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Episode #125:  Day of Destiny?
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	"So," whispered Sailor Orion, "this is it."

	At her side were Sailor Moon and Eric Lunestes.  They had gone
through the briefings over and over, and now was their last chance to
chicken out.

	None of them would.

	"ETA to DK sensors thirty seconds," sang out Kim, steadily watching
the monitors.  This was a dicey maneuver they were trying, skimming past the
star at high speeds in order to evade detection for as long as possible. 
They were now just a few million kilometers from Hell.

	The stellar interference had kept them hidden, but it wouldn't for
much longer.  When Selenite's fleet spotted them, all hell would literally
break loose.

	"Twenty seconds."

	"Eric-san," said Orion slowly, "I think that it's time you headed
back down to engineering."

	"Yeah."  He moved from his previous position leaning against a
support bar, and walked over to the hatch.  "See you later, okay?"

	"Good luck!"

	The hatch opened, and then slammed shut.

	"Ten seconds."

	Sailor Moon took a deep breath.  It was apparently too big, for she
immediately started coughing furiously.  Most people on the bridge laughed.

	"That was great, Sailor Moon," gasped Orion between giggles.  "We
needed that."

	"Five seconds."

	"It wasn't that funny," said Moon.

	"Oh come now, I was just playing with you."  She turned away before
she could see the look of alarm on Moon's face at her words.

	"Three seconds.  Two, one, zero."

	Situation clocks all over the bridge reached 00:00:00 and began
counting forward.  Kim's status board lit up like a Christmas tree.

	"Multiple targets now bearing on us!  They've spotted us, sir!"

	Sailor Orion muttered something inaudible, then raised her voice.

	She took a deep breath.  "Tallyho!"

***

	Selenite sat on her throne, looking at various screens.  They showed
her Fleet from different vantage points, and the lone ship that dared to
oppose it.  She hadn't anything to do yet; the plan was for her to only
handle the intricate details once things got muddled.

	She would like nothing better than for the leading ranks to just
roll over Pleiades, but she knew from experience that that wasn't going to
happen.  Sailors Orion and Moon simply had too many tricks up their sleeves.

	As she watched, the leading elements of her Fleet began to advance
in a textbook envelopment maneuver.  In theory, that alone should suffice to
wipe out the aggressor.  But she'd seen enough theories go to hell in the
past year.  She gave an order.

	"Mobilize all ships.  Let nothing live."

***

	"Now at optimum firing range."

	As Vanessa said those words, Sailor Orion leaned forward intently
and grabbed the Gertie controls.  "Orion Nebula!"

	At her utterance, the familiar gas cloud hovered around Pleiades. 
Now was the trying part.  She had to hold it together, or else the hydrogen
would return back to where it came: i.e., nowhere.  She didn't know how long
she could keep it up, but she was damned if she was going to give it
anything but her best.

***

	At the same time, Sailor Moon pulled out the ginzuishou.  It shone
more brightly than anyone onboard had ever seen it.  'A side effect of being
so close to Selenite?' Moon asked herself.  It was possible.

	The crystal floated millimeters above her hand, slowly rotating. 
She could feel the immense power coming forth from it, and she mentally
willed the power to lash out at the myriad ships that even now were bearing
down on them.

	She didn't give a battle cry; she didn't need to.  She just let the
energy do what she wanted it to do.

***

	Towards the rear of the bridge, next to Sammy's position and to the
left of Kim's, not that relative positions meant so much when dealing with
the Trio, Eric and Chibi-Jen stood silent, linked by circumstance and birth
in a way the former would never have considered possible.  This, however,
wasn't his main concern at the moment.  He was concentrating on maintaining
a shield around Pleiades, a shield that would hopefully protect them from
Dark Kingdom volleys.

	Volleys that, from the dozens of alarms and handful of voices
suddenly talking excitedly, had just been let loose.

***

	"Sir, they've begun attacking!" said Sammy in a voice that while
uneasy, came nowhere near to conveying just how frightened the blonde was. 
"Reading two, five, thirty-four hundred . . . it's off the scale!" She gave
up on her radar scope; all it showed was a huge green blip moving towards
them.  The fact that every blip was actually a missile wasn't encouraging.

	"Sailor Moon, if you please?"

	"I'll try," said Moon.  She concentrated a bit more, and then the
silver crystal turned golden.

