Author's Note: I'm not sure if anybody on planet Earth has seen Bubblegum Crisis in this decade except for me, but I thought it was super fun, so I wrote this. If you're reading this just because I wrote it, or if you were just clicking randomly and found it, welcome! No prior knowledge of the show is required for the story, so just sit back and enjoy.
It was another quiet night in The City, as quiet as the screams of the cars. The wealthy made toasts in their towers of steel while wind carried refuse through the streets, and a million million lights shown upwards in ununited glory, to strangle the outnumbered stars.
Far beneath the glittering towers, there lived four heroes.
A woman of uncommon passion and pain accompanied them, Priscilla by name, who screamed into microphones in shady bars by day, but rode with the heroes by night.
Linna was her friend, a woman of simple taste and particular skill, whose eyes are prone to wander and whose feet are prone to follow; she followed the heroes to war and worse.
There was also a girl of easy smile and easy wit who called herself Nene, who had always left her classmates far behind, but among the heroes, was too often left behind herself.
And finally was a lady, Sylia. Wise in her ways and careful with words, and not even half as cold and calm and cruel as her manner betrayed, who led the heroes, and did it well.
The City has needed them before; it needed them again tonight.
Priscilla was arguing with her drummer over a matter she would not later remember, while the bassist took his side and the guitarist took hers, and the keyboardist ignored them in his corner as he poked at buttons and sampled the sounds they made. The argument was cut short by her pager.
Linna was in a restaurant elsewhere, staring deep into the eyes of a charming stock broker who was really starting to bore her, and who had, over the course of the last few weeks, quite honestly sickened her to Thai food. Her pager buzzing was a welcome excuse to break things off, and she told him that she really did have to go, since it was three short buzzes, and that meant it must be very urgent. Which was true.
Nene was crouched in a crowded apartment, dimly lit by screens and little clusters of LEDs, while computers buzzed and ticked away in the corners, and a police scanner warbled across the frequencies. She had her pager in one hand with the button squeezed, and her phone in her other, and was silently praying that she was wrong, though she knew she was not.
Sylia was elsewhere on business of her own, and her voice was scratching over Nene's phone, telling her to slow down, and to present her with the facts, and only the facts please.
"O-okay. Okay." She took a deep breath. "I had... Honeypots running. Uh... Virus traps. Routing from various intranets around the city and... There was a software update. Sent out to all public service systems in districts 143, 144, 157, and 158, which forms a square down on the other side of the bay."
"I am looking at the map, yes." Sylia said. "Please describe the software update."
"It's a trigger. A trigger that disables all lights, security cameras, and regulation monitoring systems in the area, for a period of about twenty minutes. It's a simple program, it's like 20 lines of code, but it's already everywhere. The program all triggers on a remote signal, and then is set to delete itself at 3AM tomorrow."
Sylia glanced at her watch. It was almost tomorrow already. For just a moment she opened her mouth to wonder what the issue was, then saw what Nene had. "Ah."
"Would they do that? They wouldn't do that! Would they?"
"They may very well." Sylia hummed to herself. "At the moment I can't think of a way they could play this hand to their long-term favor, but we would be fools to think there is no way, and irresponsible to suppose they wouldn't play it. You were right to call the others. I'm on my way back to the safehouse now."
"O-okay! I'll come too, I'll be right there. Actually where are you? Could you pick me up on the way? My scooter isn't as fast."
"You're not on the way." Sylia told her. "...And, now that I think about this particular problem, it might be best for you to stay put for the time being. You'll do just as much good there as anywhere. I'll have Mackie deliver your hardsuit and motoslave to the corner of J-street, for when and if you have the chance. He'll be in the orange truck."
"Okay."
"Research. Learn everything." Sylia told her curtly. "I expect feasible options by the time we're underway."
"Okay."
"And thank you, Nene. I'm sure we would have slept straight through."
"Yeah."
"Orange truck! Options! Thank you!"
Click.
"Priss, where's Linna?" Sylia had already appeared out of the darkness, burst through the door, and overtaken Priss before the latter even had a chance to fumble her keycard back into her wallet.
"I don't know? On her way? Probably?" Priss blinked in the sudden glare as Sylia threw the lever in the equipment bay, and the florescent lights sizzled to blinding life. "What's even going on?" Her eyes landed on the empty chamber near the end of the line. "Wait, where's Nene's suit? What's happening?"
