This is Battle Angel, my friends, and anybody who cares to read, get ready for the violence. I try not to be too excessive, but war can't really be written cleanly. If you like, read on.
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Part 2: Rising Juggernaut
Alita walked haughtily out of the broken down factory, laughing, ignoring the voice that continued to pry at her. So this is what it meant to be insane. There were no other explanations for a waking nightmare. Daisuke Ido had died and left her alone, hopelessly insane.
Her hand brushed against a square cartridge strapped to her leg. She didn't remember how she'd come by the armor she was wearing, but it fit her body perfectly. Neither did she recognize any of the paraphernalia she carried, even though she suspected much of it to be weaponry.
What in the world had happened?
"Don't you walk away from this AR-11!" Kate shouted at her through the mysterious communications link. "I'm warning you, if you step past that broken wall, I'll have to do something drastic!"
Alita laughed a bit harder and deliberately stepped over the fragments of wall lying in her path. She passed through a channel between two junk piles and made her way out into the Scrapyard day.
"Please, AR-11," Kate pleaded, "Don't do this to me. I know in your heart you don't want me to get in trouble..."
"HA," Alita said loudly and continued on.
It was nearly midday in Scrapiron city, the rambling shanty town of factories and dense, grimy habitation spread out around the mountain of discarded junk deposited from above. Overhead, Tiphares, the sky-city, hung from its massive cylindrical shaft and shined in a corona of noon sun, like some unattainable Eden held just out of reach. Hell-on-earth and paradise above were joined by a series of massive cables trailing downward into the expansive factories from the disc-shaped rim of the sky-city. Factory produced commodities went up the tube passages and rained back down again from the funnel-like bowels of Tiphares, expended, reconverted to junk.
Alita remembered the Scrapyard. She also remembered the loving care with which Dr. Ido had raised her from the endless refuse and breathed life back into her torpid sleep. She tried desperately to find some memory to fixate upon besides his loss.
This couldn't be real. She had to be dreaming.
The blue skies between the heavens and earth were never quite clear in the Scrapyard. Chugging factories emitted a continuous haze of carbonized soot. Coal dust clung to nearly every surface, chronically. Yet, today was wrong. A particularly dense column of black lifted above the jagged skyline. Where she stood, amid deserted buildings, she could see flames licking between smokestacks. Acrid odors, burnt plastics and metals, leached into everything like a settling blanket. Alita wondered why she hadn't noticed it before.
More tongues of fire shot skyward, flinging smoldering comets of shrapnel. Several breaths later, a resounding boom echoed off the nearby building fronts several times in refrain. The aftershocks continued pounded through the relative stillness.
An arm, part flesh and part not, thumped to the ground not far from where she stood.
"What the...?" Alita exclaimed.
"That's what I'm saying AR-11," Kate told her in a high pitched note, "I can't believe you forgot that too!"
Quizzical expression locked on her face, Alita made her way in the direction of the smoke plume. She ignored the annoying voice that refused to leave her alone. People could be heard screaming. People in genuine pain. She remembered similar agonized screams from elsewhere. The memory did not emerge beyond the strong impression of deja vu. She hiked onward.
"Be careful, -11!" Kate sharply warned, "that thing's already hurt you..."
"Shut up!" Alita told her, "You don't exist!"
Where the deserted factory gave way and inhabited Scrapyard ensued, she did not quite know. Old wreckage, caused by time, transformed almost imperceptibly into steaming wreckage created by weapons. Desiccated husks from ages past became fresh, staring corpses spattered with blood. Deckmen and netmen, the reconstituted henchmen of the Factory and its Tipharean overlords, were strewn about like morbid garnishings, their weapons splintered. Buildings were knocked flat in a meandering, block-wide damage path, as if a tornado had ripped a hole across the Scrapyard. Some crater holes through solid concrete, perfectly circular, shined with glassy edges.
