And virtual Shell appeared in the rain beside me, looking thrilled and shocked.
“The quantum interdiction-field is down! The pulse knocked it down! But EMPs don’t do that—they’re not that kind of event!”
“Tell Defensenet! Assuming they don’t already know.”
“Working it.” She did a twirl, morphing into a Remarkable Ronin version of herself, and vanished. I could imagine the insanity breaking out back at Defensenet Shinjuku, but we had our own monkeys to deal with—assuming they got through the mecha-launched missile storm getting ready to greet them when they poked their heads up out of the bay.
Why was I beginning to think it was likely?
* * *
Arriving at the rendezvous told us at least one thing—six of the Eight Excellent Protectors were already there, their crisply pleated skirts and tailored jackets practically shining under the media’s camera-lights as they stood watching the bay. Considering they were surrounded by mecha—including an even dozen BFRs (Big Freaking Robots, Shell’s term for the fifteen-foot tall street-mecha)—loaded with rocket batteries and pointing at the water, their vigilance would have looked over-the-top if not for the cameras.
I nodded; it wasn’t exactly how we did things in Chicago, but half of winning tonight would be keeping the city calm; probably every news channel was running this—certainly millions of Tokyoites were watching on their cellphones and epads. They needed to see that Defensenet was ready to defend them.
“Look dangerous, people,” Jacky whispered before I spotted the camera pointed our direction and the field-reporter in front of it talking into his mic.
Lights, cameras, action! I kept us walking forward, stopped us maybe twenty feet from the Eight and copied their casually observant pose to watch the bay. Checking out the Eight’s visible preparedness (one of them was a cyborg loaded with more bristling fight-mods than Shell wore as a battle-ready Galatea), I casually unsheathed Cutter and stuck him in the sand with a one-handed flourish. Jacky snickered beside me, but I could hear the rising hums as she drew, readied, and re-holstered her scary looking Vulcans.
“Five-second delayed broadcasts.” Virtual-Shell popped in beside me, again a dark-haired fourth Remarkable Ronin. Smart—Kochi stood with her team by the water, and magic-types had the habit of being able to see my BF. “Defensenet can cut all media transmissions in a second if the situation goes bad or they need to keep someone special from seeing it. You ready for this?”
I smiled whimsically, making sure my face was angled so the camera would catch it. “I would really, really like a spa-day. With aggressive shopping. You know, the Bees would love Tokyo. Especially Isetan Shinjuku—those ladies were really, really nice.”
“That’s a lot of reallys.”
“I’m really tired and my shoulder really really hurts.” I rotated it carefully; I’d managed to clear the bridge mostly one-handed, but just the strenuous movement had stripped away the numbing protection Dr. Arai had given me, just like she’d promised.
Jacky touched my elbow. “Camera’s gone, now look clever.” With the news crews pointed elsewhere, Kaminari headed straight for us, her glowing naginata held over her shoulder so its butt didn’t brush the sand. She very carefully wasn’t limping but I could read it in her stance. Controlled rage practically poured off her in waves.
I folded my arms and almost stepped back before I stopped myself. Beside me Jacky loomed taller.
“Thank you for coming. Truly.” She said it with the briefest bow, which I automatically mirrored. Were the cameras back without my seeing them?
Again I nodded automatically. “What happened to you?”
“Agent Inoue sent us to collect one of the persons you named tonight. It did not go well.”
“They found the Verne-Type guy—” Virtual-Shell whispered beside me “—but he blew himself and his workshop up before they could get through his booby-traps and stop him. Two of the Eight are in the hospital.”
I winced. “I’m sor—”
Kaminari cut my instinctive apology short with an impatient slash of her hand; her anger wasn’t pointed at me. “We needed what you brought us. The Nine Accomplished Heroes are now in Kyoto protecting the Asian delegates from a One-Lander attack, and there has been hard fighting. The conspiracy was widespread and they began executing their plan yesterday when your actions removed the Kabukicho yakuza from play.”
“Do you know what the conspiracy was about yet?”
“A powerful attack.” She scowled. “The yakuza family involved was getting paid very well to use the gates to smuggle men and contraband—the furthest gate we’re now sure of is in Okinawa. And they stood to make even more money skimming construction contracts in the rebuilding. They believed that they were working for an ultra-nationalist group that wants to remilitarize and reestablish our prewar hegemony.” Turning around she looked out at the bay. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line had gone dark as the rest of Tokyo; hopefully the kaiju would ignore the bay-spanning bridge.
It had certainly been emptied—probably what the Eight had been doing while we’d cleared the much shorter Rainbow Bridge. If there’d still been traffic on it we wouldn’t be standing here.
