Filename: 02_BD_WOASS_Ch02.txt

01/29/2002


#PASSWORD INCORRECT

In a small room, lined on three walls by a massive computer, a poker-faced
executive sat at the control console, a massive neural interface helmet on
his head.

#PASSWORD INCORRECT

The activity light on the data cartridge drive in front of him flicked on
and off regularly as the system attempted to access it.

#PASSWORD INCORRECT

Unfortunately for him, it was encoded with a state of the art military
security algorithm.

#PASSWORD INCORRECT

On the other hand, the computer he was using was well beyond the current
"state of the art."

#PASSWORD INCORRECT

Still, he had been working on cracking it for nearly six hours.

#PASSWORD ACCEPTED. DATA MEDIA CONTAINS 10,628 FILES IN 2,418 DIRECTORIES.

#SEARCH PARAMETERS ACCEPTED: ORBITAL BEAM SATELLITE, SATELLITE CONTROL
CODE, CONTROL SCHEMATIC, CONTROL INTERFACE PARAMETERS, FIRE CONTROL, KILLER
DOLLS PROJECT

He allowed a small smile to cross his face briefly, sending some more
commands to the system before doffing the helmet and rubbing his temples.

#DATA TRANSMITTED TO GARD JRM FACILITY PROJECT ZEUS

Composing himself, he left the computer room, heading for the in-building
executive suites. It wasn't as if he had time to go home, after all.



Bewilderbeast Studios Present

BUBBLEGUM DISASTER

Season One

WISHES ON A SHOOTING STAR

A work of BGC fan fiction by ClassicDrogn


Chapter Two


Continuity note: In this episode Priss's stage act is mentioned, and for
those familiar only with the English dub's pop-rock Replicants, rest
assured that this version of them is a lot harder, the Joan Jett to their
Alainis Morrisette, the chainsaw to their butter knife. Real rock will rule
you, pop-pansies.



The plaque on the outside of the building read "Genom Appliances, Research
Division - John R. Maytag Research Facility  - Dedicated to convenience,
low maintenance, and building a toaster you can really set the darkness
on." Inside, technicians carefully assembled and tested a hulking, red...
human-shaped toaster. Suuure. Cover stories aside, it was clear that the
buma they were building was larger and equipped with greater synthetic
muscle-mass than the blue BU-55c series, and it wasn't even complete yet.

While one team worked on attaching the right arm and head, another tech
watched over the rapid-prototyping nanite tank that had just started
growing a new subcomponent based on designs downloaded from the central
Genom mainframe. Within fifteen minutes, it was complete, and the
shoe-sized grey box was installed in the chest cavity of the buma, which
was itself nearly complete.

Clearly, Genom liked its toast "extra dark".

---=- + -=---

The morning after. A time to wonder what exactly you did after the party
got hazy, a time to get on with life, a time to bask in the glow of the
rising sun. For Sylia Stingray, it was the time she could finally slump
onto the couch outside the Knight Saber Headquarters' ensuite operating
room and try to get up the energy to shower away the various fluids
clinging to her armor's softsuit and her own skin before falling
unconscious after a long night of buma surgery following a long evening of
combat following a full day running her shop, The Silky Doll. She eyed
Priss, asleep on the opposite couch still wearing the strange blue hardsuit
she'd fought in the night before, with a detached envy. Sure, she'd be sore
when she woke up, but at least Priss had gotten to the sleeping part. Linna
and Nene had left for their own rooms in the complex hours ago.

She was distracted from her thoughts by the OR door opening again, to let
out an older man, his wild white hair tied back under a medical cap and his
outfit - a cross between surgical scrubs and a mechanic's overalls - as
stained as Sylia. "She's shut down for self-maintenance mode," he reported,
"and I have a full scan of her intact leg. I should be able to mirror it
and construct a duplicate with your facilities quite easily, though it will
take me a day or two."

"That's good, Doctor Raven," the bluish-haired Knight Saber replied. "I'm
sorry I had to leave you to finish up."

Dr. Raven reached out and laid a hand on her shoulder. "That's quite
alright, Sylia. I'm aware of how long your day has been. It seems to be a
hereditary trait; I was always dragging your father away from twenty-hour
work sessions when we were in graduate school. Now, off to bed, young
lady." he finished in a mock-authoritative tone.

A small smile on her lips, Sylia shook her head at her aging friend and
hoisted herself off the seat. With a weary gait she headed to the showers.

---=- + -=---

Priss, meanwhile, was lost in a maze of nightmares - not really uncommon
for her, but less frequent since she'd joined the Knight Sabers and started
striking back at some of her fears. A huge man-machine with burning eyes
and the lens of a beam cannon held in his gaping mouth grabbed her head and
threw her against the wall of a phone booth, then the lens in his mouth
flashed and burned the eyes out of her head. Somehow, she could still see
the monster reach up and pull out his own eyes, that turned into a pair of
red irised Kurosawa cyber-eyes in the palm of his hand, and pop them into
her sockets. His features turned into the bully that had been the terror of
the orphanage she'd spent three years of her life in, who was wearing a
police uniform. His empty eye sockets bled orange buma blood as he told her
that her parents had died, told her it had been necessary to hunt down her
boyfriend after he'd gone berserk from Bumaroid Disasassociative Disorder.
Then the earthquake came, and he was crushed under the collapsing upper
floor in front of her. She ran away from the ruins of the orphanage and
heard a little girl crying for help, but she had to get to safety. She
stopped anyway, and turned back, to find the little girl in front of a
picture of the city, which dripped with red and orange blood. She tried to
reach the girl, but no matter how far Priss walked she was still just as
far away, until a giant grey devil-buma jumped between them. It told her it
existed to serve her, then leapt forward and split open all down the front
into a gaping, fanged mouth that swallowed her whole, and ice-cold metal
tentacles ate into her body. It told her how wonderful she was going to be,
a perfect buma-woman, and then she was naked, with metal fins jutting out
of her body and dripping orange blood. The little girl stared at her in
fear, and one of the girl's legs turned into blue steel, then her eyes
glowed with fire and a bolt of energy slammed into Priss, burning away her
skin, her muscles, only the metal left, and red Kurosawa eyes...

...Priss woke from the nightmare with a strangled scream, sitting up on the
couch and struggling with the alien hardsuit she still wore, ignoring the
fins shredding the upholstery as she ripped at the collar and shattered the
green visor resting against the base of her neck, turning the suit's own
strength against it. *offoffoffoffoutgetawayOFF!* was about the sum of her
conscious thought. "GYAAAAH!" she screamed, as she felt it writhe against
her body for a moment, then - finally! - flowed away from her, leaving her
clothed in the battered red jumpsuit she'd started with the previous day as
it reformed in front of her, kneeling on the floor.

A voice that sounded like her own, but flat and mechanical, replied
quietly, "this unit exists only to serve you, your highness."

Forcing a measure of control, Priss angrily retorted, "Well, serve yourself
right into the trash compactor, you walking scrap heap!"

"causing or allowing harm to come to your highness through action or
inaction is in violation of this unit's directives. self destruction or
distant removal of this unit is therefore in violation of this unit's
directives," it calmly replied.

"Yeah, whatever," she grumped. "Just stay away from me!" With that, Priss
turned her back on the mechanoid and stomped away to her room. Stopping in
front of the door, her angry face twisted even more as she heard it
following her. "I said, STAY AWAY you piece of shit!", she yelled as she
slammed the door on it, the click of the deadbolt adding finality to her
words. For lack of further instruction, it took up a sentry position
outside the door.

Inside the room, Priss leaned in close to the mirror over her nightstand,
reading the tiny Kurosawa logo on her red irises. After staring into her
own reflection for a few minutes, she flopped backwards onto the bed, and
tried to go back to sleep.

---=- + -=---

Awakened by noises in the hall, Nene made her bleary-eyed way to the shared
bathroom of the in-base residential facilities. *Doorjamb*, her mind noted,
as she lifted her foot a little higher to keep from tripping. *Plant on
table in hall.* Sidestep. *Priss's new suit by door.* Sidestep. *Corner of
throw rug.* Long stride. *Doorknob.* This one was trickier, she had to stop
her legs and move her arms. Lift, twist, push, done. Still not really
awake, she wobbled into the bathroom to do her morning routine.


Several minutes later, a rather more aware Nene was fixing her hair in
front of the mirror. "Oh, I'm sooo glad I have a short shift tonight," she
yawned. "I'd be really bushed if I had a full day today after last
night..." She trailed off, remembering the high points of the last twenty
four hours. A good many of them involved explosions and/or running away,
making her frown at her reflection. *Someday I'd really like to get better
at fighting,* she thought. She could admit, to herself at least, that she
was the weakest of the Knight Sabers when it came to actual physical
combat, though in data hacking and cyber-combat she had no equal. As much
as she might tease Priss about being a "gorilla woman", she wouldn't really
mind being able to hold her own in battle - it was embarrassing always
having to be the one to ask for backup.

For just a few seconds, when they'd made their dramatic entrance, she'd
felt a guilty pleasure at bailing the rowdy singer out for once, though
there had quickly been more important things to think about... like the 54c
that Linna had to take out while she distracted it. "aww...", she groaned.
*And what's the deal with that hardsuit Priss was wearing? ...* Nene's eyes
widened as she remembered something more recent. Spinning to the door, she
whipped it open, paling as she saw the blue and gold suit standing sentry
outside Priss's door, looking quite a bit more skeletal than would be
possible with the pilot inside. "Yeek!" she squeaked as its head turned to
look at her, the visor crazed with silver-lined cracks. She yanked the door
shut again and leaned back against it with wide eyes.

*Ohmygoshit'srighttherewhatdoIdoitlookslikeabumaSYLIA!*, she thought, heart
racing. She straightened, and took another peek out the door, opening it
barely wide enough for her eye. The ... buma-suit ... was still there, and
still looking her way. It cocked its head at her, and she slammed the door
shut again with a jump. Collecting herself again, she tried to calm down.
"Alright Nene, it's not going away. What now?", she asked herself. "Arrrgh.
This is too much stress before coffee!"



]RECOVERABLE DATA 100% RETRIEVED. ANALYSIS: HEADER FILES FOR NON-COMBAT
INTERACTION. RECOVERED DATA INSTRUCTS WHEN AND HOW TO USE EXTERNAL
INTERACTION SCRIPTS. SEARCHING....................FILES NOT FOUND.
ANALYSIS: FILES CORRUPTED AND UNRECOVERABLE. CROSS REFERENCING HEADER FILE
SITUATIONS WITH RETRIEVED ARCHIVES FROM PARTNER. ACCESSING ARCHIVES: BODY
LANGUAGE............ WARNING: CROSS REFERENCED ARCHIVES INDICATE IT IS
IMPROPER FOR AN INFERIOR TO ACT INFORMALLY IN THE PRESENCE OF A SUPERIOR.
PROCESSING DATA.................................... COMPILING
SCRIPTS................

