"Old Scars, Part 4"
Pavement cracked as rail gun slugs impacted the ground around the black
suit's feet. Streetlights and nearby buildings flickered as
electromagnetic pulses battered its electrical systems. Metal throwing
spikes narrowly missed wrapping their trailing cords around the suit's
arms and neck. A sharp blade drove the suit back, staggering from the
strength of the blow.
I'll never last against all four, Matthew thought as the computer drove
him out of the way of a lightning fast strike from the suit in blue. As
if to reinforce the inequality a rail gun slug glanced off his shoulder,
damaging the chameleon layer over his armor. Matthew tossed a pair of
mini flash grenades at his feet, the HUD showing him the radar processed
view of his surrounding. Those floodlights must go, he decided, quickly
leaping over one of the parked cars in the street.
Nene guided the spotlight after the form, grunting with the difficulty.
She'd never seen anyone move the way it did, not even Linna. Priss had
dumped half a magazine of rail gun slugs at it, and only managed to
graze it once, while it had managed to dodge Linna and her ignore own
attacks.
Sylia leapt after the suit, blade extended in front of her. She brought
it down in an axe blow that could've split the car beneath her in two.
The ninja was no longer in her view, so she spun to find it. If they let
it get on the offensive she had no idea what could happen.
"Nene! Where is he?" she demanded. With the best sensor suite of all
the hardsuits, it had fallen to Nene to track the suit.
"He's across the street!" Nene replied, working the sensors and
floodlight across the shadowy target. How did he manage to evade her
like that?
"I'm on him," Linna said as she launched herself at the fleeing suit.
She sent her blades after him, hoping to catch him as he climbed.
Instead, the ninja rebounded off the wall and directly at her. Flinching
inside her suit, Linna rolled out of the way, narrowly dodging a slash
from the suit.
The ninja sprinted directly through the middle of the divided Knight
Sabers, Linna and Sylia behind him. He feinted towards Priss, raising
the sword over his head as Priss raised the rail gun. As she pulled the
trigger a single round struck the black suit in the right arm, blowing
through the bonded carbon armor and exiting the back. The suit responded
by closing the distance between the two in a flash. A vicious kick
knocked Priss back before Linna separated the two with a toss of the
spikes.
Nene was backing away from the fight, hoping Linna could distract the
suit long enough for her to finally crack the visual ECM. Sylia fired a
blast from her palm gun, trying desperately to knock the suit down.
"There goes the capture plan," Priss grunted as she regained her feet.
Her own blade extended as the ninja faced the three combat members of
the Knight Sabers.
There was a momentary pause as all the combatants faced off for a
moment. It was broken by the ninja lifting his sword and slamming it
into the ground at his feet.
"I surrender," came from the suit's voice modulator. The chameleon
patterning on the suit's armor ceased, returning the suit to its matte
black appearance.
"Keep your hands where they are," Priss told him as he began to lift
his arms. It was definitely a male voice, she thought.
Sylia took a moment to catch her breath, studying the suit before her
as the computer fed pure oxygen to her. There was no face to it, simply
smooth black metal and plastic. Nor could she see any joints or
articulation on it at all, leaving her with no idea of how it moved. The
urge to dissect that suit was overpowering for a moment, until the real
world interfered.
The real world took the form of flashing police sirens approaching from
each end of the street. Then the explosion smudged everything into
white.
The radio command to detonate the sword hilt was sent just as the
police showed up. The polymer explosive that filled the handle produced
a brilliant white light and the equivalent of three kilos of military
grade plastic explosives. The shock wave drove Matthew many meters
backwards, through the doors of the Tachibana warehouse.
As the suit telltales started flashing red, Matthew wondered if he'd
overreacted. Pulling himself to his feet he scanned his surroundings,
accessing the building's blueprints from the computer's memory. After
the navigation subroutine determined his location he moved out of the
storage room he ended up in.
He picked his way through the debris, sensors flickering from damage.
Overall, eighty percent of the chameleon cells had been stripped from
the front of his suit, along with a decent amount of armor. Suit
response time was down sixteen percent, the wrist guns fouled by
impacted material and the external sensor pickups were in various states
of disrepair. The only thing left for him to do was get the device as
quickly as possible and destroy it.
After that, nothing really mattered.
Priss shook her head in an unsuccessful attempt to clear the ringing
noise out of her brain. She was leaning against a wall, nearly thirty
meters from the blast center, which was now a smoking crater in front of
the warehouse.