"Berzerker," Alita murmured, remembering something she didn't exactly comprehend. She suddenly recalled how it was that Ido died. It happened when Desty Nova set loose the Berzerker Zapan. She started to run, leaping over wreckage with gazelle-like bounds. The rumbles and booms came from ahead, behind a screen of half intact apartments. There were staccato shots, the crackle of gunfire and the pops of point explosives. A weird glow emanated off the black clouds from beneath.
"It's not!" Kate yowled, "we already went over this. It isn't a Berzerker."
"I thought I said shut up..." Alita grunted through clenched teeth. Steel coil muscles carried her across a flooded refuse channel. In a handful of flying leaps, she perched atop a smoking apartment looking down.
"You don't understand, it nailed you before...!"
Alita's eyes widened. She'd never seen anything like it.
Glowing liquid, almost a flaming lava, pooled in a building's burnt out hulk. Scrapyard defense forces, deckmen outfitted with slender cannons and missile pods, rained projectiles into the plasmatic mass. It shifted, the luminous thing, pooling inward in a roiling sphere before throwing off streamers of fire. The runnels slashed like blades through the defenders, scattering junk over the ruined buildings. It splashed back on itself and flowed, smashing its brilliant core straight through an intact structure as if it weren't even there. The building caught fire, then crumpled, bursting at the seams, before it was consumed entirely. Alita could feel the heat radiating upward.
"Look out! Look out!" Kate screamed shrilly in Alita's ears.
The dark haired girl with the number on her forehead startled. She might not have noticed it. The very air around her glistened, as if an invisible leviathan moved to enfold her. Grains of debris levitated at her feet. Her vision shimmered and her hands quivered. The world grew very very cold.
Her electrically driven muscle fibers tensed sluggishly, their contractions deadened. Instinct was all that moved her. The cold became hideous, unbearable even with her artificial body, but she was jumping aside.
She fell away from the top of the apartment, watching the steel reinforced concrete fracture as it contracted in the freeze. A second later, the glowing orb was there, as if spontaneously appearing from a hole in the fabric of space. Cold transformed into searing heat. Materials ballooned and the top of the building exploded with a crash of thunder. The orb ate the structure as Alita descended in slow motion.
"Use your impact foam!" Kate commanded in excitement.
"W-what..." Alita started to ask.
"The button on the right hip of your belt!"
For once, she did as she was told. Her numb hand found the button at her hip. She pushed it without thought or hesitation. White foam billowed out beneath her tattered cloak, forming a cocoon around her body. It withstood a single impact against the ground, buoying her inside, before it split apart in a cloud of fibrous dust. Alita bumped to the ground on her back.
"What in the hell?" Alita cried as she kipped to her feet. Catching her bearings toward a scrap of shelter under a tumbled wall, she ran as fast as her mechanical legs would carry her. Her lighting fast reflexes steered her through the hail of falling wreckage -mostly ruined architecture punctuated by the odd netman.
"Don't stop there!" Kate waved her on, "You're still as close as you were when it nailed you before, when... when your memory went south."
Alita ran on, not certain why she was listening to that disembodied voice. "Nothing's wrong with my memory," she protested half-heartedly.
"Doesn't this prove it to you?" Kate pried. "Doesn't this show I'm not a figment in your malfunctioning brain?"
Once she'd put a building between herself and the liquid flame entity, Alita stopped for a moment to rest. The synthetic muscles of her soft structure body were still recovering from that cold snap. "I'm schizo," Alita said to herself, trying in desperation to reconcile the growing disparities in logic.
"You are not!"
The ground heaved as the Thing slammed through another apartment complex. Broken glass sprinkled to the surface around Alita.
"Okay, if I'm not just talking to myself right now," she conceded, "tell me what the hell that monster is!"
"Now we're getting somewhere," chirped Kate, "We were the only Tuned team available to stop it."
"I don't care about that," Alita growled. "What is it?!"
"W-well we don't actually know..." Kate sighed.
