24. The Morning After
"It was a trap," Shamal said in a quiet, dead voice. "The intention was to lure a senior officer within striking distance and eliminate her, using gates formed from their hostages to provide reinforcements. Another few seconds, and Hayate would have been dead and the strike team would have been neck-deep in daemons. You made the right decision, Nanoha."
Everything she said could have been quite easily deduced by anyone present at the disastrous hostage-retrieval operation, but it needed to be spoken aloud nevertheless.
"That's... not why I did it, though," the captain replied. They were suffering... they were suffering so much. I couldn't let it continue. I couldn't.
They were seated in Shamal's office, a tranquil place attached to the main infirmary and lined with certificates, souvenirs, and photographs that had been miraculously untouched by the attack. The air was thick with disinfectant, almost overcoming the stink of butchered human emanating from next door.
The Chief Medical Officer's expression softened. Were it not for the calm, professional mask that she always adopted at times like these (insofar as they had had times like these previously), Nanoha was sure that she would have got up from her desk and given her guest a hug. Shamal tended to take a more familial role than was usual for the doctor-patient relationship – it was one of the more minor eccentricities present in the First Expeditionary Force, and tolerated for much the same reason as all the others.
"I know." Mind-reading was not amongst the designated talents of the guardians of the Tome of the Night Sky, but sometimes it seemed that it might as well have been.
The assault on the central office had ended thirty-six hours ago, after a last, desperate assault by no less than four dozen Hellhounds on the station's life-support systems. That had not been the end of the First's involvement, though – far from it. They had been deployed to the ruins of one of Mid-Childa's many residential districts, there to support the horribly overstretched DPR clean-up teams. Fortunately, most of the front-line officers had some measure of experience with such work, and when employing something with the peculiar properties of magic, the only real difference between blasting through a wall to get to trapped survivors and banishing a charging daemon was that the wall didn't try to get out of the way when one pointed a Device at it.
Those with more exotic talents put them to use as well. A long-duration, low-intensity shield made a reasonably serviceable shelter or structural support, teleportation was handy for getting civilians from places they shouldn't be (such as directly beneath a collapsing roof) to places they should (such as the nearest field hospital), and the benefits of having a healer or two with battlefield experience went without saying. Other mages worked on providing for those they had rescued. Ice spells like Hayate's Atem des Eises could provide clean, fresh water where none would otherwise be available, fire magic such as that which Signum and her Unison Device Agito specialised in was an easy source of light and heat, and even Inspector Acous, one of the few survivors of the attack on GovCentral, had donated the basic principles of his infamous cake-summoning spell to the Infinite Library in the hope that they might be able to adapt something more practical (and nutritious) from it with which to feed the refugees. The Belka-type melee specialists had not been left out either, their enhanced speed and strength finding a multitude of uses.
In other circumstances, it might have been rather enjoyable – a chance to discover new and inventive applications for their powers in a field only tangentially related to their usual line of work. As it was, though, the operation was a soul-crushing ordeal that none of them wished to repeat.
Bodies lay everywhere, of all ages and in varying states of repair. Most of the survivors were injured to some extent – even several of those who had managed to avoid the twin threats of the enemy and the treacherous landscape had had their eardrums ruptured or their retinas burnt out due to standing too close to a magical discharge. After the third legless child, weeping less because of the pain and more because of the utter incomprehensibility of it all, the whole grim tableau began to appear as a horrible, nonsensical blur to the combat mages' sleep-deprived brains. Yet more of their rescuees were simply insane, their minds snapped by the horror of what lay around them and the malevolent forces let loose in the city. A sweet-faced grandmother had tried to cave in Fate's head with a rock, her incoherent, alien babbling interjected with screams of "SISTER!" in a voice not her own, and Nanoha had been forced to remove her from her partner's back via the careful employment of her bayonet.
The operation was not without other risks, either. Quite apart from the natural hazards of the wreckage that ranged from falling debris to tangled power lines in the poorer quarters, the Hellhounds had left more than a few little presents behind. Even the most innocuous objects seemed to contain proximity-set grenades or form part of some intricate trap, as Corporal Nakajima's squad discovered when a cheap electric blender filled the room they were investigating with jagged, red-hot shrapnel. Corporal Lanster later admitted to her captain that if it had not been for her cyborg friend's superhuman reflexes, all of them would have been flayed alive.
Added to this volatile mix was a sense of creeping, twitchy paranoia. Horror stories about the enemy's elite operatives, their assassins, had been circulating the telepathic network with such intensity that Command (or what remained of it, at least) had been forced to adopt a strict information-control policy before the situation got completely out of hand, and even then the damage had been done. Now everyone knew about the snipers who could kill you from two suburbs away, the claw-handed berserkers who could dismantle a veteran melee team in seconds, the living ghosts who could shrug off bombardment-level magic and turned everything they touched to dust, and the blade-limbed shapeshifters who could be anyone, anywhere, at any time.
