Straying from the Light, Part One

When a man finds that it is his destiny to suffer, he will have to accept his suffering as his task; his single and unique task. He will have to acknowledge the fact that even in suffering he is unique and alone in the universe. No one can relieve him of his suffering or suffer in his place. His unique opportunity lies in the way in which he bears his burden.

— Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

μ∀·We must unfortunately report that Attempt 4 to compel compliance by the alien government has failed|μ+·We expect‒97% Attempt 8 at negotiations, to shortly follow this failure, will be even less productive|ν·Enforcement‐demonstration task force at chosen site three was annihilated—provisional bodyloss percentage at 94%—by planetary‐scale deployment of reality‐warping weaponry, wielded by at least tens of thousands of alien combat‐bodies, followed by a single combat‐body deploying anathemic reality‐distortion of estimated scale 10²³ J|ν+†·Detectable throughout the system, see Incident Report|ν+·No evidence of /Comprehending's hypothesized Reality‐Externalization‐Events found so far, but we do not consider this conclusively safe

ν·This organized, reckless use of reality‐warping combat‐bodies substantially raises the expected threat level of this irrational civilization|μ·Nevertheless, we will continue to engage in further dialogue in good faith|ν·Reserve task force is already being deployed while the original is restored from backup; while perhaps‒32% the aliens' reality‐warping resources have been or can be exhausted by our current allocation of force, we expect‒68% further materiel and personnel will be required|ν+·/Defector‐pursuing's accompanying representatives suspect‒67% that these organized reality‐warpers have recently seized control of the alien government, preventing it from agreeing to enact reasonable restraints upon reality‐distortion|μ+·Median estimate of timescale of operation increased from 9.7×10⁴⁹ fundamentals to 7.3×10⁵⁰ fundamentals

μν∀⌘·/Thinker‐preserving therefore requests debate upon an amendment to the Agreement for Alien Harmony which might permit the movement of further combat assets into the Milky Way galaxy||||

— vojN9j⊃Light‐everlasting, /Thinker‐preserving’s Empathizer at Great Sea, Consensus, 2440

This was all far, far worse than Misa had imagined.

If she had known from the start how deep the hole would go, would she have still plunged in? She hoped so, but perhaps she would have brought a longer rope.

It had started with the supposed death of Misa’s friend, comrade, and former pupil Hermina Green from critical soul gem exhaustion. Her death had occurred on HSS Charles Drew, a droneship dedicated to ferrying disconnected soul gems back from the front for reconstitution in new bodies. The situation had been chaotic, and the single specialty mage aboard the ship had not been able to stabilize her gem, which had gone critical unexpectedly.

That was the official story, and it had smelled wrong from the start. Misa had been around the block with soul gems in various states of fitness, becoming far more of an expert than she’d like. Hermina had been exhausted, but fine, having burned most of her remaining magic in a low‐orbit maneuver that compelled her to eject her gem away from a body that was going to tumble through an alien minefield. Twirling a set of cutting lasers that had grown nearly a kilometer long, she had been a goddamn hero, salvaging their escape from a convoy raid gone wrong.

Misa had been given a chance to inspect the gem herself, as it rocketed by in the arms of a support drone. With only a few grief cubes and some stabilization magic, she should have survived—valiant heroics were a good prophylactic against grief spirals.

Which was why the death notice had come as such a shock. After a few days, numb disbelief had given way to quiet suspicion. The whole thing felt ever so slightly off.

She had known better than to ask Governance and its imperturbably pristine networks. If something untoward had truly occurred, it had to be with Governance’s cooperation—or involve magic. She would never get any answer and only possibly tip someone off.

To Misa’s instincts, the whole thing felt like some kind of Internal Security operation, the kind you would pull if you needed magical girls for something completely black. Misa had sorted the possibilities in her head:

One, and most likely, she was completely off her rocker, in denial about her friend’s death and getting drawn to conspiratorial thinking like to a lightning rod. She could picture the look on her MHD psychiatrist’s face pretty well, if she voiced her concerns.

Two, a Governance or MSY cell had kidnapped Hermina for its own purposes. And it had to be “kidnapped”—there was no way she had volunteered. Misa had heard rumors among MagOps veterans about mysterious deaths and disappearances—some feared that Governance was creating their own magical girl organization, while others posited that the MSY, now public, was secretly forming a second, inner organization that could operate more independently, perhaps led by a not‐really‐so‐dead Homura.

Misa knew just enough about Internal Security to conclude that the latter was rather more likely than the former, and had just enough independence to want to snoop for herself. Risky, yes, but she had seen enough in her own experience, particularly with rogue colonies, to know that Hermina might not approve of her new mission. And Hermina had been her friend and comrade. That mattered.

Three… well, three was the worst possibility, because it would be something she couldn’t quite imagine. She hadn’t been able to shake that possibility out of her mind, the vague sense that she was seeing traces of the outline of… something.

Delusion, or intuition? She knew what Nadya would say.

With almost nothing else to go on, she had decided to investigate the mage responsible for managing the soul gems.

Even that had required a good deal of effort. Even with her MagOps access, she wouldn’t have been able to access something as private as the military travel logs of a total stranger. She’d had to call in a few favors, and eventually an electronics specialist she had once courted got her a look, though her ex had insisted on telepathic verification that she wasn’t lying. Honestly, fair enough.

A zap of magic later, and she had them, the completely mundane military history of a magical girl who spent most of her time on various soul gem shuttles, cycling back and forth between risky front‐line patrols and sedate body attachment assignments in the rear. There seemed to be nothing to go on at first, but then another zap elevated her classification privileges, and she found that the woman had a history of inquiries into her activity by various administrative AIs.

It was dull material by normal standards, AIs following up on some kind of complaint, followed by a perfunctory “No finding of misconduct”. The kind of thing the individual herself would never be informed about, it was so minor. But once Misa read into the substance of the complaints, she lost the dull apathy that had begun to settle over her.

There was a pattern of complaints, all similar to Misa’s own situation. Not directed at the magical girl herself, but regarding various soul gems that had passed through her care. The administrative AIs had passed by, audited the situation and her role in it, and found nothing out of line.

The pattern, though subtle, was striking, of the kind that an AI audit should perhaps have noticed.

It was Misa’s own TacComp that noticed the next discrepancy.

You see, one of the records stated that the soul mage had been on New California taking a long‐awaited leave, something corroborated by a number of surveillance reports about her whereabouts on planet. Except one of the complaints clearly listed a date within that leave window as when she had been responsible for a lost soul gem, and that was also corroborated by military records, which furthermore didn’t even mention her going on leave.

The discrepancy was blatant once you noticed the date overlap, and crosschecks with other records failed to resolve it as some kind of bookkeeping error, instead buttressing both sets of dates. And the most natural follow‐up—inspecting surrounding details to try to discern which set of facts was false—led Misa directly to side‐by‐side surveillance footage of what appeared to be the same magical girl in two different locations, doing exactly what the records said.

But how had any of this slipped past Governance’s verification code? The answer was obvious: it hadn’t. It had been noticed and ignored, and there were a number of possibilities as to why the discrepancy hadn’t been properly concealed: for instance, an untrained magic user that had failed to hide her trail, or an AI that had wiped its own memory.

But one thing was immediately apparent: if she wanted any chance of chasing this lead, she needed to book her own trip to New California, and make sure no one knew why she was really there.

So she swore her electronics ex to secrecy, and booked her leave.

Misa had been around the colonies long enough to understand that there were plenty of unofficial channels for getting answers, even when—or perhaps especially when—Governance or the colonial government couldn’t be relied upon. Outside of Earth, Governance was hardly omniscient, which left plenty of room for independent actors to find a niche, and for customers to develop a need.

Which was a long‐winded way of saying that there were freelance magical girls willing to use their magic privately for a bit of compensation, or just personal gratification. Misa had met one during one of her tours, a clairvoyant who went by Stacy—no surname at all, just Stacy—who styled herself as a private eye specializing in cold missing‐person‐or‐item cases. No one in the military really needed a side gig—their salaries were high partially to prevent this kind of thing—but she just liked doing it.

By a stroke of luck, Stacy was available, or available enough that she could file leave once Misa contacted her. Misa had plenty of leave, so it seemed wise to cover their tracks a little by having Stacy arrive a week later, after she had settled in a bit. Misa covered her own tracks by traveling with two of her squadmates and friends, Mina and Gracia, who both thought they were on a legitimate group vacation.

Paranoid? Maybe.

Misa and Stacy had finally met at a certain Café Liberica, where Misa outlined what she had found so far, cringing at times as she realized how circumstantial and conspiratorial it all sounded, the kind of thing that could have easily been written off as process errors.

Thankfully, Stacy agreed that there was at least something worth looking at, and that she had been the right person to call. After all, everything Misa had regarding New California—the discrepancies, when the soul mage had last been here—was at least a year in the past. But Stacy specialized in using high‐level sentimental, emotional, or even incidental ties—in particular, with a sentimental object—to look for connections deep in the past.

But Hermina, as Misa had pointed out, had allegedly died very recently. If they could find a trail to her here on New California, then not only would it be a very strong signal, it would prove something was up.

Their expectations of a brutally difficult search were then disproven by a simple visit to the starport, where Stacy picked up the trail almost immediately. They agreed that this was confusing: surely any conspiracy of this sort would have been capable of avoiding civilian logistics hubs.

Regardless of the reason, it gave them an easy trail to follow. Whoever it was had taken some measures to magically screen themselves, but not enough—though this implied little. Few magical girls were capable of effectively hiding every possible trail, and the MSY tried to keep tabs on those who could; simply looking up that bit of information in the power development archives had been an effort in its own right.

Confusingly, according to Stacy, Hermina had been reunited with her body, either her original or a clone, even if she wasn’t conscious for the journey. Both options suggested Governance involvement, which would certainly explain why Governance AIs had apparently been overlooking all this.

At this point, she and Stacy had seriously discussed bringing the matter up to contacts in the Soul Guard. They held back only because, given there had to be magical girls involved as well, it was probably a joint Governance‐MSY operation, and in that case contacting the MSY wouldn’t help.

They agreed to push onward, both of them priming pre‐existing dead man’s switches to tell someone they trusted about what had happened, just in case.

Misa’s, of course, was pointed at Nadya Antipova. Of everyone she knew, Nadya would be the very last to give up on her.

The trail led well outside the city of Amador, past a thin strip of suburbs and into bucolic robotic ranchland, where weary genetically‐engineered sheep grazed on sparse vegetation, interspersed with a few locals who had chosen to try a rural life. The gravity of their situation was definitely starting to get to her; Misa couldn’t shake the sense that she was being watched.

The trail led to a remote lab, registered on the map as an agricultural research facility.

Misa hadn’t intended to get herself mired too deeply. The original goal was only to take a look and see if she could figure out what was going on. If Hermina had been willingly recruited into some kind of Governance black op, then she was going to leave well enough alone and get out. If there was something more sinister going on, then even if it was a matter of saving a friend, she had to consider calling for help. Was it really wise for a magical girl, even of her skills, to take on a potentially hostile magical girl conspiracy alone?

But when she stepped inside the windowless two‐floor building—using a ceiling entrance—she found the security shockingly light, almost nonexistent, and though it was impossible to rule out stepping into a trap, what she saw soon blasted all sense of moderation out of her mind.

As she stepped through a threshold, a piece of her awareness snapped into focus, a piece she hadn’t even been aware was missing.

There had been some security after all, the lightest of magical screens, blocking her perception of what was within.

But even as she struggled with the implications of that, instantly on her guard against potential enemy magic, she couldn’t ignore what she now sensed:

Soul gems, perhaps seven of them, arrayed in a neat row a dozen meters away from her. Not active, and not in good state. Far from it; all her instincts screamed at her to get moving, that there were people in need of saving.

It took all of her paranoia to stay cautious, taking a moment to send a telepathic message to Stacy and to scan her surroundings for anything out of the ordinary. A magical perception barrier didn’t just exist in a vacuum—something, or someone was powering it, and it couldn’t last very long away from a magical girl either way.

But if there were soul gems on the brink of despair, then she needed to move to save them, even if it meant recklessly confronting an enemy.

A quick zap, and the electronic lock on the door in front of her gave way. The hallway behind had the air of a hospital, room after room of medical equipment spaced evenly apart, though only a few were occupied, and the walls between rooms were clear glass—hardly the practice of any actual hospital.

That clear glass also meant that Misa could take in everything with a glance, magically augmented vision picking out both details and gestalt. The soul gems at the end of the hallway were in one room each, placed on a small table within some kind of metal apparatus which she couldn’t identify at this range. Next to each table was a cot with a seemingly unconscious girl on it, hooked up to medical equipment.

She felt the bile rise in her throat as she edged forward. This was wrong. Whatever it was, this was wrong.

She felt something else as she got closer: grief cubes, almost unused, concentrated around each soul gem. That was sensible enough, but then why were the soul gems so depleted?

Only when she got close did she understand: the grief cubes were just slightly, painfully out of reach of the gems, sealed into a glass container. A photometer similar to the ones they wore in combat sat nearby and, as she watched, one of the glass containers shifted a few centimeters toward its gem, just long enough to bring it slightly away from the brink. Then it withdrew.

Misa had heard of torture devices like this, but only in the least credible kind of Unification Wars shock schlock. It wasn’t supposed to be practical—no information you extracted from a magical girl like this was reliable, and the kind of effort necessary to keep a magical girl confined like this was excessive, to put it mildly. At the end of the day, you were better off with a forced telepathic mind‐read—same amount of effort for much more reliable information, with much less patina of pure evil. Not even the Freedom Alliance had resisted such simple utilitarian logic.

