Forcibly United
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Chapter 11
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Ranma barely had time to catch her breath before her angry partner was grabbing her shirt and shaking her.
"Damn it, Ranma! You nearly pulled me over the boat with that stunt of yours!" Ryouga roared. His eyes widened and he grabbed both girls and heaved them to the side, rolling after them a second later. As he did, more heavy machine-gun rounds punched holes into the decking where the three had stood.
The boat pitched as it turned, putting itself at a ninety degree angle to it's airborn pursuer.
"Fuck! Our only hope of taking that Hind down is the RPG, unless you two fuckers can pull off that glowing trick again!" Revy snarled, running forward on the boat. Ranma and Ryouga quickly followed.
"We can't rely on that. That thing's moving way too fast and it's too far out for us to have any kind of reliable shot!" Ryouga called, his eyes tracking the helicopter as it banked sharply, reading to come at them once more.
"I've got the same fucking problem! These RPGs aren't the fastest things in the world!" The gunslinger slapped another round into the weapon and brought it to her shoulder. "Look, just give it a shot! Worst case scenario, you miss!"
"We don't exactly have enough chi to just be firing these things all day, tomboy!" Ranma complained, but faced off against the thing. She breathed deeply, glancing at her rival. "Think you can pull off a double shot, pork fry?"
"Not a chance," Ryouga grimaced. He glared at the helicopter as two bright flashes burst forth from the tips of the wing pylons. "Ranma, those missiles are way too fast for us to hit!"
"Rock, flare!" Revy bellowed, aiming her weapon. The young Japanese man popped out of the hatch beside her, firing the large pistol-shaped weapon straight up into the air. The missiles, racing far in advance of the attack chopper, immediately diverted after the heat signature, the ordnance flashed through the air above before detonating safely away from them.
All three combatants loosed their weapons. Revy's RPG deflected off the armor of the Hind, detonating uselessly fifty meters behind. Ranma's Double Mouko Takabisha was only half successful: One flew wide of the target and the other hit, charring the armor and doing no more damage. Ryouga's Shi Shi Hokodan clipped one of the remaining two missiles, causing it to drop to the ocean below.
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Revy was too busy reloading to notice the angle of the 30mm gunfire as it created a near perfect line along the water as the Hind closed on the Black Lagoon. Rock, wedged uncomfortably between her legs, did notice. He immediately grabbed her and pulled her into the cabin with him, causing her to drop the RPG round and the weapon itself.
Before she even had time to breathe in and yell at him, a giant hole was punched through the top of the hatch, the very place she'd been bracing herself a second before. Seeing that, she flashed the young man a grin and grabbed the RPG round before it rolled underneath Dutch's seat.
"Rock, we need another flare! That fucking Hind is coming back and it's still got one missile!" Revy bellowed, already reloading the weapon in her hand as she raised herself back out of the top hatch. Rock glanced around the cabin for the weapon as he fumbled another flare round from the case, then he realized.
The flare gun was outside.
"Revy, I don't have the flare gun!" Rock yelled.
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Hearing Rock's cry from inside the cabin, Ranma turned to her partner.
"Ryouga, we're gonna need another Perfect from you!" Ranma yelled, concentrating on the Hind as it banked. "Your chi is a lot hotter than mine. A Perfect Shi Shi Hokodan might just be hot enough to draw that last missile away from the boat!"
"On it!" Ryouga replied, chi swirling around him.
"Tomboy, you've got still got a shot for that thing, right?" Ranma demanded, getting an angry nod in return. She grinned. "Alright, I'm going to fire another Double at this clown. If we both aim our shots at that stupid thing's blades, we should be able to take it down!"
Far out from the boat, the Hind-D's last missile flared as it was launched from its pylon.
"Perfect Shi Shi Hokodan!" Ryouga bellowed, forcing his chi upward. He held his hands up, as if the act would aid his contentration in keeping the thing from falling back down. His eyes squeezed shut in concentration. "I can't hold this much longer!"
"Just another second, Ryouga!" Ranma encouraged, watching the missile as it approached. After a few agonizing seconds, it blasted through the Shi Shi Hokodan and detonated, the heat and pressure wave of the explosion washing over the trio as they watched. The Lost Boy collapsed, to one knee. "It's our turn now, tomboy!"
"I told you not to call me tomboy, bitch!" Revy snarled, her attention focused on the incoming helicopter. Neither the pigtailed girl nor the Chinese-American woman allowed their attention to waver as the Shi Shi Hokodan detonated, briefly showering them with water.
"I'll make sure this bastard comes at us a little lower so he can't spray us with any more bullets!" Ranma growled as she loosed her first Mouko Takabisha early, aiming it a little higher than the incoming chopper. The pilot saw the incoming attack and dipped lower to allow it to fly above his flight path. With only forty feet between his craft and the ocean, he now had no room to dodge if he wanted to pass over the Black Lagoon. Ranma had him. She fired the other chi blast, her victory assured.
The helicopter dropped lower, dodging the attack. It was now on a collision course.
"Dutch, hard to port!" Revy screamed into her microphone, firing the RPG before dropping it to snag the back of Ranma's shirt. Ryouga slammed painfully into the torpedo tube as the boat turned sharply, gripping it tightly through the momentum of the turn. Ranma felt something in the taller woman's shoulder give slightly as she maintained her death grip on the back of the pigtailed girl's shirt until it was safe to let go.
The RPG struck the cockpit of the Hind, instantly forcing it down into the water. It was still coming at the rear of the boat far faster than they could hope to outrun it.
