ParadoxE chapter 1 [Nanoha/SM]

[Akuma-sama]

Special Inspector Yagami Hayate, mistress of the Intelligent Device Reinforce and of the Wolkenritter, let herself sigh dejectedly as she looked down at the tickets in her hand. Working for the TSAB had definite perks; it was an exciting, rewarding job that, while sometimes dangerous, had yet to reach the levels of danger she and her children had lived through seven years ago. The pay was also very, very nice, more than enough to make one seriously consider enlisting for a whole career despite the danger.
It had its bad points, though, she reflected while looking up through the small ovoid viewport into the ever-shifting purple and pink mists of the dimensional void outside. One of those was that, if you were good enough to earn the kind of salary she made, it seemed the Admiralty always had a high-level emergency that absolutely needed to be handled by you, and only you. And so what if you had just bought yourself and your four tired and cranky familiars a first class suite at Clear Peak Springs, Midchilda’s most famous rest and relaxation resort, and still had 6 days reserved (at over a thousand credits per person, per day, no less), it was absolutely urgent that you would get back to work.
Still, there was a good reason for it, this time. Thieves from the North Spaces were certainly ballsy, stealing a Lost Logia as flamboyantly as they had, even if the one they had picked was useless without an important energy source. There was little doubt in her mind that, considering how precise the operation had been, they already had one such power source in mind. It was up to her and her children to stop them before they activated the thing, and if they managed it, to suppress its effect. She tried not to feel too excited at the thought of how intense the battle would be if that happened—with a wry smile, she decided she must have spent too much time with Fate in the past; the blonde’s appetite for battle seemed to be rubbing off on her. Or was it Signum’s? No matter.
Fortunately, the thieves had picked an old re-supply ship to escape with; the Pasagarde was a relatively recent design, equipped with the newest translation drives that could easily overtake their’s, and her sensors were more than strong enough to tell in which direction they had fled by following the displacement waves the Argennon’s inefficient drives left behind. The bad news was that the Illuminati had a lead of over twenty-six hours—four hundred and eleven vecs, which meant a little over eleven-hundred and fifty crosslines of 8-dimensional distance—for the Pasagarde to catch up on.
In the meantime, she had her children had nothing better to do than “relax” in their cabin (tiny compared to what they’d had at Clear Peak), eating regular rations (a far cry from the delicious buffets they’d enjoyed at Clear Peak) and try to relax in the ever-bustling environment of a ship rushing her way through eight-dimensional space at four crosslines per vec (oh so different from Clear Peak’s soothing hot springs and calm mountain winds).
Her fist closed around the tickets, which had been reimbursed after much hassle with the resort’s manager and were thus worthless, and let out a low growl through her clenched teeth. When she was through with this mission, she’d request a whole month of paid leave. And if they wanted to cut it off again, she’d sic Vita at them! Her poor little girl had been so looking forward to skiing, too—
“Credit for your thoughts?”
The poor fool who had dared interrupt his musings discovered it was a bad idea to startle a triple A+-class special investigator when he found himself, before both Hayate and he could register exactly what was happening, pinned to the ground by her slight but precisely positioned weight, with a head-sized snow-white ball of magic hovering about an inch from his nose, in a good position to shove it and most of his face up into his brain. For a moment, both Hayate and he froze, staring at each other’s eyes and blinking in confusion, before a horrified blush covered Hayate’s face and a wry smile appeared on his lips.
“Well, I’m happy to say that what doubts I had about a cute girl like you handling the executive part of the operation are completely gone,” he replied amusedly while Hayate helped him get up, blushing like a schoolgirl while stuttering embarrassed apologies.
“I-I’m so sorry, Captain Wallace, I just—”
“Quite alright, I was at fault, Inspector Yagami,” he replied, rubbing at the tender flesh beneath his short-cropped blonde hair at the back of his head with a good-natured wince that did nothing to make Hayate feel better.
Captain Ivan Wallace was a genuinely likable man, Hayate had found. While he was capable of both the cold intelligent logic and the sense of authority all Navy captains needed to have, the tall and lanky man had, in private at least, a jovial and friendly attitude that reminded her a bit of Lindy-san, Fate and Chrono’s mother. She suspected the two of them would get along famously.