That logic rang through her mind in a flash, in an aghast, almost delusional direct denial of what she was seeing in front of her.

Why? How? another part of her demanded.

How were these magical girls being kept confined? Had their jailor already fled? Now that she was closer, she realized what had been missing. There had been no telepathy, or any sense of emotion at all for what should have been the worst of situations. Now, though, she felt a distant, murmuring sense of…

There was no need to dig into that any further, even if she had wanted to. There were seven soul gems in her vicinity, all of them in torment. One of them was Hermina.

Getting them out was more important than anything.

Kyouko had to stop there, finding herself running through the same logic, confusion, and disgust Misa had. It wasn’t just evil, it was senseless.

Something had to be missing.

And the thought that this had been happening under their noses…

This had all happened over a decade ago, too. It ought to have ended a decade ago. Why hadn’t Homura asked for more help?

Misa was about to update Stacy when another sensation sent a shard of ice down her spine. There was someone else here. A magical girl other than her and the victims on their cots.

Despite everything around her, she felt the sudden, keen clarity of combat. She was no stealth specialist—a point of pure stubbornness on her part, she could have pursued power development into illusion magic, but no, she had always wanted more voltage, more current—and so she couldn’t hope to sneak up on anyone who was actually using the building’s surveillance systems. But she was suppressing her soul gem emissions, and whoever she was sensing didn’t seem like they were being particularly careful, or were even aware anyone else was present.

Sometimes magical girls just forgot to use the mundane tools at their disposal, relying too much on their magic senses.

As carefully as she could, she signaled Stacy to join her at her mark. Misa was very confident in her skills in a close engagement, but two was still better than one, and clairvoyants had a lot of utility even if they never threw a punch. Besides, Stacy could phase through walls—she’d still have a good chance of escape if things went sideways.

Misa found her target in the next corridor over, facing the other way towards one of the patient rooms—if they could even be called that. They were seemingly oblivious, perhaps lost in thought. They weren’t even transformed.

“Hold it right there,” Misa said, arm raised. “Keep your hands where I can see them. Transform and I drop you.”

She felt the comforting blip of Stacy’s magic behind her, signaling she was about to arrive.

Now that there was no need to hide, Misa gathered power around her, enough voltage that the air crackled, channeling power into her own body, lifting herself slightly above the ground. She could fry anything nearby at a moment’s notice, or pull a bullet out of the air. Many bullets, even.

The girl in front of her raised her hands slowly.

Did it really make sense to ask a magical girl to raise her hands? Kind of—many were unaccustomed to fighting without using their arms, and it was at least a signal of acquiescence. But Misa couldn’t drop her guard.

“Turn around, slowly,” she said.

“I’m not your enemy,” the girl said, evenly, after she had turned and given Misa a good look at her face.

“Really? Then what the hell are you doing here, with all… this?”

Misa let her disgust show a bit. She wouldn’t make any premature assumptions, but what else could possibly be going on?

“We’re here to stop it,” the girl said. “We have nothing to do with what was going on here.”

“A likely story.”

We? Misa thought, simultaneously.

But even as she responded, she felt another clear surge of magic behind her.

Perhaps she should have fried the girl in front of her on the spot, but something made her hesitate. There was something—

She recognized the magic behind her, she realized. She had only felt it once, but that had been enough to sear it into her memory, ten years ago, at New Athens.

Akemi Homura was cordial, once she had convinced Misa and Stacy to stop holding the other girl at figurative gunpoint—though Misa stayed transformed and kept much of her voltage field up, especially after she got a good look at ‘Homura’.

She didn’t look like Homura, of course. This girl with dark skin and striking eyes rather looked like Misa herself, if she were honest. But the feeling of her magic was undeniable—assuming someone hadn’t figured out how to fake it, of course. Nothing could be entirely ruled out.

Inhabiting other bodies is one method to evade detection, this Homura thought. It’s proven necessary. But let’s end our business here quickly: I’d rather not leave the victims of this facility here any longer than we have to.

Kyouko stopped again, taking a moment to refocus. She wasn’t sure why she felt so stunned—the séance she had attended with Mami had told her Homura was using other bodies, and they already knew about Valentin.

Perhaps it was simply the look on “Homura’s” face. In the séance, Homura had appeared as her normal self, as a quirk of the magic. In Misa’s memories, she was someone else. And not just physically… the telepathy itself was slightly off too, like it had traveled through some protective medium.

Kyouko replayed the memory. She didn’t think she was just imagining it, even if the telepathic impression was second‐hand. Homura was protecting her emotional state—hardly an unreasonable action here—but there was something else going on. Homura was going out of her way to project an emotional persona. One of a detached Ancient who had everything under control.

That was interesting, because it strongly implied she wasn’t that.

Ever since New Athens, Kyouko had been very worried about Homura’s mental health. Like most in the Church, she had figured her lost to a deep despair, wandering space alone on some private quest… until recently, when it turned out that Homura seemed to not only be managing a new magical girl organization, but also the Prometheus Institute on Earth as Joanne Valentin. That tended to suggest she was keeping it together, to say the least.

She had looked into Valentin of course, along with everyone else. Valentin had run a successful research lab, socialized with her colleagues and subordinates—notably, Ryouko’s parents—and even had time to raise new AIs like Vlad. If anything, her personality had been more upbeat and positive than Kyouko had ever known Homura to be.

For a time Kyouko had considered it likely that Homura was better off now—talking more with the Goddess, perhaps even enjoying her new roles in life. A bit depressing to contemplate as a friend, but Kyouko understood as well as anyone the merits of a good breakup.

Mami and Yuma had thought otherwise, of course, and now she was facing the other possibility: that these new bodies enabled Homura to retreat fully into her masking, in a way none of them would ever have let her get away with before. That was what she was getting from this memory.

Maybe she was reading into it too much.

I can agree with that much, Misa thought. But it will take more than that to convince me to drop my guard, or not call for backup.

What they really needed was a solid telepathic read on either Homura or her companion, using Stacy’s limited mind‐reading skills. But both of the magical girls in front of them kept their mental guards solidly up.

The TCF is compromised, Homura thought. Our mutual enemies have been using that for years now to conceal their operations from Governance and the MSY. Without a doubt, if you contacted anyone, you’d make everything worse. We went to a lot of trouble to isolate this facility.

Misa thought feverishly. She wanted to believe the girl in front of her, oh yes, but the consequences of being wrong were so high, and so sharp.

The girl that was Homura closed her eyes thoughtfully.

I’ll tell you some of what I know, she said. These people, this rogue conspiracy, has been around for a while, since well before the war, though I do not know how much longer. They are possessed of some kind of predictive engine—an impossibly‐effective algorithm, one partially magical. They’re ideologues, pursuing radical visions of utopia. Magical research forms a substantial part of their operations. Research like what you see around you.

Research? This is utopian research? Misa asked, appalled.

Of a sort. Certainly not research the MSY would approve of. We think that’s part of what this is all about. All this around you is an attempt to recreate the conditions I experienced on New Athens, to unlock that kind of magical energy. Foolishly, I might add. It would never work, but it was enough to force us to come and stop it.

Kyouko felt a slight shiver pass through her. Now that Homura had said it, it made sense. The Church viewed Homura’s miracle on New Athens as just that—a miracle—but she could imagine someone of a different, more exploitative mindset seeing instead an avenue toward great power.

More than that, she recalled what Mami had told her and Yuma, about what she had experienced with Akari before the Goddess saved her soul—and what Homura had cryptically hinted at, over the centuries.

She could guess that Homura would feel compelled to intervene for reasons beyond simple mercy.

It took you too long, Misa thought. She could still feel Hermina’s soul, and the others, on the brink of despair. The stalemate was agonizing.

Unfortunately, Homura thought, while their understanding of magic is limited by their misapprehension of the Law of Cycles, they are still quite capable—they have made breakthroughs, and they aren’t easily suppressed.

How capable are we talking? Misa thought.

Despite all our secrecy measures, they’ve already identified me and many of my original operatives as their enemies, while we have failed to identify their leadership. Despite a casualty ratio lopsided in our favor, their organization is growing more quickly, and employing more bodies more effectively, per member. Despite nearly seven years of conflict, and more sacrifices than I care to think about, I am little closer to protecting Humanity from them.

Misa pinged Stacy telepathically. What did she think of all this?

I’m inclined to believe her, Stacy thought. I don’t have a concrete reason; it just doesn’t feel like she’s lying, and I have some experience questioning people. But if anyone could lie successfully to my face…

Yeah, Misa agreed.

The magical girl standing next to Homura, the one that she had originally accosted, shifted in place.

Perhaps I can break the impasse, she thought. Akemi is reluctant to drop her mental guard, but I can. I’ve felt your attempts to probe me. You will see that I am not lying.

It was a surprising offer, given the risk that Misa and Stacy themselves were malicious actors, but thus far Homura and her companion had seemed largely unconcerned with that possibility.

Perhaps it was simply that Homura didn’t really fear them. After all, they had apparently been foolish enough to show up in their own, only bodies.

Makes sense, Stacy agreed tersely.

There was a tense silence as Misa waited for her friend to perform the mind‐read, trying to conceal her nervousness as she scanned her surroundings for any sign of trouble. It had occurred to her, of course, that Homura could simply be stalling for time for reinforcements.

They seem to be telling the truth, Stacy thought. Or at least this girl is. Apparently they were watching us arrive and were initially curious if we were involved with this facility, until you went inside and it was obvious you weren’t, given how much grief your soul gem immediately began accumulating.

So Misa hadn’t gotten the jump on them after all. Ultimately, not that surprising.

Misa relaxed slightly, releasing much of the voltage in the air and dropping back towards the floor. Stacy wasn’t a very good telepath, but she couldn’t justify drawing this out any further.

Not that she dropped her guard entirely. She even started applying a couple grief cubes surreptitiously, to recharge.

So what is it that you want us to do? Misa asked. And even if you’re trying to hide yourself, what good does it do not to call for backup? If we don’t let the world know what happened here, aren’t you doing the enemy’s work for them?

A very good question, Homura said. And one I don’t relish having to answer. But better than resorting to force.

The girl paused for a moment, peering at Misa’s face until she grew just a little uncomfortable.

The enemy’s penetration of Governance networks is deep. If you called for help here by mundane means, it would be intercepted, and you would become a target, Homura thought. That’s one reason. More importantly, I’m unwilling to precipitate a crisis because of the third party involved here: the Cephalopods.

Misa recoiled slightly.

We’ve discovered, Homura continued, that these people are cooperating with the Cephalopods attacking Humanity—the aliens have even given some stealth technology to them in return. But we also know that they aren’t wholeheartedly aiding the Cephalopods—we’ve seen them pass up easy opportunities to do so. At the least, they’re certainly holding back their access to Governance military intel. If the whole weight of Governance and the MSY were to suddenly bear down upon them, they would be forced to flee into the aliens’ arms, and to give them what they truly want… Humanity isn’t ready for that. Not yet. I have put plans into motion, but they’ll take years longer to mature.

She peered at Misa for a moment longer.

I know I’m speaking in riddles. The truth is I’ve been given the same riddles. I’ve been given the conclusions without the premises. That’s how it is. But I mean what I say about the risks. We have been forced to keep everything out of the light.

She turned her head slightly, so that Misa could see the red ribbon hidden behind her hair, twin to the one in the Cult headquarters. She held that pose just long enough for Misa to take the meaning.

I do wish She’d be more open with me, though I suspect I know why She won’t be. But, even so, I must continue to fight this battle. You don’t need to. Frankly, I hate recruiting people into it, and we already have more than I’d like.

Homura closed her eyes for a moment.

I know that’s a lot to take in. Under better circumstances, I’d appeal to your faith in the Goddess to let us walk away, but I have to ask for more than that. I have to ask for so much you’ll certainly balk; I would in your place. So I’ll have to offer you something else.

The next memory was tagged differently, and Kyouko realized with a start that it didn’t have Misa Virani’s metadata. Instead, the files were labeled as if they came from Akemi Homura.

“Homura gave you memories?” Kyouko asked, dumbfounded.

Van Rossum raised an eyebrow, suddenly miffed that Kyouko had gotten the memories first. Or jealous, Kyouko thought.

“Then I blew up the facility myself to hide her tracks, and let them Reformat me to wipe it all away, even the feelings regarding Hermina’s ‘death’ that led me there. So her memories were obviously pretty convincing.”

She paused for a moment to make sure she had their attention.

“I’ve reordered them to be chronological,” Misa commented. “So they’d form a cohesive narrative. Most of these I actually got later, either as part of a new recruit package or just recently. Homura believes in making sure we have all the necessary context, in a hard‐to‐fake way. I can’t provide you the magic certs, so you’ll have to take my word here, but they’re real. May the Goddess strike me down where I stand if I’m lying.”

“Since when do you believe in the Goddess?” Gracia asked. “No, wait, that’s obvious.”

The man that was Misa’s current body shook his head, laughing to himself.

“You remember when I gave Mina a good zap, right after she made a vow like that? On Karnāta? Nevermind—Kyouko, you know Homura. You’ll recognize that these memories are real. Just experience them.”

The first tranche of memories dated as early as 2440, covering the only period where Internal Security’s tracking efforts had met with any success. Even then, this was much more informative, of course—Kuroi Nana would have a keen professional interest in these memories, for the sake of validating the effectiveness of her methods if nothing else.

