The Megaman War:
Part 1 - Whistle in the Wind

By Hadrian (Hardman) Howell

Chapter 10: Guts and Glory

Gutsman sat in the middle of a wide, humming circle. The Teleportation machine was built with the idea of large pieces of equipment or several people being transported in mind. While Gutsman in and of himself was large, he was by no means taxing the machine’s limits.

To look at the largest of Dr. Wily’s Masters was like looking at a red and black boulder. Gut’s man was as tall as he was wide, but gave off no impression of a hindering amount of weight. Indeed, all of his bulk seemed to be put toward the purpose of smashing. Not smashing anything in particular, just smashing. His head, which stuck out of about the center of what anyone might call his body, was adorned with a construction-style hard hat and a square piece of protective titanium that almost looked like a jaw.

Dr. Wily giggled as he watched Reggae fiddle with the Teleportation controls. He’d taken a little extra time to ‘program’ a few things Gutsman would say upon his arrival and his inevitable fight with Megaman. It was the little things he felt required the most attention.

“How much longer, loyal assistant?” Dr. Wily asked, his grin wide.

Reggae gave his boss a bewildered, haggard expression. He hadn’t slept in three days, and the small jumping numbers on the screen of the Teleportation machine weren’t doing anything for the migraine he’d been developing in that time. He shut his left eye and tried to focus on the screen again.

“Ergh... Satellites are in place, sir.”

“Start ze process zen!”

Reggae typed away at the keyboard of the machine. He’d taken a literal crash course in the theory, physics, and mechanics of Teleportation (which is why he’d been up for three days straight), and knew the system as well as the people who’d created it. If you couldn’t say anything about Reggae’s bravery or morals, you could certainly give him a pat on the back for his brains.

“Positions, locked... Subject targeted. Starting the process...” He looked up as the circle hummed around a now glowing Gutsman. The impossibly large Master didn’t react at all to the change in the rooms atmosphere as it hummed to life around him. Reggae figured that this was because Gutsman’s IQ had taken a drastic drop during the installation of the System. The oversized monster had been lucky when it came to mental side effects, though...

“3...2...1... Transfer!” Reggae said, hitting a button. The Master before them seemed to separate into several bars of light, which then shot up and through the ceiling.

Dr. Wily looked at the ceiling skeptically for a minute. “Vat happens now?”

Reggae stood up, the weariness in his bones crying out in protest. “Well, it’ll take about five minutes for the receiver satellite to pick up his signal and process it, then about another ten before the linked emitter unit sends the signal to the next satellite in the Web. After that, it’s just a matter of the ten minute increments for his signal to go from link to link and then arrive at the destination, where the satellite there will put him back down on the ground, decode the signal and reconstruct him, which should take about five minutes.”

“So, in total, I’m vaiting how long before I turn on my TV to watch ze news?”

Reggae did a bit of mental math, which took him a bit longer than it should have in his bedraggled state. “Well, with four satellites in between us and New Detroit... about 70 minutes.”

Dr. Wily smiled and patted Reggae on the back. “Very gud. I believe I shall set ze boys on ze reconstruction task. Vy don’t you get some sleep?”

Reggae smiled back at the demented German. “Be glad to, sir.” he wavered a little and then fell over, much to Dr. Wily’s astonishment.

Reggae was asleep before he hit the metal floor.

Rock... no, Megaman, skated along the now deserted street. It’d been cleared out with the help and cooperation of the New Detroit Police Department when they’d figured out they were ill equipped to deal with the problem at hand.

And what a problem! How on EARTH did the National Guard allow one of their own TANKS to be stolen? Some psychotic idiot had actually stolen the armored roller from the nearby military base and had decided to joyride it through the streets. The damage he’d cause on his way to the city alone topped the repair cost for Maple Street already...

Megaman rounded another corner, finding himself behind the coughing, sputtering battle machine. The rust on the back end betrayed its age and the lack of care it had been given. Megaman shrugged, grateful that this criminal’s stupidity was going to make his job easier, and crouched low to sneak up behind the rumbling tank.

As he approached the metal hulk, his hands went to his belt, where he had another of Dr. Light’s Sonic Explosive Putties. He didn’t take that, however, as it wouldn’t do him any good unless he could get it inside the tank somehow. No, this called for something else...

