had required Meg to get into the computer and forge her Group 6 access. She'd falsified a down-check for two of the five seat Reindeer squad cars, and a bit more hacking on Meg's part had insured Dot would be in the vehicle garage to 'repair' them. The false report hadn't raised any flags, and with the end of second shift ten minutes past the breakout was due any time now.
Checking out from her duty station with expertly feigned unconcern, the blonde buma's racing thoughts belied her calm exterior. Everything had gone without a hitch so far, but... better than any of the others, she understood how quickly the SSPD could get forces anywhere on the station, and three little SMGs would hardly faze a patrol car, let alone the *serious* security measures. Indecisive, she dithered a moment beside a water fountain, weighing the likelihood of blowing the whole deal against the probability that it would fail because they were underarmed. A faint beeping drifted from the dispatch center behind her, a low priority alarm prearranged to be a two-minute warning in case she hadn't gotten away yet, and that decided her. While it wouldn't cause any great concern - that alert had been chosen carefully to be minor enough that she could casually leave despite it - everyone would be watching it instead of their own boring stations, and that meant she had an opportunity.
Stepping into the cramped armory entryway, she gave the human guard at the terminal a cute little wave and a happy smile with a twinkle in her eye... a twinkle that grew into a hypnotic rainbow glow as one of the systems people tended to forget sexaroids were equipped with was activated. "There now. You just sit there nursing the boob tube and don't make marshmallow peeps," she ordered the blank-eyed officer. That taken care of, she opened the inner door with the Group 6 password Meg had provided, and darted inside. Not bothering with the racks of sidearms and SMGs, she headed directly for the heavy weapons in the back of the armored compartment, hefting a large, heavy aluminum case in each hand before turning to go.
Hurrying back out through the checkpoint, the light caught briefly on the logo embossed in the side of one case - a crescent moon cupping the words, Versatile Engineering Neotechnology, U.S.
--=--
With the resemblance of the weapons' cases to the ones used for ordinary Space Development Products Corporation maintenance kits, Mina'd had no trouble walking through the nearly deserted garage to the bay where Dot was waiting with the float-cars, but the time her little side expedition had eaten made it a nerve-wracking trip. The plan called for each of them to fly one of the cars out in the general scramble when the rest of the alarms went off, but if she was too late for them to leave in the group someone might remember that those cars were supposed to be unfit for service...
Fortunately, she made it just in time, passing the second case up to the redhead just as the scramble klaxons started to howl. The faintest hint of a frown rode Dot's deathly pale features, something Mina knew would translate to a screaming fit for most other people. There was no time for apologies, however, and the blonde used the toolbox sitting beside the other car - left there for the purpose, she was sure, since it was already running with the normal boarding steps retracted, and that kind of calculated efficiency was Dot's trademark - to hop into the pilot's seat, tossing the aluminum case onto the copilot's side for the moment. Even before the canopy had fully sealed, she'd begun pulling out into the stream of patrol and squad cars flowing out of the garage, Dot following tight behind.
--=--
Despite Mina's unvoiced worries, the two float-cars had made it to the small loading area off of float-car shaft four that served the Lower Ring gymnasium without any further difficulties. While Dot stayed with the floaters she hopped out and made the short trip to collect the group gathered in the gym - everyone else but Nam, who'd been inserted as part of the shuttle maintenance team to do the usual checks and service on its life support systems. She didn't notice Dr. Barnaby, out trying to walk off a bout of insomnia, when he ducked quickly back around a corner further down the corridor connecting the two rooms.
Eyes narrowed, he leaned around the corner just far enough to see the gymnasium door, and an angry frown settled on his face as he saw the group of buma emerge from it moments later. He waited for them to pass out of sight back the way the blonde had entered from, then stepped purposefully toward an intercom panel set into the corridor wall.
--=--
Meg was the first to react when the alarms went off, her red mane snapping like flames as she jerked up short and spun to gape at the announcement system mounted high on the wall of the loading dock. "No!" she gasped, slapping a fist into her left palm. "Everyone was supposed to be at the far end..." She shook off the shock, then turned back to get the others moving again, suddenly looking a great deal like a poised lioness. Mina was already running for her floatcar, she saw, with Sylvie and Anri starting to follow, but Lou and Hyatt were still frozen. "Hurry, everyone," she urged them, "before someone gets here!"
"Too late for that, bitches," a male voice snarled from the door to the corridor. "I --"
Meg seemed to blur and vanish, a streak of color and rush of wind connecting the place she'd stood with where she reappeared in front of Dr. Barnaby, one arm extended with the palm out flat where she'd slammed into his chest with a sharp crunch. Cut off midsentence, the human was tossed through the air like a discarded doll, only to slam into the bulkhead beyond with a sickening crack. "...already called... Security..." he gasped, before hacking up a mouthful of bloody pink froth from a punctured lung.
Before he could slide to the floor, a staccato burst of machinegun fire walked across his chest and up to pound his head to ruin, Meg again blurring away as the unaccustomed kick of the SMG threw Hyatt's aim off. The bullets tracked across the wall until the magazine ran dry, the weapon shaking in her hands as cordite smoke trailed from the now open bolt. Thin white scars showed bright white on her cheeks, throat, and down each arm as she flushed with anger. "BASTARD!" she cried. "You heartless bastard, just had to get in one more kick..."
Taking the gun from her now limp fingers, Meg chivvied the now weeping Hyatt toward the waiting cars, Lou snapping out of her daze and following, her own gun now unslung and at the ready, as the rapidly approaching wail of Station Security Police float car sirens echoed in from the transit shaft.
Reaching the vehicles, she left Lou and Anri to get Hyatt aboard Dot's while she leaned into the other, to see what Mina was fiddling with in the back seat that was making such an ominous whine. Before she could say a word, however, there was a flash of red light and an earth-shattering kaboom as as the second car exploded, cored like an apple by the heavy laser mount of a patrol floater that had just flared to a halt outside the loading dock. Staggered and deafened, she saw Sylvie's lips move as she called out something, running to where her partner Anri and the other two sexaroids had been tossed by the shockwave.
Still stunned herself, Meg could only stare blankly at the dull brown patrol car, now realigning for a shot at the second stolen floater. Before it could do so a brilliant pink and orange energy beam reached out and carved a burning crescent across its prow, slicing the lightly armored craft in half before it too exploded. Her hearing had recovered enough to catch Mina's shout, "Go Meg! I'll hold them off!" as she jumped down from the nose of the car, a bulky backpack with a prominent VENUS logo on her back and a fat cable leading to the particle thrower in her hands.
Shaking off her stupor, Meg slung the gun she'd taken from Hyatt on her own back and hurried to help Sylvie with the others, no longer moving with enhanced speed to conserve her systems for the next crisis. One look was all it took to tell Hyatt was beyond their help, crushed between a chunk of wreckage and the wall. Sylvie had obviously come to the same conclusion, pulling Anri away while the green-haired buma clutched at a shrapnel wound in her side. Meg had to do the same for Lou, hauling her along and shoving her into the copilot seat while Sylvie and Anri settled in the back, then lifting the floatcar off its skids and pulling out even as the sounds of more energy blasts and explosions drifted in from the transit shaft. "I'm sorry, Mina, Hyatt, Dot," she whispered, as the car pulled into the shaft and accelerated away.
--=--
Her mind shying away from the long-term implication of what she was doing, Mina dashed for the main entryway where the loading dock opened onto shaft four, picking her way quickly through the flaming rubble of the car she'd just destroyed. The VENUS proton accelerator pack bumped and shifted on her back, as she'd not had time to adjust the straps correctly, and the whine of its operation resonated with the ringing in her ears from the explosions. Skidding out onto the metal floor of the float car tube, she could see the lights of another patrol car approaching from the Upper Ring junction. Intense red blasts flew past as she hurried to the scant cover provided by the protruding edge of a blast door, peeking out to catch a glimpse of the oncoming car, now barely in range of her weapon.