Homura had wandered the battlefields of the early war, across the Ganges Sector, infiltrating alien positions, monitoring activity and taking notes, and at times intervening from the edges of battles, a silent contributor to some early war defensive stands. Occasionally, she retreated to Optatum for supplies, but she met with no one, evading friendly and enemy patrol alike with stealth magic Kyouko had never seen. And when had she gotten a chance to squirrel away a personal ship?

Still, it was no more than what might be expected of the most capable magical girl who ever lived, turned loose.

Of more interest to Kyouko, these memories heavily censored Homura’s emotional state, focusing only on the details of her actions. Might that censorship be aimed, not only at some external audience, but against Homura herself? Was this how she had gotten herself back under control? She had clearly worked hard to hollow out these memories.

No, Kyouko concluded. Homura had never rejected suffering. She just didn’t want to share it with others.

Even so, glimmers of a dark, fatalistic mood flickered through. It was more ineffable sentiment than concrete notion: the hesitation before healing an injured arm, l’appel du vide of joining an unwinnable battle in a destroyed city, the fatalistic welcome for a squadron of enemy fighters that broke off to chase only her, the disdainful roteness in executing a score of aliens downrange.

Were those real feelings, or was Kyouko imputing false emotion onto mere actions? She doubted herself, suddenly.

If they were, these weren’t the actions of someone truly trying to protect Humanity. They were the grim battles of someone seeking a fight noble enough to justify their end.

Finally, a different sort of memory began.

On the edges of yet another battlezone, Homura silently tailed an alien ship.

She had followed the Goddess’s instructions here, and as always the results were fruitful: this frigate‐sized ship was not only a different design than any other she had seen, it was behaving very strangely. Far away from any friendly ships, this ship’s normally reliable alien stealth was flickering off and on at erratic intervals, causing the ship to appear to jump around on her sensors. Its course was evasive and inconsistent, but the general direction—toward the barely inhabitable fifth planet of the system—seemed unmistakable.

A heavily damaged ship, then?

They want to be seen, but not in any way that allows a target lock, and pull observers toward that planet, Homura thought, seemingly to herself. That’s not a theory I would have ever come up with. I’ll have to take your word on that.

A second of silence.

I’m really going to have to take your word on that, Homura thought.

Another pause.

You know I don’t doubt you on the details.

There was no apparent target for Homura’s thoughts, and while it was reasonable to think her caught within the delusions of a deeply corrupted soul gem, Kyouko thought otherwise. Homura had always had a special relationship with the Goddess, and her own twin of the Ribbon.

Still, it was something to witness Homura speaking to Her on closer terms than probably anyone ever. Kyouko almost felt jealous.

In the memory Homura sighed.

You say this is going to be important, but it’s not going to be important enough, is it? Not anytime soon?

Her voice was strained, and Kyouko didn’t like the intonation on ’enough’.

Never the straight answer. I’m glad it’s that important, at least.

Homura fell silent then, and the memory focused on the ship she was following, which appeared to be entering low orbit of Agni Five, which had yet to receive a proper name, though it did have a pair of automated groundside monitoring stations.

Then, with an urgent alert, Homura’s ship warned her about a series of projectile launches towards the groundside stations, something she was little equipped to deal with, not if she wanted to stay back and out of sight. And was it really worth saving some monitoring stations?

For that matter, why were the aliens even bothering to target these?

The alien ship began to leave orbit and vanished back into stealth, even as more sensor information arrived about the projectiles: not missiles, not standard impacters, more like drop pods than anything. Infantry? But a bit small, and clearly angled at the monitoring stations.

Homura considered the matter, then dove her ship in after. By all standards, she was being astonishingly reckless; the volume of active sensor scans, and now an atmospheric entry, would have taxed even the best of the MSY’s stealth mages to hide.

It seemed Homura was unconcerned about being detected by an alien warship, and nowhere in the memory was it clear why.

The memory recording was palpably incomplete, clear sections of mental state and motivation omitted from the record. However Misa had received this memory—the metadata tagged it as one she had received much later—Homura hadn’t wanted to share too freely. Still, the intrigue had clearly perked Homura up, and there was more energy in her motions.

It would have been difficult, likely impossible for even the best ship to catch up to the set of descending drop pods, and Kyouko wasn’t surprised to see Homura’s trajectory shallow out, as Homura stood up to don an orbital jumpsuit.

Only a magical girl with the right powerset might have reached the ground intact in time to see what was going on, and while Homura wasn’t known to have the right powerset—well, Kyouko was willing to bet any one of the Mitakihara Four could have pulled it off, one way or another.

The memory skipped forward, and now Homura was already in the air approaching the ground. It didn’t escape Kyouko that the missing time might have been someone—Homura or Misa—concealing the exact nature of the power used.

At the moment, though, she had somehow passed the drop pods on their way to the ground and was slowing herself down rather conventionally with telekinesis, the only wrinkle being that she seemed to be inside a magic stealth bubble of some kind.

The drop pods themselves had proven to be neither explosive nor packed with alien infantry. Instead, a fly‐by sensor scan had suggested they were filled with electronics of some kind. Homura would have snatched them straight out of the air—if it weren’t for the unknown magic signatures she also sensed nearby.

Rather than reaching the ground itself, she pulled up, unfurling a pair of wings to soar a few hundred feet in the air and cast her eye over the scene, magic senses keen for anyone approaching her, even as she flew an evasive pattern, just in case.

At the moment, at least, Homura’s wings looked white and angelic, not the twisting black abominations of New Athens.

But the magic signatures were veering towards the drop pods instead. It wasn’t impossible for this planet to have magical girls stationed defensively on site, just surprising—again, there was nothing here worth the protection.

But as Homura’s eyes honed in on the signals, she saw something that caused her to take pause, pulling into a vertical hover to stare. She had still yet to spot any actual people, just a triplet of flying drones, each corresponding to one of the magic signatures. They were too small to have a person inside, right?

As she watched, the drones moved into position below the drop pods, as if they fully expected to survive the impact. But surely—

A pulse of magic, and then the drop pods began to slow. Like the signatures, that pulse had come from the drones.

Homura blinked in surprise. For a moment she weighed the possibility of getting closer to get a better look, or even take another scan of the pods, but decided neither was likely to get her more in the way of information. If she wanted to know more, she would have to be more direct.

She swung over a bit closer, making sure her position would not be so close it was immediately threatening, but not so far they couldn’t get a good look at her.

Then she reached out, attempting a two‐way telepathic handshake with all of the drones. It didn’t work, which somehow surprised her.

“Hello there!” she transmitted instead, using a standard Governance frequency.

As she waved, feeling just a touch silly, she checked her corners for any sign of a magic or technological trap. She wouldn’t have done this at all if she didn’t think she could take them in a fight, push come to shove, but Ancients didn’t get to be Ancient by being careless.

The drones visibly jolted in reaction, much as a human would, and one of them began to circle.

“You are Akemi Homura, or wearing an imitation of her body,” one of them thought, mental voice young and female as she would have expected of a magical girl. “With similar wings and powers.”

The girl was doing a decent job of shielding her emotions, but Homura could still detect a layer of nervousness underneath. Natural enough, she supposed.

“I am she,” Homura thought. “Though I admit having no direct way to prove it at the moment, if you don’t recognize my magic. But who are you? And what’s with the bodies?”

Now two of the drones were circling.

“A contrivance to provide us concealment and freedom of operation,” the previous drone thought. “But why are you here? We knew you were likely alive; indeed we have instructions to speak with you if you ever appeared.”

Not the most elegant of conversation openings, and the drone had dodged her real question, giving only the answer that was guessable.

“I followed the erratically‐behaving alien vessel that dropped those canisters,” Homura thought. “Allow me to get to the point. You three appear to be three magical girls contained inside artificial bodies, collecting canisters from a strange alien ship. This aroused my curiosity, and I took the risk of appearing here and asking you who you are and what you’re doing. And now, I suppose, I should ask you what you mean when you say someone gave you instructions.”

That was the gauntlet laid down, but Homura had found in the past that it was often best for everyone to just get things said rather than beat around the bush.

“Shall we land?” the drone asked. “I can explain a bit as we fly.”

The drones flew toward the ground, and Homura followed cautiously, staying a careful distance away.

“This is probably self‐evident, but we represent a group that operates on the fringes of Governance. It is no secret that Governance seeks to direct the future of Humanity along its own lines, and to keep its grip on all Human populations. Perhaps the intentions are noble, but we believe this leads to unnecessary human suffering, and the inhibition of human potential. There must be better ways. Better utopias than Governance has constructed.”

Homura was immediately, instinctively wary. The message was ideological, and Homura had met many such ideologues in her time. Those who tried to operate outside the system could be very dangerous, even if their intentions were good.

Of course, she had been such an ideologue, once. Twice, if you counted her lesser role in the formation of Governance itself.

Still, what she heard didn’t necessarily sound good. There were reasons why the MSY had insisted on spanning all Humanity, and why Governance had aimed for a single, united utopia.

They reached the ground seconds later, touching down into the coarse red and brown regolith that dominated the landscape here. Somewhere, far away, an ocean of plankton kept the atmosphere oxygenated, but most of the land was still uncolonized.

Homura kicked some of the rocks aside.

“Is that an idea you three came up with? Or something you were told?” she asked. “I have heard many people claim to reach for utopia in my life. Governance is the closest I have ever seen, built upon the ruins of most of the others. You’ll forgive me if I start off skeptical.”

Suffice to say, Homura wasn’t signing onto any new utopian projects, rogue colony or otherwise, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t ready to let them keep talking. They could even work together on the alien pods—if they were relatively harmless and worth working with.

Though any group packing magical girls into mechanical drones was a certain level of dangerous, no matter what. It implied the presence of a capable soul mage, a willingness to dabble in research directions marked forbidden by the MSY, and the time and resources to actually complete the project. They couldn’t be taken lightly.

“A reasonable mindset,” the drone thought. “What Governance offers is certainly the safest option, given limited information. The thing is, we don’t have limited information. We have complete and accurate predictions of the future, within reasonable bounds. Enough to be certain about what we say.”

Homura’s hackles rose immediately.

“I have it on good authority that precognitive magical girls went extinct centuries ago, and that they’re not coming back,” she thought. “And I believe my sources more than I believe you.”

“No, no,” the drone thought, tilting slightly in consternation. “Definitely not precognition. We are aware of that metaphysical limitation. This is purely a predictive engine, a Laplace’s Demon transforming whatever physical and magical data we can acquire into projections of the future. Thanks to magic, we can overcome certain information theoretic limits and predict the outcomes of our actions with a precision normally reserved for physics. Albeit, we don’t know why magic allows such precision—this seems like a metaphysical loophole that wouldn’t be allowed. We’d be interested in your analysis, though that’s a conversation for later.”

It was often to your benefit to rattle someone in a conversation, so that they might leak information to you. So it had proven again here, accidentally. And while Homura had no intention of sharing such things, the answer was probably that whatever ’engine’ they were using wasn’t perfect enough for the Goddess to have screened out of the timeline as too corrosive to Human potential. It helped to have a little insider information on the matter.

Kyouko couldn’t help but raise her eyebrow at that tidbit of information. She and the Church had always suspected as much, but here was Homura thinking it, presumably with direct information. She was sending this one straight to the Theological Council.

“I see,” Homura thought simply. “Back to the main point—and you think this engine will let you build a better utopia than Governance?”

“Most certainly. Though really, we’re thinking multiple utopias rather than just one. It’s a core point. Rather than hashing it out here, in these awkward circumstances, we’d be happy to invite you to meet our leading members elsewhere, now that we’re done with our business on this planet. Our ship can lead you. They could explain things much more clearly than I can.”

That was certainly an offer, and one Homura was inclined to take, with the proper precautions. There was a simple point for her to challenge, though.

“Before I agree to that, about this engine you refer to: I assume it only works on a macro‐scale? After all, you seemed surprised by my presence here.”

There was a brief, meaningful pause.

“Well, truth be told, we are sensitive to variables that we don’t fully understand or which defy prediction,” the drone replied, with a clear undertone of embarrassment. “The honest answer is that you are one of the most prominent of those. That’s the reason why we’ve been told to be on the lookout for you specifically. We’d hardly need to be on the lookout if we knew where you were. But to be clear, we are usually confident in our micro as well as macro predictions.”

Well, that was a pretty clear question to ask the Goddess about when she had a chance. But for now, she could defer most of her questions for later. Yet something else about the situation bothered her.

“What about your companions here?” Homura asked. “They haven’t said anything. Heck, I don’t even know your name. Though I’d understand if you’d rather not share.”

It was often natural for only the leader of a group to speak, but Homura had been growing quietly suspicious: something was subtly off about the magic aura of the other drones. Of course, it could be credibly said that it was a consequence of being inside a small drone, but it didn’t sit right with her. She had been in the company of those who had been heavily mentally‐edited before, and this felt just a little like that.

“Oh, you noticed that?” the drone replied. “The truth is, a bit of light Reformatting is necessary to fit inside these drone bodies and prevent soul rejection. I’ve undergone it myself.”

The other drones perked up and sent their greetings, but neither that nor the suspiciously convenient explanation sat well with Homura.

Though if they were that upfront about it, she had to admit she didn’t have much more to go on than that feeling, but—and Clarisse loved talking about this—for an Ancient the feeling was often more important than anything.

She would go anyway—the offer to just take her to the group’s leaders was too tempting to reject. Still, she would keep her guard up—she hardly knew how to do otherwise. Even when she wanted to throw caution to the wind and gamble with her life, she always ended up hedging and making backup plans. It was second nature, and her past experience meant she understood much too well the many ways a single scenario could go wrong.