He was also a shameless, if gentlemanly, flirt, something that flawlessly raised Signum’s ire and amused Hayate in the process; anything that made the leader of her knights act less like a cold statue while in public was a good thing, in her opinion.
“I was looking for you, actually,” the Captain explained in a serious voice, and the embarrassment she had been feeling vanished like sand being washed away. “It seems the trail is getting hotter a lot faster than expected.”
Hayate startled. “Already?”
The chase had been supposed to last a little over thirty-three hours long, and that was only sixteen hours ago. With a bit more than half the distance left to cross, there was no reason for the range to be closing up so soon.
He nodded. “That’s why I’d prefer if you and your familiars get ready and come to the bridge as quickly as possible,” which, in Navy Captain language, meant ‘ten minutes ago’. “Maybe they had a technical problem, or they asked too much out of their drives… whatever’s going on, they slowed down for some reason, and everything leads me to believe your talents will soon be needed.”
“We’ll be ready,” Hayate said, giving a smart salute before turning and leaving to her quarters, even as she contacted her children telepathically. Maybe some action would cheer them up…
And maybe hitting something would cheer her up, too.
She gave herself a slight mental scolding and chuckled while she reaching down the collar of her uniform vest for Reinforce. Definitely Signum’s fault.
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Mahou Shoujo Lyrical Nanoha:
ParadoxE
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Chapter 1
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The Time-Space Administration Bureau was the single most massive organization in the known multiverse, charged with administrating the chaotic infinity of the dimensional void, it dealt with the dozens of dimensions that surrounded Midchilda’s, each with their own thousands of sentient species on average, themselves usually spread over three or more solar systems. It relied on its armed subdivisions, the Administration Navy and the Forces, for most of its tasks, and the sheer number of jobs it had to do made the only practical tool a very large one indeed.
It was rumored that if every hull the Navy counted wound up in the same place, their combined mass would be enough to throw a galaxy off its course. It took the production of twenty solar systems worth of high-efficiency farming planets to feed the hundreds of trillions of armed clerks the Forces employed, and the Bureau itself employed nearly twice as many, like any other bloated bureaucracies, as well as requiring a high-performance magi-computer the size of an entire moon simply to handle and hold the paperwork and records it continuously churned out every day. The dimensions were word-defying, the cost was astronomical, and the logistics were the biggest organizational nightmare anyone could imagine.
Hence, to prevent a misaligned gear in the mind-bogglingly huge system that was the Bureau from messing with the often time-critical operations of the Navy and the Forces, the unreliable administrative element was removed from the equation in most tasks until they actually began. Briefings were given on the mission’s flagship, often even as the fleet headed for its destination, under the direction of that ship’s captain who, for the mission at least, would find themselves leading the entire operation.
This was why Fate T. Hallaoun found herself sitting in the Captain’s quarters of the ANS Asura, trying not to fidget in her chair and looking at the other people sitting around the table. The captain of the Asura, her adoptive brother, Chrono Hallaoun, had redecorated the room; whereas their mother Lindy had favored a traditional décor, he seemed to prefer functionality over beauty, and most of the furniture in the room, such as the table in front of her, bore tell-tale signs of being temporary magical constructs. However, she could see a framed picture standing on his desk and, from the angle she was sitting at, could just barely see blurs of long blonde and teal hair that brought a smile to her face.
She hadn’t seen him in the last three months, like most of anyone else she knew. And yet, despite how much she wanted to get up and talk to him, they simply could not, as long as she was his subordinate, and as long as they were in business. Hence, except for the amicable and very unsurprised smile they had exchanged upon seeing each other, they had yet to exchange a single word that wasn’t Navy courtesy.
The presence of his fiancée—whom he always swore to their mother he would marry as soon as he got some time off, and so since their official engagement three and a half years ago—second-in-command and exec, Amy Limietta, was unsurprising. Neither was the presence of the rest of his commissioned officers, nor was Arf’s; her familiar was in her chibi-form again and sitting in front of her, her chin barely reaching over the height of the table. What was a bit of a surprise was the somewhat comical-looking man dressed in the white and orange uniform of the Bureau’s R&D division.