She rolled sideways into the shaft just in time to see a burst of energy splash against her former position, then brought the thrower wand up like the nozzle of a firehose and let fly. The writhing rope of ionized particles reached out again, drawing a burning scar across the nose of the float car before flashing across the cockpit, vitrifying the glass and frying the pilot instantly. Uncontrolled, it veered off and crashed into the wall of the shaft, and yellow hull damage lights began to flash in that segment of wall, warning that the pressure hull had felt the hit. Behind her, she could hear the stolen Reindeer's turbine rev up, but more patrol cars were on their way already, and she didn't think she could stop more than one at a time. Grimly, she set the thrower power selector to 'Overcharge' and shrugged out of the backpack, laying it against the cratered wall... it would go critical any second, just as the nearest patrol floaters came even with it, by her estimate. Turning away again, she dashed back for the loading dock, hoping to make it to the far side of the blast door before the explosion.
She didn't, and as the whirlwind of escaping air pulled her out into the endless night, her last thought before shutdown was that at least it had thrown her toward the planet, instead of away, so perhaps a few ashes would make it through reentry and to the surface.
--=--
The stolen Reindeer floatcar zipped down Shaft 7, overhead lights flickering strobelike with the speed they passed, making stress-induced beads of sweat on Meg's face twinkle like the distant stars. Even so, the redhead's hands moved surely and steadily over the controls, fully concentrating on threading the car down the tunnel at speeds far greater than the station designers had intended... save for one small bit, that kept replaying the image of Mina running toward her in the rear view camera, then being swallowed by the blast as the power pack of her VENUS Beam Cannon had overloaded, and the blast door sealing as the hull blew open and vented the compartment to space. The world seemed to move in great swoops and pauses as the stress trigger she'd set up for the 35A patch kept switching her into that state of fast-time, and she kept shutting it down to conserve her systems. She gave in and let it run as a pair of laser blasts suddenly swished past the car, one of them striking a junction box far ahead and plunging the corridor into darkness. As long as she didn't move that much, it shouldn't make a big difference anyway... and now the reaction time could be critical.
She could hear Lou seemingly suspended in mid-curse as she tried to set up the remaining VENUS cannon with the lights suddenly gone, the heavy backpack braced between her knees while its former case filled half the footwell of the rear seat, serving as a makeshift gurney for Anri's lower body, her back braced against Sylvie.
More blasts drifted toward them in the rearview and Meg maneuvered to slide around them again and again, always careful to keep the nose pointed toward the distant dot of light where the shaft lights were still functional. They floated forward timelessly, until finally the lights were upon them again. The junction with the main linear maglev highway would be upon them soon, she knew, and their lighter Reindeer would gain a bit of a speed edge over the armored Wildebeest patrol cars since all of its thrust could be put to propulsion while the heavier cars would still need a fraction for lift. The only problem was that there were a lot more routes for additional police vehicles to get on the Linear and box them in, and if the Bridge got enough control of the computers back they could seal it with emergency doors.
Endless seconds later, they crossed into the orangeish lighting of the linear highway. Vectoring nozzles extended from the lift jets at the front corners of the floatcar, and she could hear Anri's stifled grunt as the extra acceleration pressed everyone into the seats for a moment.
"Hang on, Anri," Sylvie comforted, her honey-gold eyes liquid with concern. "Just a little bit longer, and we'll be free!"
Clutched to her partner's chest, the deep green-haired buma gasped, "I'm sorry... now of all times..."
*Always worried about pulling her own weight,* Meg thought. Sneaking a glance over her shoulder at the shuttle pilots, she added aloud, "Once we get through here, we'll be at the spaceport. You suppose Nam's taken care of her part?"
"If it's all gone according to plan, she has," Sylvie answered. "We can't turn back now, no matter what happens." Her eyes seemed to flash, and her voice rang like a drawn sword as the dark haired sexaroid continued, "If we don't get to the planet, we won't have any future."
Finally finished with the VENUS, Lou cradled it in her lap, clutching it like some strange kind of teddy bear as she concurred, "Yes! I can't stand this place any longer! Faster Meg, faster!"
Suddenly, they rounded one of the few curves in the highway, and a patrol car was right in front of them, heading the same direction but slowly. The pilot punched the throttle before they could crash, but the stolen floater was still gaining with frightening speed. Locking her attention back on the controls, Meg made a desperate gamble and fed in differential thrust, tilting the Reindeer up on its side as it scraped past the patrol car in the relatively narrow tunnel. The extra pressure proved just slightly too much, and the patrol floater's front vectoring nozzle touched down to the road surface. In less than a blink, the dragging nozzle had flipped the car into a tumble, then the whole thing exploded as thruster fire reflected back from the sturdy maglev plates and melted the engines. Only the heightened reflexes of her hacked motion control code let Meg ride the shockwave without crashing her own car - that, and more luck than she wanted to think about.
The other two cars burst through the pall of smoke, continuing their pursuit and still firing the occasional blast despite falling ever further behind. Ahead, red warning lights began to flash in time with emergency klaxons, and several blast doors began to close off the tube.
One - two - three - four they shot through like a kayak through rapids, five with a scraping sound and a lurch to the right. Meg breathed a sigh of relief as they made it into the last stretch before the spacedock, even as a brilliant explosion puffed between the last set of doors. The gap had narrowed to only two feet and one of the chasers apparently hadn't managed to stop in time, after making it through the other sets.
As the end of the Linear came in sight Lou cheered, "It's the exit! We made it!" She was distracted a moment later as the forward view screen set in the dash blipped and showed a rotating wireframe image of a huge, heavily armored humanoid, text scrolling to one side to warn that it had detected and identified obstacles in the passage ahead. "Dobermans?" the blonde cried, again clutching the particle cannon. "It's no use! We can't get away now."
Sylvie seemed to have other ideas, laying Anri gently aside so she could lean forward and suggest, "Meg! Set the car on full auto-cruise! We'll have to jump for it and use the car as a distraction!" Turning back to her partner, the pilot's voice softened, asking, "Anri, you can do that, right?"
Weak but determined, the green-haired girl mumbled an affirmative, and the plan was put in action. The canopy was opened, sliding forward to leave the sides and top of the cabin clear. Its position and the fairly dark red tint of the thick plastic would make it hard to see what was happening behind it from the Dobermans' point of view, directly ahead.
Snarling, the hulking white security buma released safety latches, transformed their lower arms to expose machinegun barrels, and opened fire, the brilliant glowing steaks of tracer rounds flashing past the onrushing float-car. Two or three actually punched holes in the windshield, but missed the crouched fugitives within. They jumped before the Reindeer left the maglev tunnel, Lou carrying the VENUS while Meg and Sylvie each took one of Anri's shoulders. Even at that they were almost too late - the shockwave as a bullet finally struck the car's fuel tank and detonated it knocked them out of the air like a burning hot fly swatter, though thankfully all the wreckage and splashing fuel continued on, piling into the Dobies. Quickly, they scrambled to their feet and away through a side passage.
--=--
By the door to the shuttle bay, Nam waited just out of sight of anyone approaching from outside. She'd already gotten what equipment they could scrounge and the extra life support supplies loaded after the rest of the service crew left, having faked a hard-to-trace fault in the backup rebreather plant to hold up her part of the job. Just this once, she was glad none of the few human crewmembers who treated buma decently had been in the same crew, as it would have been awkward if some helpful soul had stayed to help her. As it was, everything had gone without a hitch, and now all she had to do was wait, impatient and twitchy, for everyone else to arrive. "What could be keeping Sylvie and the others? They're late!" she worried to herself, visions of the multitude of disasters that could have befallen them circling her mind. The third sub machine gun Mina had managed to get for them was held awkwardly somewhere near a ready position, but the little sonic blasters riding her soulders were active, and their far less lethal nature would make them her weapon of choice anyway.
Hearing running feet coming toward her, she tensed and the SMG came up as she got ready to confront whoever was approaching. The little blasters weren't all that noticeable, let alone intimidating...
The purple eyed sexaroid sighed in relief as she heard Sylvie's voice call for her, and stepped out to see the pilot with her partner hanging off of her, Meg and Lou bringing up the rear. "I thought you were done for!" she scolded.
Nodding toward the shuttle, Meg asked, "Is she ready?"
"A-OK," Nam replied, waving them forward. She followed Sylvie and Anri up the boarding ramp, but stopped halfway up, realizing Meg and Lou weren't following yet. She turned, finding that they'd taken rear guard positions by an empty cargo crate and the still parked service truck. "Hurry Everyone! The patrols are making their rounds now!" she urged.
