Occasionally, a bright flash of
light would burst out from one of the windows.
That was the only visual information that could be gleaned about the
Maverick battle. The MCP, or Mobile
Command Post, had a plethora of other sensor readings – infra-red, X-ray, light
enhancement, heat, and sonic. With all
this though, Cain still cursed his inability to see inside the fortress, to
know what his soldiers were doing, who was dying and who was injured. Despite their pat manner in the strategizing
room, the actual battle was anything but.
These wars were heart-wrenching to watch. Several injured Mavericks and Maverick
Hunters were crawling on hands and knees outside the plant, but they couldn't
risk sending out either medics until they were close enough, or teleportation
until they far enough away. So all he
could do was watch their tattered bodies scuttling on the wasteland, still
fighting with limbless torsos. It was
reploid versus reploid down there. Cain
felt like he was seeing his children get slaughtered.
"Lina, can you scan the ID
tags?"
Lina, a human, was operating a
complicated switchboard below Cain's elevated platform. "Not quite sir, there are at least
thirteen hunters still active." She
pressed the telecomm device in her ear to secure it as her head whipped back
and forth. Her hands moved quickly and
smoothly as she pressed buttons and adjusted monitors. "The rest are masked behind interference. We're essentially sitting here blind. And I wouldn't recommend moving forward."
"Just so." Cain
commented. The Mobile Command Post was
just that - mobile. The MHHQ rolling
arsenal consisted of several of these.
To someone on the outside they resembled widened lookout towers housed
in metal, slotted with windows, and attached to tank treads. They acted as a portable base and comm center
during territorial battles, when they had to coordinate attacks of large
numbers of hunters.
There was a silence in the MCP as
the two tried to make sense out of their sparse information. Quiet, muffled sounds of the skirmishes and
bursts out there sporadically popped outside their windows.
Lina said, "They sure do like
to take over power plants a lot, don't they, sir."
Cain chuckled. "Yes, I guess they do. Never thought about it before."
A support reploid climbed up the
ladder to the command center room. He
looked basically humanoid with a green and yellow armor suit and a matching
helmet with a blue-tinted visor attached.
"I've got news. What's going on in here?" he said.
Lina said, "Hey, Tyro. We don't know much. The best info we've got is from the
scope."
"The Mavericks have been
cornered." Tyro, a green reploid
took his place at Cain's right console symmetrical to Lina, "In the left
tower."
Dr. Cain immediately turned his
cameras to the tower, the tallest spire in the complex. It was capped with a cylinder with a radial
antenna. There were no windows inside so
they couldn't see in, and the sensors were just as unhelpful. Cain waited patiently for something
significant to happen.
And something did. A gigantic fire-orange explosion enveloped
the tower. Bright white light washed
into the room and monitors. The three turned
away from the sudden radiance. Dr. Cain
brought his arms up to his face.
"Holy Christ!" Tyro declared.
Cain brought his limbs down as the
light faded. Black smoke billowed out
from the broken tower. "Nobody
could've survived that," he said.
"At least no normal
reploid," Lina corrected as she suddenly remembered the Mavericks that had
been resurrected. Lina turned up the
definition on her scanners. Maybe now
the interference would go away. "I
can't make out anything. Dammit, this is
so frustrating." Lina slammed her
hand on the control panel.
"Wait, over there!" Tyro
shouted.
"Where?"
"At the entrance to the
plant. You see?"
Cain recalibrated the camera to the
front entrance. The doors flew open and
reploids began rushing out of double doors.
"There's our boys," Cain
said excitedly. He hit the comm
button. "Med-evac, get ready. Repair systems to full. Get our boys home."
Support staff rushed out of the MCP
area, carrying boxes and repair supplies.
The Maverick Hunters looked in pretty good condition overall. Cain was pleased.
"I don't see where X and Zero
are though," Lina commented.
Cain looked again. "There he is. See, he's waving." Cain centered his camera on the blue-armored
android. X made a victory sign with his
two fingers when he noticed Cain's camera on him.
The doctor relaxed back in his
seat. "Good old X, always seems to come
out in one piece."
