It's never a dark night in Tokyo-Earth. ...I suppose that's been said of many great cities of the last century and change, and anywhere there are a reasonable number of streetlights it might even be true. But there is darkness, and darkness, and while our little nation has its share of perfectly normal men and women who hurt one another, they understand that there are limits. Our limits. And that we aren't afraid to get a little rough enforcing them. An American politician once called for a thousand points of light - citizens who would do their best to make the world around them better. A cynic would point out that in a nation of hundreds of millions, a thousand or two would get buried pretty fast. In any case, certain entertainment genres aside, we don't much bother calling for points of light. There's more of them here than anyone knows what to do with. Tokyo-E is a fuckin' xenon spotlight. And my superiors get to choose what to point it at. That scares me sometimes. They tell us, in training, that even Her Majesty doesn't really know what it all means. That what we have, both in terms of our followers and ourselves, just is. And that what we make of it is simply what we make of it. I'd rather that there was some ineffable force directing the brilliance we live in, but I'll settle for trusting Her Majesty. My Duchess... well, trust is not quite the right term, but she points and I shoot - and so far when I miss, it always is my fault, not hers. Even within the glaring cauldron of our nation, though, there are specks of darkness. Dirty residue on the lens, as it were, using the light to hide itself. You have to squint and look for it from an oblique angle. It may give you a headache but it has to be cleaned, lest the searing light heats it, creating a hot spot that could shatter everything. I was out tonight, squinting against the light, looking for the point of darkness that I knew was there. That's what my job - our job - is. We're the Hunters, though if you know that name you probably were on our team once. More likely, you only think you've heard of us. The wind whipped around me as I stepped out to the edge of the roof. It was a little chilly tonight at sixty meters up despite the breeze blowing in off the warmer water of the bay. The tight black combat fatigues were merely adequate protection from the weather, though hefting the other twenty kilos of gear up here had kept me warm until now. "Two, six. Are they moving yet?" I tried to keep the plaintive note out of my voice - I'm the veteran on this team, the fearless leader, and damned if I was going to let let those kids hear my teeth chattering. There was no immediate response from street level, but I had my EI watching their van and it hadn't reported anything, Below me was one of the many parkland squares that had been designed into the heart of Tokyo as the city was rebuilt a few decades ago. The idea had been to disrupt the condensed urban sterility that the old city had developed, and give the common people a closer connection to the Earth... but of course the green space caused property values around it to spike. Before the Duchesses got a handle on the problem, a lot of the parks had become the wealthiest, most elite ghettos on the planet. Even now, you had to be someone special to get an apartment here. Tonight, "special" meant that one side of this square was the collective European embassies. Sure, sure, political union, the whole continent, one happy family, blah blah blah blah... Even though the old nations officially no longer have their own foreign policies, they all still insisted on having their own embassies, with full staffing and all the usual diplomatic trimmings. I think Her Majesty must spend a month out of every year bogged down in useless receptions with these folks. So what do thousands of bored diplomatic drones do with themselves all day? Okay, a lot of things, but from my point of view it seems like half of the really nasty crap that goes down in Tokyo-Earth can be traced back to or through the 2000 West block of Embassy Row. Give three thousand wannabe Important People diplomatic immunity: trust me, chaos does ensue. Smuggling, spying, bribery, money laundering, slave trafficking... and a literal battle with Second Brigade last month over what constitutes a legal parking space. We still haven't figured out how the Austrians snuck that APC into the country, much less into the embassy garage. Everyone in Security was sick of it, and after that mess the directors had held a little meeting. It was time to take the gloves off. Setting aside the wonderful limosine-crushing party Second Brigade threw, that was our job tonight. The Americans had passed along some fragmentary information from the Brits that a couple of Belgian staffers were bringing in some illegal biologicals with the diplomatic pouch. We didn't know what sort of biologicals... but there are a lot of things in that category which can cause an awful lot of damage. As soon as they brought the item out to deliver it - and the packaging it was in had a limited battery life