“And they were—the nationalist group exists—but its strings were being pulled by One Land. And One Land prepared for more than just an attack; they were preparing for a blow that would cripple Japan. Your interference made them kick off their plans early.”
The chill had been settling into my gut as Kaminari spoke. So maybe we’d done some good—but our enemy had gained a whole day to begin, once we’d gotten the Kabukicho yakuza trapped and before I’d talked to Kitsune. If I had gone straight to Defensenet when Ozma had been taken, told them who we were and why we were here, they’d have known we could find Kitsune for them and tonight would all be playing out very, very differently.
But if they hadn’t used Kitsune to spy on us, then we could have asked for their help instead of sneaking in.
It sucked; if we’d trusted them enough to ask, they would have learned we could find him for them. If we’d used Ozma’s magic fish to track him down and then gone in with the full might of Defensenet behind us… I felt sick. “So then, we just hope that this was the big plan? Destroying the sea wall and sending a bunch of kaiju into Tokyo?”
Kaminari actually snorted. “No, Hikari-san. Every Defensenet team across Japan is on alert, with every Defense Force base.” A new EMP hit washed over us, the static charge raising my neck-hairs and inducing tiny arcs of snapping current on the station-keeping mecha around us. She sighed and pushed wet strands of hair out of her face. “Thank you for being here, Hikari-san.”
I stared at her retreating back as she rejoined her remaining teammates.
“The kaiju just passed the Aqua-Line,” Shell reported.
Get your mind back in the game. “Why aren’t they using torpedoes on them?”
“They moved the torpedo batteries out into the Uraga Channel when they built the sea wall, and air-dropped torpedoes are too risky in the bay. Here they come!”
Back in full quantum-neural link with me, Shell was using all her processing power to analyze what I was seeing with my super-duper vision. Now she painted virtual markers on the faintest of water-trails, barely visible in the night and rain. Fast-moving markers, closing on Odaiba’s artificial beach. I didn’t have to ask to know that she was passing the images through her cat-Shell links to Jacky and Ozma’s shades.
I drew Cutter from his sheath of sand. Beside me, Jacky held a Vulcan in one fist, her free hand resting on her sash where she kept her bottled wind. Ozma stood easy, looking mildly interested but with her wand-baton held ready.
And the night exploded into furious fire as the BFRs flushed their rocket batteries at the rising hills of water. So did The Eight’s cyborg—Shell tagged her as Arashi. The screaming roars that shook the air almost drowned the sound of auto-cannon fire as the five monster lizards rose through the rain of hypervelocity and explosive rounds to tow
er over the beach, the two in front already dying.
“They’ve got them!” virtual-Shell yelled by my ear. “They’ve—what is that?”
That was the bay water around the embattled kaiju, and it looked like it was boiling, rising around the monsters’ legs.
The heaving mass exploded.
“Shell! Analysis now!” The explosion resolved into thousands of things that looked like flying stingrays, if stingrays were made of seaweed and covered in tiny bubbling membranes. Jacky swore and fumbled to reset her Vulcan as the rest of the Eight leaped into action and the cloud of flying nightmares swept over us.
Chapter Thirty
When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death. Sing your death song! And die like a hero going home.
Tecumseh
When your time comes to die, kick someone’s ass first.
Artemis
* * *
Jacky stopped trying to reset her Vulcan and disappeared into wind and mist, a whirlwind battering at the flying creatures. Ozma spun in a circle to trace a line in the sand with her wand-baton and before she’d finished the circle the sand flowed up into human shapes around her, literal sand-men that flailed at the flapping shapes descending on us. The creatures the sandmen touched dropped to the beach outside her circle.
Because sandmen brought sleep, of course.
I swung Cutter in broad one-handed arcs, cutting the creatures down in bunches as Cutter moved in my grip to carve his path through the swarm. The cloud of flapping seaweed made it hard to see more than a few feet.
“Shell! What’s going on?”
Virtual-Shell just stood there, turning in circles, as the things flew through her. “The Eight are okay—they’ve got an energy projector pushing back with her fields and they’re moving to cover the news crews—” A rolling, concussive explosion to our right almost blinded and deafened me. “—but hitting them with anything hot or electric lights them off!”
“What are they?”
“Really frisky seaweed! They break down water into gas—the bubbles in their skin are full of hydrogen to make them floaty so it doesn’t take much flapping to keep them airborne! And they’ve got some kind of toxin coating them—contact with skin is raising blisters and welts!”
“What’s their zone?”
“They’re staying on the beach, acting like mobile chaff for the kaiju—a living smokescreen!”
