Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games

by Marion G. Harmon

  Dr. Donald Piers, NASA Ways and Means Conference.

  * * *

  Ozma told Nix she was staying to keep an eye on Grendel—a royal command the tiny doll accepted happily since she absolutely adored the big guy. We packed everything tight, double and triple checking like we were packing full field-loads, folded up the tables, and strapped it all down in the cargo space before we buckled up—a more involved process for me as I locked myself into the Integral Center Flight Frame and Shell closed the pod up.

  For in-atmosphere flights I preferred to use the exterior lift harness, but what we were about to do required extra-atmosphere travel and that required a spacesuit even for me. Which was why the flight frame (a cross between a harness and an open cage) was inside the pod hull, anchored both top and bottom—I flew the thing by standing in the center of the pod and lifting it from inside, pushing against the frame with my shoulders, chest, back, or feet.

  Of course I could barely see outside through the pod’s small and thick windows, but they weren’t designed for piloting. That was what quantum-ghost friends were for; as she closed us up, Shell brought up a full-surround ghostly representation of the outside from the pod’s cameras for me to see.

  “All internal systems are good, navigation and external cameras are working with full redundancy, Captain. Are you ready to boldly sneak where no one has sneaked before?”

  I burst into uncontrollable giggles; Virtual-Shell stood beside me with feet apart and hands folded behind her back, her ears transformed to Spock-ears, and she wore a blue and black Starfleet uniform for the occasion.

  “Are we clear with LAX airspace and North America Command?” I asked as soon as I got it under control.

  “Aye aye, Captain. We are clear to go.” She gave me a wink that said And they never saw a thing. Being able to do this meant somebody somewhere would be forgetting our tracked flight-path.

  I lifted us, guided by the pressure on my shoulders and the changing virtual view. It had taken me a couple of weeks training with Watchman to get the hang of lifting like this, but now it was like riding a bike and we rose above Restormel and kept rising into the morning light as Shell painted LAX flightpath lines for me to see. I turned us towards the sun and accelerated.

  “Our path to orbit is clear,” Shell reported. “Turning off our transponder and going radio-silent, clear to turn in three…two…one…now.” High enough that nobody in LA could still see our unreflective hull, I turned us west and steepened our climb.

  Getting us into Japan was simple; I just had to avoid the attention of their National Defense System. Of course simple didn’t mean easy; Japan had begun thickening its defense system when China’s collapse had put many of their ballistic nuclear missiles in non-government hands, and had worked even harder at it since the first godzilla hit Tokyo.

  They’d had to, because while the rest of the world (including New York and Chicago) had seen a few of the monsters wade ashore, the Tokyo Godzilla had been just the first of many to hit Japan.

  Even with Shell’s Big Book of Contingent Prophecy and the Oroboros’ own collection of past future files, we had no idea what had changed. In the older potential futures—pre-California Big One and before the Teatime Anarchist ended the time war against his evil twin with mutual annihilation—the godzillas had arrived nearly two years from now. They also hadn’t been followed by more and bigger breeds of monsters. The Japanese called them kaiju.

  The Oroboros’ best guess was that whatever Verne-Type mad scientist had created the ‘zillas had been under the control of the Dark Anarchist. (The Oroboros hated the name I’d given the evil twin, especially since Shelly used it in all her reports. They weren’t too fond of Big Book of Contingent Prophecy, either.) With DA as dead as villain-rap music should be, the Oroboros believed that either the Verne-Type who’d made them had been “unleashed” or the creatures themselves were mutating without control. Either way, with only occasional exceptions the new kaiju, to use Shell’s phrase, all loved-loved-loved Japan.

  This meant Japan’s network of defense radars was second to none, and their sonar network was even better. If they saw something unknown and potentially hostile coming in, and if they said hello and it didn’t say hi back, they’d either drop a crowbar on it from orbit or fire an over-the-horizon missile at it. And that was just the outer ring—if you got through that they scrambled subs or jets depending on whether you were wet or dry. If you managed to hit shore in an urban area, well, that’s when the mecha got dropped on top of you, or one of the oversized and heavy-hitting national cape teams like the Eight Excellent Protectors and the Nine Accomplished Heroes.

  But they couldn’t watch everywhere, so they tended to focus on surface and sub-surface threats. That’s what we were counting on. The lift pod had a low radar signature and no internal heat-signature. Non-reflective, it was a dark body at night and I could slow us down enough on reentry so that atmospheric friction wouldn’t heat us and light us up as we came in. Not coming from the west, it was unlikely they’d spot us at all.