He was small and a bit squat, with graying-white hair messily poking out sideways from his otherwise bald head making him look like he’d simultaneously been run over by a lawnmower and given electric shocks. He had a pair of glasses that seemed to slide down on his pointy nose every ten seconds; even as she looked at him fidgeting in his seat, she counted the number of times his hand left the half-empty cup of coffee in front of him to push them back up. Two, three, four…
More worrying, in Fate’s opinion, were the empty chairs standing next to Arf and herself. This could only mean that the bureau didn’t intend to send her alone which, for mostly anyone, wouldn’t be a problem. Fate, however, had always found herself having trouble to adapt to having a partner other than her close friends. They either started to consider themselves the leader because of her soft-spoken personality, something she often felt uncomfortable with, or simply couldn’t keep up with her and Arf in a fight—not many people could. There weren’t enough chairs available for her missing partner to be Hayate and her ever-present familiars, and she somewhat doubted the bureau would pull their best combat instructor, Nanoha, away from her precious duties. Thus, it could only mean that—
—fsht—
“Special Investigator Takamachi Nanoha report—Fate-chan!”
—that she’d been wrong after all, her mind de-railed as she saw the radiant smile pointed her way. It was Nanoha as she remembered her, with those wide brilliant purple eyes, gentle and caring, warm like the sun on a spring day. She must have run her way through the ship’s decks, as her long silky ponytail was a bit frayed; it did not make her look any less attractive, in Fate’s opinion. Far from that, in fact; she had to resist the impish suggestion from a treacherous part of her mind, as her friend took the seat right next to her, to not run her hand through those auburn locks.
She held herself, though. Nanoha loved Yuuno, and not her. Fate was just her friend, was resigned to be just her friend, and was focused on being as good a friend as she could.
She was happy to note that reminding herself of it seemed to hurt less than it had two years ago.
It still felt like a jagged broken rib pressing against her heart, though, but she considered it an improvement.
“You’re late, Takamachi-san,” Chrono reproached. The combat instructor and part-time investigator smiled sheepishly.
“Ah, sorry Chron—ah, I mean, Captain,” she replied, and Fate’s brother let out a pained sigh. It wasn’t that she had trouble with authority—far from it, being of lawful and honest Japanese upbringing—but Nanoha, bless her great heart, seemed to be unable to connect the oft-friendly, if precociously serious teen she had known for seven years with the figure of authority he had been for the last two years. “The shuttle had a bit of a mishap along the way, nothing serious.”
“Hm,” Chrono noised. Had it been anyone else but her, Hayate or Nanoha, Fate knew he would have given the offender a throughout chew up. Although, she was fairly sure that if it had been her, their mother would have been quick to mention it the next time they’d have spoken; lucky Hayate and Nanoha wouldn’t have to go through that.
Oh, the woes of having been adopted in a Bureau Clerk family…
And she wouldn’t have changed it for all the credits in the multiverse.
“Let’s get started,” Chrono announced, tapping on his console. The overhead lights shut off, leaving the room in an ephemeral darkness quickly replaced by the light of the holographic display that appeared over the table. It was large radiant sphere that seemed to be made from either liquid smoke or moving webs, wide enough to stretch over the heads of Helm Pilot Alex Brigham and of Scanners’ Officer Randy Lakeford, at opposite sides of the table. It was only the darkness of the room that allowed Fate to detect the diminutive glowing shape of a starship, barely half as long as her finger hovering between her and Arf. She dimly remembered seeing this particular hull shape somewhere before, but she couldn’t seem to recall where…
“What you’re looking at is the effect of a Class S Lost Logia called the Gates of Time. It’s well documented, possibly the Lost Logia we know the most about. It’s a massive super-computer that takes everything in the fourth dimension of the time-area it’s in, and not only makes it available for viewing, but it also uses it to create its own predictions of what the future might turn out to be within a certain degree of accuracy; it comes about as close as anything to predicting the future as is theoretically possible. In layman’s terms, it gives whoever uses it the ability to see everything that’s happened, is happening and could happen.
