Chapter 38 – Changes
For the first time since I arrived in Canalave, I saw the massive grille gates sliding shut, cutting off the angry mob before they could get into the compound. The gate sentries were not two feet away from the crowd, and yet, they somehow managed to appear as impassive as ever.
As I watched from the rooftop, where Canalave's resident generals and their assistants were assembled, I felt a heavy weight in my gut, like a sinking stone. Sure, I had been there when the terrorists attacked Canalave, but this was a full-scale riot.
Somehow, the situation had degenerated to the point that it was us against the people. People we had sworn to protect and serve.
"All right, people!" snapped General Williams. "Evacuation will commence in ten minutes for ranking personnel, but until then, we'll have to hold the fort here. Standing orders are to minimize casualties-"
"Belay that, general," came Mummymon's rasping voice, causing the ten of us to turn as one to face him. Sure enough, Arukenimon was beside him, and the two of them were in their humanoid forms. "Our orders are to stop the riot. No mention was made of keeping the body count down."
"Are you mad?" hissed General Reardon, even as her electivire cracked its knuckles and glared at the two digimon. "Things are bad enough-"
Arukenimon cut her off. "If minimizing casualties reduces efficiency-"
"Shut it, you old crone!"
Everyone just about froze at that. The cargo elevator had just arrived at the rooftop and none other than Moira Hew was casually strolling towards us. She was flanked by her battered old bronzong and scizor, and she did not look happy.
Arukenimon opened her mouth and was about to say something, but started swaying on the spot, instead. Mummymon put a hand on her shoulder, and she collapsed to the ground in a heap.
He recoiled, visibly alarmed. "What-"
In the blink of an eye, he was up in the air, his garbled curses barely audible to us. Suddenly, he went silent, and floated slowly to the ground, landing just shy of going over the building's edge.
"Aunty!" General Fen gasped. "You didn't!"
Moira, chin held high, folded her arms across her chest. "I could and I did, Tiny. Now, those folks down there are our people, and we'll be handling the riot control, not these… aliens.
"And now, I believe you remember that gravity trick I taught you?"
General Fen stared at her for a moment, before regaining his composure and nodding. "Got it. Is Gauss ready?"
"Always," answered Moira, as her bronzong floated up to General Fen's side.
"That settles it, then," said General Reardon, sounding relieved. "Moira, Fen, you two settle the crowd at the gates. Claire, you and I will handle the evacuation. Zachary… you know what to do, right?"
General Harding merely nodded, a pokeball already in his hand. "Come on then, rookie. We've got a crowd to bring under control."
"Aren't Moira and General Fen handling that?" I asked him, as we walked briskly to the cargo elevator. "Sir?"
"Gravity only goes so far," he replied dismissively. "We'll have to bring out the tear gas."
Oh, shit.
xxx
By the time we got to the gates, the mob was even more frenzied than it had been not five minutes ago. The grilles were being quite literally shaken out of shape, and the gate sentries weren't anywhere near as composed as they had been, either – they had their transparisteel shields out, along with their impact batons.
Even as we made it to the security station near the boundary wall, more rioters seemed to be arriving, if the noise level was any indicator. The gates were bending inwards, and seemed to be moments away from being broken open.
General Harding whistled into a walkie-talkie, and a klaxon sounded from somewhere behind us. Within seconds, General Reardon's voice was echoing out across the compound.
"CITIZENS, DISPERSE. THIS IS YOUR FIRST AND LAST WARNING. I REPEAT, DISPERSE."
If anything, the rioters became even more manic.
General Harding gestured to the chief sentry and I, and we activated port control's outer defenses. Wall-mounted tear gas batteries slid out of their hiding places, and screams of pain and outrage were heard as an electric current coursed through the badly damaged gate. Sparks flew as the gate short-circuited, and finally, its locks gave way.
Shouting rioters surged through the parted gates and all but tackled the gate sentries. There were several flashes of light, and beside me, General Harding let out a curse as several pokemon materialized, none of them ours.
"Fuck! Gas them!"
I flipped the necessary switches, and within seconds, clouds of tear gas were billowing out into the mob. Cries out outrage were replaced by coughing, gasping, and confused shouts as the gas worked its magic on the crowd.
Our own sentries struggling to get out of the gassing zone didn't escape my notice, either.
