A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall

The wind was picking up by the time Jiro reached the base. Dark gray clouds were moving about the horizon over Lake Ogawara, looming with dread tendrils of rainfall. A storm was coming, and by the smell of it, it would be raging for the better part of an hour; he could taste the acid in his throat already. It’d be a cold, hard rain, much colder than the rainfall he knew from back in Gifu. Lot less people, too, he thought from behind his binoculars. Somehow.

Just a mile or so out from Misawa Air Base, even with a clear view of the lake, he wasn’t picking up any movement; the land was relatively flat, with little obstruction. So, either the tip Nagao sold him was bogus, or that two thousand yen he’d spent was suddenly paying dividends. He’d even picked up a few loose parts on the way; the Cassiopaean Theater must’ve had its battle lines drawn this way. Judging from the scraps he’d pilfered, the intensity of the fighting had ramped up in the past couple of weeks. Starcruisers, space destroyers, dreadnoughts, he’d gotten a piece of all of them. Almost completely intact, too. Say what you will about them, Jiro thought, but the bastards know how to future proof.

Besides, what did it matter if there was a war on, so long as he got his cut? Clanging together in his knapsack was the tune of about fifty thousand yen, all told. Never heard a sweeter song. People liked to call him a hagewashi, but Jiro thought of himself as pragmatic. He stole from them, sure, but when the mark was an intergalactic autocracy illegally occupying the planet, surely the immorality of the act was nullified. You steal from us, I steal right back. Fair’s fair.

Besides, taking some lost pieces of military hardware could hardly be considered real theft. Not when the Andromedans were effectively stealing everything else. Jiro was a scavenger, so he existed outside the grinder; others weren’t so lucky. Life for them was the munitions factory, the food processing plants, the space tanker brigades. Hagewashi slipped through the cracks to eke out a living elsewhere, and the Federation didn’t pay much mind to what the mice did while the cat was away. This was a world where only vermin could truly be live with some semblance of freedom, and even that came with hefty qualifications.

People had tried to fight back once. Toshiro had tried to fight back.

There was a reason only people like Jiro were still around.

He shook his head, as if to rid himself of the thoughts. There was no point in rumination. Jiro had resolved a long time ago to switch off the part of is brain that tended toward introspection and philosophizing. Miyamoto Musashi he was not; for him, like so many others, it was fight and live, or think and die.

Right now all he had to think about what getting to the central warehouse on the air base. Although, as he scoped the place out, it seemed eerily deserted. No planes on the tarmac, no soldiers patrolling the grounds, not even a terrestrial-based tanker hanging around to scare off potential hagewashi. I swear to God Nagao if you conned me… Jiro thought as he stashed his binoculars. No, if this truly were the case, he could plan his revenge later. Now he just needed to get inside and ascertain the facts.

Can’t very well do that from here.

Slowly, perhaps a bit too cautiously considering how empty the place felt, Jiro made his way to the base proper. It didn’t look to be much, just a loose collection of old squat concrete slabs overgrown with ivy and cracking from too much sun. To the north was some sort of satellite relay, but even that looked fully abandoned.

From what he gathered to be the main hangar, with its massive folding doors and strategically centralized location, he had noticed the remnants of an old AI-guided alarm system, but that too seemed disconnected. Even so, he would need to be careful; taking chances with these things could mean losing an arm and leg, and getting them replaced would cost just as much. While some just sprayed sleeping gas, this was a military base; it could just easily be equipped to fire off a precision laser capable of slicing a limb off in under a millisecond. There were prosthetics he could get should the worst come to pass, but he wasn’t trying to live off instant noodles for the next five years to make up the difference in the cost. God, the surgery alone would… He shook his head again. Put your big boy pants on. You got a job to do.

On the way up to Tohoku, he’d made sure to swing by a mostly understaffed munitions factory in Fukushima; there, he’d claimed a couple of chaff grenades. They were difficult to come by, considering how little use they had in space combat, but every so often a more technologically advanced rebellion needed to be put down.

The chaff sprang forth from the grenade, allowing Jiro a full sixty seconds to break into the hangar. Even if the cameras were offline, it was better to be discrete. Never knew who was watching; the Andromedans were, by popular opinion, omniscient. The fact that this claim had never been actually proven didn’t really matter. They had eyes and ears everywhere; they might as well be.

With the potentially lasering of his extremities on hold, he used a laser cutter also taken from that Fukushima factory to carve a hole in the side door’s electronic lock; the mechanism came undone and he heard a satisfying click. He was in. Slipping inside with twenty seconds left, he stuck to the inner wall as his eyes adjusted to the dimness.

And… it was empty. The main floor of the hangar was entirely devoid of anything. No jets, no tanks, not even the loose gatling gun or flamethrower.

This in effect opened a fork in the road of his mind. Either he’d stumbled onto a dead-end, or this was on purpose. You think I’m an easy mark, Nagao-kun, is that it? Wait until I get my hands around your throat, you son of a—

In the middle of the floor, hidden somewhat by the grease stains and oil puddles, appeared to be slats; he recognized them as being the sort military bases had installed for keeping certain machinery underground. There better be something down there, he thought as he searched around for some sort of control center. Looking up to the west, he saw it a line of glass with a good view of the whole floor.

Up there, it was nothing but outdated computers still running operating systems from the old days, although after a few minutes of investigating their hard drives, Jiro learned that they’d been completely wiped. No back-ups, no external storage, no log-in information, just as if they were taken right out of the box.

And in the middle of all this, a conspicuously large button inset in its own panel, requiring two keys to activate. Both keys were, for some reason, already in their respective slots. Beside the button was a hand-scrawled note, the kind written out in desperation. One of the edges was stained with dried blood.

Push it. Please. For Earth.

Seems awfully delusional, Jiro thought. Or altruistic?

Same thing, really.

Well, if there’s some sort of out-of-commission tanker or something, maybe I could at least get a few thousand for it.

Jiro pushed the button; a dim, crackly voice came over the comms as the slats in the floor folded back in on themselves. An alarm, much softer than what was likely intended, blared as loud as it could as red, yellow, and green lights flashed throughout the hangar. Up from the bowels came the giant head of a mecha, designed to mimic Sengoku-era samurai helmets. The rest of it, designed to fit the theme, slowly ascended until it reached the ceiling; Jiro estimated it was a full sixty feet.

Before him, as the warning lights switched off, was an Autonomous Space Tanker. Somehow, Nagao had given him a lead to an ASTER. Oh, I’m going to be a very rich man, he thought as he descended the stairs back onto the floor. Off to the side wall was a extending staircase, which Jiro pushed up to the machine and switched on. As he rose up to the cockpit, open at the chest, he heard the familiar sound of squeaking metal and boots on concrete. Glancing over, he saw not only Nagao in one his pompous three-piece suits, but a small militia of armed mercenaries, all their guns pointed squarely at him.

“Well now,” Nagao said, smiling. “I can’t believe it only took two thousand yen to find this thing. Usually they're much more expensive.”