Dancing Very Merry Christmas

by Shouji Gatou

  Sousuke’s arm in the cockpit moved, and the Arbalest’s arm moved to match it. It pointed its Boxer shotcannon, made by the Italian OTO Melara corporation, directly at the pirate base right below. There were all kinds of targets to choose from: the control room, ammunition depot, old-fashioned ASes, SPAAGs...

  He set his sights first on the roof of the depot and pulled the trigger. It hit hard. The 00 HEAT fired by the Boxer blew off the roof and set the ammunition ablaze. An explosion boomed out, and a pillar of flame raked the sky, acting like a starting gun for full hostilities.

  《E3 destroyed. Great Balls of Fire!》

  “Stop talking now,” Sousuke ordered, thinking that Al was sounding almost as flip as Kurz. Sousuke clicked his tongue and took aim at his next target.

  The first few minutes of combat would all but decide the outcome.

  Their surprise attack had taken out the pirates’ control room, ammunition, and moored high-speed craft, which threw them into pandemonium. And as for the old-style Soviet ASes set up in the back of the base, the Rk-89 Shamrocks—Sousuke had no idea what they were doing on an island like this—they were instantly dispatched by shots from Mao’s machine, before their operators could even reach them.

  Mao’s AS, the M9 Gernsback, was still in the ocean, making its way slowly toward the pirates’ dock while waist-deep in seawater. Mao was getting sniper support from Kurz, in position behind her, and from Sousuke on the mountain above.

  “Whew. Just like a shooting gallery!” Kurz laughed over the radio.

  “Uruz-6, keep your guard up. We haven’t taken out all the foot soldiers. And you know it’s when we get cocky that we—” There was a roar. Before Mao could finish, a pillar of water burst up, just to her right. Something must have exploded nearby. “What was that?!” she shouted, panicked. “It didn’t come from their base!” Sprays of salt water dashed against her M9 as she whipped it around, using its head-mounted radar to scan the area.

  “Uruz-2! Three o’clock, distance four! Eight enemy HSC!” Sousuke had a better vantage point than Mao from on top of the mountain, so he gave her the verbal warning, while Al wordlessly used the machine’s high-speed advanced data modem to distribute their sensor information to all allied machines.

  Eight high-speed craft were approaching, coming around from the island’s west side. It was a blind spot from Sousuke’s point of view, which was why he’d been slow to spot it. They were probably returning from a raid—the worst timing possible.

  Their speed was forty knots—about 74 kilometers per hour—and despite their small size, each was equipped with 20mm machine cannons and infantry rockets. The eight boats kicked up a sheet of water as they unleashed their weapons on Mao, who cursed at this new wave of concentrated fire. “Yeek! I mean... dammit! What the hell?! Intelligence said they only had what was in the dock! Where’d the reinforcements come from?”

  “It’s the usual: bad intelligence. I wish they’d give us a break, for once...” Kurz muttered.

  “Stop bitching and do something!” Mao screamed at him.

  “I am! ...That’s two down!” Kurz’s 76mm shots had hit their targets, taking out two pirate boats in a fiery explosion.

  “Only two?!”

  “Hold your horses! They’re far, and they’re pretty damned fast. Wish I’d brought a Hellfire or a Versile...” Kurz said, sounding a little panicked. The Hellfire and the Versile were kinds of guided missiles used by ASes. The position assigned to Kurz for back-up sniping was the perfect distance for safely taking aim at stationary targets, but it was less useful against targets moving at 40 knots. It was a testament to his skills that he’d been able to take out two already.

  Six boats remained. They raced through the water around Mao’s M9, peppering it mercilessly with shells and rockets. Her head-mounted machine guns blazed and filled another boat with holes, but that still left five remaining.

  “Ugh, so annoying!” she wailed. “Guh... this is really bad!”

  The M9 sloshed awkwardly through the heavy water, taking evasive maneuvers. Even with the M9’s armor and maneuverability, it couldn’t endure such a fierce assault for long.

  《Sergeant. Uruz-2 is in danger. We must open fire at the enemy HSCs,》 Al told Sousuke, who was simply watching from the mountaintop without firing any support shots.

  “Inefficient at this distance,” Sousuke said dismissively. “We don’t have many shots left.”

