by Shouji Gatou
The boy soldier fell into thoughtful silence, pausing in his work before he answered; “I don’t know.” He finished taping her shoulder and arm, then without any reluctance, began to feel around her body, touching and prodding her.
“What... What are you going to do with me?” she asked quaveringly.
“Take you with me.”
“Where?”
“First, my AS will bring you to our transport helicopter’s LZ. The helicopter will take us to our mothership which is waiting out in the ocean. After that, I don’t know...” he told her honestly. “This is all our mission called for.”
“Our... mission?”
As if to answer her question, two more gray arm slaves pushed aside the trees to make their appearance; they looked almost identical to the first one. One was armed with a rifle, the other with a missile launcher, and both seemed to be on high alert.
“No need to worry,” he told her. “They’re with me.”
Her consciousness began to grow hazy, and her field of vision narrowed. Her thoughts became sluggish, and she grew disoriented. “What’s your name?” she managed to ask, as if begging.
“You shouldn’t talk,” the pilot advised her. “Save your strength.”
“Tell me,” she pleaded.
The young soldier hesitated a moment. “Sagara. Sagara Sousuke,” he said at last.
She barely heard his words before she fell unconscious.
15 April, 1611 Hours (Greenwich Mean Time)
Amphibious Assault Submarine Tuatha de Danaan, 100 Meter Depth, Sea of Japan
The giant submarine’s sprawling hangar was lined with rows of arm slaves, transport helicopters, and VTOL fighters. They made up most of the Tuatha de Danaan’s main arsenal.
Sagara Sousuke, having finished his mission and written up his report, gazed at the AS currently under maintenance. In one hand he held a fruit-flavored CalorieMate; in the other, a checklist on a clipboard.
“Hey, Sousuke,” a haughty voice called out to him. He turned and saw his comrade, Sergeant Kurz Weber, approaching.
Kurz was a beautiful man, with blond hair and blue eyes. He had a tapered jawline, almond eyes, and a slender nose. His long hair, well-coiffed, lent him an appealing androgyny. No woman, no matter how modest, could see his smile on a first meeting without feeling her heart flutter. But that would be as far as it went, because...
“Hey, why the long face? Got constipation? Hemorrhoids?”
...when Kurz started speaking, it all fell apart. He was a man unburdened by things like “dignity” and “good taste.”
“I’m in perfectly good health,” Sousuke responded neutrally, as he chewed on his CalorieMate.
“Ugh, you’re such a pill... So what, they’re taking it apart already?” Kurz asked, looking at the stripped AS.
“They wanted to run a thorough inspection of the skeleton.”
“Well, you gave it a hell of a workout... I can’t believe you caught a helicopter! Weren’t you scared?”
“No,” Sousuke told him. “I knew it was within the limits of what the M9 is capable of.”
The AS used by Sousuke and Kurz was the M9 Gernsback. It was a state-of-the-art model, not yet available to the rank and file. Its power and agility were an order of magnitude beyond that of any AS before it.
“Well, if you wanted to pull off a stunt like that, I guess you’d need this machine to do it...” Kurz sat himself down on an empty ammunition case and peered keenly at the dissected M9.
The weapons known as “arm slaves” had their origins in the mid-1980s. The president of the United States at the time, Ronald Reagan, had pushed for this “Robot Squad” idea alongside his Strategic Defense Initiative:
“The next star in the field of localized warfare.” “A bold technological leap forward.” “A reduction of the burden on our fighting men and women.” Dressed up in such dubious rhetorical flourishes, and despite being initially laughed off as a fantasy, the humanoid weapons became reality in a mere three years. They could run at 100 kilometers per hour, handle a variety of weapons with ease, and pack firepower on par with a tank.
Specialists in the field were stunned—contemporary civilian robot technology had barely achieved bipedal movement. What genius, what group of brilliant minds, they wondered, could have possibly been responsible? But the answers were locked tight behind the word: confidential.
Occult researchers and UFO scholars, insisting it must come from alien technology, saw their books and magazines fly off the shelves. But it didn’t last long—humans soon began to see the ASes as just another piece of high-tech weaponry, no different from cruise missiles and stealth bombers.
