--------------
26 April, 3478
--------------

The workmen sent down to clear the last two metres of rock were the
first to see the anomaly.  Ami had wanted to be with them, but the
workmen had pointed out, very politely, that she would be in the way.
Tense and angry, mostly with herself, she sat in the control room at the
head of the tunnel and listened as they worked.  Artemis and Minako
waited with her, carefully staying out of her way.

For a while there was only the screaming of drills and saws, and an
occasional clatter as another chunk of rock fell to the floor of the
tunnel.  Then they heard one of the drills whine to a halt.

"Mizuno-sama?" came the voice of one of the workmen.  "Are you there?"

"Yes," Ami replied instantly.  "What is it, borehead?"

"How long ago was that bore working down here?"

Ami raised her eyebrows.  "About two days ago," she said.  "Why?  Is the
tunnel still too hot?"

"Well ... no."  The man sounded puzzled.  "That's the thing.  It isn't
hot at all.  It's cold."

"Cold?" she answered, not certain she had heard correctly.  "How cold?"

"You know when you open a freezer and touch the ice inside, and your
finger sticks to it?  That cold.  If it weren't for these special suits
of yours, we'd be freezing."

The other two men chimed in, adding their agreement.  Ami frowned in
thought.  The insulating suits had been made to keep heat out, not in,
but they worked either way.  Still, what could explain the heat loss?
The anomaly could scarcely be acting as a heat sink; it would have
warmed to the temperature of the surrounding rock millennia before.

Briefly, she considered pulling the men out, and going down to check
herself.  It would be the prudent thing to do.  But they were supposed
to stop just short of the anomaly itself anyway; Ami was to handle the
actual penetration herself.  And if they were nearly finished ...

"How much further do you have to go?" she asked at last.  "Is it too
cold to continue?  I could send down a heating unit, but it would take a
while to get there."

She heard a hurried discussion between the men.  "Another twenty minutes
should do it," came the reply.  "We can manage that long."

"All right.  Let me know if anything changes."

The drills started up again.  Ami sat back, still frowning.  She turned
on the Mercury computer and tinkered around with it for a while, trying
to come up with a model that would explain the temperature drop.  It was
a pity that she hadn't sent an instrument package down with the workmen;
but the drills would have thrown off the readings, so she hadn't
bothered.

"What could be causing that?" asked Minako softly after a little.

"It's too soon to tell," she answered absently.  "There could be a
pocket of ice in the rock ..."  She trailed off dubiously.  "Or it may
not be a natural phenomenon," she admitted.

"Something wrong?" said another voice behind her.

She looked around, to see Princess Usagi and Diana coming in.  "Not
wrong, exactly," she said, frustrated.  She explained what was
happening.  "I was expecting some unusual physical properties," she
finished.  "I noticed that the anomaly absorbed most kinds of energy,
last year.  But drawing in ambient heat on this scale ... I never
expected anything like this."

"Is it dangerous?" insisted Minako.  There was no sign of her usual
spacey personality; she was all business now, totally focused.

Ami gave a helpless shrug.  "I don't see how it could be," she said.
"Their insulating suits should protect them from --"

The sound of drills over the commlink whined down to a halt again.
"Control room, say again?" queried one of the workmen.

Ami blinked.  "What was that?" she said into the commlink.  "We didn't
say anything to you."

There was a pause.  "I thought I heard your voice," the workman said.
"It sounded like --"

There was a sudden burst of static from the commlink.

"Borehead, what did you say?" called Ami.

The workman did not answer.

"Hello?"  Ami checked the commlink.  "There's no carrier signal," she
said, frowning.  "It's as if they just disap--"

The sound came back with a crackle, making them all jump.  "--trol room,
are you there?" called the workman.

Ami shot a look at Minako -- puzzled, and beginning to be a little
worried.  "Borehead, we hear you," she said.  "Are you receiving me?"

"Received that," the man replied, sounding relieved.  "We're getting
some odd signals down here --"  He broke off.  "There it is again," he
said, suddenly agitated.  "A funny sound.  Like an echo ..."

There was another short burst of static.

"Say again?" said the workman.

"Borehead, we didn't say anything," said Ami.

"Say again?"

"Borehead, do you read me?"  Ami glanced around at Minako again, then
back to her console.  She was definitely looking worried now.

"Get them out," said Minako.

More static on the commlink.  Then: "Say again?"

"It could just be the commlink," said Usagi tentatively.

"Get them out," Minako repeated.

Ami hesitated.  "Maybe you're right," she said reluctantly.  She tapped
at the controls.  "Borehead, abort the operation," she ordered.  "Return
to the surface.  Do you read me?"

There was a long silence.  Then there was another sharp burst of static,
and they heard a voice: a young child's voice, reciting.  It counted
from one to ten, then started over again.  In the middle of the third
repetition, the static returned once more and there was silence.

"Interference," suggested Artemis nervously.

"No," Ami said, checking her instruments.  "No, that came down there."

There was a faint hiss from the speakers.  A voice said, "Borehead."  It
was fuzzy, distorted, but it was clearly Ami's voice.  "Borehead," it
repeated.

They exchanged glances.

Suddenly, shockingly, the speakers burst into a roar of sound, an
earsplitting tearing cacophony.  All of them jumped, and Usagi cried out
in surprise.  Then, one by one, they recognised the sound.

It was the drills at work again.

"They're going on," whispered Ami.

"Usagi!" rapped Minako.  "Change.  We're going down."

The princess stared at her for a moment, open-mouthed.  Then she pulled
out her henshin stick and cried out, "Moon cosmic power, make-up!"  The
lights of transformation began to swirl around her.

Minako did not bother with her henshin stick.  She narrowed her eyes in
concentration, and a wave of colour washed over her.  Moments later,
Sailor Venus stood in her place.

"Minako," said Ami.  "You can't take Usagi!  She's the princess --"

"She's also a Senshi," said Venus coldly, "and I want you to stay up
here for now.  Keep trying to contact those men.  See if any of the
other Senshi are around, and get ready to call them if I give the word."

Usagi was not in her Eternal form, Ami suddenly realised.  She had only
become Super Sailor Moon.  None of the other Senshi had ever gained an
Eternal transformation; but Usagi had reached hers long ago.  Of course,
wings would be inconvenient in the tunnel ...

"Mina-chan," she tried again, "don't you think you're overreacting?"

Venus did not spare her a glance.  "No," she replied calmly.  "You'd
better contact the Queen as wel--"

Over the commlink, the sounds of the drills suddenly rose to a scream.
They heard a shout of surprise -- and then a shriek of pain.  Somebody
cried out a question, barely audible.  There was a strange whining
sound.  Then one voice cut across the noise.

"I ... I broke through into something ..." the man gabbled.  "It felt
like ... I don't know what it felt like ..."  His voice became a wail.
"I can't feel my hand!"

There was a new surge of static over the link.  For an instant it
cleared and they heard the other men, crying out in shock and fear.
Then the static was back, smothering all other sound.

"No," Ami whispered.  "They were supposed to stop short of the anomaly.
They weren't supposed to go all the way ..."

"You ready, Usagi?" said Venus calmly.

"Yes," said Sailor Moon.

"Then let's go.  Grab that first-aid kit."  Venus began to unseal the
door that led out into the bay where the tunnel began.  Moon snatched
the first-aid kit from its wall mount, and a pair of torches; then, as
an afterthought, she bent down and picked up one of the satchels of
instruments that Ami had prepared.

[She doesn't want me to go,] Ami thought with a shock.  [She wants me to
stay at the controls.]  It was a disturbing thought.  Did Venus only
think of her as a scientist?  Had Ami become that far removed from her
duties as a Senshi, over the years?

The door swung open.  A faint chill seemed to enter the control room;
but that, surely, was only imagination.  Venus did not hesitate; she ran
out into the bay, closely followed by Moon.  Moments later, the two
entered the mouth of the tunnel and were lost to view.

                                --**--

The minutes passed.  Ami contacted Rei and briefed her on what was
happening, asking her to stand by in case she was needed.  By the time
she was finished, her computer showed that the rescue party had almost
reached their target.  The link to the borehead was completely dead now,
except for a faint hiss that rose and fell regularly.

"You're getting near the bottom," she told Venus.  "Another five hundred
metres."

"Roger," Venus replied.  "It's hard to make any speed in this tunnel.
The walls and floor are covered with this fine powder, but underneath
that it's very smooth.  Not much traction."

"Yes, I know.  The suits those men are wearing have special boots that
help, but they wouldn't fit a Senshi uniform.  All the same --"

The door opened suddenly, and she looked up, expecting to see Rei.
Instead, to her surprise, Sailor Pluto came in.  "Setsuna?" she said,
startled.

The Senshi of Time looked as if she had been running.  "I thought I felt
... something," she said.  "I couldn't tell what, but --"

Artemis began to explain what was happening.  Ami listened for a few
moments; but then her communicator beeped again.  She tapped it quickly.
"Yes?" she said.

"It's me," came Venus' voice.  The little screen remained blank; it was
too dark in the tunnel to pick up her face.  "We've met the workmen;
they were heading up on foot.  One of them --"  She broke off for a
moment, then said, "The one who was hurt.  His hand.  I've never seen
anything like it."

"What?"

"His glove was torn off.  Shredded.  His hand -- he -- it's like a burn,
but more than that.  It's ... blurred, it's as if -- as if something's
taken his whole forearm and ... twisted it somehow, distorted it --"
Venus sounded sick.  "It hardly looks like a hand any more ..."

"Minako-chan --" Ami began.

"No," Venus said quickly.  "It's all right.  I'm all right now."  They
heard her take a deep breath.  "We're heading up.  I'm carrying the man
who was hurt.  Usagi is bringing up the rear, in case ... you know.  In
case anything happens."

"I'll come down," Ami said.  "You should have taken me in the first
place.  I'm a doctor --"

"How well could you have treated him when he's sealed in an insulating
suit?" pointed out Venus.  "We'll be back at the surface in another ten
minutes anyway."

Ami forbore to mention that ten minutes could mean life or death.  Venus
knew that.  But Venus, like all the other Senshi, had had a fair bit of
paramedical training.  If she didn't think there was anything Ami could
have done for the man ...

Instead she asked, "Is he still alive?"

"Yes.  I think so.  He's unconscious, anyway.  He -- where I can touch
it, his skin feels cold.  Clammy.  But he's breathing."  Venus' voice
dropped to a near-whisper.  "They were right.  It was icy down there.
We didn't get right down to the bottom, we met them some way up, but
even there it was freezing."

Ami did not answer immediately.  At last she said, "Hurry back."

"We are," Venus said promptly.  "It's easier, going up."  After a moment
she added, "You'd better have an ambulance standing by."

"I've called one," Ami replied.  "It'll be here by the time you arrive."

"This shouldn't be happening," said Pluto softly.  "I didn't foresee
this."

Ami looked up at her quickly, then bent her head to her communicator
once more.  "Usagi, how are you doing?" she asked.  "Are the other two
men all right?

There was no answer.

Ami stiffened, and glanced back at Pluto once more.  "Usagi?  Sailor
Moon, do you hear me?  Are you --"

"I hear you."

She let out a breath.  "What's wrong?  Why didn't you -- are the other
two men all right?"

For a moment, Moon did not reply.  Then she said, "I'm not with them.  I
sent them on ahead."

"You --"  Ami looked stunned.  "Why?  What did you --"  She broke off
suddenly, and checked the tracking monitor on her computer.  "Princess,
no!"

"I'm almost at the bottom now, I think.  It's very cold, but I can stand
it."

"Usagi, no!" Ami shouted.  "You mustn't!  It's too dangerous --"

"Ami-chan," Moon interrupted her.  "Somebody must.  We have to know
what's down here.  And I'm not a kid any more, remember?"  For a moment
there was amusement in her voice.  Then she went on, "I have one of your
instrument packs, too.  You'll be able to get some decent readings."

Before Ami could respond, she added, "You know I'm right."

For what seemed like a long time, Ami did not reply.  At last she said,
"It's not as though I have a choice, is it?"  She sighed.  "Be as quick
as you can, then.  And be careful, Usagi.  When you get back up here,
you know your mother is going to have a few words with you about this."

Moon laughed.  "I know."

The communicator fell silent.  Ami looked around to Artemis and Pluto,
silently asking for suggestions.  After a moment, Artemis said, "You
could try teleporting down to help, if anything does go wrong."

Pluto shook her head.  Ami replied quietly, "No.  I thought of that; but
the gravimetric distortion from the anomaly makes it impossible to get
near.  Even if it weren't for that, it would be risky through that much
solid rock.  That's why the two of them had to go down on foot in the
first place."

She took a deep breath, and said, "She's on her own.  And she knows it."

"This shouldn't be happening," Pluto repeated quietly.  Then she added,
"Something is twisting my sight."

Ami looked up at her.  "What does that mean?" she asked.  "What could be
causing it?"

Pluto met her gaze, then glanced away.  "I don't know," she said.  There
was a note of frustration in her voice.  "I can't see it.  I can't see
... anything."  She wrinkled her brow.  "If I could just remember --"

Moon's voice came from the communicator once more.  "I'm at the bottom,"
she said.  "I can see the gap the men opened up."  She sounded puzzled.
"It's -- larger than I'd expected.  I didn't think they could clear that
much so fast ..."

Immediately Ami's attention was back on her controls.  "Is there any
activity coming from the anomaly?" she asked.  "Any ... sign of life?"

"No.  It's completely quiet.  I can't see anything in there, it's just a
solid black.  I -- wait a minute, I'll take a closer look --"

"No!" Ami shouted.  "Stay away from it!  Just ... activate that
instrument package and get out of there, all right?"

Moon hesitated.  "All right," she said reluctantly.  "I'm setting it up
now ...  There.  How's that?"

Ami checked her readouts, and sighed.  "Nothing," she reported.  "All the
signals are being blocked."  She frowned.  "That package broadcasts on a
very wide band.  How could it --"

"Ami?" called Moon.  "Can you hear me?  How's that?"

"Still nothing," Ami responded.  "Could you try pointing your
communicator in the same direction as your torch?  I should be able to
feed the picture into my computer and --"

"Ami?"

Ami froze.

"Ami, can you hear me?"

Suddenly Pluto was at her side, speaking into her own communicator.
"Princess, if you can hear me, get out _now_," she said urgently.
"Princess, can you hear me?  Small Lady?"

"It shouldn't be able to block our communicators," Ami whispered.
"They don't use radio waves at all --"

"Ami, can you hear me?" Moon called.  "Ami?  Anybody?"

"We hear you!" Artemis shouted.  "Sailor Moon, answer me!"

Complete silence.

Ami looked up at Pluto, white-faced.  "Can't you --"

Her communicator came to life again.  "All right," Moon said.  Her voice
was calm, quiet; but they could hear the hidden strain in it.  "I'm
going to keep talking, and assume that you can hear me.  Just ... just
in case.  I'm collecting the instrument pack, and then I'll head
straight back up.  The anomaly is still quiet, so I hope I -- that is,
I'm pretty sure I'll be all right."

Much softer, under her breath, they heard her add, "Scared of the dark
... like a stupid little kid ..."

Then louder, and apparently making a deliberate effort to sound cheerful,
she went on, "Did I tell you, Ami-chan?  I saw the temperature readout
on these instruments of yours.  Minus seventeen degrees.  No wonder those
workmen were complaining!"

"Minus seventeen?" Ami said.  "But that's ..."

Her eyes widened suddenly, and she tapped at her computer.  "Two million
years," she murmured after a moment.

"What?" asked Artemis.

"We analysed some of the rock fragments that came back on the bore," she
said.  "That's how old the strata that the anomaly is lying in is.  That
thing's been there for a long time."

Pluto frowned.  "Two ...?" she muttered.

Artemis looked at Ami, incredulous.  "But if the anomaly had been down
there for that long, absorbing heat energy like that ... it would have
been found long ago, you wouldn't ..."

"Or," Ami said grimly, "it wasn't that temperature all that time.  Maybe
something woke it up.  Something like a series of seismic echoes, sent
out to probe it.  Or something like a subway bore sent down to carve out
a tunnel leading right to it ..."

"Two million ..." said Pluto.  She was still frowning.

There was a sudden bang, making them all jump.  The door into the bay
had been thrown open.  Venus stood there.  She was covered, head to toe,
in a fine black dust; her hair was grey with it.  She left black
footprints as she came in.

"What happened?" she demanded.  "I've been trying to get hold of her,
and she doesn't answer.  What happened to Sailor Moon?"

Ami whispered, "She's still down there.  Right at the bottom ..."

Artemis began to explain to Venus, but Ami was hardly listening.  Out of
the corner of her eye, she could see activity down in the bay: a medical
team, clustered around the three workmen.  One of them was being
strapped to a stretcher.  She turned away from the sight, looking back
to her control panel.  Its blank displays stared mockingly back at her.

[I did it.  I triggered it ...]

As if in response to her thought, her communicator came to life once
more.  "I'm finished," Moon reported.  "The instruments are all packed
away.  I'm starting back up now; I shouldn't be too --"

She stopped.

"Usagi!" shouted Venus.

For a moment longer the communicator was silent.  Then they heard Moon
start to curse.  "Oh, no.  Oh, damn, no, oh shit --"

She fell silent once more, but they could still hear her breathing, as
if she were angry -- or afraid.  Then her voice returned -- tense,
half-strangled.  "The lights are going out," she whispered.  "The
torches are going out.  All of them.  It's getting dark.  They're going
out ..."

Two miles underground.  No darkness could be deeper.

"Those torches have crystal cells," said Venus, eerily calm.  "The power
supply should last forever.  It shouldn't be possible to drain them."

"I know," said Ami.

There was silence for a few seconds.  Then Moon said, in a voice whose
mask of control almost matched Venus', "They're gone.  It's pitch-black.
I think I ... can manage.  I hope.  I'll start to find my way up.  I-if
you can hear me, send someone down to meet me, with another torch.
Please ..."

Venus nodded shortly.  Ami pointed to a nearby locker, and Venus opened
it, pulling out an emergency kit and another pair of torches.

Then Moon cursed again.  "Wait a minute, I'm all turned around.  Which
way is up --?"

"Usagi, no," groaned Artemis.

Moon's voice came again, low and tremulous.  "I can see something," she
said.  "It's not dark.  There's a faint glow coming from ... somewhere.
Very faint, and dim.  It's -- it's coming from the gap.  It's coming
from ... from _behind_ the blackness --

"Wait.  I see.  The anomaly -- it's an energy field.  A force field of
some kind.  Like a bubble.  Hollow.  The field isn't quite opaque --
it's translucent, I can almost see through it, there's something inside
there ... something glowing --

"I think it's alive."

Venus threw the door open and sprinted out into the bay.  She vanished
down into the tunnel.

"I think it's looking at me," Moon whispered.  "It sees me ... how can
it see in the dark?  I don't like the dark."

Artemis stared at the communicator.  "What are you --" he began
incredulously.

"It can't be used to light," said Moon.  Her voice was strange: slow,
dreamy.  "Maybe that's why it's ... it's draining everything.  I'm cold,
Mama."  She did not appear to notice the non sequitur.  "I'm going to
make a light.  A bright light.  If I could just see it clearly, maybe I
could ... could ..."

"What is she talking about?" demanded Artemis.  Knowing it was useless,
he shouted, "Princess, leave it!  Get out!"

The communicator seemed to ring as Sailor Moon shouted.  "MOONFLASH!"

Pluto's eyes snapped wide open.  "Oh, _no_," she said, and vanished.

Suddenly the communicator burst into a roar of sound.  Static, surely;
white noise at a volume that seemed incredible for such a tiny device.
But mixed with it, the listeners almost thought they could hear voices
-- thousands of voices, calling.  Screaming.

Just as suddenly, it stopped, and there was a bare moment's silence.
They heard Sailor Moon say clearly, "It is free."

There was a strange splashing sound, like a cup of water being poured
out on the ground.

The communicator went dead.

Numbly, Ami stared down at the little unit in her hand.  The screen was
glowing with a message that she'd hoped she'd never see: a completely
automatic signal, horribly clear.  TERMINATION.  Then that too blinked
out.

She tried again and again, knowing it was useless; but the only signal
she could pick up from below now was from Venus, still on her mad,
desperate, futile race back down into the Earth.

After a while, the shock wore off enough for her to be able to call
Venus and tell her the news.

                                --**--

When Venus returned to the surface, Ami finally transformed to Sailor
Mercury -- there hadn't been any point before, not until the very end,
and by then it was too late -- and the three of them teleported directly
into the Palace.  It was a breach of protocol, but none of them cared.
They materialised in the Throne Room, and immediately saw that they did
not need to look any further for the Queen.

Where the twin thrones had stood, there was a sphere of energy, several
metres wide.  It looked like a huge ball of glass ... or perhaps
crystal.  It was perfectly transparent; it would have been invisible, if
its surface had not caught the light and reflected it at a hundred
thousand angles.

In the centre of the ball was Queen Serenity.  She floated there, curled
up in a foetal ball, suspended in mid-air.  Her eyes were closed.  Her
hands were clasped to her breast; there was something glowing held
between them.  She did not appear to be breathing.

The sphere was surrounded by people, gesturing and talking and arguing.
Mars and Endymion and Luna were among them.  Venus recognised most of
the rest as being personal aides and city officials.  They all looked up
as she and Sailor Mercury appeared.

Sailor Mars stepped forward to meet them.  "I was just about to call
you," she said.

"What _happened_?" Venus demanded.  "Is it the attack?  Did it hit her
too?"

Mars appeared to be controlling herself with an effort.  "Actually, as
far as we can tell she did it herself," she answered levelly.  Then she
froze.  "Wait.  What do you mean, 'too'?"

And then they had to tell them all what had happened to the Princess.

Mercury let Venus do most of the talking.  She did not have the stomach
to listen for long.  When she heard Endymion's incredulous grief, she
backed quietly away and went to look at the sphere.

There were no tears in her.  Not yet.  She was still numb.

