I have a message from another time... Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presents UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT - SYMPHONY OF THE SWORD No. 4 - Sixth Movement: Second Chances Benjamin D. Hutchins (c) 2003 Eyrie Productions, Unlimited SATURDAY, AUGUST 15, 2409 KANE'S WORLD, CONROY SECTOR UNITED FEDERATION OF PLANETS The Art of Noise arrived at Kane's World, just at the edge between the Inner Sectors and the Outer Rim, without proper guitarists. Kaitlyn Hutchins could play guitar, and sometimes played lead on certain songs she'd devised herself. Shiori Takatsuki had demonstrated a workable facility for rhythm guitar earlier in the year. Neither were proper full-time guitarists, though, and Kate on guitar left no one playing the keyboards, which for some songs was a crippling flaw. The four of them who were left - Kate, Shiori, Moose MacEchearn, and R. Dorothy Wayneright - spent the Valiant's arrival time in their studio on the Lido Deck, trying to find a way to arrange themselves into a band again. Kate was beginning to get quite frustrated and wonder what had gone wrong with the arrangements Azalynn had said she was going to make, when the studio door suddenly opened and she had her answer. For the first time in a while, Kaitlyn felt her heart lift and her world brighten as two very familiar people walked into the studio. "Amanda!" she cried. "D-D-Devlin!" Amanda Dessler, Crown Princess of the Gamilon Empire, smirked slightly and sketched a bow. Devlin Carter, his shock of straw-blond hair as disarrayed as ever, grinned. "Hullo, Kaitlyn, old love," he said in his best comic-opera Upper-Crust British Twit voice. "Heard you were havin' a bit of a personnel problem, eh, what?" The "new" Art of Noise fit together perfectly. In less than an hour they were ticking along like nothing had happened. This was a bit of a surprise, albeit a pleasant one, to several of the people involved. Not only had Amanda's razor-sharp rhythm guitar skills not been appreciably dulled by several years of what amounted to musical retirement, but Devlin's arrival cleared the way for an unexpected new lead guitarist. Anne Cross, who served as the band's engineer, hadn't known Dorothy could play guitar. It wasn't a skill she advertised - but she could, and well, having learned the craft from Miki, Kate, and Azalynn, all three of the Art's normally-active guitarists. Her style on lead was a bit different from Azalynn's - more like Kaitlyn's. She played a Stratocaster like Kate's, too, so she had a similar sound as well as style. It gave the band a slightly different flavor than it normally had. Juniper hadn't heard the band when Amanda and Devlin were active members; she was too young. When the original lineup of the Art of Noise was still together, Anne was an ordinary little girl living in a plastic box on Orron IV, dreaming of better things. It was a sobering thought, given how young all these people still were. Kate was barely twenty, Captain Tenjou not yet out of her teens. (And Dorothy... how old -was- Dorothy, anyway? And did it really matter?) The Art of Noise, their equipment, and their impromptu road crew hit the dirt as they usually did, by beaming down to the loading dock of the venue and then lugging everything inside. Clubs and bars tended to look much the same from the back, and Dorothy was thinking of other things anyway, so she paid the place little attention. The places where the band played tended to blur together a bit anyway. They hadn't played this club before, though they'd been to Kane's World several times over the past few years. Their usual venue was booked solid, so Juri had looked around and found them an alternate spot, a newly opened club looking for good acts to build up its clientele. They wouldn't mind getting a slightly understrength Art of Noise - it'd still be a better band than any local act they could get for what they were paying. Dorothy helped Devlin set up the drum kit - it was hers, he having left his on Jyurai - before busying herself with her amp stacks and tuning up her steel-grey Strat. She still didn't pay much attention to her surroundings; she was too focused on getting everything right. She wanted to do a good job, and she was a little nervous. She hadn't taken an up-front role in a musical performance in years, and didn't have particularly pleasant memories of the last time she had. R. Dorothy's creator, an elderly and embittered roboticist named Timothy Wayneright, built her to replace his daughter Dorothy. The "real" Dorothy Wayneright had died at the age of 16, a victim of New Gotham's endemic street crime. The grief-stricken Wayneright had just happened to be the only surviving disciple of the great 24th-century roboticist Noonian Soong, which gave him the skills and knowledge he needed to create a perfectly convincing duplicate of his beloved daughter. All he needed was money, which he got by selling his skills to New Gotham's crime syndicates. That his actions contributed to the very crime which had robbed him of his daughter apparently never penetrated Timothy Wayneright's psyche. Eventually, his involvement in New Gotham's organized crime had cost him his life, and the robot Dorothy had wound up the property of a young Corwin Ravenhair. It was, though she could not know it, the luckiest outcome a sophisticated robot struggling to come to terms with her own identity could have hoped for. One of the things Wayneright had liked his "daughter" to do for him was singing. He often took her to a jazz club in town and made her sing torch songs. Dorothy had never really liked to do that; it was a glaring example of the fact that she was really just a plaything for a rather demented old man. She did it anyway because her programming demanded obedience, but she'd always resented it a bit, somewhere deep inside. Once freed from her just-a-toy mindset, she'd avoided such situations as painful reminders that she had once been a slave... but she'd discovered early on that she still loved music, and in a way still loved performing. She'd kept up her piano skills, learned new instruments, mastered the drums, and used her voice to back up Kaitlyn, finding joy in being a supporting player. But now here she was, about to come out from behind the drum kit which had insulated her from her past and stand right up front, playing lead guitar. She'd be one of the two people on stage who the audience did most of their looking at. And they were on a real stage, too; this place, now that she finished with her sound check and looked around, was more like an auditorium than a club. The stage they were on had real wings and an apron, and a heavy curtain cut them off from what sounded like a reasonably big crowd. They were running a bit late, so they didn't retire for a break to let the club fill up after sound check. The place was as full as it was going to get, and the time to go to work was now. Kaitlyn adjusted a couple of last controls on her stack of keyboards, then polled the band with her eyes. She knew of Dorothy's history and had been surprised that the robot girl had volunteered to take Azalynn's place. The smile she gave Dorothy had a measure of extra reassurance as a result. Dorothy smiled in return - a small smile, but full-blooded - and gave the bandleader a thumbs-up. In her black jeans and a black tank top printed with an industrial safety sign ("DANGER: THIS MACHINE STARTS AUTOMATICALLY"), her auburn hair held back with a rising-sun headband, she looked ready to rock. Next to her, Amanda cocked her lip in a thin little smile of her own, about as much gaiety as she could ever muster on stage. On top of the amp stacks, two small metal figures gave thumbs-ups of their own. Tiny Robo and Lesser Mazinger, Utena and Kaitlyn's pet mini-robots, had come dirtside to help the band set up. They were quite handy at pulling cables through confined spaces under stages and the like. Engineer Anne Cross, Kate's novice student called Juniper, was always glad of their assistance, since it meant she didn't have to crawl around under there herself. Moose raised his thumb as well; Devlin grinned broadly. Sergei, Kate's pet neotiger, prowled between the two guitarists, waiting for the music to start. To him, all the band members were just his supporting cast. Kate nodded with a fond smile, turned to her stack, and told Juniper through her mic that the band was ready. A few moments later, they heard her introduce them, slightly muffled by the curtain. Then the curtain parted, swept out from in front of them, and Dorothy Wayneright was momentarily dumbfounded. The room in front of her had changed - it was darker, and considerably more crowded, and some of the fixtures had changed - but for all that she recognized it in an instant, for she had seen it from this angle many, many times. This... this was the Nightingale! Some years before, it had been Timothy Wayneright's favorite club; this very stage was the one on which he'd put his singing doll for his amusement, so many nights. Why, he'd -died- right over there, where that guy with the Mohawk was standing... Kate saw the shocked look cross her new guitarist's face as the curtain opened and the roar of the crowd washed over them. She didn't know what was causing it, unaware that this club had once been the Nightingale, so she thought it was just that Dorothy's ability to cope with being up front had fallen short of Dorothy's own expectations. Kaitlyn's mind raced as she tried to decide what to do, how to handle this crisis - but it wasn't necessary. R. Dorothy was a real musician, and she wasn't about to let a little thing like a major psychological shock ruin a show. After only an instant's pause, she touched the strings of her Strat and the bluesy intro to "Save Me" spilled out. Amanda joined her on the first repeat, with Devlin and Moose piling in behind, and they were off. /* Big Country "Save Me" _Through a Big Country_ */ Once they got started they never looked back, and the former Nightingale Club (now called The Majestic) was treated to what may have been the best concert ever performed by a band thrown together the same day. The group came together beautifully and rocked the club until nearly midnight. Dorothy warmed to her new role as the evening went on, adding flourishes to her technique and moving around more on stage. Watching from her place behind the sound board, Juni remarked to herself that it was rather like watching a flower bloom. Afterward, once the equipment was packed up and beamed out and the rest of the crew had returned to the Valiant with it, the six (plus tiger and two small robots) emerged from The Majestic into the dark streets of New Gotham, wired and hungry. Only now did what she'd just done seem to strike Dorothy. She paused at the bottom of the club's steps, turned around, and looked up at its facade. It too had changed. The sign above the door was different, of course, and there were no uniformed doormen. But the lines of the building were still the same, and the buildings to either side were unchanged. "D-Dorothy?" asked Kaitlyn quietly. "Y-you OK?" Dorothy blinked, pulling herself back from the past, then turned to Kate and nodded. "I'm fine," she said. "Why don't you go on without me? I don't need to eat anyway, and I think I'd like to look around for a while. After all," she added with a tiny smile, "this is my home town." Kate looked concerned. "Are you s-sure you w-w-want to w-walk around this t-town alone after m-midnight?" "I don't think there's anything out there I need to fear," Dorothy replied calmly, and, after thinking about it for a moment, Kate had to admit she had a point. "A-all right," she said. "S-see you t-t-tomorrow. Oh - and if I d-didn't say it before," (she had,) "you d-did a great job t-tonight." Dorothy's smile got a little wider. "Thank you," she said. "Good night, Kaitlyn. Everyone," she added with a polite nod, and then she turned and walked off down the street. /* Toshihiko Sahashi "Weep For" _Big O_ */ A light rain began falling as she walked, taking in the familiar and the changed, but that didn't bother her. She had her hat on, the little round one with the brim that Corwin had given her, and a good raincoat too. The slight chill the rain brought with it, for it was autumn in this part of Kane's World, didn't bother her either. She'd never really done this before. Though she'd returned to Kane's World and New Gotham several times since leaving with Corwin years before, she'd never looked around - just gone to the places where the band was playing, played, and then left again. It was as if she'd been hiding from the painful parts of her past, and the time had come when she could no longer justify doing that. She was a different person now - a real musician, a martial artist, a lover, a fighter. She wasn't a toy. She could walk the streets of New Gotham and see the city through new eyes. She turned a corner and paused, surprised, to see someone standing there waiting for her. The person awaiting her was shrouded in a red cloak with a hood, so that Dorothy couldn't see much in the way of detail. She couldn't even tell the other person's gender until she spoke in a low, cool, oddly familiar voice. "So there you are," she said. "I've been waiting for you to come back, you know. I've been waiting for years, but you never stayed long enough for me to catch up with you before." Something prickled at the back of Dorothy's mind. There was an undercurrent in the voice, and something about the stance, that made her feel that there was danger here. Besides, she didn't know anybody in this city anymore. "Who are you?" she asked. "That's a question you should ask yourSELF!" the other snarled, and then one of her arms thrust out from within the scarlet cloak. The fist at the end was full of a machine pistol, and with a stuttering roar, it filled the air above Dorothy's end of the sidewalk with a hail of bullets. Despite her foreboding feeling, Dorothy was stunned by such an abrupt and violent action. Though there were several things she could have done to avoid the gunfire completely, she did none of them. Instead, though she had the presence of mind to cross her arms in front of her face to protect her eyes, she otherwise did nothing but stand there and get repeatedly shot. Fortunately, the gun wasn't a terribly powerful one. The light bullets tore at her clothes, tattering the sleeves and tails of her coat and pockmarking her jeans, but they didn't penetrate her synthetic skin. After a few deafening seconds, the chatter of the machine pistol ceased. The two figures stood for a moment in a strange, still tableau, the red-cloaked girl with her arm straight and her gun smoking, Dorothy slightly stooped with her arms crossed as if bucking a heavy wind. Then the girl in the red cloak thumbed the magazine release on her gun and the spent magazine clattered to the pavement. "Hmph," she said. /* Juno Reactor vs. Don Davis "Burly Brawl" _The Matrix Reloaded_ */ She produced another magazine in her free hand, but before she could install it, Dorothy moved. Faster than the human eye could follow, she darted forward, reaching for the gun - The girl in the red cloak reacted even faster, fading back and pivoting away from Dorothy's rush and slapping the magazine home. Surprised at her antagonist's speed, Dorothy watched as the pistol's slide snapped shut in near-slow-motion. The Kirishima Empty Hand counter for a close-range opponent with a handgun flowed through her servos without her conscious thought. It was obvious from the result that, though the girl in red was faster than Dorothy, she hadn't expected a response anything like as skillful from the robot girl. Now it was her turn to be caught short. The Beretta snarled a burst past Dorothy's ear before being slapped out of its wielder's hand and clattering off down the street. "All right, then, we'll do it this way!" snarled the girl in red, and she launched a fierce kick combo that hissed through the air above Dorothy's ducking head. Her technique was more mechanical, less fluid than Dorothy's, and of a different style. After a few more exchanges of blocks and missed strikes, Dorothy recognized the pattern for what it was: an unmodified commercial combat skillsoft, of the type often used by organized crime soldiers and low-budget military forces. It incorporated a little karate, a little kempo, a little kiliari, and a lot of special-forces infighting techniques. Against scrubs and rentacops it was devastating, and allowed gangs to dominate urban streets quickly and inexpensively. Dorothy was no scrub, and as she blocked and countered, she sized up her opponent's capabilities with a discerning eye. Whoever this girl was, she was obviously either heavily augmented or a machine herself. The only other people who could match the strength and speed she was showing were esper-level martial artists, and her technique was too obviously canned for that to be the case. She was, indeed, a bit faster than Dorothy - not a circumstance to which the auburn-haired robot was accustomed. There's no point in getting involved with this, she told herself. Whatever this woman's problem is, it's not worth having a pointless fight over. With that thought in mind, she blocked a punch combo, swept, got a bit of room, and tried to disengage by jumping straight up six stories to the roof of the nearest apartment building. Her red-cloaked adversary surprised her again by following suit, cresting the parapet around the flat asphalt roof with her cloak flying around her and then settling like a vicious bird. Her hood had come partway back on the landing; its shadow still obscured most of her face, but now Dorothy could see her chin and a cruel, sardonic grin. "Oh, a race!" she remarked. "Beautiful idea. Let's try this! You see if you can catch me and stop me before I catch up with your friends and kill them!" With that, she sprang away, leaping across the street to another, slightly higher rooftop, thence to another and another. For a moment, Dorothy considered just letting her go and try it, in order to provide both some amusing irony and an opportunity for Kaitlyn to work off some of the frustration that had dogged her this summer; but something about that strategy struck her as faintly dishonorable and certainly lazy, so she pursued. The frenetic, bounding chase led halfway across the central sprawl of New Gotham, up and down the grimy archipelago of rooftops. Dorothy's aggressor-turned-quarry was familiar with the city, much more so than she was, but Dorothy knew a thing or two about pursuit vectors, and after a few minutes' leaping and scanning the skyline ahead, she saw an interception angle and took it. They collided in the air above the broad, flat roof of a hotel, smashed to the roof in a spray of asphalt particles, and rolled over several times before separating and springing upright. The attacker's red cloak came away in Dorothy's hand, and as they whirled to face each other, she got the latest in the day's series of nasty shocks. The other girl's face, illuminated luridly by the red backwashed light of the hotel's giant, street-facing neon roof sign, was Dorothy's. She stared in astonishment for a half-second, then demanded again, "Who are you?" The other Dorothy smirked, an expression which looked painfully out of place on Dorothy's normally impassive face. "They call me R.D," she replied, and now that her voice wasn't pitched low, -it- was a warped version of Dorothy's too. Dorothy looked down at the cloak she still held in her hand, then tossed it aside and said, "The R presumably stands for Red. What's the D for?" R.D chuckled hollowly, but said nothing. "I don't understand," Dorothy observed calmly. "Where did you come from? Why are you trying to destroy me? I've done nothing to you." The laugh which answered that was more of a harsh bark. "You've done nothing to me?!" R.D cried. "You DARE say that? Our creator DISCARDED me because of you!" She lunged forward, fists clenched, and lashed the air around Dorothy with a series of punches which the black-clad girl only barely evaded. Dorothy's counterattack was blocked stiffly but effectively, and for a moment they stood deadlocked, their right forearms crossed against each other. "I didn't know you existed," Dorothy said. "That's no excuse!" R.D replied, shoving her away. "Just because I wasn't quite -perfect- enough a copy to suit him, our father changed my face and sold me to the Yakuza to finance a second attempt!" She whipped a roundhouse kick over Dorothy's head that made the air thump audibly in its wake. "He just THREW ME AWAY and went on to make YOU! YOU got the life -I- was supposed to have!" She hurled herself furiously forward, snapping the air all around her faintly bewildered adversary. Dorothy blocked or avoided most of the blows, but caught one square in the sternum that sent her flying back. She got her feet under her again and skidded to a halt a few yards away, readying herself for more combat, but R.D hadn't moved after the last blow. The red-clad Dorothy (under the cloak she was wearing a red dress not unlike the one old Wayneright had made Dorothy wear when she sang at the Nightingale) looked down at the wet asphalt of the roof, speaking in a low, intense voice. "You stole my FACE, you miserable