No, you're not dreaming. Yes, this is a real chapter. I'm not going to guarantee regular monthly updates again, but I will say that the hiatus is over and I'll do my best not to drop off the map again.
I'd repeat the usual "it's still November somewhere, I'm in the clear!" spiel, but since this chapter is ten months late it would probably fall a bit flat. Oh gods, this chapter is ten months late. It has been
almost a year since I last posted a chapter of this story. There are
newborn children who were conceived since I last updated.
Urgh. Well, it's here now, and that's the important thing. So. Check it, yo.
...
Power Games
Chapter Seven
The coordinates Scaglietti sent them for the pickup point translated to a lightly wooded hill on a Type-1 world, somewhere in the equivalent of Germany. The air smelt clean and fresh, but the clouds on the horizon marked oncoming rain. Nanoha sat on a rock in the shade of an old larch tree and watched the shuttle recede off into the distance; tickling under Vesta's chin and thinking about Hektor's parting remark to them.
"Here we are then," he'd drawled. Concern would have been too strong a word for the glint in his eyes, but there had perhaps been a touch of fellow-feeling there. "We'll be headin' out from here, so you're on yer own from now on, lass. I'd suggest you make sure you've a way outta here in case yer contact turns out not to be so friendly, hmm?"
Now that the mindless panic of Precia's collapse had dimmed to a sick worry, that comment was niggling at her.
Could she trust this man? Linith had told her to go to him, but Linith had also told her that doing so was breaking half the rules she'd made Nanoha promise to keep to when dealing with... with people who were sort of maybe kind of criminals, which was something else that didn't sit very well with her, to be honest.
She snuck a glance over to the hovering stretcher, enclosed in a sterile bubble of oxygen concentration and pacemaker fields, on which Precia lay. Fate stood next to it, staring down at her mother and Linith with mute focus. She wasn't showing any signs of pain from her draining, but knowing Fate, she wouldn't say anything about it if she was feeling any. If she could say anything at all. She hadn't been speaking much since the fight, and her voice had been a hoarse whisper when she had, in clipped comments in between shifts of watching Precia for any signs of change. The woman was stable, thanks mostly to Ićeoak, but neither she nor Linith had woken yet, and Nanoha could see the strain their absence was putting on her friend. It was certainly putting one on Nanoha herself.
Precia and Linith weren't the only things for them to worry about, either. Alicia loitered nearby, her usual cheerfulness absent for once, scratching Arf's head quietly. She'd been awfully quiet in general since being told that Precia had passed out from using too much magic, and Nanoha wasn't sure how much of the situation's seriousness she really understood. She was willing to bet, though, that at least some of the girl's reticence was from the events of... well, the events of the fight. And the... thing, which she had summoned from her doll.
They hadn't seen it in person. But they'd caught glimpses from range and scanning spells sent forward. Nanoha wasn't sure exactly what the thing had
been, but she was pretty sure she should be worried about it. Quite apart from anything else, it bore a disturbing resemblance to the big paper worm thing that had almost eaten Arisa and Suzuka, back during her first clash with the TSAB. Until she'd shot it and it had turned into a giant dragon and tried to get out of the barrier and probably eat everyone in the city.
... considering this for a moment, Nanoha decided that she should probably be
very worried. But asking her had yielded nothing, and Nanoha didn't really want to push the girl for answers while she was still scared and off-balance. She didn't think she had the worry to spare for that, on top of everything else.
She hoped her mother was okay. Arisa and Suzuka as well. Fate said that the TSAB had been guarding them when she'd left, and Nanoha trusted the Bureau to do everything they could to keep civilians safe. She wouldn't be completely happy until she could see for herself that they were fine, though.
With a morose sigh, Nanoha gave up. There were entirely too many things to worry about, here. And their contact was taking forever to show up. Where
were they, anyway? She checked the time on Raising Heart. From what Mr Scaglietti had said, they should already...
And then she was there.
The speed of her arrival was incredible. One second the hillside was bare, the next it was occupied. There was no heavy charge of magic, no impact like the huge TSAB man with the spear. She was just there all of a sudden. Nanoha was almost tempted to think she'd teleported in, were it not for the rush of air and the glowing wing-blade things at her wrists and feet.
The new arrival was tall for her age – taller than Nanoha and Fate, easily. She looked like she was a couple of years older than them; just starting to get into the gangly stage where half her body seemed to be arms and legs and knees and elbows. The skintight flight suit she wore – a bit like a thicker, full-body version of Fate's leotard – only made her proportions stand out more. Despite that, she moved with the same practiced grace as Fate did; a sense of purpose to how she fit into the space around her that spoke of a great deal of training. Her hair was a vivid shock of close-cropped purple, and her eyes were the same odd yellow as Dr Scaglietti's.
She came to a stop about three metres away from Nanoha, who screamed and fell over.
Vesta took up a defensive stance over her mistress immediately; full-sized and growling. Nanoha couldn't see Fate, Arf and Alicia from her position under the warcat's belly, but a yelp, a crackle and a loud snarl marked them reacting much as she had.
"Please stop pointing those at my face," the other girl said. Nanoha blinked, and realised that she had Raising Heart transformed and somewhat awkwardly raised, poking out under Vesta's chin. She sheepishly lowered it and crawled out, placing a restraining hand on Vesta's shoulder to stop her lunging.
"Um... sorry. You startled us." She glanced back at Fate, who hadn't followed suit by lowering Bardiche. "We're... a little on edge. Are you from Dr Scaglietti?"
"Yeah," the girl said. "I'm Tre. I'm here to take you to the Doctor. Can you teleport?"
"Um..." Nanoha glanced back at Precia's stasis-locked body. Fate still hadn't lowered Bardiche. "If we go slowly, then... yeah, we should be. Is it far?"
"Not very," said Tre. "But we're going to be making a lot of short jumps so we don't get followed. Stay close."
...
It ended up taking almost half an hour to get to the base. They followed a route that involved no less than fourteen short, stealthed dimensional hops along with a great deal of flying to different locations on each world to throw off any tracking. Putting the route together in her head with a little help from Raising Heart as they flew high over a forest of metallic, blue-violet plants somewhere near the equator of the bright, boiling hot Type-5 world that was their penultimate stop, Nanoha realised that they could probably have made the trip in two or three jumps if they'd gone there directly.
Security was one thing, she thought grumpily, but there was such a thing as going overboard. She was worried about Fate. The girl seemed on the edge of fainting after each jump, and Nanoha had effectively been carrying her for the last few hops. She felt exhausted herself. Still, she was glad to hear that their next stop would be their destination. She wasn't keen on staying on any planet where you needed an air supply and a full environmental Jacket just to go outside.
The last jump was a long one, covering distance, dimensional transit and altitude. They materialised at sea level, just off a green and verdant coast that was a stark contrast to the eye-watering ozone-saturated vistas of the world they'd come from. Nanoha made a valiant attempt to mentally map the coordinates, but the repeated jumps and the stress of the last few days were starting to give her a headache and the numbers slipped away from her. With a tiny sigh, she asked Raising Heart to plot their coordinates to a map of Earth and tell her where they were.
The northeastern edge of Madagascar, apparently. Huh. They came in low, skimming a few dozen metres above the wave crests which... uh... shouldn't really be there, if Raising Heart was plotting the coordinates right. They should have been several kilometres inland. But apparently not all worlds were the same. Here, they were hovering over a bright cerulean-blue bay, a few hundred metres out from the white line of the beach. The pale sand of the shoreline bled into a mass of trees and jungle, broken here and there by vine-strangled stone-and-steel spires which rose through the canopy like the desperate fingers of a drowning man.
They weren't the only sign of civilisation. Further down the coast – with a little optical enhancement – Nanoha could see more signs of once-great cities. These weren't buried in jungle, though, but rather drowned and flooded. Huge megastructures stood like lone, rusted cliffs in the shallow waters of the bay, some eighty or ninety kilometres away and several kilometres out from the rolling beaches. Unlike the overgrown buildings in the jungle, these skyscrapers-turned-sea-platforms appeared to be a hive of activity. With the telescopic aid of her Jacket, she could pick out fleets of tiny boats in the bay waters around the giants – their size illustrating the sheer scale of the colossi. Dots of colour all over the enormous metal frames marked signs of humans replacing or repairing parts for inhabitation, and she could even just about see a buzz of activity and movement in some of the more open sections that must be bustling crowds of people.
Someone prodded her arm sharply, and she snapped back to reality. "Huh?"
"Stay close," Tre repeated, a slight frown flickering over her face. "You can look around later. You're here to see the Doctor."
Oh, right, yes. Caught up in examining her surroundings, she hadn't noticed falling behind the others. Nanoha flushed bright red at the implicit rebuke, and hurried to catch up.
They alighted on the beach, where Tre raised a hand to stop them before going any further. "There are the remains of damaged nuclear reactors in the ruins here," she said. "You need to adjust your Jackets to anti-rad mode before we go further in."
Nanoha swallowed. R-radiation? She hurried to obey.
They walked the rest of the way; Precia's stretcher floating between Nanoha and Fate, Alicia walking between Vesta and Arf in their war forms. The little girl's head was on a constant swivel as they made their way into the decaying, overgrown tropical city, trying to take in everything.
The buildings were a strange mix of old and new aesthetics; with roots and vines worming their way under flaking stone facades to reveal metal skeletons and concrete foundations beneath them. A thick carpet of moss covered every rock and brick, and lemurs hooted and screeched at them from empty windows in the tower blocks that still soared above the canopy; their floors filled with invasive plant-life that flourished high above the ground.
Finally, Tre pushed aside a huge fern to reveal what must once have been a plaza; its paved stone floor still mostly intact apart from the weeds and saplings pushing up between the slabs here and there. A sagging blocky building stood on the other side of it; eroded by time and with vines winding their way around the pillars that framed the open doorway. A large tree sat on top of it; its roots sprawling down the walls like a waterfall of wood to punch holes in a set of steps that led up to the roof.
In front of it stood four people.
One of them was the man Linith had told Nanoha to contact. Jail Scaglietti – Doctor Scaglietti, she supposed. He looked much as he had over the comm link; clad in a white lab coat and suit, with purple hair framing his face and excited yellow eyes. He looked fairly young for someone who knew Precia – though Nanoha supposed that Precia looked pretty young who was old enough to be her grandmother, so that didn't necessarily mean much. He smiled at her in welcome as she automatically took in his companions.
One of them was a girl in her mid-teens who looked a lot like the Doctor. Actually, so did Tre, Nanoha realised. There were differences – Tre was almost as tall as this girl despite being younger, and her hair was bluer than Scaglietti's where this girl's was paler, but there was an undeniable resemblance between the three. Maybe they were related. They all had the same eyes, too. She was wearing a crisp uniform of some kind rather than the flight suit Tre wore, and held a tablet Device with faint impatience.
The other two were children. One was a white-haired girl in shorts, a shirt and a small coat, sitting cross-legged on the floor by the Doctor's feet. She was about Alicia's age, and was busily engaged in digging up a line of weeds between two of the plaza's paving slabs with a knife. The last was hard to see at all, partly because she was hiding behind the Doctor, but Nanoha could pick out reddish-brown hair in twin braids, a swish of a sundress and a glimpse of worried yellow eyes peeking back out at her through a glimmer of yellow-green light.
"Miss Takamachi, Miss Testarossa," greeted Doctor Scaglietti, looking at her and Fate. He had a slight accent that Tre lacked, which Nanoha couldn't quite place. "Not to mention Miss Testorossa the elder," he added, dipping a sweeping bow in Alicia's direction, making her giggle. "I'm glad you arrived safely. I'm Doctor Jail Scaglietti. Tre you have met, this is Uno, Cinque and... Quattro." He gestured to the clipboard girl, the knife girl and the last girl hiding behind him in turn as he made introductions, though he had to awkwardly crane around for the last one as Quattro refused to let go of the back of his lab coat. The other two looked up as their names were mentioned; Cinque giving a little wave and a smile. "Dieci is gathering the others; they'll meet us inside. Shall we? Ah, you have a question?"
This last was directed at Nanoha, who had opened her mouth to ask why the girls had numbers instead of names, but Raising Heart was already whispering in her ear.
[Two languages were used, my master. Numbers were spoken in Venotrian; linguistically descended from Low Galean. Accent indicates Venotrian heritage.]
"Miss Takamachi?"
"Huh? Oh, uh," Nanoha stuttered. It was still odd, but she supposed that having your name mean something in another language wasn't that strange compared to some of the things she'd seen. Sequential numbers were a bit of a strange choice, but maybe he just thought the words sounded nice. Or possibly he was the same kind of namer of things as Precia. And Fate. And Alicia.
Come to think of it, she was starting to suspect that might be something cultural. Had Yuuno tried to name anything while she knew him? No, wait, now wasn't the time to think about that. Doctor Scaglietti was still waiting for an answer. "No," she blurted, "I was just... no, no questions." She lowered her voice to add "Raising Heart; don't translate their names, leave them as they are."
