Well, so much for 2 of 2! ;) This chapter has expanded all on its own to
become a three parter. 2 of 3 should be hitting the list just after you read this.
I've made a few changes to this section, while 2 of 3 is the latest additon to
Part 8. 3 of 3 should be ready by the weekend. C & C welcome (Folks, I'm not
getting much feedback on this story these days other than a couple crazy "BGC"
people who are pitying me<G>. If you have any comments about this story,
feel free to post them privately or to the list. I am a firm believer in the
idea that we can all learn from each other's mistakes (I hope that soon I will
be doing alot more learning than "mistaking" <g>) Anyway, Enjoy!


                                             BubbleGum Cross

                                       Metal Heart - Part 8 - 1 of 3

                                         (c) 1996 by Andy Skuse
                                          askuse@execulink.com 

                 Based on characters copyrighted by Youmex, AIC, Artmic



Part 8 - 1 of 3 - "Avatar"

     Priss let her arm fall from in front of her visor as her eyes adjusted
to the quickly fading glow. Standing in the center of the room where the four human hostage-takers had stood moments ago, were four, darkly shaded boomers. Looking somewhat sleeker when compared to their predecessors
that Priss was used to fighting, the smooth, muscular figures stood ram-rod straight, their broad shoulders thrown back proudly, as if at attention. While two of the boomers had displayed obvious feminine physical attributes in their earlier guise, they were nowhere to be seen now. From her vantage point all four boomers appeared identical. Emotionless, unflinching faces were wrought with a steely glare, locked onto their human opponents before
them. Their most prominent feature were the glowing eyes that pierced the gloom of the dark hall. Each of the four pairs emitted parallel beams of
energy, that if observed from overhead, sectioned the room in a cross-like
pattern, converging at the center of the room. Priss sighted down the ray's
length, to find her opponent's gaze trained just below her chin. Suddenly she was very aware of the lack of protection around her neck.
    She began to raise her arm to re-establish a target lock when Sylia's
voice crackled through the intercom and then burst into clarity.
     "Priss- stop. I need to know why-"
     "Bullshit! They lose it now!"
     "Priss- don't."
     "Syl- !!"
     Priss heard a faint click in her ear as Sylia cut her off.

     "Now," Sylia's calm voice echoed hauntingly in the massive hall, "why
do you *really* want us here?"
     The boomer that had pointed earlier to the exit, emitted a short, high
pitched whistling sound that was instantly echoed by the other three central
figures. 
      Nene and Linna shifted uncomfortably where they stood, wondering what
Sylia could be thinking, and what the boomers may have just said. Each
Knight Saber soon noticed their opponent's laser-like eye-beams following their minute movements. Nene gulped hard, thinking that her mouth had been
relatively moist before, compared to the dryness that was making her tongue
stick to the roof of her mouth now.
     Linna carefully scanned the room for exits and found only two. One led out to the front entrance of the building while the other was obscured by a door boldly labelled "OFFICES". As her own eyes completed their adjustment to the night-vision's shimmering view, a circular shadow in the corner of the room came into focus. The grisly remains of the thirty-second hostage lay in a heap, its detached head a few feet away. Linna turned away quickly and focused on Sylia's silhouette across the room, pushing out the grim image that fought to remain in her mind's eye. Sylia's name came to the tip of her tongue but would not travel any further.
     As Linna watched through the darkness in growing apprehension , Sylia's
outline staggered suddenly and then steadied. Distorted by the room's cavernous echoes, her leader's voice began to spit out in broken whispers,
unintelligible to her ears. The boomer in front of Sylia leaned forward
slowly, its movements reminding Linna of a snake about to strike. Its bright
eye-beams shifted color, now focused on Sylia's visor instead of her neck.
     Abruptly the Knight Saber's leader's voice rose to an argumentative
pitch and then fell back to silence, her shadowy figure now swaying slightly. Nene tried frantically to hail Sylia on the intercom, unsuccessfully. Linna watched helplessly, wishing she could help her friend but afraid of the consequences. Sylia appeared to be under some kind of mind control and if she attempted to break it, the results could be devastating. Something about the way she had commanded Priss to back down reassured her, that maybe her boss knew what she was doing. At this point though, it certainly didn't look that way.
     Priss cursed silently to herself for obeying Sylia's ridiculous command. What  was she thinking? Who knew what the hell that boomer was doing to her? She
edged a few inches closer to her own opponent, testing its reactions. Priss
blinked. The boomer had reacted instantaneously, meeting her advance by an
equal amount, but its movement had been little more than a blur, almost as if it
hadn't moved at all. Priss halted and stared at her opponents glowing eyes.
The parallel beams were still targeting her neck. It might be a good idea to wait
a little longer after all.
     All eyes suddenly turned to Sylia as the boomer in front of her snapped
back to attention, its eye-beams locking onto its opponents neck and changing
back to their original color. Dazed, she took a short step back from the ominous
metallic figure before her, and then steadied herself.
     Slowly, Sylia felt her head recovering from the dizziness she had endured a moment ago. After asking her question, the sensation had begun innocently as
a weak presence in her mind, whispering her name. Then it ruthlessly invaded
her, becoming a seemingly endless torrent of cold, emotionless information that
almost overwhelmed her ability to interpret any of it. Most of what she could
interpret were flashing images of her father and herself when she was young, as well as fragments of images that she recognized from her data unit. But another image kept recurring in the intense, looping, sequence of information. An image she did not recognize, of a room lit in a crimson aura. At its center, a young boy on an operating table with dozens of hoses and cables hooked-up to various input connectors located on his head, torso and limbs. Her mind had grasped at the view, fighting to hold it in her consciousness for a moment
longer to study the sleeping boy's face, and then the image vanished along with
the dizziness and the weak, whispering presence. But the battle was not lost.
She had seen enough.
      A quick check revealed that her metallic opponent was still standing
motionless before her. Who was the boy she had seen? Where had these
images come from? Had this "boomer" transmitted the information
somehow? For what purpose?
     The sensation she had just encountered was not entirely new. She had
suffered this kind of "mental itching" for years now, ever since she had
viewed the contents of the data cartridge she had received after her father's
death. But it had never been this intense, this overwhelming. She could only
recall a few times when she had felt it as more than an annoying itch she
could not scratch. It was always the same- someone calling her name with
maliciousness in its utterance. Ever since that day, almost five years ago,
when the Knight Sabers had destroyed the super-boomer that Priss referred to as "Largo", the itch had almost faded away to nothing more than a whisper . . .

