"Switching to instruments only. Out."
- Michael Payton, Viper
"This makes no sense."
- Gale Boetticher, Breaking Bad
The crumpled hull of the Verteidiger sat in a crater in the ruins of Berlin. The once amazing military marvel had been reduced to a scrap heap, smoke billowing from its damaged armor, fuel and fluids spilling out like opened veins. The crippled TSFs of the Schwarzesmarken team were motionlessly scattered around it like cattle out to slaughter.
Too easy, Beatrix thought to herself as she surveyed the damage from the air. To think everything would end so quickly, so easily, after dealing with these disgusting rebels for so long. The most entertaining thing was she never even planned on taking down the mighty Verteidiger. She had been a second away from finishing off one of the pathetic members of Schwarzesmarken when the Verteidiger erratically swerved into her sights and took the shot.
Beatrix's grudge against that particular machine cut deep. The Verteidiger's pilot escaped custody and took the experimental craft with her, but that wasn't the worst part of it. She had hijacked a massive cache of Stasi resources on her way out, which she was using to keep the Verteidiger in working condition with minimal underground support. Its mere appearance had become a mockery of everything the Stasi stood for.
Now sweet revenge would belong to Beatrix.
Being incinerated alive in a fiery explosion was always a good death for worthless sub-human scum. Beatrix focused her Aligatori's crosshairs at an exposed fuel pod on the crippled Verteidiger.
Inghiiiiild!
Jo struggled to regain her senses in the Verteidiger's cockpit. Alarms screamed at her. Her optics filled with flashing alert messages informing her of systems failures in virtually every section of the craft. Gravity pulled on her at an awkward sideways slant, and she could feel heat and smoke gradually rising underneath her.
But Jo couldn't focus on any of those things. All of the urgent sounds were muffled in the back of her head, while the world was drained of most of its color. The thing that sat in the front of her mind was the 30-second-old memory of that girl in the MiG-23—Anett, was that her name?—screaming in despair. The sound of that voice had come through Jo's comms link at the exact moment she had veered in the way of Beatrix's attack.
Inghiiiiild!
The voice looped through her disoriented mind every few seconds. Jo could feel something more and more horrifyingly familiar about it each time.
Why had she done it? Why had she sacrificed everything to protect this one arbitrary pilot? Up until now she had remained on her own side in Berlin's civil war. A few weeks ago, Anett had been making an impassioned plea for Jo to join their team, begging her to remember the life they supposedly lived together. This girl insisted that the two of them had been comrades when the war broke out, and they were best friends before that. Jo ended up turning her back, stoically walking away from the Schwarzesmarken group and toward the vacant Verteidiger in front of her. Behind her, Anett was sobbing uncontrollably. Jo had felt the human half of her heart sinking ever so slightly when she walked away. But even then, she had vowed to remain on the outside.
Inghiiiiild!
The Stasi told her she was a piece of hardware, a mechanical whore designed to lay down for West German propaganda. The Schwarzesmarken insisted she was supposed to be one of them. The only one she could trust was herself. Between the Verteidiger's ruthless West German inventors, the East German Stasi, and the Schwarzesmarken rebelling in the middle, the weapon could easily wind up in the wrong hands on any side.
And yet, all of her cold determination had been thrown aside in one fateful instant. Jo barely had any idea who Anett was, but for that one moment the only instinct in her mind had been to defend her.
Defend her.
What was Jo's consciousness trying to tell her?
Inghiiiiild!
Jo started to lose focus as the smell of smoke grew stronger. The prosthetic circuitry that had been implanted throughout her body had been constructed from the same hardware as the Verteidiger's systems. She was dying with her ship.
Suddenly, time shifted in reverse.
Inghiiiiild!
The fire burning through Berlin turned into snow. The bombed out cityscape was replaced with arctic tundra.
The Aligatori firing its rifle at Anett turned into a hidden Destroyer-class charging out of a drift.