Even with her powers, she could still get lured into and trapped within a remote star system. She was confident in her ability to extricate herself out of most situations, but interstellar travel without a ship still eluded her, and she had already lost one of her ships to an FTL missile a month prior. She had another one stored, but still.

Despite that, Homura honestly hoped these magical girls were as dangerous as she felt they were, perhaps even more so. Protecting the world a little longer was the promise she had made the Goddess, and all she had done recently felt like puttering around, making small differences here and there. Had the Goddess finally led her to a worthy task? One that might absolve that which bound her to this world?

She set that thought aside and focused on the matter at hand.

“If you are willing to take me to your leadership, then I will go, provided I receive some assurances about my security,” she thought. “But I see no reason not to discuss a little first—”

She stopped there, startled despite herself by an urgent message by tightbeam from her ship. She had instructed her ship to contact her only in case of something really important, but her annoyance faded when she learned what had happened.

She resisted the impulse to look up at the sky or show an additional reaction, and found that the drones clearly knew what was happening too, surprise clearly written in their movements.

Another alien ship had appeared out of stealth and fired on the alien vessel she had been tracking, destroying it utterly. It was now on its way to the planet.

Kyouko echoed Homura’s sense of shock, and paused the memory to try to understand it in retrospect. They had known about the existence of multiple alien factions—Kyouko considered visions from the Goddess absolute in this regard. Internecine conflicts between two alien ships were thus entirely possible.

Homura’s shock faded too after a moment, though more from emotional self‐control than anything. She watched the drones in front of her; it was obvious they were concerned about the new ship. How they had noticed the alien attack was no great mystery, she supposed—presumably they had their own ships or other scanners she hadn’t detected. They hadn’t detected her either, after all.

Homura sent no instructions to her ship, which she had to trust to do the smart thing and hide itself as much as possible.

The drones skittered erratically in circles for long seconds, before huddling together in what was obviously a conference of some kind. Homura resisted the urge to telepathically break into one of the follower drones’ minds—she was no mind‐reading expert, and while most magical girls wouldn’t notice her intrusion, the operative word was ‘most’. She would have to content herself with passive telepathic observation.

“You should hide yourself,” the lead drone thought to her directly, finally. “The aliens are certainly capable of recognizing individual humans when they bother to try, and you are a particularly notorious individual. I can’t predict how they’d react. Best not to find out.”

Homura was starting to grow increasingly skeptical of these drones’ supposed ‘predictions’, given the fact that they had now been surprised twice, first by her, and now by this alien ship.

More importantly, the discussion clearly implied the aliens were here to contact the drones, which raised so many questions it was hard to keep count. But the right thing to do now seemed to be to do as suggested and hide. If they betrayed her to the aliens—well, she could win that fight.

She had already reengaged her personal stealth, and could only hope the aliens hadn’t already scanned the area. Lifting off, she chose an outcropping a kilometer or so away that would give her a vantage point on the drones. Staying in the air gave her better vision, but staying close to the ground was just safer and more concealed.

Some minutes later, the bloom of distant fire in the sky signaled the entry of the alien vessel into the atmosphere.

Homura dialed her soul gem down even further, maintaining only the bubble of stealth she was using to hide, and kept her head down, figuratively as well as literally.

The alien ship eventually swooped into the air nearby, buffering its descent with antigrav even as it blasted dust and rocks across the landscape. The drones stayed impassive, a pulse of blue magic appearing to shield their delicate mechanisms from the debris.

The frigate dropped into place with a quiet thud, the dust blowing off the surface refusing to stick to the metamaterial hull, which shone pristine.

Homura found herself holding her breath. Despite everything, the moment got to her: it changed the face of the whole war, if the aliens were talking to any humans, even those hostile to Governance. It meant she could potentially get in there, and even run interference.

The side of the alien ship opened a few moments later, flexing slightly as a circular door slid open. With no delay, an alien in an armored exoskeleton stepped out into the air, falling to the ground with a ponderous thud. Its movements were eerie, but all too familiar to Homura at this point.

What was different was the appearance of the suit, which had ornamental gold‐and‐dark‐green stripes. She hadn’t seen that before. It was difficult not to speculate that this alien was more senior.

Homura was trying to plot in her head how she could possibly eavesdrop on what was going on. No human had previously communicated with the aliens successfully, but unless they were going to start arranging rocks into the prime number sequence it was obvious they had to have something, and if that something involved short range laser transmissions Homura didn’t really have an option but to get right back in there and record what she could, an onerous proposition.

Kyouko frowned at that thought from Homura. How exactly was Homura expecting to go stand right in the middle of several magical girls and expect to be undetected? Clearly, Homura had previously‐unknown stealth capabilities, but it was one thing to have developed a bit of a side power, like her own fire powers, and quite another to have mastered it so completely.

Fortunately—or perhaps unfortunately for Kyouko’s hopes of a power demonstration—it didn’t come to that.

Instead, one of the drones produced an orb‐like object from a compartment that opened on its side, and though the baseline design looked visibly alien, it was clearly an enchanted device.

Kyouko recognized it instantly. The same or very similar object had been seen in the recording they recovered from the asteroid, used to hold the false negotiations between Governance AIs and Cephalopods.

Homura naturally couldn’t recognize it, and was thus still trying to puzzle out the nature of the magic when the orb started speaking.

“As discussed previously, artifacts and communications from other Thinker factions are to be handed over to us immediately without inspection. We are here to collect.”

Homura contained her surprise and had time to ask herself:

Thinker? Is that what they call themselves?

One of the drones replied audibly over speakers, in a sharp female voice.

“Of course. But we must protest the abrupt nature of your intervention. We had the situation under control, as you see.”

The orb pulsed, briefly changing from its original light‐blue to sharp red.

“Past experience has made it quite clear that the temptation of knowledge represented by these artifacts outweighs your commitments to us. We are here to remind you that we are watching.”

The drone replied:

“We have protested before about your refusal to let us know basic facts of importance to us. Partners must operate under a spirit of basic cooperation.”

They don’t seem on happy terms, but partners? Homura thought. Other alien factions? My opinion of anyone who works together with the aliens is quite low, but if there is more than one alien faction, then perhaps there are some who can be negotiated with. Perhaps even these can be.

Homura was once again addressing the unseen Goddess, and seemed to receive an answer this time.

Alright we’ll discuss plans afterward, she thought. Clearest answer you’ve given me yet. I suppose you brought me here to show me this, but couldn’t this have happened earlier?

A short pause.

Naturally.

Homura turned her attention back to the alien conversation. The alien was now rebuking the drones:

“Partners are expected to stick to the terms of agreements reached, not litigate details via subterfuge. This topic was discussed at length previously. If Utopia Unbound wishes to reopen the topic for negotiation, your leadership should do so formally. For now, we will take the canisters.”

More useful information. The organizational name didn’t tell her much that she hadn’t been told already, but this proved that the aliens had extensive dealings with them, and moreover understood them as a social construct. It had not been clear, prior to today, that the aliens were capable of understanding humanity much at all.

The drones moved forward with what Kyouko imagined was reluctance, opening side compartments to disgorge their canisters, leaving them on the ground. A set of small drones scurried out of the back of the alien’s suit, picking up the canisters with small metal tentacles.

“We will be in touch,” the alien said through the orb, with what Homura swore was a brusque tone, followed with some kind of tentacle gesture.

Homura watched as the whole sequence of events reversed, the alien jumping back into its ship, the ship lifting off—again buffeting the area with an oppressive cloud of dust and regolith—as the drones stayed silently in place.

Then, once the ship was a distant speck in the sky, it vanished, in a flash of radiation that seared her eyes with the intensity of a magnesium flare even from a couple dozen kilometers away.

There had been no missiles or attacking ship this time—Homura’s ship confirmed it. Had those drop pods been bombs after all? No, the radiation strongly implied an FTL engine overloading—perhaps the pods triggered it?

Homura signaled to the drones that she wanted to speak again and quickly flew back over.

“Self‐destruction,” the drones informed her immediately. “The pods were harmless, I think—the aliens always do that. They’re worried about mind‐control.”

“That seems incredibly extreme,” Homura said, with unfeigned shock.

“It’s their policy,” the drones said. “They’re not concerned about these individual messengers.”

Nor did the drones seem overly concerned with the fact that they had just revealed an apparent alliance with the enemy. Homura simply couldn’t let that slide, even if it jeopardized her chances of meeting with their leadership.

“Care to explain yourselves, then? I don’t have a high opinion of Human factions cavorting with genocidal aliens.”

She moved cautiously and slowly—if necessary, she would fight it out. This was no longer simply a matter of investigating a rogue group of magical girls.

“They discovered and captured a few of us before the war even broke out,” the drone thought. “The aliens were and are overwhelmingly powerful, more even than you know. We were able to make an arrangement that guaranteed our survival. We admit that what happened at New Athens defied our expectations. We anticipated a short war. The vast majority of humans were to be spared.”

As before, this drone clearly had no idea what she was dealing with, or how to speak to an Ancient in general. The gaps in that explanation were wide enough to drive a fuel tanker through, and it took Homura no time at all to come up with a list of cutting questions. For instance, that clearly implied they had expected New Athens to go down as a loss for Humanity, possibly taking much of the MSY with it. And it was obvious that whatever ‘arrangement’ they had made would leave their conspiracy on top.

She focused on the core point of outrage, though.

“I don’t know what kind of arrangement involves carrying out genocide on innocent planets,” Homura thought. “If what you say is true, that happened after you talked with them. Without involving the actual Human government, mind you.”

“Their soldiers don’t see killing the same way we do,” the drone thought, with palpable discomfort, “and their leadership is not interested in opening negotiations with Governance, not until they can safely dictate terms. And the aliens remain confident in the inevitability of their final victory over Humanity.”

“Then you’ve failed to explain to them the nature of magic,” Homura thought. “Even what you know ought to be dissuasive enough. Did I not kill enough of them at New Athens? Little of what you say makes any sense.”

She was barely holding her tongue, but by now she had chosen to play along. It was obvious they were an enemy, but if she was careful and pretended to be talked down, perhaps she could learn something more.

Or they would try to kill her, now that she knew they were complicit in genocide. They had made no move toward attacking her yet, but that didn’t mean much; perhaps they simply predicted that attacking here would be futile.

“I haven’t told any lie,” the drone thought. “Believe me, we didn’t want those massacres, nor do we want aliens to dominate Humanity, nor are we fighting by the aliens’ side. Unfortunately, that doesn’t matter. A long war is acceptable to them, and they prefer certainty in their long‐term security over sparing human lives.”

For the first time in this conversation, Homura sensed a clear lie through their mental defenses. Not that the drones had been particularly honest before this, but it had all felt like misdirection and technical truths, nothing she couldn’t have detected just from the words. But this time her passive telepathic sense provided an extra crumb of information: while they didn’t enjoy the slaughter of Aurora and Atlas, they did see those crimes as useful to their cause.

Most likely, they had predicted the invasion would lure out most of the MSY’s fighting strength at New Athens—right into the sights of an orbital superweapon.

Homura made sure to show no sign she detected the slip. She couldn’t ask too many questions, or it’d be obvious she was milking them for information. But her guise allowed her a few more questions, she hoped.

The most important question first:

“And what about this talk of other alien factions?” she asked. “As far as anyone else knows, there is only one alien faction. There seems to be some tension between you and the aliens just now about those factions, and whatever they sent in those canisters.”

“At this point it’s probably best if we just take you to our leadership, as we previously discussed,” the drone thought. “Any explanation we could give here would be incomplete, and frankly I don’t necessarily know all the details.”

…and I don’t know what I’m allowed to say, and it might sound bad. That was another clear telepathic read. So much for the questioning.

Homura pretended to think about it for a moment, while actually taking the time to think about personal security arrangements.

“Alright,” she thought finally. “Please, let’s both call our ships in, and I’ll follow you in mine. I hope you’ll understand if I want to travel by myself, and have eyes on you.”

“I have to admit that makes sense,” the drone thought. “I’ll call it.”

At her direction, Homura’s ship broke radio silence, informing her that a new blip had appeared on sensors, lifting off a few hundred kilometers away for the short hop over to their current location. The appearance of the ship on sensors had caused certain anomalies that strongly resembled an alien ship decloaking.

Her own ship began its descent at the same time. There was no telling who would have the advantage if either ship opened fire: neither side had an appraisal of the other’s capabilities, even if Homura’s had the energy advantage of being at altitude.

But there was no incident, and when the drones scurried onto their ship—of a Human make and model at least—Homura boarded her own, the two ships taking off simultaneously while bombarding each other with an array of active scans.

The trip to orbit, then into intrasystem space, gave Homura some time to collect her thoughts and ask a few questions.

How big a danger are these people? Am I to focus on them, rather than the aliens and the war?

The distinctive pause.

Finally. This feels like real progress. I just hope it will be quick—perhaps within the year?—and I don’t have to kill too many people.

Another pause.

I admit that’s not what I wanted to hear.

Even with modern starships, trips into interstellar space were hardly fast. She asked for a destination, and was sent the coordinates of an uncharted system a dozen light‐years away. Unfortunately that was still most of a day.

Long years of practice had made Homura skilled at maintaining a kind of passive situational awareness, and even as both ships cruised along, maintaining light stealth, she placed herself in a kind of meditative state, magic suppressing the need for sleep. Suitable for days or weeks of loneliness.

So when an alien cruiser dropped out of stealth three‐point‐seven hours later, accompanied by a pair of FTL missiles nearly on top of her, she was able to react in time.