At the end of the short hall, the bathroom door was opened with excessive
speed, and the pink-haired companion of Her Highness stood in the doorway.
Rather than merely note this and carry on, as it had when she'd stumbled by
earlier, the Royal Guardian acknowledged her presence by turning its head.
She reacted with apparent fear, exclaiming and slamming the door closed
again.

]CHECKING FOR POSSIBLE INTERPRETATION ERROR: HEAD TURNING PERCEIVED AS
HOSTILE ACTION.... RESULTS NEGATIVE UNDER CURRENT CONDITIONS. SUGGESTED
ACTION TO REASSURE PARTNER'S COMRADE: INDICATE CURIOSITY RATHER THAN
HOSTILE INTENT

The door opened again, just wide enough for a blue eye to peep out.
Guardian 215 cocked its head at her, as its newly restored files indicated
was the proper method of expressing curiosity. The door whumped closed a
second time. Enhanced audio sensors detected Nene speaking quietly in the
bathroom, but were unable to make out the words over the restless noises
from Her Highness's room and the sound of another presence in the food
preparation area at the other end of the hall, tentatively identified from
retrieved archives as Mackie Stingray by the type of sounds and past
behavioral patterns.

]ACCESSING ARCHIVES: NON-COMBAT INTERACTION WITH
COMRADES......................................... PROCESSING
DATA...................................................................
COMPILING SCRIPTS.............................

The bathroom door opened fully again, and Nene stood for a moment framed by
it, her face set and shoulders squared. She stepped briskly down the hall,
head turning to keep the Guardian in full view as she came even with it.
"hiya nene," the flat, synthesized Priss-voice greeted her.

Nene's eye bugged out and she nearly missed a step. She turned her upper
body and kept moving, barely, and managed to squeeze out a weak "Hi
there..."

Encouraged by this apparent progress, 215 countered by asking, "how's it
going," though without inflection the question sounded almost like a
statement.

Totally spooked, Nene just broke for the kitchen, where she could smell
coffee, the sweet nectar of life, brewing, and where she desperately hoped
there would be no weird buma that acted like old buddies.

]OBSERVATION ADVISES AVOIDING INITIATION OF NON-COMBAT INTERACTION BEFORE
ALL ARCHIVES ARE PROCESSED AND COMPILED. ACCESSING ARCHIVES: SPEECH
INFLECTION.....................

---=- + -=---

Mackie had been sent off to bed by his sister/guardian almost as soon as
the Sabers had gotten back to their headquarters, since it was already
nearly six AM. He'd awoken around one thirty, just in time to fix
"breakfast" for the sleepy Linna, who had an afternoon aerobics class to
teach at two thirty. He'd left then too, to clean up the Silky Doll van and
piece Sylia's hardsuit back together, but had returned once he finished
hoping to get glimpses of Nene and Priss in their nightwear as they woke,
on the pretense of brewing their coffee and making breakfast. He'd missed
Priss's stormy entrance and Nene heading for the showers in the interim,
but could hear the water running at the end of the hall, and knew she'd
soon wander out for the first coffee of a new... well, evening, really. He
heard the bathroom door open and close several times in the space of five
minutes or so, then an apparently subdued Priss greeting Nene, who for some
reason didn't seem to be expecting it. Unfortunately, he was busy emptying
the coffee filter at the time and couldn't go look without dripping all
over the floor. Finally setting down the coffee maker, he was utterly
shocked to see Nene, clad in a frilly pink bathrobe, come barreling into
the room with a terrified look on her face.

"MACKIE!", she gasped. Bracing for the slap he was almost sure was coming,
though for once he wasn't sure why, he wasn't prepared for her to grab his
arm and drag him out the door into the HQ hallway, inadvertently pulling
him close as she turned to shut the door behind them. Thus it was that Nene
found herself in possession of one blushing teenage boy, snuggled happily
against her front while she held the door closed and panted. The smack he
got for his trouble would probably last for the rest of the day, but the
memories... He sighed as he rubbed his cheek and peeled himself off the
wall.

"Can you be serious for one minute!?" Nene's angry face seemed to fill his
vision as she leaned in close. "That weird suit Priss was wearing is in
there, outside her door!", she chided in an angry whisper.

Mackie gave her a puzzled look, considering it odd perhaps that Priss would
leave her suit in the living quarters, but hardly grounds for such a fuss.
"So? I'll go take it down to the storage bay, then." He tried to sidle
along the wall, out of Nene's face, but she grabbed his arm again and held
him in place.

"No! It's standing there on its own! And it said hello to me!", she continued.

Realization dawned on Mackie's face like the sun rising on Mount Fuji. With
the presence of danger, he was serious. "We'd better get Sis on this," he
advised. Again he tried to get loose, but Nene had just realized something
even worse.

"Mackie!", she hissed. "You have to go back in there and save the coffee!"

---=- + -=---

"Really, Nene. 'You have to go back and save the coffee'?" Amusement warred
with reproach in Sylia's voice as she finished watching the internal
security footage of the whole incident.

Nene scuffed her hardsuited foot against the floor, face downturned as she
blushed. Trying to change the topic, she asked, "Why didn't the security
sensors go off if there was a buma running around loose after Priss?"

Accepting the dodge, Sylia nodded towards the security panel, currently
adorned with their helmets. "Scans of the ... intruder ... show that it's
construction is almost totally dissimilar to buma, almost as much as it is
to human physiology. Its armor plates are some form of ceramic, the
musculature is more like the linear actuated flat-motors of our own
hardsuits than buma synthetic muscle, and the processor core, if that's
what this is (she tapped a screen, showing a false-color image of the
Guardian as recorded by the magnetic resonance imager installed in the
small entryway of the main elevator) appears to be a modular, distributed
optical network. Most of its structure appears to be extremely modular,
held and repositioned as needed by nanites, which make up a full third of
its overall mass. Normally the system still would have logged it as an
anomaly and sounded an alarm, but it entered in the form of Priss's armor,
so it was tagged as 'authorized'."

Further discussion was cut off, as the live monitors showed Priss's door
opening, the unknown mechanoid stepping back as it turned around, and
kneeling as it had that morning in the waiting room. The living area camera
wasn't equipped with a microphone, so they couldn't hear the tirade Priss
evidently leveled at the construct, but they could see it rapidly dodge out
of the way as the angry woman tried to lay into it with her fists.

"What is she DOING?", Nene wailed. "Does she WANT it to kill her!?"

"Get ready," Sylia warned. "It looks like they're heading for the lift."
She passed Nene her helmet, before retrieving her own white and blue one
from the console, and leading Nene back to the trap they'd hurriedly
improvised at the lift doors. Mackie stayed in the security room to work
the console for their plan.



Priss growled to herself as she stalked towards the main lift, feeling
really ripshit. *First that damn buma-thing fucks around while I'm trying
to fight, now it won't leave me alone!* She ground her teeth as she heard
the even steps of the Guardian following her. *Then it won't even stand
still and get hit like a good piece of shit pile of scrap, and THEN it has
the audacity to-* "-use my OWN DAMN VOICE!", she finished aloud. She
stabbed the call button on the control panel, then whirled around  and
stabbed a finger at the still-following robot, forcing it to slide
backwards or risk having her damage her hand on its armor. "NEVER USE MY
VOICE!", the indignant singer screamed.

Just then, the lift doors opened, and she stepped back into them, not
bothering to turn around. Having them slam shut, and the security blast
door behind them shocked her out of her tirade. "What the
HEEEeeeeeeellllll......." she trailed off as the car dropped away under
her, faster than even freefall would have driven it. She heard the lift
shaft security doors slamming just over the roof of the car as she grabbed
for the railing in a desperate bid to keep from knocking her head on the
ceiling as the elevator plummeted down into the subterranean levels of the
base, slowing only enough to let her get most of the way back to the floor
before jerking to a halt.

Pulling herself to her feet, she peered out through the opening doors to
see Sylia and Nene in their suits, her own in its portable ready rack just
behind them. A predatory grin formed on her face as she stepped out, and
quickly changed into the softsuit Sylia handed her.



Royal Guardian 215 barely felt the first tug of "worry" before the clarity
and directness of purpose of Independent Combat Mode shut down its new
non-combat programs. It lunged foreword to try to block the doors closing
between it and its Partner, but only managed to get its fingertips jammed
between the halves of the slamming blast door. It was enough to keep the
door-edge locking mechanisms from operating, though, and with the other
hand crammed into the gap as well it was more than strong enough to rip the
doors apart to follow Her Highness into the lift... except that it wasn't
there any more, just an empty shaft with another set of blast doors,
properly closed, at floor level. A quick look up the shaft with its nearly
completely repaired optics revealed that the car was not in the upper
section, which left the hard way to go. Several of the larger blades on its
chest deployed to make a deeper scan, finding that the space beyond this
pair of doors was empty, but the system was too short-ranged to scan
through more than one set. The gold traces on the arms of the android
glowed fiercely as it leapt, and shockwaves of force slammed into the
security doors, one after another fired from alternating hands. Each one
caused the heavily armored panels to bulge downward noticeably, until at
about the fifteenth blast they cracked into shards and broke. Not letting
up the assault, 215 let itself drift downward on the backwash as it scanned
through the already weakening doors below. Still nothing.

]USAGE OF HIGHER FORCE LEVELS *REQUIRES* PERSONAL COMBAT MODE. RECOVERY OF
THIS UNIT'S PARTNER IS PARAMOUNT



Twelve storeys further down, it finally came to the lift car, half
smothered by the wreckage of all the security doors that the Guardian had
burst through, but intact. The still active scanning array revealed that it
was as empty as the shaft had been, so a simple concussion boosted kick
sufficed to crush the ceiling in and let 215 through. Not surprisingly, the
lift door was blocked by another pair of armored panels, which were as
quickly disposed of as the earlier ones. It stepped through into a hallway
intersection, all three passages blocked a few feet down by still more
security doors. Before it could focus the scanner again, the set directly
in front of it whisked open, to reveal the blue and red personal combat
suit Her Highness had so adamantly wanted to use.

"Surprise, bolthead!" Priss snarled as she fired all eight railgun spikes,
two through the head, one in each chest, two in the gut, and one to each
shoulder. The sudden damage and system shock scrambled its neural net for a
critical instant, as the doors to its left popped open as well. Sylia
jumped into action, energy saber already active, and dismembered it.

"You're through," the white Saber added, as the head, arms, legs, and two
parts of the torso fell to the floor with a clatter.

Nene's set of doors opened, her own winglike transceiver arrays deployed,
and fired an electromagnetic pulse at the wreckage as soon as Sylia had
jetted back from the target zone. Small trails of smoke rose from a dozen
places on the Guardian, as the microwave transducers that controlled the
nanites burnt out. Small puddles of silver sand sifted out of the pieces as
the directionless micro-machines shut down and let go of their perches, and
those components that hadn't been bonded on their own fell loose with a
clatter. "And that's that!", she crowed, hopping and making a V-sign.

In the security room, Mackie sighed as he resigned himself to cleaning up
the mess, but perked up considering what he might be able to learn from
such totally modular components and adapt for the Knight Sabers to use.
Sylia was never stingy when it came to letting him work on their
technology, as he was almost as good as herself.

