Crash can be assumed not to have happened, primarily because I haven't seen it rather than because I don't like it.

Three Years Later

Fire Night Anniversary. It was a party night for the citizens of Megatokyo, who would take pretty much any excuse to party in a city that wasn't doing well with increased boomer rampages and rising costs as Genom explored how hard it could squeeze. And squeeze it had.

And as she had for the last three years, Linna Yamazaki spent the night at the Hot Legs, nursing a single drink for hours and swearing about her boyfriend troubles. She'd never been talkative about what had happened on Fire Night, but the other Knight Sabers had deduced the memory carried several gradations of pain for her, some of them physical and some not.

They just didn't know why, except possibly Sylia.

"And where were you on Fire Night?" Priss asked from the stage, a new song. It was Megatokyo shorthand. If you said "Fire Night" to a resident, they would instantly assume you meant the night of the G&B Natural Gas fire, as though there had never been any other fire on any other night in the city.

"Meeting the only man I ever gave a damn about." Linna muttered. She was slightly tipsy, perhaps, but she never got drunk. She was afraid, as she'd always been, of what might be said when she was drunk. Things that should not be said, things about the Knight Sabers.

Leon and Daley, and some other ADP sorts, were sitting at the next booth up from her. Leon half-rose, drawing Linna's attention, and yelled to someone in the crowd. "Sanderson, you jackass! You nearly got me killed!"

The man who replied was easy to pick out, he was wearing a USSD uniform. That definitely made him stand out in the crowd here. "McNichol, if I'd known you were going to do something as stupid as strap into a Twelve-Shit, I'd have stayed on!" Twelve-Shit was the not-very-affectionate nickname the ADP had for their K-12S armored troopers. Linna thought something about the man's voice familiar.

He spoke with Leon briefly, and then sat down across from her. Linna's head came up to rebuke him, and she froze. He wasn't looking at her, really paying much attention at all, still talking to Leon over the booth dividers. His voice was even more familiar now. Add a hint of electronic distortion and...

He turned to regard Linna, steadily, a flicker of interest, but that was all. No hint of recognition. "Leon told me nobody was using this seat. I see he was wrong."

Not really handsome, Linna thought. He might be reasonably photogenic, but not that handsome in person. But he had strikingly, intensely blue eyes that added a touch of electricity to meeting his gaze. He was a dirty blond. She'd never pictured him as blond.

He started to stand. And as she'd always feared she do if she met K-11-2 face-to-face instead of faceplate-to-faceplate, Linna didn't let him walk away. "No. That seat's not taken at all. What's your name?"

"Micheal Sanderson." Linna tried to read the rank tabs off his uniform, but they didn't match the ADP or Self-Defense Force ones she'd actually recognize. She gave up when he forced her to consider other matters with a question: "And you are?"

Point of no return, Linna thought. This was stupid. She liked him, liked his look, liked his friendly manner, but this was all incredibly stupid and she was even more stupid for continuing despite being aware of that. Still. Her interest in him was not romantic, she told herself, because that was even more stupid. Not boyfriend material at all.

She still gave him her name. "Linna Yamazaki."

Nene slid into the booth as well, having been tipped off by Leon and still in her ADP work clothes. "Sanderson?"

"Romanova." Sanderson grinned. "Damn it's good to see you and the old gang again. You made master sergeant, about time!"

Nene shrugged. "It wasn't that big a deal."

He shook his head. "It should have happened years ago. I've had a lot of people on the other end of the radio, you're still one of the better ones."

Nene actually blushed. Sometimes it was easy to forget the playful hacker that Linna knew lived a whole other life as Master Sergeant Nene Romanova, Advanced Police, a life that she took at least as seriously as her life as Saber Pink. "And what is it you do?"

He shrugged. "Testing advanced armored trooper designs and weaponry for SSD." Both of the women noted the way he'd abbreviated the name, not USSD, but just SSD. "It's not all fun and games. They send me some real stinkers on occasion, and sometime I get mobilized to fight the local boomers. Have to keep a hand in and the knowledge current I guess."

"So about Fire Night..." Linna began, pretending not to notice the way that Nene looked at her for it.

