Christmas Update! Sorry I haven't been able to write recently, but, well, MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Chapter 2: The Melancholy of Giroro

The return ship harboring the platoon didn't have much in the way of luxury. Besides a few comfy chairs and a mini-fridge, the ship was quite bare. A cluster of whirring dials and spiking gauges lined the walls on the west side of the ship. A weapon cache stocked with Keron's finest armaments lay in the back, and on the Eastern wall, a sliding metal door with a machine gun turret.

Keroro eyed the display with slight distaste gracing his lips. Surely they deserved something more than a simple fighter ship. The rest of the platoon had fanned out across the ship, silently doing what they could to keep their minds off what they had left behind and worse, what lay ahead.

The Sergeant felt a twinge of regret in his mind looking at the Corporal. Perhaps it wouldn't have hurt to let him say goodbye as it was very possible that he might never see them again. "Well, too late now," Keroro voiced out loud, "The only way is forward."

Giroro lay in the back of the weapons cache polishing the weapons and getting lost in his own mind. He aimlessly caressed the titanium with his cleaning cloth and wondered what Natsumi was doing back on Pekopon. Had she realized that he was missing? Did she care?

Giroro snorted to himself: of course she wasn't worried about him, he was a highly trained weapons specialist well versed in all facets of the mental and physical aspects of war. She was just a normal human girl. There would be others, Keronian women that would tempt his fancy.

"Maybe I should just…forget about Natsumi," he breathed quietly, as if testing to see if the words would even pass his lips. Involuntarily, his trigger finger contracted as his body rejected the very thought of leaving the woman he loved. In his absentmindedness, he had forgotten to pull the live charge from the barrel of his bazooka. With any other weapon, it would have been OK. Just noise and maybe a small chain reaction, but the laser bazooka could punch through just about anything.

Giroro watched in horror as the beam left the barrel and his vision was engulfed in flames. The last thing he could recall was being sucked into the cold vacuum of space.

Kururu's Ship

In no time at all, Kururu and the rest of the Pekopon gang was hurtling toward Keroro's fighter. Being quite the engineer, the Sergeant Major's craft could go many times faster than the basic ship and in minutes, Natsumi spotted Keroro in the distance. Suddenly there was a bright flash and the back of the ship exploded launching debris deep into space.

Kururu scratched his head while the others screamed in dismay. Personally, he knew nobody had gotten hurt; it was probably just a spark and a slight tilt of the ship that caused the detonation. By regulations, until authorized, no soldier less than Lieutenant rank could enter the blast doors containing the weapons cache. If Keroro and the crew knew anything about how a military operation worked, it was the safety and authorization protocol.

Something interesting caught Kururu's eye as he flew in closer to survey the wreckage. Using thermal vision to track a hot ship in the cold of space was a smart move. He could easily scan around and search for a small vessel with four occupants with Keronian heat signatures. However, the ship he was approaching with four beings suddenly had only three after the blast.

"There's only three people in the ship now…did something happen to Uncle?" Kururu jumped in his seat.

"Mois, when did you board this ship?" questioned the Sergeant Major, slightly upset that he had not been aware of something.

"Well," Mois giggled, "my Lucifer Spear can do a lot more than just cause the end of the world, you know!"

Teleportation and phone capabilities in a handheld WMD…Kururu ground his teeth. How did the Angols get their hands on that kind of stuff? With a grunt to cover his embarrassment, the Sergeant Major returned to the task at hand. He typed quickly on the control keyboard and established radio contact with Keroro's smoldering ship.

Keroro's Ship

Dororo was the first to recover from the blast as he had leaped toward the wall and secured himself to the wall. Letting himself down, he hauled Tamama into a sitting position. He had been about to dig into a pile of cake when the force of the blast drove his head into the wall and the cake into his face. On the other side of the room nearest the captain's chair, Keroro slowly staggered to his feet.

Dororo quickly assessed the damage. The weapon cache had been completely obliterated. Only a few weapons survived and they were burnt and bent beyond recognition. The gauges and dials on the west were slightly scorched, but the reinforced glass that housed them had held fast. The sliding door for the machine gun had held fast, but the gun itself was lying on the floor: the blast had completely ripped it from the mount. Since the compression system and the ammo belt was attached and welded from the base into the actual gun, repairing it would not be as simple as putting it back on top of the tripod.