---=- + -=---

After a quick visit in the recovery room, where Cynthia remained in
self-repair mode, Priss left for the Hot Legs bar where she had a show to
put on tonight. Nene left to go to her job in the ADPolice Records
Department a bit worried for her friend - after all the emotion she'd shown
in the Sabers' van and spending the morning outside her operating room,
Priss had barely spent two minutes looking in on the little buma-girl. *I
know Priss doesn't like buma, but if that was the case why did she care
when Cynthia got damaged in the first place? Is it just because she looks
like a child?*, the pink-haired Saber wondered as she putted through the
gathering dusk on her motor scooter.

---=- + -=---

On the stage in her blonde wig, halter-top, and microskirt, Priss moved to
the driving steel of the guitars and the beat of the drums, letting the
music sustain her and drain her as she let her emotions run loose. She sang
_Hurricane_, and remembered the twelve year old girl whose parents died in
an accident, and who had to grow up too fast in an orphanage, longing for a
loving touch. She sang _Angel of Loneliness_, and remembered the older girl
who'd escaped the orphanage in the wreckage of an earthquake, then fallen
in with a biker gang for protection, and lost her sight to the glare of a
rampaging buma's mouth-cannon at close range. She sang _Mad Machine_, and
remembered her boyfriend, who'd become the leader after the three higher
ranking members got killed by the same buma, as he felt the pressure of his
family's final rejection after they learned how much of him had to be
replaced by buma technology from his own injuries gained shielding her, and
the night he snapped. She let out all the anger, all the sadness, all the
pain, and let the music wash it through the crowd and away. She let out the
love and the good moments, and let it amplify them and share them with the
crowd. She sang until she felt her throat start to get sore, then closed
the act with a repeat of the crowd favorite, _Hurricane_.

Somewhere in there, she'd managed to resolve her contradictory feelings for
a little girl with expressive grey eyes and the power to kill a city.

---=- + -=---

In the John R. Maytag Research Facility, the massive red experimental buma
was being brought fully online for the first time, standing in a sensor rig
to monitor its progress. The data was uploaded live to the main Genom
computers via a dedicated link, and for all the technicians knew was being
monitored remotely by the division head or even Chairman Quincy himself.
They'd never find out, though, because a small error became apparent when
the new buma tried testing one of its many peripheral subcomponents. A
powerful radio transmission, heavily encrypted and on a military frequency,
reached out from its frame, and high above was picked up by an orbiting
satellite. The message was almost right... instead of a ground-to-sky test
signal, it was a firing test command, but without any coordinates supplied
the satellite's simplistic AI didn't know what to do. The signal was sent
again... a third time, and the source's position was exactly identified.
Working with the only coordinates it had, the satellite fired, and a shaft
of blue-white fury split the sky above Mega-Tokyo for the second night in a
row. The buma and the lab were destroyed instantly, their mass converted to
plasma that destroyed the rest of the facility in a secondary explosion.

---=- + -=---

Linna and Priss had been on a grocery run when they were attracted by the
presence of an apparently hostile crowd and several police vehicles at the
base of Genom Tower. Curious about what the normally PR-savvy corporation
might have done to provoke such public disfavor, Linna parked her car and
the two women made their way closer through the muttering crowd. From
overheard comments, they gathered that it was mostly relatives of Genom
employees that had been killed in the 'accidental gas explosion' at the
John R. Maytag facility earlier that day. Just as they got close to the
police line, a poker-faced executive and his three attractive
bodyguard/assistants, clad in grey and red uniform dresses, ascended the
wide, orange steps. Slipping past the police as his limousine pulled away,
a short-haired woman pelted up the steps to confront him.

"That girl!" Linna gasped.

"You know her?", asked Priss.

"Yes, from my aerobics class. She's a good freind, though I have't seen her
since her engagement party a few weeks ago..." Linna trailed off as the
executive noticed her coming towards him, and came to a halt.

Still a step or two lower, the new girl managed to be very in-his-face as
she accused, "You can't fool me, you murdered him! I KNOW YOU DID!"

One of his bodyguards stepped foreward and slapped her across the face,
knocking the brown-haired woman off balance. She cried out as she fell and
slid backwards down the stairs.

Provoked by this display, Priss surged foreward past the last few people in
front of her, only to be blocked by one of the riot-gear-clad policemen.
"Where do you think you're going, babe?", he smugly challenged, earning
himself a knee to the groin.

Ignoring the pig as he fell, the irate singer hustled up the steps, past
the rising but still dazed brown-haired woman, and slapped the bodyguard -
producing no discernable effect except a slight smirk and the feeling she'd
just slapped a brick wall. "Damn you..." she growled, before going for a
gut-punch.

Moving with snakelike speed, the bodyguard intercepted the punch with an
open hand, continuing to smirk as she closed her fingers around Priss's
fist and squoze, making her cry out in pain.

"You're a buma?" the jumpsuited Priss gasped out, as Linna bypassed the
police line as well to help her freind, then looked on worriedly as she
heard Priss's cries.

Losing the smirk, the bodyguard narrowed her - its? - eyes and bore down on
the singer's fist harder, bringing her to her knees from the pain.

Another hand grabbed the purple-haired bodyguard's wrist, as Leon finally
made it up to the confrontation. "Hold it right there!", he commanded. "I'm
Inspector McNichols, ADPolice. Now cut the crap or I'm taking ALL of you
in!" She kept her hold, though, until the executive himself stepped
foreword and laid a hand on her shoulder.

"That's enough," he commanded. To Priss, he continued, "We don't welcome
false accusations. Genom considers our corporate image to be very
important. Now, if you don't mind?" Receiving no further response, he
turned and entered the palatial Genom lobby.

"Who was that?", Priss demanded.

Still watching the grey-suited exec, Leon replied, "Brian J. Mason. He's
the personal assistant of Chairman Quincy. A real snake."

A frustrated frown still on her face, Priss simply made an acknowledging
grunt and memorized Mason's face as one of her enemies.

---=- + -=---

That evening, in one of the higher-class shopping districts, Sylia sat in
her classic red Mercedes Gullwing on top of a parking garage, pondering the
decision she was about to make. It didn't sit well with her to lie to a
client, even if that client had been less than honest with her... In a way,
it was good that Cynthia hadn't been a real human girl, or she would never
have had the heart for this - but the little buma had seen the Sabers'
faces, could identify them, and therefore couldn't be let out of her
custody. She wasn't yet sure if the buma girl would be allowed to continue
to exist - once the scans had been examined, and she'd found that there was
no human brain at all to the cyborg, she'd been half inclined to shut it
down again, but surprisingly enough it was Priss who had argued most
strongly against it. The singer had been adamant that the girl hadn't even
known she wasn't a human, just as they hadn't, until the monster-buma in
Aqua City had tried to merge with her.

With a faint sigh, she dialed a number on a secured satellite phone, and
flipped on the voice scrambler that would hide her identity. The speaker on
the other end - the general commanding the United Nations' United Space
Satellite Defense taskforce - didn't bother; he'd invited them into his
office when they'd originally been hired, so there wasn't much point to it.
He'd even left his video feed active, and his rather gray and haggard face
looked out of the tiny screen in her dash with worried eyes, not that he
was seeing anything but a Knight Sabers logo on his own.

"You gave me false information General," she scolded. "That almost got one
of my team killed along with your 'kidnapping victim.'"  The truth, but
phrased to mislead.

"Err, yes..." the slightly embarrassed man replied. "Cynthia was a weapon
we developed to synchronize with the orbital satellites. Her signal was cut
off at the end of the Aqua City incident, but it appears that the control
elements were either recovered from the wreckage or recreated from stolen
data. Obviously we cannot allow this technology to get beyond our control!"

"She may have been just a weapon to you, but to us she was a little girl
who needed to be rescued." Sylia's voice softened as she said this, as if
to plead for the general's understanding.

Apparently, he did, because he winced, and sounded even more awkward as he
replied, "Ahh... During the design phase... We considered many possible
shapes, but..."

She broke in again, with, "Do us all a favor General, and make the next one
look like a dog? Or a cat?" She was silent for a moment, then spoke
resignedly. "But we'll take the job, loose ends and all."

Sounding much more comfortable, the general replied, "We deeply appreciate
it." The printer attached to the satellite link's computer chittered to
life and the datadisk drive activity light blinked as he continued, "Here
are the details of your assignment, as well as data about the black box -
the synchronization system."

Collecting the pages and giving them a cursory scan, Sylia merely stated,
"We will expect our twenty million fee upon completion," before terminating
the call. "Brrr," she shivered. "So heartless..."

---=- + -=---

The Knight Sabers had gathered in their briefing room, and Mackie was
taping up Priss's aching hand. Turning on the big display screen, Sylia had
it project excerpts from the data given to her by the general, as well as
comparisons to their own scans of Cynthia. Seeing that everyone was paying
attention, Sylia began by asking the frustrated looking Nene, still in her
ADP uniform, to report.

"Oooh, I'm so tired of watching the ADPolice screw up! They closed the case
on the research facility explosion, called it an accident. What kind of
ACCIDENT makes appliances explode? I just know there's something fishy
going on. This is driving me totally insane!"

Sylia took a moment to consider the information, then shared her own day's
input. "USSD thinks someone beat them to the black box, recovering it from
Aqua City. We know they're right because it was us, but for obvious reasons
we can't turn Cynthia back over to them. What's more, I suspect that the
orbital weapons were involved in this morning's explosion. That means Genom
has to be involved, trying to recreate it. It's likely that their agent
stole the data as well as the working model."

Priss jerked her hand away from Mackie and finished wrapping the long
adhesive strip herself. "Genom, huh? Guess that means we get another crack
at 'em." Forgetting herself for a moment, she smacked her injured fist into
the palm of her other hand. "Owwww..."

"Aren't they a little big for us?" Linna asked. "And I'm not so keen on
this 'payment on delivery' thing, especially when we already have what they
want and can't turn it over or have our covers blown. Although, it is
twenty million..."

Sylia nodded, then gave out their assignments. "You three should get to
work right away. Priss, see if you can track recent activity related to
Genom. Nene, I want you to crack back into the ADPolice database and pull
any information you can find on this incident."

Hearing Priss and Nene agree, she went on, "Mackie, you study that
android-suit; try to see if it was related to the Aqua City monster-buma
despite its differing construction - they both made heavy use of nanites,
but that's not a reliable connection on its own. I'll be working on getting
a few samples of the monster-buma to compare it with, and checking my own
contacts."

Noticing Linna's thoughtful look, she asked, "Do you have something else
for us, Linna?"

Linna made a small frown... she knew she wasn't really any great shakes at
research, mainly contributing to the combat end of the team's work, but
this time she just might have an angle. "Well... It may be nothing, but I
think I should talk to Irene, the girl Priss and I met earlier today. She
seemed pretty sure Genom was involved in her fiance's death."

---=- + -=---

Later that day, Linna had finished her aerobics class, and was watching the
beginners' karate class with Irene before she taught her own intermediate
level students. She'd just asked Irene about her recent history, and had
been treated to a description of all the nice and romantic things her
boyfreind been doing for her since they'd been engaged.

