REDSHIFT by Sievert Dinar

Disclaimer - Sailormoon is not owned by me.  If you're silly enough 
to believe otherwise, you should see a doctor.



        A trail of death.  Sailormars strode through the empty valley,
her eyes attuned to the night, to the grisly scenes of mutilated 
corpses lining her path.  And all she could feel was nothing.  This
was a battle that had been over for hours, and she was long too late
to do anything for those who had survived into those bleak moments 
that followed its conclusion.

        Instead she felt angry.  The bodies of senshi and peasants 
were scattered around her, and all she wanted to do was burn them, 
to erase all evidence of their existence.  She could not stand the
thought that all these bodies once represented a life, now snuffed 
out in a futile exchange of hostility.

        She had been given command of a unit, by Neo Queen Serenity, 
whose task was to round up the last, pathetic remnants of the 
population that subsisted outside the protectorate of Crystal Tokyo.
Round them up for the purpose of purifying them, and admitting them
into the fold.  Nobody could have forseen how much these people 
feared the process.  Nobody could have forseen how strongly they 
would resist.

        Nobody expected the violence that would ensue.

        Mars was now alone, alone and with nobody to blame for what 
had happened.  Except herself.  Who else was there, left, to take 
the blame?  Serenity would forgive her, and the others would accept
that it was "just one of those things".  But everyone else....  The
way they would look upon her would change.  She remembered what had
happened to Uranus and Neptune after the accident in Tashkent....  
>From that day on they were described as "butchers", and the same 
would happen to her.

        The only difference was, they would be right.  For it was she
who panicked, and launched her most devastating attack, when she saw
several of her guard speared down.  And it was she who had run in 
fear when she saw what she had done to both sides.  Now she was 
returning, to face her shame.  Time would heal the wounds, and add
forgiveness and redemption, but the screams would ring in her ears
forever.

        And ever.

        And ever.

        Until the day she joined them.


        Overhead, a royal transport flew by, surveying the scene.  She 
did not hear it.




Sievert Anathea Dinar sievertd@hotmail.com

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