I look down at the sobbing girl, slightly scared, but mostly worried what will happen to Naru-chan, since she always seems so fragile, and has such rotten luck. I gather her against my chest, my only consolation that I'd managed to tag Zoicite with one of the new trackers. She presses her face against the rigid armor, her fingers tucked into the top of my breastplate. /Misato, something cheerful, perhaps?/ The opening strains of "Burnin' for You" filter through the link. /comforting?/ +Oh, the time has come+ /Since when is "Don't Fear the Reaper" comforting?/ \Oh, for Naru-kun\ /Boke/ \mmm\ /Something old'd do, my throat could take it, now/ The first chord filters through, and I take it up, the synth taking much of the attention I'd otherwise be spending on worry, `Shelainakka, sassugu shetteala . . . ' I sing along softly, the old words, speaking of old tragedies, old wounds survived, the death of a world. `Sekatt,' I bite the last word off, and synth the final few chords, the six voices dropping silent one by one. `What does it mean?' `The song is very old, written just after the Final War. To understand . . . ' I tell her the story. -* Long ago, now, there arose on this world a species of sentient beings. They were normal enough, grouped by geography, family bonds, the normal things. After a time they learned how to use the bonds of gravity to their advantage, and shortly most of them lived in space. The people living on the planet maintained tight control on political power, but let the family bonds weaken. They kept pressing, and eventually the people in space got upset with them, upset enough that, for the first time in several hundred years, war broke out. The war dragged on for years, and, eventually, someone in authority was convinced to end the war by dropping several midling sized asteroids on the planet. The asteroids were decelerated. As soon as people undestood what the plan was, many, on both sides, set out to stop it. A couple of the asteroids were diverted, but not enough. Within hours of the first strike most of the living things on the planet had died. The song was written by a pilot, who had thought her lover killed in the bombardment, when she found her. -* `The first line is, "Last week, the first day of fall, the world ended, and I didn't care",' I tell her, stroking her hair. `How long ago was that?' `Sixty four million years.' Naru-chan pulls back, staring into my face, `Impossible.' `No, just sad.' -* `Rei-chan?' I ask, dropping heavily to the ground behind her, my butt almost hitting the ground as my knees bend to take my weight, `You called?' `Yes. They're starting to show,' she turns her back to me, and I can see the outline of the new long bones, pressing her shirt out of shape. `May I?' `Please, they itch something terrible,' she smiles back over her shoulder at me. `That's not good,' I say, and run gentle fingers along her new wings, growing in her back. They twitch a little at the attention, and I smile, `Can I look?' `Inside,' Rei tells me, and leads the way inside. She locks the door to her room behind her, and turns towards me, unbuttoning her school uniform shirt. Her skin is so pale. `Um,' I say, and turn around. `I don't remember everything,' Rei says, then laughs a little, wrapping bare arms around me, `I probably don't remember most things,' I can feel her shrug, `But I know I loved Ritsuko, and that I love you,' she turns me around, `So you can look, and I want you to.' Her breasts are almost perfect, just a little big. I walk around, and admire her wings instead, tracing the bones with my eyes, then my fingers, the flesh still thick enough to be opaque. The bones are full length, and width, but the muscles haven't built up enough yet, so they only stick out a few centimeters from her back. She shivers, smiling over her shoulder at me, eyes dark and shining, `Gumi says it'll be another couple weeks before they finish growing, and are ready to start training.' `And a month after that before they're strong enough for you to fly?' I ask. `Not that long. A week, or two, Gumi tells me,' she turns around, wrapping her hands around my waist, `New process, that grows and strengthens the muscles at the same time.' `Cool,' I smile up at her, flick my tongue against my lips, just barely enough to be visible. She takes the cue, and kisses me. -* Zoicite falls, unconcious, at