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I asked and now i shall receive.
The Dirty Pair: Double Vision
Standard Disclaimer: I don't own the Dirty Pair. I don't claim to either,
so don't sue me. Sakura Tenjo, Natsumi Ogawa, and Bloody Mary are original
characters who may not be used without my approval. Thanks, and enjoy the
show.
"How exactly do you plan to get into a compound with what is most
likely the best security in occupied space?"
Since this is a DP fic, blowing down the door is the most likly scenario. :)
Sakura set an anti-land craft missile aside and glanced back at Kei
and Yuri, who stood in the doorway to the armory, arms folded across their
chests as they watched her pick out weapons for her assault on BTR
headquarters. She picked up an assault rifle with a funny-looking cycling
device attached to one side. "What's this one?"
Kei blinked. "A Chance Mark IV Rapid-Load Rifle."
Sakura nodded and placed it in the "take" pile.
Heh
Kei took it from her and answered, "An Anti-Cyborg Logic-Lock Stun
Glove. Delivers a powerful datafeed through the data-spikes in the palm into
the neural system of a metal-head, blows them out by swamping their cranial
sensory-I/O station. Sort of like a mini-Logic Bomb for mechs." She set the
glove down and took on an unusually serious expression. "Look Sakura, I
understand how upset you are just now,
Kei: Yuri's had the shit kicked out of her lots of times, but you don't see
me getting angry about it.
Sakura nodded graciously. Then, her eyes fell on something shiny,
black, and dangerous-looking sitting on a rack behind much of the other
ordnance. She picked the monstrosity up and tried to figure out how it
worked. Yuri winced in precognitive horror. "Oh for...Kei, she found the
Boomer."
The pink-haired girl fumbled with the weapon, which was a good four
feet long, and asked over the top of it's
its
cooling vent system, "What does it do?"
% Kei: Make big holes.
wear this again? And be clear. I don't know if I'll feel guilty or not if I
decide to shoot you for this."
Sleet smirked and looked Mary up and down again. She was dressed in
an achingly pink dress, in a style better suited to a small child on her way
to an Easter church service than a professional murderer with a kill-count
said to be in four digits.
% Busy girl.
With a tired sigh, Sleet explained again. "Look, Fisher is a man with
principals, or so he says, and he doesn't approve of needless killing."
Overriding Mary's outraged sound, Sleet went on. "So if I come in there and
show you to him as the person who I sent to get his books, and you show up
soaked in blood and carrying a virgin's head in your teeth..." Sleet shifted
uncomfortably at the way Mary's breath quickened when he said that. He was
beginning to wonder if he had made a mistake somewhere along the line.
% A wee bit late for that sort of consideration.
Kei and Yuri finished closing the clasps on their transparent body
suits, then stood, stretching their limbs to accustom them to the
restrictive layer covering their skin. Sakura mimicked them, moving
uncomfortably in her costume. All three girls wore plain white versions of
the traditional Dirty Pair costume, underneath a body suit that resembled
nothing so much as a layer of clear plastic. The suit covered their entire
bodies to the neck and fit tight enough to feel like they had been painted
on, the only ornamentation being the row of five white metal clasps up the
left side. To Sakura, it looked as if all three of them had been covered
with shellac.
% What I was thinking as well.
at the aqualogy. Most of the gear in the Lovely Angel's arsenal was intended
for heavy frontal assaults. Many of the more insidious toys on those two
belts had gone into the packs each girl now carried. Kei lugged a longer,
slender case up and onto her s
% hers
All three silently packed into the small escape pod the Angel was
equipped with. Made virtually sensor-proof out of necessity, the plan was to
use the pod to land on the planet without attracting notice. After
determining that there were several available craft on the airfield at the
BTR base, they agreed that on the way out they would steal a light craft,
and use it to get back out to the Angel. Once they were close, they would
slip into light Evac-suits, and set the ship adrift to throw off any
pursuers while they jetted back to the Lovely Angel and hit the road at high
speed.