INGHIIIIILD!
The voice became more vivid. That hollow, distant sound moved closer so it was like a live feed in Jo's ear.
She remembered.
She dove in front of the Destroyer so she could defend Anett. TSF collided with BETA as Jo absorbed most of the attack with her front fuselage. Sparks flew. Metal screamed and buckled. Bones pulverized. Organs squashed together in ways God never intended.
INGHIIIILD!
Memory stopped. Reality began. Anett was desperately screaming her name on the radio while the dislodged upper portion of her MiG spun wildly through the air. She was breathing her final agonizing breaths even before she crashed back down into the snow.
Her cockpit was open. Irisdina—she knew it was her now—was standing in the collapsed frame pointing the pistol at her. But unlike in all of those nightmares that haunted her, Jo wasn't afraid this time. She didn't try to scream. She would have told Irisdina not to feel guilty, it was okay to pull the trigger, if her vocal chords were still working. She felt… relieved.
She heard the first millisecond of a gunshot.
They say you see a light when you die. They say you should always head toward it, it's there to guide you and comfort you. The light Jo saw was anything but comforting.
A massive surgical lamp blinded her. A circle of masked, silhouetted faces hovered in front of the glare. They might as well have been enemy soldiers looming over her, their heads outlined by the burning interrogation light.
Their distant voices echoed in and out of Jo's consciousness.
"…only thing we found relatively intact out there. Her squad didn't have enough time to collect the body before the next stampede. The BETA won't eat anything that's been dead for a while."
They fashioned themselves as miracle workers saving her life, but they were more like soulless grave robbers desecrating her corpse.
And she could feel it. The bones rendered to bloody paste by the Destroyer-class's charge, the wet crater between her eyes where Irisdina had delivered her mercy killing. The surgeons toiled over her to replace everything that had been lost, to bring her back as a different person.
"Should we allow the Schildmaid to use… that?"
"No. It would be far too dangerous to unleash it."
"We'll keep the trigger hidden from her neural link. She'll never even know it's there, unless she experiences a brainwave disruption and has to do a manual reconnect."
"What kind of disruption would it take?"
"She starts to remember who she is."
The Verteidiger moved. At first, Beatrix thought it was making one final miserable attempt to take to the air on its rent Jump Units. Then she realized only the upper half of the canopy was rising up, opening on a hinge and creating the illusion that it was growing taller.
She had seen this sort of desperation far too many times before. Jo was going to surrender herself and beg for her life.
Beatrix smirked. She would wait until the idiotic girl climbed out of her cockpit with her arms raised, then execute her personally. It was going to be like shooting traitorous flies off the Wall.
The canopy continued to peel upward, but the cockpit hatch still wasn't visible. The entire front fuselage was now split open like a giant serpent separating its jaw, revealing its damaged internals and expelling a glowing, dark violet vapor—the color of decayed G-elements.
If this were a normal fanfic, the worst thing that would happen was the Alvaaron from Gundam 00 would emerge from the Verteidiger's shell and force Beatrix into a close-range aerial battle.
This was not a normal fanfic.
The Verteidiger's hull divided into a honeycomb pattern. The segments shifted, rolled over one another, and merged. The craft drastically shrank in size as it quickly repaired itself, combining undamaged sections with the parts that had been compromised, and ejecting anything that had been destroyed entirely. It gradually molded into a long, curved shaped that sat close to the ground. The nose of the craft separated to reveal two narrow headlights—like snake's eyes—and a grill lined with armored fangs. The Jump Units moved to the rear and molded into a wide crescent-shaped spoiler. The canopy smoothed over and stretched into a black windshield. The TSF's limbs folded into circles and became chrome wheels. A shadow of the Verteidiger transforming into its new form was cast on the wall of a nearby building, years before the shadow of Yamashiro having her guts beautifully ripped out by the BETA would be cast on a similar wall.