"It's with Mackie, on its way to her. Come on, we need to move!" Sylia was already undressing in quite a rush, and leaving her clothes right on the floor, which wasn't quite usual for her.
"Okay, alright." Priss got a feel for the urgency sometime about then, and rushed over to her own locker.
There was a screeching of small tires from outside the bay. "What's going on?" Linna appeared a moment later, stumbling a little on her high heels on the stairs. "Whatsit wasappenin who's hiring?"
Priss glanced her way. "Well hey, you look nice."
"I huh? Oh thanks!"
"Date?"
"Yeah, well-"
"Trouble!" Sylia reminded them, as she furled out her haptic undersuit and began threading her legs in. "No client this time, I'm afraid, but there are lives in jeopardy, and no good read on when."
"What lives? Who huh?" Linna pulled off her earrings and began to undress too. Some half-joking question formed on her lips about whether these lives were of the type who might consider paying, but she could see the ice in Sylia's poise, and took the hint, and hurried.
It took several minutes of dedicated attention to calibrate the haptics, suit up into the actual armor, lock the evac joints closed, and run through proper systems checks. So it wasn't until their fingers were around the waldo controls and their HUDs were pointing them toward the door that Sylia had a chance to really explain. "Nene discovered signs of a plan to enact a media blackout in the suburbs south of the bay area; somebody doesn't want something to be seen or recorded."
"Okay." There was a slight stickiness in the left knee of Linna's suit, that she had to pause for a moment to correct it. Her stomach made a noise around the Thai food, which she made herself ignore.
"South of the bay area? What's there?" Priss asked.
"Not much on the normal maps." Sylia said. "A condemned concrete plant and a shipping center." They were mounting up on their motoslaves now, and their comms went inaudible for a moment as the turbines spooled up, and they took the time to run the machines through their own diagnostics. "Most of it lies on land just recently purchased by a Genom front company. But more important for us are three military starport silos leftover from the Second Cold War. Also purchased by Genom, through a different front company. All this I know because of reasons. Move out!" Sylia throttled up the motoslave, and sped out of the parking garage, with her rear tire leaving a skid mark, and her front threatening to come off the ground. Linna was right behind her and Priss was dangerously close alongside.
"So wait, what does that mean? What are we doing?" Linna tried to clarify.
"An old starport?" Priss scoffed. "Yeah, right, what are they gonna do, LAUNCH something?"
Sylia let that sit for a second or two of comms silence.
"REALLY?" Priss gasped and spat.
"There's a chance." Sylia said darkly. "Along with all the plausible deniability that they didn't, and another problem or two of theirs solved along the way."
The three of them blew through a red light, and Linna in the back had to dodge a truck. "...What other problems?" She asked after she did.
"Back when those silos were built, that land was beyond the outskirts. Now, there's suburbs and low-income housing all the way from the shipping district to the canyon. And there happens to be a particularly unattractive little ghetto built almost right on top of them. Launching a rocket will shatter every window and blow out every eardrum for a kilometer in every direction, and motivate a lot of permanent vacancy in short order. Which I'm sure they'd like."
Priss understood. As they pulled off the streets and up onto the southbound highway, she opened up the throttle to peel out ahead of them, with the others following behind.
"This can't be real." Linna said. "They ca-" Her wheel hit a piece of road trash and the shock made her teeth chatter once. "They can't do that. People would... Die, right? There would be... Legal? Things?"
"I would agree." Sylia admitted. The three of them had to swerve to the shoulder to dodge a pod of traffic that was going the speed limit. "Perhaps they just have that much faith in their ability to buy off the media and the UN and the SPDC. Perhaps the blackout software update is a test for a later launch after proper evictions. Perhaps, even, it's nothing but a trap for us. But..."
"But if it's not?" Linna finished her question.
"It's not." Priss's growl crackled over the comms.
It wasn't.
"Nene, I know you're listening." Sylia spoke. "Tell me you have something."
"Uh!" The girl's voice yelped. They'd called back too soon; she wasn't ready. "I got specs for the starport silos! Or! I'll have the specs from the government servers in a couple minutes, for now I have some photos that some urban explorers took of silos like these silos! They're 40 meters inside diameter, and 150 meters deep, and inside they've got a bunch of... Cranes and chopsticks for assembling the rockets, arranged in three tiers to service the payload segment and two booster stages, with a fourth sideways tier for rotating components out of transport configuration. A retractable observation deck is up near the second tier, and there's emergency generators and equipment bays down around the first tier, behind a bulkhead. If you get into a firefight, there's walkways on each tier, and some support beams you can use as cover on each of the silo's 8 corners."
