I have a message from another time... Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT - SYMPHONY OF THE SWORD No. 4 - Fourth Movement: Hunter Rose Benjamin D. Hutchins with Janice Barlow Anne Cross Pearson Mui (c) 2003 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited TUESDAY, JULY 7, 2409 9:57 PM TAU CITY AMPHITHEATRE TAU CITY, TAU CETI /* Big Country "Rockin' in the Free World" _Kings of Emotion_ */ In many ways, it had become the Art of Noise's signature song, despite the fact that it was a cover of a twentieth-century rock number by an artist ill-remembered in the twenty-fifth. They first played it - angry, accusatory - as the Goldfish Warning which kicked off the Battle of Titan in 2406, when a single ship of the International Police Space Force took on an Earthforce battle group and emerged victorious. Despite the fact that most of its lyrics related to a situation far in the past and didn't map to the galaxy's current problems very well (what, for instance, was an "ozone layer"?), "Rockin' in the Free World" became something of an anthem for the dissatisfied youth of a galaxy, youth who saw the shape of the future and didn't like the looks of it. Audiences for the rest of the Irregular Projects Tour had demanded it as the band's opening number, and gotten it; it had been part of the Art's familiar repetiore ever since. Over time, though the anachronistic lyrics remained the same, the band tinkered with the musical arrangement, putting their own stamp on the song, developing their own particular way of performing it. The result, by the summer of 2409, was a song which was recognizably the same as, but markedly different from, the one which scorched the Earthforce tactical network on that day in 2406 - a song which had become uniquely the Art of Noise's own. They'd stopped playing it at the beginning of concerts, but now they often played it at the end. So it was at the Tau City concert. When the band returned to the stage for its third encore, and Kaitlyn Hutchins - who hadn't played an instrument all night because of an injury suffered in the afternoon's police-induced riots - came out minus her white jacket and with her black Stratocaster on, the true fans in the audience knew that this was really, truly the last song. They cheered all the harder as the brown-haired bandleader ripped into the intro. Where the original version of the song just -started-, the whole band full speed ahead, the Art of Noise version's intro had evolved into a lone, angry statement by Kaitlyn's guitar, the bandleader and her black Strat setting the tone for the song to come. Her arm was hurting - indeed, as she played, the bandage on her wound turned slowly pink - but after a show like this one, she couldn't make herself leave the finale to anybody else. She accompanied herself through the first four lines of the first verse now, before her band powered in behind her and kicked the whole thing into full, pounding life. From there, the pace never let up until the bridge before the third verse, when Kaitlyn and bassist Moose MacEchearn chopped their way through an odd alternating solo before Kate sang almost confidentially: We've got a thousand points of light for the homeless man We've got a kinder, gentler machine gun hand Then the rest of the band, led by drummer R. Dorothy Wayneright, exploded into the quiet behind her and, as the song surged to something slightly -faster- than its original pace, Kaitlyn raised her voice to a defiant cry: We got department stores and toilet paper Styrofoam boxes for the ozone layer We got a man of the people says "Keep hope alive" We got fuel to burn, we've got roads to drive Keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world Gotta keep on rockin' in the free world Keep on rockin' in the free world They drew out the outro for as long as they felt it was right, the guitarists trading impromptu solos while the rhythm section thundered behind them, finally drawing it all down to a series of mighty all-hands hits, the last of which blacked out the stage and left the audience alone with their applause. Backstage, flushed and breathless, the band members congratulated each other. Well, most of them did; while Kaitlyn sat in a chair with a towel draped around her neck, chugging a bottle of spring water and beaming, Miki Kaoru crouched next to the chair and changed the dressing on her injured arm. "Well," he said, "I hope you're satisfied, Kaitlyn, you've opened it up." "I kn-know," Kate replied mildly. "It's m-my arm, you kn-know. I c-can feel when s-s-something h-happens to it." "I still don't see why you didn't ask Liza to heal it," Miki grumbled as he bandaged the wound again. "If w-we hadn't b-been able to f-f-find another g-guitarist, I w-would have," Kate replied, "b-but it's r-really not that b-big a deal." Indeed, even though she'd stressed the wound - a glancing blaster burn - and made it bleed, it didn't seem to bother her much. She smiled and went on, "Anyw-way, it w-was worth it. Th-this was the b-best show w-we've done in a w-while." "Maybe we should hire Shiori full time," said Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan from her koala-like position on the raspberry-haired guest guitarist's back. "I wouldn't want to steal Miki's job from him," Shiori replied, grinning. "I'm just glad I was able to help." The others from the landing party - most of the crew of the starship Valiant - flooded into the dressing room, congratulating and hugging and high-fiving, and the place took on the usual post-show party atmosphere. After the initial surge of cheer was through, the group had to make their usual post-gig decision - go in search of food, or just head back to the Valiant and eat there? Normally the choice was made to seek food locally, so as to explore their latest stop, but tonight came after a long, trying day, and great show or not, the musicians and their friends were tired. They decided just to head home. Utena Tenjou, the Valiant's captain, was prepared to go along with that. She hadn't participated in the excitement on the surface, having still been seeing to the Valiant's orbital arrangements and so forth when the riot broke out in Tau City, but it was getting pretty late all the same, and she was tired and looking forward to a good night's sleep as she pulled out her communicator and hailed her ship. Nothing happened. With a grumbling sound of consternation, Utena fiddled with the dials on the device and tried again. Her second attempt silenced the conversations near her, and by the third time, everyone in the room had fallen silent to listen. "Tenjou to Valiant, come in!" She regarded the communicator with a look of mingled puzzlement and annoyance, then flipped it to a different band. "Tau Ceti ATC, this is Captain Utena Tenjou of the IPS Valiant." "Tau Ceti ATC, Lieutenant Collins. Go ahead, Captain." "I'm having trouble reaching my ship," Utena told the aerospace traffic controller. "Can you crosslink? I may be having a power problem with my transmitter." "10-4, Captain Tenjou, stand by." The hum of an open channel continued for a few seconds; then Collins's voice returned, sounding confused. "Captain, you say you're on the ground right now?" "Uh... yeah, Tau Ceti, that's right. I'm at the Tau City Amphitheatre. My passengers just finished their concert and we'd like to go home and get some sleep." Another pause; then another voice, this one more authoritative, replaced the original controller. "This is Major Brent Spencer, Tau Ceti Aerospace Defense Force. Captain, is there some problem? We thought you'd left with your ship." "Uh... " Utena gave the communicator a very odd look, then said, "Say again, Major Spencer? I thought you said 'left with your ship.'" "I did," Spencer replied. "Valiant left the system two hours ago." (At Tau Ceti ATC Headquarters in orbit, Major Spencer backed involuntarily away from the comm speaker as it emitted the sound of an entire roomful of people simultaneously saying, "WHAT?") When Utena had everybody shushed again, she added, "Left the system?! Control, there were seven personnel aboard, only three of them on duty. At least two of them were asleep. Where would they have gone?" "Wait 1, Captain, let me pull the departure clearance record. ... OK, departure clearance request was filed for Epsilon Indi." "Epsilon Indi?! Who filed that request?" "Er... well, according to the log, -you- did, Captain." Utena stood in utter silence, surrounded by her dumbfounded, shock-faced shipmates, for several long, silent seconds. "Captain?" said her communicator. At the sound of Spencer's voice, her jawline hardened, her eyes narrowed slightly, and her aspect instantly changed from tired and confused to sharp and businesslike. "Major Spencer, I am declaring an emergency," she said flatly. "IPS Valiant has been hijacked." A pause, and then Spencer's voice came back just as businesslike, "Roger, understand. We'll alert Starfleet." "Thank you, Major. Tenjou out." Utena closed the communicator and stood for a moment in silence, her face unreadable. Then everyone started talking at once - for a second, until Utena held up a hand and silenced them all again. "I don't know, dammit," she said. Then she flipped the communicator open again and dialed it to a special dedicated sub-ether band. Four seconds later, the voice of Lieutenant Luornu Durgo, yeoman to the Admiral of the Fleet, answered: "IP Space Force Flagcomm, Lieutenant Durgo." "Tenjou, Valiant," said Utena, her voice still no-nonsense and hard. "Broken Arrow. I repeat, Broken Arrow. Give me the Chief." It was a glum crew that made its way through the streets of Tau City at a little past ten-thirty that night. They weren't sure where they were going or what they were doing. All they knew was that they were dispossessed, dispirited, and hungry. The initial shock had given way to a sort of numb bafflement. They moved along one of the bazaar streets in a random cluster, all together but each alone with his or her dark thoughts. Some showed at least a cursory awareness of the food and other goods being hawked all around them, but despite their hunger, nobody seemed inclined to buy anything. Kaitlyn walked in the middle, surrounded by friends but alone, her expression more closed even than the rest. Then, as the group's ragged vanguard turned a corner, Kozue Kaoru (who had been trudging glumly along next to her twin brother Miki, lost like everyone else in thought) suddenly made a noise of startled recognition and bolted out of the formation. Ignoring the cries of consternation and query from behind her, she threaded her way hastily through the thronged bazaar, grabbed the shoulder of a man browsing at a Salusian shyam stand up ahead, and spun him around. The man, a shortish, well-built, dark-haired, casually dressed human of apparent middle age, responded by ducking from under Kozue's hand and taking a half-step back. The bazaar crowd, well-accustomed to the breaking-out of fights by now, pulled back along the sides of the lane, giving the combatants plenty of room as Kozue, still ignoring her compatriots' what-the-hell shouts, threw a punch at the stranger's head. He ducked and counterattacked, but Kozue weaved gracefully back from the swipe, settled for an instant into a martial-arts ready stance, then launched herself again at her unknown quarry. They went back and forth for about a minute in complete silence. Duelists, foremost among them Utena, Miki, and Corwin Ravenhair, pushed their way to the front of the crowd to watch as their friend and the unknown man she had attacked for no apparent reason fought. Kozue was a relative newcomer to the martial arts, not counting fencing, which she still considered a sport. She'd picked up bits and pieces here and there from a friend of Corwin's father, a man who stopped by the apartment Kozue shared with the young god in New Avalon whenever he had the time to show her another move or two. It was hardly what one would call serious instruction, but Kozue's natural kinesthesia, the same sense which made her such a phenomenal pilot, served her almost as well as R. Dorothy's positronic body memory in such matters. She remembered moves faster than most people, and what she didn't get exactly right, she had enough body control to make up as she went along. The result was a thoroughly haphazard-looking but remarkably effective fighting style all her own, one which set her apart from all others in the ranks of the Order of the Rose. She could fight with a weapon or without, and the weapon didn't have to be anything a regular person would identify as a weapon at first glance, either. The stranger she'd attacked was good too. Though his style was a bit less random-looking than Kozue's, it still contained features of a number of different formal styles to the eye practiced enough to recognize them. He was fast, damn fast, and he moved with great precision as he and Kozue traded blocks, kicks, and punches while maneuvering in rough circles around each other. After a few moments of watching this, it dawned on the observing Duelists, all of them fairly serious martial artists of one type or another themselves, that they -weren't- fighting. They were sparring, or not even that - showing off. It was like an impromptu pair kata, dynamic and flashy without any intent to injure. They knew each other... which made all this basically a complicated secret handshake. With that realization, everything became clear, at least to the Duelists among the observers. Though the man Kozue attacked hadn't stood still long enough for any of them to see his face, they all now knew who he was. A moment or two later, they traded one last double forearm block, spun as one to the left, each seized an object on one of the bazaar-stand trays and dropped another object in its place, then spun again, leaped past each other, whirled, and flung the objects they'd picked up at each other as hard as they could. "Ah!" said Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan brightly as the thrown objects unerringly found their marks - squarely in the combatants' mouths. "That's the secret Wudan technique of the Sweet Bean Manjyuu!" She blinked. "But that means -he- must be... !" Kozue scarfed down the manjyuu she'd caught in her teeth, then threw her arms around her opponent with gleeful sounds of greeting. Then she disengaged, grabbed his arm, and dragged him over to the rest of the group. Utena, along with the rest of them, got her first good look at the man's face. It was an unremarkable Asian face - a bit shopworn, in fact, though in an endearing kind of way - with a largish nose and a lot of laugh lines around the eyes. Like most people who watched movies not involving tragic love affairs, she recognized it immediately, or at least thought she did. "Uh, Kozue," she said hesitantly, "is this who I think it is?" "You better believe it!" Kozue replied, beaming. "You've never met?" Utena shook her head. "Well, then!" Kozue drew herself up into something vaguely like severe formality and said, "Captain Tenjou, may I introduce Grey Lensman Chan Kong Sang of the Experts of Justice. Master Chan, this is Captain Utena Tenjou of the International Police Space Force Reserve." The most powerful empty-handed martial artist in the galaxy