Martin Jelinek was born too soon. He knew it as well as he knew the bunk above his at the barracks, as well as he knew his expected survival rates for the next mission, as well as he knew the war.
It wasn't a rare assessment, really. Every era had a few people out of place. But most of them were unknown decades gone, tossed aside by a history that never cared about them.
Martin missed his window by six months, and cutting things that close had the suspicious feeling of a personal grudge. Six months earlier, and he might have been able to chance the Alaya-Vijnana surgery, be a Gundam pilot. He could sell his body and soul for the power to save the world. Instead, he was just another cog in the machine. Another...
"Hey! You awake?"
Another poor son-of-a-bitch who couldn't even close his eyes without the apocalypse intruding. A fresh faced recruit was staring him in the face. Blonde, cleancut and smiling, right off the most obnoxious class of recruitment posters.
Martin gave him five minutes once the shooting started, and he knew he was being generous.
"What do you want?"
"Bridge spotted an Ahab signature. Looks like our bird. The Lady's going to give us a pep talk and then it's all scramble who can scramble."
The young man, whoever he was, was smiling. Martin couldn't properly remember why anyone would do something that stupid with his face, but he could at least guess.
"Your first flight?"
"That obvious? Yeah. Spent a long time getting ready… I had family in Sydney, you know? Can't bring 'em back, but I can send a few of those things to join them. You've been in combat before, then?"
"Two drops."
"Heh. Guessing that makes both of us rookies, then? Got any tips?"
"No."
"No, as in 'I ain't no rookie, son.' or no as in 'you have to sink or swim on your own.'?"
"Yes."
"Suit yourself. Just don't steal my kills, okay? Don't want to go to hell without something to show for it."
"Can't go someplace when you're already there."
But the idiot was gone. Martin wiped the dust off his jacket and walked for the hanger deck. Two drops down as disposable cannon fodder. About time his luck ran out.
The door beckoned. And Martin stepped deeper into hell.
'The Lady' Bauduin was waiting with a speech (funny how in a society of supposed equals there were already titles and rankings.), but it was hard to notice her, even on the display. After all, she was human. And the room held more amazing things than that. Hosts of armors, tall enough to reach the ceiling, weapons that could burn away whole cities. And in the center of it all, the demon Kimaris, marquis of hell and fearless warrior.
An army fit to storm heaven. And perhaps even enough to kill an angel.
"Ahem!"
Martin snapped back to the screen. A woman stared back at him, or a girl. Someone caught in the middle of an awkward growth spurt that no-one in the room would live to see the end of, with the bearing of an ancient knight and the naivety to believe it mattered.
"I see before me the brave young men and women of Gjallarhorn. I see before me the hope for mankind. Where the past, where the older generations built machines that would destroy our worlds for a chance at power and was consumed by them, I see before me the future, those who would sacrifice their very humanity to protect others. When the stars are clean and the angels have fallen, they will still remember our glory. We fight the war at the end of all wars, with the demons themselves bowing before us to offer their aid. I could not die in better company."
The woman smiled.
"The armor is waiting for us in the shoal fields, the place it has left so many of its victims, so many of the champions who sought to slay it. If God favored us, we would have allies and support, more Gundams in position. But heaven has abandoned us, and hell is our domain. Let us show the angels their folly!"
She vanished into the Gundam, and the crowd dispersed to their machines. Martin scrambled over a fuel truck towards his Rodi. As he approached the cockpit, he banished his fears, as best he could, and ran through the pre-flight checklist. Fueled. Ammo loaded. All systems operational. Say what you would about the coffin. At least it was going to deliver a full service funeral.
The comms buzzed, a faint crackle punching through the buzz of the Ahab.
"Hey! Looks like we're wingmen on this one! Going to show me how three missions of experience flies?"
The Australian. Perfect. When you were probably going to die already, it was for the best to partner with someone who made you long for the end. No point in missing something you could never get back.
"If I live long enough. You know your assignment."
It wasn't a question. It was almost begging. It wasn't like the screening process was that effective at the best of times, not with the limited pool of pilots this side of the grave, but they surely couldn't have fallen that far. Even the Australian had to recognize the most basic duties of a pilot of Gjallarhorn in a crisis.
"Of course."
See? It would be… no worse than usual, except in all the ways the assignment was a disaster already. They would only be engaging in the middle of a storm of wreckage, during a major breakdown of the laws of physics due to Ahab wave interactions, with no real other ships arriving to support them. Nothing more than that. With odds like those, it was hardly a wonder that there were still well over a billion people alive in the Earth sphere.
"Kick ass, take names, and take down a mobile armor to earn my order. Nothing to it."
It was a wonder there was anyone alive in the Earth sphere.
"You know what happens when standard mobile suits go against an armor, don't you?"
It was funny, but a shrug had a distinct sound, even over the intercom.
"They fare better than anyone else in their way. Death or glory, right?"
Martin only hoped his shaking head could accomplish the same feat.
"We're here to tie up the Pilla and give Kimaris a clean path. We can find enough death that way for your needs. Save the glory for the demons."
