Author's Notes
 

Chapter 1
 

Presentiment

        The stars are the only things we see we cannot touch.  In this
age of airships, we can even touch the clouds, and when--if--the rockets
are done the planets will be feel the hand of man. Even the sun, in
principle.

        But the stars, ah, the stars.  As if crafting the world had been
work, so afterwards God had decided to play.  As if he wanted to create
one thing that would never become normal.

        These thoughts went through the young woman's mind as she gazed
upwards, taking just one moment to admire the one thing that was not yet
polluted and might not be polluted for a while.  But even the stars were
partially hidden by the city's glow.  Poets and authors had written
epics about this city.  One had marvelled "at the ocean made of air,
with iron islands here and there".  Another had marvelled at "the skin
of the street, with its electric tattoos".  But the woman--she did not
like cities.  But this was a time when no one did things just because
they liked them, or if they did they were things others did not like.

        No, she was here to hide, for the best place to hide is in the
spot where the searcher has already looked.  So she did not live, she
merely existed, and tried to bring what light she could to this dark
city.

        That meant flowers, to her mind.  She planted flowers every
night.  Most nights the flowers didn't last till morning, there were
people in this city who were so hungry they ate the flowers (which was
why she now only planted non-poisonous varieties), but more often the
flowers were destroyed through simple malice of seeing something
beautiful.  But sometimes they stayed, perserved by kindness or no one
looking at them.  Once a flower had lasted two years, and she had known
true joy then--until someone had caught her husband and daughter making
love and killed them, then tried to hide the bodies by dumping them out
the window.  Not a clever move, but to the woman the true tragedy was
that the corpses had landed on that plot of light.  The bodies had lain
there three days before anyone cared enough to pick them up.

        The Mako furnace that lit the alleyway shone with a green light,
one that made the faces of those in the glow look pallorous, as if they
were corpses just starting to decay.  Even the homeless people who had
lit it had fled.  It was even worse for the woman, but for other
reasons.  She did not quite run from the alley, she knew enough not to
be seen to be afraid.  But she did not quite walk from it.

        A part of her mind noticed the train, but assigned it no
importance.

        A guard never noticed the train either, not consciously, until a
girl with eyes to old for her face flipped out of it with great skill.
It was debateable if the Olympics would have taken her--she never taken
money for it, and was proud of that, but this was what she did for a
living. The guards were just fighting for their paychecks, not for
something they valued more than life, and were easily defeated.

        The next man to emerge from the train could never have moved
with such speed.  He was not a man who could pass unnoticed--his muscles
would have been impressive if he were half again as large, but men did
not exist who were even tenth larger than he.  They were not sleek
muscles, rather they were muscles practiced through decades of hard
labor and a two years of hard fighting.  His hair was in a
military-style buzzcut, done to ensure the minimum amount of maintenance
if he were to go a long time apart from civilization--which he had.  His
right arm had been severed at the elbow, and instead of a standard
prosthetic it had been replaced by a fully functional machine gun.  The
man knew that machine gun well, he had made it with his own hands and
connected it with surviving muscles.  A simple tensing, and it fired.
He could have taken out the guards even more effortlessly than the girl
did, but he simply wouldn't have been fast enough and they might have
raised the alarm.

        "C'mon newcomer, follow me." he said in a low voice specially
pitched not to carry.

        The final figure to emerge was much less memorable.  For the
large man being as distinctive as he was was a problem--when you're on
as many wanted posters as he was, it is best not to be noticed.  This
man was much smaller than the first man, but significantly larger than
the girl--yet his flip from the train was fully as graceful as hers.
His muscles were smaller than those of the other man, and on a smaller
frame. But where the larger man's frame had been built up through hard
labor, labor so hard even his immense strength needed to be husbanded to
get him through the day, the smaller man's had come from practice in the
arts of combat.  A great deal of practice, and practice that had paid
off.  Only another veteran would notice the subtleties, however.  An
ordinary person would have seen other signs that this man was dangerous,
though, not least his huge sword.  The sword wielded only by the elite
corps SOLDIER.  He also had other signs of SOLDIER--the glowing eyes
that were a mark of Mako infusion, and the long hair that was side
effect of the process.  This one wore it in tall, blonde spikes.

