Ranma 1/2 Fan Fiction / Sailor Moon Fan Fiction ❯ A New Future 2 - First Blood ❯ Checkmate ( Chapter 37 )

This was originally published by me under the name Anduril at Anime Addventures, with the only changes being a few corrections in spelling, punctuation and the occasional word choice to make things clearer. If you like the beginning of my story but think I've gone off the rails, or have your own ideas for a great branch-off, or think I'm taking too long to update and want to continue the story yourself, come to Anime Addventures and join in the fun!

I claim no ownership rights to any of the works of Rumiko Takahashi, Naoko Takeuchi, or anything in the GURPS Ogre and GURPS Tales of the Solar Patrol settings published by Steve Jackson Games. Everything else is mine.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

No ruler should put troops into the field merely to gratify his own spleen; no general should fight a battle simply out of pique. If it is to your advantage, make a forward move; if not, stay where you are.

Anger may in time change to gladness; vexation may be succeeded by content. But a kingdom that has once been destroyed can never come again into being; nor can the dead ever be brought back to life.

— The Art of War, Sun Tzu

/oOo\

Legionnaires finally stopped spilling out of the portal into the chaos that had engulfed the Plaza of Triumph. The unwounded and lightly wounded formed ranks on hastily cleared lawn to one side, uncaring of which centuries they belonged to in the need to simply get them out of the way. Ambulances swept down to load up with the seriously wounded that had managed to make it through, mostly under their own power, some supported or even carried by their comrades. As quickly as the vehicles landed, they were filled and lifted off through airspace cleared by the police for the nearest hospitals.

Still standing on the podium, Verres idly speculated for a moment what it would be like to use flyers for combat. But the energy fields that powered them only extended so far and could fluctuate without overlapping coverage, and the crystals that powered them were vulnerable to at least temporary destruction (as the new enemy was proving), so using them for anything but rear echelon support was ... unwise.

Enough, Aulus, the legate thought, forcing himself to focus on the repeater display showing the final moments of the losing battle at the beachhead, the only large body of legionnaires left still gathered around the portal after Manilius Otho decided sending any more through would risk them still being inside the tunnel when the portal went down, as the enemy magical girls threw everything they had at the last anchoring pillar. Verres was a little surprised that he'd actually relaxed enough to allow his mind to wander, but the Manilius' decision to evacuate as many men as possible before the portal collapsed had gone a long way to relieving Verres' worries, at least about his family's future — now he had someone else to blame for the lost battle, and the “guilty” party would at worst be an enemy prisoner and at best dead. Either way, he wouldn't be around to personally defend himself. His father would be, of course, and it would be obvious to anyone with any real military experience that Manilius Otho had done as well as could be expected. But the Manilii had enemies in the Senate and Verres figured that with their help his family could throw up enough confusion to survive.

Sorry, Manilius, he thought as he watched the symbol on the repeater display for the last column anchoring the portal flicker and vanish. You're a good man, but family comes —

When a heartsick and worried Verres had thought that the Confederacy had grown arrogant, he had been more right than he knew. When the Confederacy's mage-techs had first learned how to create stable portals between dimensions, they had placed those portals far from any urban center out of respect for the energies inherent in their creation and operation. But years had turned into decades into centuries, no portal had ever failed, and they had become vital to the economy of the constantly expanding cross-time empire. In time, the portals had been moved to the capitol even as the reasons for their initial placement were first disregarded and then almost forgotten by all but a few mage-techs. In the top-heavy, centralized state of the Alarna Confederacy, all roads truly led to Rome.

Now as the feedback caused by the collapsing portal smashed into the surviving terminus, a tiny star was born in the heart of The City and its millions.