Again there was a very poorly placed timeskip, and now it was obvious Homura’s memory was holding something close to its chest. Something about what exact magic Homura was performing. Kyouko would have found the situation Homura was in quite a pickle, and she didn’t know Homura to have any kind of teleportation magic, and yet the next scene was on board the ship of the drone magical girls.

Correction: Homura hadn’t originally had any kind of teleportation magic, but she had used something similar three times the last time Kyouko had seen her, right after New Athens. So, perhaps it wasn’t so strange.

Homura stared at where the soul gems had been in her palm. She had tried her best to capture the drone magical girls alive, but somehow the soul gems had burned themselves out, minutes after she had taken them, despite her best attempts to apply stasis.

Some kind of soul magic she was unfamiliar with, most likely. Well, the Goddess would show more mercy to them than she would.

Homura stepped over the shattered drone bodies and passed her magic over the pilot’s command console. A civilian transport normally had nothing in the way of internal defenses, and it seemed her opponents had not added any while making modifications. Nor was there a full onboard AI, and the relatively light security meant that it took remarkably little effort for Homura to commandeer the controls. She was hardly an electronics expert, but she had been forced to pick up a trick or two over the years.

There would be time to screen the ship for tracking devices once she got away. For now, the important fact was that the ship’s alien stealth device was still active, ironically hiding her just as well from the alien cruiser as the drones had probably intended to hide from her. Her own ship had been destroyed, she had lost her captives, and the drones had reduced their translation device to ashes, but on the whole, she still felt victorious. Finally, a goal was within sight.

There was no time to waste. She wouldn’t make the same mistakes twice. She had work.

From there the memory transitioned back to a montage of fleeting moments, with just enough detail to make the timeframe clear, obviously intended more to provide context than elucidate anything of depth. Some of it was presumably simple summarization.

Homura tried, initially, to find and extinguish this conspiracy herself, stubbornly ignoring the Goddess’s clear suggestions to recruit some help. This took her well outside the usual Human circles, away from the battlefields and into the obscure parts of Human space, tracing every rogue colony known to both Governance and the MSY.

Then she explored outside Human space, using the human‐operable alien stealth device she had obtained from the drones’ starship to penetrate deep into the Sonoran sector. She found some alien supply lines, and work being done on what Kyouko recognized as something similar to the wormhole station destroyed in the Saharan Raid, but no alien home worlds or TCF conspiracy—Utopia Unbound—home bases.

Her only substantive finds after months were a pair of seemingly‐abandoned conspiracy listening posts—similar to that found by the Task Force, Kyouko thought. A substantive hint, but not enough.

Meanwhile, the war situation went from bad to worse. Sure, some of the initial attacks had been turned away, but every time Homura returned, more systems had fallen, with losses now concentrated in the Indus Sector. All this despite the largest mobilization that Humanity had ever seen.

More than once Homura had wondered aloud whether the Goddess was sure the war was not already lost and more than once she received an answer indicating… that it was at least not the worst case. On a few occasions Homura intervened when in the area, saving some colonial militia ships, and even personally stopping an attempt to bomb a shipyard. But she knew it was pinpricks relative to the scale of the war, and when she intervened, it was more of a personal gesture, to make herself feel better.

At points Homura seemed to consider recruiting a follower, someone to work with her, as the Goddess was clearly implying was necessary, but she never quite followed through. Her options were limited anyway: a newly‐minted magical girl from a rogue colony would hardly be terribly reliable, and this didn’t seem the time to pull anyone away from front‐line combat. Nor was Homura interested in making contact with anyone from her past life.

Then the narrative reached a point that got Kyouko’s clear attention: Homura pulling into orbit of New Athens on the anniversary of the day she had saved the planet. On that day, down on the surface, Kyouko had given the most important speech of her life.

This hardly seems like a fertile place to find useful agents, Homura thought, addressing the void.

Okay yes, there are a lot of magical girls here, but what, do you want me to walk up to one of them and just talk to them? No, don’t answer that, of course you do, but I’m not going to risk revealing myself so close to Kyouko of all people—yes, same planet is plenty close, in my opinion. Why do you think anyone would even believe me? Obviously I’m just a crazy Ancient talking to a ribbon in my hair.

There was a long pause.

You spoke to Kyouko? I thought you were always against revealing yourself to more people. Just to give me a base of recruitment?

I’ve always admired the versatility of your acts.

There was another pause, and then Homura sighed.

You really think they’ll listen?

Kyouko couldn’t help but feel a shiver, unrelated to the cold of Yenisei.

It was one thing to accept intellectually that your life, and your recent upending of it, had been part of the plan of a greater power. It was another to see parts of your plan baldly sketched out, in a manner that didn’t seem to leave much room for your agency.

She had indeed had her own talk with the Goddess. The Goddess had never told her in plain terms to found the Church, or even to recruit followers. She had actually gotten the impression the Goddess was very reluctant on the matter. Kyouko had offered her ideas, arguing that magical girls needed, more than ever, the hope that Homura’s secret could provide. So many girls were being thrown into relentless, bereaving combat—it was like the old days, before the MSY. Even if no one believed her, she had to at least try to offer them comfort.

The Goddess had never even explicitly agreed, implying only that She wouldn’t try to stop her. Kyouko had even felt guilty about ignoring Her apparent wishes.

That was the understanding with which she had poured out her heart at New Athens. Knowing the Goddess a bit better after a couple decades, it did not surprise her to learn that She held more than one perspective on the matter, and that there was some degree to which her choices weren’t her own. But emotionally, she couldn’t help but feel manipulated.

That was a sensation she hadn’t felt in a long time. Even Homura and Yuma had usually avoided leaving her in the lurch.

A disturbing realization then crawled over her: this was surely how Ryouko complained about feeling in the reports. How Maki felt, about Kyouko’s interventions in her life.

A thought she had to file away for consideration later, probably with a lot more food on hand. For now she had to swallow her feelings and press onward.

I should have known you had something like this up your sleeve, Homura thought, once the speech was over and there had been time to look at the local net’s reaction. Of course, a few minutes was far too short to really know if the fire would spread, but she could easily read the winds.

Really, she should have known Kyouko had it in her. That was a real blind spot—after so many centuries, she had never really expected any of them to feel Her again in this life, even with one of Her ribbons. But it made sense, because the Goddess tended to only kick pebbles when She intervened. Rarely ever boulders.

Well, to be more precise, she was the boulder. At least when Clarisse van Rossum wasn’t serving the role.

But whatever success Kyouko might have soon, Homura was still reluctant to make direct use of it. Sure, she could see the value in a recruiting pool that was conditioned to take her word on the Goddess and the nature of her mission, but that solved only one of a succession of problems.

She took a few seconds to mull that over, and then her ship notified her of an incoming transmission.

To say that was unexpected was an understatement. Homura knew from experience that the alien stealth device she was using was very, very good, and should have kept her hidden in orbit from all but magical clairvoyants, none of whom should have had any reason to look for her up here.

There was only one possible chink in her armor: to listen to the broadcast she had been obliged to request a tightbeam signal, which was an obvious risk, except that Homura could easily perform the minor bit of magical hacking necessary to spoof a legitimate request. She had even spent the past few months refining her techniques.

Not enough, apparently.

The message was itself by tightbeam, originating from a way station on the surface. The authentication claimed it was from someone she knew: Jeannette Smith, on behalf of her wife Yasuhiro Rin.

Homura sighed. Of course. She knew she’d been too sentimental, coming back here.

For a moment she considered simply fleeing, but abandoned the thought—if Rin and Jeannette wanted to expose her, they could have done so already. Her best chance of preventing that was to simply talk them out of it. In fact, that was all the message requested: a chat.

As for how that damned couple knew it was Akemi Homura they were addressing—well, being infuriatingly perceptive was Rin’s special talent.

She sighed and dictated a response: she would meet with them, if they agreed to travel to a particular location in deep space, where Homura wouldn’t be observed decloaking.

It turned out, Rin and Jeannette contacting her was a blessing in disguise. They had repeated Rin’s Unification Wars disappearance trick, picking up new identities and lives to look for a worthy cause, and eagerly signed on to work with her. And frankly, Homura couldn’t have picked better candidates than a magical girl detective and an electronics specialist.

It had worked so well, that is, that it carried the clear whiff of higher planning. ‘Blessing’ indeed.

Homura had never been averse to looking even a divine horse in the mouth, but this time, after an indecent amount of nagging on her part, she received an unanswerable reply: the expansion of the newly‐established Church of Hope had another hidden purpose, one which mirrored a purpose Homura’s own little conspiracy would have. The ‘Laplace’s Demon’ that the enemy had mentioned was a serious threat, and the Goddess intended that Her two ribbons would cover its eyes. She did not like exerting influence upon Humanity, but Her divine intervention was necessary to bind the Demon’s power. Given that tension, She preferred having as many pebbles as possible to nudge.

That, and one or three boulders, of course.

To say that this revelation would be explosive within the Church was putting it rather mildly. The Church knew quite well that the Goddess had mixed feelings about its existence, but why they were allowed to worship Her now had always been controversial. The common answer, promoted by Kyouko herself, was that they were necessary to support magical girl morale and war mobilization, that they were a beacon of hope in the darkness. Homura’s version was… much less inspirational.

Like so much here, Kyouko had to put that into a mental box to think about later.

When Homura relayed that information to Rin, it brought a new revelation.

Rin and Jeannette hadn’t abandoned the flailing war effort just to fulfill some wanderlust—they had, even prior to the war, begun to grow suspicious of something slightly wobbly in the ever‐turning wheels of Governance, some kind of ineffable magical influence that lay at the center of several anomalies she had tried to track. That the war suddenly forced the MSY to enter Governance’s fold made them even more suspicious. But after nearly a year of effort, they had failed to derive all but the faintest leads, which had only made Rin more certain—nothing eluded her that long without deep magical support.

Her original reason for signing on with Homura so quickly had been to check if it was her—apparently her third most likely theory. But their brief time together had made clear that wasn’t the case. Rather, Homura’s information about ‘Laplace’s Demon’, and experience with magical girl drones, explained much. Some kind of magical predictive engine could dodge even Rin’s machinations, if it were powerful enough, and if it acted via agents whose existence violated old assumptions.

Homura would have liked to be smug about outmaneuvering the legendary Yasuhiro Rin, except she knew damn well the Goddess had been leading her by the nose. Moreover, she didn’t like the way Rin was now openly making a project of untangling the Goddess’s historical influence on everything that had ever happened.

But she liked even less the conclusions Rin began reaching now that she was in the fold. First, that they had to keep recruiting; unfortunately, Homura was now outvoted three to one on the question. But second, as they added new members, Jeannette finally completed the pattern she and Rin had been working on the last year: the conspiracy Homura had been trying to find was also responsible for a breach in the TCF.

For a while, plumbing the depths of the breach, and what it was being used for, was their highest priority. Their little cabal—which Inoue Yoko eventually dubbed the Coordinating Group—spread itself thin across the stars, tracing the evidence with growing horror. Governance, the MSY, the Armed Forces—all were fatally compromised, with Laplace’s Demon directing a surgical program of magical patching and unpatching that evaded all magical audits that might reveal it.

Yet so much was inexplicable—not just the age of the digital backdoor, which they traced back to shortly after the Unification Wars, but rather, the mildness of the exploitation. Utopia Unbound appeared to only be cloaking their operations and gathering data!

It was Rin who pointed out, though, that even a breach of this scale couldn’t be exploited in unlimited fashion, precisely because of the need to constantly dodge magical audits—fatally compromise the war effort, yes; execute a bloodless coup, no.

So, apparently, the drones hadn’t been lying about the limits to their cooperation with the aliens. But that was little comfort. And now the question was: what to do about it?

That exact question dominated the debates of their Coordinating Group. The natural answer was to try to coordinate with Governance and the MSY and seal the TCF backdoor all at once; unfortunately, Jeannette’s projections indicated that there weren’t enough magical girls with the right powers, nor fast enough technological methods, to do it in time. Even a couple hours was more than enough for Utopia Unbound to cripple the war effort.

There was a second obvious answer: execute a decapitation strike.

Some groundwork would be needed: first, they needed to actually find Utopia Unbound’s leaders, and then they needed a technological solution to block IIC communications, so no command to exploit the TCF breach could go out. No such technology existed yet, but with time they could perhaps induce Governance to develop something for them.

This approach was advocated for by several members, and had the appeal of being both complete and seemingly straightforward—something that Homura had long ago learned the value of. After all, as Napoleon had said, when setting out to take Vienna, take Vienna.

Unfortunately the checklist of things that could go wrong was simply too long: the leadership might not all be in one place, there might be a dead man’s switch, and they had to not see it coming, even with Laplace’s Demon.

If Utopia Unbound were ever truly endangered, and they realized it, they could sign on fully with the Cephalopods, wringing whatever leverage they could out of the incredible mounds of intel they held, not to mention the Human shipyards and fleets and exotic matter refineries they could sabotage. With the current state of the war, and frankly, in any probable near future state, that was tantamount to offering the aliens victory.

Utopia Unbound might not be traitors to that degree yet, but if cornered… well, they had already sold out Humanity once.

That put Homura’s Coordinating Group in a frankly depressing bind, and they spent some weeks thinking through how they might escape.

One unpalatable approach was to attempt negotiations with Utopia Unbound. Homura felt that her past encounter with them was more than enough evidence of bad faith in that regard, and besides, no one wanted to contemplate what kinds of concessions might be demanded. Jeannette called it ‘surrendering without a fight’ and Homura couldn’t really disagree.