"That crazy fuck," she muttered as she scanned for Sylia and the
others.
"Everyone all right?" Sylia said over the Sabers' channel.
"If you count getting blown up as all right," Linna moaned as she
pulled herself out of the wall she had impacted.
"Where did the ninja go?" Nene asked, picking herself up off the
ground, a good distance from the blast herself.
Priss, the first one back to the building's entrance, pointed to the
gaping wound in the building's front. "Probably in there somewhere," she
said, eyeing the damage. The warehouse's front was in shambles, but it
looked stable. She noticed the police keeping their distance.
"Well, at least we don't have to deal with Leon," she muttered.
"Yeah Priss, your other boyfriend is enough of a pain."
"Shut up all ready!"
"Next time that guy tries to surrender, I think we should shoot him,"
Linna added as the Sabers walked to the front of the warehouse. The
front of the building had mostly collapsed, revealing reinforced
concrete pillars that formed the infrastructure of the building.
"That's odd," Sylia said as the dug their way past the rubble at the
front of the building. "These supports are much larger than they should
be," she added as she glanced at the broad supports.
"Hey, look at this!" Nene called from her position at the far end of
the small alcove they had dug out. She pointed to the mostly intact
inside. Despite the force of the explosion, most of the central storage
area was intact, if jumbled.
"Well built," Sylia commented, obviously thinking about something.
"I've got sensor readings on the ninja!" Nene exclaimed, feeding the
data to the other Knights. Priss immediately headed towards the moving
target on her tactical display, extending her blade.
"Lets go get him!" she yelled.
"Nene, why are we getting good sensor returns all of a sudden," Linna
asked, drawing a glance from Nene and Sylia. "What, don't you think it's
a little strange?"
"There must've been some damage to his cloak-" Nene started to reply
before her sensors alerted her to something.
"I've got six other targets, all military grade battle suits. They
match the signature of the PA's from the Microsoft robbery."
"Where'd they come from?" Sylia demanded, mind racing.
"They appeared out of no where, and they're closing in on the ninja."
"Lets go," Sylia commanded, taking the point from Priss.
As the auto cannon rounds smashed into the wall around him, Matthew
realized he was in deep shit. He was nearly weaponless, his sword lost
and his wrist guns damaged. His suit was damaged, he was tired and quite
possibly had a broken rib. And six military battle suits had ambushed
him not more than ten meters from the room where the shipping manifest
said the last piece hid.
Dodging low among the crates, he drew the tonto blade from the hidden
sheath in his thigh. The twelve inch blade seemed pitifully small
compared to his old sword, but as he leapt over several crates towards
the enemy he felt adrenaline and anger building in him.
As he reached the closest suit, stepping inside the cannon mount's arc
to avoid the twenty millimeter rounds, he realized what had been
bothering him about the Knights' hardsuits. Something had made him hold
back against them, something more than his natural reluctance to hurt
humans. They looked like designs he had seen once, before this had all
began. In Dr. Stingray's lab.
Shaking the memory clear, he drove the tonto into one of the
articulation mounts for the cannon's sensor assembly, twisting until the
mount came free. He ducked the clumsy counterstrike and slashed at the
exposed ammo feed. The blade was too short to get deep enough to stop
the towering PA quickly, due to the fact that all the essential systems
were hidden deep inside the suit.
He leapt away as one of the other suits stepped in close and attempted
to squeeze him. A missile salvo from one of the other mecha knocked him
off his feet, nearly causing him to be crushed underneath one of the
towers of boxes that were raining down on him.
Biting back swears he wished he had brought the box with him. His
sensors were degrading by the second, and it would be a minute or so
before they totally failed. With no direct way to see outside, Matthew
was about to go blind.
There was a loud crack and one of the battle suits began smoking from a
hole in its shoulder. Matthew looked for the source, the damage to his
sensors proving to be too much. Then he activated his backup.
Grabbing the seams of his helmet, he pulled, triggering the emergency
release mechanism as the faceplate came free. The HUD disappeared,
leaving him with an unenhanced view of the outside world. He was greeted
by the sight of the Knight Sabers, battling what Matthew assumed were
the Tachibana security forces.
"Interesting," he muttered, convinced his mission was a failure. There
was no way he could get past either the Tachibana security or the Knight
Sabers, never mind try sneaking through the fight with his head sticking
out for anyone to shoot. His mind raced, finding only a single,
distasteful option.