Beatrix was frozen in shock. The incomprehensible thing in front of her looked as if someone had applied the Verteidiger's silver anti-Laser-class coating to a Dodge Pacifica concept car, but even that couldn't be right. This was 1983. The Pacifica wouldn't be revealed for another six years.
What kind of unholy demon-machine had those West German pigs given birth to?
Behind the pitch black windshield, Beatrix could just make out the silhouette of the vehicle's lone driver. In her mind's eye, the windshield dissolved and she could plainly see the visage of a girl who wasn't real—the slightly restructured face, the artificial blue eyes, the surgically dyed freckles, and the pale blonde hair twisted back in those stupid Heidi pigtails: a pinnacle of feminine West German beauty. And hiding behind all the makeup, Beatrix could see Inghild.
A minute ago, the Werewolf Battalion had crushed the Schwarzesmarken-led resistance and ensured victory for the Stasi. Now the battalion was falling into disarray. Some fled. Others waited for Jo to make her next move.
"You know that girl back there?" Katrina said on the radio as her Cheburashka flew past Beatrix. "She reminds me of Bronikowski!"
"And she Eishis like her!" Nicola answered, buzzing Beatrix on the opposite side.
Beatrix wasn't exactly sure what would cause her two subordinates to say those things to each other. Inghild Bronikowski and the walking lie known as "Johanna Achterberg" were the same person. The Stasi's extensive surveillance files had proven this. The entire battalion had been briefed months ago.
The madness was only starting.
More of the Werewolves spontaneously retreated. Those who weren't smart enough to leave with their lives would face the Verteidiger's wrath.
"I can just see the headlines now! 'Disgruntled Ex-Employee Gets Killed in a SWAT Shootout'!" another withdrawing Werewolf shouted over the comms for reasons that would forever remain unexplained.
Rosalinde was one of the few to stay behind. Her Cheburashka began covering the Verteidiger in a hail of machine gun fire. Despite her bravery and determination, she seemed to have succumbed to the same lunacy as everyone else.
"Get out of the car, Astor!" she shouted oddly. "Get out of the car or go to Hell!"
The bullets bounced off the Verteidiger's armor like harmless grains of rice. Something vaguely resembling a TSF's auxiliary arm opened on the side of the transformed craft. The inside barrel began to glow like it were a Laser-class charging its lens.
The resulting attack wasn't an intense beam that instantly vaporized Rosalinde, but instead a condensed ball of lightning that struck her TSF and took all of its systems offline, sparing her life in the progress.
The Verteidiger's tires screamed as it began its race through the besieged streets of Berlin. Every time it made a sharp turn, it launched another glowing orb of static at one of the attacking Werewolves. When the orbs failed, the Verteidiger would fire grappling hooks from the same ports and use the wires to force the Werewolves to crash into each other. And every time it brought down another TSF, it did so in non-lethal fashion. It was almost as if Beatrix were watching an alternate version of Gundam SEED Destiny handled by a production team that actually understood character development and basic coherent story structure. Well, maybe not so much the "coherent" part, but you get the idea.
Jo caught Inga—the Werewolves' special Esper member—on her wires. Inga tried to tear away from the indestructible cables, going as far as hopping her Aligatori to the top of a building with the Verteidiger in tow. Jo remained vigilant, pressing on the brakes to keep Inga from getting too far.
Overwhelmed by the infectious insanity, Inga decided the only way out was to take her own life. Her Aligatori jumped head-first off the side of the building, finally creating enough force to snap free of the Verteidiger's grappling wire. The TSF crumpled like a tin can as soon as it hit the pavement, smearing Inga's soupy remains across the Berlin street.
When Beatrix was watching the live feed, Inga uttered a short fit of maniacal laughter and activated her Prafka just before she made the leap. Replaying the footage, Beatrix thought she heard the Esper girl shout "Don't be late for the party!" a second before splattering into the concrete. Those glowing eyes burned deep into her mind.