so they had to deliver it tonight - we were going to make the package, its couriers, and hopefully its recipients disappear. Depending just what was in the package, that disappearance might well be permanent. If that meant that getting our ambassador to Belgium PNG'd... well, that would just be one more Lady back in Tokyo-E where she could do something useful. I had overwatch, as always. Well, that's what I'm best at, even if it means I'm freezing my ass off half the time. It's great, I guess, that their Majesties turned the corner on global warming a decade ago, but I'd rather have the extra two or three degrees average temperature that I remember growing up in the 'teens. Japanese weather really is mis- "Six, one. Sorry, there was a whole tour bus that just loaded up down here and our hardware was going a little nuts trying to sort them all out. No matches, buuuut here's target-1 now, waiting on the front steps and looking more dyspeptic than usual. He's got a medium sized bag of some sort - should I scan?" 'One' was Lady Midnight - purveyor of darkness, mistress of hiding, and pretty scary in a knife fight. She'd been on the team for a couple of years and had become the aggressive heart of our little group. "Negative one, negative, passives only." All sorts of tricks up our sleeves, at least when we can cart a van of equipment around. But there are only so many ways to look into closed luggage, and a lot of them would either blast everything electronic within three meters of the target or cook anything living... or both. ELS would spare the hardware and wetware in the target zone, but any 2-bit con with a thirty-year-old computer and a microphone could detect that. And then there was magic - but farsensory Ladies were way too valuable to risk in a frontline unit like mine. I whispered a command to my EI, and it copied the visual and IR takes from the van to my ballistic glasses. The guy was carrying some sort of vintage gear bag - it looked like my father's ancient laptop case, really - with all sorts of little pockets and nooks and compartments to slip gadgets and accessories into. The IR showed... "One, the far bottom corner of the bag... is that an artifact, or some sort of conductive warming from the target?" "No, milady, it's real, and it's adjusting relative to ambient far too much to be conductive. The energy output matches what the airport sensors picked up, within about 20 percent anyway, and the shape is right." "Turn on the nose." There was a moment of silence at that, before the inevitable objection. The other woman in the van was Junior Lady Pickup. Yes, as in pickup truck. When there are nearly six hundred and fifty of us MG's running around and the Earth Magic is bound and determined to make each one unique, you get some odd powersets. She was the youngest on the team, and the freshest out of college, where the instructors seemed to have gone out of their way to pound conservative behavior and nonconfrontational tactics into her. Maybe I'm imagining it, but when I was in training it seemed like the Ladies with abilities that involved smashing things with large objects were browbeaten rather than encouraged when they showed initiative. Granted there is some historical justification for doing so, but I'd rather have aggression than meekness watching my back. "Six, two. Ma'am, we're overbudget on the quarter, and you know how much those refills cost. The DDS-" The "nose" was almost literally that - a insect-quality sensory organ connected to a computer. The individual receptor cells were easy enough to grow in a lab... but broad-spectrum sensors like ours needed to be assembled from tens of thousands of cultures, and once exposed to the environment the sensor would die - literally - within hours. Expensive as all hell, and budget was always a concern, but... "The Duchess will have our hides if we make too strong a play without good documentation. Besides this is technically a joint op so we're only paying for a quarter of it. So turn on the damn nose." They didn't acknowledge, but my EI popped up the analysis highlights after a few seconds. "Industrial refrigerants, huh? Looks like we have a winner. But what's he doing just standing out there?" "Waiting for his buddy - here comes target-2's car out of the rear lot." I could hear their van starting up as the call came through, so I reached over the edge of the roof and pried my sensor pod loose from where it had been monitoring the street. I replaced it in the holder on my chest, then checked with my EI to be certain it had switched the pod over from wireless. With that taken care of, it was time to go. I took a couple of light steps back from the edge, then pushed forward and up... and was sailing through the air, a black blot arcing into the black sky. On a cloudy night I had to be more careful about this, but when the stars were out it would be a thousand-to-one chance anyone would spot me, even if they were trying. Yeah, I'm Lady Jump. I know I'm on the roster as an agent in H-2, but that's pretty typical cover for someone on our team. Even more