“Zero deaths, three light injuries! No one out of action,” Kurz reported. “The tomatoes got the worst of it.”
“Was it just the one?”
“Of course! If we’d had to fight even two or three of those things—” Kurz was cut off, this time by a loud bang that echoed through the hold. Further in from where they were standing, the door of a comparatively unscathed container had been blasted open from the inside. Something had kicked its way out.
“Hey...” Heavy footsteps rang out. Stepping on the door ripped from its hinges, a large black-clad man emerged from the container. It was identical to the enemy they had just fought, from its build, to its clothing, to its expressionless face. Its drive system let out a low hum, and its head sensor glowed in a single, horizontal red line.
“There’s more...” Kurz trailed off. It was the worst-case scenario; that single robot hadn’t been the end of it. They could hear more containers breaking open, one after another, all throughout the hold. More and more copies of the robot emerged, and began to slowly look around. Or... scan for hostiles, maybe? Kurz told himself. Eight of them... no, probably more.
“Uruz-6,” Clouseau demanded. “What’s wrong? Report, Uruz-6!”
“We... We just got about a dozen—” Kurz began to report.
“What? Say that one more—”
“Guys, break for it! This isn’t g—” Kurz turned to warn Yang and Wu, and found them already dashing headlong for the exit. Those jerks... He didn’t even have time to yell at them for their cruel abandonment. Darting around a grasping enemy hand, Kurz hurried to join them.
“Uruz-1 to all units. Code-13, top priority. A dozen or more of those ultra-mini ASes have appeared in the C32 cargo hold. Their abilities are likely as previously reported. If you disable them, they’ll explode with shrapnel. Be careful. Follow standard response procedures, with priority to the evacuation of hostages. Team Delta to C28. Team Echo to corridor C35. Hold the enemy at bay. AP shells permitted. If you can’t hold them back, at least slow them as much as possible.”
At times like these, Clouseau didn’t get angry, nor did he raise his voice. He doled out orders to each team with utmost calm. This precision of his did a better job than anything of communicating the urgency of the situation to the men. There was a faint smell of tension, different than before, as each team radioed acknowledgment.
What the hell are they after? Clouseau asked himself. What do the robots want? Are they here to kill everyone in Mithril and take control of the ship? No, from what Chidori Kaname had said, the robots’ programming wasn’t that sophisticated; their mission must be something simpler. Protect the secret of the vault, then? Kill everyone on the ship and sink it? No, they wouldn’t need robots for that... a high explosive of equivalent size would do the job just as well.
What did they want? How much of their plan had the enemy foreseen? There were too many things he didn’t know. The one thing he did know was that a powerful enemy had appeared on the ship, and that they couldn’t be intimidated or negotiated with.
A member of the PRT spoke up. “Lieutenant, what are they after?”
“We don’t know yet,” Clouseau answered tersely. “This whole thing could have been a setup, or maybe this deployment is a last resort option... Either way, they’ve gotten serious.” He then used his radio to call Mao by the vault. “Uruz-2. Progress report.”
“Not much to say,” she replied swiftly. “Could be as much as three hours, as little as thirty minutes. Something like that.” Clouseau could hear a drill whirring in the background.
“When you have a better idea, let me know,” he told her. “If it’s going to take a while, we’ll give up and withdraw.”
“Got it,” Mao agreed. “Going fast as I can. Out.”
Clouseau yanked away a PC a nearby sergeant was using, knocking a cup and a battery case off the table. “I’m going to have a look around the scene myself. You stay here. Monitor and direct the movement of all teams and hostages. Understand?” He scanned the map of the ship displayed on the 20-inch retractable screen. Then he grabbed a magic marker that had fallen nearby and drew on the screen—a thick line cutting off the back quarter of the ship.
“Ah—” the sergeant began.
“This will be our last line of defense,” Clouseau announced, cutting him off. “Get the hostages behind it, and hold the enemy in front of it. Understand?”
“Y-Yes sir—”
Grabbing a submachine gun loaded not with rubber bullets, but with special armor-piercing rounds, Clouseau flew out of the bridge. He was worried about the status of the hostage evacuation; the cargo hold where the enemy had appeared was close to the ballroom where the students were being held. He didn’t know what the robots were programmed to do. What if they’re programmed to kill indiscriminately? he wondered. What if a killing machine like that just bursts out into the midst of hundreds of students?
Naturally, the nearby explosion had put an end to the carousing of the students of Jindai High. Most of them were now craning their necks around suspiciously and wondering about the sound. The students around Kaname, Kyoko included, were no exception. They halted their game of Scotland Yard (a board game that Kurz had brought from the shopping area, along with a mess of other toys and games to ‘pass the time’), and looked over at their masked supervisor.
He was talking to someone on his radio. After an unusually long silence, the man waded through the crowd, ran up to the stage, and spoke into the microphone. “Um, hey... sorry to interrupt the fun, guys, but there’s a small fire in the hold below us. That explosion you heard earlier was just some cans bursting—” The students erupted into concerned whispers.
“Ah, but don’t worry!” he insisted. “Everything’s fine! It’s just