  Once we’d come down, I would put on the brakes and drop us just offshore in shallow water—avoiding death-by-missile or breaking our necks, whichever came first. Simple.

  The minutes crept by, counted on a virtual clock Shell provided as I kept our acceleration at one gee and kept us inside the virtual painted lines. “Entering orbital path,” Shell informed us all. “One ring around the rosy and we’re good for entry.” I relaxed a little. We were in orbit, floating in zero-gee, and she was saying nothing about non-NASA or Air Force contacts. We’d passed over Japan’s high-frontier once going up, and Shell would tell us if someone was talking. Jacky looked bored and Ozma read a huge old book she’d pulled from her little box.

  The virtually painted lines changed, dipping down as Shell chanted.

  “Begin braking in three…two…one…now!”

  Spinning us so the g-force from braking would press Jacky and Ozma back into their seats, I pushed hard, shedding orbital velocity and letting gravity have its way.

  “Adjust attitude in three…two…one…zero.”

  I stopped pushing and spun us again until the attitude lines showed we were coming in belly-down. Feeling the atmosphere start to grab, I held our attitude until our building velocity did it for me. In interest of keeping the lifter’s weight down, only the bottom of its hull came with a thick heat shield—and even if we weren’t going to come down hot this time, belly-down reentry was safest.

  A climbing whistle softly vibrated through the cabin, the first wisps of atmosphere contesting our intrusion. “We’re riding on rails now, people,” Shell sang out. “Prepare for spin and breaking in five minutes, give or take a few counts. Next stop—” She cut out, vanished, along with the virtual map and positioning lines I was following.

  * * *

  “Hope? What’s happening?” Ozma closed her book and looked up, and I realized she’d been wearing Seeing Specs so she could see Shell and her virtual screens.

  “Shell? Shell?” No answer in my head. Shell wouldn’t leave. That was stating the obvious. Okay, something had broken our link, a quantum-entanglement interdiction field or something, like the one around Guantanamo Bay. All the way up here? Still being obvious. “Shell’s gone, and I’m blind.”

  Jacky started unbuckling, looking around the cabin. “What about the internal controls?”

  “Stay in your seat, there are no internal flight controls. Watchman uses a VR rig when he flies inside, and it’s back at the Dome.”

  “Can you land us without it?” Ozma asked with the same urgency she’d use to ask if tea would be served on time.

  “No.” I started unlocking myself from the flight frame. “We’re in free-fall, which means when I start pushing I won’t know which direction down is. I won’t know when and how hard to push, and even using the windows I could fly us into the ocean. I’d survive.” I didn’t have to say “you wouldn’t.”

  “Okay…so what do we do?” Jacky sounded n
early as calm as Ozma. I wasn’t panicking, but only because there was a way out. It killed the mission, but we’d go home.

  “I need to go outside to land us, and we don’t have a pressure-lock. If I pop the hatch we’re going to depressurize and start tumbling, and our radar-profile is going to spike. Which means a getting a crowbar or a missile.”

  “So we can’t stay. Got it.” Jacky started unbuckling again.

  “No. I’m aborting the flight.” I’d reached the single control box in the cabin, the one with the big red handle. “When I pull the emergency release, the transponder turns on, the radio starts screaming SOS, and we grow parachutes the instant the flight computer says we’re low enough.”

  Hopefully we weren’t already in Japan’s airspace.

  “Stop!” Ozma actually yelled over the rising vibration and howl. “Jacky, how long can you remain mist?”

  “Up to half an hour. Why?”

  “Get what you need. Hope, you’re leaving. We’re leaving with you.”

  They unbuckled and moved fast—all the Sentinels and Young Sentinels had received zero-gee training. I grabbed my sword and sheathed it while Jacky grabbed her guns and Ozma retrieved her wand-baton. Clutching it and her magic box, she yelled a string of nonsense-words and turned into a green crystal jar.

  “Okay, she can come,” Jacky said.

  “You think?” I picked Ozma up and popped her lid, trying not to think about it. “Get in.” When Jacky turned herself into mist she also lost a lot of her mass (otherwise the transition from solid to gas would have made her transformations explosive). The remaining mist that was Jacky could compress into the jar, and did, leaving me with a sealed Ozma-jar of Jacky and an empty cabin.

  Our baggage wouldn’t survive the trip. But then again, I wasn’t going to let go of Ozma with one hand just to take anything else with us.

  How much time? Less than five minutes, but since we hadn’t eaten a missile yet there was reason to be insanely optimistic. I went back to the control box and popped and pushed a different button, then took a deep breath and punched through the hatch.

  And spun hard in the hammering air.