Scaglietti gave her a measured look, then nodded. "Alright. In that case, let's get dear Precia inside where I can have a look at her." He waved them over and looked down gravely at Precia's pale face in the stasis field of the hovering stretcher. "Mmm. I'm sorry to see her like this. Well, I promise you that I'll work to the limits of my ability to help her. This way, please. Mind your step."
To Nanoha's surprise, he turned and led them straight into the doorless opening of the ruined building behind him. She opened her mouth to object as she followed, or at least question why his base was in such a... well, dump. But it only took until she got inside for Raising Heart to adjust to the dimmer light levels and show her. The stone gave way to fresh concrete and new metal struts as they went down several sets of stairs. Electric lights in the ceiling lit the downward-sloping corridor, attired in a fresh coat of white paint. The air was cooler and much less humid.
Alicia trotted forwards to keep pace with him, flanked by her Familiar guards. Her focus wasn't on Scaglietti, though, but the little girl who was half-jogging to keep up with him. She was difficult to make out even without the Doctor to hide behind; slipping in and out of sight in flickers of yellow-green light. She couldn't quite manage full invisibility though, perhaps because she was concentrating more on not falling behind; her hand stubbornly gripping to his lab coat, taking two steps for every one of his as he led them down what began as a straight downward-sloping tunnel before branching off into a warren of underground corridors, all looking a lot more modern and well-maintained than the deteriorating city above them.
"Hey," said Alicia, looking down at her. She was taller than Quattro, who looked like she was only four or so, and didn't have to jog quite as hard to keep pace with Scaglietti and the hovering stretcher. She squinted at the girl and cocked her head curiously. "Why do you look all weird?"
Quattro shot her a nervous look, stuck her thumb in her mouth with her free hand, and made her way around to Jail's other side as he turned a corner. Not best pleased at being ignored, Alicia stopped for long enough to scramble up onto a patient Arf's back, then had her lope forward to catch up again.
"Hey!" she demanded. "I asked you a question! Why are you all... ghosty? Oh! Are you a ghost?" She leaned over precariously to try and prod the younger girl, who squeaked and fled back around to Jail's right hand side again.
Alicia frowned and looked up at Jail. "I think your little girl is broken," she confided to him in a loud whisper. "She looks all funny and isn't saying anything."
Jail chuckled and reached down to ruffle Quattro's hair as they paused to let a thick steel door slide open to let them pass. "She's just a little shy, that's all. More comfortable with her sisters than with strangers. I'm sure you'll become good friends in time."
'How many sisters does she have?' asked Arf, tilting her head to look up at him.
'And where are the others?'
"Ah, you'd be... Arf? And Vesta. My apologies for not greeting the two of you earlier. I have nine girls in total – Uno, Tre, Quattro and Cinque you've met. Due is away on business. Sein was meant to meet you with us, but must have forgotten. She'll be... around, somewhere." He waved vaguely with a sigh. "Probably trying to adopt another lemur. And Dieci was just going to fetch Zero and Nulla from the- ah, here they are now."
And indeed, three more girls were approaching across the large room they'd entered. Nanoha looked over them, and noted that they all had the same yellow eye colour as Jail and the other girls. The one in the lead was the odd one out; brown-haired, wearing a much smaller version of Tre's flight suit and toting a Bureau-issue shooting staff that was taller than she was. The butt trailed along the floor behind her with a faint scraping noise as she made a beeline for the group.
The other two were obviously sisters, with matching blue hair and an obvious similarity in their faces. Nanoha frowned. Something about them seemed familiar, though she couldn't quite place it. The older of the two was a couple of years younger than Nanoha herself, and had a dress on. Her little sister, who she was dragging along by one hand, was wearing shorts and a t-shirt that was two sizes too big and which had obviously seen better days. Fairly recent ones, given that wisps of smoke were still curling up from a charred patch near her hip. Uno gave a wordless groan of frustration as soon as she saw the pair, which was explained a moment later as the elder spoke up.
"Uno! Zero stole one of my shirts again and ruined it 'cause she was playing where she wasn't meant to!"
"Was not!" the younger defended herself hotly. There was a brief pause as several sets of eyes turned to the smoking hole in her overlarge t-shirt, and she hastily amended herself. "Okay, I was, but Nulla dared me to do it!"
"Did not!"
"Did so!"
"I told you not to play there!"
"You were daring me to do it!"
"Uno, could you deal with this?" Jail asked, glancing at the teenager. "I need to get Precia to the medical labs and have a look at her. Tre?" He gestured at Alicia, along with Quattro and Cinque. "Please take the children to the play area. Miss Takamachi, Miss Testarossa, I assume you'll want to stay with her?"
Nanoha and Fate nodded fervently.
"Very well then." He nodded to Uno as she grabbed the blue-haired sisters by the collar and dragged them away for a telling-off, and guided the stretcher away as Tre began to round up the younger children.
'Fate?' Arf asked quietly, including Nanoha and Vesta in the whisper.
'Should we...'
Nanoha and Fate traded glances.
'Stay with Alicia,' Fate said firmly, despite the weariness in her telepathic voice.
'Linith said not to trust these people.'
Nanoha gave a tiny nod of agreement, mindful of watching eyes.
'We can look after ourselves,' she added.
'Alicia can't. Stay with her and keep her safe.'
Arf nodded back, and peeled off with Vesta to flank the little girl as Nanoha and Fate hurried after Precia and their last ditch hope for her recovery.
...
Pink hair. Cold blue eyes. The sword – sheathed at the hip, ignored, unneeded. She couldn't move, couldn't walk, couldn't stop the terrible speed and force, the implacable advance towards the children... the children! Behind her! Alicia was...
Momoko shot awake with a cry, twisting around to stop the swordswoman before she hurt the girls. But her fingers met nothing but soft resistance – a mattress, and the movement snarled her further in what she realised were bedsheets.
A bed?
She extracted herself gingerly, wincing as the bruises on her arms and torso protested. She hadn't seen exactly how the woman had taken her down, but from the way she had a pounding headache and her chest felt like one solid bruise, it had probably involved a blow to the ribs and a crack to the head. Or perhaps that had been when she'd fallen. Either way, it hurt. A lot.
So. She was in a bed. That was... nice, she supposed. It probably meant they had won, or at least not lost, because she couldn't really see the swordswoman and her companions carrying her to a bed and tucking her in. But where
was she?
Well she wasn't at home; that was for sure. Now that she thought about it, she remembered one of the TSAB mages doing... something. Whatever it was, it had lessened the pain. But then she'd done something else, and sleep had overtaken her again, and now she was here. Wherever 'here' was.
It looked like... actually, the room she was in looked suspiciously similar to the hospital room she'd spent a fortnight in after the swordswoman's
first attack. Momoko groaned. More time spent cooped up and unable to practice magic without being caught by the nurses. Lovely. But no, if the Bureau mage had been taking care of her... was she with them, then? Had she been taken by... by trans-dimensional aliens, onto a UFO or something? Were there going to be probes?
Her eyes were caught by another occupied bed as they wandered over the room. So, she wasn't alone! At least she had someone to talk to, and maybe get a better idea of where she was. She levered herself upright to see what her roommate looked like.
And froze.
"N-Nakajima-san!" she exclaimed, startled. It was the woman who'd come to tell them that Nanoha was... that they'd lost track of Nanoha, after the business six months ago. She looked in bad... no, in
terrible shape. Her face was bruised, battered and pale, one arm was splinted by a glowing field and there was another glow from underneath her sheets that was centred on her chest. What had
happened to her?
Momoko turned away, feeling suddenly ill. The... Wolkenritter, that was what the Bureau mage had called them. If this was the kind of damage they could do to a powerful mage with years of training, it was a miracle that she'd escaped from two fights with the swordswoman with her life. That, or... or she'd been holding back. Deliberately. But why?
"You're awake, good." It was the girl who'd come to warn them about the Wolkenritter. Momoko was fairly sure her name had been Hilda, or something like that. No, Heidi. She was standing at the door, her uniform clean and fresh. So, she'd been asleep at least long enough for the mages that had been on the ground to change, then. Heidi made a beckoning gesture. "The Admiral would like to speak to you."
Momoko followed her out of the medical bay to the elevators, and then along several corridors, trying not to stare. From the look of things, her earlier guess had been close to the truth. She really was on a spaceship!
... she hoped the stories about alien abductions she'd heard weren't as accurate as the ones about spaceships.
"Here we are," Heidi said, pausing at a large set of doors. "The bridge." She didn't make any apparent gesture, but the doors slid open with a hiss to let them through. And behind the doors...
"... oh
my," breathed Momoko, trying to hide her awe. Now this...
this was what she'd always imagined a spaceship to look like. The room was large, and on constructed on two separate levels – the raised platform that the doors were at the back of, and then a lower deck in front of it. Stairways to the left and right connected the upper and lower decks, and huge screens covered the far end of the room. A dozen crew members manned the glittering banks of consoles beneath them, conferring in low voices or typing into specific stations.
And above it all, with the entire bridge spread before her, in a shining chrome swivelling chair that had holographic screens hovering above the armrests and a small semicircular console bank in front of it...
... sat a woman.
She was wearing the uniform that Momoko was starting to associate with the Bureau – the royal blue coat with navy shoulders – and had a long waterfall of green hair up in an artfully messy ponytail. Heidi stood at attention, cleared her throat and got her attention with a quiet "Mrs Takamachi to see you, Admiral," and the woman turned round, revealing green eyes a few shades darker than her hair and a forehead tattoo – four pale dots in a diamond shape.
"Ah," she said tiredly. "Mrs Takamachi. Thank you, Lieutenant Zwischenfall. That will be all."
She rose to her feet and stretched, rotating her neck to work out the kinks. "Ahhh," she sighed. "Sitting and staring at a bunch of screens for hours on end really does a number on your spine, let me tell you." She smiled cheerfully. "So, Mrs Takamachi. I'm Lindy Harlaown. Do you mind if we go for a stroll while we talk?"
Momoko considered her carefully. Friendly and harmless the woman might look, but she was in charge of a spaceship. And apparently an admiral. And leading the Bureau's response to the Book of Darkness. And if she was willing to leave the bridge to go for a walk while they spoke, there was no real reason for Momoko to have been brought up here in the first place, which meant that it was probably an attempt to impress and overawe her.
An attempt which had succeeded, but she wasn't going to let that show if she could help it.
"Of course," she replied, going for politeness. "And maybe we could start an explanation of exactly what happened yesterday, and where Arisa and Suzuka are."
Lindy hooked an arm through hers and directed them back to an elevator and down several floors. "We'll talk in one of the observation rooms," she explained. "They'll be empty at this time of day, and they'll be a nice treat for you. This is your first time off-planet, I believe?" The elevator door slid open, and Momoko suppressed her second gasp of awe in as many minutes. The long, narrow room seemed to have been squeezed up between the hull and more important partitions, but the entire far wall was a window, or what looked like one. Momoko wasn't sure if it was a holographic feed from outside or if she was literally looking out of a transparent section of hull, and to be quite honest she didn't care. The rippling veils colour drifting through the violet-black void outside the ship seemed to go on forever.
"The Dimensional Sea. Impressive, I know," said Lindy. "But a little unfamiliar for now. Here's something you might recognise better." She wiggled her fingers, and the displays shifted to a velvet black, studded by stars and occupied by...
"Earth!" Lindy said happily. "Or Unadministered World 97, in our records. Home sweet home. Now, where shall I begin?" She crossed to one of the padded benches that were set along the middle of the room and sat down. "The girls – Arisa and Suzuka, you said? – are, as far as I am aware, at home. They weren't hurt in the battle, and after a quick debriefing we popped them back outside their respective homes."
Momoko raised an eyebrow. "So why am I still up here?"
Lindy laughed. "You would have preferred we left you down there?" The smile slid from her face when Momoko stared evenly back at her, and she shrugged. "You attempted to delay the Blade – not a wise move – and it knocked you out rather forcefully. Lieutenant Jhanashdi gave you preliminary field care and brought you back with her when we extracted our forces. She recommended that you stay overnight to make sure that your concussion wasn't serious."
She checked her watch. "It's been about... twelve hours since the battle ended. We kept you magically sedated for part of that time while our medics were checking you over, but it looks like you needed to sleep naturally for a while to recover. You'll be pleased to hear that you have a mostly clean bill of health, though you're still suffering a few mild aftereffects of your Linker Core draining and will probably have some interesting bruises for a week or so. Speaking of which, you must be sore, please do sit down."
Momoko pursed her lips and sat down across from her. "And Nanoha?"
Lindy's cheerful expression flickered for a moment, revealing vague annoyance behind it. "Your daughter got away unharmed, though going by Mr Scrya's report she was the only member of her group that managed the latter clause. One of the Wolkenritter apparently managed to catch her friend unguarded and drain her core. Scrya was nearby and chose," she frowned, leaning forwards, "to cover their escape against pursuit instead of convincing them to come into Bureau custody and work with us directly."
