Yes, Nanoha and Fate are together. I think I've said that before. But lots of people tell that story. I'm here to tell other stories.
Once More
A simple meeting engagement, Bureau ships feeling for a way to New Belkan space, New Belkan ships probably trying to do the same thing. Though the New Belkans ran for help, the Bureau ship soon found itself having to assist its ground teams in fighting off multiple groups of Rogue Wolkenritter and called for help as well.
And Chrono's Navy dream team was at the top of the list.
"Uhlan, Seventy, we have another group coming in, minus a ripper and a godling." The Bureau had finally got around to instituting some kind of codenames to distinguish the Rogues from the real deal. The ripper and the godling were Shamal and Reinforce respectively. Vita clones were "hammerer", a Signum clone was "swords", and the duplicate Zafira was "wolf".
"These ones are wearing black." Bei noted.
"Seventy, this is Uhlan. No support available. Engage and hold if you can."
"We're fucked, aren't we?" Carolyn said softly.
"We buy time and they get us help as fast as they can." Samuel replied. "B, C, and D sections, take the wolf. Hit and move."
"Sir. That leaves you and Tre to deal with two of them." Sentri pointed out.
"Then you'd better make it quick. Go." Samuel replied.
The Signum paused, just short of easy reach, and bowed to Samuel and Tre. "Ah. I hoped to meet you both, considering you have defeated some of our...lesser sisters. Allow me to introduce us. We are the Immortal Order. Death is meaningless. Defeat is temporary."
"But you still know pain, don't you? You're not a mad dog like your sister is." Samuel had never sounded so much like her father to Tre then at this exact moment. He spoke in nearly the same tone, the warm and friendly but not quite patronizing one that Jail had used with friend and foe alike. "No, when someone hurts you, you still flinch. And if you know pain, then you know fear." Tre was afraid to look at him. She was afraid she'd see the expression her father had worn. Looking at the Signum clone was almost worse though. The blank expression actually formed into a smile a few seconds after Samuel finished speaking.
Tre, take the hammerer. The command was short, and Tre was grateful it was given telepathically. After his earlier tone, the cold void of combat was surprisingly reassuring. Jail would never have understood it or the need for it, after all.
Tre threw herself at the Vita clone, glad to be away from unpleasant reminders.
"Can't send you without Colonel Yagami. Special orders." The teleport operator was tense. Or perhaps just sane. Nobody liked to contradict a Wolkenritter.
"Hayate is offworld. People are dying as we speak because I cannot help them. Unless you wish to be held responsible..." Signum let the threat hang. Much like she rather hoped whoever gave those special orders would eventually hang, lynched and left swinging from the nearest lamppost.
Signum, you're creeping me out. Agito warned from inside Unison. You just crossed the line from concerned to psycho, get back on the other side right now.
"Look," Vita said, "do the smart thing. Save lives. Be the hero. Or be able to sleep at night. I don't really care. Right now all I know is there are people there that I'm the best person in the world to deal with and you are preventing me from doing my job."
Signum jerked her head up as someone else entered the room. "Uno. We are not allowed to teleport without Hayate."
"That's nonsense," the Combat Cyborg observed. She called up a holowindow and went to work. "Sorry, but I'm not letting you keep the best people we've got on the sidelines. You can tell your boss there was nothing you could do. Because it's quite true."
Decades of familiarity with Bureau technology made engaging the teleporter the work of a moment to the not-quite-Combat Cyborg.
"Uhlan, this is DT-Two. I have a partial team. Where do you need us?" Signum said to the holowindow she'd summoned.
"Head north. Team Twenty-Six and Ninety-Four took down a group of Rogue Wolkenritter but were chewed up. Team Seventy reports additional contact and requested support thirty seconds ago."
Thirty seconds. Thirty seconds of combat against Wolkenritter, pale shadows though they may be. But Seventy was smart, lead well. They would use their advantages, to move and strike, to keep their distance. No, she could still save them.
It was to Signum's surprise she discovered the battle mostly won. The Zafira clone had not proved accommodating, and they had been forced to engage at close quarters to halt its advance. Galland, who had been read the riot act rather than transferred, was injured. Sette, who had saved his life by presenting the clone with what was in effect six perfectly coordinated opponents, was also injured but still able to fight.
Tre had defeated her own opponent, but her Inherent Equipment was damaged, erratic. She was not fit to fight another enemy at the same level, not when her weapon was behaving poorly. Uno had to talk her down from it anyways, for Samuel was still engaged.
Two minutes on, and still engaged. Still fighting a Signum clone. This one was better, too, and Signum could tell it. Not her equal, still a shadow, but not a pale shadow or a mad dog like the others had been. Skilled, even by Wolkenritter standards.