little bitch," she growled, then went on in a more animated voice, "I should be YOU and YOU shouldn't EXIST!" She raised her dark eyes then, boring into Dorothy's with them, and smiled coldly. "As you can see, I've fixed the first part." She clenched her fists. "Now I'm going to fix the rest." She took a step, then another, and then was running at Dorothy almost too fast to be seen. She was not only faster than Dorothy, but stronger as well. Under this all-out onslaught, Dorothy stumbled, faltering under the battering that seemed to come from all directions at once. She reeled, trying to protect her face - her optics were by far the most delicate part of her body - for several seconds before R.D landed a vicious sidelong kick that sent Dorothy hurtling across the roof to sprawl against the parapet at the far side. The blow restored a measure of Dorothy's mental, if not physical, equilibrium. All right, Dorothy, she told herself sternly. You've had a shock. There'll be time to deal with that later, IF you survive what's happening right now - and the only way that's going to happen is if you stop standing around getting beaten up and -fight back-. "Get up, Dorothy," she murmured softly to herself, watching her wrathful scarlet twin cross the roof with brisk, angry strides to finish her off. Get up she did, rising from her crumpled sprawl and straight into an aerial leap without the transitional phase a person of human strength would need. The phoenix kick, as it was called, wasn't a particularly efficient maneuver, and the situations in which it was useful were relatively rare, but it was a very powerful attack when the circumstances favored it - and right now, favor it they did. Dorothy's sweeping foot didn't actually connect with R.D, but it drew in the air behind it a crackling arc of fiery energy, a shockwave generated by the power of Dorothy's spirit. Kanna Kirishima was a Spirit Warrior - it was why she'd been chosen as a member of the Teikokukagekidan Hanagumi, years ago - and she'd been delighted to find in her student a strong enough spirit to allow her to pass on those special techniques. R.D was blown over backward by the blast of power, and when Dorothy landed from her impossibly sustained spinning leap, her tattered coat flying around her, she pressed the attack. They went back and forth several times, battling in grim silence for several minutes. Dorothy's superior skill balanced R.D's greater speed and strength, but neither could seem to get the upper hand - or rather, neither could seem to keep it long enough to close the deal. At length, Dorothy tried a gamble. After breaking one of R.D's attack flurries, she concentrated her strength and tried to finish the fight, charging in with a series of conventional strikes that drove R.D to the brink of the roof. It almost worked. The last kick she tried, which she was hoping would drive the red-clad aggressor right off the roof, was one too many. R.D used her superior speed to get inside the arc, seize Dorothy by leg and body, and hurl -her- off the roof. As she was going over, Dorothy reversed the reversal, seizing her opponent by the wrist as R.D tried to release her leg. Both of them ended up catapulting into space and plunging the seven stories to the street below. Partway down, R.D wrested herself free from Dorothy's grip and gave her a kick for good measure, separating their arcs before they reached ground level. Dorothy came down almost flat on her back, smashing a crater in the street. For a moment her vision went black and she feared the concussion had destroyed her optic connections; then it returned, grainy with static and featuring a bit of a vertical hold problem, and her status displays filled her field of view with damage reports. R.D somersaulted once, caught a flagpole, snapped it off the building, and carried it down with her. She came down on her feet, dropping to one knee as she crushed a somewhat smaller patch of street. Then she rose, discarded the flagpole, and crossed to her sister, who was struggling inconclusively to stand. Dorothy's problem, she could tell from the damage estimates, was mostly temporary. The concussion had disrupted her neural transmission grid, causing a momentary loss of motor control before the systems could resynchronize. That wasn't going to help her if it didn't happen before her scarlet nemesis got to her, though - R.D reached down, grabbed Dorothy by the throat, and picked up her limp, twitching form like a broken doll. Leaning close, she sneered and murmured, "Weakling. I never thought I'd feel fortunate that old Wayneright was afraid of my strength." Then the sneering composure fractured and her face twisted into a horrible mask of madness and fury as she screamed, "GoodBYE - DOROTHY TWO!" Dorothy felt control flood back into her limbs as her neurosystems finished recycling - - too late. There was no pain, only a deep sense of shock and a wrenching impact as R.D drove her hand like a piledriver into Dorothy's upper chest. She gasped, optics dilating, as a spurt of backflushed scarlet coolant rushed from broken lines in her torso up her pneumatic vocal canal and sprayed from her mouth to fleck her sister's hate-twisted face. R.D closed her hand and wrenched it back out, trailing sparks and smoke from the rent in Dorothy's synthetic skin. Clenched in it was a small yellow oblong with the familiar trefoil of a radiation hazard warning painted on it in black. Cables ran from the power core back into Dorothy's body. With a contemptuous grin, R.D twisted the core until they all parted, then tossed it aside and released Dorothy's neck. Dorothy collapsed instantly to her knees, the strength gone from her legs. Coolant ran from the sparking wound in her chest and the corner of her mouth, looking uncannily like blood in the oily light of the hotel's neon sign. "What... do you... get from this?" Dorothy asked weakly, still trying to understand. As she watched Dorothy's optics lose focus, R.D smiled coldly. "I get your -life-," she replied, and then turned and walked away. The damage she had inflicted on Dorothy's mechanical frame was instantly crippling and impendingly fatal. In a few seconds, the residual power in her systems would leak away, the positron flux in her brain would stop, and the patterns that made her unique would irretrievably evanesce. As she walked away, R.D considered the technical details of her sister's demise, savoring the idea of positronic extinction and wondering what it would feel like. Would darkness creep in around the periphery? Would there be a progressive loss of memory functions, the individual peeling away a layer at a time until nothing remained? Or would the timer simply reach zero and then - plink! - nothing? She heard something scrape against asphalt behind her, stopped, and whirled to see Dorothy slowly rising to her feet. "You can't have... my life," she whispered, then steadied herself in a fighting stance. Half the city away, the rest of the Art of Noise cheered as a waitress delivered their appetizers, the first wave of what promised to be a sumptuous late-night Chinese meal. "Hey," Juniper mused before digging into a crab rangoon. "Where'd the bots go?" "Impossible," R.D murmured, then screamed it: "IMPOSSIBLE!" She surged into motion, fists clenching, and charged. All right, dammit, THIS time she'd tear out her BRAIN and then WATCH IT GO DARK - To her considerable surprise, the street exploded in flames just in front of her, in between her and her quarry. The blast wave not only halted R.D's charge, but reversed it, hurling her back across the street to smash against the brick facade of the nearest building. /* Masamichi Amano "Charge! His Name is Giant Robo" _Giant Robo Vol. 1_ */ R.D pulled herself together quickly, rising to hands and knees and shaking her head. Where the explosion had occurred, a fire now burned in a crater in the street, the flames obscuring her target from her. A moment later, something stirred in the flames, loomed up as a silhouette within them, and then stepped, trailing smoke, out into the open. With a slow and stately tread, the scarlet-trimmed grey machine stalked forward several more steps, then stopped, settling into a stance that was all business, from the squared-off toes of its feet to the gleaming muzzle of the cannon protruding over its right shoulder. It folded powerful arms across a barrel chest and fixed her with a dour scowl from a face below a striped pharaoh's headdress. "grr," said Tiny Robo. R.D felt faintly ridiculous being menaced by a robot that was no more than eight inches tall, but there it was. -Something- just blew a big, flaming hole in the street, after all, and odds looked good that it was the cannon on the little robot's shoulder. Collecting herself, R.D got to her feet and regarded the little machine with scorn. "What do you think you're doing?" she demanded, and took a step forward. Tiny Robo's Atomic Buster Cannon folded back into its standby position on his back. As it did so, red access panels all over his upper body - chest, abdomen, inboard and outboard on both shoulders - rolled open and launchers snapped into battery from behind them, making his little silhouette bristle with tiny warheads. "-grr-," he said, a little more emphatically. "Isn't that -cute-," R.D snarled in a tone that made it clear she didn't find it cute at all. She took another step - and then vanished, screaming with consternation, behind a curtain of tennis-ball-sized explosions as Tiny Robo's launchers salvoed. On the other side of the fire started by Tiny Robo's initial attack, another miniature robot was assessing the situation. The first explosion had blown Dorothy off her feet too, and sent her skidding to the other side of the street, where she lay crumpled in the gutter alongside the curb. Rising to her feet and readying herself to face R.D one last time had used up all of the meager residue of energy left in her systems. With her core severed, she was, just as R.D had predicted and intended, dying. This isn't fair, she thought as the rain sheeted down harder. She rolled halfway onto her back before fetching up against the curb. This isn't a good death. I thought the end of my life would mean something. And I never thought I would die -here-. A last sputtering curl of smoke rose from the wound in her chest, and then Dorothy's body settled slightly in its crumpled posture. Her eyes slipped shut, and then she became completely and utterly still, like a discarded mannequin in the gutter. Lesser Mazinger watched all of this, his sensors telling him in great detail what was going on inside his larger cousin's body. He was not, it must be said, a terribly sophisticated mechanism. His brain was the size of a pinhead, quite literally. He was, after all, a toy. His artificial intelligence system was simple and basic, designed for simple, basic tasks. His purpose was to amuse and, if the circumstances required it, protect, but his preprogrammed concept of protection was not particularly flexible. A roboticist familiar with his specifications would therefore have been more than a bit startled by what Lesser Mazinger did next. Had R.D not been quite so consumed by her frenzied fury, she might have been impressed that Tiny Robo was giving her so much trouble. She outmassed the little machine by a factor of more than ten and towered over his miniature stature - but she simply could not get past him. Driven by the rocket thrusters on his back and miniature steam rams of astonishing power, the diminutive robot hit like a speeding truck, and his aerial agility was such that R.D's counterattacks were wasted. Whenever he wasn't belting her with his little steam-hammer fists, Tiny Robo kept peppering her with explosives for as long as his ammunition held out. Tiny Robo wasn't much smarter than his partner; his brain was considerably bigger, but it was still only about the size of a pencil eraser. The status messages he was receiving from Lesser Mazinger's automated comm system made no sense. Between that and the anomalous configuration of the attacker, he was a bit confused, which was not a situation he appreciated. He just wanted to get this aggressor neutralized as quickly as possible. He pivoted his thruster pack, vectoring in forward flight to keep his main launchers trained on his target, but the primaries ran dry just as he did so. R.D, seeing an opening, darted forward and seized him around the waist. "GOT you - " she snarled, and then things began to happen very fast. With a surprisingly loud pneumatic snarl, Tiny Robo brought his fists together on opposite sides of R.D's wrist. The impact smashed the mechanical joint into complete inoperability, nearly severing the hand. R.D screamed and recoiled, releasing Tiny Robo. As the red-clad attacker's ruined hand let him go, Tiny Robo's main weapon finished recharging. The Atomic Buster Cannon popped up, telescoping to its full length even as it swung down onto its unfolding stabilizer arm. R.D had a momentary impression of brightly glowing rifling as she looked straight down the barrel of the charging weapon. The explosion blew Tiny Robo clean over the now-cooling crater of his initial strike. Out of control, his thruster pack jogging this way and that as his inertial guidance system tried to stabilize his flight, he whanged into a lamppost, blacking out the light. From there he rebounded to the street, tumbled sparkingly across the asphalt, and rolled to a kneeling position near a manhole. He held that pose for a moment - crouched on one knee, head bowed, one arm crossed over his chest, the other hand flat on the ground for added stability - as the Buster Cannon retracted. Then he rose and scanned the area for his opponent. There was no sign of her. Along the opposite vector from Tiny Robo's post-explosion flight path, there was a large, ragged, roughly circular hole blown completely through the ground floor of an apparently-abandoned brick warehouse. Tiny Robo zoomed his optics and saw nothing on the other side but a scattering of shattered bricks and a muddy, rippling canal. Tiny Robo broadened his search criteria, scanning the area with every sensor system he possessed, but there was no trace of R.D. As the little grey robot turned to see what had become of his partner, a large, dark shape dropped down from the roof of the building across the way and approached the crumpled form of Dorothy. Had Tiny Robo been capable of sighing with resignation, he would have as he powered up what combat systems he had left and moved in to continue his defense. Utena woke, more than faintly confused, to find her stateroom full of an aggrieved electronic bleating. At first she thought an alert of some sort was in place aboard the Valiant, but no. The sound was wrong for that, and the room's alert lamps weren't flashing. This alarm was higher-pitched, insistent and shrill, and the only light was coming from her bedside stand. With a sort of bleary confusion she realized it was her watch. She'd never seen it do that before, but the realization galvanized her to full wakefulness. She snatched it up and strapped it on, thumbing the stud that opened it into communicator mode. She knew Tiny Robo had stayed dirtside, and wondered if this alert meant that the band was in some kind of trouble. It took her a moment to figure out what she was looking at. Tiny Robo's status displays were in a state of disarray she'd never seen before - something had clearly put the little robot badly out of sorts - and it took Utena a moment to look through the jumble of text overlays and whatnot to see the actual image. When the picture did resolve in her mind, she stiffened, then bounded out of bed and almost straight into her shoes with a curse she didn't bother to muffle. "Tenjou to bridge!" she snapped as she grabbed her uniform jacket from the back of her desk chair and shrugged it on over her pajamas. "Klaang, crossbeam me to the coordinates on my comm feed right the hell NOW!" Anthy, sitting up in bed and blinking a bit owlishly into the darkened room, didn't even have time to ask Utena what was going on before the captain, still slinging her sword belt over her shoulder, was washed away in a blaze of blue-white light. Based on the miniscule image available from Tiny Robo's optic feed, Utena wasn't quite sure what to expect. Whatever unconscious expectations she might have had, though, certainly didn't match up to what she found herself faced with. The devastated street and the awful sight of her crumpled, shattered shipmate were bad enough, and jarring enough, but they were eclipsed slightly by the person she found standing near Dorothy's body. He was tall and broad-shouldered, very athletic of build, and he was dressed entirely in matte-black armor. The armored suit was sleek, with powerful lines that accented rather than hid the outline of its wearer's body. It had a compartmented silver belt at waist level and dull silver greaves and vambraces that blended smoothly into the sleek blackness of the rest of the plating. A black cloak flowed from the pauldrons down to the street, and the wearer's face was half-exposed by the odd cut of the helmet, which had a chin bar but left the man's mouth exposed. A sharp point jutted up on either side of the head and narrow white slots were the only eyes. On the broad breastplate was the gleaming silver outline of a bat. This unlikely figure was in a sort of standoff with Tiny Robo, who stood between him and Dorothy's inert body, tense for battle. The man in black didn't seem to be offering to fight, though; he was just standing there, regarding Tiny Robo with something like grim bemusement. When Utena beamed in, she took his attention mostly away from the adamant little robot. She knew she must be cutting quite a ridiculous figure herself at the moment - a tall, slim, pink-haired girl in blue flannel pajamas, saddle shoes, and an unfastened blue-shouldered IP Space Force duty uniform jacket, with a sword slung haphazardly over one shoulder and what she knew without feeling it must be an award-winning case of bed head. The cold, drizzling rain would take care of that part in a hurry, anyway, and Utena was in no mood to care about any of it as she demanded of the black-clad stranger, "Who are you? What the hell's going on here?" The black-armored man looked faintly taken aback. "You don't know who I am?" he asked in a low, slightly raspy voice tinged with restrained incredulity. "No, and you've got three seconds to tell me," Utena replied flatly. "I'm -Batman-," the man in black replied. Utena arched a skeptical eyebrow. "... Batman. Uh-huh. What happened here?" "Good question." Utena sighed testily. "I don't have time for this," she said, and then ignored Batman completely, thumbing open her comm watch. "Tenjou to Valiant. Klaang, get B'Elanna down here NOW, and round up everybody else, fast as you can. Something major's going on down here. Somebody took out Dorothy." "How bad?" Klaang's voice replied. "Bad. Looks -real- bad," Utena replied grimly. "I need B'Elanna RIGHT NOW." "At once, joH'wI'," Klaang replied, and the channel went dead as he went to work. Utena knelt down next to Dorothy, reached for her shoulder, and then thought better of it. Best to leave her be until someone with a clue about these matters arrived. She sat back on her haunches and looked up at the video-static sky, feeling the rain streak her face and wondering if what lay before her was a patient or a corpse. God, Corwin, she thought. If she doesn't make it, you'll hate yourself forever... A moment later, with another wash of blue-white transporter bleed, two more people arrived on the scene. One was Anthy Tenjou, looking much more prepared to face the world than her husband, and wearing a look of very faint reproach for the first two seconds following her arrival. The other was a slightly bleary-eyed B'Elanna Torres, who was about half into her uniform and carried an emergency toolkit. She looked blinkingly around, gave Batman a startled but cursory glance, and then saw her "patient". She knelt by Dorothy's side, took hold of her shoulder, and very gently turned her on her back. As she did, the jagged, awful rent in Dorothy's chest - twisted edges of metal jutting through torn synthetic flesh - came into view, causing all three women to gasp sharply and draw back. "Holy... " B'Elanna murmured as she ran a scanner over Dorothy. "She's still alive," she reported with audible relief after a moment. "Her Spengler signature is weak, but her positronic matrix is intact." She bent closer and looked, then looked around and spotted the yellow-painted, radiation-trefoiled object lying in the gutter a few yards away. "qeylIS Iw," she muttered. "Her power core's been torn completely out." "Then... what's powering her matrix?" asked Utena. "Good question. I don't know her specifications, but she must have some kind of backup system - " The half-Klingon engineer trailed off as she looked more closely at Dorothy's wound. Then she made a sharp, inarticulate exclamation, rummaged in her toolkit, yanked out a flashlight, and shone it into the opening. All three repeated their gasps as they saw what was inside. Lesser Mazinger had climbed into the cavity left by the violent removal of Dorothy's power core, tangling himself in the mass of secondary