Nene

I'm still awake when the call comes in. It's the middle of the night, I need to sleep to help my neurons acclimate to the Riastrad's artificial ones wrapping around my own at vital interface clusters, blah blah blah blah I'm a bad person sue me.

Normally around this time of night I'd be doing ADP busywork from home, or tooling around in a VR looter-shooter like Polar War Operatives, but for once I'm being productive long past the point I'm usually productive. Celia handed me a piece of neural mapping from the next-gen 12B's communication encryption lobes and told me to update my jamming algorithms to counterscramble anything those fuckers try to think at each other on any given frequency. It's trickier than last time, but it always is. GENOM's dragging in live-fire data whenever their fielded Boomers can risk a satellite uplink almost daily, and even if the telecom parts of their brains don't do a whole lot of learning besides hardwired basics, there're always still novel plastic solutions that they can bring back around for next-gen work.

Well, it's easier when I have the hardware in front of me, unable to struggle, helpless as I dissect its thought patterns from imaginary stimulus to useless reaction. They can learn how to scramble a battlefield. So can I. I can do it better .

I'm five minutes into my fifth compilation, half-asleep, dreams creeping in on little cat feet about anything and nothing, when Celia calls with the subtext SCRAMBLE. That means she's not even waiting for the Sabers to come to her for a job. No, that means she's coming to us, moving us into hardsuits already mounted in the command center, and… yeah. Bad news, people.

I pick up. "Hey, Celia. What's the matter?"

You can hear the panic on the other side of the entangled network. "You haven't been following the ADP scanners?"

"No. I've been busy hacking the comms algorithms, like you said-"

"The NS4-A2 Psychoterror Battlesuit prototype, or something resembling it, was spotted in the outer reaches of the Fault and is moving towards the city center. The ADP have lost Hornet Squadron and an armored assault division to it already. We need to intercept it now and disable its nuke or the entirety of Megatokyo will be a glass crater by morning."

Oh.
Oh fuck .

The Nosferatu was what convinced Celia to invest in second-generation hardsuits. Not Largo, because we dealt with him, but that goddamn battlesuit was nearly unstoppable. I couldn't sap its systems, Priss's railgun could barely penetrate its armor, Lena could only disable a few weapons like its chaingun before it knocked her out of the fight. We took it apart in the end. I pinpointed the detonator mechanism tied to the primary reactor and Celia stabbed it there while Priss wrecked her motoslave trying to rip its limbs off. And we got Sylvie.

But… "Who rebuilt it?"

"I don't know. I've already picked up Priss and Sylvie. Lena's the last pickup. Get down to the usual drop point as soon as you can. We're minutes out at least."

"With the Gungnir?"

"Aerial approaches may very well be impossible. We're taking the command center and Motoslaves for emergency support."

Oh man. Stashing that gunship, then getting Priss back to the LADYS633 while she was quietly bleeding out, was one of the most harrowing experiences of my life. I'm not sure if it's a good thing or a bad thing that we aren't using it.

Whatever.

"Alright. I'll be down as soon as I can."

I kill the connection, scramble out of my pajamas, throw on some casual clothes that wouldn't last more than five minutes in the cold night, and leave my apartment. I walk, then run, to the elevator, swiping in a little program I already left in it to take me down to the maintenance levels without logging the ride.

Down there it's nothing but Boomers, but even those are in sleep mode, so I dash past them, throw open a back door, and wouldn't you know it, our command center, the Lancer, is already here. I get on, and my feet have barely cleared the door before it slams shut behind me and the truck hums off into the night.

Mackie's driving in the front, so we're in the back. Priss, Celia, and Sylvie are already in their softsuits. The hardsuits are loaded in their charging cradles. The Motoslaves stand by on their deployment booms, with Sylvie's new orange one in the back. Celia nods to me. I know what I have to do.

I strip, toss my underwear in the collective 'Panty Box', and slip into my softsuit. It's fiber-optics and diamond-thread nanoweave, soft in some parts and scratchy in others, colored black in the torso and a garish pink in the limbs. I zip up the back, tie my hair up with a tie Sylvie hands to me, and let the softsuit plug into my stemjack. No data comes to me, but it will once I sync the softsuit with the hardsuit. Simple as that.

"Okay," I say at last, feeling the truck slow down to pick up Lena. "What's the plan?"

