Hakusan Angel

by Alex Powell

  "Don't do this."

  "You better let go of me, Kaede, or you're going to get caught up in it."

  "Sae––"

  Sae closed her eyes, and her brows lowered in concentration. A moment later, all the ports down her limbs started crackling with energy. Her hair, which had been loose around her shoulders started floating upwards in twitching tendrils.

  Mari took a step back. She had never seen a source instigate anything while not connected to a machine, and she had no idea what to expect.

  "Now you've done it, Mari," Matsura said from beside her.

  The crackling increased, and suddenly the tension burst, sending arcs of blue energy racing over the surface of her skin and connecting at the ports, like a web of light. As soon as that happened, the place where Kaede was touching her arm sparked, and she cried out. It must have triggered something in her as well, because a moment later, her ports started crackling too.

  "I'm not a battery," Sae said, and her voice had become distorted with energy. "I'm a weapon."

  The arcs of light danced over her skin, growing stronger and throwing up a field around her which caused another reaction in Kaede.

  "Sae ..." Kaede said, her hoarse voice echoing. "Stop it. I mean it, stop!"

  Sae ignored her, raising her arm up in front of her, spreading her hand out and curving her fingers in. There were tiny metal studs inset into the skin of her hands––not ports, but conductors. The energy raced down her arm and collected in the cupped shape of her hand.

  "Something tells me that's not good!" Matsura stumbled back, tripping on a chair in his haste and falling to the ground.

  "It's not," one of the other sources at the table gasped. "We should get everybody out, there's no telling how much damage a Level 3 Source could do, never mind two!"

  "I'm not trying to––" Kaede said, hand grasping Sae's shoulder so tightly her knuckles were turning white. "Her energy field has drawn me in!"

  The both of them were glowing now, and Kaede visibly struggled for control. Mari hadn't ever seen anything like it. Could all sources do this, light up with energy and become a walking livewire? This was trouble for sure. She knew how big Level 3 machines were and how much power it must take to run them. How much of that power could be emitted when a source wasn't hooked up to a machine? Apparently a lot.

  The light in Sae's palm intensified to the point that Mari couldn't look directly at it without blinding herself. Their war machines were weaponized, and she knew what it meant when energy gathered like that.

  "Hit the deck!" she yelled, slamming herself to the floor and putting her hands over her head.

  The air lit up above her head, energy arcing in lightning patterns around the room. Luckily, they all missed her, but the blast left a scorched smell on the air and Mari could feel the residual energy in the room rippling over her skin.

  She lifted her head cautiously and looked around to survey the damage. Mostly everyone had managed to hit the ground in time to avoid the blast, but a few pilots were groaning on the floor and holding their heads. Sae had slumped a bit as her energy output had drained her slightly, but the field around her was still swirling with light.

  "Sae, stop it," one of the sources pleaded. "You're making my ports buzz!"

  "You're hurting Kaede!" another source, a tall, willowy girl added. "You know we're not supposed to link up like that; you could interrupt the regular flow of her energy."

  "She's power-drunk, we need to knock her out."

  "We can't knock her out, her energy field will draw us in and cause more links to form! One of the pilots has to get close enough to do it."

  Mari considered it. With all the power running rampant above her, it looked as if getting close enough to knock Sae out would be difficult. Not to mention, the penalties for causing damage to a source were steep. Who knew whether High Command would see this as a breach of her contract?

  "We should just get everybody out and wait for her to stop," Mari said, drawing the attention of the sources arguing around her.

  "It'll take hours for her to become drained enough to power down again, especially linked with Kaede. Oh, poor Kaede, I hope this hasn't damaged her internal energy web too much," the tall source said.

  Kaede did look as if she were in pain, while Sae hardly seemed to notice that she was causing her friend damage.

  "I don't think we can get near enough to stop her," Mari said, starting to edge backward on her knees and elbows in a reverse army crawl. "I say we get out of here before she starts doing that to other sources too!"

  "So much power!" Sae screamed, her voice vibrating through the whole room.

  The space exploded with light and roaring noise. Mari was hit with a wall of energy, and for a moment it was so intense that she swore that she could feel her every atom crackle. There was nothing in her head but whiteness, and as she fell into unconsciousness, she could see energy patterns dancing on the inside of her eyelids.

  *~*~*

  Kaede woke up with her head pounding as if every pump of blood through her system was a resounding drum beat. Her limbs ached and her skin felt tight and over-sensitive. She blinked and groaned; even the dark was too bright, and so she closed her eyes again. She tried to figure out what had happened without moving too much, because every motion sent pain careening through her body.

  Even thinking caused the ache in her temple to twinge.

  Kaede was lying on the wooden floor of the bar, and she could feel the tiny cracks between floorboards against her cheek. Her yukata was in tatters and hanging off her body in ragged strings. It was night time. The cold air encased her, but moving in order to cover herself was beyond her at the moment.

  She blinked again, and the night flared against her open eyes. Kaede blinked again and again until her vision cleared enough that she could see around her. Everyone that had been in the bar was laid out flat much like her, although at least their clothing was intact. It was late enough that the moon had risen and all the stars were out.

