No Need for Conspiracy
(to those Amtgarders out there, the resemblance of any characters to Sir Sir Sir Sir Aramithras is completely intentional.)
Office in a Skyskraper
"Your man didn't do his job," the cloaked man said. "My master was hoping for a bloodier message."
"You did not give us all the information," the man responded with a slight Italian accent. He didn't like this Jedi wannabe, but he had paid for their services in gold bars. "Now we have to find our operative and dispose of him as well."
"You won't find him," the cloaked man laughed, then turned serious. "He was carrying the coin, was he not?" The suit waved off that question.
"You don't seem to understand who we are," the man told him with a silky threatening voice. "We could find and take anyone that lives on this world."
"Exactly my point, he was carrying the coin, correct?" the cloaked man was insistent now.
"He was a professional, of course he had the coin."
"Good, then our business is concluded," the man stood up from the recliner and began walking out of the office. "If I were you I would not make any further moves on the targets, my master would not appreciate that." The suit snapped and another man in a dark suit blocked the man's passage out with a pistol. The cloaked man smiled, he flickered out of view with a ripping sound as the gunman fired. The bullet struck the gunman's boss, passing through his arm and out the window, as the cloaked man reappeared behind him.
"Your job is done," the cloaked man emphasized the statement with deadly clarity. "But since you don't seem to realize that." The cloaked man tossed a small sphere at the suit as he vanished again. Mere moments later the top five floors of the skyskraper exploded.
The Yagami Brig
"Well, we've identified your client, Mister...A.R.A Mithras" Kiyone told the lawyer from across the screen. The assassin himself was dismayed at the youthful appearance of his court appointed attorney. "The locals have quite a file on him, excuse me, but are you drinking wine out of a box?" The lawyer on the screen had a large, bright red nose poking out of a spherical mass of hair that concealed any other facial feature.
"ITS A CARDBOARD CARAFE!!!" the assassin and Kiyone both paused to look at him, then they went back to what they had been doing.
"Wait, wait," the lawyer insisted. Kiyone looked in wide-eyed embarrassment as the lawyer shuffled papers about.
"Excuse me, can I possibly get another lawyer?"
"I'll have you know that I'm the most experienced attorney in this office," the lawyer was indignant.
"You don't act like you've had many cases," the assassin noted.
"Just how many people from legal survived the Caine incident?" Kiyone asked nervously.
"Umm, I had to do some shopping for my mother." The assassin turned from the inebriated public defender to face Kiyone.
"What do you want to know?" he asked desparately.
"Who hired you?" Kiyone asked.
"Listen you!" the lawyer shouted. "You have to let me defend you, we can't let the dream die just because we've had more major disasters and battles in the last two years than all of the past hundred."
"I don't know who contracted me," the assassin answered ignoring the lawyer. "I work through an agency, an office on the top floor of the Makiko building." Kiyone pulled up a Washu holo-unit and scanned for the indicated building.
"Bad news for you," Kiyone said. "The top five floors of that building were destroyed in some kind of terrorist bombing. Don't you have any clues for me?" The assassin looked shocked as the lawyer began to rant about how the Caine incident was all a plot by the Jurai empire to weaken the true center of civilization in the galaxy.
"Wasn't Caine trying to destroy all the Jurai?" Kiyone put in for a moment.
"You see how far they're willing to go to ruin it all for us!!" Kiyone rolled her eyes away from the odd man faced the assassin again.
"I had this coin I was supposed to leave with the bodies," he reached into his pockets and retrieved a small flat piece of metal with the crest of Jurai imprinted on it.
"You see!! The evil Jurai have corrupted this innocent young man...." Kiyone switched off the brig energy wall and reached out to accept the coin, behind her Rakkan watched everything carefully. Turning it over Kiyone saw a serial number.
"Its a Jurai keydisk," Kiyone noted as she raised the energy wall behind her. She turned to the holo-unit and typed in the serial number. "Thought so, that shipment of hard currency that disappeared a couple of weeks ago." She did a little more checking, accessing the galactic net through Yagami's computers and the holo-unit. "The crew reported a black ship of some kind before all transmission was lost, thanks." She started to leave.
"Wait, what about me?"
"Oh, I'm going to charge you with possession of an unlicensed weapon," Kiyone informed him. "If you plead you might be able to get away with ten years."
"Thanks alot," he grumbled as Kiyone left.
"No problem," Kiyone said non-chalantly as she walked down the corridor. Rakkan glided after her after a few moments glaring at the assassin.
"You damn detectives!" the lawyer was yelling. "You're destroying the Dream with your abuses of power and rand-*" The lawyer's drunken rant was cut off as the holoscreen vanished at an unheard command from Kiyone down the corridor.
The Yagami Living Quarters
"Oh, you beat me again," Mihoshi whined.
"No one can beat me at Spiritblade!" Sasami declared. "So why don't we try another game."