importantly, my "normal" name has never leaked out so I can go anywhere and do anything in that form without any suspicion arising. Some of our work requires that but tonight's activities were considerably more direct. I was transformed already; the rest of my team probably would be for the, uh, arrest. All of our powers tend to give the physicists ulcers for one reason or another. Mine perhaps less than some, but what I can do with inertia while free-falling violates all sorts of rules. Being able to highjump a hundred meters is great, but it makes planning where you're going to land a little tricky unless you can steer like a Nintendo character on the way down. The analogy is particularly apt, since landing on someone's head is about as strong a magical attack as I've got. Then again, when my combat boots meet your head at near-terminal velocity, your spine is a guaranteed loser. My leap had started from the western side of the block, on top of one of the mid-rise apartments there. I cut the corner, watching the dark green of the park blur underneath me, then began to check my forward speed just a little, aiming for the Czech/Polish/Slovak roof. I pulled down my mask as I glided out of the sky - most buildings don't put cameras on the roof, but it wouldn't hurt to keep some degree of anonymity. This part was always a bit dicey on my bigger jumps; the roof rose up to meet me with a resounding *WHAM* and I breathed a sigh of relief before pushing off on a flatter trajectory. A wham is a good thing - it means that the roof absorbed the impact. When it goes crunch, it means that it didn't, and I'm embedded in it, or worse, have gone right through it. I skidded to a halt on the roof of England's embassy, then stepped off the front to drop to an unoccupied balcony below. I checked below, and there was target- 2's rental car, moving out into the evening traffic. "Three, six... they're finally moving on this end. Are you seeing any activity on your side?" The last member of my team was kilometers away, covering the spot where target-1 met with his favorite local criminal contact. H-3 had been watching the Belgian for years - he was listed as second-in-charge of the Belgian embassy technical group, but it hadn't taken reading much of their mail to work out that he was their intelligence service's station chief. He didn't do much fieldwork on his own. Half of his excursions outside the embassy were for food and booze. The other half were to a parking lot on the southern edge of Tokyo-E, for more exotic intoxicants. We hadn't even tried infiltrating that particular yakuza - they were third-tier distributors and secondhand muscle, not even really worth the district police's attention. But since they were the only locals target-1 ever had any interesting dealings with, they seemed his most likely destination tonight. Target-two was something different; younger, faster... sharper. He didn't even have a local cover, other than as a courier for their diplomatic corps. He'd flit in-country, drop off something at the embassy, then take the scenic route back to the airport. Sometimes a very scenic route. H-3 had tried a background check - what they'd found smelled like a cover identity, but wasn't provably false. Before tonight, that made him someone we needed to watch. Tonight... that made him someone we needed to watch out for. "This is three... There ain't nobody here, Ladies. No smugglers. No druggies, no dealers, no muscle, no Pets, no tank police, no dancing girls, no Queens, no nobody. Just me." He sounded disgusted, and I couldn't really blame him. Ladies like Lords. A lot. All the good parts of having male companionship without the downsides that hooking up with a normal entails. Since there aren't nearly enough to go around, the powers that be tend to get a little overprotective. Lords just don't get many postings where combat is a possibility these days. And since combat is the almost the only way to get the big promotion, there aren't quite as many of them in the upper tiers of the Hierachy as one might expect. Lords might be the first oppressed minority group ever to get nookied into historical oblivion. The Queen talks a good game on the issue, but the only promotions she makes are the really, *really* deserved ones. The Duchesses don't ever talk about it, but collectively they're a bunch of social darwinists and meritocracy mavens who turn up their noses at even the least whiff of affirmative action within the Hierarchy. No one is suggesting in public that Lords be excluded from military duties yet, but it's a sentiment that I hear a lot in the ladies' locker room. I still don't quite know how Lord Millimeter managed to get assigned to our team. A couple of my contemporaries had moved on to other Security assignments and I had put in for a sneaky-type or a ranged combatant replacement. A few weeks ago he arrived with the mail. The girls were thrilled, absolutely thrilled, but I got a pithy little note from the DDS requesting that I not get this young (unattached bachelor superpowered hardbody love machine) Lord killed... or