He turned and ran, keeping low and putting the suit into overdrive. The
neural interface muted the pain, fatigue and shock, allowing Matthew a
good chance of escape. The interface also exceeded the safety limits,
but Matthew ignored that worry. Ideally there wouldn't been too much
left of him when this was all over.
He was out of the building and racing towards his truck before any of
the Knight Sabers realized he was gone.
"Where'd that bastard go?" Priss yelled as she traded blows with the
power suit in front of her.
"I lost him on the sensors!" Nene replied, desperately dodging missile
attacks from the Tachibana suits. Even with her sensors fully deployed,
the tight quarters and strewn boxes made it difficult to keep one's head
straight.
"Why are we fighting the Tachibana suits? I thought they were the ones
paying us for this mission," Linna asked, driving one of her spikes into
the closest enemy.
"Something isn't right here," Sylia replied. "This facility is more
than a warehouse."
Suddenly, the remaining Tachibana suits withdrew, fading from the
sensors mysteriously. The Sabers cautiously spread out, checking the
room.
"Where the hell did they go?" Priss demanded.
Matthew made it past the police barricade before the stealth system
failed completely. In the absence of a HUD, the suit provided audio
feedback on its condition, which was rapidly becoming more urgent. To
make matters worse, Matt felt the hollowness building in his body again,
a reminder of the price he was paying while piloting. It would be a bad
case of the shakes when he left the suit, possibly crippling, but there
was nothing he could do to stop it.
He reached his truck as the rain began to fall, the cold droplets
running down Matt's face as he tried to key in the pass code to his
house. The radio transmitter was long damaged, and the suits power
reserves were on the brink of failure. Getting his hand to work right
was becoming difficult as the neurolink wavered.
The suit failed completely just as the final button was pressed,
allowing Matt to fall painfully into his home. The nerves in his arm,
their cries ignored for so long, erupted in pain as the severity of his
wound was realized. He was close to shock as he activated the emergency
release in his suit's collar, splitting the suit apart. Six years work
wasted as the delicate structure destroyed itself to free its pilot.
As he struggled to his feet, Matt remembered the last time they had
been this bad. His eyes were glued to the shipping crate in the far
corner of the workshop. What looked like years worth of trash was piled
over it, in a vain attempt to hide what was inside. He stumbled towards
it, collapsing in a heap on the floor. His limbs twitched painfully,
nearly wrenching a scream from him, but he managed to regain his feet
and clear the crate.
He'd wanted to destroy this thing since his wife died. He wanted to
remove the machine inside, as if it would wipe away the past. But inside
he knew it would be worthless to get rid of it.
He glanced over his shoulder at the destroyed ninja suit. The prototype
he built seven year ago at the Special Research Plant in the back hills
of Arizona. That suit had filled him with pride, a physical
manifestation of his desire to create.
He threw the lid off the crate, staring at the suit inside. The gray
and black suit had been his final creation there, before he found out
what they were planning to use it for.
Matthew stared at it as if the suit's presence alone was more painful
than his bleeding arm or convulsing nerves. Samurai stared back at him,
the expressionless helmet mocking him.
"Open," he told it, almost hoping it would have forgotten its master.
But the suit slid apart, chest cavity opening in a bizarrely welcoming
manner. He climbed in, knowing the neurolink would shred the remains of
his nervous system beyond repair. The link was much more complete with
Samurai than the ninja, which was one of the reasons it had been hidden
away. The burn marks on its armor were the others, a constant reminder
of his failure.
The suit started up perfectly, six years of dormancy manifesting
themselves as a mere six percent loss of charge in the suit's batteries.
Still plenty left, Matt thought as he brought the much larger suit to
its feet. He remembered exactly how it handled, its balance and reaction
time drilled into his head by the countless dreams that replayed his
last day at the SRP. He slung the autocannon over his shoulder, and slid
the matched katana and short shord set into their respective sheaths and
reached for the small battered box in the center of the room. He opened
the box, unfolded the device inside and slid it submachine gun shaped
device into a holster on his back.
He took a last glance at his home of six years and departed.
End Part 4
Man, this part took a while. I've been meaning to do more writing but
I've had a strange case of writer's block. Any time I intend to write
something I end up working on this, so I'm going to finish this one
first, then move on. There should be one more part, since I chickened
out of finishing this one.
Thanks for reading!
By Jerico Mele. No infringement one any trademarked intellectual
property is justified, but hopefully neither is any reprisal. For more
like this (and several things completely different) please visit
www.brandeis.edu/~jmele or feel free to drop me a line at
jmele@brandeis.edu