She reached out and touched the surface of the globe.  It was cool and
slick to the touch, but there was a tingle in her fingers.  She pressed
a little harder.  It did not give at all.  She filed the information
away for later contemplation and turned her attention to the Queen.

From this distance she could make out what Serenity was holding.  She
hissed in shock at the sight.

The Ginzuishou was cupped in Serenity's hands.  It flickered and pulsed
madly, like a thing alive, as if some titanic battle was raging in its
depths.  At times it was incandescent, too bright to look at.  At others
it seemed almost dead, little more than a many-faceted glass bauble.
And now and then, just for an instant, she thought she could see
something else: a stab of darkness, a cancerous un-light that stabbed at
the centre of the stone, before a new pulse of light drove it out --

"What ...?" she breathed.

"It began just before you arrived," said Luna.  Mercury glanced down
quickly; she had not heard the cat approach.  Luna continued, "She was
talking to a Finnish party of trade officials.  Then suddenly she stood
up.  She shouted, 'No, don't!'  Something like that.  Then she screamed,
and pulled the Ginzuishou out.  It was glowing, but not -- not normally.
A _dark_ kind of glow.  I don't know how to describe it ..."

"You're doing fine," said Mercury.  "What happened?"

Luna shook her head.  She said, "She held it for a few seconds.  It
looked as though it was hurting her.  Then she screamed again.  'No, I
won't let you!'  And there was a brilliant flash of light, and when we
could see again --"

"You saw this," Mercury finished for her.  She touched the sphere again.
It tingled, as before.  "Some kind of protective shield, perhaps."

"How can you be so cold?" someone said from behind her.  Mars' voice.
"How can you just _talk_ about it so calmly when the Princess is --"

She broke off.  There was something odd in her voice.  Mercury looked
around and saw why.  Mars was crying; the tears ran down her cheeks
ceaselessly.  She did nothing to stop them; she simply stood there and
wept.  It was one of the most heartrending things Mercury had ever seen.

[The Princess,] she realised.  Usagi was dead: Small Lady, Chibi-Usa,
Sailor Moon ... the daughter of Serenity and Endymion, but in many ways
a daughter to them all.  Gone.  Dead.

She wished she could cry too.  But she could not.  She was not certain
that she had the right.

Luna cleared her throat, and she looked down quickly.  The cat was
outwardly calm, but Mercury suddenly saw how much of an effort it was
for her to keep from joining Mars.

"Serenity implied that something was attacking her," Luna said.  "Or
perhaps, striking at the Ginzuishou itself.  Do you think it's connected
to what happened to ... to the Princess?"

"I would say," said Artemis, "that that is a pretty safe assumption."

Mercury turned away from the sphere.  She did not want to look at it any
more.  She felt suddenly tired.  [Stress; shock; emotional exhaustion,]
she thought analytically.  She sat down on the dais beside the sphere.
She wanted it all to go away.  She wanted to stop thinking.

Something hot fell on her hand.  She looked down.  Amazing.  It seemed
that she could cry after all.

Above her head, the world rolled on.  Venus and Endymion had joined them
now.  In the background, somebody was clearing all the other people out
of the Throne Room.  Within an hour, the whole world would know that
something had happened to the Queen.

She heard Endymion's voice, though the words did not register.  He had
stopped crying; now, he sounded as if he were barely controlling his
rage.

Rei's voice: sharp, just as angry, snapping something back.  Then
Artemis, soothing, trying to play the peacemaker.  Good luck to him.
Mercury had an idea that the time for peace was gone.

Venus' voice was suddenly raised in protest; in spite of herself,
Mercury lifted her head to listen.  "But how?" Venus burst out.  "I
thought the Ginzuishou was supposed to be -- I don't know, invulnerable!
Impervious!  What could affect something that powerful?"

Mercury shook her head, and said, "Something new."

"Or something very old," put in Artemis.

She looked at him.  "Yes," she admitted.

"Have you called the others?" asked Mars.  "If this enemy can affect the
Ginzuishou itself ... and, oh, God, the Princess ..."

Venus shook her head wearily.  "Not yet," she said.  "But you're right.
We're going to want everybody in on this ..."

She activated her communicator and started making calls.  As it turned
out, though, their information was already out-of-date.

                                --**--

Makoto was in Bali when everything went mad.  She was lying on the
beach, lazing in the sun.  It was only the middle of spring, and it had
rained earlier, but now the sky was clear, the air warm and humid.  A
music rom was playing by her side, and she was humming along
contentedly, when the first screams began.

She sat up quickly, the rom shutting off automatically.  Some distance
down the beach, people were running and shouting.  They sounded
frightened, but why?  Nothing else seemed out of the ordinary --

Then she saw the bodies, and the blood soaking into the sand.

She stared in shock.  What had happened, what could possibly have killed
them?  She stood up and started toward the scene to investigate --

Just a few metres away from her, a man suddenly clutched his head and
cried out in pain.  Makoto looked around quickly.  She took a single
step toward him, one hand outstretched to offer help ... and froze.

The man's body began to twist and writhe.  He shrieked.  Bones shattered
with a series of muffled cracking sounds.  His screams cut off as his
skull abruptly deformed into something utterly inhuman.

He tumbled to the sand, obviously dead.

All around her, the same thing was happening to others.  Most of them
died, thankfully.  But a few of them did not.  Their transformations
continued, and continued.  They shifted and warped, screaming in torment
all the while.  They began to grow.  Their skins became hard and glossy
... crystalline.  When the change was finished at last, she found
herself looking at monsters.

They were the size of grizzly bears: squat, powerful, and apparently
made out of living glass, but Makoto had the feeling that it would take
more than throwing stones to shatter one.  They had no heads, but in the
centre of their chests were faces, startlingly (shockingly) human-like,
their eyes closed, their mouths hanging slackly open.  They had four
arms.  When they walked, she could feel the impact of their footsteps in
the sand.

They began to move about.  Their targets seemed to be the people who had
not changed.  Several of them made for her.

She transformed to Sailor Jupiter, just in time.  Within three and a
half minutes of the first screams, she was fighting for her life.  When
Venus' call came through, she had no time to spare to answer.

                                --**--

Haruka and Michiru were strolling through an art gallery in Osaka when
the madness began.  A third of the patrons began to scream and mutate.
Most of them died.  A few of them became ... monstrosities.

Sailors Uranus and Neptune went into action before the first
vitrification was complete.  Neptune got the remaining people to safety,
while Uranus went on the attack.  She soon found that, glasslike or not,
they were amazingly tough.  It was not until Neptune returned and joined
in the attack that she managed to make any headway.

Their combined attacks were enough to destroy the things, thankfully.
They were just polishing off the last one when Uranus' communicator
bleeped.  She answered it somewhat testily.

"Just fine, thanks," she said to Venus' orders to report in.  "Couldn't
be better.  A nice romantic outing, a few glass monsters, a bunch of
dead people, the day just couldn't be better.  Oh, and how are you?"

"Monsters?"  Venus sounded disconcerted.  "This may be more widespread
than I thought.  Uranus, we have _major_ trouble back here --"

"Here, too," interrupted Neptune.  Uranus looked up at her, surprised,
and she pointed to a nearby window.  Uranus glanced out, and her eyes
widened.

The street was filled with more of the glass creatures.  All of them
seemed to be heading directly toward the gallery.

Uranus let out a whistle.  "We're going to need reinforcements for this
one," she said.  Neptune nodded.  The two of them linked hands and
teleported to Crystal Tokyo.

                                --**--

The question was not whether reinforcement were needed, but rather where
to reinforce.

They held a council of war in the Throne Room.  Mercury, Venus, Mars,
Uranus, Neptune and Endymion were present.  Serenity was in the room,
but none of them could tell if she was hearing them or not.  Jupiter was
still in Bali -- they had had a short, hurried message from her that
spoke of the same kind of monsters that Uranus and Neptune had met.
Unfortunately, Serenity, Venus and Pluto were still the only ones who
could teleport alone; the rest of them needed to be in at least pairs.
Jupiter was on her way, but it might take her an hour or two to get
there.

Pluto did not answer her communicator.  Nobody knew where she was.

With reports of attacks in two places already, Rei did a little
investigation.  The results were shocking.  Reports were coming in of
similar occurrences in other places.  A great many other places.  Kyoto,
Sapporo, Nagasaki, Kagoshima ... and Beijing, Calcutta, Johannesburg,
Rome, London, Montreal, Los Angeles, Sydney ...

It was everywhere.

Some newscasters were calling it the Glass Plague.  Others spoke of the
Madness.  Countless thousands of people were dead already.  And
everywhere, the monsters roamed the streets, destroying.

                                --**--

Clearly, precisely, Mercury explained what had happened.  She made no
attempt to conceal her own guilt in the matter.  "I've been able to
check the timing pretty accurately," she said.  "These glass creatures
began to appear just a few seconds after Sailor Moon d-died," she said.
Nobody said anything about the stumble.  Mercury's face was pale and
there were dark shadows under her eyes, but she was holding together.
"The overwhelming probability is that there's a connection," she went
on.  "Whoever -- or whatever is down there must be responsible for the
creatures."

"What do you think it is?" asked Endymion quietly.

Mercury shrugged.  "Some kind of alien life-form, I would assume," she
said.  "The energy barrier Sailor Moon spoke of could have been a type
of protective stasis field --"

"Or a prison," said Uranus grimly.

Mercury looked startled.  "Yes, perhaps," she said.  "I hadn't thought
of that."

"Does it really matter?" demanded Luna.  "Our first priority has to be
helping the Queen.  Nothing's more important than that!"

"Actually, I disagree," said Neptune calmly.  "The Queen is safe, for
now.  Our first priority needs to be stopping the enemy.  Destroying it,
if necessary."

"How?" demanded Artemis.  "Do you want to go down and attack it in
person?  It can drain a torch, remember.  I hope you like fighting in
the dark --"

"There are other kinds of torches," said Mars, her voice cold.  "Simple
wooden ones, if necessary.  I'd like to see it drain a flame."

"What if it _can_?" asked Venus.

"Do you have any better ideas?" Mars flared up.

"Actually, I have a thought," put in Endymion unexpectedly.  They all
turned to look at him.  "How smooth is the floor of that tunnel?  And
how steep is it?"

Venus raised her eyebrows.  "Pretty smooth, and pretty steep," she said.
"I can tell you that from experience."

"Twenty point three six degrees," added Mercury.  Then she flushed.
"Sorry."

"What are you getting at?" demanded Uranus.

"I was thinking of rolling bombs down," Endymion said.  His voice was
quiet and composed, as if he were discussing the weather.

Uranus stared at him, half in admiration.  "You what?"

He looked up at her.  "That thing down there killed my daughter," he
said simply.  For just a moment, the calm veneer cracked, and she
recoiled from the look in his eye: a smouldering, murderous cauldron of
grief and rage that threatened dire vengeance on anyone who got in his
way.

"Could it be done?" Venus asked Mercury.

Mercury thought about it.  "Yes, I should think so," she said after a
moment.  "It would take a day or so to build -- the bomb would have to
be carefully shaped, and I'd have to shock-proof it -- we wouldn't be
able to set it off remotely, so it would have to be a timed fuse ..."

"Don't bother," said Luna.

Endymion gave her a hard look.  "Why not?" he asked dangerously.

"Just send the bore back down," she suggested.  "It should go a lot
faster through a ready-made tunnel.  Only this time, don't stop it
when it gets to the anomaly."

They thought about it.  Mars, Uranus and Endymion began to smile.
Artemis shook his head.  "Did anyone ever tell you you have a vicious
streak?" he asked Luna.

"It killed Princess Usagi," she said quietly.

He looked away for a moment.  "I've been trying not to think about it,"
he admitted.  "It's too ... too big.  I can't ..."  His voice broke for
a moment.  "She's gone, and we don't even have time to mourn her," he
went on at last.  "It's not ... not ..."

"Not fair," said Endymion softly.  "No.  It's not fair."  He took a deep
breath, then stood up and shifted into his armour.  "Sailor Venus,
please consider me under your command for the duration of this crisis,"
he requested.

Venus nodded.  "Thank you," she said.  She looked at him sidelong for a
second, and then added, "In that case, my first order is: don't go off
half-cocked.  You are not to go taking private action, understand?  If
you're going to be part of the team, you are to _act_ as part of the
team."

He took it fairly well, all things considered; he gave her a single mute
nod and then sat back down.

"That goes for the rest of you, too," Venus went on, glaring around at
the others.  "This is too big to go playing those kinds of games.
Understand?"  One by one, they nodded back at her.

"All right," she said, relaxing a little.  "Mercury, get onto that bore
right away.  It sounds like our best shot for now.  Can you program it
to do what we want?  I suppose you won't be able to steer it by remote
control."

"Not with the signal jamming," agreed Mercury.  "Give me half an hour to
reprogram the onboard computers.  I'll set it to --"

Venus waved her silent.  "Tell me the details later," she said.  "Just
get started.  Mars, get back to the communications centre.  See if you
can get me a better picture of what's happening.  Uranus, Neptune, take
a flyer and have a look around in the city.  Keep an eye open for any of
those monsters.  Take care of them if you see any."

"And if we run into too many of them to handle?" asked Neptune with a
faint smile.

Venus looked her straight in the eye.  "Deal with it," she said.

Uranus grinned.  "Gotcha."  She and Neptune left quickly.

"What about me?" asked Endymion quietly.

Venus nodded.  "You'll act as backup, for now.  Be ready to move out if
Haruka and Michiru run into trouble.  In the meantime, see if you can
get hold of Makoto, and get an update from her.  And ..."  She
hesitated.  "Try and find Sailor Pluto.  You're Serenity's consort, she
may pay more attention to you."

"Do you really think so?"  He looked amused.

Venus did not.  "It's worth a try.  Also --"  She wrinkled her brow,
looking around the room.  "Has anybody seen Diana?"

Luna looked up.  "She ran off when she heard about Usagi.  I think she
was going to --"  She stopped suddenly.  "Well, that doesn't matter
now," she went on after a moment.  "I don't think you need to worry
about her, though."

Artemis gave her a puzzled look.  "Where --"

"I'll tell you some other time," she snapped.

"All right, enough chatter," Venus ordered.  "Let's get going, everyone.
Move out!"  She watched as they left.  In a few moments, there were only
herself, the cats, and the unmoving Serenity left.

"What are you going to be doing?" asked Luna curiously.

"Going to the borehead, I think," she said absently, gazing down at the
Queen.  "I wish ..."

She knelt suddenly by the sphere, looking into her still face.  "Dammit,
Serenity!" she whispered.  "First the Black Moon, now this!  Why do you
always have to be immobilised when we need you the most?"

She stayed there for some time, waiting for an answer that never came.
In the Queen's hands, the Ginzuishou continued to pulse and flicker,
echoing some titanic inner struggle.  She could only guess at what
Serenity was going through, locked in that bubble.

Then she realised that something had changed.  The Queen's eyes had been
closed, before.  Now they were open.  They stared sightlessly up at the
ceiling, but they were open.

She stared for a moment.  Then she whispered aloud, "She's alive.  She's
_alive_."

Until that moment she had not realised how much she had been afraid that
the Queen was dead.  She lay there, so still and calm; the only sign of
life at all was the flickering of the Ginzuishou in her hands.  But now,
there was no doubt.

She lifted a hand to touch the sphere for a moment.  "Hold on," she
murmured.  "Just hold on.  We'll get you out of this.  I promise."

After a little, she could bear to turn away.  She took a deep breath,
and looked down at Luna and Artemis.  "I'm going to the borehead," she
told them.  "Contact me if anything changes."  Then she sped off.

The two cats exchanged glances; then, with a shrug, Artemis followed
her.

                                --**--

Venus and Artemis arrived just as Mercury gave the bore's onboard
computer the last of its instructions.  She swung the access panels
closed and re-sealed the heat shielding carefully, then ran back into
the control room.

Her assistants watched her uneasily as she began to power up the control
and monitoring stations.  Distantly, she realised that this was probably
the first time they'd seen her in her Senshi form, at least up-close.
She didn't change often, these days.

Down in the bay, the bore lurched forward.  For several seconds it
halted at the mouth of the hole, grinding slowly back and forward,
aligning itself with the hole.  Then it started forward once more,
slowly passing out of sight.  A jet of fine dust shot out of the rear
port behind it.

Mercury sat back, satisfied.  She turned and saw Venus, who raised an
eyebrow.  "It will take about three hours to reach the anomaly," Mercury
said firmly.  "I've programmed it to ignite its flame two hundred metres
short of that point, or if it detects anything out of the ordinary in
the tunnel.  When it's gone two hundred metres past the anomaly, it will
stop and return to the surface again."

"You'll be monitoring it, I assume," said Venus.  "When do you expect to
lose contact with it?"

Mercury shrugged.  "If I had any idea what's causing the loss of signals
from below ..."  She shook her head.

"All right."  Venus thought for a moment.  "Do you need to be here, or
can your assistants handle things for now?  If you can get away, I want
you do take a better look at the Queen.  See if you can find some way to
shield the Ginzuishou."

"Yes, of course."  Mercury glanced around.  "Artemis, can you keep an
eye on things here?  Contact me if anything happens."

Artemis nodded.  As the two left -- not quite at a run, but moving fast
-- he hopped up onto one of the monitoring stations and settled down
where he could see the displays.  It would be a while before he could
expect anything to happen, he knew.  But if everything went well, this
was where the battle would be won, in just a few short hours ...

                                --**--

Sailor Mars cursed to herself, silently but steadily, as she went
through report after report in the Palace communications centre.  The
madness had begun only two hours ago, but already the messages showed
that this was the biggest disaster since the Black Moon invasion,
centuries ago.  Maybe the biggest ever.

It struck everywhere, but not with equal strength.  More people were
affected in large population centres, of course; but still, the ratios
were not the same.  In smaller, rural areas, the change struck down
barely one in twenty.  In larger cities it was double that.  In a few
areas, it was nearly one in six.  Was there any pattern?  She did not
have enough data ...

Ami would be able to make more sense of this, she realised.  But Sailor
Mercury had other priorities right now; and in any case, Rei had gotten
very good with reports and statistics over the last few centuries.

(Rei the bureaucrat!  The others wondered why she'd taken such a role,
she knew.  Well, let them wonder.  But she thought sometimes that maybe,
just maybe, Serenity understood.)

The timing was strange.  The plague had struck everywhere, more or less
simultaneously -- and then stopped.  There was one single, massive wave
of changes, and then nothing.  A few scattered reports of belated
metamorphoses, but they were well within the margin of error.  Had the
plague somehow _used up_ everyone who could be affected?

She began to plot all outbreaks of the Glass Plague on a world map.  It
appeared to cover the entire globe; even the undersea habitats had been
hit.  There were no reports of it from the orbital colonies or anything
further out, which was interesting.  There were major concentrations in
all the cities, of course --

Then she saw one glaring inconsistency, and wondered how she could have
missed it before.  She almost broke her thumb, activating her
communicator to call Venus.

                                --**--

Sailor Jupiter fired off one last Oak Evolution, reducing the glass-like
monster before her to splinters.  She sagged back against a nearby wall,
exhausted.  She had been fighting for nearly two hours, almost non-stop.
The creatures were everywhere.  They seemed to follow her.  Wherever she
went, more turned up.  She'd killed -- she'd lost count of how many of
them she'd killed.

[And all of them used to be innocent people.]  But she couldn't afford
to think about that.  She was fighting for her life.  If only she'd
gotten them all ... if only she could stop to catch her breath ...

No such luck.  The familiar thud-thud-thud of their footsteps came
again, from behind her.  The wall at her back shuddered, the impact
sending her reeling away.  Then the stone burst open, and two more of
the monsters stalked through toward her.

[Sooner or later we're going to have to work out what to call these
things,] she thought irrationally.  Then there was no more time for
thought.

They didn't just rely on strength and toughness.  They could move quite
fast, for all their bulk, and some of them had other attacks.  There was
a kind of whirling cloud that they could produce, that she'd learned to
watch out for.  It looked like a puff of dust, but it could eat right
through solid stone without slowing down, and she didn't want to find
out what it would do to flesh.

She managed to blast an arm off one of them.  It didn't seem to notice;
it threw a massive punch at her that would have caved in her ribs if it
had connected.  She flung herself back, just in time, and fired her Echo
Convulsion attack at the other one.  The multiple arcs of energy danced
about it for a second, then collapsed inward, piercing it from every
direction at once and shivering it to pieces.  She shouted in triumph --
and realised her mistake an instant later as a new blow from the first
monster clipped her in the side, knocking her flying.

There were black spots dancing before her eyes as she levered herself up
again.  The Convulsion attack had taken more energy than she could
afford; she was close to passing out.  She was pretty sure that blow had
broken a rib or two, as well.  But she had to keep going -- the last
monster was right on top of her --

There was a whooshing sound, and a loud explosion.  Almost deafened, she
looked around wildly.  The monster was staggering back.  There was a
crater in its chest, and half of another arm was missing.  What --?

"Are you all right, Ma'am?" somebody shouted in English.  They must have
been shouting, for her to hear it at all.  Her ears were ringing.  She
glanced about, and saw the young man with the missile launcher over his
shoulder.  He was wearing a uniform that she recognised.

[I'll be damned,] she thought wildly.  [So Australia _does_ have a
secret base in Bali.  I'll have to tell Endymion ...]

A moment later, and the soldier was gone from the waist up.  The vortex
of crystal shards chewed him apart in a fraction of a second, leaving
nothing but a bloody shower of shredded flesh behind.  Jupiter cried out
in fury, and fired her Supreme Thunder -- all she had left -- at the
glass monster.

It was enough ... barely.  The monster shattered, even as Jupiter sagged
back, all strength gone from her limbs.  Two hours of combat shouldn't
have exhausted her like this.  Normally, though, she'd be fighting with
the others; their backup and support would ease the load, let her even
out the drain so she could keep going.  But all on her own like this ...

There were footsteps around her.  Not heavy ones; these were lighter ...
human.  She opened her eyes once more, took a deep breath, and managed
to stand up.