Another suggestion was a form of strategic stalling: wait for a moment in the war where Humanity had enough of a temporary advantage that it would be safe to patch the TCF and undergo the risk of Utopia Unbound sabotage. Better, but hardly easy to calculate or achieve, especially anytime soon.

The nature of the war troubled them, too. Governance simulation and standard logic made one conclusion clear: any aggressive alien power ought to be overwhelmingly powerful, enough to overrun Humanity with barely a fight. The statistically likely differences in civilizational size and age made it almost a guarantee. Even magic shouldn’t have been enough to bridge the gap, barring heavy divine intervention. That Humanity had held out already for over a year was incredibly implausible a priori.

Nonetheless, the explanation for Humanity’s continued independence had to lie within that implausible space, and the most obvious explanation was that the aliens were not fully invested into the war. That was even consistent with what the Utopia Unbound drones had told Homura, and the apparent internal conflict among the aliens.

But, frankly, that assumption wasn’t useful on its own. A careless attempt at negotiation with the various alien factions could easily backfire—it certainly didn’t seem like Utopia Unbound was pleased with the results of their negotiations. Though that didn’t mean they couldn’t try.

For now, only one clear path presented itself: to lead their enemies into a deep, twilit forest, and then strangle them there. It had to be over before they saw it coming. To accomplish that against a currently superior foe, whose strength lay in predicting the future…

Someone had done that once—alone, even—but Yuma had faced opponents with much more serious restraints, and a precognitive who might very well have let her win. Lacking such advantages, their counterplot would have to be so exquisitely precise, yet so devilishly insidious, that even Laplace’s Demon could never anticipate it.

Fortunately, that was possible. Unfortunately, Homura knew exactly from Whom they might obtain such a plot.

Homura squinted at the sheet of metal in her hands, laser‐etched to atomic precision with row after row of inscrutable petroglyphs, each a pattern of four symbols arranged within a circle. It might have been mistaken for a lost ancient language, but there was something about the curves involved, the connections between the quarters, that suggested something ineffably alien.

Or so she liked to imagine. The atomic precision was, of course, pointless, since she had designed the etchings entirely from memory, based on an image the Goddess had cast into her mind. It was, She claimed, a message in an alien language, one that would help convince a friendly alien faction of her goodwill.

Only help. The friendly aliens’ previous five attempts to make independent contact with Humanity had been sabotaged by hostile activity, either from compromised Governance AIs, Utopia Unbound agents, or false flag attacks from the attacker faction. They were on the verge of giving up, and after repeated hostile receptions, they weren’t likely to believe her claims on their face.

The question then was obvious. Why was she being given a single document to hand over instead of, say, a translation guide to the alien written language, or even better, a way to get an enchanted translation device like Utopia Unbound had? At the least, she could take an enormous box of grief cubes and sojourn with the friendly aliens, spend however long it took to build up a common language, even hash things out via hand signals if she had to.

Patience, she had been told. The document was efficient, limiting the extent of Her meddling. Full mutual understanding, enough to enchant a translation device or properly communicate, required a certain sacrifice. Moreover, and more importantly, limiting contact with these aliens for now would produce a better final outcome—a proper diplomatic exchange too early would lead to dire consequences, barring extreme interventions on Her part.

Would this be like the Unification Wars? Homura had asked. Would She mostly let this war play out, too, acting only to help prevent the worst possible outcomes?

That question had caused only sullen silence. She didn’t like discussing the topic.

The Goddess had never wanted to stand athwart history. Never mind that her power was limited, she had no right to dictate people’s choices in life—Her succor came only at death. Nonetheless, her good nature led her to often steal from mortals the worst possibilities, and she felt fewer scruples about adjusting Humanity’s course as a whole. She framed it as guiding everyone toward their own, better impulses. She tried not to interfere in anyone’s clear, reasoned choices.

But, even knowing that, Homura and her Goddess hadn’t spoken much, in the latter years of the Unification Wars. They had both felt guilty, and not without good reason. Yet in those days, Homura had at least been able to take solace in the thought that with a United Front victory, the establishment of a lasting peace, and the founding of Governance, her earthly duties would at last be fulfilled, and she could finally rest.

She had been wrong. And then, at New Athens, wrong again. How much hope could she have left?

Homura hated to think it, hated to consider the notion, but she felt sure that the Goddess could have respected her wishes, could have asked less of her, could have shared more with her. How come the Goddess could accept Miki Sayaka’s wish, but not hers?

Sometimes, Homura felt that Sayaka must be laughing at her, up there in the timeless aether.

Not that she thought the Goddess was lying about the big picture, about whatever stopped her from just giving the friendly aliens, Homura, and Humanity what they thought they wanted. Oh no, on that, they were aligned. She was well aware that sometimes it was necessary to take some losses in the short‐term to improve the long‐term. Perhaps even serious losses. That the Goddess didn’t like talking about it just showed she still cared.

No, it was ultimately about Homura’s own, selfish desires. She had a closer relationship to the universe’s only divine being than anyone, and still she wanted more. The Goddess was opening up to more magical girls now—couldn’t Homura have more, now, too? More magical girls were giving their lives in defense of Humanity than ever before—couldn’t Homura, too?

And all she had gotten was the same responses, over and over. She supposed when you were timeless there was never really an occasion to compose a better response.

Well, for now her only option was to play along. The aliens couldn’t be easily communicated with normally, thanks to an incompatible telepathic interface and alien mindset. The block of hieroglyphs in her hand was all she had to work with, unless the Goddess chose to give her more.

Even setting up this meeting had required retrocausal information, which taxed the Goddess’s resources. Homura had piloted a ship in personally to receive the transmission—a rudimentary encoding of the local star map with location circled—and echo it back, intended as an affirmation. According to her special source, this would prevent the same transmission being picked up by a Governance deep space probe and subsequently diverted by Utopia Unbound.

And now she was here, orbiting around a silent world roaming the interstellar void just inside the boundary of the Nile Sector. Without divine guidance she would have been very nervous about her position, alone and plainly uncloaked in a civilian‐class ship that could be blown up at a whim.

At least she had gotten very used to this kind of travel, filled as it was with lonely views of a dark horizon far from any of her kind. Or even the Incubators, for that matter—she was hiding from them, too. She had learned the technique from an ex‐SMC soul mage some centuries prior, before she died on mission in Pakistan. It was one of a few cards she had kept close to her chest all this time, withheld until she needed it most.

She almost jumped when the sensors registered an unknown ship inbound to the system at FTL speeds. This happened more than she liked to admit: her mind, sitting on idle, letting too much time slip away.

It only took a few more seconds for her ship to process the finer details of the sensor profile and lack of human transponder signal and conclude that, yes, this had a 98% chance of being an alien vessel. No attempt was being made at any kind of stealthy approach—if anything, they were trying to be seen.

All of which boded well, of course, even if she felt a tinge of nervousness about the possibility of such a ship triggering one of Governance’s deep space border nets. Surely they were remote enough here?

She had to take entirely too much on faith nowadays.

At this range, it would still be dozens of minutes before they would arrive at the planet, so Homura sent a signal in the clear: a ping with no informational content, meant only to be acknowledged.

The reply came back almost immediately, disregarding travel time: a repeat of the ping with the same characteristics, clearly not a natural reflection.

It was difficult not to be impatient as the minutes passed, and Homura found herself fiddling with her hair, knowing full well that the aliens didn’t care a single whit what her hair looked like. Like Kyouko, she had never allowed Governance hair implants on her scalp. Hair care was simply part of her centuries‐old routine, and she hadn’t wanted to lose it.

She remembered… no, it was better not to think about that right now.

At length the alien ship grew near, and it began to fire a repeated infrared beam at a location on the planet’s surface. Combined with the trajectory, the meaning was clear: they intended to land, and intended her to follow.

She had anticipated this. Docking procedures in space were hard enough without needing to deal with alien locking clamps and airlocks, and potential hostility and ambushes. Dropping to the surface made them both a bit more vulnerable as well, but it didn’t bother her much: she certainly had no intention of attacking her alien guests, and she knew there was no way the Goddess would let her drop into danger here.

Well, perhaps a little danger, but never any real risk.

She was becoming a little too grumpy with the Goddess, she chided herself. Here, at least, she was doing something quite real. And it wasn’t like the planet’s surface was a vacation destination—without the light of a star, the only question about most rogue planet surfaces was what flavor of frozen gas or rock you would be standing on, and how many dozens of Kelvin the ambient temperature would be, which affected how long your environmental suit would last.

Really, trying to coordinate a meet‐up there was only moderately easier than it had been in space. That the aliens had chosen a place like this showed what their mindset was like after the previous disasters.

She had come prepared for this possibility, of course, as well as the possibility of needing to attempt a docking, or make a spacewalk. Thus, she was already wearing the right underlayers and could step right into the necessary ultra‐low temperature environmental suit.

As the ship lowered itself toward the surface—specifically, a wide stretch of shallow ice plains only a few centimeters deep—she picked up her message‐engraved plate, vacuum‐sealed into a protective sleeve. If necessary, she had prepared backups, and could even shine the message through a special filter on her flashlight.

It took only a few seconds for the ship’s thrusters to sublimate the ice below, and then she stepped out onto the bare rock. A surface was a surface, no matter how frozen.

Homura pulled out a pair of magically‐enhanced farsight goggles she had cribbed from the MSY, a pair that dated back to, of all people, Mikuni Oriko.

It turned out she had hardly needed to bother. The Cephalopods were already waiting, a pair of them standing in plain view a hundred meters away in their own suits, both of them large and barrel‐shaped, far larger than Homura, or indeed any of the numerous alien combat troops she had killed in her time.

That alone was strange. She had seen on the battlefield that the aliens had a diversity of combat or computing augments, but this was on a whole different level.

Still, sensor scans showed they carried no apparent weaponry, though the very nature of the environmental suits meant that they leaked very little informative radiation.

One of the aliens moved aside as she approached, lifting one of several arms to gesture at a glowing panel on the side of their ship. The message was obvious: they wanted her to board.

It was a big ask, in a way, since aboard the alien ship was hardly neutral ground, but Homura could hardly blame them after their previous encounters with humans. And as before, she herself had little to fear.

She hoped the Goddess’s implied protection wasn’t making her too reckless.

She had prepared as well as she could, but it was still an understatement to say she had no idea what to expect. She had dictated all kinds of contingency plans for various outré scenarios to her cortical implants, fully expecting that she would have to play everything by ear regardless.

As someone had said once, plans were useless but planning was everything.

She jumped up towards the alien ship, barely catching herself on the side of the door when it slid open just a bit too slow. Right. She was showing a bit too much power.

She felt a tad naked taking off her environmental suit in the forcefield airlock, all too aware that even with her magic, being ejected back into the near‐vacuum outside would be unpleasant and annoying, especially were she slow to get a bubble up.

Then she raised an eyebrow when she stepped inside the alien ship proper, making a special note in her memory logs to review everything she saw later. It was simply different from the alien ships she had seen before, in ways both subtle and not, supporting the Goddess’s claim that they represented a different alien faction. In particular, there were a number of strange thin metal rods embedded throughout the room—sensors of some kind, presumably.

Overall, though, she was a bit relieved to see that she was looking at a scenario three: in front of her was an obvious conference table, complete with two trios of seats facing each other, with the seats on one side obviously more suited for humans.

For now, though, the room was empty.

She pulled a scanner out of her pocket and waved it over the room, checking it with her magic at the same time. Hopefully the aliens wouldn’t mind a little due diligence, as long as she carried it out as visibly as possible.

That was when the oversized door at the far side of the room irised open, admitting another Cephalopod that was as grossly oversized as the ones outside. Without the suit, her scanners could read more clearly what was going on—as best as her sensors could tell, this alien had a prodigious amount of implants in its core, enough to require a dedicated heat radiator in the back. But it didn’t look like weaponry—if anything, it looked like computing. They really had mastered biotechnology, it seemed.

The alien sat into one of the comically oversized seats on the other side of the table, bending down with a grace that she wouldn’t have given them credit for. Then it gestured with a large arm‐tentacle toward one of the human chairs. The message was obvious.

Homura couldn’t help but look over the chair one last time—it rather resembled a piece of custom‐molded plastic—before taking her seat. It shifted to her presence, like many of the modern human chairs, but was just a little off, poking her in one of her lumbar vertebrae.

As she did, the door to the airlock once again slid open, and the two aliens that had been outside stepped in single‐file. Part of Homura wanted to remain on edge, tense against the possibility that sitting her down had been a trap to render her less mobile. She had to actively calm herself, and realized, with an almost perverse sense of relief, that the Goddess’s protections had indeed not dulled her sense of danger.

The other two aliens took their seats, making clear that Humanity was a bit underrepresented here relative to their expectations. Homura wondered if she should wait: the aliens probably had some attempted communication scheme cooked up.

She decided to take the initiative. The Goddess’s pictogram message should be self‐explanatory, and would skip a lot of potentially unnecessary throat‐clearing about who had what motives.

She pulled the metal slab out of the sleeve on the side of her garment, holding it up for a moment for everyone to look at, before setting it on the table, where it was bombarded by the inevitable barrage of sensor scans, one of the aliens leaning ponderously over.

Once that activity had calmed down, she reached her hand out and pushed it forward, though by now the aliens should have spotted the quite clear inscriptions—and judging by the tentacle gestures, they had, or so she imagined.

The one in the middle picked it up immediately, human‐like eyes casting over the surface.

The reaction after that was almost comical, the three aliens squeezing together to peer at the piece of metal barely wider than one of their arm tentacles. She doubted they lacked the human ability to simply take a picture of the slab and sit back into their chairs to study it in their heads, but they preferred to study it in front of them. Very human, in a way.