The Humanoid Interfaces had assured them that the threat had been dealt with, but after an incident in the south-western districts where something in the guise of a refugee had wiped out five rescue squads before a bombardment team from the Seventh Artillery had levelled the entire area, such assurances began to ring increasingly hollow. Though the First had been fortunate enough to avoid it, there had been several reported incidents where combat mages had opened fire on civilians, often employing justifications that only made sense if one had been awake for over two days in a pleasant, peaceful metropolis that had abruptly turned into hell on earth.
Those were the most subtle, insidious threats – the psychological ones. Most of the relief force had been subjected to some sort of traumatic event during the attack – the loss of loved ones, first-hand experience of the invaders' horrific tactics, or just a quiet day at the office suddenly depositing them on the front lines of an interdimensional war. They had had no time to recover, though, instead being assigned to non-stop rescue work amongst the broken, the dead, and the dying. The results, predictably, had been messy.
Several times, Nanoha had caught herself zoning out; standing in place for minutes at a time as the screams of trapped civilians faded into the background, or staring at the bloodied corpse of a child as she relived that horrible moment when Shamal's orderlies had wheeled out the small, mangled bodies of the First Expeditionary Force's youngest recruits. Though this was far from advisable behaviour when in charge of high-powered weaponry in a hazardous environment, it wasn't anywhere near the worst case the Eventide's mages encountered during the clean-up.
Six troops were reported AWOL, requiring Nanoha and the other officers to track them down. One was found lying unconscious in the cellar of a ruined pub, having apparently attempted to drink himself to death (with, the medical staff reported, a moderate level of success). Three were discovered under makeshift piles of blankets and pillows, sleeping as if the end of the world would not wake them. The final two were huddled together in the defunct shell of a refrigerator, naked and covered in tears as well as other, more private fluids. They had been detained pending court-martial, of course, but there were few who could not muster some small measure of sympathy for them. The First had reached their physical and emotional limit.
Even the order to stand down had not marked the end of Nanoha's duties – instead, it had simply shifted the emphasis from professional to personal. That was why she was currently in Shamal's office, asking questions she really didn't want to know the answers to.
"Why didn't they warn us?" she wondered aloud. "They must have known what was going to happen. If we'd known, we could have..."
The Wolkenritter looked like she'd swallowed something deeply unpleasant and possibly spiky. "I checked the hostages' bodies. Not... all their wounds were inflicted by the gate. Some were... caused beforehand."
'The hostages'. That was what they were calling them now. Not Privates Mondial and La Rushe. Not Erio and Caro. Somehow, it made things easier.
"Oh," she said. After the cavalcade of horrors that was the attack and its aftermath, what was one more?
Nevertheless, her own reaction disturbed her. It was not that she didn't feel grief, loss, or guilt (oh, yes, she certainly felt guilt) for the children's deaths, but it was all rather... distant, somehow, not that much more than what she felt for the many others she had trained who had died that day. Whenever she concentrated on her feelings, her first thought was not 'I miss them' or 'How could I have prevented this?', but rather 'So this is how all the others who've lost loved ones feel'. Being able to see the bigger picture and acknowledge that personal wasn't the same thing as important was generally regarded as a virtue, but Nanoha was having a hard time seeing it that way – especially when she knew of at least two other people who she very much made an exception for.
It wasn't hard to see why such a state of affairs had come about – unlike Vivio, who they had raised together, Erio and Caro had been far more Fate's children. Like her, they had originally been adopted by the vast, ever-expanding Harlaown clan, and like her, they had both come from very unfortunate circumstances. Erio had been a cast-off creation of Project F, the illegal study into human cloning that Precia Testarossa had adapted in her ill-advised attempt to resurrect her daughter, whilst Caro's innate summoning abilities had made her little more than her home village's equivalent of a nuclear deterrent. Nanoha, meanwhile, had been more of a superior officer to them than anything else, especially after they had been placed under her as recruits of Section Six. Though her methods of training were more personal than most, there was still some difference between a teacher and a parent.
The captain bore no grudge against her partner for how things had turned out – she just wished that she'd gotten to know them better. Too late for that now.
"One other thing," Shamal continued in her I'm-not-sure-you-want-to-hear-this voice. "I think I discovered why they were unable to use telepathy. It's the concealment spell again – I believe it creates a disturbance akin to a low-level anti-magic field as a side-effect. Just enough to disrupt a sensitive ability like that – probably an intentional decision by whoever created it, though we can't rule out simple coincidence."
