"We have orders?"
"Yes." A picture was handed over. "Find this kid and hold him somewhere where he can't be found. His sister's one of the Valkyries we're interested in. Upstairs is afraid she might bolt out of our grasp, especially since that Kuga bitch and that Lady Marvel girl started making noise on the TV about the Orphans."
The agent's eyes narrowed as he gazed on the picture there. "Takumi Tokiha . . . "
"AH-CHOO!"
"Bless you, Takumi-kun!" Senou Aoi gasped as she and Harada Chie stared concernedly at their classmate's cute brother, the three of them now in the Academy's cafeteria ready to dig into a well-anticipated dinner. "Are you alright?!"
"Not sure," Takumi moaned as he rubbed his nose. "Someone's talking about me."
"Let's hope it's good talk," Chie mused.
"You're back early."
"Passing through," the Batman said to Superman as he stepped off the teleport pad on the Watchtower, and then he stared at Mister Terrific. "Open communications frequencies. This channel," he said as he handed the younger man a slip of paper.
Terrific looked at the note written there, and then he nodded. "Okay, getting the channel open. Not that many people use that frequency, sir."
"I know," the Dark Knight Detective said evenly.
"Channel open."
"Castle Nine, this is Dark Knight," the Batman then said. "Respond."
A second later, a woman's voice called back, "Dark Knight, Castle Nine, we read you five-by-five. New orders came in from Base One. Are you going to be in play?"
"Yes. Send coordinates so I can join you."
"Transmitting now."
A message then flashed on the computer screen before Mister Terrific. "Got the coordinates," he said, and then he blinked. "Uh, Batman . . . "
"What?"
"According to this, you'll be beaming to a point almost due west of Victoria, British Columbia -- at an altitude of two hundred miles! And our scanners are showing that nothing's out there at this time, not even a satellite!"
"Your point?"
The younger Justice Leaguer jerked on hearing the hard edge in the Batman's voice. When the Dark Knight Detective began speaking in that tone, everyone knew, you were on very thin ice with him. "Setting the coordinates now, sir."
"Excellent. Castle Nine, Dark Knight, I'll be joining you shortly."
"We're waiting for you, Big Guy," the woman cooed over the radio.
Terrific jolted, and then he stared wide-eyed at Batman. "She's a friend," the latter noted before he walked over to step onto the pad. "Go!"
Controls were pressed . . .
"Dark Knight, arriving!"
A boatswain's call shrilled the salute as the Batman materialised in the aft passenger compartment of a CY-199, it currently holding station-keeping over the North Pacific Ocean some five hundred kilometres west of the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca separating Vancouver Island from Washington state. "Thank you," Batman said before he reached up to slip his mask away, he heading past the soldiers relaxing in the benches there. "Where's Major Lightholler?"
"His usual place, Mister Wayne," a sergeant replied, he pointing forward.
"Thank you."
As he walked forward, Bruce could only smirk. If the others in the League knew how close the ties were between him and the Specialised Warfare Regiment of Canada, they would think he was out of his mind. Not that most of the people in the Justice League didn't think he was fully sane in the first place. Clark might understand and J'onn would applaud his cunning, but the others just simply wouldn't get the message.
We have power, the Batman had often told himself when he considered these sorts of situations. We have the duty to use it wisely.
And that was the whole point, the Dark Knight had long understood, especially when his personal crusade had intermingled with others and his horizons had been forced to spread far beyond the boundaries of Gotham City. If he was to ultimately succeed in his life's goal -- to ensure as many people as possible would never suffer as he had done when he was eight -- he had to stay in as control of his personal situation and maintain as much influence over the situations of others around him as possible.
When he had to use force, he used force.
When it was time to intimidate, he intimidated.
When he had to use gentle persuasion, he was very gentle.
And when he met people who thought like he did, he treated them as equals.
As they did him in return.
"Bruce! Over here!"