Sanderson was quick to shake his head. "That night was all kinds of crazy. It's hard to explain to someone who wasn't there."

Try me, Linna thought. But she didn't say it. Despite his brief media stardom, and in his official reports, he'd never made mention of the presence of any Knight Sabers. As far as the rest of the world knew, his odyssey across the port district had been made alone. It was, Linna reluctantly admitted, not a great embellishment. She'd only taken down a few service boomers that were not actually a threat to either of them, with their respective armors.

Sanderson had been quiet for at least fifteen seconds, probably longer, but apparently he decided to make the attempt. "I didn't meet a single living human for over three hours. You know what this town is like, how utterly impossible that is. As far as I knew the town was over. I thought I was dead. I thought everyone was dead. It was...very mechanical after that first hour."

Mechanical. That's not a bad description. Mechanical, because thinking made your brain go numb. Linna nodded, and restrained her urge to reach out and offer support by taking his hand. He'd made the world a darker place for himself, telling and having to live out the consequences of a story of mind-numbing horror. Even if it wasn't real, he'd made it real because that was the only way to make it believed.

To protect a secret she was responsible for. To allow them both to keep the fight going in their separate ways. Great, now I'm feeling responsible. Before she could do something else to make the situation worse, Leon and Daley both intruded on the conversation, and Linna could blend into the background and watch past and present ADP tell war stories.

And spend a little time getting to know the other Nene, the one in the uniform, because you could never tell when you might need to know such things.

"In local news today, a boomer incident in Little Germany was contained by the ADP with unusual efficiency, assisted by USSD soldiers from the nearby Far East Command of that organization. The Diet has no comment on the intervention of outsiders, but the USSD spokeperson had this comment-" Sylia killed volume for the canned statement. She'd heard it a few minutes ago on a different channel.

USSD hadn't been a player in the local power structure since before Largo. The organization had undergone serious house-cleaning and rebuilding after Largo managed to temporarily hijack the particle beam satellites, and then period of quiet that had lead most people to believe they were badly damaged by the event. Now, as she sat here and looked over information from her various contacts, she began to realize they might not have been.

First, and most worrisome, was the silence from within USSD itself. Far East Command might as well have been a black hole as far as information was concerned. Sylia knew that a large number of personnel, somewhere around one hundred, had been recently posted to the facility as group, but what they were doing there none of her contacts could discover. Even Fargo's sources had dried up or been transferred away. That meant they'd gone to some trouble to clean house, and that meant they were up to something.

She had noted, though, that a mission payment had been made to the Knight Sabers regarding the USSD black box they'd be meant to recover years ago, plus interest and bonus for tardy payment. The note the bank had been asked to pass on with it had expressed USSD's apologies and stated that with Largo destroyed the mission had been accomplished to their satisfaction.

A peace gesture, Sylia thought. Someone didn't want the Knight Sabers feeling unkindly towards USSD. Which made her more suspicious. Sylia was aware of the irony of that, but paranoia was a survival skill when you ran a team of high-tech vigilantes against the megacorps. USSD was flexing a little muscle; it was locking down its leaks; it was reaching out its enemies and trying to make new friends. Something was going on.

Nene could find out more. Or so Sylia hoped.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Slow, steady, patient breathing, the sound of a hunter. It had been a long time since he'd been in a K-suit in this town. He felt oddly as though he'd never left, though the slow pulse of indicator lights on his heads-up display made it obvious this wasn't his first deployment all over again.

The boomers, too, felt like home. A -55C rounded the corner ahead of him, a light went solid indicating the boomer had lock with its active sensors. "Gunslinger One, contact, going loud." The indicator lights went solid, ECM, Active Defense System, Active Sensors. A block-wide radius went blind to transmission and reception for most electronics.

The light that indicated targeting lock went dark. "All Gunslingers move in." The gun in his suit's hand bucked, but encased in his armor he heard no sound. Five rounds struck the boomer, tearing its chest to pieces.

K-11-2, now K-12Z-2 and Gunslinger 1, smiled under his helmet and moved in on the Genom satellite production facility. It was good to be home.