by Shouji Gatou
“Enough! That’s enough!” The platform Kaname was lying on slid out of the drum once more. The doctor ran up to her, irritation on full display. She pressed Kaname’s head down and shouted, “You conceited little brat! I should never have been nice to you!”
“There’s nothing nice about you, you hag!” Kaname retorted.
“What did you say?!”
“I finally remembered who you remind me of!” Kaname ranted. “You’re like my science teacher in middle school! She got so focused on her experiments that she got too old to get married, so she took it out on us and gave us the meanest homework! But when we had a student teacher in she’d get all dressed up and flirty...” She hit the woman with a barrage of abuse, struggling all the while. One of her arm restraints had started coming loose, so the doctor tried to refasten it. She held her down by the wrist, used her free hand to remove the belt, and—
“Eek!” All the sweat caused her hand to slip, allowing Kaname’s right arm to go flying. Momentum slammed her elbow into the chin of the doctor, who staggered, hit the back of her head on the medicine cabinet, and then slid slowly to the floor.
“Ah...” Kaname sobered immediately. “Hey... you’re not dead, are you?” No response came. It was then that she realized that her right arm was free. Slowly, she tried removing the nylon strap that was holding down her left arm. “Wow,” she mumbled, “easier than I expected...” With her hands liberated, she removed the strap holding down her head, and sat up. From this position, it was easy to free her legs. Once she was out of her restraints, she checked the floor and saw the doctor, who was just coming to, moaning and trying to sit up.
Wh-What should I do? she wondered. Run away? But where to? She took one step toward the trailer door, then another. She managed to make it in front of the door, but then...
“Where do you think you’re going?” The doctor, standing up with great effort, pointed a small pistol at her. “Come back here. Do as I say, or you’ll regret it.”
“N-No way,” Kaname told her shakily. “I’m not doing any more of your tests. I—”
The woman fired, putting a bullet hole in the trailer wall.
“H-Hey—”
The doctor fired again. This time, the shot cracked an LCD screen behind Kaname, who realized that the woman’s face was locked in cold anger; she really might shoot her.
Suddenly, the door opened. Two men charged in, both of them wielding submachine guns. “What’s going on here?!” A man in a suit—probably one of the guards outside—held Kaname at gunpoint as he surveyed the condition of the trailer.
“We had a little bit of trouble,” the doctor explained. “I needed to teach the brat some manners.”
“So you shot at her? Don’t you know how much this equipment—”
“—Costs? 580 million yen. I don’t need you fools to remind me of that.” She turned back to Kaname. “Now, come over here.” The doctor put her gun away and beckoned to Kaname. The man snorted, and gave her a push.
The woman took a bottle out of the medicine cabinet and sucked some of its contents into a syringe. “Hold the girl on the bed, would you?”
The men forced Kaname down on the dais, and she watched the woman squirt some clear fluid from the syringe. “Wh-What are you going to...”
“A little change in tactics. This is medicine that makes people compliant,” the woman explained, as if enjoying her fear. “It can also cause various impairments—especially to a growing young girl—so I had planned to hold off during the testing stage, but...”
“P-Please, no...” Kaname begged.
“Don’t blame me,” the doctor gloated. “I tried to be nice...”
This time, Kaname knew there would be no struggling her way out of it. The men holding her down were too strong; they could snap her arms like twigs. “No, please,” she tried again. “I’ll be good, I...”
The woman chuckled. “Too late.”
But just as the needle touched Kaname’s arm, the men holding her—first one, then the other—both collapsed with a cry.
“What?” Kaname looked up, stunned by her sudden freedom. The first thing she saw was the doctor, who was drawing back in panic; she wasn’t looking at Kaname, but at something behind her. Curious, Kaname turned around, and was stunned by what she saw. “S-Sagara-kun?”