“The ancient civilization left many mentions of it behind them; they apparently used it for things as mundane as predicting the weather and history lessons, to things like crime scene investigation or high-level research. There are even rumors that it allowed for actual time-travel, but unless the ancient civilization had the ability to casually bend the laws of magic and physics, that’s probably just hearsay.”
“I’m guessing our mission is to bring it back?” Nanoha asked. Chrono nodded.
“Precisely.”
A memory suddenly jolted loose in Fate’s mind, of the very first time she had stepped in Chrono’s bedroom on Midchilda. She had been surprised at how boyish it had all been, not because Chrono couldn’t be considered manly, but rather because he always seemed so serious all the time; there had been a set of racks full of comic books, small toys stored neatly on whatever flat surface could be found, and especially hand-glued starship models which, after she had asked about them, her then fourteen years old brother had proceeded to show and describe her a few of those he’d been proudest of with almost child-like glee. Among those had been the Millenium-class super-heavy SuperDreadnaught, the largest ship class ever commissioned by the bureau.
Another look confirmed Fate’s suspicion; the tiny blot she had noticed was indeed the two kilometer large and nearly ten times longer antique warship Chrono had described. This meant that to call the sphere gigantic was a bit of an understatement; it must have been as large as a star!
It also meant it had been discovered long ago, as the Millenium-class ship had become obsolete approximately five-hundred years ago, when the bureau had decided to focus more on light, mobile units like the Asura’s own Longknight-class of Patrol cruisers.
“If it’s so well known, why hasn’t anyone gone and fetched it before now?” Fate asked.
“I believe doctor Hanz can explain it better than I can,” Chrono said, turning toward the orange-clad man at his left. “Doctor, if you’d please…”
“A-Ah, yes—o-oops” were the sounds he made as he suddenly stood from his chair; his glasses finally gave up their fight against gravity, and only Engineering Officer Commander Garret Yverland’s timely intervention prevented his chair from falling to the floor. After giving the brown-haired man an apologetic glance and picking up his glasses, the doctor cleared his throat and began.
“Anomaly DC-four-K-oh-nine, known as the Closed Gates, contains a standard class M dimensional singularity behind a V-class compression envelope; its resonance cycle is of less than one nanovec, and its Newmann rating is over nine thousa—”
“It’s a universe behind very strong shield,” Amy interrupted and clarified, seeing the confused looks that were appearing on her crewmates’ faces. After a small chorus of understanding noises, Amy gave a nod at Chrono, who smiled back and motioned at the doctor.
The doctor babbled a bit, visibly lost at having his speech interrupted, then released an uncomfortable cough, pushed his glasses up and resumed. “Ah, yes… well, as she said, it’s a very powerful—um—shield, the most powerful one ever recorded actually. We believe its purpose is to isolate the fourth dimension in its plane in order to get a more accurate reading, seeing as there are mentions of a similar phenomenon in a few records of the ancients’ era. It was only supposed to appear for a few microseconds whenever someone was using the gates’ time-predicting features…”
“Which means that someone’s found and been using the gates for… what, the last five-hundred years?” Nanoha gave Fate a weird look, probably wondering where she had gotten that information from, before shrugging it off as unimportant.
“One thousand, actually, and it might have been even longer,” Chrono said. “I think it’s more likely that whoever used it either left it open, or didn’t know how to close it, but for all we know, that universe could contain an exceptionally long-lived alien race.”
He tapped a few buttons on his console and the massive sphere was replaced into a much smaller one, a crimson and opaque gem that reminded Fate of Nanoha’s intelligent device. “This is the key to the gates, and your primary target; the closest approximation we can get of its name is “chrono sphere”, though the natives probably call it something else entirely since it isn’t sentient and can’t give its own name, so don’t rely on that to look for it. Fortunately, thanks to the shield, we know the general area the key is located at, and your ride will drop you approximately in the right location, give or take a few light-hours.”
“Right around the corner,” Fate grumbled with a roll of her eyes, though she knew she was being unfair; a universe was infinitely large, after all, and the range they would get would at least tell them which solar system to look into.
If the species on the other side had colonized more than one world, though, that still left a lot of ground to cover. Hell, even one planet would have a lot of corners to look into.
