Whattaya know, I finally got around to writing this chapter.
Begin Chapter!
"What?" Zero refused to believe his ears. He had to have heard that sentence wrong.
"We were… waiting for you…" Dande gasped. "In shuttle… Reploid attacked… me… Ciel must have… ducked out of sight…"
"Take it easy." The crimson warrior interrupted the story. Once Dande was reclined on the ground, the Hunter whipped his head around to glance over his shoulder. "Merge."
"Merge here!" The Cyber Elf popped into view.
"Find Ciel. Where is she?"
The blue sprite closed his eyes and concentrated for a long moment. Abruptly his eyelids snapped open as Merge finished his analysis, hastily the Elf pointed in the general direction that the stolen shuttle had taken. "Ms. Ciel going that way! Ms. Ciel ten miles out, moving fast!"
"Keep tracking her- and Alia too, if you can." Zero added the last half of that sentence as an afterthought. The crimson warrior stood up, turning the situation over in his mind. There wasn't much he could do here on this barren wasteland of an island… there wasn't anyway to catch up to the shuttle since Merge's coordinates wouldn't be accurate enough to feed into the Trans Serv- the last time they had tried that, Zero had accidentally wound up in the Panda Exhibit of the Neo Arcadian Zoo.
Besides that, he had to think about the injured Dande. The Reploid wouldn't be able to survive if he was dragged around on a wild-goose chase.
In short, the only real option was to pull back to the HQ and reassess the situation.
The Hunter's teeth grit in frustration, he didn't like not being able to take action- and that was exactly where he was at the moment.
"Operator." Zero activated his communications link. "Bring us back."
"Roger that."
Zero, Merge, and Dande vanished in a blast of light.
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Alia pulled herself back around the corner, and turned to Ciel.
"I don't think that he knows we're here." The blond Reploid whispered. "Have you received any word from Zero or the resistance?"
"Nothing." Ciel shook her head. "Something's interfering with my communicator, we're on our own."
"What about Merge?" Passy popped back into existence and fluttered in the air between her companions. "Wouldn't he be able to track us?"
"I don't know," The blond scientist shook her head. "Whatever is interfering with my communications could be affecting his tracking ability, or it might not. There's no way to tell."
"But either way," Alia commented. "until the cavalry arrives, we're on our own."
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"Welcome back."
Zero blinked as the world cam back into focus. As he had expected, Cerveau was already there and in motion to help the wounded Dande.
The researcher also had two other Resistance members with him, gently but efficiently they rolled Dande onto a stretcher and began carrying him down to Cerveau's lab/repair shop.
Blood.
The crimson warrior blinked, confused. There was… something… flicking about on the edge of his mind, like an elusive memory that one couldn't grab hold of… What was it?
Blood… Blood everywhere… Even in her hair…
Slowly the dream, if that was what it was, began to solidify in the Hunter's mind.
A female Reploid… lying on the floor. Blood was everywhere… He leaned over her, as she slowly opened one eye… The female lifted up her hand weakly, her lips parting as she tired to speak-
"ZERO!"
The Hunter snapped to attention, slightly annoyed at himself for becoming oblivious to everything around him. Zero turned to find none other than the not-so-focused Perroquiet hovering behind him.
"And they say that I'm the day dreamer." The scientist chuckled.
Zero just turned his gaze on Perroquiet and waited for her to continue.
"Er, anyway, Cerveau told me to help you while he's trying to get Dande patched back together… What's the situation?"
At that prompting, Zero recounted his misadventures.
Perroquiet's eyes almost popped out of her head in disbelief.
"You're telling me that Alia and Ciel are trapped on board of a shuttle with a- a Maverick?"
"Yes." Zero replied, his voice emotionless.
"We've got to find them!" The scientist was rapidly losing control over herself. "There's no telling what could happen to them! Wait, what about Merge? Can't he find them? Why haven't you used Merge? ZERO!"
The warrior contained the sigh that threatened to emerge from his throat. From the looks of things, he was going to have to calm Perroquiet down. And counseling emotional humans and Reploids had never been his strong point; his idea of talking someone down was telling them to shut up and deal with the situation, but past experience had proven that that tactic rarely, if ever, worked.