It was indeed Sagara Sousuke. He had a pistol in his right hand (which was pointed at the doctor), and a stun gun in his left. A submachine gun hung from a strap around his neck. Beneath his open uniform jacket, he had two spare magazines stuck into his belt. “Were you hurt, Chidori?” Sousuke asked, his voice shockingly calm.
“Huh?” she stammered, disoriented. “I... N-No, but...”
“I see,” he said. “Then get behind me, and stay close.” With Kaname behind him, Sousuke carefully approached the doctor.
“You... You’re one of the students from the plane, aren’t you?” she asked, weakly. “When... did you...”
“I’m the one asking the questions here,” he told her abruptly. “Talk: what is this facility? Why did you kidnap her?”
“There’s no way I would tell—”
Sousuke put two shots into the electrical equipment beside her. It sparked and shut down. “Talk,” he demanded. “The next one goes into you.” He pointed the gun at the woman’s head.
The doctor’s hands shot into the air. “Don’t!” she screamed. “I’ll talk! This equipment... it’s to determine if she’s a true Whispered or not.”
“‘Whispered’?” Sousuke asked. “What’s that?”
“It’s difficult to explain,” the doctor answered him. “Whispered are storehouses of ‘black technology,’ knowledge that could shift the power balance of the world. It’s still difficult to draw it out on command but, someday, we’ll form a living database to—” She’d only gotten that far when, suddenly, Sousuke grabbed Kaname by the hand and dove behind the CT scanner.
A split second later, a thunder of gunshots rang out, sending sparks and shards of plastic flying all around them. Kaname and the doctor both screamed. Sousuke turned over, stuck his gun over the lip of the machine, and unloaded the clip at the trailer’s entrance.
Kaname heard another scream; this time, it was from an unknown man. Sousuke tossed aside the emptied pistol and, while pulling and releasing the submachine gun’s cocking handle, stood up and checked on the state of the man at the entrance.
Kaname gasped as she saw the doctor, who was now lying prone on the floor. She must have taken a stray bullet—she was moaning weakly, as a pool of blood spread out from her body.
“We need to go, Chidori,” Sousuke said.
“I-Is she dea—” Kaname started to ask.
“She’s alive,” he cut her off. “But we have no time, and no obligation to treat her.” With one hand holding hers and the other readying his submachine gun, Sousuke began running to the entrance.
Kaname, still completely disoriented, asked him, “Hey, why are you—”
“I’ll explain later. The enemy will be coming.”
There was a man collapsed just inside the door to the trailer. He was clutching at his side, struggling desperately to get up. Hands trembling, he tried to point his submachine gun in their direction, but Sousuke mercilessly kicked him down. The terrorist fell out of the trailer, his gun clattering away helplessly.
“That looked like it hurt...” Kaname observed.
“Let’s go,” Sousuke ordered.
“W-Wait. I can’t go around like this,” Kaname said in protest. “Let me change first.” The gown’s hem ended halfway down her thighs and was incredibly flimsy; even a little running around would put her underwear on full display.
“We don’t have time. Forget it,” Sousuke told her.
“Don’t order me around!” she insisted. “And don’t leer at me like that!”
“I wasn’t,” he said obliviously. “I was examining your outfit to identify the problem—”
“Liar! You’re gonna take advantage of this c
raziness to do stuff to me!”
“I’m not. Now, you need to follow me—”
“No way!” she shrilled. “Who even are you, anyway?! This goes way beyond panty theft!”
“Listen to me, please. I’ve gone to these unwise lengths to try to save—” he was interrupted by another gunshot from outside. The bullet ricocheted off the trailer door, and Sousuke threw himself at Kaname. He slammed her to the floor, where they ended up, entangled, with him on top of her.
She shrieked. “G-Get your hands off of me!”
“I told you,” he bellowed, “it’s not like that!”
“Get off me! Pervert! Groper! Rapist!”
“Enough!”
It was a truly pathetic sight. In spite of the enemy gunfire outside, inside the trailer, the two of them continued to grapple and argue.
