Quietly, Ocher stepped into the maintenance station. The only sound to be heard was the dull hum of electronics, monitoring each other and themselves. Slowly, he moved forwards to the high-backed chair set into the three-quarters ring of control panels. Reaching out with one hand, he grabbed the side of the back, and spun it halfway around.
There was nobody in the chair.
"Aw, shiiiit...." Ocher groaned, then switched on his helmet comm. There was no time to be discreet about this now- this needed to be dealt with immediately, or sooner.
"Attention, all personnel of Maverick Hunter Headquarters! This is Captain Ocher, putting out an all-points bulletin. The staff member known as Boron is hereby requested to report to Unit 04 Command Quarters and remain there until further notice. Furthermore, if staff member Boron is seen, he is to be escorted to said Quarters immediately, regardless of other possible obligations or needs. Boron is a needed possible witness regarding tampering with the Simulator systems. Thank you for your attention."
Triggering a five-minute repeat cycle, Ocher immediately turned to one of the panels, and began typing. He had work to do.
SMASH REND TEAR MELT BEND FOLD BREAK SNAP CLANG CLANG CRUNCH
"CLEANUP!!!"
Having established something of a rhythm, the three crews of technicians immediately set to work, practically diving into the wall to clear the debris. Zero was nearing halfway through the wall, which was the sticky point. The route through the wall would have to make a small semi-circle to route around a power main, and there was no way to divert the current to anywhere else- no other power lines close by could handle that much electricity.
Cain, looking on from the other side of the hall, sighed as he leaned on his staff. "X... I know you should be alright, but please, Kimiko, don't put yourself at risk..."
It was, perhaps, a silly thought, he knew. Still, he would never like the fact that sometimes Maverick Hunters died, and there was little to nothing he could do about it. It wasn't that Kimiko was special... or maybe it was. A part of him was determined to figure out where she came from, and how, but if she was dead....
At this point, the vacuum tube about four meters down the hall rang out a small chime, and a datapad clunked into the exit bin. Blinking himself out of his reverie, Cain walked over to the chute, and pulled out the pad. Still leaning on his staff, he turned it on one-handed, and began to read.
"Attention, all personnel of Maverick Hunter Headquarters!" Declared the loudspeakers, in Ocher's voice. "This is Captain Ocher, putting out an all-points bulletin..."
X nodded grimly to himself as Kimiko kneeled on the floor before the rotary door, gathering herself. She had, indeed, been improving. Between the two of them, they had plowed through Blasé's hordes of guard robots like a stream of water through cotton candy. The green prereploid hadn't even taken any hits this time through.
Though, he mused, that might change when they went to deal with the opponent who awaited them on the other side of the door. Of course, there was really only one way to find out...
Heaving a heavy sigh, X strode through the rotary-lock door, ignoring the slightly puzzled look Kimiko gave his back as she followed. Time to focus- without access to the weaponry of Gravity Beetle, or even of any other Maverick General, this would be a very difficult fight.
As the door closed behind her, Kimiko regarded the room, indigo eyes scanning all corners. He had to be here somewhere, now which- aha.
With an angry buzzing sound, the menacing form of Blasé Horneck descended slowly partway from the farthest ceiling corner of the blank, cubical room. X's determined gaze was met by an angry glare from the Maverick, and there was a heavy silence for a moment.
Then, with no warning whatsoever, X leaped up and back, latching onto the wall with the climbing claws on his arm. It took Kimiko an instant to register the hornet Maverick charging at her, stinger-first. Almost an instant too long, as she dived forwards to the floor, rolling as she moved to see him pass over her, close enough for the wind from his slender wings to irritate her eyes. Irritation or not, she loosed her charged buster shot at him as he passed overhead, then fired her dash jets.
Jinking slightly, Blasé managed to avoid taking the full brunt of the shot, and missed Kimiko on the back-pass by virtue of her improvised dodge. Turning to focus on her, the airborne menace received a second full-charge shot, this one actually stronger than the previous one by virtue of X's modified Buster, proving that it really wouldn't pay to ignore either of his opponents. Spinning about, the irritated insect launched a spray of wasp bombs at X, who was forced to drop to the floor and dash towards Kimiko in order to avoid the clinging, stinging mechanical mines.
Kimiko took this opportunity to kipup, backflipping back into a standing position and then strafing left as she let loose a spray of fire at their enemy. Sliding through the middle of the formation, Blasé took a few shots and, in return, attempted to bury his stinger in Kimiko's chestplate again. However, she jumped up at the last moment, and was on the receiving end of a body-check instead.
