Hayate double-faceplams. I don't think much more can be said.

Arisen
"Has she spoken at all?" Signum asked. She was looking at the Reinforce clone, now apparently sleeping. She had been talking with Chrono; the Admiral needed to know what had happened, but the obvious officer to make the report was sort of busy keeping the Reinforce clone away from the crew and the crew away from the Reinforce clone.

"She told us not to call her Reinforce. That was it." Samuel replied. "The Combat Cyborg would at least give us a name."

"Oh?" Signum was mildly interested in the Combat Cyborg, but not nearly as much as she was in the Reinforce clone."

"Isis. She claims not to remember a last name. We've already confirmed it's JS-type cyborg parts, down to the last detail. Has anyone checked to see if he's still in his cell recently?" Samuel asked.

Signum's eyes widened ever so slightly, the only sign of surprise that Samuel could ever recall seeing from the senior Wolkenritter. It was also something he would have missed if he had not been looking directly at her eyes and standing within arm's reach. "He had better be. May I speak with…" a pause while Signum attempted to come up with a name besides Reinforce and failed, "her?" A gesture to the apparently sleeping Reinforce clone worked to indicate who she meant instead.

"You talk directly to the Admiral whenever you want. I have to go through the ship's captain first usually. Don't act like you need permission from me for anything." Samuel replied, sounding amused she'd asked.

Signum actually favored him with a faint grin.

"Signum." Not asleep after all, it seemed. The Reinforce clone sat up.

"So what do you want to be called?" Unlike others, when Signum put emphasis on a word it required active attention to notice.

"Reinforce is your Hayate's name for…a different person. Not me." A pause. "You can refer to me as Drei, I suppose. Since I would be the third one you know."

"Not the third I have met." Signum said, softly. "But yes, the third I have known."

"Is it really true? Your Hayate Yagami? That there are others like us running around killing people still? The fall of Belka?" Drei asked.

Signum didn't consider that worth responding to. They had shared memories by touch; Drei knew the truth of these things. After a couple of moments Drei acceded to the awkwardness of the question. "They are, I know, but…this is much to absorb at once."

"The Bureau will ask if you will fight for them. They need you." Signum had noticed that even though she could touch Drei and share the link that way, she could not do it any other way. The senior Wolkenritter had a theory, but that could only be proved by touching one of the other duplicates, and Signum had no intention of doing that unless she was strangling them.

Drei shook her head quickly. "I can not. The limiter is…if I could not break it during several hundred years, I doubt they will be able to with anything less than ten. And I think I have had enough of orders. I have a unique situation now, after all. Masterless woman for the first time." That was an interesting point. A Wolkenritter or Reinforce were duty-bound to defend their master at all costs, and it was a part of themselves they could no more alter then a human could tear out their own heart and keep living. But Drei had no master, and with the normal method of her succession from one to the next broken by her current state, never would again.

"They…even I cannot fully trust you, Drei. Prudence demands that I not. Duty dictates that I not. You can cause massive destruction, a fact with which I was already well-acquainted and which the Bureau has learned to its cost." Signum was feeling helpless again. "They cannot ignore you, Limiter or not. You have spent hundreds of years on it by your own admission and the odds you will break it, or that it will break on its own, only get better."

"True." Drei said softly. "I am not unsympathetic to their and your cause, Signum. I simply do not know what I can do to help. You think this Bureau will not have me…help…the way the Belkans did."

"Most likely. The Bureau has its skeletons in the closet, but none quite so horrific as that. And they seem to geniunely enjoy cleaning the closet out on a regular basis anyways." Signum replied. "But you should be careful. Not everyone will be as reasonable as Admiral Harlaown and his subordinates. The guards at your door are as much to protect you as to protect people from you."

"Do you trust those guards?" Drei asked.

"Al-Faddil?" Signum paused a moment. "He will do his duty, no matter how distasteful. Just like we have. But I doubt he finds this particular task to be a problem for his conscience. You are in good hands, Drei, for now. If you can stay under the Navy's jurisdiction somehow, I strongly recommend you do so. They seem to be the most," Signum paused a moment, wondering how to put this, "sane of the services."

Back aboard Headquarters now, Hayate and Chrono were talking for a moment, Hayate having come to collect Signum.

Nanoha entered the room as well, having clearly been searching for the two, and visibly braced herself. "Signum asked me to check something for her." Signum had been showing a political astuteness she rarely bothered with. Fate outranked Nanoha in literal terms, but when the Ace of Aces spoke people listened much more closely. Thus she asked Nanoha. "She wanted to know if Jail had been having outside communications lately, even with Bureau personnel."

Hayate was nonplussed. "So?"

