Soldier of OZ: Walker's Account
Chapter 3 – Khushrenada's Secret, I
One month since the Battle of Corsica, Nairobi Air Force Base.
Since the "end" of martial law in East Africa in AC 181, Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, southeast of Nairobi, had been militarized into the headquarters of the East African Air Army, the third of the three Alliance Air Armies in the African Continent—one for each Alliance military district. Though it was staffed by civilian and military workers, Bantu people from throughout the country, the actual military mobile suit presence, as well as much of the rest of the Alliance Army and a large portion of the Alliance Air Force personnel, originated from throughout Europe and Asia. Accordingly, they had no idea who Jomo Kenyatta was, and the installation was almost universally referred to as "Nairobi Air Force Base." Civilian traffic had been diverted to other airports in the region, like Moi.
Nairobi was strategically important to the Alliance—good access to multiple port-cities on the Indian Ocean via railways, close proximity to the dozen oil refineries in South Kenya that refined the imported crude oil that the UESA and the region as a whole needed.
Kenyan perceptions of the Alliance were a varied, but mostly positive. The elderly were direct witnesses to the extensive military campaigns conducted by the African Union with the formation of the United Earth Sphere Alliance sixty years ago. In the subsequent half-century, there had only been one "hot war" in the entirety of continental Africa, at the Battle of Mogadishu, an impressive feat. Years before, in AC 139, the UESA had allowed the relatively bloodless three-day annexation of all twelve districts of South Somalia by Kenya. This wasn't an exaggeration: since its founding, the Alliance had not lost a single formal war against any particular country, from the Republic of Utah to the Sanc Kingdom. On the increasingly rare occasions that Alliance soldiers engaged the remains of what had been the world armies, the Alliance consistently obliterated the opposition. Part of that was the edge supplied by mobile suits; the rest was the supremacy of Alliance tactics and numbers.
On the other hand, particularly in Nairobi, people were less enthralled with the heavy interference of the Alliance East African Military District on domestic politics. Centuries ago, in the dangerous neighborhood of Somalia, anarchy reigned and guns flowed. Nowadays, even the police didn't always carry firearms: everything was controlled by the Alliance, and the African Union.
Flight Lieutenant Oswald Walker actually liked Kenya. Particularly in Nairobi, the people were very cosmopolitan and reminded him a little of his childhood in Windsor in North America. Besides Swahili, they were fluent in English, which he couldn't say about every posting, and that made communication easy. On a personal level, they seemed impressed by his rank in the Speciali—that it was clear from his uniform that he wasn't one of the "Alliance riffraff" as they haughtily called them.
He was waiting for an assignment—there were two Speciali units in Nairobi, the 33rd Independent and the 19th Airborne Mobile Suit Battalions, but they were awaiting orders to be reassigned to India and elsewhere. The moment Walker had dreaded for years had come: for the first time in his career, Walker was one of the non assegnatti, the name for active-duty Speciali pilots who weren't attached to a Special Mobile Suit Division or Battalion. Practically all of them were attached to Alliance units—Zechs Merquise was a well-known example.
It was pretty normal for high-ranking Speciali, but for Walker, it was just a memory of how much he missed the Forty-Fourth. Serving with the Alliance Army Mobile Suit Troops was a reminder of just what separated them from the Speciali: for their part, the Alliance considered them upstarts, spoiled, dangerous brats. The Speciali considered the Alliance pilots rude, corrupt, and violent jarheads.
"Hey, Lieutenant, you still here?"
Walker was sitting in the open cockpit of an OZ-07AMS 'Aries', in Alliance cadet grey livery. Being a non assegnatti had given him more time to ply his engineer training, even if he found the Alliance Aries pilots a little obnoxious. Plus, if the call came, all non assegnatti would climb into Alliance mobile suits and fight, and potentially die, along their Alliance comrades. Even the Alliance pilots understood and appreciated that.
At the very least, throwing himself into engineering took his mind off what had happened at Lake Victoria. "Hey, Ozzie!" the same voice yelled.
For a second, Walker wondered if 'Ozzie' referred to his rarely-used given name. Probably not. Probably just OZ. "I'm in here Beauttah," he responded, flipping the master electronics back and forth.
Chief Engineer Beauttah, a Kenyan with almost twenty years in the Alliance Army technical services, treated the third hangar at Nairobi has his personal residence and the mobile suits in it as his possessions. Hangar No. 3 housed fourteen OZ-06MS 'Leo' mobile suits, including one command model, along with Nairobi's scant four Aries air defense machines, which Beauttah was charged with. He did not like Walker poking around, but there was little he could do about it.
Beauttah climbed up the ladder onto the gantry and peered into the Aries, as Walker tapped a finger against the top-left forward switch panel.
"Something the matter, sir?" Beauttah asked sarcastically.
"Unit three's turbofans," he asked, referring to the suit he was sitting in, "Are they Aviadvigatel or Pratt & Whitney?"