At brief intervals they exchanged glances, and the occasional twitching arm wave showed what was going through their minds. With a reaction like this, there was no doubt that they understood the slab, as the Goddess had promised.

Not that she had ever doubted.

She knew what it said, of course, approximately. It explained that Humanity was not willfully resisting the demands of the aliens—that, in fact, the main human government had never received any set of demands, only a seemingly‐unprovoked, genocidal attack. It explained that magic‐empowered bad actors had sabotaged their previous attempts at communication, and would continue to block future attempts as well. In the document, Homura promised that her faction would work to defeat the problem, but that she needed time—lots of time.

That was not the most inflammatory content in the document. That would be the section discussing the faction of aliens attacking Humanity, which was also magically compromised by some of the same bad actors as were afflicting Humanity, and who were the real blockers on any diplomatic contact. The aliens Homura was speaking to would be erased in a ‘combat accident’ if they tried anything direct, and it was imperative they return home immediately to report their contact before anything else happened to them, via the very particular route and schedule provided. The other faction already knew they were in the area.

It was difficult to expect any communication of such complexity to be conveyed by one message, no matter how well‐written, but Homura had the advantage of divine providence. The Goddess claimed that most of the answers to any questions they might have were already embedded, which perhaps explained why the aliens were still reading, and why the glyphs had to be so small and dense.

But some things would still require another interaction. The document promised the aliens clear proof of Homura’s ability to predict the future, apparently involving fine measurements of the behavior of a certain pulsar, and that would take time to resolve. Moreover, they were supposed to provide her with certain schematics and pieces of technology to reverse‐engineer, and presumably couldn’t whip that out of a hat. There was an arranged drop‐off before the aliens left Human space—in exchange, the Goddess told Homura, she was to provide an enchanted container protecting a specific number of empty grief cubes.

Homura didn’t know most of the details, not yet, but she supposed things would soon be clear enough.

After some conference, one of the aliens pulled an electronic tablet from a fold in their robes and slid it in front of her. The message was drawn in pictures rather than text, a picture of her face with an arrow pointing to another star map location, this time in what appeared to be deep space. They had agreed.

Above her head in the picture was a set of inscrutable symbols, but she could guess the meaning. It was the name she had given herself, written in the style of an alien culture, a name that the aliens probably didn’t understand and that the Goddess had disapproved of: Akemi‐Homura⊃Divine‐seeking.

The plan the Goddess had sketched out to her after she retrieved the friendly aliens’ gifted technological package was elaborate and time‐consuming, in a way that sparked serious concerns among those she was working with. She did her best to assuage them, but in her heart she shared many of the same thoughts, and more besides.

She had known defeating Utopia Unbound would take some time and technical effort, yes, and she had been prepared to be at the task for years. But even an optimistic assessment of the Goddess’s plan estimated roughly thirteen years. Could the war truly last into the 2450s?

It was difficult to imagine that a Goddess with knowledge of the future couldn’t achieve better, even with self‐imposed constraints on restricting free will, unless there were other long‐term considerations at play.

It wasn’t the human she had once known, to sit on a celestial throne weighing billions on a scale, and they both knew it.

Here there was another gap in the memory record. Subtle enough to miss, but Kyouko noticed. Whatever emotions Homura had felt here were simply missing, faded to a simple thought exposition. Kyouko could hazard a guess as to why.

Moreover, it was a glimpse of the kind of person the Goddess had once been.

Sadly, she had learned that lesson back in the Unification Wars. Now, for this new Contact War, Homura felt sure they were in the same kind of situation, and Homura did not like it. Was this why the Goddess was keeping her in the dark? To preserve her sensibilities? Homura was not as loyal to the Goddess’s divinity as to Her humanity, and this flew in the face of that.

Would she simply accept that again? Before, she had thought to return to her Goddess’s side, and save her that way. Now, she worried the Goddess had no intention of letting that happen.

If she were younger, and thereby more foolish, Homura might have considered…

And here the memory skipped again.

Still, she put on a brave face, resolving to diligently execute Her plans as Her Human part would. She and Rin and the rest of the group plotted out a plan for containing Utopia Unbound without alarming them unduly—ideally, without even letting them know anything was amiss at first. Despite the need for secrecy and mobility, that required more resources—personnel and grief cubes far in excess of what they currently had, to spread their tentacles far and wide. That meant recruiting at scale, as subtly as possible. It also meant scrounging and stealing materiel, ships, and even financial assets in less‐monitored colonial markets.

Sensible.

Also sensible: as a matter of due diligence they made continued efforts to contact members of the friendly alien faction. Even if they couldn’t properly communicate, they could perhaps gain more alien technology, or at least make it clear they hadn’t just taken their technology and run—although, unfortunately, Homura suspected it would be a long time before they would ever have the chance to prove otherwise.

They had also, after some debate, experimented with trying to communicate with the more unfriendly aliens, which at least were easily found. Despite some rather creative attempts by both Jeannette and Sophia, they were completely unsuccessful, just as Governance had been since the war began. Several cornered aliens committed suicide. Mind‐reads, as much as they could be understood, indicated that all the aliens they could find had been mentally stripped‐down. Even having Homura herself sit deep within alien territory and broadcast in the clear, hoping to contact alien leadership, had no result—to her frustration, she wasn’t even attacked.

But the Goddess had other, more controversial directives.

The alternate TCF lines could at least be chalked up to divine prescience. As a human and erstwhile citizen of Governance, Homura was instinctively quite concerned about the ramifications of making an alternate TCF, whatever the security reasons. It would have warranted at least a little thought. But in this case, she had no reasons to doubt the Goddess when She said it was a good idea, and necessary, and that was that. She suspected, given the war, she could probably maneuver Governance into undertaking that effort for them.

But there was another project, one that bothered Homura much more.

The key lay in the technology package that they had requested from the friendly aliens at the Goddess’s behest. Purely on a technical level, it was clearly the most important technology package ever received, a set of artifacts, data crystals, and engraved diagrams detailing or demonstrating a variety of biotechnologies outside standard human reach.

Or at least they were supposed to be. The outlines of it all looked promising enough, but the contents were essentially unintelligible on their face, and clearly the kind of thing that required a dedicated research team and an unknown number of years, something they very much did not have.

The only reason they knew what was in there at all was the Goddess’s explanation of what she had asked for and what to do with it. And this was what gave Homura the most pause: somewhere in there was what both the aliens and the Goddess considered the most important, some kind of mental communication organ, one that would align human cognition with alien well enough to enable telepathy.

According to the Goddess, figuring out how to build and grow the thing would be one of their most important tasks—and it needed to be grown from birth. Implanting one in an adult was possible, but much more difficult, and there were drawbacks for magical girls in particular.

Homura didn’t like any of the implications of that, much less the practical: she and Rin simply hadn’t built their organization around any kind of scientific nucleus. Instead, they had focused on investigators, spies, and agents. Inoue Yoko, Sophia Aaronson—skilled operatives yes, biologists no, and they were already out combing for others of their own kind. It simply seemed like the best way to do things, even if the Goddess had implied the thinking there was too short‐term, and that Homura should stop being so stubborn.

In the end, as always, the Goddess got Her way. The long‐term approach had to be investigated, even if it pulled them down a path they didn’t like.

So they started looking for biologists, technicians, researchers.

“Smuggling technology of this magnitude into the Governance research programs would be quite a feat. They’ll be bound to know something is up if it just appears from an unknown institute.”

“Not to mention we don’t quite understand enough about it ourselves. There would need to be a whole project around it. With our limited resources, we’ve made very little progress. Ideally we could tap Governance resources to do the research for us.”

“Can we recruit a prominent researcher? Someone already in position for something like this?”

“Would take a lot of doing, but maybe. Would have to make sure we can trust them.”

“I have a better idea.”

Homura stood up, peering down at the others at the conference table. There was a diversity of eyes staring back at her, polite, beseeching, skeptical. Nearly all were magical girls, but there were two human scientists mixed in, one of them even male—both rescued at the last second from marauding aliens and brought on as scientific advisors.

Represented here was about half of those she had managed to recruit to her fledgling organization, pulled in by personal charisma, loyalty to the Goddess, or detailed argumentation. Those missing were on assignment elsewhere, and the strain was tremendous—even with some ability to tap into Governance resources, it was proving nearly impossible to coordinate with numerous agents across interstellar distance while still maintaining coherent planning.

“I am confident in my own ability to infiltrate as a researcher, provided we generate an adequate amount of cover,” Homura said, “but of course so far I have been forced to spend all my time here. However, our rivals have shown us the solution: simply be in multiple places at once. Or so we’ve recently discovered.”

She paused to let the astonished murmur flow around the table.

“You want us to split our souls like they do?” Pratiwi Surija asked. “We’re still not sure that’s safe. Nor are we sure how they do it. Nor—”

“No, not like we think they do,” Homura said. “Not even if we were desperate. There are some lines not to cross lightly. But I do have some ideas, and I am willing to be the first test case myself. More importantly, I’ve asked, and it’s safe and should be possible. There can be no better source.”

There was an uneasy silence. While the vast majority of those present were willing to accept the word of Homura’s Goddess, it still wasn’t unanimous, and it was a test of Homura’s credibility every time she invoked Her. Still, her occasional uncannily accurate predictions of the future went a long way.

“As long as this experiment doesn’t risk you personally,” one of the others said. “You’re too important. Maybe one of us should do it.”

Homura prided herself on her legendary impassivity, so she really hoped that her tinge of annoyance didn’t show. It was a reasonable sentiment. She shouldn’t lay her personal issues onto them.

“If I think I’m in any danger I’ll consider it,” she lied.

The years passed, just as Homura had feared, while in the background the war continued to expand—the aliens had invaded the Rhine Sector, and then the Mekong. Fully one‐third of Human sectors were now being invaded; morale in Human space was low. Many feared alien ships would soon see Sol itself.

Homura and the Coordinating Group knew better, but it wasn’t much comfort.

Her organization broadened the scope of their recruiting, discovering on the way that the dark corners of Governance space hid a lot more than they imagined, with both unknown rogue colonies and quite a few magical girls, and others, in seclusion.

Some of those put Homura and the others in a moral quandary, caught between their need for personnel and a cast of candidates that ranged all the way from soul criminals to the merely very untrustworthy. Some they recruited anyway, others were best to just leave alone, and still others required immediate elimination.

At least there were a few rogue colonies Homura could take personal satisfaction in having leaked back to Governance—though of course it would be some time before Governance could focus on them. She tried not to think about the ones they couldn’t find, but knew existed, like the fraudulent colony mission that had eluded her early on at San Giuseppe.

Meanwhile, Homura acquired the scientists and technicians she needed, some using her new connections as ‘Joanne Valentin’, and quickly discovered their utility.

Firstly, there was the practical matter of developing technology and techniques to subsist in secrecy, modifying Governance implants to allow them to pass. They even picked up one or two AIs along the way, rigorously magically screened—it was strangely gratifying to have them accede to their mission, once it was sufficiently explained and proven, and useful to have someone capable of making the necessary modifications with the certainty of AI.

But secondly, and most interesting, perhaps, was the original reason they were here in the first place, the data package they had received from the friendly aliens.

They had finally begun to make progress decoding and reverse‐engineering the contents, even if the whole topic threatened to boil Homura’s mind over with frustration. It seemed almost unfair to think this way, to ask a divine entity to provide technology—but surely the Goddess could furnish a translation guide, at least?

But, there was still progress. If nothing else, some of the biological techniques provided had helped them build the body of Joanne Valentin, a mundane clone of a volunteer without a trace of direct magic. Of course they knew how to clone, but many of the finer points of modifying the brain to be closer to Homura’s required the mediation of neural implants with plenty of alien technique.

Though in truth, the main body of innovation was still magic‐based. The neural implants made the process easier, but they still needed her soul gem to perform the main body of work. After that came the really hairy part, involving deeply experimental soul mage techniques to ‘dilute’ her soul into the new body. The very concept was worrisome, even to her, but it was so useful she had even done it more than once, since it allowed her to keep many irons in the fire.

Routine regroupings allowed her to synchronize herself across copies, and with time they had expanded the process to others. Only the original body with the soul gem could use magic—unlike Utopia Unbound—but they were working on a process for at least transferring the soul gem to another body, so she could use her magic to infiltrate without looking like, well, Akemi Homura.

This kind of expanded scope, along with their improved roster of field agents, allowed them to more regularly catch sight of Utopia Unbound’s operatives—even if that had resulted in several skirmishes, and a couple fights to the death.

Despite their better preparation, it seemed the drones still couldn’t be captured alive, but they could at least extract some tangible intelligence to pry open more of the enemy’s operations. What they had found so far was suggestive, in a disturbing kind of way.

Utopia Unbound seemed obsessed with information gathering, with a constellation of long‐range monitoring stations and even a handful nestled in remote regions of Governance worlds. Given how Laplace’s Demon was described, it made sense.

But beyond that, Rin’s tracking of rogue, TCF‐breach‐induced logistics shipments suggested the existence of sites engaged in clandestine research. Hardly too alarming on its own—Homura’s group was itself doing the same—it became so once one considered what Homura had heard of Utopia Unbound’s aspirations. What kind of a utopia required so many secret research facilities?

They had to know what the group was up to. The manifests alone suggested research into magic, and alien technology, an alarming combination even in the best circumstances. But attacking the facilities was for now out of the question; for now, they needed to avoid any significant escalation.

Moreover, their handful of successful mind‐reads had indicated that many of the drones they were fighting were heavily Reformatted, and not even responsible for their actions. But that moral angle couldn’t hold them back, not with these kinds of stakes. If necessary, they would apologize in the afterlife.