“So how do we go in then?” Nanoha asked. “Trying a dimensional transfer through a shield of that strength doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.”
“And it probably isn’t. This is your ride,” the Asura’s captain agreed with another tap on his console. The chrono sphere disappeared, to be replaced by the schematics of a standard TSAN-issue cutter, a barely thirty meters long, lightly armed light craft generally used for non-magical or long-distance personnel transfer. However, as she looked closer, she saw notable differences, most of them in the back section where the energy-creating D9 core was supposed to be located; the section in question was, as far as she could tell, nearly three times too long, taking up nearly half the available room on the craft’s main floor.
“This is the Pizzicato, a cutter specially modified for this mission’s very purpose and which, I’m told, Doctor Hanz had a significant role in building,” Chrono said, trying to ignore the way the excitable doctor preened visibly. “In short, this craft is equipped with a very high density shield, which should let you two get through the shield unharmed.”
“Two?” Arf repeated.
“While it probably won’t be a pleasant ride for Takamachi-san or Hallaoun-san, it would probably be fatal to a familiar,” Doctor Hanz explained frankly, and Chrono shut his mouth to let him do it. “Our simulations indicate that the closed gates’ energies would probably mess up with your inner matrix; it’s very likely you would lose cohesion and turn into pile of elementary molecules.”
“Right. Gotcha.” Fate gave a fond look at her mollified familiar, who fidgeted uncomfortably (and adorably, in her opinion) in her seat.
“The mission plan is simple,” Chrono resumed as he hit the console, changing the display again, and Fate focused on the holographic images, storing everything to her memory.
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That had been about twenty-seven hours ago. After the welcoming sparring match that had badly taxed Asura’s training gym’s containment fields and earned them a scandalous accusation of having unusually high levels of testosterone in their blood from Amy, Fate and Nanoha had spent most of that time in idle conversation and getting ready for the job.
Once more, as she often did before a mission, Fate spared a moment to wish Midchildan craft were equipped with automatic chargers like those Velka ships enjoyed; as much as she liked the enhancements Bardiche was equipped with, pumping magic inside cartridges was a time-consuming and tiring process. It had given them ample time for small talk, though Fate had, for both the sake of avoiding an uncomfortable pause and for her own happy mood, avoided the subject of Yuuno. She had been pleasantly—guiltily so—surprised that Nanoha hadn’t brought up the subject herself; perhaps she had noticed the coldness Fate couldn’t help but feel toward her oldest friend’s boyfriend?
She doubted it, though; Nanoha was many things, but observant was unfortunately not one of them.
She sighed and gave a glance at the side window of the Pizzicato’s rear-mounted cockpit, watching as the engineers moved around the modified cutter’s hull like ants around their queen.
Like most Midchildan crafts, she was built with the cockpit at the highest point in the back, directly connected to the engineering section to allow the ship’s captain, usually a class S mage, to use their personal powers to enhance the ship’s weapons and defense in times of emergency. In this case, the tiny cockpit stood directly above a tightly cramped machinery section, where it was nearly impossible to turn around without banging their elbows against some piece of hardware. The fact that the ship’s specialized shield had been stuffed in there in a way that Fate was too polite to call jury-rigged only made it worse.
The rest of the ship could be considered spacious, by small craft standards. Of course, those standards being approximately the same as a submariner’s, it meant that, while she and Nanoha would have enough room to walk around without immediately bumping into each other—stop it, she told herself as a pleasant mental picture jumped from a treacherous corner of her mind—it meant that they would have been hard pressed to add any piece of furniture inside and keep the same properties.
Pizzicato had been modified specially with this mission in mind. Its supply holds had been enlarged, a section of the floor was adapted to produce a medium-level force field as an improvised holding cell, the cockpit chairs had been specially adapted to serve as more comfortable beds than ordinary chairs would have been and, more importantly in Fate’s opinion, the luxury of a shower had been somehow packed into the relative privacy of engineering, which was a lot more than she’d expected upon hearing about the mission.
Still, she continued as her attention went from the people around them to the gigantic obstacle visible through the open bay doors, she wondered if she’d ever get a chance to enjoy that shower stall. The whole plan stunk, in her opinion, and she had a feeling Nanoha agreed with her. Of course, it wasn’t a hard opinion to agree with, considering it was little more than a near-suicidal run through.