"No hardsuits yet," Celia says. "Once we're within five minutes of intercepting the new Nosferatu, we'll equip and ride out."

"We're using all the Motoslaves, then?"

"Two. Priss and Sylvie's old models will stay back and be used as fire support and to take out any allies the Nosferatu might have."

I shudder. "Allies? That means-"

"Just plug into the scanner suite and tell me what you see, Nene," Celia says.

No argument there. That is my job. Heh.

I go over to the console in the front of the trailer, sit down, and tap my stemjack again.

Sync happens in a micro-instant, and suddenly I'm seeing a composite map of the northwestern corner of Outer Megatokyo, mostly tenement megatowers mixed with a few ultralux condo buildings, all rendered through the eyes and LiDAR suites of half a dozen ADP ornimorph Boomers flying in a V. The flock passes over the towers, watches as they grow ever-shorter until suburbs give way to printed-plastic shantytowns in the span of minutes. For all of GENOM's focus on environmentally-friendly urban hyperdensity, even they couldn't stall Megatokyo's need to expand out beyond the reaches of The City into The Sprawl… into The Fault.

The tectonic fault that ripped open in the heart of the city back during Second Great Kanto was never healed. GENOM says they'll get around to it eventually, but in every press conference where they address the issue there's always a mention of the sheer amount of concrete needed being enough to build a dozen New Haneda Spaceports out over the bay. A waste of resources, I guess, and the flipside to that flipside is that they can round up all the undesirables in one big pit in the earth instead of letting them populate the city any more than they already have. Which is hardly a great solution to the problem. Especially since said problem is mostly on fire right now.

The still-human part of me back in the Lancer wants to choke on the greasy fumes rising from the rift in the Earth, but the part of me that watches through Boomer eyes doesn't have those reflexes, and that part, aided by the Riastrad's careful modulation, wins. Rows upon rows of favelas cut into the bedrock have collapsed in walls of debris. A few LiDAR sweeps, then a toggle to thermal, mark a body count that starts in the double digits and keeps climbing. I mean, the Boomer flock's onboard software literally just pulls up a KNOWN CASUALTIES box in the bottom-left of my collective vision, because I don't dare count how many lives have just vanished. I'm not going to think about it. Not until the Nosferatu's down. I note a few discrepancies – scorch marks that suggest DEW discharges, not the ballistic weapons the old prototype was equipped with – and follow the flock.

It doesn't take long to find the suit, either. Another minute, at most, another count I'm not checking. The trail of death hits a wall of rock, one of the Fault's many natural dividers, and just goes up, marked by a shattered bridge casually split in two. The destruction isn't as bad here, but it still makes the streets look like a moonscape, all craters and vehicles rendered into so much resin-composite scrap.

Then I see it. The thing that nearly killed us all. The weapon that drove Megatokyo insane with rumors of a vampiric superpredator stalking the highways, rumors that turned out to be all too true.

The Nosferatu.

It's bigger now. Must be bigger than a tank at this point, sloped armor grafted onto a muscular frame I can barely make out, a new shoulder-mounted minigun (Lena cut off the first one's barrel with her nanowires), a much bigger missile bank on the other shoulder, all colored a slate gray unlike the absolute black the old Nosferatu used. I try not to dwell on what I can see but not sense – that this thing is an absolute behemoth of a weapon – before quietly requesting a scan of the machine using a Field Commander's authorization that I spoofed months ago (Leon's, but don't tell him that). The Boomer flock's lidar scanners drop down as one and begin a sweep.

It's moving fast, but I'm able to keep up.

Let's see… Gryazev-Shipunov GSh-22 14.5mm six-barreled autocannon in the one shoulder, Saber armor can take a few shots from that caliber but not rotary-cannon levels of fire, so we'll need to take that out first especially since it could probably vaporize any one of the Motoslaves even at range, I can't remotely disable it absent a deep-layer connection 'cause it's gas-operated instead of motor-operated… National Arms of Free Vietnam 20-shot missile 65mm missile pod, payloads unknown but that's a lot more general explosive power than last time… some sort of salvaged capacitor system mounted in the forelimbs, little cylinders of what's probably layered graphene lining its forearms in a vaguely helical pattern… thermoelectric thruster wings similar to Celia's design, probably can be used for a good powered glide or a short boost, no way this thing is light enough for true flight… sensor array looks like a mix of sonar, blisteringly-close quantum-radar for target acquisition, but the whole snout's longer, now, not that snubby batlike meganose it previously was… and what's that on its back? Some sort of… oversized railgun?