X walked through the pods of injured
reploids, being unhurt himself, just exhausted from fighting. He took a moment to look at the fellow
hunters around him, some struggling to escape the fiery power plant. Whoever said reploids had no emotions, that
they felt no pain, had yet to see one of these Maverick battles up close, to
see what really went on here. In this
one, they were fortunate. No one had anything
worse than a detached arm. All they had
to do was clean out the Mavericks, prevent them from setting up shop in the
plant, from gaining a foothold. It had
been a small victory but a decisive one.
Still, X had that nagging feeling that it all could've been avoided
somehow. The feeling had found him in
nearly every battle, so often that he expected it now, like a scheduled
reminder.
X wandered in between the troops
taking the field and grabbed hold of the rung of the ladder into the MCP. Typing some commands into the panel above his
head, he undid the hatch and entered the sectioned-off part of the room in
back. Fresh air puffed into the
compartment.
"X!" Lina turned as X
hoisted himself into the room, "Good to see you," she quick turned
back to her monitor.
"Where's Zero?" Cain
asked.
"I'm not entirely sure. Our strategy was to corner them all into the
top tower. One of them caused a chain
reaction, it ended up combusting the lot of them. It was a narrow escape, but we all
survived." It was pretty nasty, as
X recalled. One Maverick panicked and
all the rest of them suffered the sacrifice.
"What a quick victory,"
Tyro commented.
"I'm pretty confident Zero is
still in there, and he's okay. Probably
finishing up the job." X climbed up
next to Cain and looked over his shoulder at the monitors. He smelled of hot oil and gas.
"A saber? Was that a saber?" Tyro yelped and
practically jumped out of his seat.
"Through the window?"
"Maybe," Lina said.
"Don't send any hunters inside
to get him," Cain said, "I don't want to risk soldiers in case there
are any more explosions or being exposed to the virus."
X suddenly leaned down to Lina's
station. "Lina, did you do a scan
for the virus?"
"Nope." X's eyes widened. She corrected herself, "I mean, no,
there was no evidence of freeborn Maverick virus that I could detect."
"Okay, good. Keep an eye on it. We still don't know how it's
communicated." X thought maybe
through constant scans they'd be able to tell how the Maverick virus traversed
from reploid to reploid. There were so
many precautions set up that were nothing but a smokescreen to assuage fear in
the camp.
The entrance hatch flipped open and
Janus and Duplex climbed into the MCP. X
turned his attention to them for a moment as they stepped up to Cain's
platform. "Report from Commander
Zero, sir," Janus said and saluted.
"Zero is still inside the power plant, in good condition. He's searching for any Mavericks that may
have survived. The transporter scrambler
is out of commission so he can teleport out at the first sign of trouble, or if
the plant reaches critical."
"Good, acknowledged," X
said.
"Well, it's good to be able to
relax now," Dr. Cain said. "I
thought this was going to be the beginning of another all-out war."
Lina typed into her control
panel. "Systems are not yet
reporting that the field is safe for teleportation... oh, wait, yes it is. Hee hee, oops."
"What 'oops'?" Cain asked.
"I just didn't switch my scan
filters on. Sorry."
Janus peered over Lina's shoulder
and put a hand on the back of her chair.
"If the computer system is too difficult for you to understand, I
suggest some training courses. Human
error can be very costly in battle."
Lina looked back at the gray reploid
without turning her head. Duplex stood
behind him, idle as usual. "Thank
you Janus, but I think I know the system better than you. Just go back to blasting things."
"Lina, behave yourself. Janus, mind your place," Cain
disciplined.
Janus huffed and stepped away. "I am very mindful of my place, thank
you very much. A low rung on the ladder
of war. Thrust into any job that could
have me, while she gets to sit here in the aerie and make mistakes."
"Oh, we'd let you sit here, but
we're afraid you'd talk us all to sleep," Lina smirked. Janus just scowled.
Tyro laughed heartily at Lina's
zinger. "What's the matter,
Janus? Don't like hunting with
humans? If I didn't know better, I'd say
you'd gone Maverick. Cause if you have,
you're not a very good one," he smirked.