  《Shoot the high-speed craft. There is no other choice.》

  “No choice, eh? I disagree.” Sousuke promptly took the Arbalest a few steps down the mountain, judged his timing, and launched into a starting run.

  《Sergeant. This angle is—》

  “Shut up and help me!” Immediately, he dove off the edge of the rocky mountain, and leaped the Arbalest over the ocean. Wreathed by the silver moon, the slender silhouette hung in the air. Just as it reached the apex of its arc and began to descend, Sousuke fired off his arm’s wire gun. When the anchor pierced one of the high-speed craft racing around down below, he immediately retracted the wire, closing the gap between the two in a flash.

  The Arbalest landed on top of the boat with a scream of metal and a spray of seawater. The deck buckled beneath its feet, and it sank so far it nearly capsized. In human-size terms, the effect was like falling several stories to land on a pedal boat.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” Kurz shouted in surprise.

  The men aboard the unfortunate HSC had fallen on their backsides in shock. As they gazed up at the Arbalest, it plunged its monomolecular cutter into the deck to regain its balance, then let loose with its head-mounted 12.7mm machine guns. The shots shredded the boat’s armaments and engine, effectively taking it out of the fight.

  “Get the gist?” he asked Al. “Let’s jump to the next one.”

  Kicking its way off of the now-smoking boat, the Arbalest jumped. Sousuke shot off the wire gun in its left arm again, this time at a high-speed craft racing just ahead. Then the high-powered motor quickly retracted the wire, and... Landing achieved! Sousuke sprayed machine gun fire across the violently rocking boat, taking out its engine and gun turrets.

  The Arbalest’s sensors quickly scanned its surroundings. The closest pirate boat had just fired a rocket in his direction; its red light was closing in. With a grunt, Sousuke jumped a third time, managing it just before impact. The rocket hit the boat he had just been standing on, and exploded. His machine twisted through the air, backed by fire.

  The Arbalest roared down from the sky, aiming for the enemy boat currently bathing him in cannon fire, and successfully completed his third landing. The pirates practically climbed over each other to escape, evacuating into the dark sea around them.

  《Sergeant. Such tactics were not anticipated. They are nonsense.》

  “Are they?” Sousuke said, manipulating his machine. “Tell me the definition of nonsense.”

  《Impossible, reckless, irrational.》

  “You really are just a machine,” Sousuke told him, as the Arbalest shot a Boxer shell into a now-empty gun turret and the engine section.

  The battle thereafter was completely one-sided. All of the high-speed craft were destroyed, and the pirates in the base were in a rout.

  Mao’s M9 made landfall and went around taking out their remaining defenses. With her external speakers on, she called for surrenders in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. Any who kept up their resistance got a zap from her taser.

  Their transport helicopters landed, and their ground forces poured out. Decked out in thick body armor, carrying bulletproof plastic shields, and under the cover provided by Sousuke and the others, they swarmed into the structures that the ASes couldn’t enter.

  Before long, each team had announced that they had secured their designated area. Several minutes after that, the pirates that had surrendered were chained up and gathered in the dock. Their mission was effectively complete.

  “Yeesh. That was rougher than I expected...” Kurz’s machine, too, had moved
from its sniping point to join them, striding through the smoke to eventually make landfall. The M9 Gernsbacks that he and Mao were operating had similar silhouettes to the Arbalest, with long limbs, slender waists, and gray armor that dripped with seawater.

  “Let’s just be glad that no Venoms showed up,” Sousuke said, returning the shotcannon to the Arbalest’s waist hardpoint. It was standing next to a group of pirates, seated and stripped of their weapons, and the allied ground forces who were watching over them. The pirates were sulking as if they’d lost a game to a cheating opponent. They didn’t seem to like that their ‘impenetrable stronghold’ had fallen so easily to the weapons known as ASes.

  “Uruz-9 here. All ground squads have secured their areas; just two light injuries on our side, and no compromise to mission performance. Pirates have eight dead, four badly wounded, ten lightly wounded,” reported Corporal Yang Jun-kyu, the infantry team leader, over the radio.

  Apparently they’d had to kill some resisting pirates—but then, these were people who had attacked any number of shipping vessels and killed their crews, as well. They were already being generous by employing tasers and tear gas and giving them a chance to surrender; it was the pirates’ own fault if they chose to die instead.

