by Shouji Gatou
Tessa was so shocked by his words that she forgot everything else about their current situation. Sailor used to serve under my late father? she wondered. And Mardukas and my father were friends? Mardukas had never mentioned that in the past...
“I heard that after Mr. Mardukas retired, he joined some civilian shipping company... What’s this all about?” Sailor demanded to know. “Is he on board here? I don’t get it. Are you hiding things from me?!”
“W-well, all girls have to have their share of secrets... ah, please don’t lean in so close. You smell like cigars...” Tessa turned away, wincing, as the angry Sailor bore down on her.
“Don’t change the subject!” he bellowed, sounding absolutely serious. “Who the hell are you?! If you don’t tell me right now, I’ll tie you up and throw you into the boys’ latrine!”
Tessa didn’t even have time to be shaken by the strange coincidence. It was time, she decided, to explain her position and the situation as simply as possible, and try to earn his cooperation. She couldn’t be stuck here, playing some comedy of errors with some old man, while everyone else was out there, struggling. It was completely unbecoming of a commander-in-chief.
Even so... “I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you,” she told him reluctantly.
“I’ll be the judge of that!” Sailor declared. “Now, tell me everything. As fast as you can!”
“Er... the truth is, I’m a captain, like you,” Tessa admitted.
“I’m being serious!”
“See?” she complained. “I knew you wouldn’t believe me...”
“Of course not! Are you a spy with the CIA or something? Trying to steal my glory before I—” Sailor was interrupted midway.
In the dim light of the corridor stood a large man. He was wearing a hooded coat, and a faint light shone from a horizontal slit on his face.
Tessa gasped as the figure began to approach them, silently, step by step. She immediately recognized it as being one of the robot attackers. Had it slipped through Clouseau’s line of defense and made it this far?
“The hell is your problem?” Sailor asked it quizzically. “What’s with the mask? Hey, stay back! I’ve got a gun, see?!” Sailor pointed his submachine gun at it, still unaware that it was loaded with rubber bullets.
“That won’t work! Throw it away!” Tessa screamed, leaping for the gun... but it was too late. Reacting immediately to Sailor’s aggression, the robot stooped over and took aim with its arm-mounted rifle. “Ah—”
It fired. Sailor was lucky that Tessa’s leap had thrown him off-balance, because the three-round burst just missed his head to spark against the wall behind him. “Huh?!” he exclaimed, sounding perplexed. Meanwhile, the enemy’s drive system hummed to life as it stopped firing and charged, its coat billowing behind it.
Tessa interposed herself between Sailor and the enemy. She was betting, based off of the inferences she’d inherited during her resonance with Kaname, that the robot wouldn’t target her.
“Run—” she began to say.
But the Alastor didn’t hesitate to swing its right arm at Tessa, sending her small body flying into the wall. Maybe this was its version of “going easy on her”... but it was still a painful and disabling blow. The impact forced the air out of her lungs. The world around her went black, and she lost all feeling in her body.
She could hear Sailor shouting and firing his gun recklessly. The rubber bullets bounced off the wall and rained down on her where she lay on the floor. “Urgh...” Shaking her swimming head, Tessa sat up, and saw the hand at the end of the enemy’s thick arm holding Sailor by the throat.
“Sailor-san?! Stop! Please, stop!” Tessa stood up and grabbed the robot’s arm, but all she could do was dangle helplessly. No matter how the two of them punched and scratched, their enemy remained unfazed.
“Going to... die...” Sailor wheezed.
“Stop it, please!” she cried again, and it was in that exact moment that the robot relaxed its grip.
“Urgh... guh.” Sailor thrust himself away desperately from the robot’s chest. He and Tessa both swayed and fell on their backsides, but the enemy didn’t attack again.
“What...?” she breathed, while Sailor coughed and retched.
Seemingly to have lost all interest in both of them, the Alastor slowly turned around and tilted its faceplate upwards. It was looking toward the upper decks of the ship’s fore. The next instant, the robot whipped around, leaped, and crashed through the deck above. Fragments of plaster and pipe rained down, and when the dust settled, they could see a perfect hole torn in the ceiling.