"Possible points of entry?"
"Ummmmm that's the trick huh. Well when it launches the whole top has to swing open, so that's something."
"I think we'd like to be inside sometime before then, please."
"Right. Um! Okay. So, you can't break through the hatch itself; it's meant to withstand orbital strikes. Even a direct hit from a laser satellite would just burn down to the optical rebar and then get reflected out to sea."
"Okay."
"Uhhhh okay I see two points of entry! First, it has to connect to the subway freight lines somewhere to receive the rocket components. Which isn't on any of the ordinary line maps, but I think I can see where it would have to connect somewhere on section line J of the commercial network. There would probably be armored doors and security checkpoints along there, since that's the proper way in. And then the second option is the tunnel where they vent the rocket exhaust; I don't know how long before launch they open the sluices, but it comes up to the surface in a flame trench about 800 meters west of the silos."
She sent a snippet of a map to their HUDs, showing the basic gist of the south bay area. The silos and the flame trench were circled.
"We'll scope out the flame trench first." Sylia suggested. "Seeing as how we're above ground. Routes and coords? We're currently on highway 8 southbound."
"Searching! Gimme a sec!"
"Affirmative."
"So once we get in there, what's the plan?" Linna asked.
"It shouldn't be rocket science." Priss completely failed to notice her own joke. "I mean, rockets are super fragile. Right?"
"Indeed. They are exceptionally adept at exploding." Sylia agreed in a cautionary tone. "But I should not need to mention why an explosion of that magnitude at ground level inside the silo would be just as bad or worse than a healthy launch. For everyone, but most of all for us, who would be inside."
"Oh yeah."
"Right."
"We'll have to be precise and deliberate in the manner that we damage it. Nene, once you've nailed down our entry path, start looking into technical details of the rocket, and especially into ways we could shut it down without completely destroying it. Based on the size you gave for the silos, the booster stage will likely be either a Genom Seraphim-IP7, or a SpaceX Midbulk Albatross."
"One thing at a TIME!" Nene squealed. "I've already got 500 tabs open so just-WAIT there's traffic up ahead, take exit 15! Exit 15 South!"
Priss had to swerve to peel off the highway in time, and they followed her onto an arterial through an underpass. There was traffic here too, and bystanders where the traffic wasn't, so they had to slow down to give them time to dive out of the way. Priss slammed on her brakes to dodge a bus bench she hadn't seen, and Linna and Sylia fell into single-file behind her. "BAD TURN, Nene!" Priss snapped. "Get us back on the highway!"
"Sorry! Um! Just ahead there should be a, um-"
That was one too many 'um's for Priss, who decided to take navigation into her own hands. She skidded to a stop, and hit a button to transform the motoslave. Its wheels split and swung around, servos and actuators in its frame elements rotated into the shape of arms and legs that locked into hardpoints on her own suit, and the handlebar grips were now the control sticks for a primitive but agile semi-auto exoskeleton. The drive turbines which had been spinning the wheels now clutched into a pair of concentric turbofans, which spooled up and lifted her off the ground. The machine could only boost for a short time like this without overheating, so she pulled back to just under a hover as soon a she cleared the immediate rooftops. Her momentum carried her up a little higher, until she was able to see a fair distance down the highway. Nene had been right to get them off it when she did; it curved off to the west about a kilometer ahead, and the next-nearest southbound highway wasn't far from here; it's closest point to them was diagonally across several city blocks.
"This way! Follow me!" She hollered to Sylia and Linna, who'd just finished shifting their own motoslaves, and followed her upwards.
"You can't just...!"Nene frowned between the map and Priss's GPS position, then shook her head and turned her attention back to her own business. "Okay, whatever. That works. Where was I?"
Priss made a rough landing on a nearby rooftop, half-tripping over an air conditioning unit, then jumped again as soon as she re-stabilized. So they continued, rooftop to rooftop, sometimes gliding over shorter buildings, making for the next highway. The motoslaves were a lot slower at flying than driving, so this was little more than a noisy shortcut.