"Hello, Chris," Bruce hailed the officer commanding SPECWARDEFRON NINE, Major Christopher Lightholler. Beside him was the squadron sergeant major, Master Warrant Officer Danitra Jones. "Dani. Have you talked to Tess or the others lately?"
"Sometimes," Danitra said with a playful wink to the Dark Knight; she had been the one who had talked to Batman when he had traveled to the Watchtower from Gotham. "Whenever I do talk to any of the old crowd, they still ask me if I'm running my own tojang in Vancouver's East End. I hate lying to them."
"If they knew, they'd understand," Bruce assured her with a wink of his own. Danitra was African-Canadian with some Mi'kmaq ancestry through her mother, she was born in Halifax, the capital of Nova Scotia. A migrant to Gotham when she was a child after her parents' marriage fell apart, she eventually wound up working the streets for one of Batman's many sources of information, Tess Kelly, one of Gotham's brothel madams. After an ugly incident with a john Batman later broke up, Danitra had taken up to studying martial arts. After a visiting t'aekkyoun teacher from Vancouver took note of her passion in the Art, he invited her to come study at his tojang (the Korean version of a doojou). Ninth Specialised Warfare Defence Squadron soon found out about her, then gave her another offer. She took it and never looked back.
"Hope so," Danitra replied before she pressed the plane-wide intercom. "Pilotage, this is Danitra. SITREP on the Searrs Fleet, Glen?"
"Current position still one-five-K clicks, bearing one-seven-two magnetic from Fuuka Island, Dani," the squadron's electronic warfare officer, currently in the CY-199's cockpit with the flight crew, replied. "On station keeping, keeping clear from any surface traffic. We're picking up heavy traffic between their flattop and Searrs HQ in the Big Apple. Some side messages being also beamed over to Greer at Fuuka."
"Have Sigs been advised?" Chris Lightholler asked.
"Soon as we picked it up, I called into Base One, sir. They got their code breakers on it. Searrs is using new comm gear they installed in about five months ago."
"Obtained from where?" Bruce asked.
"Most likely S.T.A.R. Labs, Mister Wayne," the EWO replied; everyone on the CY-199 knew who had just come aboard to join them on this mission. "Maybe some stuff they created on their own, with some personnel who were enticed over from Lexcorp."
Bruce shook his head. The aftermath of Lex Luthor's aborted run on the Presidency of the United States -- and the damage that had done to his company -- would be felt worldwide for years to come, in many ways and many places. "How soon can we get to Fuuka so we can make sure the boy's safe?" he then asked the OC of DEFRON NINE.
"How do you want to go in, Bruce?" the major asked him in return.
The intercom sounded off before the Dark Knight could make his answer. "Major Lightholler?" the EWO called down.
"Go!" Lightholler ordered.
"Flash traffic from OBUNIT Tokyo," the other man reported, using the military shorthand for the Regiment's observation unit in Japan's capital city. "Just relayed from the locals. First Division personnel who've sold out to Searrs are moving to take the Lady's brother under their wing, most likely to make her dance to their tune. It'll go down sometime this evening, probably after lights out. Regiment's got it."
"Call down when the ops orders come in," the major ordered.
"Yes, sir."
Bruce's eyes closed as he ran through the intelligence he had received from the Regiment concerning this matter. The "Lady," of course, was Tokiha Mai, Lady Marvel. She had a brother, Tokiha Takumi, who suffered from heart problems and would most likely be travelling to the United States for surgery, all sponsored by the Fuuka Academy. Thanks to what the Regiment's observation unit in New York City had passed onto him through Alfred earlier in the day, the Searrs Foundation had begun to seriously consider targeting the boy as a way of bringing Mai to heel.
That had now just been confirmed.
"I need to read through everything you have on these people," he then said.
"Dani, help him," Lightholler ordered.
"Yes, sir."