The new star only survived for a fraction of a second, but that tiny slice of time was more than enough as the wavefront of abruptly superheated air smashed outward in all directions, annihilating all in its way for tens of miles — including the portals leading to every world in the empire. Even as the new star winked out of existence, leaving behind a vast, shallow, glassed, crackling-hot crater just as quickly cooled by inrushing water from the Tyrrhenian Sea (sending more massive clouds of steam into the atmosphere to join the steam, smoke and dust the initial event had thrown up), central cities on Earth after Earth shared Rome's fate as a chain reaction of collapsing portals swept through the Confederacy, even more destructive due to their larger sizes. Within a matter of seconds, the work of centuries was gone.

It would be more centuries before the Earth that had dominated worlds would again be united under a single government, and never again would its people seek to conquer across the dimensions.

/oOo\

Manilius sighed with relief as the shriek of the last shattering column broke off with its destruction, then sighed again as the portal flickered and vanished. Well, that's that. Now, to save as many of the ones that I wasn't able to get out as I can. Ignoring the legionnaires around him taking hands away from their ears, some rising to their feet, he turned his attention back to his Heads-Up Display, and the planned formation on three sides of the enemy aid station at the edge of the park he had been spelling out to the only centurion that wasn't a casualty before the scream of the breaking column had become too intense.

It was an ad hoc formation, of course. There was one century that was at about half strength — he still couldn't believe how much slaughter one warrior had inflicted before going down — and the remnant of the century he'd brought with him, but the rest were dribs and drabs that had managed to make their way to the portal from all over the battlefield. There were even some survivors from the smashed rearguard. (He fought off a stab of pain at the thought — the veteran that had taken an ignorant teenager full of book learning and turned him into a commander of men hadn't been one of them.)

“Lucius Helvius, make absolutely sure that these guards are in place,” he continued over the leadership communications net. On the HUD he highlighted men at each of the aid station corners then the ones between them, all inside the main ring of legionnaires. “The idea is to hold these people off long enough to talk to them, not force them into a headlong charge to save their wounded, so whatever else no reprisal killings. If that means those guards have to kill legionnaires to protect enemy wounded, so be it. If someone attacks those wounded and the guards don't kill him, I'll execute him myself before we surrender our arms. Make that clear to the troops, and let me know when you're ready.”

“At once, Tribune,” Helvius acknowledged, and the link broke.

As Manilius waited for Helvius to report back, he switched to a legionnaire vidcam facing the aid station across the park and watched the soon-to-be hostages. He hated involving noncombatants, especially ones that were apparently helping the occasional wounded legionnaire, but he had no choice. He'd lost track of the magical girl that could obliterate entire formations, and they didn't really need her now, anyway — the field that kept the enemy weapons from working properly was gone with the portal. If he simply waited in place sooner or later his men would simply be dead. He needed to prevent that, and that meant mixing the enemy's people in with his own and praying to God that these people weren't one of the cultures that would sacrifice its own without a thought.

/\

As Kasumi's nimble fingers manipulated thread and needle, her stitches as tight and neat as when she'd stretched the household finances by repairing her sisters' little accidents, she did her best to ignore that this time what she was stitching up was flesh rather than cloth. Finally, she stepped back with a sigh of relief. Done, and this one would live.

She had been certain when she'd finally stepped off the sidelines to force a place for herself on the battlefield that she'd known what to expect and could handle it. She'd been right on the second, but very, very wrong on the first. Intellectually, she'd understood the concept of triage: you don't have time or resources to try and help everyone, so separate patients out into groups of “it can wait,” “there's nothing we can do,” and “this one might live if we move fast enough.” What she hadn't realized was that “might” meant that she and her husband would have patient after patient die even as they fought to save her (and occasionally “him”).

But this young woman would live, and Kasumi stripped off her bloody surgeon's gloves and tossed them into the garbage. She grabbed a fresh pair before stepping over to the next table and the new patient her husband was examining, another legionnaire this time, they were getting more of them. Good, that meant that the fighting had dropped off enough that the number of seriously wounded Amazons was falling off. Maybe that meant the battle was almost over. Please, kami, let this be almost over!

“Here they come.”