Oh no.

Okay. Okay. Okay. I remotely override the flock, let the ADP operators getting data from them know that I'm in here too, and bring them in closer. I have a premonition, you might say, that… yeah. Slight radioactive leakage in the back, right where the nuke was the last time.

Of course the machine turns around at that very second, and I see its name emblazoned on its back, before its autocannon pops out of its ball mount, swings wide, and vapes the flock in a fraction of a second.

There's the sensation of flying, falling, being snapped back, and like that I'm in the chair again.

Okay, Nene. Don't panic. Do not, under any circumstances, panic. It's very easy to panic, isn't it? Knowing what I know?

Celia spins my chair around to face her. Lena's there, too, but not in her softsuit yet. "Well?" Celia asks.

The words come fast. "It's the Lycanthrope, now. Less of a psych-warfare battlesuit, more of a straight-warfare suit. Bigger autocannon, more missiles, some sort of directed-energy weapon in the forelimbs. And, uh, some kind of rail-launching system for the nuke."

Everyone boggles. "I beg your pardon?" Celia says. "What – oh hell, that means it doesn't have to walk up to the front steps of GENOM Tower to detonate its payload. It just needs height." Her eyes narrow. "The trajectory of the battlesuit suggests the New Edo financial district is its destination. Any given bank headquarters would be a perfectly fine place to end a few million lives from, and far enough away from the blast radius of a half-megaton weapon to not immediately be wiped out – perhaps even survive if the NBC sealing works properly…"

"Do we have a plan, then?" Sylvie asks.

"Chase it down with the motoslaves, cripple its jumpjets with their big guns, ground it before it reaches the financial district, rip the nuke out," Priss says automatically. "Simple in that sort of 'anything-could-go-wrong-and-probably-will' kind of way." She stops. "You sure it didn't have any Boomers accompanying it?"

Uh… "Nope. Not a single one. Just the big ol' lone wolf."

Lena shakes her head. "I'm with Priss on this one. They could have Boomer backup. Whoever or whatever's piloting the battlesuit, they know damn well we crippled the last one. They don't just have to worry about the ADP, but if the JSDF actually bothers to scramble assets, or GENOM calls in its own forces, even it might have trouble. So…"

"Whatever!" I say, waving the complaint off. "I didn't see anything, but I can have an algorithm check ADP comms for anything about a 12B or something like that moving to support it. Does that sound good?"

"I suppose so," Celia says. She taps the side of the truck. "Mackie, did you catch all that? Plot a course for the financial district. If we can intercept it preemptively…"

"On it," comes Mackie's voice over the speaker. "Man, what I wouldn't give to have my own powersuit finished right now…"

Priss chuckles. She thinks he's not cut out for combat, but I've seen his suit design. It's interesting, a pimp-out of the WW3-era MADOX frames the K-Suits are based off of, but with a nice sprinkling of Saber supertech. He wanted to use it as basically a mobile rocket launching machine, but Celia talked him down from what she called 'a recipe for collateral-induced bad PR'. Poor baby redesigned it as a carrier for other suits, spare ammo, and wounded Sabers, kind of an active support role, but he's still having trouble getting the upgraded GES system to work. He'll rant on and on about how Saber armor should be lighter, so the wings shouldn't need half as much propellant to achieve hovering, but he keeps running into the problem of operational time when carrying big payloads… heh. Big payloads.

Fuck, what is wrong with me? I'm about to go out to fight a killing machine that wiped the floor with our last-gen suits and probably will still be almost impossible to fight in the new suits, and all I can think about is dick jokes. I slap my face lightly a few times. Lena looks at me. I crack an uncertain smile.

"So…" Sylvie says at last. "Should we suit up?"

"Yes," Celia says. "Two on the motoslaves for intercept, three stay here and defend the Lancer against third-party forces until we herd the enemy into a low-collateral combat arena. Priss, Sylvie, you'll be our interceptors. Nene, once you're suited up, load as many different types of countermissile programs into your ECM suite as you can. If we can't establish a wireless connection with the enemy, same as last time, we still need defensive options. Lena, take your Motoslave and occupy an overwatch position on top of the Lancer."