All that was left were Beatrix and one other Werewolf, and they were both in the path of the Verteidiger. In anger, Beatrix threw open her comms channel and screamed at the Cheburashka beside her.
"Hohenstein, deal with this traitor!"
There was no response. The Cheburashka simply stood at attention, perfectly functional but perfectly still.
"Open fire, Hohenstein!" Beatrix commanded with even more authority. "She's coming straight for you!"
Opening the video channel, Beatrix saw the hopeless state of her subordinate. Lise was staring at Beatrix through the link, but she acted as if there was nobody there. Her mouth was slightly agape. There was a vacant and strangely innocent look in her eyes. The Verteidiger's madness had completely crushed her mind.
"Mom, dad… what happens now?" Lise said in a small frightened voice.
Jo bypassed Lise and moved straight for Beatrix. In emergency, Beatrix opened the radio frequency that would patch her straight to the Ministry building. She expected to hear the calm and collected voice of Schmidt asking her about the situation in Berlin. Instead he was shouting at the top of his lungs as soon as the channel opened. And what he said was enough to drive Beatrix herself to the brink.
"I want the Viper OFF the streets, once and for all!"
He slammed the channel shut as soon as he finished speaking. Beatrix was alone.
The Verteidiger veered toward the back of Lise's Cheburashka. It accelerated onto the ends of her Jump Units, using her as a ramp and launching itself over the shoulders of her TSF. The vehicle became airborne and flew straight into Beatrix's trajectory.
Beatrix started to raise the Aligatori's shield. The world moved in slow motion as the Verteidiger inched closer and closer and Beatrix braced for impact. Against all rhyme and reason, a bizarre string of words suddenly escaped her mouth.
"You're not going to have me stuffed and mounted!"
An instant before the Verteidiger was in contact range, Beatrix gasped at what she saw in her optics. The vehicle's fangs popped out of its grill like titanium battering rams. When the machines collided, one of the fangs smashed through Beatrix's cockpit door and instantly crushed her ribcage.
Jo and Beatrix went into a freefall together. Impaled on her seat, blood frothing from her mouth, Beatrix could see the Verteidiger's weapons port opening directly in front of her with her bare eyes.
"And the outside port houses the Tunneler Missile. It carries an explosive payload. It's unguided, it's basically used to clear obstacles."
The missile left the Verteidiger's launcher, traveled forward three feet, and struck the Aligatori's exposed cockpit at point blank range. Major Beatrix Brehme was terminated with extreme prejudice.
Jo landed her fighter just in front of one of the Schwarzesmarken MiGs, guiding the legs into a kneeling position. Frantically, she climbed out of the Verteidiger's cockpit and rappelled to the ground. It was true that the Verteidiger was armed with an alternate mode Jo had only miraculously discovered at the last minute. It was also true that the craft had expelled high levels of waste material when it was ejecting its damaged components, and she had been cautious to direct the plume away from the disabled Schwarzesmarken team. Everything that happened after that was anyone's guess. The mysterious vapor had driven the Werewolves out of their minds. Jo didn't want to think about what they might have hallucinated.
She quickly found the lever for the MiG-23's external emergency hatch and released the lock. Her greatest fear was to find Anett hopelessly mangled and in indescribable misery, the same way they had found her that day.
Jo ducked down as the door blew open. The frame was still scorching hot and she was petrified of what she might find inside, but she had to see for herself.
Anett was motionless at first. She began to stir as the light washed over her eyelids, and then slowly she looked up. Nothing was broken. There were no signs of internal injury. The only things that made her look worse for wear were a few bruises and a small trickle of blood sliding down her temple.
"Inghild…" She gasped tiredly, squinting in one eye. A weak teasing smile started to form across her mouth. "You should really learn some new skills instead of throwing yourself in the way all the time."
"Anett!" Jo dove into the cockpit with tears in her eyes, wrapping her arms around her friend.
Author's note: Is my credit rating in there? I was thinking about buying a condo.