Kasumi looked up at the calm, almost resigned statement from the pink-haired magical girl that the eldest Tendo had met the day before, sitting by a blanket-covered unconscious Sailor Saturn and holding her hand a few yards away at the edge of the group of low cots for the ones not wounded badly enough to need immediate help. Seeing the direction the teenager was looking, Kasumi shifted her gaze and froze. “Tofu!” she gasped, fear shooting through her.

Her husband looked up from his patient toward his wife, then followed her pointing hand and stiffened at the sight of the mass of legionnaires trotting toward them. He stepped away from the operating table and joined her, Sailor Chibi-Moon tucking her friend's hand back under the blanket before rising to join them. Silently, the three watched as the formation approached, the Senshi growing more and more tense, until she seemed to be shivering like a plucked bowstring. Kasumi herself was fighting to maintain her familiar calm, but though she wasn't trained in the Arts like her youngest sister, she refused to shame her family.

Then ten yards away the formation split, one half circling to the left and the other to the right around the canopies and the patients that had accumulated until they spilled out into the open air. Within minutes, the circle was complete with the enemy on three sides and the rubble of the first building destroyed by Saturn on the fourth, except for the occasional gap in the line — and soldiers that had stepped out of the formation and walked to the edges of the patients before turning away from those patients and those helping them to face the backs of their fellow legionnaires.

Beside Kasumi, Chibi-Moon relaxed, breathing out a relieved sigh. “Those are guards — and to protect us from them, not them from us. Good, we're hostages, but they're going to be civilized about it.”

Tofu nodded. “And that means we still have work to do. Come, love, back to work.”

“Right,” Kasumi agreed. As Chibi-Moon sat back down beside her friend and again clutched her hand, Kasumi took a deep breath and finished pulling on the fresh gloves while taking one more look around. Even as she rejoined her husband at the table with the wounded legionnaire, she saw an obviously nervous stretcher party come through a gap in the line of legionnaires. Yes, they were being civilized about it, which meant she and her husband would have plenty to do for some time, yet.

/\

Manilius stood just in front of the ranks of legionnaires and did his best not to rock on his heels with impatience. There'd been no immediate reaction to his soldiers' new position, except for some stretcher bearers shying off for a few minutes until some of the legionnaires had motioned them in through the gaps to the aid station. He did have to admit that their surprise at being let through was amusing, and their shock at being let back out to collect more even moreso, but that had been only temporarily diverting as he'd watched reinforcements arrive on the field — more of the “modern” male soldiers rather than the warrior women that had mangled his centuries so badly, spreading out to take up positions all around him. So he'd waited for a reaction from the enemy's leadership ... and waited. Sooner or later, someone had to come forward to accept the surrender that would end his career. He hadn't heard a shot fired, but from the way the enemy soldiers were staying well back from his men and forming firing lines, they were as well aware of their weapons' resumed effectiveness as he was. But no shots had been fired.

Finally, six individuals walked through the soldiers surrounding his men and toward him, two men and four women. Four of them he recognized from the views through his legionnaires' vidcams: the man in dark armor with a sword in its scabbard on his belt, the miniskirted woman with emerald hair and staff tipped with a heart-shaped setting for a large red jewel, and the miniskirted blonde with the long braid swinging behind her — all of their faces somehow hazy, as if he couldn't remember what they looked like from one moment to the next — had all been with the magical girls destroying the columns; the magical girl with short, dark hair and unusually long skirt (for a magical girl) had helped guard the portal. The older, unarmored man in a military uniform and the redheaded girl in a magical girl costume similar to the raven-haired girl's were new to him.

The six stopped just out of plumbata range and waited. Behind the six, several men with what he assumed were some sort of recording devices on their shoulders followed them, taking up positions out to the sides. Suppressing a sigh, Manilius started forward, two legionnaires accompanying him on each side. He was not looking forward to communicating the details of a surrender to someone with whom he didn't share a language. He strongly suspected it was going to look fairly hilarious — it had in previous invasions when the situation had been reversed, after all — and it was going to be recorded for posterity. He halted several yards away, and was considering which of the playactings he'd thought up would look least ridiculous, when the emerald-haired magical girl started speaking and his jaw dropped. He understood her! Okay, the accent was like nothing he'd ever heard, and from the occasional hesitations it wasn't a language she used much, but it was definitely Latin.

