Respect between Enemies – The BetanWerecat
Gundam Seed: "Descending Sword" and after. OCs with appearances by canon characters. The actions of Kira, Athrun, and the others have far reaching effects. Not all things that begin as acts of war must stay such. Rated T for language and openly acknowledged but off screen activity. (Reviews are welcomed but not required. This is written only for my own enjoyment. Flaming me will get you ignored.)
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Seed.
It was a beautiful day. Crisp, clear, the kind of day only Alaska seemed to produce. You could see forever in the clean air, your vision hampered only by the fleecy clouds. It was, according to the Elders, the perfect kind of day to die.
Lt. Kayla Grayhawk pulled her mobile armor hard to her starboard as she dropped her ship's nose to slide under the fire of the GINN on her tail. She'd been in this battle for maybe fifteen minutes now, a lifetime in this place where the EA was outnumbered and outgunned so badly. Damn it! This fight was supposed to be taking place at Panama! That's where everyone said ZAFT was going to strike! And that's where all the rest of the 421st Air Wing was waiting for them. If her ship had been repaired on time, she wouldn't even be here.
But it hadn't been ready yesterday when the 3d Squadron had gone south. And she was here today. And so was ZAFT. In force. Where they weren't supposed to be either.
She could hear one of the few fighter squadrons left pleading for support. But the only thing coming back was the endlessly repeated loop from Command ordering everyone to stand their ground to the bitter end. Fat lot of good that was doing anyone now! Why didn't someone just shut the damned thing off?
The GINN behind her fired again. This time she was forced to roll to port. Shit! This was getting to be a bad habit. This bastard was driving her farther and farther from the base at Josh-A. The frantic chatter in her headset was slowly diminishing as the Earth forces were being cut down back there behind her. She needed to get turned around and back in the main fight! But the GINN following her was too good. She was barely staying out of his targeting ring as it was.
The problem was, the Moebius Zero was designed for space and this was an inside atmosphere fight. Even though hers was fitted out with enough wing surface to handle being in an atmosphere, that didn't really make it combat worthy no matter what the upper echelon people thought. The GINN on the other hand, was designed to handle both space and atmosphere combat. And it was a mobile suit, not mobile armor. It was a lot more adaptable and maneuverable than her ship. Kayla needed a break, something to distract the GINN pilot for a couple of seconds.
The arrival of another GINN right in her path wasn't exactly what she'd had in mind. However, this new guy clearly wasn't as fast on the uptake as the one behind her. He seemed to have an attitude as well; the familiar one she'd seen from some Coordinators before that just assumed they were automatically better than any Natural just because they were there. It was an attitude a smart Natural could use to her advantage. Kayla was a very smart Natural; she had no trouble slipping over his wild shooting to fly right over his shoulder, chewing large pieces out of him as she went by. His wretched aim had the added bonus of forcing the other GINN to dodge the 'friendly' fire, reducing his targeting percentage on her Zero even further.
Suddenly, she had a shield from the persistent first GINN. It would only last a second or two; she was going to have to guess correctly on which way the other pilot would turn and turn the other way. She chose port.
The GINN pilot had picked starboard. She saw that at once as her ship came around hard. He was out of line and still mostly blocked by the incompetent in the second GINN. She wasted no time. Her pods separated from the main hull and she fired.
This time the new GINN lost both legs, the left wing and left arm. She missed the cockpit though as the pilot finally realized he was in serious trouble and threw his machine into a sharp reverse climb she couldn't quite match. She settled for what she could get, killing the machine even if she couldn't have the pilot too. Her score was now three DINNs and one GINN. Too bad it wasn't going to matter one little damn in this battle.
The ruined GINN immediately fell away towards the sea so far below. Kayla kept firing, aiming now at the first GINN as she closed the distance at high speed. Her only hope with a mobile suit was to hit it hard and fast. To do that, she had to get close, so close the damn thing couldn't use it's superior mobility to dodge.
The GINN pilot was a real master of his machine. The professional in her could only admire the skill that kept him out of the most serious of her fire. She was chipping him but she wasn't knocking him down. And in three seconds she was going to shoot past him, giving him a clean shot at her back. For a split second, Lt. Kayla Grayhawk looked again at the Alaskan sky. The Elders were right. It was a good day to die.
Adrian Ito was reminded one more time how stupid it was to assume just being a Coordinator made one automatically superior to every Natural. The pilot of this damn mobile armor was one slippery bastard. He'd chased the Natural a good five minutes and hadn't been able to take him down. Captain Thoms was going to read him the riot act for this! And now the son of a bitch had knocked Holman out of the sky too.
