Chapter LXXI: Thus, always to Tyrants.
1230hrs, 26 December 2013, Socotra, Yemen.
"Sic Semper Tyrannis!" Marcus Junius Brutus and John Wilkes Booth
"The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people and so long as men die, liberty will never perish." Charlie Chaplain, The Great Dictator.
The SAILOR took a quick breather, reloading their weapons and checking that they didn't have any additional holes in their bodies.
"Hey, I've been hit," Raye said, looking at a gash on her right arm. Apparently, she had been grazed by a bullet, but the adrenaline kept her from feeling any pain. Amy went over to her and examined the wound; it didn't look too bad. She got a small tube of the healing solution and applied it to the wound, and within a couple of seconds, it was healed up.
"Just like new," Raye said, rotating her arm back and forth, before realizing that Lita was glaring at her. Apparently, being reminded that not having one of those limbs was a major faux pas.
"Let's get going guys," Serena said to them, seeing that they were all ready to go.
"Luna, walk me toward Beryl's quarters," Serena said over her radio.
"It's 100 meters forward, a security station, then on the right another ten meters, with the room on the right."
"Sounds simple enough. Keep going right then."
"That's affirmative."
The SAILOR team sprinted the 100 meters in no time, which would have made any 2012 Olympians beam with pride if they had that sort of performance. They rounded a corner, and ran straight into more hostiles.
"Contact, enemy youma, to the front!" Raye pointed straight in front of them. Two youma were by the guard station, their machine guns all ready to go. They opened up the instant they saw the SAILOR team advancing down the corridor, while the guards behind them half-heartily got ready to engage them. Lita and Raye, the ever consummate pointmen, dove into the prone position and opened up with their weapons, M16A4 and M249s chattering away at the two UGVs. The hail of bullets quickly disabled the youma, but two more took their place.
"Raye, use the launcher!" Serena yelled out, sending a burst of fire down the hall.
Raye got out the grenade launcher and took aim down the hallway. Breathing in and out, she depressed the trigger twice, sending the 40mm grenades downrange. They exploded, taking out the youma and adding to the general carnage there.
Lita tossed a grenade of her own into the security post, which exploded inside. Several more guards were taken out that way.
"Fall back! Fall back!" Lita heard the guards cry out to each other. Even with all the money in the world, people had their limits. And after besting most of the PMC, these guys weren't going to stick around to be killed. They abandoned the post and went scurrying down a side hall, never to be seen again.
"Don't pursue them," Serena ordered. "Amy, where's Beryl's room?"
Amy put it up on their HUDs. "It's the one on the right here."
It wasn't hard to miss. A large wooden door marked with the logo of the Nakanishi Group (a simple N and G crossed over each other), stuck out amongst the bland steel doors that they had fought their way through all throughout the fortress.
Beryl heard the gunfire outside her door and realized that the end was near. Quickly, she used the webcamera on her computer sitting on her desk to make one last call. It took a second, but it went through.
"Who…you…" POTUS snarled at her.
"Yes me." A couple of more gunshots sounded off, closer this time.
President Hamilton leaned in closer to the camera. "You're finished, you bitch. Rot in hell."
Beryl just smiled at her. "Perhaps not. I suggest that you take a look at that email…"
"I am not going to listen to a coward like you. Have a nice death." The conversation was terminated by POTUS.
"How the fuck does she keep contacting me?!" The President shouted out to the roomful of collected advisors. Even at the end, that infernal woman kept taunting her.
"Maybe we haven't gotten all of that Nakanishi software…" SecDef suggested to her.
"Bah…" She threw up her hands and got back to watching the battle, or what was left of it, seeing that the Nakanishi PMC was collapsing. But those UGVs were still giving the Marines and special operations forces trouble, as the calls for more air strikes and fire missions went out over the radiowaves.
The SAILOR team opened the doors up to Beryl's room. Lita went in first, her shotgun at the ready. Behind her, Raye, Serena, Amy with her PDW, and Mina with her shotgun, the HK417 slung over her shoulder.
Beryl and Kunzite turned to face their former-pawns, the people they had manipulated for so long to do their bidding.
"Glad to see you could make it, SAILOR team," Beryl said, smiling at the five weapons trained on them.