And so, ten years passed. AS tech continued to evolve in leaps and bounds. Before long, they became so deadly that even attack helicopters had to approach with care.
“Anyway, I’m here about that girl you picked up,” Kurz said, as if only just remembering.
“Did she pull through?” Sousuke asked.
“Yeah. But they say she’s in serious withdrawal.”
“Narcotics?”
“Cannabinoids... or something like. We don’t know all the details yet. They pumped her full of ’em in a KGB lab... No idea what kind of experiments they were running, but they put her in one hell of a state.”
“Will she recover?”
“Who knows?” Kurz answered. “It’ll take a long time if she does, though.”
Sousuke fell silent. Their squad hadn’t been told what kind of experiments the girl was being used for. Their commanding officers seemed to know, but they rarely shared that kind of info with the soldiers on the ground.
The man who had saved her was a spy with Mithril’s intelligence department. His mission as conceived had been a low-risk one—smuggle some information out of the KGB lab—but when he saw her being used as a guinea pig, he’d decided he couldn’t just leave her there. He’d placed himself in the crosshairs to get her out; a chase had ensued, and he had died, leaving the CD and the nearly catatonic girl to Sousuke’s rescue squad.
As Sousuke and Kurz fell into silence, Master Sergeant Melissa Mao entered the hangar. “Oh, there you are.” She made a beeline for the two men.
Mao was Chinese-American, in her mid-twenties, and—like Sousuke and Kurz—qualified to operate an AS. The three of them were frequently put on missions together, with Mao acting as their team leader. She was a striking woman, with short black hair and a lively glint in her eyes. “I see you’re working overtime,” she said.
Sousuke nodded silently in response.
“What is it now, Big Sis?” Kurz asked, his expression confrontational.
“What’s with that look?” she bristled. “You got a problem?”
“Never said that.”
“Then loosen up already. You look like enough of a bozo as it is.”
“L-Like a bozo?! Me?” Kurz spluttered. “I’ve done modeling for Esquire!”
Mao got up in his face, eyes wide. “Yeah, I saw that. With your big, stupid grin... I thought it was a poster for one of those war spoofs, like Charlie Sheen in Hot Shots.”
Kurz growled. “You stupid bitch...”
Suddenly, Mao reached out and seized Kurz by the cheeks.
“H-Hey, thassh meeeeam!” he cried.
“What was that? What did you call me?” she asked sweetly. “‘You...’ what?”
“B-Beauuuufifuw, srennnerr, commhehant m-massssersarrgennt!”
“Better.”
Sousuke watched them sidelong while he finished off his CalorieMate. Mao noticed it, and asked him, “Was it good?”
“Yes. It had just the right amount of sweetness.” His face was as expressionless as ever, but there was a vague light of happiness in his eyes.
“Oh? Good to hear. Anyway, Sousuke. The major wants to talk to you.”
“Understood.”
“You too, Kurz.”
“Huh? But you said we could have a break...”
“Well, I take it back. I, on the
other hand, will take a break. I’m going to take a shower and get to bed.” Mao cackled as she walked away.
“Stupid bitch. Some day I’m really gonna give it to her. I’ll make her scratch my back until she begs for mercy!” Kurz flipped the bird at Mao’s departing form.
Sousuke watched him and asked in confusion, “Is that some sort of magic ritual?”
Sousuke and Kurz knocked on the major’s door. The reply was immediate: “Come in.”
They did so. In the back of a room piled high with documents and bookshelves sat a large Caucasian man. He was absorbed in some reading material on his desk, and didn’t even spare them a glance as they entered. He was a broad-shouldered man dressed in an olive green uniform, and had an attractive face with strong features. His long gray hair was tied back in a tail, and he kept his mustache and beard clipped short. This was Major Andrey Kalinin, their commanding officer.
“Reporting in,” Sousuke declared, standing at attention.
“Yeah, we made it,” Kurz acknowledged sullenly.