4: Field of Giants
28 April, 2241 Hours (Japan/North Korea Standard Time)
Sunan Airfield, People’s Democratic Republic of Korea
In the end, Sousuke offered his uniform jacket, and Kaname was mollified.
Weaving between carefully aimed shots, Sousuke bounded out the other side of the trailer, leading a grumpy Kaname by the hand. They were heading for the nearby generator truck. “Get in!” he urged her. “Hurry!”
“But... yeek!” she yelped.
He threw Kaname into the passenger seat, revved up the engine, and then slammed the gas. A moment later, more shots came from behind. The rear license plate was blown off, and the cables connecting them to the trailer snapped as they drove away.
“Keep your head down!” he ordered.
“What now?!”
The new wave of soldiers behind them kept firing, but the generator vehicle was already speeding at 80 kilometers per hour toward the north end of the base.
“Who are you? Where are we going? Where are you taking me?!” Kaname peppered him. “Tell me what’s going on!” Her shouts carried over the wind rushing by.
Sousuke responded, casting glances into the cracked rear-view mirror all the while. “The truth is, I’ve been tailing you since I first came to your school.”
“Oh, is that supposed to be news?” Kaname wanted to know. “I already knew that! Now would you please tell me why?!”
“I don’t know all the details myself,” Sousuke admitted. “All I know is that you’re special, somehow, and that an intelligence organization wants to use you as a guinea pig.”
“Intelligence organization?” she objected indignantly. “Guinea pig?!”
“Yes, I’m a soldier. I was dispatched as a bodyguard to prevent your kidnapping.”
Kaname looked at him dubiously. “A soldier? With the JSDF?”
“No,” he responded shortly. “With Mithril.”
“Mithril?”
“A secret military organization, unaligned and elite,” he explained. “We act to stop regional disputes and terrorism, independent of national interests. I’m part of their SRT—Special Response Team—specializing in recon, sabotage, and AS operation. My rank is sergeant. My callsign is Uruz-7. My ID number is B-3128.” Sousuke rattled it all off smoothly, but Kaname looked at him with concern.
“Um, Sagara-kun,” she began cautiously. “I know you love all this military stuff, but... I think you’ve really lost it now.”
“What are you talking about?” he asked, bewildered.
“I’ve read about this,” she went on. “A traumatic event can sever a person’s connection to reality, causing them to regress into fantasy. I don’t know how you got out of the plane, but right now, you’re just confused.”
“Confused?” It seemed to Sousuke that Kaname was the one who was confused.
Nevertheless, she continued, soothingly: “Yes, confused. You need to calm down and tell yourself, ‘I am a normal high school student.’ Okay? Let’s both take a deep breath and—”
Suddenly, Sousuke wrenched the steering wheel to one side. A wall of machine gun fire ended up hitting just to their right, bringing asphalt raining down on their heads. The armored cars pursuing them had begun to open fire.
Kaname shrieked again. “Stop the car! Let me out!”
“Stay quiet and hold on tight.” Sousuke threw the car into zigs and zags, just barely avoiding the enemy fire. And all the while, the hangar on the north half of the base came closer and closer. “Get down,” he commanded.
“Wh... Why?”
“We’re breaking through.”
“What—” In almost the same instant that Kaname braced herself, the generator truck crashed through the shuttered hangar door. The rusted old metal gave way without a fight. Their truck flew into the hangar, grazed a large tow tractor parked in the middle, skidded, and slammed into a large compressor vehicle, which brought it to a stop.
Sousuke stood up in the driver’s seat. “Chidori, can you move?”
“I’m dead,” she groaned.
“Get up,” he told her. “The enemy is coming.”
Kaname looked around the hangar. The front wall was lined with massive humanoid figures; three in total, each about three stories tall. They were surrounded by scaffolding and strung up with a mess of pipes and cables. They were machines, long-armed and khaki-colored.
“Are these... arm slaves?” she wondered. They were featured in the news and in Hollywood movies from time to time, so even Kaname knew what they were called.