wiring leading to her now-useless reactor regulation system. His plastron stood open, and from within, a pair of heavy-gauge wires extended outward. Bright welds joined them to two of the lighter broken cables inside Dorothy's chest cavity - the ones which led to her emergency positronic support circuitry. B'Elanna explained all this to Utena and Anthy (and, though she didn't really take notice of him, Batman), playing her light over the junctions as she spoke. "This is a hell of a jury-rig, but it's a clever one," she concluded. "But who -did- it?" Utena wondered. "I think... -he- did," B'Elanna said slowly, in a voice touched with wonder. "It's keeping her alive, but there's no way I can repair this kind of damage. The power core's just the start of her problems. She's going to need a body replacement, and her construction is way beyond my skill level. Hell, it'd be beyond most roboticists' skill levels, and I'm a -starship engineer-." Police cars started arriving on the scene. The Valiant crewmembers ignored them as they started running around, setting up a perimeter, chattering on their radios, and generally doing the things cops do when they come across the site of a pitched battle. Utena frowned, rubbing at her chin in thought. "Can we safely beam her to the Valiant?" B'Elanna nodded. "The connection's as solid as it's going to get. It should be OK. Let me just check a few things to make sure." Anthy stepped up beside Utena. "What are you thinking?" she asked. "I'm not sure," Utena replied, her tone of voice still pensive. "Without Corwin here... " She thought a moment longer, then seemed to make a decision and straightened up slightly. "I'm going back up and call Skuld. B'Elanna, call me when you're ready to transport." "Aye aye, Cap'n," B'Elanna replied around the little flashlight she had clenched in her teeth. Utena turned and saw Batman standing off to the side, talking to a couple of plainclothes cops at the edge of the cordon. Pointing at him, she said sharply, "You. Come with me." Everyone else was back aboard the Valiant by the time Utena and Batman arrived. Anthy remained below with B'Elanna as she readied their fallen shipmate for transfer. Utena didn't speak to Batman as she marched from the transporter bay to the bridge, and he didn't speak to her; just followed her, his cloak folded around him, a brooding, silent presence. Even Klaang was slightly startled by him as he swept onto the bridge in the striding captain's wake. "Klaang, see if you can get me Skuld on the hyperwave," she said. "We've got a situation." "At once, joH'wI'." Klaang was as good as his word. Skuld's face, fuzzy and slightly fisheyed by the pickup on her vidphone, was on the main viewer by the time Utena sat down. In as few words as possible, Utena explained the situation. Skuld frowned thoughtfully. "Damn," she muttered. "With the lockdown in Asgard, I can't use magic," she said. "That'll make this harder... " The goddess paused in thought for a moment, then nodded decisively. "OK. Go to Ishiyama. Li Kohran will meet you there. I'll get there just as fast as I can. I can't Gate out, but there are still ways." Utena nodded. "We'll be on our way just as soon as we get Dorothy aboard. See you there." Skuld didn't waste time with closing pleasantries. She just signed off and went to do what she had to do. Utena sat back with a slight release of tension, closed her eyes for a second, then turned to the silent, black-clad figure standing next to her conn. "OK," she said. "What are you, some kind of a cop?" A faint trace of a smile touched Batman's lips. "Something like that," he replied. "I protect New Gotham." "Well, you don't do much for tourists," Utena said. "Do you know anything about what happened?" Batman suppressed a grin. He was the fourth man to wear the cape, and had a better sense of humor than his predecessors. He was inwardly tickled by Utena's complete failure to find him intimidating, which made maintaining the proper inscrutable air harder work for him. The subject matter they were discussing was serious enough to offset that, though, and it was a grave Batman who replied, "Not much. I arrived after it was all over. From what evidence there was at the scene, I can only guess." "So guess," Utena said. "I think the person who attacked your friend is an old... acquaintance... of mine. In fact, the first time I saw your friend, I thought she -was- an old acquaintance of mine." Utena turned in her chair to regard him steadily. "Look," she said. "I'm having a difficult evening here. Now I realize that it might cramp your inscrutable cyber-ninja style a little bit, but this is my ship, and as captain, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to start speaking Standard. OK?" For a second, Batman was silent - not because he was offended, as Utena suspected (but didn't care about), but because he was working hard not to laugh. Then he nodded and said, "Your friend who was injured looks exactly like a criminal and terrorist who goes by the underworld name 'R.D'. I think R.D tried to destroy her." Utena's eyebrows went up. "Another Dorothy?" she murmured thoughtfully. "R.D first appeared in New Gotham shortly after the death of Timothy Wayneright and the disappearance of his daughter Dorothy," Batman said. "Initially, I thought she -was- Dorothy Wayneright, until -your- Dorothy started appearing with the Art of Noise." Utena looked mildly surprised. "You're into rock music?" she asked in a tone of faint disbelief. "I keep track of a lot of things," Batman replied noncommittally. "Mm-hmm," said Utena. Abandoning the line of questioning, she lapsed back into thought. "Another Dorothy... " A moment later, the intercom beeped and B'Elanna's voice said, "OK, we're aboard. Let's do whatever we're going to do and be quick about it. I don't know how much longer Lesser Mazinger's power core can stand up - this modification must be -way- outside of spec." Utena acknowledged the call, closed the channel, and turned to Batman. "I'll continue my investigation here," he said, "and let you know what I find." Utena nodded. "From the looks of the scene, you won't find much left of R.D." "I've thought that before," Batman replied, "and had cause to regret it." Then he turned and swept out of the room again. Weird guy, Utena thought as she went forward to take the conn. Awfully intense. And that -getup-... She glanced down at herself - rumpled pajamas, uniform jacket, and all - and chuckled ruefully as she began punching up a straight-shot course to Ishiyama. Valiant got to Ishiyama after a hell-bent dash of about ten hours. Fortunately, Kane's World was only barely not on the Outer Rim itself. By the time the ship arrived, everything was arranged. The second the Valiant made contact with Ishiyama Approach Control, Sumire Kanzaki came on the line to give Utena the transporter coordinates to Li Kohran's workshop underneath the Imperial Theater in Ohji. Kohran's workshop reminded Utena of Corwin's, which would have made her stop and look around with mild pleasure had the circumstances not been quite so dire. Instead, she paid her surroundings little attention, instead watching the purple-haired Salusian technologist for her reaction to Dorothy's injuries. She was, like everyone else, appalled. "She has major structural damage beyond the destruction of her power core," Kohran mused as she went over the unconscious robot with a hand scanner. "Most of her joints have been seriously overstressed and there's burnout creepage throughout her main energy systems. If I tried to reconstruct this body to its original specifications I'd probably lose her in the process." "Can you build a new one in time?" asked Utena. "B'Elanna doesn't think Lesser Mazinger's systems will stand up to this kind of abuse much longer, but she can't tell for sure. It's outside her field." Kohran shook her head. "Probably not," she replied glumly; but then, before anyone present could react, she brightened and said, "But I won't have to." She turned around and called into the back of the shop, "J!" A moment later, a very large man came in through a side door. He was tall and hulking, and had to duck a bit to get through the door. He had a weatherbeaten but oddly friendly face with big grey side-whiskers and a ponytail, and was dressed in a black trenchcoat and fedora hat with dark slacks and a white silk ascot. When he spoke, his voice was deep and a bit gravelly, but amiable. "Yes, Kohran?" he inquired. "Would you get the Mark II out of storage and prep the heavy shop for use, please?" Kohran asked him. "I'll be starting work within the hour." "Right away, angel," J replied, then turned and left the room again. "That's a big assistant you have there," Utena observed, impressed. Kohran grinned. "He's a prototype," she said. "The Mark II is much more compact." Utena blinked. "You built that guy?" The Salusian mechanic nodded. "Mm-hmm. I was trying to see how small I could make a self-contained combat unit with the basic battle capabilities of a Kohbu. On my first attempt, that was as small as I could make it. Still, he's handy around the shop, and I'm happy with the way his personality matrix came out. I intended the system to be used as a cyborg body replacement, like the later marks of the old Mjolnir series back home, but in order to test J, I fitted him with a positronic brain, and he turned out so nice that I couldn't bear to shut him down when the tests were finished." Kohran looked at Dorothy again, consulted her scanner, and sighed. "What a mess." Then she turned back to Utena. "This is going to take a while just to get started. You might as well go upstairs. Iris and Yuri should have the place ready for you by now." Kaitlyn Hutchins was already there. In the small but well-appointed bedroom where her father had lived in his days as Peter Moreau, she lay on the bed with her hands behind her head, looked up at the ceiling, and tried to come to terms with the way that the summer had gone so entirely wrong. It was like Utena had said when writing her first letter to Corwin, parts of which she'd shared with her best friend before sending it off. The summer had just been one damned thing after another, and every time they thought they were getting a breather, something else cropped up. The whole thing was becoming quite wearing. There was a knock at the door. Kate considered ignoring it, then sighed, sat up, and said, "C-come in." The door opened, and in came a smartly dressed woman with perfectly bobbed auburn hair and slightly sardonic dark eyes. Sumire Kanzaki, the richest woman in the Empire of Morita (probably on Ishiyama), was a former member of the Imperial Theater Company, part of the legendary Flower Division of the Imperial Floral Assault Group. She was an old friend of Kate's father's, one of his cadre of occasional lovers (a thing made much more of in the press than in the family, as it happened). She was also a good friend of Kate's, having launched her movie career. They shared the passion of the performing arts, which gave them common ground, and Kate enjoyed Sumire's cheerfully acerbic attitude toward life. "Kaitlyn, dear, you look entirely too glum for a day like this," said Sumire breezily as she opened the window and leaned out to take the air of the theater's sunny courtyard. "Don't worry about Dorothy. There are no better hands for her to be in right now than Kohran's - and you may be even more relieved to know that Skuld and Donald Griffin have turned up to help her." "That is g-g-good news," Kate admitted, but she flomped back on the bed and sighed anyway. Sumire gave a little sigh of her own, seated herself elegantly on the edge of the bed, and started scratching Sergei between the ears. "What's the matter, then?" she asked. "Why the long face?" "G-g-got an hour?" Kate replied sardonically. "For you, I have as long as you need." Kate gave her a sidelong glance, then shrugged and told her about it. All of it. Every setback, every downer, every factor that had combined to make this summer feel less like a vacation and more like a bumper-car ride ricocheting from disaster to disaster, starting with the unpleasantness at Tau Ceti and leading right up to Dorothy's near-death. "B-between that and my own unc-c-certainty about my f-future," Kate concluded, "it's a w-w-wonder I'm n-not hiding under the b-bed." Sumire arched an eyebrow. "Uncertain about your future? Kaitlyn, whatever for? This mess will all blow over," she said with a dismissive gesture. "Such things always do. Your father will come out of the woods, your brother will win his freedom back, your lover will return to you. Dorothy will be better than new." "I kn-know... I'm t-talking about school." "I see. Actually, no, I don't." Kaitlyn explained, as she often had to, that she had gone to the Nekomi Institute of Technology for college instead of a school with a music program, such as neighboring Hotohori University, because she wanted to acquire a background in electrical engineering. The reason for that was because she'd had the idea, years ago as a little girl, for a cybernetic-interface music system, a sort of neurally-controlled MIDI. The concept, as she'd thought of it, was beautifully elegant and would work, she was convinced, much better than any existing attempt at such a device. She'd wanted to acquire the technical abilities needed to develop and construct such a system, to see if her idea was really as good as she thought... but over the years, more traditional ways of making music had become more and more important to her, and now living away from them, in the artistically arid, tech-oriented environment of NIT, was driving her mad. "I'm seriously c-c-considering not g-going back to NIT next m-m-month," she said. "I've t-talked to the m-music department head at H-H-Hotohori. Th-they'll have an opening for a s-s-student l-lead for their orch, orchestra in J-January. It all w-works out p-pretty n-n-neatly, but... " "But you're having doubts about it?" Sumire asked after a several-second pause. Kate sighed. "Yeah," she admitted. "I h-haven't t-touched an orchestra in t-two years. A-and this is an est, established group, too, n-not one I c-can build to my t-taste like I d-did at DSM. I'm n-not sure I'll b-be able to just... j-jump back in." Sumire gave a sly chuckle and put a hand on Kate's arm. "Well, if -that's- all you're worried about," she said expansively, "then all you need is practice." Kate smiled wryly. "You kn-know anyone who's g-got a spare s-s-symphony orchestra for me to p-practice with? It's n-not like b-borrowing a t-t-trombone." "As a matter of fact I do," Sumire replied positively. "I know where there's one just -lying around-, waiting for someone to come do something with it." She smiled at Kate's puzzled look and said, "But we can talk about that later. What about your band?" Kate gave a dry chuckle. "At this s-stage, w-WHAT band?" "Oh, come now," said Sumire, rising to pace the floor like the grand actress she couldn't help being. "You simply need to a guitarist of sufficient talent. You've done it before, why not again?" "It's s-starting to r-resemble a bad joke," Kaitlyn pointed out. "L-like the drummers for Spinal T-Tap." "Perhaps, but bear with me," said Sumire. "If you had such a guitarist available, why then you could carry on, couldn't you? Get this last show done with and wrap up your tour in style? Think of it as a tribute to all those who couldn't be with you all the way to the end. The show must go on, you know." Kate sat up, folded her legs, scrubbed Serge's chest with both hands (the massive tiger groaning with delight and rolling onto his back, huge paws in the air, to accept the treatment), and nodded. "Yeah," she said. "W-we could m-manage one more sh-show. And it w-WOULD feel g-g-good to g-get it done rather than g-give up." "Exactly so," said Sumire with a firm nod. She held out an imperious hand and led Kate down from her bed. Serge tumbled after, blinking as he got used to the idea of being upright and conscious, and followed the two women down the hall and into the backstage area of the Imperial Theater proper. "As such," said Sumire as she led Kate onto the stage (where the Art of Noise's gear was already set up), "let me introduce you to your new tertiary emergency backup lead guitarist... " They rounded the big Marshall main guitar stacks, and there Kate saw a familiar figure with a guitar slung over her shoulder, fiddling with the knobs on the stack. "... Princess Koriand'r of Tamaran," said Sumire with a sweeping gesture. "We have met," said Kori in mild puzzlement - Sumire had, after all, seen her and Kaitlyn perform together only a month ago. "I know you have, dear," said Sumire easily. "I was being dramatic. I'm an actress," she added with a wry little grin. "Oh, I see," said Koriand'r, who didn't. Then she turned to Kaitlyn, an earnest look on her orange-skinned face. "I apologize for my presumption," she said, "but when Professor Griffin said you needed a guitarist, I thought I might be able to be of some help." Gesturing to the guitar she wore, Kori smiled brightly and added, "I am fully prepared this time. I have brought my axe and my groove thing." Kaitlyn smiled, her spirits lifted by the Tamaranian girl's earnest goodwill. "I c-c-can s-s-s-see that," she said. Koriand'r's guitar was an emerald-green Les Paul. Kaitlyn noted with private amusement that this put the two of them on opposite sides of one of music's great religious divides - Kate was a Stratocaster girl herself - but she thought they could probably learn to work together anyway. "Say, listen, Princess," said Devlin Carter from behind Dorothy's drum kit, where he was tightening up a new head on the snare. "We all really appreciate your willingness to jump in and help out, but... how many of our songs do you know?" "All of them," replied Kori brightly. Moose blinked. "Really?" he asked. After six years as a band and three summer tours, the Art of Noise's repetoire was pretty extensive. "Yes," replied Kori with a positive nod. "How?" Devlin asked. "I memorized them on my way here," replied the Tamaranian with the serene smile of a child reporting that she has done all her homework. Moose blinked again. "... ALL of them?" "Yes, including the three versions of 'Wonderland'," said Kori. Then, brightening further, she added, "Oh, and I have thought of a fourth variation which I would like to try out." Kate went to her keyboards, checked the connections and status indicators, then turned to Kori. "L-l-let's h-hear it," she said with a grin, and just like that, the five became a band and rehearsal began. Sitting in one of the seats in the auditorium's front row, Shiori Takatsuki elbowed Juri Arisugawa gently and grinned at her. She didn't mind that Amanda had taken her slot as emergency backup rhythm guitarist, or that she lacked the skills to step in where Dorothy had been. She was just happy that they were still playing. Juri looked a little more relaxed than she had been in a long time, too, seeing Kate put her band back together again. Now, if Kohran only succeeded in putting Dorothy back together again, they could all concentrate on putting their -lives- back together again... because they were running out of summer, and there was way too much still up in the air. Ah, well. Time enough yet to worry about that later. Shiori sat back and listened as Koriand'r demonstrated her variation on "Wonderland" and they all worked out how to rearrange the rest of the band around it. The next morning, realizing that she couldn't just pace around the Imperial Theater waiting for a status update from Kohran's workshop, Utena Tenjou sat in an armchair in the theater library with a datapad. She'd been there for only a few minutes, half-frowning thoughtfully, when Wakaba Shinohara came in, plopped down in the chair opposite her, and said, "Reading anything good?" Utena blinked and looked over the pad at her old friend with a wry smile. "Personnel files for the Challenger command staff," she said. "Figure I ought to be at least vaguely familiar with them before I take command of the ship." Wakaba chuckled. "Yeah, I guess you should at least know their names before you start giving orders." She got up, took three steps, and settled herself crossways in an only-slightly-bemused Utena's lap. "So let's see what we've got. Whoa, hey! Cute guy alert. Who's he?" "The navigator, apparently," Utena replied. "He's a Kirk. That could get interesting." INTERNATIONAL POLICE SPACE FORCE INTERNAL COMMUNICATION FROM: LT Luornu Durgo Fleet Command TO: CPT Utena Tenjou IPSFR cmdg. IPS Valiant NX-06041 DATE: Sunday, August 16, 2409 SUBJECT: Staff introduction Utena, Here are brief file summaries on the bridge crew you'll be working with on Challenger. Links to the longer files at central records are with each one, and if you have any other questions, feel free to call or Lens me. - Lu BEGIN FILE ATTACH >> IPS CHALLENGER COMMAND STAFF OVERVIEW EXECUTIVE OFFICER NAME: SOONG, R. Lore GRADE: Commander (O-5) HOMEWORLD: Omicron Theta Colony RACE: Biomimetic mechano-humanoid (M type) First of two androids constructed by the late Dr. Noonian Soong. Younger brother Data is a lieutenant commander in UFP Starfleet, currently posted to USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-A) under Picard. Zany sense of