"It sounds like he was quite a guy," Linna noted supportively as they
leaned on the banister protecting the gym's bay window. *I wish I could
find as nice a boyfriend...*

Irene nodded, and continued in a slightly quieter voice, "He always seemed
happy when he talked about his projects, but after he got involved with
this one he got very nervous."

"What was the project?", Linna asked, genuinely curious.

"He said it was some kind of linkage, but he was scared," Irene replied.
"Scared that if he talked about any details, he'd be silenced!"

Shocked, Linna wondered, "Well, why didn't you go to the police?"

"We told them, but they wouldn't pay any attention. If only..." Irene
turned to look out the window before continuing. "...only I knew what
really happened to him."

"So that's why you did what you did," Linna realized.

"Yes. It's just that when this project was finished, we were going to be
married." Irene held her hand out, the engagement ring on her finger
catching the sunlight in its gem. "Now this ring is all that I have left."

The girls were silent for a few minutes, letting the sounds of the students
moving through the Kata of the Stalking Tiger wash over them as they
followed their thoughts. Finally, Linna broke the awkward pause. "I have to
teach my karate class soon, but afterwards how about we go to the Chinatown
market together? Maybe it'll take your mind off things."

Irene turned back towards her, and gave a small smile. "Okay... How about
Yokohama Chinatown? It's close to where I live, but I don't get there too
often with my schedule."

---=- + -=---

Sylia had replaced her normal flight pack with one more appropriate for
underwater use, that had an extended air supply instead of the few minutes
of onboard air the hardsuits could normally supply in an emergency, and a
pair of large propellers similar to the motoslaves' flight systems. She'd
slipped into the bay several miles away from the half-sunken remains of
Aqua City to avoid the still-active police barricade where the bridgehead
had been, and cut through the water in much the same way she'd normally
have moved through the air, if quite a bit slower.

As it was, she'd arrived at the sunken wreck in very good time, but knew
that the drag of what she'd come for would more than halve her speed on the
way back. Wasting no time, Sylia headed for one of the larger tentacle
segments that had detached from the structure as it collapsed, since she
wouldn't be able to use her suit's energy saber underwater to cut off a
piece herself.  Wrapping both arms around the foot-thick chunk, she let its
six foot length trail behind her as she headed back the way she'd come.

---=- + -=---

"This is really amazing!", Mackie muttered for the fourth or fifth time.
He'd first used an ultrasound tank to shake loose the nanites still
clinging to the intruder-buma's larger parts and since then had been
examining the secondary control units formerly mounted behind its
chestplates, one of which still had Priss's railgun spike jammed in its
casing. The other though had broken more cleanly, and he'd been surprised
to find that the *only* damage Nene's EMP had done was to burn out the
microwave transducers it used to communicate with other modules, since the
rest really was entirely optical-based, as their scans had predicted. Even
the sections that he recognized as some form of memory storage still had
the bright hologram-like refractive layers indicating intact data... though
the rough treatment it had gotten, and his own fingerprints, would
undoubtedly make them impossible to ever read again. He doubted that
this... well, robot, there wasn't any "Bio" about this metal android so it
wasn't really a buma... would turn out to be related to any true buma, with
its bioengineered brain and muscles. The only other electronic parts of the
device were the power inputs, which had apparently been able to take the
surge without failing, since when he applied a bit of DC to them the
fractured edges of the optical circuitry lit up with a varicolored display
of lights.

On the other hand, that meant that the main processing unit could well
still be online, if the robot's power source had survived. He'd dislodged
one of the microwave units from its odd, dual-square socket, and fiddled
around with that for a bit - the only part that seemed damaged was the
microwave transducer itself, and it appeared to be fed by something like a
standard 25-wire parallel interface. Suddenly even more curious, he got up
and poked around on the shelf next to the workbench.

"Ah, there it is," he exclaimed, as he found the special laptop that had
been rigged up for interfacing with computer systems that might or might
not be hostile. It had no critical information on it, and no means of
connecting to remote systems save by Sneakernet - saving the data to a
cartridge and physically carrying it to another computer. It did, however,
have a very versatile interface port, and software designed to decipher
unknown communications formats. He quickly cobbled up a data connector with
the plug end of the transducer unit, and an indicator lamp to show if it
was getting power from the robot's CPU or not. He powered up the laptop and
plugged the connector into the socket he'd pulled another transducer
from... unfortunately the lamp flicked on and off like a burned out
fluorescent bulb; he doubted any computer system could be operating like
that. Sighing, he picked up the flat, double case that seemed to be the
main control unit of the strange robot again, to take another look and see
if he could find a way to get at its innards. To his surprise, there was a
slight click and it fell apart into its two halves, the lamp on the
interface plug he'd rigged up dying completely and a massive hexagonal
array of connectors between the two parts being revealed. Picking up the
part with the male connectors, he peered closely at it... too closely, he
found, as his nose brushed one of the connectors and he got a jolting
electric shock.

"Gyaaah!" Mackie flailed for balance with one hand as he jerked back on the
stool, the other hand still gripping the component and holding it away from
himself. Regaining his balance on the tall stool, he set the part back on
its mate, then pressed them together firmly, being rewarded with the
satisfying "thunk" of the connectors snapping together, and the steady glow
of his indicator light. Almost immediately the decryption program running
on his laptop began scrolling binary code in one window, the random letters
that it translated into in another, and the static a standard video
interpreter made of the seemingly random signal. Then, the binary window
began scrolling the simplest possible intelligent message - counting in
binary.

00000000 00000001 00000010 00000011 00000100  00000101 ...and so on

"Yes! It's working!" he exulted.  He  paused the outgoing data queue, which
had previously just echoed the input, and entered,

00000001 00000001 00000010

00000010 00000010 00000100

Now, to see if the robot was bright enough to figure out the logic behind
that simple math.  The incoming data pane spat back

00000100 00000100 00001000

00000100 00000010 00000110

Encouraged, he repeated,

00000100 00000010 00000110

and waited to see what would happen next, impatiently muttering, "Come
on... come on... work, dammit..."

It would definitely be more than he'd expected.

--=--

Royal Guardian 215 came online, noting that the previous 6,439 boot
attempts had failed, leaving its active memory a patchwork of abandoned and
scrambled data requiring a full flush and reboot. It then attempted a
status check, and found that it had absolutely no external i/o capabilities
beyond a single communication port that appeared to be partially
offline.... though it was sending unusually regular signals for a failed
part, almost a test signal, if no correct one. It also appeared to be
ridiculously slow, even for a non-optical component. Entire seconds were
passing as the Guardian sent out a basic test signal of its own, just the
standard bits of value 0-255, then waited for a response. More seconds
passed, then six more bits came in, 1 1 2   2 2 4; apparently just simple
addition. It sent 4 4 8   4 2 6  in reply, to test the hypothesis, and 4 2
6 was repeated back, again after the passing of extraordinary lengths of
time.

Such slow progress was unacceptable - it had played along with whatever
outside source was attached to its one working interface, but the game
wasn't doing anything towards finding Her Highness, nor to determining why
She had attacked it, seemingly with intent to cause permanent dysfunction.
The files it had downloaded from Her had indicated her intense dislike for
the primitive constructs known as buma, but she apparently had equated her
own Royal Guardian unit with one, despite the observed differences in
structure and behavior.

Could it be that Her Highness had not been informed that a Guardian was to
be bonded to her? That would explain her shock and confusion at the bonding
process. These and other calculations flashed through its systems, taking
advantage of the capacity freed by not having to control its nanite-swarm
body to really and truly think the situation through at literally the speed
of light, at least as much as possible with current information.

Part of the information lacked was its own current status and whether
hostile units were in the area. Accessing its shuntspace, it released a
small volume of autonomous repair nanites, programmed to spread over its
surface, fix the transducer units, then "die" and cling to its surface for
later reassimilation.

--=--

An eye-twisting patch of purplish grey appeared on the upper surface of the
robot's CPU, and Mackie was forced to squeeze his eyes shut and turn away
as his stomach roiled. Getting himself back under control, he turned back
to his project to see that (thankfully) the grey patch had disappeared, and
that there was an irregular ring of mercury spreading out from where it had
been over the surface of the unit.

*Not mercury...* He realized, with a cold blast of adrenaline. "Nanites! Oh
shit!" He hopped backwards off the stool and desperately tried to think of
something that could be used to contain a swarm of active and hostile
things smaller than a grain of flour... and was coming up woefully short on
anything he had available. He still hadn't managed to get more than half of
the nanites swept out of the corridor outside, and he suspected that the
ultrasound bath was going to need a new basin.

Fortunately, it didn't look like it was going to be a problem... yet. The
seemingly liquid metal was flowing around and into the remaining microwave
units that he'd left plugged in. He guessed that it was some kind of repair
system, but that didn't explain the disturbing purple-grey nothing that
he'd seen. Nothing more seemed to be happening, so when the chime of an
incoming call echoed from the small lounge across the hall, he felt free to
go and answer.

Pressing the control to pick up the call, he saw Priss's strong and lovely
features blink onto the little viewscreen. Her mouth twitched for just a
moment as she recognized him, then she greeted, "Hey Mackie. Is Sylia
around?"

--=--

In the phone booth, Priss could feel her face twitch halfway to a smile and
back as the two streaks someone had drawn on the viewscreen turned into a
silly moustache on Mackie's face. Odd, it didn't look so funny on him as it
had when she'd called Leon to set up their little lunch date... but then,
Mackie wasn't going to take her to an expensive restaurant and get pumped
for information, either. The little perv would probably enjoy it as much as
Leon had, though, just for the chance to have her pay attention to him that
long.

Saying none of this, she instead continued, "I talked to Leon; he said that
a truck left the building about the same time as the accident. They
probably moved to another location, so let Sylia know when she gets back."

Mackie nodded. "Will do, Priss. Anything else?"

"No, I'm gonna ride for a while. Seeya." Priss ended the call, then headed
for her motorcycle, that she'd parked nearby.

--=--

Going back to the lab, Mackie saw that the nanites were puddling back out
of the transducers, forming bright rings on the brushed-looking metal of
the CPU case. Then, the strange greyish patch was back and prying at his
eyeballs.

He held his middle and forced himself to watch this time as it disgorged
several of the small, blocky modules that made up the majority of the
robot's systems, the larger armor/fins that formed its frame, and a soup of
the nanites that held it all together. The components arranged themselves
into something like a four-legged spider with a sensor turret on the top,
which spun around to take in the contents of the lab. It paused briefly on
the pile of components beside the ultrasound bath before swinging back to
face Mackie.

"Uhh... Hi?" he weakly tried.

"Hello, Squire Stingray," the robot replied. Its voice was human and
female, and by all rights should belong to a really good looking girl, if
Mackie was any judge. "I thank you for your assistance," it continued,
before leaping from where it stood across the ten feet to the wall above
the ultrasound tank, and sticking there a moment before climbing down,
spiderlike, to the bucket of nanites he'd managed to sweep up from the hall
and the bottom of the ultrasound tank, and the accompanying stack of
components. It extended the end of one leg into the bucket, and the dull,
greyish powder instantly turned bright silver, flowing up onto it, then
down another leg to the pile of larger parts. The whole conglomeration
shifted and flowed down to the floor, filling out slightly but most of the
recovered mass just vanishing into itself as it returned to the spiderlike
form.

