Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh (3)
Within Japanese territorial waters lay Achob, the mobile subsea military research base of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In all that vast facility, only a single project was underway: to wring every last drop from the tides of fortune and faith that had lately come flooding into Japan, and to drive the development of a new superweapon at full throttle.
To that end the United States had gone so far as to mobilize Laura Groothuizen herself. Not that it would have mattered either way. Knowing her temperament, she would have shoved her way in uninvited no matter how sternly anyone warned her off.
And now the Doctor's betrayal had just come to light. Worse, word had it she had joined hands with the terrorists behind last year's Christmas Eve massacre.
It was a grave problem, and not only because a talent like Groothuizen had gone over to the enemy. The information she held was worse still. According to the Church's reports, as creator of the Apostle James the Greater—Abraham-Delta—she was presumed to have planted a kind of backdoor in him. Abraham had served as the Church's foremost prophet and intelligence operative. How many of the Church's secrets might already have leaked to Groothuizen was frightening even to imagine.
And when was the Roman Catholic Church ever an ordinary organization? The state secrets in its keeping alone could have stacked paperwork into a tower. If the Church had been compromised, it was not the sort of trouble that would inconvenience them and them alone.
Set even those long-term fears aside, and the superweapon under development was a problem in its own right.
The battleship had already reached the final stages of development, and the Doctor could not spirit the whole of it away by herself. Command was no fool; they would never have concentrated authority of that kind in a single pair of hands. Unless every researcher on the project cooperated with her unanimously, stealing the ship was impossible.
A piece of it, though, was another matter. The anomalies invested as the project's core technology were dangerous materials even taken one by one, each of them with a history of triggering a scenario. Misuse even a single one with intent, and a country or two could be wiped from the map within days. That much, at least, had to be kept out of terrorist hands.
That was why the Second Anomaly Response Special Task Force, Leviathan—why Rachel Evans—had moved.
Maintaining the security of Research Base Achob was already among their assigned missions. At this moment, the muzzle closest to the Doctor belonged to Leviathan, and their being professionals of anomaly warfare, a special task force in the truest sense, was no small point in their favor. It was the only move that could be made before the enemy had time to answer, and sending Leviathan as that move could fairly be called the best one available.
Even so, nothing guaranteed the operation would succeed.
It stood to reason. People liked to say modern war was a war of information—and if that was true, just how many cards was the other side holding? No one knew how long she had been working with the terrorists, but the odds were high she had prepared countermeasures against the Leviathan unit well in advance. The fight came down to whether even those countermeasures could be smashed through head-on by overwhelming force. Personally, it was an operation very much to her taste. Strip away private feeling, though, and a commander who heard orders like these ought to have hurled them back on the spot and told the sender to stop talking nonsense.
She hadn't, because she knew this truly was the best move. No—because they were the only ones left who could even attempt a surprise strike on Dr. Groothuizen. Call it the best option if you liked. It still only meant first place in a field of one.
So what was there to do? Charge in, and see what happened. Anyone liable to cut and run here could never have made it into this unit in the first place.
And yet.
"I'm seriously gonna lose it..."
Even so, she had never once imagined she would take a knife in the back from her own people.
Scraping along the floor through a blurring field of vision, Evans let out a groan. What left her mouth, though, was more blood than breath. The gurgling was especially thick; scraps of torn lung or flesh might well have been tangled up in it. Her body was heavy. A frame that had swallowed a gutful of rounds without distinguishing lead from silver was heavy in the purely physical sense, but worse than that, strength simply would not enter her limbs.
Right up until the operation began, there had been no sign of anything wrong. It was a dangerous op, and the tension had hung thick, but she had not caught so much as a whiff of unrest from inside their own ranks. They sealed the research facility's entrance and drew in on the Doctor's position like a noose, and Colonel Evans had thought it was all proceeding smoothly.
That held until, out of nowhere, reports of friendly betrayal came in all at once. Nearly half the unit had turned their guns on their own comrades, as if they had planned it together.
And Rachel Evans was no exception to having a muzzle leveled at her. If anything, it was worse. Every last member of the team that had been moving with her opened fire on her without a single one left out.
That she had clawed her way out of it alive was nothing short of a miracle—and even that miracle had ended with her pitching over mid-flight and rolling across the floor like this.