raised his eyebrows, looked slightly embarrassed, hurriedly finished chewing his bean roll, swallowed hard, grimaced in faint discomfort, then grinned ingratiatingly and said, "Call me Jackie." Before anyone else could do much of anything, a uniformed Tau Ceti Military Police officer cautiously eased out of the (dispersing, murmuring) crowd and, with his hand well clear of his holstered sidearm, said carefully, "Captain Tenjou?" "That's me," Utena replied in a tone just shy of a you-wanna- fight-about-it? growl. "Governor Kallon's compliments, Captain, and he'd like to see all of you in his office if it's convenient." Utena gave a short, mirthless laugh and replied, "We've got noplace -else- to be right now." 10:47 PM GOVERNOR'S PALACE TAU CITY, TAU CETI Governor Charles Kallon was genuinely upset. This was plain to see. The portly little man was sweating and muttering, even more than he had been at the end of the riot. He stood behind his desk, a large and expensive one made of Salusian greelwood, and fidgeted with a pen while the grounded majority of the Valiant ship's company filed into his office. He didn't even seem to notice that one of his guests was accompanied by a full-grown and testy-looking Siberian tiger. Kaitlyn's face was pinched with worry and pain. Her wounded arm, which hadn't bothered her at all in the after-concert rush, now throbbed most disagreeably, and the new dressing was stained pink again. She had torn the wound anew in the process of punching a wall back at the Amphitheatre. Sergei followed her to one of the tall-backed leather chairs and curled up protectively at her feet. Seven of the Valiant's company had been aboard the ship when it was taken. One was a Lensman, and could not now be reached by the other Lensmen in the group - never a good sign. Seven people, seven friends and comrades, now in the clutches of... well, nobody really knew that yet, although everyone had a prime guess. Klaang tai-Kalaan, science officer, deck officer at the time of the hijacking. B'Elanna Torres, assistant chief engineer. Kanna Kirishima, chief of security. Dr. Aaron Ajlond-Mui, chief medical officer. John Hyatt, ship's AEGIS operative, in sick bay following a mysterious collapse after the afternoon's riot. Constable Janice Barlow, IPO CID, staying to find out what was wrong with Hyatt. And Juri Arisugawa, the Art of Noise's manager, who had had a very difficult, exhausting day and, as such, had gone back to bed once the band was all set for their evening's concert. Juri was also Kaitlyn's lover, a fact not lost on anyone there (except possibly Governor Kallon). It was her lover's unknown fate, not the throbbing of her wounded arm, which drew Kate's face tight with pain. The members of her band hovered nearby, seeming uncertain whether to get closer would be to offer comfort or to crowd their leader - all except Miki Kaoru, who sat on the arm of Kaitlyn's chair and was simply there, demanding nothing, offering whatever he could give. She surprised him by reaching up almost absently and taking his hand. Perhaps she didn't realize she was doing it; her eyes were focused a million miles away. That didn't bother Miki. Juri was his oldest friend, aside from his twin sister Kozue, and he was terribly worried about her as well. Kaitlyn, at least, he could help. The tall, blonde, brightly-clad form of Liza Shustal came in just after the Valiant's company, led by another uniformed cop and trailed by her exec and chief of security. As she crossed the room, she smiled a private, reassuring little smile for Kaitlyn, bent down, and kissed her on the cheek. Kate's eyes widened in surprise, her free hand reaching up to touch the spot where her wound had been; Liza winked and kept going, crossing to stand near Azalynn. Once everyone was gathered, Kallon sat down behind his desk, fidgeted for a moment more with his pen, and then said in a surprisingly strong and steady voice, "I want you to know, Captain Tenjou, that I had nothing to do with this. Something very unpleasant is going on here, and it's doing so without my knowledge or consent. As planetary governor, that makes me very unhappy. You and your crew are my guests, I invited you here with nothing but goodwill, and someone on Tau Ceti is taking grotesque advantage of my hospitality." Now that he'd started talking, the governor seemed to hit his stride. His face darkened as he put his fists on his desk, stood up, and said, "When we find them - assuming you leave anything - rest assured, I will make them pay." It surprised some of the Duelists a little how menacing that promise sounded, coming from this tubby little balding man in an expensive but crumpled suit. With that sentiment expressed, Kallon deflated a little; he sat back down and said heavily, "I cannot begin to tell you how embarrassed I am." Utena, who had come here fully prepared to read the riot act to another Earth Alliance politician who thought he could get away with something, blinked, thrown off her stride by the governor's blunt admission of embarrassment. This gave Kallon a chance to get hold of himself again, square up his sloping shoulders, and say, "If there is anything I or my -legitimate- forces can do to help you," (with a nicely done significant little emphasis on 'legitimate'), "please." Utena opened her mouth to reply, her fury completely defused by the governor's cooperative manner, when the intercom panel on Kallon's desk beeped. "Yes?" he inquired. "Your Honor," a voice replied, "ATC has a full hyperspace vector trace and course projection data set ready for Captain Tenjou's pursuit force." "Ah, excellent. Thank you, Winema. Tell Major Spencer to stand by, will you?" "Very good, Your Honor." Visibly pleased, Kallon turned his attention back to Utena. "Tau Ceti has no space fleet of its own," he said, "so I cannot offer you a pursuit vessel, but I can at least help with navigational data. We can transmit it to Starfleet, the IPSF, the WDF - whoever you please." "That sounds like my cue," said Liza with a faint smile. "Elisabeth R'tas Shustal, Your Honor, of the Ishkarat trading vessel Kuratai. Captain Tenjou and I are old schoolmates, and my crew and I would be happy to take her and a strike force in pursuit of the Valiant." Utena smiled. "Is your ship fast?" Liza's return smile was just slightly challenging. "Fast enough," she replied. Then she dropped the smile and said, "There's just one problem - our crew space is limited. I can't take all of you unless I leave a lot of my own people behind." "How many could you squeeze in?" "For a few days? Half a dozen or so." "How are you fixed for small craft space?" "Plenty. #1 hold is empty, and can be converted for that kind of thing in no time, if your small craft have magclamp landing gear." Utena nodded, scratching thoughtfully at her chin. Then she turned to address her crew and passengers. "OK. We shouldn't all go chasing after the ship together anyway; it'd be a hell of a note to catch her and then find out that our friends were here on Tau Ceti the whole time." Kaitlyn nodded. "Ag-greed. S-some of us should s-stay here and inv-v-v-investig-gate." "Right. So." Utena swept her thoughtful azure gaze across the group, then said in a crisp, commanding tone, "Corwin, Kozue, I'll need you two with me for two reasons - to help me run the ship when we catch her and to help me catch her in the first place. Anthy, I assume you'll insist on coming with me. Saionji, I assume you'll insist on coming to look after Anthy." She cracked the slightest smile as she said this, pleased even under the circumstances by the trace of color the observation brought to Saionji's face and the snickering elbow it got him from Wakaba. "The rest of you, stay here and see what you can find out. OK?" Nods all around. "Good. C'mon, Liza - there's no time to lose." Liza nodded, kissed Azalynn goodbye-for-now, nodded to the governor, and left the office with her crewmates. Utena gathered up her team. Saionji said a quick goodbye to, and got a hearty kiss and a "be careful" from, Wakaba. Corwin made eye contact with his sister and nodded to her, his face determined; such was their rapport, that was enough. Kozue turned to Chan and said, "Will you stay here and help Kaitlyn's group?" "Of course!" Chan replied at once. Then he smiled and added, "What do you think the Chief sent me here to do?" "The Chief sent you?" Kozue said. Chan nodded. "How'd you get here so -fast-?!" The Grey Lensman smiled a trifle smugly and replied, "Ancient Chinese magic." Kozue gave him a skeptical look, then muttered, "When this is over with, I -will- make you tell me. You realize that." Chan beamed. "I'm counting on it." "OK." They traded a quick one-hand punch combo, a shorter version of their "secret handshake", and then Kozue clapped him on the shoulder and went to join the assembling team. Utena looked them over as if satisfying herself that they were all up to the job, then crossed to Kaitlyn and leaned over her chair to speak to her privately for a moment. "If she's out there," she said softly, "we'll get her back. We'll get them all back. I promise." Kate smiled and patted her old roommate's hand where she was leaning on the arm of the chair. "I kn-know. And if th-they're h-h-here, w-we'll have them b-back by the t-time you get b-b-back." Utena grinned solemnly. "The Federation lives forever." Kaitlyn nodded. "The F-F-Federation lives f-forever." They clasped hands, and then Utena straightened, smoothed her uniform jacket, and led her pursuit team out. Kate looked at the doorway where they'd gone for a moment, then stood up and said, "I g-g-guess we'd b-better t-try to g-g-get some r-rest. W-we w-won't be any g-g-good to anyone if w-w-we d-don't." "Do you have accommodations?" asked Governor Kallon. "I assume you were planning to sleep aboard your ship." "We'll f-f-f-figure s-s-someth-th-thing out," Kate replied. "Despite all that's happened, I still consider all of you my guests," said Kallon with great dignity. Then he opened one of the side drawers of his desk and ceremoniously removed a fat stack of small rectangular papers, which he very deliberately placed on top of his desk and then pushed toward the front. Azalynn crossed the room, examined the papers, then looked at the governor with a puzzled expression and asked, "Why do you have a big wadge of cash in your desk drawer?" Governor Kallon smiled. "That, my dear, is the governor's discretionary evacuation fund." "Ahhhh," said Azalynn with a knowing nod. Kaitlyn looked in similar puzzlement at the money for a moment. Was the governor trying to buy them off? She really believed at this point that he was genuinely on their side... Then she realized what it truly meant. The cash enabled him to pay for their lodgings without knowing where they were - his way of tacitly acknowledging that they had no reason to trust him or his office. More than that - it might well be his way of silently indicating that they -shouldn't- trust his office by calling and telling his staff where they were staying. She met his eyes with her own, nodded slightly to show she understood his message, and picked up the money. "W-w-we'll b-b-b-be in t-t-touch," she said. Governor Kallon nodded graciously, then got up to bow them out of his office. "There's an art to hyperspace tracking," Liza told Utena as she led the way from the Kuratai's docking bay to the bridge. "Jandia is one of the best. We'll find the Valiant, have no fear." Utena nodded. "I believe it," she said. "This is some ship," she added appreciatively. While they walked down the ship's main stem-to-stern corridor, she'd been admiring the finish work and the richness of the materials. It looked more like a corridor in one of the buildings back at Tenjou Academy in Cephiro than the inside of a starship. "The finest in the Ishkarat fleet," Liza replied proudly. "Salusian architecture, Zeta Cygnan weapons, Corellian propulsion systems - all fused together with t'skrang genius. There isn't a warship of cruiser class or under that the Kuratai can't beat." "I hope we don't have to test that against the Valiant," Utena mused unhappily. "We won't," Corwin Ravenhair said positively. "Once Liza catches her, you and I and Kozue can stop her." Utena nodded, but didn't look quite convinced. Corwin put his hand on her shoulder and gave her a reassuring smile. "Trust me." Utena nodded and smiled, a little shyly, duly reassured. To her right and slightly behind her, a quiet little smile crossed Anthy's face as well at the sight. The group climbed a ladder - no turbolifts on t'skrang ships - and emerged from the ladderwell onto the bridge - though it took Utena a moment to realize that it -was- the bridge. It looked more like an expensive restaurant which happened to have highly advanced warship controls in it. Utena had never before seen a starship bridge that featured bright-shined brass railings, dark wood paneling, a nice Oriental rug on the polished teak deck in front of the captain's chair (which appeared to be a brown leather Barcalounger), tapestries, or... "The chandelier adds just the right, oh, je ne sais quoi," Utena observed as Liza settled into her (nicely cleaned) conn. "Doesn't it, though?" Liza replied, pleased. "I took it from the grand ballroom of an Elasi novaliner that was carrying slaves conditioned to tell customs inspectors they were third-class passengers. Filthy bastards. I spaced their officers," she added conversationally. "Tea?" As a steward brought the Valiant team comfortable chairs and cups of tea with saucers, Liza settled back in her overstuffed conn, crossed her legs elegantly at the knees, and said, "It's your show, Jandia." "Aye aye, Captain," the tiger-striped green t'skrang replied. Jandia R'lajj Metolin Ishkarat was the Kuratai's executive officer, an unusually brisk and serious t'skrang. She did still have her whimsical side, but she was all business now as she went to the navigation station. "All right. We can pretty safely assume they -aren't- heading for Epsilon Indi. And it stands to reason they would have used the hyperdrive," said Jandia thoughtfully as she sat down and started tapping at controls. "They don't have an engineer qualified in the DDNG's warp system, so they're not going to play with that, and using a metagate would have been too obvious. "Now, they're too smart not to know that Tau Ceti ATC would be able to track their exit vector, so most likely they only jumped for a few light-minutes on that vector," the t'skrang officer went on. "Just long enough to clear Tau Ceti's long-range sensor net. Then they'll have jumped again on a different vector. They may have done this several times to try and shake off pursuit... " Jandia's jaws opened slightly, revealing her many sharp teeth. "... but they won't succeed." The Kuratai went to yellow alert and broke orbit just before 11 PM Tau City time, following the first of the hyperspace vector tracks provided by Tau Ceti ATC. The hunt was on. WEDNESDAY, JULY 8, 2409 1:31 AM DECK 3 (THE LIDO DECK) IPS VALIANT Psi Corps Enforcer (Cybernetically Augmented) Second Class Medrick Mutabi stood with his hands folded behind his back outside the locked door of the Deck 3 restroom, waiting. "C'mon, Jerry," he said in an irritated tone after about five minutes. "What're you, reading 'War and Peace' in there? I realize this is a small ship, but we've still got a lot of cargo space to search, and I -ain't- doin' it all -alone-." Mutabi thumped on the door with an armored fist. "So c'mon already!" Jerry Gillis's response was muffled by the door and unintelligible, but sounded argumentative. "Hey, man, don't cop an attitude on me!" Mutabi snapped. He banged on the door again, harder this time. "C'mon!" Something - it sounded like a booted foot - struck the door from the inside in response, banging not once but several times in a frenetic rhythm. For a second, Mutabi thought his comrade was just indulging in a bit of a tantrum - Gillis could be immature at times, a tendency not helped by the extensive cerebral modifications involved in becoming an E(CA) - but then it slowly dawned on him that there was something subtly wrong, something agonal about the rhythm. "Jerry? You OK?" No answer; just the muffled sound of something... moving. Metal against metal, a sliding, scraping sound. "Jerry? I'm comin' in, man, so you better not be foolin' around." No answer. "OK, I'm comin' in," Mutabi repeated. He backed off two steps, leveled his blaster carbine, and slagged the lock, then yanked the door open and aimed his weapon inside. He had just enough time to start screaming. 