Dame Signum. I've got this. Still calm, the void holding despite being completely outmatched and knowing it. Samuel even seemed a little confident.
Don't be a fool. Brave, stupid, admirable nonetheless.
I'll be fine. If she wanted me dead, it would have already happened. There was truth to that, and Signum suspected she knew why. It would not have made sense to anyone else, perhaps, but to her...
Call if you need me. Signum replied. She could see dust rising on the horizon.
Many. Too many. Signum knew it, even as she plunged into the fray. Heads and hands and arms flew. Where she and Levantine went, enemies died. But not enough, not fast enough. There were hundreds, and she knew she could not kill them all.
At least, not before they killed her. But to retreat meant these enemies would overrun what was left of three depleted Mage Teams trying to tend to their wounded. Signum was not suicidal, but those men and women were hurt trying to buy time for her. Returning the favor was the least she could do.
She blocked a blade with her hand, feeling it go through, not letting herself wince as it stabbed through her palm and stuck there. She shrugged it off and ran her current opponent through, feeling blades score at her back, more injuries. She was acquiring quite a set. Sooner or later, one of them was going to matter.
"Major, this is Nemesis. We're thirty seconds to optimal range for secondary bombardment. Clear the field." A reprieve for now. Signum didn't bother to acknowledge, throwing all her energies into a direct vertical climb to clear the strike zone. She had been in the way of starship weapons before.
There are two main obstacles to starships in atmosphere. The first is that they are typically not very aerodynamic and have a huge wake from their huge surface area, with the passage of a starship at any speed near the ground kicking up debris. The second is that at about half of Mach 1, their wards begin to react to the air around the ship, making it even less aerodynamic and have an even larger wake...and stressing the wards. By the time a starship breaches the sound barrier, the stress on the ship's wards is significant enough to degrade their defenses if they have to fight.
The Nemesis ignored both problems and charged in at somewhere past the sound barrier and barely a hundred meters off the ground, its wards flaring brilliant blue. It was reckless, stupid, but devastating. Nemesis did not have to fire, the shockwave of her passage was weapon enough. It tore the very ground up, hurled men and women through the air or smashed them flat like toys. Even Signum, accelerating skyward, well above the cruiser by the time it got there, clapped her hands to her ears in intense pain and tumbled out of control through the air.
At the same time she felt it, the pins and needles and scratching of a dimensional dislocation.
Tre and Sette both put their hands to their ears twenty kilometers away, trying to blot out a sound that they weren't actually hearing, something coming in over radio frequencies through their implants, a demented, insane shrieking that overwhelmed the built-in squelch for simple background noise or directed jamming. Tre went down on her knees, gritting her teeth, and rode out the thirty-five seconds of aural madness. Sette scrabbled for the implants, the simple things masquerading as hair decorations, and tore them out of their sockets regardless of the danger to her cybernetics and the blood from skin that had grown in around them. Not silence, the rolling boom of Nemesis' run reaching her ears and the sounds of battle nearby, but her hearing was her own again.
On the opposite horizon, more dust rose as Team Forty-Nine played cat and mouse with another group of Belkans. Tre scanned the sky, ignoring the cloud the Nemesis had kicked up, and spotted her team leader falling from the sky. She darted in to catch him.
And she spotted another group of figures in the simple black tunics of the most recent set of Rogue Wolkenritter. "Sentri-"
"I see them. The Commander?" The team's 2IC sounded tired.
Tre checked her team leader. Samuel was unconscious at a glance, injured, bleeding badly. Missing fingers from his right hand, Steelheart held in a deathgrip in his left. It shouldn't be. He was right-handed.
"Unconscious, missing fingers, bleeding, his left foot's mangled." Tre wasn't entirely sure how you could do what had happened to Samuel's foot using only a blade. "He needs a doc, right now."
"Yes." Steelheart agreed, surprising Tre. The Device was normally a thing of few words. It didn't even speak when directly addressed usually.
"We can't take another wave." Bei said.
"I know." Sentri replied. "Uhlan, Team Seventy. Either we recover real quick or we're not leaving."
"Copy Seventy. Stand by. General withdrawal is in progress."
It had been a bad day to the end. Vita sported a bandage on her head from where she'd been hurt in the last few seconds before the teleport, holding off one of her twins. Treating a Wolkenritter's wounds with things like bandages shouldn't have worked, but for some reason basic first aid stuff actually did have an effect on their healing, perhaps pure placebo but still an effect. The Iron Knight collapsed into a chair across from Signum, who was still being tended to by the doctors. "We can't do this."
Signum looked at the younger knight for a long moment, and then her head dropped, chin resting on her collarbone with a long sigh. Defeat was a sensation she had not confronted for a long time. Desperation, she remembered that well from when she had believed Hayate might die, but not defeat. "No. We cannot."
