Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (30 page)

“Shell, the kaiju aren’t close yet are they?”

“
They’re still south of us in the bay! That EMP hit came from something else and its pulse-strength is too high!
”

Whatever had made it, our job had just gotten impossible; nearly a third of the cars on the bridge went dark, their sensitive controller chips shorted out by the pulse. And the effect wasn’t limited to the bridge—if anything it was on the periphery, and anyone in the city behind us not able to get into a shelter was a walking target. Where were the Eight and the Nine?

“
New instructions!
” Shell called out. “
Clear an exit on the bridge for the cars that can still move and then
rendezvous at the Gundam! They’re going to keep it, the Ferris wheel, and Lady Liberty lit up as bait—try and suck the kaiju onto the island where the mecha can deal with them!
”

Good plan if it worked—keep the big monsters concentrated instead of trying to hold them back wherever they decided to come ashore—but hard on any civilians who didn’t make it off Odaiba. I dropped Jacky and Ozma at the mainland end and we moved up the bridge.

Ozma and Jacky settled the mob as we went—Ozma with her words, Jacky by “pushing” with her vampy mind-power—while I tossed abandoned vehicles into the bay to make room. The two of them had to jog to keep up. Behind us, the lights of Tokyo died as Defensenet shut down the ones not taken down by the pulse to provide focus on the target. We were helped by a half-dozen pedestrians who turned out to be unpowered Defensenet reservists; they’d brought their own white armbands, and just seeing all of us moving calmly down the road and directing people past us settled the crowd tremendously.

Lucky for us, traffic had already been at a standstill when the EMP hit—there were no injuries from rear-end collisions into dead cars. Getting to the end of the bridge, I looked out over the rain shrouded bay.

“Shell, what’s the biggest kaiju attack they’ve dealt with before?”

“
A couple of Second-Gen kaiju off of the Port of Nagoya. Why?
”

Nagoya—Japan’s biggest port, and totally open to the Pacific. “Just checking my master-villain hypothesis.”

“Oh,
d’you think? Defensenet’s already called the play for that and is activating every reservist they’ve got
.
But forget about government capes—with the mecha tonnage they’re dropping, none of those lizards are going to make it to shore
.”

“Yeah, but—” It still didn’t make sense; the EMP hit hadn’t stopped Tokyo’s mecha-deployment—mech units were all EMP-hardened to handle the kaiju. All the hit had done was slow civilian evacuation. “Let’s get to the rendezvous.”

The second EMP hit caught us halfway there and this time I
felt
the sticky static discharge wash over us, like standing too close to one of Lei Zi’s local pulses. The lights lighting up the Gundam statue and Lady Liberty died and then came back.

And
virtual
Shell appeared in the rain beside me, looking thrilled and
shocked
.

“The quantum interdiction-field is down! The pulse knocked it down! But EMPs don’t do that—they’re not that kind of event!”

“Tell Defensenet! Assuming they don’t already know.”

“Working it.” She did a twirl, morphing into a Remarkable Ronin version of herself, and vanished. I could imagine the insanity breaking out back at Defensenet Shinjuku, but we had our own monkeys to deal with—assuming they got through the mecha-launched missile storm getting ready to greet them when they poked their heads up out of the bay.

Why was I beginning to think it was likely?

Arriving at the rendezvous told us at least one thing—six of the Eight Excellent Protectors were already there, their crisply pleated skirts and tailored jackets practically shining under the media’s camera-lights as they stood watching the bay. Considering they were surrounded by mecha—including an even dozen BFRs (Big Freaking Robots, Shell’s term for the fifteen-foot tall street-mecha)—loaded with rocket batteries and pointing at the water, their vigilance would have looked over-the-top if not for the cameras.

I nodded; it wasn’t exactly how we did things in Chicago, but half of winning tonight would be keeping the city calm; probably every news channel was running this—certainly millions of Tokyoites were watching on their cellphones and epads. They needed to see that Defensenet was ready to defend them.

“Look dangerous, people,” Jacky whispered before I spotted the camera pointed our direction and the field-reporter in front of it talking into his mic.

Lights, cameras, action!
I kept us walking forward, stopped us maybe twenty feet from the Eight and copied their casually observant pose to watch the bay. Checking out the Eight’s visible preparedness (one of them was a cyborg loaded with more bristling fight-mods than Shell wore as a battle-ready Galatea), I casually unsheathed Cutter and stuck him in the sand with a one-handed flourish. Jacky snickered beside me, but I could hear the rising hums as she drew, readied, and re-holstered her scary looking Vulcans.

“Five-second delayed broadcasts.” Virtual-Shell popped in beside me, again a dark-haired fourth Remarkable Ronin. Smart—Kochi stood with her team by the water, and magic-types had the habit of being able to see my BF. “Defensenet can cut all media transmissions in a second if the situation goes bad or they need to keep someone special from seeing it. You ready for this?”

I smiled whimsically, making sure my face was angled so the camera would catch it. “I would really, really like a spa-day. With aggressive shopping. You know, the Bees would love Tokyo. Especially Isetan Shinjuku—those ladies were really, really nice.”

“That’s a lot of reallys.”