        The larger man wasted no more words.  He ran up the stairs the
guards had been watching if not protecting, his bulk carried with the
ease of someone who knows it well.  Two more guards attempted to stop
them--the large man barely slowed down to defeat them, and the SOLDIER
not at all.

        At the top of the stairs they met the rest of their group--the
girl, who was named Jessie, and two others.  One of them was Biggs, a
veteran of the Wutai Wars.  He had been an expert in demolitions, both
in using them and in guarding against their use.  Bridges were still
destroyed in the manner he had pioneered.  After the demobilizations
Bigg's facial ticks, tendency to blurt out long sentences about nothing
in particular, and total lack of tact had kept him from acquiring the
peace dividend of his hard-earned skills.  For some obscure reason,
prospective employers hadn't wanted him near explosives.  The large man
had had no such compunctions.

        Biggs was appropriately awed by the display of fighting prowess.

He was a veteran of some of the hardest fighting in history, and knew
skill when he saw it.  "Wow! You used to be in SOLDIER all right! ...Not
everyday ya find one in a group like AVALANCHE."  Tact was not his
strong point.

        Jessie spun her head around, ignoring the keypad she had been
wiring.  "SOLDIER?  Aren't they the enemy?  What's he doing with
AVALANCHE?"  Unlike the third one awaiting the pair, Wedge, she didn't
reach for her weapon--a knife, in her case.  Not because she didn't
think the SOLDIER was a threat, but Jessie was highly intelligent and a
very quick thinker.  She was perfectly aware that against a SOLDIER, a
knife in her hands wouldn't do any good.

        "Hold it, Jessie." rumbled the large man.  "He was in SOLDIER.
He quit them and is now one of us.  His name is Cloud."

        "Wow!" Biggs said.  "Cool name!  Lots of meaning in it, probably
you've got Gorsic ancestry with that name.  My name's less impressive,
I'm just . . ."

        Cloud loosened the blade in the sheath, and Biggs shut up.  He
was unstable, not stupid.  "I don't care what your names are.  Once this
job's over, and you pay me, I'm out of here."  Cloud was no fool.  He
had dealt with fanatics before, and this bunch fit the bill.  They were
trying to recruit him--the large man's ploy of introducing him to the
others was an attempt to bond him emotionally to the rest of this group.

        "Code deciphered."  Jessie said.  She chuckled at that, smiling.
 Cloud had her pegged too--danger junkie, addicted to her own
adrenaline.  Too smart for normal things, she needed abnormal situations
to be alive.  She really believed in Barret's rhetoric--the large man
had never told him his name, but Cloud could read wanted posters--but
that wasn't the real reason she cared enough to risk her life in these
things.  She'd gone as far as she could with extreme sports and risky
games, she wanted to *really* be in danger.  Barret had given her
equipment to do what she wanted, but more importantly he'd given her the
excuse.

        The gateway opened silently, and they entered the reactor.  All
except Wedge.

        "Hold it."  Barret said.  "Wedge, we need you to go around to
the escape route.  There will be two guards there, you can handle them.
 We can't afford any delays on the way out."

        Wedge nodded, and went off silently.  The only time Wedge made
noise was when he talked--he was a veteran of the slums, in the same way
that Briggs was a veteran of the wars.  He'd reacted differently though,
he'd taken the idea of "be seen but not heard" to its logical
conclusion.  The skill had been valuable in his former job as gang
leader, until he had attempted to take on a large man invading his turf.
 For the first time in his life he'd met someone tougher than he was and
with the rest of his gang dead or fled he'd pledged to follow Barret
anywhere.

