The Legend of Ranma Saotome
Disclaimer: I do not own or claim to own any of these characters. I'm
just fusing them together. Ranma 1/2 belongs to the Rumiko Takahashi
and Legend of the Duelist belongs to Rutledge Etheridge.
Chapter 1
The life of Ranma Saotome began to take shape long before the dawn
of the human mind.
Billions of miles from the gaseous caldron that would become the
Earth, an asteroid plunged full-force into a barren, rocky planet.
The stricken world shook, split open down to the core, and wobbled
away from its orbit. But the pieces clung together--just barely--
bound by a gravity-field that grew continually stronger by dragging
passing bits of matter down from the freedom of space and forcing
them to become part of the jumble formed by the broken world and the
wanderer. Thus was born a new body in the cosmos--running free of
ordained orbit and falling, drawn by an irresistible tide, toward the
dense center of the Milky Way galaxy.
Eventually, perhaps inevitably, something got in the way. It was a
small thing, a tiny comet, which brushed the wanderer-world with just
enough force to upset the delicate balance between gravity and
centrifugal force.
This time world flew apart.
Millions of fragments were simultaneously released to shoot through
a shattered sky and enter space as a meteor storm. From that one
cataclysmic moment--and for billions of years more--the meteor storm
raced out toward eternal night; unchanging, unchallenged, flung on
its course by unwitnessed violence, destined to rage through
emptiness--blindly, forever--on a path that contained nothing.
Until A.D. 2128
At precisely the wrong moment, a human mind abourd Utic Shinar made
the decision to bring the vessel back into normal-space.
The ship, therefore, was the intruder.
First to strike was a broad, tumbling hunk of iron and nickel that
rang the outer hull of Utic Shinar like a gong. The mteor bulled into
the ship's starboard quarter, broke apart as it gored through six
layers of plastalum alloy, hurled armies of jagged shrapnel in every
direction, and dead-ended in the heart of Shinar's Primary Power
Junction Box. All ship-wide power systems failed immediately.
That first collision lifted the gargantuan vessel from it course
and slammed it hard-over. In machinery areas throughout the ship,
soft human bodies were ground to pulp beneath shifting, unyielding
metal. Airtight doors banged open and could not reseal as bulkheads
compressed, warped, and folded inward. The spine of the vessel
snapped; then it too folded. The atmosphere vanished in an instant.
Three hundred crew were dead, the rest doomed, before the ship had
spent ten seconds in normal-space.
Within those same ten seconds a lifelaunch flew clear of limp
hydraulic pinions and was driven to the opposite bulkhead, now thirty
feet below. The craft contained a small amount of air, and one
sleeping boy.
And then the rest of the meteor storm hit.
Utic Shinar cartwheeled through space as thousands more pieces of
the old wandering world ripped through its carcass. Piercing,
squealing shrieks of mangled metal tore at the boy in staccato
percussion-waves while the lifelaunch that held him tumbled in total
darkness, end over end, through the crazily spinning compartment.
Finally the craft jolted to a stop, suspended halfway between ship
and space, wedge tightly and bleeding, terrified, the boy vomited and
clamped his hands over his ears, gasping in the last few precious
breaths of air inside the life launch.
<Dead!> he thought. <I'm sixteen, a criminal, and dead!>
The boy groped blindly. Even panic was overwhelmed by the desperate
need to breathe. His entire being was focused on one thought: Reach
the air controls and set them to Autoflow. Outside this tiny one-
thought world withing the lifelaunch, oxygen tanks stored beneath the
hangar's deck-plates exploded. Flame flashed through the cavernous
compartment and died instantly as the unburned gas was sucked into
space. The force of the explosion kicked open the airlock door by a
few more inches. It was just enough. Boy and lifelaunch were suddenly
free, spinning wildly away from Shinar.
Disoriented by the sudden loss of all weight, the boy was thrown
face-first into the lifelaunch control panel, crushing his jaw. The
impact activated the ventilation Auto-flow, and the vessel's distress
beacon. The boy drifted freely in the small space, unconscious,
globules of his own blood and vomit flying around him in a microcosm
of the meteor storm that was passing outside.
The lifelaunch fell away into black, empty space.
Utic Shinar continued its death throes. For a short time, solenoids
sparked within servo-control valves in a vain attempt to shut and
seal ninety-three twisted airtight doors. Emergency generators whined
to life, only to die each time as crushed and shredded cables were
unable to transfer current.
For that eternally short time there were ment and women aboard Utic
Shinar who did not know the extent of the damage, and who therefore
believed that despite the devastation they could see from their
limited vantage points, they and the ship might survive. These were
the Ready Crews, who had been standing by in full suits for the shift
to normal-space. Now they continued to stand by, helpless, without
power for their tools or emergency lights. They spoke to one another
through battery-powered communicators intelligibly and calmly for as
long as they could. Their deaths were the cruelest, because they
would be such a very long time in dying.
The only component abour Utic Shinar that still functioned properly
was the self-contained bank of distress beacons. The radio signals
would travel for sexteen days before reaching Earth.
When help arrived fifty days later, only the boy was alive. Not one
of the 1,180 carefully selected crew and scientists sent out on
Shinar as "The Pride of ALL Nations" survived. Thus ended the first
great expedition under the aegis of UTIC, Universal Terramorphic
Industries Corporation. The grand adventure had lasted for exactly
nineteen days, forty minutes and nine seconds.
The death of Utic Shinar, and the miraculous survival of young
Ranma Saotome, would come to be known--for good or bad; opinion would
vary--as the single most significant event of the twenty-second
century.
(to be continued...)
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