  “But did we really have to come all this way just for some crummy pirates?” Kurz muttered, surveying the hostages with his M9’s head-mounted sensors.

  “These are the Spratly Islands. It’s a jumble of spheres of influence: North and South China, Vietnam, Taiwan... That by itself makes it difficult for any national military to perform large-scale exercises here. This was explained in the briefing,” Sousuke said.

  Kurz’s M9 waved its left hand in annoyance. “C’mon, I know that much.”

  “Besides, this mission wasn’t just about taking out pirates,” Sousuke went on. “The name of the island is important, too.”

  Badamu Island—that was the name of the isolated islet that the pirates had taken as their base. It had many names, as many as there were countries that claimed control of the Spratlys, and as many as there were languages that the Westerners who had once controlled the island spoke. This name, its Mandarin one, was similar to ‘Badam,’ the keyword that Gauron had passed to Sousuke in Hong Kong.

  If it had just been the name alone, with nothing else distinctive about it, Mithril likely would have paid the island no mind. But the fact that it was also a stronghold for pirates causing trouble around the Spratlys made it a different story. Intense investigation and recon work suggested that there was little chance that the island was connected to Amalgam—but at the same time, they couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t.

  “Uruz-8 to all,” Corporal Speck, the one investigating the pirate base’s storage block, said over the radio. “All I’ve got here is ammo and heroin. There are containers of vanadium, too... but they’re probably plundered. From the Peruvian vessel they raided a few weeks ago, I’d wager.”

  “Vanadium?”

  “It’s a rare metal, used to make that M9 you’re piloting now. It’s skyrocketed in price in the last few years thanks to the Soviet Civil War and uprisings in South Africa and such. It’s not as valuable as heroin, but... well, that’s a pretty high bar.”

  “Oh? You know a lot about it,” Kurz muttered softly.

  “I’ve been playing the stocks lately. Read an economics magazine now and then—When you make fighting your whole life, you get stupid.”

  “Shut up, you gambling addict.”

  Sousuke interrupted Kurz and Speck’s discussion. “Was there anything else that stood out? Any complex machinery, or AS parts?”

  “Nope. It’s your standard pirate base, top to bottom,” Corporal Speck confirmed. “Nothing to connect it to those Amalgam guys.”

  “We can’t be sure yet. We need to interrogate the base commander first,” Mao said. Her M9 had moved to the summit of the rocky mountain, where she was keeping watch over the surroundings.

  “Uruz-9 here. Ah... about that...” Corporal Yang said. “The commander doesn’t seem to be among the hostages. Though that doesn’t mean he isn’t in the base somewhere...”

  “Uruz-7 here. He could be hiding among the rank-and-file. Or he could still be somewhere on the island—” Sousuke got that far, then stopped as he realized something. The Arbalest’s sensors gave him a view of the rocky slope, and he could see a person moving around on the rock face that looked out over the harbor. The smoke and the darkness made it hard to see precisely, but it looked like the man had an anti-tank missile on his shoulder. No... he definitely did. The missile was pointing down at him from above. But by the time Sousuke realized it, the man had already fired.

  “Sousuke, one o’clock—”

  《Warning! ATM!》

  Kurz’s and Al’s warnings came at the exact same time.

  It was a close-range shot, but well within the range of what the Arbalest could dodge. Still, he knew that dozens of hostages and allied infantrymen were right behind him—in other words, right in the missile’s path. If Sousuke dodged, the missile would fly smack into the middle of those unarmed men.

  He made the decision in a split-second: Sousuke didn’t dodge, but faced down the charging missile. There was a flash and a roar, and the anti-tank missile struck the Arbalest’s upper half.

  “Dammit!” Instantly, Kurz’s M9 let loose with its 12.7mm head-mounted machine guns on full automatic. Bullets the size of Tabasco sauce bottles rained down in an instant, shredding the man who’d fired the missile, along with the rock he’d been standing on. “Sousuke?!” Kurz whipped around.

  As the smoke cleared, the Arbalest could be seen, completely intact. It hadn’t moved from its arms-crossed position, but there wasn’t a single dent in the armor. Normally, a direct hit from a missile like that would have blown it to pieces.