        Cloud noted the subtleties of Barret's words, and nodded
unconsciously.  He had sent a man eager to fight away from the main
action, and had done so in a way that implied the job was important and
only Wedge could do it.  Not that that wasn't true, but many leaders,
even in the military, wouldn't have spotted that the job needed to be
done and wouldn't have had the guts to send someone away from where they
would be fighting personally.  Barret was a fanatic, but he had an
instinctive grasp of leadership and tactics many in SOLDIER itself would
do well to imitate.

        The inside of the reactor was huge.  They were on a catwalk
seemingly hundreds of feet above the--pool? mist?--it seemed to embody
both and neither--of green-glowing Mako that fueled the titanic
generators.  The feeling was that the reactor had been designed, and
people having to actually enter it had merely been an afterthought.  The
illumination was a mixture of dim lighting high above--even in a
reactor, Shinra was cheap with electricity--and the Mako itself, and the
mix of yellow and green gave things and eerie air.

        "Yo!" Barret said to Cloud in a voice that didn't carry beyond
them.  "This your first time in a reactor?"

        "No.  I did work for SOLDIER after all."

        Barret nodded.  "The planet's full of Mako energy, you know.
People here use it every day.  It's the life blood of the planet, but
Shinra keep sucking the blood out with these machines.  They're like
vampires, you know, on a grander scale than any undead ever dreamed.
Not just physical drain but economic, cultural, and they drain the very
hopes."

        "I'm not here for a lecture." Cloud snapped.  Snapped in a low
voice, they were on a mission after all.  "Let's just hurry."  They met
three more groups of guards on their way to the reactor core, each
easily disposed of.  They were grunts with the occasional guard dog,
here against kids on dares and the weekend terrorists you got in any
large city.  They could take on most civilians, but Cloud was a SOLDIER
and Barret had fought more times than most men had made love.  Cloud's
expert eye marked Jessie as being skilled at two different varieties of
martial arts.  Biggs was a demolitions man, and destroyed things in big
chunks rather than bit by bit, but even he was a match for these guys.

        Finally they reached the objective.  To Cloud it looked little
different from the rest of the machinery around them, but Barret broke
into a smile that showed too few teeth.

        "This chassis is damn close to a whole lot of liho--liquid
hydrogen.  Best coolant there was when they built this thing.  We bomb
it, and this whole place goes sky-high."

        "The reactor will get hot that quickly?"  Cloud asked.

        "No, of course not."  Biggs said.  "This thing isn't *that*
cheaply built.  But hydrogen combining with oxygen has a damn low
activation energy, and it's a damn exothermic reaction.  Logistics
prevented us from carrying enough to blow up the reactor, both in terms
of weight and cost--"

        "What the guy's trying to say is that we couldn't afford enough
explosives to blow this whole reactor directly, and they'd take about
two trucks to carry."  Barret cut in.  "But we've got one of the
nastiest chemical reactions known, just waiting for us.  The bomb isn't
to blow the reactor, it's to blow a hole in the coolant tanks.  After
that, bang bang baby."

        "And all my idea."  Biggs said with pride.  He took a packet
from his knapsack, and began attaching it with all the care of an
expert.  A nailgun was employed, so it couldn't be yanked off if found.
 The outer shell was all of one piece, and Cloud was sure all the wires
would be grey inside just to puzzle anyone who'd seen too many bomb
squad movies.

        Cloud sighed, and muttered something under his breath.

        "What was that?"  Barret demanded sharply.

        "Something about fire."  Jessie supplied.

        "If you know something about bombs we don't, and we're in
danger, tell us."  Barret said.  "It's your life too, you know."

        "I was just saying that I think you're making too big a deal out
of this whole Mako thing.  The people who first figured out how fire
worked probably feel the same way you do about Mako."

        "Yeah, they would have."  Barrey rumbled.  "If the only way to
make fire had been to use human bones as fuel.  Cause that's what Mako
reactors do, Cloud.  They burn the future and scorn the past, all for a
brighter present that's turned out to be dark anyway."

