Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games by Marion G. Harmon Page A

still see our unreflective hull, I turned us west and steepened our climb.
     
    Getting us into Japan was simple; I just had to avoid the attention of their National Defense System. Of course simple didn’t mean easy ; Japan had begun thickening its defense system when China’s collapse had put many of their ballistic nuclear missiles in non-government hands, and had worked even harder at it since the first godzilla hit Tokyo.
     
    They’d had to, because while the rest of the world (including New York and Chicago) had seen a few of the monsters wade ashore, the Tokyo Godzilla had been just the first of many to hit Japan.
     
    Even with Shell’s Big Book of Contingent Prophecy and the Oroboros’ own collection of past future files, we had no idea what had changed. In the older potential futures—pre-California Big One and before the Teatime Anarchist ended the time war against his evil twin with mutual annihilation—the godzillas had arrived nearly two years from now. They also hadn’t been followed by more and bigger breeds of monsters. The Japanese called them kaiju .
     
    The Oroboros’ best guess was that whatever Verne-Type mad scientist had created the ‘zillas had been under the control of the Dark Anarchist. (The Oroboros hated the name I’d given the evil twin, especially since Shelly used it in all her reports. They weren’t too fond of Big Book of Contingent Prophecy , either.) With DA as dead as villain-rap music should be, the Oroboros believed that either the Verne-Type who’d made them had been “unleashed” or the creatures themselves were mutating without control. Either way, with only occasional exceptions the new kaiju, to use Shell’s phrase, all loved-loved- loved Japan.
     
    This meant Japan’s network of defense radars was second to none, and their sonar network was even better. If they saw something unknown and potentially hostile coming in, and if they said hello and it didn’t say hi back, they’d either drop a crowbar on it from orbit or fire an over-the-horizon missile at it.   And that was just the outer ring—if you got through that they scrambled subs or jets depending on whether you were wet or dry. If you managed to hit shore in an urban area, well, that’s when the mecha got dropped on top of you, or one of the oversized and heavy-hitting national cape teams like the Eight Excellent Protectors and the Nine Accomplished Heroes.
     
    But they couldn’t watch everywhere, so they tended to focus on surface and sub-surface threats. That’s what we were counting on. The lift pod had a low radar signature and no internal heat-signature. Non-reflective, it was a dark body at night and I could slow us down enough on reentry so that atmospheric friction wouldn’t heat us and light us up as we came in. Not coming from the west, it was unlikely they’d spot us at all.
     
    Once we’d come down, I would put on the brakes and drop us just offshore in shallow water—avoiding death-by-missile or breaking our necks, whichever came first. Simple.
     
    The minutes crept by, counted on a virtual clock Shell provided as I kept our acceleration at one gee and kept us inside the virtual painted lines. “Entering orbital path,” Shell informed us all. “One ring around the rosy and we’re good for entry.” I relaxed a little. We were in orbit, floating in zero-gee, and she was saying nothing about non-NASA or Air Force contacts. We’d passed over Japan’s high-frontier once going up, and Shell would tell us if someone was talking. Jacky looked bored and Ozma read a huge old book she’d pulled from her little box.
     
    The virtually painted lines changed, dipping down as Shell chanted.
     
    “Begin braking in three…two…one…now!”
     
    Spinning us so the g-force from braking would press Jacky and Ozma back into their seats, I pushed hard, shedding orbital velocity and letting gravity have its way.
     
    “Adjust attitude in three…two…one…zero.”
     
    I stopped pushing