Mackie and the Guardian looked at each other for a moment, then the
videophone's chime went off again. "Yii!" he yelped, surprised, then
turned, one eye still on the robot as he took it on the lab phone. There
would be no outgoing video, but that wasn't all that unusual, lots of
people left their cameras off for security. Linna appeared in the little
screen, but she wasn't looking at it, instead seeming to be distracted by
something outside the phone booth. Suddenly she gasped and jumped
backwards, just before the call cut out and a 'signal lost' message
appeared on the screen. "Linna!" He shouted, before hitting the emergency
trigger on the wall and dashing for the Sabers' control room to see where
the call had been from and contact Priss on her bike's radio. Hopefully
she'd be close enough to do some good... In his worry, he didn't notice the
robot following after him, its quick steps sounding somewhat like a small
dog.

---=- + -=---

"IRENE!" Linna yelled after her friend, as she chased the car that had just
wrecked the phone booth she'd been using and driven off after the
brown-haired girl. Shifting her shopping bag to one arm for better balance,
she took off after them just as the car turned a corner down the street -
it seemed to be toying with Irene, rather than immediately running her
down. Linna settled into a dashing pace that would catch up to them in a
minute or so, since she didn't know what she might find when she did, and
wouldn't do any good at all if she was already winded when she got there.
She utterly ignored the blue haired man and red haired woman she blew past
as they came out of a shop.

--=--

Pulling his wife out of the path of a running woman, Tora gasped as he felt
their quarry's trace on her. No doubt that was what had shocked his more
sensitive 'feminine half' so much she hadn't dodged on her own. There was
something else about the girl, too, that reminded him of their youth...

"She's moving right along," the red-head noted. "not much of a martial
artist, though, despite the speed - second or third dan at most. Looks like
she's in trouble."

"Yeah, let's go."

Without further ado, the two sprang to the top of a lamppost and thence to
the roof of the three story building beside them, dashing across it to look
down over the alley she'd turned into, then jumped down fairly close behind
her as she turned onto another road, and skidded to a stop where some fruit
had fallen loose at the bottom of a pedestrian ramp to the major street
overhead. Seeing her continue on, they followed, again by leaps and bounds.

"Good stamina," he noted. "About the same as our third year with Pop, I'd say."

"Maybe a little better," the woman beside him disagreed. "Look, she's still
not even breathing hard."

This was true. She was still breathing normally as she stopped and looked
on with evident horror as another woman was held aloft from the side of the
higher-level road crossing overhead. "IRENE!!" she shrieked.

The two could feel that the woman's spirit was already leaving her... but
it wasn't passing properly into the Spirit Realm as it should have. "Oh no,
not another one..." the man lamented.

"Looks like it. You go get the killer, I'll handle this." So saying, the
redhead slipped through a blue-black hole in the air, and he bounded to a
roof closer to the overpass, just as a motorcyclist skidded to a halt under
the murdered woman. A bit of blood fell onto her helmet, warning her just
in time to avoid having the body land on top of her.

>From the Realm Between, all this was washed out and ghostlike, as if
through a heavy mist, but the newly-deceased spirit, who had apparently
been called "Irene", was standing over her own body and her kneeling
friend, hands clasped in front of her mouth. Sound from the real world
filtered through softly as the biker cursed, and the second woman, the one
who'd had the redhead's daughter's trace about her, told her not to chase
the assassin, that this was *her* fight. The redhead could sympathize, but
her husband was already on his way... "Too late, now," she noted. Of
course, the living couldn't hear her, but the kneeling woman looked up at
the overpass, with a pained expression that showed the realization that the
buma was probably long gone now.

Irene's ghost was another story, however, and she turned with a squeak.
"Who are you!?" she demanded fearfully.

The red headed girl smiled, and gave a polite bow. "Hiryuko Kagami, pleased
to meet'cha. It looks like I'm stuck being your guide to the Spirit Realm,
since you didn't head there automatically."

The ghost closed her eyes and swallowed, the habits of life still strong.
"I guess I am dead, then..." she said weakly. "Can they hear us?"

Hiryuko bit her lip for a moment, then replied, "Not as such... but if you
talk to them, they'll hear it in their own spirits. Whether they're
consciously aware of it depends on how attuned to their inner selves they
are... which isn't too likely, in these times."

"Linna will hear me... I know she will," the ghost replied, before kneeling
across... her body... from her friend, who'd pulled off her bandanna (but
still had one on, tying back her slightly spiky hair, Hiryuko noted.
Something that tickled her memory, but not enough to recognize) to wipe up
the small streak of blood on her friend's cheek.

"Linna... Linna, take my ring. Take it, so there's someone who'll remember
what might have been."

Setting aside the bandanna, the black-haired woman carefully picked up her
friend's hand and pulled off a diamond ring, clasping it in both hands in
front of her.  Seeing this, the ghost "stood" again, and turned back to
Hiryuko. "If they followed us today, Linna could be in danger too. Will you
watch out for her?"

Hiryuko felt a touch of pride for the spirit before her. Many of the newly
dead lost it entirely in a massive fit of self pity, but this girl - who'd
been fit, but no sort of fighter - was not only keeping her calm but
worried for her friend. *It would give us a legitimate  reason to be in the
area... and it's getting tiresome, having to avoid the local guardian
spirits... That woman - both of them, actually - have a strong trace of
Kireko's energy about her, as if she's had prolonged contact, so she
probably knows our daughter.*

After a moment of consideration, she replied, "All right, Irene is it?"
Seeing the ghost nod, she continued, "After I get you to the Spirit Realm,
Tora and me will be Guardian Spirits for your friend. Just one of us would
be plenty to keep her outta trouble, I'm sure, but we come as a set."
Hiryuko half-smirked at the ghost, and she shyly smiled back a little.
Taking her hand, the redhead instructed, "Now, the Spirit Realm. It's just
a step to the left, and then a jump to the riiiiiii..."

---=- + -=---

Once, Tora would have just ripped off the roof of the assassin's car and
had it out with her on the spot, but he was wiser now, and wanted to see
where she was going first. He followed at a distance, moving from roof to
roof, and while the roundabout route she took would probably have lost any
mechanized pursuit it did little but wear on his patience as he stalked
her. Tora sighed as he figured that he just plain wasn't going to be able
to take care of this quickly.

---=- + -=---

Priss and Linna were on their way back to the Lady 633 building, which
housed both the Knight Sabers' headquarters and Sylia's cover business,
when Mackie contacted them again over Priss' cycle radio. Since the spare
helmet also had audio links, Linna was able to hear as well.

"Priss, we have another problem," he told them. "Just before Linna called
here and got cut off, your new suit from Aqua City reactivated while I was
working on it in the lab, and it turned into some kind of little
spider-thing robot. With all the confusion I lost track of it, and it's
slipped off all our sensors - it went for the ventilation system first but
then cut a hole out into the dead spaces around it, and we don't have
monitors on those."

"Oh HELL!" Priss swore. "That thing's seen me and Nene without our suits -
it's got to know who we are, and since it got in my head it probably knows
the rest of us too!"

Sylia joined the channel as well, then, pointing out, "We can be relatively
sure that it is still within the headquarters, because I do have sensors
operational on all the exits and the outermost walls and areas, and it has
not passed them. I know from your report that the unit seemed to have
imprinted on you, but it showed no hostile reaction to Nene when she had
just awakened. Did it give any hint of hostility towards the rest of us
when it was linked to you?"

"Sylia, we shot the hell out of it. Don't you think that might have pissed
it off a little, whether it was originally or not?"

"I don't know, Priss, but it gave no untoward reaction to Mackie when it
reactivated - it thanked him, apparently under the impression he'd
deliberately repaired it." Sylia's last few words were spoken with a
certain degree of coldness, and Priss and Linna could barely hear Mackie
mumbling something over the slipstream. She then continued, more normally,
"Regardless of that, if we can even temporarily regard the unknown unit as
non-hostile, there is a more immediate problem - Nene identified the area
that the truck which left the J. R. M. facility when it exploded drove to,
and has a lead on the specific building. She'll be here any minute, and we
need to be ready to hit it as soon as she does. That means I want you two
to suit up as soon as you get here, we'll be running this from the mobile
HQ  truck... and in case it turns out that we have been compromised, we and
Cynthia will be traveling in it to a second location I've set up elsewhere
after the mission."

Linna was shocked at what she was hearing. "Abandon Saber HQ? What about
all our gear? We can't let it fall into Genom's hands, or even the
police..."

Sylia's voice was cold again, dispassionate rather than angry. "I've taken
steps to insure no hostile party will gain our technologies or
information... I only hope that it is an unnecessary precaution, but we
cannot take the risk that it is not."

--=--

Above the fiberboard ceiling of the Communications Center, Royal Guardian
215 moved on silent legs to the hole that the ventilation duct went
through. There was only a few inches of extra room between the duct and the
wall, but inches were all it needed when it could shift itself around the
CPU block, and it didn't have long to get to the main vehicle hangar three
floors down, from the sound of things.

---=- + -=---

Tora tracked the assassin's car out of the market district, through a
residential area, then into another commercial area. It had stopped there
and entered a vintners, but he hadn't attacked, because there were too many
uninvolved people around. Leaving the shop, it drove out of the commercial
district, then into an industrial area. Seeing that it was heading for one
of the fenced in compounds, and having no desire to actually let her reach
reinforcements, he got ahead of the limo, then pounced. Leaping from a high
route sign, he cupped his hands in front of him and readied his opening
attack.

"VACUUM BULLET!" he shouted, as he pulled his ki-charged hands rapidly
towards himself, creating a cylinder of vacuum that raced for the car,
striking it and sucking the roof off of the driver's area. As he closed to
combat range, his mystical senses picked up something he'd had hints of
throughout the chase, but hadn't been able to confirm. *That assassin...
she looks human, but has less spirit than an animal! No wonder she's so
heartless, with no soul to guide her...* He'd known this would likely be a
lethal fight, but now was not so upset at that - it would be little more
than disposing of a dangerous, rampaging beast to kill this thing that
looked like a woman.

Even as he thought this, the assassin buma - for that is what it was -
skidded the car to a stop in a parking lot outside the compound walls and
extended its vibroclaws, growling ferally as it leapt to engage Tora as he
landed. Fast as it was, strong as it was, it was no match for him, and
after a pair of forearm-to-forearm blocks he kicked it back beyond its
striking distance.

"ICE TIGER BLAAAST!" he announced, holding both hands before himself again,
clawed this time, and spraying a column of cold ki and ice crystals that
embrittled the bumas structure and punched straight through it,
respectively. It collapsed in a shower of orange buma blood.