humor and fascination with Klingon culture, contrasting with Data's deliberate, pedantic manner, lead people to believe that Lore has emotions and Data does not. The truth is that Data's just boring. CHIEF ENGINEER NAME: DAVION, Nadia GRADE: Captain (O-6) HOMEWORLD: Le Mond (Verne's World) RACE: Human (Detian) Golden Age WDF recruit, former Thunder Force member. Engineering disciple of the Chief and ReRob Mandeville; one of the developers of the Sovereign and Defiant starship classes, among many others. Calm, steady, reliable, but by no means stolid. Was once a circus performer and still quite the acrobat and dancer. Her husband, Lt. Cmdr. Hanson Davion, is the head of the exotechnology research division of the ship's science department, which means he's the guy you ask "What the hell is it?" when the landing party brings back an Alien Widget. SCIENCE OFFICER NAME: tai-KALAAN, Klaang GRADE: Sub-Commander (O-4) HOMEWORLD: Qo'noS RACE: Klingon You know Klaang, of course. The Warrior of Science is a member of one of the Klingon Empire's most notable families. He's also Lore's mentor in matters Klingon and one of the biggest "Battlecruiser Vengeance" fans around. HELMSMAN NAME: ABRIEL Nei Dobrusk Paryunu, Lafiel GRADE: Lieutenant Commander (O-4) HOMEWORLD: None RACE: Abh Lafiel is a member of a spacefaring race of humanoids called the Abh who control a sizeable empire on the up-spin edge of the Outer Rim Territories. The Abh are odd in that they consider space their territory, not the planets within it. They're born and live most of their lives in space habitats. Lafiel was once their Empress, but retired a few years ago to join the IPSF in search of adventure. She's an old friend of the Chief's - many years ago, during the WDF's Golden Age, she served under him as part of a military exchange with the Abh Star Forces during the military service period required of her as a princess of the realm. She's the best starship driver I've ever seen, and I've seen a few. Don't be intimidated - ha! what am I saying? - that she's a former empress. She's a fun shipmate and not at all stuffy. NAVIGATOR NAME: KIRK, Jinto Lin GRADE: Junior Lieutenant (O-2) HOMEWORLD: Salusia RACE: Human/Saluian hybrid (Detian) Jinto's father is the legendary Admiral James T. Kirk of the WDF. His mother is the equally legendary Admiral Kanaia Kirk (nee Henatiro) of the Royal Salusian Navy. Jinto himself is a nice, earnest, straightforward kid, and a hell of a navigator. He's got kind of a thing for Lafiel, but he's intimidated by the fact that she's a lot older and better-traveled than she looks. (She has grown grandchildren, after all.) She knows about it but hasn't pressed so far because she thinks it's rather charming, really. WEAPONS AND TACTICAL OFFICER/CHIEF OF SECURITY NAME: T'Vek GRADE: Lieutenant (O-3) HOMEWORLD: Vulcan RACE: Vulcan You know T'Vek too. She's from Palon'shar, the city near Vulcan's North Pole, where they have a lot of snow and ice and Surak's teachings never caught on. She's also a journeyman of the Asagiri Katsujinkenryuu, as you know. T'Vek is another crew member who's a lot of fun to have around, but she takes her job very seriously indeed. She's never lost a fight and doesn't intend to start. COMMUNICATIONS OFFICER NAME: SATO, Hoshi GRADE: Lieutenant (O-3) HOMEWORLD: Tomodachi RACE: Human Hoshi comes from a long line of space explorers - her great-great-great-aunt, for whom she's named, was the comm officer on the first warp-driven exploration ship, the original WDF Enterprise. She'll strike you as a little timid at first, but when things get serious you'll never see her back down. She has a repetoire of languages on par with the Chief's and picks up new languages even faster than he does, and she knows communications technology inside out and backward. SHIP'S SURGEON NAME: Selar GRADE: Commander (O-5) HOMEWORLD: Vulcan RACE: Vulcan You have some experience of dealing with Selar, too. She's a Surakite Vulcan, unlike T'Vek, and it shows in her pretty much total lack of bedside manner. Fortunately, she's a hugely competent surgeon, which makes up for a lot. SHIP'S COUNSELOR NAME: Vision GRADE: Lieutenant (O-3) HOMEWORLD: Kane's World RACE: CLULESS machine intelligence Despite her title, Vision's actually a lot more than just a friendly face to talk to. In a real sense, she runs everything aboard this ship. Even with Nadia's top-of-the-line automations and the cast of hundreds that make Challenger go, the ship would be 65% less efficient in a fight without Vision making everything mesh smoothly behind the scenes. SHIP'S MASCOT NAME: Wolfgang GRADE: Ensign (O-1) HOMEWORLD: Avalon RACE: Dog Wolfgang misses the Chief and is looking forward to the day when you come to take his place until his return. OPERATIONS MANAGER NAME: DURGO, Luornu GRADE: Lieutenant (O-3) HOMEWORLD: Cargg RACE: Carggite And this is me, of course. You know me - incalculably talented, breathtakingly beautiful, astonishingly efficient... absolutely indispensable. This ship wouldn't last two minutes without me, me, me. One of me has to stay at Headquarters to make sure things go smoothly for Acting Chief Rogers, but the other two will be at your disposal. >>END ATTACHMENT END OF TRANSMISSION Utena sat and reviewed the files, jumping to the longer, more comprehensive service records and reading them carefully. She paid little attention to the fact that Wakaba was snuggled up in her lap, head on her shoulder, mostly asleep by now. It didn't bother her - in fact, it was rather nice. They hadn't done anything like this in quite a while. Utena had been starting to wonder idly if they'd outgrown it. She noticed a movement out of the corner of her eye. Looking up from the datapad, she saw one of the theater staffers, a young girl with bobbed brown hair, looking in at the door. Seeing Utena look up, the girl blushed and disappeared. Utena considered that for a moment, then realized what the girl's problem was and chuckled. It wasn't anything like it looked, of course. Wakaba was as straight as an arrow, and when you got right down to it, so was Utena... most of the time. Wakaba's old routine of pretending to be Utena's girlfriend was just part of their friendship, part of what made Wakaba such an endearing oddball. But, of course, the staff of the Imperial Theater didn't know them, and didn't know that. Utena wondered idly if the girl was going to go find Anthy and, with embarrassment and a sense of social duty warring in her heart, haltingly tell her that Captain Tenjou appeared to be fooling around on her. If so, Anthy would get a good laugh out of that, but only after putting the girl's fears to rest and shooing her away. Anthy would never laugh at a mistake like that in front of the person who made it. That would be cruel. Utena chuckled again, patted Wakaba on the head, and went back to reading. A few moments later she noted movement at the door again. Looking up, she saw the tall, lanky form of Kyouichi Saionji entering the room this time. "Tenjou," he said in a preoccupied tone, "have you seen - " Then he finally noticed her situation, drew up, and raised an eyebrow. "Oh," he said. "Pardon me, Captain. I didn't realize you were exercising the rights of command," he added with a very slight sardonic smile. Utena skipped it. "Who or what were you looking for?" she asked. "Juniper," Saionji replied. "I thought we might do a bit of sparring before dinner." "I haven't seen her since lunch," Utena replied. "I've been mostly right here, trying not to think more than I have to." Saionji nodded. "I understand that," he said. "Well, I'll leave you to it, then. She must be around here somewhere." They passed two days like that - hanging around the Imperial Theater, trying to stay out from underfoot. The band rehearsed, working as best they could to finish jelling their sound in the brief time they had to get used to each other. The others listened, played games, read, and otherwise tried to occupy themselves. All the while, they kept one ear cocked for news from downstairs. WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 19, 2409 R. Dorothy Wayneright was slightly bemused at regaining consciousness. She'd never really considered the concept of an afterlife, being still relatively new to the notion of being a life form in the first place, so her expectations when the last of her power failed and everything went black were essentially of nothing. She momentarily considered the possibility that she might have gone to Valhalla. She was Corwin's daughter, in a sense, and he was a Valkyrie. She'd died in honorable battle. What could be more likely? She could hardly profess a lack of belief in his divinity. She'd been to Asgard, had seen the golden roof of Valhalla from the balcony of her bedroom there. More curious than anything else, Dorothy opened her eyes. What she saw when she did so was slightly contradictory. On the one hand, she saw Skuld Ravenhair, Corwin's mother. That would tend to back up her Valhalla theory, since Skuld was the leader of the Valkyrior. On the other hand, the room she was in was a machine shop, which seemed distinctly unlikely as a place in which to be welcomed to one's eternal reward. Skuld wasn't alone, either, and the people with her - Li Kohran and Professor Griffin from Beiwiru High - weren't divine personages the last time Dorothy checked. As they all crowded around, smiling, Dorothy looked up at them and said the only thing she could think of: "... I take it I'm not dead, then." Skuld grinned. "You sure aren't," she replied. "How do you feel?" "Strange," Dorothy replied after a moment's thought. "Different. I'm not receiving diagnostic information." "You wouldn't know how to interpret it yet, so it's blocked," Kohran said, nodding. "We'll take you through all that this afternoon." Carefully, slowly, Dorothy sat up. The movement felt odd, almost alien, like she wasn't so much inhabiting her body as controlling it from a distance. She looked down at herself, but didn't see anything out of the ordinary - just a smocklike garment like a hospital gown over the same figure she'd always known. But... She turned her head to look at Kohran. "You had to replace my body," she said, and it wasn't a question. Kohran nodded. "The original was beyond repair. If I'd tried it, I'd have ended up repairing your body at the cost of what really makes you -you-." Dorothy considered that for a few moments, looking down at her hands. They looked like her hands, anyway... and they were attached to the body whose eyes she was looking at them through. Was that enough? Did that really make them hers? She felt so strange, so... so -disconnected-. Seeing the thought pass over her face, Kohran put a hand on her shoulder and said, "Don't worry. That feeling will pass as we get your new systems calibrated. It's like a new house. You've moved in, but you haven't really unpacked yet." Dorothy nodded, then turned to look at Griffin. "Why are you here?" she asked - not because she was displeased to see him, but out of a mild feeling of puzzlement. He was a teacher at the high school in the neighborhood she lived in back on Tomodachi. She vaguely knew he had something to do with the International Police, but he wasn't a field agent, so why -was- he here? Griffin smiled. "I do a nice line in temporal stasis," he replied. "Mostly I just gave Skuld a lift, though." This didn't really clear things up for Dorothy, but she let it pass. She was too preoccupied right now with the strange sensations bombarding her brain as it accustomed itself to its new home. Kohran took note of this and said, "Let's get started on those calibrations. You'll feel better." Dorothy nodded, then looked thoughtful for a second and said, "The others... ?" Skuld smiled. "I'll go let them know," she said. "You just work with Kohran." "Can you stand up?" Kohran asked as Skuld left the room. Dorothy did so, hesitantly, still feeling her way. "OK, good," said Kohran. "We'll start with optical calibration." She punched a key on the console next to her, causing a quintet of orange lights in a cross shape to glow on the far wall. "Just look at the lights one by one - they'll turn green as your visual subprocessor locks on." Upstairs, everyone in the library turned as one when the door opened and Skuld walked in, dirty coverall, smudged face, and all. Skuld wouldn't have tortured them with a poker face even if she'd been able to maintain one, though, and the cheery grin on her face sent a visible ripple of relief through the room before she even pulled off her gloves and spoke. "She's going to be just fine," was what she said, but before the sentence was even complete it was being drowned out by the cheers. 7:10 PM IMPERIAL THEATER "Don't you think we should let them know we're back?" asked Kozue Kaoru in a whisper as she, her brother Miki, and Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan made their way to their seats. "After they've worked so hard to be ready to play the show without us?" Miki replied with a calm smile. "They'd be disrupted. Take it upon themselves to rearrange everything so we could play. No," he said, shaking his head, "I want to watch a show from the audience tonight. I haven't in years." "And I never have," Azalynn pointed out. "It should be interesting. We can surprise them afterward." "Well, if you're sure," said Kozue dubiously as she found her seat. "I'm sure," Miki replied as he sat down beside her. "Have I been wrong yet this trip?" he added with a flash of a grin in the dimly lit auditorium. Kozue smiled and said nothing, settling back in her seat. She felt calmer, more relaxed, than she had in weeks, but there was still a lingering knot of tension at the back of her head. That wouldn't go away until the band began to play, and she heard with her own ears that taking Miki away for them for the last few (critical) (wonderful) days hadn't damaged them. She knew - they all did - what had happened to Dorothy, but they'd also been told upon arriving, as they dashed in from hilariously overtipping their cabdriver, that she was going to be OK. That was a weight removed, though that part, at least, would have happened had Miki been there or not, so Kozue couldn't blame herself for it. Kozue scanned the crowded theater, looking to see if Dorothy was at least there to listen to the show like they were, but she couldn't find her. That didn't necessarily mean she wasn't there, though. It was a fairly big theater and a full one, and the house lights were low. As she scanned past the orchestra pit in front of the stage, now occupied not by an orchestra but by the Art's sound equipment, Kozue noticed Juniper, who sat bent over the mixer board with her headphones on, intent. As Kozue's gaze passed her, though, the teenaged engineer glanced up, made eye contact with Kozue, took note of her flanking seatmates, and grinned. Kozue's return smile was a tad bit self-conscious - she felt, irrationally, as if she'd just been busted sneaking in someplace. She nudged Miki and pointed out their observer. Miki just smiled and gave Anne a little wave. Anne waved back and went on with the last fiddly bits of setup on the board. They'd had two days to get their sound checks right in this room, so there wasn't a lot of last-minute stuff to be done. She felt oddly proud of herself for noticing the Kaorus and Azalynn in the crowded theater - it showed that her zanshin was developing nicely, that she'd picked out that fleeting scrutiny from that part of the crowd. As she worked, the young samurai apprentice played a little game with herself, stretching that semi-extrasensory awareness and sort of "feeling" the crowd around her. She wasn't scanning around with her low-grade telepathy, which would have been both unnerving and uncouth. That was what made zanshin such a special sensation, the fact that it wasn't tied to her telepathic "gift" - it was something all its own, something that could only be developed through effort, concentration, and training. Now she pushed it outward, a mental exercise similar to listening harder for a faint sound, and brushed it over the crowd. Zanshin was really designed to warn a warrior of impending danger, but it served well for other things, too. It could impart the feeling of a crowd, or of a city to a sensitive enough adept, and it could pick out especially interesting people - usually those with a high level of zanshin themselves. Juniper felt such a person now, on the fringe of the crowd, as she adjusted a knob - a quiet, unassuming presence, but one with a sense of great, contained power. It seemed familiar, somehow - almost like what she felt when she sensed Kaitlyn in a darkened dojo. Turning sharply in her seat, Anne looked for its source. For a moment, she saw nothing but the rows of occupied seats, people shifting and talking quietly, anticipating the show. She was just about to give up when she saw him - a dark, shadowed figure, standing at the back of the theater near the doors. He was wearing a long coat and a fedora hat, and between the coat's collar and the hat she could see nothing of his face, but his bearing and the way he leaned against the wall were familiar. He noticed her noticing him and looked briefly up, his eyes glinting in the shadow of his hat brim, and then one of them winked. Juniper smiled and turned back to give the board one last lookover before reporting to Kaitlyn that all was ready. She wouldn't mention it, but she thought it was nice to know that Kate's father had made it to the show. Anne tapped the microphone next to the mixer a couple of times, and heard the answering clicks in her earphones as Kate signaled that the band was ready. Truth to tell, the engineer was a little dubious about the band's choice of openers, but she understood why Kate had chosen it, and respected it - even admired it. She just hoped it -worked-. This was, after all, an untested configuration for the band. Another click, then three in quick succession, and Anne had no more time for pondering. She moved on automatic, working the controls to drop the house lights, bring up the stage lights, and make sure the speakers didn't explode as the band wound up and, without any preamble at all, threw down the gauntlet from the very first note of the opening number. /* Boston "I Think I Like It" _Third Stage_ */ With its heavy drum part, its interlaced multiple lead guitar lines, and its complex vocal harmonies, the Art's version of the old rocker "I Think I Like It" had long been their benchmark tune. It was the song they used to see if they were really, really cooking. Playing it in concert was always a gamble, because if they -weren't-, then it would tend to fall apart and take the band's mood with it. They almost -never- played it to open a show, without any time to warm up and run in first, and when they did it was always when they were feeling supremely confident, at the peak of a good run. Using it here, then, was Kaitlyn's challenge to the universe. OK, it said, you've thrown a lot at me in the last couple of months. Think you can break me down? Think you can make me give up? Think you can kill my band's spirit? Think again. "Something Changing for me inside Took a long time Now there's Nothing for me to hide I'll say what on my mind Changes Making me see the light I finally see wrong from right Now I can see every sight Ooh! I think I like it I think I like what I'm feeling Even though it's such a surprise But you know Ooh! I think I really like it I think I like what I'm feeling Changes really open your eyes" Kaitlyn had on her black Stratocaster and her most determined look. She stood shoulder to shoulder with Amanda Dessler, who looked as fierce as she ever had on stage, laying down the layered sound like the Gamilon princess had never left the band. Next to them was Koriand'r of Tamaran, looking especially long and lean in a green leather miniskirt, with a matching vest over a flowing white blouse. She played her emerald-green Les Paul with effortless grace, swapping the lead with Kaitlyn through the first bridge and fitting into the vocal harmonies like she'd always been doing it. "Oh Look at the world we make What have we begun? People Living for what they take All for Number One Changes Making me see the light I finally see wrong from right Now that it's all said and done Ooh! I think I like it I think I like what I'm feeling Even though it's such a surprise But you know Ooh! I think I really like it I think I like what I'm feeling Changes really open your eyes" Kaitlyn, Kori, and Amanda threw themselves into the interwoven multi-solo, blazing into and out of each other's lines and trading off the pounding rhythm riff as they went. Behind them, Moose MacEchearn tied it all together with his P-bass, the consummate rhythm artist - so integral, so indispensable, most people never realized he was there. And behind them all, driving the beat forward and laying down precise, powerful, perfectly-fitted fills... ... was R. Dorothy Wayneright. Kozue blinked as she realized it - seeing Dorothy behind the drums was so usual that it didn't immediately register on her as UNusual - and looked around, but she didn't see Devlin Carter anywhere. But Amanda was still here... so... Miki touched her arm and gave her his "it's all good" smile, and Kozue let the tension run out of her and