[story] Saber Chase

[Dartz]

And more. Lots of dialogue.... so much dialogue. Headbang. Go pop.

So clunky.

The first place she checked was the Mayor’s house. It was empty. The same uncomfortably constant draft was being sucked towards the ventilation stacks. The lawnmower was drunkenly circling, having apparently malfunctioned somehow.

Even the green grass seemed oddly dead.

Maico made her way back to the lift, sitting down on the cold steel floor for the journey. The wheels in their runners were drumming against her skull. Another few hours and this would be done, and she could have a nice long rest at home in the comfort of her own bed. Or maybe she could stay down below in the SilkyDoll and luxuriate in the hot-tub for a few days.

No, I’m leaving.

Except for the tub, Frigga just wasn’t a nice place to stay. Too lifeless.

Only exocomps and concrete. She decided to check the main control room. Chances were someone would be there who’d know where Jet was, either puppet or real. The by now familiar New Birmingham Founders Day mural still creeped her out.

Over 500 people used to live here.

The control room door was ajar. It didn’t surprise her. Outside the SilkyDoll, they didn’t seem to be much too worried about security. There didn’t seem to be much need to worry about it. She pushed it open, slipping inside.

Jet herself was there. Feet up on the console in front of her, crunching away on a bowl of cereal with a steaming cup of broadleaf tea, staring unblinkingly at something Maico couldn’t identify on screen in front of her.

A webcomic

Maico found herself blinking at the sight of something like Jet, relaxed back in a creaking chair, annunciator lights playing across her armour, reading webcomics while eating breakfast. It was so strangely incongruous, she was taken aback for a moment.

“Oh, hey there,” said the cyber, mildly, noticing Maico standing in the doorway.

She didn’t get up. She swallowed another spoonful.

“I’m here, because Kotono...” Maico began.

Jet hummed in between crunches, nodding. She swallowed. “Yeah. So where do you want us to take you?”

Maico tried to read Jet’s expression. Relaxed, definitely relaxed. Seemingly in good humour. Maybe a morning person. As happy and good-humoured as she’d been right before she’d gone off like a bomb a day earlier.

And this wasn’t a puppet. She swallowed her unease.

“Stellvia. Could you take me to Stellvia please?”

She deliberately phrased it as request.

Jet sucked a breath through her teeth, her half empty bowl clattering on the console as she set it down. Blue eyes studied her, her expression still mild, a gentle surprise creeping into her features.

“Why do you want to go there?”

“I’d feel safest,” Maico gave her answer. It was a half-truth.

Jet studied her for a second, seemingly mulling it over. Maico felt herself reminded of something Ford had told her, about spinning beachballs.

“Right so.” Jet agreed, in that husky voice of hers. Maico found herself wondering if she’d ever smoked. “We’ll be departing in about six hours,”

The radio hissed. “Frigga, Ladies Man. Frigga, Ladies Man.” Mackie’s voice “Sector Bravo Seven Romeo clear. Carrying on to Bravo Eight Romeo,”

Jet lazily picked up a handset, rolling her eyes. “Ladies man, Frigga. Just keep rolling,”

Maico raised an eyebrow. Jet’s expression cooled.

“After what happened to you, I amn’t taking any more chances. Mackie’s up in the ‘Wing making sure there’s nothing out there,”

The side of Maico’s head pulsed a reminder. She sat herself down on a spare chair beside an idling console.

“Alright?”

“Feeling better,” Maico croaked out. But not feeling good. After being knocked out cold for nearly an hour, nobody would be feeling good for days afterwards.

Jet carried on eating. The machinery carried on chattering and humming away to itself as it worked out things that only it would know. All the lights just sort of blurred into each other, like a wall full of christmas lights, flickering and winking at her.

There was one other thing.

Gnawing.

Demanding to be raised.

Ryan’s warning about being the person with the pet tiger who couldn’t see how dangerous it really was rang loud and clear. Jet seemed at ease. Inside that armour was enough power to rip her apart.

Jet had seemed relaxed and cheerful yesterday too. And then went from that, to yelling about how she didn’t have any problems, and if she had any problems she could deal with them, and they weren’t really big or unusual problems anyway. It was almost political.

And the cyber had run away yesterday. She’d covered her retreat with thunder and lightning., rather than launched on the offensive

“Jet, about yesterday,”

The cyborg held up a big metal hand, “No need to apologise,”

Maico felt herself gawk.