3:41 AM UNKNOWN LOCATION Mark 47 anti-intruder gas is a remarkable compound. It can rapidly and painlessly incapacitate almost ninety percent of the carbon-based animal lifeforms in the galaxy and a few other types besides - ninety-seven percent of the galaxy's known sentient species are affected by it. In humans, still the galactic baseline for sentient life, it generally takes effect in under 30 seconds and lasts for somewhere between eight and twelve hours. Most subjects awaken as though rising from a deep sleep, without the stereotypical splitting headache people always expected from tactical hypnotics. Janice Barlow did wake with a dull, throbbing pain at the base of her skull, but it wasn't from the gas. She sat up slowly, instantly wary. Her tactical awareness, born on a homeworld renowned for its dangerous fauna and honed as a member of the IPO's Criminal Investigations Division, reminded her instantly upon regaining consciousness that she hadn't lost it normally. People didn't just keel over in the middle of sickbay, not when they were just keeping an eye on a patient. Reflexively, she reached for her Varista, to discover that her sidearm was gone. She hadn't been wearing her Frame - there seemed little need for light powered armor in sickbay - and the rugged WDF flightsuit she favored for duty coveralls seemed undamaged, but all the pockets had been cleaned out. She couldn't tell anything much about her surroundings, because the place was pitch black. She switched her cybereye to night-vision mode... ... and had to suppress a surge of panic when nothing happened. OK, calm down, think, she told herself firmly. Your eye's probably just offline. Diagnostics aren't responding either. Your other eye's probably just fine; it's too dark in here to tell. She raised her hand to the back of her neck, where the low pain was, and felt metal. That was a point in favor of the "offline" theory; the device was a neuroprocessor inhibitor collar, a measure commonly used in holding prisoners so equipped. The pain was a sympathetic reaction to the electromagnetic noise with which the collar was flooding her neuroprocessor's primary cerebrospinal leads. That also explained why she couldn't raise Mitra. She hoped the remote hadn't been damaged; she knew it was just a robotic battleslave, but she'd become fond of the thing. Hopefully it was just locked up someplace, like its owner. She sat in the dark for a few minutes - with her processor disabled and her watch taken, there was no way to tell exactly how long - and fought against the waves of irrational fear that kept threatening to sweep over her. The little fatalistic voice in the back of her head kept whispering, Well, you're blind again - now what are you going to do? Janice gritted her teeth, growling, and then the grimace became a grin as a thought occurred to her. "Lights," she said, and to her surprise, a light turned on. She was still blind in one eye - her cybereye was, indeed, offline - but her organic one still worked just fine. It showed her that she was in a pretty standard-looking jail cell. The room was about eight by eight, with thermofused walls, ceiling and floor all the same dull grey color, several dull glowstrips on the ceiling, and no furniture. The bunk she was sitting on was part of the wall. It wasn't clear from a simple visual inspection where the door was. A button on the wall next to the bunk deployed a retractable toilet and sink from the far corner, then retracted it again. "Seexty days in ze coola," Janice murmured wryly. Then she thumped the wall with the side of a fist. It was solid, probably metal with a plasticized coating, and it didn't make much of a noise. "Hey," said Janice experimentally. "Hey!" A small rectangular opening like a Judas window slid soundlessly open in the wall opposite the bunk. "Yes?" a metallic voice replied. "OK, look," said Janice. "I'm not dumb enough to expect you to answer me if I ask who you are or why you've got me locked up, so skip that. But can you at least gimme something to -do- in here? A book or something? I'm not picky, but with my processor offline I can't even play Shanghai." A metallic chuckle replied, and then the window slid shut again. "Jerk," Janice grumbled. A moment later, however, the window opened again - slightly wider, this time - and an object fell through. Janice got up, approached the object warily, and then blinked in surprise. It was a baseball glove, quite well-worn, and when she picked it up, a baseball fell out and rolled into the corner. "Uh... thanks," said Janice, perplexed. "Don't mention it," the metallic voice replied, and the window closed once more. Janice retrieved the baseball, sat on the bunk, and then discovered belatedly how frustrating it was trying to play catch with oneself without any depth perception. "Jerk," she muttered again. 4:11 AM LIDO DECK IPS VALIANT E(CA)1 Lois Raghavan suspected her esteemed colleagues Gillis and Mutabi of, in the parlance of her native New England, dubbing off. They were 11 minutes overdue for their top-of-the-hour check-in, and, in fact, no on had heard from them in a couple of hours. They should have finished sweeping the cargo holds by now and reported to the lunchroom on Deck 2 for a patrol assignment, but there was no sign of them, and they didn't answer the com. Their transponders were still active, though, and showed them down here in on the cargo deck, in one of the forward holds. That probably meant that they'd found something which amused their tiny brains in that hold and were still playing with it, too wrapped up in their recreation to bother with little niggling annoyances like the chain of command. Raghavan was no rocket scientist either - it was hard to be, when significant bits of your brain had been removed as part of a cybernetic process immunizing you against telepathic attack - but she was brighter than -those- two nimrods. She keyed the door to the hold, waited for it to grind open (like most cargo hold doors in the galaxy, it was a big, reinforced power affair wide enough to drive a small truck through), and entered. The hold was dark and mostly empty; there were a few crates and boxes here and there, and a stack of what looked like luggage in the back, but the ship wasn't hauling anything special and most of the spare parts were stored aft, near the freight turbolift to Main Engineering. So much for the shiny-object theory, thought Raghavan as she switched on her searchlamp and moved further into the hold. The most interesting thing down here is a case of lube oil for the shuttlebay doors, and I don't want to think about what those two morons would find amusing about that. "Gillis? Mutabi?" she called. Her voice echoed eerily in the darkness, but she paid that no mind. Fear was another one of the things which went by the wayside with the surgery E(CA)s underwent. Near the middle of the hold, she tripped over something and nearly fell, performing a comical little dance to stay upright. Once she'd stabilized her position, she turned and shone her light on the object she'd tripped over. It seemed to be Medrick Mutabi... or at least most of him. "Holy -shit-," she grunted. Before she could key her comlink and inform the commander, Raghavan was startled by the sudden activation of a blindingly intense floodlight - a floodlight which abruptly lunged toward her. She instinctively raised her blaster and opened fire; the scarlet energy splashed against something behind the light, but before she could parse that this meant more than just the light was approaching her, whatever it was had struck her a powerful blow. Raghavan skidded backward on the deck as something ripped through her armor at both shoulders; then the aft bulkhead slammed into her back. She tried to wrench herself free, but whatever had penetrated her armor had gone all the way through and pinioned her to the bulkhead like a bug on a tray. Undaunted, she raised both legs, planted her boots against the front of whatever had pinned her, and shoved with all her powered strength. With a scream of metal on metal, the pinions tore from her shoulders and the whole affair went skidding away, then struck a joint in the deck plating and overturned with a mighty crash. Raghavan slid down the wall, panting, as her armor's automed system sealed the breaches and did what it could for her damaged shoulders. Her right arm still worked a little, but the left would need extensive reconstruction to be useful again. Still, the Enforcer felt no pain and was confident that she was still somewhat combat effective. On the other hand, her comlink was dead, its transmitter package ripped away. She picked herself up, found her blaster, and then turned to see what the hell had hit her. It was a compact fusion-powered cargo-handling vehicle, the twin prongs of its work fork gleaming dully in the light of her helmet searchlight. "... tried to kill me with a -forklift-?" she muttered incredulously. The operator's seat of the overturned cargo handler was empty; whoever it was had prudently dismounted when Raghavan kicked the machine over. Raghavan heard something clatter behind her and whirled, blaster ready. The last thing she saw was the edge of a spare deck plate, hurtling toward her head at a completely unreasonable speed. 6:17 AM INFIRMARY, PSI CORPS HEADQUARTERS TAU CITY, TAU CETI Carmela Sunderland had slept, but only because the infirmary staff insisted on it, and backed their insistence with drugs. Even then, she had only managed about four hours of full unconsciousness. The rest had been a sort of twilight haze studded with images that weren't quite flashbacks, but weren't dreams either. Sunderland had never seen anyone come unhinged the way the redheaded Duelist had after that psionic thrust. She'd read about the phenomenon - "neuroshock berserker syndrome" was the technical term - but it was exceedingly rare and almost never happened outside the laboratory. The experience, and not just the severe beating she had incurred in the process, had shaken the Psi Cop deeply. She'd spent her conscious time (and apparently some of her unconscious time) thinking it over ever since. Carmela Sunderland believed in the mission of the Psi Corps, truly believed that it was the best - the only workable - way of managing the human telepath population in a safe, equitable way for the benefit of all society. She had the arrogance of power that many high-ranked telepaths had, an arrogance cultivated by the Enforcement Division's training policies and corporate culture, but she was not an evil woman. Her reaction to seeing the Duelists again had been personal, petty and bitter, and lying in her hospital bed she recognized that and was ashamed of it; but when not acting out of knee-jerk personal hostility, she did what she did out of a belief that it was the best way she could use her gifts to serve humanity. But she had started to wonder now, her personal grudges aside, was hounding the International Police really serving humanity? Certainly, the IPO and its leaders misunderstood the Corps. The two organizations clashed frequently, especially since the Psi Corps had become a branch of the Federation government rather than that of the Earth Alliance. There was, Sunderland thought, a perception among the IPO's people that the Federation Corps still took its marching orders from Earthdome, and given the Intercops' several bad scrapes with the Dome back in the day, she supposed their attitude toward the Corps was understandable given that. Why couldn't two organizations with similar goals - the protection of society, defense of the rule of law - work together? Why the hostility and animosity? The IPO's founder was an old Wedge Defender, and the WDF had supported the Federation and its predecessor, the United Galactica, for centuries. Why this relatively sudden breakdown in relations between what should have been mutually supportive allies? Sunderland didn't know, but the questions troubled her more and more as the long, painful night went on. At a little after quarter past six, she felt a hand touch her arm gently and opened her eyes to see the familiar face of one of her colleagues in the Tau City Psi Cop contingent. Ahmed Garcia was a Spanish Moor in his late twenties, about Carmela's own age. He was a dangerously good-looking fellow, tall, thin-faced and dusky with his hair (prematurely grey, like that of many hardworking P12s) drawn back into a ponytail, and he was popular around the Tau City station for his easy charm and good humor. Like most of her co-workers, Sunderland liked him, though she fancied there was something faintly, subconsciously disturbing about him. That probably stemmed from her knowledge of his job. Like her, he was a P12 telepath, but his training specialties were in the black arts of deep interrogation and identity sublimation, not investigation and psionic combat. Garcia wasn't a field officer, he was attached to the headquarters division; and it was a winkingly open secret around the Tau City station that he was involved in the secret branch which didn't exist, though everyone at the grade of P10 or above knew damn well it did. All the same, in her current condition, Carmela was pleased to see him. She smiled with the small part of her face that didn't hurt. "Hey," said Garcia. Then he smiled and went on telepathically, Sunderland chuckled mentally. It required both skill and strength to keep the torrent of misgivings she'd been feeling all night from leaking into the superficial link she had with Garcia for this conversation, but Sunderland wasn't a Psi Cop for nothing; she managed it ably and replied lightly, Garcia added with a wink. Then, lowering his mental tone to a conspiratorial murmur, he went on, He laughed and added, Carmela grumbled reflexively. Then the full importance of what he'd told her sunk in. Once again she mastered her true reaction perfectly, keeping the tone of her link with Garcia light, and replied only, Garcia winked again. Then, breaking the link, he patted her arm and said cheerfully, "Rest up, OK? I'll stop in later to see how you're doing." "Thanks, Ahmed," she said, her physical speech blurred by the damage to her face. "Don't go anywhere," said Garcia with a grin, and then he left her with her thoughts. A silent arrest by the "special colleagues"; deep scans; God only knew what else. No; that wouldn't do. It wouldn't do at all. An experienced cop, Sunderland had unconsciously been timing the routines of the infirmary staff since her arrival. Now she knew exactly the right time to muster all her remaining strength, throw off the blanket that covered her, and slip painfully but silently from her bed. 6:38 AM KURATAI "Captain." Liza was awake and alert instantly, coming upright in her nicely padded conn. "Yes?" "I've just found the vector trace for their fourth course change," Jandia reported. "The pattern is nicely defined; I can now make a reasonable guess as to their destination." Utena, also awakened by the t'skrang first lieutenant's quiet summons, leaned over the back of Liza's chair. "Where are they taking my ship?" Jandia's response was unhesitant. "The Solar system. I can't be more specific yet, but I estimate a 92% probability that they're headed for Sol." "Earth," Utena muttered. Her fist clenched on the top of Liza's conn. "The bastards are taking her home." Liza nodded. "Earthforce?" "Or the Psi Corps. They both hate us, and they'd both like a good look at a DDNG. They'll probably take her to the Lunar Yards and get a crew in to dismantle her." The pirate captain looked pensive for a moment, then asked her police colleague, "Are you a gambler?" Utena glanced over her shoulder at Corwin and Anthy, who both looked significantly amused, and then grinned and replied, "Roll 'em." Liza's return grin was sharkish as she straightened in her conn and said briskly, "Secure hyperdrive. Rig ship for metaspace transition." While Captain Shustal handled her ship, Captain Tenjou pulled out her communicator, flipped it open, and said quietly, "Tenjou here. Give me the Chief." 