% Of course, this plan is damned to ruination almost as soon as they hit the
atmosphere.
The three of them gripped the support straps as the pod silently
jettisoned itself into the quiet of space. The only sound was the quiet
hissing of the pod's propulsion system activating. Sakura leaned back and
watched the planet's atmosphere approaching them like a large, silver
marble. There were so many eco-domes creating specialized environments on
the planet's surface that the surface
% two uses of 'surface' very close together. I'd change it to 'planet's
surface that it'
Kei flipped the communicator off and looked at Sakura seriously.
"We're committed now," She said quietly, "so any second thoughts you may
have been having can go right out the window." Sakura just smiled grimly.
% I'd make the last sentence into a seperate paragraph.
When they were approximately a mile above the ground, Yuri gave the
nod. The invasion was beginning. Kei leaned back and kicked out the hatch on
the pod. A shrieking wind whipped up by their velocity immediately filled
the tiny space. In perfect precision, Yuri and Kei grabbed their respective
bundles and rolled out of the pod into empty space. With only a little more
trepidation Sakura dived out after them.
Instantly, there was total silence around her. The night was black,
pitch darkness enveloping her in emptiness. Sakura straightened, aiming
herself head down and pressing her arms to her side to lessen her wind
shear. The comlink clipped over her ear sparked to life, and Yuri's voice
spoke as if inside her head. <Count to eight slowly, then activate the
gravity-pack.>
As the comlink died again, Sakura began counting.
% At seven she hit an eco-dome and went *splat*. Evidentily Sakura had
counted a little TOO slowly.
As Sakura righted herself and began scanning her surroundings, Yuri
and Kei floated over. Scratching her head in embarrassment, Yuri spoke
through the comlink. <Sorry about that. I meant to say count to six instead
of eight, because the pack has a two-second start-up time. Sorry...>
heh. I wasn't that far off the mark.
Sakura stared at her wordlessly. Finally, she floated down to crouch
lightly on the curve of the dome. As she touched down, her boots adhered to
the slick surface, creating a minute series of suction-holds by opening tiny
valves and forcing the air from the spaces this created. Kei and Yuri did
the same. Holding it in place with one hand, Kei opened her bag and produced
a flat metal box and handed it to Yuri, who held it while Kei removed a
small handgrip. She flicked a switch on its side, and a small point of light
appeared at its slightly protruding head. Kei bent down and created a
suction grip with one glove, then drew the point of light on the handgrip in
an oval around her hand. Where the point of light touched, the super-dense
plastic melted away silently. Finally, she handed the oval of plastic to
Yuri, who tossed it over her shoulder casually. This done, both Angels knelt
over their newly created entryway. Yuri set down the flat metal box, a
rectangle about a foot wide a
% Hmm. Something seems to have been cut here.
devices, but no other markings at all. Kei detached her feet from the dome
and floated into a prone position. The comlink spoke into Sakura's head
again, this time with Kei's voice. <We're going to locate a couple of
troopers patrolling the perimeter and make them go bye-bye. That way, when
you two show up, they won't wonder why there are two too many people out
there>
% Nice
They flew in that direction. On the grassy ground were two Tac/Int
soldiers, each with a neat hole through his head and a shallow furrow along
the left side of his neck. Sakura gasped. Their comlink antennae had been
severed cleanly by a single bullet each. Kei's smirk was almost audible over
the comlink. <Sometimes you have to wait a second for the sweet shot. Okay
ladies, get your stalking suits on, because we're going stealth-mode!>
Yuri bent down and attached a small pin with a faintly glowing head
to the still chest of each of the dead soldiers. Touching a small activator
on the wrist-clasp of her suit, she said, <Activating the
holo-camouflage...> The air around the two soldiers shimmered, then changed
slightly. Sakura gasped out loud. The soldiers were gone! She bent forward
and gasped again when her hand vanished as it got close to their former
resting-place. <Tight-circumference holographic field.> Yuri explained.