“You hide in the back,” Sousuke ordered.
“Y-You’re not going to... take one of them, are you?” Kaname asked suspiciously.
“Yes, I am.” He ran to the foot of the AS and climbed the ladder to the cockpit.
“Hey...” Kaname felt the blood drain from her face. A military geek, regressing into a dangerous fantasy that he was a soldier in a secret organization... he had dragged her into a suicide run, and now he was planning to wreak havoc in a robot.
She was done for. Reinforcements would be here soon. A mere enthusiast couldn’t win against professional soldiers. He was going to get her killed at this rate. “Stop it!” Kaname begged him. “An amateur can’t move a robot like that!”
Sousuke looked down at her from the top of the ladder. “Amateur?”
In the darkness, she couldn’t properly make out his face. But for just a minute, she thought she saw his eyes glint. And... was it just her imagination? A ghoulish smile seemed to appear on his face.
“I’m not an amateur; I’m a specialist.”
Sousuke climbed to the AS’s shoulder, then pulled the lever to open the cockpit hatch.
There was a sound of a pressure release. The head of the AS slid open, exposing the cramped cockpit in the chest just below. It was large enough to fit a human body with not much room left over; you didn’t so much sit in it so much as you were ensconced.
That was how an arm slave’s cockpit—otherwise known as the “master room”—worked; it read the pilot’s movements, and replicated them in the machine. The slightest movement by the “master” was exaggerated in the “slave”; a 10 degree bend of the pilot’s elbow would cause a 30 degree bend in the machine’s. The designation of “AS” originated from the full name, which was “Armored Mobile Master/Slave System,” and most AS employed this basic piloting formula.
“Just get back, Chidori,” Sousuke shouted, as he slid into the cockpit of the Soviet-produced Rk-92 Savage. He gripped the sticks at the ends of his arms and clicked the lever under his thumb. There was another sound of rushing pressure as the cockpit hatch closed, and the endoskeleton locked in with a sound of grinding metal.
A monochrome screen in front of Sousuke’s face lit up, displaying lines of words:
[Cockpit Block: Closed | Master Suit: Adjusting]
He felt it tighten slowly across his body, but he didn’t have time to waste. He smoothly worked the buttons on the stick, scrolling through the boot-up procedure.
[Movement Mode: 4 | Bilateral Angle: 2.8 → 3.4]
He heard shots from their pursuers outside, sparking as they blasted large holes in
the shutters. The size of the holes was strange—Did they have more than just armored trucks out there?
[Main Generator: Activated | Main Capacitor: Charge increasing]
Inside the shutter, a compressor car burst into flame. Beyond the crackle of the fire, Sousuke heard heavy footsteps approach. Footsteps? That wasn’t an armored truck—it was an AS. Not good.
More words flicked on and off the screen. Almost there...
[Vetronics: Initiated]
[Actuators: Connected]
[Final Startup Checks: Omitted]
“Get moving already...” He cursed the startup speed of these Russian computers. There was a roar, as the bullet-riddled shutter flew off its hinges. An AS identical to his, an Rk-92 Savage, stepped in. Its inorganic red eyes were locked on him.
[Joints: Unlocking]
“Hurry...” Sousuke muttered, as the hostile AS pointed its rifle at him. It knew he was here. It was about to fire—
[Combat Maneuvers: Open]
The enemy rifle’s fire and the movement of Sousuke’s AS came in the same instant: the bullet missed by a hair’s breadth.
Sousuke’s machine lurched forward, knocking the enemy rifle away and shoulder-slamming it in the same action. The hostile AS crashed, back-first, through the hangar wall, and the pulverized concrete beneath it sent white smoke into the air.
Sousuke picked up the rifle he’d knocked out of its hand and checked the remaining rounds inside. Then he pointed it at the enemy machine, which was trying to right itself, and whispered, “Battle, commence.”
Then, he pulled the trigger.
“There’s no way...” Kaname whispered to herself from her hiding place behind a tractor.