7:02 AM IPS VALIANT Commander John Darien (Psi Cop, Black Omega) was fed up with Enforcers. He'd never thought the project was a good idea to begin with, and the performance of his prize crew's armored contingent was just proving him right as far as he was concerned. E(CA)s gained their immunity to psionic attack, in Darien's view, through being too stupid to be affected, and that also made them too stupid to be effective soldiers. Now he had three of them missing, one of whom had apparently disabled her transponder. Aboard a vessel this size, one secured by a team led by no less a personage than Jason Galantine! It was infuriating - unconscionable. He had nine Enforcers and three telepath junior officers left, and when he'd come aboard he'd thought this force more than sufficient - too big, in fact, but SOP required that he bring them. Well. Let the dumb bastards slack off if they wanted; there'd be -hell- to pay when they got to Lunarville VII and disembarked. Darien and Psi Cop Horace Umphrey, the only members of the prize crew not to be wearing J-series power armor, sat in the command seat and pilot's station, respectively. Umphrey had finally stopped making appreciative noises about the ship's drivetrain and stopped trying to talk the commander into letting him use the warp drive, for which Darien was grateful; though a hell of a pilot, the man's enthusiasm for his craft could occasionally get a bit stale. The same could be said of their engineering review officer, Psi Cop Kaela Kaloris. Kaloris was down in the engine room in something like ecstasy, looking over the ship's systems. Early on she'd tried to persuade Darien to let Umphrey take the ship to warp speed, but the prize commander wasn't about to mess around with -that- on a ship whose drive technology he knew nothing about. That hadn't dented Kaloris's mood much. She was still oohing and aahing over the engine room's fittings and systems, devouring technical documentation and generally acting like a kid at Christmas. Some distance forward of Kaloris, E(CA)2 Sergio Philips sat at one of the tables in the ship's messhall - which reminded him extremely of a particularly pleasant office breakroom - enjoying a Hungry Humanoid tray. Philips was noting to himself as he did so that International Police crews had it pretty cushy. Their staterooms were comfy, the decor on board was pleasant and businesslike, and the chow was first-rate. (The Enforcer would have been extremely impressed had he known that the food he was eating was the emergency backup "captain and security chief are both too busy to cook" food, not what the ship's company generally looked forward to each day.) As he ate, he noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye. Philips whirled, his blaster instantly at the ready, and then relaxed, laughing slightly at himself, as he saw what it was. A battleship-grey housecat was prowling into the lunchroom, looking around as though expecting to find someone. It seemed unimpressed by the hulking black-armored figure pointing a blaster at it. Philips remembered seeing a grey cat on the list of things one might encounter aboard, though he couldn't remember which crewmember the animal belonged to. The Enforcer put up his blaster, fished a little bit of chicken out of his tray, and offered it to the cat, who came closer with a look of faint interest. "Hey, kitty," said Philips, smiling. "Want something to eat?" The cat stopped advancing just short of the Enforcer's outstretched hand, sniffed at the chicken, then looked up at him with a startlingly intelligent look in its eyes. Then... "GYAAAAAAH!" John Darien blinked in slight consternation as the blood- curdling scream ripped through the prize crew's internal comm network. "The hell was that?" Horace Umphrey wondered aloud. Darien looked at his wrist computer, pulling up a display of his Enforcer team's ID transponders. Now there were two dark entries on the list, Raghavan and Philips. However, unlike last time, Darien knew exactly where Philips was, or at least where he was supposed to be. He keyed his communicator and said, "Ellsworth. Go check on Philips. He should be in the messhall." The prize crew's fourth officer, Psi Cop Harris Ellsworth, acknowledged. He and E(CA)2s Kohler and Katagawa were near the lunchroom anyway, sweeping the forward staterooms. The one they were looking into right now seemed to be the ship's library, which was surprisingly extensive but very poorly organized. The three went down the crescent hall and into the lunchroom, Ellsworth in the lead. He stopped short in the doorway, Kohler almost plowing into the back of him, and emitted a gasp of shock and horror. The lunchroom looked like somebody had painted it red, and very sloppily, spattering the paint all over the floor, the tables, and the vending machines in the process of giving the walls a patchy, uneven coat. Except... it wasn't paint. "Ellsworth. Report," Darien's voice insisted in his ear. "Ellsworth here, sir," said the Psi Cop, a trifle shakily. "What's the matter with you, Ellsworth? Did you find Philips?" "Uh... " Ellsworth advanced warily into the room and toed over the black-armored mass in the middle of the floor, then drew back in horror. "Uh... roger that, sir." "Well? What's he doing?" Darien demanded. "Nothing, sir. He's dead." A pause. "-Dead-?!" Darien blurted. "Yessir. He's been... partially decapitated." "By -what-?" "Damned if I know. There's nothing else in here. This ship is supposed to be deserted." There was another pause while Darien thought; then he replied grimly, "Perhaps Mutabi and Gillis aren't just screwing around after all. You three had better find them." 8:12 AM HOTEL METROPOLE TAU CITY, TAU CETI One of the things Kaitlyn's father had taught her - in between automobile maintenance, basic cuisine, and samurai swordsmanship - was how to sleep at times when people would ask, "How can you sleep at a time like this?!" - if she weren't asleep. He and her mother had also taught her the -importance- of sleeping at times like that; so, once the group of them had checked into a block of rooms near the top of the Metropole, that's exactly what she had done. So it was a clear-headed and rested Kaitlyn, if still one under a great deal of stress and worry, who stood at the window in the living room of Suite 2104 and looked out at the dingy concrete jumble of downtown Tau City, stretching smoggily off to the eastern hills. Somewhere out there were seven of her friends, one of them among the dearest people to her in the universe - out there in the city or out there beyond the hazy yellow-grey sky; either way, somewhere out there. Kaitlyn didn't know where; she didn't even know who had taken them. She had, therefore, no idea where to start looking. Purpose burned within her, but without direction, it was worthless. She clenched her fist on the smooth wooden grip of her zatoichi and fought down an urge to scream and smash the window. Behind her, the rest of the Valiant's company, aside from those who had gone with Liza to retrieve the Valiant, sat on couches, chairs, or the floor and watched her. With Utena, the ship's captain, gone on the retrieval mission, Kate was the group's spiritual if not nominal leader. The others looked to her for guidance; and they knew her well enough to be able to tell that she didn't know what to do either. They represented a remarkable force in themselves: Miki Kaoru, though known mostly as a musician and renowned for the gentleness of his nature, was nonetheless a Duelist of the Order of the Rose. He was an artist with a sword, and Juri was his oldest friend who wasn't a blood relative. R. Dorothy Wayneright was a student of the Kirishima Empty Hand School of karate - a martial art designed for the powerful people of high-gravity Hoffman. She was fearless, implacable, and damned near unstoppable when roused. Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan and Moose MacEchearn were nominally noncombatants, but neither would run out on a friend, and the super-swift Dantrovian and brawny (if untrained) Hoffmanite had contributions to make all the same. Shiori Takatsuki was a Duelist of the Rose as well, though untested in actual battle. She had known Juri even longer than Miki had, and she wasn't about to be cowed by enemies who weren't even man enough to strike openly. Her two years in Midgard since high school had given her other skills which might be of use as well. Mousy-looking Yomiko Readman was a Grey Lensman and an Expert of Justice with powerful (if quirky) psionic gifts. The day before, she had defeated a power-armored Tau City Military Police officer in single combat, armed only with a newspaper, a comic book, and some index cards. Wakaba Shinohara, the Green Lensman, was a fusion of Lensman and Cephirean mage knight whose unique abilities had earned her the underworld nickname "the Emerald Crusader". Gunnr Brynjelfr was a Valkyrie, one of the elite warrior maids of Asgard, and among those supremely martial women was the acknowledged grand mistress of the handgun. Anne "Juniper" Cross was Kaitlyn's student in the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, and though by her own admission she was only a raw novice, she had potential, she had power, and she had courage. She also had considerable street wisdom acquired in two years on the Rim and good instincts in a scrap. Sergeant Neal Krummell was a Lensman and an up-and-comer in the IPO Criminal Investigations Division, known for his stubbornness and intuition. One of the missing was his Ragolian colleague Janice Barlow, whom everyone aboard the Valiant except the Niogan sergeant himself understood implicitly to be Krummell's significant other. Jackie Chan was a contemporary of Kaitlyn's father (actually, if you wanted to get technical, he was a contemporary of Kaitlyn's -grandfather-, but after the first few centuries, such distinctions blur to meaninglessness), a former Wedge Defender, a Grey Lensman, an Expert of Justice, a movie star, and, just incidentally, a galactic legend. And, of course, Sergei was Kaitlyn's pet neo-Siberian tiger, a five-hundred-pound natural killing machine whose friendly, playful nature did not extend to people who kidnapped his humans for sport. Kaitlyn stood looking out the window for a moment longer, then turned around and said, "All r-r-right. L-let's think: W-w-who w-would have d-d-done this?" "Big Fire?" suggested Chan. "The Psi Corps," Juniper said without hesitation. "The Church of Man," R. Dorothy opined flatly. "Could've been the Cardassians," said Krummell. "Or House Klavaar," Azalynn added. "They never -did- find B'Elanna's Uncle Klayvor." "Earthforce Commandos?" Gunnr mused. "The Black Dragon Society?" Miki speculated. "Damn, man," Moose rumbled. "Y'know, I never really noticed before how many enemies we have." "We're very popular," said Miki ruefully. The door to the suite clicked, beeped, clicked again, and then, to the surprise of everyone concerned (since it had been set in 'Do Not Disturb' mode, which should theoretically have kept the housekeepers out), opened. It had taken pretty much everything Carmela Sunderland had left in her to get here without being spotted. As such, she didn't really notice the large number of readied weapons and whatnot being directed at her from the startled-looking contingent in the room before her. All her attention was focused on the nearest member of the group, the great orange-and-black creature which sprang to face off against her and roared a challenge through a gleaming forest of ivory. Sunderland smiled, reached out with her good hand, and poked the tiger playfully on the nose. "Aren't you cute," she said, and collapsed unconscious on the entryway rug. Serge, thrown completely off his stride by both actions, abandoned his combative stance entirely and blinked down at her with a puzzled, "Grmf?" 8:21 AM KURATAI The hardest part of gambling like this, Utena reflected, was the waiting time between the play and the payoff. The Kuratai cruised through metaspace, that most efficient but, paradoxically, least satisfying FTL method. Most efficient because it was much faster than hyperdrive or warp speed, without the tremendous power consumption of instantaneous spacefold; least satisfying because, unlike the blue-white, rushing chaos of hyperspace or the streaky rainbow starfield of warp travel, metaspace's shifting, lowering red-black void gave no visual sensation of movement. You didn't feel like you were getting anyplace, even though you were making much better time than you would in hyperspace. She stood at the forward end of the Kuratai's bridge, looking pensively out the bridge window, her thoughts half musings on metaspace and half on the situation she and the others had left behind on Tau Ceti. Liza came up next to her, looked out the windows herself for a few moments, and then said quietly, "You're worrying about Kaitlyn?" Utena glanced at the blonde pirate captain, then nodded silently. Liza nodded in return, then said firmly, "She'll hold up. You should know better than most that there's steel under everything else she is. She'll hold up... and may Shivoam have mercy on whoever did