else. That means that the angles I assign him to cover are the lower-probability, less-risky ends of the play. Like tonight. "That's too bad, three. Stay on it - if the meet is there, his dealer may be late." Sure he will be. They wouldn't have brought in a real player if this was just handing something off to the local dopers. "Yes, milady." The resentment oozed through the headset, but it wouldn't last. He'd get his chance one of these weeks - his powers were well-suited for bloody close combat, and with only four on the squad right now he'd either be forced to intervene sometime or just plain act as muscle in some situation. The car was moving east towards the city center, and I needed to follow. If they got out on the freeway they'd become Midnight and Pickup's responsibility, but I could keep much better track of them if they stayed below 70 kilometers per hour or so. It wasn't so late yet that downtown and the Palace district had emptied, so traffic would help for now. I bounced a couple of times down to the end of the block, waited for their traffic light to change, then followed from above as they drove into the very heart of Tokyo-E. As Tokyo was rebuilt in the immediate aftermath of the Ningyo War, the section of the city that was meant to be the new downtown was set back from the water, and built relatively low and strong so that it couldn't be swept away in a new flood. But then the Ningyo and Her Majesty made peace... and the new downtown mutated into a combination of squat blockhouse buildings that had already been constructed, assorted skyscrapers of Modern and Postmodern descent, and some multi-block arcologies that individually had members in the Representative Body. From high in the air, it looks absolutely hideous. From ground level, or even the heights that I reach, it's a wonderfully friendly mess of architecture that intermittently dwarfs, accomodates, and inspires you. Of course there's the little traffic problem that goes along with that. Downtown had been planned with narrow, one-way streets on the say-so of overly optimistic young women who expected that their citizens would be willing to live without personal vehicles. A decade later, the Queen was using her powers to shape huge underground traffic bypasses and parking garages. Not that many people like living, working, or playing underground, so the surface-level roads are still a continual mess. Traffic slowed to a well-regulated crawl as we edged along the Purity Arcology. From above, I could measure the targets' impatience building by their repeated and futile lane-changing. I wondered for a second if the power on the transport capsule was running out, and whether we should call up H-4 and get a hazmat unit lined up, but then they cut across traffic into the turn lane and I grinned. "Team, six - they're switching to the southern bypass. They can't be headed for the Palace, but surely Ningyo City doesn't make any more sense..." As I trailed off, Pickup acknowledged. "This is two. We're moving to follow, you will just have keep up on the surface. One has the traffic cameras linked in, if you want the feed. ...milady, maybe they are just taking the scenic route and will loop north?" "Nah." Midnight's radio discipline tended to break down whenever things started to get interesting, but as long as she didn't use birth names I wasn't going to get on her case. "A driving tour of a foreign country with undeclared biologicals in the back seat? They may not know the best way to get where they're going, but target-2 is too savvy to be going out of his way." "Six, three... does this mean that I can go home now, mommy?" I had to smile at that. "No, dear, get on the train and head this way just in case the party lasts a while, okay?" Unless the targets were trying to play this way too clever, he wouldn't make it. On the other hand he could learn a good bit from the mop-up for when he finally was in the right spot. "Right. On my way, sir." I stood on the ledge outside one of the arcology promenade windows watching the target vehicle disappear into the tunnels. I could hear a small crowd gathering behind me - it's not so often that a woman jumps onto a ledge sixty meters up, even in this town, and they knew I had to be a Lady on some sort of mission. I didn't much care - who were they going to tell? The media isn't exactly in our pocket but they know better than to try live coverage every time a Lady is sighted doing something business-related in T-E, unless there's fire or explosions or juicy carnage that we can't cover up. I leapt out into the night sky once more and they lost sight of me instantly. Midnight and my EI kept my HUD updated with the targets' progress, but I hardly needed the visual cue to know which way to head. I've heard many of my normal friends comment that MG's seem to have an uncanny sense of direction, but that's not quite true - what we have is an uncanny sense of is the exact direction to where the Queen of the Sea is. I can understand why the Hierarchy and the Ningyo had a war - we can *feel* them or at least their magic in