"Or SAILOR Scouts," Kunzite grumpily pointed out.
"Okay, that's kind of a stupid name," Serena snarled. She didn't remember anyone calling her, or the team a name like that before. SAILOR in general, was a very stupid name to begin with, and whoever came up the acronym just wanted to have a nice word spelled out. Real smooth.
"Just a little something Nephrite kept naming you by," Beryl replied to her, continuing to smile. "It was one of the last things I ever heard from him."
"And you three…" Kunzite pointed at Serena, Lita and Raye, keeping his pistol at his side. It would be a futile gesture to try to raise it up and shoot at them. "I saw you on the news cameras. I saw you gun down my love. I saw you riddle him with bullets to make sure that he was dead." The quiet rage in his voice was almost akin to shouting at the top of his lungs. Everyone in the room could tell that he was upset over the death of Zoicite, and that made him all the more dangerous at this particular moment. Even without a weapon, he could have something, anything up his sleeve.
"I'm sure you have a lot of questions before you execute us," Beryl said quite smugly.
Serena made a motion with her M4 CQB Receiver to put the guns down. "First off, weapons on the ground," Serena ordered. Beryl and Kunzite both put down their pistols; Serena noted that Kunzite's weapon was a silver-plated PPK, much like the James Bond weapon.
"Second off…why?"
Beryl cocked her head at her. "Why…?"
"Yeah Beryl, why? Why us? Why all of this? Why kill so many innocent people?" Serena spat every word at her like it was a bullet, riddling Beryl with every subject, noun and adjective in the sentence.
Beryl kept her cool. "I did this for the benefit of Japan, Ms. Tsukino. If you and your friends there weren't so short sighted, then maybe you wouldn't have tossed away Japan's only chance to stay relevant on the modern scene."
"So that gives you the right to become a terrorist?" Amy jumped into the interrogation. "Blow up innocent schoolgirls in the streets and turn them into killing machines? Does that give you the right to kill people who get in your way of corporate profit? Does that make you a good person? A hero to Japan?" Amy winced at that last question. She should have said something else, but Beryl would just twist around that answer and…
"A good person? Hero to Japan? What do you think I've been doing all this time? Do you think I wanted all of this?"
Yeah, should have kept my mouth shut, Amy grumbled to herself. Now Beryl was going to go on for a little bit, justifying her actions. It didn't matter that if they killed her right then and there, she would still get the last word, gloat, and then die. She had nothing to lose.
"Do you think I wanted the Nakanishi Group destroyed? Like this?" Beryl gestured at her office, but was probably trying to reference the island as a whole.
"I don't see how…" Amy began, but Beryl cut her off.
"Ms. Mizuno," Beryl snapped at her. "At least give me the decency to finish my sentence."
Amy glared at her, while Mina's trigger finger tightened slightly. A little bit more pull, and Beryl would be…
"Don't," Serena said, looking over at where Mina was standing. "Not yet anyway."
"Yes, that's right," Beryl continued, smirking at all of them.
"What did you hope to gain through all of this?" Lita asked her, narrowing her eyes at the two people in front of her. She felt a slight pain in her (phantom) arm, reminding her of what had happened a scant six months ago. And it was all because of this woman.
Kunzite, who had been mostly silent since the SAILOR team burst into their office, spoke now.
"It may seem trite and overused, but we wished to secure Japan's future."
"Yeah yeah, we know. Japan is dying," Mina mocked. "We got that speech from the Prime Minister, your toady."
"Well, then you know all about the why of the matter," Kunzite replied, ignoring the mocking tone of Mina. "We just decided to do something about it."
"Which leads us back to the extreme decisions that led us to today," Mina then said. "When did you come up with the idea of the SAILOR program?"
"Some five or six years ago," Beryl replied. Her eyes flickered for a second, as if remembering a nostalgic memory, of good times, days gone past. "I had just tossed out some idiot for coming up for completely fucking up one of these secret projects that he just couldn't keep secret. There's a reason why only a few people know about these things."
"I'm sure of that," Amy said, icily. "And what about the medical staff? The microchips? The prosthetic limbs?"