Sylia glanced here and there when she had a chance near the crest of jumps, and saw people in windows and streets with faces turned upwards, eyes wide and hands over their ears, others with their phones out to record; Priss was drawing altogether too much attention with this stunt. Not that Sylia didn't normally adore the attention, but it really wasn't tactical; they couldn't afford anything slowing them down. She couldn't see any helicopters on the horizon, police or otherwise, but she still got a feeling that the night could become very complicated very quickly.
A minute or two later and they were through with their shortcut. Priss landed on the highway hard enough to take a chip out of the barricade, shifted her motoslave back into cycle config, and sped off on a long stain of rubber. Flying tended to heat up the turbines quite a lot, which made the machine drive slightly rougher for a minute or so after landing, as the bearings shrank back to their normal fit. A vibration around an aggressive turn caused her hardsuit's knee to scrape against the road briefly, so she took the next turn slightly wider. Sylia and Linna had a chance to catch up.
Nene radioed over with the rest of their directions. They were 13 minutes out.
There was a moment or two of tense quiet between them, as quiet as turbines and clawing wind could ever let it become.
"We really are just going in with no plan then, huh?" Linna surmised outloud.
"Yeah." Priss grunted, in a voice with no worry.
"Well, the plan is certainly to make a plan." Sylia added, in a voice with even less worry.
"I'm WORKING on it!" Nene was on the verge of panic. "Keep your... Uh. Pantyhose. On."
"10-4, Pantyhose retained, standing by." Sylia acknowledged, without even a hint of mirth or irony.
Nene found something about that very funny, and her stress cut itself abruptly short. She made a noise and took a breath. "Ha. Uh. Sorry. Okay. Uh. Right. So I'm still waiting for a return from the government servers so I can confirm the internal layout of the place. I managed to access the rail network's switching history, and it hasn't shown any deliveries to the silos, but there were some discrepancies between it and a log I pulled from a nearby railroad crossing, so I'm pretty sure it's all been doctored. Anyway long story short, I can't tell you what types of engines or payload they've been delivering there, if any."
"They could be using one of the stacks leftover from the war?" Linna suggested.
"Could." Nene agreed. "But a rocket would gum up and decay sitting upright for decades. They're precision instruments."
"Could've fixed it up?" Linna guessed.
"But to what end?" Sylia muttered. "What payload are they so desperate to launch?"
"They probably just want to clear the land." Priss snapped. "They DO that, you know. They just evict people, they come up with excuses or pretend it's an accident, edge out anyone who'd sue, and 2 years later there'll be a high-rise and a golf course there, you watch, they've done it before."
"Of course they do." Sylia agreed. "But staging a rogue demolition droid and hiring a couple lawyers and work crews is SO much cheaper than launching an entire rocket."
"You think they don't have enough money?" Priss asked. "They have enough to throw it around, they don't even care. You know they do, they-"
"Stop, Priss." Sylia cut her off. "We both know that this is a handgun to swat a fly. There must be some other factor at play."
"...Maybe." Priss admitted.
"But what?" She hummed to herself. "Whatever it is, it concerns orbit and the SPDC and the colonies; topics a bothersome distance from my sphere of expertise."
"Yeah, well. We'll find out." Priss told her.
"Of course we will."
"8 minutes out." Nene said.
A knock on the door almost startled Nene out of her skin. "AH! WHO IS IT!?"
"It's Mackie!" Came a familiar voice from outside. "You okay in there?"
"Uhh oh hi Mackie! I'm doing fine, haha, uh. Yeah we're all doing fine! This will all turn out just dandy I'm sure..."
"You need some help?"
"...Sure?" She set down the headset for just a moment to go open the door. The hallway outside was as bright as day compared to her apartment, and her pupils dilated rapidly and rather painfully. Her eyes pieced together the blurry silhouette of Mackie, with an armorsuit-sized case on a handtruck behind him. "Cool cool, come on in."
He stepped past her. The floor creaked as he stood the handtruck up. "What can I do?" He asked.
"Well, I guess you can help me research?" She blinked in the familiar dark, and saw his face outlined in the blue glare of the screens. He was smiling. "Uhhh do you know how to rapidly decommission a fully-fueled spaceship in a way that doesn't explode?"
"Nope!" Mackie proudly put his hands on his hips.
"Me neither!" She only had one chair in her apartment, but computers to spare, so she upended her laundry hamper and kicked it in front of one of them. "Go over there and find out!"
"What kind of spaceship?" He asked as he sat down.