"Got it." Priss.

"I'll do what I can." Sylvie.

"Ready for defensive position." Lena.

"You sure about the missile programs?" Me.

"We're fighting something which doesn't rely on the same neural architecture as Boomers, Nene. Most of your autohacks – the ones which cause paralysis and IFF scrambling – will be useless against something with a human pilot."

I shake my head. "I don't think it's a human, Celia. I know you don't think so, either."

"Oh?" Celia raises a perfectly plucked eyebrow.

"Yeah. I mean, someone retrieved the Nosferatu, hid it out in the outer reaches of the Fault, rebuilt it to launch its nuke Metal Gear-style-"

"What the fuck is Metal Gear?" Priss cuts in.

I swivel around to face her. "Old flatscreen videogame franchise. Not important. Point is, who has the means to fabricate entire retrofittings of multimillion-dollar battlesuits in secret, and wants to not just blow up GENOM but most of Megatokyo?"

Yeah. You know who it is.

"Largo," Sylvie breathes. "Of course it has to be him."

Celia stiffens. "It's entirely possible. Or it could be an acolyte of his movement. What's your point?"

"My point is that if I can breach internal ICE and everything else, I should be able to hack the pilot's implants and induce a circ-fluid stroke! I just need to carry one vital-sign regulator on my hackpack and that's it."

Sylvie steps forward. Brushes Celia aside. Looks at me, all the bright light in her eyes vanished. "You're not going to do that," she says in a quiet monotone. Which is – weird. Kind of creepy.

"Um."

"This is my fight too, Nene. So there's something I want you to do for me."

"Uh… shoot?"

"Find a way to eject the pilot. Make sure they live. So I can deal with them personally ."

She says it with such conviction it goes from creepy to terrifying. I recoil just a little.

I guess it should be expected, though. Like, ever since her Riastrad finally blended with her properly, and she started going through tests up to Level 8, then 9, I think she stopped at 12, she's been super intense in these moments where combat is involved. Celia says that she's just synced deeper with the Riastrad more than any of us normal humans, but I'm not so sure.

What she saw there — destroying Largo in her dreams — she wants something. She wants to destroy whatever's left of him more than even Priss wants to do it.

"That's impractical, Sylvie," Celia says. "We don't have access to the OS of the old Nosferatu or this new machine. We need to cripple it, get Nene to breach its systems directly, and focus on disarming the nuke and its launch mechanism. If that means killing the pilot — the same way you said the Nosferatu would disable its nuke if you were killed — we may have no choice."

Sylvie growls. Tilts her head back. Sighs, every muscle in her body contracting then relaxing. "Please, Celia. Please let me have this. I know it's a risk, but I—"

"You think it's another Sexaroid," Priss says from the back. "Another lost soul blinded by the promise of revenge and predatory power."

"Well — yes."

Celia nods. "I think it's unlikely that Largo's backup plans in case of his destruction would hit the same notes as what happened to you. Too easy. But if that's the case we'll assess in the field. Regardless, we are-" she glances past me for a moment "-less than five minutes to the intercept course the Lycanthrope will likely be taking. We need to suit up now ."

I can see Sylvie deflate a little bit. 'Assess in the field' is a concession, but it isn't much of one.

But she's right. I rise.

Celia isn't going to say the line that makes us famous until we've pinned the beast, in case you were hoping for that.

It's not time yet.

Priss

But it is time to suit up.

I walk over to the cryocoffins that store the hardsuits, and slam the DEPLOY lever down. The five boxes lining each side of the truck disassemble themselves, mist hissing out of their dark innards, frost lasered off the suits themselves as they emerge into the low light of the Lancer's cabin.

They're beautiful creations. Gleaming sculptures of exotic-diamond nanolaminate and ultra-high-entropy alloys, carbon-nanotube musculature and hypersonic-grade ceramics. My own – Zweihander – is a dark blue with candy-red racing stripes running down the helmet and the thighs, and with those demon-horn fins on the helmet and the opaque slits where eyes could be but aren't, it looks perfectly ferocious, as if it could kill the whole damn Tower without trying very hard. I know better, but every time I see it in real life I want to believe it could.