"Not at all, sir, I just have a
thing against inept humans."
Lina thought it best to keep her
mouth shut and pay attention to her control panel.
X said, "Come on, Janus, you
know we couldn't survive without humans in the post."
"No, of course not. I could never survive without typographically
errored reports, broken down machinery, miscommunication, not to mention the
budgetary allocations for food, clothing, shelter, first-aid-"
"Remind me not to have you
write my obituary," Lina laughed. X
did as well.
"Your obituary... hmm, how
would that go?" Janus pondered sarcastically. "'Here lies Lina Rowe, her skill was
always touch-and-go'."
"Pfft," Lina scoffed and
rolled her eyes. Mega Man X snickered
at, if nothing else, the wit of it.
"How about me?" Tyro asked
as he leaned back in his chair to look at him.
"Oh, please. I'd really rather not," Janus said.
"Come on, we're waiting for
Zero anyway. Do me! Do me!"
"Fine, let me put my gears to
work here." Janus put his fingers
to his head like he was concentrating hard on receiving a psychic vision. 'Below rests the earnest Tyro, experience in
short supply though'."
"Ooh, burn," Lina
laughed. "How about Dr. Cain?"
"'Cain lived in scholarly ways,
but ended in a senile daze'."
Again, the small crowd laughed at
Janus' rhyme.
"You have no shame,
Janus," Lina said.
"How about X?" Tyro said.
"'Here lies the mighty X, Upon
whom there was a mighty hex, Cursed with a cannon on his hand, And strife
throughout the reploid land, Fighting Mavericks who would defy, And never
really knowing why, He had to blast them all to dust, But fight he did cause
fight he must, Until one day, he met his end, By the trait-'"
X waited for him to finish the
line. "Well?"
"By the blast he could not
defend."
The group stayed silent at Janus'
long and eerily accurate foretelling.
"Heh," X surmised, breaking the tension. "You can certainly talk well, but
Mavericks don't really care if you can recite Keats in the middle of a
firefight." X stepped down off the
platform and up to the gray reploid.
"And I'd watch what you say in public. Don't want to be accused of being Maverick,
do you? We all know what happened last
time... with Double."
As Janus watched him pass by and
leave the common room into one of the side compartments a sly smile crept over
his face. He brought a finger to his
chin deep in thought.
"Zero's coming out!" Lina
exclaimed.
"At last," Cain said.
Janus looked through the window at
Lina's station. Down below, Zero was
indeed walking out of the power plant, and looking ravaged. His red and white armor was burnt and scratched. The long blond hair under his helmet was
clumped from oil and other fluids. His
right arm had a severe tear in the protective covering, and he favored his
right leg. But his face had that
determined look on it, the look of a feral warrior, and his beam saber was
still at the ready. After he surveyed
the gray field outside the power plant, where the clean-up crew was still
working, he retracted the green energy blade into the hilt and holstered it. All in the MCP tracked him as he managed his
way through the debris and up into the tank.
Zero climbed in, passing by Janus
and Duplex and approached the elevated doctor who spun around to talk
face-to-face. "Commander Zero
checking in, sir." Zero saluted.
"Victory has been achieved.
There's no more threat to the power plant."
"There's barely any power
plant," Cain remarked. "What
was that massive explosion?"
"That was the power
transformer, unfortunately, sir. One of
the lesser ranked Mavericks panicked, took it upon himself to sacrifice it in
order to protect it."
"I see. All the Mavericks are accounted for?"
"There were twenty-four in
total, twelve of them Docs."
Docs were a colloquialism for 'Doc
Robots', named from the technology that allowed the 'cloning' of complex robots
and reploids. It copied attack A.I. and
physical construction, but little else, including personality. They were named for the Doc Robot technology
invented a century ago.
"I see. And how about your injuries."
"Better than they look. I'll get all cleaned up after we leave."
"All right then, I'll order all
non-essential personnel to pull out.
We'll leave it at that."