Finally, for the Coordinating Group’s peak project, the alien communication organ…

Truthfully, she was nervous about that. They were only barely ready.

They had a while ago worked out the main details of the mental communication organ whose design the aliens had sent them—though it seemed to involve much more than communication, now. The original data had described alien cell types and neurotransmitters, but thankfully the principles of biological pattern‐matching still applied. Function could match even when form did not. The aliens had also been assiduous about laying out some key abstractions for consideration, though it had taken her brightest minds a year to understand what the diagrams were even intended to represent.

There was much they still didn’t understand of its functioning, and Valentin née Homura had to admit certain reservations about implanting a design about which they knew so little into a human fetus.

But in the end, neither she nor the rest of their leadership had wanted to wait any longer. The whole process had taken too long already, and of course, just as she was preparing to find or engineer a candidate mother, the Goddess Herself presented a candidate, one that worked in her own lab.

All too convenient, in a taxing and wearisome kind of way. Valentin had quite liked Kuroi Nakase, had even attended her wedding. Why couldn’t She just reveal these things from the start?

There was a brief lull in the montage there, a slow moment among what was otherwise a jarring barrage of mental exposition.

Valentin sat in her office, sipping impatiently at a cup of coffee, trying not to think too hard about the procedure under way just a few doors over.

It made no sense for her to perform the procedure herself. Plainly, she didn’t have the skills. But the waiting and the lack of direct involvement ate at her.

She looked at the ribbon she had hidden in her pocket and touched it with one hand. The gesture brought her little serenity.

She sipped more coffee.

After that, there was only the painful wait, made better by the fact that at least the war was finally stabilizing. Hardly won, or safe, but the aliens had clearly overstretched themselves, bypassing too many worlds and leaving their long supply lines exposed. Much of the Rhine had been retaken, and the deepest incursions into the Indus, Mekong, and even Ganges had been cut off. The aliens still had the strategic initiative and were clearly plotting something, alongside ever‐persistent raids, but it gave them all some breathing room to work with.

It was also nice to see that Humanity was producing plenty of technical innovation even without Valentin‐injected gifts—Von Rohr’s forcefield work, for instance, which had nothing to do with anything Homura was involved in. Moreover, Homura felt confident that Valentin was now deep enough in Governance’s scientific establishment that she could begin directly introducing technology.

In particular, she was interested in establishing a brand‐new generation of TacComps as a biotechnology‐based solution surreptitiously based on a new TCF branch—a direct contribution to the war effort that also protected against TCF corruption. The sooner she got moving, the better: even now, she estimated it would be at least a year or two before such a project could get off the ground.

In the meantime, their shadow conflict with Utopia Unbound had entered a phase of what might be called strategic mutual avoidance. They watched each other carefully, almost incessantly, but took immense pains to avoid being detected. That didn’t mean a lack of violence—attempting to eliminate each other’s watchers was a routine solution to the ‘problem’ of being spotted, and even ship‐to‐ship combat in the orbit of rogue planets had happened on occasion. But at the end of the day they still wanted to avoid an escalation that, even if they won, might drive Utopia Unbound into helping the alien invaders.

As for the other direction… Utopia Unbound actually tried, once, attacking one of their facilities with nearly two dozen drone magical girls and supporting equipment. Unfortunately for them, Homura had been there, and they had been annihilated in ambush.

Since then, they simply hadn’t tried again.

There had been some worry that Utopia Unbound would expose Homura’s agents to the MSY, but mind‐reading during that attack had revealed that the drones had instructions not to expose the Coordinating Group. Their leadership apparently feared escalation as well.

Instead, while both sides kept away from each other’s core facilities, interference activities in the field only got more intense.

They had traced some of Utopia Unbound’s own recruiting, both within and without Governance, and attacked this recruiting where they could. Homura’s group did all it could to identify every rogue colony being recruited from, and then eliminate the recruitment, either by prompting Governance to quash the colony or by recruiting accessible candidates themselves.

They had also observed the occasional kidnapping on contested or besieged worlds, and subtly interfered, sometimes by just triggering Governance’s alien intrusion alarms, then staying in the area to prevent easy use of the TCF breach.

There was also the question of grief cubes.

Their own grief cube logistics they had solved a while ago, as a matter of necessity. While in the past they had managed to secure stocks by tasking every field agent with a dual assignment of gathering surplus when on Human worlds, particularly on rogue colonies, this had simply stopped being practicable after a certain point. So, for all that they found it to be distasteful, they were obliged to start tapping into the MSY’s supply, concealing their tracks behind them.

They had plenty of ideas on how to do that, of course, because they had been tracking Utopia Unbound’s own efforts in the same direction, which were far less restrained and at times seemed actively malicious. As always, they made efforts to interfere when possible.

All in all, they could accurately assert that they were extending their tendrils everywhere around Utopia Unbound’s operations.

Yet they didn’t seem to be making an impact, not in any way that showed up in the level of their enemy’s activities.

Partly, it was just hard to tell. Their penetration of Utopia Unbound was awful—Laplace’s Demon made for an excellent watchdog—meaning that neither side had any direct insight into the other.

But it still seemed very likely they were missing something, and it was Rin who first suggested that Utopia Unbound was recruiting—or coercing—people cornered by the aliens on conquered worlds. That kind of thing would be very difficult to verify in the field, and would be invisible to Governance if executed correctly.

Nor could they do very much about it, yet.

They had other initiatives. One very useful thing, prophesied by the Goddess, was that their very presence interfered heavily with Utopia Unbound activity, simply by confounding their predictions.

But too much of that would let Utopia Unbound trace their interference, and so they realized there was a simple trick: help expand the Church of Hope. It had much of the same effect and couldn’t be blamed on anyone in particular, except perhaps Kyouko. Utopia Unbound would hopefully write it off as some incredible inconvenience brought on by the Ribbon.

That did mean that they spent a surprising amount of effort influencing Governance policy and subtly protecting Kyouko and the Church, when they could do so unobserved. This was a necessary task: Governance was innately hostile toward religion, and it was doubly wary of a fast‐growing ‘cult’ reducing its already tenuous authority over magical girls.

Valentin herself subtly encouraged her colleagues, including a couple AIs, to investigate the Church’s effect on the war effort. Their concrete positive results served as a powerful institutional armor for the Church.

The memories cut out there, both Homura’s and Misa’s, leaving Kyouko with far too much to digest at all at once.

Misa spoke immediately, not yet giving her a chance to recover.

“Like I said, most of that I learned much later—some memories about the Goddess Homura only shared in the last month. But on New California, we did learn about how the Trusted Computing Framework had been compromised, and about Utopia Unbound, and the aliens. Stacy and I both agreed to have our memories erased; I offered to work for Homura some time in the future, if she needed me. Hermina—well, she was already officially dead, so they couldn’t just set her loose. She joined up. Survived until I joined too, thank the Goddess.”

“Okay, you can’t just blast me with all of that at once,” Kyouko thought, struggling to organize her thoughts in a way that she hadn’t experienced in many years, not counting Maki. She needed time to think.

Kyouko handed over the data crystal reader to Van Rossum. Impatient, Gracia got Van Rossum to agree to let her mind‐read alongside her—they sat down together in the Tanaka posture.

Kyouko did find some amusement watching the looks on their faces as they absorbed the memories. What a day.

After a few minutes, they finally stood up.

“I don’t even know where to start,” Gracia thought. “What are we even supposed to focus on?”

“Yeah, imagine how I felt,” Misa thought. “On New California, she wouldn’t even tell me what poor kid she had installed this creepy alien biotech project into. I think you’ve figured out who that is, though.”

Kyouko had, of course. She knew her own mentee.

Oh Goddess, that was another can of worms. She hoped Shizuki Ryouko could forgive Homura. And the Goddess.

“Okay, I have many questions,” Van Rossum interjected. “Let me see if I have this narrative straight. The Goddess set Homura against the TCF conspiracy back in 2440, right before she fell off Internal Security’s radar. In 2441, the Goddess arranged a meeting between Homura and the ‘friendly aliens’ that we saw attempting to negotiate with Governance in the video from the asteroid. They gave Homura the biotechnology to build whatever alien brain organ they use to communicate with each other, and Homura’s scientists then figured out how to build that into Shizuki Ryouko, so that, over a decade later, Ryouko could go successfully negotiate with the friendly aliens. The Goddess insisted it had to be Ryouko, and it had to wait until that much later, in order to prevent worse possible futures. In the meantime, Homura’s conspiracy infiltrated themselves into Governance using cloned mundane bodies, and was fighting a cold war of some kind against the TCF conspiracy as late as 2445, the last memory. But clearly that continued escalating, because by 2450 in New California she was regularly going out to destroy Utopia Unbound’s facilities herself.”

Kyouko was newly impressed by Van Rossum, and barely avoided staring. How had she kept track of all that?

“Pretty much,” Misa said. “But while I’m giving you all this quite valuable intel, there’s a question you haven’t asked yet, though you’ve probably thought of it. If I’m willing to show you all this, why couldn’t Akemi Homura come herself?”

“Surely she could have at least used one of her extra bodies, if she was worried about capture,” Van Rossum commented.

The man Misa was wearing as a body smiled oddly, shrugging and looking off to the side in a way that was just a tiny bit uncanny, or so Kyouko imagined.

“Can you imagine? She wanted me to convince you to just trust us that we’re doing good, with only the barest details. She knew better than that on New California, and I know better than that now. So instead I’m telling you a lot. I would say it’s a bit of a rebellion inside the group, but really it isn’t—it’s most of us, trying to operate outside the strange lines Homura has drawn.”

“So what do you want us to do?” Gracia asked, aghast. “You’re telling us this like we’re supposed to help you. How?”

Kyouko held up a hand to interject.

“If you tell us where she is, even just where one of her bodies is, maybe we can talk with her. Is that the idea?”

“Maybe. We don’t know yet. That was all only one piece of what I’m here to tell you. The truth is, there’s a bigger problem than Homura refusing to meet with you all: not long after the TCF breach was repaired, Homura started refusing to speak with the Goddess.”

She looked between the three of them for their reactions. Gracia looked a bit overwhelmed, Van Rossum looked thoughtful, and Kyouko…

“Why after that?” Kyouko thought, turning it over rapidly in her mind. “No, wait why at all? She has a Ribbon in her personal possession, and a personal relationship. That’s a level of direct guidance She gives no one—gave no one, until Homura recently, apparently. We knew she was special, but—”

“I wouldn’t go so far,” Van Rossum interjected. “Remember, I got quite a few instructions myself, long ago. Maybe not all the time, but the guidance was pretty direct. And I’ll admit here that I was and am still not happy with all of it. Though I can’t say I really understand Homura’s reasons here. I had moral qualms. I don’t think that’s her problem.”

“Well, regardless of how it happened, it’s definitely happened,” Misa thought. “And none of us have been granted any Ribbon guidance either, not even when Prometheus fell. So we’re stuck. We pulled off the Goddess’s twenty‐year plan—Shizuki Ryouko is going to set off a chain reaction that will end the war and save Humanity. That was the whole point. But we don’t know what the follow‐through is. Are we really supposed to just sit back and watch? Some of us in the Coordinating Group don’t think so—hell, Homura doesn’t think so. For the first time we’re flying blind, and if something doesn’t change, I think we’re going to crash.”

“And Homura still thinks she can’t ask us for help,” Kyouko thought, putting a hand on her head. “What’s wrong with her? We really do need to talk with her.”

Misa was silent for a couple of long seconds. Kyouko had found it difficult to read her slightly uncanny body language, but was starting to learn—Misa was uncertain, and nervous, in a way that she was trying to hide.

“It won’t be that easy,” Misa thought finally. “I sincerely doubt she will speak to any of you, even if I were to sneak you in, even if you managed to get close. She doesn’t want to be spoken to. The impression we’ve gotten is that she’s only even still with us reluctantly. More than once, she’s talked about handing over control to one of us. We’ve pleaded with her otherwise, but some of us are starting to seriously consider it.”

Kyouko took that in for a moment.

“All the more reason to try,” she thought.

“Maybe,” Misa thought. “We can consider it. I would have to talk to the others. She might really disappear if you try it.”

“If I may speak plainly, what even are you all still up to?” Van Rossum asked. “Is there a reason you can’t just come in from the cold, so to speak? Sure, there was the stunt at Adept Blue, but is there a reason you couldn’t have just warned us, if you knew the aliens were going to attack us?”

“We didn’t know,” Misa thought. “We hardly know anything anymore. But, given the leak at Persepolis, we figured it was a priority target and needed defense, especially given its connections to Shizuki Ryouko—after all, her grandfather was targeted on Persepolis, which hardly seems a coincidence. It was only luck that we got to Persepolis first, by the way. We were only there investigating Ceph behavior. That’s one of the only things Homura has really pushed to do recently; she claims we must be missing something.”

Misa shook her head slightly; Kyouko wasn’t sure at what.

“Do you know what technique this Utopia Unbound is using to split between bodies and into drones?” Van Rossum asked. “You shared details of what you do, but it’s more relevant to us what they do, so we can prepare countermeasures.”

Misa seemed to think about that a moment.

“It might be better if I gave you more of my memories to sample, from after Orpheus, and my recruitment. The answer is already in there, and it will give you answers to your other practical questions too. More importantly, I think it will make clearer what’s wrong with Homura.”

Kyouko thought about asking more questions anyway, while the previous topics were still hot, but decided to save it. The last thing she wanted to do was change Misa’s mind.