"Lieutenant," she said in English to the leader of the little troop
standing around her.  With a wry grin, she went on, "Under the
circumstances, I think that Crystal Tokyo may be prepared to turn a
blind eye to any ... er, activities that Australia may be conducting in
Bali."

The attempt at humour fell flat.  "With respect, Ma'am, I think that's
kind of irrelevant now," he answered heavily.  He was dirty and he
looked tired.  There were burn-marks on his uniform.  She hadn't been
the only one fighting, she realised.

She nodded, her own grin fading.  "Yes, I suppose so," she replied.
"Lieutenant, do you have transport?  I need to get back to Japan as
quickly as possible."

He rubbed grime from his forehead uneasily.  "Well, not exactly, Ma'am,"
he answered.  "Actually, that's sort of the problem."

Then he showed her why.

The vehicles were flying by themselves.  They floated to and fro through
the streets of Singaraja, moving with a silent, eerie precision.  There
were no people at the controls; as far as she could see, all of them
were completely empty.

"That isn't possible," she whispered.  "The safety interlocks should --"

"That's not all," the lieutenant replied, equally softly.  "Watch this."
He picked up a pebble and tossed it toward one of the flyers.  His aim
was good; but as the stone within a few centimetres of its target, there
was a sudden, brilliant flash of light.  Jupiter heard a splinter fly
past her ear, and there was a sharp _crack_ from somewhere far behind.

"Some of my techs think it's an energy spike from the liftor field," the
Lieutenant said grimly.  "It's all gibberish to me.  But if anybody
tries to touch those things, they get hit."  He shrugged, making a
disgusted face.  Then, eyeing her slyly, he added, "Unless you can --?"

Jupiter echoed his headshake, grinning mirthlessly.  Blow one up,
probably.  Disarm it?  Nuh-uh.  Her talents didn't run in those
directions.

She turned her attention back to the flyers.  It was an unnerving sight.
She could not help thinking that there was a strange, unseen purpose in
the way they moved.

"But what are they _doing_ ...?" she muttered.

When Endymion called her a little later, she had to report that she
would be delayed in leaving Bali.

                                --**--

"There aren't any of those things in Crystal Tokyo at all," said Mars
urgently.

Venus had been standing at Mercury's side, watching silently as the
latter methodically scanned the Queen.  At Mars' words, though, she
looked up sharply.  Mercury glanced up for a moment as well, then
returned to her work, the visor over her eyes alive with flickering
readouts.

"None?" Venus said, frowning.

"No reports at all.  There are millions of those things, all over the
world, everywhere I check.  But none in Crystal Tokyo."

"Millions of --?"  Venus blinked.  Then she tapped her communicator.
"Sailor Uranus, are you there?" she asked.

"Here," came the reply a moment later.  "Minako-chan, you're not going
to believe this --"

"You aren't seeing any of those things, right?"

There was a pause.  "How did you know?" asked Uranus suspiciously.

"A little bird told me.  You and Michiru had better head back in.  This
isn't going to be fun."  Venus deactivated her communicator.  Her face
was grim.

Mars could see the implications as well.  "If there aren't any here,
then we have to go out of Crystal Tokyo to fight them.  And that leaves
the city undefended."

"Especially with Serenity out of action," finished Venus.  She glanced
at Mercury, who was still at work with her computer, and shook her head.
"If that bore doesn't stop this thing ..."

Endymion walked in at that moment, his armour clinking faintly.  "I got
hold of Sailor Jupiter," he announced.  "She's run into a problem; she
can't come back.  At least not right away."

Venus sighed.  "Wonderful, let's have the bad news all at once.  What's
gone wrong _now_?"

He explained quickly, not bothering to mention the identity of the
people Jupiter was with.  Before, they would have been his business as
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Japan.  Now, as Jupiter had
pointed out, the issue hardly seemed relevant.

Venus swore.  "I'd better teleport over, bring her back."

"It might be better to let her stay," he suggested.  "She sounded
confident enough -- said she was with some other people who'd rounded up
weapons from somewhere.  And she said she wanted to find out what the
vehicles are doing.  Where they're going."

Venus hesitated for a few seconds.  "All right," she said at last.  "We
need information more than anything else right now.  Tell her to call
for a pickup if there's any trouble.  We can't to afford to lose any
more --"  She stopped suddenly, seeing Endymion's face.  "Sorry," she
muttered.

Mars was more thoughtful.  "First people ... now vehicles," she
murmured.  "What next?  What else can it control?"

Something nagged at the back of her mind, but she could not place it.

                                --**--

Artemis sat watching the instrument readouts in the borehead control
room.  One of Ami's assistants had shown him what everything meant.
(The man had been rather nervous, talking to a cat.  Even after all
this time, he still got that reaction from humans.  In other
circumstances, it might have been funny.)

The numbers on the monitor ticked by steadily.  Everything was going
very smoothly.

                                --**--

"Well?" asked Neptune.  "What have you found?"

Mercury flipped her visor back up, rising and stepping back from the
Queen.  "I can't tell much," she confessed.  "The energy extends far
beyond the shell that we can see.  The whole Throne Room is saturated
with the power of the Ginzuishou.  Maybe the whole Palace.  If it were
dark, we'd almost be able to see the air glowing."

Uranus whistled in surprise.

"That, and the sphere itself, is blocking my scans rather effectively,"
Mercury went on.  "I can detect that some kind of struggle is going on
in the heart of the crystal.  But --"  She shook her head slowly,
looking worried.  "I can't find any trace of what Serenity's fighting
_against_.  It's as if the energy of the Ginzuishou is all turned
against itself, somehow."

"But Serenity said 'I won't let you do it'," Luna pointed out.  "That
certainly suggests that she could feel somebody else attacking her."

"She's always been attuned to the Ginzuishou," said Mars.  "It's not
surprising that she'd be able to sense things Ami can't."  She tightened
her lips.  "Maybe we should just get her out of here.  The orbital
habitats haven't been affected; if we teleport her there, say to the
L-22 station --"

Mercury was shaking her head.  "There's too much power.  The sphere is
blocking the attack, but it blocks us, too.  She'd have to drop her
barrier for us to move her --"

"And we can't even get to her to ask her to do it," finished Uranus
sourly.  "Damn it ... she might as well be sealed in crystal all over
again ..."

"How sure are you that the shield is hers, and not the Enemy's?" asked
Neptune.  "And how long can she keep it up, before she drains herself to
a dangerous level?"

Mercury sighed.  "There _is_ no safe level for this kind of thing," she
said.  "Oh, it's Serenity doing it, all right.  The force pattern is
unmistakable.  The Ginzuishou has a fractal lattice; it extends into
multiple dimensions, on a resolution that may approach the infinite --"
She broke off, shaking her head.  "No.  Never mind that.  She won't
drain herself, anyway, or not in the way you're thinking.  Serenity's
linked her own life force to the Ginzuishou.  She's pouring everything
she has into it.  At the same time, though, she shares its resources.
She could stay like that for a year, or a thousand years, and not run
out of strength.  Though what would be left of her once she broke
contact would be --"

She shivered suddenly.  "And all that power is just barely enough to
resist the attack," she added in a low voice.  "You can see the struggle
in the Ginzuishou's light.  Some of the Enemy's influence is breaking
through, and all she can do is interpose herself to protect it ..."

"Then we'll just have to remove the attacker," stated Venus firmly.
"The bore's on its way, and once it arrives this will all be over.
Right, Ami-chan?"

Mercury checked the time.  "It should reach the anomaly in another half
an hour," she said.  "Perhaps we should head over to the borehead --"

The ground shook.

"What the hell was that?" demanded Mars, keeping her feet with
difficulty.  Across the room, several ornaments toppled to the floor
with a crash of breaking glass.

Mercury did not answer.  She was looking out the window.  There was a
bright light shining down in the city, ruddy-gold.  As she watched, it
was hidden by a pillar of smoke.

The windows burst inward as the sound of the explosion reached them.

                                --**--

A bell chimed softly in the borehead control room.  After a second, it
sounded again.

Artemis looked around, stretching.  "What was that?" he asked idly.

One of Ami's assistants, a tall, gaunt man with a receding hairline,
looked puzzled.  "I'm not sure," he said.  "It sounded like --"

The bell chimed.

Another assistant checked an indicator light, which had begun to flash
steadily.  "That can't be right," she muttered.

"The proximity alarm?" said the first man.  "Don't be silly.  That would
mean the bore's about to arrive back at the surface."  Frowning, he
checked the other readouts.  They indicated that the bore was operating
normally, still on its way down.  He flipped a switch below the
proximity indicator, to no avail.  He began to flick it on and off, the
frown growing.  "Some kind of malfunction ..." he grumbled.

The alarm rang.

Artemis stared at the display in front of him.  All the readings were
normal -- perfectly normal.  But the bell ...  His fur was all standing
on end.  He added several and several together and got --

Devastation.

"We've got to get out of here," he said.

The woman stared at him.  "What --?" she began.

"It's the bore!" Artemis shouted.  "It's been taken over!  It's going to
arrive here any moment now, with the flame still going, and it's not
going to stop when it gets to that bay down there!"

The two of them simply stood there, open-mouthed.  The man's adam's
apple bobbed up and down convulsively.

Artemis looked him firmly in the eye and said, very quietly, "If we
don't get out now, we are going to die."

They began to move.  Slowly, oh, far too slowly, but they began to move
at last.  He bit back an incredulous oath when he saw what they were
doing.  The man stepped to the door and hovered in it uncertainly,
looking back at the controls.  The woman ... sat at her console, and
began to check the readings one last time.

Artemis ran.  Hating himself, he left them to their fate and ran.  He
could wait no longer; he was probably too late already.  He wanted to
curse their stupidity; he wanted to curse himself for abandoning them.
Instead he simply ran, and hoped that he would still be alive tomorrow
to feel guilty.

He went what he hoped was a safe distance, then paused and looked back.
There was a faint noise coming from somewhere, just at the limit of
hearing but steadily growing.  The ground was beginning to tremble under
his paws.  Back in the doorway, he could see the two of them, coming out
of the doorway at last.  They were running, but too slowly.  Far, far
too slowly.

The trembling was still growing.  Suddenly terrified, he turned and
began to run again himself, with a speed born of desperation.

The bore site became a column of fire.  The blast caught him and flung
him head-first into a wall and he knew no more.

                                --**--

Eventually, the city's emergency services got the fires under control.
The Senshi helped out as best they could.  Quite a few people in the
area around the explosion had survived, trapped in the ruins.

Uranus was the one to find Artemis.  She carried him to the hospital
herself, holding the limp body tenderly in her arms.  The doctors were
startled at their new charge, but did their best.  Mercury arrived a
little later to lend her considerable experience.  He was badly hurt,
but would survive.

By eleven o'clock that night, the situation was enough under control for
Venus to be able to check out the bore site itself.  It was buried in a
vast pile of wreckage.  She gave the order to start clearing it away,
but she doubted that it would do any good.  If the bore had returned to
the surface with its flame running, the borehole would be melted shut.
The anomaly was inaccessible.

So ended the first day.



---------
Interlude
---------

Crystal Tokyo was a city under siege.

By dawn on the day after Usagi's death, it was already clear that the
glass creatures were on the move.  None of the Senshi were really
surprised to hear that they were headed straight for Crystal Tokyo.

At first there were only a few of them.  The crystites -- a newscaster
in the United States had dubbed them that, and unfortunately the name
had stuck -- travelled slowly, and not many of them had been in the
vicinity of the city to start with.  But hour by hour, more arrived.
They were tireless, and unrelenting.

The Senshi destroyed the first of them to arrive with ease.  On their
own, they were not much of a challenge.  Their numbers increased
steadily, however; and they kept coming from all directions.  Gradually,
the pressure increased, and some of them began to slip through the gaps.

Long ago, after the Nemesis Invasion, a comprehensive defence system had
been built to protect Crystal Tokyo; but in the centuries since then,
the city had spread far beyond them.  Now, the perimeter of Crystal
Tokyo was far too large for five Senshi and one Prince to protect.
There was a near-disaster, with more than fifty people killed, when the
crystites began to cross Tokyo Bay.  The water did not seem to affect
them; they simply walked across the seabed.

The Palace Guard was mobilised almost immediately: the first time they
had been issued with live weapons, other than in training, for years.
They were primarily an exhibition unit -- Serenity had little use for
soldiers -- but they were the only armed force the city had, or, in
quieter times, needed.  Their casualties were high to begin with, but
the survivors learned fast.

Ordinary weapons did not have much effect on the crystites.  Most energy
weapons were almost useless.  Ami experimented briefly with ultrasonic
attacks; but while they slowed the crystites briefly, they were
otherwise unaffected.  Artillery could destroy them.  So could
concentrated, high-impact, armour-piercing rounds, if kept up for long
enough; but the crystites could move fast enough that it was difficult
to keep them under fire for long enough.  Landmines also met with some
limited success, but a heavy charge was needed do enough damage.  The
city's supply of ammunition, limited to begin with, began to fall with
alarming speed.

Venus tried to bring in more supplies; but the first time they sent out
a flyer to bring in a cache of ammunition, it fell under the Enemy's
control as soon as it passed beyond the limits of Serenity's power.  The
pilot was killed instantly.  Mars, Uranus and Neptune, working together,
did manage to teleport the supplies in; but the effort exhausted them,
and as a long-term solution it was clearly useless.

In any case, they were not the only ones who needed the ammunition.

Only the crystites in the surrounding regions were heading for Crystal
Tokyo.  Elsewhere, they moved around on their own mysterious errands --
as incomprehensible and unpredictable as the vehicles, all over the
world, that now moved according to the Enemy's will.  They generally
ignored surviving humans, as long as they were alone.  Groups of three
or more people were almost always attacked.  So was anybody who was seen
carrying anything -- even something as innocent as a piece of paper.

Resistance groups were springing up all over the world, with gratifying
speed.  Mars organised a communications centre to try and coordinate
them, offering advice and spreading word on any tactics that worked
against the crystites.

Not many tactics did work; and they never worked twice.  The enemy
learned fast.

The Senshi teleported all around the world, meeting resistance leaders
and helping where they could.  Some heartening victories were won.  But
always, after a defeat, more crystites simply began to move in from
other areas until the loss had been made up.

Furthermore, Mars began to receive reports that the Enemy was
controlling more than just vehicles.  All kinds of machinery were
working by themselves.  The reports suggested that the crystites and the
machines were working together to build something, but details were
maddeningly vague.  Spy cameras failed to operate, and anyone who
physically approached the building sites was killed.  Mercury, Mars and
Endymion teleported to a site and tried to break in, so that Mercury
could examine what was happening; but the mission was a disastrous
failure.  They had expected a strong defence, but, faced with a dual
assault from both the crystites and the machinery, they were lucky to
escape with their lives.

The subversion of the machines caused a new problem.  The world had
mostly been at peace for many years, and there were few arms, and little
ammunition, anywhere.  Now, there was no way of making more.  The
initial victories won by the rebels were soon reversed, and no more
followed.

After the debacle when the crystites crossed Tokyo Bay, Venus tried to
contact Sailor Jupiter again.  There was no reply.  She teleported over
to Bali immediately, and found traces of a major battle, and an area
littered with bodies and the remains of destroyed crystites.  Of Jupiter
herself there was no sign.

                                --**--

The defence of Crystal Tokyo was holding -- barely.  When the crystite
attacks began to cause heavy casualties, the Inner Senshi came together
and prepared to raise the force shield that they had used during the
Nemesis invasion.  To their shock, they could not do it.  The shield
refused to form at all.

Instead, they had to resort to more physical defences.  A wall around
the city was under construction, and growing with gratifying speed.  A
team of engineers had designed a new weapon: a railgun that accelerated
and fired metal slivers at an appreciable fraction of the speed of
light.  A direct hit would destroy a crystite; but the weapons were
difficult to build and too big to be carried, and the rate of fire was
poor.  Still, they helped stem the tide for now.

The borehole, as Venus had feared, was sealed shut.  She put a crew to
work carving it open again, but activity came to a halt when the workmen
began to suffer strange injuries.  Some of them looked exactly like the
organic fusing that had struck down the worker in the tunnel.  The men
would have worked on anyway -- they knew how much was at stake -- but
Venus pulled them off and grimly set them to work on a more direct
route: a vertical tunnel, directly over the location of the anomaly.  As
Mercury pointed out, going straight down meant they would only have to
dig a third as far.  Before long hundreds of people were at work over a
steadily-deepening pit.

Sailor Mercury herself examined the railgun design and made a few
suggestions, and supervised the progress of the new excavation; but her
main work was elsewhere.  She was helping defend the city, of course,
fighting with the other Senshi.  Most of her time, though, was spent on
two projects: trying to find a way to block the Enemy's control of the
crystites and the machines, and trying to find a way to shield Serenity
and the Ginzuishou.

Nothing seemed to work.  She developed batteries of new devices intended
to scan through the interference caused by the Ginzuishou's power.  At
one time, the entire Throne Room was filled with banks of equipment.
But as before, she could not even detect the Enemy's attack taking
place, let alone find any way to block it.  She did eventually announce
that the aura of power that extended out from Serenity's bubble was what
protected the city from the Enemy's control -- and what prevented the
Senshi from raising their own force shield.

They were left with little choice but to fight.  So many other
possibilities had already failed.  They could not teleport the Queen
away.  Physically transporting her was equally impossible; the bubble
around the queen was utterly immovable.  For a time, they had hopes of
evacuating the city; but when a lander from one of the orbital habitats
did try to reach Crystal Tokyo, it fell under the Enemy's influence
while still beyond the atmosphere, and was destroyed during reentry.
The Senshi themselves could have left, but that was not an option that
any of them were prepared to consider.

There was nowhere to turn to for help.  With Pluto gone, sending to the
past -- or even the future -- was impossible.  Seeking aid from outside
the solar system was equally futile; Kinmoku, like most other worlds
with Senshi defenders, had been devastated in the new wars that racked
the galaxy after Galaxia began to restore the damage she had done.
Crystal Tokyo was on its own.

After several unsuccessful tries, Uranus and Neptune managed to capture
a crystite alive.  As they brought it into the city, though, it exploded
violently.  Other crystites had entered Crystal Tokyo before, during any
number of attacks, so they were forced to conclude that the enemy had
destroyed it deliberately.  They were willing to try again, but Venus
forbade any further attempts, for the time being.

In spite of Mercury's warnings, Venus finally gave in to the others'
pleas and allowed them to try to teleport down to the anomaly.  Mercury
supplied coordinates, and insisted on joining the attempt.  It was a
disastrous failure.  They hit some kind of barrier, deep underground,
with blinding force, and rebounded in horrible pain.  Venus and Uranus,
struggling to stay conscious, managed to materialise the others back on
the surface; but the others were senseless for hours.  The new tunnel
remained their best chance of reaching the Enemy.

Serenity herself continued her own unending battle.  She floated,
untouchable, in the centre of her force bubble, the Ginzuishou held to
her heart.  Her eyes were closed again.  Sometimes the flickering in the
Ginzuishou's depths seemed to slow and fade, as if the Enemy were
abandoning the attack, or turning its attention to other things.  At
those times they sometimes saw the Queen's eyelids flicker, as if she
were close to waking up.  The attack always resumed after a short time,
though; and the Queen fought on: grimly, silently and endlessly.

Mars wanted them all to link with her, to join their strength to hers as
they had done before.  When they tried it, they found that they could
not penetrate her shell.  To let them in to join with her, she would
have had to lower her barrier; but doing so would let the Enemy in too,
and that would be the end of it ...

Still, the defence continued.  Every entrance to the city was blocked
off now, and there was no shortage of volunteers to protect the walls.
Uranus and Neptune spent endless hours training new recruits.  The
railguns were an important help, too.  The Senshi sent the plans out all
over the world, and even managed to teleport a few to resistance groups
outside the city, but the guns were too big to deliver in quantity, and
Crystal Tokyo was the only place left that had the machinery to make
them.

Beyond the defence perimeter, the crystites gathered.



-----------
7 May, 3478
-----------

Mars looked up when Michiru came in to relieve her, and let her
transformation lapse with a sigh.  Her eyes were red from lack of sleep.

"Bad night?" Michiru asked.

"Bad enough," Rei said wearily.  She stifled a yawn.

Michiru did not press the question.  She knew how it would have been.
Floodlights lit up the ground all around the barricades, so that the
crystites could not approach under cover of darkness.  Volunteers kept a
ceaseless lookout.  Often they had only a split second to warn of an
attack; the crystites' whirling clouds of razor-sharp shards were deadly
from a considerable distance.  Lookout was a high-risk position.  There
were teams working around the clock to get every approach monitored
electronically, but it would be another week before they were finished.

When an assault came, the action would be savage and furious.  The roar
of the railguns opening fire.  The sharp cracks of more conventional
gunfire, and the thunder of artillery.  And, where the action was
thickest -- always, where the danger was greatest -- the cries of the
Senshi launching their attacks.

Perhaps the worst of it was a fact that they never discussed, but which
none of them could forget: that every crystite they destroyed was
another innocent human life lost.  It could not be helped, they had no
real choice; but still, in her heart Rei suspected that if Serenity were
awake, she would find a way to save them.  Sometimes Rei dreamed of an
endless sea of faces, all staring at her reproachfully.  Then she would
get up and go and fight some more.

All night, and all day.  Now, Mars could go back to being Rei, and try
to get a few hours sleep; and Michiru would become Sailor Neptune and
take her own turn under the grindstone.

(They had to detransform, to get any sleep.  It was hard to relax in
Senshi form during a crisis; some kind of instinct, perhaps.  And
lately, they'd had nothing _but_ crisis.)

"Bad enough," Rei repeated.  She glanced up at Michiru.  "Sato in the
comms centre says they've lost contact with another six resistance
groups."

That did provoke a wince.  Going out of contact could mean a lot of
things, but usually it only meant one.

Michiru nodded slowly, her lips tight.  "Anything new happen?" she
asked.

