by Shouji Gatou
“The... the final enemy is approaching from the north, XO. The MAGROCs won’t work again,” Captain Goddard, still recovering from the first near-death experience, said to Mardukas as he wiped the sweat from his brow.
Despite having seen the heroic way he’d dealt with the enemy torpedoes seconds before they hit, Goddard really thought they were done for this time.
“Course 2-0-5, you said?” But Mardukas remained calm.
“Affirmative!”
“Speed?”
“Estimated 50 knots!”
“Hmm...” A corner of Mardukas’s mouth quirked up a bit at that. It was the smile of a professor getting the answer he wanted from a promising student. “That’s right, Mike-13. If you wanted to keep up the fight, that’s the only course you could take. Sad to say...”
“XO? What...”
“Captain,” Mardukas asked patiently. “Why do you think I had you send out those ADSLMMs in advance?”
“Ah...!” Goddard remembered the locations of the ADSLMMs—the autonomous mines he’d had them secretly fire earlier—and slapped his own forehead. The final enemy was heading right for the mines.
Shark-1
Shark-1, burning with vengeance, hadn’t expected the path to the enemy to be blocked by smart mines. If he’d been thinking calmly and clearly, he might have realized that the enemy could have fired one while they were running loud earlier. If he’d been thinking, maybe he could have avoided his fate.
But he hadn’t. Back in his Royal Navy days, it had been his domestic violence issues that had kept him out of his superiors’ good graces. To the very end, he had never come to terms with that brutal, impulsive aspect of his character.
Suddenly, two automatic mines appeared in his path, heading straight for him. “What the—” Shark-1 started to say. Even with the Leviathan’s maneuverability, he wouldn’t be able to change course in time. Mere seconds remained. He tried firing his decoy, but it was useless this close. The crewman behind him screamed.
With alarms blaring in the cockpit, Shark-1 swore, spitting out a curse to his former superior. “Mardukas, you son of a—”
Those were his last words. The de Danaan’s smart mine detonated at close range and tore the Shark-1 to pieces.
Tuatha de Danaan
“Contact, ADSLMM explosion. Mike-13 is down!” The sonar tech’s report inspired a sigh of relief among the crew. They were too deflated to let out a cheer of the kind typically seen in the movies.
Goddard himself could hardly believe it. A strained smile appeared on his face, and he peered over at Mardukas. “XO... s-sir...”
“The enemy should have known,” Mardukas opined coldly. “Sending three mere ‘underwater fighters’ to defeat a vessel I command is like sending three infantrymen against a fortress.”
From the very start, he had known just how the battle would go, and just what the enemy would do. It was almost like a chess game. The boldness, the calm of it... This realization of his superior’s true abilities had Goddard at a loss for words.
“If the captain had been here, we’d have likely seen the same outcome. And perhaps if she’d been giving the orders, you wouldn’t have been so terrified, Goddard,” Mardukas said with his usual biting sarcasm.
“Oh, well... forgive me, sir.”
“Hmm. You are forgiven. More importantly...” The Duke turned his hat back to its original position. The commanding officer, who had shown a presence to rival Major Kalinin or the other impressive members of the ground forces, now resumed his usual appearance as a slightly world-weary middle-aged man. “That’s the match. Open a channel to the ground forces immediately; they’re in more danger than we are. A torpedo is headed for the cruise ship.”
Pacific Chrysalis
Disasters tend to come in waves. Not minutes after Sousuke and the other ground force members had finished off the Alastor horde, they received word from the de Danaan of another incoming threat:
Enemy high-speed torpedo approaching. Estimated arrival, less than one minute. Evasive maneuvers and evacuation recommended.
“You could at least try to sound freaked out about this!” Kurz shouted to the heavens as the word came down, but it was drowned out by the evacuation alarm blaring throughout the ship.
《All passengers and crew evacuate to the starboard side. Repeat, evacuate to the starboard side. We apologize for the inconvenience on this fine Christmas Eve, but just in case, please head for the starboard—》
“Drop the damned apologies! Just repeat the order!” Clouseau shouted over the radio to his subordinate on the bridge.