Why in the world had they done it? Even as she clenched her fist hard, fighting to hold on to consciousness, the question turned over in one corner of her mind. Charm, suggestion, brainwashing: she found it difficult to believe they had fallen under any of those. An anomaly response unit kept countermeasures for exactly that, and for so many personnel to have been under someone's control without a soul noticing, right up until the moment the operation began, was plainly wrong.
Evans trusted her own eye, and on this much she could speak with certainty. Every one of them had been in their right mind.
Which meant all those people had chosen, of their own will, to stand with the Doctor. That was no easier to accept. They were not the sort to waver under a temptation to betray the unit in the first place. Stretch charity as far as it would go and she might allow that a few of them could have. But to get this many to turn their blades the wrong way—what in the world would it take?
She could not understand it. She could not make herself accept it.
The situation, however, had already happened, and Rachel Evans had to answer it. She wrung out what strength she had and crawled.
At some point a trick had been played. Communications with the outside were cut off as well.
She had to get out. At the very least, she had to get this situation—this information—through, without fail. The exits were likely already sealed by the enemy, but she could not simply give up on them. Even if she had to crawl across the floor like something wretched...
"...Ah."
Thud. The hand she had thrust out with everything she had left touched something, and for an instant focus snapped back into her vision.
It was a person's leg. A woman's leg, a little slender, belonging to a small frame.
Rachel Evans slowly raised her head... and her eyes met the leg's owner.
Hair come undone, clothes in tatters, and irises dyed a scarlet light. It was a different figure from the photograph she had seen in a report, and yet the moment she saw that face, Evans was certain.
"Kisaki Sasa—"
She glared on reflex and squeezed the breath out of herself. She never got to finish the name. Before the sound could even form, Evans's windpipe and lungs were parted from one another, and in a spinning field of vision she could make out her own torso, its head cut away.
Slowly her eyelids sank. By the time the head that had briefly bounced up fell back to the ground, Rachel Evans's eyes were already shut.
The throbbing through her whole body hardly registered anymore. The trouble was that her legs grew far too heavy with every step. Whipping herself onward by sheer will had its limits, and still she could move, because she was certain it would all be over soon. Sasaki Kisaki forced the strength into herself and lifted her foot from the ground once more. The steps were closer to staggering than to walking.
She managed a few of them, then turned her head on a whim and looked down at the corpse of a foreigner dressed in uniform. A corpse with its head cut off. The blade of blood that had been circling it soon broke apart and soaked the floor. Spending still more blood when she was already this exhausted was a waste, but she had been ordered to kill anyone she met fleeing on the way in, and so there was nothing for it.
In this horrific business of being hunted by the Church, the orders, at least, she could trust. No—she had to trust them.
Sasaki Kisaki glanced at the phone she had been clutching tight in one hand. A slider feature phone, in this day and age; you could hardly find a model more obsolete. But this old phone had kept her alive until now.
At first she had not been able to understand the situation at all. Out of nowhere a call had come from Sanjou Miyuki, bringing word that the prophet had been captured. Then she had gone on to say that the prophet—Kan'in Tomoe—would soon expose their identities as well, and that they had to flee at once. Naturally Sasaki had been flustered and at a loss to begin with, but she quickly grasped that the warning had been meant in earnest. She packed only the bare minimum and left the house that very moment.
Her destination was a coin locker a few stations past her home. Miyuki had told her a means of contact was hidden there, and that they should use it to stay in touch from then on. The phone had been the thing waiting inside that locker.
At first she had even wondered whether she could truly escape. And no wonder—the Church was the opponent. But she did acknowledge Sanjou Miyuki's skill, at least, in having kept herself well hidden from the Church even after committing terrorism, and so she decided to follow her for the time being, telling herself this was the better of the options she had. It worked far better than she had expected. Well enough that it seemed as if every operation meant to capture her was being grasped in full and answered with instructions.
During the flight she subdued a holy knight and interrogated him, and when she heard that the pursuit had deployed not only an Apostle but the prophet and even the Vampire Slayer, she doubted her own ears. Which was to say that she had been escaping, safely, from monsters of that order. Had they gone and recruited yet another prophet? Even with thoughts like that turning over, Sasaki carried on her life on the run.
The news of Sanjou Miyuki's death reached her several days after that.
It was suicide. And not a mere death: her soul itself had been extinguished, leaving her in a state where no trick of any kind could be played. Miyuki had been a necromancer, after all, and the Church would certainly have examined that part with care. The problem was the date. Sanjou Miyuki had met her eternal death on the very day Sasaki left home.