His hands passed over the small, inoffensive looking cylinder attached to his side as well. While Dr. Light swore up and down it would work, Megaman was unsure. Despite how easy it would make this job if it DID work, how could you trust science fiction move science? Especially OLD science fiction movie science? Megaman sure couldn’t.

Finally, his searching glove rested on a metal spike. It was simple, inexpensive, and really all he needed. Grinning, Megaman took the spike off his belt and held it in his hand, getting a feel for the weight.

Taking a look at one of the aged tank’s treads, he watched it, carefully timing how long it took for a single link in the tread to get back around to him.

With a sharp breath and a precise jab, Megaman drove the spike into one of the two bolts holding two of the links in the tread together. With his enhanced strength and the incredible focused point of impact, the bolt popped apart like the average coat button. His heart racing now, Megaman waited for the same two links to present themselves to him again, this time hitting the other bolt.

The effect was instant and obvious, as the lower half of the tread flopped onto the concrete and lay there like a dread snake. As the tank continued on, more and more of the tread was left behind, until finally the drive wheels hit the concrete and the whole tank shook to a shuddering halt.

Megaman took an easy leap onto the top of the now halted tank and pried the hatch open with relative ease. He was just about to reach inside and pull out the criminal when a bright flash of light from inside forced him to turn away.

Inside the Pentagon, Hubert Lyma was wide awake this time, and witnessed not one, but two unauthorized uses of the Teleportation Web. One of the originated from the Mountain, and the signal it carried was large... large enough to be three or four people. The second originated in New Detroit, but was only enough to register as a single person.

Hubert couldn’t do anything to stop these signals either. To terminate any use of the Teleportation Web prematurely could cause the entire system to malfunction, sending some, if not most, of the satellites on wild tangents and flying in different directions. While some of them would wind up in deep space, more than NASA was comfortable with would fall to Earth, in places that the White House was VERY uncomfortable with.

So, with absolutely no options available to him, Hubert didn’t draw any attention away from the plans for Cheyenne Mountain. He wrote down the times and places of the unauthorized uses, however, and sat back to watch where they went. The larger signal seemed to be cutting a path toward New Detroit, but the other was bouncing in and out, bypassing all of the necessary processing times. The 10 minutes required by each satellite to process and send on any data they recieved was simply not there, as the signal bounced over Nevada, then California, then over Washington State, back and forth over Japan and Hawaii, with an unimaginable leap over into Oklahoma, and off of the closest allowed satellite by the Pentagon itself, and up and around into some location in New England.

Hubert realized that he’d been following a dummy signal on the second teleportation! Whatever had been in the system had sent out dummy signals to nearly every satellite it could before moving on, repeating the process at each satellite, with the dummy signals continuing on random paths. He sat back and tried to make sense out of what he’d just seen. Then he decided he needed a drink.

Megaman had returned to the semi truck, now parked nearer to Roll’s apartment building, and told Dr. Light what had happened. Roll was there too, getting the story of what had happened to Rock from Dr. Light. The white-haired scientist couldn’t make any sense out of what Rock had seen.

“From what you’ve said, it sounded like the perpetrator had teleported out of the tank, but that’s not possible... The machinery to initiate a teleport is large and requires a lot of power. It must have been something else.”

Rock shrugged as he removed his helmet. “All that matters to me is that he didn’t drive through any buildings.”

Roll smiled. “You’ve really taken to this super hero gig, haven’t you?”

“How could I not?” Rock sighed, sitting down and removing the worn boots. “I mean, I’m doing good things, and I’m getting better at minimizing property damage, so why shouldn’t I like what I’m doing? It’s all practice anyway.”

“Practice?”

“Rock wants to take on Dr. Wily,” Dr. Light grumbled.

“WHAT?”

“Roll, I have to! I’m the only one who can! The military can’t stop him, and who knows how long it’ll be before he starts attacking other countries? With the funding he’s recieved from the US Government, he can claim they made him do it, and suddenly the world’s at war again.”

Roll was taken aback by the outburst. She sat in silence for a while as Rock removed the rest of his armor. “You... you think he’d go that far?”

“Without a doubt,” Rock nodded solemnly.

“But... other countries wouldn’t believe him, would they? Wouldn’t they see that he’s just... insane or something?” Roll wondered.