***

	From the vantage point of one of the leading Dark Kingdom ships,
Sailor Moon's attack was very impressive.  It was made more so by the fact
that it caused the leading Dark Kingdom ships to cease leading, or anything
else.  They simply stopped existing.

	About an astronomical unit behind, the second echelon watched as
four hundred ships were mowed down in a single pink blast.  Then they, too,
were ordered to the kill zone.

***

	What followed could not even be dignified with the term 'controlled
chaos.' It was utter anarchy.  Over two thousand fighting ships, and quite a
few ships that had no business fighting, all let loose a colossal volley of
weapons.  Lasers and missiles intertwined with each other.  Fire control was
virtually nonexistent, and the Dark Kingdom found that its missiles were
being destroyed by its own laser fire.

	With so many objects cluttering their sensor screens, tactical
officers on hundreds of ships found that their fire control computers were
useless.  Resorting to visual targeting, they continued firing anyway. 
However, this meant that much of the fire directed at Pleiades fell on Dark
Kingdom ships.

	Normally, lasers are invisible in space.  Now, with the dust from
thousands of explosions to refract it, they were easily visible.  The space
between Pleiades and the fleet was filled with red streaks and yellow
fireballs that were just as quickly snuffed out.

	From afar, it would have been very pretty.  From up close, it was
deadly.

***

	On the bridge of Pleiades, the direction that the main screen was
showing no longer mattered.  They were now in the midst of the fleet, and
the enemy surrounded them.

	The stress was beginning to take its toll on Sailor Orion.  Her role
of obscuring the ship had ended some time ago, and now she had taken up the
responsibility of taking out some of the opposing ships.

	Orion privately reflected that her first officer had it far better
than she.  It had been hard enough to maintain and detonate a single Nebula
when their opponents came singly, and without much intelligence.  Now, with
literally hundreds of ships coming at Pleiades, the pre-Dante strategy of
allowing the cloud to build to its peak had been thrown out the window, and
replaced with a more survival-oriented strategy.

	Her new plan was to get her Nebulas up and exploding as quickly as
possible.  The obvious drawback was that with so many Nebulas being formed
in so short a period of time, her energy was being drained at a prodigious
rate even with the help of the Gertie.

	Another side-effect was that the clouds lacked their former impact. 
A well-formed cloud would make a new star, if only for a few thousand years. 
The Nebulas she was detonating now were only good for a few seconds.  To be
painfully frank, she thought to herself, they aren't much superior in yield
to the best nuclear weapons that were stockpiled on Ganymede.

	But they *were* having a definite effect.  Every blast removed two
or three ships from the board.  The Dark Kingdom's seeming inability to deal
with return fire would have ordinarily boggled the crew.  Hadn't they
displayed a crude shielding ability in the past?  Why were their attacks
breaking through so easily?

	However, they didn't have much time to ponder that or anything
else.  The constant shaking of the ship served to rattle their nerves, and
remind them of just how precarious their situation was.  Eric and Chibi-Jen
were the only ones who were keeping the ship from being pulverized at this
point, and a single glance back at their gaunt forms told Vanessa that they
couldn't keep defending the ship against the constant barrage for much
longer.

***
	Selenite looked at her situation screens with something approaching
insane rage.  She turned to a lackey in fury.

	"WHAT IN MY MOTHER'S NAME ARE THEY DOING?!?"

	"Um, your-"

	"Dammit, we're killing ourselves!  Look!"  The screen showed
Pleiades, still marching forward to the planet, surrounded by her fleet. 
Her grand fleet, with which she meant to take Earth.

	Her Grand Fleet, which had reduced in number by one-half.

	"Don't you see?" asked Selenite angrily.  "A full two thirds of our
losses are coming from our own fire!  Get me Number Two!"

	One of the screens then displayed the person in question.

	"You miserable worm, what in Metallia's name do you think you're
doing?  Why all the friendly fire losses?"

	Number Two sighed the breath of one who knows he's several million
kilometers from his sovereign.  He also sighed the breath of one who's in
the midst of far more than he can handle.

	"My Queen, there are simply too many ships.  We never gave any
thought as to how our targeting systems would react to such an overload. 
Apparently ship commanders are simply turning their targeting programs off
and firing by line of sight, and with that kind of accuracy, it's only
inevitable that we shoot down some of our own ships."

	"YOU BASTARD!  Dammit, by the time you're finished, we'll have
*nothing* to defeat Earth with.  NOTHING!

	"Now you listen, and you listen well.  Defeat Pleiades in the next
minute, or so help me you will wish a million times you had never been
born."