Suddenly, the crowd seemed to slow down. People dropped like sacks of potatoes and bird pokemon plummeted down to joint their trainers on the ground. Some tried to crawl towards port control, but seemed to run up against an invisible barrier of some sort.
"Sir, what…" I started to ask General Harding, only to find myself staring as the tear gas started forming what appeared to be a solid barrier between us and the mob. "Sir?"
"Fen and Moira must've gotten a barrier up," he replied, eyes still on the cameras monitoring the tear gas batteries. "And I think we've given them enough gas; cut it, but keep it on standby."
My hands had just reached the switches when part of the boundary wall collapsed with a muffled explosion of concrete dust.
"What the Hell?" the chief sentry swore, as what felt like an earthquake shook the ground beneath our feet. "Gravity pull my arse!"
It was then that the onix surged out of the dust cloud, trailing debris. We froze, hardly believing our eyes, as the rock snake reared up and brought its body down on another section of the wall. Mortar crumbled and steel cables were mangled as it rampaged.
General Harding recovered first. "Code Black!"
The words had barely made it through to my head before the onix's tail swept out in a wide arc, tearing through half of the sentry post. It caught one of the sentries, and sent the man's broken body flying out over the compound.
"What the fuck are you waiting for?" General Harding bellowed. "CODE BLACK!"
My trembling hands somehow managed to get to the emergency controls, and I flipped open the security panel. For a moment, time seemed to stop, as I realised what I was about to do.
"Do it!" a sentry shouted, as he opened fire on several pokemon that had made it through the demolished wall. "We haven't got all day, kid!"
I slammed my fist down on the black switch, and watched as panels on port control's front walls slid open to reveal some weaponry I'd only ever heard of during briefings. They looked like bizarre cameras, and rolled out of their housings with deceptively smooth movements. And yet, those same machines held enough power to disintegrate a tank or throw it fifty feet back, depending on how you programmed them.
Just as the onix coiled itself up and prepared to strike at the building itself, the multicannons opened fire.
Arcs of blue light fanned out over our heads and into the crowd as we scrambled out of the collapsing sentry booth. Rioters, pokemon, and military personnel alike were being thrown off their feet by the dozens, and for the first time since the protest started, parts of the crowd started pulling back. Even the onix appeared to feel the blasts which hit it, as it was slowly pushed back, its heavy coils gouging out a massive furrow in the ground as it tried to plant itself in place.
"Move it, guys!" General Harding ordered, as we made our way past the firing radius of the multicannons. "And someone get Fen on the line-"
Abruptly, the cannons stopped firing.
There was a great silence. General Harding took a look around, froze, and paled.
Not for the first time, I felt my gut twisting into knots. "What?"
"Sir?" one of our surviving sentries asked him. "Orders, sir!"
He remained rooted to the spot, even as the onix figured out that our defenses were down, and proceeded to dive headfirst into the building. Glass shattered and rained down all over the place, some of it barely missing us. The rioters resumed their relentless push towards the building.
Gritting my teeth, I grabbed him by the shoulder, and nodded to the sentry. "I'll get him to General Fen. You guys cover us, got it?"
"Understood!"
I all but hauled General Harding towards the building. "Snap out of it, sir! What the fuck's your problem?"
He shook me off, and glared at me, all traces of pallor abruptly disappearing from his expression.
"Knightmon, that's what!"
Two seconds. That was how long it took for my memory to match a digimon to the name. And from then on, I knew just how bad things were going to get.
With thundering footfalls, the clanking of metal joints, and the whine of motors, the knightmon sentinels emerged from their subterranean bunkers. There were only two of them, but the rioters seemed to hesitate upon seeing the two digimon monstrosities – and I couldn't blame them.
Armed with a sword as long as I was tall, and towering over us at twelve feet in height, the two digimon proceeded to literally grab the onix by the tail, and all but pulled it out of the hole it was making in port control. Foul-smelling ichor spurted out of the onix's ruptured hide as the mechanical creatures dug their armoured gauntlets into it, and ripped its tail off.
The onix went completely berserk, even as our reinforcements boiled out of the building like a swarm of angered ariados. Black-armoured commandos, MP's, and even dock workers spilled out and started fighting back against the crowd. Dozens were crushed as the knightmon carelessly threw the onix out of their way, and started taking a few test swings with their swords.
I felt bile rising in my throat as I saw more than a handful of people, pokemon, and digimon getting cleaved in two by the knightmons. "Oh, gods."