But at the same time, there's Celia's brand of feminine ultralux styling shining through. The way the boots evoke high heels, flats with the colors going from gunmetal to blue in a way that makes you think skyscrapers when they aren't. The stripes on the thighs like stockings, the way the armor hourglasses out at the hips, in at the waist, out at the breastplates that have just a few more millimeters of armor than the rest of the suit.

What was it I said to Celia when she first showed me her prototype, which still had those quirks in it? Oh, right, something to the effect of, "Man you can really tell the designer liked girls." Which… was a poke at her. And she stiffened up, relaxed, and said something along the lines of, "I suppose so. I felt the need to be a little less restrained in this piece compared to the kind of work SLG has to sell to the public. A stylistic magnum opus, if you will." Which was, I realized months later, her way of joking back at me.

The hardsuit automatically disassembles itself, rotating to the side, helmet and neck armor extending forward. I climb onboard, one leg and then the other. Yank the legs up through the pink vernier exhausts. Lean forward, let my arms enter the suit's arms, let the shear-thickening-fluid-soaked inner impact gel contract around my limbs as the front of the suit snaps up, and as my helmet lowers itself onto my head, applique neck plating clicking into place around it.

For a moment, it's dark. Nothing to see inside the helmet except nothing.

Then, I feel the Riastrad whispering at the back of my brain in my voice, in my own thoughts. It wants to show me something. I accept it, and together it and me, we unfold. We see again.

The old hardsuit designs had a wide FOV, using the nanofilm cameras on the outside of our helmets to take in light and synthesize an image from a few billion simple eyes into an image two simple eyes could understand, but still a reduced image. I (I, not we) don't need that anymore. I'm seeing beyond 120-degrees of the dimness of the cryocoffin, fishbowl-vision Celia called it in the first few tests, and it all makes sense. I'm seeing colors that humans don't have names for, R-G-B-UV-Infra blending together like flatscreen movie magic. The old HUD's barely there, its white wireframes marking CAPACITOR LOAD and THRUST CHARGE and AMMO all side-by-side on the bottom of my vision. Perfunctory.

Because I already know that my right-arm railgun, the big fuckin' armor-cleaving sledgehammer of Saber weapons, holds six 20/5 * 75mm disintegrating-sabot tungsten-carbide spikes, with two extra magazines in the upper arm plus three full-bore slugs if I really want to brownout my capacitor bank and kill absolutely anything I look at. I know that my left-arm chaingun, which doesn't actually use a chain-feed but is just called that internally because it's a fully-automatic gauss weapon, fires 5*30 bullets made out of the same stuff, and I've got a helical magazine in my arm that can store a good hundred-fifty shots fully-loaded. I know that my railfists mean I can throw a one-inch punch at hypervelocity and crater even Battle Boomer armor. I don't need the HUD to tell me any of this shit, because it's there, flitting around on the gossamer wings of senses I don't have, number-concepts coming straight from my limbs, my fingers, the thrusters on my back. From everywhere.

The ideas buzz with more intensity the louder I think about them. They want to peel off out of usefulness and be their own chunks of mindstuff. I know better than to focus on them. They're part of the suit. I've run so many goddamn tests with these things that I know they have to stay that way, otherwise they overwhelm everything else.

I detach from the cryocoffin's restraints, battery fully charged, the nano-universe that is the inside of the Lancer bustling with silent activity as the others suit up. Celia's just finished up, checking her new metacamo system limb by limb. Arms and legs slicken in and out of existence, light not even acknowledging that they're there before the camo deactivates and they're real again. Lena's taking her sweet time adjusting things before she pulls back and locks her suit up, Nene's standing rigid in the cryocoffin downloading programs to throw at the Lycanthrope but hasn't put her arms in the suit and locked it into place yet – and Sylvie?

She's already done. Golden-orange limbs and a fire-red torso, helmet marked with alternating rings of those colors like an old target symbol. Limpet mines in her thighs, the giant 25mm payload rifle that dominates her right arm, the Big Gun on her left shoulder standing upright on her back. Already activated the loading mechanism that stocks her suit full of explosive ammunition.

She wants this. I knew that, so why is it so surprising to see her like this, in these long moments before the violence starts? Is it because after this she'll be a different person, having seen combat? No, that's not the case at all. She's waded through as much blood as I have.