Trying to pick up the pace, Anri overstressed her wounded side and faltered at the head of the stairs, gasping and blinking back tears. Sylvie stopped with her, the smaller buma hanging off her desperately as she tried to recover. "It's OK Anri," she encouraged, "it's all right now. Hang on."
As if to disprove her, a loud metallic thump echoed through the bay. Meg, who'd been looking at the right moment to see the now closed blast doors they'd entered through jump in their tracks, moaned, "It's the Doberman!" Another hit, and the doors started to bulge where they joined. "Get on board, quickly!" the fire-haired sexaroid ordered.
"Meg! Lou! what about you?" Nam protested. Before either could answer, the Doberman succeeded in tearing through the heavily armored doors, greeted by a strangled noise of dismay as it stepped heavily over the wreckage.
"Hurry!" urged Meg, popping out from behind her crate with a gun in each hand. Amplified strength from the 35A software let her hold them steady, pouring a stream of lead at the Dobie's head in an attempt to at least distract it. She held little hope of actually doing damage, as even the collision and explosion of their floater had only crisped the plating of its left arm.
Irritably, it swatted at the incoming rounds, deflecting a handful into the air while the rest ricocheted harmlessly from its heavy armor. High above, one of the strays punctured an umbilical carrying hydrazine for the reaction thrusters, and the impact combined with the hot copper case of the round set off a small explosion.
Seeing the debris falling straight for them, Nam activated her own 35A patch, suddenly blurring out and shoving Sylvie and Anri forward into the shuttle, taking shelter with them in the airlock.
Gasping for breath after having the wind knocked out of her, Sylvie choked out, "Nam... thanks. That was close."
Lou had also stepped out to fire, playing the proton beam across the Doberman's chest like a fireman trying to quell rioters, but where the squad cars had quickly succumbed to its searing force the space combat buma took only minor damage. It dodged to the side and roared with anger at the little insects that dared to harm it.
Hearing Sylvie still behind her, Lou turned to yell over her shoulder, "What are you standing there for? Mo-" The sun-hot green annihilation of the Doberman's mouth laser cut her off, wiping the blonde from existence even as it breached the containment field of the accelerator on her back, causing a secondary explosion that tossed the flaming wreckage of the service truck into a far corner.
"LOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.uU!" Meg's grieving cry seemed to warble like a police siren as she again blurred into motion, solid streaks of jumpsuit beige and fiery red ringing the Doberman as she built up speed, then leapt to plant both heels in its grinning skull of a face. The impact staggered even that mighty war machine, but it caught her around the chest as she rebounded, and one short, sickly crunch later the leader of the escapees was no more.
In the shuttle, Nam let out one terrible sob, as if she'd felt her own heart crushed along with Meg, and jabbed a control beside the still open airlock.
"Nam, what are you DOING?" demanded Sylvie. "We can't just..."
"We have to go," the purple haired sexaroid choked. "We have to find freedom... enough freedom for all of them." She touched another key and the elevator started to move, even as the outer door slid shut. "Meg, Lou, Mina, Hyatt, Dot... everyone."
They arrived at the flight deck, and all three quickly strapped in. Sylvie had to fight herself to pull the launch lever, even though she knew it was far too late to do anything for the others by going back, but after only a second's pause she did it. A glance at the aft monitor to confirm all engines firing normally - not that there was anything she could do about it if they weren't, or that the computer wouldn't notice long before she could anyway, but it was part of her checklist - revealed that the Doberman had tried to jump onto the side of the shuttle, but had been just a whisker too slow. She felt a tiny measure of satisfaction watching the murderous buma warp and melt in the inferno of the shuttle's main engine cluster, finally exploding as its fusion core was breached.
Somehow, even though it meant they'd escaped, she couldn't cheer. Nam's strangled, choking sobs behind her on one side, Anri's comatose silence on the other, and most of all the half dozen empty seats weighed far too heavily for that. At least with Nam having made it, she could patch up Anri before they made landfall, even if it took an extra orbit to do it - anything more than sticking a bandage over the wound was beyond Sylvie's knowledge. That might even buy them more time before ground forces could come when they did land, if she made some orbit changes as feints in between. With the booster stage attached, she'd have had to dump a lot of fuel just to get into re-entry trim anyway.
---=- + -=---
Cynthia woke to the gentle poking of Yuki, the ten inch tall, platinum blonde pixie crouching beside the girl's pillow. On the bedside stand just beyond, dark-haired Hotaru looked on, agitatedly collapsing and extending her iridescent wings and fidgeting with a pencil. Seeing her mistress's eyes flutter open and focus, Yuki's jingle-bell voice chimed softly to tell Cynthia why they'd awakened her.
Rising from her futon, the young girl wrapped the covers around herself for warmth as she opened the window of the bedroom the Akimotos had given her and leaned out over the rail bounding the tiny balcony. The two fairy-buma hovering near her head, she craned her neck to look south past the eaves, to where a fiery streak marred the early morning gloom.
"A shooting star? How pretty..." Cynthia remembered Major Rose's large, warm hands on her shoulders, steadying her as she leaned over the rail on the roof of the SDPC Building to watch the Leonid meteor shower one cool summer night, her housecoat fluttering in the breeze. A faint smile touched her face at the memory, a stolen moment away from everyone else, until the silvery tones of Yuki and Hotaru's voices drew her back to the present. Yuki twittered again, suggesting looking closer with her other vision, the way they'd been practicing.
"Un," the little girl agreed, closing her eyes while concentrating on keeping a clear image of the shooting star, still creeping along the horizon. The image in her mind zoomed in, arc welder speck swelling to a blazing fireball, and then ... "A spaceship? But the place they land is by the bay, that's not the right way for one to come down," the former buma commented. She shifted the viewpoint again, moving through the hull of the shuttle to find the cockpit. There a dark-haired woman worked the controls with barely restrained desperation, the copilot slumped against the seat and a third woman gritting her teeth and clutching the armrests of her seat with knuckles white from fear. An angry red indicator glared from the console, warning that the computerized landing system was shut down, and the craft was completely off the Megatokyo spaceport approach path.
Hotaru's voice was ever so slightly deeper than Yuki's, but still sweeter than silver bells as she too sang to Cynthia, calling on other lessons that they'd practiced to pull back the view again and determine where the shuttle was headed, the most probable course stretching before it like the headlamps of a car.
"Oh no, that's right here!" Cynthia cried. "It might hurt the horses if it lands in the field like that. We have to do something!" Two fairy bells chimed in agreement, as they suggested some things she could do about it.
--=--
Sylia's awakening was considerably less pleasant; with the volume she had to set the alarms at for them to actually rouse her from a deep sleep her head was left ringing despite how quickly she rolled out from the covers and slapped the 'acknowledge' button on her bedside console. Stifling a yawn, she quickly scanned through the on-site sensor logs, then turned to the remote feeds - the passive equipment installed around the hydroponic farm base was the best, but even that couldn't give meaningful coverage beyond a mile or two away. A bit of creative hacking to divert a copy of the datastream from the airport and spaceport traffic control systems was one of the ways she made up for that lack, the feeds constantly monitored by expert system AIs of her own design.
Those systems had picked up the wayward Orca IV even before Hotaru and Yuki - the mere fact that its IFF transponder had gone to emergency mode would have rated flagging it for attention when the logs were checked, but when its projected flight path took it directly over the base they signaled for immediate action. As Sylia switched to the relevant feed and interpreted it herself, her breath caught in her throat - that shuttle wasn't just heading overhead, it was going to come down RIGHT HERE, probably in the horse field, but if it shortened its path the slightest bit, or just came in a little lower than expected, it would pile straight into the hill facility itself.
Even if the impact didn't break it open physically there was still no way crash investigators could miss the base hidden under the farm - nothing could be THAT well hidden. Worse still, there was precious little she could do about it, even if she'd had days of warning, let alone minutes - sure, she had weapons capable of shooting it down before it reached them, but even without the moral question of such an action it was sure to be seen, and that would be worse than simply having it crash and expose them. Still, there was ONE possibility left, with the abilities she'd gained in her transformation.
