Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games (31 page)

When your time comes to die, be not like those whose hearts are filled with fear of death. Sing your death song! And die like a hero going home.

Tecumseh

When your time comes to die, kick someone’s ass first.

Artemis

Jacky stopped trying to reset her Vulcan and disappeared into wind and mist, a whirlwind battering at the flying creatures. Ozma spun in a circle to trace a line in the sand with her wand-baton and before she’d finished the circle the sand flowed up into human shapes around her, literal sand-
men
that flailed at the flapping shapes descending on us. The creatures the sandmen touched dropped to the beach outside her circle.

Because sandmen brought sleep, of course.

I swung Cutter in broad one-handed arcs, cutting the creatures down in bunches as Cutter moved in my grip to carve his path through the swarm. The cloud of flapping seaweed made it hard to see more than a few feet.

“Shell! What’s going on?”

Virtual-Shell just stood there, turning in circles, as the things flew through her. “The Eight are okay—they’ve got an energy projector pushing back with her fields and they’re moving to cover the news crews—” A rolling, concussive explosion to our right almost blinded and deafened me. “—but hitting them with anything hot or electric lights them off!”

“What
are
they?”

“Really frisky seaweed! They break down water into gas—the bubbles in their skin are full of hydrogen to make them floaty so it doesn’t take much flapping to keep them airborne! And they’ve got some kind of toxin coating them—contact with skin is raising blisters and welts!”

“What’s their zone?”

“They’re staying on the beach, acting like mobile chaff for the kaiju—a living smokescreen!”

Even with Cutter’s help all my swinging couldn’t kill every flapper that came within our reach—I had to keep pulling them off me. Fortunately whatever secretions they were slimed with didn’t bother me; I just
really
needed to shower. But I wasn’t worried about them—they were
nuisances
and I needed to know where the—

The beach shook and the roaring came from damn near overhead; another rippling shockwave signaled the fiery mass-death of a cloud of flappers.

“I’ve hacked a drone-feed!” Shell shouted. “The kaiju are on the beach, plasma-jetting the fat flapper clusters around the street mecha! Good thing they’re piloted remotely—the big guys are going down!”

Great—we were losing our heavy artillery.

Another EMP hit washed over us and this time the arcing sparks ignited whole clumps of flappers.

And what was
that
about?

And— “Shell! Where’s Ozma?” She’d vanished into the dark green airborne mass.

“Our magical princess is headed for the Gundam statue! Kaminari says we need to hit the kaiju!”

That
I could do. “Point me!”

The one upside to the flapper-clouds was that the kaiju couldn’t see us through the flying things any better than we could see them; these monsters were Second Gen kaiju—bigger and tougher than the Chicago Godzilla—but they still had the signature plasma-breath and Shell confirmed that three of them were still standing.

I could have launched myself low and chopped at the first legs I found, but an instant vision of an injured kaiju blasting away at whatever was below it—a beach crowded with powered-armor mecha, news crews, and assorted capes—killed all possibility of a low shot. Instead I told Shell to pass the word that I’d be providing a platform, and went straight up.

The flapper swarm was thickest close to the ground, and as I cleared its densest layers I stayed low to eyeball my targets. Jacky dropped out of mist to stand on my shoulders as she drew her humming Vulcans and leaped into mist again. Kaminari used me as a stepping stone—a nice trick since she couldn’t fly and I was at least thirty feet up. Landing soft-footed on my head she jumped higher into the sky, multiplying as she sailed upward to become a swarm of naginata-wielding Kaminaris that descended on the closest kaiju.

“Okay, that’s impressive,” Shell allowed.

I closed on the one Jacky and Kaminari hadn’t targeted, circling around in the rain to come up behind it. Diving to bury Cutter to his hilt, I felt the shock through my body as he drove down through hide and bone into the back of the monster’s skull. The kaiju roared and twisted violently, almost throwing me off despite my two-handed grip on Cutter’s hilt and I clung tight as my shoulder screamed. I had no idea if I could kill it—the thing was so huge it made Heavenly Dragon look like a Chihuahua. Then we saw the Gundam.

Shell started
laughing
. “And that’s just crazy.”

All I could do was hang on and nod—I literally had no words.

With all the flappers flying around its legs, the brilliantly white, blue, and red Gundam robot statue waded towards us through a dark green tide. The “energy sword” it lifted glowed almost too bright to look at and our kaiju saw it coming, all sixty feet of impossible steel.

Common sense would tell you that one jet of a kaiju’s super-heated plasma breath would reduce the walking statue to melted wreckage, but common sense checks out the instant magic is involved. Ozma hadn’t just animated the giant Gundam statue—she had transformed it into something close to the real deal and the first plasma-jet to hit the Gundam splashed off it without doing more than scorching the paint. The mighty symbol of all Giant Robot Anime struck back with a swing of its energy sword that half-decapitated the most aggressive kaiju.

“Kaminari says to pull back!” Shell yelled. Turning my attention I saw that all of the Eight-leader’s duplicates had disappeared as she leaped away from her own now one-eyed opponent. Jacky stopped dancing in and out of mist and pouring Vulcan-shots into her target’s face to vanish a final time. Cutter came free with my pull and I shot up and away.