Zero turned and walked down the
steps. "Janus," he pointed,
"You're in charge of clean-up."
He passed by and climbed down the ladder out of the post. He was going to take one of the retreating
mobile units back to get repaired and take it easy.
"Yes, sir," he muttered
quietly.
Dr. Cain turned back to the
console. "Janus, we're going to be
moving the MCP pretty soon. Go out and
oversee the clean-up." Lina and
Tyro had their backs to him as well.
"Yes, sir," Janus made a
little bow and gestured to Duplex to follow him as well. They went down the ladder and onto the
pebbled valley, rocks crunching underneath their padded treads.
Janus kneeled down and rolled around
an abandoned helmet, cracked open on the side.
"First, Duplex, I must confess something to you. Should even ten men fall in the line of duty,
you would not be promoted."
"Wh- what?" he
stammered. "I don't get- what-
?"
"Keep your tongue and listen to
my instructions." He started
walking toward the power plant, passing by soldiers and medics getting their
gear together and heading out.
"There can be no doubt X and Zero are the finest Maverick Hunters
ever. They're at the top of their
game. Where one fails, the other
succeeds. X's pacifism is replaced by
Zero's heroics. Zero's ferocity is
subdued by X's humanism. While they are
together, they cannot be defeated."
Janus turned back and waved the incoming reploids onto the field, coming
in to repair the power plant and make general clean up of anything left over.
Janus continued, "However,
strong they are, despite all they do to protect the humans, they can never
win. Why? Because they fight against what they are. The reploids are their true enemy. Isn't that ironic?"
"I suppose."
"They know it just as well as
we. Soon they'll get tired of fighting
an endless war. The fight's already
getting to him. Did you see how paranoid
X behaved in the cockpit? His irrational
fear of the spread of the Maverick virus among us?"
"I don't think he was that
irrational."
Janus quickly turned to Duplex,
stopping those thoughts before they could develop. "No one is so worried about something
that can't be tracked and can't be identified.
He was practically jumping at the thought of being infected. He's clearly nervous about having one of his
own turned into a monster he must have to defeat. He must still be guilt-racked from
before. Now he believes he can't trust
anyone. Anyone could turn at anytime,
the mystery of the virus." Janus
picked up a broken chunk of metal, an unidentifiable piece of Maverick. "Irrational or no, X has
reservations." He tossed it back on
the ground.
"Soooo... what should we
do?"
Janus smiled. "Here's what you'll do tomorrow
night. X will be walking through the
halls. Use your ability and strike him,
tap him on the shoulder or such."
"You know my Star Cloak isn't
exactly flawless. There is still a vague
outline of me-"
"Oh, that's what I'm counting
on. X will find you and try to apprehend
you. Obviously, don't let him do
it. Struggle, fight, whatever it
takes."
"What if he destroys me?"
"He won't. X is a pacifist at heart. He won't kill you."
"What if I accidentally kill
him?"
"Huh," Janus suppressed a
chuckle. "You won't kill X, trust
me."
"So how is this supposed to
help me?"
"Can't you see? You will be found to obviously not be a
Maverick. X's attack will be unprovoked
and he'll be discredited, perhaps discommended for attacking a fellow officer."
"Ah, I see," Duplex
nodded. "So instead of bringing me
up, we'll be bringing them down. I like
it. I'll make sure I have something
special in your inbox at my first opportunity."
Janus nodded. "I must tend to my duties now. Go about your business and meet at the
workroom at seven tonight."
Duplex's path bent around to the
side of the power plant where he would join some other sweepers. The facilities' large double doors opened
like a maw. The gray reploid led those
behind him into the dark hole.
REC SYSTEM 1.2
Copyright © 2105, 2109, 2114
Real Mem =
8192 TB
Avail Mem = 32768 TB
Primary Data Cache = 512 KB
Primary Inst Cache = 768 KB
Secondary Cache = 32768KB
Testing file system..........
Testing files.........
OK!
Login: janus221347
Pass: *********
Welcome!
Janus2214347> new log -nx
Created new logfile 6/29/21XX 184934