The two shared thoughts in silence through the Wolkenritter's link. The New Belkans had deployed their shock troops, the Rogue Wolkenritter, in number. There were simply too many of them. The Navy mages and their starship support had accounted for at least five groups, but there had been still more. They had circled and struck from multiple directions. They had used their numbers advantage the best way they could. Even if she and Vita had been there from the start, it would not have been enough. They could only fight one group of enemies at time, and if their enemies would not come at them in single groups...
"You seen Faddil?" Vita asked. She had gone to check up on her sometime sparring partner earlier.
"No." Signum replied. "I heard he was injured. Is it serious?"
"He'll live," to a Wolkenritter, at least, that was the important distinction. Anything that did not kill them outright, they would recover from in time. "But...well, he's off the active-duty roster. Even with standard cybernetics he'll be out for months while he relearns everything." The Bureau's cybernetics could replace a finger or a foot, almost as good as new. But unlike Jail's they lacked the innate sense of being able to tell where a body part was without looking, the literal feel of a real bodypart. If you had to have a foot replaced, you had to relearn how to walk. If you had fingers replaced, you had to relearn how to write. Or how to handle a sword.
Signum shook her head. "Him and a dozen others. We cannot do this." The New Belkans and their reincarnating Wolkenritter, their hordes of low-rank artificial mages. The Bureau had barely three thousand active-duty flight mages, and might be able to scrounge up a thousand more if it tried. This engagement alone had killed seven, severely injured thirteen, and injured another twenty. And it would only, could only, get worse. "We cannot fight them all. Not like this, not on their terms."
"Nope." Vita agreed. "We can't."
"Should have been there." Nanoha mumbled to herself. She had been hospitalized, acute skin infection picked up from somewhere. It made it impossible for her to sleep except with sedation. She couldn't serve active duty like that. Fate reached out and placed her hands on her lover's shoulders, silently pulling Nanoha into a hug from behind.
Yuuno pointedly ignored the two, despite the pangs. It was getting easier, with time. So was combat. When he'd been young, combat had been the hardest thing in the world. Sometimes he wouldn't be able to sleep for days afterward. Now...now, he wasn't having nightmares anymore. It worried him, slightly. It also worried him that for the first time in his life, he was seriously contemplating what it might feel like to kill a man. Once the mere thought he would ever intentionally kill someone had been unthinkable.
"To a truly rational mind, no thought is unthinkable." Uno's voice, close by.
Once he would have jerked around, embarrassed to be caught thinking aloud. Now Yuuno turned more slowly. "Apologies. I shouldn't think aloud."
"You didn't actually think much if it was all aloud." Uno said. It was not quite playful; she could not manage a playful tone at the moment, the fault of a misaligned finger joint and considerable pain even with a hand gesture. Even she hadn't come off the battle totally well. She didn't intend to offend; actually respected Yuuno's mental competence in truth. "My apologies. A moment." She killed her pain receptors for a moment and placed her finger joint back in alignment.
Yuuno tried very hard not to stare. The Combat Cyborg could be downright weird, honestly. It went beyond socialization issues; Uno simply didn't care if people saw her do things that normal people couldn't do. It was the exact opposite of the Wolkenritter, who never showed off, and somewhat difficult to adapt to. And honestly, it wasn't like anyone who saw him staring at Uno would assume it was because she was doing something Combat Cyborg-related unless they were paying attention. She wore the brown uniform well.
Yuuno shook it off and resolved to be more available. He could have made a difference there. Maybe not much of one, but a little difference. A few less injured, maybe even less dead. The Bureau needed that edge. And the people needed to come home still. He clung fiercely to that thought as proof that he retained his soul in spite of his growing comfort with combat.
Uno sighed, spotting a very angry-looking Headquarters officer pushing towards them. She suspected her little stunt of hacking the teleporter was about to backfire. "Uno." The cyborg turned around to confront Hayate.
"Ma'am." Uno's exact rank was in flux at the moment...and she was too valuable to be fired for not adhering perfectly to military discipline and she knew it. Still, Hayate was undoubtedly her superior even if everyone else was still a mystery.
Hayate grinned and clapped the taller Cyborg on the shoulder. "You did the right thing. Don't let anybody tell you different." Then Hayate moved off to confront the angry officer herself, spinning a story that Uno was following Hayate's orders by her actions. If somebody was getting court-martialed here, they'd better start with her. It was an effective gambit. The Bureau couldn't afford to court-martial Hayate.
Uno stared after Hayate for long moments, a little confused perhaps, but grateful. And pleased, somehow, to work with her. Jail would never have appreciated that sort of initiative or any transgression against his own orthodoxies, no matter how effective.
Signum had her own visit to make. "Commander." She started to make to salute.