our bones, and until one gets innured to the sensation it can be quite unsettling. Individual empowered Ningyo can be felt a few klicks away but Her Majesty the fish can be felt hundreds of kilometers away, unless she's in deep water. She makes her home in Ningyo City, just east of the Palace and downtown, so a lot of us use her for navigational purposes. Of course, when she goes to visit the Palace or some other place in T-E we get quite discombobulated... Bounce off the end of the arcology; Touch down in the street, giving a couple of souvenier vendors the fright of their lives; A few steps to accelerate then off again, aiming for the top of the stock exchange; Idly wonder how the trust fund is doing this quarter as I go over Parliament; The big raw iron statue of the first Queen makes a great springboard to the hotels and office buildings beyond; Pick my roofs to go up and up and up so I can go over rather than around the Pie Arcology; Skip off the roof instead of jump so I don't end up going too high as the fringes of the downtown abruptly fall away into smaller- scale commercial development, then the undeveloped parkland which surrounds Ningyo City. Yes, the fish are our friends now, and there's not been one single officially documented case of them harming a T-E citizen in thirty-five years. Then again, one dark night in 2004 they killed eight million humans, give or take a couple hundred thousand. That's the sort of thing that makes most folks not want to live next door. "Six, Two - they didn't take the beltway north... they can't be expecting to cross into the Chiba reclamation zone, can they?" Lady Midnight snerked hard over the radio. "Yeah, that would be cute - sneaking into a nuclear crater with some sort of bioweapon. They're going to give the five-eyed raccoons Ebola or some shit." The ground ahead was looking a little too muddy for my tastes. It's always embarrassing to need an assist from a backhoe, so I shifted course by a couple of degrees and snagged the middle branches of a tree. As the tree swayed back and forth, I caught my breath and listened to Pickup and Midnight's banter. "We don't know that it's a weapon, One." "Yeah, whatever. They go to all this trouble for some genetically enhanced rice. Sure. No, they're not going to Chiba, you doofus, they're going to stop in Ningyo City." "That makes no sense!" "Not really, but maybe the Ningyo are starting something. Time was they played the game fast and reeeeal hard." "They'd never break the treaty!" "Oh, yeah, like you know everything the fish are-" I hopped over to an access road and started eastward again. "Ladies, ladies, calm down. We'll find out what's happening soon enough." According to the HUD I was falling behind a little... but then the range leveled off then started to close. Pickup called it before I could ask. "Six, they're pulling off at the Ningyo City Universal Garage." I could hear the van decelerating then rolling over a rumble strip, and nodded. The Ningyo had built an oversized parking garage as part of the overall Ningyo City construction plan. They had canals there, not streets, and the garage was the main terminal for the system of ferries and water-taxis. In the summer, it would be filled with tourist vehicles. Tonight, it would pretty empty, but not completely deserted. Ideal for transacting some delicate, but brief business. "Keep them in range. Whetever their plan is, it'll probably happen in the garage. It's an open-air design, so I'll be less than five seconds out when you call." I landed just outside the puddle of light thrown by the streetlamps around the parking garage and my sense of all the nearby Ningyo wavered for a second. Our magic sense is impossible to describe to someone who lacks it, but to draw on a visual metaphor it was as if someone had slid a pane of coarsely-faceted glass between myself and the fish for a second, making all the point-sources waver. Then the odd effect was gone, leaving me to wonder if I had imagined it. "Did any of you feel that?" "Feel what?" "Six, two doesn't know what you're talking about." "Three here, I must be too far away." I mentally paged through the possible scenarios and grimaced at some of the ickier ones. When I had five on the team, this was so much easier. "Three, you're still in the net?" "Yes'm!" "Call H-4 dispatch, use our team authentication codes, and get them to task a UAM-7 on the parking garage here. And to get ready to interdict Ningyo City, if we call for it. Tell them it's a possible case November Three." That probably wouldn't cause a war, even if things went really, really wrong. "Me, sir?" Milly sounded surprised, but this was another thing he needed to get some practice with. We have a lot of rank to throw around, even the newbs like him. We have to be careful not to step on the wrong toes too often, but if we're not using it we're not doing our job right. "You. Right now. We're a little busy here." A little bit of a lie - by now I was standing in a dark spot on the decorative landscaping around the garage, waiting for something to happen inside. "Right." He