% Very nice. I like their toys. Very inventive.
Natsumi screaming weakly as the little blond freak assaulted her shot
through Sakura's head, making her teeth clench and her hands shake. She
wanted to find that little bitch and hurt her. Hurt her bad. She wasn't
quite sure what had gotten into her, and it worried her. She wasn't normally
this violent. She paused and amended that. Well, she was always pretty
violent, but she wasn't usually so sadistic.
% Yeah. An important qualifier.
allowing the computer inside of it to recognize the person by their
neural-signature. Into this port, Yuri inserted a pointed plug attached to a
small black disk with a short cable she connected to the port at her neck.
Once the plug was in, the computer in the door-lock hummed. Yuri explained
to Sakura, <It's a Neural Lockpick. The disk has a universal brain-pattern,
an engineered neu
% And more cut here.
The outer office was a wide circular room, with a sweeping view of
the compound and the surrounding eco-domes. Along the walls were pieces of
holographic audio/visual art, the placid nature scenes that all corporate
offices held; forest waterfalls, birds hopping on dewy branches, deer
walking gracefully through idyllic glades. All very nice, but each and every
one hid a potentially deadly trap for the unwary. Hidden inside the most
active parts of the pictures, and therefor the ones the eye was drawn to
most, were encoded messages in bitmap form, tiny streams of binary scrolling
across the surface of the image in nearly-microscopic size, that spooled
directly into the subconscious mind. These clever little messages would
travel along pre-existing synapses into the logic center of the person's
brain, and start to "convince" the unwitting reader that Fisher knew what
they were thinking, what they were planning. They would whisper that their
plots would fail, and everything that the
More missing here. I don't know what happened, but I definitely didn't get
this whole thing. They seem to be at the end of the paragraphs, though not
all of them.But enough, especially later. I won't bother mentioning it
anymore.
Kei interjected, <It gets better! Accompanying the datafile is a
Universal Locater number keyed to her personal wetware signature. The BTR
Security force has constant tabs on every agent in the facility.
% Makes sense. They seem that paranoid.
A computer bank in the BTR Security Center sparked into life.
FOREIGN SIGNAL LOCATED. AUTOMATED ANTI-COVERT INVASION DEFENSE PROGRAM
ACTIVATING IN SECTOR C-3.
% Oops.
Sakura popped the section of wall away and handed it to Yuri, who
held it in both hands while watching the hallway for activity. Using a floor
plan supplied by Kei and her hacking plus a hand-held super-sonic pulse
device, they had located a ventilation duct wide enough to fit through, an
air pipe about fourteen inches wide. While the prospect of flattening out
and flying in a space too tight to even qualify as being coffin-like didn't
appeal to Sakura, the idea of trying to shoot her way in appealed even less.
So, while Yuri stood lookout, she cut away a panel of wall over the duct
using a tiny electrical-arc cutting tool from the belt of devices she had
taken from the Tac/Int soldiers in the aqualogy.
% They did have a bunch of useful toys, didn't they?
Like a deadly shark striking, she pushed off of the wall at about
waist height and pulled her arms tight across her face, flying along the
ground at ankle height. She straightened out like a pencil and shot between
the legs of the guard on the left. The man registered emotion for the first
time as he started to turn, saying "What the fuck..?" The second guard
started to turn before realizing his mistake.
Having gained her opponent's back in an unexpected manner, Yuri went
to work. She shot up behind the guard on the left and grabbed his
half-turned head between her hands. A foot off of the ground, she snapped
his neck with a sharp twist and drove her right knee into the small of his
back, severing his spine several vertebrae lower at the same time. He died
without a sound, slumping to the ground limply. The second guard had more
time to react, and only received a glancing kick to the chest from Yuri's
left leg, rather than the windpipe-crushing blow she had intended. He did
not however avoid the four silenced bullets Sakura sent into his gun-arm,
neck, cheek and temple. There was a spray of blood as he pitched over and
landed with a thump. The entire conflict had taken less than seven seconds.