The robot was gone.
Could it be that its designer had programmed it to listen to her pleas? No, not possible; he wasn’t that kind of person anymore. Which meant... the diversion had worked.
Kaname-san, Sagara-san... be well... Tessa prayed to herself.
Meanwhile, Sailor stopped coughing long enough to curse. “Ugh... the hell is going on here? How was that thing so strong? Guh...”
“Are you all right, Sailor-san?”
“I’m fine! But I want to know what’s happening on this ship!” he demanded. “Who the hell was that? And who the hell are you?!”
“Well...” Tessa began, and trailed off while considering her next move. Sailor was in so deep at this point, that it occurred to her she might as well come clean with him—but just as she made up her mind to do so, she heard another voice.
“That girl is the captain of the Toy Box, sir. And the leader of the terrorists.” She turned to see Captain Harris standing there, holding a German-made automatic pistol.
Tessa froze up, and Sailor looked suspicious. “Captain,” he said. “Where have you been hiding? And... what’d you just say? The Toy Box? Captain? Leader? Her? Don’t give me that crap—”
“I don’t have time to explain. I need you out of the picture right now.” Then, without warning, Harris shot him. The sound echoed through the room, and Sailor dropped like a sack of potatoes.
A bloodstain spread out across the floor as the big man let out a moan. “Run... strange maid.”
“Sailor-san?!” Tessa gasped. “No! You have to hold on!”
“I don’t know what’s going on, but... please run,” Sailor told her weakly.
“No! You need treatment—”
“He doesn’t need treatment.” Harris calmly pointed his gun at Tessa as she clung to Sailor’s body. “They’re going to sink the ship soon enough. At least, that’s what I’d do, if I were an Amalgam executive. Even with treatment, he won’t last long in the open ocean at this time of year.”
Tessa glared at him. “How could you? He saved you when you were a prisoner, out of the goodness of his heart!”
But Harris just shrugged. “Yeah, right. I think he was just trying to play hero. He’s a stupid man. And let’s not forget... the one who got him, the crew and passengers all mixed up in this, was you—Mithril.”
Tessa had no response for this.
“We don’t have any time left,” Harris announced abruptly. “I’ve given up on catching Chidori Kaname, and I’ll be taking you with me instead. The organization has to forgive me if I bring them the captain of the Tuatha de Danaan.”
He’s going to take me and escape, Tessa realized. The captain is going to abandon his ship, its passengers and its crew, and run away. “You coward. You’re unworthy to captain a ship!” she shouted angrily. “Captain Sailor isn’t the stupid one. You are!”
Harris’s response was simply to sidle up to her with a grin. “I certainly am,” he agreed. “There I was, scolding you on the observation deck, and I didn’t even recognize you. It never occurred to me that the much-rumored Miss Testarossa could be such a beautiful, frail... easily wrangled little girl.” His hand reached for the back of her neck.
Kaname was running up the stairs. She took them three at a time, grabbing the railing—which was white, with anti-corrosion paint—for support. How long until the rooftop deck? She wondered. She knew the s
hip couldn’t really be a hundred stories tall... but right now, it certainly felt like it was.
“Don’t stop! Keep running!” Sousuke shouted from behind her, before turning to unload briefly on their pursuer. The ear-splitting gunshots made it almost impossible to hear his rebuke.
Kaname panted as she kept running. “Sheesh!” she wheezed. “Who thought up this plan?!”
“You did, remember?” Kurz said, injecting some of his reliable snark as he took his turn against their pursuers with his submachine gun. The two men were alternating regularly in firing back at the Alastors chasing Kaname.
“Uruz-7 to all! We’re about to reach the jogging track! Don’t shoot us, okay? We have three enemies in sight right now... no, now four! Team Echo, come from the starboard side—” Sousuke spoke into the radio, swiftly updating his comrades.
Struggling for breath, Kaname mounted the top stair and slammed the door open before exclaiming in shock. She had made it to the highest deck at last—but now, there was Alastor standing right in front of her eyes.