	Number Two gulped; Selenite simply never lost her cool like that. 
Never.  It was all over.

	"Yes, my Queen."

***

	H.M.S. Pleiades raced towards the surface of Hell.  Their shield, in
the form of Eric, now faced the double challenge of protecting against both
the shots leveled at them from the Dark Kingdom ships, and the problem of
the heat generated by re-entry.  Pleiades had never been designed to enter a
planetary atmosphere, and it showed.

	"Hull temperature two hundred degrees centigrade and rising, sir,"
said Sammy calmly.  Too calmly, in fact.  "Interior temperature thirty-nine
degrees centigrade.  And engineering reports that the cooling systems are
already at maximum."

	A steward came onto the bridge, will a couple others in tow.  They
immediately began giving the officers bottles of water to drink from. 
Sailor Orion took hers and quaffed it ravenously.

	"Hm," said Orion, who now had her break in the whole plan.  There
weren't so many targets anymore, so she had a bit of time to rest.  The same
went for Sailor Moon, who was on her way down to an airlock and getting a
crash course in skydiving.  "Um, Antares, the support systems for your CPU
are able to vent to normal ship air, right?"

	"Well," said Antares, "in theory, yes."  The actual processors and
memory banks that made up Antares were in a special room, usually cooled to
near zero Kelvin, so as to provide for faster processing speeds.  "But if
you expose the ship to the core's air, then there will be a corresponding
decrease in my performance."

	"Good enough," said Orion, "we don't want to bake in here.  Vent
it."

	"Yes sir," said Sammy.

***

	A few decks below, a small group was breathing in the air of Hell
for the first time.  The airlock door had been swung open and the wind
rushed by the open door at incredible speeds, making it hard to breathe, or
to be heard.

	"Putrid," coughed Sailor Moon.

	"Don't worry," shouted the tactical leader, a tall blue-haired man,
"it won't kill you.  Okay, we jump in three, two, one, NOW!"

	For the second time in her life, Sailor Moon went into free-fall.

***

	Selenite watched as Pleiades pulled up from her dive, disgorging a
shuttle craft.  "Fools," she whispered.  "They'll be chewed up."

***

	"You know," gasped Sailor Moon, "the phrase rabbit's warren comes to
mind when I run around here."

	"I thought you--behind you!"

	There was a pink flash.

	"Got it."  The tiny strike team pressed on forward.  "You were
saying?"

	"I was saying that I thought you didn't like the rabbit jokes."

	"It's okay, we need some humor around here."

	There were deep inside D-Point, the source of all of Selenite's
power.  They had spent the past twenty minutes fighting nightmarish monsters
that they all would have preferred to forget about.  They didn't care to
think about what would have happened if the shuttle hadn't drawn away most
of the Dark Kingdom's attention.  Her Majesty now had one less autopilot and
shuttle craft, but they were still alive.  Sailor Moon had lead them, using
the ginzuishou to direct them to wherever the evil queen was hiding.

	There had been a curious effect as they neared Selenite; the crystal
shone brighter and brighter.  Eventually, Moon took a strip of cloth and
wrap it around the crystal.  Otherwise, eye damage would have been a serious
concern.

	"We turn this way!" she ordered, taking the leftmost of the five
passageways that their path diverged into.  "We should be less than a
thousand meters away!"

	They turned another corner, and found a veritable army of youma.

	"Great.  Guys, cover your eyes."

	She unwrapped the crystal.  Immediately, the youma disintegrated.

	"Wow, and I'm not even trying!" crowed Sailor Moon.  "Come on, let's
go!"

***

	H.M.S. Pleiades rocked yet again.  They had returned to space, and
were now playing a desperate game of dodge with the fleet.  They had been
winning with surprising easiness; apparently the Dark Kingdom didn't provide
much training to its commanders.  The shield held.

	Sailor Orion was now conserving her strength for the big blow, and
waited for the signal from D-Point to retrieve their comrades.

	Or rather, to get in a position for their comrades to arrive.

***

	With a loud bang and a slight cloud of smoke, Sailor Moon and the
other members of her team burst into Selenite's chamber.

	Sailor Moon quickly took things in.  The room had a rather high
ceiling, yet seemed inexplicably familiar.  Hereditary memories?  She
thought that those had been disproved, but it seemed like she'd been there
before.  But she couldn't have; she hadn't been born when her mother
defeated Beryl, and Serenity had been very reluctant to discuss her
experiences at the North Pole with her daughter.