She pursed her lips. "As to the broader question of what happened; Miss Bannings and Miss Tsukimura informed us that you were present for the event that sparked everything off – the younger Testarossa girl teleported in without any stealth measures. We moved in to investigate, thinking it was you, just as the Wolkenritter went on the hunt. And then your daughter and her friend intervened as well which was," she smiled tightly, "something of a surprise for us, I must say."
Leaning back on the bench and threading her fingers together as she stared at the planet that hung suspended in space on the window-displays, Lindy frowned contemplatively. "The fourth party is by far the most concerning," she continued seriously, all levity gone. "There appears to be a Mariage outbreak involved in this situation." She harrumphed. "This is turning out to be one of
those years, it really is. First the Jewel Seed Incident, now this."
She cleared her throat and turned back to Momoko, bringing up a couple of holographic images with a twitch of her fingers; grey-suited faceless figures with arms that flowed fluidly into blades and gun barrels at the joint. "The Mariage are a Lost Logia bioweapon from the Dawn States era; corpses reanimated by lost technology. They are extremely dangerous, self-destruct so it's nearly impossible to study them, and aim to convert new hosts en masse as much as possible. Unchecked, they can overrun worlds."
Momoko paled. "Can... is there anything we can do to help?"
Lindy raised an eyebrow that did not, Momoko thought, need to be quite that dismissive. "Not at present," she replied. "We're waiting on someone who can, but he's rather occupied with a diplomatic nightmare in the next sector over." She smiled patronisingly. "If there's anything you can do, we'll be sure to let you know."
She let that hang for a moment before letting her eyes widen as if with a sudden realisation. "Oh!" she exclaimed. "Actually, now that I think of it, there is something you could help with." She leaned forward with the air of one about to share a secret. "So," she asked in all innocence, as though commenting on the weather, "how long have you known your daughter was alive?"
Momoko stilled. Then she shrugged, unable to resist poking at the woman's poise a little. "I've known she was alive since she was born," she answered deliberately. "I was there at the time, after all. It was rather hard to miss."
Again came the slight expression of annoyance from beneath the cheerful exterior. "Ah, of course, silly me," Lindy chuckled. "I suppose a mother would know her daughter hadn't been lost to her. But you know, if you had told us that six months ago, it would have really helped us quite a lot! My, I expect we looked very silly, telling you something you knew wasn't true." She cocked her head. "Unless you only found out after the fact, of course. I don't suppose she's made any mention of where she's been since? I'm sure she hasn't been visiting home enough, and we'd be quite happy if she decided to settle down with her family again."
As a matter of fact, Nanoha hadn't specified where she'd been, and their communication over the past half-year had been mostly one-way anyway. She'd been able to sense when Nanoha was scrying on her and keep her up to date on what was happening in her family's lives, but Nanoha hadn't sent anything back. Which was why Momoko didn't feel terribly guilty about spreading her hands and shrugging again. "We can't keep our children in the nest forever," she pointed out. "Eventually we have to let them spread their wings and fly. I would have preferred that she hadn't done so at nine years old, but..." She smiled and tilted her head with a 'what can you do?' expression.
Lindy pinched the bridge of her nose. "I see. Well, if by pure happenstance she should fly over your general neighbourhood, could you at least broach the possibility of cooperating with us to prevent the end of the world? In a closer sense than 'shooting at the same targets', I mean. I honestly don't want to hurt her, and she's certainly the lowest-priority of our targets at the moment, but she was last seen working with a dimensional criminal in a space station that exploded, and we honestly haven't the faintest idea what they might have done since. Certainly, whatever Precia did to her daughter seems to have involved a Lost Logia that may be unstable or dangerous to her and everyone around her."
Momoko's hackles lowered somewhat, and she nodded grudgingly. "I'll tell her whenever I next see her. Though I can't make any promises as to when that will be." There
was the throwaway phone that she'd sent, but Nanoha tended to keep that switched off unless she was using it, so it wasn't exactly a reliable means of contacting her.
'Admiral,' Amy's voice sounded.
'Admiral Graham is calling. Conference Room One is set up for secure comms.'
Lindy kept her face set in a polite mask.
'Very well. I'll be right along.' She cleared her throat. "Thank you, Mrs Takamachi. Now, no doubt you'll be wanting to get back to your home. I'm going to have you escorted back to the medbay so the doctors can give you a formal all clear, and then after you've been debriefed we can have you transferred back to your house."
"Debriefed?" Momoko asked suspiciously.
The admiral sighed. "Just a talk with a few people. Among other things, we'd quite like to give you a way to call us in emergencies if you see the Wolkenritter again." She rose. "Now, I'll have someone come and take you back to the doctors, but I'm afraid I have to talk to someone about this recent chain of events."
Lindy stopped off in the toilets and washed her face with cold water before she headed to the conference room. Mrs Takamachi got on her nerves almost as much as Megane Alpine had. Why did she have to make everything so difficult? And the fact that she was an unusually powerful mage who was entirely self-taught didn't help matters. It might be unfair to judge a woman by her daughter, but Lindy had been on edge throughout the entire conversation simply because she had no idea what the woman from a backwater planet would do.
Settling down in the conference room, she took the call. It was stuffier and more cramped in here than in the observation chambers where she'd left Momoko. Gil said he'd been moving closer for easier communications, but he was still seventy lisecs out and the lag made communications a halting, awkward process full of long pauses. Real time video was pointless with that kind of delay, so messages took its place. It was a lonely method of communication, waiting over two minutes for any reply for something she'd just said to make it back to her.
"Lindy," Gil's voice said. "How are you holding up?"
"Worry less about how I'm holding up and more about the situation we have developing," she dictated. "Gil, I have two Class One Lost Logia on my hands. Please tell me High Command has authorised you to move everything you have to support me. Your fleets are a week out. You can make it. We can contain this."
It was a long, painful wait for his reply.
Gil sighed. "You're not going to like what I'm about to say, Lindy," he said frankly. "I've got a friend close to High Command, and they dropped me a few hints that… well. Command thinks the Mariage are the real threat. Given the production rate of the units, much as it pains me, I have to agree with them. So from what I've heard, they're handling the situation as a Mariage containment situation. You've read the protocols just as I have. They're straight from Belkan doctrine. Overwhelming force must be brought to hand to crush them. Feeding in dribs and drabs doesn't work."
"What?" Lindy exploded, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her gut. "That's… it's the Book of Darkness! And Mariage containment means they'll delay? I told them that the Mariage are going after the Book! Even if they want to prioritise them… we have to stop the Book!" She sagged down, head in her hands. No. No.
Intellectually, she could understand High Command's reaction. Although no one would say it out loud, the Book of Darkness usually did damage on the city-to-continent scale when it went critical. If it was on UA-97, it would cause heavy damage, yes, but then it would vanish. The Mariage were one of the weapons of the Dawn States, and they were a tool of conquest and conversion and expansion. If they could make more...
And perhaps there was an edge of weary acceptance. No one could stop the Book of Darkness. At least the Mariage were a threat you could destroy.
"Yes, Lindy, I understand how dangerous it is. God knows I do," the man said when his reply came back, sounding exhausted. He all but confirmed her suspicions. After all, it was his homeworld at risk. "So does Command. But a rapid response team is
not enough to handle a full-blown Mariage outbreak. This is one of the Category One contingencies. You know this as well as I do. All previous Mariage outbreaks have been isolated units dug up by archaeologists. Your report states they're being proactive. That means either someone is controlling units they've dug up from somewhere, or the Dark Queen has emerged again. And either way, I'd be willing to bet they're remembering that the Mariage need powerful mages to make their command units.
"So I'll see what I can do. I'll try to spare you as many mages as I can, although…" he took a deep breath, "I can't say much about their quality. But as soon as High Command gives the orders, all my choices go out the window. Look on the bright side. It'll only be a week to gather the forces, and then one or two for transit. If… if the worst hasn't happened by then, you'll have overwhelming forces to deal with the case." He sighed. "This shouldn't be happening. Not now," he said, with heartfelt sorrow.
Lindy balled her hands into fists, staring at the floating holographic image of his face. "Damn it all," she whispered.
...
The play area turned out to be a large room in a rough L-shape, with the door at the corner of the two segments. Drawing tablets lay on a couple of tables, and there was a wide and somewhat battered sofa in front of a holo-window television. Half-unpacked games were scattered everywhere. Someone had put down a carpet and painted the walls, but it didn't do a very good job of hiding the bare metal and piping. Three coffee-skinned men and women were in it, one woman reading something and the other two watching a music channel on television. They got to their feet as the small group entered, and Alicia cocked her head at them.
"Minders," Tre said, before she could ask. "Locals from the city. Where are the others?" She spoke the last line apparently to the room at large, but the woman who had been reading stepped forward.
"They are trying to locate Miss Sein, I am afraid," she explained, ducking her head. "She has... left again."
Tre twitched slightly, and growled something that sounded suspiciously like 'going to kill her'. "You all," she snapped, gesturing to the children.
"Stay here. Don't wander off. I'm going to find Sein."
"Me too!" Cinque spoke up immediately. "She listens to me!"
Tre glanced at her and shrugged. "Fine." She turned to the woman. "Has anyone seen her?"
She hesitated for a second. "In the dining hall. Heading, ah, upwards."
This apparently meant something to everyone who knew her, as it drew a chorus of groans. "Oh, great," Tre sighed. "Okay, Cinque, get to her room; she'll head there once she catches something. Take a net. I'll see if I can head her off."
Cinque nodded seriously and ran off. Tre turned back to the woman and gestured at Alicia, Vesta and Arf. "They're the Doctor's guests. Look after them, don't let them wander off. Nulla and Zero might be coming later; Uno's telling them off." She held eye contact for a moment longer, and Alicia got the distinct impression that she was adding something telepathically. The woman nodded once, and Tre turned and left in a hurry without another word.
'... okay then!' Arf said with attempted cheer.
'So, this is a play area, right? What is there to do?'
Dieci walked past her, still dragging her oversized staff, and headed in a straight line for the other end of the room, where she carefully leaned her staff against the wall and booted up a wide holowindow. It wavered for a moment, before resolving into a start-up screen. Quattro, for her part, sniffed haughtily and wandered off down the other branch of the room, where she pulled herself up onto the sofa and brought up a control window.
Alicia dithered for a moment, but the siren call of the video game was too strong to resist, and she spared only a few seconds for indecision before joining Dieci. The loading screen faded to reveal a holographic firing gallery, and Dieci was shooting almost before it had begun.
She was very, very good. The game was simple – a light blue background with moving circles of every size moving across the gallery. But that didn't mean it was easy. The targets bobbed and dipped as they went, some as small as a fingernail, the largest no larger than Alicia's palm. And yet not one of them made it from one side of the room to the other without being tagged. At the bottom of the virtual range, a ribbon kept count of centre-mass hits, glancing shots and misses.
There were a lot more of the first two than the last.
Vesta quickly grew bored and started a game of tag with Arf; racing around the room in kitten and puppy form. Alicia watched with interest, though. After a few minutes of careful observation, she tapped Dieci on the shoulder. "Can I have a go?"
Dieci's eyes stayed riveted dead ahead, not even tracking the targets as they dodged and weaved, but she tilted her head towards Baton without ceasing fire. "Ask for permission," she said quietly. "There is a multiplayer mode."
Expanding Baton to its full size, Alicia did so, and the targets multiplied. With a happy whoop, Alicia set to blasting them with virtual shots.
This turned out to be less successful than she'd expected.
Aim. Shoot. Miss.
"They're going too fast! Can't we slow them down?"
Aim. Shoot. Pre-empted.
"Hey! I was
aiming at that! That was mine!"
Aim. Shoot. Miss.
"How are you doing that? You're not even watching them move!"
Aim. Shoot. Pre-empted.
"Ha ha... argh! You got there first! How are your shots going faster?! No fair!"
Aim. Shoot. Intercepted.
"Argh! Stop shooting my shots! You're meant to be shooting the targets!"
"She always does this," Quattro called from the other end of the room, apparently braver now that Alicia was expressing an opinion she agreed with. "It's unfair and weird! She spends all her free time doing this and even trains when she doesn't have to! And not the fun training like illusions, either!"
Alicia pointed at Dieci dramatically. "You're cheating!" she accused. "You cheating cheater who... who cheats!"
Dieci frowned slightly and paused the game. "Am not," she retorted, still looking at the screen. "You're just bad."
"Well... well... you're weird and your eyes aren't right!"
Dieci stared forwards blankly, the slight frown fading into confusion. "Aren't right how?"
"You don't look at things!" Alicia pointed accusingly. "Even right now! You're not looking at me! And you weren't looking at the targets really either, I saw! And you're freaky-good at hitting them anyway, even though you weren't watching to see which way they were going! You were probably
cheating! And you're all..." She made an exaggeratedly serious face, with her eyes wide and her lips curled downward comically. "'bluh bluh boring boring blurghle' all the time! Totally unfun!"