     Sylia quickly pushed aside the nagging questions, her instincts suddenly
telling her that the information she had received and the images she had seen were a test-  and that she had failed. Now the Knight Sabers were in real
danger.
     Priss started a bit as Sylia's noticeably anxious voice filled her helmet's earphones, "Linna- Nene- on my signal, each of you take a step towards each other. Priss when they start moving open fire. Got it?"
     Three relieved, affirmative responses came back to Sylia as she thought
quickly about her own first strike.
    After a final glance at the arrogant, statuesque stance of the ebony cyborgs that waited patiently for any provoking movement, Sylia tightened her jaw muscles involuntarily and drew her fingers into a fist.
     "Go."

     The sound of high-powered weapons fire echoed from the open skylight
and the open front entrance of the Matsumi Military Base. Soldiers and AD
Police officers scrambled to crouch down behind their vehicles, scanning
the building for any signs of the firefight spilling outside. General Reeves'
smile quickly  vanished. 

     "Sis! Sis! Can you hear me?!"
     Macky stared at the static filled monitors and then tore off the intercom
headset in disgust. "Leon- We've got to do something! I lost the video feed
and now I've got no intercom signal! They're cut off in there!"
     Leon stood up from his seat with a grim look in his eyes, and moved
quickly to the rear of the van.
     "Kid, keep working on the intercom and the video feed. I'll see what I
can do out there." Macky watched as Leon peeked out of the van's back
door and then jumped out, lowering his dark sunglasses over his eyes and sliding the door shut quickly behind him.
     Macky turned back to the video controls and stared blankly at them for a
moment, his mind working feverishly to trouble-shoot the lost satellite link. He ran his finger down a list of other geo-synchronous satellites, their
co-ordinates displayed on a computer screen in front of him. Macky traced
the video link in his mind from the source at the military base, to the satellite
above, to the dish atop the van he now sat in. It was a simple surveillance channel, but it was probably being fed to an external military receiver as a precaution. The nearest military site to Matsumi was the air base near the bay. Maybe they were still getting the feed somehow.
     Macky scratched his head in frustration, wondering how he could check if the air base was getting the precious video signal when the question hit him- 'Who was blocking the signal and how?'
     While the answer remained illusive, an idea began to take shape. Maybe
it was time to start thinking offensively. Macky found himself cursing his
fingers that seemed to drag across the keyboard slower than his brain could
command them. After five agonizing minutes, his shoulders suddenly drooped, as his first attempt failed, leaving him even more perplexed than before. He
returned to the starting point of his tedious task, muttering under his breath,
and wishing Nene was with him now, and not inside the base.

