Story Preview-Hot Pursuit (Patreon)

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“Say, Rookie, anyone ever told you you remind them—“

“I swear, if you say the Major from Ghost in the Shell—”

“—of the Major from Ghost in the Shell? Sergeant O’Neill inched his head and the nose of his sidearm up from behind the hood of their cruiser in his latest attempt to get a bead on one of the robbers. He quickly ducked back, narrowly avoiding a beam of sizzling plasma as it bounced off their vehicle’s energy shield. “What’s so bad about that?”

“I just get it a lot. Plus, I have nanites, not cybernetic implants.” Gracia—Corporal Takayama—did not bother abandoning cover. Instead, she interfaced with one of the few remaining surveillance cameras near the bullet-pocked entrance to Kawasaki Heavy Industries and turned it to face the standoff. Before she could get a firing solution, though, a bullet took out the camera. “Speaking of implants, their sniper’s got a few.”

With the sniper occupied, O’Neill finally managed to get off two shots, one of which clipped the robber who’d been manning the stolen plasma lance. “Noted. Get ready to advance before they get the laser—“

“Plasma lance.”

“—back up. Also, you don’t remind me of the Major because of the robot stuff.”

“Why, then?” Gracia emulated O’Neill by popping up from behind the rear of the cruiser to fire off three shots. She took out three of the robbers, including the sniper.

O’Neill watched Gracia’s pert ass jiggle from the recoil of her gun, which was powerful enough that it would have sent him tumbling. He smirked at his tall, black-haired, small-breasted, narrow-shouldered, slender-hipped partner as she crouched back down. Her delicate, smoothly tapering face seemed too innocent for someone so formidable. “The resemblance to Scarlet Johansen.”

Gracia snorted, then laughed. “You asshole. I don’t—“ Gracia’s aural nanites suddenly picked up coil whine. Memories from the battlefield helped her quickly identify its source as the capacitor in a high-yield beam weapon of some sort reaching its discharge point. “Duck!”

O’Neill flattened himself on the ground an instant before a ray of green light not only disrupted their cruiser’s energy shield, but melted a two-foot-diameter hole in the car. He looked up to see a similarly wide trench carved in the street right next to him, then back to see the damage to the cruiser. The hole was centered exactly where he’d been crouched. Gracia must have pulled him out of the way—and saved his life. “Jesus, Rookie. You okay?”

“Yeah. I guess we finally know what they’re here to steal.” Her nanites picked up the coil whine again. It was, at least, lower this time. But based on the current pitch and its rate of ascent, she had between fifteen and seventeen seconds before they got off another shot. “Find cover.”

“What about—” O’Neill watched a nanite-generated energy field crackle to life around Gracia’s body as she grabbed his gun from him with her left hand and raised her own in her right. “—yes ma’am.”

The robbers also saw the sparkle of light around the tall, slender woman. The color and brilliance gave it away as state-of-the-art combat shielding—the kind that lasted not for 30 seconds, like most commercially-available personal shields, but unless and until depleted. And at least some of them had heard the rumors that this new version could recharge itself with the energy from beam weapons.

The leader of the robbers tucked into his belt the unwieldy, unidentified beam pistol that they’d found next to the disintegration cannon. He swung his automatic rifle down from his shoulder, pointed at Gracia, and shouted, “Focus ballistic fire on the Ghost in the Shell chick!” He made a gutteral sigh as one of his people promptly hit Gracia with the beam from a stolen plasma rifle, making her shield glow brighter. “That means only shoot her with bullets, you idiots!”

Gracia got to her feet with her back facing the Kawasaki Heavy Industries facade, then turned to face the hail of bullets bouncing off of her shielding. “You know, I’m getting real tired of that comparison.” With the help of her nanites, she took separate aim with each handgun and rushed the robbers’ position.

O’Neill panted and fell to his knees behind the next closest cruiser to his and Gracia’s. He’d spent the last few seconds running at a dead sprint and was sure he’d felt a plasma lance beam pass within millimeters of the back of his neck. When he composed himself, he realized that the two officers he’d joined were gaping at Gracia. They had their guns pointed at the ground and fingers off the triggers. “What the fuck are you lazy assholes doing? Fire!”

One of the officers simply pointed. O’Neill turned to see Gracia, running at 50 kph, taking out robbers with precise headshots as she simultaneously dodged fire and rushed the building entrance. He gasped aloud as she leapt high in the air, executed a twisting pike, killed one robber each with the final bullet from each handgun (mid-twisting pike, no less), and tossed the guns away in the same instant that she landed in a crouch atop the large, hoversled-mounted turret (which, O’Neill surmised, was the disintegration cannon). He felt his mouth continue to hang open as Gracia peeled open the cannon’s casing with her bare hands, tore out its capacitor, and snapped the apparatus in half over her knee.

