Ghost In The Shell: Stand Alone Complex Fan Fiction ❯ My Magical Gate Experience Was Ruined, As I Expected ❯ YGS: 13 ( Chapter 13 )

[Tanya/Komachi]

“Did you know the star charts match, Niisan? That’s the same planet as the Outbreak Company thing,” I pointed out. Batou had been assigned to site-security for the science teams, and a small telescope had been setup in the camp which was automapping star positions and the data was transferred by sneakernet, a USB stick, through the gate and uploaded to teams of Astronomers who were racing to locate the position of the planet. It had a moon, but it was closer than ours and possibly lighter, with completely different craters.

The reconnaissance teams had night vision cameras, and there were thousands of people examining the data after the initial battle on Alnus Hill, apparently the name of the place where the Gate was on the other side. The Alnus Hill Slaughter, I privately called it. It was a scene of vicious brutality, driving home just how outmatched these screwheads were.

The other side of the gate was Earthlike world with breathable air, normal weather and temperature range, good oxygen and very similar gas levels, and untapped mineral wealth. Geologists were getting recruited into the JSDF and sent over with recon teams. And they got a huge signing bonus and preferential treatment. A whole world to map and explore, and the long range drones were doing recon flights and photo mapping the region, and eventually the whole planet would get the ground penetrating radar treatment for high resolution mapping. Spy satellites are easy, when you can carry the rockets through via truck, the mere three miles to the other side. It was harder to get the rockets through Tokyo than setup and launched into LEO.

For now there was no GPS so it was dead reckoning, at first. I suggested using radio beacons on mountain peaks to transmit to simple triangulation navigation, very similar to what was used routinely in aviation. This suggestion was approved and commercial aviation nav beacons were modified and I got the job of installing them on several peaks around Alnus hill. Each one would need resupply for the generator to run the radio, but I got paid by the trip until such time as the air force would take over this job using helicopters. For now, I was getting the equivalent of a house payment each trip.

This was a good thing, because I needed to move out of that apartment. There were spies across the hall. I dread them kidnapping Taishi. It would make me lose my temper, and I might damage the building. I told Taishi to request temporary leave at work and find a real estate agent and buy us a house, quietly. The spies would know where it was, too, but at least with a house I could deal with trespassers in a more effective and permanent way.

The world beyond the Gate was only dry steppe near the Alnus Hill. The river descended the valley into forest and farming villages, which I had to be content viewing from above. Niisan said that Batou would probably be joining him in forward recon with one of the advance teams. There were a couple hundred soldiers doing that with Japanese army trucks. That Lieutenant Itami was leading one of them, probably as punishment. I heard from Ebina, who is working for him. She’s never worked with Itami before, and I haven’t met the guy, but Batou and Niisan call him the classic combination of aggravating competence and lazy luck. They think, so they told me, that something terrible would happen to him AGAIN. As that sort of thing normally happens to me, I am all in favor of someone else being a magnet for some god’s spite.

Yukino and I were called out for rapid response action from time to time. Sometimes we were offered bonuses for supply drops in areas where a helicopter would draw too much attention, including at the slum of the capitol city of this scummy slaver empire. For once, the Japanese government and myself were on the same page about slavers, and work was being done to destroy that way of life. Criminal gangs who took slaves found themselves sniped in the darkness. Caravans of slave carts were attacked by Yukino and I, and the slaves freed by a quick strike from a vorpal enhanced machete. They won’t issue me a decent bayonet, even though this crappy rifle will take one and has the mounts. The staff sergeant says I don’t have training and he doesn’t have to issue them to the untrained. I resisted the urge to kill him, but his car was found flipped over and its undercarriage cut out with some sharp instrument in the base parking lot later that morning. Jerk. Showed you.

I had made no headway about getting a proper rifle. The army said that only this model was issued for the Special Region, what they were calling this entire planet was Special Region, like some kind of breakfast cereal. I was making it work, but the ammo was heavy, thus limited, and the flak vest was dead weight that slowed me down. The vest weighed almost as much as I do. Modern police Kevlar, or better yet Iraq war vests with cermet inserts would be better and lighter. And takes all those alice pack pouches for granola bars and filled magazines and the radio. And a Kevlar helmet for stopping all the bullets that the enemy can’t shoot because they don’t have guns because they are primitive screw heads. Ahem. I am not angry. I am not losing my temper. Armies are dumb, but they kill lots of people, some of them even on the enemy side.