     The hall that once resembled a dark murky cavern had now evolved into
an ornately decorated square room, illuminated by the stroboscopic flashes
of light from the Knight Saber's weapon's energy. Eight figures moved in
and out of the center of the hall as the boomers shifted their positions
constantly, never letting their opponents get a clear shot. And their speed!
Sylia had barely avoided being slammed into the wall when the first shot had been fired. One moment her opponent was in front of her, the next it was
behind her, pulling its gleaming metallic arm from the wall. She wondered how
Nene and Priss were doing with all this running around.
     "Stand still you bastard!" Priss leveled her right arm to fire a rail-gun spike but her opponent had already moved out of her sights. She followed its erratic
track, firing when it finally came to a wall. The spike went sailing past and tore
through the wall into the offices beyond. Her opponent stood staring at her,
almost quizzically, its head still tilted away from the railgun spike's previous
path. Priss fired again with the same result. She checked her ammo count and
swore. Time for a different tactic.
     Priss leapt forward, attempting to jam her fist into the boomer's throat
but found her own throat being clenched in a metallic grip instead. The
boomer cocked its arm back and quickly followed through with a hard punch to Priss' left forearm. Priss screamed in pain as the armor gave way and the
boomers fist penetrated through, smashing into her arm below the elbow.
     In a fit of blind rage, Priss pushed the thought of a possibly broken arm
out of her head and shoved her right arm into the boomer's face. Three
spikes exploded from point blank range, momentarily dazing the cyborg
and releasing Priss' neck from its grasp. It took two steps backwards and
then  straightened up, searching the room for its opponent with only one
glowing eye. Priss smiled, 'So you're not invincible eh?' she thought to
herself as she checked her arm. Testing her hand by flexing the fingers, she
felt a twinge of pain in the fore-arm muscle but nothing that would indicate
she'd have more than a bruise to deal with later. Checking her ammo count
again revealed that finishing this boomer would be no simple matter. Setting
her jaw firmly, she resumed her attack.
     Nene was doing her best to stay out of the way of her opponent's unarmed
attacks, but was having little success. Her left arm was already aching from the hit she had taken when the fight began. As she and Linna had moved a step
towards each other in an attempt to negate the cross-fire danger, her boomer
had bolted from its statue-like pose and pinned her to the wall with a thrusting
metallic fist to the shoulder. The attack was soswift she hadn't seen the boomer
move, but she had felt the force of its punch very clearly. Now it was becoming
obvious to her that it would be a battle on her opponent's terms. A battle of wits
and alertness; something Nene was not entirely unfamiliar with. But her body
did not want to cooperate.
     She continued to dodge the next flurry of attacks until her opponent
disappeared before her eyes in a bright flash of light. She checked her visor
display for the boomer's location and stared in disbelief at the seven blips
on her screen when she suddenly felt an arm close around her neck. As the
black metallic arm tightened its grip, Nene fired her jump jet thrusters,
sending the boomer backwards with a piercing whistle of surprise. She
turned to face the boomer, expecting to find it sprawled on the floor and
was taken aback by its quick recovery. This was one of those few times that she thought that it would be okay to swear.
     Linna was doing a little better than the others, her martial arts and
dance training proving to be an important defense from these extremely
agile machines. But like the others, her offensive strikes were simply
wasting ammo and energy. She tried to get behind her opponent by vaulting
off the boomer's shoulders but the thing was waiting for her when she
landed. A metallic hand suddenly spread open and pushed forward in
her direction. Linna felt the air rush out from her lungs as an unseen force
hurtled her body backwards into a wall. As she struggled to rise her opponent
was there, grabbing her arm and flinging her towards another wall. Linna held
her hand out to stop her flight but quickly retracted it when she realized her
speed. The wall shuddered and crumbled as Linna's back impacted on the flat
surface. Slumping a bit, she checked her knuckle-bomb's charge on her visor's
display and waited for her opponent to pick her up again. This time a loud
sub-sonic thump shook the wall next to her as the boomer recoiled from the
surprise attack. She withdrew her fist from the boomer's shoulder area and
stared in surprise as the boomer resumed its stance and came at her again,
unharmed by her attack.

End of 1 of 3 - Part 8

********************************
BG Cross
The Dark Traveller
askuse@execulink.com
Co-Maintainer of the Fanfic ML FAQ
********************************