Nevertheless, he did have his methods.
"Perroquiet!" The Hunter snapped, his voice rock hard. His outburst had the desired effect, and caused the distraught Reploid to turn and look at him in surprise. "Zip it. I need you to trace Ciel so that I can go and bring her back."
"Right, right! I should have thought of that! Seriously, I really need to develop some more self-control…" Perroquiet launched into another rambling exposition as she bent over the Trans Server's control panel.
Zero just hovered in the background, waiting on her to finish her job and track down Ciel's location.
The Hunter waited, for several long moments… which lengthened into minutes, and then almost an hour.
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"We're landing." Alia realized as she felt a familiar bump run down the length of the shuttle. "This is strange, we haven't really been in the air that long…"
"I wonder why." Ciel wondered aloud, puzzled by the events of the past few hours. "Does Ariel have other transportation ready to carry him on from this point, or is this where he was going all along?"
"We can't be that far from the South Continent." The blond Reploid commented. "Maybe that's where he's going."
"I just wish that we had some way of finding out what he was up to." Ciel sat back against the shuttle's wall and closed her eyes wearily. "Then we'd know what to do…"
As soon as she heard that, Passy blinked as a thought struck her. It was crazy, but so crazy that it just might work. She could go ahead and check things out! Due to her small size, and ability to drift through various obstacles, she would be able to go anywhere she wanted to and the odds were that she wouldn't be seen.
"I can go find out!" The small sprite exclaimed, slightly more loudly than either Ciel or Alia would have preferred.
"Shhh…" The blond Reploid quickly shushed the Cyber Elf in annoyance.
"It would work." The Elf quietly pressed on. "I'll slip up there and find out what Ariel's up to, then I'll come back and tell you."
"Passy, are you-"
"Come on, Ciel, I know I can do this." Passy said. "It would be just like those hide and seek games we played as kids…"
Alia and Ciel traded a long look and then the woman gave in.
"Go ahead, Passy, but be careful."
After nodding gravely, the sprite fluttered up over the two's heads and vanished through the front wall.
Passy drifted forward, being careful to stay concealed behind something solid at all times. As a Cyber Elf, she was capable of traveling through or in most solid substances. A few solids she couldn't bypass, but none of those were found in this shuttle.
A few moments passed before the Elf spotted her target, the Maverick Ariel. The wiry Reploid was stepping out from the cockpit and heading for the side exit.
Passy stayed out of sight, watching from her nook in the wall as the Reploid popped the side door open.
Wondering what would happen next, Passy drifted out of her hiding place and slowly worked her way over to the door. There she paused for a moment to gather her nerve; then she poked her head out of the doorway to see what was happening.
Passy froze as her mind tried to comprehend what she was seeing.
Out there were Reploids… LOTS of Reploids. Passy had never seen so many of the mechanical creatures, not even at the Resistance HQ. She watched, enthralled as events began unfolding before her.
"Not bad, Ariel…" A tall, lean purple and gray Reploid stepped up and greeted the Maverick. "Not bad at all. This shuttle could very well be useful to us later."
"Glad you think so, General Vortex." Ariel smirked. "I told you that I'd succeed."
"The threat has been neutralized?"
"That's what I said. There was some resistance and a few unexpected twists" The orange Reploid replied, glossing over his failures. "But Clio and Burgan are dead, and I know for a fact that they didn't share their knowledge."
"Excellent." Vortex nodded. "The master will be pleased to hear this. Have the clean-up crew go over that shuttle and then meet me in the main Conference Room, we have details to discuss."
Passy pulled herself back into the shuttle and beat a hasty retreat, she had to warn Ciel and Alia!
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Zero ran his mind back as he waited, trying to bring that fragment of a memory back to his conscious mind… So far he wasn't having that much luck. All he could remember was that face framed with brown hair- hair that had been matted with Reploidic blood.
The entire thing was unnerving at the absolute least.
"I don't get it!"
The Hunter looked up to see Perroquiet throwing up her hands in frustration.