  The entire base was dark and silent. Not just the bar, but the docking bays, guard posts––everything. The energy surge that Sae had released had knocked out the power for the entire base.

  Sae.

  She turned her head slightly and found Sae next to her, their hands still clasped together. Kaede could hardly feel her fingers where they were twined with Sae's. She remembered it. Sae had linked up their energy and then been overcome with it, because having that much power at one's control would override conscious thought. So instinctively, she must have gotten rid of it all at once, both Sae's power and Kaede's.

  Hopefully those investigating the incident would attribute the widespread damage to the fact it was two linked sources and not the real reason.

  It hadn't been very long since she'd woken when she heard voices and people walking around outside the bar. She turned her head towards the door just as it banged open, and several officers marched inside. They were regular military, not pilots and sources.

  "Sir, the scanners say that this was the centre of the blast. It had to have originated in this building."

  "Take them all in. We need to question the pilots and sources separately. Make sure you don't miss anybody."

  Someone was lifting her up, and it felt like she was floating. She closed her eyes again and let herself be borne away.

  Time became intermittent after that. She kept drifting in and out of sleep, too tired and drained to struggle to stay awake. Faces passed by above her, some military and some medical. A lot of them seemed to be worried, but she couldn't see why. She was only sleeping.

  Kaede wasn't certain how long it took for her to wake up properly, and even after she did, her head still buzzed slightly. The medical personnel fussed over her, checking machine readings and poking at her with their instruments. She couldn't wait for them to be gone and to be released, but when they finally did release her, she wished she could have stayed.

  They took her to an interview room. She was still dr
essed in a flimsy, white hospital gown and the nurses had provided her with a chair, but that didn't change the fact that this was an interrogation. A military investigation was taking place to find out what happened during the incident at the bar.

  "Name."

  "Nomura Kaede."

  "Position."

  "Source."

  "Level."

  "Three."

  There were three of them, all standing around the room with her in the middle. She couldn't watch them all; they kept moving, walking around her in circles. It was disorienting.

  "Where were you the night of the incident?"

  "The Level 3 Bar."

  "Who were you with?"

  "Ikeda Sae."

  "Anyone else?"

  "Other Level 3 Sources, I don't remember who else was there. Some pilots."

  "What happened?"

  She told them the best she could. Sae was going to be in huge amounts of trouble, and no doubt everyone else had already been questioned. They all knew Sae had caused this, so telling what happened would only confirm their stories. They already knew that she and Sae had linked up, and if they'd done their research, they knew that it was dangerous for sources to do so, because it could upset the balance of energy within them.

  "Ikeda linked up with you."

  "Yes," Kaede confirmed.

  "On purpose?"

  "No, it was an accident. I was trying to stop her."

  "Whose energy did she expend in the final release?"

  "Both of our energy."

  "Which one of you is the Level 1?"

  Kaede froze.

  "Neither of us. We're Level 3," she said, trying to keep her voice even.

  "We've calculated it over and over and all the extrapolated energy expenditure estimates say that the blast radius was far smaller than the range of the actual blast. Even with exchanging one Level 3 for a Level 2 in the equation still gave us an area exponentially less expansive."

  "How ..." Kaede cleared her throat. "How big was the blast radius?"

  "Fifty kilometres."

  "That's impossible," Kaede said, clenching her hands in her hospital gown.

  "It's true. You two caused a prefecture-wide power outage. The entire base was down for three days before the engineers could figure out how to rewire the central generators. Even the back-up systems were down. The whole east coast was completely defenceless against attack until we had it back up."

  Oh. This was so much more trouble than even she could have reckoned.

  "I'm a Level 3," she repeated firmly.

  "That's funny. That's what Ikeda says as well, and one of you is lying."

  "It's not me."

  "I for one, think it is you." One of her interrogators leaned in close and stared into her eyes. "Any source who was trying to hide the true magnitude of her power would not go flaunting it in a bar, especially not in such an uncontrollable and risky manner."

  "It's not me."

  "No, Ikeda was just showing off, and she knew that in the worst case scenario of one, lone Level 3 Source losing control, the damage would only affect those in the bar. That's what she meant to happen, but you yourself said that the power surge was an accident. Your involvement was an accident, the link was an accident and the surge was an accident. The revelation of a Level 1 Source was an accident, too. You were the one that caused Ikeda to lose control, and so I think that you are the Level 1 Source."

  She was well and truly caught. The evidence was stacked against her and clearly irrefutable. Yet Kaede could barely contemplate it, her head mired in panic at the thought of all the things that could happen to her now that they had found out her secret. There was one way to find out.

  "So what if I am the Level 1 Source? What are you going to do about it?"

  Kaede found that she really didn't like the looks on their faces.

  2

  Mari didn't know what was happening anymore.

  She and Matsura smoked beside an open window, careful not to let the fumes spread to the rest of the compound. All of the pilots who had been at the bar the night of the incident were in the building with them. What Mari didn't know was why they were there in the first place.