"Then what the hell good are you?! You can't even prove anything you say."
"If we could just get to work," Kate pointedly exclaimed, "I could prove it to you!"
"Worthless," Alita grumbled. When the structure she was leaning against began to shiver in a not-so-wholesome manner, she sprinted off toward the next building.
"We don't know what it is," Kate quickly amended, "but we do know some of what it's trying to do."
"Then what _is_ it trying to do," Alita pressed coolly, again propped with her back against a wall.
"It's attacking the factory tube-ways leading from the Scrapyard to Tiphares. It's a Juggernaut, we can't seem to stop it!"
"Really," Alita responded sarcastically. "The tubes?"
"It's already severed one," Kate told her, "Our mission was to prevent that. But the solid wing didn't help against it and projectiles go right through it! My stupid mistake."
"Whatever a solid wing is," Alita interjected.
"Let me finish," Kate said, "Thank God Chief Biggott's still over trying to get permission to release heavier weapons. If he found out about this he'd be soo pissed..."
"Finish what? What are you talking about?!" Alita mumbled, not certain where her internal logic could possibly have dredged this up.
"If you and I work together, there might be a chance to save both the Scrapyard and Tiphares..."
Another building across the way went down in a ball of flames. A yelping dog booked past with its tail tucked. Alita's eyes fixed on a child's hand and leg protruding from some wreckage. She felt pangs of guilt and sadness. One more life never to be realized. Potential burned into vapor. A life that would not again know the love of someone who really cared. Someone else's Daisuke Ido?
"I'm going to regret this," Alita sighed, "What can we do to stop that... Juggernaut?"
"Thank God, I thought you'd never start talking sense!" Kate cried with glee. "I knew you didn't really want to get me in trouble, we work too well together!"
"I'm not doing it for your sake," Alita reminded her angrily, "I'm doing this because it's right!"
"Well, at least we're working."
"Don't get used to it," the dark hair girl with the number on her forehead grumbled angrily, "this is only for convenience. Now, what does a 'Tuned Agent' do to solve a problem?"
-to be continued-
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Part 2: Rising Juggernaut
Alita walked haughtily out of the broken down factory, laughing, ignoring the voice that continued to pry at her. So this is what it meant to be insane. There were no other explanations for a waking nightmare. Daisuke Ido had died and left her alone, hopelessly insane.
Her hand brushed against a square cartridge strapped to her leg. She didn't remember how she'd come by the armor she was wearing, but it fit her body perfectly. Neither did she recognize any of the paraphernalia she carried, even though she suspected much of it to be weaponry.
What in the world had happened?
"Don't you walk away from this AR-11!" Kate shouted at her through the mysterious communications link. "I'm warning you, if you step past that broken wall, I'll have to do something drastic!"
Alita laughed a bit harder and deliberately stepped over the fragments of wall lying in her path. She passed through a channel between two junk piles and made her way out into the Scrapyard day.
"Please, AR-11," Kate pleaded, "Don't do this to me. I know in your heart you don't want me to get in trouble..."
"HA," Alita said loudly and continued on.
It was nearly midday in Scrapiron city, the rambling shanty town of factories and dense, grimy habitation spread out around the mountain of discarded junk deposited from above. Overhead, Tiphares, the sky-city, hung from its massive cylindrical shaft and shined in a corona of noon sun, like some unattainable Eden held just out of reach. Hell-on-earth and paradise above were joined by a series of massive cables trailing downward into the expansive factories from the disc-shaped rim of the sky-city. Factory produced commodities went up the tube passages and rained back down again from the funnel-like bowels of Tiphares, expended, reconverted to junk.
Alita remembered the Scrapyard. She also remembered the loving care with which Dr. Ido had raised her from the endless refuse and breathed life back into her torpid sleep. She tried desperately to find some memory to fixate upon besides his loss.
This couldn't be real. She had to be dreaming.