《But Lieutenant Clouseau. We are the ones who started this trouble, so I think we owe them— ah, damn. The speaker button...》
“Incompetent!!” Clouseau shouted as he heard his real name broadcast ship-wide. He clenched a fist as a vein throbbed on his forehead.
“Ah, hey, Lieutenant... I know you’re in a tough position, but we should probably evacuate. If that torpedo hits us, this whole area goes up in smoke,” Kurz said, coaxing him from behind, and Clouseau clicked his tongue.
Per Mardukas’s instruction, the de Danaan had all its helicopters on standby for the rescue. Another transport helicopter, which had taken off before this all started, was spreading countermeasures across the sea surface to interfere with the torpedo’s targeting, trying to protect the passengers in any way they could.
Still, it was almost impossible for a cruise ship of this size to avoid a torpedo.
“Everyone evacuate,” Clouseau finally sighed. “We’re out of options.”
“No, we’re not,” Sousuke said over the external speakers and radio at once. Clouseau turned to see the Arbalest, positioned in the middle of the tennis court, begin to rise to its feet, now occupied by its operator.
“What are you doing, Sousuke? Hey!” Kurz called, as Sousuke walked the Arbalest to the ship’s port side and stared down at the black water that the torpedo would soon be tearing through.
Sousuke pressed the voice order switch in his cockpit, and said, “Al. Set all your sensors to maximum. Search the area. Find heat sources located up to thirty feet under the surface.”
《Roger. The torpedo?》 responded the machine’s AI, Al.
“Yes.”
《Located. Designating target Alpha-12. Eleven o’clock, range 1000. Estimated speed: Ninety kilometers per hour. Approaching. Collision in thirty seconds.》
“Precision fire mode. We’re going to hit it with all we’ve got. Variable adjustments?”
《I have no reliable targeting adjustment data for underwater objects.》
“No choice. Concentrate.”
《Roger. Precision fire mode.》
Surrounded by the green water of his night vision screen, Sousuke could see the heat source, shimmering white, as it approached. The thought of sparing ammunition didn’t enter his mind; the moment it was in the crosshairs, he pulled both triggers. Sprays from both his 40mm rifle and 12.7mm head-mounted chain guns hit the water with a roar. At his feet, Kurz and the others covered their ears and retreated to the ship’s starboard side.
Chain guns were originally 30mm machine guns developed for use by combat helicopters. The Arbalest and M9s came with a modified version of them, smaller but with greater firing speed, mounted on their heads. It was these chain guns—firing at a rate of 1800 shots per minute, or thirty high-caliber shots per second—that he had just used to clear up the Alastor horde. These chain guns joined the Arbalest’s 1200-shot-per-minute 40mm rifle in raining fire down on the ocean.
But even all of this failed to stop the torpedo. None of the shots even landed; the minute the bullets hit the water, they went wildly off course, and they only maintained momentum for a couple of meters, anyway.
The high-speed torpedo continued towards the Pacific Chrysalis.
《Torpedo interception failed. Evasive maneuvers recommended,》 urged his machine, likely thinking of its own safety.
But Sousuke, still scowling at the target on hi
s screen, was working his rarely-employed imagination. There are no options left. The ship is going to sink. My comrades, my schoolmates, Chidori... they’ll all be blown away. Cast into the cold winter sea. I won’t let it happen!
That determination, combined with unshakable confidence, proved to be the perfect formula to activate the system sleeping inside his machine.
《We have it. It will work. Orders, Sarge,》 Al said briefly, as if to encourage him.
“Jump in!”
《Roger.》
Sousuke and Al threw themselves from the cruise ship’s deck into the ocean. A feeling of weightlessness lasted for just a second, before the impact came. Bubbles foamed up around him and then promptly burst into nothing as he sank through the water’s surface. After shooting a line into the ship from his wire gun to anchor him, Sousuke fought against the currents created by the ship to carefully fine-tune his position.
《Torpedo incoming. Okay, hold position. Ready? Count five. Three... two...》 Reading Sousuke’s rhythm and mood perfectly, Al began the countdown at just the right moment. It was the kind of thing that a normal AI wouldn’t be capable of. He could see the torpedo approaching, right at the center of his night-vision screen. 《Now!》
Sousuke gripped the stick and wrenched the right master arm back. Mimicking his movements perfectly, the machine thrust an unwavering fist at the torpedo that had come to encompass his vision.