Oh, sure, the Asura was supposed to shoot a D9 bomb, the transdimensional equivalent of a tactical nuke—which were definitely not part of the patrol cruiser’s normal armament and had cost Chrono a lot of his firepower to cram two single-shot launchers into his ship—to weaken the shield before it went through, but the ever-helpful doctor Hanz had assured them that it wouldn’t be enough to dig a full hole through the obstacle; the remaining length, which could very well turn out to be too long after all, would have to be forced through, the kamikaze way.
Once on the other side—if they made it to the other side, that is—the mission had a time limit of two weeks. The Asura would follow the explosion’s shockwave all the way around the shield until it focused on the other side, and if the good doctor was to be believed, there would be a very short-lived hole directly through at that point, barely wide enough to allow a transmission beam through, exactly one week after the blast. That would be their only chance to communicate with the flag; they would be on their own otherwise, until the wave would come all the way back, the Asura’s second bomb would be launched to open the way out.
Yes, it stunk. In many different ways, it stunk. Hopefully the natives wouldn’t be strong enough to put out a significant resistance, and Fate and Nanoha would be able to turn the gates off and bring the shield down on their own. Even though she didn’t like playing thief—bad memories and all—she would give it her all to keep the mission short.
“Missile tube one reports green for launch,” Weapons Officer Bill Mossman’s voice reported over the com line of the “fleet”, such as it was.
“No anomalies on the closed gates,” Sensors Officer Randy Lakeland chimed in. “N-space bubble is stable and generator is green.”
“Orbit is green, plot traced for course change and propulsion drives are green. Waiting for signal to execute,” Alex Brigham said.
“We’ve got green on Pizzicato,” Amy said even as the consoles on Fate and Nanoha’s boards lit up. “Standby for go.”
“Fate, Nanoha, fire your propulsion drives whenever you’re ready,” Chrono said, his face appearing on the screen in front of them. He gave them a smile, but while Nanoha was probably fooled by the façade of confidence he showed, Fate knew him well enough to tell how worried he was—and did her best to think about anything except the causes of that worry.
His face vanished, and radio silence came as everyone on the bridge and the entire ship waited for them. Nanoha and Fate shared a nervous look, before the auburn-haired girl steeled herself with that unshakable determination Fate admired so much in her, and smiled.
“Let’s go?”
Fate hesitated, gave another glance at the massive shield in front of the Asura and felt her own determination splutter and cough like a choked engine. Yet a single glance at Nanoha’s face was enough to revive it, and she felt more than made her own hand move on the console and hit the Full Speed signal. The other girl’s smile grew even as nervousness once again peeked through the mask of confidence she had put on.
“Now hopefully this’ll work,” Nanoha mused out loud. Fate’s eyebrow twitched.
“Nanoha?”
“Hnn?”
“I could have lived without that ‘hopefully’.”
“Oh… sorry.”
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Traveling through the dimensional void had once been declared theoretically impossible, or at least unsurvivable for any living beings. Beyond the problem of actually crossing a distance on a plane one could barely imagine, much less quantify, early tests had proven being forced to shift out on a higher or lower plane caused Bad Things to happen to the unfortunate traveler. It wasn’t until theory developed further and the construction of the first working N-space generator, a device capable of creating a bubble of stable three-dimensional space like those found in stable dimensions, that dimension-travel finally became possible.
Of course, then came the problem of propulsion; propellers of the time, even those using magi-enhanced reactor fuel, were completely useless in the dimensional void, because the movement they allowed was limited to within the N-space bubble, which could only move in the three dimensions it contained. The first travels had also been limited to the fifth dimension using slow, inefficient and expensive portal systems, and the lack of worlds discovered near those portals limited dimension-travel to a strictly scientific curiosity, with typical results as to the speed of application and improvement of related systems.
At least, until Teleportation spells were proven possible, and until someone had the brilliant idea to use it in what was now called the Translation Drive; essentially, the drive allowed a ship to travel through the void simply by shifting its dimensional coordinates in extremely fast and short jumps. A distance that would have required six jumps and about two weeks could now be accomplished in little more than forty-five minutes, the same distance a modern drive could cross in about six minutes.