Even as Kimiko went flying, the hornet Maverick whirled to face X, just in time to catch a spattering of light plasma bursts along the frontside. With a hiss of pain, Blasé darted straight up to the ceiling, out of immediate reach. As Kimiko caught herself on the wall and began scrambling up it with a frantic series of rappelling kicks and clutches with her gauntlet spikes, the Maverick dropped a much wider spread of wasp bombs at X.
"Crap." X deadpanned, dashing furiously to escape the radius covered by the kamikaze robots, and nearly succeeding. One clamped itself to his back, then detonated simultaneously with the others, the shockwave throwing the blue prototype forwards, smack into a wall.
Chuckling evilly, Blasé readied his stinger and, just in case, 'painted' X with his targeting laser. Just as he was about to swoop in to impale the prototype, something large and heavy landed on his back. For an instant, the whine of a buster was audible over the Maverick's humming wings. The last thing Blasé heard was the p-kow sound of a plasma discharge, and then his head was melted.
Gripping the Maverick's body with her legs, Kimiko used her weight as leverage to perform a midair backflip, tossing the much lighter mass of metal away from her, and landing in a kneeling position. She paused then, to catch her breath, and inspect her left Buster cuff- the sharp wings of the Maverick had left an impressive line along it, where one had impacted. As she stood up, she heard a low whistle, and turned to where X was inspecting the reploid carcass.
"Well, that put a short end to that.... I'd have expected that would take much longer." He fingered the molten edge of the former Maverick's neck, examining the damage. "I think it's safe to say you're improving a lot. I'm impressed."
Kimiko had just enough time to blush before the scenery seemed to melt, colors and details shifting- and suddenly, the cubical room they had been in converted to a completely different one, the Maverick corpse gone entirely.
Instead, directly between the two armored fighters, stood a low, long figure, armed with two huge, heavy pincers, and a wide-bladed tail.
"How did you two get into my submarine?!? X???? Oh, this will be sweet. TIME TO DIE!!!"
And Crush Crawfish launched himself backwards towards the prototype, sharp tail-edge leading the way.
Turtlava muttered to himself as he tramped down the wide hallway as quickly as he could. "Rassa frassam..."
Another emergency WOULD happen just as his shift began. The orange-colored turtle-reploid felt his streak of bad luck was just getting worse. Bad enough he had drawn guard duty on the most boring part of the perimiter a few weeks ago, worse yet that that area would be the subject of an attack. To top that off, the intruder had easily gotten in past him, leaving him injured, with a fair-sized hole in his neck. As if that weren't enough, he had STILL had to complete the week's shifts for that location, and then, to top it off, he was now stuck with scrambling all about that area trying to make sure nothing happened AND look for a rogue.
He pulled a hard left, sliding into the wall and using that to alter his cource.
Still, he had to admit that that Kimiko character was actually a pretty nice young woman, when she wasn't wearing weird berserkoid robot armor. Her method of entry alone had been plenty to install her as a sort of celebrity about the base. That could have been bad if she'd turned out to be another crabby one, like Zero, or another recluse like X often was. But, she was friendly, if a bit shy, and managed to get along with the humans on base even better than most of the other reploids, which was really saying something.
Turtlava was pulled from his reverie by a 'crunch-hiss' from under his foot, then went sliding as the can of soda he'd stepped on squirted out from under his foot, leaving him to slide on his shell down the hallway, aided by a slick of cola.
'Typical.' He thought to himself. 'I wonder what'll happen now?'
As if in answer to that question, he hit a slightly down-sloped section of hallway, picking up a great deal of speed from his bulk, the soda, and the polished condition he always kept his shell in. Just as it was occuring to him that he was about to head out the service entrance and right into his patrol area, he struck something, and spun out, suddenly burdened with a passenger.
"WAAAGH!" Exclaimed the reploid he had caromed into, as they span and ricocheted down the hallway in a blur of green and orange. Moments later, there was a heavy CRASH, followed by a few shattering glass and crumpling plastic sounds, amidst the screech of twisting metal. Abruptly sitting up amidst a mess of garbage, with his slide-companion pinned into the corner by his weight, Turtlava sighed.
"Garbage, yeah, that's about right."
He stood, groaning slightly, and turned to regard the now-unconscious Reploid he'd unwittingly tossed into an old garbage can, and blinked twice. Suddenly, he felt like today was a very, very good day for him. He held up one of his arms, and spoke into the freshly installed comm there.
"This is Turtlava. I seem to have collected something... interesting. Requesting a lance of guards in corridor W-31, by the service bay."