Major Kalinin looked up from the documents he’d been reading, then flipped them over to hide their contents. He showed no sign of being bothered by Kurz’s attitude. “I have a mission for you,” he said, cutting right to the chase. He took out another document pack and tossed it in front of the young men. “First, look through this.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Sure thing.”
They skimmed through the information. It seemed to be someone’s personal history. There was a black and white picture attached, of an East Asian girl about twelve years old. She was smiling shyly, snuggled up to a woman who was probably her mother. She was fair-skinned and cute, with nicely proportioned features.
Kurz whistled. “She’ll be a heartbreaker some day.”
“That picture was taken four years ago. The girl is currently sixteen years old,” Major Kalinin added.
“Oh? Got a picture of that version?”
“No.”
Sousuke showed no interest in their exchange, and silently continued reading her history.
First came her name: Chidori Kaname. She lived in Tokyo, Japan. Her father was a high commissioner with the UN. She had one sister, eleven years old, who lived with their father in New York. Her mother had passed three years ago, and Kaname herself was attending school in Tokyo. Past that came more detailed information—height, blood type, medical history, etc.
Sousuke’s eyes stopped on one particular row, where a key word had been sloppily blacked out with magic marker: “W*******d potential: 88% (according to Mirror Method).” It seemed a rather perfunctory way to hide classified information, but perhaps that was a sign of how much he trusted them.
“So, something happen to her?” Kurz asked.
“Something might.”
“Huh?”
Major Kalinin sat back in his chair and gazed at the tabloid-sized map on the wall. It showed the world’s current borders—the complicated territories of the Soviet Union, China divided into North and South, and the mess of dotted lines that made up the Middle East region. “All you need to know is that the girl in that picture, Chidori Kaname, is under high risk of kidnapping from the KGB and an unknown number of other organizations.”
“How come?”
“You don’t need to know that,” Major Kalinin said shortly.
“I see,” Kurz sniffed.
The point was, people might be coming for Chidori Kaname. Might. Sousuke didn’t know why they wanted her, or what could have led to it. The situation was completely opaque. “So, what’s our mission?” he asked.
“We’re going to need you to keep her safe. I know Sergeant Sagara can speak Japanese, and I think you can too, Sergeant Weber.”
“Well sure, but...” Kurz’s father had been a special correspondent with a newspaper, and he’d lived in Edogawa, Tokyo until he was 14, so he could speak Japanese well enough.
“I’ve already briefed Sergeant Mao,” Major Kalinin told them. “It’ll be up to the three of you.”
“Just the three of us?” Sousuke asked.
“We can’t spare any more. It’s already been decided.”
“It’s not gonna be easy,” Kurz observed.
“That’s why we’re sending you,” Major Kalinin answered. Sousuke, Kurz, and Mao weren’t merely AS operators; they were soldiers trained in a variety of skills, including parachuting and recon. They were part of an elite team hand-picked from a large pool of candidates. To them, ASes were just another kind of weapon, no different from a gun or a vehicle. “And... because Sergeant Mao insisted, your equipment will be Class B.”
Kurz and Sousuke both stared in disbelief. Class B equipment: he was telling them to take an arm slave.
“Uh... in the middle of a city?” Kurz questioned.
“Use the ECS in invisibility mode,” Major Kalinin recommended, “and you’ll be fine.”
Most modern-day weapons, including the arm slaves, came equipped with an ECS—an electromagnetic camouflage system. It was a cutting-edge stealth device that used hologram technology to hide the user completely from radar and infrared sensors. The ECS employed by Mithril were even more advanced, capable of nullifying wavelengths on the visible spectrum—in effect, rendering you invisible. This consumed a lot of energy, of course, so it was unrealistic to use once maneuvers began. But for staying stationary and hiding, it was nearly flawless.
“You’ll get one M9,” Kalinin added. “Take minimal armaments, and two packs of external capacitors.”
“Sir.”
“Also, this mission must be conducted in utmost secret. We’ll have a mess on our hands if the Japanese government learns about it. Therefore, you must monitor Kaname—and protect her if it comes to it—without her awareness.”