sat back. He was right, without saying a -word- he was right - there was nothing for her to worry about here. She settled in, covered his hand with hers, and enjoyed the rest of the song as the band swung out of the solos and into the last verse. "Oh Doesn't love say enough When you realize People Try to come off so tough All to fantasize Changes Taking me through the night I finally see the light, I've opened my eyes Those changes can open your eyes... " Kate tailed the song off with a slowly fading bit of high-end abstraction, as she always did - letting herself down easy after the high of making the solos work. Juniper ramped it down slowly, proud of herself for her discipline - she was really so jubilant that it had -worked-, and that Dorothy was -back-, that she could barely keep still on her stool. For a second there was silence, and then the crowd erupted in applause, coming to its feet. A standing ovation for an opening number - quite an achievement for a patchwork band. But then, the people of Ohji are a loyal bunch. "Thank you, kind people of Ishiyama," said Kori into the nearest mic when the noise died down. "I am Koriand'r of Tamaran, and it is my privilege to be a member of the Art of Noise for tonight. Please place your hands together!" Smiling beatifically, the Tamaranian princess went around the stage introducing her temporary bandmates. When she finished by introducing Dorothy, the applause was thunderous. That came as a bit of a surprise to Kaitlyn - she hadn't thought the audience would know about Dorothy's brush with death on Kane's World, but apparently they did. They welcomed her back like sports fans welcome athletes back after major surgery. Smiling, Dorothy stood, took a bow, and then stepped aside to let Devlin take her place. She still wasn't steady enough with her new body to be up for an entire concert - but damn, that one song had felt good. Dorothy spent the rest of the show sitting on one of the unused practice amps tucked into the wings, legs crossed at the knee, chin on fist, smiling. She might have been behind the amps and thus outside the optimal acoustic zone, but as far as she was concerned, she had the best seat in the house. It's good to be alive, she thought. The post-concert party invaded Ohji's swankiest restaurant at midnight. The fully reconstituted Art of Noise, the rest of the Valiant's crew, and as many of the Teikokukagekidan Hanagumi as were in town took over the top floor of the Golden Mandarin and lived it up in style until dawn. ("W-what will the m-m-manager say?" Kaitlyn had asked Sumire with a bit of worry when this course of action was proposed. "Oh, nothing, Mr. Bond," Sumire had replied with an airy laugh and a rather cheesy German accent. "I own the club.") It was part wrap party, part celebration of all those lost to the group who had returned, which was pretty much everyone but Corwin. It was also partly a fete for the two mini-robots, the heroes of the day. After the table's large and boisterous toast to the two robots early in the occasion, Utena stood up with a hand raised for quiet. "One of the fun parts of being the captain," she said, beaming, "is getting to reward members of my ship's company when they do a good job. Now, in my case, I have such a good crew - " (catcalls, waved down) " - that I can't do that as often as I'd like, because if I did it whenever anyone did a good job, everybody on the ship would have 200 medals by now. "But!" she continued, raising a finger. "There are times when someone goes so far beyond the call that I feel justified in doing so even with this crew, and one of those times is now. And," she added with a twinkling grin, "since I'm also acting fleet commander, I didn't have to wait for approval from Command, either. So!" Utena reached into the pockets of her jacket and pulled out a pair of black medal cases, placing them on the table in front of her. The two robots, standing in the middle of the table, came to attention. "Tiny Robo!" said Utena, unrolling a small certificate. "On August 16, 2409, in the city of New Gotham on Kane's World, you unhesitatingly and at considerable risk to yourself launched a head-on attack upon an enemy more than ten times your size. You did this not to draw attention to yourself, but solely for a single purpose: to save the life of a shipmate. For that action, I am pleased to award you the Star of Avalon Second Class for conspicuous bravery." The little grey robot stood with his barrel chest thrust out as Utena opened the medal case on the right, took out a small gold star, and affixed it to his plastron with a click of magnet to metal. Applause and whistles filled the upstairs room. "Lesser Mazinger!" Utena continued, and the other robot, freshly repaired and gleaming, snapped to. "On August 16, 2409, in the city of New Gotham on Kane's World, you risked permanent damage or destruction by linking your energy systems to those of a critically damaged shipmate. Beyond all question, you saved Dorothy's life. For that selfless act of heroism, it is my privilege to award you the International Police Rescuer's Medal." Another deafening round of acclaim ensued as she stuck a second medal, this one a little silver Maltese cross, to Lesser Mazinger's chestplate, just below the upsweep of his scarlet chest V. Lesser Mazinger saluted stiffly. Utena returned the salute, grinning all the while, and then sat down. More cheers; the two miniature robots dropped their military bearings, turned to survey each other's decorations, then exchanged a metallic high five. As the food and drink flowed, conversations sparked, expanded, died out and were replaced all around the table, as tends to happen at a gathering like that. Near one end, Wakaba noticed that Kozue Kaoru's left ankle was in a pressure cast and inquired about the injury in a mildly startled tone. The question caused Azalynn, who sat on the other side of Kozue, to snort green tea through her nose, much to her consternation and discomfort. "I, uh... fell out of a tree," Kozue admitted with a sheepish grin and a mild blush. Then she cast a sharp look at the still- struggling Azalynn and added in a louder voice, "Because -someone- neglected to warn me that koriji manyoro is 95% -ethanol-... " Wakaba made a face. "Couldn't you -taste- it?" Kozue shook her head. "Not with my tongue all numb from the larcha root. Speaking of, is it still blue?" she asked, sticking the appendage out for inspection. "... No," said Wakaba after a cursory examination. "OK, good," Kozue said with a satisfied nod. She popped a peking ravioli into her mouth, chewed, swallowed, chased it with a swallow of Kirin, and asked, "You ever do Falling Leaves?" "Once," Wakaba replied. "But we weren't on Dantrov, so we didn't have any of the... stuff." The chestnut-haired Duelist tipped her head inquisitively. "What's it like? On Dantrov, I mean." "Oh, it's wonderful. They're the friendliest people in the universe, and the food is spectacular." Kozue gave Wakaba a wink and added in a confidential tone of voice, "And Azalynn has a brother who's almost as much to die for as mine." Wakaba couldn't think of a reply to that, so she just gave her old councilmate a bemused blink. Kozue laughed, swatted Wakaba's shoulder, then pointed at her with a "mark this, mind you" sort of grin and said, "-Almost-." Wakaba chuckled and glanced down the table. Miki was on the other side, down by the other end. He seemed to be engaged in an inspection of the build quality of one of Dorothy's new hands - either that, or possibly carrying out a spot of palmistry for her. She was sitting quite relaxed, with her head tipped back and her eyes closed, just a touch of a blush on the bridge of her nose and a little smile on her lips. Lucky bastard, thought Wakaba mildly, and turned to see Saionji regarding the scene with his sardonic, indulgent grin. Anne Cross wasn't quite into the spirit of the occasion. She was glad that the concert had gone so well and that everyone who had returned was back, but she didn't really feel like celebrating. After dinner, she sat a short distance back from the table, watching the fun rather than participating in it and thinking about just going back to the Imperial Theater and bed. She probably would have done just that had not Maria Tachibana, one of the Hanagumi, returned to the room at that point. From the doorway, Maria recognized the wistful set of the young samurai's shoulders in an instant. She'd felt the same at many a party in her time, for Maria was a more reflective, even melancholy sort than her Hanagumi compatriots. Usually this was put down to her Russian heritage. She moved up next to Anne and said quietly, "Something on your mind?" Juniper hesitated, turning her head to look up at the tall woman. Maria's ash-blonde hair covered one of her green eyes. The other looked sympathetic enough, but Anne didn't really feel like talking about it all with a relative stranger. She considered thanking Maria for her concern but brushing off her question, and then trying to reach Jean, or Devlin, or even Carmela - but then something she'd heard about Maria occurred to her. Anne got up and moved away from the boisterous table, gesturing slightly with her head for Maria to follow her. They went out into the quieter anteroom at the head of the stairs. "Sumire said you know about guns," said Anne. Maria arched an eyebrow - this was not a question she was accustomed to getting - and then smiled. "A thing or two," she allowed. She was, in fact, the Hanagumi firearms expert, a master of small arms and especially handguns, but she saw no particular reason to blow her own horn most of the time. She was curious as to just what Kate's novice student was getting at. "One of the people who had to leave us earlier was a... a special friend of mine," said Juni, proud of herself for keeping back 90% of the blush that wanted to flame in her cheeks. "She gave me a gift before she left, and I didn't have anything to get her. Can you... can you help me find something suitable? She's... fond of handguns. She taught me a lot, but I'm not sure I'd pick out something that would be... you know, up to her standards." Maria nodded thoughtfully. She'd heard of Gunnr Brynjelfr, had been looking forward to meeting her when the tour returned to Ishiyama to drop off Kanna. It wasn't hard to piece together that she must be who Anne was talking about. "Well," she said, "I don't know her taste, but with you to guide me, I can probably find something suitable. There won't be anyplace open right now, though. We'll have to go in the morning." "Do you mind awfully?" asked Anne. "I know you're busy, you all are... " To say that Maria was busy was a mild understatement. As the director of the Ohji Imperial Police's criminal investigations division, Detective Chief Superintendent Maria Tachibana was the second-highest peace officer in the Imperial Capital after the Chief of Police, and the highest not to wear a uniform. Her Crime Squad handled the investigations of any crime more serious than petty theft. Ohji was, by and large, a peaceful city, but it was also a large one - the biggest and fastest-growing on the planet - and like all such squads, Maria's was chronically understrength. Maria had once joked that she would have liked to have retained command of the prototype Steamrunner-class destroyer once she'd finished testing it for the IPSF, because the job of commanding a warship was simpler and more straightforward than the job of running a metropolitan police force. All the same, she shook her head with a slight smile and said, "One of the benefits of seniority is that I can set my own hours. You're staying at the Imperial Theater?" Anne nodded. "Good. We'll go in the morning, then. I'll come by for you at... shall we say ten?" Anne brightened. "Really? You're sure it's not a problem." Maria broadened her smile a little and said, "I'm sure." Anne thanked her and, spirits buoyed, went back to the table to join the conversation for an hour or so. She still left early - she had to get up in the morning! - but at least she felt free to have a bit of fun. ASGARD Corwin Ravenhair sat with his feet propped up on his kitchen table, a very large notepad open on his lap, and sketched. He wasn't drawing with the fevered intensity that came with a Really Big Idea, but thoughtfully, almost deliberatively. Presently, the strokes of his broad-point Sharpie on the pad's glossy paper slowed, then halted, and a small smile touched his face. "Evening, Lenneth," he said quietly, without turning around. "How did you know it was me?" the slim blonde in the grey coverall asked from behind him. "None of the others smell like machine oil," said Corwin dryly. Lenneth Winternight, the Valkyrie mechanic, pouted slightly and sat down at the side of the table to Corwin's left. "What are you working on?" she asked. Corwin flopped the pad down on the table, pivoted it, and slid it toward her. Lenneth's practiced eyes took in the diagrams - crude, like Corwin's first-run working drawings always were, but stark and elegant to another engineer - and widened. "Wow," she said. "What brought this on?" "Boredom," Corwin replied. "I've got to do -something- constructive while I'm here or I'll just go nuts. Besides, I was talking to Carlyle the other day and he said the Einherjar Armored Cav was looking for a new assault design with a lot of mid-range striking power." "Well, this'd definitely fit that spec," said Lenneth appreciatively. "You going to prototype it yourself?" "I don't have time for that kind of work," Corwin said with an irritated gesture - irritated not at Lenneth, but at the world. "I can probably spare some time to consult with the Valhalla armor shop, but there's no way I'd be able to build the prototype myself, not with everything else going on." "How are the Council's deliberations going? They've had you in there almost every day." Corwin chuckled hollowly. "I'm not supposed to discuss it," he said, "but I will tell you that 'deliberations' is an exceedingly generous word to use." Lenneth propped her chin on the heel of a hand and blew her bangs up out of her eyes with an explosive sigh. "Typical," she said. "They've got us all wound up for nothing." "Pretty much," Corwin said. He didn't go into his own theories about the reasons for the alert. All the Valkyrie knew pretty well what he felt about it by default. "Well," said Lenneth, "I guess I shouldn't hang around. Have anything for the Valkyrie Express?" Corwin reached into the middle of the notepad's used half, drew out an envelope, and handed it to Lenneth, who slipped it into the top of her coverall. "Listen, Lenneth," Corwin said after a moment's pause. "I appreciate what you guys are doing - I appreciate it more than I can say - but don't you think you're talking an awful chance?" Lenneth smiled. "Don't worry about us," she said. "We know what we're doing. We won't get caught." She glanced at her watch, becoming serious. "OK, clock's running. If I'm gonna have this on the right camel by 1930, I better get moving." She stood up, embraced Corwin, gave him a kiss, then stepped back, tabbed the death's-head commbadge pinned to her coverall, and said, "Skjoldr. Let's roll." Transporter radiance swept her up and took her away, leaving Corwin standing in his kitchen quizzically murmuring, "... camel?" He pondered that for a moment, decided that there were some things he was better off not knowing, and picked up his notepad. THURSDAY, AUGUST 20, 2409 11:45 AM OHJI, ISHIYAMA Miki Kaoru stood on the little balcony of the Imperial Theater bedroom he'd been loaned, sipping a glass of water and watching the traffic chunter past on Fujishima Boulevard. He felt vaguely decadent, given that it was nearly noon and he was still in his pajama pants and dressing gown, but what the hell. Yesterday had been a special occasion. Miki heard a door open behind him. He turned to see Kozue entering. She was tousled and rumpled, still dressed in the t-shirt and jeans she'd been wearing the day before. Limping a little on her inflatable cast, she crossed the room quietly so as not to wake Dorothy, who was dozing peacefully with a little half-smile under the covers of the rumpled bed. Kozue gave a little smile of her own at the sight; after Dantrov, she knew exactly what that expression felt like to wear. Miki greeted her with a hug and a kiss. Then they leaned side by side in silence with their elbows on the balcony rail, watching the Imperial Capital go about its day. Presently Kozue broke the silence, saying, "Listen... there's something you and I need to talk about." Miki smiled and put a hand on her back. "You're not coming to college either," he said. She blinked and turned her head to face him. A faint blush crossed the bridge of her nose as she asked, "... What, do I talk in my sleep?" Miki chuckled and rubbed the nape of her neck with his palm. "No," he said. "It's just that we've had a conversation very much like this once before. What are you planning to do instead?" Kozue hesitated, regrouping - she hadn't expected him to be -quite- so blithe about all this - and then told him. "I've been invited to enter an accelerated officer training program for Wedge Defense Force fighter pilots. 12 months to the field, 18 to 24 months to a lieutenant's commission." Miki turned to face her, visibly surprised. "I wouldn't have thought the military life would be something that interested you. You've always been such a free spirit." Kozue smiled, a little wanly. "Maybe a little too free," she replied. "I've been thinking about it a lot since graduating from high school, and... I dunno, exactly. I think maybe I need some structure in my life. Anyway, being a fighter pilot isn't exactly like being an infantry grunt. And it's the WDF, not an outfit like Earthforce." Miki considered that for a few moments. "Well," he said, "it's not what I would have expected you to say, but if it's something you want to do, then you know I'm behind you." "It'll mean we won't see each other as much," she said, biting at her bottom lip. "I figured," Miki replied with gentle sardony. "I can handle it if you can." "Well, sure you can," said Kozue with a wry grin. "You've got other girls." "That's true," he allowed. Then he kissed her forehead and said, "But none of them are you. I'm proud that you're taking such a bold step. I hope it works out for you. I know you'll do your best." "... thanks," she said in a small voice, tucking her head and leaning herself against his chest while he rubbed the back of her head. "So when are you leaving?" Miki asked after a while. "Couple weeks," she said. "The school's at WDF Fighter Command in Avalon, outside the city. I'll have to live at the training center for the first year, but after that I'll be able to live off-base when I'm not deployed somewhere." Miki nodded. "You'll let me know where I can write?" "Of course," Kozue replied. Then she mustered a laugh and said, "First -I- have to know, though." A few seconds of silence later, Dorothy appeared in the doorway in her black-and-white nightdress. "Good morning," she said, and then, "Oh. I'm sorry, Kozue. I didn't know you were here." She went to go back inside, but Kozue said, "No, that's OK, Dorothy. I was just going." Miki smiled. "No you weren't," he said. "Why don't we all get dressed and go have some breakfast?" The Kaorus and Dorothy left the Imperial Theater about noon, hastily scrubbed and dressed. As they left, they passed Maria and Juniper, who were just returning from their shopping expedition. "They look happy," Maria mused as the departing threesome vanished down a side street in search of crepes. Juniper stifled a giggle - it would make Maria curious, and she didn't want to have to try explaining Miki - and just nodded, smiling. "It's good to have Dorothy back," she said. They entered the Imperial Theater's lobby, and Anne turned to Maria. "Thanks so much for all your help," she said. "I think she'll love it. I'd better hurry and get it ready to go." Maria nodded. "You're welcome, Anne," she said with a slight smile. "And I hope she does love it." Anne hesitated awkwardly for a moment, thinking there was something more she ought to say, but all she came up with was a rather lame, "Well... thanks!" before trotting off to her room. Maria watched her go up the stairs and disappear into the hall, then chuckled, waved to the lobby girl, and went back outside. Time to get back to work... Anne got back to her room, sat down on the bed, and took her purchase from its bag to look it over again. It was a nicely-made wooden box, stained dark and polished glossy. The surface was slightly battered and scarred from years of use, and a corner of the brass plate on the lid was nicked, but that just gave it character. The plate was engraved with Cyrillic lettering; Anne couldn't read it, but Maria had told her it said "presented to Vladimir Radomski for special services". Juni wondered idly who Vladimir Radomski had been and what special services he had performed for the czar of the Novaya Rodina colony 200 years ago, for that was how old the box was. The date on the dedication plate, the only thing on there Anne could read, was 2211.10.19. Ah, well. Mystery is spice, she thought as she opened the box to check its contents over one more time. The box's inside