Rei shrugged.  "Nothing important."  The corner of her mouth quirked
suddenly.  "There was a message from L-117.  They say they've solved all
our problems.  They've designed an orbital laser cannon.  They want Ami
to check it over."

Michiru snorted in exasperation.  "How many crystites at a time do they
think they can hit?  How accurately do they think they can _aim_ it?"

"Oh, it's even better than that.  I had a look at the specifications
myself.  They'd left out the power consumption figures."  Michiru began
to grin, and Rei smirked back.  "Right.  It'd take more power crystals
than the whole city of Crystal Tokyo uses."

Michiru laughed.  It was black humour -- joking about flaws in a plan
that was supposed to save them all -- but lately, black humour was all
they had.  "At least they're trying," she said.

"Yeah, I suppose so."  Rei leaned back.  "If they could build a laser
cannon that easily, they might as well forget shooting monsters and use
it to help us drill that damned pit."

"Wouldn't that be convenient?"  Michiru gestured toward the monitoring
station, and Rei stood up obediently, letting her sit down.  "I checked
on the way in," she added.  "They're down to three hundred metres."

Rei nodded.  "Not bad," she said.  "All things considered."  She started
toward the door, stretching.  "I've got to get some sleep."

"Good luck," Michiru said ironically.

Rei made a rude gesture and opened the door -- and the alarm sounded,
and she was back at the monitors, her eyes wide open, in a heartbeat.
"Where?" she rapped.  "How many?"  Unspoken was the question, [Do you
need me to stay?]

Michiru was already tapping up the display.  "North-east," she said.
"Hibari district."  She bit off a curse.  "Two or three hundred of
them."

"Let's go."  Rei was out the door, running.  Michiru followed her an
instant later.

                                --**--

They transformed wordlessly on the way out to the flyer.  They could
have teleported to the attack point, perhaps; but neither had the
strength to spare.  (A full, unbroken night's sleep was almost a
forgotten dream.)  They would need all their energy for fighting.

As their flyer neared the wall, they were joined by Mercury, in a flyer
of her own.  Her face was drawn and weary, but she looked alert.  Good.
They could use the help.

The guns had already opened fire.  There were three railguns covering
this direction: more than a lot of the perimeter had.  They made an
eerie humming sound as the accelerators charged, followed by an
earsplitting _crack_ when they launched.  The shots moved so fast that
they were ignited by friction; they looked like streaks of white flame.

Mars jumped out of the flyer before it had stopped moving.  The other
two followed her an instant later.  The three of them leaped up to the
top of the wall, keeping low to avoid the razor-sharp return fire.

They risked a quick look out over the battlefield.  The crystites were
approaching the defence perimeter in a wedge formation: not too tightly
packed, so that a single shot could take out more than one at a time,
but closely enough that those further back had reasonable cover.  Their
tactics were slowly improving.

The guns were not having much effect; crystites were falling, but
slowly.  The three Senshi exchanged glances.  "Freeze and shatter?"
suggested Mars.  The other two nodded.

It was a fairly basic move.  Neptune produced water and Mercury froze
it, chilling the crystites.  Then Mars used her flame, and the sudden
temperature difference shattered them.  An elementary combination, but
one that worked well from a distance, and one that could, ideally, hit a
lot of the enemy at once.

But they couldn't keep it up forever; that kind of wide-area attack took
a lot of energy from all of them, and they were tired to begin with ...

Before long, as always, they were down off the wall, and fighting up
close.  Up close and dirty, with no time to think or plan, only react;
dodge and weave and strike, and know that the others were doing the
same.  Alone, against these odds, they would have died quickly; but
working together, protecting each other's backs, they could fight off
vastly superior numbers -- as long as they stayed close together.  At
this range, too, they could use their older, lower-powered attacks to
devastating effect.

So they fought.  Neptune was poetry in motion, as always; she moved with
cool poise and grace, her every action calculated and precise, seemingly
inexhaustable.  Mercury was equally precise, her attacks mathematically
exact; but she fought with a passion that would have surprised someone
who knew her only for her scientific and academic work.  And Mars --
Mars burned.  Always, she burned; her whole life was fire, aflame to
give warmth and light and love to those she loved -- and a flame to burn
those who would destroy them.  Spirit of fire, a spirit on fire ...

The enemy fell before them.

At last, after a time that could have been minutes or hours, they drew
to a halt, chests heaving, gasping for breath -- victorious once again.
A shot from a railgun took out the last crystite on the battlefield, and
Neptune raised a hand to salute the marksman.

They all heard the beeping, as the silence fell.

It took a moment to sink in.  It was the emergency alarm, coming from
all three communicators.  The three exchanged horrified glances.  How
long had it been sounding, unheard?

Mercury answered for all of them.  It was Diana calling, and she sounded
frantic.

"Oh, thank goodness," she burst out, almost gabbling.  "You've got to
hurry!  It's Venus and Uranus and the King -- there's a big attack --
hundreds of crystites, maybe thousands -- and Venus sent out a distress
call and you know she doesn't do that unless it's real trouble and she
said they couldn't handle it alone and that was nearly _half an hour_
ago --"

"Where?" demanded Mercury.  Her face was pale.

The south side of the city, she told them.  Almost directly opposite
to where they were now.

"They tricked us," Mars said incredulously.  "All of this -- it was just
a diversion while they --"

"Never mind that _now_!" Neptune roared at her, her composure failing
her for once.  "Come _on_!"

They scrambled to the flyers and took off.  They flew with breakneck
speed, fast enough that in an open cockpit it was hard to breathe ...
and every moment of the trip thundered in Mars' mind like the beating of
a funereal drum.  Like the slamming of coffin lids.

Half an hour late.

It took nearly four minutes more to cross the city.  The roar of the
wind in their ears was deafening -- but over it, clearer and clearer,
they could hear the rumble of the guns.  As they approached the southern
wall, they saw the size of the enemy force.

If anything, Diana had underestimated it.  There were nearly five
thousand crystites massed on the south side of the city, spread out over
a wide front.  They were being bombarded ceaselessly, and more fell
every minute -- but still they came onward.  They glittered in the
sunlight, eerily beautiful.  They were clearly unstoppable.

Venus, Uranus and Endymion were doing their best.

The sparks and flashes of power were unmistakable.  They were out there,
caught in the centre of the densest cluster of the enemy -- of course.
They looked battered -- from this distance it was hard to make out more
than that -- but they were still on their feet.

Mars put the flyer into a long, shallow curve over the battlefield,
looking for a clear space to land.  For a moment they passed over the
three down on the ground, and she got a quick, confused glimpse of the
struggle.  Venus and Uranus were fighting back-to-back; Venus seemed to
be letting off Crescent Beams almost ceaselessly, shattering any
crystite that came near, while Uranus was wielding the Space Sword,
firing bolts of power and using it as a weapon at the same time.
Endymion had his own sword drawn; he was wearing full armour, but he
bounded and leaped about with an easy athletic grace, making it look
effortless -- and everywhere he went, the black sword cut a swath
through the enemy.

The flyer rocked suddenly, and Mars glanced around in time to see
Neptune jump out.  She blinked, startled.  Well, that was one way to
join the battle in a hurry, she supposed.

Then she looked down at the controls, thought for a moment, and aimed
the flyer at a dense cluster of the enemy.  A second later she followed
Neptune over the side.

She hit the ground with bone-shaking force, rolling over and over.
Moments later, as she climbed shakily to her feet, she heard the sudden
explosion as the flyer crashed, followed an instant later by a second
explosion.  Mercury must have followed her example.  She hoped they had
done a lot of damage.

She looked around quickly (and dodged a pair of crystites that were
aiming hammerblows at her), trying to get her bearings.  A flash of
light from some way off caught her eye.  She nodded to herself, took a
quick breath, and ran.

A group of crystites were in her way.  The faces in the middle of their
chests -- slack-jawed, eyes closed as always -- made excellent targets.
She destroyed them all with a Burning Mandala without breaking stride.
Crystal fragments stung her arms and legs as she ran.  She barely
noticed.

A shout came from just in front of her: "CRESCENT BEAM SHOWER!"  It was
followed by a shattering sound.  Mars leaped over a pair of crystites,
dodging their eight-armed swipe at her as she passed, and landed in a
little clearing in the middle of the battlefield.

"Glad you could make it," said Venus casually.

She was a mess.  She was bleeding freely from cuts all over her body;
half her hair was gone -- it looked as if it had been burned somehow --
and the ginger way she was standing suggested that she had some broken
ribs.  But she was surrounded by piles of destroyed enemies; the light
in her eye was undimmed, and that cocky, indomitable grin was firmly in
place.

Mars wasn't in the mood for snappy comebacks.  "There's too many of
them," she said roughly.  "You've got to pull back."

"The thought had crossed my mind," Venus admitted.  She glanced around
and shot something over Mars' shoulder.  "But it was a little difficult
to make any headway.  Now that you're here ..."

There was a sudden blur of motion from their left, and Mercury joined
them.  "We have a problem," she said tersely.  "There's a big cluster of
the enemy, moving up fast.  I don't think we can hold them."

Venus swore.  "All right," she said.  "Let's get out of here.  What
happened to Uranus --?"

Endymion landed next to them.  He was breathing hard, his armour was
pitted with nicks and gouges, and there was a bloody gash on his
forehead, but he looked otherwise unharmed.  "She's a little way off
that way," he said, pointing.  "Neptune's with her."

"Okay."  Venus glanced around quickly.  "Mercury, go help them," she
ordered.  Mercury have a quick nod, and sped off.  Venus sighed.  "Mars,
Endymion," she said.  "Let's go ..."

They began a fighting retreat.  It was slow going.  The crystites were
generally spread quite thinly, but wherever the Senshi went, the enemy
converged on them.  They had to fight almost every step of the way.

A Flame Sniper might have cleared a path for them, Mars thought grimly.
But she didn't have the energy left; she had been on the go for so long
already that Fire Souls were almost all she could still do.  Venus was
in a similar state; her Crescent Beams were still deadly, but she wasn't
trying anything more.  Endymion was the only one of them who was still
really in good fighting condition; but even he had run out of roses, and
his Smoking Bomber attacks were becoming an obvious effort.

Still, this time they were headed in the same direction as the
crystites.  That helped a lot.  Slowly, painfully, they worked their way
through.  Another few minutes, and they would reach the walls.

Then, as they came to the top of a low hill, Mars heard Venus curse.

She looked back quickly.  From this height she could see some distance
-- to where Mercury, Uranus and Neptune were fighting.  They were cut
off: surrounded by fifty or sixty of the enemy, clustered so thickly
around them that they could not work their way free.  And the larger
group that Mercury had warned them of was approaching fast.

She made a quick decision.  Endymion was really best at close combat.
Venus was almost spent.  Mars was, too; but she wasn't as badly hurt as
Venus was.

"Take care of her, Mamoru," she said quietly, and somehow dredged up the
energy to run again.  She heard the King shout after her, but ignored
him.

The going was a little easier now.  They had almost made their way to
the front line; the numbers were fewer here, and she could actually get
up a little speed.  She conserved her powers, ducking and leaping rather
than fighting.  Gradually she worked her way free -- and then arced
around and plunged back into the enemy once more.

Before long she had to stop.  There were just too many crystites; they
changed direction and made for her as she approached, and she couldn't
get through.  She tried to zig-zag, ducking and weaving around them, but
it didn't help much.

Still, she could see the sparks and flashes of power, not too far ahead.
She simply had to hope that she was close enough for it to work ...

"Mercury!  Uranus!  Neptune!" she shouted.  "Get ready!  When I say go!"

She heard an answering shout.  She dodged back, then forward past one
more pair of crystites.  A gap opened up in front of her for a moment.
She took a deep breath, drew in everything she had left, and let it
all out at once.

"FIRE SOUL BIRD!"

She heard them launch their own attacks in reply.

"MERCURY AQUA RHAPSODY!"
"ASTRAL THUNDER!"
"TYPHOON SHOCK!"

The quadruple assault did it: opened a hole in the wall.  She saw
Mercury, followed by Neptune and Uranus, break through.  They began to
run toward her.

At the same time, she felt her Senshi transformation ebb and vanish.
She turned and ran ahead of the other three.  She was drained dry; there
was nothing left, she could not have transformed again if her life
depended on it.  But she could still run, and they were close to the
walls; close enough that nothing could stop them.  They were all going
to get out of this, once again; they were home free --

She looked back, and saw it all start to go wrong.

That big body of crystites was still moving up fast, and the others,
strangely, seemed to be making way for it.  A group of them surged in
from the side, casting their razor-whirlwind attacks.

A hail of crystal shards caught Uranus in the side.

She shrieked in agony.  A cloud of fine red mist seemed to hang in the
air.  The attack knocked her sprawling, limp and bloody, and instantly
the crystites rounded on her.

Neptune cried out in horror and fear, and turned back to help.  She
pulled out the Aqua Mirror and started to throw her Typhoon Shock attack
again; but another cluster of the enemy surged up and swept her away
before she could complete it.

Mercury whirled about and launched her Shabon Spray Freezing.  It hit
the crystites around Neptune and turned them into splinters.  Neptune
leaped away from them and looked around desperately for Uranus ...

Too late.  The crystites were all around Uranus, dozens of them.  Rei
caught one quick glimpse of her as they converged on her, saw her arm
reach out between two of their bodies as she struggled desperately to
break free.  Then it was jerked back suddenly.  They heard Uranus cry
out in pain once more.  More crystites continued to gather around her,
and all sight of her was lost.

Neptune moaned in disbelief, in agony herself.

There was a sudden flash from within the mill of crystites.  A blaze of
power.  Rei never learned what final attack Uranus found in her ultimate
crisis; but it blew the enemy away from her as if a bomb had gone off in
their midst.

Sailor Uranus leaped out from the horde of crystites.  They began to
close in on her once more, but she moved too quickly; she escaped their
grasp and began to run.

She looked terrible.  She was covered in blood.  Her uniform was torn
away all up one side; there was a deep open wound beneath her ribs, and
something long and ropy-looking was dangling out of it.  But she was
running, running, and the way ahead of her was clear --

She almost made it.  She almost almost almost made it.

Rei saw what happened clearly.  It seemed to take place slowly, in
complete silence.  Far behind, one of the crystites shuddered, and the
face on its chest suddenly came alive.  Its eyes flicked open.  They
burned with a pale blue light.  Its mouth twisted into a hungry grin.

It bent down, picked up a stone, and threw.  The missile caught Sailor
Uranus squarely in the small of her back; it lifted her off her feet and
sent her tumbling, spinning, face-first to the ground.  Before she could
move again, the enemy were upon her.

They swarmed over her like ants.  They closed around her.  Their arms
rose and fell.  The fists were stained with red.

Rei caught hold of Neptune's arm, holding her back.  Neptune jerked free
effortlessly, stumbled forward.  She was making a thin whining noise, a
high keening that sounded like a baby crying.  Her face was chalk-white;
her eyes were enormous.

Rei took her arm again, gently.  She did not try to break free this
time.  She did not seem to have any strength left in her at all.  She
only stared -- stared at what was happening before her, what was being
done.  A hundred metres away; a lifetime away.

The crystites finished their work.  The group split apart, leaving
something huddled and broken where they had been.  It did not look even
faintly human any more.

Neptune threw her head back and screamed.  Her voice was full of
shattered glass.

The crystites began to advance once more.

Someone else appeared at Rei's side.  Mercury.  Rei gave her a quick
look and said, "We've got to get her away from here."

Mercury did not look much better than Neptune; but she nodded in
understanding.  They each took one of Neptune's arms and began to lead
her back.  She came docilely at first, as if that scream had taken up
all the defiance left in her.  Then she began to struggle.

"No," she whispered.  Then, louder: "We ... we can't just give up!"  She
looked back over her shoulder, straining, unable to escape their grasp.
"We can't just leave her there!" she wailed.  "We can't!"

Rei and Mercury glanced at each other once more, and then back behind
them.  There were more than fifty crystites coming up behind them,
moving fast.  They tried to hurry Neptune along a little faster.

She stumbled along between them, still trying to break free.  "We can't
leave her," she sobbed.  "Please ... please, we have to go back ...
please ..."

Perhaps somebody heard her.

A thunderbolt crackled over their heads.

It was followed moments later by a second, and a third.  They slammed
into the crystites in quick succession, blowing them apart as if they
were made of tissue paper.

Rei lifted her eyes, and saw who was standing just ahead of them.
Sailor Venus: tired, hurt, but with the light of battle in her eye.
King Endymion: battered, weary, but grim-faced and ready for action.
And between them, impossibly, smouldering with power and very much
alive, was Sailor Jupiter.

Mercury hesitated, staring at them.  "Rei ..." she said.  But Rei was
already waving her on.  Mercury nodded; then, deliberately, she released
Neptune's arm, and went to join the three.

"Come on, Michiru-chan," Rei said gently.  "Come with me.  They'll take
care of Haruka now.  I promise."

She led Neptune back to the wall, ignoring the sound of battle behind
her.  Inside the gates, she knocked on the door of the first house she
came to and asked for a bed.  The people there recognised her, and let
her in.  She made Neptune detransform and put her to bed tenderly, and
held her hand until she fell asleep.

Then she went back to the wall and ordered the defenders to give her a
gun.

All along the southern wall of the city, the artillery were firing
without pause.  The crystites died hard, but they did die.  Out on the
battlefield, three Senshi and a King fought their own kind of war; and
wherever they went the enemy fell.

Somehow, the tide had turned.   Perhaps the unexpected return of Sailor
Jupiter had revitalised the defenders.  Perhaps the true Enemy, the
controlling intelligence, had given up, or lost interest.  But the
crystites appeared less driven; their actions were more random, and they
no longer seemed to fight as hard.  One by one, they fell.

An hour before sundown, the gates opened and the Senshi re-entered the
city.  Sailor Jupiter was at their head, carrying a limp, wrapped bundle
in her arms.  The defenders at the wall bowed their heads as she passed.



-----------
8 May, 3478
-----------

After the battle came the inquisition, apparently.

"So what happened?" asked Venus flatly.  "Why did you vanish like that?"
There were bags under her eyes; she had been in Senshi form all night,
taking advantage of the accelerated healing that offered, and it didn't
look like she'd had much sleep.

Neither had Makoto, though for a different reason.  As she'd lain in
bed, the image of Haruka's broken body had returned to her, again and
again.  [We've lost three, now,] she kept thinking.  [Four, if you count
Pluto.  Five, if you count the Queen.  If this goes on ...]

[No.  The pit they're digging, down to the Enemy, that'll work.  We'll
be able to attack then.  We'll win then.  Of course we will ...]

With difficulty, she brought her attention back to Venus, who was
waiting impatiently for an answer.

"I didn't have any choice," she answered.  "They attacked the group I
was with.  Everyone --"  She paused, took a deep breath.  She'd grown to
like the little band she'd been working with.  "Everyone except me was
killed," she went on in a level tone, "and I wasn't in great shape
myself.  And my communicator was damaged.  I couldn't call for help.

"Freak chance," she added at Venus' inquiring look.  "They -- the
crystites -- got a lucky shot.  A splinter hit my communicator.  I
brought it back; maybe Ami can repair it."  She shrugged.  "Anyway, I
had to keep moving after that.  Everywhere I went, they seemed to home
in on me.  I don't know if you've noticed that; they can always tell
where we are ..."

Venus nodded.  "Whenever we go out to fight, they head straight for us.
If it weren't for that, Haruka --"  She broke off suddenly.

"Yeah."  Makoto was silent for a moment.  "How's Michiru?"

"How do you expect?" Venus snarled.  "She's ... bad.  It's just lucky
for us that they used up all their forces in the area on that attack.
We'll have a bit of a breathing-space before they're back."

"There'll be more of them next time.  You know that."

"Yes."  Venus shrugged.  "But there are more factories getting tooled-up
for making guns, too.  We'll be better-armed by the time they arrive."

"Will it be enough?"

"It'll just have to be, won't it?"

A silence fell.  Makoto poured herself another cup of tea -- Western
tea; it was in short supply now but she loved it -- and added a large
helping of sugar.

"So why didn't you call?" demanded Venus suddenly.  "Okay, your
communicator was busted.  But you could have found an ordinary radio.
Hell, even the telephones are still working in some places."

"But if I'd --" Makoto began.  Then she stopped, staring at Venus.  "You
don't know," she said.  "Oh, no.  You don't know --"

"What?"  Venus' voice was impatient.

"I _told_ you the Enemy can control machines.  Flyers, factory
assemblers, anything.  I found out too late, but surely one of the other
resistance groups must have --"  She saw Venus' expression.  "It's not
just those," she went on hastily.  "It's _anything_.  Any machine.
Including radios.  And telephones."

Venus frowned for an instant, not understanding.  Then her eyes widened.
"Wait a minute.  You're saying --"

"I mean they can hear anything you broadcast!  Scramblers, encryption,
they don't make any difference.  If I'd called you and told you where to
come to find me, there would have been crystites waiting for you when
you arrived."

Makoto sighed.  "We might have been able to work out a way around it,
but I never dreamed how bad things were getting here.  I just thought it
was safest to make my own way home.  It took me a while, but I managed
to find a sailboat."  She smiled mirthlessly.  "One with no automatic
systems.  Everything manual."

Venus had something else on her mind.  "But -- but Rei's gone and set up
a big communications centre to link all the resistance groups.  You mean
that --"

Makoto sat for a moment, taking in the implications.  "Then the Enemy
knows all about them," she confirmed grimly.  "Where they are.  Even
what they're planning, if they've talked about that on the air ..."

"And we get reports from the orbital habitats about the crystites'
movements ..."  Venus closed her eyes, wincing as if in real pain.  "But
why?" she demanded.  "If the Enemy knows where all the groups are, why
haven't they been destroyed yet?  Why are they just being picked off a
few at a time?"

"Who knows?"  Makoto made a face as a new thought occurred to her.
"Maybe ... maybe the Enemy isn't interested.  Maybe, unless they get
inconvenient, it thinks it just isn't worth the bother."