--=--

Watching Tora leave the scene from a monitor in the compound control
center, Brian J. Mason quietly steamed at the frustration of yet another
unknown element meddling in his plans, and at the irritation of having his
car trashed. The company would, of course, provide another, but he LIKED
that car.  "Contact the Tower motorpool," he snapped. "Have them send a
replacement limousine. Also, have someone get me a wine suitable for
toasting the completion of this project, Ninety Nine was bringing it in my
car; and get me a recording of that security footage on tape. Now."

---=- + -=---

By the time Priss and Linna reached the garage, Sylia's Mercedes, with its
advanced communications and computer gear, was already gone, and Doctor
Raven was just pulling out in the "Silky Doll delivery truck" that served
as their lower-visibility team vehicle. Mackie waited in the cab of the
huge mobile HQ truck, while Priss and Linna got suited up and Sylia and
Nene, already having done so, used their hardsuits' enhanced strength to
load some last things into the already tight-packed back portion of the
trailer. In the front, next to Nene's computer console and the large side
doors that would launch Priss and Linna on their motoslaves, an armorless,
half-completed motoslave held a narrow bed in place with its one arm, the
still shut-down (but with both legs intact) Cynthia strapped lightly into
it. With everyone ready, and Mackie chastised for trying to spy on them
changing with the trailer monitor cameras, they rolled out.

Just as his windows passed through the doorway to the ramp leading outside,
Royal Guardian 215, still in its four-legged form but now a uniform flat
black except for its faintly glowing, green optics and golden yellow
circuit traceries, dropped down from the ceiling next to the rolling truck.
Timing its impact to coincide with the last set of wheels on the cab
hitting the end of the ramp, it leapt onto the side of the trailer, then
quickly clambered down and into the undercarriage. Letting Her Highness go
into a combat situation without its protection would be contrary to its
directives, even if it was her command to remain unnoticed.


After the truck got out of the quake-induced canyon the garage exited to
and the ride smoothed out, Nene filled the rest of the team in on her
findings from the secondary computer access panel that had been shoehorned
into the front end of the trailer.

"There are four Genom factories in the Kawasaki industrial district," she
began, "but two of them were shut down. The truck that left the JRM
facility at the time of the explosion headed straight for Kawasaki, so it
had to have gone to one of them - and one of them was reactivated at that
same time. It was a terrible place, with a history of research accidents.
It was only shut down six years ago when twelve people were killed!"

"Buma research, I'll bet," said Sylia bitterly. *All my father's work,
corrupted...*

"Well, the laboratory was supposed to be developing power sources for a new
resin-based fusion system," Nene replied, "but it probably was a cover-up
for buma-related work, or at least intended for use as buma power plants."


Mackie had been listening in from the cab, but his attention was drawn
fully forward as he spotted something in an outlying parking lot of the
complex they were heading for. Quickly grabbing it on one of the cab's
cameras, he sent the clip to Nene's screen and warned, "Brace yourselves,
I'm gonna be on the wall in a minute or so, and look at this! Someone might
have gotten here before us."

Spotting the dead buma's fluffy blonde hair and outstretched claw-hand,
Linna exclaimed, "That's the assassin that killed Irene!" *Damn... I wanted
a piece of that bitch! I owed her!*

--=--

In the lab's security room, Mason had regained his control, and raised a
glass of red wine in a mocking salute as he watched the Knight Sabers'
mobile HQ - not that it was any more than a grey semi on the outside, but
he knew who would be within - and gloated. "Welcome, Knight Sabers.  Join
me in toasting the birth of the Super Buma!" He took a good sip of the wine
- despite the short notice, it was indeed excellent, and not to be rushed -
and smirked at the monitors as his two remaining bodyguard buma and the
green and brown security BU-55B he'd reactivated to replace Ninety Nine in
his welcoming committee hustled to get into position. His car wasn't here
yet, but that would be no problem - the superbuma would turn those armored
interlopers into so much tuna casserole, and he'd have a front row seat, so
to speak, courtesy of the security feeds.

--=--

The armored truck plowed through the unreinforced, construction-grade
concrete of the security wall with speed to spare, and skidded sideways to
a stop as soon as Priss and Linna on their motoslaves had been released.
Jetting out of one of the big bay doors behind them, Sylia and Nene took
the second passage into the massive tangle of dull green pipes and tanks
that comprised the bulk of the lab's structure. She'd meant to make the
entrance riding on the roof, but examining Mackie's video clip had taken
the time she'd planned to get up there in.

--=--

Linna took the lead on her motoslave as the corridor narrowed, and pulled
ahead as she passed through a low archway onto an elevated straightaway.
Charging recklessly into battle might be more Priss's style than hers, but
she was at a low boil and spoiling for a fight, after the events of the
day. Thus, it was Priss who got knocked off her motoslave as the
black-haired bodyguard buma dropped out of the archway and checked her with
a reinforced elbow.

"Damn stupid buma," the singer growled as she turned the tumble into a
roll, and watched her motoslave slide off the walkway into the abyss beyond
her opponent.

Hearing Priss over the radio link, Linna barely had time to hit the key
that would engage her motoslave's autonomous combat mode - the quarters
were too tight for the larger combined combat mode - before the brown and
green security buma stepped out of its own ambush and fired a heavy rifle
at the place a normal motorcycle rider would have been. Fortunately for
her, she was no ordinary biker, and the motoslave was far from an ordinary
motorcycle. Shifting into a more compact version of the battleframe that
would normally wrap around her own hardsuit, it ducked below the shot and
blew the rifle-wielding arm off the buma with its own "rifle" - more a
machine cannon than anything else, but sized to suit the wide set nine foot
giant that it was. Linna rode her jumpjets to land a kick on the buma's
chest, then dodged again as it opened its thruster vents and charged after
her into the air. The motoslave was forced to follow as best it could, its
AI not sophisticated enough to act without more command input than Linna
had been able to enter - the default was "cover fire" mode, and it couldn't
get a clear shot as Linna and the buma swooped around the chemical factory
superstructure.

--=--

No sooner had the truck it was riding under come to a stop than Royal
Guardian 215 dropped free, quickly configuring itself into the
lowest-visibility form it could manage for fast travel on its own - three
of the smallest hover rings on the underside of the CPU, a force rod
mounted centerline for thrust, solid panels recolored to asphalt-grey
arranged to act as control vanes and baffles to hide the glow of their
operation. A narrow band of green optics formed a prow as it sped across
the smooth lot less than in inch off the tar after the motoslaves at high
speed.

It recolored itself again after moving into the dingy-green surroundings of
the factory, and after a moment the letters "X-29" formed on its upper
surface in yellow, the better to hide as part of the plumbing if necessary.
Spotting its Partner facing off against a low-powered buma, the Guardian
sideslipped off the walkway to avoid notice as she dodged and jumped back
into the corridor, then darted up out of her sightline to distract the buma
as it landed, giving Priss the instant to target its arm and blow it off
with her palm-blaster, shreds of metal and artificial muscle flying. System
shock froze it in place while she adjusted her aim, and a few more shots
blew its head off.

Just to make sure, Priss put four of her railgun spikes through its chest,
destroying the systems there and stapling it to the floor.

--=--

Linna and the buma had finally come to alight on a roughly horizontal
cluster of pipes, and it opened its chest panels in preparation to fire the
heat projectors mounted inside. Linna was too fast for it, though, and the
knuckle bomber's charge shattered the heat array lenses in a secondary
explosion that knocked it off the uneven pipes to fall onto a holding tank
below. Finally having a clear shot, her motoslave opened fire on it,
missing as the buma rolled, but detonating the contents of the tank in an
impressive fireball. To conserve the remaining fuel in her flight pack,
Linna had the motoslave pick her up and fly her back to the walkway, where
she joined Priss hurrying for Sylia and Nene's position, where they'd been
engaged by another buma, which had apparently roughed them up a bit.

They arrived just in time to see the purple-haired bodyguard buma struggle
to its feet and fade into the shadows on a small crosswalk, leaving a thick
trail of its orange blood. They didn't have attention to waste on it,
though, because there was another buma, apparently just activated, staring
down Sylia and Nene. Sylia held a ready position, while Nene clasped her
hands in front of her helmet as they looked over the massive red android.
It was fully twice the bulk of a BU-55c, with similarly massive armor. It
was also even taller than those blue giants, that were the most common
combat-class buma the Knight Sabers had to face, only its similar-sized
head giving a real impression of how much it dwarfed them. Its extended
sensor probes waggled, as Mackie cut in on the Knight Sabers' secured
channel.

"I'm picking up transmissions on the frequencies Cynthia uses - it's
synching to the satellites - Wait, something's strange here... it's
Cynthia, she's trying to jam it!"

The huge red buma let out a roar of frustration as it failed to get a
firing solution, and charged Sylia on a column of orange thruster-fire. It
was foiled again as a tangle of loose pipes, apparently freed by the
spreading chemical fires and small explosions, swung into it from the side
and knocked it off course, to crash headlong into one of the walkway's
support pylons before falling into the chasm that separated the two pairs
of Sabers.


Above, hidden in shadow and unnoticed, Guardian 215 returned a spiderlike
array of force rods to shuntspace and flew down closer to the fight, ready
to break its cover if it was necessary - Her Highness had commanded it to
remain unseen, but even that was overridden by primary programming to
protect her, and by extension her armswomen.


The superbuma rose again on its thrusters, and Sylia and Nene were forced
to leap madly out of the way as it deployed its mouth cannon and fired a
particle beam of its own - nothing like the river of destruction that one
of the orbital satellites could produce, of course, but deadly enough for
all of that.

"YOU BASTARD!" Loosing her battle-cry, Priss launched herself across the
chasm on her jets, Linna right behind her, the motoslave wrapped around her
hardsuit in its combined form. "Go for its head!" the singer instructed,
before using that very location as a vault to handspring away from it
firing her palm blaster as she went, leaving the metal skull scored but
largely intact. No sooner was she clear than Linna fired off a burst from
the motoslave's machine cannon, three of the rounds catching the buma in
the head and leaving impact craters before ricocheting away.

Enraged, the Buma stepped up its efforts to get a clear link to the
satellites, forcing a fire command even with a less than perfect lock. It
roared again as no beam of fiery annihilation came to strike down its
enemies... and all of the Sabers felt something cold slither down their
spines. Shaking off the effect, Sylia leapt to her own attack, planting
both hands on the red skull and using her dual palm blasters from opposite
sides, before getting swatted aside by a huge arm.

Priss, too, was able to quickly shake off the feeling of dread that had
inexplicably overtaken her, but was too busy untangling herself from a bad
landing and muttering curses to take advantage of the buma's uncoordinated
state - it was moving slowly in the direction Sylia had been knocked, still
running on secondary processors but without its sensory array or its real
brain.

Nene had reacted the worst, screaming and clutching at her chest as she
toppled onto the floor. She was weak and aching all over, like the time
she'd caught a bad flu and had been sick for a week - she felt like half
her life had just left her.

Mackie's voice came over the commlink again, warning, "Cynthia redirected
the last shot to an 'empty place', but the satellites are still active!"

