Nanami sprinted like the hounds of hell were on her heels.
This was, in her opinion, becoming a wholly unwelcome and entirely too frequent occurrence in her life.
Still, she preferred the heart-in-mouth terror, headlong rush, and adrenaline burn to being butchered by a piece of idiotically homicidal hardware. OCP’s ED-200 series of military hardware platforms had a widespread reputation for being devastatingly effective in combat, but they also had a notorious rep as the butt of a great many nervous jokes about their hair-trigger responses and less than discriminating targeting abilities. That was part of the reason they hadn’t been deployed as security at the Repository. Even the Colonial Marines acknowledged that the best way to deploy EDs (which, she’d heard, meant ‘Everybody Dies’ among the Marines) was to drop them into a combat zone and write off any non-targets left in the area as collateral damage.
NOT what she wanted in her obituary.
Neither did she want ‘Xenomorph Mutant’.
Behind her she could hear the sound of clanging actuators, heavy footfalls, whining servos, and farther back, somebody yelling at somebody else called ‘Schmidt’ about shutting the thing the hell off. She’d agree with that last if not for the crack of heavy machine gun rounds zipping over her head or behind her.
She ran around a corner and suddenly skidded to a halt, quietly cursing as she did so.
Of COURSE she had to make a turn into a dead end. Twenty-five foot tall prefab modloc plascrete framed the walls of the alley, no doors, no windows, no way out except back.
*CLANK*WHIRR*CLANK*CLANK*”NON-HUMAN TARGET ACQUIR-”
Oh gee, how’d I get up here?
Oh, right. I jumped.
Nanami looked down the other side of the wall, saw a even greater drop into what looked like a canal drainage system. Looked back and saw mechanical movement down the way she’d come. Felt the shudder through her legs as something big and heavy hit the wall under her.
Well, I got up here. Figure I can get back down.
She leapt.
Ranma had been eyeing a local abandoned strip-mining pit as a good place to practice some of the more devastating moves he recalled in his past life; chi projection, Breaking Point, life force-pumped moves, all things he wanted to know if he could (still) do, what with his radically altered physique. Any new or old tricks he could acquire might be the difference between life and death.
He’d found a good spot when the sense of imminent danger had flashed through his mind. He recognized the source; Nanami.
He also felt Kodachi’s alarmed mental query through their shared link.
It’s not my fault! Ranma tried to communicate.
Nevertheless, he dropped his practice and took off for town as fast as he could.
Roof-hopping, it seemed, was something he COULD still do.
Kodachi had finished up her food shopping, having arranged delivery to the Beagle(and incidentally generously tipping the stockgirl), and had been browsing in a hardware store, looking at some steel cable and ribbon stock, a half-formed idea or two in her head, when she had picked up the alarm. Hastily she made a few last moment purchases, excused herself , and ran outside, looking for a vacant stretch of unwatched street or alley .
Within moments she too had taken to the rooftops.
Roof-hopping, it also seemed, was something she remembered how to do as well.
Moments later, two nondescript men came out onto the street from where they’d been shadowing the woman off the newly arrived ship, as per their orders.
”Huh?! Where’d she go? Awww man, we LOST her?”
”Well, we better backtrack to the ‘port and hope we can pick her up again, or the boss is goin’ to be righteously PISSED.”
Security Patrol Chief Cho looked at the alleyway and the large HOLE torn in the end of the end. With a cold menace that even an ED-290 could admire, his glare swiveled on the hapless Schmidt.
The aforementioned man nervously eyed his superior officer, noted the man’s fingering of the trigger on his USM-101 burner shockrifle, and gulped.
”I thought I told you to shut the thing off!”
”Ah, I thought I did! I’m pretty sure I did!”
Cho looked back at the roughly ED-shaped and -sized hole in the reinforced concrete, the rest of the patrol crowded around it, looking through into the concrete-sided drainage canal beyond, filled with murky run-off from one of Mudpie’s frequent thundersquals. There was no trace of either the robot or the woman the thing had gone rampaging after.
”Well, I’m pretty sure you DIDN’T.”
Schmidt almost countered he HAD felt the kill-switch slide home when he’d punched it, but it’s hard to mount a defense based on that when there’s more compelling evidence to the contrary gaping next to you. So he tried the next best thing.
”Maybe it fell in the river and drowned?”
Cho tiredly sighed and decided to let Schmidt a LITTLE off the hook. “Doubt it. I’m going to have call this in and inform Central we got a possible robot rampage on our hands. The rest of you, fan out and start searching; maybe newbie’s right and all we have to do is wait for a hook-and-dredge crew to recover a great big rock on the bottom, but I ain’t taking any chances. Central’s going to want to be on alert if we got a killer robot situation.”
And what was with that bunch of guys milling around back there? They’d followed the patrol since the chase had started. Cho shook his head; so much for covering up THIS incident if they already had an audience.
High above, a stealthed blackbody ghosted into the upper atmosphere, the intelligence aboard making final adjustments for its atmospheric reentry. It had slipped unnoticed through the outer traffic control with ease. It also took the opportunity to conduct last minute surveys of its targets, taking note of the number of spacecraft down, the deposition of vehicles, activity around the refineries, and some such.
It was as the earlier scouts had determined. Just a sleepy little colony, not expecting any trouble, and without any reason to raise an alarm.
The element of surprise would make its mission a whole lot easier.
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(Posted Mon, 08 Feb 2010 19:11)
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らんま1/2 © Rumiko Takahashi
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