  It took a few seconds of spinning ass-over-teakettle to figure out which end was up and get in front of the tumbling lifter while counting—which was important because of the button. Thirty seconds later the lifter blew up, throwing me ahead of it. I didn’t let go of the jar.

  It’s not often I could say that falling at terminal velocity was a good thing. Rolling over so I could see the blast cloud, I couldn’t see any very large pieces; the blast combined with the violence of reentry would spread what bits survived—which wouldn’t be soft things like clothes or travel bags or even shoes—over a wide radius. And hopefully Japan’s defenders had mistaken the radar-spike and explosion for a meteorite coming apart in the atmosphere.

  Turning back over, I looked ahead. No glowing missile trails, no sudden launch plumes in the black water far below me through the gauzy cloud layer. And no radio for me to yell my harmlessness through if one appeared.

  St. Michael, defender of man, stand with us in the day of battle.

  St. Jude, giver of hope, be with us in our desperate hour.

  St. Christopher, bearer of burdens, lift us when we fall.

  And please don’t let me have just killed my friends.

  Somebody heard me, and not the wrong people; the ocean remained unbroken and when I hit the lower cloud layer I hesitantly began flying instead of free-falling, turning my steep descent into a more gradual one towards the coastline glittering under the Moon.

  * * *

  If this had been a movie I’d have submerged and swam ashore, walking dramatically out of the surf (probably wearing something appropriate to a wet t-shirt contest). Movies are stupid; I hugged the waves and angled to the south of the thickest lights, looking for a dark beach. Sliding past a fleet of outbound fishing boats, I found a stretch of sand cut off from the resorts around it by cliffs pushing out to sea, and landed on sandy rock far above the high tide line.

  And sat down.

  I waited until I stopped shaking and my breathing evened out. It wasn’t PTSD (I knew what that felt like)—it was five of the most terrifying minutes of my life, ready to eat a missile at any moment with no warning and literally holding my friends’ lives in my hands. When I could trust my hands not to shake and drop it, I carefully popped the top of the Ozma-jar. Jacky rose like a genie from its bottle, filling out and then dropping into solid black-suited flesh.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked around at the cliffs, down at me. “‘Hey?’ I heard the boom, and all you’ve got is ‘Hey?’”

  “That was the lifter, not a missile. I stuck around so I’d be mistaken for debris if anyone saw me fall.”

  “Clever girl.” She sat on the rock beside me, nudged Ozma. “So, how long do you think she’s going to stay a canning accessory?”

  “You said you could stay mist for half an hour, so I suppose she’ll un-jar a little before that. She wouldn’t want to risk you going…” I mimed an explosive size change with my hands. “Bawoosh! inside her. And if I was still in the air after half an hour, something would definitely be wrong.”

  Jacky nodded, brushed the sand beside her. “So, no lifter. How are we going to leave with Kitsune?”

  “We’ll think of something.”

  “And our vacation luggage?”

  “We have credit cards in our packets; we’ll buy more.”

  “And without Shell, how are we going to find the Miyamoto family grave?”

  “I— I don’t know.” I really didn’t. “We’ll manage.”

  “Yeah. We always do.”

  We sat and looked out at the water.

  “Jacky? I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Don’t get sappy on me now.”

  I smiled in the dark, and when Jacky looked down at the jar sitting between us and scooted over a couple of feet, I burst into laughter. I was still laughing when Ozma stopped being jar-shaped.

  “Hey,” Jacky greeted her, bringing another burst of giggles out of me.

  Ozma nodded silently. “Are you okay?” I asked when she didn’t say anything.

  “I was quite happy being full, thank you.” Her voice was thin, her eyes unfocused, but then she smiled. “After all, that is a container’s purpose in life, and if I can’t abide a little time as a useful oddment then I have no business turning people into headwear. Are we in Japan?”

  “Yes. We made it.”

  Out to sea, gold light touched the horizon to fade the stars.

  Episode Two

  Chapter Nine

  Defensenet Report, Shibushi Alert: See attached video-report from Defensenet boat Kagoshima 4-7. Observation of high-altitude detonation and confirmation of floating debris suggests independent destruction of unknown transport vehicle, direction of travel unknown.

  Defensenet Recommendation: Move Defensenet assets to region and elevate observation until security from incursion has been assured.

  DR105-BV [Classified]

  * * *

  A warm summer rain started to fall and we moved under the ridge of the cliff as the sky brightened to gray.

  By American standards, Japan didn’t have a lot of wide-open and empty places. There were only about one-third as many Japanese as there were Americans, but they all lived on an island chain—a mountainous island chain at that—so all the territory that wasn’t too vertical or forested was either farmed on or occupied.