I flew over the skies of the Special Region and got the news of a giant red dragon. This was interesting. And it was about 10 minutes away. We veered off course, radioing back our intercept time and readied our crappy rifles. Intel said it was over 100 meters long, agile, and breathed fire. It could hover. I had spells to block fire, and artillery spells for my rifle. There were civilians at risk. I signaled to Yukino and we both accelerated drastically, approaching 400 kph. The dragon quickly became visible and we readied our rifles and fired artillery shells at its back. One hit, the other missed. It was agile, and it shook off the blow with minor damage I could see. It flared fire at us and then turned and flapped its great wings, gaining altitude and then dived below the bluff, surging away, gaining speed.

“Do we pursue?” asked Yukino.

“Negative. There are wounded civilians. Provide aid or overwatch.”

It was horrible. There were burned twisted corpses of close to two hundred dead and wagons sending up plumes of black smoke. The stink of human flesh turned to charcoal is nothing like BBQ. We are monkeys, apes. We don’t smell anything like pork. And there were screaming people, some of them going still and just dying in front of us. These weren’t the soldiers who came to pillage Tokyo. These were farmers and villagers, plowing the land and struggling to survive on poor soil and hard luck. I did my best with the healing magic I could use. I saved a few from shock. I healed some bones and some skin regrew over what could be deadly otherwise. I did what I could. It wasn’t nice. It was horrible, but battlefields are horrible. The medic named Kurokawa, a pretty woman who reminded me of Saki, tended to a man with a broken leg when I found Yukino staring into the eyes of a girl in a blue robe, a girl who was holding a wizards staff and staring back just as oddly.

“You,” said Yukino. “You remind me of Yui.”

“You,” said the girl in her Latin, ”are familiar.”

A wounded horse bucked, screaming on a broken leg. It lurched at my subordinate dragging harness and the wagon so I calmly shot it once in the brain without thinking about it. It flopped to the ground, dead. A dumb looking lieutenant stuck his head out from around a wagon and peered at me. The name tag said Itami. Oh, it was him. I sighed.

“Aren’t you those girls from Ginza?” he said.

“We’re from Chiba. We were visiting Ginza that day. Lots of people visit Ginza.”

“Well, not anymore. Or not for fun.” This was from Ebina, who stepped out from around another cart. The villagers were peering at us, not understanding our language. I gathered they spoke guttural Latin, like a version of Romanian with slightly different pronunciation and some bastard consonants and vowels that probably evolved over 2000 years. So close to Latin, but not exactly.

“Ebina. Want to introduce us?” I offered.

“Komachi and Yukino, magical girls of Japan,” she said, pointing at each of us. She introduced her own patrol, barely a platoon for recon. There were also several hundred refugees, whose town was a pillar of smoke in the distance, thanks to the big red dragon we’d shot at.

“Where are you taking all these people?” I asked Itami. He was in charge, so he was the guy to ask.

“We’re escorting the villagers to another village with room for them, but there’s some orphans who have nowhere to go. The village chief says they can’t feed anyone else and will starve if they try, or might not get shelter if they bring orphans so I’m taking them back to Alnus with the trucks.” A morally correct decision, but I wasn’t experienced in dealing with refugees. I mostly blew up the enemy, and the last time I ran into “civilians” they ended up shooting at me so I wiped out their entire city with artillery strikes. I faced court martial over that. Thankfully I was able to blame shift, but as a modern and more stable person I wonder if I would have had the ethical gravitas to simply step back and NOT attack rather than let my pride create the massacre which really happened there. Ethical decisions and practical decisions.

“We’ll escort you and keep the dragon off. You should probably radio ahead about tents, and food. They might be able to deliver in time for dinner from Tokyo. It isn’t a long trip through the gate, but it would be a good idea to give advanced notice.” Itami seemed to think this was a good point and got on the horn about it. We finished up the horrible job of policing the site and had to abandon many corpses on the field of battle and flee. I suspect the dragon would return at eat them. They said the villager told them that dragons who have eaten human or elven flesh grow a taste for it, and hunt us like snack food on legs. Are we the Elvis of snack food? Tasty and nutritious to flying monsters? I have a terrible feeling this is so.