  “Not an issue,” Sousuke said at length. An invisible wall that had formed in front of the Arbalest had blocked the missile’s explosion—and the missile itself—dispersing the shockwave harmlessly.

  “Uruz-2 here. What happened?! Status report!” Mao spoke nervously.

  “Uruz-7 here,” Sousuke replied. “I was attacked by a remaining enemy soldier, but Uruz-6 took him out. No damage on our side.”

  A small sigh of relief came out over the radio. “Uruz-2, roger. Be careful, okay?”

  The transmission ended, and Sousuke stood his machine up. Kurz’s M9 was staring at him and the Arbalest. “Sousuke. Did you just...”

  “Yeah,” he answered. “Did you register it?”

  “I... I think so?” Kurz answered, flummoxed as he fiddled with the unfamiliar device.

  “Al. It worked, didn’t it?”

  《Affirmative. No damage to machine detected. Main capacitor voltage is stable, as well.》

  “Good. Store the 120 seconds’ worth of data before and after into high-compression file Zulu-1.”

  《Roger.》

  Sousuke felt like he was starting to get the hang of this; together, he and the Arbalest were learning how to use the lambda driver.

  “It’s a hell of a thing, though,” Kurz breathed. “Seeing it up close... You know that was a direct hit from an ATM, right? And you freaking brushed it off. That device scares the crap out of me.”

  “I thought the same thing the first time I saw the ECS’s full invisibility mode,” Sousuke responded. “Don’t think too hard about it. It’ll seem completely natural, soon enough.”

  “Well... maybe, I guess,” Kurz said over the radio in a thoughtful tone. “But I feel like when we brush this stuff off, we’re forgetting something important... when we start to think of the most out-there tech as being ‘completely natural,’ I mean. Even these things we’re in now... the ASes. There’s something really off about ’em, when you think about it.”

  Sousuke just looked at him, non-comprehending.

  “Ah, I’m just rambling. Anyway...” Kurz began, then changed his tone. “Uruz-6 here. You said you hadn’t found the base commander, right? Round him up quick
and get him questioned. I’m ready to head back and get some shuteye.”

  “Uruz-9 here... Um, according to the hostages, the commander is—” Corporal Yang spoke into the radio from where he was standing in front of the hostages. A few of them had gotten his attention, and were pointing in the direction that the missile had come from minutes earlier.

  “What the hell is it? Spit it out already.”

  “The commander was the guy with the missile that Kurz just gunned down.”

  “Huh?” There was a long pause, and then, “Ah... I see,” Kurz said awkwardly.

  Mao burst in. “What did you say? Gunned him down? You killed him? Why didn’t you use your taser?!”

  “Use my taser?!” Kurz protested. “I was kind of in a hurry, y’know!”

  “Shut up!” she screamed back. “How could you do this? We were just talking about having to take the commander in alive! You’ve completely ruined my debut sortie as a lieutenant!”

  “Sh-Shut up! He’s an asshole who’s killed countless defenseless crews! He deserved that .50-caliber justice!”

  “That’s not the damned point! We can’t interrogate a corpse!”

  “He fired a missile at Sousuke!”

  “Oh?!” Mao cried out, with mock concern. “And how’d that go for you, Sousuke?”

  “Not an issue,” Sousuke told her.

  “Ah, you asshole!” Kurz put in.

  “See? This is your fault!” Mao lectured at Kurz. “You’d better write up one hell of a report! God dammit, Ben is gonna give me hell for this when we get back... Why’d I bother busting my ass to become an officer if I still have to deal with this crap?! I’ve made up my mind: next time we go out drinking, everything’s on you! Because of your short-sighted, simple-minded—”

  “Shut up! Quit yelling at me!” Kurz yelled back. “You’re the one who blew away a hostage target-board with a 40mm shell last week at practice! That was—”

  “Yeah, well, that was practice! This is real life!”

  Sousuke interrupted the tedious exchange. “Excuse me. I would appreciate it if we could set questions of responsibility aside and begin making preparations to leave. If we head back now, I could still make it in time for my classic literature makeup exam. Mr. Fujisaki is very strict, and I’m in danger of failing—”