“I’m really tired and my shoulder really really hurts.” I rotated it carefully; I’d managed to clear the bridge mostly one-handed, but just the strenuous movement had stripped away the numbing protection Dr. Arai had given me, just like she’d promised.

Jacky touched my elbow. “Camera’s gone, now look clever.” With the news crews pointed elsewhere, Kaminari headed straight for us, her glowing naginata held over her shoulder so its butt didn’t brush the sand. She very carefully
wasn’t
limping but I could read it in her stance. Controlled rage practically poured off her in waves.

I folded my arms and almost stepped back before I stopped myself. Beside me Jacky loomed taller.

“Thank you for coming. Truly.” She said it with the briefest bow, which I automatically mirrored. Were the cameras back without my seeing them?

Again I nodded automatically. “What happened to you?”

“Agent Inoue sent us to collect one of the persons you named tonight. It did not go well.”

“They found the Verne-Type guy—” Virtual-Shell whispered beside me “—but he blew himself and his workshop up before they could get through his booby-traps and stop him. Two of the Eight are in the hospital.”

I winced. “I’m sor—”

Kaminari cut my instinctive apology short with an impatient slash of her hand; her anger wasn’t pointed at me. “We needed what you brought us. The Nine Accomplished Heroes are now in Kyoto protecting the Asian delegates from a One-Lander attack, and there has been hard fighting. The conspiracy was widespread and they began executing their plan yesterday when your actions removed the Kabukicho yakuza from play.”

“Do you know what the conspiracy was about yet?”

“A powerful attack.” She scowled. “The yakuza family involved was getting paid very well to use the gates to smuggle men and contraband—the furthest gate we’re now sure of is in Okinawa. And they stood to make even more money skimming construction contracts in the rebuilding.
 
They believed that they were working for an ultra-nationalist group that wants to remilitarize and reestablish our prewar hegemony.” Turning around she looked out at the bay. The Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line had gone dark as the rest of Tokyo; hopefully the kaiju would ignore the bay-spanning bridge.

It had certainly been emptied—probably what the Eight had been doing while we’d cleared the much shorter Rainbow Bridge. If there’d still been traffic on it we wouldn’t be standing here.

“And they were—the nationalist group exists—but its strings were being pulled by One Land. And One Land prepared for more than just an attack; they were preparing for a blow that would cripple Japan. Your interference made them kick off their plans early.”

The chill had been settling into my gut as Kaminari spoke. So maybe we’d done some good—but our enemy had gained a whole day to begin, once we’d gotten the Kabukicho yakuza trapped and before I’d talked to Kitsune. If I had gone straight to Defensenet when Ozma had been taken, told them who we were and why we were here, they’d have known we could find Kitsune for them and tonight would all be playing out very, very differently.

But if they hadn’t used Kitsune to spy on us, then we could have asked for their help instead of sneaking in.

It
sucked
; if we’d trusted them enough to ask, they would have learned we could find him for them. If we’d used Ozma’s magic fish to track him down and then gone in with the full might of Defensenet behind us… I felt sick. “So then, we just hope that this was the big plan? Destroying the sea wall and sending a bunch of kaiju into Tokyo?”

Kaminari
actually snorted. “No, Hikari-san. Every Defensenet team across Japan is on alert, with every Defense Force base.” A new EMP hit washed over us, the static charge raising my neck-hairs and inducing tiny arcs of snapping current on the station-keeping mecha around us. She sighed and pushed wet strands of hair out of her face. “Thank you for being here, Hikari-san.”

I stared at her retreating back as she rejoined her remaining teammates.

“The kaiju just passed the Aqua-Line,” Shell reported.

Get your mind back in the game
. “Why aren’t they using torpedoes on them?”

“They moved the torpedo batteries out into the Uraga Channel when they built the sea wall, and air-dropped torpedoes are too risky in the bay. Here they come!”

Back in full quantum-neural link with me, Shell was using all her processing power to analyze what I was seeing with my super-duper vision. Now she painted virtual markers on the faintest of water-trails, barely visible in the night and rain. Fast-moving markers, closing on Odaiba’s artificial beach. I didn’t have to ask to know that she was passing the images through her cat-Shell links to Jacky and Ozma’s shades.

I drew Cutter from his sheath of sand. Beside me, Jacky held a Vulcan in one fist, her free hand resting on her sash where she kept her bottled wind.
 
Ozma stood easy, looking mildly interested but with her wand-baton held ready.

And the night exploded into furious fire as the BFRs flushed their rocket batteries at the rising hills of water. So did The Eight’s cyborg—Shell tagged her as Arashi. The screaming roars that shook the air almost drowned the sound of auto-cannon fire as the five monster lizards rose through the rain of hypervelocity and explosive rounds to tower over the beach, the two in front already dying.

“They’ve got them!” virtual-Shell yelled by my ear. “They’ve—what is
that
?”

That
was the bay water around the embattled kaiju, and it looked like it was
boiling
, rising around the monsters’ legs.

The heaving mass exploded.

“Shell! Analysis now!” The explosion resolved into thousands of
things
that looked like flying stingrays, if stingrays were made of seaweed and covered in tiny bubbling membranes. Jacky swore and fumbled to reset her Vulcan as the rest of the Eight leaped into action and the cloud of flying nightmares swept over us.