% An eternity. I thought they had dealt with them more quickly.
Sleet began running through his back-up plans in his head. Fisher
moved out from behind his desk to sit on the edge of it directly in front of
them. Sleet tried not to stare. He had never seen Fisher do anything so
casual, so...normal.
% That would be cause for alarm, all right.
It was with a conscious effort that Sleet refrained from nervously
clutching his hands into fists. Fisher was not playing, and he was not in
the semi-euphoric state of religious ecstasy he spent most of his time in.
>From underneath the deadly cunning, but still aging shell a demon had
emerged, a consciousness of lightning-fast wits and perceptiveness. The
Fisher that had clawed his way to near the very top of the BTR's political
heap was not dead after all, simply resting. Sleet wanted to run, to kill
him, to throw Mary at him and duck for cover. Like the essentially basic
lifeform he was, Sleet's danger sense was screaming at him, and he wanted to
escape. But it was too late. He sighed mentally and leaned back in his
chair. The only thing left was to wait for a moment of weakness to climb
through.
% Very nice description.
The duct, having long since made its case for why it should not be
made to hold two girls covered with intrusions gear, surrendered all hope
and gave way under their combined weight. The metal broke at the next
junction, spilling the girls out into the crawlspace below, the space Yuri
had been looking for on a blueprint she was unaware she had been reading
upside-down.
% Heh. Cute
Sleet had seen a lot of weird things in his day. Many of these things
left him wondering if he had seen right afterwards. A number of them had
something to do with the Dirty Pair, but this was of little consequence. The
point was, Sleet was no stranger to the bizarre. But this really took the
cake. Right at the point when Fisher should have been giving them their
death sentences, the ceiling exploded, and a blur of skin, ceiling material
and dust landed on the desk, and more importantly, on Fisher. Then things
got really weird.
% I would have to agree with that assessment.
Before things could proceed any further, a massive humming came into
being from somewhere outside the room. The doors exploded inward, twinned by
the windows smashing in. Sakura started at the sound, losing her focus for a
split-second. Time slowed down again. Mary grinned viciously and pulled the
trigger. Using the reflexes that a person can only call upon when about to
die, Sakura whipped her head to the side, receiving a stinging graze along
her temple. She reflexively returned a bullet, but shot wild, punching a
small hole through the girl's dress without hitting skin. Then her nemesis
was on her. The blond moved like a pitbull, even in the dress. She delivered
a stunning kick to Sakura's midriff, which Sakura barely managed to counter
with a toe-kick to the thigh that sent her opponent staggering backwards.
Using her moment of advantage, she bulled in, launching two snapping jabs at
her face. The first connected squarely, but Mary knocked the second aside
with her wrist and
% Argh! I hate this! Another cut
One of the ACIDs aimed its head at Yuri and spoke in a hollow
monotone. "CEASE ALL CODED TRANSMISSIONS AND RELINQUISH YOUR ARMS."
The others closed in, repeating in the same voice, "DO NOT MOVE, DO
NOT MOVE, DO NOT MOVE."
Sakura backed up against Yuri and asked, "Fight 'em?" Yuri nodded.
Sakura sighed. "I was afraid of that. They look pretty well armored. Hand to
hand?" Yuri nodded again. Sakura sighed once more. "I was afraid of that
too. Well, here we go." She set her gun down slowly. The robots moved
closer. Then, in a blur of action, she attacked with her partner.
And they're off.
High above, a small hatch in the belly of the Lovely Angel opened.