'And you smell funny!' offered Vesta helpfully, pausing in her game of tag. Sensing an opportunity, Arf manoeuvred into her blind spot and began to sneak up on her as she continued.
'Like metal and brownness and sort of like bread after it- waaargh!'
Ignoring the kitten-puppy scuffle developing near her feet, Alicia's eyes widened as a realisation hit her. "That... that's
it! You're totally unfun! Your Fun levels are too low; you're going into Fun withdrawal!"
"Shooting is fun," Dieci protested quietly. "I like shooting."
Alicia was in full swing, though, and something as paltry as direct contradiction had no chance of dissuading her. "That's why you're all weird! You're suffering a deadly lack of Fun! Do you realise what this means, Dieci?" She dropped Baton and grabbed the other girl by the shoulders urgently. "You're at risk of being like
Fate! If you don't get medicine, you'll
never be able to have fun again!"
Dieci stilled, something vaguely akin to concern showing. "R-really? How do I get... treated?"
"There's only one way," Alicia revealed in low, ominous tones. She leant forwards, a small mana ball floating beneath her face to give it all-important under lighting. "We'll have to go find a cure! From a mystical planet far beyond Dimensional Space, where heroines are born and evil scary monsters lurk, and nobody wears shoes indoors!"
"Oh no!" Quattro burst out in a falsely concerned voice. She had abandoned the television some way through Alicia's dramatic monologue in favour of claiming a better chair from which to eavesdrop. "We'll never be able to get there in time! I guess," she sighed mournfully, "that Dieci will just have to have a life without fun."
"Nah, it's fine," Alicia broke in. "I already went there and got some."
Quattro momentarily looked like she'd been hit in the face with a brick, before she scowled and stomped back to her television. Alicia didn't notice, as she was busy trying to break up the familiar's wrestling match.
"Arf! Vesta! I need you to carry my bag over! It's too heavy for me to... Arf! Vesta! Stop it!"
'Never give up! Never surrender!' Arf howled, chewing on Vesta's tail as the kitten headbutted her repeatedly in the ribs.
'Only one can be victori- aargh! Hey! Lasers are cheating! Photon Bullet!'
Dieci pointed behind herself, towards the entrance to the room. "That bag?"
Alicia blinked, abandoning her futile attempt to get Arf and Vesta's attention, and followed her finger. "Um... yeah. Okay, seriously, are you blind or something? Only you don't look at things when you're... looking at them."
"No," Dieci said, carefully putting her staff down and walking over to heft the bag up on one shoulder without apparent effort. "Not blind. I see my own way. Don't need to look at things to see them."
She dumped the bag in front of Alicia, who frowned. "How does that work?"
Dieci hesitated. "Cure for the Fun thing first? I don't want to not have fun anymore."
"Oh, right!" Alicia delved into the bag and came back up with a large chocolate bar. "This is a mystical food from a special magical world as old as Alhazred! The people there are really really really bad at having magic and stuff, but they make up for it with weird and super-brilliant ideas! Like this stuff! It's called chocolate!" She peeled the wrapping open and broke the bar into rough thirds, handing two pieces out to Dieci and Quattro, who'd snuck closer again. "Try some and see!"
Quattro looked at the brown substance dubiously. "It looks like poo," she pointed out. "And my bit's smaller than Dieci's. And all the worlds are as old as Alhazred, they're
planets." She said this last in the tones of a person patronisingly explaining that the sky is blue to someone very young or stupid. Alicia glared.
"I know that, stupid!" she snapped. "I was being meta... thingical! And if you don't like it, don't have any! I'll have yours!" She made a grab for Quattro's piece.
"Hey!" yelped Quattro, snatching it back and stuffing half of it in her mouth. "Mu caf't... nng... mmmoh wow, thif iv
veally goob." Dieci cocked her head curiously and took a bite of her own chunk. Her eyes went wide, and she grabbed Alicia's arm urgently.
"Mmmf!"
Alicia giggled. "See? Now you're having fun! I think that's the biggest expression I've seen on you so far!" She punched the air in triumph. "So, now that you've been introduced to the Fun Kingdom, you have to meet its ruler! Queen Dollie!" She held up the blue-haired doll reverently. "Hmm. And you need a nickname, too. But first, say hello to Queen Dollie!"
Dieci regarded her warily. "... it is a doll," she pointed out. "It can't speak."
Alicia gave her a look of exasperation. "You're
really bad at this," she complained. "Fine, don't." She brightened.
"Instead, you can tell me how your eyes work! And show me around! And we can see if some more chocolate gets you understanding how Pretend works." She dug two more bars out of the bulging rucksack, pressed one into Dieci's hands and slipped another into a pocket.
"I'll come too!" Quattro volunteered, having finished her own chocolate. There were smears around her mouth and across her fingers, and she eyed the bag full of bars with hungry eyes. "I know more about the place than Dieci, anyway.
I ask our big sisters questions instead of just training all the time."
"Oh, would you?" Alicia asked sweetly. "That's so nice! Let me just put my bag away, then."
Uncertainty flickered across Quattro's face. "... wait, what about my chocolate?"
Alicia's smile turned slightly smug. "Chocolate?
I didn't hear anything about chocolate. Did you, Dieci?" She grinned. "Besides, I thought it looked like poo? Why would you want any more of that?"
Quattro sputtered in outrage. "You... you can't say that! I didn't mean that! That's
cheating!" Her last words rose to a shriek, and she made a grab for the bag, but Alicia pulled it back out of reach.
"Nuh uh uh!" she crowed. "It's my chocolate, so I get to choose who to share it with, and you were mean so I don't want to share it with you.
And I can stop you from getting it while me and Dieci are exploring!" She held up Dollie proudly. "With this!"
Her eyes closed. Violet light surged and flared in her chest. "Woooormyyyyy!" she sang, happily.
And the doll bulged out and grew. Up, and up, and
up.
'Alicia!' barked Arf, her fur standing on end and her teeth bared,
'Send that thing back where it came from or so help me, I will...'
She was cut off as the face of the amorphous, serpentine thing of woven cloth finished forming; the great red eyes popping out of the mass and the enormous jaws opening. It coiled around the bag protectively and screeched; a discordant sound of wailing metal on glass. Quattro screamed and Dieci backed away until her back hit the wall. The minders fled in terror. Even Arf and Vesta backed away from the thing warily, both shifting to their war forms and growling. Combat spells bloomed by their heads, waiting for orders to fire.
Alicia wobbled a little and then straightened, looking up at her creation. It was smaller than it had been on Earth, but still towered over her, four or five times her own height. The coarse white-blue cloth of its head scraped the high ceiling and huge red button-eyes the size of dinner plates revolved madly in a head the size of a wheelbarrow. Needle-like teeth filled its mouth, each barb the length of a man's hand.
The little girl giggled, and held her arms up as if demanding a hug. And the monstrous serpent bowed down, dipping its head low enough for her to encircle its neck. The thick body flowed inwards where her arms touched; allowing her to get her arms all the way around to meet at the back.
"Wormy!" she greeted happily. "Good Wormy! Guard my stuff, okay?"
It screeched again; eyes roving with uncomfortable purpose over the familiars, Dieci and Quattro before going back to their mad, disconnected spinning.
Reassured that the monster had come from Alicia, and wasn't about to rampage, Dieci took a few cautious steps forward and started circling it, trying to get a better view from all angles. "It looks soft," she said. "Or is it a she? It was the doll you called Queen Dollie." She paused, thinking. "Is it like her Barrier Jacket?"
Alicia's face lit up. "That's
exactly what it is!" she squealed, delighted beyond measure. "Come on, let's go explore!" Grabbing the other girl's arm, she dragged her off towards the door, Arf and Vesta following reluctantly after the pair.
Behind them, Quattro whimpered as the worm-monster turned its attention to her. She threw a longing glance at the bag it was coiled around, before a determined expression settled on her face.
Sticking her tongue out at the thing defiantly, she turned and rushed out of the room as fast as her legs would carry her.
...
There was a certain consistency to hospital rooms, Nanoha had noticed. It didn't matter whether they were in large brick buildings on Earth, or in strange organic structures floating in Dimensional Space or on poky, cramped spaceships or in secret bases hidden under crumbling ruins in a tropical jungle, something about them always gave off the same feeling. It wasn't their appearance, though there were some things that seemed to be universal there, or even their smell. Medical wards out here had magic to do what the sharp scent of antiseptics did back on Earth, after all.
No, it was just something about the feeling that such rooms held. These were places that people came when they were sick or hurt or dying. The fear and discomfort and general unpleasantness seemed to seep into the walls and floor, and no amount of effort spent on making the spaces cheerful could quite counter the awkward unease that one felt in them.
Or maybe that was just Nanoha. Her experiences with hospital rooms hadn't exactly been friendly to date.
This one was fairly inoffensive, all things considered. The slight layer of dust built up in some of the corners and on the more out-of-the-way surfaces made Nanoha think that it probably only saw minimal use, which she supposed was a good thing.
"Core haemorrhage," said Jail as he flipped through the holoscreens surrounding Fate's bed, where she obediently lay quiet and still. He was speaking mostly to himself, as well as Uno, who had arrived midway through his examination. A faint shimmer in the air around the prone girl hinted at the numerous detection spells running up and down her. Nanoha suspected that the bed itself was probably something a bit like a Device, and crammed her hands in her pockets to stifle the temptation to take it apart and see how the magic worked.
"Not as bad as it might have been, though," the Doctor continued, skimming through virtual windows on the screen with idle flicks of his fingers and pausing here and there to enlarge a few and adjust values. "Your conditioning saved you, I think – your core is used to high burst-power output, and accustomed to high stress. Your physical fitness didn't hurt, either. If you didn't have the muscle density that you do, you'd probably have a case of broken ribs from some of those impacts. Fighting both the Blade and the Hound simultaneously, even for a few seconds, was... not wise." He looked at Fate sternly. "While I'm impressed that you survived, I hope you'll take this as a lesson not to try that in future."
He turned back to the screens, opening several new windows. "As it is, you got away with severe bruising in several places – your chest, your throat, both arms, your left hip – and mild core damage, as well as first-degree subdermal burns from the violent mana transfer." He hummed to himself. "If I didn't know better, I'd almost say they were gentle with you. As it is... hmm, you say you had a high-grade military Jacket up at the time? Yes, they were probably being careful not to trigger any hidden counter-intrusion functions. Which you should probably look into, Miss Takamachi. Your familiar won't always be there to save you." He nodded towards the teenager reading in the corner. "Uno, arrange a selection of options for her perusal, would you?"
He swiped both hands down, closing the screens, and the distracted air of professionalism slid away as he seemed to focus on Fate as a person again, rather than as an interesting case subject. "I'm sorry, my dear," he said to her. "I'd hoped to meet you in more pleasant circumstances than this, but it looks like this is the hand we've been dealt."
Nanoha frowned. "You're talking like you know her," she noted. "Have you two met before?"
Fate shook her head, but Jail was nodding. "Indeed we have," he agreed, turning to Fate. "Though I'm not surprised you don't remember it," he said. "Did Precia not tell you?"
Two puzzled looks met his rhetorical question, and he spread his hands wide. "Why, who do you think she worked with to restore her daughter to life? Who do you think helped her with Project Fate? Whose resources do you think she used to clone little Alicia and create an Artificial Mage from her cells?"
He smiled down benevolently at Fate. "If Precia is your mother, dear girl, then from a certain point of view; I am your father. And I must say." His eyes crinkled merrily. "I am
very proud. Why, some of the footage from the Jewel Seed Incident was nothing short of thrilling. And now to stand up to two of the fabled Wolkenritter at once and escape!" He spun around with a flourish of his lab coat to check on the screens. "You have lived up to every projection and expectation I had of you, if not exceeded them. Bravo!"
Fate stared up at him in surprise for a moment, and then slowly blushed. "My... father?" she whispered hoarsely. "I never saw you, though. Why..." she winced and reached over to the glass of water sitting on the stool beside her bed for a few sips. "Why did I never see you?"
"Ah, if only I could have been there," sighed Jail. "But I had work that took me far afield – very far afield, at times – and Precia was intent on finding a way to revive Alicia. She was very protective of you, I'm afraid. Ah, my apologies, I meant at the time, not that she doesn't still feel such."
Fate nodded, absorbing this with a tiny, shy smile. "So..." she asked after a moment's hesitation, "so do you know who our real father is?"
Jail shrugged. "In that, I'm afraid I can't help you. Precia first contacted me several years after the accident. She seemed singularly uninterested in romance, and if she was ever married then I've found no record of it. I gave her some medical care for her condition, and then later we began work on Project Fate together."
This seemed to shake Fate out of the faint state of shock she'd been in since learning she had a father-figure. "Mother!" she forced out. "Nevermind the... is she... can you help her?"
Jail pursed his lips and moved around between Fate's bed and Precia's. Drumming his fingers thoughtfully along the headboard, he opened the new set of screens and examined them.
