Esther Freisner - The Chick Is In The Mail

Slow and measured, it was nonetheless the rhythm of footsteps.

Impossibly huge, impossibly heavy footsteps.

"Only a few blocks more," Teruhisha said. "See?" He pointed at a storefront. "That is where you bought the T-shirts."

Jenna nodded. They were in familiar territory, all right. Even so, however, she knew that this street would never again be the same. Already, jagged cracks had opened in the pavement and display windows were spider-webbed with silver fractures.

Teruhisha seemed to read her thoughts. "Collateral damage," he said, a sound of agreement in his voice. "It is always thus, whenever Reptilla strikes. Oh! My poor city!"

"It-it looks like a war zone."

Teruhisha nodded. "It will be worse, before the day is done. But we will rebuild, as we always do." He looked suddenly bleak. "As we have, so many times before."

Something raced by overhead, something white and moving fast-a stray missile from the battle that raged somewhere behind them, Jenna realized. It buried itself in the facade of an internationally famous telecommunications firm's headquarters, creating a cloud of concrete shrapnel, much of which rained down in the Nissan's path.

Teruhisha said something in Japanese, something short and sharp and harsh, a word that Jenna suspected he would never have voiced before a woman who could understand it. He snapped the wheel to the left, hard, and then to the right, trying to dodge the chunks of flaming, falling stone.

"Brace yourself!" he said. "We-"

A fiery mass, small and heavy, struck the hood. The car flipped, tumbled, rolled. The world spun around Jenna. When it stopped, she hung sideways in her seat, held there by the harness Teruhisha had insisted that she buckle.

The car was on its side.

She shook her head to clear it, then struggled free and inspected herself for damage. A few cuts, a few aches were all she found, but no broken bones.

Teruhisha had not been quite so lucky.

Like Jenna, her companion hung in the nylon web of his seat belt and shoulder harness. Unlike her, he was motionless, his eyes closed. Jenna peeled back one lid and inspected the blank orb beneath. She breathed a sigh of relief as she realized that he was unconscious but basically unharmed. Aspirin and rest, lots of each, were all he needed, most likely.

Jenna wasn't a doctor, but she knew a lot about being knocked unconscious.

She paused a moment, thinking. They were only blocks from their goal, and God knew how far from her hotel. She shrugged, her decision made. It made more sense to go forward than back.

She pulled Teruhisha free and slung him over her shoulder-he didn't weigh much more than her gym bag, really-and began walking.

Behind her, she knew, Reptilla was walking, too.

Technically, it wasn't the Army whose forces lay next in Reptilla's path; technically, Japan had no army, only heavily armed defense forces.

Reptilla didn't know the difference.

Had he known, he would not have cared.

He gazed for a moment at the low vehicles that swarmed towards him on tractor treads, bearing mounted cannons that did him even less harm than the missiles. He scarcely noticed the shells that struck him, or the clinging incendiary gel that splashed across his body and burned. Instead, moving without pause, he strode forward, stepping on some of the tanks and over the rest, nearly oblivious to the difference. Instinct drove him forward, uncaring, unmindful.

Mobile Defender Park was a square of green bordered by steel and glass office towers. In turn, the park's gardens and rolling expanses of close-cropped clover served as a setting for the squat assembly of steel cylinders and slabs at its center. Earlier, Jenna had assumed that the asymmetrical structure was some kind of abstract monument, but now she was willing to believe it was something more.

At least, she hoped it was.

Teruhisha's "key" in her free hand, she approached the Mobile Defender. As she neared it, a door, hidden until now, slid open. All second thoughts fled as she entered. Despite the bizarre circumstances, she felt a serene certainty now, one she knew well.

It was the calm before the storm, the tranquillity that always came just before stepping into the ring. She didn't know why she felt this way now, but she welcomed the familiar sensation.

Right now, in a city suddenly gone mad, in a world where Saturday matinees had supposedly come to life, familiar was good.

Beyond the monument doorway was a place like an airplane's cockpit-two padded seats, one front and center, one behind and to the side. Curved control arrays waited before both, but the larger, more complex one was in front of what Jenna knew instinctively to be the command chair. She took that seat for herself, after strapping Teruhisha into the other for safekeeping.

As she sat, the place came to life. The lamps overhead dimmed and the wall before her erupted in light and color, resolving itself quickly into an image that matched the view outside. The wall was a giant view screen, Jenna realized. Overlaying the picture it presented were what had to be instrument readings-luminous meters and gauges and neatly glowing legends. It was like a giant Nintendo display, but all in Japanese. Jenna made a frustrated sound.

She couldn't read Japanese.

She was so preoccupied with the screen that she took little notice as padded grips reached out from the armrests, wrapped themselves around her hands. Equivalent devices grew from the floor and found her feet, then floorboards slid back to reveal a small treadmill. Jointed armatures linked her limbs to the control panel. Abruptly, resonating throughout the structure came the rhythmic rumble of hidden engines, so low in pitch that she felt rather than heard them, and then-

Something else.

The sound that metal surfaces made as they slid along each other, found new configurations and locked into place, and then moved together. The rumbling chatter that gears made when they met, and the sighing whisper of hydraulics. The rumbling ka-chunk! of powered systems engaging.

The world jerked, shifted, moved. The image in the view screen lurched, the instrument readings remaining in place as the vista beyond them scrolled by. Jenna's ears popped, as if she were on an airplane or in an express elevator. Then, when stability came again, Jenna took a deep breath and peered again at the outside world through the giant view screen.

But from a much greater height.

A moment before, looking straight ahead, she had stared at a hotel's lobby entrance. Now, she was looking at its twelfth floor-and at what was reflected in the building's mirrored glass facade.

At a humanoid figure, at least one hundred and twenty feet tall, with a barrel chest and broad shoulders, with oversized gloves and boots, and with a stern steel mask where its face should have been. At what the Mobile Defender had become, now that it had unfolded itself. At red and silver armor, at heavy slabs of metal shaped into a figure approximating that of a man-a very large, very armored man.

Or, at the moment, a woman.

Jenna smiled, as sudden understanding swept over her.

She had finally found something in her size.

She raised one hand, moving the grip with it, and watched as the reflected figure raised its matching one. She stamped one foot; her counterpart did the same, bringing a red metal boot down hard enough to send tremors through the surrounding ground. She took a step on the treadmill and curled the fingers of her right hand, and the armored figure moved forward, even as it formed a perfect fist.

Jenna's smile grew wider and became an expression of absolute delight. "Yes!" she whispered, and the single word hung in the control room's cool air. It all made sense, in a crazy kind of way.