Decision made, Sylia grabbed the robe from her dresser, belting it securely over her nightie as she hurried to her lab. There'd be no time to change into something more suitable, she'd just have to trust in her own durability.
Moments later, she'd reached her workshop, her most recent project still lying where she'd left it before finally going off to bed. She'd meant to have the thing well away from the base - and anything else, for that matter - before lighting it off, but now there just wouldn't be time...
She had J.B. Gibson to thank for it, really, or the demon that had possessed his car. She'd drawn energy right out of the streetlight power lines for the attack that had finished it off, and after consciously figuring out the field patterns that had let her do so, she was quite sure she could pull the heat out of a fusion core and convert it to useable power.
The only problem was, she'd never built one before - Knight Sabers equipment so far had been efficient enough to run off batteries or, for the motoslaves, small gas turbines. This unit was a replica of the resin-based design that had powered the Superbuma, a lucky crack Nene had managed to pull off of a computer core recovered from the wreckage of that fiasco in the fifteen minute interval it was in ADP custody before being confiscated by government personnel - and undoubtedly delivered right back to Genom.
*I'm just stalling,* she thought irritatedly. Clearing her mind, the silvery haired Knight Saber took a deep breath, hoping that there was still someone to listen as she entered the activation code and murmured Shepard's Prayer.
--=--
Reaching to re-engage the (reprogrammed) autopilot, Sylvie hesitated, turning to look over her shoulder to where Nam was unstrapping Anri's seat harness. "Are you sure about this, Nam? I know you never got much practice with those sonic blasters..."
"No, this is the only way. Without-" The purple haired buma had to choke back a sob before continuing; they had no time for tears now. "Without the others, we'd never be able to escape the spaceport. I can keep a barrier up for a few seconds at least, and the DD will protect you and Anri. Are YOU sure you'll be able to pilot it with her in your lap?"
Activating the control with a sigh, Sylvie stood and replied, "I'll find a way. Like you said, it's our only hope, now... what the heck!?" She'd stumbled, shocked, as the shuttle suddenly stopped descending, maintaining a level course instead of the gently inclined one she'd set. "Oh hell! We'd better hurry, something's wrong and there's no time to figure out what!"
Each of them took one of the unconscious Anri's arms over their shoulders, then hustled aft to the bay where the DD Battlemover crouched; already fueled, armed, and supplied, and ready to be delivered for 'testing' to whichever arms smuggler had managed to land the deal. It was about to be tested a bit sooner than expected, however, as Sylvie scrambled into the cockpit while Nam supported Anri, then passed her up to the pilot.
"Bio-links on!" the lavender headed sexaroid commanded, slapping the ring on her right hand into the control cuff on the opposite wrist even as the crimson mecha's hatch hissed closed beside her on its hydraulic rams. A greenish energy flare flickered around her for a moment as her powerplant went to full output and synchronized with the prototype sonic blasters still riding on her shoulders, and then there was nothing but the faint, musical tone of the sonic bubble forming around her, a subharmonic of the inaudible wavelengths used for the effect. The air shimmered slightly where the perfectly balanced waveforms met around her, and Nam crouched to let the four foot diameter sphere completely surround her as it grew.
Moving carefully to avoid losing the frictionless barrier and her friend inside it, Sylvie wrapped the DD's arms around the energy-ball, then kicked her way through the side of the shuttle and bailed out. The battlemover's thrusters ignited to carry them away barely above the treetops, the cyclone-force slipstream shredding the side of the shuttle behind them and tumbling the renegades dangerously until she could compensate. Leveling out, she turned to look back one last time at the Orca IV - she was a bit sorry to see it go this way, after serving her so well for the years she'd been assigned to it - then paused, still hovering just above tree height, as she saw something glowing a brilliant blue drop away from under the nose and ... fly towards her?
--=--
No one else was awakened by the faint rumble that shook the hidden base moments later - after all, minor quakes hit Japan on a weekly, if not daily basis. They'd have to wait until morning to find out just what had happened in the wee hours of the night.
---=- + -=---
Captain Akemichi was on the husky side for a police officer even in the N-Police instead of the SWAT-like ADP, but he always managed to pass his certifications, and as a crime scene investigator rather than a beat cop it made little practical difference. He was waiting now for a couple of AD Police hotshots while his team carefully picked over the wreckage of a crashed shuttle, the somewhat narrow valley making their heavy aerodyne's lift fan echo oddly as it flew in from Megatokyo to the east.
*How troublesome...* He could almost hear his old partner Shika's signature line as the aerodyne circled lower, starting to kick up a small dust cloud from the debris.
Soon enough they were on the ground, the sunglasses-clad officer who was first out the hatch letting his Inspector's badge do the talking as he grumpily peered around the scene, while the lavender-suited redhead who followed made introductions after sharing a sardonic look. "I'm Inspector Wong, and this is my partner, Leon McNichol," he greeted. "So what've you got for us, ...?"
"Choji Akemichi," he replied. "According to the wreckage we've seen so far, it looks like it probably belongs to the Space Development Products Corporation."
Daley snorted. "Don't they have any better way of throwing their trash away?" he quipped.
Leon led the way as they walked closer, wanting a better look at the remains. "What about the pilot?" he asked, finally coming to a halt and pulling off his sunglasses as parts tossed out on the ground become too thick to walk through without disturbing the scene.
"Whoever it was, he must have had eyes like a hawk," Akemichi replied. "Judging by the flight path, he saw the Ishioka greenhouse somehow despite coming in so fast and pulled up to miss it, then lost it when the extra strain made the shuttle start breaking up. That may have saved a dozen lives, but..." He paused to cast an eye over the twisted wreckage of the spacecraft, little more than a mass of alloy and melted plastic. "Under the circumstances, he's probably dead."
"Yeah," Leon agreed somewhat reluctantly, surveying the devastated shuttle and the long scar where it had plowed aside dirt and uprooted trees before coming to a halt. "There's no way anyone could have survived."
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows
As usual, there's been a bunch of corrections for things that only stopped hiding when I posted the thing, and a number of continuity edits while writing Ch05EX and Ch06. I am therefore going to cut the old versions away and put in the new versions and finished(!!!) Ch05EX.
- CD
ETA: Yes, the above does mean that the versions onnthe Adelphia site should be considered depreciated, with several sets of edits since they were current. The basic plot is not changed, but there's significant qualitative difference in spelchekz and line-level continuity.
---------
Now that I'm on the library machine instead of my wholly inadequate PDA, I'll put the first section of 5 in here.
---------
08_BD_WOASS_Ch_05a.txt
2007-06-07 - the typical just-posted-it-why-didn't-I-see-that-before errors fixed, including a couple of fairly major continuity glitches and numerous spelchekz
2007-05-31 - split the file, as it was becoming inconveniently large.
2007-05-30 - fixed an egregious continuity error, transcribed the part of the canon beach/cat scene too important to skip.
2005-06-14 - Nene/Sylia breifing done
06-13-2005 - finished mental ward scene, driving, spelchekz
05-10-2005 - working on cops-not-in-morgue scene
01-16-2005 - now exceeds the length of Ch4, got Fargo's scene done. Yay!
01-12-2005 - still in progress
12/11/2004 - in progress
"My my, Mr. Mason, you certainly do get into the most *interesting* situations," Dr. Gero Yoshida cackled. The executive's carbonized corpse had been delivered to him within hours of its clandestine recovery at the foot of Genom Tower for dissection and a final report on the project, since the only other remaining subjects appeared to have become collateral damage in a buma attack. Even he had been amazed to discover that there was still brain activity in it, despite massive damage to the torso and the fact that destruction of surface tissues was nearly total, leaving only traceries and empty sheathes where the augmentation had run through it. Still, if the company was going to cut him off and hang him out to dry in the Production department, the least he could do was to double cross them in return. Brian Mason might have died, and the report he turned in would reflect that, but the project would not. Turning away from the vaguely humanoid charcoal briquette floating in a support tank, he studied the readings displayed on his computer screen, then continued typing in observations.