        "Whatever."  Cloud said.  "Just pay me my money when we get out
of here, and you can go save the world as much as you want for all I
care."  Then his eyes bulged.

        "Biggs, how close are the pipes to the surface?" Cloud demanded.
 Barret and Jessie turned to him.

        "Three meters."  Biggs replied.  "Don't worry, I'm a
professional and I've studied the plans."  Jessie blushed a bit at that,
Cloud could guess who had hacked into the computer systems to get those
plans.  But he had another concern.

        "And you're going to get through with a bomb that small, and an
untamped explosion?"  Cloud asked, a terrible suspiscion rising in his
mind.

        "Sure, this is the latest in materia explosives, more powerful
than anything chemical and self-tamping.  It'll get through easy."

        "You *are* aware that this place has materia detectors to sense
if anyone uses unauthorized materia."  Barret said, following Cloud's
train of thought.  "At least I *hope* you are."  You'd better be, his
voice implied.

        Biggs sweated.  "I'm just the demolitions guy, OK?  Tech stuff
is Jessie's job, you know."

        "Don't try to blame this on me!"  Jessie snapped, in a normal
tone.  She had forgotten quiet in her anger.  "The security specs were
on the plans you studied, you know.  Or were you just with your
Summon-Whore materia again?"

        "Voices down." Barret said.  "Change of plans, people.  Biggs,
skip the remote detonation.  Once the security alarms go off the
Shinnies do a blanket signal jamming around the facility.  It's supposed
to interfere with communications of intruders, and to keep them from
setting off bombs by remote.  We'll set a timer, instead."  Cloud was
impressed, Barret had made a plan instantly.  And one that took guts to
even consider.  "Jessie, assume that all the doors between here and the
exit are closed and you need to decode all the locks.  How much extra
time gets added on?"

        "Nine minutes." she said.

        Barret nodded.  "Cloud, you know Shinnie forces better than us.
 How much extra time to fight through whatever they send out once
security alarms go off?"

        "Twelve minutes." he said, silently adding on two minutes.  He
didn't want to get blown up.

        Barret nodded again.  "We practiced out the escape route, it
takes seven minutes at full run.  Biggs, set the timer to 30 minutes.  I
don't want to give Shinra *any* chance to disarm the bomb."

        "That's cutting it fine."  Cloud warned.

        "I know."  Jessie whispered breathlessly.  Her pupils seemed
slightly dilated, and she grinning with anticipation.

        Suddenly words spoke to Cloud.  They were not said in a voice,
or anything spoken.  Rather, they were in the distant rumble of the Mako
down below.  The rumbling did not change, not exactly.  He did not make
out the words through the rumbling, rather the rumbling became words.
It was like walking through a foreign city, and all around you is a
language you don't know and have tuned out, and then suddenly you know
the language.

        /"\Watch out, this isn't just a reactor./"\

        Barret's keen eyes had noticed Cloud's startlement, and he
turned to the mercenary.  "A pattern?" the large man demanded.

        Cloud nodded.  It was a side effect of the Mako enhancements
SOLDIERS received, the scientists called it "spontaneous pattern
emergence".  Most of the brain's activity took place on a subconscious
level, the results of that activity perlocating to waking mind through
such things as hunches, deja vu, gut feelings, intuition.  In a SOLDIER
those subliminal inductions manifested more directly, partially taking
over the sensory apparatus to imprint message into meaningless
background noise.  Cloud had seen messages in the patterns of bee swarms
and detected words in the aroma coming from restaurants, and the plan
for the final campaign that had ended the Wutai Wars had been spelled
out to the commanding general in a mosiac of raindrops.

        Still, the patterns weren't always meaningful.  There was a lot
of crap floating around in the subconscious, and useful patterns were
far in the minority.  Cloud decided that this was just another such
case.