They exchanged worried looks.



------------
15 May, 3478
------------

"All right," said Ami briskly.  "I've made some progress, at least.  I
think I've worked out how the Enemy controls machinery -- and the
crystites too, for that matter."

They were all gathered together, at her request, in a private room in
the Palace.  It was a grey, murky day outside, and there had been no new
attacks for several hours, so everybody was present -- even Michiru, who
sat at the back and did not speak.

"Have you found any way to block it?" asked Rei eagerly.

Ami shook her head.  "No.  Actually, what I've found may make things
worse -- if that's possible.  But still ..."

"Anything we can learn about the Enemy may help," said Endymion.
"Right?"

"Let's hope so."  Ami tapped at her computer for a moment, and a display
flashed up on a wall-screen behind her.  "I've been looking for common
factors in the people who became crystites," she explained.  "I built a
list of names from refugees' reports, and I've created a database of
personal and medical histories."

The display showed a slowly-scrolling list of details: names, birth-
places, ages, occupations, blood-types and other medical details.  "I
was able to eliminate most environmental factors almost immediately,"
she said.  "They were pretty unlikely anyway; the changes were just too
widespread.  Then I started to weed out the medical details.  Before
long, I found I'd eliminated everything.  There weren't any consistent
common factors at all.

"But then I noticed something rather odd ..."

Rei had been watching the list as it scrolled up the display.  "They
don't all have the same blood type or anything," she murmured.  Then she
sat up.  "Wait a minute, I see it, they all have -- no, wait, there's
one who doesn't ..."

Unexpectedly, Ami was smiling.  "What?" she asked.  "What did you think
you saw?"

Rei shook her head.  "It doesn't matter," she said.  "It wouldn't make
any sense anyway."  Ami prompted her again, wordlessly, and she sighed.
"I thought for a moment they all had bad eyes, all right?  But they
don't.  Look -- there's another one with perfect vision ..."

"Nevertheless, about eighty percent do have poor eyesight," said Ami
calmly.  "That was what I noticed, too.  It's not a universal common
factor -- but it is strange, you must admit."

"Eyes?" demanded Michiru.  "_Eyes?_  Is that your miracle solution?
Short-sighted people become crystites?  That's the most ridiculous --"

"Michiru," said Minako sharply.  She fell silent.  "Let her finish,"
Minako added in a softer tone.

Michiru sank back into her seat.  There was a look of sour contempt on
her face that had been there all too often since Haruka's death.  She
had become rough, abrasive and short-tempered; there was not one of them
who had not felt the lash of her tongue.  It was hard to accept, but the
others bore it patiently.  They could see that most of her anger was
directed at herself.  Haruka had died and she had not; she blamed
herself for failing to protect her love, and they could not convince her
that she was wrong.

She had insisted on returning to duty even before the crystite attacks
resumed.  She renewed the defence training courses that she and Haruka
had been running; but after only two days Venus had to order her to
stop, after too many reports of "accidents."  Her anger and her loss
drove her to push the recruits too hard; broken bones and other injuries
became common for new recruits who could not do what she demanded of
them.  After that, the only thing left for her was fighting the enemy,
which she did with a fury and a viciousness that sometimes frightened
the other Senshi.  Ami was concerned that she was heading for a
breakdown of some kind; but the truth was, on the battlefield her anger
was too useful to stop ...

Ami cleared her throat self-consciously.  "Eyesight," she repeated.
"Not all the warped people had bad eyes.  But if we consider those that
didn't ..."

She paused her display, and began to point to entries.  "Ichikawa Isako
-- hard of hearing," she said.  "Also Ebina Yugoro and Sanda Harukichi.
Terakado Sen had a pacemaker.  And here, and here ... more hearing
defects.  This man had lost a foot in an industrial accident and had an
artificial replacement.  This woman had an artificial larynx.  There's a
group here with blood-pressure control implants.  And this woman ..."
Ami paused, and blinked.  "... Had nothing wrong with her," she
finished.  "Wait a minute.  She had an cosmetic optical enhancement to
give her slitted pupils."  She shook her head in wonder.

"So what _is_ the common factor?" asked Makoto, baffled.  "None of those
have anything to do with bad eyes.  Do they?"

"Most forms of myopia or hypermetropia are treated with a simple implant
that generates a focusing field just in front of the eyes," Ami pointed
out.  "They were introduced about three hundred years ago; it's a very
simple, common procedure.  The implant constantly measures the eyeball's
shape and focal length and adjusts the field to compensate.  Nobody
needs eyeglasses any more ..."

"So the common factor is ... cybernetic enhancements?" suggested
Endymion.  "Optical fields ... pacemakers ... artificial limbs ... any
kind of implant ..."

"Not quite any kind," said Ami quietly.  "Any _powered_ implant.  The
power source, of course, is a crystal cell.  Cheap, reliable, and never
needs replacing.

"Oh, there were all sorts of variations," she told them, "but I've
checked every case, and there are no exceptions.  One way or another,
they all had some kind of crystal, physically within their bodies."

A silence fell as they took in the implications.  After a few seconds,
Makoto shuddered.  "That's ... disgusting."

"Yes, it is," Ami agreed.

"Wait just a minute!"  Minako was standing; she seemed agitated.
"You're saying that ... this Enemy somehow controls crystal?  That's how
it took over all those people?"

Ami nodded solemnly.  "Yes.  There may be another factor at work, too --
some of the victims had DNA sequences on record, and I think that there
may be some kind of genetic propensity as well.  But the crystal
connection is definite."

"And if it controls crystal, then we know how it's taken control of all
those machines as well, don't we?" said Endymion.

"But ... but we use crystal power cells for everything!"  Minako looked
appalled.  "Vehicles, lights ... everything!"

"Maybe we need to start looking for new alternatives," said Ami.

"If there's time," said Makoto.



------------
26 May, 3478
------------

As Makoto and Luna hurried through the corridors of the Palace, they
were interrupted by a small grey figure.

"Yes?" said Luna.  "Can it wait?  I'm in a bit of a hurry.  Makoto and I
are supposed to be meeting with the Supply Council."

"I need to talk to you," said Diana.  "In private."  She hesitated for a
moment, then said reluctantly, "I have a problem ..."



------------
6 June, 3478
------------

"Ami!" Rei called.  She hurried down the corridor toward her fellow
Senshi.  "I got your message.  What's the problem?" she asked as she
reached her.

"It's Michiru," said Ami quietly.  She was standing at a window, looking
out over the city.  From this high up in the Palace tower, everything
looked almost normal.

"Oh."  Rei bit her lip.  She had been afraid of this.  "What's she been
doing now?" she asked at last.

"She's been asking me some very ... strange questions."  Ami looked
upset, Rei realised.  Disturbed.  Whatever Michiru had said had shaken
her.  She looked up at Rei and said, "You've seen her the most since
Haruka ... died.  What's she doing?  She won't talk to anyone else,
usually; when she's not fighting she stays in her rooms all the time,
with the privacy barrier up ...  What is she up to, Rei?  What is she
doing in there?"

Rei tried to make a joke of it.  "Well, maybe the sort of thing most
people want privacy for --"

"Rei!"

She gave in.  "I'm not quite certain," she replied slowly.  "She's
spending a lot of time with the Aqua Mirror, I think.  She sits staring
into it, almost in a trance.  For hours on end.  I don't think she's
sleeping enough --"

"Is she trying to see Haruka, do you think?" asked Ami.

"No.  That's the strange part."  Rei closed her eyes for a second,
thinking.  "She's ... trying to find something.  But not Haruka.  She
borrowed some texts from me, did you know?  Old scrolls; meditation
techniques, very esoteric stuff.  And other things -- invocations.  I
don't understand some of them myself. But I think she's ... trying to
use them somehow."

"What for?"

"What did she ask _you_?"

Ami did not try to dodge the question.  "She asked me if I thought the
Ginzuishou was Serenity's talisman."

"She _what_?" Rei demanded, astonished.

"Yes.  Do you see now why I'm worried?"

Rei did not answer immediately.  "What did you tell her?"

"I told her I don't know.  But I don't think so.  The Ginzuishou is a
different ... order of power from the talismans."

"If anything," Rei said slowly, "the Grail would be ..."  She trailed
off.  "I wonder if --"

"It occurred to me," Ami said in a low voice, "that she might be looking
for the Space Sword -- maybe as an anchor to try and get Haruka back.
Or perhaps ... Setsuna's staff."

"The Time Gate?  I don't think so.  She --"  Rei hesitated, then said
flatly, "She says Setsuna is dead."

Ami was caught by surprise.  "She --?"

Rei grimaced.  "I'd been starting to think that myself.  I mean, you
know, Setsuna could be cryptic, aggravating.  She _never_ told us
everything we needed to know.  But ... she wouldn't just abandon us when
we need her like this, either.  She wouldn't --"  She stopped, and shook
her head.  "Michiru said she'd looked for her.  But there was no sign.
Setsuna was gone."

"But ... how?"  Ami sounded bewildered.

"The Enemy controls crystal, remember?" Rei said dully.  "When it broke
free, I think it attacked her through her staff.  Pulled her down into
that cave ..."  She shivered.  "When they finish that pit, I think we'll
find her.  Down there."

"You never said anything."

"No.  Who needs more demoralisation?  But if Michiru is starting to
talk --"

"No.  It doesn't add up," said Ami.  "Why does she need advanced
meditation techniques for that?  And what's the connection to the
Ginzuishou?  She can't still be --"  She swallowed.  "All right.  I
won't talk to the others about Pluto; you're right.  But she must be
looking for something else, too.  Haruka.  Or perhaps some way to break
through to the Enemy ..."

"Perhaps."  Rei's voice was noncommittal.

"Or she might want to try to form a link between the Ginzuishou and the
Mirror ..."  Ami shook her head.  "But why won't she _say_?"  Ami looked
at her sharply.  "You think you know, don't you?" she said.  "You've been
dodging the question all along.  What is it?  Tell me!"

Rei stirred.  "I think," she said carefully, "that she's looking for
something different.  Something _more_.  More power.  The ability to
fight better ... maybe the ability to do a whole lot of things."

Ami frowned, not understanding.  "But --"

"I think she's looking for her Eternal transformation."

Ami stood stock-still.

"I think she believes that she can use the Aqua Mirror to trigger it
somehow."  Rei shook her head.  "She tried to use the mirror to reach
Haruka's spirit, and couldn't.  So she's looking for justifications in
other directions now.  She still thinks she failed Haruka because she
wasn't strong enough ..."

"But ..."  Ami finally found words again.  "But she can't ... can she?
I mean, none of us have ever had an Eternal transformation except Sailor
Moon, and that was because she had --"  She stopped suddenly.  "The
Ginzuishou," she breathed.  "Her talisman?  Rei, is it possible?"

"I don't know," Rei answered sombrely.  She sighed heavily.  "I wish we
could talk to Serenity about this.  I don't think Michiru can do it; the
talismans aren't that kind of tool.  Just trying it could be dangerous
to her.  But ..."  She shrugged.  "What if I'm wrong?  The way things
are going, do we dare keep her from trying?"

Ami bit her lip.  "Have you talked to Minako about any of this?" she
asked.

"Some," said Rei.  "She said I shouldn't do anything to stop her ... for
now.  But to watch her."

Ami nodded slowly.  She looked worried.  "Yes," she said.  "Watch her.
I think that may be wise."



---------
Interlude
---------

Slowly, the net tightened about Crystal Tokyo.

Everywhere, all over the world, the enemy were on the move.  In most
places, the crystites went about their own mysterious business.  They
roamed the deserted streets of the world's cities, apparently moving at
random.  They worked in the factories, making strange, meaningless
objects that served no apparent purpose.  They killed every squirrel
they saw, though nobody could suggest any reason why.  Now and then,
vast numbers of crystites -- sometimes ten thousand or more -- could be
seen in wide open spaces, moving in intricate, dance-like patterns, all
of them perfectly in step.

One by one, the rebel cells throughout the world stopped communicating.
Some of them were known to have been wiped out by the crystites.
Others, the majority, simply fell silent, one by one.  Rei and Ami
teleported out to look for a few of them.  They found well-stocked
headquarters, without any signs of fighting -- but with no people.

Early in June, the factories suddenly opened their doors, all over the
world, and a host of machines rolled out and swarmed into action.  Their
exact purpose was uncertain, but it quickly became apparent that they
were building something new in their turn: a strange, elaborate network,
a web of crystal filaments, ranging from a few centimetres thick to over
a metre, spreading slowly across the countryside.  Cables, perhaps, or
pathways of some other kind; but even to Ami they were incomprehensible.

The webs came together at certain locations: less than a score, over the
entire globe.  At the confluence points, different machines began to
erect huge, alien structures, built of glittering crystal.  They
reminded some observers of hives.  Or perhaps they were set up as
mockeries of Crystal Tokyo itself.

Ami plotted the locations of the hives, and announced that they did
follow a mathematical pattern.  There was a gap in the pattern, though:
one point where a hive was missing.  No-one was particularly surprised
to hear where that point was.

The people on space habitat L-117 went ahead and built their laser
cannon, and fired it at one of the hives.  Five-eighths of a second
after they opened fire, an unexplained resonance effect travelled from
the hive back _up_ the beam.  When it reached the habitat, every power
crystal on board shattered at once.  The habitat itself exploded moments
later; there were no survivors.

That same five-eighths of a second was enough to melt or shatter a large
portion of the target hive.  The enemy showed no reaction to the damage,
though.  The construction machines simply stopped what they were doing
and began to rebuild the structure.  Within six days, it was difficult
to see where the cannon had struck.

The Senshi attempted to teleport into one of the hives, to investigate
what the Enemy was doing there.  They encountered the same cripplingly
painful barrier that surrounded the underground anomaly.  Rei and Ami
were unconscious for a day.

In Japan, a new army of crystites was on the move.  From all over Japan
they came, from all directions, more than fifty thousand of them,
heading directly for Crystal Tokyo.  There were reports of crystites
simply walking south from Hokkaido, across the floor of Tsugaru Strait.

Here and there, scattered among their number, there were other,
different creatures.  Another kind of crystite, it seemed; similar in
form, but larger, and a pale, delicate blue in colour.  The regular,
clear crystites seemed to defer to them.  Perhaps the army had found
leaders.  Perhaps the Enemy had found -- or made -- Captains.

Meanwhile, Crystal Tokyo had not been idle.  More and more of their
resources were being converted to war production every day.  The pause
in the assault after Haruka's death had been enough for them to develop
a slight edge.  Every attack since then had been beaten off with little
difficulty.  The Senshi remained the city's main defence, but they were
no longer being worked to exhaustion.  The railgun design had been
improved, and a portable version was being tested.  Nobody had any
doubts that, as things stood, they would be able to hold off the
crystites indefinitely.

Nobody had any doubts that once the new crystite army arrived, the edge
they held would vanish.

The pit in the heart of the city continued to deepen.  As the workers
dug further down, progress slowed; but a simple calculation showed that
they would reach the anomaly at about the same time as the army reached
the city.

As the day approached, the whole city held its breath.



-------------
19 June, 3478
-------------

Minako stood in the excavation site, keeping out of the way.  Around
her, an army of workers surged.  There was an air of expectancy about
them, an eagerness that shone even through the tension and the weariness
stamped on every face.

The air was filled with the constant roar of heavy machinery.  A dense
cloud of dust hung over the area.  There was a constant gritty taste in
Minako's mouth.  A few of the workers wore breathing masks, but most
found them too hot or inconvenient.  Minako had stopped the site foremen
when they tried to make everybody keep them on; it was a horrible
thought, but a few cases of silicosis or pneumonoconiosis were a small
price to pay for more speed.

Now and then, someone would glance up from what he or she was doing,
catch her eye, and grin confidently.  She would grin back, and raise her
fingers in the V sign.  It seemed to inspire them to work even harder.

Artemis was curled around her neck.  It was uncomfortable, but she felt
absurdly pleased to have him there.  He hadn't ridden her shoulders like
this in decades.  It reminded her of the days when there had been just
the two of them ...

"How much longer?" she asked.

"You keep asking that," he complained.  "They should break through to
the anomaly in about an hour."

"And the enemy won't be here for six," she answered.  "We're going to
make it, Artemis, we're really going to make it!"

She felt, rather than heard, him snort.  "And then the hard part
begins," he pointed out.  "Calm down, Mina-chan."

"Spoilsport," she said cheerfully, reaching up to ruffle his fur.  He
was probably right; but all the same, she could barely restrain her
excitement.  It was tempting to pull all the Senshi in now, ready for
the attack.  But there was still the possibility of something unexpected
happening at the walls; she did not want to take the risk.  Maybe in
another half an hour ...

She was still pondering the question, occasionally stepping out of the
way as a vehicle roared past carrying another load of debris, when she
felt a tap on her shoulder.  She looked around to see Makoto.

"You're early," she commented.

Makoto shrugged.  "Everything's quiet on the walls.  If something comes
up, you can always help me teleport back.  And ..."  She grinned.  "I
couldn't resist it.  The chance to strike _back_ at last ..."  She
punctuated the words by slapping a clenched fist into her hand.

Artemis groaned.  "Not you, too," he said.

Minako sighed.  "Artemis --"

"You think you're just going to drop down there, blast some evil
monster, and it'll be all over?" he demanded.  "You should know better
than that.  You should have _learned_ better than that.  You think this
is going to be a pushover?  Look what happened to Usagi!"

After a long, uncomfortable silence, Makoto said, "That was pretty low,
Artemis."

"Maybe it needed to be," he said quietly.  "This isn't a game, Makoto.
You can't afford to treat it like one."

"Is it treating it like a game to be pleased that we can actually _do_
something at last?" she demanded.  "Is it a game to want to strike back?
Damn it, Artemis, there isn't a day when I don't remember Usagi.  There
isn't a day when I dread seeing the look on Serenity's face when she
wakes up and we have to tell her that Small Lady is dead!  So --" there
was sudden pleading in her voice -- "is it so wrong that I should be
looking forward to giving a little payback to the one who killed her?
Is it?"

Artemis shook his head.  "You're missing the point," he told her.  "It's
not wrong, Makoto.  But it's not wise, either.  If you go down there all
excited and itching to strike back, you'll make mistakes.  And that's
something you absolutely can't afford.  You should know _that_.  You know
what this enemy can do."

"We know," put in Minako.  "Artemis, you're overreacting.  We _do_ know.
We've had a dozen planning sessions for this, we've sat through Rei's
meditation lessons in case it tries to affect our minds like it did
Moon's, we've gone through scenarios until the cows come home --"
Makoto coughed suddenly, and Minako raised an eyebrow.  "Yes?  Something
you wanted to say?"

"Sorry," said Makoto, straight-faced.  "Dust in my throat."

"Of course," Minako purred.  Then, to Artemis, she added, "High spirits
don't mean we're not ready.  So lay off a little, huh?"

He sighed, and grumbled, "I suppose so."  Minako chuckled.

They watched the activity in silence for a few minutes.  The pit was
almost twenty metres across at the top, narrowing to less than three at
the bottom, almost two kilometres below.  A set of three rails ran down
one side, bolted into the solid rock.  Two of them carried broken-up
rock up from the bottom, in a continuous circular train of iron scoops.
The third rail carried a platform for transporting tools, equipment and
people.  Minako had ridden it down to the bottom once, two weeks before.
It was rickety, bumpy and very noisy, and took more than five minutes to
make a one-way trip, swaying and lurching from side to side all the way.
In other circumstances, it would have been one hell of a ride.

As they watched, the platform reached the surface with a shrill whining
screech that set their teeth on edge.  A group of workmen got off,
staggering a little as they set foot on solid ground once more.  Three
more stepped on to descend.  They took it very casually, Minako saw.
One of them didn't even hold on to the handrail; he kept his hands stuck
in his pockets, even when the sudden jerk as the platform started
downward made him stagger.

Minako shook her head in wonder.  All of this machinery had been built
from scratch; there had been no heavy mining equipment within Crystal
Tokyo when the Enemy struck.  Industrial lasers could cut rock, but it
still had to be shifted out of the pit by manual labour.  These people
had worked miracles to have done so much, so fast.  If the Senshi won
this battle -- no, _when_ they won this battle -- she was going to make
sure that the miners received the highest honours Serenity had to give.

"Forty minutes to go," Makoto sighed.

"Well, more or less," Artemis said pedantically.  "It could take a
little longer.  Or even a --"  He saw the look she was giving him, and
got the message.  "Why don't I go and check the progress board, just to
make sure?" he said rapidly.

"Why don't you do that?" agreed Minako, smirking.  With a put-upon sigh,
he jumped down from her shoulder and hurried off.  "Rat-bag," she
muttered, watching him go and rubbing her neck.  He hadn't been too
careful with his claws.  "He does worry, doesn't he?" she said
affectionately.

Makoto chuckled.  "Are you ever tempted to do something horrible to
him?" she asked.

"Periodically," Minako admitted.  "Hit him with catnip just before an
important meeting, maybe."  They both laughed.  "He does worry," she
repeated.  "But it's nice to have someone who does that ..."

After a little, Makoto said tentatively, "Isn't it about time to call
the others in?"

Minako rubbed her shoulder absently.  "I suppose so," she mumbled.  She
looked up suddenly and said, "Look, what is the problem with you and
Rei, anyway?"

Makoto jerked, startled.  "What --" she fumbled.  "What do you mean?"

"Are you and her having some kind of squabble?  I've noticed, the last
few days, that you're keeping out of each other's way."

"Oh!"  Makoto seemed unaccountably relieved.  "We, er, had a bit of an
argument a little while ago," she said cautiously.  "Don't worry about
it.  We can handle it."

Minako snorted.  "You could have picked a better time for it.  Oh, well,
I suppose --"  She rubbed her shoulder again, and frowned.  "I've seen
that man before," she muttered.

"What man?"

"The one on the platform."  She scratched her head, puzzled.  "He
reminds me of someone.  Who does he remind me of?"

"Your sempai?" suggested Makoto, grinning.