“Me....” she stumbled over her own words for a second. “You were the one who lost your temper at me, why should I be the one to apologise?”

“You’re the one who calls me crazy and you’re surprised I get a little pissed off,” Jet snapped at her, folding her arms. Her armour scratched against itself.

Maico’s face warmed up with building anger. “You asked for my opinion and I gave it. And I didn’t think it was wrong. I still don’t think it’s wrong.”

Jet’s feet hit the floor with a bang, propelling her upright.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” Jet yelled, looming over Maico. inside that armour, she seemed huge. “Nothing at all.” Her eyes were staring. Maico felt her throat constrict as Jets hands gripped tight around the seatback. She heard it snap. Her neck ached in sympathy.

Maico shrank down into her own chair. Her body clamoured for her to run, every nerve ending bristling and tickling beneath her blouse.

“Nothing you can’t control,”

Jet barked. “Exactly!”

Maico forced herself to stay mild, despite herself. “So, What happens if you lose control, Jet?”

The cyber stopped. Something was going to happen. It was a pregnant moment. Staring at the steel case of the bomb waiting for it to decide to go off. Maico pushed through.

“If you lose your temper with someone. What happens then? You could kill someone”

She saw Jet go rigid. Her whole body locked up for what seemed to be an eternity, but must’ve been less than a half-second.

“Nobody,” she barked, before stopping. She glared down at Maico, then down at herself. She still had her glacier eyes. Reflected light sparked demonically from her eyes. “Nobody understands what happens if I lose my cool more than I do.” she hissed through her teeth. “It’s one of the first things we learn. It’s one of the reasons why we learn. It’s the very first thing I teach my students. I know the damage I’m capable of doing, even without meaning to.”

Maico stood her ground. Or sat at any rate. “But most people don’t......”

“And that’s exactly how I want it to be.” Jet slammed the verbal door on her again. “People know what I did alright, they know that I was right at the cutting edge. But they don’t know. It’s not even a movie to them, it’s a history book. It’s words on a screen in a wiki-article that inform that I’m capable of splitting a human being in two, without the visceral understanding of what exactly that entails. There’s an inherent disconnect there. People see me in person, and they’re unable to join printed words, with the person in front of them.”

The cyber’s body was rigid. Locked in place. Jet rooted herself to the spot, bracing her hands against the console. There was a hard current of tension running through her body, grounded through her gripping hands.

Maico didn’t doubt that Jet was capable of splitting her in two....

The energy sank from Jet’s frame.

“I think I see what you mean,”

Jet slowly sat herself back down, crossing her legs as she did so. Her eyes were closed as she drew in a breath through her nostrils. Maico could see the tension visibly drain from her body.

I’ve disarmed her! She tried desperately not to smirk.

“No you don’t, not really. You heard about how we were attacked, while we had a BNF customer aboard?

“Anika told me about it. It was mercenaries, hired by the UBA. You managed to beat them off. Reading a little between the lines, I think that attack might have been where you learned the UBA was gone rotten,”

“Yeah. We were able to get details from the survivors aboard the One Night,”

The name rung a bell. “That’s the ship in orbit?”

“Uh-huh,” Jet confirmed with a nod. “They got aboard through the apartment windows like we expected, I went down with the students and fought the attackers off.”

She was trying to keep her expression grave and serious, but Maico saw that quiet curl up at the edges of her lips.

“Our guests were able to fight, so I coordinated with them to pin the Boskone down, where I...” Jet stopped to go for a quick word hunt, before settling for a well worn euphemism “...neutralised the threat. The survivors were taken into custody and the Patrol were called to pick them up. We took stock of the damage, casualties, and got back to business.”

It was, too her, no big deal. She inhaled a long breath through her mouth.

“The thing is. Our guests got to watch the whole battle on the monitors, and they got to see me in action. Live and unfiltered. “

Maico recalled Saber White in action. Nothing of her against human beings, just those few frames of her slamming an aging powered suit with the Hertza Haeon , and the back of the pilot’s compartment bowing out.

“We got a returning customer out of it....” Jet grinned wryly. “We proved we knew what we were doing. But...” the cheer drained from her expression again. She looked away towards the control panels on the wall for a moment “Well.... a lot of them were on edge around me. When they looked at me, they were thinking about what they saw on those monitors. They were looking at me like I was one second away from ripping their arms off. The connection had been made.”

Jet’s shoulders drooped. Armour plates scratched against each other.

