Chapter Seventeen—Surprise Arrival

Ichiro watched the radar, knowing that he couldn’t dodge three missiles—not conventionally.

This mech was a fast flyer, but it had no flares. It was not a sky-fighting mech, but rather a good scouting mech. It was fast, agile and capable, but meant to be used in recon mission, not dogfights.

Ichiro angled the machine down and pushed forward on his throttle. The engines roared as he approached the ground at eleven-hundred kilometers per hour.

The missiles traveled at a similar trajectory, putting the speed of impact when taking his mech and the missiles together at approximately twenty-one hundred kilometers per hour.

The missiles approached and Ichiro watched the countdown as the meters per second shrunk in the thousands.

The alarms shrilled, counting the time to impact to five seconds.

By his estimation he had a slightly larger margin of error than he had before because of the extreme speed.

The missiles were agile, but they couldn’t turn on a sword prick.

Shiro gritted his teeth as he banked the mech left, then right, then left again.

The missiles flew past him in woosh and he pulled up, angling his trajectory toward the Governor’s Mansion.

“Um… Commander?”

The commander turned around, wondering what the controller wanted now. “What is it?”

“It was…”

“Out with it.”

“It was a miss, Commander.”

He stalked over to the controller’s radar scan and bent down. When he saw that the missiles indeed had missed, he slammed his fists on the controller’s desk. “FUCK!”

The controller lurched away.

“Get back to your station, idiot!” Then to the rest of the operations controllers in the command station he barked, “Scramble all fighter mechs! We have an introducer in our territory!”

As enemy mechs appeared on Ichiro’s scanners, he did nothing as he screamed toward his trajectory at full burn.

He was down to twenty percent fuel capacity, but it didn’t matter. He would reach the palace in thirty seconds!

Angling the mech down, he flew the machine directly toward his target, not changing or slowing his trajectory.

So far, the official stance of the military in every province was one of a sneering contempt for the resistance.

Overreacting fearfully was to admit the veracity of the threat the resistance posed. If that happened, more would be attracted to the cause. It was simple logic.

And logic was against the empress and her governors.

That was why the Ground to Air Ordinance Commander didn’t take Ichiro seriously. It was why he hadn’t called the governor’s palace to tell them of the threat so they would raise their berries against incoming attacks.

Ichiro grinned as his mech screamed through the air.

At the last moment he angled his sticks back, the mech’s chassis swiveling downward. The mech landed on its feet and crashed through the palace roof and sunk four floors down, the jolting and jarring of the machine so powerful that not even his impact bracers could stop his teeth from bouncing painfully within his mouth. The shock of the impact nearly cracked Ichiro’s spine.

Shaking his head, he felt disoriented, but quickly glanced at his readouts as alarms and scanner imagery appeared, revealing the extent of the mech’s damage and of the surrounding floors.

He hit the cockpit release button.

There was no hiss, as his cockpit was already punctured. Without the shield lifting up, he unbuckled his safety harness and kicked it open.

Before Ichiro was a cloud of dust and sparking electricity as lights blinked in the corridor. He stepped out with his assault rifle slung over his back and his katana in hand.

The red carpets were strewn with dust as smoke wafted though out the room, making anything impossible to see further than an arm’s length ahead.

Grinding his teeth, Ichiro tightened his grips on the sword and rifle in his possession.