Then Chinese-American woman slumped inside the cabin, screaming in pain as her good hand clutched her injured shoulder.
"Ryouga, on your feet! We gotta do something!" Ranma snarled, dragging the boy to his feet and pulling him to the back of the boat. With every passing second it was closing by another hundred feet as it skipping along the water like a stone. Shaking his head clear, Ryouga nodded.
Neither martial artist was strong enough to stop the Hind-D's momentum. Ranma doubted Lime could have stopped it. There was also the relative disparity in weight to consider, and both knew that the lack of a stable platform would hurt more than it would help. It was madness to even try, and both fighters knew it.
As the Hind bounced up, a pigtailed girl and bandanna-clad boy jumped up to meet it as it reached the top of the arc which would have left it on top of the boat, punching out at the helicopter at the at exactly the same time. The impressive blows snapped the pair almost immediately back onto the deck of the ship, their own meager weight insufficient to move the Hind's much greater mass.
Much.
Yet it was enough to lift the chopper a few extra feet. Combined with the sudden deceleration of the boat as Dutch reversed the throttle, the mechanical corpse skipped once or twice off the water in front of the boat and sunk instead of smashing into the boat and dragging the Black Lagoon's crew with it.
Neither Ranma nor Ryouga remained conscious long enough for someone to come out and check on them.
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Benny came into the cabin, a wry grin on his face as he looked at the calm man at the helm of the ship. The ship was scarred with gunfire from the 30mm, but thankfully none of the critical engine components had been struck. More irritatingly, the beer cooler had been pierced where it lay in the cabin, taking the entire case of Heirekan tallboys with it to the grave.
Revy was not happy about that. Or the shoulder she'd dislocated, truth be told. Though compared to the pair they'd brought into the lower cabin, now resting on the bunks, she'd gotten off very lightly. Both were unconscious and breathing shallowly, and they'd both collected a fair amount of scrapes and bruises.
There was also the fact that Ranma was now a short, red-haired girl instead of a less short, black-haired guy. That was sort of weird, Benny, thought, but given his own recent foray into the realm of strange magical crap, it was no longer enough to warrant a total freak out.
"What's up, Benny?" Dutch asked, glacing up from piloting the ship.
"I finally got a hold of Balalaika. She's told me that if we have to scuttle the cargo to escape, we can. She wasn't expecting nearly this much opposition for us, " Benny noted, tapping a button on the black man's control console to redirect the radio from the communications room.
"Go ahead, Balalaika," Dutch said, grinning at the smirk on Benny's face.
"Six heavily-armored attack boats and a Hind-D inbound, Dutch? You sound far too calm for a man in your position," Balalaika's voice was tinged with careful amusement. After a moment's pause, she continued. "As I told Benny: If you have to drop the cargo to save yourselves, you may. Clearly you can't be expected to fight off that many foes with just three people defending the ship."
"You're right, Balalaika. We can't be expected to fight them all," Dutch said, and Benny knew the man well enough to recognize when he was trying to keep his voice level. He finally allowed his mirth to enter his voice as he continued. "However, that doesn't change the fact that we already did. Your cargo is en-route and will be arriving at the scheduled time."
"Surely you must be joking. You mean my dear little sister managed to take down that Hind-D with whatever weapons she had on hand? I'm impressed," Balalaika admitted, not bothering to hide the surprise in her voice.
"Oh, she had help," Dutch informed the woman. "Whatever you're paying those two you saddled with us, you should probably double for this job. Without them, we'd be a boat full of corpses and empty of cargo by now."
"As it so happens, Hotel Moscow has a bounty on the pilot of the Hind-D," Balalaika informed him, sounding pleased. "Alexei should have known better than to try to rob me. I can't imagine what he was thinking."
"Well, I'm sure that'll make Revy happy. An even three-way split between her and those two sounds fair to me," Dutch said.
"As always, Hotel Moscow is happy to do business with the Lagoon Company. Your payment will be waiting at port when you arrive," Balalaika concluded, ending the transmission.
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Rock glanced at the woman he was tending, wrapping some of her cuts. She'd screamed when he popped her shoulder back into place, and the limb was now suspended with a sling until her strength returned to the limp arm.
"They were... glowing?" Rock asked dubiously, putting ointment on the final scrape on her back, just under her left shoulder blade. He put a bandage on it and then lowered her shirt once more.
"Hey, don't ask me how it fucking works," Revy snorted, slowly getting to her feet. She walked over to the doorway to the cabin's bunks, where the pair now lay on the bed. "You know, I think the bigger question here is how the pigtailed fucker turned into a stacked girl."
"Good point, I guess," Rock admitted, joining her at the door.
"It's weird. Remember back when I fought Jumbo? I thought that was pretty intense, but this? This is a hell of a lot beyond that," Revy said, her tone strangely wistful to Rock's ears. "These bastards are as good with their bare hands as I am with a fucking armory."
"Oh, you think they're actually better than you?" Rock wondered, grinning at the sharp look she directed his way.
"Hey, I can take either of these bastards just fine. They're good, but they're not that good," Revy snorted, finally turning away from the pair in the room. "Fuck it, I'm pretty sure we've got a spare case of beer in the hold. Warm beer is better than no beer."
After glancing at the slumbering teens for a moment, Rock followed.
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Author's Notes:
Well, I hope everyone liked the battle with the boats and the Hind-D. I did my best to give everyone who was topside a moment of awesome there and I hope I succeeded. I figured slamming the Hind up enough to pass over the Black Lagoon wouldn't be much harder for Ranma and Ryouga than tossing ice around during the fight with Mikado and Azusa was, so there you go.