The ocean frothed and the air warped. The Arbalest’s lambda driver activated, and an invisible force field slammed the torpedo from the front. The target shattered and exploded on impact, and the entirety of the torpedo’s explosive energy was channeled out behind it. A geyser of water burst out of the sea, and rocked the ship with its force. The Arbalest was sent tumbling, clinging desperately to the wire extending from its left arm, and Sousuke let out a noise of strain.
《Success,》 Al reported. 《The lambda driver has activated. Enemy torpedo eliminated. Let’s rev ourselves up again quickly, in case another one appears. Get revved up. The revving up is important.》
“I know! Shut up!” Sousuke shouted, struggling to regain his machine’s balance as raging waves buffeted him from all sides. He had to be careful: if the wire gun’s anchor came loose, he’d end up spinning free of the ship. But soon enough, the turbulence from the explosion died down, and the threat of a follow-up torpedo seemed nil. Sousuke let out a sigh of relief, carefully retracted the wire, and managed to crawl back onto the deck.
But their troubles weren’t over.
While the Arbalest was off stopping the torpedo, Kaname was running toward the starboard side of the deck with Yang and a few other Mithril soldiers. After hearing Tessa’s voice in her mind, she had called out to a few nearby men, and they’d rushed together to the corner where the lifeboats were located.
Suddenly, they were hit by a roar and an impact. The ship lurched hard to the right. Kaname almost went tumbling, but she clung to the wall desperately and shouted, “What was that?!”
“I guess the torpedo hit us. It’s strange, though. It didn’t feel as bad as all that...”
Did Sousuke and the Arbalest stop the torpedo? Kaname wondered as she picked herself up. “We’re probably okay. Hurry!”
Yang looked at her quizzically, but responded, “R-Right...” and they started running again. “But are you sure the colonel was kidnap—”
“I’m sure. The captain here was gonna take her in a lifeboat— There!” Kaname pointed beyond the part of the deck used for a jogging track, to the broadside that housed the lifeboats.
Yang got ahead of her and readied his gun. “Keep back,” he ordered. “Stay behind me. The enemy could still be hiding out here.” According to the nearby diagram, there should be five boats hanging off the side of the ship. But as Kaname and Yang ran up, they found only four.
“One’s missing,” Kaname whispered. “Tessa...”
“Dammit,” a soldier shouted. “One o’clock, 500 meters out!” In the vague illumination provided by the cruise’s ship’s lighting, Kaname could see a boat speeding away.
“We’re too late,” Yang growled.
“Don’t give up!” Kaname cried out. “There has to be a—”
“I know. Uruz-9 to Gebo 9, do you read me?” Yang called into his radio, to the helicopter flying nearby.
The transport helicopter, Gebo-9, replied immediately. “Gebo-9, I read you.”
“You see the lifeboat that just left the cruise ship? 800 meters north-northeast from here. It’s got Ansuz on it! Stop them!” Even as he spoke, the boat carrying Tessa continued to move further and further away, until it was fully swallowed up by the darkness.
Call Sign Gebo-9, MH-67 Utility Helicopter “Pave Mare”
“Stop them? How?” shouted First Lieutenant Eva Santos. She was the pilot of a Mithril utility helicopter, a MH-67 Pave Mare, which was currently circling from a position four kilometers south of the Pacific Chrysalis. “Tessa’s on board, right? We can’t fire on them. What if we hit her?”
“Can’t you target the engine or something?!” Yang shouted over the radio.
“Oh, as easy as that, huh? I’ll try, but... dammit, have you got them yet?!” Santos shouted to the electronic warfare technician in the back seat, who was scanning the area with their infrared sensors.
“Hang on... just got them. Bearing 3-4-0, distance 4000. Speed, thirty knots.”
“Okay, circle around to their port side and approach.” Lieutenant Santos tilted the stick forward to speed them after the boat. The engine’s turbines roared, and the Pave Mare approached its target. Since they had previously been carrying the enormous payload of the Arbalest, the chopper now felt as agile as a fighter jet.