"We need to get to the roof," General Harding urged me, as the knightmon started carving their way into the front of the crowd. "Come on!"
Numbly, I followed him at a run into the main building, through the massive hole created by the onix. Behind us, I could hear screams and gunshots as the knightmon had their bloodthirsty way with the rioters.
"TRAITORS!"
We were just about to reach the emergency lift-pad at the side of the building when the man tackled General Harding to the ground. I barely had to time to wonder how he'd made it into the building before his kangaskhan backhanded me across my chest and sent me flying into a wall.
The wall collapsed in a mess of cheap plasterboard, and I ended up falling backwards onto what sounded like a lot of breaking glass. I bit back a scream as I felt something sharp digging into my side, and tried to reach for my sidearm, only to see the kangaskhan looming over me.
It bellowed and raised a clawed foot to stomp on me. At the last moment, what looked like a metallic cable shot through the air and looped around its neck, jerking it backwards and unbalancing it.
"General Harding!" Persiamon's voice called out, even as Castor the whimsicott sprang off her shoulder and sent a cluster of Leech Seeds at the downed kangskhan, which Ford was dutifully binding down with even more webbing. "Unhand him, you, you animal!"
The burly man who my boss was grappling with let out a curse when he caught sight of her. "Digimon scum!"
He dished out a vicious headbutt, and by the looks of it nearly took General Harding's head off his shoulders. General Harding crumpled to the ground in a heap, and the man wheeled about to face Persiamon, his expression lighting up with malice.
"Go back to Data, you sick bastards!"
Persiamon offered him a cold glare in return. "Fuck off, grasshopper."
In the blink of an eye, she had closed the two-meter gap between them, and snapped his neck with a spinning kick. Landing on her feet just as a meowth might have done after jumping off a windowsill she dusted off her shoulders, and offered me a hand.
Her eyes turned fearful when she saw me aiming my pistol at her. She hesitated, but just for a second, before lunging at me.
I pulled the trigger and shot the golbat that had been about to swoop down behind her, just as she landed on me and grabbed me by the neck. The bat pokemon's bloody remains fell to the ground not a meter away from where I lay, its wings still twitching feebly. She nodded in thanks, visibly relieved.
Only then did we notice just how quiet it had become.
"Wha-" I asked, my voice slurring as my throat recovered from her grabbing it and attempting to throttle me.
She cast a furtive glance past the hole we'd entered the building through, and recoiled slightly. "Just relax, alright? It's… nothing."
"Persiamon!" I grated, as I tried to prop myself up, wincing as whatever it was I had piercing my side shifted about. "What. Is. It."
Her answer shut me up in one sentence and two syllables.
"The end."
xxx
It took a while, but by the time everything was more or less back under control, ten hours later, the full extent of Howard Beale's little stunt with the morning news finally became evident. Riots had broken out all over the continent, and the admiralty had authorized the release of the two knightmon assigned to each military installation. They had cleaned up the riots neatly enough, but their methods left little doubt as to why even the digimon feared unleashing their mechanical fury.
Between the sixteen cities where riots had taken place, a total of twelve thousand had died. And that was just the humans, from what body parts the cleanup crews could piece together.
When General Harding had returned to consciousness and I had debriefed him – even as a medic stitched up my side and Silas watched with wide eyes – he had buried his face in his hands, and groaned.
"The training population has been spoiling for a fight, and the government just gave them a reason to start one," he spat. "What were they thinking?"
"Maybe they weren't thinking," I hissed in pain as I sat up, causing the medic working on me to give me a dirty look. "But jeez, twelve thousand?"
"Just an early estimate," nodded the medic, looking haggard. "Almost done… there. Keep still or the stitches will tear, got it?"
For a while, we sat there in silence, watching the medics tend to the wounded, and the cleanup crews bringing in what seemed to be more and more body bags. After some time, Silas spoke up.
"So what's going to happen now?"
He and I turned to look at General Harding, who frowned, and shrugged.
"Official protocol is that if the knightmon get released, martial law gets implemented. They weren't supposed to be released for anything less than a full-blown terrorist attack on a military base, really."
"This is all so fucked up," I muttered, as I picked up Silas and hugged him like a cushion. "So… when will the emergency meeting be?"
General Harding grimaced. "Five minutes ago, actually. Shall we?"
xxx
The emergency meeting was a long one, and as General Harding had said, the top brass decided to put martial law in effect.