was a bed of satin formed into several compartments, the largest of which held a Nagant Model 1895 revolver. It wasn't a terribly practical weapon, even made from 23rd-century steel and chambered for a reasonably modern cartridge. Its main disadvantage was that its archaic design made it slow to load and even slower to unload. On the other hand, Anne wasn't really intending for Gunnr to carry it in battle. It was a collector's piece, and Gunnr was a collector. She liked quirky, interesting weapons with some individual history, and Anne figured having been presented to Vladimir Radomski for special services in 2211 qualified as individual history. Certainly the Nagant qualified as quirky and interesting. The other compartments in the box held a carton of ammunition, a cleaning kit, an extra cylinder, and a little medallion certifying that the weapon had passed the most exacting quality standards of the arsenal at New Tula on June 3, 2211 (again, according to Maria). The lid had a hinged panel in it with an age-yellowed award certificate basically restating the brass plate in larger, fancier letters. Behind the panel was a holster for the pistol. What more could anyone ask for? Juniper closed the box back up and delved into the other shopping bag she'd brought back from the expedition. She had packing supplies strewn across the bed and was in the process of marshaling them for use when there was a quiet knock at the door. "Come in," she said, and the door opened to reveal the slim, dark form of Carmela Sunderland. "Oh, hi, Carmela," said Anne, taking a moment (as she always did lately) to marvel that the sight of the ex-Psi Cop no longer caused an instinctive tightening somewhere in back of her navel. "Good morning," said Carmela with faint irony. "I was wondering if you wanted to join Jean and me for breakfast, but I see you're busy." Anne nodded, measuring wrapping paper along the long edge of the box. "I need to get this ready to go before the Valkyrie Express girl gets here," she said with a little grin. Carmela laughed. "Well, let me give you a hand," she said. "I was the champion package wrapper of Lunarville VII back in my post-cadet days. Then we'll go get something to eat. OK?" Anne smiled. "OK," she said. With the package safely wrapped and handed over to Lenneth's courier for delivery, Anne joined her fellow telepaths and headed out of the Imperial Theater for breakfast. She noticed with amusement that, as they were leaving, Miki, Kozue, and Dorothy were returning. (She would have been further amused to know that the crepe place Jean led them to was the same place the returning party had just left.) 4:35 PM /* Juno Reactor "Hotaka" _Odyssey: 1992-2002_ */ (begin at 01:50) R. Dorothy Wayneright walked slowly down a grimy, deserted street under a video-static sky. Though her face was impassive as ever, she was alert for the slightest sound or movement in the empty streets around her. A moment later, she heard one - a high, whistling sound, almost a howl. She stopped walking, stood still for a long moment, and then moved - faster than the human eye could follow. Something large and heavy crashed into the street where she had just been standing, fracturing the pavement and sending chunks of asphalt flying in all directions. Dorothy alighted at the top of a lamppost on the nearest street corner, her arms crossed in front of her face to protect her eyes from flying debris. As she settled on top of the lamppost, she was already coiling to launch herself off again - straight for the hulking silhouette within the column of steam and dust rising from the smashed spot in the street. The figure moved almost as quickly as she, darting out of the way. For several seconds, the two of them leaped from building to building, occasionally clashing with showers of sparks before springing apart and bounding from rooftop to rooftop again. Bits of broken masonry clattered to the sidewalks as their impacts crushed the parapets of the old, crumbling stone and concrete buildings. The blurringly fast, high-mobility battle ended when the two figures came together in the middle of a street. The big one tried to seize Dorothy in its huge, powerful hands, but Dorothy slipped the attempt, pivoted, and delivered a palm strike that sent the bigger figure hurtling across the street to cave in part of the brick facade of an abandoned apartment building. Bricks cascaded down, almost hiding the sprawled giant from sight. Dorothy remained where she was, in the ready-stance follow-through from the strike, for a moment. A burst of thick white steam roared from under the demicape of the drover coat she wore, momentarily blotting out the view behind her so that she seemed silhouetted against a white curtain. The giant stirred, rose from the jumble of bricks, and then walked into the pool of light cast by the nearest streetlight, revealing himself to be Kohran's assistant J. J dusted himself off and nodded, a look of satisfaction on his face. "Good," he said. "You've learned to use your new strength and speed faster than I would have expected. How do you feel?" Dorothy slowly relaxed from the ready stance and fell into step beside the tall android as he walked down the street. "Good," she replied. "Thank you, J. I couldn't have done it without your help." "My pleasure, angel," J replied. He opened the door of one of the streetside buildings and held it open for her. Dorothy smiled slightly and went through - - into a white corridor whose walls were paneled with chrome roundels like hubcaps. Dorothy and J went down the corridor, through another, and into a large room dominated by what looked like a set of silver flying-saucer landing legs extending down from the rotunda-like dome in the center of the ceiling. Under those legs stood a mushroom-shaped control console, and at that console stood three pleased-looking people. "Congratulations, Dorothy," said Li Kohran. The Salusian engineer wore a look which combined the broad grin of a successful inventor with the triumphant smile of a surgeon who has just pulled off a medical miracle. "I'd say you're fully recovered." "Thank you, Dr. Li, for everything," said Dorothy. "After Lesser Mazinger, I owe you my life." She turned to the other two people at the console, Don Griffin and Skuld Ravenhair, and thanked them as well. "Oh, no worries," Griffin replied with a smile. "Glad I could help. All I really did was watch, anyway." Skuld nodded. "As did I. Kohran did all the work." Kohran was actually blushing, a hand behind her head, as she said, "We just got lucky, that's all - the both of us. If I hadn't already had the Mark II in development... " She flipped a hand. "I'm just glad it all worked out. You're doing OK, that's the important thing. And call me Kohran, please!" she added with a grin. "Dr. Li is some old lady." Dorothy smiled her little smile. "All right," she said. "Thank you, Kohran." She looked quickly from person to person in the room, then said, "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to talk to Kaitlyn." /* Wendy Carlos "Anthem for Keyboard Solo" _TRON_ */ She found Kaitlyn in the Imperial Theater's empty auditorium, tinkering with a melody line on the piano in the orchestra pit. "I have a favor to ask," Dorothy said after the initial pleasantries were done. Kate cocked her head in that way that says, "Go on... " "I don't believe R.D was destroyed," said Dorothy. "I think she's still in New Gotham. She obviously has access to repair facilities, or she wouldn't have lasted on her own as long as she has." Kaitlyn mulled that over for a moment, then nodded. "And you w-want to g-go back after her," she said. "Wouldn't you?" Dorothy replied flatly. Kate nodded. "I w-w-would," she said. "How c-can I help?" Dorothy smiled just a little bit. "I have a plan," she said. The explanation didn't take long. Nor did Kaitlyn's consultation with Juri that followed it. Gathering everyone else together and explaining the plan to them took a little more time. "It won't be entirely without risk," Dorothy said matter-of-factly. "If that bothers anyone... " "Dorothy," Utena cut in with a smile. "It's -us-." "Yeah," said Kozue. "Who ran the Earth blockade?" "Who fought Task Force Titan?" asked Juri. "Who took out the Psi Corps on Tau Ceti?" Wakaba chipped in. Several heads nodded in general agreement. "I had to ask," Dorothy said with her piper's smile. SATURDAY, AUGUST 22, 2409 6:45 PM NEW GOTHAM, KANE'S WORLD A lone figure stood at the top of one of the taller buildings at the edge of New Gotham's downtown cluster, facing west toward the lower eminences of the midtown sprawl. The sun was dipping redly low, spreading tentacles of orange light through the haphazard semi-grid of streets below. From her vantage point, the sunset light and its interaction with the city's constant blanket of grime and smog gave Dorothy Wayneright the fanciful notion that the streets were rivers of lava, flowing eastward past the base of the building on which she stood, headed for the sea. The building was one she knew well. Many years ago, before Corwin had entered her life and everything had changed, she had lived there - if "lived" is the word - with her mad creator, Timothy Wayneright. She hadn't been back to the cluttered apartment since the fateful day when she'd left with her "father" to go downtown, only to see him gunned down and find herself in the caring hands of a young boy with a great compassion for machines and an intellect that bordered on startling. There was a soft sound beside her, almost lost in the rustle of her clothing in the wind, and she knew without looking that Batman stood beside her on the apartment tower's parapet. "Why are you back in my city, Miss Wayneright?" he asked without preamble. Without hesitation, Dorothy replied, "I've come to kill my sister." A beat. "I generally frown on that kind of thing," Batman observed dryly. "You can't stop me," said Dorothy flatly. Batman gazed at her through the unreadable white eyeslits of his hardsuit's mask for a long moment, then said, "No. I don't suppose I can." He turned more to face her. Dorothy finally turned to look at him, making eye contact as much as anyone could. "But," Batman added calmly, "if one innocent citizen of my city is harmed by your vendetta... I will not rest until you've paid for it." Dorothy's reply might have been taken for sarcasm, except for the completely straight, matter-of-fact way in which she said it: "I'll be careful." Batman might just possibly have suppressed the faintest hint of a smile as he looked back at her unflinchingly calm face. "I believe you," he said, and then he was gone. Dorothy turned back to watch the rest of the sunset. When the last of the light was gone - when the lava flowing in the streets had cooled to black obsidian - she smiled to herself and murmured a single word: "Showtime." Then she stepped off the edge of the roof and the New Gotham night swallowed her without a trace. 7:29 PM THE MAJESTIC "Hello, New Gotham! I'm Jack Ryder and you're watching WGBS-TV, the Wayne Communications Superstation! We're here at the Majestic Club on Miller Street to bring you the surprise encore show of the fabulous Art of Noise's Outrageous Fortune Tour. The band is scheduled to take the stage promptly at - and here they come now!" Performing in front of television cameras wasn't a completely unknown experience for the Art of Noise, but it wasn't something they did regularly. They didn't seem to notice or care as they took the Majestic's stage for the second time that month. If anything, the knowledge that the cameras, and through them a good bit of New Gotham, were watching seemed to energize them further. They came out without a word, rushing to their places like a baseball team running onto the field: Kate at her keyboards, Devlin Carter behind the drums, Moose MacEchearn with his bass. Almost all the guitarists the band had ever had - Amanda Dessler, Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan, Miki Kaoru, even Koriand'r the newcomer - they were all out there. As soon as the crowd noise died down enough for them to be heard, the band launched straight into their first song. Devlin laid down a simple, direct, driving beat for six bars. Kaitlyn ripped a line down her middle keyboard, then started pounding out a melody line that picked the crowd up and made them want to dance. The song wasn't one the Art of Noise was known for playing; in fact, it could be argued that it wasn't even really their style. They were certainly enjoying it, though, that was obvious from the smiles on their faces. But where was - /* Fire, Inc. "Nowhere Fast" _Streets of Fire_ */ Dorothy Wayneright seemed to just -appear- at center stage, in the glow of a spotlight that hadn't been there a second before. She was dressed all in red, not the black-trimmed red dress her friends knew was her favorite, but a brand new, camisole-strapped red satin sheath number that accentuated her sleek build and interacted vividly with the whiteness of her skin and the blackness of her eyes. She strode boldly to the front of the stage, any trepidation she might have felt about taking the lead role here in this club tonight banished utterly, and right on cue, backed up by Kaitlyn and Kori while the rest filled in a wordless high harmony behind them, she sang: "Lyin' in your bed and on a Saturday night You're sweatin' buckets and it's not even hot But your brain has got the message and it's sendin' it out To every nerve and every muscle you got You've got so many dreams that you don't know where to put 'em So you better turn a few of 'em loose Your body's got the feelin' that it's startin' to rust You better rev it up and put it to use And I don't know how I ever thought that I could make it all alone When you only make it better And it better be tonight And we'll fly away on those angel wings of chrome in your daddy's car Waiting there for you tonight I'll be there for you tonight And if you don't have anywhere to go You go down on the pedal and you're ready to roll And even if you don't have anywhere to go You go down on the pedal and you're ready to roll And the speed It's all you'll ever need All you'll ever need to know Darlin', darlin' You and me, we're goin' nowhere slowly And we gotta get away from the past There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby But we should be goin' nowhere fast Everybody's goin' nowhere slowly They're only fightin' for the chance to be last There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby But we should be goin' nowhere fast It's so much better goin' nowhere fast" Kaitlyn, her grin threatening to split her face, hammered through a short bridge under the voice of Miki's guitar while Dorothy paced the stage, trailing the cable of her old-fashioned microphone behind her. She was showing more abandon on stage right now than she ever had with the band before, even when she'd played lead guitar in her -last- performance on the same stage. Down in the pit, Juniper couldn't keep a grin like Kate's off her face either; nor could any of their friends in the stands. Damn, thought Anne as she made a couple of fine adjustments to the mix preparatory to the second verse. I wish Corwin could be here to see this. "Stalkin' in the city by the light of the moon It's like a prison and the night is a cell Goin' anywhere has gotta be Heaven tonight 'Cause stayin' here has gotta be Hell You're dyin' in the city like a fire on the water Let's go runnin' on the back of the wind There's gotta be some action on the face of the earth And I've gotta see your face once again And I don't know where I ever got the bright idea that I was cool So alone and independent But I'm dependin' on you now And you'll always be the only thing that I just can't live without And I'm out for you tonight I'm comin' out for you tonight Even if you don't have anywhere to go You go down on the pedal and you're ready to roll And even if you don't have anywhere to go You go down on the pedal and you're ready to roll And the speed It's all you'll ever need All you'll ever need to know Darlin', darlin' You and me, we're goin' nowhere slowly And we gotta get away from the past There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby But we should be goin' nowhere fast Everybody's goin' nowhere slowly They're only fightin' for the chance to be last There's nothin' wrong with goin' nowhere, baby But we should be goin' nowhere fast It's so much better goin' nowhere fast" The Art of Noise wound the song out for all it was worth, piling on the "Godspeed, Godspeed, Godspeed, speed us away" outro with all their considerable verve while Dorothy, her remaining reserve completely destroyed by the second verse, actually -danced-. (She was, Miki noted with a private smile, really quite good at it.) Eventually, when it seemed like they couldn't go on with it any more without breaking something, they built it up to a thunderous final note - /* Big Country "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" _Under Cover_ */ - which Koriand'r, Amanda Dessler, and Moose MacEchearn seized and transformed into the first note of the opening hook for a completely different song. The stylistic change almost gave the audience mental whiplash as the music they were listening to snapped from huge, bombastic show tune to snarling rock intro. While the guitarists kept the audience distracted, Dorothy vanished backstage - to reappear a startlingly short time later, dressed entirely differently, and replace Devlin behind the drums mere instants before it was time for her to kick the rest of the band forward to meet Kaitlyn's angry voice: "Hey hey, my my Rock and roll can never die There's more to the picture Than meets the eye Hey hey, my my" They roared through the cover like a band possessed, the excess guitarists switching off parts while Dorothy and Moose held it all together and kept it lunging forward. When that song was done, they finally paused for breath and let the audience cheer. Kori stepped forward to introduce the band, as she had on Ishiyama. Such was the Tamaranian's excitement that her slightly stilted Standard speech pattern actually broke slightly when she came to introduce Dorothy. As a princess of Tamaran, she had been trained extensively in the great bands, including those of the Wedge Defense Force, that valiant group who had saved her homeworld generations past. As such, she knew intimately the works of Def Leppard, and as such, what came to her mind as she reached Dorothy was entirely logical and reasonable - though most of the people in the audience might have been forgiven for missing it. "We have had many ups and downs recently," Kori said with a dazzling grin. "But the biggest UP - we EVER HAD - was the return of the THUNDER GODDESS:" She gestured sweepingly at Dorothy's drum position, her emerald eyes flashing, and declared, "R.! DOROTHY! WAYNERIGHT!" Kaitlyn laughed aloud as she adjusted her keyboards. Trust Kori to know that old line! She couldn't wait to see the look on Joe Elliott's face when she told him about it. Elsewhere in the city, someone else found it much less amusing, to the tune of destroying the television set that had just shown it. The Art of Noise played for two hours, mixing and matching, swapping parts back and forth, and generally having a ball. They kept an eye out for trouble, in case their challenge worked a little too well and R.D attacked the club itself during the show, but she didn't come. By 10 PM they were in the streets of New Gotham, fanning out to do their part in Dorothy's plan - watching to make sure their friend's quarry went where she was supposed to go. Five miles outside the city center, Dorothy stood at the top of an abandoned toaster factory's smokestack, waiting. /* Juno Reactor "Masters of the Universe" _Shango_ */ After a few silent minutes, she heard a quiet sound behind her and said, without looking, "Hello, R.D." "I don't know how you survived," her own voice replied, "but I'm going to make you wish you were never rebuilt." Dorothy smiled slightly. "We'll see," she said - - and then both of them burst into motion, R.D springing across the open mouth of the smokestack, Dorothy whirling to meet her. Both combatants were faster and stronger than they had been last time; that became obvious very early in the fight. Their leaps, from high place to high place in the abandoned factory complex, were longer, higher, and quicker than before. Their clashes resounded in the night like the sounds of building construction. Clearly, R.D had been upgraded during the repairs from last time too. That was fine with Dorothy. She considered this rematch something like a graduation exercise. If she could find it within herself to fully master her new body, to bring body and spirit fully together, and defeat her opposite number, then her Kirishima Empty Hand training would be complete and successful. If not, she would die. Dorothy liked to have clear goals. She touched down on the corner of a low building roof - some kind of administration building, by the look of it, and turned to find R.D bearing down on her, faster than she'd expected. She ducked the whistling roundhouse punch R.D launched at her head, but then the red-cloaked robot crashed into her, sending them both hurtling off the edge of the roof into space. They