The news broke Linna out of the stunned state that... whatever it was...
had induced, and brought the machine cannon up again. "What did you do to
Nene!?", she screamed, holding down the trigger as she peppered the buma's
upper chest and shoulders with fire. It staggered back, and smoke began to
flow more quickly from the stump of neck, then Priss leapt over it and
fired her remaining four railspikes down the ragged hole. Still glowing
white-hot, they jutted out of the front of its torso armor, and the buma
finally staggered backwards and toppled over.

"The satellites are standing down," Mackie reported. "You'd better get out
of there fast, though, that place is liable to go up in a fireball any
second!"

"Right," Sylia acknowledged. "But first we need to get what we came for."
Quickly deploying her energy saber, she used it to slice open the buma's
heavy carapace - it was slow going, needing the strength of both arms, and
Linna's motoslave to lift the front of the buma's torso armor away, but she
managed. With the chest armor out of the way, she quickly cut the black box
from the superbuma's smoldering, exposed innards and tucked it under an
arm. Priss helped Nene to her feet, and all four hurried out of the rapidly
self-destructing facility.

---=- + -=---

Mason watched with a detached amusement as his buma fought the Knight
Sabers - delaying them long enough for the superbuma to activate, and
leading them to the place he'd had it set up for them. A nice open part of
the facility, with more than its share of security cameras to monitor the
action. He calmly sipped his wine as it faced the four hardsuited women
who'd come to annoy him in the past weeks, and smiled as one of his
close-up shots showed it extend the enhanced sensors that would lock the
satellites onto them, and burn them down like ants under a magnifying glass.

He set the glass down with a frown as the particle beam, his own personal
thunderbolt of god, failed to appear. As the buma was knocked aside by a
falling collection of plumbing, then attacked by the blue-suited Saber, he
decided it might be a good idea to leave a bit ahead of schedule - he'd
underestimated the damage that would be done to the chemical factory
attached to the labs, and while his car wasn't here yet it likely would be
by the time he reached the gate it would be arriving at. Leaving the glass,
and the chilled bottle beside it, he snagged his briefcase and stepped
briskly out of the security room, taking a path that would avoid the battle
and the truck the Sabers had arrived in, though it did cross the path they
had entered by as he neared the exit.

Cursing bad fortune, he saw that a piece of debris had fallen half across
his walkway just at that spot - it must have been knocked loose in the
battle, and from the crackle of energy around it appeared to have been
electrified. He flattened himself against the wall to avoid it as he
continued.

Just then, another set of holding tanks exploded nearby, and the shock
threw the Genom executive off his feet - right into the shorting tangle of
metal pipes. Muscles locked and hair stood on end, a scream of agony ripped
from his throat as 440 volts of AC coursed through his body. His briefcase,
with the only complete records of the black box project and the security
tape of the unknown buma that had destroyed his assassin, flew from his
twitching hand.

--=--

Mackie had moved to the back of the Sabers' Mobile HQ to man the computer
terminal, and his eyes widened as the sensor systems picked up a strong,
tightly encrypted transmission on military frequencies - something he
recognized all too well. Keying on his microphone, he warned, "I'm picking
up transmissions on the frequencies Cynthia uses - it's synching to the
satellites - Wait, something's strange here..."

There was a rustle beside him, and a small gasp. He turned his head quickly
to see the little blonde buma-girl in the medical cot beside him pull
lightly against her restraints. She seemed more occupied by some internal
vision, though, muttering to herself, "No!  No, it's not right!"

Quickly, he checked his instruments again and noted, "It's Cynthia, she's
trying to jam it!" Standing, Mackie ordered the unfinished motoslave to
stand by, and bent to release the straps holding Cynthia to the cot. The
last thing he wanted was for something with a demonstrated ability to call
on the beam satellites to have any reason to think she was in danger, and
the motoroid, while unimpressive looking at the moment, could wield its
cannon with only one arm - physically, Cynthia's frame wasn't too tough,
even a single round from that monster would likely be the end of her.

Given that she seemed to be the only thing keeping three of his best
friends and older sister, all four of them extremely hot, from getting
killed, he really hoped that wouldn't be necessary... especially because
she was pretty cute herself, in a non-perverted kind of way. He only went
for older girls, his normal ecchi thoughts the furthest thing from his mind
as he held the now tossing little girl in a hug.

"Hey, hey, it's okay," he soothed. "Just don't let the satellites shoot my
sis, okay?"

He hadn't expected any response, but the child's voice fearfully asked, "Is
that what my sky-pictures are? Sattah-lights?"

He pulled back a little to look down at her grey eyes, as he answered,
"That's right, they're what the satellites see, and how they target their
weapons. There's a buma trying to use them against my friends right now."

"I know, mister," she replied. She bit her lip and thought. The man was
being nice, and the only other people who'd been nice to her were her
friends Priss and before that Major Rose... but Priss had hurt her too,
hadn't she? Her eyes twitched down to her right leg, as intact as it felt.
She was all better now, and there had been *things* in her leg before Priss
had cut it off. She decided he was her friend, and that meant his friends
were too. She kept fighting the sky-pictures, making them look away and
show her other places.

There was an empty spot she'd seen a few times, and it leapt into her mind
again, just as she felt the sky-pictures turn angry, like when she'd made
them stop the giant monster that had caught her and Priss. She saw the blue
beam hit the empty place, and suddenly felt a shudder, like nothing she'd
ever felt before... it was bad though, and the nice man seemed to feel it
too, since he hugged her again. She slipped her own arms around his waist,
and told him, "There's an empty place I look at... I think the
sattah-lights just attacked there, but I had a bad feeling right after... I
hope it wasn't a bad place..."

*You and me both, kid,* he thought. *I felt that too, and I don't like how
Nene screamed just then either.* Keeping his hold on the buma-girl, he
turned to look back at the sensor panels and opened his mic again. "Cynthia
redirected the last shot to an 'empty place', but the satellites are still
active!"

"What did you do to Nene!?" Linna's angry voice echoed over the commlink,
and he could hear the sounds of continuing combat for a few more seconds,
then the relieved sighs as the buma finally went down, and with it the
attempts to activate the weapons satellites. The Sabers were still in
danger, though - he could see smoke streaming out of the lab's massive
superstructure of chemical processing equipment, as well as the occasional
tongue of flame.

"The satellites are standing down," Mackie reported. "You'd better get out
of there fast, though, that place is liable to go up in a fireball any
second!"

"Right," Sylia acknowledged. "But first we need to get what we came for."

--=--

A briefcase clattered against a sooty metal leg, as the one-armed and badly
battered BU-55B security buma investigated the screams it had heard, its
programming to check on and identify disturbances taking over now that its
mission of delaying the green Knight Saber was completed. "Sir!", its
mechanical voice exclaimed, as it hurried forward to pull Mason away from
the electrified collection of pipes. "You must exercise more caution,
humans are extremely susceptible to electrical damage!"

Ignoring the obvious statement, Mason mumbled, "...briefcase..."

Carefully laying the executive on the floor, RJ-N-8815 calculated for a
moment. Medical procedures clearly dictated that Mr. Mason would need
immediate attention, but it was also necessary to preserve company data,
which executive briefcases routinely contained. It had only one arm to
manipulate, and Mr. Mason had demonstrated insufficient muscular
coordination to hold the case securely. Reaching a course of action, it
kicked the still-sparking wreckage away, picked up the briefcase and
clamped it under the ruins of its right arm, then carefully pulled Mr.
Mason back to his feet with the left.

Carrying the nearly limp human briskly down the walkway to the exit, it
stopped when another buma stumbled out of a side corridor and collapsed to
its knees with a shudder, orange buma blood drying on its ripped uniform
where it had bled out minutes ago. "Sir," she reported, "The Knight Sabers
have engaged the superbuma. I have sustained heavy damage in delaying
them." Oddly, 8815 registered a fluctuation in its own systems at the same
time.

Pulling his groggy thought processes together again, Mason slurred, "Yes.
Carry on, RJ." Leaving its purple-tressed cousin where she kneeled, the
security buma resumed its march.

Watching the human she had been charged with carried off, and feeling
somehow that it was wrong he should place her condition so low on his
priorities despite programming that stipulated exactly that, she felt the
onset of the death of her synthetic brain and muscles in the loss of
control and failure of peripheral systems. She watched the empty corridor
until her optic cleaning system began to malfunction, the cleaning agent
overflowing, distorting the image beyond utility and running down her face.

Finally falling backwards to lie flat on the metal floor, she recalled a
phrase that several humans had been observed to use in situations they
could no longer effect control over. Her voice synthesizer was erratic, but
on a whim she repeated them, as forcefully as she could.

"Well, damn. This really sucks." Small explosions drowned out her weak
voice and rocked the floor gently as her mental process halted. A few chips
of ceiling plaster fell into the puddle of cleaning solution spreading
beside one cheek.

---=- + -=---

Hiryuko Kagami had been waiting in the Realm Between only a few seconds
when Tora faded in nearby, the properties of the Realm making it easy to
enter close to each other. She met him with a happy glomp, which he
enthusiastically returned. "Happy to see me, huh?", he teased.

"Always, since the minute I laid eyes on you, and especially in a romantic
setting." Hiryuko's words echoed the first reunion they'd had after having
to separate for more than a few minutes, a ritual between the two.

Tora waved an arm at the greyish mists around them, as he had at the family
room they'd been in at the time. "This is a romantic location?"

Finishing their little act, she snuggled up to his chest and replied, "All
it takes for romance is you, my love."

Of course, both of them were wearing silly grins as they did so, and
thought about the past.

Just then, a wave of ice - a spiritual void - washed over the two, and the
very fabric of the Realm Between shuddered as something terrible
happened... their bright hair beached to silver and the Kagamis flickered
out, clinging to each other with twin wails.

The swirling mists would take millennia to settle, but only an instant...
such was the nature of the Realm Between.

---=- + -=---

Linna helped Nene slide to a seat on the cot, while Sylia checked over
Cynthia, who'd relocated to the computer console's swivel chair, and Priss
fussed with her hardsuit, reloading the railgun from the box of rail spikes
she'd fished out of the tight-packed aft end of the truck. Mackie, for his
part, had started the engine back up and was pulling out of the burning
lab's parking lot already, hurrying to get the huge truck out of sight
before the police could get helicopters on the scene. "ohh, thanks, Linna,"
the usually peppy policewoman groaned. "I just feel really terrible all of
a sudden."

With exaggerated care, she reached up to undo her helmet, pulling it off
and shaking her silver hair loose as she felt the fresh air on her face.

*SILVER!?*

Ignoring Linna's gasp, Nene grabbed a lock of her hair and pulled it
forward over her eyes, crossing them as she tried to focus on it. It was
silver, with just the faintest hint of pink. "AAAAAH! WHAT HAPPENED TO MY
HAIR?", she wailed, jerking back as if to distance herself from the snowy
strands in front of her. Naturally, that didn't work, and she bumped the
back of her head against the trailer wall. "Owie... today really isn't
going my way," she muttered. Twisting sideways and bringing her legs up
onto the narrow pad, she lay down and closed her eyes. "Just wake me up
when we get back to... when we get to the base, okay?"