Jupiter's feet, and she blinks, surprised, `What do I do?' `Tracker!' I gasp, and slap the item to the man's back, feeling the painfully hot tingle of a blocked teleport wash over us, then it's melted into his back, `Let him go, Noriko!' He vanishes in a swirl of darkness. `Who's Noriko?' `An AS, like this one, but she wasn't captured by the Dark Kingdom,' Mercury says, tending to Manatsu's wounds, separating her fully from the man she'd been bound too, and the Shard as well, `She's ready for transport.' Manatsu vanishes without any special effects at all. -* `You're older than us,' Makoto says, staring into my eyes, `Why do you defer to them?' `Before, when we were together, Mercury was my elder sister's wife, and I was Serenity and Mars's concubine.' `Concubine?' `Well, they always used "intended", but everyone else used "concubine".' `That's rude.' `Serenity's mother had forbidden her to marry me.' `Why?' `We couldn't ever figure that out,' I shrug, `Maybe she just didn't want to be Mercury's mother.' `What?' Ami asks, then closes her eyes for a moment, `I suppose I would have been, wouldn't I. My aunt was her consort for a time, around the time Serenity was born. That's probably what it was.' `She could have told us!' Rei yells, stomping her foot. It's utterly adorable. `So, then, I would be my cousin's sister?' Usagi starts laughing, then sits down and continues. After a time, she stops, and presses her head to the ground. `It's not like the dirtling she was pushing at me was any better! He was Beryl's little brother!' `Wait,' I say, `What dirtling?' `Endymion?' `Endy wasn't a dirtling! Well, he emmigrated, but that doesn't count.' `Endy?' `My half-brother, or somesuch. Tall, kinda nice looking, if you like guys, good person, not too bright, but he got by.' `He made a pass at Mars, so I was going to mess with him the whole time he was on the moon for that conference, convince the poor guy he was in love with me, then have him walk in on me kissing you.' `You were a mean person, sometimes, weren't you,' I tell Usagi, and gather her into a hug to take some of the sting out of that. `Yep,' she says, and I can feel warm tears on my neck. -* `Your roots have changed,' I tell Rei, brushing my fingertips along her hairline. `Body hair, too,' she pulls up a sleeve, `See?' I give the little tuft of black and white hair a tug, a little amused to see that each hair has gone white, rather than only the new ones. `All of it?' `Yes,' she says, and blushes, her paler skin not showing it well. `Another week?' I touch the ridge of one forming wing on her back. `That's what Gumi says,' she twists, leans in close, and kisses me. I note, irrelevantly, that her eyebrows seem to be going white one new hair at a time, before the new familiar feel of her lips touching mine. Sometime later I look up at her, flat on my back on her bed, both shirt and armor open down the front, her warm hands on my chest for a fleeting instant before she sits back, straddling my thighs, breath short, still fully clothed. `Whoa,' she says, dropping her hands to her knees, her dark eyes still on my flushed skin, then sliding up to meet my own, gold flecks sparlkling in the sunlight streaming in her window. `Is this,' she pauses, fumbling for words. Instead of waiting I take her hands and bring them back to my chest, arching up into her touch when she squeezes, not too gently. A little later, I ask as she peels off her own shirt, `Usagi?' `Said she wanted it to be just the two of us, this time,' Rei leans forward and drags her satin-covered breasts up my torso. I gasp, ready to accept that explanation. - `Whell,' Akane growls, `You look like the cat that ate the canary.' `I was the canary, mostly,' I answer, then realize what I said once it was quite too late. Akane stares at me, then turns and rushes up the stairs. I gawp stupidly for a moment, then run up after her. I stop outside her door, then knock. Soft sobbing noises stop, `Go away,' she says firmly. `Not yet,' I tell her, `If you don't talk to me I don't know what you're thinking or what you want.' `Go away!' `Gone then. Think about it, though,' I say, and gate to Farside. `She came out right after you gated,' Misato greets me, a hundred meters after I step from the gate. `Any of the corridor courses open?' I ask her instead. `Ceres hasn't been hit, so the mine course there should be