        "Nothing." Cloud said.  "No important message."  Barret frowned,
then nodded to Biggs.  The veteran placed his left hand on the materia
bomb, and performed the mental twists that activated it.  Materia didn't
actually use life energy to accomplish their deeds, despite popular
myth.  Rather materia used the wielder's life energy as a catalyst for
esoteric spiritual processes--but ones with very physical effects.
Anyone could use materia, but to get full effect you had to Master a
piece of materia, learning its every spiritual nook and cranny to
acheive greater effects.  Bigg's had Mastered this bomb, only he could
truly activate it.

        The alarm that came was both sonic and psychic, bombarding the
building and the area around it with waves of spiritual power that put
anyone without shielding materia on them into deep slumbers.  The
AVALANCHE people had such materia though, from the black market.  Not
very powerful versions, but this wasn't the most up to date of security
systems.

        "MOVE."  Barret bellowed, and the team members did so.  Barret
led the way, and unerringly leading them across the catwalks on the
shortest possible route to the exit.  He'd planned this well, Cloud
noted.  Barret fired with his gun arm as they ran, clearing out the
security drones that had come out of their hiding place when the alarm
activated.  The response of the automated defenses was chaotic and
lackdaisical, though, the captured soul of the anthill that ran the
security system hadn't been from army ants.  In fact, that was the
reason they'd chosen this reactor.  Jessie had also spent the past few
days corrupting the installation's software, and that helped as well.

        Jessie was giggling with glee as they ran, but the other three
were silent.  They were veterans, and knew when talking was just one
more way to waste oxygen needed for other endeavors.  Then even Jessie
stopped giggling.

        The platform they were heading towards was covered by a GS-119C.
 Jessie recoiled and stood still in shock, whispering "so big, so big".
 Cloud knew what had caused it.  He had no doubt someone like her knew
the GS series was based on arthropod body form.  She probably also knew
the GS-11series was security oriented, and that the GS-119C were six
meters high, four meters wide, eight meters long.  The C just meant it
was the third version of this device.

        But she hadn't known that the GS-119C was a metal scorpion four
times as she was.

        Barret and the GS-119 both fired instantaneously.  His gun arm
scrapped the scorpion's antenna, the most vulnerable spot on this model.
 Its senses were crippled now, and more importantly it couldn't
communicate their location.  The GS-119C's tail laser lanced at Barret's
leg, and the scent of burned flesh filled the air.  A claw reached for
Cloud, but his reflexes were faster and he rolled under it.  Before the
Guard Scorpion's minigun could swivel to target him, Cloud leapt onto
the things top and thrust his sword into the metallic skin.  The sword
of a SOLDIER was made of much better alloys than the GS-119C used, and
blade sunk in three feet.  Then Cloud sent a pulse of thought through
the blade, and the lightning materia that he had placed into it
activated.  The electric shock ran through the Guard Scorpion, savaging
components and frying synthetic muscle.

        "Fire in the hole!"  Biggs screamed, and Cloud needed no other
prompting to get off the robot.  Biggs timed the grenade throw
perfectly, and it exploded less than ten centimeters from the
laser-stinger and blew the tail clean off.  Its balancing programs were
thrown off kilter by the sudden shift in weight and shock from Cloud's
sword and the Guard Scorpion rolled over its back and waved its legs
futilely in the air, its synthetic brain believing it was now upright.

        Barret was pressing a cure bandage to his scorched leg.  Cloud
recognized it as an over the counter version, healing slowly and in
small amounts.  Any more, and the cure addicts would rob the stores.
Given a half hour and no movement, the leg would heal completely.
Barret would not be a man to stay still, though.

        "Great job, people." Barret said.  Then he frowned.
"Unfortunately, we now seem to have a disoriented giant bug blocking our
path."  He limped to some of the shattered pieces and picked up a cannon
that had been blown off the scorpion, probably with the intent of adding
it to his own gun-arm.

        "There's a way around it."  Cloud said.  "Back, this way."  He
saw Barret's glance.  "Hey, I've been in a reactor before."

        "Lead the way."  Barret said.  Cloud led them off, but after a
few steps stopped.