this if she catches them first." Utena cracked a little smile at the thought, which was what Liza had been aiming for. "At any rate," the blonde went on, "we'll soon be finished with our part of it. Then we'll know where to go next." UNKNOWN LOCATION When Juri Arisugawa had taken a couple of Tylenol tablets and turned in to sleep in Kaitlyn's bunk, she'd expected to be awakened at some point in the night by the arrival of her lover back from the surface, climbing into bed. Kate always tried not to wake her under such conditions, but she usually failed, and Juri didn't mind; it gave her a chance to say hello and enjoy Kate's presence as she went back to sleep. As such, it came as a bit of a shock when, upon waking, her slowly returning senses informed her that not only was she alone, she wasn't in bed. Her green eyes snapped open and she drew in a sharp breath as a number of wrong sensations all hit her at once, adding up to something which felt like the very edge of panic. The pain in her head had more or less gone, but she still had a sharp pain in her shoulder, a pain exacerbated by the fact that her arms were stretched above her head. The room was cool, just cool enough to be uncomfortable, and as her eyes opened she could see that it wasn't Kate's cabin on the Valiant by any stretch of the imagination. It was so utterly -nonsensical- that, having gone to sleep in a comfortable bunk on a secure, homelike starship, Juri should wake hanging from the ceiling of a large, gloomy room, its exact size and any other details about it obscured by harsh, angular shadows, that at first her newly conscious mind just couldn't grasp the concept. This, she thought, must be some sort of bizarre dream, though what could have prompted it was a complete mystery. The pain in her shoulder, which had been cut by the sword of a Psi Cop during the previous day's riot, put the lie to that notion, though. "Ah," said a voice off to her right. Juri tried to look, but the speaker was too far to the side, and in her current position, she couldn't do a lot of looking around. "You're finally awake," the voice went on - a soft, smooth voice with a trace of an accent she couldn't place. There was something about its diction that struck Juri as familiar, but she couldn't place that either. A moment later the owner of the voice walked into her field of view, and the redhead's heart felt momentarily frozen. He was tall, thin and dusky, with long silver hair pulled back from his aquiline face in a ponytail, and he walked with a lazy, arrogant sort of grace. He was absolutely the last person Juri Arisugawa would ever have expected to find mocking her, even under these surreal circumstances. For a few harrowing seconds, her still-awakening, understrength mind was paralyzed with the horrified, disbelieving notion that the dead walked. The speaker seemed to recognize this; his teeth gleamed white in the shadows on his face as he smiled, chuckling darkly. Then he took a step forward so that one of the irregular beams of light from the ceiling fell across his face and the gleaming badge on his chest. Relief flooded through Juri - most incongruous relief, from her confronter's point of view. Her body, which had stiffened visibly against its restraints at the sight of him, relaxed, sagging against the bonds that held her more or less upright. Ahmed Garcia didn't really know what to make of that. He had carried out a great number of interrogations and other such operations since his assignment to Black Omega, and never once had anyone, in waking and recognizing his uniform, had the thought, "Oh - it's only a Psi Cop." Who the hell, he wondered, did she -think- I was? That might be worth digging for once we get going. He recovered his aplomb as best he could - it wouldn't do to show how peculiar he thought her response was - and said calmly, "Now that you're paying attention, Miss Arisugawa, we may as well get started." Juri raised her head, meeting his dark eyes in the shadows, and did not reply, except to give him a look that contained no trace of the fear that had just gripped her. This is going to be a tough one, Garcia mused. Ah, well. So much the better. 8:37 AM IPS VALIANT "302, check in. Mutabi, are you receiving? 303? Gillis? Raghavan?" Harris Ellsworth listened, got back nothing but dead air, and sighed. "Shit. Sir, they're not answering." The voice of John Darien replied, "Well, keep looking, then. They can't have gone too far," the commander added sardonically. Ellsworth acknowledged, checked his weapon, and headed for the nearest turbolift with his pair of Enforcers lumbering at his heels. The lieutenant knew Darien hated Enforcers, but for himself, he was glad to have them. Something didn't feel right. Darien would have sneered at that, too - he despised such notions, which he held to be little more than superstitions - but he wasn't down here, about to climb down to a deserted cargo deck in search of three missing E(CA)s with a fourth lying inexplicably dead in the lunchroom forward. The three armored men walked around the curving corridor of the Valiant's lower-level living quarters, making for the lift at the circular main deck's widthwise axis. One of the two Enforcers lagged behind slightly, preoccupied with a weapons check. Ellsworth and the other Enforcer thus didn't see what happened to him. His radio suddenly clicked into band: "Hey, WHAT the - " Then there was a startled cry which ended in a burst of static, and then... nothing. By the time Ellsworth and his companion turned around, there was nothing down there but an empty hallway. It was as if the second Enforcer had never existed at all. Then the radio clicked again. "Ellsworth, this is Darien," said the commander testily. "The ship's status monitor claims we just ejected 280 pounds of mass into hyperspace. What the hell's going on down there?" Ellsworth blinked, feeling his face go pale. 280 pounds... "Uh... " Ellsworth swallowed, licked dry lips, and checked his squad status member for the identity of the missing Enforcer. "I'm not sure, sir, but I think Katagawa just got spaced." "What?!" Darien snapped. "You're in A-corridor, correct? There isn't an airlock for a hundred yards." The commander went on in an icily sarcastic voice, "You don't have a hull breach down there, do you, Ellsworth?" "Uh, no sir." "Then don't be an idiot. Wherever Katagawa went, it can't have been outside. What the -hell- is going on? Get a move on, Ellsworth. Now you have four Enforcers to find." Before Ellsworth could respond, the familiar bulky shape of another Enforcer appeared at the head of the corridor. "Hey!" it said. "Lieutenant Ellsworth! I think I found Mutabi." Ellsworth blinked. "Gillis! Where the fuck have you been?" "Head call, sir." "For three hours?" "I'm afraid I'm not feeling very well." "Never mind that right now! Where's Mutabi? Show me." "Will do, sir. But first I'd like you to shoot Kohler, please. It would really save me a great deal of trouble." Ellsworth blinked. "Shoot Kohler?" "That's right. If you wouldn't mind, sir." Ellsworth considered the request. It seemed reasonable enough. Kohler was an idiot anyway, even by the rather liberal standards of the E(CA) corps. He turned around, powered his officer armor's built-in blaster to its highest level, and blew Kohler's head to vapor. Turning back to Gillis, he made an impatient gesture. "There. Happy? Can we go now?" Then, before Ellsworth's horrified eyes, Gillis... -rippled-. The Enforcer's whole outer surface, face, armor, attachments and all, quivered like a reflection in a pool of windswept water, and then Gillis seemed to -melt-. As he did so, the fog which had settled over Ellsworth's mind cleared, and he realized that Commander Darien was bellowing in his ear, demanding to know what the FUCK he thought he was doing fragging Kohler. "Jesus H. Christ!" Ellsworth screamed, recoiling in horror as the thing he had taken for Gillis sagged and fell to its knees, its surface still collapsing, rippling, changing color. It hunched into a near-fetal position and emitted a racking, liquid cough which splattered something wet on the deck. Ellsworth raised his blaster, still jacked to its highest power setting. The creature kneeling on the deck - which seemed to have stabilized somewhat, and was much smaller, with what looked in the poor night-shift lighting like a fall of dark hair - looked up at him, fixing his gaze with whiteless, bottomless black eyes. Something inside Harris Ellsworth's mind flared star-bright and incinerated what remained of his sanity, and in the last second before he vaporized his -own- head with his built-in, he knew what the rest of his compatriots were up against. In his dying thought, broadcast throughout the ship, the other three telepaths all felt a word which chilled them to the depths of their souls. MARTIAN! 9:15 AM PSI CORPS COMMUNICATIONS RELAY STATION TAU CITY, TAU CETI It was business as usual at the comm station, a squat four-story concrete building surmounted by a vertical dish antenna up on a hill just outside the city proper. Comm traffic for the Psi Corps assets on Tau Ceti was relatively light right now, with the captured IPO ship in direct contact with Earth Central and the Black Omega teams back at their dirtside base. They wouldn't have priority traffic for Earth for hours yet, so all the comm station had to handle right now was the routine "white" traffic of the open Corps facilities in Tau City and the planet's other major population centers. /* Hide "Run Rabbit Junk" _Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex OST_ */ Outside, a small group of individuals moved quietly into position around the building, swiftly and silently removing the Enforcement Division guards posted at the corners of the perimeter fence from play. The event went completely unnoticed by those inside the building. They weren't expecting trouble - who would attack a comm relay? - and the guards were more or less only there to ward off curious citizens anyway. In the top-floor main comm room, this quiet, boring sense of routine was shattered quite abruptly when something ripped the antenna assembly clean off the roof, tearing out a huge, roughly round chunk of the roof in the process. The half-dozen personnel in the room below that hole looked up in shock and dismay as two figures dropped through it. Communications Manager (P7) Joanna Garson recovered her wits first, turned, and lunged for the master alarm panel next to the main entrance door from the security station outside. Before she reached the panel, one of the three intruders interposed himself. The slim, blue-haired, blue-eyed young man in black said nothing; his cup-hilt rapier, point leveled so that Garson would run herself onto it if she tried for the alarm, did all the talking. She listened, skidding to a halt and raising her hands. Elsewhere, others entered the building through more conventional entrances, immobilizing personnel in the lower level offices and disabling all of the land-line and wireless communications links the station had with downtown. With the hypercomm antenna destroyed, that cut the station off entirely - which was just the way the strike team wanted it. The takedown was fast, silent (except on the top floor), and perfectly executed. Not a shot was fired by the attacking team, not a person injured. It wasn't a situation that could be held onto for long; eventually the penned-up Psi Corps personnel would realize that they outnumbered their attackers about five to one, and even if the attackers -were- mostly Lensmen and there wasn't a Psi Cop on the comm-station staff, there was the possibility that a countermove would dislodge them. That was all right, though. The Duelists weren't staying long. "OK, you six," said the other intruder who had come through the roof, an auburn-haired girl in a bottle-green cavalry jacket and black trousers, to the main comm-room staff. "Nobody do anything rash. We're not here to hurt you." One of the commtechs in the far corner spun in his chair, yanked out his PPG sidearm, and let fly. The ring on the auburn-haired girl's left hand pulsed with a bright green light, and a square of the same light flickered into existence in front of her, deflecting the PPG pulse. It streaked back along a very slightly different vector and blew the monitor panel clean out of that tech's station. Yelping, he threw himself to the floor. "OK, that was rash," said the Green Lensman dryly. "My fault. I should've opened with 'drop your weapons'. Let's try that instead. Weapons on the floor, and move away from the consoles." She smiled brightly and leveled her glowing ring, which they all realized was a Lens. "Now, please." Slowly, the staffers complied, disarming themselves and moving into the open space in the middle of the room. A moment later, the main entrance to the room opened and two more unauthorized personnel entered. Both were women. One was a black-haired, buxom, bespectacled girl in a suit and trenchcoat; she entered warily, like a cop taking down a room, except that instead of a gun, her raised and ready hand had a fan of what looked like index cards in it. The other was a slim girl with raspberry-colored hair. Like all of them, she was dressed in an unlikely sort of way for a member of a strike team which had taken down a secure facility as quickly and professionally as this group had. She was wearing threadbare jeans and a man's dress shirt over a holographic Laughing Man t-shirt whose scrolling logo was a bit disconcerting on a real-world garment. If she hadn't been so well-groomed, the outfit would have made her look outright disreputable, and the dueling saber hanging on her belt added a particularly weird touch. "All yours, Shiori," said Wakaba, gesturing to the main console. Shiori Takatsuki gave her old councilmate a grin and a gracious nod, then sidestepped around Garson and seated herself at that console. She glanced over it for a few moments, getting accustomed to its layout, then unslung a beat-up leather one-shoulder pack from her back, delved into it, and pulled out a fistful of cables and a cybernetic interface deck. Shiori's native Cephiro hadn't had anything like the Internet when she was growing up; it was a completely alien concept to her when she moved to Midgard following high school, which she did mainly for the change of scenery, and because so many of her friends seemed to like it there. Upon enrolling at the Nekomi Institute of Technology as a civil engineering major, with the thought of possibly becoming an architect, she had shortly discovered the online world and, like so many other incoming students from essentially rural backgrounds, had been enthralled. In her freshman year at NIT, Shiori proceeded through the classic larval stage, doing things online which now made her wince with sympathetic embarrassment for the twink newbies who did them. These included, but were not limited to, failing all of her B-term 07 classes and all but ignoring her pre-existing circle of friends in favor of a crowd consisting mostly of computer science majors. Fortunately, those pre-computing friends, rather than getting huffy and abandoning her in return, had staged something like an intervention over the Christmas holidays, helping her bring her