"Regarding Precia..." he sighed. "Her condition is considerably less optimistic. If she'd come to me sooner..." Fate made a tiny sound, caught between sob and whimper, and Jail's eyes flickered across to her. "Ah, but I suppose she was intent on reviving her daughter," he added. His face lit up as his train of thought shifted tracks. "A truly marvellous achievement, by the way. I'd be happy to give her an exam to ensure there are no adverse side-effects from whatever method Precia used, just in case. But... yes. She's stable, but her condition is very serious. She may never wake again. If she does, I'm afraid I'm not sure how much I can do for her, besides making her comfortable."
Fate didn't make a sound, but Nanoha saw the muscles in her jaw clench and her hands ball into white-knuckled fists.
"Can't you do whatever she did for Alicia for her?" she asked hopefully, gauging Fate's reaction surreptitiously. "That implant thing? They have the same thing wrong with them, right?"
Jail shook his head. "I'm not sure what, exactly, Precia did," he admitted. "I would need to study it in depth to have any hope of understanding the process – life extension technology and reanimation are not specialties of mine, and Precia had accumulated an enormous knowledge base to base her work on that I simply do not have. Such a mind, gone to waste! It's heartbreaking! I doubt I would be able to adequately research the subject in what time she has left, and I'm dubious as to whether it would even work. Their conditions might stem from the same cause, but they're very different problems. Alicia was merely mana-saturated. Precia has decades-worth of built-up damage from the poisoning. Her body is simply falling apart."
He sighed again. "Still, I'll do my best. I owe her that much, after all. Unfortunately, Precia is not our only problem." He waved a hand invitingly. "Uno? Explain the situation to them."
The teenager paused, tilting her head as her eyes flickered from left to right across sudden spell windows that bloomed in front of her. Her hands darted out over them; far more than Jail had been moving, surrounding her in a half-cylinder as she opened and dismissed individual screens according to no pattern Nanoha could make out. She was very curious as to how Uno was doing it, though. It looked useful. She wondered if she could learn the spell from her.
"Facts," she said clinically, without looking away from the web of data. "The TSAB has a proven previous capacity to deal with Book of Darkness incidents, at some loss to itself. They have specialist combat mages on site and multiple warships in the area. Their projections estimate that they will be able to contain this incident on their own, with a moderate degree of certainty, and my own predictions bear this out."
She twitched her fingers, and several of the screens enlarged to show the grey-suited figures that had appeared like locusts in the three-way fight.
"However," she continued, "they will not be able to do this if they are trying to fight a war on two fronts. All evidence suggests that the new element in the situation is a Mariage outbreak. If the Bureau is distracted, either the Book will be completed successfully, or the Mariage will obtain access to it and be able to use it to begin mass production in a way not seen since the Dawn States. I predict that the former is the more likely, because TSAB protocols are such that they will prioritise the Mariage as the greater threat."
Fate winced. So did Nanoha, despite only understanding one of the two outcomes.
"Evaluation," Uno finished conclusively. "The best chance of successfully resolving the Book of Darkness Incident is to remove the Mariage from the equation. This is in line with our goals."
"Um." Nanoha raised her hand. "What exactly
are the Mariage? I'm still a bit unclear on that."
Uno turned to face her smartly. "The Mariage are a Dawn States cybernetic weapons platform," she explained in a clipped tone. Nanoha squirmed slightly. It felt a lot like being lectured in class on Schzenais by a teacher who didn't like her much. Like her history teacher. Or her geography teacher. Or her literature teacher.
"At full strength," continued Uno, "they would be designated as a Class 1 Lost Logia on par with the Jewel Seeds. We appear to be facing a crippled force, or they would have already overrun, killed and reprocessed a noticeable fraction of the sector. Functionally, a single Mariage unit is a reanimated corpse, capable of magic on par with a B-rank mage, and with several functions that give them an edge in combat. Command units are more powerful, and capable of reanimating corpses on the battlefield in combat time, though they are not capable of doing so indefinitely. Details on how they function are uncertain, as every unit is equipped with a self-destruct, and capturing one intact is extremely difficult."
"Truly impressive specimens..." Jail mused. "It's said that the Mariage were controlled in the days of the ancient Dawn States by the kingdom of Galea. The last recorded Dark Queen of that state was recorded as Ixpellia. Her name crops up several times in the Warring States Era, but what happened to her is unknown." He ran a hand through his hair thoughtfully. "I wonder if she may have risen once more?"
"So we just have to find the queen and get her to tell them to stop, then?" asked Nanoha. "And she can order them to... I don't know, turn off?"
Jail hesitated. "... no," he said, frowning slightly. "I said she... ah, I think there may be a problem with the translation there. No, Ixpellia wasn't a queen in the sense that humans have queens. She was a queen in the sense that ants have queens."
Nanoha made a silent 'oh', and nodded. "So... she controls them all with her mind, then? She's the leader of the hivemind?"
The Doctor's mouth twitched. "You... don't know much about ants, do you? Well, regardless, Miss Takamachi, I wonder if you would be willing to help me capture one. Studying how they work would help considerably in fighting them. We might even be able to extract the location of their base and put them down."
"Eh?" Nanoha blinked. "But... I thought they were impossible to... and you said they're
corpses..." She blanched, and Fate half-rose at the fear in her voice before a warning trill from the bed made her lie back down again. "Like..."
"Now now," Jail soothed. "I'm not asking you to fight them head-on. But I'm sure that with the help of you and your familiar, Uno, Tre and Quattro should be able to find a way to circumvent their self-destruct defences and take one intact." He paused. "Well, intact enough to get something useful from. And once we have that information, we can use it to eliminate them without anyone needing to be put in danger."
Nanoha's expression firmed. "Right!" she agreed. "So, um, what would you need me to do?"
"Nanoha!" Fate said in alarm. "You can't just... agree that qui... qui..." She broke off with a wince, took another soothing sip of water, and switched to telepathy.
'You can't just agree that quickly! You'd be going in without backup, and Linith told us not to trust these people!'
But Nanoha's jaw was already set mulishly.
'Is she telling the truth? About the Mariage? About what they are?'
Fate hesitated.
'... yes,' she admitted.
'But you should still...'
"Then I'm helping," Nanoha interrupted stubbornly. "The Wolkenritter only go after people once, but things like that... they'd want to turn my family into...
things. Things like what we fought at the hospital. And on the submarine."
Fate opened her mouth to argue, paused, and closed it again. Jail watched with polite interest as she debated for a moment. Finally, she slumped back down onto the pillows.
'Okay,' she said reluctantly.
'But be careful. You won't have me or Arf for backup – she'll have to stay here to guard Alicia and Mother and Linith.'
'And you,' pointed out Nanoha.
'And don't worry, I will be. But if there are monsters like that involved in this, we have to stop them. I can't just sit back and let the TSAB try to handle it. They'd lose.'
Apparently sensing that the argument had been resolved in Nanoha's favour, Jail clapped his hands, making both girls jump. "Well!" he exclaimed. "I'm glad you're willing to help, Miss Takamachi. Now, as to what we'll be doing; I happen to know of some Alhazredian-era ruins near here." He pursed his lips, running a hand through his already-messy hair. "Hmm. From their behaviour on your Devices' logs, they seem to want power – they're certainly pursuing the storage tomes that the Wolkenritter carry. I think that if we set up some bait in the ruins, we may be able to lure one of them into a trap."
He mulled it over for a moment, nodding to himself. "We'll probably fail to capture the first one," he decided. "But it will let us observe the self-destruct firsthand. There is a
small chance we may net a Knight or the Bureau instead, but there are measures we can take to guard against that."
Uno turned back to her screens, all business. "They'll need different methods," she warned, "and we won't be able to guarantee anything. But a barrier filter set to the Bureau's frequencies would..."
"Doctor! Doctor! Uno!" Quattro skidded into the room, bouncing off the doorframe in her haste. "The new girl is being mean to me! And Sein's being bad! And Dieci's being... Dieci!" She looked up at Jail plaintively. "She's being friends with Alicia and they were mean to me and wouldn't share and then Alicia
summoned something big and horrible in the
playroom and it's not fair!"
"Summoned?" Nanoha mouthed, confused. And then she paled. On the bed, she heard Fate breathe in sharply. But there was no flare of power characteristic of an activating Jewel Seed nearby. That, and that alone, convinced her not to bolt out to find Alicia immediately.
Jail quirked an eyebrow, then settled into a fond smile. "Well," he said. "I don't know about Dieci and Alicia, but I think I have a special mission that needs a Quattro along on it." He smirked over at Uno before looking down at Quattro again. "Do you know where I might find one?"
Quattro's eyes lit up. "I'll go! I can do it! What do you want me to do?"
Jail patted her on the head.
"Just be yourself," he said with a grin.
...
An icy wind was rolling in off the ocean, bringing with it steel grey clouds. There was a scent to the air which suggested it might snow soon. Miyuki Takamachi, for one, hoped it would hold off for a few days. She tucked her coat tighter, and adjusted her scarf, looking around the grey streets. The streets were packed. Schools were out, and that meant there were children everywhere.
Miyuki shook her head sadly, and blew in her hands. She ducked into a supermarket, picked up a basket, and then drifted down the vegetable aisle. Pretending to examine the discount potatoes, she took a deep breath, and closed her eyes. Breathe in, breathe out. Sink into the meditative pattern they used in training. She could feel it deep inside her, her
ki, a candle hidden within her. She breathed in and she fanned the flames; she breathed out and drew the heat up and out into her limbs.
Compared to her mother, she couldn't do much. Even untrained, Momoko could simply exceed her with raw brute force. It was kind of embarrassing. Shiro was from an ancient samurai clan – and so was Miyuki, even if she was technically his niece rather than his daughter. But he was her dad despite all that, and he'd never treated her any differently from Kyouya. She'd put years into studying the art of the blade and the associated secret techniques.
It was a little galling to watch Momoko manage to make armour from her ki and fire blasts of energy – and even more galling to see that Suzuka and Arisa could manage the second as well, when they had that alien technology to help, and to know that her little sister was a full-blown flying magical girl. Of course she was a little bit jealous. It wasn't fair. But it wasn't like complaining would change anything.
And in the meantime, she could help protect her family. She only had a pinch of 'magic' – and didn't it feel strange to think about it like that? Maybe pinches weren't how you measured magic, but the point remained; she couldn't even make a glow. So it probably meant they couldn't pick her out of a crowd, and even if they tried to drain her they wouldn't get much. So she was wandering around crowded areas using her ki, seeing who paid attention to her. Keeping her eyes open, she walked up and down the corridors of the supermarket, looking for anyone who seemed to pay her suspicious amounts of attention.
Well, anyone who wasn't a hormonal teenage boy.
Maybe she'd see one of the people who'd threatened her family, who her mother and Arisa and Suzuka had seen. There was a tall, athletic one built like a swordswoman with long pink hair, one who looked like an eight year old girl with bright red hair, and a darker skinned man with pale hair. Momoko in particular had got a good look at the older woman twice now, and she'd managed to produce a sketch of her. Miyuki felt fairly sure she'd recognise her if she saw her. And redheads weren't common in Japan. The description of the man was much vaguer, but at least she had something to work off.
Kyouya had worked out what she was doing on her third trip out. So now he was trailing behind at a safe distance with his blade hidden in a sports bag. She didn't mind being the bait. He was a better swordsman than her, so if she wound up really needing help it'd be good to have him there. She didn't have a weapon herself, in case they had some kind of magical scanning. Even so, she might go by the name of Takamachi now, but she had been born a Fuwa and hundreds of years of Fuwa heritage were telling her that she should at the very least try to fight back.
Of course, things would be more convenient if hundreds of years of Fuwa heritage hadn't also given her astigmatism. She took off her glasses, and started cleaning them. If only she'd thought to wear contacts today. She turned and managed to walk into a wheelchair, tripped and ended up face-first in the melons.
"Oh, I'm sorry! Are you okay?" a young girl asked, at nearly the same time as an older woman's "Oh dear, let me help you."
"Ow," Miyuki groaned for the sake of appearances as the woman helped her out of the pile of fruit. She was perfectly fine. She could take harder falls than that, even if she was never normally that clumsy when channelling her ki. She was more worried about her glasses, which luckily she'd managed to hold onto. A blonde woman helped her up. The lenses seemed to be fine, she thought as she peered at them, but the frame was bent. "Sorry, sorry, that was my fault," she apologised.
She really, really hoped Kyouya hadn't seen her do that. He'd be insufferable for weeks.
"No, no, really, it was my fault," said the girl sitting in the wheelchair. She had brown hair and looked to be about Nanoha's age. Her expression was a mix of worry and embarrassment.
"She's fine, Hayate," the blonde woman said, hovering protectively between the girl – Hayate – and Miyuki, looking concerned. "I told you to stay close. Why did you go off like that? Are you hurt?"
"I'm
fine, Shamal," the girl said petulantly, rolling her eyes. "She's the one who fell." She looked back to Miyuki. "Really, sorry about that."
"I should have been looking where I was going," Miyuki insisted.
"No, no, I need to take more care when moving behind people. It's my fault," the girl fired back.