"Well, yes, you were the test subjects," Beryl said, looking at the five of them. "If nothing else, you can at least take comfort in knowing that the data collected will help other people. Dr. Kobayashi had some theories at least, and he put them to work in you. It wasn't hard to find good, trained medical personnel, with the recession and all. We simply put out a want ad, and we were overflowing in qualified people within hours." She glanced at Kunzite. "Kunzite, how many applications did we get for the medical personnel? For thirty spots I believe."
He racked his brain for the information. "Four thousand applications for thirty spots."
"Yes, do you see how easy it was? Give people a purpose, and they'll follow you forever," Beryl replied.
"All of this, of course, was at price," she added, frowning. "We had to spend a lot of money on you five, along with salaries, junkets, weapons, security contracting…it really was a shame that we contracted out to another security company, it would have made our life a lot easier when we moved on the medical facility two weeks ago."
"And the healing solution?" Serena asked, fiddling with the safety catch on her weapon, in complete violation of weapons safety. She was starting to get extremely bored of Beryl and Kunzite justifying themselves at every question they asked.
"That was developed by the government, nominally. But since we had many contracts with them, it basically belonged to us. All they had to do was sign some paper giving the order to mass produce it."
"And hike up the price to an extravagant level," Amy said. Her mom could have certainly saved so many more lives as a doctor using that healing solution to operate on wounds that would have normally killed the person or left them scarred for life. "Looking to make a quick buck on people's misery?" Amy said to her, glaringly. "It wouldn't be the first time."
Beryl shook her head at that. "Please. The pharmaceutical companies would be suing us out of business so fast…well, certainly faster than you did, that's for sure."
"Oh, that's extremely funny," Lita snarled at her. "I'm sure that went into your planning process when you also decided to contact that…that…" She was temporarily at a loss for words, trying to come up with a name. "What was his name again?" she whispered to Mina.
"Chong…Zhung…something like that."
"Yeah, that Zhung guy. Going around, blowing up schoolgirls to become assassins for a megacorp. How much did you pay that guy anyway?"
Beryl shook her head. "I don't know. Wasn't very much, that's for sure."
"Who's idea was it to use underaged teenage girls for assassins?" Lita asked again. She was on a roll. Might as well keep pushing it as far as she could. It was getting pretty ridiculous at this point anyway, so might as well just keep asking the stupid questions.
"Lita, by this time, I think you would have figured it out, it was me," Beryl said, exasperated. "Really now, I just put the data together, and that was what it told me. And I quote…" Beryl had that entire report memorized; the one that had been sent to the PM to get the ball rolling on the SAILOR team. "Certain individuals will be selected from the general Japanese populace between the ages of 14-18 (and not from the JSDF) to carry out operations. The reasoning behind the age group selection is the flexibility of learning, the rate of learning, the continued growth of the body post-puberty, and the potential of said persons to become leaders in the society of future Japan. Unquote."
Amy remembered reading that in one of the many reports that had been given to them when the PM begged them for their help. What utter nonsense it was, and that still held true now. Underaged girls, nice. That certainly violated practically every law on the book in Japan and on the international scene. Of course, I didn't really know about that until they implanted me with microchips in my brain, Amy bitterly cursed to herself.
"Japan is known for employing underaged teens to pilot mecha or become assassins," Beryl said, without a trace of irony. "Neon Genesis Evangelion, for example. I preferred Rahxephon, but no matter."
"That's only in fiction," Raye pointed out. Really, was. How stupid was that to compare fictional works of art to their situation? That was beyond insulting, Raye thought.
Beryl shrugged off Raye's comment. "Says you." She continued to stare down them, examining them individually.
"I saw you in there, the medical facility at one time," she commented, deciding to pick at her nails. They were painted red. How appropriate for this situation. She didn't remember painting them this morning, but then again, it had been a long day after all.
All of the girls looked at Beryl strangely.
"What do you mean by that?" Mina asked her. They were certainly getting their questions answered, and then some. Not that it helped Serena and her impatientness to remove Beryl from this world.
"Exactly what it says," she tossed back the phrase to Mina. "Came by the observation room where that stupid nurse was snooping around in my operations. Showed her."
"Nurse Kuroi?"