"Do I look like I can return a salute?" Samuel asked, a touch of irritation in his tone as he waved a hand missing three fingers at her. His tone calmed, however. "What are you here for, Dame Signum?
"Curiosity." Signum replied, sitting down. "I believed you back there. Do you know why?"
"I can guess." Samuel replied. "But I'd rather hear it."
Signum leaned forward. "Have you ever tried something at which you were so good, there were no challengers? You could never be defeated? It was all simply automatic, no thought, no real effort, required?"
A momentary closure of his eyes. Samuel actually considered the question, which surprised her. "No. At least, not to that degree. There have been things where I was good enough to not need to make an effort, but I still made it simply because I was used to making an effort. I've never gone that far."
Signum actually smiled. It was not entirely friendly. The truth was that this particular smile had made children cry and sent strong men running before. It was a predator's smile, all teeth, no joy, a smile that flensed souls. It wasn't a smile you just smiled at anyone. They had to understand, or you had to want to scare them half to death.
Signum was oddly proud that Samuel fell into the category who seemed to understand. "The greatest gift in my life, Samuel, is to meet an opponent who forces me to actually fight, not merely go through long-remembered motions. To be challenged, to strive, to actually struggle once again. It is the greatest feeling I know. So, you see, a truly worthy opponent is something I treasure more than anything else, something that makes this life worth the living. I would not ever kill one, not even on pain of my own death. I make exception for her and her ilk. They are not opponents to be respected, but mad dogs to be put down." Signum tilted her head slightly. "Still, I imagine she thinks much the same. How did you beat her?"
Samuel shook his head. "She might have thought the same. But I disabused her of the notion. She chopped up my foot and was despairing of me being any good, demanded to know how I won against two of her 'lesser sisters'. Had Steelheart pushed against me, was right up in my face too."
Signum raised an eyebrow. "And?"
"Told her I cheated because I thought it would upset her. It did. Then Steelheart ups and fires a Deathblow at her." Samuel looked uncomfortable. "I caught hell for that from the admiral. Admiral Harlaown wanted to set me on fire and flush my ashes out an airlock. But...well, Steelheart's old, nearly seventy years." The older an Intelligent Device got, the more it developed personality. This could mean many things, and a seventy-year-old Intelligent Device could be a priceless companion or a psychotic wreck, but it always included a fierce, instinctive loyalty. That was why Intelligent Devices only grudgingly worked for anyone who was either not incredibly similar to their last master or a close relative. "The only man whose word Steelheart regards as utterly binding is my grandfather, and his orders were to protect his descendants no matter the cost. Steelheart took it literally."
Both eyebrows went up this time. "That's a fairly high level of autonomy for a Device. Particularly with something that dangerous." The Deathblow mechanism was a controlled dimensional dislocation. This series of words was inherently contradictory; the truth that the Deathblow usually worked as advertised, meaning not always. The dislocation did not always appear in the correct place, and could sometimes grow quite large. "Also, doing that to her displays a fine sense of humor, and I appreciate it. But she will not forgive you for it."
"I figured as much." Samuel asked. "And yes, it's dangerous. How do you think I lost these fingers? Have to save what you can, I guess. This isn't how I pictured the end of my first command." Months off the line; they couldn't immobilize a whole team to wait for him. Team 70 would go to someone else and he'd get a new one when he was fit for duty again.
Signum shrugged. "How did you picture your first command ending, then?"
"With a lot less of me left. Something my grandfather said once. His only regret was that he let himself be promoted to Captain. He did a lot of good there, later as an admiral. But he saw too many times where a personal touch was needed, and he couldn't provide it. There are plenty of people who can command but can't be mages, but there aren't enough mages who can lead. I meant to get a Mage Team command and stay there until it killed me." Samuel replied.
It sounded terribly familiar. Fate had said something similar once, that she never wanted to be in a position where she did not daily see all those she was responsible for. Signum herself had lead small units for the Bureau on occasion. Higher command would probably be easy for her, but on the other hand...on the other hand, she wasn't just a person doing a job. She was the only person who could do her job. There was no replacing Signum. Not so a Mage Team leader, not really. "You once told me that you got by on fatalism."
Samuel chuckled tiredly. "It's true. But just because I'm replaceable doesn't mean it would be easy. The Admiral didn't actually set me on fire and flush me out an airlock after all. You don't seem to have come out of that ruckus entirely intact." Minor understatement. Signum was in shirtsleeves, not her full uniform, and the bandages were visible where the undershirts didn't hang loosely. "You aren't replaceable, so what's your excuse?"
Anyone else might have blushed, but Signum hadn't blushed in a time longer than most human reckoning. Signum would normally simply intimidate those who embarrassed her into silence, but...an exception, just this once. "You buy time for me, and I buy time for you. I pay my debts, Commander."
A nagging thought at the back of her mind. Something about promises made...