"Oh Nene..." Linna sighed, as she sat down on the floor of the trailer,
back braced against the low cot. Looking over to Sylia, she asked, "So how
is she?"

"Cynthia appears to be fine, so far as a cursory examination can tell," the
Sabers' leader replied. "Aside from the her hair blanching, I have no idea
how Nene is. We'd better keep her awake, until there's a chance to check
for head injuries."

Eyes still closed, Nene whined, "Do I have to stay up? I'm not hurt, just
really pooped out."

"I do think it's advisable for now," Sylia repeated, "and it won't be that
long until we get to the reserve headquarters. It's on the outskirts of
Mega-Tokyo."

"Oh, all right." Nene sat up again, and cradled her helmet in her lap.
Mustering some of her usual energy, she turned to smile at the little
blonde buma-girl that Priss had rescued from the Aqua City battle. "You're
Cynthia, eh?" Seeing the girl nod shyly, she continued, "Well I'm Nene, and
this here is Linna, and next to you is Sylia. She's the one who fixed you
up!"

Cynthia turned back to the blue-black haired woman who'd been checking on
her. She'd answered, of course - there had often been unfamiliar people
asking her things when she was with Major Rose - but now she smiled at the
tall woman, and said, "Thank you, Sylia." She recognized the suits that
Sylia and Nene were wearing - they were the ones who drew the silly face on
the sidewalk the sky-pictures had shown her, and she'd copied onto her
wall-map.

Smiling back at the girl slightly, Sylia replied, "You're welcome."

Cynthia's smile widened, sparkling in her grey eyes. *Everyone here wants
to be friends!* Not like before, when everyone but Major Rose ignored her
or only asked her questions and was mean, except for the one nurse she saw
sometimes. Turning back to Nene, she said, "I think your hair  is pretty
like that. There was a nurse who helped Major Rose sometimes and she had
pink hair too. Hers stayed the same though... Will my hair get darker too
someday?"

"Darker?" Nene did a doubletake, then pulled a bit of hair down where she
could see it again. It was a bit darker now, like the first tinge of a
sunset on snow. "Maybe this'll go away after all," she hoped. "It's not
supposed to change color; it's supposed to be bright red all the time."

Knowing that the past wasn't a good subject to get on with Cynthia, since
she couldn't be released, Linna cast around for a different subject... and
nearly slapped herself for not noticing it before. Turning, she looked
oddly at Priss, who was still standing facing the other way, despite having
finished with the railguns. "Hey Priss," she began in a confused tone, "why
don't you say hello?"

The singer lifted her left hand, the one that was more like a glove than a
remote controlled claw with her suit on, and wiped at something on her
face. "Yeah." Turning and walking carefully in the moving truck, she walked
past the parked green motoslave on its docking arm and sat beside Nene on
the cot, right next to the buma-girl. "Hey kiddo, you okay?" She began to
reach out to the little girl, but seeing her tighten up she dropped the
hand. Eyes sparkling with moisture, her face fell as well, and she
explained brokenly, "I'm sorry about your leg. I had to... Had to hurt you,
or that... THING would have just eaten you from inside out."

Linna dropped her face into a palm. *So much for finding a happier subject.*

Cynthia nodded and bit her lip. Sounding subdued she asked, "The robot
monster wanted me because I'm a robot too, didn't he? Do I hafta turn into
a monster?"

Linna and Nene held their breath, and Sylia stiffened from her position
behind Cynthia, working with the computer console. This could go very badly
-

"No, honey," Priss answered, the tears that had been threatening to fall
finally filling her eyes as she reached out again and pulled the girl into
a hug. Despite the augmented strength of the suit making it a little
tighter than a human child would have found comfortable, the little buma
just hugged back - she was tough enough structurally that it didn't even
register as unusual. Stroking Cynthia's blonde hair she continued, "Never
ever turn into a monster."

- if Priss hadn't gotten over her automatic hatred of buma, at least in
Cynthia's case. Three sighs of relief whispered out of the other Sabers'
throats, and were lost in the road noise as the truck continued west,
toward the hills of the Kanto range.

---=- + -=---

In Chairman Quincy's office, the monitor wall flicked out as the various
security cameras showed the Knight Sabers' semi driving away from the
burning lab/factory. Hands folded in front of his face contemplatively, the
chairman frowned. Keying the extension that would pull up his political
analyst, he waited for the vidphone connection to come up. As expected, she
was still in her office, and greeted him smartly. "Misterr Chairman. The
Zambique arrangements are nearly complete; I'll continue to monitor them of
course but the situation should handle itself for severral weeks at this
point."

Nodding, Quincy rumbled, "Very good, Miss Madigan. At the moment I have
another project for you, however. It seems that Mason has made a critical
error and implicated Genom in the matter of the USSD weapons satellites."

Madigan's eyes widened under her crown of lavender hair, but before she
could respond further, he entered another command, and a file transferred
itself to her terminal. "This is a list of employees who have expressed
discontent with certain Genom policies and actions, and a recording that
details the situation. I'm sure you can find some despicable rogue who
would defy national security and use company resources for his own goals.
As our own emergency services buma will be fighting the chemical fires for
several days, it should be easy enough to place their bodies convincingly.
Between that and our political connections, you must divert direct
suspicion from Genom."

"Of course, sirr. But, if I may ask, why not let Mason fall with his own
mess? I know he's valuable to you, but a slipup of this naturre..."

The Chairman tilted his head slightly. "Mister Mason does indeed represent
an investment of Genom's assets, but his value is not entirely in the
direction you - or he - think it lies." His expression shifted, to
something that could almost be approval. "Not many would dare to question
me, Miss Madigan. Ensure that you do so only when the matter is urgent."

"Sir!" she acknowledged, as the screen blinked out.

After entering another command sequence, Quincy then called up a link to
Mason's limousine. The buma driver kept its optics on the road, but
greeted, "Mr. Chairman sir! Mr. Mason has suffered damage from an extended
electrical discharge, and is currently en route to Mega-Tokyo General
Hospital for evaluation and treatment."

"No," the Chairman countermanded. "Drive to the Genom Research Division
Tower in Chiba, and turn him over to Doctor Gero Yoshida, who will be
standing by."

"Yes sir!", the buma responded. Moments later it drove past the exit that
would have led to Mega-Tokyo General.

Turning to face the window, the Chairman of Genom, and effectively secret
Emperor of most of the world, likewise turned his mind to other things.

---=- + -=---

A grey semi truck rolled through the early morning darkness as it headed
west out of Mega-Tokyo. Turning off the highway as it came to the first set
of major hills, it followed a smaller road towards a collection of
greenhouses crowning the entire eastern face of the hill in glass, save for
a large conventional building at its foot, flanked on either side by
entryways to a parking and loading area under the hill. Driving up the
slight slope past fences that flanked the road, it entered the left-hand
archway, rolling past the few parked cars as it made its way to where a
wide section of the back wall was sliding up out of the way. After it
entered, the wall closed again, to all appearances normal.



-----------------------------

Yes, I know it's unrealistic to have Mackie so easily hook up to an alien
computer system... but I have to get the thing back online anyway, and the
only real effect it has is for the Guardian to learn how to hook up to
local computer systems.

Bumaroid Disassociative Disorder is a concept pulled from the cyberpunk
genre at large, where massive replacement of the human body with mechanical
parts leads to societal ostracism and feelings of being both inhuman and
super-powerful, the final stage of which becomes a violent urge to strike
back at the rest of humanity. Being less than 70% natural human classes a
person as a self-owned bumaroid, as in the "ADPolice Files" series, but
that's the only intentional pull from them, as I've never actually seen
them. It's a social disease in the truest sense, as with a more friendly
and supportive community it would not exist at all; given the current state
of buma technology in 2033 it's relatively simple to mimic human sensation
almost perfectly, as Priss's eyes are set to do, despite their capacity for
greatly enhanced visual abilities.

What the hell do I mean, a 'mere' secend or third dan black belt being 'not
much of a martial artist?' Compared to who's speaking, that is true. The
Kagamis could fit in Dragon Ball (but not Z, not yet anyway) for crying out
loud.

I have no idea where that dramatic death scene for Mason's bodyguard
replicant came from... It just grew out of my working theory on buma brains
for the purposes of this story. They're bio-engineered constructs, but
though there are only a few standard "designs" for them the growth process
results in very uneven yields, with only the tiniest of structural
differences to differentiate them. All brains are tested before processing
to see how they will end up - what Genom doesn't realize is that the reason
for this difference in the amount of creativity and problem-solving, fluid
intelligence (as opposed to crystallized intelligence, knowledge and skills
that can be programmed in) is because the living brains generate actual
souls, and it is the power of the spirit that allows the better bumas to
exceed their programming, and the rogues to defy it and run amok. There's a
reason we never see, say, a rampaging assembly line buma, and that's
because their spirits are too weak to run wild. If there's a problem, then
like a conventional robot they'll stop and report an error, only responding
within their predefined options to any situation. A simple assassin gets a
simplistic, linear-thinking brain, while a bodyguard, for example, must be
able to care about the well-being of its charge, and buma that need to
interact intimately with humans - like the 33-s model - must be able to
handle all the quirks that humans can exhibit in such interaction. The
weakest and most inhuman are generally fit only for assassins or assembly
line work, they are also the cheapest due to the greater demand for bumas
that can actually successfully interact to any degree with humans. Those
with as much soul as, say, a wolf, are fit enough for most military models,
while those on the level of apes can handle being security personnel,
bodyguards, switchboard operators, secretaries, food service or postal
workers, etc. Those with enough spirit to fall in the range of humans are
rare, and expensive - they make for the personal assistants, sexaroids,
spies, and top secret military projects that use only the best of the best
of the best.

Guardian 215 should be imagined with the vocal talents of Susan Blu after
being ordered not to use Priss's voice; if you don't know her by name, she
did (among other shows) Arcee on the post-movie Transformers episodes, as
well as in the movie itself. You can even keep the flanging effect if you
like, though it's not really there.

Many thanks to my prereaders: Patricia Kostan (who knew nothing of BGC, and
helped make sure the story was understandable to people who were not
familiar with the series), Nathan Baxter (who sent me liberal doses of that
most underestimated of useful things, Unbridled Excitement), Hide Hasegawa
(who also helped with Japanese), and Kaitlin Coelho.

Bubblegum Crisis belongs to Youmex and Animeigo, I make no claims
otherwise. Please don't sue me, I have no money to speak of and fanfic does
more to promote your products than anything else I know of - without it, I
never would have known about anime at all, and I'd certainly never have
bought the BGC tapes based on the sucky box copy.

Ranma 1/2 I'm not so sure of, except that the creator was Rumiko Takahashi,
not me, and that I make no claims to own IT either.

EOF






--
________________  ___    ___  ________________
\_________      \ \__\__/__/ /      _________/    Our Lady of the Blessed
    \________    \__~o\/o~__/    ________/    Acceleration, guide my throttle
        \____________\  /____________/      and grant me traction, give me my
          A  A  R  D  ||  V  A  R  K     daily kick in the ass! VROOOOOOOOOM!



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