"And save the lectures for the classroom. I may have skimmed some of the reading, but I saw the survival odds, same as you. Which means I know that I can go out big or I can go out whining and cowering like you seem to think will look better in Valhalla. We're heroes. Act like one."
Martin readied a response. After all, the only heroes he knew were floating in the void, like Aussie boy was going to be, or damned like the Lady. The point was to avoid being a hero as long as possible, and it would be pretty easy to say so. But another voice cut him off with a better argument against bravado.
"System checks complete. All pilots report status."
"Rodi pilot Martin Jelinek, reporting in. Boosters fueled. Ammunition loadout full. Ready to deploy."
"Prepare to launch in five…"
The floor dropped out. And the void rushed in. The stars were hidden behind lightning and walls of steel, the comms were drowned out by the static of countless ghosts, and any hope died when a beam lit up another mobile suit just behind Martin, condemning another to the graveyard. He kicked on the thrusters and fell deeper into the shoal.
A pluma caught him on the way down, hidden in the storm. The reflexes that came with two drops were just enough to cost his mobile suit the use of an arm instead of destroying the cockpit, but they weren't good for much beyond that. There was an automated monster pinning down his right, and his left had about five seconds to make a move if he didn't want to lose everything.
He fired the charges, burning away the connection between the his gun arm and the main suit. Better to lose one arm than both. Better to lose both than to go out that way, watching your death inch closer without a single damn thing you could do to stop it.
The arm detached, and Martin twisted his Rodi's remaining arm to his axe and slammed into the attached Pluma with the force of a meteor, knocking the angel's servant back enough to fire the thrusters and retreat through the carnage of a hundred long dead armors and the fresh drifting corpses. It was a nightmare.
It didn't get much better from there. Every second was spent watching his death inch closer, or seeing someone else take death's attention for a tick of the clock, a slight delay at the cost of some other poor bastard. He'd never seen so many Pila, illuminated by the light of energy beams reducing the most invulnerable armor to nothing. Hope was the only thing more fragile than human life in the shoal.
Only a few moments stood out from the mayhem. Glimpses of the demon.
Martin had never properly seen a Gundam in action before. Survival had been too pressing, their fights were too swift and too distant. But now he was all but sure to die, his focus drifted. And the Gundam and the armor snatched it up every time they appeared.
Kimaris was the wind, a meteor, lightning. It made an impact and was gone before anything could respond, leaving nothing but the mark of its lance, dodging around the debris of the battlefield (including what looked to be the Australian's mobile suit, from the markings) like it was empty air.
Slowly, the demon became the center of his battlefield. Drawing too close would draw the armor. Straying too far would leave a ful swarm of Pluma, death for his badly damaged mobile suit. In the middle, he could survive a little longer, an odd little satellite for a brutal little battle in a doomed little system. Equilibrium in the midst of madness.
He tried to pretend it could last. A demon and an angel, with a brutal and battered little human to watch their eternal waltz, a man somehow apart from his kin, dead or dying.
Even he wasn't stupid enough to believe it.
Martin's radio crackled. For a moment, he expected the voice of a god or a devil on the line, something to suit the occasion. Instead, it was just the Lady.
"Pilot! Excellent! We have our chance."
"What?"
"I could use…"
A beam pierced the emptiness between them.
"Assistance."
"I'm not sure my suit's in any shape…"
"I just need a moment's distraction. A chance to end this so-called angel with one clean strike. From its motions, it has not yet recovered from its last encounter with our lost associate Caim. We have an opportunity for the glory of seizing a fallen star, avenging our lost, and ending an enemy of man in one swift stroke. I need one chance. We won't live to see a better one."
"And for me?"
There was a pause, filled with the silence of dead souls and empty space.
"A noble death. I cannot promise any better. The same as every other soldier fallen in the service of mankind."
More silence on Martin's end. A little less on the Lady's.
"Our only other choice is both our deaths, not long after your failure, followed by the deaths of millions more. I wish…"
"Fine."
Either a cough or a crackle of static punched through the Ahab radiation to Martin's cockpit.
"Oh. Good."
"Like you said, I'm a dead man. Never had a choice in that. Always the same for the little guys, when someone 'important' has a job to do."
"I was never…"
"Was. Now you're a big shot hero, or trying to be, and that's probably going to stay around as long as you live. And I'm going to be dust. So you do your job, and I'll do mine."
"Thank you, pilot."
"It's… you know what? Pilot will do."
Martin turned off his communications, and looked towards the mobile weapon. Looked towards his death. It was funny. The thing looked less terrible up close. Or maybe he was just content to know it would follow after him soon enough, his death the last thing it would ever see.
Maybe he'd been wrong all along.
Maybe he'd been born at just the right time.
And with that last thought, Gjallarhorn Rodi pilot third class Martin Jelinek faded into stardust.
(Author's notes: It's a bit short, a bit rushed, and this might be made impossible to reconcile with canon in just a couple days, but when the muse strikes, it strikes. Hearing about the Calamity War in episode thirty five of Iron Blooded Orphans really made me want to write something about it. As I said, it's less refined than I like, but I feel like I still managed a bit of something decent. Hopefully decent, at least. Not really my place to judge.
Hope you liked, feel free to say why if you didn't, and thanks for reading.)