Then who on earth were these calls coming from? Who was this person cooperating with her even while impersonating Sanjou Miyuki? Honestly, it was less curiosity than terror.
And still she could not refuse the instructions. That they were helping her escape was plain enough, and by now the only pillar she had left to lean on was those orders. So Sasaki Kisaki never pried into the identity of the voice on the other end, and following the instructions, she arrived here.
She had to go on. She felt certain that he would be waiting ahead. Staggering, Sasaki moved her feet.
How far she walked, she could not have said. At some moment a vast space opened before her: a wide cavern spread out indoors, and within it another structure raised—no, a machine so enormous it could be mistaken for a building. The facility itself, seated on the seafloor, already had the air of something out of a science fiction film, but this place gave that impression more than anywhere else.
"—Oh. Made it right on time, did you?"
One person stood against the backdrop of those strange machines. Between locks of golden hair, two eyes of different colors. Heterochromia itself was not so very rare, but a difference that stark was exceedingly so. Among the people Sasaki Kisaki knew, there was only one.
That it was the very person she had thought of was proven by the white coat worn over a black shirt—more precisely, by the name on the researcher identification clipped to the coat.
...Principal Research Engineer. Dr. Laura Groothuizen.
"...So it was you? The one who helped me while pretending to be Sanjou Miyuki?"
A far bigger figure than she had expected, and for a moment Sasaki was thrown. Then she forced the question out through a bone-dry throat. In truth it did not matter who it was. If she did not want the Church to catch her and tear her limb from limb, there was only one place left to cling to.
"Helping you—that part's right."
"The way you put it is... off, somehow."
"I never pretended to be Sanjou Miyuki."
"What are you saying... no. Enough. So—what am I to do? What exactly are you planning?"
The explanation could wait. What mattered right now lay elsewhere, and Sasaki, seeming to grasp as much, turned the talk aside. At that the Doctor grinned.
"What am I planning? I'm planning to steal this."
She jerked a thumb at the thing, which resembled a spaceship out of a film.
"We ride it while we run, and burn a city down now and then."
"The running I'll set aside... but the cities. Why?"
"I've always said it. What, has the old hag gone senile already? I just like it when innocent people die in agony."
"Which is precisely why there is no need, at this point, to carry on like that Miyuki brat..."
"Which is precisely why I said I never pretended. Didn't I?"
Laura Groothuizen swept her bangs up with the flat of her hand and met Sasaki's eyes.
"...Nonsense. Sanjou Miyuki's soul was extinguished."
"Isn't the idea that you can't possess someone without a soul just a narrow little prejudice?"
"You would do better to look up the definition of possession and come back, would you not...?"
She had no idea what the woman intended. Whether a miracle had truly occurred and Sanjou Miyuki had deceived the Church and lived, or whether Dr. Groothuizen was playing some vicious trick.
"Fine. I shall take it as you say. That will do, will it not?"
In the end, Sasaki Kisaki had no choice but to fall in with whatever the woman wanted. In the present situation, the overwhelmingly dominant position belonged to the other side.
"So then—we board that great lump of iron and depart, is that it?"
"Wait a little. We've secured every researcher, so we could leave this instant, but the armaments aren't fully mounted yet."
"Do we have leisure enough for that?"
"Oh, we've got it and then some. The Church, the Japanese government, the American government... our departure will come long before any of them commits a meaningful force, so rest easy."
Now that they had cleanly disposed of the Leviathan unit—the only force that could have matched their timing, the only thing that could fairly have been called a surprise attack—there truly were no risks left. Even a meteor falling out of the sky could not have stood in her way. The Doctor had already finished calculating every variable, up to and including the movements of the heavenly bodies.
Laura Groothuizen said as much, and grinned once more.
—Grinned, and met the eyes of a man walking in from beyond with heavy, deliberate steps.
"Here. I smell a vampire."
He wore a formal suit, and in one hand he carried a rifle fitted with a grenade launcher. For some unfathomable reason there was a pink flower pinned even to his breast... and he was staring at this place.
"Oh, for— fuck."
"Sasaki Kisaki... that's her. Confirmed."
"Damn it...! Get on, now! Armaments or whatever, we're leaving this second—aaaaagh!"
And then the man's eyes began to shine.
It was summer.