life back into balance. The result, in this summer after her sophomore year, was a Shiori who defied the social conventions of tech school cliques, hanging with the comp sci crowd and the Motor Club both. She kept up her course of study in architecture, avoided academic probation by working her tail off in C- and D-08, and mildly freaked out Juri, her oldest friend, by getting a neuroprocessor installed over the summer so that she could take a cybernetic interface theory course as an elective in A-08. With Edward Tivrusky and Ein somewhere else in the galaxy, it thus fell to her to get the information the Duelists needed out of the comm station's computer systems, if indeed it was there. "I won't give you any access codes," said Garson stiffly as Shiori plugged together the adapters she'd need to connect her deck to the master console. Shiori grinned over her shoulder. "If we thought you would, Wakaba would be doing this part," she said, then jacked in and started typing. Garson watched her work with bemusement. She had expensive equipment, that was for sure. Garson was an information technology specialist for the Psi Corps, which was not exactly an agency that operated on a shoestring budget, and she had never seen a Fairlight Excalibur in person before. Those inlined skull-base jacks weren't cheap either; most of Garson's own staff had wrist plugs. This kid's stuff was mil-spec. All the same, the system she was going up against was one of the toughest in the Federation, specially hardened against such intrusions. It had to be; it handled information about Black Omega, an organization about which only about ten percent of the Psi Corps itself was cleared to know, which was why it was buried up here at the comm station, not sited downtown at the public Corps headquarters. Garson was confident that this scruffy teenager was certainly not going to get anywhere with it, expensive deck or no. About most scruffy teenagers, even the talented CS majors with whom Shiori hung out when she wasn't running with the Duelists or the Motor Club, the Psi Corps member would have been right; but most scruffy teenagers didn't run icebreakers written by the goddess of technology. That said, it was no walk in the park. The Tau Ceti Center computer was the toughest one Shiori had ever gone up against, and beating it unscathed took all of her skill, talent, and software. There was also the time pressure to consider, since the Duelists knew full well that they couldn't hold the station for very long. The battle was a silent one. To the observers, it looked like nothing in particular - a girl sitting at a console, typing furiously on a keyboard, her eyes closed. A fine sweat broke out on her forehead as she worked, but there was no other outward sign of the struggle going on within the system. The minutes stretched. Wakaba kept one ear tuned for the sound of trouble reports, ready to order an abort and get the team out if the Corps personnel tried a revolt, but determined to give Shiori as long as she possibly could. Shiori spared nothing in her assault on the TCC computer. How could she possibly hold back, given what information she was after? How else would they find out where the bastards were keeping Juri? Even the source which had dropped serendipitously into their laps hadn't known that, only that it was somewhere on the planet - and Tau Ceti was a big planet. The raspberry-haired Duelist had a long history with Juri Arisugawa. Not all of it was good, thanks to some truly mind-boggling communication problems a few years back, but their friendship had survived jealousy, anger, unrequited romance, all magnified by the warped lens of the Grand Tournament. The physical attraction was one-sided, but Shiori loved Juri all the same, and she wasn't about to leave the redhead in these bastards' clutches if she had anything to say about it. And thanks to her misspent freshman year, she had. Shiori sat back abruptly, disconnected her deck from the console, and turned a slightly spacey smile to Wakaba. "Got it," she said. Then, blinking several times, she came fully back to reality. As she did, the spaciness and the triumph both faded from her expression, hardening it into a scowl of distaste. "You won't get away with this," Garson snarled. "This is a blatant act of terrorism. We'll be able to turn public opinion so far against you - " "You want to talk about blatant acts of terrorism?" Shiori interrupted sharply, holding up a datacrystal she'd just burned. "Piracy, hijacking, grand theft, kidnapping, and unlawful psionic probing. You bastards are going down for this." She pocketed the crystal, then started repacking her deck and cables with quick, angry motions. Wakaba turned to Garson and said conversationally, "You'll want to get all of your people out of this building now." "Why?" the Psi Corps commtech demanded. The Green Lensman smiled grimly. "Because we're going to blow it up," she replied. BLACK OMEGA DETENTION CENTER 12 MILES NORTHEAST OF TAU CITY After an hour and a half of work, Ahmed Garcia had to confess that he didn't have a hell of a lot to show for it. Oh, he'd learned all sorts of interesting things about the Duelists, their ties to the International Police, and the various mainstream IPO figures Juri Arisugawa knew. She was no more able to conceal that information from Garcia than a book is able to keep people from reading it. The information-gathering component of his assignment was thus proceeding quite well. The other part - identity sublimation, the first phase of a comprehensive reprogramming which would turn the redheaded Duelist into a Corps sleeper agent within the IPO - wasn't working out quite so well, and for the life of him, Garcia couldn't figure out why. It should have been easier than usual; after all, Arisugawa had suffered a psychotic episode not 24 hours before, as part of an attack of neuroshock berserker syndrome. Her mental strength and identity integrity should have been compromised already, making her easy pickings for a determined, well-trained, powerful telepath like Ahmed Garcia. Instead, she had a hard core of unbending steel, starting in her conscious mind and rooted so far down in her subconscious that Garcia hadn't yet been able to find the bottom, however deep he probed. However hard he hit it, he couldn't crack it with brute force, and there seemed to be no chink anywhere he could use to pry at it. The result was that, despite the fact that she was injured, chained to the ceiling, and completely powerless to resist her interrogator's telepathic powers, Juri was, in a weird way, the one in control of the conversation - and that rattled Garcia almost visibly. It had started with that look she gave him, calm and unafraid, once her initial spasm of panic had abated. (Garcia couldn't figure out what that had been caused by, either; whatever it was, it was buried in that steel core he hadn't been able to penetrate.) His initial attempts to undermine her sense of importance hadn't gone very well, either. "You know," he told her while she shivered and reeled with the lingering pain of his first resisted deep probe, "I'm really quite disappointed that our strike team only managed to capture you lot. I was quite looking forward to... conversing... with Captain Tenjou." Rather than its desired effect, which was to make his prisoner feel that she was second-best even as a prisoner (and also to play on any fear for her captain's sake she might have), the statement made Juri -laugh-, a dry, cool chuckle. "What," Garcia asked her coldly, "is so funny?" "I was just picturing," Juri replied thoughtfully, "what Captain Tenjou would have done to you, had she had the same experience on waking that I had. It's a most gratifying image." Ahmed Garcia prided himself on the fact that he needed only his knowledge of psychology, his telepathic abilities, and his force of personality to achieve results. He never struck a subject, and he wasn't about to start now - but he sorely wanted to wipe that sardonic little smile off this subject's face, and the ferocity of his suddenly renewed telepathic probe was certainly attributable to it. Garcia wasn't even a particularly cruel man, really - sadists didn't last long in the real business of interrogation and programming, contrary to popular belief - but there was something deeply satisfying about making this particular subject scream. 10:10 AM HOTEL METROPOLE While Shiori hastily prepared a briefing for them based on the data she'd ripped from the Comm Center's computers, the Duelists, the Art of Noise, and their Lensman allies prepared their equipment. Neal Krummell sat at the kitchenette table, running a cleaning swab through the barrel of his dismantled sidearm. As he did so, radiating clear ill-temper waves, Gunnr Brynjelfr slid into the chair across the corner from him. "Hey," she said. "Hey," Krummell grunted. "Is that an A&K Mark 23?" she asked. Krummell nodded. "Sweet. I always wanted one of those, but they only make 'em for CID Lensmen. May I?" The Niogan Lensman glanced sidelong at her, then shrugged. "Sure," he said, and slid the placemat with the field-stripped gun's parts on it toward her. Gunnr picked up the frame, looked it over with a critical eye, and then quickly, deftly reassembled the gun. As she held it up, trigger finger laid along the side of the frame, and looked over the hi-vis semi-holographic sights, she said offhandedly, "By the way, when you get Janice out, you might want to acknowledge that you're in love with her. We girls aren't as high-maintenance as all that, but a little positive reinforcement now and then... " Neal regarded her silently for a moment, and then said in a tone of admission, "I wasn't planning on doing anything about it." Gunnr blinked, then put the Mark 23 carefully down on the table before looking Neal straight in the eyes and saying in a conversational tone, "That is the stupidest thing anyone has ever said to me. And I hang out with Svanhvit Icebinder, the ditziest demon ever to be spawned in the Pit of Ice." To Krummell's dumbfounded expression, she went on, "This is a woman who came face to face with Odin Almighty at her Trial of Defection and said, and I quote:" Gunnr's normally mellow voice took on an alarmingly squeaky quality as she adopted a vacantly happy expression and burbled, "Oh wow! I always thought you'd be taller!" Then she returned to her normal expression and voice and said, "Seriously, man, talk to her. Don't be a moron. It's a dangerous galaxy and you live dangerous lives - you have to learn not to put stuff off. You may not get to it later. If this incident teaches you -anything-, that should be it." Before he could reply, Shiori sat back from her work on the coffee table, capped her black Magic Marker, and called, "OK, you guys! Gather 'round." The group did as instructed, clustering around the crude diagram Shiori had drawn for their reference. "This is the Black Omega detention center just outside the city," she told them, pointing. "It's disguised as an office building at the end of a cul-de-sac in a mostly deserted commercial park - two miles from the nearest other building - but it's really a fortress: duracrete walls, concealed security weapons, the works." "It's geared more toward keeping people in than keeping them out, though," Wakaba noted. "Most of the weapons and security systems on the perimeter face inward, and the building itself shouldn't be much harder to get into than the comm station was. It's tough, but they're not expecting it to be attacked." "Don't the people there know by now that you took down the comm station?" Moose wondered. "We're hoping not," Wakaba replied. "The manager there told me that they have connectivity problems from the station and Tau City Center to the Omega station pretty frequently. Hopefully the people out there and at the Center will just assume this is another line failure." "What about the comm station's crew?" asked Azalynn. "Won't they tell anyone what happened?" "Not from Governor Kallon's basement they won't," said Shiori with a nasty grin. "Now. Here's a rough floorplan of the building. It's laid out kind of like a mall, with three wings and an underground part. These two wings are detention cells; this one is the barracks for the security detachment. They'll be our biggest problem - a full company of security troopers. Fortunately they're not the cyborg tank kind, but still, that's about 300 heavily armed goons." Jackie Chan smiled. "I'll take care of them," he said. That got a few is-this-guy-serious looks from some of those gathered, but Kaitlyn just smiled a small, dark smile and nodded to him. "The interesting part is underground," Shiori added. "Down these stairs here, there's a tunnel which leads a hundred yards away from the center gallery, under the courtyard, to this hill here. Inside the hill is an interrogation center, one main room and a couple of offices, which can be sealed off from the rest of the complex in the event of an attack or riot." She paused, as if not certain she should say the next part, then looked at Kate and said slowly, "According to the prisoner database... they're working on Juri right now." Kaitlyn said nothing; she looked down at the diagram for a moment, traced her fingertip up the underground corridor, tapped the main interrogation room once, and then nodded. Then she turned to Anne, looked pensively at her for a moment, and drew her aside. "I d-don't want you to t-take this the w-wrong way," she said, "b-but - " "Don't worry, Sensei," Anne said, saving her the trouble. "I'll stay right here. Don't worry about me - just go and get Juri and the others back." Kaitlyn put a hand on her junior student's shoulder, looked into her calm grey eyes for a moment, then smiled, kissed her on the forehead, and turned to the others. "Let's g-go," she said. 10:10 AM DEEP SPACE 2 LY COREWARD OF SOLAR SYSTEM Kuratai held station, weapons deployed from their normally hidden bays, systems charged for battle. On the bridge, Liza Shustal sat upright and alert in her command seat, gazing intently at the tactical plot being projected on the main window. "Final course and speed calculations complete," said Jandia R'lajj Metolin Ishkarat at the helm station. The tiger-striped t'skrang seemed tireless; she had tracked the Valiant all night and into the morning, and now she kept her station as the "merchant" ship prepared for action against her quarry. "Fire on my mark," Jandia continued, keeping her eyes firmly on the chronometer display of her panel. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Mark!" "Fire gravity torpedoes!" Liza barked. T'skaia Vorokoshiga'ar Ixtixtaaqitl't'chl'Vraihelt Ishkarat, chief of security and fellow Duelist, plied the weapons console. The uppermost two of the six torpedo tubes built discreetly into the Kuratai's bow spat glowing greenish-blue projectiles which streaked off into space before the ship. "Torpedoes away," the gas-flame-blue t'skrang reported. "Detonate on my mark," Jandia replied. "Four. Three. Two. One. Mark!" "Detonate torpedoes!" called Liza, and Sky jabbed a foreclaw down on a flashing red button. Some distance ahead of the hovering Kuratai, the two speeding torpedoes exploded in twin bursts of eerie purple light, the shock discs rippling outward and meeting in a brilliant interference pattern as the two warheads' effects interacted to create a zone of massive but transitory gravitic disturbance. An instant later, a second starship burst out of nowhere with a rush of pseudomotion, yanked forcibly from hyperspace by the pulse. "Ha HA!" Liza crowed, slapping her chair arm. "G Flight, this is Kuratai - the game is flushed. Go!" "What the hell was that?" John Darien demanded angrily over the howl of the hyperspace emergency alarm. "Gravitic pulse," Umphrey replied, silencing the alarm. "Hyperspace motivator is offline while safety systems recycle." "What ship is that?" "Looks like the Barsaivian merchantman that was one orbit track over at Tau Ceti, sir." Darien clenched a fist. "How the hell - no matter. Get us out of here, maximum impulse. Don't let them engage us; go back to hyperspace as soon as the drive restarts." "Aye aye, sir." Darien knew that Umphrey thought this move unnecessary; the helmsman had remarked several times on the power of the Valiant's weapons systems, which had been well-documented by Earthforce in the Battle of Titan at any rate. Umphrey would have preferred to fight the Kuratai rather than turning tail and running - but John Darien was not about to try fighting a ship-to-ship engagement in an unfamiliar vessel, -against- an unfamiliar vessel, with a -Martian- loose inside his hull. Of the seven remaining Enforcers, two were on the bridge, one at either entrance; one was aft of the bridge in the T-corridor where the turbolifts were; and the other four were below, two securing Main Engineering with Kaela Kaloris, the others sweeping the living spaces. It wasn't entirely certain that Ellsworth had been right when he declared his attacker a Martian, but what else would so terrify a trained, armored Psi Cop that he would kill himself rather than face it? The Martians were the most feared, most powerful single enemies the Corps trained its people to assume they might face one day. On Darien's arm computer, the transponder icon for one of the two sweeping Enforcers went red, then black, and he heard the other calling for his partner over the tactical band. No; now was definitely not the time to get into a starship battle as well. "Damn, that ship is fast," Jandia grumbled. "Captain, we cannot overtake Valiant." "I expected as much," Liza replied unconcernedly. "That's all right. We don't have to." "What are they doing, dumping cargo? That won't help them with -our- speed advantage," Umphrey observed as the t'skrang merchantman's forward hold doors opened wide. A moment later, three fightercraft streaked out from within the bay, bearing down on the fleeing destroyer with wide-open thrusters. "What the hell are those?" Darien wondered. "Unknown, sir. Never seen anything like them." "Corwin," said Utena Tenjou, "how long do we have before the hyperdrive comes back online?" Corwin glanced at his watch. "One minute... mark." "Damn! We're not going to catch them at this rate." "Oh yes we are," Kozue Kaoru's voice crackled. "You ready, Corwin?" "Always. How about you, Utena? Just like we played it in the simulation." Utena grinned. She'd been wanting to try something like this for a long time; who would have thought that the theft of her ship would provide her with the opportunity? "Let's do it." As one, all three reached to the instrument panels of their respective craft and threw the central of an array of three levers into battery. As they did so, they arranged their trio of ships in a careful formation and then hung on grimly as the semi-automatic systems kicked in to guide them through the tricky part. "CHANGE!" Kozue declared with gusto. "GETTER RYGER!" Ryger came together flawlessly, the Getter G unit's first fully piloted combination maneuver; then the Inertia-Vector field came online, the thrusters screamed, and the spindly blue robot streaked forward with a speed nearly double that which the red or yellow Getter Machines could achieve alone. The Psi Corps helmsman saw the robot approaching and tried to take evasive maneuvers, but it was too late; Ryger was upon him before he could finish registering the change. The blue robot pulled up short of intercepting the stolen destroyer, matching its speed, and before the startled Umphrey, unfamiliar with the weapons systems, could power anything up that might be able to attack, Kozue struck. "DRILL HARPOON!" she cried, and the wickedly pointed drill that formed Getter Ryger's left forearm spun up to full speed, then rocketed out on a stream of fire, trailing a heavy chain behind it to the robot's upper arm. Its point and edges glowing with emerald Getter radiation, the drill bit through the Valiant's shields and then plowed into the armored hull plating to port and a bit aft of the bridge. It penetrated partway, then stopped, buried deep in the tough composite-alloy armor. "Got 'em!" Kozue declared. "You're up, Corwin!" Corwin, in the cockpit of Getter Machine #3, flipped down the folding console for his unit's onboard computer and patched through the inductive connection to Valiant's hull. This was a tricky maneuver, and one that couldn't have been tried with systems less sophisticated than those on board the Getter Machine prototypes; even so, he wasn't sure it would work. "OK, we are hardwired. Attempting to send prefix code for main power override and shutdown," he said through gritted teeth, his fingers flying across the keyboard as the violent maneuvers of the Valiant's Corps helmsman tried to shake off the attached robot. "Connection's lousy, but we expected that. I think I've almost got it - " At that point, Umphrey figured out how to operate the ship's targeted weapons. One of the strip-collimated phasers glowed to life and then slashed up and back along its track, seeking the unwelcome passenger. Kozue evaded it perfectly, but she couldn't elude the laws of geometry; the phaser beam intersected Ryger's chain and severed it, breaking the robot's connection to the starship. "Slag!" Corwin snarled. "OK, plan B," said Utena. "Corwin?" "Go!" Corwin replied. "The transmorphic systems will compensate - fifteen seconds!" That was all Utena needed to hear. She was unable to keep a grin from stretching across her face, even under the desperate circumstances, as she seized hold of a control lever. "Open GET!" The Getter Machines separated, falling slightly behind the still-fleeing Valiant, but Umphrey's now-unnecessary evasive maneuvering was using up enough energy that the ship wasn't speeding away from the Getters like it had before. They didn't remain separated for long, either; Utena's next transmission was, "Change! Getter DRAGON!" The Dragon configuration wasn't as fast as Ryger, but that wasn't the important thing for the team's second hastily conceived plan. All of them, especially Corwin, had been hoping they wouldn't have to do it, but the Psi Corps pirate helmsman's weapons skill, better than they'd expected, had forced the issue. Getter Dragon boosted "up" relative to the Valiant's bearing, then fell into a pursuit course above and behind the hijacked destroyer. Utena bent over her controls, pressing her right eye to a targeting scope which had extended on an arm from the panel above her. Her hands worked a pair of the Getter's many control levers with quick, deft movements while Corwin's voice in her ear guided the last of the fine adjustments. Below, in Getter Machine #3's cockpit, the God of Mecha had his eyes closed, his brand glowing, as he drew on his intimate knowledge of the Valiant's mechanisms for the next very delicate move. Listening to them coordinate the move from the center cockpit, Kozue reflected, Damn, they really work well together. It's like... like me and Miki, at our best. "OK," said Corwin after eight eternal seconds. "We get 'em now or we don't get 'em at all. Ready?" "Ready." Utena closed her eyes for a moment, murmured, "Sorry about this, Valiant," and then opened them, thumbed a control, and declared, "GETTER BEAM!" The coruscant green energy beam shot arrow-straight from the central horn of Getter Dragon's crown of spikes, focused down to a tight, brilliant ray no thicker than a hand blaster's bolt. It spiked through the fleeing Valiant's shields and hull like a needle through hide and transfixed the ship completely at a very carefully calculated point, well away from the inhabited spaces, and did a miniscule, carefully metered amount of damage to the ship's internal structure. Horace Umphrey blinked in disbelief as the yellow hyperdrive indicator on his helm panel, which he'd expected would turn green at about that time, flared red, then went black. "WHAT the - ?!" he blurted. Hurriedly, he ran a diagnostic, regarded it with continued disbelief, then turned to Darien. "Sir, the hyperdrive... they've destroyed it!" Darien gritted his teeth and made an angry growling sound. Umphrey's unwelcome news had been accompanied by the disappearance of another Enforcer ID token on his onboard tactical plot. "Yes!" Corwin cried, punching the air. "PERFECT shot!" "Couldn't have done it without you," Utena replied, grinning. "That's great, but, uh, how do we stop them?" Kozue inquired. "They can still outrun the Kuratai and two out of three of our modes, and Ryger's running out of arms." Corwin's grin turned a little fierce. "That's my job, once you get us ahead of them... " Kozue raised an eyebrow at him on his intercom screen, then smiled nastily herself as she realized what he was getting at. "OK, here we go! Open GET, change RYGER!" Getter Ryger, minus most of his left arm, streaked past the Valiant at full throttle and kept right on going, disappearing from sight on the main viewer in seconds except for the glow of his thrusters. "-Now- what are they doing?" Umphrey wondered, annoyed. "I don't care. Can you operate the metaspace jump drive?" "I think so," Umphrey replied. "Do it. The op's blown anyway, but if we can make it to Earth, these punks will never get their ship back even if they -do- know we have it. They haven't seen us; they can't prove anything." "Aye aye, sir." Umphrey reached to obey, but as he did so, an alarm wailed. "What the - incoming missile!" It wasn't actually a missile, though the Valiant's threat analysis system, being unfamiliar with kaiju-class weapons, registered it as such. Umphrey saw as much when the oncoming attacker got near enough to resolve on the viewer - at which point he rose from his seat and gaped in complete astonishment. It was another robot, far different from either of the configurations that had attacked the ship already, but sporting both of their colors and yellow as well, the component vehicles' full three-tone color scheme. It was quite beyond Umphrey how three fighters could combine to form such radically, bizarrely different robot types, but there wasn't any other explanation - this had to be the same ones again. The oncoming robot would have been shorter than the other two, standing on a level surface, but it was much, much wider, with a barrel body, massive arms and legs, and a squat turret for a head. It sported two enormous canisters on its back which might have been missiles. It had no feet; its thick round legs ended in huge thruster exhausts. /* Kouhei Tanaka "Crisis M-17" _Sound Collection of Gunbuster_ */ Getter Poseidon plunged through the brief storm of phaser fire Umphrey threw at it and collided with the Valiant's blunt shark-mouthed nose at full speed, smashing into the starship with a jolt that shook both vehicles. On the face of it, the move looked like a suicide maneuver; despite its great size, the Getter Robo was still a great deal smaller than the destroyer, with a miniscule fraction of the ship's mass. It was like a man trying to stop a train. Poseidon, the mightiest of Getter G's three forms in terms of absolute physical strength, was up to the challenge. Though it was knocked backward, the robot's initial collision did cut the Valiant's speed considerably, and neither vehicle was particularly damaged by the crash. The nose module was the toughest part of the Defiant-class destroyer, built with the eventuality of ramming in mind, and Poseidon's armor was by far the heaviest of the three Getter G modes. At the controls of Poseidon, Corwin gritted his teeth, clutched the master control levers, and threw all his mount's tremendous power into the effort. "This is it - our last chance," Corwin grunted as Poseidon shuddered and fought, pushed onward by the Valiant's mighty impulse thrusters. "They were powering up - the metadrive - as we came in." "If they get away now, they'll take her to Earth and tear her apart!" Kozue cried. "Right," said Utena. "The IPO can lodge all the protests it wants after that; with no evidence, there'll be no case." "It'd be like - our ship - never existed," Corwin agreed. Three pairs of eyes opened as one, burning with indignation and determination. "Not - " Two pairs of hands seized control levers and slaved them to the master controls in #3 cockpit. "- going - " The fires in the Getter pilots' hearts resonated with the green fire at the heart of their three-as-one machine. Poseidon's power doubled, then tripled. " - to HAPPEN!" The robot's huge main thruster nozzles opened to full diameter and roared, emitting green-white shock cones whose light could be seen with the naked eye from the bridge of the Kuratai. The t'skrang vessel was charging down on the oddly lopsided battle at somewhere beyond top speed. The canisters on Poseidon's back were, in fact, missiles, but Corwin's mastery of the machine turned them to a different purpose; with their warheads and launch systems disabled and their thrusters at full bore, they added their enormous energy to the Getter Robo's own massive thrust. Poseidon's fingers dug into the super-thick armor of the Valiant's prow, bending the surface plates, and, to the utter astonishment of everyone involved except the furious Getter pilots themselves, the Valiant slowed... slowed... and stopped. "That's it! There's our chance!" Liza cried, coming out of her conn, lit up with glee. "Tractor beam, stand ready! Torqq - more speed!" If Corwin's eyes had been open, he would have kept one on the time display for the missiles' fuel supply and the other on the stress indicators for Poseidon's structure. They weren't, but he didn't really need them anyway. He kept the count of the fuel time in his mind, and his innate rapport with machines told him more about Poseidon's structural integrity than any gauge could ever have done. What that rapport told him was that Poseidon was doing a fantastic job, fueled by the wrath in the hearts of his crew, but it couldn't keep it up forever. No machine, not even a Getter-powered creation of the Lord of the Great Machines himself, could take this kind of punishment for long. "Time to tractor range!" Liza barked, her eyes fixed on the star-bright green-edged glare of Poseidon's thrusters. "20 seconds," Jandia replied. Too long! Liza thought, but she didn't say it out loud; her crew and her ship were working as hard as they could, and telling them they weren't going to make it wouldn't help. With a shuddering BANG, Poseidon's left main thruster ruptured the leg's outer armor, streaming green fire. The thruster still ran, but poorly; the robot faltered, slipping against the Valiant's prow. The armor of the Getter's left arm started to buckle visibly as Corwin re-braced his grip and tried to find better purchase with the now uneven thrust he had to work with. Well, he thought, this is it; Kuratai can't get here quite fast enough. The best we can hope for now is to hang on and go to metaspace with them - and then make as big a mess as we can when we get to Earth... Suddenly, the insistent, crushing pressure against Poseidon's arms and plastron ceased as though someone had thrown a switch, for the very simple reason that someone had. The Valiant had abruptly gone dark and silent, all energy systems shut down. On the bridge, John Darien rose from his seat, his jaw set in annoyance. He'd been expecting this since the icons for the Enforcers in Main Engineering had gone out one by one, and then Kaloris's after them. The gravity failed, but that didn't bother Darien; he was a trained spacer and could handle it easily. The same went for Umphrey, who floated free of his console, cursing. "Come on, Umphrey," Darien said, "we've got work to do," and he kicked himself toward the corner where he'd left his powered armor stowed. 