The Pizzicato was too small a craft to equip the massive translation drives cruisers like the Asura enjoyed. She was, in fact, too small to carry any kind of translation drive, which would have taken half her length and required enough energy to make her twice as large as she was. Even worse, she was also too small to pack an N-space generator, making her completely dependant on the bubble of stable space generated by the Asura’s two generators.
What she had plenty of, however, was N-space speed. Her small mass made the force of her three propellers, simple acceleration rings circling her over the cockpit, around the middle of her mostly cylindrical hull, and on her nose, push her forward, clear out of the Asura’s boat bay and into a direct collision course with the shield in front of them like Newton’s law personified.
Nearly simultaneously, the hatch covering the single, massive missile tube mounted on the Asura’s left arm faded out of existence, and a missile nearly six times larger than Pizzicato herself shot out with all the force its twenty propeller rings offered it.
Eyes set on the readings on her console, Nanoha watched as the missile, accelerating at nine-hundred and fifty kilometers per second per second, sped ahead of their “mere” six-hundred and seventy-six KpS², towards the shield a million kilometers in front. Despite being so much bigger than Pizzicato, it soon became nothing more than a glowing blip on the screen, impossible to see in the brilliant background of the Closed Gates, yet the computers could still see it clearly.
“Explosion in 3, 2, 1…”
And suddenly, the closed gates no longer seemed all that bright as the bomb’s heavy matter warhead was forcefully shifted into the ninth dimension, coming in contact with other, less stable multiverses and annihilated itself in a massive and uncontrollable deflagration. The brilliant fireball expanded in a bubble of elemental fury, growing at incredible rates into the Closed Gates… and towards the Pizzicato.
“Brace for impact!” Fate shouted, grabbing Bardiche’s staff and focusing on the craft’s shield. They entered the explosion like an insignificant rock into the sun, and she felt the intense drain it demanded on their defenses; had the shield not been enhanced, she knew the Pizzicato would have been ripped to shreds within seconds. As it was, the energy was growing dangerously low considering what would be coming, and Fate sent her own power into it, smiling grimly as she felt Nanoha do the same.
Ten seconds later, they were through the explosion… and rammed right into the already repairing surface of the Closed Gates. This time, the drain was simply incredible; the shield was holding, but the energies of the shield prodded and punched at it, trying to crush it like an eggshell. An electric sensation ran through her body and she felt her magic recoil as it was attacked directly. Still, she grit her teeth, did her best to ignore it and continued to feed the barrier protecting her and Nanoha from certain death.
“Cardrige Load,” Without being commanded, Bardiche punched a bullet of focused magic into his matrix almost at the same time as Raging Heart, and fresh power flooded through her and into the shield. A second cartridge went, then a third, and Fate counted them with apprehension. Raging Heart’s seven-shot cartridge was soon spent with the trademark speed of automatic weapons, and the shield became increasingly hard to hold. Five of her shots were spent, and the sixth loaded… and the Closed Gates were still not over.
Holding the shield with everything she had, Fate closed her eyes as she felt the limits of her strength come, and cursed the fates for letting her die so stupidly…
But at least she would die next to Nan—
She didn’t have time to finish the thought; the pressure suddenly grew lighter and stopped, the Pizzicato burst through the shield and dived directly into the mirror-like singularity, and Fate knew no more.
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“Well, there they go,” Chrono sighed as he watched as the explosion grew fainter through the main screen, even as the Asura’s arm-mounted propeller rings lit up and set the cruiser on its new trajectory. He tried to hide his fear that he had just sent his little sister to her death, but his crew knew him well enough to see through it.
“Fate-chan…” Arf whispered, her hands clenched around the railing.
“No distress signal or debris detected at the point of impact,” Randy Lakeland said and Arf sighed in relief. That meant there was a chance that—
“If the shield had collapsed while in travel, there wouldn’t be any debris either,” Doctor Hanz “helpfully” put in. Chrono just barely caught Arf in time before she could throw herself at the tactless scientist.

