Nyton tipped his head to Yukari, then slipped away. It gave her a moment to soak in what had just happened.
Heroes. All of them were now heroes, celebrated by the entire Empire. They were names and faces, beings so important to the nation's history that they were canonized as saints, the dead among them memorialized as few others ever had been.
Yuzuki and Nao were sharing a moment, and it was beautiful. Rolf had walked away, and it was sorrowful. Masako looked giddy, and Yukari felt giddy for her and with her. Tom looked proud with his chest puffed out. Kyou, Rin, Nimura, even surly Tori ... everyone was trying to grasp at their emotions, but they were so large that it was not done. Not at that moment, not when flag officers were congratulating them, ceremonial swords being shown to them. When the weight of their medals pulled them toward the ground.
None of them bent from the weight. Everyone stood straight, tall and proud. Yukari felt hopeful.
Despite all the Empire's sins they had uncovered, and all of the sins yet unaddressed, the crew of the
YSS Miharu was proud of what it had done. Nothing could be more graceful than that.
Tom was beaming as he looked over everyone, too.
It gave Yukari a moment to look away, toward the blank space where the painting would go for the Battle of Yamatai. She would not be there to see it, and neither would Kotori.
That is what leaves this moment incomplete, she thought, as her green eyes glistened at the blank space.
That is what will leave this moment forever incomplete.
* * *
3 days later — Somewhere in the Caitel mountain range, Caitel Prefecture
The group of five black Daisy power armors trailed behind a sixth, the fusion thruster packs roaring as they flew above the dry, brownish mounds of land that seemed untouched by civilization. Desert scrub formed a dotted grey-green carpet amid various brown grasses and glimmering, sun-baked white and brown rocks. The armor pilots occasionally zoomed in on bits of movement below, only to find it was a lizard, a fox, sometimes a big insect. It was summer in the southern hemisphere; temperatures usually reached the mid-30s to mid-40s.
"Up ahead," said the lead armor, visually zooming in on an overhang about 100 meters from the summit of a mountain. The peak's height was about 1,000 meters. The armors landed on top of the overhang, then began scanning the area. It took some tweaking of their radar systems, but they managed to penetrate beneath the rock of the overhang to get the visual they needed.
Beneath the overhang was a circular portal about 70 centimeters wide and protected by a four-piece door. Beyond the door was a smooth, rectangular rock tunnel that was perhaps 40 cm at its tallest. It went on for dozens of meters into a wider tunnel that went further into the mountain. Beyond that, the radar could not penetrate the ground.
"Blast it," one of the armor pilots said, shouldering her SLAG-equipped LASR. "Won't take long. Then we have the shuttle air it out with aether fire."
"Eve will have considered that," the lead armor replied. "If she is to have intruders, she will have them on her terms. We go in unarmored; it is the only way to enter that size a tunnel."
"Fuck you," the other pilot scoffed over the com, stance stiffening as she turned her shining black helmet to look at the lead. "I'm not about to risk my unit on your hunch. SAINT might like you here, but you're not in my chain of command, so I don't have to follow your shit, especially after the first two nearly got two soldiers blown to bits. We'll set a perimeter and you can get yourself killed."
The lead nodded. "So be it. Hei-san?"
The armor closest to the lead nodded.
Moments later, two unarmored Neko curled around to get below the overhang and the portal. Using a long-barreled plasma torch taken from the shuttle that had caught up to them, the Hei cut off one piece of the door at a time, letting one fall to the ground hundreds of meters below before starting on the next. The two Neko flew upward and into the portal, NSPs drawn.
Flying through the portal took 10 minutes of slow hovering. The entrance was so tight that trying to twist or turn took a dozen seconds or more. The smell of acrid smoke, heavy with burnt plastics and dirt, caught their noses early on, but the farther they went the thicker it became. Breathing was difficult when the tunnel ended into a small chamber cut from the rock.
Wreckage. That was all that was left inside the chamber, from what the two could tell from their NSP flashlights. Sparking parts from a few squads of Nekomachina were scattered across the chamber, almost all of them sheared clearly from their original body. A few had energy scores across their chests or heads. Some were cleaved in half, others had heads missing. One had its torso, from the center of its neck to the edge of its right hip, cut away, like a child cutting up construction paper.
It explained the smell of the dirt, as well as some of the burning plastic. With the two Neko out of the tunnel, the smoke was starting to rush out toward the entrance. The Neko could see other debris in the dim chamber — much of it chunks of rock. The Hei located the source of that debris. A bomb of some sort had blasted apart the sides of an entryway leading to a smaller chamber at the other end of the one they were in.
The lead nodded, and the two approached the entryway, with the Hei taking point.
No light was inside, but more destruction greeted their flashlights there, this time with hemosynthetic fluids crossing over the walls. The chamber was about nine meters square, with a slashed-up power generator in one back corner and a hemosynth tube in the other. The tube was smashed apart in the front, a large pool of fluid at the base of it. A body was slumped into what was left of the bottom of the chamber, its head missing.
After they had swept the rest of the chamber with their lights, the Neko approached the body. The Hei covered the lead's back as she bent down to examine the corpse.
The skin was pale, almost white. It had been drained of fluid from wounds, but the skin was a light color to start with. It was a Neko body, from the number of fingers on the hands. No defensive wounds were present on the hands ... or any other extremity. There were no cuts on the torso.
The only damage was the missing head. The lead brought her pistol light up to look at the glass of the tube, searching for any other evidence of what happened. She stopped on the back of the tube, near its center. And sighed.
"What is it," the Hei said.
"A message," the other Neko said, and read the message carved into the glass.
Kotori said:
This makes three.
Long live Miharu.
* * * YSS Miharu: End * * *
Main Cast
Ketsurui Kotori played by Fred
Suzuka Yukari played by Doshii Jun
Nyton Claymere played by Nyton
Tom Freeman played by Tom
Saito Miyoko played by Kelenar
Miharu Yuzuki played by Gallant
Miharu Nao played by CadetNewb
Miharu Rin played by Kyoki
Asher Westwood/Rolf Eastwood played by Kokuten
Gunshin Kyoufuu played by Aendri
Kurohoshi Masako played by Abwehran Commander
Nakamura Kai played by Kai
Mizuno Yoroko played by Yoroko
Ashitaka Sanjuro played by MoonMan
* * * And introducing * * *
Miharu Nimura
Miharu Ichigo
Miharu Hinoto
and Miharu Mara played by Fred
* * * 2006 to 2011 — Grace Under Pressure * * *