Beauttah frowned, leaned into the port top turbofan airtake, then turned back to him. "Pratt & Whitney."
Walker nodded in agreement. "Mmhmm. And tell me, for Pratt & Whitney E500-A6 turbofans, like this one, what's the thrust-to-weight ratio?"
"Eight-point-one to one, why?"
Walked pulled himself out of the cockpit, then jammed a stack of paper printouts into Beauttah's chest, and replied angrily, "Then why can't this unit break seven to one? Your Pratt & Whitney's either need overhaul or they need to be replaced."
Beauttah stared at Walker, confused, then past the silhouette of the Aries at the open hangar doors immediately behind it. Walker took the red pencil out from behind his ear, removed his goggles and replaced his garrison cap. "I knew I heard something half-an-hour ago! You bloody busybody, don't you have anything better to do with your time?"
"I'm amazed you can sleep through that," Walker countered, climbing onto the top rung of the ladder.
"Wait!" Beauttah reached into his work satchel and took something wrapped in wax paper. "This came for you, from that jeweler in Nairobi."
He tossed it to Walker, who caught it. Holding onto the ladder, he tore the wax paper open with his teeth and removed a layer of bubble wrap to reveal a small, polished disk of titanium with chrome electroplating.
"What's that?" Beauttah asked.
"You've never seen a mobile suit pennant before?" he asked, holding it up. The pennant medallion bore the emblem of the Special Mobile Suit Troops, a defaced Alliance coat-of-arms, and a small inscription.
"Not really, no. What are they for?"
"Well, if you belong to an old family or clan, you have one of these things engraved with your coat of arms and your motto. Identification's etched on the back. It's designed to survive a crash or even an ammunition explosion. I don't personally, but I still have a slot in the center of my machine's seat over the battery access to mount one." They're rare in the Alliance, but all Speciali have them, even those from the proletariat. And I doubt they'll find mine.
"So what does yours say?"
He looked at it. "When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things." He looked back up at the chief engineer.
"That's from First Corinthians," Beauttah said, his voice softer. "I didn't know you were religious."
"I'm not. On the contrary, I'm an atheist. But I do enjoy that saying. Oh, and by the way, the semi-active radar guidance is sketchy. Seems like voltage fluctuations. If active radar and laser go down or aren't available, the backup better damn well work flawlessly."
With his leather gloves Walker slid down to hangar floor and walked over to his motorcycle, leaving Beauttah up there.
"Oh, how about I just install a wire-guide? That way, someone has to cut your bloody missile wires to fuck up your shot!" Beauttah yelled back down at him as he climbed onto his motorcycle, put on his goggles again, and kicked up the stand.
"Just the semi-active, Chief," Walker replied before drowning out his voice with the four-stroke engine and peeling off out of the hangar.
Beauttah watched Walker's motorcycle leave the hangar and sighed, before reaching for the telephone on the hangar wall. "Nzima? It's Beauttah in number three…they're fine, except we'll need to rebuild unit three's turbofans. Probably all of them. Yes, I know."
II
Walker wouldn't say he "loved" motorcycles—he was a gearhead, as he'd been told, and motorcycles had been where he cut his teeth on as a mechanic, as an apprentice at a motorcycle repair shop in Windsor when he was twelve, even before he'd considered a military career. Back then he might have loved motorcycles, but in the seven years since then, he'd been forced to approach mechanics from a practical standpoint, whether they were motorcycles, automobiles, aircraft or mobile suits. He'd worked on all of them in wartime, and he'd come to one conclusion: the greatest military machine in the world, without a human operator, was a large, expensive proof-of-concept or the world's largest paperweight.
Accordingly, it wasn't much of an exaggeration to say that humans—in the case of the military, soldiers, officers, pilots—were valued, not machines. Now, he wasn't about to claim that a single human life was automatically of greater strategic worth than a 100,000-ton fusion-powered aircraft carrier and the forty Aries mobile suits it could carry, but that was false equivalency anyway.
It becomes harder to love machines if you're obsessed with making sure their human users come back alive, even at the cost of machines. The Aries he lost in Corsica had been his since the Pyongyang Raid two years ago, and while he regretted losing it, it wasn't so much the machine he missed as much as the failure to accomplish his objective in it. It wasn't really 'his' anyway, no sane mobile suit pilot 'owned' his or her machine—it was property of the United Earth Sphere Alliance.
He did own his bike, literally. He'd ordered it off the Network shortly before leaving from a seller in France, a direct replacement of the bike he'd lost in Corsica, an ancient Armstrong MT500 that had become popular again in England around AC 190. It had a 481 cc air-cooled engine, single cylinder four-stroke, and was a good match for his size. Walker guessed his old bike was destroyed when the Gundams destroyed the utility lift he'd left it on when he boarded his Aries.
I'm starting to resent them, he thought, has he drove down Airport South Road. Especially the black-and-white one. He bounced on the bikes suspension as he passed over a rough section of road, watching the sun set in the west.