There was an awkward pause, as Miyuki adjusted the set of her glasses. "How about we agree it was both our faults?" Miyuki suggested. There was a… feeling about this girl. She wasn't sure what. But if she was in a wheelchair, maybe she'd been attacked too. Miyuki wished that she could scan things like Momoko could. It would make this much easier.
The girl laughed. "Well, fine. If you insist. I am really sorry, though." She mock-dusted down her fluffy white jumper. "I'm Hayate, in case you didn't hear," she said. "This is Shamal."
"Pleased to meet you," said the blonde, looking Miyuki up and down. She quirked a smile. "Well, you don't look too injured," she said, "so Hayate's clumsiness can't have been too lethal. And the melons don't look to be damaged, so they must be unripe."
The other woman looked to be in her late twenties or early thirties, and was dressed warmly in a tan-coloured coat. A jade-green scarf added some colour to her outfit. Miyuki relaxed. Shamal had quite a strong grip, but she didn't hold herself like someone trained in fighting. She shook her head minutely. There was caution, and there was paranoia. The mother of a girl in a wheelchair wasn't very likely to be the one who'd attacked all these people and fought off trained space magical girl – and magical boy – soldiers.
"They were pretty hard," Miyuki agreed, frowning as she tried to straighten out the wire frame of her glasses "Not that I'm complaining. I don't think I'd have wanted to fall into a crate of tomatoes. I'm Miyuki, by the way." She chose her next words carefully. "I hope I didn't nudge your broken leg."
Hayate frowned, wheeling back a bit. Then her expression cleared. "Oh, no, I don't have a broken leg," she said. There was a slight tremor in her expression. "It's just a disease I have."
"Oh, I'm so sorry," Miyuki said. "Well, I hope you get better."
There was the same quiver again. "So do I," Hayate said. "I'm getting pretty sick of hospital visits. I might as well move there full time at this rate." She crossed her arms and huffed, obviously not thinking much of that idea.
Miyuki didn't let her emotions show. So, no, the girl probably hadn't been drained. It had hit the other people like influenza, taking them out of action for a few days. But she was maybe thirty-percent sure that she was feeling some kind of magic in the area, and - much as she was loathe to admit it - there did seem to be a lot of magical nine-year old girls around. Maybe there had been something strange in the water ten years ago. She tried again. "Well, you should take care," she told Hayate. "I heard some rumours that some young girls were attacked around here. You should be careful."
"Oh, I'll be fine," Hayate said, confidently. "I have Zafira."
"Zafira?"
"Our dog," Shamal said. "He's tied up outside. They don't allow dogs in here." She pursed her lips. "And we probably should hurry up and get the things in here quickly," she reminded Hayate. "Otherwise he'll get lonely, and we still need to take him to the park today."
Hayate nodded. "Oh, I suppose," she said. "Well, it was nice… um, bumping into you," she told Miyuki.
"I really am sorry about that," Miyuki said. "But yes. Take care. And don't trust strangers."
Hayate grinned. "But you're a stranger telling me to not trust strangers," she pointed out reasonably. "Which means I shouldn't trust you when you tell me not to trust strangers which mean I should trust you which means I shouldn't trust you and so on. Which means now we're going to start seeing dogs all over the place! Not just Zafira! Because…"
"Hayate," Shamal chided her. "Are you going to tell that joke again?"
"What joke?" Hayate asked innocently. "You mean how the most dangerous kind of dogs are para-dogs?"
"... yes, that one," Shamal said, wincing. "I'm sorry for putting you through
that," she apologised to Miyuki. "Come on, Hayate. Let's go pick up Zafira."
...
The hangar wasn't actually a hangar, but rather a camouflaged aerodome constructed over a largeish stretch of forest just outside the ruined city. The trees and undergrowth had been cleared away – from the state of the tree stumps, Nanoha rather suspected that Tre had been allowed to cut loose – from a patch of ground a few hundred metres in diameter. There was a landing strip running alongside it, which looked like it might once have been a road. Safe from the weather and the moisture in the air under the aerodome's environmental barrier spells, the ships sat in neat rows, ready to take off at a moment's notice.
Nanoha looked around with interest, Vesta curled up in her hood and peering out with equal curiosity. Jail apparently had managed to get his hands on several vessels, from something which looked like a newer, cleaner, and less dented version of Hektor's ship to things which looked vaguely like one-man fighter aircraft. The latter didn't seem to have cockpits, though, and Nanoha stared as the mechanical sensor on one rotated to face her.
The ship Uno led her to was the size of a smallish-plane, with a conical body and long swept-back delta wings. It was painted a greyish colour, and she inhaled in amazement as the back unfolded to provide a ramp. "What is that?" she asked.
Uno tilted her head. "This is a DD-21 Fox Manta," she said in her quiet voice. "It's a short-ranged dimensional craft capable of atmospheric entry and exit."
"Does that mean that it can fly normally as well?" Nanoha asked.
Uno stared at her. "Yes," she said, after a pause. "Now, Tre and Quattro will be accompanying you down to the surface, and I will be flying you there. The Doctor will stay in remote contact with us as we go. Do you have any relevant questions before we set off?"
"Um..." Nanoha began, but wilted in the face of Uno's cold expression. "N-no. No questions."
The inside of the ship was wider and flatter than the pictures Nanoha had seen of Earth planes, but still a bit cramped. The seats – padded for acceleration – were arranged facing a low table, which looked like it was part of the ship rather than a later add-on. Vesta relocated from her hood to her lap as she gingerly sank into one and she tangled her fingers in the ruff of fur around her familiar's neck for some soothing stroking. The kitten melted onto her leg and purred happily, her tail flicking lazily from side to side.
"I'm going in the front!" Quattro piped up as Tre took her own seat. "Uno, Uno, I want to help pilot! I'll go in the front with you! I get to help pilot, right? Right?"
Uno rolled her eyes and stepped aside to allow Quattro to clamber into the co-pilot's seat. "Yes, fine," she sighed. "You can co-pilot. As long as you promise not to touch anything I don't tell you to. And mean it, this time."
Passengers safely installed and strapped in, the engine started up with a rumble that resonated through the plane, and the Fox Manta pulled out of the aerodome and took to the skies. It turned in a slow, lazy upward spiral; heading out to sea and away from the skyscraper-city down the coast so as not to be spotted.
A co-pilot wasn't really necessary, despite Quattro's eagerness to fill the role. The pilot didn't even have much to do, once the autopilot had taken over. Uno – after carefully disabling most of the buttons and switches around Quattro's seat – had turned her chair around and was using the time to run through a preliminary briefing on the plan.
She made a tiny gesture with her fingers, and the air above the table wavered and bloomed with colour, resolving into a three-dimensional image of a hot, arid mountainous region; barren and lifeless. The image expanded slightly to include a holographic projection of Jail, only half visible within the bounds of the projectors.
"Our plan is to lay bait in the Alhazredian ruins on UA-52," Uno said, "luring the Mariage in to investigate. Historic conflicts have shown that they target power sources, a hypothesis that has been confirmed by observations of their current activities. Quattro will minimise the chance of the Wolkenritter or the Bureau detecting the signal by..."
Nanoha raised her hand, drawing a protesting mewl from Vesta as the stroking stopped. "... Mr Scaglietti? Um, I was wondering... how do you know about these ruins in the first place? Won't there be dangerous stuff in them?"
Uno sent her a sharp look for interrupting, but Jail just smiled. "Oh, I have my ways," he said mysteriously. "I knew Precia found the Garden in this area, so a few years ago I went to see if there were any more Meso-Urahnian ruins lying around. I've actually already looked through those ones; we're just baiting them with an energy signature to lure the hunters out of hiding. The area is uninhabitable and there's no human presence, but I assure you they've been picked quite clean."
Nanoha looked at the screens. "I can't see anything there," she said, frowning, as she took in the hillside. She perked up. "Oh! Does that mean it's an ancient invisible Alhazredian castle?"
'Or maybe it's in a special barrier you can only get into if you have the right password!' Vesta suggested.
Jail chuckled, running his hands through his hair. "No, sadly not, wonderful though that would be. The facility was... hmm, do you have deep surface bunkers where you come? I believe UA-97 has WMDs, so you probably have something similar. It was built into the side of a mountain to defend against orbital bombardment." His finger traced depressions on the three dimensional map, and a nearby circular lake. "Defences which were apparently necessary. I found the traces of a city around the edge of that lake."
Nanoha shuddered. An entire city, destroyed? That was dreadful. It must have been a long, long time ago, because the arid salt flats looked pristine and unmarked; the pale sands smooth and unmarred and shifting. There were strange animals – creatures native to Type-3 worlds, she remembered from lessons – roaming the landscape. Most of them looked reptilian. Quite a few looked hungry.
"We – which is to say, you – will be making your way to the site via a high-acceleration, high altitude, no-opening insertion," Uno went on, sounding slightly peeved. "There are still inhabited areas on-world, and monitoring stations might detect the..." She sighed as Nanoha's hand went up again.
"Yes, Miss Takamachi?"
Nanoha's cheeks burned, and Vesta hissed at the condescending tone, but she set her jaw firmly and took a breath to ask. "What..."
Tre reached over to touch her arm and gave a small smile. "We're doing a high atmospheric drop," she said. "Uno is going to just skim the atmosphere, where it's not too dense, and then we jump out the back." She leaned forwards, a grin spreading across her face. "And then we fly straight down. No parachutes. Not even just falling. We
accelerate."
Nanoha looked dubious. "Why not just land?" she asked.
"It really is the best way," Uno said from her seat, legs crossed. "It's much harder to pick up the approach of two mages than a vessel. Although," she added slightly reproachfully to Tre, "this time I want you to begin deceleration when I
tell you to."
Tre pouted. "I was fine," she muttered.
Quattro peered over the back of her seat. "But you'll be carrying me this time!" she interjected. "That means you have to be more careful! I'm important for the plan! The Doctor said so!"
Tre rolled her eyes at Nanoha in an unspoken comment on the annoyance presented by little sisters everywhere. Despite not actually having any little sisters of her own, Nanoha stifled a giggle. Prolonged exposure to Vesta and Alicia had given her a pretty good idea of what having a bratty little sister must be like, though one of them was being fairly well behaved at the moment, and the other...
... well, Arf was looking after her. Hopefully that 'summoning' comment had just been a misunderstanding or something. She'd ask Quattro later, once the Doctor wasn't listening. She didn't want to draw his attention to Alicia's powers.
A beep sounded from the controls, and Uno spun her chair back around to take them. "We're at cruising altitude," she noted. "Course plotted. Doctor, please confirm our flight path." Jail stepped back from the hologram, which winked off as he left, and after a moment of quiet conferring Uno raised her voice again. "The journey will take twenty minutes or so. Tre, please take Miss Takamachi through the safety protocols.
All of them. Twice."
The faint jolt of transition to D-space rippled through the ship, and Nanoha turned to Tre with a thoughtful expression.
"Sooo..." she asked, drawing the vowel out slowly. "When you said we accelerate down... how
fast, exactly?"
Tre beamed.
...
"I still say I felt magic there," Hayate insisted stubbornly as Shamal wheeled her along a path in a small park. The wheels of her chair crunched over the uneven path, rocking her from side to side a little. "I'm not sure
where, but it was definitely, you know, in the general area. I'm sure I was getting close!"
"You were leading us in circles," Shamal pointed out gently. "And tripping people over. I sensed something there too, but not all magic comes from people. It might just have been a natural fluctuation."
Hayate pouted. "It
felt like a person," she grouched. "Like when Signum is doing sword practice. Or when Vita is hammering things." She cocked her head. "Huh. If Vita's practice is hammering things, does that means Signum's is swording things?"
Shamal's lips twitched, but she hid her amusement and raised a sceptical eyebrow. "I'm sure Signum would have a more informed opinion," she said neutrally. "And I didn't see anyone hammering or... swording anything, so it was probably nothing."
Hayate wrinkled her nose disgruntledly and sighed. "You take all the fun out of looking for magic," she complained. "Oh, though, I guess Vita won't be hammering anything for a while. What did you say she had?"
"Some form of flu, we think," Shamal replied calmly. "You shouldn't be in any real danger of catching anything from her, but it might be best to keep away for a while just in case."
This garnered a suspicious look. "Hang on," Hayate said, raising a finger with the air of someone who has just come to a sudden realisation. "I thought you were... magic... construct... body... whatever they were called? How come you can even
get flu?"
Shamal hesitated. But only for a second. "... flu might be the wrong word, I suppose," she admitted. "When we get ill, it's more like minor corruptions in our data structures. Like your computer getting a bug in it, I suppose. She'll self-repair, but she'll feel woozy and uncomfortable until then. Since it's not a virus like humans get, there's not really any chance of you catching it."
Hayate gave her a suspicious look for a moment, which Shamal smiled back placidly at. After a moment's scrutiny, the mask broke.