]The additional system support of a nutrient bath appears to
]have stabilized subject ZODIAC-9, and the new nanites have
]integrated perfectly with his existing set. Physical repairs
]have already begun, and scan results show that the subject's
]skeleton is again being upgraded with sturdier joints and
]muscle attachment points, as well as what appear to be nodes
]for a distributed Dykstra field system. Combined with the
]results from ZODIAC-19 in Aqua City and vivisection data from
]17 and 18, it can be concluded that the quick-conversion
]process is indeed successful; all that remains is to create
]the perfect combination of offense and defense. Further data
]samples will be required on the mercenaries who opposed #9.
Saving and closing the file for the moment, he created a new copy of the experiment template and began filling in preliminary information.
]SUBJECT ZODIAC-20
]NAME: YOSHIDA, Gero
Bewilderbeast Studios Present
BUBBLEGUM DISASTER
Season One
WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR
A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn
Chapter Five
Continuity note: The Police Motorcycle Battloid introduced in this chapter is not, repeat *not*, I say again *NOT* a MOSPEADA cycle! Nor for that matter is it a Cyclone from Robotech: New Generation, which was made from Genesis Climber MOSPEADA's raped corpse. What it is, is a motoslave that links to unpowered armor. For the full rant on why this is a significant difference and why I hate the MOSPEADA ride armor, see the end notes.
Thanks to her position as a dispatcher for the security forces of Genaros, Mina actually held a higher clearance level than most of the human staff of the station, with Group 7 access. That had sufficed to let her 'lose' a trio of submachine guns in the paperwork, but arranging for a float-car to get their group to the space dock - most of whom would have set off alarms if they got within ten decks of it - had required Meg to get into the computer and forge her Group 6 access. She'd falsified a down-check for two of the five seat Reindeer squad cars, and a bit more hacking on Meg's part had insured Dot would be in the vehicle garage to 'repair' them. The false report hadn't raised any flags, and with the end of second shift ten minutes past the breakout was due any time now.
Checking out from her duty station with expertly feigned unconcern, the blonde buma's racing thoughts belied her calm exterior. Everything had gone without a hitch so far, but... better than any of the others, she understood how quickly the SSPD could get forces anywhere on the station, and three little SMGs would hardly faze a patrol car, let alone the *serious* security measures. Indecisive, she dithered a moment beside a water fountain, weighing the likelihood of blowing the whole deal against the probability that it would fail because they were underarmed. A faint beeping drifted from the dispatch center behind her, a low priority alarm prearranged to be a two-minute warning in case she hadn't gotten away yet, and that decided her. While it wouldn't cause any great concern - that alert had been chosen carefully to be minor enough that she could casually leave despite it - everyone would be watching it instead of their own boring stations, and that meant she had an opportunity.
Stepping into the cramped armory entryway, she gave the human guard at the terminal a cute little wave and a happy smile with a twinkle in her eye... a twinkle that grew into a hypnotic rainbow glow as one of the systems people tended to forget sexaroids were equipped with was activated. "There now. You just sit there nursing the boob tube and don't make marshmallow peeps," she ordered the blank-eyed officer. That taken care of, she opened the inner door with the Group 6 password Meg had provided, and darted inside. Not bothering with the racks of sidearms and SMGs, she headed directly for the heavy weapons in the back of the armored compartment, hefting a large, heavy aluminum case in each hand before turning to go.
Hurrying back out through the checkpoint, the light caught briefly on the logo embossed in the side of one case - a crescent moon cupping the words, Versatile Engineering Neotechnology, U.S.
--=--
With the resemblance of the weapons' cases to the ones used for ordinary Space Development Products Corporation maintenance kits, Mina'd had no trouble walking through the nearly deserted garage to the bay where Dot was waiting with the float-cars, but the time her little side expedition had eaten made it a nerve-wracking trip. The plan called for each of them to fly one of the cars out in the general scramble when the rest of the alarms went off, but if she was too late for them to leave in the group someone might remember that those cars were supposed to be unfit for service...
Fortunately, she made it just in time, passing the second case up to the redhead just as the scramble klaxons started to howl. The faintest hint of a frown rode Dot's deathly pale features, something Mina knew would translate to a screaming fit for most other people. There was no time for apologies, however, and the blonde used the toolbox sitting beside the other car - left there for the purpose, she was sure, since it was already running with the normal boarding steps retracted, and that kind of calculated efficiency was Dot's trademark - to hop into the pilot's seat, tossing the aluminum case onto the copilot's side for the moment. Even before the canopy had fully sealed, she'd begun pulling out into the stream of patrol and squad cars flowing out of the garage, Dot following tight behind.
--=--
Despite Mina's unvoiced worries, the two float-cars had made it to the small loading area off of float-car shaft four that served the Lower Ring gymnasium without any further difficulties. While Dot stayed with the floaters she hopped out and made the short trip to collect the group gathered in the gym - everyone else but Nam, who'd been inserted as part of the shuttle maintenance team to do the usual checks and service on its life support systems. She didn't notice Dr. Barnaby, out trying to walk off a bout of insomnia, when he ducked quickly back around a corner further down the corridor connecting the two rooms.
Eyes narrowed, he leaned around the corner just far enough to see the gymnasium door, and an angry frown settled on his face as he saw the group of buma emerge from it moments later. He waited for them to pass out of sight back the way the blonde had entered from, then stepped purposefully toward an intercom panel set into the corridor wall.
--=--
Meg was the first to react when the alarms went off, her red mane snapping like flames as she jerked up short and spun to gape at the announcement system mounted high on the wall of the loading dock. "No!" she gasped, slapping a fist into her left palm. "Everyone was supposed to be at the far end..." She shook off the shock, then turned back to get the others moving again, suddenly looking a great deal like a poised lioness. Mina was already running for her floatcar, she saw, with Sylvie and Anri starting to follow, but Lou and Hyatt were still frozen. "Hurry, everyone," she urged them, "before someone gets here!"
"Too late for that, bitches," a male voice snarled from the door to the corridor. "I --"
Meg seemed to blur and vanish, a streak of color and rush of wind connecting the place she'd stood with where she reappeared in front of Dr. Barnaby, one arm extended with the palm out flat where she'd slammed into his chest with a sharp crunch. Cut off midsentence, the human was tossed through the air like a discarded doll, only to slam into the bulkhead beyond with a sickening crack. "...already called... Security..." he gasped, before hacking up a mouthful of bloody pink froth from a punctured lung.
Before he could slide to the floor, a staccato burst of machinegun fire walked across his chest and up to pound his head to ruin, Meg again blurring away as the unaccustomed kick of the SMG threw Hyatt's aim off. The bullets tracked across the wall until the magazine ran dry, the weapon shaking in her hands as cordite smoke trailed from the now open bolt. Thin white scars showed bright white on her cheeks, throat, and down each arm as she flushed with anger. "BASTARD!" she cried. "You heartless bastard, just had to get in one more kick..."
Taking the gun from her now limp fingers, Meg chivvied the now weeping Hyatt toward the waiting cars, Lou snapping out of her daze and following, her own gun now unslung and at the ready, as the rapidly approaching wail of Station Security Police float car sirens echoed in from the transit shaft.
Reaching the vehicles, she left Lou and Anri to get Hyatt aboard Dot's while she leaned into the other, to see what Mina was fiddling with in the back seat that was making such an ominous whine. Before she could say a word, however, there was a flash of red light and an earth-shattering kaboom as as the second car exploded, cored like an apple by the heavy laser mount of a patrol floater that had just flared to a halt outside the loading dock. Staggered and deafened, she saw Sylvie's lips move as she called out something, running to where her partner Anri and the other two sexaroids had been tossed by the shockwave.
Still stunned herself, Meg could only stare blankly at the dull brown patrol car, now realigning for a shot at the second stolen floater. Before it could do so a brilliant pink and orange energy beam reached out and carved a burning crescent across its prow, slicing the lightly armored craft in half before it too exploded. Her hearing had recovered enough to catch Mina's shout, "Go Meg! I'll hold them off!" as she jumped down from the nose of the car, a bulky backpack with a prominent VENUS logo on her back and a fat cable leading to the particle thrower in her hands.