intact. Pallas is fully functional, but the course was damaged about three hundred fifty thousand years ago. Your booster is in the Vesta dock, but Vesta's been dark since Noriko and Kazumi shifted ops here 423 KYA. Telephoto monitors look to show it as intact, but it didn't come up at the restart signals.' `Booster?' I blink, surprised at the thought, then smile, `Is the token-ring prototype still available?' `Yes.' `Good!' I gate back, and start armoring up, stripping bare before pulling on the softsuit, then the spikey bits and motors, clicking each piece in place and giving it a tug before moving on to the next. Akane walks in before I get the left wrist motor on, so I don't gate out after that, turning toward her instead, `Yes?' `I think I kinda like you,' she says, `I don't want to marry you, anyone, but . . . ' she trails off. `You get jealous?' `No! . . . Yes . . . I don't know,' she hangs her head. `I'm not the boy my father promised,' I look up at her, `I'm not the boy who walked in here a couple months ago. Ritsuko -- the "me" from five hundred thousand years ago -- is a real big part of me. Only two things mattered to me, to her, back then. The Art -- fighting, racing, dancing, tehy all aspects of the same Art to her -- and her Mistresses. Ritsuko was Princess Serenity and her Consort Mars's concubine.' `Concubine?' `Not quite the right word, but closer than Fiancee, or girlfriend. I -- she loved them with all her heart. Until she became theirs, everything she knew, everything she did, was to advance her Art -- mechanics, physics, math, everything was for the Art. After, there were entire weeks where she'd let it slip.' `What?' `Those were good times. These new ones aren't the same, but they're so cute, and I could love them as hard so easily.' `What about me?' `I don't know,' a sudden thought strikes, `Want to see Farside?' `Which is?' `Silver Millennium Military Maintnence Facility, Farside. The main remaining facility on the moon.' `O.K.' I open a gate, and lead her through, `Here we are. Misato, a volunteer to show her around?' `This is Mayuko,' Misato ghosts in, an AS with floor length grey hair and silver eyes at her side. `Pleased to meet you,' she says in a Kasumi-like voice. `Mayuko-san, this is my friend Akane. she's granted green access, and I'll review and authorize any equipment requests to purple.' `Logged. Should she get an interface?' `If she wants. Akane,' I turn to her, `She'll show you around, so please ask her any question you want.' `Where are you going?' `To check on and restart the docks on Vesta. I should be back in a couple hours, but if I'm not, Mayuko can open a gate home for you.' `O.K.' Akane nods. - The token-ring prototype is as I remember it, painted in zinc chromate primer, the control systems housed in the bulging transverse delta uper and lower plates, the two main token rings in the outer engine pods, the cooling spells aready glowing red and blue, the backup motors, mounted at the back point, dark. The control cabin, boom mounted from the center of each plate's forward side, stares at me, the single eye glowing red, then pulling back as the chin drops and the forehead lifts, the faceplate splits to either side, exposing the pilot's seat. I walk up the two steps, grab the hand, and settle myself into it, clip the five-point harness shut as the cockpit slides closed. A touch unlocks the docking grapnels, then I check the controls, throttle, wiggle the stick left and right roll, back and forth for pitch about the CG, rock the pedals forward and back for yaw, then tilting them for pitch, the craft swinging about the cockpit. `Misato, gate me close.' `Roger.' Close, it turns out, is a good six light seconds from the asteroid, but that's O.K. The token rings are almost still, massive steel rods mounted between facing gates, driven back or forth by linear accelerators. The drive system only gets unwieldy as the ring reaches realtivistic velocities, inhibiting maneuver and acceleration. The second prototype was to be able to turn the rings when they got too fast, then decelerate them while acclerating the ship, but the coherent-impulse results put the the kibosh on that, and I managed to obtain opac to the warp-impulse prototype. For short-distance insystem work, it's fine. Full-throttle slams me bac in the couch, 80 Gs making things a little grey around the