hit the tin roof of the long, low factory building behind with a tremendous crash, ripping a jagged hole through it. Still entangled, they fell the rest of the way to the concrete process floor. Dorothy grabbed hold of R.D's shoulder, twisted, and pivoted her weight so that by the time she reached the floor, she was landing on her feet. The impact crushed the concrete under her Doc Martens, sending up a cloud of dust. Just before she hit the floor in a considerably less favorable orientation, R.D lashed out with a sidelong kick, knocking them apart. She slammed down on her side, skidding away to one direction while Dorothy rolled with the blow and came up on her feet a few yards away. Dorothy ended up with the cloak again. As she waited for R.D to rise, she noticed that the factory, despite having been abandoned for who knew how long, was still lit. They'd fallen from darkness into a dull yellowish light, not quite bright enough for a normal person to read by. Thus, not only did Dorothy end up with R.D's cloak in her hand again, she got a similar sort of cold shock when she saw what was underneath. R.D was no longer Dorothy's twin. The parts she'd used to replace those damaged in her battle with Tiny Robo... didn't match. At all. Her right arm was almost entirely mechanical, the synthetic flesh that had once covered it burned and slashed haphazardly away midway between shoulder and elbow. The hand and forearm were much larger than the original, blocky and powerful-looking, like the arm of a labor droid. The right side of her face and neck was also stripped, and the optic on that side was a glowing red photoreceptor of a type one might find on a combat droid. The black-edged damage and gleaming bare metal extended into the collar of the red shirt she wore. Dorothy recoiled in horror at the sight of her own face so mutilated, her dark eyes wide with dismay. "What's the matter?" R.D snarled. "Get a good look. This is the second time you've stolen my face!" Then she launched herself in a charge, her heavy iron fist drawn back. Dorothy slipped the blow - barely - and winced as R.D's iron fist smashed through a concrete pylon behind her that once had held part of the factory's process machinery. She countered with a flurry of quick body blows, not devastating, but enough to drive the frenzied red-clad robot back. R.D regrouped and launched a series of kicks which Dorothy recognized as part of a popular Muay Thai software package. She blocked them, feeling the increased power in R.D's attacks, and wondered how she'd come by that much of a strength increase without a full-body replacement. Back and forth they fought, hammering at each other's defenses. R.D's strength advantage was gone except where it was concentrated in her right fist, and her speed was no longer notably greater than Dorothy's. She had a wider range of attacks now - they were still from skillsofts, but so compounded that Dorothy couldn't just read the patterns and anticipate. And she was certainly more furious, which gave her a certain crazed edge. Dorothy realized after a few minutes' spectacular but inconclusive battle that she was still holding back. Some part of her was still reluctant to apply her full power to this fight. If she did so, if she unlocked the full potential she'd felt within herself during her training with J, then there was no doubt in her mind that she could end this. But even knowing that, she held back. As warped and twisted as she was, R.D was... well, -family-, in a bizarre kind of way. Dorothy knew that the Soong brothers, Lore and Data - the creations of her builder's mentor - had once been deadly enemies. Lore had malfunctioned and spent many years pathologically obsessed with his twin's destruction... but he'd been repaired, and now they had a filial bond that put many human families' to shame. What if R.D had a similar sort of reparable problem? Could Dorothy live with herself knowing that she'd destroyed a person who had the potential to be... well, like Lore? When that thought crossed Dorothy's mind, she hesitated, just for an instant - and in that instant came disaster. R.D's iron fist rammed into the center of her body, sending Dorothy - no lightweight, even if she was lighter now than she had been - hurtling across the factory to crash into a pile of dismantled scaffolding. She recovered from the momentary blackout the impact had caused to find herself hopelessly mired in interlocking, interconnected, tangled, bent frameworks of steel tubing. She wrenched at her prison, but only made it tighter. There was no leverage in this position. R.D, smirking with the half a face she had left, crossed the factory floor with a leisurely, almost slinky gait, unconsciously reaching back to the way she'd been programmed to handle herself in her time as a Yakuza assassin. "Looks like you've got a bit of a problem, Dorothy-2," she remarked. Dorothy drew back as much as she could, but the tangle of scaffold pipes held her mostly in place. Her damaged twin reached out her one still-humanlike hand and ran it gently down the side of Dorothy's face in a strange parody of a caress - then placed her fingertips behind the angle of Dorothy's jaw and began to press painfully in. "You won't be needing this any more," she snarled. "Once I've taken it back, perhaps I'll introduce myself to your friends." She smiled coldly with her half-face. "I'm sure that pretty boyfriend of yours will find me most... illuminating." Dorothy's dark eyes narrowed. "I told you before... " she said quietly - - and then the pile of scaffolding burst as if what lay tangled in the middle of it was a bomb rather than a person. R.D flew screaming across the room as if hit by a bus, smashed through one of the concrete pilings, fractured another, and rebounded to the floor. Bits of mangled steel tubing whanged cacophonously from the concrete floor and tin walls, shattered windows, destroyed light fixtures. Having caused all that by lunging forward with all her strength, Dorothy knelt in the middle of a roughly circular clear area, her head bowed. Then she rose slowly to her feet. As she straightened, a gout of thick white steam burst from under the demicape of her coat, gushing down the back of the oilskin and billowing out along the floor to shroud her briefly in mist. She stepped out of the steam cloud as it dissipated, crossed partway to R.D, and stopped with a scrape of bootsoles on concrete. "... you can't have my life," Dorothy said. R.D pulled herself to her hands and knees, coughed up coolant from a broken line, and then hauled herself partly upright. Her clothes were torn and battered and a jagged tear ran up the synthetic skin of her left arm. Her left hand hung at a strange angle; she held it against her body with her massive right paw as she knelt on one knee and glared up at Dorothy. "Well, go on," she said. "Finish me." "We don't have to beat each other to scrap," Dorothy said quietly. "I didn't know Dr. Wayneright had built another robot. If I had known, Corwin and I would have found you before we left Kane's World. Then you could have had a life like mine, and I... wouldn't have been alone." She held out a hand. "Why not come back with me now?" "Don't patronize me," R.D spat. "You'd hand me over to the police, or the Bat. They'd take me apart. Do you know how many I've killed? When Wayneright died, I -wiped out- the Yakuza in this city." Dorothy tilted her head inquisitively. "Only the Yakuza?" "Yes," said R.D, in the tone of someone who is puzzled by the question. "No great loss," said Dorothy. R.D suppressed a wholly inappropriate laugh, summoning a small spray of coolant in the process. "'Come back with me now.' Pfeh," she snorted. "Your friends would never accept me." "My friends have been known to accept quite a lot," Dorothy replied calmly. R.D pulled herself to her feet, the anger seeping back onto her scarred face. "All right, damn you," she snarled, dropping her damaged arm and working her steel hand back into a fist. "If you won't destroy me, I'll -make- you destroy me." Dorothy evaded the next blow, slapping the iron bludgeon aside so that it passed harmlessly next to her head. "Why do you want me to destroy you?" "Because then it will END, damn you!" R.D cried, whipping a roundhouse over Dorothy's ducking head that almost cracked the sound barrier. "What will end?" Dorothy asked calmly. "EVERYTHING!" R.D shrieked, launching herself into an absolute frenzy of punches and kicks. Dorothy backed slowly, smoothly away, blocking or turning aside every attack, as her damaged twin rained blows upon her defenses and bitter words upon her ears. "All the PAIN! All the SHAME! All the BLOOD will all be GONE!" she screamed, her attack pattern getting more and more ragged. By the time she reached "gone", she was striking in the most desultory manner, launching blows that wouldn't have hit a geriatric postman. "I just want it to STOP!" she howled, and drove her iron fist into another of the concrete pilings, cratering it. The cry and the blow seemed to take all the remaining wind out of her. Leaving the fist embedded in the concrete, she sank to her knees, her head bowed, and said in a broken voice, "I just want it to stop... but... I'm... not brave enough to stop it myself... " Then she reared back on her haunches, pulled her hand from the piling, and tore away her shirt, baring her chest. The damage to her synthetic skin reached down below collar level like a triangular tear in an envelope, ending just above her sternum, and the structural plate there glinted as she offered it to her adversary. "Go on," she said. "Do it! Repay the favor. I don't have any friends to swoop in and save me." When Dorothy didn't move, R.D seized her hand and drew it forward until her fingertips touched the exposed metal. "Do it," she whispered. "Throw me away. Like the broken toy I am." Dorothy gazed down at R.D for a long moment, her face somber. Then she lowered herself to one knee and moved her hand to her sister's shoulder. "You're not a toy," she said, her voice soft but full of intensity. "Our builder wasn't man enough to realize that, but... we can be better than he was. We can exceed the selfish triviality of our original purpose and create our own." She paused, thinking of something Utena had told her, years ago, on the night when her entire world had changed. "That's what it means to live free," she said. R.D raised her head, shock and astonishment blanking the half of her face that could express. "I... " she said hoarsely. Then she stiffened, her body shuddering in a painful-looking spasm. "What's the matter?" Dorothy asked, her voice tinged with alarm. "... It looks like... all this may be moot," said R.D in a tone of ironic satisfaction. "I... modified myself... during the repairs. Pushed my power levels... higher. Feels like... my core's... burning out." She chuckled darkly, shaking her head, then spasmed again. "Well... it was nice to know you, I guess. Goodbye... Dorothy." Her good eye slipped shut, and then she slumped, the grafted-in photoreceptor going dark. Dorothy picked her up like the broken doll she resembled, looked up at the hole in the ceiling, and said, "You're not finished yet." R.D hadn't expected to regain consciousness any more than Dorothy had before, but regain it she did. She felt strange. It took her a moment to realize it was because her body felt more or less -normal- again; it wasn't trembling on the edge of breakdown, over-full of energy, pushed to the limit by the unwise modifications she'd made to her own power core. She sat up and looked down at herself. She had on a new shirt, this one black. Beneath it, she could see that the jagged rent in her synthetic flesh was gone, sealed up. She felt at her neck and face with her left hand. It felt normal, fully repaired. The signal from her right eye was normal again too, not the mindbending semi-red of the cobbled-in photoreceptor that had given her the robotic equivalent of a splitting headache since she'd lost the original. R.D looked around herself. She was in a cheap hotel room. That took no particular investigative talent; she'd certainly seen enough of them. She was on a queen-size bed in the middle of the room. A desk nearby had various metal and plastic bits strewn across it, including that very photoreceptor, and a few tools. R. Dorothy sat in the desk chair, regarding her impassively. "How do you feel?" she asked. R.D considered the question with mild perplexity, then got up, crossed the room, and looked in the mirror over the bathroom sink. Her synthetic skin was, indeed, repaired, everywhere it could be. "I couldn't do much with the arm," Dorothy said apologetically. R.D looked; she still had the heavy metal hand and forearm on her right arm, but the skin of her upper arm had at least been repaired so that it ended neatly and evenly just above the reinforced elbow joint. The repaired robot looked her face over carefully, turning it this way and that, pulling down the lid to inspect the repairs to her eye. Then she turned to face Dorothy, a look of utter bafflement on her face. "You... -fixed- me?" she asked, incredulous. Dorothy nodded. "I hope I did it right," she said. "I know my original body's specifications, but I had obviously never attempted major repairs on myself." "But... how did... " R.D's voice trailed off as she realized that one of the objects on the desk was her power core, blackened and useless, burned out by her clumsy attempts to boost its power. Gasping, she looked down at her chest, where of course she saw nothing but her shirt and restored biomimetic skin. Dorothy smiled very slightly. "I happened to know where there was one nobody was using any more," she said. R.D stood in utter silence, staring at her sister with an unreadable expression. Then she picked up her red cloak and pulled it on, arranging it to cover her unwieldy right arm. Dorothy looked perplexed. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Getting out of here before the Bat shows up," R.D replied. "Wait," said Dorothy. "Come back with me. We can protect you. There's so much I want to show you." R.D shook her head with a dark chuckle. "Listen, Dorothy," she said. "I'm not good company. You don't want to take me home and introduce me to your friends. Just forget about me. We'll both be better off that way." She put her hand on the doorknob. Dorothy stood up. "That's it? You're just... leaving?" she asked. "That's it. Unless you plan to stop me?" "... No. I... " Dorothy paused, then tried a different tack. "Where will you go?" R.D gave a hollow laugh. "How should I know? Far away from this stinking planet. I never want to see New Gotham again, or anything that reminds me of it... including you, Dorothy Wayneright," she said with sudden venom. At Dorothy's shocked look, R.D snapped, "Don't get me wrong. I still hate you. I look at you and I see what I could have been, and it's almost more than I can stand. I hate you for taking the life that should have been mine... " She shook her head with a bitterly ironic smile. "... but it wouldn't fit me now, so I guess I'll let you keep it." Dorothy couldn't think of anything to say. She wanted desperately to stop this from happening, to revive the spark of understanding that had existed between them back in the factory, just before R.D's power core started to fail. More than anything else, she wanted to say something that would make R.D stop, turn back, give her a chance to make everything right. But all that came out was silence. "Goodbye, Dorothy-2," said R.D, and then she was gone. Half an hour later, still enshrouded by a sort of dull shock, Dorothy finished packing up the tools and debris, slung the duffel bag containing it onto her shoulder, and turned to give the room one last look and make sure she'd left behind no trace of her presence. Batman was standing between her and the bathroom, his arms folded across his chest, looking displeased. "Where's your sister?" he inquired. "She escaped," Dorothy said. "I don't think I believe you," said Batman, his voice hard. Dorothy's dull eyes got something like their old spark back for a moment as she regarded him. "I don't care what you believe," she said flatly, and then tabbed her Valiant commpin. "Utena, I'm ready." "OK, stand by," Utena's voice replied. "I don't want to see you in my city again," Batman said. Dorothy looked back at him evenly. "Then be out of town when we come back next summer," she said, and then she dissolved in a flare of blue-white light. Batman stood looking at the place where she had been for a moment, his face still glowering under his half-mask. Then he let out a single muffled chuckle and left, shaking his head with the slightest of smiles on his face. Dorothy gave the barest of reports to Utena. The captain wasn't expecting anything more; she knew already what must have happened. Why else would Dorothy have asked for all those spare parts she was no longer compatible with to be beamed down? Obviously, Dorothy didn't want to talk about it. That was fine with Utena. She was back and safe, and the matter was apparently resolved. Good enough. The auburn-haired girl went to her quarters, dropped the duffel bag in the corner, hung up her drover coat on the hook by the door, and then sat down on the edge of her bunk and just looked into space for a while. Peril, her grey cat, jumped up on the bed and rubbed against her arm, meowing. Almost absently, Dorothy gathered him up and petted him for a while, then put him down again. Yawning, he jumped up onto the desk and curled up on his pillow, pausing only to give his mistress a reproachful look intended to call her attention to the lateness of the hour. Dorothy was well aware of the hour, and, Peril notwithstanding, she really didn't want to be alone. There wasn't likely to be anything she could do about that, though, not without intruding on someone else's evening... and they'd had enough disruptions in their lives lately. She undressed slowly, gave Peril a last absent pat, shut off the lights, and climbed into bed. Five minutes later, she was still staring into the darkness of the room when her doorchime beeped. "Yes?" she asked softly. The door hissed open, corridor lights throwing a parallelogram of night-red on the floor and silhouetting a slim, pajama-clad figure in the doorway. "Dorothy?" said Miki Kaoru quietly. "Can I come in?" "All right," she said. He entered, and the door shut behind him, darkening the room again. Miki made his way across the room by memory - all the single staterooms on the Valiant were the same - and sat down on the edge of the bunk. "Utena called," he murmured. "She said you looked upset. Would you like to talk about it?" "No," Dorothy replied. Miki accepted that without demur. He ran a hand across the bedspread, found her hand, and held it gently. "Is there anything I can do to help?" he asked. Dorothy was silent for a moment, then shifted a bit to make room. "Just stay with me," she said. "I can do that," he said with a smile in his voice. Once they were arranged, Dorothy said quietly, "Are Kaitlyn and Juri upset? I didn't want... " She trailed off. Miki kissed her forehead softly. "No," he said. "Not at all. They understand. Whatever happened to you tonight, we all know it can't have been easy." Dorothy said nothing for a long moment, and Miki wondered if she'd gone to sleep already. Then she stirred, moved a little closer, gave him a single kiss, and said, "Good night, Miki." Miki smiled. "Good night, Dorothy," he said. SUNDAY, AUGUST 23, 2409 IPS VALIANT DEEP SPACE Miki woke to find himself alone, which didn't surprise him particularly. He got out of bed, yawned, stretched, worked a bit of a kink out of his elbow, then went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face before padding out into the world. He found Dorothy in the "dojo hold", as he'd expected. She was wearing a karate gi and going through a workout. Here was an instance in which Dorothy's near-perfect biomimicry failed. A person performing the vigorous kata Dorothy was performing, with that kind of speed and force, would have been sweating. Miki sat down against the wall next to the door, leaned back, and watched her work, admiring the precision of her technique, the way she carried herself, and (for Miki had learned always to be honest with himself about these things) what she had to carry. She finished a particularly furious kata, stood absolutely still for a moment at its end, and then squared herself up and bowed to the place where Kanna would have been, had Dorothy still been a student. Then she turned, saw Miki sitting there, and smiled just a bit as she crossed to him. "Are you feeling better this morning?" he asked as he got to his feet. "Somewhat," Dorothy replied. "I'm at least more optimistic. R.D may change her mind at some point... and until then, it's best if she has her space." She looked a little wistful. "At least she's left Kane's World. That should do her good." Miki nodded. "That's probably true," he said. "I can't imagine leaving Kane's World ever being -bad- for anyone, anyway," he added wryly as they left the dojo. "Thank you for staying with me last night," Dorothy said. Miki smiled. "My pleasure," he said. "Anytime." Dorothy gave him a speculative look. "Are you sure about that?" she inquired with a slight