cut his mic, and a few seconds later my EI reported that his EI was securing a com session with the call center at H-4. Right. I pulled my Security-standard 11mm out from under my left arm, checked the magazine, chambered a round, flipped the safety off, then back on, and reholstered it. For a real weapon, I had an AR-10E refitted for select-fire on my back. I reslung it now, just slightly looser so that the strap wouldn't catch on my head if I needed it in a hurry. The rest of the team had various newfangled subguns for up close and personal firefights, but with my talent for getting to high perches I needed a gun I could properly snipe with. A real sniper rifle would be too unwieldly when I did have to get closer. Most modern battlefield guns were all chambered for the dinky little 5.56mm round, and I preferred more punch. And the nice thing about an 80-year-old design is they've gotten the kinks worked out of it. I'd tried an AK-47 for a while, but it was just too primitive-looking to be taken seriously. In the van I knew Midnight would be prepping some very different weapons. We wanted to interrogate everyone we caught tonight, not bury them, so she'd be breaking out the clips of tranq rounds. Unfortunately those were only about 98% non-lethal, which meant getting the targets to surrender was the plan of the day. That meant overawing them with our visible firepower and our, uh, magical- girlyness. Well, they were in T-E, so they'd figure it- "Six, one. Target vehicle stopped on the roof level of the garage. We've driven past, and down two levels. We are dismounting and approaching." "Acknowledged. I am-" I crouched, then pushed off with as much force as I could muster, and the parking garage blurred downwards. "-on my way." I cleared the tenth-story roof with most of my vertical momentum remaining, leaving me about seven seconds to scan the situation and decide where to land for maximum effect. Our two known targets had emerged from their car, and... "Plus three targets! Two armed, watching approaches." One was watching the elevators, the other was keeping an eye on the single ramp leading up from the garage interior. I was already past apogee and needed to decide what I was going to do. I had the option of dropping back to ground level, but I couldn't jump like this too often without them spotting me. Better to go straight in. That meant doing one of the obvious guards. Midnight could take the guy on the ramp, especially if he was distracted. What Pickup could do to him wasn't something I wanted to think about this soon after dinner. Crunching his buddy's neck would make a great distraction, so I angled for... Wait. Something was there - something was here, with me, right now - how did a- *wham* H-1 A sandwich.net #besm RPG Fiction and setting created by Kerry "Ked" Stump With apologies to Mister Shattuck, Takeuchi-sama, Shirow-sama, Mister Latus, and Mister Bouyer. I sighed at the idiocy of it all and got out of the rented land-vehicle just in time to see the Lady plunge out of the sky. She landed face-first on the concrete roof, but I could still feel magic pulsing from her broken and bloodied form. The mules - both groups of them - flinched, then panicked. The Belgians scrambled for their vehicle while the locals panicked and started blasting at anything moving. I killed the nearer shooter, ignoring the projectiles hitting my back. Those stopped abruptly as a bolt of molten fire sizzled in from above burning the man down where he stood. I felt rather than saw the Belgians' car detonate under the same blazing rain while I eliminated the last of the locals. The deck of the garage bucked under my feet once, twice as my sisters eliminated the other two Ladies who were charging up from below. Purplish dust and black smoke billowed up out of ramp and curled around the edges of the building as I paused to take stock of the situation. Not that there was much of a situation left to take stock of. "Why did you do that! They were supposed to get caught!" The voice in my ear chattered something about the plan, and why were we watching over it if we were not going to see it through. I wanted to scream at her, but that would cause... unfortunate consequences. And now she was telling me to- "We don't need to do that, she hasn't seen anything." Ah, but she values completeness. A complete fuckup, that one. Granted, these Ladies were not exactly the sharpest sticks I'd ever seen, but then most of them hadn't had to play against real opposition in their lifetimes. Well. They'd be getting some practice now. I walked briskly over to the black-clad woman. She was beginning to stir and reach clumsily for the nasty-looking weapon slung on her back, but her hands were still too mangled from the landing to do more than claw bonelessly at its barrel. Her eyes opened, crossed, focussed on my face and widened in... not horror, surely. Bewilderment, probably. Such a shame. I knelt down beside her and put my lips to her ear. "For what it's worth... I'm sorry." Her red blood dripped from my red hands as I walked away into the darkness.