edges. Full reverse slams me forward against the straps, and then I'm coasting up to Vesta. Two circuits around the asteroid show that both antenna sets are gone. The dock's hatch opens to the emergency code, however, and that wakes the automatics. I tell them. I park the prototype at the guest dock, and burn lightly, just tiny flickers of flame, to bay 21. Bays 21 to 52 are full-sized commercial bays, as befits an STX booster. Boosters predate warp tech, originally using their huge motors to haul kilotons of cargo and hundreds of kilotons of frozen fuel. Warp ended that. Fuel no longer needed to be carried, so sudden the cargo ships were obsolete, and many were destroyed before racing became popular. Smashing into an asteroid was generally fatal for both booster and pilot, but new ones were being built, just for racing. Mine is real, with dozens of mount rings for fuel bags ans sixes of cargo mounts towards the front of its six hundred meter length. Most of the bay lights come on at once, then the rest over the next few minutes as the autos fix them. A couple minutes later the telltales flash purple -- no compromise of the bay. The booster's hatch opens at a touch, and I throw myself hand over hand up the center shaft. The comps are up, the sensors . . . half failed. I slip into the pilot seat, facing the transparency, centerline of the great shaft, all the way at the other end of the craft from it's unloaded CG, which is right in front of the engines. I fire the maneuvers, the six directionals, just behind the cockpit, facing outward in opposing pairs, then the rotationals, three sets of three pairs, around the centerline at the mains, middle, and between the directionals. I bring the mains up to ten percent, the retros to fifty percent, then shut them down. Six days for the sensors, two days for the leaks the old beast just sprung when pumps and hoses warmed for the first time in millenia. A quarter of the strain gauges are out, but the rest read normal. I smile, and put her systems back to sleep, bounce out of the couch, boots to the tranparency and down the corridor, spinning quickly. I snatch the handle by the hatch and out I go. Back in the guest bay I toss myself backwards into the prototypes cockpit, which closes around me. I almost spin it in place before I remember the strange yaw pivot, and back it out of the bay first. I push through, coming out five light seconds to the outside of the asteroid. I spin, throttle up in reverse, cut it, then pitch over, coasting into visual range of the asteroid, decel hard enough to make things go black as they tunnel, the straps biting into my body as they support thirteen tons of girl, armor, and engines. I love that feeling. Six days, and I'll have the boosters hundred and twenty percent, two hundred and fifty G thrust again. Five seconds, then things go red and I have two more to throttle down before they go black and, in a race, I smear myself and my beloved booster's sixty-five million year history comes to an end. I can maintain, could maintain, will be able to maintain, a pleasant grey at two hundred and thirty Gs, all the way from the moon to Jupiter. Six weeks pay, that was, the few times I paid for the run. After that I ran with cargo and passenger pods, and turned a small profit -- bulk cargo could be a bit more expensive to gate, but not much, and small things cheaper, but they got a sponsor link as well. The passengers just liked to try things the old way, like Japanese steam train buffs, or enjoy the high G, and a seat in a passenger pod is cheaper than equivalent time in a 'fuge. Not that the Jupiter run takes long at full throttle. The autos are down, flat. Antenna's look good. Almost no vibration, so the motors are off on the hab cylinders, but they're still turning. Once I get to the manuals I'll be able to suck energy off of them until we get the pebbles replaced. The manual hatch is stiff, water ice in the mechanism, probably, the same problem as the last time I opened it. I put some muscle into it, and it pops free. I grind it open, letting out a gust of cold gas, helium sharp with crystals of water, nitrogen and oxygen. Once inside I I muscle the door closed, then open the inner lock, even harder than the outer. Globs of liquid coat the walls, a thin helium atmosphere all that's still gas. Unlike Vesta, Ceres never had proper insulation