“Are they?” Sousuke said, manipulating his machine. “Tell me the definition of nonsense.”
《Impossible, reckless, irrational.》
“You really are just a machine,” Sousuke told him, as the Arbalest shot a Boxer shell into a now-empty gun turret and the engine section.
The battle thereafter was completely one-sided. All of the high-speed craft were destroyed, and the pirates in the base were in a rout.
Mao’s M9 made landfall and went around taking out their remaining defenses. With her external speakers on, she called for surrenders in Cantonese, Mandarin, and Vietnamese. Any who kept up their resistance got a zap from her taser.
Their transport helicopters landed, and their ground forces poured out. Decked out in thick body armor, carrying bulletproof plastic shields, and under the cover provided by Sousuke and the others, they swarmed into the structures that the ASes couldn’t enter.
Before long, each team had announced that they had secured their designated area. Several minutes after that, the pirates that had surrendered were chained up and gathered in the dock. Their mission was effectively complete.
“Yeesh. That was rougher than I expected...” Kurz’s machine, too, had moved from its sniping point to join them, striding through the smoke to eventually make landfall. The M9 Gernsbacks that he and Mao were operating had similar silhouettes to the Arbalest, with long limbs, slender waists, and gray armor that dripped with seawater.
“Let’s just be glad that no Venoms showed up,” Sousuke said, returning the shotcannon to the Arbalest’s waist hardpoint. It was standing next to a group of pirates, seated and stripped of their weapons, and the allied ground forces who were watching over them. The pirates were sulking as if they’d lost a game to a cheating opponent. They didn’t seem to like that their ‘impenetrable stronghold’ had fallen so easily to the weapons known as ASes.
“Uruz-9 here. All ground squads have secured their areas; just two light injuries on our side, and no compromise to mission performance. Pirates have eight dead, four badly wounded, ten lightly wounded,” reported Corporal Yang Jun-kyu, the infantry team leader, over the radio.
Apparently they’d had to kill some resisting pirates—but then, these were people who had attacked any number of shipping vessels and killed their crews, as well. They were already being generous by employing tasers and tear gas and giving them a chance to surrender; it was the pirates’ own fault if they chose to die instead.
“But did we really have to come all this way just for some crummy pirates?” Kurz muttered, surveying the hostages with his M9’s head-mounted sensors.
“These are the Spratly Islands. It’s a jumble of spheres of influence: North and South China, Vietnam, Taiwan... That by itself makes it difficult for any national military to perform large-scale exercises here. This was explained in the briefing,” Sousuke said.
Kurz’s M9 waved its left hand in annoyance. “C’mon, I know that much.”
“Besides, this mission wasn’t just about taking out pirates,” Sousuke went on. “The name of the island is important, too.”
Badamu Island—that was the name of the isolated islet that the pirates had taken as their base. It had many names, as many as there were countries that claimed control of the Spratlys, and as many as there were languages that the Westerners who had once controlled the island spoke. This name, its Mandarin one, was similar to ‘Badam,’ the keyword that Gauron had passed to Sousuke in Hong Kong.
If it had just been the name alone, with nothing else distinctive about it, Mithril likely would have paid the island no mind. But the fact that it was also a stronghold for pirates causing trouble around the Spratlys made it a different story. Intense investigation and recon work suggested that there was little chance that the island was connected to Amalgam—but at the same time, they couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t.
“Uruz-8 to all,” Corporal Speck, the one investigating the pirate base’s storage block, said over the radio. “All I’ve got here is ammo and heroin. There are containers of vanadium, too... but they’re probably plundered. From the Peruvian vessel they raided a few weeks ago, I’d wager.”
“Vanadium?”
“It’s a rare metal, used to make that M9 you’re piloting now. It’s skyrocketed in price in the last few years thanks to the Soviet Civil War and uprisings in South Africa and such. It’s not as valuable as heroin, but... well, that’s a pretty high bar.”
“Oh? You know a lot about it,” Kurz muttered softly.
“I’ve been playing the stocks lately. Read an economics magazine now and then—When you make fighting your whole life, you get stupid.”
“Shut up, you gambling addict.”
Sousuke interrupted Kurz and Speck’s discussion. “Was there anything else that stood out? Any complex machinery, or AS parts?”
“Nope. It’s your standard pirate base, top to bottom,” Corporal Speck confirmed. “Nothing to connect it to those Amalgam guys.”
“We can’t be sure yet. We need to interrogate the base commander first,” Mao said. Her M9 had moved to the summit of the rocky mountain, where she was keeping watch over the surroundings.
“Uruz-9 here. Ah... about that...” Corporal Yang said. “The commander doesn’t seem to be among the hostages. Though that doesn’t mean he isn’t in the base somewhere...”
“Uruz-7 here. He could be hiding among the rank-and-file. Or he could still be somewhere on the island—” Sousuke got that far, then stopped as he realized something. The Arbalest’s sensors gave him a view of the rocky slope, and he could see a person moving around on the rock face that looked out over the harbor. The smoke and the darkness made it hard to see precisely, but it looked like the man had an anti-tank missile on his shoulder. No... he definitely did. The missile was pointing down at him from above. But by the time Sousuke realized it, the man had already fired.
“Sousuke, one o’clock—”
《Warning! ATM!》
Kurz’s and Al’s warnings came at the exact same time.
It was a close-range shot, but well within the range of what the Arbalest could dodge. Still, he knew that