“So, what do you expect us to do with you?”

Manilius stiffened at the cold tone of the question. “I had hoped for an honorable surrender,” he said.

“And just what do you consider an honorable surrender?” she asked in the same frozen voice.

“Medical care for my wounded. Adequate housing, based on that of our guards. Adequate food, likewise. We may be used as physical labor, but not separated or sold as slaves. Executions only for attempts to escape or attacks on guards or civilians. Eventual exchange for prisoners my people take once they return.”

“There's a problem with that, Tribune,” she said, smiling tightly. “Your people aren't going to be back.”

“What? What did you do?” Manilius demanded, mind racing, trying to think of how the enemy of a world with almost no magic might have prevented a return. The Senate wouldn't accept a single repulse, would they?

“We did nothing,” she replied. She glanced over at one of the groups of men recording the meeting, then stepped closer. Lowering her voice, she continued, “I am the Senshi of Time. All of this world's futures are open to me, and in none of them does the Confederacy ever return.”

A time witch! And if she was as powerful as she claimed ... Manilius' thoughts flashed back over the battle he'd just lost, the way the magical girls had known exactly what needed to be done to block the portal while bringing it down, the way the Amazons had been perfectly positioned on each side of the initial annihilating blast. Sick to his core as he considered the perfect ambush his cohort had landed in, he fought for calm. Finally, voice strained, he said, “We never had a chance, did we?”

“No, you didn't,” the time witch replied. “I knew you were coming months before the first of your monsters showed up.”

Manilius froze. “Monsters?”

“Yes. Flying snakes with paralytic spit, walking rock piles with acid for blood that explode if they take too much damage, winged things with poison stingers — monsters. That last one really hurts, by the way.”

“But there weren't any portals before the one you just brought down!” the tribune protested.

She shrugged. “I imagine they got here the same way you did — one way drops, in the middle of noncombatant gatherings, and the monsters killed until we showed up to deal with them. All so your leaders could learn how we fought and wear us down, I suspect.

“At any rate, your people aren't coming back, and since I never was able to find the dimension you came from I can't send you home, and thanks to the monster attacks you aren't exactly popular here.”

Okay, the fact that she can describe some of our battle beasts means nothing — she's a time witch, after all, she could have watched their use in a now-vanished future. But even as he thought that, he remembered the revolt he'd been ordered to help put down on Greater Hawaii with extreme force, and the sick feeling in his stomach grew stronger. “I didn't know,” he whispered.

The emerald-haired woman glanced back toward the redheaded girl, who nodded. “Apparently, you're telling the truth,” the older woman said, turning back to Manilius. Stepping back and speaking louder, she continued, “Still, while you all aren't exactly prisoners and slavery is illegal here, neither are you simply free to leave. Where would you go? So for now, have your soldiers stack their arms, and we'll see to all our wounded. More than that can wait until later.”

“Very well. And to whom am I surrendering them?”

“Oh.” The woman blushed. “My apologies. My name is Sailor Pluto. The others are Sailor Moon, Prince Endymion, Vanguard, Hammer and General Hara.” She motioned to each as she named them. “ `General' is a military rank, roughly equivalent to one of your legates. He will be in charge of the soldiers taking your surrender and guarding your men. I imagine you have a formal ceremony for surrenders?” Manilius nodded, throat tight. “I think we can dispense with it, since I'm the only one here that knows both languages and this isn't exactly a surrender, anyway.”

“Very well.” Keeping his relief out of his voice, Manilius reached across his body, slowly drew his longsword, and stabbed it into the ground. Motioning for his guards to do the same, he said, “Let's get this over with so, as you said, we can care for the wounded.” The four legionnaires with him drew their gladii to follow their leader's example, and Manilius turned to return to his soldiers and tell them of their uncertain but at least continuing future.