"It's a bit worse than that…" Nanoha said. She looked distinctly uncomfortable. "It's a Ground Forces facility, the Diosid Orbital Penal Complex. They covered up the fact Jail and Quattro escaped."

Hayate and Chrono both knocked over their chairs as they stood rapidly. "They WHAT?" the two chorused.

"There are times when I strongly think the Bureau needs to adopt teleporting someone into the Dimensional Sea unprotected as a legal punishment." Chrono practically hissed it. It was an uncomfortable realization for Hayate that this was the first time she'd seen Chrono geniunely angry. Oh, sure, she'd seen Chrono act angry about serious mistakes or problems, blow up at some hapless junior or occasionally very senior officer and make them wet their pants, but it was a show anger, done for effect and not because he actually felt it. This time Chrono was definitely not acting, because there was no one here he'd try to impress with such behavior.

Nanoha nodded, mainly as means of trying to calm Chrono down. Like Hayate, she'd never seen him truly angry before. "I can't prove anything but I think the orders came from Vult."

Hayate buried her face in her hands. "The most dangerous dimensional criminal in the last ten years escapes and Vult is worried about his service's reputation." She looked up. "Where did Ground Forces get these people? How did nobody stop them when they were majors or lieutenants or something? Who was sleeping through their evaluation boards?"

"Not the most important problem we have at the moment." Chrono said. "Where's that Combat Cyborg you brought back?"

"On Mid, getting a full medical workup from Shamal and the people who look after the other Combat Cyborgs so we can try and figure out not only style but origin of her cybernetics." Hayate replied.

"We need to talk to her."

"She is sedated." Shamal said. Chrono opened his mouth to object, but Shamal gave him a hard-edged stare, surprising the other Wolkenritter. "I outrank everyone in the universe so long as we are within the walls of a hospital, Admiral, do not start."

Chrono sighed. "Have you learned anything of value?"

Shamal stopped for a moment. "Yes, and no. Tracing on the parts is still underway. But we did learn something about her construction. The other Combat Cyborgs…a human body cannot take that kind of enhanced performance normally, understand?" Evolution does not overengineer and it is meant for specific tolerances and stresses, those it can normally reach." Shamal got a nod from Hayate and Chrono and continued. "A mage can surpass them for relatively brief periods because they can strengthen themselves in the short term. Combat Cyborgs undergo complete skeletonal replacement and still have to be genetically engineered from birth to achieve the same end, but for them it is always on." Shamal looked like she might be ill as she related what had happened to Isis. "But this one…Isis was just a normal human who underwent the mechanical but not the genetic enhancements necessary to become a Combat Cyborg. Her body is doing things it's not supposed to, too much is being asked of it. Her musculature, circulatory system, lungs are all being overstressed badly. She will burn out."

"How long?" Hayate asked softly.

"Three months at best. Possibly as little as half that." Shamal replied. "We might be able to do something about it, the Bureau does have the technology for genetic therapy, but even if that works her lifespan will be drastically shortened by the damage already done. She would live to see forty, but not much longer. We can't duplicate Jail's biological immortality trick."

Hayate hammered a fist against the wall. "Dammit, Jail…" she breathed. "You treated the last ones like daughters. Why do this?"

Signum shifted uncomfortably. "If I may Mistress." She didn't actually wait for confirmation. "He is newly out of prison. He has only one Combat Cyborg currently working for him, and she is only marginal as a direct combatant. He is desperate for a defense, and we know he only treated the last ones like daughters to a point. They were ultimately still tools, merely tools he was nice to."

"Contacts. Starships dropping out of the Dimensional Sea." This was the boonies. Actually, it was beyond the boonies. Non-Adminstrated World #257 was the furthest world that received a regular starship visit from the Bureau. It had produced a few Bureau mages, but the practice of magic was pretty much unknown there, nor was their technology much beyond the Industrial Age. They didn't dabble in things that punched holes in reality, so the Bureau didn't see much need for interference or supervision. If they did manage to split the atom soon and happened to blow themselves up shortly after…well. They had a right to self-determination, even if they self-determined into the grave.

"War Cruisers." Uhlan's captain breathed. He counted twelve of them. "Helm, best-time course to a posistion we can jump from. Weapons, wards up and charge guns." A futile gesture, perhaps, to fire on them, but might as well.

"Captain, we're being hailed. They're ordering us to stop engines and prepare to be boarded." The comms woman sounded incredulous.

"Tell them we politely refuse and inquire as to their intentions," the captain replied.

"They…they say they're here to pacify this world. For Belka." Nobody bothered to comment on how Belka was dead and gone or the like. That was something for later; at the needed to escape.

A few shots stopped dead at Uhlan's wards, but the range was long and their power low. Inbound missiles struggled to catch the starship but could not keep pace. Her secondary guns picked off a few off them anyways just to be safe.

"Jump."