ParadoxE Chapter 1 – End.
There. Sailor Moon is introduced in the next chapter.

[Waruiko]

I've been waiting for someone to use this idea!

[Ion-chan]

very nice
i didnt notice any spelling or grammer ...
but then again i was enjoying the story!

[Alathon]

An interesting start; readable as a whole, without any really obnoxious spelling or grammatical issues to interfere. While you haven't really detailed yet just what sort of conflict we'll be seeing, I think it could go a number of ways and be successful. That said, a few things jumped out at me as being off.
The prologue with Hayate, and the rest of the story, felt very much like two different stories. I don't know if that's by design, if for example you have two plot lines you plan to merge later on the story, and wanted to foreshadow one of 'em. If you don't, you might consider giving the Hayate section a little more closure... as it is now, it's kinda left hanging.
I'll be interested to see how the Fate x Nanoha angle is worked.. whether Fate's impression that Nanoha is with Yuuno is fact, fiction, a function of her own imagination, or the result of some (potentially embarassing) scene in the past. And if Fate is in fact fated (heh.. heheh..) to be without her Nanoha-chan, will she be able to find someone else?

She was happy to note that reminding herself of it seemed to hurt less than it had two years ago.
It still felt like a jagged broken rib pressing against her heart, though, but she considered it an improvement.

Consider merging these sentences into one paragraph. They're part of the same thought, and while I can understand wanting to emphasize the latter sentence by setting it apart, it really isn't necessary.
One thing that really bothers me is how casually two of the TSAB's elite mages are being tossed at a problem which, at least as it's been described, isn't really that big of a problem. Why are Fate and Nanoha being shoved through a life-threatening shield.. just to retrieve yet another Lost Logia? If it's been missing for centuries, what makes it worth spending their lives on right now, rather than waiting and finding a better way to go about punching the shield than nuking it? If you don't already have a justification waiting to be revealed, seriously consider adding one.
There are plenty of potential ways a powerful time-altering Lost Logia could inspire the TSAB to immediate action, after all. Such as the shield its universe possesses posing some threat to dimension with which it intersects because movements of galaxies are bringing them nearby, or perhaps the Gates nearing the end of their expected lifetime and posing a risk of erratic behavior endangering the natives of its dimension. Anything credible will do.. there just really oughta be a reason for doing something as risky as the insertion is described as... other than crossing Nanoha & Sailor Moon.

“While it probably won’t be a pleasant ride for Takamachi-san or Hallaoun-san, it would probably be fatal to a familiar,”

Probably is used twice in this sentence.. you can probably drop the first one.
I'm almost glad to see Fate going into the mission with the assumption of conflict with "the natives"... without a certain amount of aggressiveness on the part of the TSAB agents, it'd be hard to justify real conflicts between them and the senshi without turning the senshi into cardboard cutouts. Which would really kinda suck, especially if that resulted in a horrible fanon Pluto-the-manipulative-bitch characterization.

[Akuma-sama]

Thank you for your comments.

The prologue with Hayate, and the rest of the story, felt very much like two different stories. I don't know if that's by design, if for example you have two plot lines you plan to merge later on the story, and wanted to foreshadow one of 'em.

Actually, that's exactly it.

One thing that really bothers me is how casually two of the TSAB's elite mages are being tossed at a problem which, at least as it's been described, isn't really that big of a problem. Why are Fate and Nanoha being shoved through a life-threatening shield.. just to retrieve yet another Lost Logia?

Ah... that was explained in the first draft, but I changed the dialogue around a bit and apparently it got shuffled out of the way!
Must fix it...

There are plenty of potential ways a powerful time-altering Lost Logia could inspire the TSAB to immediate action, after all.

Essentially, there is a bit of that, but they didn't before because technology hadn't been on their side; the Pizzicato's shield is brand new.