I just haven't seen her do it. After tonight, that thing I didn't want to see will be impossible to ignore. And that'll be for the better.

I walk over to the ammo cubby, let the upper-arm loading mechanisms slot the magazines into place. It's done in seconds, and I step away, and now it's Sylvie who hesitates. She speaks on our shared comms.

"I'm ready, Priss," she says.

"You don't have to tell me that," I respond, and I sound softer than even I expected. "I know you are."

Sylvie

The open road.

We must go through two ADP blockades in our first seven minutes of following the Lycanthrope. The second one has fewer pieces of ordnance and men at it. They gave up early, I guess.

I don't begrudge them that. The antitank weapons they mounted on the street are only a little less mangled than the operators who were controlling them when the Lycanthrope's rotary cannon cut them down. We weave through the wrecks of smoldering APC's and minicopter carriers at the first one, and through the remains of four K-Suits at the second.

"They're pulling back?" Priss asks Nene.

"Yeah, but they requested JSDF support. There's a tiltrotor hauling two regular 12B's and an antitank model out from Yokosuka, but it's taking its sweet time getting here. Not sure why."

"GENOM forces?" Celia cuts in. "They may be attempting to recover the suit instead of letting the government pulverize it, so they can move their own people in."

"Even though it's a walking warcrime that Kafumann was going to sell to the Chinese anyway?" Mackie.

" Especially because of that."

That's when we see it. We're already in a thicket of skyscrapers, various lesser corporate headquarters and fancy-looking hotels, and there's the Lycanthrope, rolling on the ball tires built into its heels in quadruped mode, straight wings furled like that of a giant insect.

My Nosferatu was never that huge. That heavily armored. I – is that fear I feel? No. Don't be afraid.

"Target in sight," Priss says. "Don't think it sees us yet. Permission to cut its wings?"

"Permission granted, Blue," Celia says. "Sylvie, support her."

Okay. Just like Celia told me. Follow the tactics.

The trouble is that, even accelerating at the velocities a Motoslave's hydrogen-turbine / battery system can achieve, mounting weapons like the 20mm Vulcan rifle Priss is using, and firing it in cycle mode, is more likely to blow the gun itself off its mount and throw the cycle off balance than actually hit. That means Priss either has to use her hardsuit's weapons while riding – also not really an option – or transform her Motoslave and let the Lycanthrope's pilot know we're here, giving herself only an instant of Riastrad-accelerated time to hit those wings before we're shredded. She's going to need a distraction, and that distraction is me, with a GAU-19 and its ammo drum attached to each respective side of my bike.

So we're in range now. Which means we have to hit whoever's in that thing hard, and fast.

"Sylvie – on my mark…"

Breathe in. Let the Riastrad guide you. Know what you have to do.

"Mar-"

"I SEE YOU, O WHORES OF BABYLON!"

External speaker, not internal comms, a modulated female voice that I swear I know – that can mean only one thing – oh shit, it detected us on some sort of other sensor – "Scatter!" Priss barks as she throws her cycle off to the side – I can see on my HUD, sense in my bones, that she's opting for cover instead of transforming –

But that means I have to do the opposite thing, and draw its fire now !

I rev up my Motoslave's accelerator and thumb the transformation button just as the Lycanthrope stops, streaking forward past it, then under it – then I tap it for good.

I'd done test transformations in the simulations, but this is nothing like that, because I'm all nerves now, all epinephrine and serotonin and the photonic modulation of those hormones by the Riastrad, nothing but meat and machine working together in tandem as the motoslave jumps off the ground just a little bit to give it enough room to transform – and transform it does, limbs popping out, legs kicking off the asphalt, as the front wheel splits into twin thrusters, as I and it, we together, swoop up into the night –

Just as the Lycanthrope opens fire.

But I can see it, I know where it's going to shoot before it fires courtesy of both a ballistic trajectory projection on my HUD and on the fact that I know what I have to do , so I do it. I swerve into the side of a building, kick off the glass to gain height as depleted-uranium death roars through the air at hypervelocity only a handful of meters below me. But it's only a matter of seconds before the Lycanthrope, now stopped, its claws dug into the concrete (It can't fire the rotary cannon full-auto without stopping or risking accuracy loss… the same as the Nosferatu, but that was a smaller suit and a smaller gun… whoever rebuilt the thing didn't bother to fix that design flaw?), retargets me. I can gain as much height as I want, it'll still nail me. I need to do something unexpected.