This time it was Kimiko's turn to examine the remains of a Maverick, as X leaned on a wall, eyes moderately bloodshot from stress. Of course, the scene was slightly different.
As she gazed down at what would be better called a 'scrapheap' than a destroyed reploid, Kimiko reflected that, in large enough quantity, even the basic plasma 'pellets' normally fired by a buster could do a very good job of slagging things and people. She couldn't say for sure, but she got the impression that between the light spray of shot she'd laid out and the frenzied hail of plasma X had flung out while dashing backwards away from the Maverick, Crush hadn't even gotten the opportunity to come in contact with her mentor.
"I think," X began, trying to calm himself, "That staying on full alert from hereon out might be prudent."
Still somewhat wide-eyed, Kimiko nodded, fascinated by the spot where she could look in one side of the mangled heap and see the floor on the other side.
Stamp remained in place, blocking the hall, watching the hole that Zero had disappeared into. Several times, he could almost swear he smelt metal catching fire with the elite Hunter's rapid slashes, but there was no way to say.
For the seventh time, the last tech clambered out of the gaping hole in the wall, and the okay was given.
Immediately, a riot of buzzing, humming, and metallic impacts was heard. This time, there were several extra sounds, almost like... something hard, but flexible, hitting metal? The tone would suggest that Zero was now using his fist as well as his saber to break himself a path through the wall.
Tuning out the (barely) contained mayhem, Stamp craned his head over to look at one of the scrapheaps. Circuit boards, pipes, thick cables, thinner wires, at least one piece of conduit large enough for a smaller reploid to walk through standing upright, bundles of wire, many, many chunks of granite 'filler'...
It was amazing, he mused, just how much stuff was actually IN a wall, when one got down to it. Heck, half of what he saw, he couldn't even say what it was used for. Though THAT looked a little like a hard drive.
"'Scuse me." Turk grunted, stepping in the way of Stamp's line of sight. He began sifting through the pile of wreckage, sorting it into three piles- Filler, stuff, and other stuff. It was quite beyond stamp what the distinction between the latter two piles was, but then, he wasn't into the technical side of things.
Doctor James Cain, meanwhile, was still leaning on the wall, worrying. Boron had been around the base for quite a while. If he had been a Maverick plant, then there was plenty of potential for others. He had thought and hoped that the extensive Maverick Hunter screening process would prevent that. It also raised several questions.
If a reploid on base had been Maverick, why hadn't he infected, or tried to infect anyone else, or even the base's computer network? It didn't make a lot of sense for the Mavericks to go to the trouble of infiltrating a reploid that deeply in, only to leave a booby trap that would take out, at most, one unit of reploids.
Something wasn't adding up here.
Just as Cain arrived at that thought, there was a chime from the missive tube near him, and a datapad clunked down into the bin. Distractedly, he reached over and picked it up with his left hand, the other toying with his everpresent walking stick. Perhaps he ought to have one of the espionage/intelligence units look into this?
So distracted was he, that it took him several moments to register the words on the pad, but when he did, the reaction was instantaneous.
"Turk!" He exclaimed, causing the bulky reploid tech to whirl around. "You're in charge for the moment. There's something I have to go do."
With amazing speed for a man his age who was using a cane to be able to walk without an excessive limp, Cain hobbled down the hallway, squeaking past Stamp, and then rounding the corner, muttering excitedly to himself.
The only response Turk gave to the giant reploid's questioning gaze was a mystified shrug.
Hmmm... Another cliffhanger, I think. Will X and Kimiko ever finish the simulation? Will Zero make it in before they can/do? What, exactly, has James Cain so excited? Who did Turtlava run into? Why hasn't Arnie reappeared? Will Kimiko and X manage to keep from suffering fatal blood pressure rises? What's the secret ingredient in Pepsi? Why did only part one of Shining Force III come out in America? Are there any parts in Skies of Arcadia Legends that aren't in the original Dreamcast game? Will Lionhead Studios ever come out with a sequel to Black and White? Why do people join AOL when the Instant Messenger is free and lets you do more stuff? Why are there only three triggers on a Gamecube controller? What secrets are hidden in the Megaman Anniversary Collection for Gamecube? Will I ever stop asking questions? What happened to Shiny Entertainment after Earthworm Jim 2? What ever happened to the armadillo from the Saturn game Knuckles Chaotix? Why do I think you know? What aren't you telling me? Who stole the cookies from the cookie jar?
Answers to some of these questions, and to other questions that haven't been asked, in the next episode of Light's Shade!
Oh, and a large wad of taffy will be in there too.