Dororo sighed. While two useful and probably expensive pieces of the ship had been damaged, the true precious cargo, the soldiers, had survived the blast. He looked around and smiled. Tamama was sleeping off the impact peacefully and Keroro was checking the basics functions of the ship for damages. Giroro was- Dororo's heart went cold and time stopped for a quiet second.

A call from Keroro shocked Dororo from his stupor. "HEY! Kururu has contacted us!"

Kururu face appeared on the screen. Without a pause, he opened with a very serious question: "Are all four of you on the ship?" Keroro was about to quickly answer an affirmative, but the Lance Corporal quickly put a hand on his shoulder. Keroro glanced around the compartment. From Tamama slouched on the wall, to Dororo and then back again.

"Where's Giroro?"

Kururu's Ship

Kururu banged his head against the keyboard in a rage. "I let you losers out of my sight for a second and you go make a big deal about nothing!" he grabbed his head and sighed, "When the explosion went off, the blast doors shut as a precaution! As you can see, there are only a few mangled weapons outside the blast doors. If they weren't there, there would be shrapnel all over the floors…and you all would be dead."

"Excellent," Keroro exclaimed, wiping a bit of sweat off his brow, "We'll just open the blast doors then. Our Corporal may be injured, but with your ship's first aid supplies, we should have no problem." Typing furiously on the computer, the Sergeant tapped in the passwords to open the blast doors. He met with unexpected resistance.

When he told Kururu over the video chat what was going on, Kururu grew even more agitated. "I hope to god that you remember the password."

"Of course I remember them! What kind of soldier do you take me for?"

"No comment 'leader'. Anyway, if the passwords aren't working, the shockwaves must have messed something in the circuitry. If I were on board, it would be no sweat, but since it's just you and Dororo, you'll just have to pull the manual override switch and open the gates that way.

Keroro sniffed at Kururu's attitude. "There's a reason that I'm the leader and not you."

Sergeant Keroro pulled the lever and the locks on the blast door disengaged with a hiss. Slowly, it lifted and the two plus Kururu watching from the video screen were horrified by what they saw. The back of the ship had been completely blasted off. Only empty space lay beyond the door and worse, Giroro was nowhere to be found.

Keroro whipped around; panic now flooding his heart, "You told me he was in there! You told me that the ship could survive a blast like that!"

"I wasn't mistaken…" muttered Kururu, suddenly at a loss for words. Suddenly, a thought came to him. There was only one thing that could have created a hole like that. A laser bazooka could quickly break through the reinforced metal. The explosion would have been severe and death would be swift. Had Giroro done it on purpose? Would he rather die than leave the woman he loved? Was his devotion that strong? Questions that he couldn't answer and subjects he never studied circled in Kururu's head.

The dam burst. Natsumi couldn't take it anymore. If something happened to Giroro so early in their life together…Aki, Koyuki, Momoka, and Fuyuki huddled in a corner.

Finally, within docking range, Kururu's vessel attached itself to Keroro's ship. To anybody passing by, it would have looked like Keroro parked his small fighter on Kururu's larger transport ship because of the size difference. Immediately after the "seatbelt" and "no-smoking" lights went out, Natsumi ripped off the belt and charged through the docking door and entered Keroro's ship.

"Stupid frog!" she cried, fear and anger mixed into a strangled cocktail in her voice, "What happened to Giroro. Why didn't he give me a heads-up? Why did he not even say good-bye?

Keroro looked solemnly at Kururu. "You've committed countless crimes by bringing these humans along with you on a classified mission. You may be put in prison when this is all over you know."

"I'd do it again in a second," answered Kururu without blinking an eye, "Do you not think that I would factor legal ramifications into my decision to bring them along? We need all the help we can get, and last time I checked, Natsumi's skill as a warrior is equal or even greater than Giroro's-

"WHERE IS GIRORO!"

Natsumi looked wildly from sleeping Tamama, to sullen Kururu, to Keroro and Dororo who were avidly avoiding her gaze. The message couldn't be clearer. Wordlessly, the rest of the platoon lead a shocked girl back into Kururu's ship before taking off again, course set for Keron. As the disabled ship slowly disappeared in the window, a single tear rolled down Natsumi's cheek. Aki tried to console her, but the girl heard nothing. As the ship disappeared completely, the single tear suddenly turned into a torrent as Natsumi realized and comprehended fully the gravity of the situation.

As she slowly cried herself to sleep, Keroro grimly marked Keron on the GPS. Whoever had caused Keron to send the distress call and send the platoon on this ill-fated mission was going to pay.