The blue skies between the heavens and earth were never quite clear in the Scrapyard. Chugging factories emitted a continuous haze of carbonized soot. Coal dust clung to nearly every surface, chronically. Yet, today was wrong. A particularly dense column of black lifted above the jagged skyline. Where she stood, amid deserted buildings, she could see flames licking between smokestacks. Acrid odors, burnt plastics and metals, leached into everything like a settling blanket. Alita wondered why she hadn't noticed it before.
More tongues of fire shot skyward, flinging smoldering comets of shrapnel. Several breaths later, a resounding boom echoed off the nearby building fronts several times in refrain. The aftershocks continued pounded through the relative stillness.
An arm, part flesh and part not, thumped to the ground not far from where she stood.
"What the...?" Alita exclaimed.
"That's what I'm saying AR-11," Kate told her in a high pitched note, "I can't believe you forgot that too!"
Quizzical expression locked on her face, Alita made her way in the direction of the smoke plume. She ignored the annoying voice that refused to leave her alone. People could be heard screaming. People in genuine pain. She remembered similar agonized screams from elsewhere. The memory did not emerge beyond the strong impression of deja vu. She hiked onward.
"Be careful, -11!" Kate sharply warned, "that thing's already hurt you..."
"Shut up!" Alita told her, "You don't exist!"
Where the deserted factory gave way and inhabited Scrapyard ensued, she did not quite know. Old wreckage, caused by time, transformed almost imperceptibly into steaming wreckage created by weapons. Desiccated husks from ages past became fresh, staring corpses spattered with blood. Deckmen and netmen, the reconstituted henchmen of the Factory and its Tipharean overlords, were strewn about like morbid garnishings, their weapons splintered. Buildings were knocked flat in a meandering, block-wide damage path, as if a tornado had ripped a hole across the Scrapyard. Some crater holes through solid concrete, perfectly circular, shined with glassy edges.
"Berzerker," Alita murmured, remembering something she didn't exactly comprehend. She suddenly recalled how it was that Ido died. It happened when Desty Nova set loose the Berzerker Zapan. She started to run, leaping over wreckage with gazelle-like bounds. The rumbles and booms came from ahead, behind a screen of half intact apartments. There were staccato shots, the crackle of gunfire and the pops of point explosives. A weird glow emanated off the black clouds from beneath.
"It's not!" Kate yowled, "we already went over this. It isn't a Berzerker."
"I thought I said shut up..." Alita grunted through clenched teeth. Steel coil muscles carried her across a flooded refuse channel. In a handful of flying leaps, she perched atop a smoking apartment looking down.
"You don't understand, it nailed you before...!"
Alita's eyes widened. She'd never seen anything like it.
Glowing liquid, almost a flaming lava, pooled in a building's burnt out hulk. Scrapyard defense forces, deckmen outfitted with slender cannons and missile pods, rained projectiles into the plasmatic mass. It shifted, the luminous thing, pooling inward in a roiling sphere before throwing off streamers of fire. The runnels slashed like blades through the defenders, scattering junk over the ruined buildings. It splashed back on itself and flowed, smashing its brilliant core straight through an intact structure as if it weren't even there. The building caught fire, then crumpled, bursting at the seams, before it was consumed entirely. Alita could feel the heat radiating upward.
"Look out! Look out!" Kate screamed shrilly in Alita's ears.
The dark haired girl with the number on her forehead startled. She might not have noticed it. The very air around her glistened, as if an invisible leviathan moved to enfold her. Grains of debris levitated at her feet. Her vision shimmered and her hands quivered. The world grew very very cold.
Her electrically driven muscle fibers tensed sluggishly, their contractions deadened. Instinct was all that moved her. The cold became hideous, unbearable even with her artificial body, but she was jumping aside.
She fell away from the top of the apartment, watching the steel reinforced concrete fracture as it contracted in the freeze. A second later, the glowing orb was there, as if spontaneously appearing from a hole in the fabric of space. Cold transformed into searing heat. Materials ballooned and the top of the building exploded with a crash of thunder. The orb ate the structure as Alita descended in slow motion.