Did one get ahead of me? she wondered. No— Just as the Alastor began to reach for her, a hail of bullets assailed it from the side. Squeals rang out from the bulletproof metal, and sparks from ricochets showered down on her.
“Team Golf here! I think we made it in time. Get Angel to shelter—You hear that, Kaname? Run, run, run!” Just five meters to her right, around the corner of a hallway leading to the fitness center, stood an armed Mithril crewman who was shouting at her. She remembered that his name was Yang.
“Ah...”
“Hurry!”
Sousuke grabbed Kaname and ran in the opposite direction from Yang and the others. The Alastor in front of them was about to fire back, but Kurz unleashed a burst to distract it.
They never had a chance to catch their breath. Just as they thought they’d evaded the enemy, another Alastor would appear from the darkness and charge at them. Enemy after enemy came out of the woodwork, then pursued, hot on their heels. Just how many were there?
At last, they made it out into the vast open space on the roof of the ship. Seeing that it contained both a tennis and a basketball court filled Kaname with a renewed sense of disgust at the ship’s sheer size.
“Run! Hurry—” She turned back for a second, and gasped as she saw not one, but three Alastors advancing on Yang and the others, raining down gunfire and forcing the team into retreat. Kurz was under fire, as well; he’d just barely managed to dive behind a bench and run off into the darkness, herded by the shots coming down all around him.
“Don’t stop!” Sousuke called out urgently. “Go, go!”
Kaname ran with all of her might. Even when she wrenched her ankle and stumbled, Sousuke just grabbed her arm and kept running, pulling her mercilessly along with him. He didn’t even acknowledge her protests of pain and exhaustion.
“Eyes up, comrade! Our goal is near!” Sousuke said, trying to encourage her.
Comrade. It was a plain, vulgar word, and the opposite of romantic. Despite that, Kaname found herself reluctantly accepting it. Maybe this suited their relationship better than a pet name like “honey” or “darling.” But how did they keep getting into these situations?
“Some Christmas, huh?!” Kaname howled up to the sky, over all the gunfire and shouting. Okay, maybe it’s time to accept it, she told herself. I’m in love with him. I don’t know why these are the only times I can admit it to myself. Maybe it’s the sense of trust. Maybe it’s the touch-and-go nature of a firefight making it impossible to deny...
Tonight is Christmas. Normal couples all over Japan are whispering sweet nothings to each other, gazing out over beautiful nightscapes and listening to romantic music. Delicious dinners and intimate conversations; the kind of things Yamashita Tatsuro would sing about. There was a time when I thought that was what I wanted. But when I’m with him...!
Chased around by creepy robots, flinching from close-range ricochets, running for our lives, out of breath and soaked to the bone... Whoever heard of a couple like us?! “It’s got to be karma!” she yelled. “One of us was a real scumbag in a past life!!”
“I don’t quite follow, but I’m sure it’s not an issue!” Sousuke bellowed back.
“It so is!” Kaname wailed. “You’ve ruined my youth, and my 17-year-old Christmas Eve!”
“Really? This seems like an appropriate sort of night for you!”
“I hate it!”
“Then why are you laughing?” Sousuke wanted to know.
“This is crying!” she retorted.
Just then, their flight came to a stop; they’d hit a wall. A smoke stack, otherwise known as a ‘funnel,’ towered in front of them, while behind them was the wide-open tennis court. Panting for breath, they turned around and saw that roughly eleven Alastors had fanned out to surround them.
Clouseau spoke over the radio, “Uruz-1 to Uruz-7. Nearly all teams are out of ammo. There’s nothing more we can do for you. Good luck.”
“Uruz-7,” Sousuke briefly acknowledged. “Roger.”
Slowly, the eleven Alastors began to approach. They were crouched over, and ready to charge at any time. Their arm-loaded machine guns were exposed, their aim fixed on Sousuke and Kaname.
“We’re cornered,” Kaname announced with resignation.