installed or the ancient pebble-bed reactor replaced. The walls steam wherever I touch them, liquid vaporizing at my touch and refreezing almost as fast. I think about it, and it has the special triple overlay of data RNA dumped, experienced, then dumped again, Six more doors, and three mechanical combination locks, later I start flipping switches, first the big one turning on the rectifier pack, then the cutout into the main systems, followed by the smaller ones for the backup caps, then the autos. The ventilators hum on, and warm, almost balmy hundred degree kelvin air gushes out. The the oxigen starts to evaporate instantly, but the nitrogen will take a bit longer. - The sorter is already pulling pool-ball sized pebbles out of the reactor bed, and all of them are going in the reject bin. I send the coords, and the gates open, one in the reject chute, one in the return chute feeding fresh pebbles. I pick one out of the reject hopper, shake the two-kilo carbide sphere, full of smaller spheres, each a carbide shell around a few grams of what was, five hundred thousand years ago, enriched uranium. Cold now, barely warmer than background radiation. I pitch it into the inspection return chute, followed by the other ninety. The corridors are up to almost eighty degrees kelvin as I drift down them. I go out the manual hatch, pause to work it a bit, then burn over to the prototype, which has drifted away from the hatch, its autos maintaining distance from Ceres and avoiding colisions. In the hatch, - `Learn anything?' I ask Akane. She turns shell-shocked eyes on me, `I'm an alien?' `Descended from one, anyway,' I shrug, `I thought I told you that? I'm one too, anyway, this time, but my genes don't show it anymore.' `And your Queen killed everyone in the solar system to stop this enemy of yours?' `Transubstantiated. About half the energy went into the attack, the other half went to force our rebirth in a safer time.' `Everyone?' `Everyone not on Earth who was alive or had died in the hours before.' `Why?' `Consensus amoung the ASs is that she panicked. She was kinda flighty in a crisis.' `Oh,' she wraps me, armor and all, in a hug, `You're cold. Standard interface and an RNA dump,' she smiles, `And a map job.' `Don't change anything if you're unsure about it.' `I won't, but I don't like _me_, a lot of the time.' `If you chase self-esteem through modification, you'll probably never find it.' `Mayuko said the same thing.' `Good.' The crystal device drops into me outstretched hand, followed by the platinum pendant mount and chain. `What's that?' Akane asks, pulling back to look. `Scanner.' `Oh, wow!' she actscans the complex, `How do I -- Oh,' she cuts the feed, `That's cool.' `Don't actscan without asking me first. Metallia has a number of our ASs, who can detect that.' `Right.' - `Our babies went off together! For hours! Oh, surely the schools will be joined now!' Soun weeps for joy. `Shall we leave?' I ask Akane. `Yes.' I pull her through the gate to the courtyard of Hikawa shrine. `There you are!' Usagi announces, bounding out, `We're having a meeting, but couldn't find you!,' she pouts prettily. `You could have called,' I send to her communicator. It beeps, and she fishes it out, listens to the message, `Your booster! That's how we met, I was a pod passenger!' I nod, smiling, `Yep, rather rude, too.' `I was,' she nods, `Who's this?' `Tendo Akane, my arranged fiancee.' `She looks familiar. I'm Tsukino Usagi, pleased to meet you,' she bows. `Same here,' Akane bows back. `Come up, both of you,' she turns to me, `I'm guessing she's green, if you gated her here.' `Yes. I think she's good for purple, but-' `You can't grant that. Let me get to know her a bit.' `Of course.' `Momma,' Akane gasps, softly. Ami looks up from her computer, `Misty?' she whispers, shocked. Akane glomps her, crying happily. `What?' Rei says, then, `Wow.' `What is it?' Makoto comes in from the direction of the kitchen, `Misty?' `Jupiter?' Akane motions her over, and pulls her into the hug, `We're almost the same age this time.' --- log: 1999 August 17: decided SSMM2 was done, and started this one. 2000 March 25: added a bit 2004 August 30: added some (probably, logging this 2005/Aug/25 ^^;) 2006 July: Paper Drafting at NTC and on the bus ride back. 2006 Nov 11: Started typing in paper draft 2006 Nov 12: Paper draft typed in 2006 Dec 11: tiny edit