"Ah, yes, very interesting," Nanoha replied distractedly. "Was there anything else, Shamal?"
If the Chief Medical Officer had been reluctant before, she was doubly so now. "One other thing, yes. I'm sorry, Nanoha, I mean nothing by this, but my job dictates that I have to ask. When you visited the infirmary before the... incident, you opted against a memory wipe. Is... is that your final decision?"
She didn't hesitate for a moment. "Yes. Yes it is. Those I saw die, those I killed... as long as I remember them, some small part of them remains. Who am I to deny them that?"
Shamal smiled tiredly. "I knew you'd say that. That's everything, Nanoha. See if you can get some rest, and if there's something you want to talk about, anything at all, just give the word, won't you?"
"I'll see what I can do. Goodbye, Shamal."
She stood up and started to walk out, feeling a fresh wave of fatigue wash over her. Just before she reached the door, though, she heard the Wolkenritter's voice again.
"Hold on a second – think you might be interested in this."
The captain turned around, her hand hovering over the door's activation switch. "Oh? What is it?"
"A data-probe I had Klarer Wind send out an hour ago. The results just came back, and... well... long story short, Vivio's safe."
With those two small words, Nanoha was more awake than she had been since the attack. "Go on."
"I got this from an after-action report that got declassified a few minutes ago. The St. Hilda Magic School was attacked by several large swarms of daemons during the later stages of the invasion, and several of its buildings were destroyed. The teachers managed to hold them off long enough for their pupils to be evacuated, though, thanks largely to the intervention of a mysterious SSS-ranked mage employing a fighting style they'd never seen before."
"Did the reports mention this mage's appearance?"
"They did indeed. Female, late teens or early twenties, blonde hair, and a black-and-white Barrier Jacket with blue trim."
Nanoha's jaw sagged open. "She didn't..."
"I'm afraid so. That said, there was a full head-count at the shelter and her name was on the list, so she clearly managed to get back there safely. Comms are still down in that area of the city apart from the high-encryption military channels – possibly because there was a fight involving a triple-S there – but I'll let you know as soon as there's the opportunity for you to get in touch with her." The hint of amusement in her voice indicated that she knew full well what the tone of that particular conversation would be.
"Thanks, Shamal. See if you can do the same for others – I know that a fair few of the rest of the crew are worried about their own families. In the meantime, I'd best get going."
She left the office torn between blessed relief and maternal wrath at the news, and hating herself for how easily it had shunted aside her thoughts on her other two children's deaths. Attempting to distract herself, she patched into the network once more.
As was normal in the military, stories, rumours, and anecdotes had been circling amongst the troops throughout the attack and its aftermath. Command had done some careful pruning, giving the positive, encouraging stories particular emphasis and factoring in a pro-Bureau spin wherever it could. Despair, distrust, and recriminations during one of the biggest humanitarian crises the planet had ever seen would not, they had decided, be terribly productive. Unfortunately, this meant that it was often hard to tell whether any given tale was true or not, but there were some that Nanoha knew to be accurate.
It was Arf who had served as Naval Command's liaison with the Infinite Library, and who had first seen the esper refugees join the fight against the daemons, constellations of red lights rising from the Suzumiyaverse enclave like fireflies at dusk. It was Chrono who had helped dig the special-needs class out from under thousands of tonnes of rubble, their teacher half-dead from preserving his young charges with a hastily-summoned shield for hours on end. It was Yuuno who had discovered the fate of the Hellhound team that had attempted to set fire to the Library's shelves, their only remains the broken, mangled, and disturbingly clean wreckage of their cybernetic implants. Many strange things happened in war, and the invasion of Mid-Childa had had its full complement.
Leaving the First's headquarters was a long and complicated affair during which the squad of nervous recruits responsible for perimeter security pointed various intimidating technosorcerous gadgets at her and ran through the entire checklist of countermeasures against potential infiltrators with a complete lack of deference for her rank and reputation. Seeing as this was exactly what she had trained them to do, she was actually rather pleased at it. Once the procedure was finally over, she strolled away down the endless corridors of the central office, following the occasional signposts to the detention sector.
The dark shadows in the back of her mind seeped forward once more, and she shook her head to dismiss them. Just a little longer...
Author's Notes: Welcome back for another week, ladies and gentlemen. Did the author read too much Lois McMaster Bujold over the summer? All signs point to 'yes'.
Given how... ah... close Fate and Nanoha were by the time StrikerS rolled around, I couldn't help but find it a little odd in hindsight how little the latter had to do with the former's adoptive children. It's always fun to explore these little incongruities in fanfiction, is it not?