"Don't you start."  Minako scratched her head.  "He reminds me of ... he
reminds me ..."  She blinked, suddenly looking confused.  "He reminds me
of Artemis.  Now why is that?"

Makoto rolled her eyes.  "I'm sure I wouldn't want to speculate about
_that_."

"Oh, go wash your mouth out.  Why would he remind me of --"  Minako came
to a sudden stop.  Her eyes widened.  "They're both a pain in the
shoulder," she said.  "Oh, _no_!"

Makoto stopped grinning.  "What?" she asked sharply.

"He's the man I carried up from the borehead, back when all this
started.  He was the one who broke through to the anomaly.  It did
something to his hand ..."

She cursed furiously.  "He even had his hands in his pockets just now!
Mako-chan, call the others in.  I've got a bad feeling about this --"

Without waiting for an answer, she transformed and sprinted over to the
pit.

She paused for a moment at the edge to glance down.  A column of lights,
evenly spaced, ran down the three rails.  Every few seconds, they were
blocked out of sight as a debris scoop rattled past.  The passenger
platform was out of sight, lost in darkness far below.

She watched the scoops, timing them carefully.  Then she took a single
quick breath and jumped.

At the last moment, as she hung suspended for an instant in mid-air,
something hit her in the back, sending her tumbling off-balance.  She
felt needle-sharp claws digging into her.  A familiar weight.
[Artemis,] she realised.  [You crazy idiot --]

She twisted in mid-air and just managed to catch hold of one of the
descending scoops.  She pulled herself up onto it, breathing hard, and
resisted the urge to bawl him out.  Instead she glanced down, checking
her timing once more.

"Ready?" she asked Artemis shortly.  She felt him tense in response.
Then she started downward again, leaping from scoop to scoop.  It was a
wild, dizzying, maniacal ride.  She could feel the blood pounding in her
veins.  She felt utterly alive.

She felt desperately worried.

She gasped out the situation to Artemis as she went, plunging ever
deeper into the ground.  The man she had seen had no business being
here.  He was a cripple: his hand and lower forearm had been warped,
distorted, the flesh transmuted into something resembling crystal.  He
had come into direct contact with something awful, and it had twisted
him.  The last Venus had heard of him, he was in hospital, in constant
pain, surrounded by a team of scientists trying to analyse what had
happened to him for some hint about the Enemy.  His doctors, she
thought, wanted to amputate the arm, but the scientists would not let
them while there was any chance of learning more ...

Here at the pit-site, dressed for work, was the last place he should
have been.  She did not know what it meant, but she was absolutely
certain that it was nothing good.  The timing of it, if nothing else,
was ominous.  And he was still far below them; he had several minutes'
lead ...

To her right, the passenger rail suddenly rattled, and ground to a halt.
Then it began to rise again.  Startled, she almost missed a jump.
Makoto must have done it, she realised.  She should have thought of it
herself.  Now she ought to have plenty of time to --

With a jerk, the passenger rail stopped once more.  She heard a
mechanical whining, like a machine overloading; then, from far below, a
scream of tearing metal.

She gritted her teeth.  She was out of time.  All right, she'd just have
to try this the tricky way ...

She shot out her Love-Me Chain, wrapping it around the scoop she was
standing on.  Then, quite deliberately, she simply off the scoop,
holding onto the chain.

This was the quick way down.  The hard part would be when she wanted to
stop again.

Below her there was light, coming rapidly closer.  She caught a confused
glimpse of the passenger platform: a twisted, shattered ruin, hanging
from the third rail as she went past.  The wind was roaring in her ears.
Then there was no more time; she tightened her grip on the chain, felt
it tearing at her hands, the sudden wrench in her arms, the panicky grip
around her neck as Artemis held on for dear life -- the pain in her
hands, the burning --

At the last moment she let the chain dissolve.  She hit the bottom of
the pit, hard, and rolled shakily to her feet to confront the man there.

Except that she was not sure that he was a man.  Not any more.

He still looked human.  Mostly.  He was burly, muscular, and a little
taller than her; the hair at his temples was turning grey.  He was
bending over something, adjusting it, but as she landed he straightened
up quickly.  There was a very convincing look of innocent surprise on
his face.  If that had been all, she might have been fooled.

But his left sleeve was pulled back, and she could see what had once
been his hand.  When she had carried him up from the borehead, weeks
before, it had been a warped mockery of a human hand: the fingers
blurred, fused together into a solid, twisted mass, the skin itself
transmuted into a glassy, crystalline substance.  Now, the mutation had
progressed still further.  The thing at the end of his arm was no hand
at all; it was a massive clamp, vise-like, with a glittering spike
protruding from the bottom.

The spike was red with blood.  Behind him, lying at the base of the
third rail, were the bodies of the other two who had come down with him.

She took it all in in one quick look.  "You're not going to come
quietly, are you?" she asked rhetorically.

He did not reply.  Imstead he lunged at her; the spike flashed out,
ready to impale.  She was already dodging; as he came in range, she took
hold of his arm and yanked, pulling him off balance.  She followed the
motion through, spinning him around and sending him flying head-first
into the wall.

It ought to have dazed him, perhaps knocked him unconscious, but no more
than that; there was not enough room at the base of the pit to get up
enough momentum to hurt him badly.  Instead, she heard a brittle
crunching, splintering sound, shockingly loud.  The man collapsed
without another sound, sprawling limply on the gouged-up rock of the pit
workface.  His head was twisted at an unnatural angle.

She stared for a moment, startled.  Then she ran to his side.  A
tentative check showed no pulse.  His body was already turning cold.
His neck was unmistakably broken.  He was dead.

She stood, looking down at him bewilderedly.  She had not thrown him
nearly hard enough to break his neck.  Surely?  Numbly, she reached for
her communicator to tell Makoto that the problem was over --

Wait a moment.  How could his body _already_ feel cold --?

His eyes flew open.  "Boo," he said, and started to laugh.  At the same
moment, he began to change.  His face blurred, rippled; his body began
to twist, reform.  As Venus stood staring in shock, he lifted one arm,
almost casually, and smashed her off her feet.  She hit the wall of the
pit with bone-numbing force.  By the time she could see again, much less
move, he was towering over her.

He was no longer even faintly human.  But he was not a crystite, either;
he was something ... new.  Three metres tall, at least.  His clothing
had split, and was hanging off him; the skin underneath was translucent,
crystalline -- almost faceted.  It shone with a deep golden light.  His
arms and legs were monstrous, clublike things; both hands were spiked
clamps now.  His face was distorted, like a parody of a human face.
There was a third eye in the centre of his forehead.  All three eyes
glowed a pale blue.

She had no time to react.  He picked her up and threw her up the shaft.

She spun uncontrollably as she rose, bouncing off the walls three times.
It was painful.  Worse, it was humiliating.  Gritting her teeth, she
reached out at the apex of her flight and caught one of the rubble
scoops, which were still rattling along in their endless loop.  She
perched on it for a second, rubbing a sore shoulder.  Then she tapped
her communicator.  Sailor Jupiter's face appeared.

"I could use some help down here," she told her.  As she spoke, she
leaned over the edge for a moment to check how far up the shaft she'd
been thrown.  "Our man's transformed," she continued.  "He's big and
strong, and pretty fast.  Tell the others to -- _whuhh_!"  She cut off
sharply as she saw what her enemy was doing.

He was only a few dozen metres below her, and gaining fast.  He was
swarming up the third rail, hand-over-hand, as easily as if he were
climbing a ladder.  There was a broad, hungry grin on that twisted face.
His eyes blazed in the darkness.

She had just enough time to fire off a Crescent Beam before he reached
him.  He twisted, as if he had felt it coming, and it passed over his
shoulder.

She dodged back, just in time, as he reached her level.  A blow from one
of those massive hand-clamps shattered the rock where her head had been.
The wall cracked; fragments of stone caught in the scoops' drive-chain
with an ear-splitting, grinding squeal.  She ducked another blow, leaped
across to a passing scoop on the other rail, and spun, firing a Crescent
Beam at him as she went.

This time it hit him squarely in the chest -- and suddenly he lit up, as
if he were some giant crystal lamp and she had just provided the power.
For a second she had to shield her eyes.  In that moment, another blow
caught her squarely in the breast.

It knocked her back, end-over-end, off the scoop.  She began to fall
once more, crying out in pain and surprise.  Even so, long centuries of
experience did not fail her.  She managed to fire off another Love-Me
Chain, wrapping it around a lower scoop.  She swung in toward the rails,
bounced once more off the wall, and finally managed to drag herself up
onto one of the rising scoops.  She lay in it for a few seconds, eyes
closed, gasping for breath and trying to nurse her sore chest.

"Minako-chan?"

She managed to open her eyes, and found herself face-to-face with
Artemis.  He had been following her up in the scoop, she realised.  "I'm
okay," she groaned.  "Just give me a moment."  She had had worse before.
Not often, admittedly.

She picked up Artemis and looked up the shaft for her enemy.  He was
easy to make out; his body was still glowing brilliantly, far brighter
than before she'd hit him.  He was no longer ascending; he was clinging
to the side of the pit somehow, high above her.  She had a sudden
thought, and fired another Crescent Beam at him.  Maybe it would
overload him and make him shatter or something.  He dodged easily, but
otherwise stayed motionless in the shaft.

Far above, she could see other sparks of power, arcing down toward him.
Jupiter, and at least two of the others, coming in range at last.  But
he ducked their shots as easily as he had Venus', without moving from
his position on the wall.

"Damn it," Venus swore.  "What is he doing up there?"  She decided to
see if he could dodge a Love and Beauty Shock.

The sound of an explosion interrupted her.

It came from far below her, a sudden bellowing roar, the sound amplified
by the shape of the pit.  She froze, taken by surprise.  Too late, she
remembered that he had been working on something when she had reached
the bottom.  [A bomb?  He'll bring the whole pit down around himself --]

A second later, a great wind caught her, almost lifting her off the
scoop.  A reverse avalanche of loose rock and pebbles shot out of the
depths, as if fired from a shotgun.  She was struck a hundred times or
more in a fraction of a second.  The world went black.

-- She opened her eyes an indeterminate time later.  The air was
chokingly thick with dust.  It was dark all around her; the lamps that
lined the shaft had been shattered by the blast.  Some way above, she
could see a few that were still working.  The scoop she was lying on was
no longer moving.

One of the lamps far above her moved, and she realised that it was not a
lamp after all; she was seeing the enemy.  He was still glowing, still
clinging to the side of the pit.

As she watched, he became a star.

Another explosion.  He had been setting a second bomb, she realised
faintly.  Or perhaps, his task accomplished, he had _become_ a second
bomb.  Either way, it did not matter.  Before the last of the lamps went
out, she saw the sides of the pit began to cave in above her.  Thousands
of tonnes of rock began to fall straight toward her.

Artemis was shouting in her ear.  "Teleport, Venus!  Teleport!"

Teleport.  Yes, that was a good idea.  Somehow, she managed to drive the
cobwebs from her mind; she took hold of Artemis, reached out for the
power, and twisted the two of them through space a fraction of a second
before the scoop she had been lying in was buried.

                                --**--

The pit was a total ruin.  After Venus and Artemis had been taken to
hospital, Jupiter ordered the pit crew to start digging it out again.
The foreman warned her that the walls would be unstable after the
cave-in; they would have to work slowly, strengthening them as they
went.  She listened, nodded curtly, and told him to do the best he
could.

Then she went to the city wall.  The crystites were about to arrive.



-------------
22 June, 3478
-------------

A high-pitched whine split the air and people dove for cover.  A cluster
of energy bolts struck the wall, tearing out a hole nearly a dozen
metres wide.  As the echoes of the explosion faded, they were replaced
to the cries and moans of the wounded.

Moments later, the railguns opened up in reply.  Pencil-thin lines of
white flame shot back at the source of the bolts: a group of three Blue
Crystites that stood outside the walls, in a triangle formation, about
eight hundred metres away.

There was a an odd metallic glitter in the air about the trio: a
shimmering that clung near to them like an almost-imperceptible shell of
mist.  As the railgun shots entered the shell, they twisted, their paths
bending crazily.  Most of them came straight back out of the shell,
moving at wild, unpredictable angles.  The shots travelled so fast that
it all happened in the blink of an eye; they were fired and deflected in
a microsecond.

Some few shots did not return.  Whether they were actually penetrating
the shield or not, nobody could say.  They had no visible effect on the
Blue Crystites.

Ami had tried to analyse the shield.  She'd announced that it was not
a magnetic field, or any other kind of electromagnetic field that she
could detect.  She also claimed that railgun shots showed a marked
red-shift effect as they were deflected.  The others nodded wisely and
tried to look as though they understood.

The Blue Crystites were taller and heavier than the regular, clear
variety.  The faces in the centre of their chests were different, too;
their eyes were fully open, and their mouths occasionally worked
silently, as if trying to shout or scream.  And, of course, the Blue
variety had a few abilities that the others lacked.

The trio raised their twelve arms and gestured, and a new barrage of
energy bolts arced toward the walls.  Another section of the wall became
rubble.

In the wake of the bolts came the physical attack.  A vast army of
regular crystites surrounded the city.  Wherever the walls were hit,
they swarmed forward.  Defenders rushed to fill the breaches with sacks
of rubble from the collapsed pit, but every time, there were fewer
defenders to make the effort.

"They're destroying us," groaned Michiru.  She was standing on top of
the wall, perilously close to where the latest bolts had struck, but she
did not flinch, even when they hit.  She was being peppered with rock
fragments, but she barely seemed to notice.

"For heaven's sake, at least transform!" hissed Jupiter, emerging
gingerly from shelter.  Endymion followed her, throwing a dark glance
out at the enemy before stepping up onto the wall beside the other two.

Michiru did not seem to hear.  "They hit us and hit us, and we can't ...
we don't even have the power to strike back," she whispered bleakly.

"We can strike back," said Endymion.  "We _are_ striking back."

Michiru turned her head, finally acknowledging him.  Her eyes were dark,
empty.  "Pinpricks against an elephant," she said.  "That's all.  Do you
actually think we can succeed?"

"We _will_ succeed," said Jupiter grimly.

"We must," added Endymion.

She stared at them for a moment longer, then looked away, unable to meet
their gazes.  "This isn't --" she began, then broke off.  "It's not what
we need," she said hoarsely.  "Not another attack.  Not throwing more
... more lives away.  We can't just ... it's not guns.  We don't need
more guns.  We can't fight them with guns.  We can't ..."

She trailed away into silence.  They saw that her cheeks were wet.

"What do we need?" asked Jupiter gently.

"A different weapon," Michiru whispered.  "Not guns.  _Power_.  We have
to find --"

The strength seemed to go out of her, all at once.  She fell to her
knees, clutching at the stone wall like a security blanket.  "It's no
good," she said mournfully.  "It's no good.  I've tried and tried, but I
can't find -- I can't find it --"

Endymion knelt beside her, and laid a hand gently on her shoulder.  "You
need to have faith," he suggested.

She turned on him.  "Faith?"  Her voice was bitter.  "Faith?  What use
is faith?  I used to have faith.  It didn't help.  It didn't -- I
couldn't --"  She sagged back once more.  "Half of me is missing," she
said dully.  "What is there left to have faith in?"

"Light," he suggested.  His tone was firm, confident, full of certainty.

"Life," said Jupiter.

"Serenity," Endymion added.

Michiru opened her mouth, as if to contradict them, but then closed it
again, shaking her head.  "You can't see it.  I can't argue with you,"
she muttered.  "I can't ..."  She shuddered under Endymion's hand.

"Michiru," he said softly.

She did not respond at first.  Then she sighed, and got to her feet
slowly.  "All right," she said wearily.  "You want me to come with you,
I suppose?"  He nodded.  "For all the good it'll do," she muttered.

Jupiter and Endymion exchanged glances.  "Yes," Jupiter said.  "You
should come now.  We're supposed to move out in a few minutes."

Michiru nodded shortly.  She closed her eyes, and a ripple of change
washed over her, leaving Sailor Neptune in its wake.  "Let's go, then,"
she said.

They were staring at her.  "What's wrong?" she asked.

Jupiter pointed.  She looked down.  The bow on her breast had changed.
It was no longer blue.  It had become so dark that it was almost black.

She gave a bitter laugh.  "It's appropriate, don't you think?" she said.
"After all, I'm the only one left.  The only Outer Senshi ... the last
to stand against the outer darkness ..."

"Michiru --"  Jupiter hesitated, then said, "You sound like you ..."

"Like I want to die?"  Neptune laughed: an ugly sound.  "You don't
understand.  I don't want that at all.  I want --"  Her eyes grew
distant.  "I want it to _mean_ something."

"Haruka's death, you mean?" asked Endymion.

She laughed again.  "You _don't_ understand.  I mean ... all of this.
Everything!  Damn it --"  She broke off.  "Look," she said.  "We
sacrificed our youths ... we gave our whole lives to build this.  We
worked for fifteen fucking hundred years to build paradise, and now look
at it!  Two months, and it's all gone!  Can't you _see_?

"Think about it," she urged them desperately.  "We built Utopia -- no,
Serenity built it, she was always the heart of it all, but damn it, we
were a part of it too!  We built Paradise!  But if our Utopia was this
fragile -- if it could be destroyed around us this easily -- then what
_good_ was it?  If everything we worked for could be taken away so
quickly, then what was the _point_?  What does it _mean_?

"Don't you see?" she whispered.  "I just don't want it to have been for
nothing."

There was a long silence.  Endymion and Jupiter stared at her.  In the
distance, they heard another series of explosions.  Neptune sighed, and
started to turn away.

"Then fight," snapped Jupiter.

Neptune looked around quickly, shocked.

"Fight, damn it!" Jupiter repeated.  Her voice was filled with anger.
"You want it all to be 'meaningful' ... how dare you!  The only thing
that makes it meaningless right now is that you've given up!  You want
meaning?  You want what you've done to be significant?  Then _defend_
it!  Instead of just beating your breast and moaning about how sad you
feel!"

"The surest way to defeat," said Endymion quietly, "is to give up before
you begin."  He shook his head, and something like a smile crossed his
lips.  "Michiru, it's not hopeless.  It's not.  You know that Ami's
devoting every available moment to trying to find a way to strike back.
Even if all we do is buy time for her ... it's not hopeless.  It's not
meaningless.  It's not."

"Maybe," said Neptune, her voice subdued.  "But a chance of winning
would be nice ..."

She held one hand out toward them, the fist closed.  "A way to strike
back.  Is that what you said?"  She laughed mirthlessly, and raised her
hand above her head.  When she opened her grip, they saw that she was
holding her henshin stick.

"Neptune eternal make-up," she breathed.

For a moment, there was utter silence.  The dim, watery sunlight seemed
to gather around the rod in her hand.  A halo of power clung to it, and
spread, reaching down her arm --

No.  It was gone.  More likely, it had never been.  Sailor Neptune
slumped back, her head bowed, her arms limp.  Her face was pale, and
beaded with sweat; her hands were shaking.  "It's no good," she groaned.
"I can't do it.  I can't find it, no matter how hard I try."

"Eternal --?"  Jupiter stared at her.  "You --  Is _that_ what you've
been doing?"  She reached out and took Neptune by the shoulders, shaking
her gently.  "You know you can't -- you _know_ that none of us ever --
oh, you idiot --"  She drew her in, hugging her, holding her until the
shaking stopped.  "You idiot," she murmured again.

"I thought I --"  Neptune's voice was muffled.  She pulled back a
little, without breaking Jupiter's embrace.  She was shivering.  "I
wanted to find ... I thought, there must be a way -- if it's to mean
anything, there _must_ be a way to, to win somehow ... a power that
could help us ... and the Eternal transformation was the only thing I
could think of ..."

"You should know that you can't force it," said Endymion softly.  "If
it's even possible at all, it will come in its own time."

"But we have so little time left!"

"Only if you give up," Jupiter said firmly.  "If you're willing to try,
there's no limit to what you can do."

"But I _have_ been trying!  I have been --"  Neptune stopped suddenly.
"Have I?" she asked, sounding oddly curious.

Endymion's voice was sad.  "Have you?" he repeated.  "Or have you been
hiding away, looking for a magic way to make everything right again?"

"Maybe I have," she murmured.  "Maybe I -- oh, damn it, I don't know
anything any more ... if only --"  She looked up at them, and her eyes
were full of tears.  "If only Haruka were here, to tell me what's right!
She always knew -- she was always so certain --"  And with that, at
last, the floodgates were opened, and she began to cry.

"You don't need Haruka for that," Endymion told her.  "You need courage,
and faith.  Believe in yourself, Michiru.  Believe that there's hope."

"I know," she wept.  "I know."  Then suddenly she laughed through her
tears.  "That's what you always say, isn't it?  'Believe in yourself.'
How come you're always so _right_ all the time?"

He buffed his fingernails on his armour.  "It's a talent I have," he
said modestly.  "Pick a message and stick with it, that's the trick."

She sniffed.  "Idiot," she whispered.  But it had done the trick; the
mood had been broken.  She pulled free of Jupiter and said with a sigh,
"It's time to go, isn't it?"

Jupiter checked.  "Another five minutes," she said.  "Then we'll find
out ..."

"So we will," Neptune answered sombrely.  She looked out over the
ruined, pitted land beyond the city wall.  The trio of Blue Crystites
was moving on; they were already several hundred metres further down the
wall.

"Maybe we _do_ have a chance," she said, half to herself.  "Maybe ..."

Sensing her mood, Jupiter and Endymion did not reply.  They simply stood
with her, waiting in silence, as the minutes ticked away.

At last, the signal came.

And the gates of Crystal Tokyo opened, and her people poured forth, and
went to war.

                                --**--

The army surrounding Crystal Tokyo was led by some thirty-six Blue
Crystites, raining down an almost constant, devastating hail of death
and destruction on the walls.  They seldom approached the walls closely;
they seemed to prefer to strike from a distance, letting the Clear
Crystites act as their infantry.  Even so, in just three days they had
brought the city's defences to the brink of collapse.

