Full Metal Panic! Volume 9 (eBook)

Shouji Gatou (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 1. Auflage
404 Seiten
Distributed By PublishDrive (Verlag)
978-1-7183-4216-3 (ISBN)

Infos

All hope is not lost! Mithril might be scattered to the four winds for now, but its members continue to work toward the same goal. While Tessa concocts a plan to strike back at Amalgam, Hunter conspires to create a new ace machine to turn the tide. Meanwhile Sousuke-even with few allies, limited resources, and a body riddled by mortal wounds-remains determined to free Kaname from Leonard's clutches. Can these disconnected factions meet up and begin working together in time?!

Textauszug

1: Fallen Witch

Martha Witt, psychiatrist, adjusted her glasses and scanned carefully through the documents given to her by the SFPD officer once more: patient name, distinguishing characteristics, approximate age, state of health, circumstances under which she was taken into police custody. Many of the entries were simply blank.

She was sitting in a hospital in southern San Francisco, while the patient sitting across from her gazed vacantly at a point on her desk.

The girl appeared to be in her mid-teens, but her lips were dry and her skin had lost its luster; one might easily mistake her for thirty or forty. She was wearing a baggy blue T-shirt that someone at the police must have provided her with, and her waist-length ash blonde hair was tangled and untended. No one had bothered to clean the dirt from her face.

According to the doctor who had first examined her, she was relatively lucid in response to questioning. Martha introduced herself to the girl first, and then asked her, in the gentlest tone she could, “What’s your name?”

“Teletha... Testarossa,” the girl responded.

“That’s a beautiful name. All right, Teletha. How old are you?”

“Seventeen.”

“Where do you go to school?”

“I don’t.”

“I see,” Martha commented. “I’m sure that if you cleaned up a little, the boys there would all want to date you.”

The girl didn’t respond. She showed no embarrassment at the mention of her dreary state, and neither interest nor revulsion at the mention of boys.

“Now... the officers who took you in say they found you walking barefoot down the freeway near Redwood. It was three o’clock in the morning, and you were alone.”

“Yes.”

“Did something happen that you don’t want to remember?”

“No.”

Her responses were indeed fairly lucid... but she also wasn’t volunteering any information.

“What were you doing there?” Martha asked next.

“I was abandoned.”

“By whom?”

“By my former subordinates.”

“Subordinates?” Martha looked piercingly at Teletha Testarossa. She clearly wasn’t joking. “Er... you said you don’t go to school, I believe. What kind of people are these ‘subordinates’?”

“Mercenaries.”

“Mercenaries?”

“Mithril mercenaries.”

“Mithril?”

“A private armed organization designed to stamp out terrorism and regional conflict. I was the commander of their West Pacific Battle Group, the Tuatha de Danaan.” Teletha’s eyes remained focused on a single point on the desk. She talked as if she wasn’t saying anything particularly extraordinary. “My rank was colonel. I had an amphibious assault submarine, third-generation arm slaves, and other cutting-edge equipment I used to attain victory on numerous dangerous missions.”

“Ah-hah... I don’t understand any of that, but it sounds quite impressive,” Martha told her. Yet even as she said that, her hand scribbled in her notebook. Exceptionally rare delusion. Accurate(?) use of specialist terminology—battle group, amphibious, etc. Further investigation needed.

Martha didn’t know much about military terminology herself, so she changed her line of questioning. “You mentioned ‘Tuatha de Danaan’ before, didn’t you? Isn’t that from Celtic mythology?”

“Yes,” Teletha confirmed. “It means ‘the tribe of the goddess Dana.’”

“Would that make you Dana herself, the earth goddess?”

“‘Dana’ is the name of my submarine’s AI. It’s a massive and complex system that utilizes quantum computing.”

“I see.” Martha added, sci-fi novel? to her notes, then asked another question. “And... as the commander of this military organization, what were you doing on the freeway? You said your subordinates abandoned you?”

“Yes.” Teletha fell quiet for some time. The examination room was dimly lit, with weakly flickering fluorescent lights in the ceiling, and filled with the heavy, humid night air. “My base was attacked by a large enemy force.”

“Enemy?”

“An organization called Amalgam. Mithril was destroyed by a massive attack that they mounted. I escaped on my submarine with my subordinates and managed to survive, but...” Terrible pain appeared in the girl’s eyes for the first time. Whatever had happened to her next must have been a difficult memory to face. Her shoulders tensed up and began to shake.