Well, if the fool survived, maybe he'd finally learn to respect a top gun pilot whoever they were. The rest of the Thoms Team had finally shut up about this guy at least. So they'd noticed at last that he wasn't your average Earth Alliance idiot. Oh no, this one was a whole lot better than the EA could usually put up.
If he hadn't flown against him once and so knew the difference in combat style, Adrian would be tempted to think this was the Hawk of Endymion. This was a Moebius Zero in front of him after all. But the Hawk was a lot more aggressive than this pilot and a lot less evasive. An in-your-face fighter style characterized the Hawk. This guy was more a hit-and-run expert. Both of 'em could do a whole lot of damage in a real short time though. It had taken this Natural what, five whole seconds to put Holman out of action?
A hasty check of his screens showed him two more of his Team coming up fast. The Natural had this one pass to take him out before there were three of them on his tail. And no matter how good he was, no Natural was going to come out of it with three expert Coordinator pilots after him when he was completely unsupported himself. Even if the others had elected to sacrifice mobility for extended power by riding those ungainly GUUL's, the three of them were still more than the enemy pilot was going to be able to escape.
Adrian was catching nothing more than minor damage at the moment but it was taking everything he had to keep it that way. The Natural had a fine instinct for which way he was going to turn and only the faster reflexes of a Coordinator kept his GINN mostly out of the line of fire as the other tracked him nearly flawlessly. He didn't really get any opportunity to shoot back. That was going to change in scant seconds. The enemy flyer was going to overshoot him and then the advantage would be all his again.
The GINN rocked as the enemy ripped a noticeable chunk out of his lower left leg. That would weaken the leg and make landing interesting later. It was going to interfere with his flight characteristics as well. But it was not going to knock him down and it was the Natural's last shot before racing past.
Crap! Crap! Crap and shit! She'd missed taking the GINN down! And there was another pair of 'em coming up to support the one she'd been fighting all this while now. She hadn't really done much more than mess up his paintwork. Damn but he was good!
So, she was probably going to die today. Well that didn't mean she had to make it easy for them. Kayla proceeded to throw her ship all over the sky. She was headed back toward the Josh-A base now but holding anything like a straight line out in this sky was begging for a missile to hit you. Since she wasn't interested in meeting any missiles, she played dodge-em to a fair-thee-well. It also kept her out of the ring sights of the three GINNs now following her.
The sky in front of her told its own depressing story. She was getting readings on very few Alliance craft and those were growing fewer with frightening speed. On the water, the ships of the Eurasian Fleet were also disappearing quickly. Only the Eighth Fleet's Archangel seemed to be holding her own and even she was showing smoke and battle damage. On land, she could see a lot of smokes and damn little active fighting left. Yeah, ZAFT was definitely winning this one.
She was less than twelve miles out when her sensors told her someone behind her had finally gotten a target lock on her. She threw the ship wildly to starboard but the lock buzzer stayed on. Split seconds later the ship jumped out of control as enemy fire hit three of her four weapon's pods.
Kayla hit the ejector tabs and shed the ruined units before they could explode on her. They blew in her wake, right in front of the pursuing GINNs, forcing them to dodge around the erupting explosions. Then there were only two GINNs behind her, the third suddenly losing speed and altitude as it trailed smoke toward the shot-torn water below.
She was leaving a thin line of smoke behind her ship too she realized belatedly. The now unbalanced mobile armor was harder to handle, noticeably less responsive to the helm. Her heads-up graphics warned her she'd taken engine damage. The ship was not going to be flying much longer even if the enemy didn't shoot again. A line of laser pulses past her cockpit informed her the enemy was quite intent on helping her hit the ground sooner rather than later.
It was fast decision time. Kayla punched the last ejector and tossed off the remaining pod. She needed to balance the damaged ship a lot more than she needed the firepower now. This was no sky to try ejecting herself into either. The highest probability was the GINN pilots would just pick her off midair.
With the gun pod gone, the ship was a lot more stable. Maneuverability improved as well. She could dodge again almost as well as before and now she was a much smaller target. The enemy fire was now forcing her more and more to move to starboard, toward land and the advancing ZAFT ground forces there. Well, that might be useful.
There was a strip of open ground about three miles to her starboard. It backed up on a pretty open cliff, which was not inviting, but there was no other space down there that wouldn't put her immediately in the center of a small forest fire. It was going to have to do.
A set of wild rolls and turns let her shed altitude and line herself up on the open strip. The GINNs were still behind her but she'd lost so much altitude so quickly there they were far above her now and were going to overshoot her in a second. They would be back fast enough but she couldn't worry about that now. She had to put the ship on the ground in the next twelve seconds and get herself away from it.