Kurz’s attractive face grimaced. “The hell? That’s ridiculous...”
“It will be difficult,” Sousuke agreed. The idea of protecting someone without their knowledge or consent seemed absurd.
But Major Kalinin remained unfazed. “We have a way to make it easier. This girl, Chidori Kaname, attends a co-ed public high school, where she spends most of her day. Thus, we’ll install our youngest squad member there. He’s the same age as her, and he’s Japanese.”
“Oh, I get it.” Kurz clapped his hands in realization. He and the major both turned to gaze at Sousuke.
Sousuke stood there silently at first, perplexed by their attention. “Major,” he finally asked, “are you suggesting...?”
Major Kalinin signed the directive as he responded. “First, we need to manufacture some documentation. We’ll have to find out what the school requires.”
“What the school requires for what?” Sagara Sousuke asked with trepidation, though he already knew the answer.
“What else?” Major Kalinin replied. “A transfer student application.”
16 April, 1150 Hours (Greenwich Mean Time)
1st Briefing Room, Tuatha de Danaan, 100 Meter Depth, Near Tsugaru Peninsula
Sousuke glared sullenly into the camera.
“Big smile, Sousuke,” Kurz cooed, beckoning. He was serving as an impromptu photographer.
Sousuke made an awkward attempt to twist his face into a smile. It ended up looking more like a muscle spasm.
“There we go,” Kurz said encouragingly. “You want to look nice and friendly on your ID, right?” He snapped the picture.
Sousuke immediately reverted to his blank expression.
Kurz sighed.
16 April, 2120 Hours (Greenwich Mean Time)
Dining Hall, Tuatha de Danaan, 80 Meter Depth, Near Kinkasan
Sousuke furrowed his brow as he surveyed the items scattered across the table. “What is all of this?”
Mousse and a brush, a portable CD player, CDs by enka singer Itsuki Hiroshi and pop icon SMAP, an amulet from Mt. Narita, Rohto Pharmaceutical eyedrops, a coupon to Tower Records, a Nintendo GameBoy, a Mr. Junko-brand watch, a Yunker Kotei health tonic, packs of Marlboro and Libera cigarettes, magazine
s like Popeye, Josei Jishin, and Dragon Magazine, etc, etc, etc...
“We rounded up everything on board that a Japanese high school student might have,” Melissa Mao explained proudly.
“I see,” he said, then paused. “What’s this?” It was a small ring of rubber in a square plastic wrapper.
“That’s a condom,” Melissa grinned.
“I know that,” Sousuke told her. “But what use would a high school student have for a condom?”
“Don’t play dumb, you perv!” she teased.
“What are you talking about?” he asked with perfect sincerity. “I’ve used them several times before. They’re meant for use in the jungle, to replace a lost canteen.”
Mao stared and said nothing.
“They can hold a liter of fresh water,” Sousuke added.
“Oh, really?” Mao sighed.
18 April, 1006 Hours (Greenwich Mean Time)
1st Briefing Room, Tuatha de Danaan, 50 Meter Depth, Near Boso Peninsula
“Here, have a look at this.” Kurz pushed Sousuke to the LCD screen, remote for the tape deck in hand. “This is how Japanese high school students act. Burn it into your brain, okay?”
It was footage of a classroom. It seemed to be around sunset, and there were only two students present—one male, one female. Though the classroom was large, they had holed up together in a corner, exchanging nervous conversation.
“Hey... listen. I used to just think of you as a childhood friend, but...” the boy stuttered out, while the girl remained silent. “But I’ve finally realized how I really feel. I... I...”
“Toru-kun!” she cried out.
The two of them embraced. Just then, there was a sound. They gasped and turned. Another girl stood in the door to the classroom. She was watching them and trembling.
“Naomi!” the boy cried.
“You’re awful,” the second girl whispered and then ran away, crying. The boy looked about to follow her, but the girl he was sitting with stopped him, and—
“Well?” Kurz asked, prompting Sousuke for his opinion.
Sousuke’s expression was one of ardent confusion. “I don’t understand. Why did the second girl flee the scene?”