"Use your impact foam!" Kate commanded in excitement.
"W-what..." Alita started to ask.
"The button on the right hip of your belt!"
For once, she did as she was told. Her numb hand found the button at her hip. She pushed it without thought or hesitation. White foam billowed out beneath her tattered cloak, forming a cocoon around her body. It withstood a single impact against the ground, buoying her inside, before it split apart in a cloud of fibrous dust. Alita bumped to the ground on her back.
"What in the hell?" Alita cried as she kipped to her feet. Catching her bearings toward a scrap of shelter under a tumbled wall, she ran as fast as her mechanical legs would carry her. Her lighting fast reflexes steered her through the hail of falling wreckage -mostly ruined architecture punctuated by the odd netman.
"Don't stop there!" Kate waved her on, "You're still as close as you were when it nailed you before, when... when your memory went south."
Alita ran on, not certain why she was listening to that disembodied voice. "Nothing's wrong with my memory," she protested half-heartedly.
"Doesn't this prove it to you?" Kate pried. "Doesn't this show I'm not a figment in your malfunctioning brain?"
Once she'd put a building between herself and the liquid flame entity, Alita stopped for a moment to rest. The synthetic muscles of her soft structure body were still recovering from that cold snap. "I'm schizo," Alita said to herself, trying in desperation to reconcile the growing disparities in logic.
"You are not!"
The ground heaved as the Thing slammed through another apartment complex. Broken glass sprinkled to the surface around Alita.
"Okay, if I'm not just talking to myself right now," she conceded, "tell me what the hell that monster is!"
"Now we're getting somewhere," chirped Kate, "We were the only Tuned team available to stop it."
"I don't care about that," Alita growled. "What is it?!"
"W-well we don't actually know..." Kate sighed.
"Then what the hell good are you?! You can't even prove anything you say."
"If we could just get to work," Kate pointedly exclaimed, "I could prove it to you!"
"Worthless," Alita grumbled. When the structure she was leaning against began to shiver in a not-so-wholesome manner, she sprinted off toward the next building.
"We don't know what it is," Kate quickly amended, "but we do know some of what it's trying to do."
"Then what _is_ it trying to do," Alita pressed coolly, again propped with her back against a wall.
"It's attacking the factory tube-ways leading from the Scrapyard to Tiphares. It's a Juggernaut, we can't seem to stop it!"
"Really," Alita responded sarcastically. "The tubes?"
"It's already severed one," Kate told her, "Our mission was to prevent that. But the solid wing didn't help against it and projectiles go right through it! My stupid mistake."
"Whatever a solid wing is," Alita interjected.
"Let me finish," Kate said, "Thank God Chief Biggott's still over trying to get permission to release heavier weapons. If he found out about this he'd be soo pissed..."
"Finish what? What are you talking about?!" Alita mumbled, not certain where her internal logic could possibly have dredged this up.
"If you and I work together, there might be a chance to save both the Scrapyard and Tiphares..."
Another building across the way went down in a ball of flames. A yelping dog booked past with its tail tucked. Alita's eyes fixed on a child's hand and leg protruding from some wreckage. She felt pangs of guilt and sadness. One more life never to be realized. Potential burned into vapor. A life that would not again know the love of someone who really cared. Someone else's Daisuke Ido?
"I'm going to regret this," Alita sighed, "What can we do to stop that... Juggernaut?"
"Thank God, I thought you'd never start talking sense!" Kate cried with glee. "I knew you didn't really want to get me in trouble, we work too well together!"
"I'm not doing it for your sake," Alita reminded her angrily, "I'm doing this because it's right!"
"Well, at least we're working."
"Don't get used to it," the dark hair girl with the number on her forehead grumbled angrily, "this is only for convenience. Now, what does a 'Tuned Agent' do to solve a problem?"
-to be continued-