"Not sure yet!" She turned back to her own work. "I guess start with the Genom Seraphim-IP7 and the SpaceX Midbulk Albatross. And from there branch out to other booster stages of that era."
"Will do!" Mackie smiled, and opened Bing.
"Oh boy." She put her own headset back on, and checked her teammates' GPS. "Six minutes out, guys."
Somewhere around then, Priss's phone decided to ring. She glanced at the number in the HUD, noticed it was an official police code, and answered angrily. "What do you want, Leon?"
"Heeeeyyy Priss how's it going!" She could hear him winking, somehow. "I was just thinking of you, wondering if you were doing anything tonight, and if, you know, you wanted any company for whatever reason, just to hang out, you know, I mean-"
"Leon! I don't have time for this!"
"I, hey, you sure? I mean, I've got nothing going on, it's been a pretty quiet night so far. No big crimes, no rogue droids, nothing but a few sightings of some brightly-colored flying people heading south, which, I mean, who knows what that's all about, but it's a pretty poor excuse to mobilize on its own. So how you been?"
"I'm hanging up."
"GAH! OKAY! LOOK, do the Knight Sabers need backup or not?"
"NO!"
"Priss!" Sylia interrupted. "Tell him the leader of the Knight Sabers just called in a bomb threat in sector 144, and that they'll blow up a building full of people if their demands aren't met."
"I'm NOT telling him that."
"Sector 144, copy that!" Leon chimed. "I'll set up a perimeter and see if I can get the patrols to start evacuating the residents."
"Yes please officer!" Sylia agreed cheerily. "But you'd better hurry, for our demands are unreasonable and our bomb is enormous."
"Copy that! DALEY I WAS RIGHT, SOMETHING BIG'S UP! GET OFF YOUR BUM!"
Priss hang up angrily. "We don't need police help!" She snapped at Sylia.
"I should hope not." Sylia agreed. "But why be against it?"
"We're outlaws!"
"Not when we can help it."
"They'd turn on us in a second."
"Oh would they now?"
Nene spoke up. "Leon wouldn't."
"Yeah." Linna agreed. "He's cool."
"Oh really, yeah, okay, fine." Priss growled. "Whatever."
A trio of police helicopters appeared above the rooftops, and sped past them, blanketing the night in the glare of spotlights. Sirens and drones and patrolmen wouldn't be long behind them. Hopefully not too soon to get in the way, but at the same time, hopefully not too late.
"You're 4 minutes out." Nene said.
There was a warning sign on the offramp telling drivers to slow down to half-speed for the sharp curve down to street level. Priss ignored this, continued straight for the wall, and transformed her motoslave without slowing down. There was a brief shower of sparks as its feet skidded on the concrete, then its turbines engaged and she launched over the wall, to hover out in a beeline for their destination. Sylia was less than a second behind her, and mirrored the stunt more cleanly, by popping a wheelie before transforming, so the feet didn't scrape. Linna would gladly have just obeyed the signs, but followed them upwards anyway. They were approaching the hills now, and with how narrow and winding the roads were between, they'd make better time over the last two kilometers by air.
The map directed them around a bend in the hills, over an abandoned production plant of some kind, and then down toward a long concrete lot in the shadow of a ghetto. The whole lot was sloped by about 10 degrees, leading from a skyward-pointed ramp at one end, to a pit leading down into the Earth at the other. There was evidence that some very imposing fences and walls used to be in place at some point, but the years of disrepair and competing construction projects meant there wasn't much besides the concrete slope remaining.
They came in for a landing on the edge, and stood and stared.
Linna swore.
Priss swore, and kept swearing.
Sylia unlatched from her motoslave, and hit her radio. "Nene, we've safely arrived at the flame trench, forty seconds ahead of schedule. However, we have a problem."
"The sluices are closed, aren't they? I know, I know, I kind of figured they would be." Nene swapped to another screen. "And you'll never break through them in time. But I think I might've found a third way down into the silos. If you head east eight blocks, there should be a-"
"Not that." Sylia made a fist. "Nene, you didn't look very hard at the satellite view of this place, did you?"
"Huh? Uh... No, not really? What is it?"
"The entire flame trench is a homeless camp." Sylia's eyes wandered across the sea of tents and cardboard and corrugated scraps. "If that rocket launches, it won't just blow out windows and eardrums. Hundreds of people are going to be vaporized."