“Are you all right?” Martha asked. “You don’t have to tell me, if it’s painful.”

“It’s okay.” Teletha gulped and let out a small sigh. “The submarine didn’t have adequate supplies aboard. We managed to last a few weeks after escaping, but soon the vessel broke down. We had no money. I couldn’t even pay my people.”

Martha said nothing.

“The environment of a submarine in a dive puts extraordinary stress on its crew,” Teletha explained. “Soon, some of them began to complain about me. They began whispering about selling me and the boat out to the enemy.”

“What happened to them?”

“I had them executed,” Teletha said again, her tone of voice suggesting that this wasn’t at all remarkable.

“You killed them?”

“Yes,” she said faintly. Then she shut down, refusing to respond to any more of Martha’s questions.

A week had passed since that first meeting. Martha met with the girl named Teletha Testarossa twice a day and, little by little, she eked out the story of how she’d come to be here. She didn’t have much confidence that she was building up a proper doctor—patient trust, but in fits and starts, she’d managed to get Teletha’s full account of how she’d come to be in police custody.

In short, the girl was an officer with a private military organization that ran counterterror operations. That organization had suffered an enemy attack, and her squad had ended up isolated on the high seas. Dissatisfied soldiers had rebelled, they’d run low on supplies, and in the end, the cutting-edge “amphibious assault submarine” that she commanded had suffered a fatal malfunction and ended up dead in the water.

She’d then taken a small group of subordinates on one of their on-board helicopters to escape the capsized vessel, but the helicopter had run out of fuel and crashed into the sea off California. By the time their lifeboat reached the shore of Half Moon Bay, she was down to a mere five subordinates, and they were all thoroughly sick of her. Annoyed by her continued attempts to order them around, they’d thrown her out of their stolen car onto the street. One had wanted to rape her first, but she’d managed to avoid that fate. That was how she’d ended up walking down the road despondent and alone until a truck driver saw her and called the police.

Martha had never heard this particular delusion before. The talk of mercenaries, submarines, and helicopters was all utterly absurd, but the rest of the information she gave, about the circumstances of being taken into custody, was coherent.

To be honest, when Martha had first read the information in the report, she’d assumed a traumatic assault had occurred. That turned out not to be the case. The chart made up by the ER doctor that had first taken the girl in showed no sign of sexual or physical abuse, and her external injuries were limited to a few small scratches that had clearly come from walking through the underbrush.

Then, not only did her story not contradict any facts as Martha knew them, but she was also using proper military terminology. There were no obvious inconsistencies in her story about the “private military organization,” either. Martha knew a member of the police who was former Navy, so she’d called him up to confirm a few things.

“I’m pretty ignorant about these things. Are there really submarines that can carry helicopters on board?” she’d asked, and the officer had laughed it off.

“Well, there used to be submarines that could carry aircraft, but that was a long time ago,” he told her. “It would have to be huge, for one thing, and that’s just not practical. She sounds delusional to me.”

“But she said it was a special submarine. An amphibious... assault submarine, or something like that.”

The man laughed. “Sounds awesome.”

“She said that the Navy referred to it as the ‘Toy Box,’” Martha persisted.

There was a pause. “What did you say?” The voice of Martha’s friend, who had previously been jovial as he waited for a chance to hit on her, suddenly tensed.

“The Toy Box.”

“Who told you about that?” he asked now, pressing her for more information.

“The patient, I told you. Is it familiar?”

“No... No, it’s not.”

“What?” Martha tried again, feeling baffled.

Her friend responded in a very serious tone, “Well... I heard a rumor from a friend who’s still in the service. That’s all.”

“What did he say?”

“Listen, Martha. I don’t know what’s going on here, but you should probably drop this patient,” her friend cautioned. “Pretend you never heard anything she said. Just say she was totally incoherent or something.”

...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.11.2020
• Reihe/Serie: Full Metal Panic!
• Reihe/Serie: Full Metal Panic!
• Illustrationen: Shouji Gatou
• Übersetzer: Shouji Gatou
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction
• Schlagworte: Boy-meets-Girl • Espionage • Fish out of Water • International Relations • Mecha • Military • Science Fiction
• ISBN-10: 1-7183-4216-0 / 1718342160
• ISBN-13: 978-1-7183-4216-3 / 9781718342163