A Night On The Street: Knight Sabers

"We missed them again." Nene said, sighing. She had one ear to ADP radio chatter, and it was reporting the escape of their targets.

"Maybe we should just try to hire them or something, we might have better luck." Linna muttered.

Sylia would have shot her a betrayed look, but she was flying the Knightwing. She'd been trying to confront the new group in town for the past three weeks. Instead, she had three weeks of frustration.

Corporate Megatokyo was in an uproar. There was an ongoing sabotage campaign, but who was running it and why was up in the air. They were very professional, leaving little behind but broken boomers, burning buildings, and grainy images of large armored troopers or small battlemovers painted red. It took them an average of less than five minutes to hit and vanish. Sylia wanted them gone. Megatokyo was hard enough to keep calm with just the usual lunatics.

But wanting wasn't going to make it so, and unless the Knight Sabers could actually come to grips with the newcomers, it wasn't going to happen. Then Nene's head snapped up. "Boomer incident being reported in Tinsel City."

Why am I here? Linna Yamazaki was currently lying on her back, looking up at a Megatokyo night sky so choked by light pollution that no stars were visible. Not because she wanted to, but being thrown around like a ragdoll was an occupational hazard of wearing what amounted to an armored catsuit and fighting insane biomechanical robots.

She wasn't Priss, eternally seeking revenge for lost loves and a life that had dead-ended against a wall of record companies that wouldn't dare hire her for fear of Genom. She wasn't Sylia, on a grand crusade to right wrongs done to a father long-dead and to redeem his works. She approved of both, in a way. Vengeance for her friend Irene who was killed because she knew the wrong man, a crusade to save the world from those who viewed people as resources to be expended. But here and now those thoughts seemed distant abstractions.

The ringing in her ears, the pain in her back and her left arm, the blinking warning lights for her hardsuit, those were very real. So was the knowledge that being Saber Green had made her a very rich woman, and she could have simply taken her money and left this mad crusade of five or six people against a megacorp, disappeared into the night and nobody would ever find her.

Linna levered herself partway up with her left arm before it started to bind up. She would again be having words with Sylia about the need for the suit joints to be both robust and mobile. Priss could bulldoze through people in close combat, but that wasn't Linna's skills or style. A heavy industrial boomer stood about twenty feet away, the pilot for her short flight.

Linna didn't give the boomer high marks for skill, still put off by the landing. She raised her right arm and shot it through the head with her laser several times, which was a bit too much of a grandstanding gesture for her her normally, but definitely made her feel better now. She followed that up with enough shots to the torso to kill it, then scrambled to her feet and walked over to kick the boomer for good measure.

"Feeling a little vindictive there?" Priss asked over their radio.

Linna spat out a string of curses in response, which silenced the singer from the improbable role reversal. None of the other Sabers spoke to her again for the rest of the night, aware of the anger that hovered about her like a visible aura. Sylia even commented on the joint issue, without directly addressing Linna, before Linna could raise it.

It was as if they were afraid. Good. Let them be.

Sylia was dismissing them for the night, with the note that Mackie would be returning soon from his schooling, but she noted that Linna didn't stand to leave. Nor did Linna say anything, so she waited until the others were gone and then turned back. "Linna?"

"We're losing, aren't we?" Linna asked. "They're close to having rebuilt all the towers. Quincy apparently wasn't killed. And those things weren't even our work."

Sylia had always known this question would come. But she hadn't expected Linna to ask it.