“The Major’s pretty badass, huh, Sarge?”

“Her name’s Corporal Takayama. And yeah. Yep. That she is.” O’Neill saw the right side of Gracia’s shield turn bright blue. He realized the two remaining robbers were firing at her with fully-automatic rifles. “Okay, now fire! They’re going to run out her shield!”

In response to the renewed fire from the police, the leader backed away into the building. He kept firing at Gracia as he backpedaled and stopped shooting just long enough to shout to his one remaining man, “Get to the security controls! Raise the building’s—!“ He felt Gracia’s hand grab the barrel of his gun, immobilizing it like it was buried in cement. He gaped at the slightly taller woman in terror. In desperation, he pulled the rifle’s trigger one last time. It fired two bullets, then clicked empty, before she tore it from his hands.

The first bullet bounced off Gracia’s shield, expending the last of its energy. The second bullet pierced Gracia through her chest just below a B-cup breast. It narrowly missed her heart.

“Kill her! Shoot her n—“

The one remaining henchman (who had, as ordered, activated the building’s security screen) did not even have time to aim before his leader’s rifle hit him in the face, stock-first, and knocked him unconscious.

Gracia wobbled on her feet. She grit her teeth against the pain and tried not to pass out as she felt her strength drain away. The nanites apparently needed all their energy to repair the gunshot wound. It would have been better if the bullet had stayed in—they could have converted the bullet’s mass into resources for themselves. As her vision blurred, Gracia looked up to see the leader backing away from her with an oddly configured, gun-shaped…thing…aimed straight at her. She gave the man credit for being smart enough to assume she was still a threat. But the fact that he seemed to think whatever he was holding was a weapon just because it was gun-shaped canceled that credit right out. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound right for a plasma pistol. Nor was it creating a plasma pistol’s telltale ozone scent. It wasn’t even weighted or proportioned right for a gun. And, for that matter, there wasn’t even an opening in the barrel. “Put that thing down. You’ve lost. Surrender.”

“Sorry, Makoto, not an option. Scary as you nanotech soldiers are, the people who wanted that disintegrator are a lot scarier. One of us is going to die today.”

Gracia’s nanites neared completion of the repairs to her body while he was speaking. She returned to clear consciousness and could feel she was just seconds from full strength and speed. Gracia nonetheless continued to feign unsteadiness so she could catch him off-guard—and, hopefully, prevent him from using some pill or implant to kill himself if captured. She wanted the man interrogated. “Listen, we…we can both—“

“Oh, drop the act. We both know you’re two seconds from battle-ready.”

She lunged.

He fired.

What happened next stunned the both of them (literally, in Gracia’s case). As Gracia managed to get a hand on his wrist, what appeared to be a miniature star manifested at the tip of the pistol. It then shot into Gracia’ chest.

Gracia screamed in agony. Searing heat and pressure filled her entire being. Brilliant white light flooded her eyes, blinding her. Her muscles all spasmed as if she’d been electrocuted. She fell over backwards, incapacitated.

The leader (or, at this point, really just the one remaining robber) brought the “barrel” of the pistol up to his eye level. He frowned and nodded appreciatively. “Not bad! Probably made for exactly this—aagh!” He grabbed his mid-forearm, just above where Gracia’s hand had touched him. A band of grey was expanding under his skin to encircle his wrist. Gracia’s nannies were converting mass from his own body to build a GPS tracking cuff. “Fuck! You bitch! Do you know how much it costs to get one of these removed?” It then hit him that if Gracia’s nanites were carrying out this task, their command matrix was active—which meant she was alive. “Shit.” He turned to aim the pistol at her again in the hopes of completely overloading her. What he saw made him quickly back up two steps.

Gracia was still on the ground with her every muscle tensed. White light was shining from her eyes and open mouth. She arched her back further and, all at once, the buttons on her uniform tore open, its sleeves ripped at the shoulders, her belt snapped, and her tight black pants burst at the waist, hems, and seams. She winced, then moaned involuntarily in relief, as her boots tightened painfully against her feet before the laces popped and the heels and balls of her feet forced the heavy-duty rubber soles to tear away from the leather.

The leader backed up another two steps as Gracia tensed—and grew—again. The front hook of her delicate, lacy red bra shattered into small plastic shards. Despite everything else, he chuckled at her choice of bra. The cups were definitely too small for her. He figured she was making the most of what little she had by hiking them up. Then he watched her legs stretch further and her hips swell wider, and came back to his senses. This nanite-enhanced police officer still seemed incapacitated. But she had gone from having a handful of centimeters on him to being at least half a meter taller—and was still growing. He did not relish the idea of being trapped in the building with a giant, angry former soldier. The leader rushed to the security panel, stepping over his woozy-but-now-conscious co-conspirator as he went, and tried to figure out how to temporarily drop the security field. He rolled his eyes as a police negotiator’s voice issued from his wrist.