Protected and guided by the Angel's GM Field, an oblong object raced down
towards the planet's surface. It breached the stratosphere easily, still
protected by the field around it. As if magnetized to her, the object shot
down towards Kei at impossible speeds. Knowing what was coming, Kei casually
raised an arm. With an audible humming, the object rocketed down, stopping
without a micro-inch of drag a foot above Kei's hand, to settle there
comfortably, using the GM field to keep it up. Kei lovingly stroked The
Boomer, cooing to it like a favored pet.
% Hehehe. Very nice.
This settled, she strapped herself into the gun's firing harness,
took aim, and fired. There was a sound like thunder mixed with a car
exploding. Kei was yanked back twenty feet by the blast, even with her pack
compensating. Had it not been, she would now be tumbling end over end a good
mile away. Even so, it felt like both of her arms had been dislocated. She
grinned wider. This was fun!
% Yep. Good ole Kei
She clutched it to her chest and snapped. "Mine! Fuck off!"
He sighed. "Look, you can barely stand up. Let me carry the gun, so
at least one of us has a decent chance of potting anyone who shoots at us. I
refuse to die because you want to be selfish and stubborn."
After staring at him hard, Mary smiled and reversed the gun to hand
it to him. "Here, you big lunk. Honestly...." She turned away to look down
the staircase and said, "I know I'm not quite normal, but I think I have my
reasons...my mom and dad, they...aw, fuck it, it doesn't matter....the point
is, I really think you're okay Kevin. I mean, you're willing to keep with me
even though I know I scare you, and that sort of, y'know, means something to
me. I guess I'm trying to say...if you'll just be patient, I can...I can try
to change. Maybe. Okay?"
% He's a sucker if he believes her.
Sleet, pressing the gun to the side of her head, said quietly, "You'd
only slow me down. I have to get out alive. Besides, I can't help but think
you'd have done the same to me, given the chance. If...if it's any
consolation, I am sort of sorry. I...I think I was sort of falling in love
with you."
Mary nodded as a tear slipped from under one eyelid. "I..." She
whispered, "I know." Then there was an explosion and soundless white peace
and she was falling away from the railing and she was getting cold...
% See. He wasn't a chump after all.
The gun hit the metal stairwell with a clang. Sleet leaned against
the wall tiredly and looked down at Mary's body, so small and frail now, in
her bloody pink dress as a puddle of blood spread out under her head. Her
eyes were wide open and stared at nothing. "You would've done the same to
me..." Sleet whispered. For one of the rare moments in his life, one of less
than five, Sleet felt sick with himself, at what he did. He looked again at
the tiny body on the stairs and stepped over the puddle of blood and hurried
away. He wanted to die. Or maybe just kill everyone else everywhere. He
couldn't really decide.
% Then do both.
Kei could see with her heads-up display's image magnification a
pink-headed form in front of one of the ships. She grinned and put on the
final burst of speed she would need. She started forward, leaving the ACIDs
behind. Then, a new message popped up on the display. GRAVITY-REPULSION
SYSTEM BATTERY PACK AT 0% POWER. IF YOU WISH TO RECHARGE IT, PLEASE
INSERT...
The rest of the message became moot as Kei began rapidly falling. She
gasped and cursed at the same time. She was so close! Something hard and
cold grabbed her around the middle. She looked up into the eerie featureless
face of an ACID. Frantically, she sent a message to Yuri and Sakura. <Guys,
they've got me! Get me-> She was cut off as the ACID attached a small disk
to Kei's neck. The disk, a potent neural inhibitor, made Kei's body go slack
as all high-order functions were neutralized instantly. She watched
helplessly as the ACID turned and flew back towards the base carrying her
limp and unresisting body in one pair of its massive hands. She stared
frantically, unable to move a muscle, and prayed that they had gotten her
message and seen her approach. Otherwise, things were about to start sucking
badly
% Oops. Things do look rather bad,
Quite the cliffhanger. Already looking forward to more. Nice job on killing
Mary. It surprised me, since i thought there was still more to do with her.
But then again, she might be missed, but there's plenty of other exciting
things going on.
D.B. Sommer