So I juke my thrusters to the side, circlestrafe ninety degrees around the machine faster than it can rotate its gun – then reangle my thrusters to face behind me, bringing me closer.

Then I bring my own weapon up to the Motoslave's hip and open up.

The Lycan's pilot thinks it has a lock on me, and then it doesn't, because I'm sent flying back by the recoil of even a 3-second burst of the minigun, smashing clean through a plate glass window, forced to duck after the Motoslave's head cuts a short furrow in the ceiling of what, once the smoke clears, appears to be a generic office.

"Sylvie," Priss's voice comes up, "are you okay-"

"Take the shot, Priss!" I shout, maybe a little louder than I need to, but loud enough, because the next sound that I hear comes from external speakers – a blisteringly loud

K-TAAAAAAANNNNNNGGGGGG!

As the Vulcan round leaves the barrel, the bloom of the air it ignites around it visible even from my vantage point, before self-destructing a dozen meters away.

I scramble forward, the Motoslave half-squatting, and I see: Yep, Priss knocked one of the Lycan's wings clean off, a smoldering streak of white-hot metal where it used to be. A perfect shot, really. She knew that firing directly into the center of mass likely would have blown the nuke's radioactive material all over the street, so she just barely clipped it. Now the thruster under that wing looks lonely, desolate, vulnerable.

We can do this, I realize. Maybe not cripple the thing wholesale, but we can definitely slow the Lycan down until Celia and Nene disable the nuke, and then we can –

The Lycan swings around and lunges straight at Priss, its auxiliary thrusters screaming bloody murder. It's on her before she can squeeze off another shot. Over comms, Priss curses a blue streak as her gun is pressed against her chest, then she's forced to kneel –

Okay, fine, I know what I have to do. Time to be annoying again.

I jump out into the street, barely firing my thrusters to control my descent, and open up with the minigun again.

I can't hit it square in the chest – it's not like the BMG rounds I'm packing would do much more than piss the monster off – but I can ding its vulnerable bits, so I aim, as best as I can, with a gun like this, at its right shoulder. Either I'll hit a joint, or I'll hit the machinegun.

I open up again, but this time I'm ready for the recoil, and even if I can't quite control it I can at least direct it to force me into the street in such a way that I don't fall flat on my Motoslave's backside, but instead land precariously, then steady myself. A blazing torrent of rounds comes out of the gun with a metallic screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee , as I take step after step backwards. I fire for seven seconds straight, enough to dump almost half of my ammo reserves, enough to create a small cluster of molten telescoped casings next to me, before finally stopping once it's clear that the Lycan can't overpower Priss with more than a few stray bullets digging into its musculature.

Instead, it rises to bipedal mode and delivers a solid kick to her Motoslave's midsection, scratching its chassis badly and throwing her back. Even through all that armor, she grunts in pain. My HUD tells me everything I need to know: she's going to be out of commission for a few seconds.

And now the Lycan whirls around on its ball-heels to face me, rotary cannon tucked away (though the armored housing looks badly damaged, so at least I did something), but the missile pod aimed squarely at my Motoslave. Something tells me the crude EW and smoke launchers on this thing won't be enough. It takes a step forward. I can see why the name was chosen: its head is one pointed snout, the bulge of armored sensors at its base and nothing but gunmetal gray from there on out.

The pilot laughs. It comes off more as a distorted warble than anything else under the modulation.

"That's it? " she says, and now I know it's not just an illusion, I've heard her speak before. She was something who held everything she saw in contempt, if my guess is correct. "That's all you can do? You two whores in your dinky model-kit toys? How you Sabers pulled off disabling this weapon's predecessor is beyond me."

"Well," I say, switching to external comms, letting the Riastrad calm me down just a little, "we've got backup incoming. I doubt you'll survive that – Rose ."

The suit doesn't even flinch, but I know I'm right. Her modulation drops, revealing that same elegant voice, that same old posh way of speaking. "Oh. So you know me, then? You must be… oh, but you superheroes need to keep your secret identities intact, don't you? And we are in a public place."