  The night they'd woken up, they had all been questioned. None of them were blamed for the incident, not even Mari, who admitted to having provoked Sae into action. They weren't being punished. They had the same food, they were allowed drinks and cigarettes and to use the flight simulators provided for them.

  The thing was, none of them were allowed outside. They could talk to each other, and sometimes officers would come in to check up on them, but they had no outside contact. Their comm systems had all been put offline, and none of the computers in the building would hook up to the net.

  "I asked one of them this morning whether they were going to let us go," Matsura said, stubbing out the remains of his cigarette on the side of the window. "They didn't say."

  "They haven't said anything for a week. I don't understand what we've done to deserve this." Mari followed suit, and they wandered back over to the rest of the group.

  They settled down into yet another card game, but Mari spent the whole while trying to figure out what was going on.

  They weren't being punished, because they'd done nothing wrong. She was the only one who might have done something to deserve reprimand, but the other pilots were also here. It was only the pilots from the bar who were here. There were over a hundred Level 3 Pilots, but only about a third of them were present here. None of the sources were here with them.

  "It must be something we know," she said, startling the other pilots into lowering their cards to stare at her sudden outburst.

  "What do you mean?" Matsura asked, throwing down a pair of aces.

  "I mean, we must have seen something in the bar that High Command doesn't want us to spread around to anyone else. We must have witnessed something top secret."

  "So why can't we just sign a confidentiality contract and get on with life?" Honda complained. "I just want to get out of this building. It's maddening, being locked up in here."

  "This secret must be so vital that they can't risk even the possibility of us talking about anything, even by accident. What was it, then? What did we see? It has to be something to do with the sources, otherwise we'd all be in the same place," Mari said, becoming more certain she was right the more she talked.

  "Are you sure you want to know, Mari?" Matsura asked, still more focused on the game than on her theories. "Maybe that's why we aren't in with the sources, so they don't tell us what happened. We're a threat to national security!"

  Their speculation ended when one of the officers came into the room with a clipboard. The room fell silent as all attention was turned on her.

  "Ishigaki Mariko?"

  "That's me," Mari raised her arm.

  "You're wanted by High Command. Come with me. Stay right behind me; do not stray from the path."

  "What about the rest of us?" Matsura demanded.

  "The rest of you remain. Only Ishigaki Mariko is required at this time."

  Mari followed the officer, staying a couple paces behind her. As soon as they left the building, a pair of armed guards fell into step on either side of them. Mari wasn't sure whether they were a protective escort or if they were preventing her escape. Both, perhaps.

  "Do not speak to anyone you see."

  She was led to a Level 8 ground vehicle, and was seated in the passenger seats in the back. Mari had always been a pilot when inside a machine, so it was odd to be in a vehicle with nothing to do. She hadn't been a Level 8 Pilot since she'd first started working with the military, but she knew exactly how the ground vehicle functioned.

  It didn't take them long to get to High Command, and the escort tapered off once they were inside the building. She was led to a conference room which was already full of people, all of whom turned upon her entry.

  "You," she cried, forgetting her order not to speak upon seeing a familiar face. "I know you!"
>
  It was the other source, the one that had tried to prevent Sae from attacking everyone. What was her name? Keiko? Kasumi?

  "Nomura Kaede, meet your new pilot. This is Ishigaki Mariko."

  "I'm not anyone's pilot," Mari said in surprise. "I'm a Level 3, we're interchangeable. I was recently promoted to start training on Level 1 driving sims."

  "Yes, we know who you are. We have your file. That's how we know that you're the only acceptable candidate for Nomura's new partner."

  "New partner?" Mari looked around the room, but no one was smiling, not even Kaede, who avoided her gaze as Mari focused on her. Something important and possibly bad was happening, and she was part of it.

  "Yes, you were there the night of the incident, and you were the only one of three pilots approved for Level 1 that has any knowledge of it. Therefore, you were the logical choice."

  "I don't understand!" Mari said, voice rising. "Why am I her partner in particular?"

  "This is Nomura Kaede, recently promoted to Source Level 1. She is your new partner because you are the only pilot skilled enough to drive a Level 1 machine that was also part of the incident that revealed her true nature. We are trying to keep the fact that we have acquired a Level 1 Source secret from Morwe, and the less people that know, the better."

  Mari thought that she had better sit down.

  It didn't take long for Mari to realize that the majority of the meeting was a discussion on logistics regarding how to keep the secret under wraps. Mari listened with half an ear, but turned most of her attention on her new partner.

  Kaede appeared to be ignoring the rest of the room with a stony face and silence. She was a small thing, bird-like in her size and the way she sat perched on the edge of her seat. Maybe her bones were hollow, too. Mari thought she could lift her up with one arm without any difficulty. Sources tended to be small, but Kaede was taking it to an extreme. Mari wondered how such a tiny person could hold so much power.

  The meeting ended, and guards escorted the two of them to shared quarters. Mari took note of the cameras guarding the halls and realized that she was under as much observation as she had been when stuck in the compound with her fellow pilots.