	Perhaps, she thought, the ginzuishou can transfer memories.  There
*were* quite a few details about exactly how she'd gotten it that had not
been explained adequately.  But she decided that there were other things to
get to.

	Surprisingly, the queen was alone.  No guards at all.  Sailor Moon
stood for a moment, considered a long speech, and then decided against it on
the grounds that she just wanted to get things over with immediately and
without delay.  She powered up the crystal, just as she had been carefully
taught, and centered her sights on the queen of the Dark Kingdom.

	Behind her, her escorts realized that now would be a good time to
get clear, and they hastily exited to stand guard against uninvited guests.

	"I am the warrior known as Sailor Moon.  My mother defeated your
mother a thousand years ago, and I will do the same to you.  Do you have
anything to say before I destroy you?" asked Moon.

	'So,' thought Selenite, 'this is the bitch's daughter.'  "I am
Selenite.  I was named after your grandmother, I believe.  As a tribute, I
suppose . . . as homage to pay respect to the only one who ever defeated my
mother." Selenite stepped down from the throne and stood confidently before
Moon, with her silver hair streaming behind her.  Sailor Moon realized that
there was in fact more than a fleeting resemblance to the mental images
she'd gotten of her grandmother, the Queen of the Moon Kingdom.

	"I've waited a thousand years to kill your mother, but I can delay
that for a few minutes while I take care of you." She held up her hands, and
a ball of black energy began to form, crackling and sparking furiously.

	"Good, because this won't take long."  This is for you, Mama. 
"Die!" She focused the ginzuishou upon Selenite.  She could sense that
Selenite's energy was almost equal to her own, perhaps even greater.  But
Sailor Moon had already committed herself; almost all her power would be
going into this one.

	Oh well, she thought, I guess this is it.  Do or die.

	She and Selenite released their energies simultaneously.

***

	Kim's sensor display lit up.  "Sir, I'm reading a huge discharge
from the ginzuishou.  Sailor Moon has fired."

	"Great.  Chibi-Jen, would you please do the honors?"

	"Gladly," said Orion's daughter.  This was the hard part, but it
should work.  "Sailor Teleport!"

***

	Sailor Moon blinked, and suddenly she and the rest of her team were
back on Pleiades.  On the bridge, to boot.  Of course, given the generally
cramped condition of the bridge, this meant that things got *quite* hairy.

***

	Selenite moaned in pain.  When she'd released her bolt on Moon,
she'd been certain that it would do the trick.  Now . . . now, she wasn't at
all sure if Sailor Moon had even been injured.

	Sailor Moon.  It was damned ironic, wasn't it?  If the pink-haired
bitch was telling the truth, and she had no reason to believe otherwise,
then she'd been done in by the same line that had done in her mother.

	Fate?  In the thousand years that she'd spent planning revenge,
she'd thought about fate a lot.  She'd decided that fate was just an
invention, an invention meant to console the losers in life.  She had never
planned on being a loser.

	And yet there she was, in the ruins of her once mighty fortress. 
She didn't know how the battle above her was going.  She didn't know how
many had died in her very chambers.  She suspected that her servants were
dead; otherwise they surely would have come looking for her.

	Selenite struggled to her feet.  She didn't know if she had the
energy left to loose a bolt at Pleiades; she didn't even know if it had made
its getaway or not.  It probably didn't matter.  She wasn't a fighter
anyway.  She'd thought that she wouldn't need an aid like Metallia to
conquer Earth; she'd planned on doing it with technology.  What had it
gotten her?  A kingdom in ruins, the once proud line of Beryl come to an
end.

	She eyed a strong, steel door that still stood.  It was her escape
route, of sorts.  The plane that the original Dark Kingdom had existed in
was no more, but there had to be others, other dimensions in which she could
survive without fear of those damned senshi.  If she could only get there
she could bide her time, build up her strength, prepare to come back in full
force, properly set to destroy Earth once and for all.  After all, when
you've had a single goal for a millennium, it's difficult to let it go.

	The door was across the room, however.  It would take awhile to get
to it, especially in her condition.  Twenty seconds, perhaps.

***

	"Twenty seconds!"

	On Number Two's ship, someone had just called out how long they
could survive.  Their power systems were failing, and they had to either
abandon ship or crash land.

	"Ram them!  We'll take out Pleiades with our own ship!" roared
Number Two.  He'd made many mistakes today, and he reflected to himself that
this would probably be his last.  Anything, he thought, as long as it gets
rid of Sailor Orion.