Shaking off her stupor, Meg slung the gun she'd taken from Hyatt on her own back and hurried to help Sylvie with the others, no longer moving with enhanced speed to conserve her systems for the next crisis. One look was all it took to tell Hyatt was beyond their help, crushed between a chunk of wreckage and the wall. Sylvie had obviously come to the same conclusion, pulling Anri away while the green-haired buma clutched at a shrapnel wound in her side. Meg had to do the same for Lou, hauling her along and shoving her into the copilot seat while Sylvie and Anri settled in the back, then lifting the floatcar off its skids and pulling out even as the sounds of more energy blasts and explosions drifted in from the transit shaft. "I'm sorry, Mina, Hyatt, Dot," she whispered, as the car pulled into the shaft and accelerated away.
--=--
Her mind shying away from the long-term implication of what she was doing, Mina dashed for the main entryway where the loading dock opened onto shaft four, picking her way quickly through the flaming rubble of the car she'd just destroyed. The VENUS proton accelerator pack bumped and shifted on her back, as she'd not had time to adjust the straps correctly, and the whine of its operation resonated with the ringing in her ears from the explosions. Skidding out onto the metal floor of the float car tube, she could see the lights of another patrol car approaching from the Upper Ring junction. Intense red blasts flew past as she hurried to the scant cover provided by the protruding edge of a blast door, peeking out to catch a glimpse of the oncoming car, now barely in range of her weapon.
She rolled sideways into the shaft just in time to see a burst of energy splash against her former position, then brought the thrower wand up like the nozzle of a firehose and let fly. The writhing rope of ionized particles reached out again, drawing a burning scar across the nose of the float car before flashing across the cockpit, vitrifying the glass and frying the pilot instantly. Uncontrolled, it veered off and crashed into the wall of the shaft, and yellow hull damage lights began to flash in that segment of wall, warning that the pressure hull had felt the hit. Behind her, she could hear the stolen Reindeer's turbine rev up, but more patrol cars were on their way already, and she didn't think she could stop more than one at a time. Grimly, she set the thrower power selector to 'Overcharge' and shrugged out of the backpack, laying it against the cratered wall... it would go critical any second, just as the nearest patrol floaters came even with it, by her estimate. Turning away again, she dashed back for the loading dock, hoping to make it to the far side of the blast door before the explosion.
She didn't, and as the whirlwind of escaping air pulled her out into the endless night, her last thought before shutdown was that at least it had thrown her toward the planet, instead of away, so perhaps a few ashes would make it through reentry and to the surface.
--=--
The stolen Reindeer floatcar zipped down Shaft 7, overhead lights flickering strobelike with the speed they passed, making stress-induced beads of sweat on Meg's face twinkle like the distant stars. Even so, the redhead's hands moved surely and steadily over the controls, fully concentrating on threading the car down the tunnel at speeds far greater than the station designers had intended... save for one small bit, that kept replaying the image of Mina running toward her in the rear view camera, then being swallowed by the blast as the power pack of her VENUS Beam Cannon had overloaded, and the blast door sealing as the hull blew open and vented the compartment to space. The world seemed to move in great swoops and pauses as the stress trigger she'd set up for the 35A patch kept switching her into that state of fast-time, and she kept shutting it down to conserve her systems. She gave in and let it run as a pair of laser blasts suddenly swished past the car, one of them striking a junction box far ahead and plunging the corridor into darkness. As long as she didn't move that much, it shouldn't make a big difference anyway... and now the reaction time could be critical.
She could hear Lou seemingly suspended in mid-curse as she tried to set up the remaining VENUS cannon with the lights suddenly gone, the heavy backpack braced between her knees while its former case filled half the footwell of the rear seat, serving as a makeshift gurney for Anri's lower body, her back braced against Sylvie.
More blasts drifted toward them in the rearview and Meg maneuvered to slide around them again and again, always careful to keep the nose pointed toward the distant dot of light where the shaft lights were still functional. They floated forward timelessly, until finally the lights were upon them again. The junction with the main linear maglev highway would be upon them soon, she knew, and their lighter Reindeer would gain a bit of a speed edge over the armored Wildebeest patrol cars since all of its thrust could be put to propulsion while the heavier cars would still need a fraction for lift. The only problem was that there were a lot more routes for additional police vehicles to get on the Linear and box them in, and if the Bridge got enough control of the computers back they could seal it with emergency doors.
Endless seconds later, they crossed into the orangeish lighting of the linear highway. Vectoring nozzles extended from the lift jets at the front corners of the floatcar, and she could hear Anri's stifled grunt as the extra acceleration pressed everyone into the seats for a moment.
"Hang on, Anri," Sylvie comforted, her honey-gold eyes liquid with concern. "Just a little bit longer, and we'll be free!"
Clutched to her partner's chest, the deep green-haired buma gasped, "I'm sorry... now of all times..."
*Always worried about pulling her own weight,* Meg thought. Sneaking a glance over her shoulder at the shuttle pilots, she added aloud, "Once we get through here, we'll be at the spaceport. You suppose Nam's taken care of her part?"
"If it's all gone according to plan, she has," Sylvie answered. "We can't turn back now, no matter what happens." Her eyes seemed to flash, and her voice rang like a drawn sword as the dark haired sexaroid continued, "If we don't get to the planet, we won't have any future."
Finally finished with the VENUS, Lou cradled it in her lap, clutching it like some strange kind of teddy bear as she concurred, "Yes! I can't stand this place any longer! Faster Meg, faster!"
Suddenly, they rounded one of the few curves in the highway, and a patrol car was right in front of them, heading the same direction but slowly. The pilot punched the throttle before they could crash, but the stolen floater was still gaining with frightening speed. Locking her attention back on the controls, Meg made a desperate gamble and fed in differential thrust, tilting the Reindeer up on its side as it scraped past the patrol car in the relatively narrow tunnel. The extra pressure proved just slightly too much, and the patrol floater's front vectoring nozzle touched down to the road surface. In less than a blink, the dragging nozzle had flipped the car into a tumble, then the whole thing exploded as thruster fire reflected back from the sturdy maglev plates and melted the engines. Only the heightened reflexes of her hacked motion control code let Meg ride the shockwave without crashing her own car - that, and more luck than she wanted to think about.
The other two cars burst through the pall of smoke, continuing their pursuit and still firing the occasional blast despite falling ever further behind. Ahead, red warning lights began to flash in time with emergency klaxons, and several blast doors began to close off the tube.
One - two - three - four they shot through like a kayak through rapids, five with a scraping sound and a lurch to the right. Meg breathed a sigh of relief as they made it into the last stretch before the spacedock, even as a brilliant explosion puffed between the last set of doors. The gap had narrowed to only two feet and one of the chasers apparently hadn't managed to stop in time, after making it through the other sets.
As the end of the Linear came in sight Lou cheered, "It's the exit! We made it!" She was distracted a moment later as the forward view screen set in the dash blipped and showed a rotating wireframe image of a huge, heavily armored humanoid, text scrolling to one side to warn that it had detected and identified obstacles in the passage ahead. "Dobermans?" the blonde cried, again clutching the particle cannon. "It's no use! We can't get away now."
Sylvie seemed to have other ideas, laying Anri gently aside so she could lean forward and suggest, "Meg! Set the car on full auto-cruise! We'll have to jump for it and use the car as a distraction!" Turning back to her partner, the pilot's voice softened, asking, "Anri, you can do that, right?"
Weak but determined, the green-haired girl mumbled an affirmative, and the plan was put in action. The canopy was opened, sliding forward to leave the sides and top of the cabin clear. Its position and the fairly dark red tint of the thick plastic would make it hard to see what was happening behind it from the Dobermans' point of view, directly ahead.
Snarling, the hulking white security buma released safety latches, transformed their lower arms to expose machinegun barrels, and opened fire, the brilliant glowing steaks of tracer rounds flashing past the onrushing float-car. Two or three actually punched holes in the windshield, but missed the crouched fugitives within. They jumped before the Reindeer left the maglev tunnel, Lou carrying the VENUS while Meg and Sylvie each took one of Anri's shoulders. Even at that they were almost too late - the shockwave as a bullet finally struck the car's fuel tank and detonated it knocked them out of the air like a burning hot fly swatter, though thankfully all the wreckage and splashing fuel continued on, piling into the Dobies. Quickly, they scrambled to their feet and away through a side passage.