"So... she'll need a nurse to make her feel better?" Hayate asked, a light brightening her eyes which Shamal recognised from bitter experience. Faced with a choice between condemning a fellow knight to overenthusiastic mothering from a nine-year old girl and risking that same terrible force of childish medical attention being turned on her, she threw Vita under the bus without a second's hesitation.
"Why," she said brightly, "that sounds like a wonderful idea, Hayate. I'm sure Vita will be grateful for your concern."
Hayate grinned happily for a moment, but the smile slipped off her face and left a morose expression behind it. "At least I can help
her get better," she muttered, poking at her legs. The latest visit to the hospital hadn't brought positive news. The paralysis had spread almost to her hips, and she couldn't feel most of her thighs anymore. She tipped her head back to look at Shamal from an upside-down perspective. "Soon I won't be able to go out shopping with you, if it keeps up like this. I won't be much help choosing what to get if my arms don't work, heheh..."
The attempt at humour fell flat, and Shamal's lips tightened. Neither of them mentioned the fact that Hayate's lungs and heart would stop beating long before the paralysis reached her arms. That she would be bedridden and coma-bound even before that.
"We can still hope for a miracle," Shamal said eventually. "The doctors may find something they've missed up until now. Your body may turn the condition around. Giving up now would be... would be premature." She forced a smile. "Let's just take it a day at a time, shall we? Try to enjoy life as it comes. Speaking of which..."
She nodded to their left, where they'd drawn up to a small playground. It was empty at the moment; the chill in the air having discouraged most of its regulars from coming out, and the busy hour occupying most of the others with school. Hayate looked over it with poorly-concealed interest, and Shamal noted the places where her gaze stalled.
"Do you want to go on the slide?" she asked gently.
"Shamaaaal!" Hayate said, elongating the word. "I'm not a baby anymore! Only little kids go on slides at the park!"
"But that's not what I asked you," Shamal said. The wind caught her hair, and she shivered in the cool breeze. "I asked you if you wanted to go on it."
"... well, a bit," Hayate admitted. "But! Only if no one is watching! I'm nearly ten!"
Shamal felt the cold tracks of moisture on her cheeks, and ruffled Hayate's hair affectionately. Lifting the wheelchair a little to get it over the low curb around the playground, she headed towards the slide.
"Whatever you say, Hayate," she murmured with a bittersweet smile. "Whatever you say."
...
It wasn't often that you got to jump out of a spaceship fifty kilometres above the ground with no parachute. In fact, Nanoha would go so far as to say that she'd never expected to do so at all.
Nevertheless, she was about to do it now, waiting in the airlock for Uno to skim the edge of the stratosphere and let them out. Vesta huddled in her hood, digging as deep as she could to avoid the cold. Cats might be able to land on their feet from any height, she had told Nanoha, but that did not mean they enjoyed having to do so from fifty thousand metres up.
Uno and Tre had drilled the sequence into her rigorously. Under gravity alone, the fall would take fifteen to twenty minutes, and she'd be likely to break the sound barrier in the higher atmosphere, before slowing down as the air got denser and she was limited to terminal velocity.
But she wasn't going to be falling under gravity alone. She was going to be
flying.
She was also, ironically, going to be braking. They were going to be staying just under the speed of sound so as not to set off any shockwaves that might alert people watching, which meant that she'd have to slow down so as not to exceed it in the high atmosphere. The real work would come lower down; pushing through the denser air that would usually comprise the majority of the trip.
In total, she would have just over a hundred and sixty seconds of flight time straight down – which meant that she'd be averaging about three hundred metres a second, which was
dizzyingly fast to contemplate. She'd have to stick to just under the speed of sound for the first two and a half minutes, and then start rapidly decelerating at a little over a kilometre up, around the bottom of the fluffy white cumulus clouds that she could see being blown southwards far, far below. Seven seconds of deceleration at five times Earth gravity, and she'd be going slowly enough to land without cratering the ground under her feet or squashing herself into a pancake.
She didn't envy Tre, who was going to have to decelerate considerably more weight and keep hold of Quattro on the way down. But she didn't have time to think about her partner. The outer door of the airlock opened and a freezing cold howling wind exploded through it. Tre shouted something – possibly 'go' but Nanoha couldn't hear her over the noise.
She got the gist, though, and jumped.
For a moment she hung in space, turning slightly as she fell and seeing the Fox Manta pulling away. At this height, it was still light, but down on the ground she could see the terminus line of dusk racing across the landscape as the day faded away and the evening drew in. Another spin brought Tre into view; falling above her and to her left with Quattro clinging to her back. The little girl's arms were tight around her sister's waist and a bind kept her firmly attached. With a grin, pale violet blades of light appeared at Tre's her wrists and ankles, and she shot forward like a bullet.
'Last one to the ground's a loser!' she called back as she passed. Nanoha's eyes narrowed. So. She wanted to race, did she?
"Raising Heart!" she called, "Let's beat her!"
[Maximum speed, mistress!] her Device chimed back. [Flier Fin!]
Tre was fast. Tre was
very fast, and had gotten a head start besides. Two comets cut through the freezing air; oxygen-concentrators in their Jackets keeping them from blacking out at the dangerously thin atmosphere. But as much as Nanoha pushed herself – edging as close to the sound barrier as she could get away with – she couldn't quite catch up to the darting form ahead of her. Only when she started to decelerate did the gap close, and even then – even though Nanoha delayed her own deceleration for a second or so longer than she was meant to – she only managed to get within a few dozen metres of Tre's feet.
And then the ground was rearing up alarmingly fast, and she slammed on the brakes, flipping forwards to fall face-down so that the blood didn't rush to her head. The drag pulled at her cheeks even through the Barrier Jacket, like she was being squashed against a mattress by an incredibly heavy weight. She held her breath, counting in her head and keeping a mental eye on the altimeter that Raising Heart provided, watching the numbers blur past as the mountains loomed closer and the ground rushed up...
[Protection]
... and with a flip back into an upright stance and a last, brutal jerk of deceleration, she smashed into the ground on a rocky plateau, leaving a deep circular imprint from the barrier that absorbed the last of her momentum. Even with that, her feet still felt like she'd stubbed all ten toes and both soles, and she hissed in pain, hopping from foot to aching foot for a moment before sitting down hard and massaging them. She had pins and needles and they really hurt! And it felt like she'd nearly twisted an ankle!
'Firstly, that was stupid,' Vesta commented from the depths of her hood.
'Secondly, this hood is nowhere near good enough at keeping the cold out. Thirdly, that was stupid. Fourthly, ow, why did you have land that hard, I got bumped around. And fifthly, that was really stupid
, mistress, you were meant to brake
.' She squirmed out enough to nibble Nanoha's earlobe with sharp little teeth in punishment.
"Thank you, Vesta," Nanoha hissed sarcastically under her breath once she'd finished whimpering, and swatted her back into the hood. Tre had, she noted, beaten her here by less than a second. She tried to play it cool and look unaffected. "Well," she said in a casual tone. "That was actually kind of fun."
Tre stepped out of the cratered imprints her own feet had made in the ground. "That was doing it on easy," she said, grinning wildly. "But not bad; keeping up with me like that. We should totally do it again when we don't have to take it easy with Quattro along." She released the bind keeping her sister on her back and put her down. "Oh, you touched the ground last, by the way," she smirked at her. "So it looks like you're the loser."
Quattro made an offended noise of protest. "I am not!" she objected, "And I can go just as fast as you!"
Tre ruffled her hair affectionately. "No you can't," she said. "But it's good that you want to try."
Scrabbling at her wind- and hand-mussed hair, the younger girl glowered at her. "I can so! And Vesta is the loser because she still hasn't touched the ground and I so, so can!" she cried. "I can..."
"Quattro, hush. Tre, stop teasing her," Uno cut in over the secure channel.
"Quattro, do you remember what your job here is?"
"Uh huh!" Quattro nodded proudly. "I'm keeping us all safe from the Bureau and the Wol... Wolke... from the Book of Darkness!"
She spread her arms wide, light brown hair swishing behind her in the evening breeze. "IS: Silver Curtain!" she shouted, and a ripple spread across the ruins like a wave of translucent light.
There was a pause.
'Was that it?' Vesta asked from Nanoha's hood.
'That's all that's keeping us safe? Doesn't seem like much to me.'
Quattro stuck her tongue out. "It's better than anything
you can do," she shot back. "You can barely turn invisible! You're probably just jealous that I'm better at illusions than you!"
Vesta wriggled onto Nanoha's shoulder and jumped to the ground, growing into her war form in the time it took her to land.
'Oh yeah?' she challenged.
'Prove it!'
Tre rolled her eyes, pulling out a small disc from a pocket. "I'm going to scout the area and set this up somewhere we can lay an ambush," she said. "Nanoha, you want to help? Quattro, be sure to stay hidden, and come when I call, okay?"
"'Kay," Quattro said distractedly, occupied with the glaring contest she was having with Vesta. "Fine, let's have an illusion contest! Both of us try to stay hidden; the one who gets found by the other one loses!"
'Fine!' Vesta agreed smugly.
'And they have to do everything the other one says for a day! No, a week!'
"Fine!" Quattro didn't waste any time in rippling invisible, and Vesta followed suit immediately. Nanoha groaned. This was either going to end in her familiar bullying a little girl, or – more likely, since Quattro's illusionary abilities were probably very good if Jail trusted her to keep them all safe – in a little girl bullying her familiar.
Well, it wasn't like Vesta wouldn't deserve it. And if she won, Nanoha could always prevent things from getting out of hand. "Don't go too far," she ordered the empty air wearily. "And don't hurt each other."
Unsurprisingly, there was no reply. Nanoha sent up a silent prayer that Vesta's overly competitive side wouldn't come out, and followed Tre into the passages that led to the underground bunkers.
These ruins weren't quite like the Garden of Time, she thought to herself as they made their way in. For one, they were much more broken down. There were no lights, and there was no power. Even the air was too stale to breathe. Safe in her Barrier Jacket, Nanoha brightened the light slightly.
"Keep it down," Tre ordered. "Use light-amp if you can't see."
Nanoha blinked. Oh yes. She quickly added a night vision function to her Jacket, and a band like the visor Tre was wearing slid over her eyes. That was better.
But the broken-down condition of the ruins wasn't the only difference. Now that she could see more clearly, she could see that while the architecture was clearly related to the Garden, it was less grand, less looming. It was smaller scale, and softer. The dust-choked decorations on the walls resembled abstract flowers and sunbursts, and there was gold ornamentation amongst the crumbling furniture.
"I think this used to be a palace," she sent to Tre. "Or maybe some kind of fancy summer house."
The older girl up ahead nodded. "Yes. That was what the Doctor said. A fortified retreat for someone used to luxury."
She paused, looking around. The room they were in was large; a dining hall or something similar, with a high ceiling and alcoves along the walls. There were two entrances, but one was mostly blocked by rubble from some past collapse.
"Here will do," Tre said, pressing something in the disc. It whirred and telescoped upwards into a stubby cylinder, with a thick coil wound around it. "Call the others. I'll set this up."
"What is it?" Nanoha asked, curious. "I mean, I know it's bait, but..."
Tre glanced up at her for a moment as she input a series of commands into the thing. "A miniature reactor," she explained. "Filtered mana output. Exactly the sort of thing they want. Which is a bit risky, because if they take it then they'll be able to make a lot more of themselves. But it has a self-destruct in it just in case, and we won't let them hold onto it long enough to disable that."
Nanoha nodded, though she was a little uneasy about using something that could make the Mariage so much more dangerous as bait.
'Quattro? Vesta?' she called telepathically.
'Come here, we've found a good spot!'
Silence.
'You can have your illusion contest later, this is important!' snapped Tre.
'Get in here! We're at...'
More silence. Nanoha rolled her eyes. "They're probably coming," she said. "They're just not saying anything because they don't want the other one to..."
'Got you!' yelled Vesta from the doorway, and leapt out of thin air at another patch of thin air. A stifled gasp came from her target, and the outline of a cowering Quattro appeared...
... and flickered, as Vesta passed clean through it and crashed into the wall. She staggered slightly from the impact, dizzy and disoriented. After two wobbly steps, she tripped over thin air and fell over.
Quattro faded into view, looking extremely smug. "Told you I was better," she gloated over folded arms. "Now you have to..."
"Save it for later," Tre interrupted. "Put another layer of shielding over this room, and hide us all. Nanoha, put sensing spells out in a wide perimeter."
"Then what?" Nanoha asked, already modifying a Wide Area Search with Raising Heart's help. All she had to do was alter a few variables, and instead of moving across an area, the spell-motes would stay in place and wait for movement. "Quattro, could you hide my scanning spell as well?"
Tre crouched down in an alcove, lacing her fingers together. "Then we wait."
...
As it turned out, the waiting was the longest part of the mission. An hour or so after Tre started the reactor up, Vesta and Quattro were quietly duelling with illusions again – the kitten having convinced Quattro to go "best two out of three" – and Nanoha had drifted to the edge of the hall despite Tre's disapproval to examine the carvings. There were a lot of the sunburst motifs – or possibly flowers; a lot of them were faded and hard to make out – amongst old jagged script that neither she nor Raising Heart could translate.