10:10 AM BLACK OMEGA DETENTION CENTER TAU CETI Ahmed Garcia was starting to get good and frustrated with this assignment. It should have been an easy one, and it had turned into a nightmare, the hardest job of his career. This woman, whoever she was and wherever she came from, had the toughest ego he had ever encountered, and after an entire morning of relentless probing, taunting, questioning, and mental battering, he hadn't found so much as a crack anywhere. She certainly looked as if she'd been through a wringer by this point. Her head lolled forward; she lacked the strength to hold it up for more than a few seconds. She had dark rings around her eyes, as if from sleep deprivation, and there was blood dried on the lower half of her face and matted on the chest of her white prisoner's coverall from the multiple nosebleeds Garcia's psionic lashings had induced. But whenever she did raise her head and look at him, there was that same dark sardony in her deep green eyes, and Garcia was becoming more and more unnerved by it every time he saw it. He finished another deep, agonizing probe and withdrew, disgusted with himself. Juri sagged against her bonds, blood trickling anew from her nose, and for a moment, the interrogation room was silent. Then she asked a question which Garcia was accustomed to hearing: "Why are you doing this?" It wasn't asked in the pitiful, hopeless croak he was used to hearing it in, though. It was just a question, asked out of curiosity, or perhaps just to pass the time, by a woman who was undoubtedly in great pain, but nonetheless sounded... rather bored, really. Without quite knowing why he was doing so, Garcia answered the question in considerable detail. Perhaps he was just glad for the excuse to do something other than bash his will against hers. He explained to her the Psi Corps philosophy - the real one, not the "to serve mankind" garbage the public relations people spewed across the galactic airwaves. Telepaths, he explained, were the future of humanity, the next stage in human evolution. As more highly evolved, superior beings, they belonged at the top of the power structure, even if the more numerous normals weren't ready yet to accept that they'd been left behind by Nature. Normals were sheep, stupid and easily manipulated, and it was the destiny of the telepaths to rule them. The Psi Corps existed to refine the telepath race and help that process along, and Black Omega was the secret fist of the Psi Corps. Soon the black tide of the Corps would sweep aside all that stood before it, and human telepaths would take their rightful place in control of everything. For a few moments after Garcia finished this passionate discourse, Juri didn't respond. Her head remained bowed, and the Psi Cop wondered briefly if she had had the temerity to fall asleep; but then she started making a soft sound. For a second, Garcia thought she'd started to cry, a sign that she was finally giving way to the hopelessness of her predicament and falling into despair. That would be just the crack he needed to drive in a wedge and break her mental discipline wide open. But she wasn't crying. She was, he realized with a mixture of horror and indignation, -laughing-, a dry, dark chuckle with real mirth mixed into the bitterness. Before the Psi Cop could regain his composure enough to demand to know what was so funny, Juri made the effort to lift her head, raising her eyes to his. Garcia recoiled visibly from the black merriment that danced in those green eyes as they met his, at the cold irony of the little smile on the redhead's bloody lips. "Well, then," she said softly, "I suppose you have no choice but to revolutionize the world." Then she threw her head back and laughed at him, amusement wracking her whole body. "Stop that," Garcia said softly, his voice quivering with rage. She didn't stop. "STOP IT!" he roared, launching his most violent assault yet. That had the desired effect - the laughter stopped, replaced with a choking scream - but it didn't make him feel better, and it didn't accomplish anything meaningful either. All he managed to do was knock her out. He stood in the silent interrogation chamber, fists clenched, breathing hard, and wondered just where this session had gone so very wrong. 10:17 AM HOTEL METROPOLE As they watched the Duelists leave for the second time, heading for the "mall" at the edge of town, Gunnr turned to Anne. "You really don't mind us getting left behind like this?" she asked. Anne shook her head. "Not really," she said, in a tone that indicated pretty clearly that she was telling the truth. "I'll admit I'd love to be in there, helping rescue Juri and B'Elanna and Janice, but I'm not ready and I know it. And I'd rather they be successful at this than held back by worrying about me." "And the thought of that many Psi Cops scares the living daylights out of you, right?" Gunnr added. Anne sighed. "Yeah, it does," she admitted. "Frankly, staying here to guard -one- Psi Cop, defector or not, doesn't really give me a warm fuzzy feeling either," she added, gesturing toward the bedroom where Carmela Sunderland, having awakened just long enough to spill her guts, slept once more. "But if I can't cope with guarding one who probably isn't going to try to scramble my brains, then going into a compound -full- of them isn't a good idea either." Gunnr grinned. "I'm impressed. I probably wouldn't have admitted that to one of my teachers." The young samurai-in-training smiled ruefully and rubbed the ears of R. Dorothy's cat Peril, who was sleeping on the living room's window seat. "One of the lessons I learned -very- hard and very fast once I started running was to know what my limitations were. Being cocky was very nearly a nasty form of suicide. But it doesn't mean I like it." "Well, you're -visibly- better with your bokken now than you were when I met you. If you keep progressing like that, you won't have to worry about them for too much longer." "Against slavers and pimps, maybe," Anne said, climbing up onto the window seat next to Peril and resting her wooden blade across her knees. "The mental discipline that I need to learn is going to come slower, I expect. Shielding's one thing - I don't pick up stray emotions anymore, thank the gods, and Devlin says I could probably block a P8 probe if I was -really- motivated." Gunnr grabbed one of the hotel chairs and flipped it around sideways so that she could still look at Anne while she talked. "So you're mostly OK," she pointed out. "How many P9s or better are there, anyway?" Anne laughed. "In this crowd? More than enough. And blocking a Psi Cop or another strong telepath long enough to close to melee or shoot them takes abilities I don't have yet." Anne looked over at the sleeping Psi Cop on the bed. "Kaitlyn-sensei took her on without -any- psionics except Katsujinkenryuu, and won. Someday, I'll do the same thing. I just have to be careful not to get cocky." The Valkyrie looked between Anne and the sleeping Psi Cop. "Maybe," she pointed out. "But you also have to not get in the habit of thinking you -can't- take one on and win. Oh, sure, you can't do it yet, but if you keep thinking that you can't handle one, you'll never be able to." "Point taken," Anne sighed. "It's a balancing act." "Hey, you're doing OK so far. You downed that cyborg when he was going to deck me, and you couldn't have done -that- before." Gunnr grinned. "-I- was impressed. And grateful, too. That would have hurt." Anne got somewhat pink over the bridge of her nose. "Um... thanks." Gunnr's grin turned a little sly. "You're welcome. You're cute when you blush, you know." Anne was saved from having to reply by the sound of a knock on the door. She frowned and uncurled from the window seat. Gunnr's mischievous expression faded to a very businesslike look of concentration. "Stay by the window," the Valkyrie said. "If it's a Psi Cop, you can back me up from there." Anne reached to the end table next to the couch and picked up the .32 automatic Gunnr had given her earlier, then nodded. Gunnr went toward the door, careful to stay out of its direct line, and called out, "Who is it?" "Housekeeping," came the cheerful answer. Anne shifted her pistol in her grip slightly. "Just checking if you need any more towels? Does the room need cleaning?" "Um, we're a little busy in here... " She shot Anne a gleeful look that made the younger girl's blush come back with a vengeance, then winked, which didn't help. "Can you come back later?" "Oh, uh..." The voice sounded embarrassed. "Certainly, certainly." The sound of footsteps and a squeaking cart rolling down the hall was muffled by the door, and Gunnr backed up slowly. She was squinting at the door, then glanced at Anne and cocked her thumb at the door, wavering it between down and neutral, while her other hand strayed behind her to the holster across her back. Anne continued to squint at the door, listening with all her might. The nervous, twitchy feeling for a bad situation that she'd honed to an art on the Rim itched ferociously. Peril seemed to agree. With an air of moderate concern, the cat jumped up onto the back of the sofa, thence to the armoire that contained the TV, and then up onto the glass bowl of the ceiling light fixture. That was enough to convince Anne, who had seen Peril in a similar place the last time things went non-linear. She cocked the hand with the gun it, then thumbed the safety off; in doing so, she pointed her thumb straight at the floor. Gunnr nodded her agreement. Then the door imploded. Carmela Sunderland -had- been asleep. The sound of an explosion, followed by the smell of burning carpet and the loud crack of handgun fire close to her feet, sent her surging to awareness faster than she would have thought possible, given her condition. She sat partway up, wincing and gasping at the pain this brought from her fractured ribs, and opened her eyes. It took a moment for them to focus and another for her mind to catch up and explain to her what she was seeing. It was the teenage girl with the dark hair - Anne Cross, the infamous Jutekh blip - kneeling at the foot of the bed, facing toward the double doors leading into the suite's sitting room. She had a wooden sword in one hand and a small autopistol of a distinctly antique-looking type in the other, and the look on her face was one of concentrated displeasure. There was no fear in it, though, and most people, blips especially, would have shown some to what burst through those double doors in pursuit of her - a fully armored Enforcer, blaster carbine in hand. They found out the blip was here and staged a raid? Carmela thought. Bold of them... The Enforcer opened fire on his quarry, spraying the end of the room with blasterfire. The Cross girl moved like smoke, an evasion very reminiscent of her sensei's, and the fire ravaged the bureau in the far corner. Anne came up from her roll on one knee and, without really thinking about it, leveled the .32 and fired, her sighting eye glowing with a light like flame. Sunderland and the Enforcer were both fully prepared to find this effort pathetic. A 500-year-old .32 Colt automatic could still quite easily punch a deadly hole in a human being, but an Enforcer armored against modern small arms was another thing entirely. Fortunately, both the .32 and the girl wielding it were -also- another thing entirely. The .32 was a Valkyrie's weapon, with the runic credo engraved in the side of its slide and a techno-mystic ammunition feed supplying it with cartridges prepared by the Armorer to the Forces of Asgard. And as she fired, Anne Cross was unconsciously applying a skills integration technique originally taught to her by Kaitlyn for use with her sword. She hadn't considered whether it would work with a gun, but the effect spoke for itself. As each bullet left the Hammerless's muzzle, the pyrokinetic novice samurai's furiously concentrated will shrouded it in fire - not just a little match-head of a fire, but the essence of the flame, superheated plasma, radiant chaos itself. The shroud of plasma, the minor enchantments, and the jacket of Asgardian iron on each bullet combined to make each shot from the little automatic roughly equivalent to a bolt from a hot-rodded blaster like the Enforcer's own. It was a very surprised E(CA)2 who stumbled back with three smoking craters in his armored plastron, roaring as much in shock and indignation as pain. Sunderland heard the deeper BOOM of a much heavier weapon from out in the living room, followed almost instantly by the piercing SHRAK of armor giving way. The Enforcer confronting Cross dropped to one knee and crossed his left arm across his chest, deploying a glowing powershield from a projector mounted on his vambrace. It absorbed two more of the flame-charged shots from the girl's pistol before he lunged up and charged, taking another shot in the shield and losing his blaster to another before sweeping his armored hand around and smacking the weapon from the girl's hand. Undaunted, she coiled back, added her freed gun hand to the grip of her bokuto, and exploded up from her own crouch with a kiai that sent a spike of pain through Carmela Sunderland's head even as it impressed what of the Psi Cop's faculties were watching. The wooden blade smashed into the Enforcer's shield. He deployed a vibro-bayonet from his right vambrace and struck back with great speed and agility for a creature of his bulk. Anne was ready and blocked the strike, then riposted and counterattacked, going for his head with a blade that trailed a crackling arc of fire. The blow dented the side of the Enforcer's helmet and sent him reeling. Anne pressed her advantage; her next blow overloaded her opponent's shield, blowing out the projector in a spray of blue-white sparks. Sunderland's eyes widened; the girl's face was a mask of fury, but -controlled- fury, similar to the look Arisugawa had worn before Sunderland had snuffed her conscious mind and released what lay beneath. The Enforcer parried another attack with his bayonet and gave it a twist that sent the much lighter Anne stumbling back to