Nothing seemed able to stop them.  Nothing seemed to touch them at all.
The Senshi had tried to strike back, several times.  The Blue Crystites
simply fell back when they came on the field, and allowed their clear
kindred to fight in their place.  Each time, within a few minutes the
Senshi were so outnumbered that they had no choice but to retreat.

They usually travelled in groups of three.  Now and then, groups would
meet and act in concert for a short time; but three seemed to be the
minimum number.  Venus had planned the assault for a moment when the
trios were as close together as possible.

On her signal, one thousand, eight hundred and fifty flyers lifted over
the walls and flew to the attack.  Each of them was armoured, and each
of them carried as many people and weapons as would fit.  They opened
fire as soon as they cleared the wall.

At first they concentrated their aim on the crystites surrounding the
city gates, opening a space for the second wave of the attack.  Once the
way was clear, the gates opened and the ground forces emerged: a ragtag
army, on foot or riding in ground-effect vehicles, carrying the new
portable railguns.

Then the flyers swept out toward their designated targets.  They were
limited in range; beyond a certain distance from the city, the enemy
would have taken control of them.  Within that range, though, there was
no shortage of enemies.  The larger flyers set down and people and
equipment poured out, establishing beach-heads.  The others continued to
move in evasive patterns, keeping up constant fire on the nearby
crystites.

They were using more than just railguns, now.  They carried anything and
everything that had a chance of damaging the enemy; everybody knew what
would happen if they failed.  So the crystites were deluged with acid
sprays and ultrasonic bursts, plasma torches and tachyon streams, and
even simple, traditional high explosives.  The air was filled with smoke
and thick, choking fumes, and penetrated by the blazing white tracery of
railgun fire.  The whistle and crump of artillery was everywhere, and
the constant humming of the charging accelerators.  At this range, it
was hoped that the bombardment would be enough to penetrate the Blue
Crystites' shields.  Nothing would be held back today; every possibility
would be tried.

When the attack began, the Blue Crystites hesitated, as if uncertain.
Some of them began to turn away from the conflict, as they did when the
Senshi entered the field.  In that moment, the bombardment actually
penetrated their shields for an instant and struck home.  Six Blue
Crystites exploded into vapour.

The attackers raised a cheer at the sight; but this minor victory seemed
to make up the other crystites' minds.  They started to move again --
the loss of their companions did not seem to bother them at all -- and
began to fire back.  A wave of energy bolts launched out at the
attackers.

At this range there was no defence.  Seventy human positions were
reduced to blood and ash.

The bombardment continued; but the Blue Crystites no longer seemed
troubled by it.  Shots that hit the shields glanced off, or ricocheted
back.  The crystites fired again.  Three hundred men and women died.

Standing on top of the wall, overlooking the battle, Venus swore.
"They're recovering too fast!" she said furiously.  "Is everybody ready?
We've got to start now!"

The other Senshi nodded, and stepped into place.  Neptune and Endymion
moved forward, ready to shield the others if they were attacked.  Then,
at their ready nods, the four Inner Senshi stood in a circle, linked
hands once more, closed their eyes -- and joined their powers.

They had been unable to use their force shield to cover the city; the
power radiating from the Ginzuishou made it impossible.  But here, on
the fringes of that power, Mercury had calculated that they would be
able to use it for more limited purposes.  So they joined together and
united their strength, and focused it into a tight ball, and cast it
_downward_.  Out and down, into the battlefield -- materialising the
field precisely around a group of six Blue Crystites.

For a few moments, it hung there, shimmering faintly, sparkling where
the breeze blew clouds of smoke into it.  Then the Senshi began to pour
all their power into it.

It began to shrink.  It collapsed inward upon the crystites, smaller and
smaller.  It caught their shield and drove that inward too, forcing it
down, back.  For a few seconds it seemed as though the Senshi were going
to win unopposed.  Then the crystites struck back.  Their shield
stiffened against the Senshis'.  The implosion slowed, then stopped.

The intersection of the two fields began to glow.  Energy arced across
it.  The Inner Senshi gritted their teeth and pushed harder.  The
shields shuddered, and closed a few centimetres further in.  Then they
stopped again.

One by one, the other groups of Blue Crystites on the battlefield
stopped firing upon the attacking humans.  One by one, they looked up at
the little group of Senshi on the wall.

"Here they come," said Endymion softly.

The crystites opened fire.  Energy bolts blazed through the air toward
the Senshi.  Neptune and Endymion sprang to the defence.  Neptune pulled
out the Aqua Mirror and summoned a sheet of water that arched through
the air.  Every bolt that struck it was absorbed in a burst of steam.
For his part, Endymion suddenly shifted out of his armour, and into a
costume that he had not worn in centuries: his black tuxedo, complete
with mask, top hat and cane.  With one quick gesture, he threw the cane
up into the air.  It hung there, spinning like a propeller, and somehow
contrived to arc around, catching the incoming bolts and deflecting
them.

Behind them, the Inner Senshi groaned with effort, and drove their
shield inward another half metre.  It now formed a sphere less than five
metres in diameter.  The conflicting energies were almost too bright to
look at.

"They can't do it," Neptune breathed.

"Yes, they can," said Endymion, his voice filled with the utmost
confidence and certainty.  "They believe, so they can do anything."

He winked at her.  "With a little help from their friends."  And he
plucked a rose out of nothingness, and threw it.

It flew in an improbably straight line, straight toward the sphere.
When it hit, it somehow passed through, unhindered -- and struck one of
the crystites directly in the eye.

The stalemate was broken in an instant.  The Senshis' shield collapsed
inward, almost too quickly to follow.  There was a blinding flash, and a
sound like thunder.  Moments later, where six Blue Crystites had stood,
there was nothing but a faint glittering powder, floating in the breeze.

The four Inner Senshi opened their eyes and released each other's hands
with a gasp.  They staggered back, chests heaving, their faces pale with
strain.  "We got them," wheezed Venus.  "I think we got them."

"Yes," confirmed Endymion.  "They're gone."

But Neptune shook her head, and said, "You got _them_?  Take another
look.  Who got who?"

They looked out over the battlefield, and saw what had happened while
they had been busy.

The forces of Crystal Tokyo were in total rout.  More than twelve
thousand people had gone out to fight, and less than a tenth of them
were left.  None of the flyers were still in the air.  Thousands of
crystites were destroyed, their shards littering the battlefield; but
the others simply ignored their losses and pressed on.  Here and there
the Senshi could see scattered remnants of the human forces who were
still fighting, but even as they watched another one of them broke and
began to flee.  The crystites cut them down before they had gone ten
metres.

"Massacred," Neptune moaned.  "They're being massacred."

"No ..." whispered Rei in horror.

A large body of men and women, a thousand or more, were making toward
one of the city gates.  Behind them, a small group had stopped and
turned to fight -- deliberately sacrificing themselves to buy the others
a little more time.  They managed to bring down a few of the enemy,
before the advancing crystites rolled over them.

The rest of the soldiers fought on toward the gates.  There were under
attack from every direction, but they were making headway.  For a minute
it looked as thought they were going to make it.  Then an advancing
flank of crystites surged out in front of them, cutting them off and
forcing them to stop.  In a few seconds more, they were surrounded.

The crystites began to close in on them, in a horrid mockery of the way
the Senshi had close their shield upon the Blue Crystites only moments
before.

"We've got to _do_ something!" raged Neptune.

"How do we fight fifty thousand crystites at once?" shouted back Venus.
"If you have any suggestions, I'd like to hear them!"

"The shield," rapped out Makoto.  "Around those people.  If we can cover
them for long enough --"

"Quickly, then," Venus snarled.  She held out her hands to Makoto and
Rei.  Ami closed the gap an instant later.  They closed their eyes in
concentration.  Out on the battlefield, a glimmering formed, and spread
to became a broad dome, covering the beleaguered soldiers.

"Follow them," Venus gasped through clenched teeth.  "Move it ... as
they move ..."

Slowly, the dome began to creep across the ground, following the people
underneath as they started for the gates once more.  For a little, it
seemed that it was going to work.  Then the Blue Crystites began to fire
their energy bolts again -- straight into the shield.

Nobody had to point out the obvious -- that it was much harder for the
Senshi to cast the shield from a distance, than when they stood at its
centre.  The bolts struck them like physical blows; as each one hit the
dome, the four groaned in pain.  Their grip on each other's hands was
all that kept them from falling.

"Hold on," pleaded Neptune.  "You've got to hold on!"

Endymion watched furiously.  The remaining Blue Crystites were out of
range of his roses, or even his Smoking Bomber attack.  "Can't you help
them?" he demanded helplessly.

"No!" she said helplessly.  "None of the Outers could do it.  We were
there to attack the Queen's enemies.  They were the ones who were
supposed to shield the Princess ..."

She cast a tormented look down at the battlefield.  "But I can't attack
now," she whispered.  "I can't leave ... and I can't fight that many of
them anyway ..."

She looked down at the Aqua Mirror, still in her hand, and then back up
at Endymion.  "You said they believe, so they can do anything," she said
beseechingly.  "What can _I_ do now?"

The Blue Crystites fired again.  A section of the dome flared with
light, and Sailor Mars cried out in agony.

Neptune held up her henshin stick.  "There must be more than this," she
whispered.

Mercury groaned with effort.  There was blood in her mouth, where she
had bitten through her lip.

Sailor Neptune took a deep breath.  "Neptune Eternal Make-up."

Another volley of shots.  Jupiter gasped in pain.  The dome blazed, and
a narrow section of it winked out.  Inside, a score of people fell.

"Neptune Eternal Make-up!"

"Michiru, don't," said Endymion.

More people died.  Venus snarled in fury, and drove the gap in the dome
closed again.  In another moment, it was blasted open once more.

"No!" Neptune cried out.  "Neptune Eternal Make-up!"

She was down on her knees, now, henshin stick in one hand and mirror in
the other.  Her face was chalk-white and beaded with sweat.  Her words
no longer drew even a glimmer of power from the stick, but each
repetition was draining more from her all the same.  She looked ready to
pass out.

"Michiru, stop," Endymion pleaded.  "You're only hurting yourself."

The crystites fired as one.  The dome flickered, and for a moment
guttered out of existence entirely.  The Inner Senshi doggedly forced it
back; but it was only a pale shadow of its former self now, a mere
glimmer in the air.

"I don't care!" Neptune raged.  "Do you hear?  NEPTUNE ETERNAL MAKE-UP!"

Nothing happened.  She swayed and fell.  Her Senshi uniform flickered
and faded.  Kaiou Michiru levered herself painfully up onto her hands
and knees, and then to her feet.  She still held the mirror and her
henshin stick.

The crystites fired.  And fired.  And fired.

The dome vanished like a soap bubble.  The Inner Senshi collapsed to the
ground, like puppets whose strings had been cut.  Down on the
battlefield, the last of the army of Crystal Tokyo began to die.

"No, damn it!" Michiru screamed.  "NO!  I WON'T LET IT END LIKE THIS!"

She held up the Aqua Mirror.  For one moment it shone in her hand, as if
a piece of the sun had been caught in the glass.  Then, in one swift,
sure motion, she brought it smashing it down onto the solid stone.

The mirror shattered with a gentle tinkle.

The world seemed to hold its breath.

A blaze of raw power erupted up from the fragments.  A fountain of
light, a vortex of energy; it roared out of the splintered remains of
the Aqua Mirror, a fiery, all-consuming storm of chaos and destruction.
There was a thunderclap of sound, like a stormwave breaking, like the
howling of a banshee wind, like the clamorous ringing of a thousand
thousand bells.

Above it all, out of the centre of that vortex, out of a throat aflame
with power and raw with tortured need, came her cry.

         "***  NEPTUNE  ETERNAL  MAKE-UP!  ***"

The vortex became a whirling spindle of energy.  It drew in, it turned
back on itself.  Like an explosion in reverse, it collapsed inward.  It
poured itself into her; it filled her to overflowing and then did it
again, over and over.  The air was sharp with the smell of ozone.
Streamers of light, pale turquoise and aquamarine, burst out from the
core of the spindle, arced back and shot into her again.  The roaring of
the ocean.  A delicate shimmering, like sunlight refracted through an
endlessly-moving watery surface.

The light and the power faded.  They left behind a woman transfigured.

Her uniform was a delicate cream colour; her skirt was a pale green,
with a double border of gold and aquamarine.  Her gloves were longer,
and of the same cream as her leotard.  The bow on her breast had been
replaced by a pair of stylised wings, of the same green as her skirt.
The stone that had been in the centre of the bow had become a golden
disc, imprinted with the astrological symbol for Neptune.

And on her back, there were her wings.  But these wings were not flesh
and blood and bone and feather.  They were things of shimmering energy
and pearly shadow.  They seemed to ebb and flow, brightening and fading,
as she moved.

"Yes," she whispered.  "Oh, yes."

Then she took one short running leap, and soared into the air.  Eternal
Sailor Neptune circled once over the battlefield, and then swooped to
the attack.

Her voice was clear and triumphant as she cried out her attack.  "SOLAR
TIDE EXECUTION WAVE!"  And it came: a column of light, falling from the
sky; a titanic beam of power, savage and beautiful, shimmering and
rippling with all the colours of the sea.  She caught it in her palms,
and it gathered there; it swelled and took form, became a weapon of
glittering energy.  In the instant before she let it fly, it looked like
a trident.

It howled down out of the sky like a meteor and struck the shield of a
trio of Blue Crystites.  It caught there for a moment, glowing brighter
and brighter.  Then it burst through.  The shield flared out of
existence, and the crystites followed it a microsecond later, swept away
in a wave of sea-green energy that washed outward, taking more than a
hundred other crystites with it before it finally faded out of view.

Down on the wall, the Inner Senshi were climbing back to their feet.
They watched in stunned amazement; they heard her laugh in exultation as
she launched the attack again and again.  The sky was alight with green
fire.  Neptune herself almost seemed to be glowing.

"She's doing it," whispered Jupiter.  "She's actually doing it."

The trident lashed down from the skies once more.  Another trio of Blue
Crystites became vapour.  There were only four groups left now.  They
directed their energy bolts up at her, but she dodged them easily,
wheeling and diving effortlessly around them.  She was surrounded by a
halo of blue-green light.

"No, wait," said Mercury.  "Look --"

Another hammer-blow from the heavens; another group of crystites flared
out of existence, consumed by sea-green fire.  The halo around Neptune
continued to brighten.  Her wings were glowing with a pale light.

There was horror in Mercury's voice.  "It's too much for her," she said.
"She can't --"

Neptune struck again; the trident thundered down toward its target --
and missed.  The Execution Wave hit the ground, carving out a deep
crater.  Neptune seemed to stagger in the sky; for a moment, it looked
as though she was going to fall.  Then she recovered and flew on, but
more slowly than before.  Still she glowed brighter.

Mercury's computer was in her hands; her fingers flew over it, scanning
and analysing.  "She can't possibly keep this up," she said.  "The power
is going to burn her to a crisp --"

Neptune's eyes were shining like twin stars.  She left a luminous trail
behind her in the sky.  She was not laughing any more; she looked as
though she were in pain.  She threw another Execution Wave at the
crystites that she'd missed before, and destroyed them; but as the
energy left her hands, she seemed to sag.  And still the aurora about
her brightened.

"The power of the Talismans was never meant to be wielded so directly,"
Mercury said.  "That's why it was bound away as it was.  Her body can't
channel that much energy."  She looked sick.  "She's burning herself up
from within, with every attack ..."

Above them, Neptune banked over another trio of crystites, and threw one
more attack.  It burned down from the sky -- and behind it, for an
instant Neptune too seemed to burn.  They heard her cry out, faint and
distant -- and then she reeled, and tumbled, and began to fall.

"No!" screamed Mars.  "Sailor Neptune!  Michiru!"

Barely fifty metres above the ground, Neptune stirred, and straightened
out, spreading her wings and turning her plummet into a controlled dive.
She pulled out of it just in time, skimming over the ground so low that
she could have reached out and touched the crystites below her.  They
reached up for her as she passed, missing her by a hairsbreadth; in
another second, she was moving upward again.  But she was moving slowly,
oh so slowly ...

They saw her face for a moment as she passed over the wall.  It was
tense, drawn with pain, but filled with a grim resolution.  She beat her
way back up into the air, rising higher and higher.  Below her, the last
remnants of the human army escaped to safety through a field of enemy
filled with confusion.

Venus tapped her communicator.  "Michiru," she said urgently.  "You've
got to come back down, quickly.  Ami says if you keep this up, you're
going to --"

"Venus."  It was Neptune's voice.  But she sounded -- strange.

Venus hesitated.  "Yes," she said.

"Tell the others goodbye for me."

"What?"  Venus looked down at her communicator, and then up into the
sky in dawning realisation.  "No!" she shouted.

"She knew," Jupiter said, horror in her voice.  "She knew."

Above them, Neptune soared higher and higher.  She was picking up speed
now.  She glowed, almost too brilliantly to look at.  There were two
suns in the sky, but one of them was green, and it moved rapidly through
the air.

The sky darkened.  Clouds began to gather around her.  They moved in a
vast spiral, slowly drawing inward.

Venus' communicator crackled, and they heard Michiru's voice say one
more word.  "Haruka," she murmured.

Then she cried out; and even from that great height, thousands of metres
up in the air, her voice was piercingly clear and powerful; a voice of
flame, uttering words of thunder.

"NEPTUNE ETERNAL TSUNAMI!"

She flared with light.  She became a star; she became a supernova.  The
heavens opened, and began to descend in fury.

Venus stiffened.  "Get everybody off the wall," she snapped to Endymion.
"Hurry!"

He lifted a commlink and began to speak quickly.  Far above him, a sheet
of solid water filled the sky.  It drew nearer, and nearer.  In the
centre of it was a point of light.

All along the wall, people began to scramble for cover.  Venus stood
firm, her eyes lifted steadily upward.  Her face was wet with tears.

The light grew brighter and brighter.  Something was happening to the
falling water.  It foamed, roiled.  There was a great wind, and a noise
like a distant rumble, growing louder and louder.  The water was
boiling.  Still the light grew, and the water became hotter yet; it
became vapour, superheated steam, and then still hotter.

Venus looked over her shoulder.  Above the city, the sky was clear.  The
tsunami was only falling outside the walls.  Even in her last moments,
Neptune's control was exquisite.

An ocean of raw, star-hot plasma descended on the crystites in almost
perfect silence.  From her place the city wall, Venus watched it all.  A
great scorching-hot wind came, threatening to lift her off her feet;
but after a minute or two it dropped, and all was quiet again.  The
ground where the crystites had been was empty.

There was a sweet, fresh smell in the air.

                                --**--

"She knew," Jupiter repeated brokenly.  "She knew it was killing her,
but she wouldn't stop until it was finished ..."

Endymion rested a hand on her shoulder.  "Hush," he said gently.  "She
found the answers she was looking for."

She looked up at him defiantly.  "How do you know?" she demanded.  "How
can you be so sure?"

                                --**--

Afterward, when the earth had cooled enough for it to be safe, Venus
went out to see for herself.  She found Neptune's uniform, some distance
from the city gate.  Her henshin stick and communicator were lying
nearby.  Nothing was left of her body at all.

The bow on the front of her uniform was a bright blue.



---------------
Gotterdammerung
---------------

Neptune's sacrifice delayed the end for a full week.

By the time Venus carried her uniform back to the city, a new army of
crystites was already on its way.  A new group of thirty-six Blue
Crystites led it.  They reached the walls of Crystal Tokyo on the 29th
of June, and broke through shortly after midnight the next day.

The moon had just set.  The skies were deep and black.  In the city
streets, there was fire.

Most of the people were gone.  The Senshi had spent most of their week
of grace in escorting people away from the city.  The camp they had been
taken to was primitive, but it was the best that anyone had to offer.
Too many defenders had died in that last disastrous battle, and it was
painfully clear that, short of a miracle, nothing could save Crystal
Tokyo now.

A few people would not leave; they insisted on staying and fighting to
the last.  Venus could not refuse them the right.  Besides, with their
help it was just possible that they would have enough strength to defend
the Palace itself.  Maybe, just maybe, there might be a miracle yet.  If
Serenity could break free ...

The defenders met the enemy at the gates, and fell back along carefully-
planned routes.  At every step, they had set up barricades and other
obstructions, designed to channel the advancing enemy through specific
points.  There were mines or booby-traps at some of those points.  At
others, concealed railguns were waiting.

The crystites paid them no heed.  They advanced, imperturbable.  Where
there were obstacles, they smashed them or went around.  Where there
were booby-traps, the first to pass were destroyed -- and the others
came on.  Where there were railguns, the crystites were shattered by
tens and hundreds -- but the gunfire could not hit all of them, and
always, there were more coming.

They advanced from all directions, and they destroyed everything as they
came, people and buildings both.  Behind them they left nothing but a
ruined wasteland.

At a little after nine in the morning, the last defenders fell back to
the Palace and closed the doors.  A curious silence fell.  They
exchanged glances and nervous grins.  Win or lose, this was the last
throw of the dice.

                                --**--

Venus looked down from a window high in the Palace and swore softly.
"Look at them all," she said in disgust.  "Where do they keep coming
from?"

Mars shrugged.  "One in ten people were changed," she said.  "I doubt
that we've seen even a twentieth of all the crystites in Japan alone."
She looked over Venus' shoulder, down at the army surrounding the
Palace.  "A lot of them, aren't there?" she remarked.

Venus glared at her.  "I'm glad you're taking it so calmly," she said
acidly.

"Would you rather I panicked?"  An angry gleam appeared in Mars' eye.
"Or perhaps I could throw myself into the sacred fire, and see if it
turns me into Eternal Sailor Mars?"

Venus winced.  "Don't even joke about it."

"No," Mars agreed.  Her anger retreated, a little.  "Michiru despaired.
I won't do that.  She -- she stole power, and used it to force a
transformation she wasn't ready for, and she paid the --"  She cut off
short, unwilling to complete her sentence.  Instead she sighed.  "I'd
suspected what she was thinking of, but I never dreamed she'd try what
she did."