        "Jessie, come on." Barret said.  She was still wimpering, curled
up in the fetal position with a heart that pumped fear intstead of
blood.

        "So terrible." she whispered.  "The monster, so terrible."

        "Yes,"  Cloud said.  "Terrible, terrible.  But we were even more
terrible, and we smashed it.  Now come on!"

        She unfolded slowly, Cloud was aware of every second and his
mind cast itself back to the bomb.  She had one minute, he decided, then
he'd leave her, and the rest of this bunch if they stayed behind.  He'd
been paid to risk his life, not throw it away.

        She scanned the three men, and her eyes predated Babel.  "How
can we stop them?"  she asked.  "Shinra created *that* monster like it
was nothing, and put it to guard a place they barely even care about.
What about the things that they *do* care about.  What will we do when
we reach things that are important?"

        "We'll smash them too."  Barret said, his voice full of
confidence.  "AVALANCHE isn't alone in this, and you know it.  It's a
big world out there, and it's waking up.  And when it does, Shinra will
first be screaming in rage, then in pain, and finally in *fear*."

        "But how can anyone stop them?" she repeated.  "Their creations
are so terrible.  Nothing can destroy what they make, except for other
things that they create.  Shinra created Cloud, and it created Biggs,
and it even created you, Barret, though they didn't know it.  And how
can I defeat them, I, who has never known the flames?"

        Cloud had had enough of this.  "Common," he said.  "Leave her."
 He spun around to dash off, but Barret's voice stopped him cold.

        "SOLDIER."  Barret said, making the word a sentence.  A death
sentence.  "Let me tell you something.  I know that in SOLDIER, they
teach you to evaluate casualties by cost analysis.  What's the going
rate, one SOLDIER is worth eighty riflemen?  So if there's a choice
between losing eight hundred riflemen and eleven SOLDIERS, they write
off the riflemen.  Well, that's how Shinra does things.  But it is *not*
how AVALANCHE does things.  You take a step to abandon us, and you'll be
dead before you take another."

        Cloud turned back around, and walked over to Jessie.  He put his
hands to her chin and gently turned her head so their eyes met.  "I know
you feel." he said.  "I was in the Roach Wars, you know."  Barret and
Biggs did a double take, and looked at him with the respect you gave to
a survivor.  "There was this one night I slept with this girl from
Support, and we fell asleep in each other's arms.  When I woke up, she
was dead.  An infiltrator had killed her during the night, for me to
find in the morning.  And do you know something?  I didn't give up, not
then, not through a year and a half of some of the hardest campaigning
I've ever been in.  And I survived, and I grew strong.  And girl, if you
don't give in you'll grow, and be strong, and you'll laugh in the face
of everything they send at you.  You may die, but they'll be damned
sorry you weren't on their side.  But that'll never happen if you give
up now."  They'd drilled this stuff into him in boot camp, how to help
broken soldiers recover morale.

        It was enough.  Jessie stood up on shaky legs, and said in a
hoarse voice.  "Let's go." she said.

        But soon Cloud knew they weren't going to make it.  They'd lost
too much time, and Barret and Jessie were slowing them down.  If it was
a straight line they could maybe make it--but they were slowed down by
the need to get through doors, and to fight the security systems.
Barret's new gun was a big help in that, but not enough.

        Then he came.  Wedge, looking to their eyes like a sun after a
night that lasts longer than it should.  "I heard the alarm." he said,
"and realized you'd need help.  I've broken down the doors and gotten
rid of the security, it's clean sailing from here on."

        The hope gave new life to tired limbs.  They ran as fast as
injuries would allow, and got out just in time.  They split up as soon
as they were out, anyone following their trail wouldn't be able to chase
all of them.  They'd meet up later, and Cloud would get the rest of his
pay.

        And behind them the bomb went off, and everything transpired
just as Biggs had intended.  The explosion blossomed like the kind of
rose they grew in hell.
 

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