All non-military personnel were confined to residential areas until further notice, pending the clearing of debris and cadavers off the streets.
No one was allowed outdoors between six p.m. to seven a.m. without official clearance.
All pokemon not actively involved in industrial trade and commerce were to be kept in their pokeballs until further notice. The jury was out on whether they would be confiscated.
The construction of specialized camps for the detention of individuals suspected to be involved in terrorism was to begin the next day.
Military officers were to be granted temporary clearance to detain individuals deemed as suspicious without a warrant.
As Datamon and the other Grand Admirals continued to outline their plans via a hologram link, the people gathered in the conference room slowly began murmuring among themselves. Eventually, the murmuring made it to our side of the room, and what we heard did little to make things better.
Simply put, it was one in the morning.
Usually, the digimon would have been back in their sleeping chambers by that time of day, thanks to whatever unique radiation it was they needed every fifteen hours. Given that Datamon and quite a few of the admiralty were all based on Earth as opposed to the digimon planet, them being out of those chambers defied everything we thought we'd known about them.
Something was seriously wrong.
xxx
That night, none of us pokemon trainers who worked at port control slept. Even though the emergency meeting ended by about four in the morning, we all gathered at the docks – pretty much the only part of port control which had been spared during the riot – and mourned. It wasn't those killed by the knightmon whom we mourned, though.
We mourned the loss of Babamon.
During the riot, she had been in the underground vaults, recalling all the pokemon kept there into their pokeballs and securing them into a blast-proof chamber. When the onix started rampaging, though, the resulting earthquakes had dislodged a bank of floodlights, which had fallen on her and pinned her down. Unable to move or call for help, she had bled to death down in the vaults, with a handful of pokemon she had yet to recall by her side.
When they found her, she had been clutching one of her customary packets of Marlboro cigarettes, and several of the noxious-smelling things were scattered around her other hand. It seemed that she hadn't even managed to get one last puff in before she had died.
So there we were at four in the morning, on the docks, gathered around a shipping crate that was Babamon's makeshift coffin. Several digimon were there, too, and Persiamon was one of them.
"Babamon must have really loved this world," she sniffed, as the crate was closed over Babamon's broken body. "She could have opted for reincarnation, but she didn't now, did she?"
We bowed our heads, acknowledging Babamon's last choice. It was true – all digimon only truly died if they chose to let their spirits depart the mortal plane, so to speak. And the crate before us made it clear which option she had gone for, in the end. She might have been born a digimon, but as far as we were concerned right then… she was one of us.
And so the sealed crate was lowered into the sea, where it bobbed about like a cork. We all did an about-face, and looked away, closing our eyes. The thermite charges packed into the case were then detonated remotely, disintegrating all that was left of the person who had given me Silas.
Later, at about seven, when I was given a few minutes to grab a break and a bite, General Harding asked me for a word in private.
"Alright, kid," he said, sounding as tired as I'd heard him sound since I'd started being his assistant, "it seems Babamon actually raised a few pokemon of her own. Of course, those pokemon are now orphans, and… well, one of them asked if you'd take it in."
"Say what?" I asked him, wearily. "A pokemon asking for me to adopt it? I take it he or she hasn't heard of the soup pot incident with Silas."
"I am a male, thank you very much. And Babamon called me Newton," said a calm voice from somewhere behind me. "She spoke most highly of you."
With a sigh, I turned around, and saw… nothing. "Where are you, then?"
"Look down!"
I looked down, and sure enough, there by my feet was… a wooper. While most wooper often had a big smile on their faces, this one looked more thoughtful than happy. "Oh."
General Harding patted me on my shoulder. "So, you'll take him?"
Shaking my head, I replied, "No. Silas is more than a handful, really. And what would I do with a second pokemon, anyway?"
"I could make sure you take care of yourself, you know," chirped the wooper. "Babamon said you were a twit who tends to forget to take of yourself whenever you get stressed out, and Silas can't even walk around with you!"
"What did she name you, again?" I raised an eyebrow at the precocious little thing.
"Newton," he replied, all but beaming at me.
"It's settled, then?" General Harding nodded. "Great!"
"Wait a minute-"
"Oh, shut up and take the newt. Think of it as a last favour to Babamon!"
And that was how, in the midst of what would turn out to be a pivotal point in things to come and Earth's history as a whole, I ended up with a wooper named Newton as my second pokemon.