Our moves had bought time and the surviving BFRs opened fire again, rockets and auto-cannons ripping the air as I narrowly missed a Defensenet drone in my climb.

The gut-churning reek of ruptured and burned lizard filled the air.

“And that’s how they do it in Japan,” Shell said, floating beside me. Below us, the Eight were doing something to thin the flappers; for whatever reason, the things seemed to want to remain close to the definitively dead kaiju—the only break we’d gotten tonight. “You okay?”

“I’m tired.” I’d never felt so utterly done; Cutter weighed nothing but I felt every breath give more weight to my bones. I’d be able to sleep even without another pain-patch. For
days
.

Landing, I found Ozma by the de-animated Gundam. It had frozen in a stable posture but not its original at-ease pose, and I wondered if Tokyo would just rebuild its base down here on the beach and leave it like this to commemorate the attack.

“I thought you said your belt was almost tapped out?”

Ozma smiled. “The Magic Belt absorbs and stores magic. Think of it as a solar battery.”

“Okay…”

“Taking it to the godfish’s realm was like wearing it to sunbathe on Mercury.”

“So—
oh
. Then…” She’d told me once that the Magic Belt wasn’t as powerful, outside of Oz, and I really had no idea what that meant for her now.

She shook her head. “I used up a great deal of it, just now. But I think our metal defender was effective, don’t you?” She patted the Gundam’s foot affectionately.

I nodded dazedly. “Yeah, you could—”

Beside me Shell
jerked
. “What the actual
fu
—”

“Shell?”

She was grabbing fistfuls of her currently dark hair, almond eyes wide. “The EMP hits are coming from a
generator
. It’s cycling up, which is why the hits have been getting stronger.”

“And this means…”

“Defensenet just found the source, and I’m trying to tell them what they’re looking at.”

“
You
know— Shell, what’s going on?” Jacky dropped out of mist down the beach and I waved her over.

“The crazy-powerful Verne that suicided built a zero-point energy generator. The pulses are phase-discharges as the thing cycles up. It sucks up energy from the decaying virtual particles in the quantum foam—knocking down the quantum-interdiction field is just a side-effect of that. It’s something that becomes more than just theoretically possible a hundred years from now—the Chinese Verne must have used his weirdass superscience to skip steps.”

“Okay.” So we were looking at an exotic power source; maybe I was too tired, but that didn’t seem like enough to be making Shell pull her virtual hair out.

“So freaking
not
okay. The pulse strength tells me it’s passed its critical threshold.” Her eyes were wide. “It
was
a generator.
Now
it’s a bomb.”

I wasn’t tired anymore. “Where is it?”

The zero-point generator had been buried at the address the Eight Excellent Protectors raided earlier tonight. Buried
literally
—the conspirators had assembled it in the empty foundation of a soon-to-be built Shinjuku skyscraper (construction had been halted when the financing company went bankrupt) and buried it in cement. I grabbed Jacky and Ozma and flew as fast as I could safely carry them, landing us in the open pit with the Eight Excellent Protectors still far behind us.

The open pit looked like what it was: the site of a serious superhuman fight. A couple of street-mecha left to guard the scene had done more to rip up the site, using their ordnance to crack open the cement over the buried generator. In their spotlights the generator shone too dim, the exposed mirror-smooth shell of the huge dark sphere looking almost black and seeming to suck in the light—Shell said it was absorbing more photons than it was reflecting, another clue it was now a bomb.

“The pulses aren’t centered on the generator!” Shell explained. “They’re quantum-eruptions popping up anywhere in the generator’s disbursed subtraction field! Defensenet didn’t find the source until the generator passed the threshold and flared detectable tachyons in time with a pulse—that’s when I realized what it was.”

Standing beside me, she stared down at the sphere. Her face was a study in despair. “Defensenet’s sending a superhuman lifter but he won’t make it on time.” A new pulse washed over us.

“Can we destroy it?”

“No. It will just release the energy it’s stored and it’s already got enough.”

“Enough for what?”

“Enough to incinerate Tokyo and break Japan. Japan is a volcanic island chain. This thing will blow it a new one.”

“So we move it! How fragile is it?”

“Its outer wall is two-meter thick carbon alloy—you’re not going to crack it!”

“I don’t want to crack it!” Dropping into the newly smashed hole, I landed on top of it and drew Cutter. “Don’t let go,” I told him.

“Do your part—I know what to do, girl.”

I screamed and buried Cutter in the sphere like Excalibur in the stone, screamed again as I
pulled
.

The street-mecha helped by blasting away at the engine’s cement bed with their autocannons, fracturing the concrete and surrounding me with a blizzard of cement chips and fragmented rounds as I pulled with everything I had.

“How! Much! Time?”

“Minutes! We’ve got to drop it over the ocean! Past the coastal shelf!”

Every breath was a grinding scream and my vision started to gray out before the engine moved and came free of its cement anchor. “Shell! I can barely lift this! I can’t— I can’t—” We weren’t going to make it.

If I broke it now, before it built up
more
power, would it help at all?

“We will succeed,” Ozma said, opening her magic box and taking out…her little ivory netsuke? She whispered “Fly,” and the tiny white dragon uncurled to dart around her head. She smiled at it, touched the Magic Belt where it hid beneath her sash. “Grow.”