The transport helicopter, Gebo-9, replied immediately. “Gebo-9, I read you.”
“You see the lifeboat that just left the cruise ship? 800 meters north-northeast from here. It’s got Ansuz on it! Stop them!” Even as he spoke, the boat carrying Tessa continued to move further and further away, until it was fully swallowed up by the darkness.Call Sign Gebo-9, MH-67 Utility Helicopter “Pave Mare”
“Stop them? How?” shouted First Lieutenant Eva Santos. She was the pilot of a Mithril utility helicopter, a MH-67 Pave Mare, which was currently circling from a position four kilometers south of the Pacific Chrysalis. “Tessa’s on board, right? We can’t fire on them. What if we hit her?”
“Can’t you target the engine or something?!” Yang shouted over the radio.
“Oh, as easy as that, huh? I’ll try, but... dammit, have you got them yet?!” Santos shouted to the electronic warfare technician in the back seat, who was scanning the area with their infrared sensors.
“Hang on... just got them. Bearing 3-4-0, distance 4000. Speed, thirty knots.”
“Okay, circle around to their port side and approach.” Lieutenant Santos tilted the stick forward to speed them after the boat. The engine’s turbines roared, and the Pave Mare approached its target. Since they had previously been carrying the enormous payload of the Arbalest, the chopper now felt as agile as a fighter jet.
In less than a minute, the escaping boat came into view of her night vision goggles. “Got it in sight. Minigun two on standby. Don’t hit the cabin by mistake.”
“Roger, Captain!” the gunner responded enthusiastically.
Once they were about 200 meters from the left side of the speeding boat, Santos gave the order. “Fire!”
The 7.62mm machine gun attached to the Pave Mare’s starboard side fired. A rain of a hundred bullets per second grazed the back of the boat, sending up pillars of water. Unfortunately, none hit their target.
“Get your aim right!”
“The waves are rocking it all over the place!” the gunner protested. “Dammit, the thing’s too fast; we’ll hit the colonel. I can’t pinpoint-target the engine. Can’t we get closer?!”
“I’ll try—” Santos was just about to pitch them forward again when something strange happened. From an empty patch of sea, a few hundred meters ahead of the lifeboat’s current course, came a peal of light.
“Anti-air missile!” someone shouted. It had appeared abruptly from the sea surface and was tearing through the air straight at Santos’s helicopter.
“Ngh!” She moved the stick and cyclic violently, ejected decoy flares and chaff into the air around them, and sent the Pave Mare into a spin. It was an extreme maneuver, practically diving them right for the ocean.
It was going to be close. Two seconds left—
The missile exploded at close range, and a hard jolt from the side sent them pitching to the right. Lieutenant Santos’s instruments went haywire, and strange metallic squeals erupted from the engine and drive shaft. Alarms rang out all around them. She could hear her copilot and the electronic warfare tech shouting:
“Fire in the second engine! Output down! Losing fuel pressure!”
“Port-side ECS damaged! We lost our left stub wing!”
Though dizzy from banging her head on the seat, Santos calmly checked the stick’s responsiveness. “Stay calm,” she ordered. “Shut off the second engine. Switch to auxiliary power and fuel lines. Fuel supply, too. We’ve still got the tail rotor, right? Do you have visual?”
“Affirmative!” the crew member in the cargo room responded.
“And the automatic fire suppression systems?”
“Working.”
Great, Lieutenant Santos thought. We can still fly. If she’d acted even a few seconds later, they’d all have been blown to kingdom come. It had been a very close call. While dishing out precise directions on how to minimize the damage, she used her active ECCS to search the area the missile had come from for ECS activity.
“Dammit...” she swore as she found what she was looking for. There was a large aircraft floating on the water, camouflaged with ECS, and an infantryman had shot the anti-air missile from one of the wings. It must be an Amalgam ship that had slunk into the area to serve as backup at some point.
If a second shot came, they wouldn’t be able to avoid it. Santos desperately wanted to save Tessa, but she knew that getting herself shot down wouldn’t help anyone. Gritting her teeth, Santos ordered, “W-Withdraw...” and turned the helicopter back in the direction they’d come from. All she could do now was to make a frustrated report to her colleagues.
As the boat continued racing through the night, Tessa sat in its cabin, handcuffed and powerless. She could only watch silently as the allied helicopter pursuing them took a hit from a missile and withdrew. It was probably Lieutenant Santos’s Gebo-9—She just hoped nobody had been injured.
“Hmhmhm, hmmhmhmm, hmm, hmm, hmm...” Harris sat in the boat’s driver seat, humming Beethoven’s 9th against the salt air. “It’s Christmas. Enjoy it!” the man proclaimed joyously as he spun to face her. “The truth is, you’re a much more valuable VIP than Chidori Kaname. Normally, you stay hidden and unreachable under the sea. I consider myself truly lucky. If I still had access to my ship’s facility, I could have pried into every part of your mind... but I guess we can’t have everything.”
Tessa just glared death at him.
“Ooh, scary,” Harris said, taunting her with a shrug. “Sad to say, I’ll probably be denied the chance to investigate you directly. I wanted to strip your mind naked and prod its deepest depths. I wanted to see that proud, beautiful face of yours twisted, and screaming in humiliation. Exposing all your ugliest hatreds and fears, your most obscene desires... I wanted to watch your dull eyes fill with tears as drool dripped down your chin.”
Tessa met his lecherous gaze with steel. “The facility that investigated Kaname-san in Sunan was on that ship?”
“That’s right,” Harris confirmed. “It’s a cruise ship that travels around the world, you see. Very convenient for abducting ‘candidates’—identified in the usual way—from various countries, and smuggling them past national borders.”
“Very inefficient,”