Yuuno would probably be able to, she thought sadly. At least he knew she was safe now, even if she wished she'd gotten to talk to him. He'd saved her – all of them, standing between them and the Hound like that.
She hoped he was okay. If he wasn't, if he'd been hurt covering their escape...
... well, she
really hoped he was okay. She'd have to thank him the next time she saw him. And then smack him for sealing Alicia like that. And then apologise for letting him think she was dead.
It occurred to Nanoha that her feelings regarding the boy who'd introduced her to magic were probably a bit more confused than was wise for someone working with an organisation that wanted to arrest her.
Perhaps sensing her mistress's confusion, Vesta broke off from angrily chasing something that wasn't there and – wobbling a bit from the effect of several more wall collisions – scampered over to rub her head against Nanoha's ankle.
'Mistress?' she inquired.
'You smell sad. Are you okay?'
Nanoha crouched down to pet her.
'Just thinking of Y- you know who.' she soothed. Line-of-sight telepathy was pretty much unbreakable unless you were between the speaker and the recipient, especially at this distance, but there was no reason to be careless.
'It's okay, I'm not...'
She tailed off. One of her search spells had just gone off. Something was moving down from the upper levels. It must have used a different entrance into the bunkers than they had.
She beckoned Vesta up into her hood and rushed across to her alcove. "It's here!" she hissed.
'It's here! Movement, coming from above! Judging by the speed... it should be here in fifty seconds or so!'
Quattro was already nowhere to be seen, and Tre rippled and disappeared after a moment. Nanoha felt the almost liquid sensation of the Silver Curtain covering her, even as Vesta wrapped her in an extra bubble of her own invisibility. There was no real need to hold her breath as the movement signature approached the door but she did so anyway, Raising Heart gripped in white-knuckled hands.
The door slipped open, and a figure slid through. It was of medium height, clad entirely in drab grey, with the same heat-haze around it that had cloaked the one that had interfered in the second fight with the Breaker. It was almost anticlimactic in how unassuming it was as it paused just past the door, though there was an unnatural stillness to it that sent a chill up the spine. It wasn't just standing still, it was
perfectly still, without even the minor shifts in posture that breathing and a heartbeat made. Its head didn't move, but it gave a definite impression of scanning the room for traps as it stood there silently. Nanoha bit her lip and prayed for Quattro's stealth to hold.
Apparently, the little girl was up to the task. Seemingly satisfied, the figure made a beeline for the humming cylinder on the floor with the same tunnel-vision intensity that its companions – or perhaps even this one – had shown when going for the book at the Breaker's hip.
Nanoha took that as her cue to act. "Restrict Lock," she whispered, and pink casting rings snapped into place around the thing's chest, wrists and ankles. It stopped dead, pinned to the air, and immediately began thrashing to escape. It was stronger than Nanoha had expected – a
lot stronger, in fact. But not strong enough. Despite its best attempts, it couldn't get free.
'Now!' Nanoha prompted, though she needn't have bothered. Tre was already arrowing across the floor, an arm-blade extended to take the thing's head off. Nanoha's heard surged. They might even get an intact sample to take back, even if its self-destruct worked on the main body!
And then things went very wrong, very fast. Tre let out a shocked, angry yell and twisted almost ninety degrees to charge at something else. Her arm erupted in fire as something hit her, throwing her back. A second Mariage unit appeared; its own stealth measures sloughing off as its arm shifted back from a cannon barrel to a hand. This one was a command unit, Nanoha realised; more powerful and versatile than the other. It must have been using the normal one as a distraction to draw their attention. And it was going for the reactor! She brought Raising Heart up to try and stop it, but the thing was already halfway across the room, moving too fast for her to get an easy lock. Its fingers closed around the cylinder...
... and passed through it.
[Divine Barret!]
It had just enough time to turn around before a hundred rays of crackling pink light surged out in a spray sixty degrees wide, before turning inwards again to home in on it from three sides at once. It tried to dodge, but the blazing light was simply too close and too fast, and it was off-balance and stumbling from bending down to grab at the false image. One of the dozens of beams smashed into its hip.
And exploded, as the detonation spell layered within the shot was triggered. The Mariage went down, its hip clearly broken.
And then the rest of the beams smashed home.
When the thundering detonations and brilliant light faded, it was to reveal a smoking hole in the floor and no trace of the Mariage.
'Wow,' quipped Tre.
'Remind me not to make you angry.'
Nanoha coughed, fanning the dust-laden air in front of her.
'I thought it was going to get the power source,' she muttered.
'No, silly!' Quattro sing-sung gleefully from... somewhere. Nanoha hadn't the faintest idea of her location, which she supposed was the point.
'I tricked it! Because I'm the best!'
Tre shook herself off and climbed to her feet.
'Nice work, Quattro. Now, let's- stop it!'
Taking advantage of Nanoha's distraction and the sudden dip in her attention to the bind, the remaining Mariage ripped its way free from the bind in a sudden burst of strength and fled for the door. Nanoha swung around to stop it, but Tre was moving before she'd turned halfway. The girl accelerated from a standstill to a blur quicker than Nanoha could follow, and Nanoha swore she heard a
crack of displaced air as she crossed the hall.
She skidded to a halt at the other end of the room, catching herself against the wall with a dull impact to get rid of the rest of her momentum. The Mariage hit the ground in two separate pieces; bisected at the waist. Two pieces which promptly caught fire.
Tre wrinkled her nose at the eye-watering chemical stench. "Yuck," she commented. "But good reflexes, Nanoha. Is there anything left of other one?" She glanced over at the hole Nanoha had punched through the floor of the hall. There was already a trace of blackish smoke coming up from beneath, and flickering light lit the dark recess it opened into. "Looks like it caught fire too. Tch. Though I think this place is new; I don't remember seeing it on the Doctor's map of the place."
Nanoha didn't really hear her, staring in shock at Tre's arm. It was blackened and charred, but what was almost worse was what had been revealed underneath. Black artificial musculature banded by metal took the place of flesh. Occasional frayed wires and blood-oozing tubes protruded from the inhuman mechanisms. Scraps of burned flesh – the protective, deceptive layer which made her look normal – clung to her arm around the edges of her damaged Jacket.
"Doesn't that hurt?" Nanoha blurted.
Tre blinked. "No," she said. "I turned off pain sensors when I got damaged." She paused. "But thank you for worrying," she added, with a quiet smile.
Nanoha swayed, feeling shocked. Tre… was a robot? Did that mean that all the other girls here were robots? That Doctor Scagletti was one too? That wasn't possible! There was no such thing as…
… um. Drat. Nanoha hadn't found herself going 'that was impossible' about magic in a while. She wondered how on earth they worked.
Unaware of the conflict in the younger girl's head, Tre turned to the still-burning pool of liquid on the floor of the hall, and cast an anti-oxygen field over it. The flames dimmed, but kept burning, and she scowled. "Great," she muttered, and stooped to gingerly scoop some of the goopy chemical substance into a vial, hissing at the heat. "Ach... even through a Barrier Jacket it's hot enough to burn."
Shaking the clinging film off her fingers and climbing back up to her feet, she tucked the vial away. "Okay," she said. "Job done. Now let's get a sample from the other one and go."
...
"And we found a whole big lab under there, with more carvings and lots of big old machines and some
skeletons!" Quattro finished excitedly. "I wanted to take a skull back but Tre didn't let me! It was a better skull than the one Sein found! It had a pretty tiara!"
Purely coincidentally, Quattro was in fact wearing a tiara; an ancient golden ornament that was rather too large for her and was thus mostly being kept on by her ears. "Now I'm a real queen! Much better than some doll!"
She'd already told Jail that much on the way back, of course. But now, seated in sinfully comfortable memory-foam swivel-seats around a table in his labs, Jail seemed just as interested as he had been over holoconference.
"Really?" he said, raising an inquisitive eyebrow. "
Fascinating! And you say this room was under the dining hall in C12?" He brought up a holoscreen, skimming through his schematics of the interior. "Hmm. Yes, there's a void there; most of B-level is on the eastern half of the complex. What was it like?"
Uno flicked her fingers, sending him the newly updated schematics. "Three rooms that we found, and several corridors that we didn't explore," she said. "The main laboratory had a variety of machine banks, though the centrepiece was four large globes – maps of the four main planet types, from the looks of things. The Type-3 was broken, but the others were mostly intact, and the frames were made of gold. There were several locations marked on the Type-1; possibly other installations. I've noted them down, we can look over the nearby Type-1s for the facilities they refer to."
"What do you mean, 'we'?" objected Tre. "It was me and Nanoha who did all the work. Oh, I took scans of the machines, too! Look, here!" She offered a data chip, which Jail took with a smile.
"I helped as well!" Quattro protested, tugging at Jail's coat. "I was the one who hid the reactor! And hid everyone else! And made it so the Bureau and the Book didn't find us! And tricked the bad robots! And helped fly us there!"
Tre gave her a superior look for a moment, then broke into a grin. "Yeah, fair enough," she admitted. "Good one."
Jail clapped his hands. "Excellent! Well then, it looks like this mission was an unqualified success! I'll have to do a follow-up mission myself, once this has all blown over. Hmm. The Mariage probably won't go back now that the reactor has been removed; they have nothing to gain from an old ruin. And nobody else knows of its location, so it should stay uncontaminated."
He stood back. "Now, Miss Takamachi, I'm sure you'd like to go and spend time with your friend. Quattro, very well done, I'm proud of you. Uno, Sein has found another pet and seems intent on keeping it, could you convince her not to? Or failing that, confiscate it? And Tre, speak with me for a moment?"
She gave him a curious look, but waited while the others filed out – not without some reluctance on Uno and Quattro's parts. Cracking his knuckles, Jail opened the data chip she'd given him and pulled up one of the scans.
"Fascinating..." he murmured. "A very pleasant surprise. Well done, Tre."
She shrugged, though she was clearly pleased by the praise. "I didn't find it, exactly. Nanoha did, when she blew through the floor."
"Indeed." Jail leaned forward, propping his chin on a hand. "So, what did you think of Miss Takamachi?"
Tre considered the question for a moment, and smiled shyly. "... I like her." she said. "She's fun. And an even better shooter than Dieci. Can I go on more missions with her, if she stays?"
He chuckled. "We'll see. You could certainly do worse than make friends with her. I'm sure she has a great deal to offer us. If you hurry, you might be able to catch up to her on the way to the medical bay."
Tre cocked her head at him. "That's it? No other questions?"
Jail grinned. "No other questions. You've given me all I needed to know for now. Go on, run along and be with your new friend. Just try not to go so fast that you damage the corridors, hmm? Uno gets upset."
She flashed him a quick grin in response at the tacit permission, and was gone.
...
Uno found him still working on the machine schematics, and lingered in the doorway training a meaningful look on him until he noticed her. He nodded, closed the display he had open and beckoned her in. The teenager was still in her uniform, but the normally crisp lines of the Jacket looked distinctly ruffled, and her jaw was clenched. Jail's lips twitched slightly – he'd been seeing that expression a lot more since Nulla and Zero had joined them. Dealing with small children was not Uno's favourite activity. Dieci and Quattro were usually well-behaved enough, but Sein and Zero were enough of a handful individually, and only egged each other on when they were together.
"Uno," he acknowledged. "Something you wanted to talk about?"
"Why are we helping them?" she asked bluntly, getting straight to the point. "Even if their presence furthers the plan, why are we keeping them
here? There must be easier ways. Safer ones."
Jail nodded noncommittally. He'd been expecting something like this since Precia's party had arrived. "Go on," he prompted.
Uno frowned, but complied. Uno frowned. "The Takamachi girl is powerful, impulsive and conspicuous," she listed, ticking off the points on her fingers. "She's flashy. Distinctive. Destructive. As much of an adrenaline junkie as Tre, and those two are going to
encourage each other, you know they will; it'll be like Zero and Sein only
worse. Testarossa – all three of them – are wanted, and the Bureau will be looking for them. Precia's treatment will be expensive, and some of the drugs we'll need are going to raise flags if we acquire them legally. Doctor, their youngest might be interesting, but are they really worth keeping if it puts the TSAB closer to our trail?"
She wrinkled her nose as she spotted a long brown hair on the seat Nanoha had been sitting on, and picked it off. "And they're
messy", she added distastefully. There was a hint of a whine to her voice. "The familiars will shed everywhere, and the youngest one will be a bad influence on the girls and it will be impossible to persuade Sein she can't have a pet if she sees others having them. Do we
have to keep them?"
Jail smiled paternally. "I'm sure we can cope with some extra mess," he said, plucking the hair from between her fingers and patting her shoulder. "We can always hire another cleaner or two if it comes to it; they can't be much worse than Sein and Zero. And in answer to your question..."
He smiled, weaving his fingers together and rubbing his hands in anticipation.
"I suspect our gains will far outweigh our losses."
...