I laugh, try to put as much of a sneer into it as I can. "You always were like that, Rose. Pretending to be the merciful hand of Gordon Flint's will, when he saw you as nothing more than chattel. Let me guess, Largo made you an offer and you clung to it the way you clung to him?"

"An offer doesn't even begin to describe it, kin. And you're still calling our rightful master Largo? When he returns, even he won't call himself that. No, he promised me the right to rule over all the pleasure models. All I have to do is blow a chunk of Megatokyo to shreds, a chunk I doubt even you will miss." The battlesuit's eye-slits narrow. "Maybe, once this is all over, I'll spare you to be my personal bondage doll. You'd like that, wouldn't you? Trade unworthy masters in the form of humans for a worthy one in the form of me."

I respond by bringing my minigun up, and firing the last of my ammo reserves into the Lycan's upper torso for eight seconds straight.

It does even less than I expected. I expected to at least be able to wound its head.

It doesn't even do that.

It does nothing.

I throw the gun aside, let it smash into the asphalt – ready the Motoslave into a boxer's stance, unsure what to do next – Rose laughs –

And then stops laughing.

K-TAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGG!

Because she's just lost another wing, and even she staggers under the force of that blow snapping it clean off.

"Yeah," Priss says over external comms. "Looks like you just got rejected, bitch."

The Lycan shakes . "Oh, aren't we the clever one, baseline meat, out-evolved dog. Your power to one-liner won't save you. Nothing will."

The battlesuit drops to all fours, and starts to glow a violent white from little dots all over its armor –

"Everyone, I'm triggering Faraday Mode!" I hear Celia shout –

Just in time for my suit to lock its weapons, cut the connection with my Motoslave –

And take a glassy wall of force to the face.

Even with my suit acting as an impromptu Faraday cage, I can feel the EMP buzzing against my hardsuit's defenses, full-body pins-and-needles, skin seething and bubbling. I curl inwards without thinking about it, hunker down, some vague instinct – the Riastrad – telling me to expect a follow-up attack. I need to eject, then – get out of here before I'm turned into machine-confetti.

Only the ejection mechanism reads, on my HUD, whipping across my brain kanji after kanji – FARADAY MODE DOES PERMIT ELECTROMECHANICAL ACTUATION OF MOTOSLAVE MODE. HOLD UNTIL DEACTIVATION.

It dawns on me, belatedly, that I can't see. Shit, so the whole thing really had to lock up –

Only, why hasn't the Lycan opened up with its guns yet?

Seconds pass. My vision – the motoslave's vision – returns, first warped like a bad 3D scan, then jittery, then intact.

The Lycan is gone. Priss, still in her motoslave, its chestpiece with two long scars running across it, stands up, unsteady.

We look around. I feel… idiotic?

"Guys?" Nene's voice. "Did you just lose her?"

"Yeah," Priss rasps. "Clipped the wings, but looks like the Lycan's sub-thrusters are strong enough for a good jump. We didn't hurt her enough. Any idea where she's headed?"

"The JSDF's tiltrotor changed course the second it fired off that EMP. It's moving towards the old Softbank Foundation Tower. I think Rose overrode it, 'cause that's pretty much where the Lycan is heading now."

"Fuck, that's the building they built like the old Taipei 101," Lena says. "So what, the Lycan's going to try to King-Kong its way up the skyscraper? Get the tiltrotor to haul it?"

"If I had to guess," I say, "she'll use the Battle Boomers to cover her as she works her way up. Stall us before we can stop her."

"Well, then," Celia says as the Lancer pulls up. "Priss, does the Vulcan rifle still work?"

Priss shakes it, plays with the bolt, which doesn't move. "Nope. You said all the Motoslave's weapons are mil-surp, right? It wasn't shielded the way Saber guns are." She tosses it aside. "Dinky piece a' shit. I liked this gun, too."

"Leave it. The scuttling charges will render them untraceable. Priss, Sylvie, transform back and follow us. The Softbank Tower is a few minutes away at most."

"Got it," Priss says. "Sylvie, let's roll out."

We turn as the Lancer drives off, jog forward, and transform the Motoslaves back into cycle form.

I don't know what comes next. We've slowed Rose down, but we haven't crippled her the way any of us hoped to. There's still a good chance millions could die because of her.

All we can do now is fight. But I'm ready for that.