Even with Cutter’s help all my swinging couldn’t kill every flapper that came within our reach—I had to keep pulling them off me. Fortunately whatever secretions they were slimed with didn’t bother me; I just really needed to shower. But I wasn’t worried about them—they were nuisances and I needed to know where the—
The beach shook and the roaring came from damn near overhead; another rippling shockwave signaled the fiery mass-death of a cloud of flappers.
“I’ve hacked a drone-feed!” Shell shouted. “The kaiju are on the beach, plasma-jetting the fat flapper clusters around the street mecha! Good thing they’re piloted remotely—the big guys are going down!”
Great—we were losing our heavy artillery.
Another EMP hit washed over us and this time the arcing sparks ignited whole clumps of flappers.
And what was that about?
And— “Shell! Where’s Ozma?” She’d vanished into the dark green airborne mass.
“Our magical princess is headed for the Gundam statue! Kaminari says we need to hit the kaiju!”
That I could do. “Point me!”
The one upside to the flapper-clouds was that the kaiju couldn’t see us through the flying things any better than we could see them; these monsters were Second Gen kaiju—bigger and tougher than the Chicago Godzilla—but they still had the signature plasma-breath and Shell confirmed that three of them were still standing.
I could have launched myself low and chopped at the first legs I found, but an instant vision of an injured kaiju blasting away at whatever was below it—a beach crowded with powered-armor mecha, news crews, and assorted capes—killed all possibility of a low shot. Instead I told Shell to pass the word that I’d be providing a platform, and went straight up.
The flapper swarm was thickest close to the ground, and as I cleared its densest layers I stayed low to eyeball my targets. Jacky dropped out of mist to stand on my shoulders as she drew her humming Vulcans and leaped into mist again. Kaminari used me as a stepping stone—a nice trick since she couldn’t fly and I was at least thirty feet up. Landing soft-footed on my head she jumped higher into the sky, multiplying as she sailed upward to become a swarm of naginata-wielding Kaminaris that descended on the closest kaiju.
“Okay, that’s impressive,” Shell allowed.
I closed on the one Jacky and Kaminari hadn’t targeted, circling around in the rain to come up behind it. Diving to bury Cutter to his hilt, I felt the shock through my body as he drove down through hide and bone into the back of the monster’s skull. The kaiju roared and twisted violently, almost throwing me off despite my two-handed grip on Cutter’s hilt and I clung tight as my shoulder screamed. I had no idea if I could kill it—the thing was so huge it made Heavenly Dragon look like a Chihuahua. Then we saw the Gundam.
Shell started laughing. “And that’s just crazy.”
All I could do was hang on and nod—I literally had no words.
With all the flappers flying around its legs, the brilliantly white, blue, and red Gundam robot statue waded towards us through a dark green tide. The “energy sword” it lifted glowed almost too bright to look at and our kaiju saw it coming, all sixty feet of impossible steel.
Common sense would tell you that one jet of a kaiju’s super-heated plasma breath would reduce the walking statue to melted wreckage, but common sense checks out the instant magic is involved. Ozma hadn’t just animated the giant Gundam statue—she had transformed it into something close to the real deal and the first plasma-jet to hit the Gundam splashed off it without doing more than scorching the paint. The mighty symbol of all Giant Robot Anime struck back with a swing of its energy sword that half-decapitated the most aggressive kaiju.
“Kaminari says to pull back!” Shell yelled. Turning my attention I saw that all of the Eight-leader’s duplicates had disappeared as she leaped away from her own now one-eyed opponent. Jacky stopped dancing in and out of mist and pouring Vulcan-shots into her target’s face to vanish a final time. Cutter came free with my pull and I shot up and away.
Our moves had bought time and the surviving BFRs opened fire again, rockets and auto-cannons ripping the air as I narrowly missed a Defensenet drone in my climb.
The gut-churning reek of ruptured and burned lizard filled the air.
“And that’s how they do it in Japan,” Shell said, floating beside me. Below us, the Eight were doing something to thin the flappers; for whatever reason, the things seemed to want to remain close to the definitively dead kaiju—the only break we’d gotten tonight. “You okay?”
“I’m tired.” I’d never felt so utterly done; Cutter weighed nothing but I felt every breath give more weight to my bones. I’d be able to sleep even without another pain-patch. For days.
Landing, I found Ozma by the de-animated Gundam. It had frozen in a stable posture but not its original at-ease pose, and I wondered if Tokyo would just rebuild its base down here on the beach and leave it like this to commemorate the attack.
“I thought you said your belt was almost tapped out?”
Ozma smiled. “The Magic Belt absorbs and stores magic. Think of it as a solar battery.”
Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games Page 29