In less than a minute, the escaping boat came into view of her night vision goggles. “Got it in sight. Minigun two on standby. Don’t hit the cabin by mistake.”
“Roger, Captain!” the gunner responded enthusiastically.
Once they were about 200 meters from the left side of the speeding boat, Santos gave the order. “Fire!”
The 7.62mm machine gun attached to the Pave Mare’s starboard side fired. A rain of a hundred bullets per second grazed the back of the boat, sending up pillars of water. Unfortunately, none hit their target.
“Get your aim right!”
“The waves are rocking it all over the place!” the gunner protested. “Dammit, the thing’s too fast; we’ll hit the colonel. I can’t pinpoint-target the engine. Can’t we get closer?!”
“I’ll try—” Santos was just about to pitch them forward again when something strange happened. From an empty patch of sea, a few hundred meters ahead of the lifeboat’s current course, came a peal of light.
“Anti-air missile!” someone shouted. It had appeared abruptly from the sea surface and was tearing through the air straight at Santos’s helicopter.
“Ngh!” She moved the stick and cyclic violently, ejected decoy flares and chaff into the air around them, and sent the Pave Mare into a spin. It was an extreme maneuver, practically diving them right for the ocean.
It was going to be close. Two seconds left—
The missile exploded at close range, and a hard jolt from the side sent them pitching to the right. Lieutenant Santos’s instruments went haywire, and strange metallic squeals erupted from the engine and drive shaft. Alarms rang out all around them. She could hear her copilot and the electronic warfare tech shouting:
“Fire in the second engine! Output down! Losing fuel pressure!”
“Port-side ECS damaged! We lost our left stub wing!”
Though dizzy from banging her head on the seat, Santos calmly checked the stick’s responsiveness. “Stay calm,” she ordered. “Shut off the second engine. Switch to auxiliary power and fuel lines. Fuel supply, too. We’ve still got the tail rotor, right? Do you have visual?”
“Affirmative!” the crew member in the cargo room responded.
“And the automatic fire suppression systems?”
“Working.”
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Great, Lieutenant Santos thought. We can still fly. If she’d acted even a few seconds later, they’d all have been blown to kingdom come. It had been a very close call. While dishing out precise directions on how to minimize the damage, she used her active ECCS to search the area the missile had come from for ECS activity.
“Dammit...” she swore as she found what she was looking for. There was a large aircraft floating on the water, camouflaged with ECS, and an infantryman had shot the anti-air missile from one of the wings. It must be an Amalgam ship that had slunk into the area to serve as backup at some point.
If a second shot came, they wouldn’t be able to avoid it. Santos desperately wanted to save Tessa, but she knew that getting herself shot down wouldn’t help anyone. Gritting her teeth, Santos ordered, “W-Withdraw...” and turned the helicopter back in the direction they’d come from. All she could do now was to make a frustrated report to her colleagues.
As the boat continued racing through the night, Tessa sat in its cabin, handcuffed and powerless. She could only watch silently as the allied helicopter pursuing them took a hit from a missile and withdrew. It was probably Lieutenant Santos’s Gebo-9—She just hoped nobody had been injured.
“Hmhmhm, hmmhmhmm, hmm, hmm, hmm...” Harris sat in the boat’s driver seat, humming Beethoven’s 9th against the salt air. “It’s Christmas. Enjoy it!” the man proclaimed joyously as he spun to face her. “The truth is, you’re a much more valuable VIP than Chidori Kaname. Normally, you stay hidden and unreachable under the sea. I consider myself truly lucky. If I still had access to my ship’s facility, I could have pried into every part of your mind... but I guess we can’t have everything.”
Tessa just glared death at him.
“Ooh, scary,” Harris said, taunting her with a shrug. “Sad to say, I’ll probably be denied the chance to investigate you directly. I wanted to strip your mind naked and prod its deepest depths. I wanted to see that proud, beautiful face of yours twisted, and screaming in humiliation. Exposing all your ugliest hatreds and fears, your most obscene desires... I wanted to watch your dull eyes fill with tears as drool dripped down your chin.”