"Yeah, a spacefighter game," Mihoshi insisted. She started scanning through the computer's databanks for more games. She found utilities, reports, databases, and then finally, after a great deal of random pointing and clicking she came to something that resembled a game.
"Hey isn't that Miss Washu?" Sasami asked as the intro screen of the game popped up.
"Yeah, it looks like her doesn't it."
"What's this game called?"
"Semi-Holographic three-dimensional simulation field generator," Mihoshi read. "Look at all the scenarios! Oh, which one should I pick?"
"How about Bandit Swarm?"
"Yeah that sounds fun!"
The Yagami Bridge
"Captain," Karya turned to face Kiyone as she entered the bridge. "We've just crossed the fifth planet's sol-orbital path. Is there something we should know?"
"Less Earth traffic around here," Kiyone noted as she sat down in the pilot's chair.
"Any idea of who hired that man in the brig," Ayeka asked in a slightly annoyed tone.
"I have a suspicion, that it was an Akuneko."
"Rei Kuroi?" Tenchi asked, anxious about facing another dark warrior.
"Nervous, Tenchi?" Ryoko asked viciously. Before Tenchi could rise to the jibe the ships alarms began going wild. Kiyone and Karya both turned to the scanners and controls of the Yagami to see what the problem was.
"We're tracking approximately forty ships of various make and designs," Kiyone noted. "They look like some kind of.....whooaaah!!!!!" Kiyone was cut off as the ship, seemingly on its own began a series of evasive maneuvers. The crew were thrown to the side as the Yagami took an almost instantaneous one-eighty, temporarily shifting and strengthening the gravity field.
"What the hell is going on here?" Ryoko yelled.
"I see one of their ships, Captain!" Karya shouted. "They appear to have a cloaking device of some kind!" A streak of color blazed past the Yagami's forward viewpoint, everyone noticed that they seemed to be looking right through it.
The Yagami Cargo Bay
"What's going on!?!" Washu demanded as she was plastered to the ceiling and then found herself falling again. "Who's driving this thing?" The gravity field shifted again and Washu's fall became a gentle tumble. The pink haired scientist rushed, or tried to rush in the currently low gravity, for a section of exposed circuitry.
"Have to reactivate inertial damper!" she gasped before being tossed across the cargo bay by another gravity shift.
The Yagami Living Quarters
"Washu makes great video games!" Sasami declared cheerfully as she felt the gravity shift with another motion of the computer ship. The computer recognized this as the place from which the ship was being controlled, and while the intensity of the field was fluctuating, the computer did its best to maintain center of gravity at the computer. As a result Sasami and Mihoshi were mostly unaware of the problems everybody else was having.
"Hey Sasami, you're turn is coming up, try and beat that score!"
"Oh just watch me!" Sasami exclaimed excitedly.
The Yagami Bridge
"Its stopped," Kiyone declared as the ship paused. She rushed to the scanners, "No hostiles detected."
"Kiyone, could this be the problem?" Rikyu pointed to a small monitor on the side of the pilot station where the words "reloading simulation" were flashing.
"Simulation?" Rakkan asked, confused. "What does that mean?" Then they were moving again and the ships alarms blared all over again. Fortunately the gravity shifts were not near as severe this time.
"Who's flying this thing!!" Washu demanded over a holoscreen. "Is Mihoshi up there! If I hadn't reactivated the inertial damper during that pause we'd still be flying all over the place."
"The computer is running some sort of simulation," Ayeka informed the scientist, acting mildly miffed. "I assume this might have something to do with what you fiddling with." The ship wasn't maneuvering in the same insane manner anymore, but it was doing a somewhat decent job at avoiding damage from the now obviously holographic ships.
"You think I like being kicked around like a hacky sack?" Everybody looked at each other in confusion.
"What's a hacky sack?" somebody asked.
"Err, never mind, what's this simulation you're talking about?"
"Captain!!" Karya yelled. "We're heading back into the asteroid belt!"
Everybody watched with terror as the Yagami piloted through the asteroid belt at high speed. They didn't care about the number of holo-bandits that blew up in shimmering computer generated explosions. They were concerned with the very real pieces of rock passing to the side of them at high speed. By the time they came out the other side they were all staring in shock out the viewport. Then the last holo-bandit shattered into a last explosive light show. Moments later the sound of Mihoshi and Sasami's voices came to them from the cooridors.
"That was fun Mihoshi!" Sasami declared. "I'll beat you next time, you were only ten seconds ahead of me."
"I don't think so, Sasami," Mihoshi declared proudly. "Guess what, I beat Sasami at a game! Hey what's wrong with you guys?"
"I thought so," Washu muttered from the holoscreen.
"You can't use my computer without supervision anymore," Kiyone declared breathlessly. "Neither of you."
"But Kiyone..." Sasami started.
"I think we have to agree with that," Tenchi noted. Everybody nodded wordlessly.
"Captain, shouldn't we check on the prisoner." Everybody took a moment to think about that and then crinkled their faces in sympathetic pain.
"Err...later..."
Return of the Akuneko contents page