“Satoshi Nakano. Your continued efforts to evade capture only add to your offenses. Surrender. Lower the security field. Place you hands on your head and get on your knees. You will not be harmed.”

“No.”

“You have been genetic profile-matched and are GPS tracked. You cannot escape.”

“Funny. They said that the last time I escaped, too.” He glanced up nervously at the sound of Gracia moaning through her gritted teeth. He now placed her at 2.5 meters tall. Her arm movements made him worry that she was regaining motor function. He also retracted his judgment on her poor bra sizing—her breasts were clearly growing relative to her body. They were now closer to D-cups than B-cups.

“If need be, we will use the nanites implanted by our officer to incapacitate you.”

“Oh, come on. If you could do that, you’d have done it already.” Satoshi found the option to turn off the security field emitters, then noticed the option to drop the field covering just the evacuation route to the nearest nuclear shelter. He stole another glance at Gracia—who, sure enough, was slowly pulling herself together and moving her now-three-meter-tall body to sitting—dropped the field on the path to the underground shelter, and sprinted for the stairwell.

With difficulty, Gracia put a hand to her forehead and slowly sat up. The movement felt oddly slow and long. She groaned. Or, at least, she thought she did. She could hear nothing over the rushing in her ears. And she was still blind. Gracia audiated, “Diagnostic.”

Her nanite command matrix responded, “Nature of disruption currently unknown. Analysis ongoing. Repairs proceeding. Assimilating influx of mass and energy to avoid catastrophic injury. Full motor function in ten seconds.”

“Why can’t I see or hear?”

“Sight and hearing normal. Sight occluded by influx of photons and hearing by rate of assimilation of surplus mass/energy.”

Gracia didn’t understand what the nanites were saying, but they had been through enough battles together that she trusted them to figure it out. She could also “see,” thanks to the nanites, the moving beacon that was Satoshi’s newly-implanted GPS cuff. “We can’t let him escape with that weapon. Can you lead me to him?”

“Affirmative. Accessing known building schematics.”

Gracia winced at the “known” qualifier on “building schematics.” Kawasaki Heavy Industries had, in secret, built a disintegration cannon and what she could only surmise was a prototype nanite disruptor for use against soldiers—against people—like her. There was no way the “known schematics” of its building were fully accurate. That meant running into (or, really, through) walls as she moved, at the risk of damaging the building and herself. But she could take it. And, regardless, the highest priority was to capture him. “Can you generate our shield?”

“Affirmative.”

“Do it.” After a second’s thought, Gracia realized that they hadn’t been able to evacuate the building. There might be people inside. She would not risk their safety for hers. “Modulate shield to allow organic material to pass through and absorb its inertia. And warn me of people in my way.”

“Scan radius currently limited.”

“Do your best.”

“Affirmative.”

With that, Gracia got (somewhat unsteadily) to her feet. She paused and furrowed her brow at the unexpectedly heavy jiggle of her chest, then cupped her breasts. At the realization of just how much breast she had to cup, she felt a flash of anger at the nanites. “Guys! The hell?”

“Influx of mass/energy threatened catastrophic injury. Dimensions modified within previously set parameters to facilitate safe conversion.”

“What previously set….” Gracia remembered, and blushed.

“Utilizing proportions requested during—“

“No, no, I remember.”

“—nighttime encounter with unknown single-instance sexual partner—“

“I got it, guys.”

“—to whom you offered ‘tits big enough to dwarf his monster cock.’”

“…right. Great. Thanks for that trip down memory lane.”

“You are welcome.”

She pushed aside the embarrassment and attended to Satoshi’s beacon. He was already down a level and moving towards the sub-basement. “Alright, let’s go.” She set off in the direction of the signal.

Satoshi’s accomplice regained full consciousness just in time to see the naked, DD-cupped, four-meter-tall Gracia take a stride towards him. He screamed and instinctively curled into the fetal position as half a metric ton of weight thudded down just millimeters from his face on Gracia’s 70cm-long foot. Her instep was close enough that he could feel the static of her personal shield tickling his nose and forehead. He picked up his head to watch as she took her next step before breaking into a jog. He shook his head as her body punched through the 10m-high, marble wall of the building’s minimalist-but-finely-appointed lobby like it was nothing. The way Gracia’s previously-slender hips swayed with her strides was sufficiently mesmerizing that he briefly considered following her just to watch the literally growing spectacle. Then he shook his head. “Nope, no, I really just want to go to prison now, thanks.”