--=--
By the door to the shuttle bay, Nam waited just out of sight of anyone approaching from outside. She'd already gotten what equipment they could scrounge and the extra life support supplies loaded after the rest of the service crew left, having faked a hard-to-trace fault in the backup rebreather plant to hold up her part of the job. Just this once, she was glad none of the few human crewmembers who treated buma decently had been in the same crew, as it would have been awkward if some helpful soul had stayed to help her. As it was, everything had gone without a hitch, and now all she had to do was wait, impatient and twitchy, for everyone else to arrive. "What could be keeping Sylvie and the others? They're late!" she worried to herself, visions of the multitude of disasters that could have befallen them circling her mind. The third sub machine gun Mina had managed to get for them was held awkwardly somewhere near a ready position, but the little sonic blasters riding her soulders were active, and their far less lethal nature would make them her weapon of choice anyway.
Hearing running feet coming toward her, she tensed and the SMG came up as she got ready to confront whoever was approaching. The little blasters weren't all that noticeable, let alone intimidating...
The purple eyed sexaroid sighed in relief as she heard Sylvie's voice call for her, and stepped out to see the pilot with her partner hanging off of her, Meg and Lou bringing up the rear. "I thought you were done for!" she scolded.
Nodding toward the shuttle, Meg asked, "Is she ready?"
"A-OK," Nam replied, waving them forward. She followed Sylvie and Anri up the boarding ramp, but stopped halfway up, realizing Meg and Lou weren't following yet. She turned, finding that they'd taken rear guard positions by an empty cargo crate and the still parked service truck. "Hurry Everyone! The patrols are making their rounds now!" she urged.
Trying to pick up the pace, Anri overstressed her wounded side and faltered at the head of the stairs, gasping and blinking back tears. Sylvie stopped with her, the smaller buma hanging off her desperately as she tried to recover. "It's OK Anri," she encouraged, "it's all right now. Hang on."
As if to disprove her, a loud metallic thump echoed through the bay. Meg, who'd been looking at the right moment to see the now closed blast doors they'd entered through jump in their tracks, moaned, "It's the Doberman!" Another hit, and the doors started to bulge where they joined. "Get on board, quickly!" the fire-haired sexaroid ordered.
"Meg! Lou! what about you?" Nam protested. Before either could answer, the Doberman succeeded in tearing through the heavily armored doors, greeted by a strangled noise of dismay as it stepped heavily over the wreckage.
"Hurry!" urged Meg, popping out from behind her crate with a gun in each hand. Amplified strength from the 35A software let her hold them steady, pouring a stream of lead at the Dobie's head in an attempt to at least distract it. She held little hope of actually doing damage, as even the collision and explosion of their floater had only crisped the plating of its left arm.
Irritably, it swatted at the incoming rounds, deflecting a handful into the air while the rest ricocheted harmlessly from its heavy armor. High above, one of the strays punctured an umbilical carrying hydrazine for the reaction thrusters, and the impact combined with the hot copper case of the round set off a small explosion.
Seeing the debris falling straight for them, Nam activated her own 35A patch, suddenly blurring out and shoving Sylvie and Anri forward into the shuttle, taking shelter with them in the airlock.
Gasping for breath after having the wind knocked out of her, Sylvie choked out, "Nam... thanks. That was close."
Lou had also stepped out to fire, playing the proton beam across the Doberman's chest like a fireman trying to quell rioters, but where the squad cars had quickly succumbed to its searing force the space combat buma took only minor damage. It dodged to the side and roared with anger at the little insects that dared to harm it.
Hearing Sylvie still behind her, Lou turned to yell over her shoulder, "What are you standing there for? Mo-" The sun-hot green annihilation of the Doberman's mouth laser cut her off, wiping the blonde from existence even as it breached the containment field of the accelerator on her back, causing a secondary explosion that tossed the flaming wreckage of the service truck into a far corner.
"LOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.oOo.uU!" Meg's grieving cry seemed to warble like a police siren as she again blurred into motion, solid streaks of jumpsuit beige and fiery red ringing the Doberman as she built up speed, then leapt to plant both heels in its grinning skull of a face. The impact staggered even that mighty war machine, but it caught her around the chest as she rebounded, and one short, sickly crunch later the leader of the escapees was no more.
In the shuttle, Nam let out one terrible sob, as if she'd felt her own heart crushed along with Meg, and jabbed a control beside the still open airlock.
"Nam, what are you DOING?" demanded Sylvie. "We can't just..."
"We have to go," the purple haired sexaroid choked. "We have to find freedom... enough freedom for all of them." She touched another key and the elevator started to move, even as the outer door slid shut. "Meg, Lou, Mina, Hyatt, Dot... everyone."
They arrived at the flight deck, and all three quickly strapped in. Sylvie had to fight herself to pull the launch lever, even though she knew it was far too late to do anything for the others by going back, but after only a second's pause she did it. A glance at the aft monitor to confirm all engines firing normally - not that there was anything she could do about it if they weren't, or that the computer wouldn't notice long before she could anyway, but it was part of her checklist - revealed that the Doberman had tried to jump onto the side of the shuttle, but had been just a whisker too slow. She felt a tiny measure of satisfaction watching the murderous buma warp and melt in the inferno of the shuttle's main engine cluster, finally exploding as its fusion core was breached.
Somehow, even though it meant they'd escaped, she couldn't cheer. Nam's strangled, choking sobs behind her on one side, Anri's comatose silence on the other, and most of all the half dozen empty seats weighed far too heavily for that. At least with Nam having made it, she could patch up Anri before they made landfall, even if it took an extra orbit to do it - anything more than sticking a bandage over the wound was beyond Sylvie's knowledge. That might even buy them more time before ground forces could come when they did land, if she made some orbit changes as feints in between. With the booster stage attached, she'd have had to dump a lot of fuel just to get into re-entry trim anyway.
---=- + -=---
Cynthia woke to the gentle poking of Yuki, the ten inch tall, platinum blonde pixie crouching beside the girl's pillow. On the bedside stand just beyond, dark-haired Hotaru looked on, agitatedly collapsing and extending her iridescent wings and fidgeting with a pencil. Seeing her mistress's eyes flutter open and focus, Yuki's jingle-bell voice chimed softly to tell Cynthia why they'd awakened her.
Rising from her futon, the young girl wrapped the covers around herself for warmth as she opened the window of the bedroom the Akimotos had given her and leaned out over the rail bounding the tiny balcony. The two fairy-buma hovering near her head, she craned her neck to look south past the eaves, to where a fiery streak marred the early morning gloom.
"A shooting star? How pretty..." Cynthia remembered Major Rose's large, warm hands on her shoulders, steadying her as she leaned over the rail on the roof of the SDPC Building to watch the Leonid meteor shower one cool summer night, her housecoat fluttering in the breeze. A faint smile touched her face at the memory, a stolen moment away from everyone else, until the silvery tones of Yuki and Hotaru's voices drew her back to the present. Yuki twittered again, suggesting looking closer with her other vision, the way they'd been practicing.
"Un," the little girl agreed, closing her eyes while concentrating on keeping a clear image of the shooting star, still creeping along the horizon. The image in her mind zoomed in, arc welder speck swelling to a blazing fireball, and then ... "A spaceship? But the place they land is by the bay, that's not the right way for one to come down," the former buma commented. She shifted the viewpoint again, moving through the hull of the shuttle to find the cockpit. There a dark-haired woman worked the controls with barely restrained desperation, the copilot slumped against the seat and a third woman gritting her teeth and clutching the armrests of her seat with knuckles white from fear. An angry red indicator glared from the console, warning that the computerized landing system was shut down, and the craft was completely off the Megatokyo spaceport approach path.
Hotaru's voice was ever so slightly deeper than Yuki's, but still sweeter than silver bells as she too sang to Cynthia, calling on other lessons that they'd practiced to pull back the view again and determine where the shuttle was headed, the most probable course stretching before it like the headlamps of a car.
"Oh no, that's right here!" Cynthia cried. "It might hurt the horses if it lands in the field like that. We have to do something!" Two fairy bells chimed in agreement, as they suggested some things she could do about it.