“That’s not a nice feeling.” she continued, her voice going soft. “I don’t like people being afraid of me. I don’t want them to whisper behind my back about how dangerous I really am, or the amount of death I can deal inside a minute.”

She’d relaxed completely, Maico’s pen scratching away struggling to keep up. One question she sketched out immediately had to wait.

“I’ve been very careful to make people comfortable, so what people see when they look at me isn’t a blood-stained warrior, or something capable of coldly tearing them apart. I want them to see that Jet Jaguar is a good, decent person with a gentle smile and kind blue eyes. Jet likes to show off. Jet likes to go fast. Jet is a martial artist. Jet defends Fenspace, and trains people to defend themselves, but Jet won’t ever harm them.”

Maico nodded. “But of course.” This was good stuff! Great stuff!. Crack the crust and get at the juice beneath.

“That’s the image of me I want to show. It’s why I joined the Panzer Kunst in the first place, so I had the self-control not to harm people by accident. It’s part of why I originally chose to keep this particular body-shape, and my puppet design.”

She knocked the knuckles of her right hand against her left breast, a hollow, ceramic sound. Her smile returned again as she flexed her fingers, each in turn.

“I know that I need to interact with people. I need to be able to get out there and meet and talk with people and make connections, or to bring people to Frigga. I need friends and allies, I need people I can have a good time with. The more the better. I can’t afford to be sequestered away in private."

Jet took a breath, reminding Maico that she hadn’t often seen her do that. The whole time she’d been speaking, she hadn’t needed to inhale. The cyber’s gaze cooled again. Maico could feel her trying to look right through her

“I don’t need people to be afraid of me. If people are afraid of me, they’ll start avoiding me. I’ll start getting isolated and if that starts happening, that’s when the rot will really start to set in. And that’s when those fears might turn out to be self-fulfilling.”

Jet paused for just a moment.

“So long as I’m able to do things with people, and people are willing to do things with me, I’ll be fine. If that changes, then it could destroy me,”

She seemed to wait, and Maico wondered if she shouldn’t just drop the next question. But this was important. This was Jet’s motivation. This was the why of it. This was her looking for Jet to make her decision to run the story for her.

Maico swallowed her fears and went for it.

“How many of them survived?” she asked, forcing her voice to be as plain and unthreatening as she could manage.

For a moment, the cyborg seemed taken aback by it. She wasn’t offended, just surprised Maico figured.

“Seven.” she stated. “And fifteen crew were captured aboard the One Night after a lucky missile shot out it’s engines.”

Fifty take away seven survivors left forty three people. Jet admitted to killing forty three people. And she didn’t bat an eyelash.

Maico tried to look into Jet’s eyes again.

“And how do you feel about that?”

Again, she recalled what Ryan had told her about cold blue glacier ice.

“If you’re asking me how I feel about killing people, I amn’t thinking about it at the time. I’m thinking about doing what needs to be done to end a battle as quick as I can.”

Which, Maico noted with a chill, neatly explained the Knight Sabers’ modus operandi.

“I learned through experience. The best way to save lives in a fight, is to end it as soon as possible. To hit as hard as I can, and keep hitting until the enemy stops fighting, rather than have people I care about shot down while I’m worrying over using appropriate levels of force for the situation,”

“You believe this?”

“I wouldn’t be able to fight like I do if I didn’t.”

There was one hell of an argument behind all of this, and Maico knew in her own heart of hearts that Jet was, if not wrong, definitely skirting the edges of it. It hit her on a visceral level.

On her notepad she added the comment; Remember Ryan’s dossier, 'During the war she was known for bringing people in alive, and completely ignoring those who put themselves out of the fight. She claims it’s a speed thing. If people stop fighting and surrender, Jet won’t harm them. The downside is that she hits just so hard, they don’t normally get the chance to think about it. '

“You don’t agree,”

“I understand,” said Maico. “On a rational level, I understand and it makes a sort sense, but it feels wrong. But then, those forty three people aren’t just a statistic either, are they? I was told they were lied to, when hired to attack Frigga. They were still attackers.” she paused, gathering her thoughts. “Is it possible you could be attacking them so hard that, even if they want to surrender and back out of the fight., they can’t?”

“It is.” Jet admitted, with a cold certainty “But all told, I’d rather kill them all, than risk someone innocent die. They’re the ones that decided to attack us, remember? Friends come first.”