As the CY-199 slipped into a parking orbit over Fuuka-jima, Bruce covered his mouth with a hand as a yawn escaped him. The packet delivered by DEFRON FIVE -- ultimately, from the Regiment's Intelligence and Observation Records Troop on Ellesmere Island -- was scattered all over the small work desk in the space Danitra had given him. He had committed as much as he could in those pages to memory and the digital records of his mini-camera; the packet would go back to the Regiment with his current hosts. Shaking his head as he considered the implications of what Tokiha Mai and her fellow HiMEs in the Fuuka Academy were ultimately up against, he could only steel himself, make the necessary plans to ensure the many innocents on Fuuka-jima who would soon be caught in the crossfire between the Regiment and the Foundation would not be harmed.
Starting with Tokiha Takumi.
A scowl turned the Dark Knight's lips as he called up the image of Joseph Searrs in his mind. There had been the odd time when Bruce Wayne had dealt with Searrs and his lackeys, especially in the period after No Man's Land when the Foundation had moved in with all the other NGOs to help put Gotham back on its feet again. While they were all sweet and decent on the outside, Bruce and his friends had all been quick to smell something very rotten in that particular state of Denmark.
Remembering the phrase from Hamlet, the Dark Knight then smirked as he moved to perform some shiatsu on his face to calm him for the work ahead. How ironic, he mused as he recalled what the Regiment had discovered about the origins of the Searrs Foundation. A society which had existed in one form or another for hundreds of years, working to influence governments in hopes of eventually enslaving humanity into a "golden millennium" which probably would turn out to be like every other failed Utopian dream forced on innocents by dictators throughout history.
And it would be doomed to failure, Bruce grimly knew. The Foundation had run roughshod over too many people in its march to create the "Golden Millennium," angering far too many others along the way. And three of those people were Darren Jackson, Richard Yasovitch and Edward Mills, men united in a common purpose to protect humanity as a whole against such monsters as Joseph Searrs and his ilk. And these men had the power -- and the willpower -- to do something about it when it came time for problems like this to be dealt with once and for all.
Dean Raeburn had trained her students too well for any other outcome to occur.
Raeburn . . .
Bruce breathed out. He had never met the legendary cavalry major who had created the Regiment's Second World War incarnation, the 1st Canadian Specialised Warfare Unit ("the War Hawks"), then helped create the post-war perpetuation of that unit in the mid-1950s during the early days of the Cold War. She was still alive; that much the members of the Regiment suspected. But after the disappearance of the 33rd Specialised Warfare Operations Squadron -- the Heroes Alliance of Canada -- the poor woman had been shattered by the loss of such a huge number of promising students (how Raeburn had trained them, Bruce didn't know and the Regiment was keeping mum over that secret). She vanished shortly afterward, having not been seen again . . .
Students.
Grigori Wysynski -- Doctor Destructo -- had also been one of Raeburn's students.
Raeburn herself had once been the student of an immortal Japanese warrior named Hosan Hirosuke, who had served the Chrysanthemum Throne for centuries, right up to his committing seppuku just before the start of World War Two in the Pacific.
And Master Hosan had been a witness to the last HiME Festival in 1704!
He vowing at that time to ensure it would never happen again.
And Raeburn, as Hosan's last student in the Tensei-ryuu (Heaven's Star School) of ninjitsu, would be bound by the demands of Bushido to fulfil her teacher's wishes.
But if she was unable to do that . . .?
If Destructo still felt some sort of loyalty to his old teacher . . .?
Would he step in to ensure Hosan's wishes were fulfilled?
If so, what then . . .?
Had he already started to interfere?
And in what way?
Too many questions, Bruce thought. Too many questions. Not enough time to sit back and think it all through . . .
"Well done, Bruce. You're understanding it now, aren't you?"
The Doctor could only grin as he gazed on Batman's image on his viewscreen, he relaxing in his base north of Ottawa. Knowing that very soon, Edward Mills would order Christopher Lightholler's men into action, he then closed his eyes as he telepathically called out, Windtalker!
Eh?! the shocked voice of Asakura Kazumi echoed in his mind, and then she gasped as recognition dawned on her. S-s-sir . . .?
I've some information you will be interested in, the Doctor explained . . .
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(Posted Sun, 01 Oct 2006 06:26)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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