	The helmsman lacked his superior's courage, however, and set a
course for the planet.

	That was *his* final mistake.

***

	"Twenty seconds!"

	Kim had just cried out how long they had until Eric's shield
collapsed.  It was only a matter of time now.

	"Okay, people," said Orion, "it's time for the big firework."  She
closed her eyes, and concentrated all her thought on a single object.  Hell.

	Behind her, Sailor Moon crept forward to stand next to her, still a
bit weary from her battle with Selenite.  She didn't have much energy to
spare, but she would give it a try.

	When this is over, she thought, I'm sleeping for a week.

	From the back of the bridge came Eric and Chibi-Jen.  Eric was
visibly drained and had to be supported by Chibi-Jen, who showed no signs
of fatigue at all.

	Kami-sama, thought Vanessa, is she even human?  *I'm* tired, and I
don't even have any magical abilities.

	"Fifteen seconds," called Kim.  She looked at the group: Orion,
Moon, Eric, Jen.  One big, happy, temporally displaced family.  It seemed so
normal, though.  Eric and Chibi-Jen were still in standard uniform, Orion's
fuku looked immaculate, and Moon's, while still a bit dusty from her battles
down on the planet, was still in good condition.

	Sailor Orion took a deep breath, and felt her companions take one as
well.  She could feel for the first time their energies as they flowed into
her.  It was a bit intoxicating, and not a little frightening.  She would
have given anything for Eileen to be with her right now . . . but that was
something to worry about later.

***

	Sammy turned to look at Orion, and saw that her eyes were closed. 
About a dozen green dots glowed on her forehead.  She knew, without even
looking closer, that they were arranged as the constellation Orion.  She
could see Sailor Moon's tiara replaced with a circlet and a crescent moon,
and the sign of the sun was on Eric's.

	Chibi-Jen still looked the same.  Looking at her, you couldn't tell
whether she was trying to save humanity or getting ready for a nature walk.

	She then turned to Vanessa.  "Get ready."

***

	"Orion Nebula."

***

	An observer located a comfortable distance from Hell would have
noticed many interesting things over the past few hours.  They would have
noticed a swarm of large ships surrounding a smaller, sleeker one.  They
would have noticed a firefight of the sort legends are made of.

	At that moment, they would have seen the small, sleek ship racing
away from the swarm of larger ships, and would also have noticed a smudge
growing around the planet.

	It was growing very fast.

***

	"Envelopment at seventy percent," said Sammy.  Almost as a footnote,
"shields are down." Now the ship began to rock in earnest, as the shots
began to connect with greater and greater frequency.

	Sailor Orion's eyes were closed, but she could still see the planet. 
She'd heard from Sammy that about two-thirds of the planet were covered with
the nebula.  She wanted one hundred percent.

	"Eighty percent."  Alarms started going off all over the place. 
"Multiple hull breaches on several decks.  We can't last much longer."

	Orion could feel it, and she knew the others could as well.  With so
much power, she could feel that she could last seemingly forever.  She
opened her eyes and thought a single thought.

	'For love and justice, I am the pretty sailor suited warrior Sailor
Orion!  In place of the constellation Orion, I will punish you!'

	Then she said a single word.

	"Collapse."

***

	From afar, the smudge around Hell suddenly swelled to a prodigious
size, and then, in the space of four milliseconds, compacted into a total
volume of . . . well, it was quite small, in comparison.  In doing so, the
hydrogen nuclei fused, forming helium.  The tremendous energy generated by
this fusion began setting off the fusion of helium into beryllium, and so on
down the periodic table.  At the stage when iron began to fuse, lots of
other heavy metals began to go.

	That was the point at which Hell became a star.

***

	On the bridge of Pleiades, the foursome collapsed in exhaustion. 
Monitors showing the exterior all blanked out from the overload of light and
radiation.  Sammy wheeled around in her chair to face Vanessa, panic in her
eyes.  Vanessa merely nodded.

	"Execute fold in three-"

	On the screens, things had calmed down somewhat.  Now there was just
an immense shockwave coming towards them at insane velocity.  At the last
moment, Vanessa realized that her three count wasn't going to give them
enough time.

	"-two, NOW!"

	H.M.S. Pleiades, along with Hell, Selenite, Number Two, and the only
Dark Kingdom denizens in the universe, all dropped out of existence.