Pretty much exactly the answer she’d expected.

“How can you think like that? I’m not sure I can think like that,” Maico said, quietly, “It feels so wrong to me. The closest I can come to that mindset would be, if I had a handgun on that ship, and I ask myself if I could’ve fired it to keep that mercenary Captain from attacking me, or shooting Anika. How would I feel if I shot him dead instead?”

Her skull throbbed, reminding her of the blow, an echo of the initial hit still ringing in her brain.

“I’m glad I don’t know the answer to that for certain, but I remember I felt I’d do anything to stay alive. For a moment, I thought I was winning the fight and it was so exciting. And maybe then, I could’ve done it....”

She called up an image into her mind of herself with the weight of a smoking handgun in her hands, standing over the bloodied body of that Captain, and tried to put herself into that moment...

“I don’t think it’s a decision I could make rationally. I don’t think I could choose to kill someone. And I think... I’d be shocked if I actually did.”

“But, you’d probably have been glad that yourself and Anika were safe. There’re far more people alive today, living free and happy and safe, because of what I’ve done, than there would be otherwise. That’s what I believe. That’s how I’m able to do it.”

“And that’s why you do it?”

Why you believe you do it, Maico added mentally.

“Yeah. it is.” Jet confirmed. “And I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy it,”

“Enjoy it?”

“I’ve met some of the lives I’ve saved. And there’s nothing that beats that feeling.” She was grinning as she said that, wide and proud. Maico felt the edge of her lips curl up in sympathy. “You know how many of our guests were killed in the attack? None.” She shook her head. “None at all.”

And now she was just boasting.

Maico sighed. There was no question about making a story out of Jet’s temper. That would be counterproductive for everyone. That was the thing which made a journalist....

It was knowing what not to report.

While there were plenty of people who’d find the whole thing fascinating, she’d alienate some of her most valuable sources in the process, and ruin her own reputation as someone who could be talked to, without fear that every little slip up would be splayed across the interwave for everyfen to read.

Ryan was different. He sold raw information. So long as someone was interested. That was how he earned his cookies

“So are you going to run with the story?” Jet broke into her thoughts.

“About yesterday? No...” said Maico, with a shake of her head. She could see Jet exhale a sigh of relief. “About the Knight Sabers?.... I still haven’t decided,” she admitted.

She wasn’t even sure if she was trying to talk herself into it, or out of it anymore.

“I understand why you want to keep the Saber’s identity a secret,” she said. “But the Saber’s willingness to use force....” She steadied herself on her feet. “You’re unlicensed mercenaries who use deadly force, without any overseeing authority, operating with the support of several Big name fen, and probably with the tacit approval of Great Justice too. Probably in Great Justice’s employment. And that right there is something people do have some right to know about,”

And, I’ve been following this up for so long, that I really need the money. But it was a fair point.

“I can’t stop you running the story.” Jet stated, calmly.. “Not without crossing the line in a big way. And like I told you, there’re enough people who know who we are to shut us down hard when that happens,”

“But you plan to offer me the UBA story, with the promise of more to come if I keep it quiet, right?”

Jet nodded. “We planned to give you the story yeah. The news of Mason’s corruption needs to be broken by an independant, to have the right effect.”

Feeling her momentum build, Maico stretched.

“You know, there’s nothing stopping me from running with both....”

Jet folded her arms across her chest.“And by asking us to go to Stellvia, you given yourself the perfect opportunity to break the story, with us right there in person and in public to prove it.”

Silence.

Maico cast her eyes down on her scrawled notes, exhaling a satisfied sigh.

“One last thing. Have you been manipulating me the whole time I’ve been here?”

Jet blinked, caught by surprise for a moment. Maico felt herself smirk. Jet gave a lazy shrug of her metallic blue shoulders.

“Ah now, that would be an ecumenical matter.” she reassured her.

Maico was left with the unsettling feeling of having a reference go whizzing over her head, with no idea even what fandom it belonged to. Something religious?

It didn’t stop her getting the jist of what was meant.

For whatever reason, Jet wasn’t telling. Either she was too proud to admit she’d been caught.... or too proud to admit she hadn’t been at all.

----

"For you, the day the Panzer Kunst came to your asteroid and saved you from the Boskone was the most important day of your life. For me, it was Tuesday," ...... I've generated so much flotsam and jetsam to the side of this, it's not funny.
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--m(^0^)m-- Wot, no sig?