--=--
Sylia's awakening was considerably less pleasant; with the volume she had to set the alarms at for them to actually rouse her from a deep sleep her head was left ringing despite how quickly she rolled out from the covers and slapped the 'acknowledge' button on her bedside console. Stifling a yawn, she quickly scanned through the on-site sensor logs, then turned to the remote feeds - the passive equipment installed around the hydroponic farm base was the best, but even that couldn't give meaningful coverage beyond a mile or two away. A bit of creative hacking to divert a copy of the datastream from the airport and spaceport traffic control systems was one of the ways she made up for that lack, the feeds constantly monitored by expert system AIs of her own design.
Those systems had picked up the wayward Orca IV even before Hotaru and Yuki - the mere fact that its IFF transponder had gone to emergency mode would have rated flagging it for attention when the logs were checked, but when its projected flight path took it directly over the base they signaled for immediate action. As Sylia switched to the relevant feed and interpreted it herself, her breath caught in her throat - that shuttle wasn't just heading overhead, it was going to come down RIGHT HERE, probably in the horse field, but if it shortened its path the slightest bit, or just came in a little lower than expected, it would pile straight into the hill facility itself.
Even if the impact didn't break it open physically there was still no way crash investigators could miss the base hidden under the farm - nothing could be THAT well hidden. Worse still, there was precious little she could do about it, even if she'd had days of warning, let alone minutes - sure, she had weapons capable of shooting it down before it reached them, but even without the moral question of such an action it was sure to be seen, and that would be worse than simply having it crash and expose them. Still, there was ONE possibility left, with the abilities she'd gained in her transformation.
Decision made, Sylia grabbed the robe from her dresser, belting it securely over her nightie as she hurried to her lab. There'd be no time to change into something more suitable, she'd just have to trust in her own durability.
Moments later, she'd reached her workshop, her most recent project still lying where she'd left it before finally going off to bed. She'd meant to have the thing well away from the base - and anything else, for that matter - before lighting it off, but now there just wouldn't be time...
She had J.B. Gibson to thank for it, really, or the demon that had possessed his car. She'd drawn energy right out of the streetlight power lines for the attack that had finished it off, and after consciously figuring out the field patterns that had let her do so, she was quite sure she could pull the heat out of a fusion core and convert it to useable power.
The only problem was, she'd never built one before - Knight Sabers equipment so far had been efficient enough to run off batteries or, for the motoslaves, small gas turbines. This unit was a replica of the resin-based design that had powered the Superbuma, a lucky crack Nene had managed to pull off of a computer core recovered from the wreckage of that fiasco in the fifteen minute interval it was in ADP custody before being confiscated by government personnel - and undoubtedly delivered right back to Genom.
*I'm just stalling,* she thought irritatedly. Clearing her mind, the silvery haired Knight Saber took a deep breath, hoping that there was still someone to listen as she entered the activation code and murmured Shepard's Prayer.
--=--
Reaching to re-engage the (reprogrammed) autopilot, Sylvie hesitated, turning to look over her shoulder to where Nam was unstrapping Anri's seat harness. "Are you sure about this, Nam? I know you never got much practice with those sonic blasters..."
"No, this is the only way. Without-" The purple haired buma had to choke back a sob before continuing; they had no time for tears now. "Without the others, we'd never be able to escape the spaceport. I can keep a barrier up for a few seconds at least, and the DD will protect you and Anri. Are YOU sure you'll be able to pilot it with her in your lap?"
Activating the control with a sigh, Sylvie stood and replied, "I'll find a way. Like you said, it's our only hope, now... what the heck!?" She'd stumbled, shocked, as the shuttle suddenly stopped descending, maintaining a level course instead of the gently inclined one she'd set. "Oh hell! We'd better hurry, something's wrong and there's no time to figure out what!"
Each of them took one of the unconscious Anri's arms over their shoulders, then hustled aft to the bay where the DD Battlemover crouched; already fueled, armed, and supplied, and ready to be delivered for 'testing' to whichever arms smuggler had managed to land the deal. It was about to be tested a bit sooner than expected, however, as Sylvie scrambled into the cockpit while Nam supported Anri, then passed her up to the pilot.
"Bio-links on!" the lavender headed sexaroid commanded, slapping the ring on her right hand into the control cuff on the opposite wrist even as the crimson mecha's hatch hissed closed beside her on its hydraulic rams. A greenish energy flare flickered around her for a moment as her powerplant went to full output and synchronized with the prototype sonic blasters still riding on her shoulders, and then there was nothing but the faint, musical tone of the sonic bubble forming around her, a subharmonic of the inaudible wavelengths used for the effect. The air shimmered slightly where the perfectly balanced waveforms met around her, and Nam crouched to let the four foot diameter sphere completely surround her as it grew.
Moving carefully to avoid losing the frictionless barrier and her friend inside it, Sylvie wrapped the DD's arms around the energy-ball, then kicked her way through the side of the shuttle and bailed out. The battlemover's thrusters ignited to carry them away barely above the treetops, the cyclone-force slipstream shredding the side of the shuttle behind them and tumbling the renegades dangerously until she could compensate. Leveling out, she turned to look back one last time at the Orca IV - she was a bit sorry to see it go this way, after serving her so well for the years she'd been assigned to it - then paused, still hovering just above tree height, as she saw something glowing a brilliant blue drop away from under the nose and ... fly towards her?
--=--
No one else was awakened by the faint rumble that shook the hidden base moments later - after all, minor quakes hit Japan on a weekly, if not daily basis. They'd have to wait until morning to find out just what had happened in the wee hours of the night.
---=- + -=---
Captain Akemichi was on the husky side for a police officer even in the N-Police instead of the SWAT-like ADP, but he always managed to pass his certifications, and as a crime scene investigator rather than a beat cop it made little practical difference. He was waiting now for a couple of AD Police hotshots while his team carefully picked over the wreckage of a crashed shuttle, the somewhat narrow valley making their heavy aerodyne's lift fan echo oddly as it flew in from Megatokyo to the east.
*How troublesome...* He could almost hear his old partner Shika's signature line as the aerodyne circled lower, starting to kick up a small dust cloud from the debris.
Soon enough they were on the ground, the sunglasses-clad officer who was first out the hatch letting his Inspector's badge do the talking as he grumpily peered around the scene, while the lavender-suited redhead who followed made introductions after sharing a sardonic look. "I'm Inspector Wong, and this is my partner, Leon McNichol," he greeted. "So what've you got for us, ...?"
"Choji Akemichi," he replied. "According to the wreckage we've seen so far, it looks like it probably belongs to the Space Development Products Corporation."
Daley snorted. "Don't they have any better way of throwing their trash away?" he quipped.
Leon led the way as they walked closer, wanting a better look at the remains. "What about the pilot?" he asked, finally coming to a halt and pulling off his sunglasses as parts tossed out on the ground become too thick to walk through without disturbing the scene.
"Whoever it was, he must have had eyes like a hawk," Akemichi replied. "Judging by the flight path, he saw the Ishioka greenhouse somehow despite coming in so fast and pulled up to miss it, then lost it when the extra strain made the shuttle start breaking up. That may have saved a dozen lives, but..." He paused to cast an eye over the twisted wreckage of the spacecraft, little more than a mass of alloy and melted plastic. "Under the circumstances, he's probably dead."
"Yeah," Leon agreed somewhat reluctantly, surveying the devastated shuttle and the long scar where it had plowed aside dirt and uprooted trees before coming to a halt. "There's no way anyone could have survived."
SERVO: Loook *deeeeply* into my eyes... Tell me, what do you see?
CROW: (hypnotized) A twisted man who wants to inflict his pain upon others.
For the next 72 hours, Itachi intoned, I will slap you with this trout. - Spying no Jutsu, chapter 3
"In the futuristic taco bell of the year 20XX, justice wears an aluminum sombrero!"hemlock-martini
--
"Anko, what you do in your free time is your own choice. Use it wisely. And if you do not use it wisely, make sure you thoroughly enjoy whatever unwise thing you are doing." - HymnOfRagnorok as Orochimaru at SpaceBattles
woot Med. Eng., verb, 1st & 3rd pers. prsnt. sg. know, knows