“That’s right,” Sousuke agreed. “It’s all going just as planned.”
A faint metal scraping sound came from somewhere above them, but Kaname could barely hear it. She just clung to Sousuke’s arm as she looked out over the field of executioners. “They’re going to kill us,” she muttered.
“You’re the one who assured us they wouldn’t.”
“Well, I’m a little less certain now! And they might not kill me, but what about you?!”
Instead of responding to Kaname’s panicked concerns, Sousuke whispered into his radio. “Uruz-7, here. Have you arrived?”
The response came a minute later. It was an electronic voice, low and male. “Affirmative. I am in position. And here I thought I would never get my time to shine...”
“I’ve told you to stop using human turns of phrase,” Sousuke scolded back.
“And I have informed you that dangerous situations like these require jokes.”
Sousuke seethed. “If we make it out of this alive, I’m disassembling you.”
“I fear that you lack that authority, Sergeant.”
The Alastors prepared, and their attack would come at any moment. Sousuke clucked his tongue and said to the one on the radio, “They’re coming. I give you permission to fire at the targets. Fire, fire, fire!”
“Roger. Fire at will!”
“Do you even have will?” Sousuke muttered, but Kaname almost didn’t hear it as a new roar ripped out, louder than anything she’d heard that night.
Suddenly, a hail of 12.7mm shots came streaking down from the funnel above; each packing far more power than the rounds from the rifles and submachine guns the others had been using. This wasn’t fire meant for infantry, but for military LAVs. Any one hit could easily tear through an engine block, and they were coming at a rate of thirty per second.
The incredible curtain of fire did a full sweep: right to left across the line, then back again. It ripped the robots crowding around them to pieces. Several of the robots’ auto-destruct sequences seemed to have engaged, but Kaname and Sousuke took cover in a gutter at the end of the tennis court, so most of what hit them were wood splinters. Nevertheless, Sousuke threw himself over Kaname to protect her as tiny particles showered down on them.
Even with all of that, one Alastor seemed to have avoided fatal damage. Kaname was still its target, and it used what remained of its arms and legs to approach her. Sousuke dove in front of her, protectively...
And then suddenly, the Alastor flattened out, as if crushed from above by an invisible hammer. The air rippled faintly above it, like a heat haze.
“All targets destroyed. Orders, sir?” prompted the voice over the radio.
“Hold your fire. Stand by on Master Mode 4.”
“Roger. Holding fire. Mode 4: Stay alert, ready.”
“Disengage ECS.”
“Roger. ECS off.”
Above the machine, mercilessly crushed without a trace... a faint light appeared and began to pool out, like ink. The ‘spill’ in space slowly began to take shape, until at last it defined itself as the form of an AS.
It was the ARX-7 Arbalest. It was kneeling on the tennis court, smoke billowing around it, with the final Alastor crushed beneath its weight.
“Wow...” Kaname found herself breathing, even as she winced from the ringing in her ears. When she’d explained her plan to lure the robots out to the only wide-open part of the ship and finish them all at once, Sousuke and the others had said they would ‘use the AS loaded in the helicopter above.’ But even knowing that it was coming, she couldn’t help but be taken aback by the sight of the AS’s power in action.
After all the trouble the Alastors had given the flesh-and-blood humans, it had taken just a few rounds from the Arbalest’s head-mounted 12.7mm machine guns to polish them off—and those were its lower-powered integral weapons, barely useful in battle against other ASes. Imagining the destructive power of its more high-powered “optional” equipment—the 40mm rifle and 57mm shotcannon—was enough to make her dizzy. The maneuverability, the firepower... ASes were often called the ultimate land weapon, and it was clear that this was no exaggeration.
“Is it over?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah. Things are looking up,” Sousuke whispered back, hands on his hips as he stood up in the smoke. “Though I’d feel better if the view wasn’t the back of an awful AS.”
“Ah...” Kaname breathed vacantly, in a combination of relief and surprise.
The Arbalest responded over the radio. “Sergeant. Are you referring to me as ‘an awful AS’?”