"I've tried everything I can think of, and I can narrow it down to a large area," The scientist bemoaned her fruitless efforts. "But I can't find Ciel. Something has to be blocking our transmitter or scrambling it… I wonder if it's possible to find a frequency that bypasses the jamming, if I can narrow out the wavelength and then-"
Zero tuned out the long speech he knew was coming. There wasn't any point in listening to all of this.
Thankfully, Zero was saved when the doors parted and Cerveau stepped into the room.
"Cerveau!" Perroquiet instantly noticed her mentor and way out of her current predicament. "Just in time! I can't find Ciel! They're scrambling the transmission on the wavelength level and I can't break through or bypass it. It's like they're scattering the readings so that we pick up multiple targets."
"Let me take a look." The researcher walked over to the console and shooed Perroquiet aside. Cerveau then bent over the instruments, taking measurements and gauging their accuracy.
For a long moment, the only sound in the area was the sharp tapping of Cerveau's typing.
Finally, the Reploid shook his head and stepped backward.
"Seinar Class scramblers."
Zero waited, knowing that more of Cerveau's explanation would have to be coming.
"It's virtually impossible to bypass/pierce a Seinar Cloaking Unit." The researcher didn't disappoint. "And trying to pin down the source of the cloaking is a fairly futile exercise."
The Hunter couldn't help himself, he raised an eyebrow in surprise. If Cerveau was saying that something couldn't be done, then it had to be impossible.
"Although…" Cerveau muttered, his mind picking up the problem and beginning to unravel it for possible solutions. "It might be possible to pierce through the barrier if… No, we don't have the satellite capabilities for that to work…"
"What are you thinking?" Perroquiet wanted to know.
"It's possible that Merge could get through that scrambler." The scientist explained. "Very possible; however, to do so, he would have to interface with a communications system that can reach all over the globe. We just don't have those kinds of resources available to us."
"You're saying that if Merge can merge with an extensive satellite system he'll be able to find Ciel." Zero clarified his understanding.
Cerveau nodded the affirmative.
"Then fire up the Trans Server." The crimson warrior stepped forward and began walking towards the aforementioned device.
"Zero, what- where are you going?"
"To enter politics." The Hunter grinned for a split second.
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"Those fools!" Fefnir slammed his fist into the tabletop. "We just got attacked and they want to decrease our standing army! Now's the time to attack, not retreat!"
"True, that is not the result that we had hoped for." Harpuia removed his helmet and sat wearily on a nearby chair. "However, it was expected given their past actions."
"This does leave us with a problem." Leviathan entered the room, "How are we going to protect humans who don't want to be protected anymore?"
Harpuia sighed and then raked his fingers through what little hair that he had. Their meeting with the Senatorial Committee had not gone well, to put it mildly. The humans had convinced themselves that the Guardians were incapable of fulfilling their duty, and so they had refused to listen to any of them and instead trusted that outcast, Dr. Weil.
"It doesn't matter what we have to work with." The Thunder Guardian replied. "What we must do is protect the city and humans of Neo Arcadia, regardless of the other circumstances."
"Which would be a lot easier if that blasted Weil would get over himself..." Over the past few months, Fefnir's already low opinion of the scientist had dropped to an even deeper level. "And stop trying to undermine us. Harpuia, I tell you, it's only a matter of time before he turns on us and does us in."
"I don't doubt it." The green Reploid wearily replied. There were so many forces in motion, so many new dangers appearing and political shifting that were in motion, how was one supposed to keep up with it all?
"We don't have to worry about Weil at the moment." Leviathan turned the subject back to the task at hand. "We really have to take care of that Ride Armor attack we suffered a few days ago. We don't have any idea who carried it out or why- We need some answers."
"Answers that I can provide."
Startled by the new voice that had interrupted the conversation, the three Guardians leapt to their feet and drew their weapons.
"Relax. It's me." Zero stepped into the room, his hands empty. The Hunter made no move to approach the Guardians, instead he settled himself in against the doorway and waited on the other Reploids to acknowledge him.
"Zero?" Harpuia couldn't believe his eyes. "How did you get in here? … Don't answer that, I don't want to know."
"I've got a proposition for you." The crimson warrior cut straight to the chase. "One that benefits both of us."
End Chapter