Dr. Light sighed. “I hate to agree with Rock, but he has a valid point. If Dr. Wily tries to attack the middle east, no amount of political persuasion will convince them that the USA isn’t directly responsible. Japan probably feels doubly threatened, as it falls under the Teleportation Web, and if Wily figures out a way to use THAT, he can have any of those demented Masters there within hours. North Korea and China probably feel the same way the middle east does,” Thomas Light said, leaning on a table with a glum expression.

“Yeah,” Rock echoed, and tried to lighten the mood. “But what are the chances Wily can hi-jack the Teleportation Web? There’s all kinds of safeguards on it, right?”

Dr. Light shrugged. “I don’t know. I can assume so, but I never worked on the project itself. I knew one of the scientists who worked on it, Sergei Cossack, and he was a nice enough fellow. We had lunch occasionally, but he never got past telling me the basic principals behind the Web.”

Roll blinked. “There was a Russian working in Cheyenne Mountain?”

“Why not?” Dr. Light asked. “Wily is German, so why not a Russian? Heck, Dr. Caine was Swedish.”

“Dr. Caine?” Rock asked.

Dr. Light allowed himself a small chuckle. “Dr. Caine was my partner on the Prometheus Project, but he... ah... told the media a bit more than the government was comfortable with.”

“So what happened to him?” asked Roll.

Sighing, Dr. Light told them.

Neither of them liked it.

Rock opened his mouth to protest when... SOMETHING... shook the ground, the tremors shaking the trailer dangerously. Dr. Light and Roll hit the floor, quite unintentionally, as one of Dr. Light’s tables started to fall toward them. With a swear word, Rock jumped, grabbing the table and trying to hold it up as the tremor stopped.

In his unarmored hands, Rock found the table to be much heavier than he expected, and struggled to put it back onto place. “What was that?” he asked as the other two picked themselves up.

Dr. Light brushed off his lab coat. “I have no idea, but you’re not going to find out. Not until your Armor is recharged.”

“How long will that take?” Roll asked.

“I didn’t use too much power,” Rock assured her. “Should be about... thirty minutes?”

Dr. Light nodded, and immediately hooked up the Armor’s battery to the generator he’d brought with him.

“I’ll go find out what happened,” Roll said, making her way over scattered equipment toward the door.

“Not alone,” Rock told her. “I’m coming with you to make sure you don’t get hurt.”

Dr. Light sighed. “Be careful you two.”

The High Rise was a fancy restaurant that had been built onto one of New Detroit’s more recent sky scrapers. It served all kinds of food, from Carribean to English, and all the way back through the gourmet spectrum to Mexican.

Well, it HAD served all those things. That was before Gutsman had arrived in the flash of light.

Now, the High Rise was anything but. The arrival of the three ton Master had crushed the floor of the eatery, sending Gutsman’s bulk down through all of the subsequent floors of the building. The shock to the sky scraper’s structure had been, in architectural terms, fatal, and the sky scraper collapsed in on itself as the mass of metal that had slammed through its floors fell to ground level.

Hundreds of tons of concrete and steel fell on Gutsman, but he paid little attention. The debris fell harmlessly on his armored back, sliding off as he plodded forward through the rain of wreckage. His mind, damaged as it was, barely registered the fact that a building had fallen on him, and the cloud of dust that the fall of the sky scraper had put into the streets masked Gutsman’s exit from the remains of the building.

Sirens were already wailing as the massive Master stepped out into the street, his heavy strides cracking the concrete below him. With and animalistic roar, he set off in a random direction to get away from the horrendous noise of the sirens, and plowed through another building. Screams of terror and cries of pain only further served to aggravate Gutsman, and in a fit of rage, he began smashing things at random, traveling about in a totally meaningless pattern. As more and more dust and debris choked the air around him, Gutsman remembered something he was supposed to say. Something that Dr. Wily had told him to say as soon as he got there. His failure to repeat the phrase until now would probably result in the doctor getting angry... Dr. Wily was mean when he was angry... Gutsman didn’t want Dr. Wily to be mean to him.

“MEGAMAN!” He roared above the noise of the sirens and the screams of the dying, “WHERE ARE YOU HIDING!?”

Gutsman almost smiled to himself at his job well done, and returned to randomly smashing everything around him.