"She was always that way," said Venus morosely.  "Her and Haruka.
'Sacrifices have to be made.'  It was almost the Outers' motto."

Mars nodded.  "Sometimes I thing that the Outers traded power for
flexibility.  Especially ... moral flexibility.  One way or another,
they always demanded absolutes.

"But in the end," she added, "the one Michiru sacrificed was herself, to
save others.  And in a way, she saved herself, too.  Perhaps she learned
something from Serenity ..."

Venus did not answer for some time.  She stood looking out of the
window, down at the sea of crystites that surrounded the palace.  At
last she said, "I've been thinking about it, you know.  About doing it
myself."

Mars caught her breath.  "You -- Mina-chan, no!"

"I mean, wouldn't it be worth it?" Venus insisted.  "If it meant I could
destroy all their forces -- save all those people -- wouldn't that be
worth it?  Wasn't it worth it, in the end, what Michiru did?"

"No," said Mars softly.

"No," agreed Venus.  She seemed to sag for a moment.  "I thought about
it a little more, and ... it wouldn't work, would it?"

"No," said Mars again.  "Michiru was driven to an extraordinary level of
desperation.  She was close to being able to change even without the
power she stole.  You don't have that ... that need for justification.
I think the power would simply kill you."

"Even if I had a source of power to break," Venus added.  "And even then
... if I destroyed another army, what would be the point?  You said it
yourself: we haven't seen a twentieth of the crystites in Japan alone.
The Enemy'd just send more, and you'd be right where you are now, only
without me."

"A poor trade," said Mars, carefully not smiling.

"Hey, yeah!"  Venus brightened momentarily, then became solemn once
more.  "Anyway, we've evacuated the city.  The only people left are
volunteers.  We should be able to hold the Palace for as long as we
need, until Ami finds a way to shield Serenity."

Mars nodded.  There was no need to point out the obvious.  Deliberately
changing the subject, she said, "Speaking of the evacuation -- do you
know if Higoshi-san and her children got out safely?"

"Yes.  Three days ago.  I made sure of that myself."  Venus sighed.  "I
think they'll be safe.  Not like the rest of us."  She smiled, a little
sadly.  "Her line, at least, will continue."

They fell silent.  There seemed little left to say.  At last Venus
sighed, and said, "We'd better get back to work.  Colonel Shitsuji said
he had everything organised, but there's probably a million things going
wrong anyway ..."

They shared a quick smile, and turned to go.  At that moment, the alarms
started to go off.

                                --**--

At first, the crystites tried simply breaking their way through.  But
the Palace defences had been carefully planned, long ago.  The Nemesis
invasion had taught Crystal Tokyo a lot, and Crystal Tokyo had not been
slow to apply those lessons.  If, in the centuries since then, the city
had lowered its guard, the Palace had not.  When it needed to be, it was
palace and fortress both.

So the walls were layered and shaped to reflect physical force back upon
itself; and the blows that the crystites directed against them did more
damage to the attackers than to the walls.

So every centimetre of the exterior of the Palace was ray-shielded; and
the energy bolts that the Blue Crystites aimed at it were caught, and
twisted, and bent back again.

So, one by one, each attack failed; and all the while, the defenders
inside the palace kept the crystites under a withering rain of fire.
The enemy fell by tens and hundreds.

But there were always more to come.

Shortly after noon, they changed their tactics.  The Blue Crystites
slowly withdrew, and gathered together outside the main entrance.  For a
long time, they simply stood there, motionless, their eyes closed as if
in thought.  It was as if they were conferring.  The defenders directed
all their fire at them; but they ignored it completely.  This close to
Serenity and the Ginzuishou, the Senshis' force shield was useless; but
the crystites' still worked perfectly.

Then a ripple of change swept over them.  One by one, their eyes opened.
They glowed a pale blue.  One crystite stirred, and stepped forward.  It
marched unhurriedly up to the doors, held out one massive hand, and
touched them.

Something like a spark leaped from its fingertip to the door; something
tiny, motelike, but so bright that it was blinding.  There was a sound
like distant thunder.  Almost imperceptibly, the doors quivered.

The Blue Crystite that had touched the door froze, and then -- in less
than a second -- crumbled away into dust.

The remaining crystites showed no reaction.  Moments later, a second one
of them stirred to life, and marched forward.  It touched the doors
without hesitation.  With a second flash and a thunderclap, it too
became dust.  And the doors quivered again.

One by one, they marched forward to their own dissolution.  One by one,
they touched the doors in turn.  And with each touch, the doors shook a
little more.  By the tweflth crystite, they were quivering almost
constantly.  By the eighteenth, their rattling was becoming audible.  By
the twenty-third, they were bucking and flexing like live things.

The next crystite stepped forward.  And the next.

                                --**--

Mercury and Jupiter were stationed at the front gates -- perhaps the
weakest point of the Palace's defences.  They were busy checking over
the gate defence systems when the soldiers stationed at the doorway
called.  Mercury dropped everything and came at a run, Jupiter at her
heels.  By the time they got there, the entrance hall was filled with a
low rumbling sound; the floor was pulsing and shaking, and the doors --

"What are they _doing_?" Jupiter blurted out.  At her side, Mercury
frowned, but did not speak; she quietly dropped her visor over her eyes,
and began to scan the doors with her computer.  Her expression was grim.

One of the soldiers, a slender, grim-faced young woman, answered
Jupiter.  "It started just a few minutes ago.  At first we thought they
were trying to bash their way in again, but then --"

"It's some kind of harmonic effect," Mercury reported.  Her fingers flew
over her computer.  "It's concentrated in the doors, but I don't see
what they're -- the defence grid is supposed to --"

The floor rocked, and she almost lost her balance.  She continued to
type furiously.

"Harmonic effect?" said Jupiter, looking confused.  "You mean, like
sympathetic vibrations?  Are they trying to make the palace vibrate
until it shatters --"

"No," Mercury said impatiently.  "The palace structure is too
inhomogeneous, it couldn't -- never mind that now, I have to --"  She
stopped suddenly.  "I think I see," she breathed.  "They're feeding
energy into the doors -- they're setting up a kind of standing wave, a
resonance loop -- but if that's so, then --"

She froze.  Her eyes widened.

"Jupiter, call the others," she ordered crisply.  "Everyone, fall back.
Now."

As the soldiers obeyed, puzzled and beginning to be afraid, she stepped
forward and raised her hands.  Ice began to cover the door.  It was only
a thin shell at first, barely visible.  Then, faster and faster, it
began to thicken.

"Ami-chan, are you --" began Jupiter worriedly.

Mercury's face was tense, taut with concentration.  The ice on the door
was nearly a metre thick.  "Ice is a crystal, too," she ground out.  "If
I can add enough mass -- fast enough to change the resonance patterns
before they --"

The soldier who had spoken before hurried back to her side, saying
urgently, "Ma'am, Colonel Nagumo says there'll be reinforcements here in
two minutes ..."

Mercury glanced over at her quickly.  There was sweat on her brow; the
effort she was making was clear.  The ice continued to build under her
hands.  "All right," she gasped.  "I think I can hold it that long ...
if I just --"

There was a sound of thunder.

The doors burst inward with a roar.  Daggers of ice and crystal filled
the air.  The last thing Sailor Mercury saw was a splinter of ice, a
metre long and razor-sharp, coming toward her like an arrow.

                                --**--

Sailor Jupiter saw Mercury fall with a spear of ice through her,
sticking out from her back.  She screamed in horror and ran toward her,
but another explosion threw her off her feet.  By the time she could
stand again, there was only a huge pile of rubble and ice fragments
where Mercury had fallen.  One pale hand, bloody and still, protruded
from the wreckage.

The crystites marched into the Palace.

Jupiter shouted something incoherent and attacked them.  Beside her, the
soldiers opened fire.  Then, suddenly, Venus and Mars were there too.  A
blaze of lightning and fire and light drove the crystites back for a
moment, and Jupiter broke away and ran to the rubble pile; but by the
time she got there, there was no pulse in that hand, and the skin was
already turning cold.

She knelt there, holding that still hand and weeping in horror and
grief, unable to accept that Sailor Mercury, gentle Mizuno Ami, was
dead, until an urgent warning shout from Venus roused her.  At the same
time, a shadow fell across her.  She looked up in shock; she started to
roll to one side, away from the blow; but it was far, far too late.  A
massive crystal fist shattered her skull.

The enemy advanced.

                                --**--

Luna found Artemis in a corridor just outside the Throne Room.  The air
was filled with the sound of shouts and screams, gunfire and distant
explosions.  The chaos had yet to penetrate this far into the Palace,
but it was clear now that it was only a matter of time.

"You've got to save Diana," Luna told him.

Artemis stared at her incredulously.  "I've got to --?  Luna, what are
you talking about?  You can't just ask me to --"

He faltered as it sunk in.  She _was_ asking.

He tried again.  "How can you even think that I'd ..."  And again, he
trailed off.  Luna was talking about his daughter.  _Their_ daughter.
"Diana," he breathed.  "Luna, what the hell?  I thought she was
evacuated a long time ago -- I haven't even seen her for weeks --"

"She's still here," said Luna carefully.  "She hasn't been getting
around much, just lately."

"But --"  Artemis fumbled for the words.  "Luna, you know I can't.  If
she stayed, she ... she knew the risks.  I won't blame her if she leaves
on her own, but -- I -- you, you can't ask me to abandon the others!
You can't ask me to run away, Luna!  I can't --"

"You have to," Luna told him fiercely.  "You have to save her, Artemis!"

He shook his head wildly.  "But --" he began.

"Because she's pregnant."

"She --"  He stared at her, stunned.  "What?"

"The child is due in just a few days," said Luna.  Her voice was calm,
but there was a furious intensity in her eyes.  "Diana is in no
condition to leave on her own.  She was supposed to have gone to safety
three weeks ago, but this morning I found out that she stayed anyway.
And now, it's too --"

"But," he fumbled, "how --?  Who --?"

"There's no _time_ to argue about it!" she burst out, frustrated.  "You
have to!  You're the only one who can do this!"

"You could do it yourself," he objected.  Then, with a sudden chill, he
saw the truth.  "You could, but you won't," he said flatly.  "So you
picked me --"

"Because you _will_," she said.  "If you have to."  Under his accusing
gaze, she crouched down, her hackles rising.  There was only firm, cold
determination in her eyes.  "I'll _never_ leave Serenity," she hissed.
"Never!"

"Because she's your other child," Artemis whispered.  "Your firstborn."

"That's right," Luna snarled.  "That's exactly right."

He backed away a little from the rage in her eyes.  "Then I don't suppose
I have any choice, do I?" he asked, defeated.

Her anger seemed to retreat a little.  "No," she said, "you don't."

He had to look away.  "All right," he said.  "All right.  I'll go.  Tell
me where to find her --"

Luna gave him quick directions to a little-used section of the Palace,
at the rear, close to the Guard headquarters.  As he prepared to go, she
said, "Take care of her, Artemis.  And give her my love."

He nodded dumbly, realising that she did not expect to see him again.
He stepped forward, touched noses with her one last time.  Luna: friend,
sometimes lover, companion of a thousand years.  Good-bye.

As he turned to go, he heard her mutter, "Damn, but I hate doing this."
He looked back, and saw her change.  She shimmered, and her body
stretched, reshaped itself.  A young woman with black hair and a golden
crescent moon on her forehead bent down to pick up a portable railgun
that had been lying on the floor nearby.  He saw her step out past the
corner at the end of the corridor, crouch down, and open fire on the
enemy.

He saw a whirling cloud of crystal shards rip her head from her body.

With a sob, he looked away, and ran to find his daughter.

                                --**--

So it came to an ending.

Sailor Venus, Sailor Mars and King Endymion made their last stand before
the twin thrones.  In the bubble behind them, Queen Serenity floated,
her eyes wide open, staring sightlessly out at the enemies that poured
into the Throne Room, and the lone trio who remained to defend her.

They fought with a brilliance born of desperation.  But they were
constrained by their surroundings, and by the necessity of defending the
Queen.  One by one, the trio fell.

Sailor Mars was hit in the leg by an energy bolt from one of the Blue
Crystites.  She staggered and would have fallen, but before she could
hit the ground another crystite was upon her, four fists lashing out at
once.  The sound of bones breaking was horribly loud.  Mars flew
backward and struck the wall with an audible crunch, and slid limply to
the floor.  Blood spilled from her open mouth.

Sailor Venus fought on, last of the Senshi as she had been first.  She
was a blonde dervish; she kicked and leaped and spun, her every motion
swift and clean, striking another enemy with every attack.  But six Blue
Crystites shot her at once, and she could not evade the crossfire.  Her
whole body lit up with the energy that poured into her; she seemed to
hang suspended in mid-air.  The body that hit the floor was a charred
ruin.

And lastly there was Endymion, alone before his beloved.  He fought on
for longer than anyone might have expected; but in the end they brought
him down.  An energy bolt shattered his armour; a crystal foot broke
his sword.  His roses claimed a dozen more of them yet, before the end;
but then one of them caught him by the throat, and crushed it.  As he
fell, a foot kicked out, and smashed his chest.

Queen Serenity screamed.

                                --**--

When the enemy broke into her palace, her eyes opened.  Nobody saw it;
her head was bowed forward, her eyes in shadow.  But she felt it; she
felt the invasion, and slowly, she began to be drawn back to herself.

She had fought for so long already.  She had wrestled with the Enemy,
endlessly, for more than two months.  With dogged determination she had
blocked every attack, denied every attempt.  She had bound her own life
to that of the Ginzuishou; she had made it part of herself.  Unheeding
of what was going on around her, unaware of anything but the necessity
of preventing the Enemy from possessing the crystal, she had sealed
herself away, denying the invading force any access to what it sought.
But now, she felt the invader drawing nearer and nearer in spite of all
her efforts.  She opened her senses, and she felt:

She felt Mercury be buried by falling rubble, the icy spear protruding
from her back.  She felt Jupiter's sudden end, and Luna's.  She felt the
death of every last defender in the Palace.  She was in torment.  She
saw the enemy enter her Throne Room.  She saw Rei fall; she saw Venus
burn.  But when she saw what they did to her husband, she could contain
the anguish no longer.

She screamed.  And in her hands, the Ginzuishou flamed.

It was a cry of protest, of anguish, of utmost extremity.  Her pain, her
loss, her ultimate rejection of this end blazed pure and clean within
her.  The crystal flared in her hands, incandescent.  She called upon
its utmost power.  Unheeding of the destruction about her, she invoked
Life.

The Throne Room blazed with light.  The shell around her blinked out of
existence in an instant; in another moment, the crystites in the Throne
Room became dust.  Still the light spread.  It filled the palace; it
spread beyond.  The streets of Crystal Tokyo became luminous rivers.

With a howl of frustrated fury, the Enemy broke away, unable to tolerate
that deadly light.

Serenity lowered her hands, and the power ebbed away.  Slowly, she got
to her feet.  She looked around the Throne Room and saw what had become
of her people.

                                --**--

Artemis saw it end.

He had found Diana and carried her to safety, taking human form to lift
her.  He made his way out of the Palace through the link to the
underground Archives complex; but once he had found a safe place to hide
her he returned to the Palace, running like a madman, dodging and
weaving past the enemy in cat form once more.

He reached the throne room just in time to see Minako fall.  On top of
Luna's death, it was almost more than he could take.  Life-long
companions, each of them, and in less than an hour he had lost them
both.

Then Endymion died, and he saw Serenity's transfiguration.

As the light died away, the Queen stood and looked around the Throne
Room.  He heard her gasp in horror at the sight.  He saw her steel her
shoulders and step forward to confront the worst.

She knelt briefly, and touched the shoulders of her three fallen
defenders.  Then, silently, she rose and walked out of the Throne Room.
Her eyes were dry, but there was a look of such grief and loss on her
face that Artemis could hardly bear to see it.  He fell in behind her,
following her as she walked through the corridors of the Palace.  She
glanced back at him once, but did not speak.

At the doors of the Palace, she stopped, and looked out over her city,
and saw what had been done to it.  She buried her face in her hands and
wept.

"Your Majesty ..." said Artemis painfully.

"Who did this, Artemis?" she whispered.  "Who did this thing?"

"We never knew," he answered wearily.  He told her what had happened,
from Usagi's death to the fall of the Palace gates.  He spoke briefly,
but he left nothing important out.  "We never even found out why," he
finished in a low voice.  "They just attacked and attacked, and we never
even found out _why_."

"No.  I understand."  She looked out across the smoking ruins of the
city.  "Is -- is there anyone left?  Anywhere?"

He nodded.  "Yes.  Some.  We managed to evacuate a few of the people.
And there are still survivors elsewhere in the world.  Most people
weren't affected by the Glass Plague.  A lot -- some of them should
still be alive."

"Then there is hope for the future."  Serenity drew a deep breath.
"Thank you, Artemis.  I -- I want you to go now."

"What?"  He stared at her, hurt.  "Serenity, no!  I can't --"  He broke
off.  "Why does everyone think I'm ready to run away and abandon the
people I love?" he asked bitterly.

"No!  It's not like that!" she exclaimed.  He looked up at her,
startled, and saw with a chill just how pale her face was, and how
exhausted she looked.

"Don't you see, Artemis?" she said.  "Someone has to carry on.  It's
going to have to start over now, just ... just like it did before.
Someone will have to find them all, and show them who they are.  Teach
them about their heritage."

"No --" he protested.  "You can't ... ask me to go through that all
over again ..."

"Who else is there?" she asked gently.  She held up the Ginzuishou,
glittering in the late afternoon sunlight.  Her hand looked almost
transparent.  "I bound myself to it too closely, Artemis.  I don't have
much time left."  She gave a faint smile.  "Just enough to finish what
I have to, perhaps.

"I'm going to do it again," she told him.  "Send them forward.  I won't
let them die like this.  I won't _allow_ it to end this way.  They'll
live again, someday, Artemis, and you'll find them, and teach them to be
themselves again."

She gave a sweet, sad smile.  "And this time, Small Lady will be their
Moon Princess.  Be good to them, Artemis.  Take care of my daughter."

"Serenity --"

"Well, I can hardly send _myself_ forward, can I?" she asked reasonably.
"Besides, I have other things I have to do.

"There's an Enemy down there, underground.  And once I've saved my
people, we two will have one more contest.  And we shall see who is the
stronger, then."

He bowed his head.  "Your Majesty," he said.  Acceptance,
acknowledgment, and farewell ... with love.

"Go on, now," she said.  "This Palace won't be safe once the battle
begins."

"You were never my daughter," he said with difficulty.  "But you were
_hers_.  Goodbye ... Tsukino Usagi."

She nodded, and smiled that gentle, glorious smile.  And Artemis turned
away and left the Queen in the ruins of her city, and went to do her
bidding.

                                --**--

He looked back, one last time, as he made his way away from the Palace.
Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw something moving.  He
turned his head, but saw nothing.  Then something caught the sun with a
cold sparkle, and he saw.

Crystites.  More of them.  A party of at least twenty.  Heading toward
the Palace.

Without hesitation, he turned and started back.  One last desperate
race.  Somehow, even as he ran, he knew he would not be in time.

Serenity was standing on the steps of the Crystal Palace.  Her head was
lowered, her face taut with effort.  The power of the Ginzuishou was
gathering about her.  She was lost in concentration; all her senses were
elsewhere.  Reaching out, gathering in the souls of those she loved.

She was still at work, pouring all her spirit, all her love, into the
crystal, when the invaders ran her through.

                                --**--

It was the evening of June 30th, 3478.

Happy fifteen hundredth birthday, Queen Serenity.



---------
Afterward
---------

Hino Rei awoke in darkness and pain.

She reached out a hand, and even that small motion was agony.  Her chest
felt as though it was full of broken glass.  Everything else hurt too;
her back felt as though she had been beaten with a baseball bat, and
there was a horrible, burning pain in her leg.  But her chest was the
worst.  There was a foul taste in her mouth, too, and after a while she
realised that it was blood.

Coughing up blood was a pretty bad sign, she remembered.  Well, Ami
would be able to take care of her.

Then she remembered that Ami was dead.

She wasn't Sailor Mars any more, for some reason.  If she changed, at
least the accelerated healing should help.  She steeled herself and made
the familiar mental effort that should have triggered her
transformation.  Nothing happened.

[Too weak to do it,] she thought muzzily.  She felt around gingerly, and
found her henshin stick lying nearby.  Somehow, even in the darkness,
she knew where it was.

"Mars Crystal Power, Make-Up," she whispered.  And again, nothing
happened.

She tried the other variations -- Star Power, and plain old Mars Power.
Neither of them did anything at all.  After some hesitation, she even
tried for Eternal Power.  Still nothing.

Tired, confused, and in a great deal of pain, she managed to lever
herself up onto her hands and knees, and then to her feet.  There was a
little light filtering in from the windows high in the east wall.  The
sun was just rising, she realised.  What day was it?

The light, slowly growing, revealed things she would rather not have
seen.  Venus' body, and Endymion's.

Serenity was not there, she saw with a flash of hope.

Slowly, haltingly, she made her way through the Palace.  The building
was half in ruins.  On her way, she saw Jupiter's body, and was
surprised to find that even that saddened her, for all the bad blood
that there'd been between them in the last few years.

A dim red-gold light was spreading across the city as she emerged into
the open air.  On the Palace steps, she found Queen Serenity.

Crying was new agony, but she cried for a long time.  She wanted to bury
the Queen, but she could not even manage to lift her body.  In the end,
she had to leave her lying there, and that was worse than anything else.

Eventually, she thought to look for the Ginzuishou, but it was nowhere
to be found.

The streets of Crystal Tokyo were filled with crystites, lying silent
and motionless.  It looked as though they had simply fallen over and
turned to glass.  She kicked one, and it broke into pieces with a faint
clink.  She gave a thin, rusty laugh.

Alternately crying and laughing, half-mad with grief and pain, Hino
Rei staggered away from Crystal Tokyo, into a dark future.


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