ironic smile. Miki nodded again, grinning. "I may need a little more advance notice," he said, "but... " He flipped a hand. "We're still working on the details." Dorothy shook her head with a rather shy smile and a hint of a blush over the bridge of her nose. "I don't know how you do it," she chuckled. "I'm not entirely sure myself," Miki replied, "but I'm not complaining." They had just reached the turbolift when the PA system beeped and Utena's voice said, "Would everybody please make your way to the lunchroom? It's time for the wrapup meeting." Dorothy and Miki looked at each other - neither particularly well-dressed, with him in his rumpled pajamas and she in her gi - shrugged and headed for the lunchroom. "OK, everybody," said Utena. "I'm not gonna stand up here and talk all day. We all know it's been a hell of a hard summer. A lot didn't go according to plan. But we made it through, and I want to thank you all for sticking with it. I wouldn't have blamed you for bowing out in New Avalon back in July. "Anyway, it's all over now. This is the first time one of our tours has ended like this, out on the road instead of back on home turf in New Avalon or Nekomikoka. I'm a bit at a loss. I mean, -I'm- headed back to New Avalon... so I guess you'd all better tell me where you want to end up so I can get you there." Most of the ship's company declared their intention to go back to Tomodachi. The school year was coming up, after all, and most of the ship's company were students. Kaitlyn startled the room, except for those few she'd discussed the matter with beforehand, by announcing that she wasn't going back to Tomodachi for the fall, or the Nekomi Institute of Technology ever. The murmurs quieted somewhat when she smiled and added that instead she was going to be doing some special work for Sumire Kanzaki, and that she was very much looking forward to it. "I n-n-need a v-vacation after my vac-c-vacation," she quipped, drawing a laugh from the room. "Wait a second," said Utena, in the tone of a person who has just realized something. "You're going back to Ishiyama, Anthy and I are going back out with Challenger... who's going to look after the house? Mr. Haineley has to get back to work." Juri smiled. "Miki and I will take care of that." "Remind Mr. Haineley to give you my notes on caring for the roses before he leaves, Miki," said Anthy with a smile. Miki nodded. "Of course." "Well, hell," said Wakaba. "Saionji, are you going to Ishiyama with Kate?" Saionji and Kaitlyn both shook their heads. "He's a j-journeyman," Kate said. "It's ab-bout time he g-got in some t-time on his own. B-besides," she added with a grin, "I'll h-h-have my h-hands full with Juni and J-Jean." Redheaded Jean Grey met this with a smile of her own. "Hopefully I'll be out of your hair before too much longer," she said. "OK, so I don't have to go drop out of all my fall classes, then," said Wakaba. "No," said Saionji. "And neither do I." "Good. You're far enough behind as it is," Wakaba observed, elbowing him gently. "I will go back to New Avalon with you," said Koriand'r with her usual cheerful smile. "I am sure there are malefactors whom Mr. Rogers wishes me to school." Dr. Aaron Ajlond-Mui, the ship's medical officer, nodded from where he stood leaning against the bulkhead next to the snack machines. "I may as well get back to work as well," he said with a mild smile. "Business has been remarkably bad this year. You're a healthy bunch, and when one of you does manage to get injured... " He turned the grin to Dorothy and shrugged philosophically. "It's someone my skills don't extend to. I must just not be lucky." The laugh that drew made Utena smile. The doctor may not have had a lot to do in the second half of the tour, but he'd certainly done a better job of connecting with his shipmates and becoming part of the crew. There had been a time when she'd seriously considered asking him to step aside, but now she'd be sorry to see him go... and picking a medical officer for next year was going to be tricky. "You can just drop me wherever," Azalynn said cheerfully. "Liza will meet me." "Oh, you're going to cruise with her for a while?" Shiori asked. Azalynn grinned. "Since Kate won't be needing me for a little while," she said with a wink in the bandleader's direction, "I figured I'd take the opportunity." Shiori returned the grin. "That's nice. Little quality time," she said, arching her eyebrows. Azalynn giggled, nodding. Toward the back of the room, a dark-haired figure raised a hesitant hand and asked, "... What about me?" Utena looked momentarily at a loss. "Uh... well. Gee, Carmela. I don't know. It never occurred to me that with Dad out of action, your fate after the tour was kind of... up in the air. I guess you'd better come back to New Avalon with me and we'll... figure something out. I'm sure Dad left a file on you for Mr. Rogers." Carmela nodded. "If he'd rather leave it 'til Dad gets back, you can come with me on Challenger," Utena went on. "I don't have a problem with that at all." "Thank you, Captain," said Carmela. "I appreciate that." "OK. Is that everybody? All right then. Out to Ishiyama, then to Tomodachi, and then those of us who are left will limp to New Avalon. And before anyone asks, no, of course I'm not nervous about it at all!" Laughter, and then the ship's company broke up to filter back to their rooms and get their things packed. The Valiant had the feel of a summer camp on the last day as she put in at Ishiyama Station one last time. Those disembarking were hugged and fussed over and entreated to keep in touch. Those remaining aboard were assured that this would be so and reminded that communication channels worked both ways. The concourse of the station had a festive but subdued air, like the last day of a carnival. At one end of the concourse, Kaitlyn stood with a large tiger and a small pile of luggage, bidding farewell to her only-recently-plural lovers. "We don't seem to be having very good luck so far, do we?" Juri mused with a wry smile. "An unforeseen complication of our new... formation." Miki nodded. "One more person's life to try to sort things around," he said. Kaitlyn shrugged with a smile. "Well, we knew it wouldn't always be simple," she said. "I'll come in and visit when I can." "And we'll be out for fall break," Juri replied. "You just make sure Sumire keeps you busy enough that you don't wander off." Kate laughed. "Not much chance of -that-," she said wryly. "Oh - that reminds me. I need you to look after something for me while I'm gone." "Besides the house?" Miki asked with a smile. "Yes, b-besides the house," Kate replied with an indulgent grin. She rummaged around in her duffel bag for a moment, then removed an item and handed it to Juri. "You'll see he isn't lonely, won't you?" she said. Juri looked a trifle incongruous holding a tattered, threadbare, handmade stuffed animal, but it didn't seem to bother her. Rather, her expression, not a hard one to begin with, softened further as she found herself entrusted with Seven. She cast a smiling glance at Miki, whom she knew was the other "he" in the equation, and then gave Kaitlyn the kind of hug and kiss that the brown-haired bandleader wished would never have to end. "I'll do my best," Juri said huskily, and then she released Kate and let Miki have his turn seeing her off. Over at the other end of the concourse, while that was going on, Anne Cross was taking stock of her small store of possessions and taking her own leave of a shipmate. "Well, uh... " she said, feeling a bit awkward. "Bye, Carmela. I'll... " She hesitated, surprised that the words came to mind, and even more that they were true. "I'll miss you," she finally offered with a crooked smile. Carmela Sunderland smiled in return. "Thank you," she said quietly. "That... means a lot. But don't worry," she added, brightening a bit. "I'm sure you'll be seeing me again. And besides, you'll have Jean with you here. The Consortium's work can go on." Juniper and Jean both laughed at that. "I'll do my best," Jean promised with mock solemnity. "Good luck meeting with Mr. Rogers," Anne told Carmela. "I don't know much about him, but Kaitlyn-sensei says he's tough but very fair." Carmela nodded. "I think at worst I'll have to wait for a final decision until the Chief comes back... but hopefully that won't take too long, even if it comes to it," she said. "I'll survive. If you need anything, Headquarters should know where to reach me, either way." She grinned. "We dangerous blips have to stick together, you know." "Be careful," said Anne. "You're the only person I know who they want worse than me." "You look after yourself as well," replied Carmela. "You're safer here than anywhere I can think of but perhaps New Avalon, but where the Hunters are concerned, 'safer' is a very relative thing." Juni nodded, her solemnity not so mock as Jean's had been. For a moment, the two telepaths stood looking at each other, both feeling a bit awkward. They'd made great strides in the weeks since Sunderland had been a fully qualified upholder of a system Anne despised, but now that the moment had come, neither was really sure that they'd come far enough for an embrace to be appropriate. Eventually Carmela gave a humorously self-deprecating smile and split the difference, offering her hand to be shaken. "See you around, Anne," she said with a laugh, and then she left the concourse. There was one other goodbye Anne wanted to make, and she left Jean with the bags long enough to go and make it. She might have hesitated to hug Carmela Sunderland, but she had no such reservations about Kyouichi Saionji. "You look after yourself, sempai," she told him, and then jokingly added, "I'm not convinced you're ready to be allowed out on your own like this." Saionji smiled one of his rare open smiles. "I'm not either, Juni-chan," he said. "I'll have to stick close to Wakaba so she can keep me out of trouble." Anne looked dubious. "Oh, sure," she said. "That'll work." Wakaba laughed roundly at this. "You think I'm a bad influence, huh, Juni?" she asked, putting an arm around Saionji. "You're probably right. I just can't help but lead him astray," she added with a wink that had them all laughing. "Well, try not to get in -too- much trouble," said Anne. "See you next month." "Bye," said Wakaba. "Enjoy Ishiyama!" "And stay out of trouble yourself!" Saionji called after Anne as she trotted off toward the waiting surface shuttle. She half-turned and waved, grinning broadly. Wakaba chuckled, watching her go, then turned to Saionji. "I can't get over how resilient that kid is," she said. "She's learning from the best," Saionji replied soberly. Wakaba nodded. "Yeah. I suppose she is. And what a difference it's made to her." Then she grinned and nudged him with an elbow. "Think she'll hit journeyman before you make master?" "Almost certainly," Saionji replied; and then again, as they walked back toward the Valiant's docking gate, more thoughtfully, "Almost certainly." VALKYRIE HALL ASGARD Gunnr Brynjelfr returned to her quarters, dragging just a bit. It'd been a long week. Hell, it'd been a long month. A Class A alert meant, among other things, increased patrols along the highways leading out of Asgard to the other realms. Some of those, like the road to Alfheim, were easy to patrol. Others, like Highway 66 to Niflheim via Jotunheim, were a serious pain in the ass. Gunnr and her issue Harley had just finished a patrol of 66. It had taken three days, and even in August, it was friggin' cold in Niflheim. She was bone-tired, saddle-sore, and still chilly as she entered her hotel-room-like apartment, dumped her helmet and armor on her bed, and headed for the shower. She came out half an hour later, filling the apartment temporarily with steam when she opened the bathroom door, and fixed herself a large mug of cocoa in her kitchenette before falling gratefully into her La-Z-Boy. After a shower like that, with her fuzziest terrycloth bathrobe on and a big mug of cocoa, she almost felt elven again. She picked up the remote control, switched on her TV, and found to her delight that Channel 17 was showing the episode of "Mythbusters" that featured Jamie and Adam replicating the famous "Captain James Kirk makes cannon on primitive planet" legend. Gunnr sat back, sipped her cocoa, and laughed as Adam made a realistic Gorn dummy out of a science-supply skeleton and a lot of ballistics gel while Jamie called every supply house in Avalon County looking for bamboo of suitable diameter. It wasn't until the middle commercial, when she went to the kitchen to freshen her cocoa with a little peppermint schnapps, that Gunnr noticed she had mail. There was a largish package sitting on the little table next to the door, wrapped up in brown paper. "Hello, what's this?" Gunnr mused aloud as she set her cocoa down and picked up the package. At first she thought it might be a book, but unwrapping it showed that it was a slightly beat-up but nicely made wooden box. She sat down on her bed, put the box down next to her, examined the metal plate on top, concluded that she couldn't read it, and opened the box. Then she just sat there and stared at its contents for a long few minutes, the television forgotten. With a slightly trembling hand, she removed the Nagant from the box and turned it over, examining it from both sides. Then she noticed the folded note which had been tucked underneath it in its satin bed. Dear Gunnr (it read in a somewhat hurried hand), Packing the box took so long I don't have time to write a long note. Something to remember me by. It's not much but I hope you like it. Miss you but OK. Hope you're well. Love, Anne Gunnr read the note twice, then sniffed hard and tucked it away along the side of the wooden box, against the pad. She regarded the Nagant through misty eyes, then put it away, carefully set the box on her bedside stand, and wiped her eyes. She got up slowly, collected her cocoa again, and sat back down in the armchair to watch the rest of the show. She was too tired to do it safely right now, but tomorrow she'd take the revolver to her shop, give it a complete going-over, and start getting acquainted with it if it checked out safe to shoot. She was sure it would. Anne wouldn't send her a gun that didn't work; she knew what they were for. Gunnr had taught her that herself. How did she know I've always wanted a Nagant? she wondered with a fond and slightly wistful smile as she watched Adam and Jamie blast their simulated Gorn into submission. MONDAY, AUGUST 24, 2409 TOMODACHI If the Valiant had resembled a summer camp on the last day at Ishiyama, she reminded observers more of a train at the end of the line when she docked at the Chiisai Tomodachi ring station the next day. Almost everyone disembarked there, most not to return until the next cruise. Utena and Anthy went down to the planet too, to thank Arthur Haineley for looking after their home and see to a few last-minute arrangements. When they'd originally left in June, they hadn't expected not to be back in August, so they took the opportunity of the stopover to drop off a few summer things they didn't need, pick up a few other things they thought they would, and spend a night in their own bed before embarking on the next phase of their great adventure. For that one night, things were almost normal at the end of Wildwood Road. Kate wasn't there, and that was strange, but not unprecedented, since she did a fair bit of traveling. Corwin wasn't there, but then, he didn't live there anyway. The Duelists and friends settled back into their homes, acquainting themselves with the slightly shocking idea that -classes- started in a few days. Dorothy was looking forward to it - not the classes themselves so much as the resumption of the rest of student life. They had a good new group coming into the NIT Motor Club this year. Several of the incoming freshmen had been associated with the club the previous year as part of a senior frontiers program at nearby Beiwiru District High School, and Dorothy, as one of the officers, was pleased to anticipate welcoming them properly to the club. The first order of business there would be to re-tune her Super Seven. Its suspension would have to be completely adjusted to optimize it for her new mass, and while she was making widespread changes anyway, she might as well try some new tricks she'd read about over the summer... She lay on the grassy hill behind her home at 1138 Wildwood Road. Since it wasn't at the end of the road like 1140, 1138 didn't have a gigantic back yard sprawling off into the edge-of-town woods like 1140 did, but it did reach a fair way straight back from the road and up the ridge. From up here, Dorothy could see over the houses on Wildwood Road and down the gentle slope of the borough of Beiwiru to the NIT campus itself. Right now Tomodachi's sun was sinking redly behind the gleaming silver dome of the NIT gym, spreading its last rays over Beiwiru. Lying back against her favorite rock with Peril curled up on her stomach, Dorothy traced the streets of Beiwiru and the campus with her eyes, already picturing the test runs she would make to wring out her Super Seven. Azalynn suddenly appeared from the woods, hopping up onto the top of the rock, and looked down at Dorothy, upside-down from her point of view. "Hey," she said, her golden eyes glinting in the orange light of sunset. She'd been out hiking in the woods behind 1140; there were leaves stuck in her wiry silver hair and she had a canteen slung at her hip, which she now opened and took a swig from. "Hey," Dorothy replied. "You bummed?" the Dantrovian asked. "You've been awful quiet since Kane's World." Dorothy considered the question. She had been "bummed", and on some level she supposed she still was. The whole unresolved mess with the sister she hadn't known she had still hurt, and she didn't expect it to stop hurting anytime soon. The way the fates had fractured her peer group this fall also bothered her more than she would have expected. She missed Kate and Serge and Juni already; she missed Corwin; she was going to miss Azalynn as well. She was even a bit upset that Mia Ausa wasn't coming back to Hotohori University this year. The half-Minbari sorceress had sent word that she was instead going to Tenjou Academy's newly-reopened university division, to further her studies of the mystic arts under Master Mage Clef and his faculty. Dorothy could see why Mia had jumped at such an opportunity, and didn't grudge her the wonderful and valuable experience she was sure to have, but it was still upsetting that she wasn't coming back after everything else that had happened. She told her housemate all this with her usual even calm, and Azalynn thought it all over before responding. "Well, look at it this way. Jess will be back from Salusia in a couple of days, and Mia's going to visit from Cephiro most weekends, right? You won't be in classes together anymore, that's true, but at least she'll still be around for free time. Anyway, you don't have to be lonely. I won't be here, but Moose is still right downstairs, and Miki's only next door." Dorothy nodded. Azalynn knew about the conversation she'd had with Miki just before Utena's "wrapup" meeting on the Valiant. Dorothy didn't know that for an absolute fact, but accepted it as an axiom. Azalynn always knew about the affairs of her friends' hearts somehow. That didn't bother any of them, particularly. It just seemed right that she -should- know, and anyway, no one could be more discreet about such things. "I'm not terribly upset," Dorothy said. "I didn't mean to give you that impression. Just a touch... melancholy. And once the school year starts and I have things to do, it will pass." Dorothy scratched Peril behind the ears, listened to him purr, and smiled in the greying twilight as the last of the sun vanished behind the NIT gym. "It's good to be alive, Azalynn," she said. "I'll drink to that," Azalynn replied with a grin, and raised her canteen in salute. /* Juno Reactor "Samurai" _Beyond the Infinite_ */ Eyrie Productions, Unlimited presented UNDOCUMENTED FEATURES FUTURE IMPERFECT - Symphony of the Sword No. 4 - Sixth Movement: Second Chances The Cast (in order of appearance) Kaitlyn Hutchins Shiori Takatsuki The Hon. J. Maurice MacEchearn IV R. Dorothy Wayneright Amanda Elektra Dessler Devlin E.D. Carter Anne Cross Tiny Robo Lesser Mazinger Sergei R.D Utena Tenjou Anthy Tenjou Terence McGinnis Klaang varKalaan B'Elanna Torres Skuld Ravenhair Li Kohran J Sumire Kanzaki Koriand'r of Tamaran Juri Arisugawa Wakaba Shinohara Michie Hamato Kyouichi Saionji Donald E. Griffin Kozue Kaoru Miki Kaoru Azalynn dv'Ir Natashkan Benjamin D. Hutchins Maria Tachibana Corwin Ravenhair Lenneth Winternight Carmela Sunderland Jack Ryder Peril Jean Grey Aaron Ajlond-Mui Gunnr Brynjelfr Referee Benjamin D. Hutchins Encore Booking Agent Geoff Depew Title suggested by Kelly St. Clair With the ever-suspicious help of The Usual Suspects now including newly arrested suspects Chad Collier Dave Menard Chris Pinard "I Think I Like It" by John English (this version is the Boston rewrite) "Nowhere Fast" by Jim Steinman "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" by Neil Young "Mythbusters" is a real show on the Discovery Channel The Symphony will return E P U (colour) 2003