"Yes, that's the one. Anyway, you looked quite like normal girls back then. Now look at you!"
Everyone's eyes flickered back and forth, even Kunzite, who gave a quick look over of the SAILOR team. They were a mess, their eyes with heavy black circles around them. Mina and Serena's hair had been mussed, and had been put up in a tight bun that didn't exactly suit them. Raye and Lita had blank stares on their faces, trying to block out everything that had happened to them in the past six months, and were trying desperately to keep it together. Amy had an impassive look on her face, stoically hiding whatever feelings she had gathered over the last couple of weeks. It was a brave effort on all their parts.
"You know, that's great and all," Serena said to her, "But the fact remains. You ruined our lives. You ruined Japan. Hell, you would have ruined the entire would if we hadn't stopped you today. And that's why we decided to come here and to take care of you. You're our problem."
"'Our problem?'" Beryl smiled. "Really now?"
"Yes, Beryl," Amy shot back. "Our problem. We're just cleaning house from the people who dirtied it. And when we get back to Japan, we're going to set everything straight. So there you have it."
Serena had about had it with the conversation. She looked at the rest of the team, who silently agreed with her. It was time to end all of this.
"Well, enough chit-chat. In the name of counter-terrorism, I'll punish you!"
Everyone in the room stopped and stared at Serena, incredulous that she would say something that stupid in the middle of something as serious as this.
"What…?" Amy asked, giving her a very confused look.
"Never again," Raye said, shaking her head.
"It was something I came up when I was looking in the mirror on the ship," Serena quickly said to them, embarrassed that she actually said it. "It sounded much better in my head…"
"I haven't heard of that one before," Beryl said, puzzled at that choice of words. The SAILOR team sure had their quirks.
Serena switched to a more succinct way of putting the situation to Beryl. "We're going to…uh…fuck your face!"
"Now that I have heard before," she said, smiling at her executioners. "But before you kill me, permit me to show you one last thing."
"And what would that be?" Serena snarled at her.
"You'll see." She pulled out a clicker, one of those things you advance powerpoint slides with. The entire SAILOR flinched as she pulled it.
"Beryl, drop it!" Lita screamed. She readied her weapon, just in case.
"It's just a powerpoint clicker," she reassured. It wasn't having the desired effect on them.
"Last warning, Beryl!" Amy yelled, although it still seemed like her version of "yelling" was talking very loudly.
Beryl gave one last smile, knowing where this route was taking them. "Relax, SAILOR team, it's just something that we recorded earlier today, that's all."
She pressed the "play" button.
"No!" Mina was the first to fire. Her shotgun slug flew out of the barrel and tunneled its way into Beryl's face. In an instant, the striking beauty of the perfectly sculpted and maintained face was disintegrated into a mass of exploded tissue and bone. There was no face anymore, or a head for that matter. The slug continued through the head, smashing the brain, pulpifying it into oblivion. The time that it had served its master had just now come to an end, all the hopes, dreams, and ambitions that Beryl held, now lost forever when Mina's slug tunneled its way through her face. Some might say that it was one of the worst tragedies, losing a great mind like that, but those were few and far between, extremist free-market advocates who completely missed the point when it came to Beryl's policies and decisions. In quick succession, Amy and Lita fired their weapons, riddling Beryl's tailored pinstripe slacks and matching suit, obliterating the material that the tailor at Harrod's had spent hours working on, making sure that the suit was perfectly suited to Beryl's stunning figure. The pink matter splayed all over the wall as she fell backward, headless, matched with the blossoming blood patterns that emanated from her body from the extra bullets being fired.
Kunzite was next, his body twitching from the multitude of rounds that Raye and Serena were pumping into him at the moment. Obviously, Raye was not using the grenade launcher at this close of a distance, so her Masterkey would have to do. She pumped round after round into Kunzite, but unlike Mina, she missed the head, instead blasting shotgun shells into him at close range. Serena flipped to full auto on her M4 CQB-Receiver, and depressed the trigger. The entire magazine was emptied in a matter of seconds. Both of them slumped against the wall, their blood staining it.
It took a minute for the SAILOR team to figure out something was playing on the wall behind the bodies.