In a few minutes, he became aware that he was being followed, or at least, he wasn't alone on the road. Glancing in his left rearview mirror, he spotted something reflecting the setting sun back at him—in a few seconds, it grew larger and louder as it approached him, and he could make out its distinct report, different from his old four-stroke—it was probably three times the size of his, by engine displacement. The motorcycle was also a sport bike design, even a superbike, probably Japanese, and much heavier than his military bike.
Walker drifted towards the shoulder as the superbike slowed down to his speed, giving him a good look at it. A Suzuki Hayabusa. You don't see those very often, not in Africa anyway.
He was actually more interested in the rider: it was a woman in a formfitting leather motorcyclist's suit, solid black and zipped in the front. Her head was completely hidden by a closed full face helmet, painted white with a black visor. Out of the back of the helmet, she had long, thick black hair that reached to her waist.
The rider glanced at him at he stared at her, the visor still obscuring her features, before turning back to the road and accelerating away. Walker almost didn't notice that, attached to her seat, was a military saddlebag with the emblem of the Speciali sewn into the leather.
Was that…her? Why would she be here?
III
"So who was it?"
Walker looked up. Flight Officer Tycho Nichol, a Speciali officer a few years Walker's senior and an ambitious, worldly man by comparison. Nichol may have lacked battlefield leadership experience, but he made up for it in flexibility: he'd served as an attaché for the Alliance Space Forces, posted to mobile suit units.
"I told you, I didn't see her face."
Nichol rephrased the question. "All right, who did you think it was?"
This was typical for a slow day at Nairobi, which was everyday. He stood over him as he sat in the media room, whose walls were lined with televisions set to various news channels. Several tables in the middle had computers stacked on them, near where Walker sat.
"A woman I knew, a flight officer. She was in the Special Recon Battalion attached to the Indian Air Army." He paused and frowned. "'Knew' might be the wrong word. A woman I'd heard of."
"Did this woman have a name?"
"Why? She's probably been promoted to F/L by now," he told Nichol, using the acronym for 'flight lieutenant'.
"Well, does she?"
Walker didn't like being teased. "Forget I mentioned it. Who's that on television?"
"Who do you think? The War Ministry." Nichol suddenly checked his pager, which was vibrating on his belt. "Excuse me, sir."
I wonder when he's going to be promoted. Walker turned to the television and watched the broadcast of Duke Karl Wilhem von Hohenzollern, a heavyweight in the international body known as the Romefeller Foundation and the Alliance's Minister of Defense, addressing the United Earth Sphere Assembly. As the Alliance's legislature, Assembly was probably the single most powerful body in Earth Sphere, at least legitimately, and it still dominated Alliance politics. Of course, the Assembly was a huge body. More than a few of them were also members of the Foundation, a secretive group Walker knew more about in concept than in reality.
The Duke was discussing the ramifications of diverting further mobile suit assets—primarily, units from the interdependent corps of the Mobile Suit Troops that were stationed as reserves throughout Eurasia—to space. Aside from the Gundam attacks, Earth as a whole remained peaceful, compared to the colonies, which were in a state of military rule and outright rebellion. The congress in Tokyo was probably going to last to a few more weeks, only to produce more indecision. General Gwinter Septim, commander-in-chief of Alliance Space Forces, was notoriously difficult to deal with.
Really, this typifies the Alliance's problems. The largest armed force in human history, as well as the most technologically advance, and head can barely agree with itself, much less communicate with the arms and the legs. Walker sighed. Every so often, I doubt whether our sense of smug self-superiority is justified, and then the Alliance does something that proves it is.
Take Nichol, for example. He had made a name for himself in linking the two sides of the coin of Alliance space supremacy: the outer space Pioneer Troops, and the Colonial and Lunar Assault troops. The two mobile suit-using sub-branches or services of the UESA Space Forces, unlike the Space Forces Navy, or the oddly-named Space Forces Army aboard Barge and rest of General Gwinter Septim's "space fortresses" as they were called in military parlance. They both operated variants of the tried-and-true OZ-06MS 'Leo', but beyond that, they practically shared nothing, not even sharing military color schemes and patterns. The Pioneer Leo Troops were charged with high-stakes vacuum no-gravity combat that involved distances of thousands of meters, at minimum—shooting down rebel colonial cruisers, frigates, and ballistic missiles, for example. They operated the OZ-06SMS, and probably would've been considered a component of the Alliance Space Navy if it weren't for bureaucratic territoriality fostered by Septim, not only organized in independent battalions and divisions, but as squadrons aboard the navy's carriers, and made up the bulk of Alliance space mobile suits. By contrast, the Assault Leo Troops were employed specifically in the actual boarding operations and general fighting insertions into colonies or Luna. As such it was closer to conventional urban combat, at particularly claustrophobic distances. They used modified OZ-06MS which traded operational range for heavier armor, and even favored shorter range weapons. Typically, Pioneer Leos escorted the carriers that ferried Assault Leos to docking rings and other hangar structures on the outside of a targeted colony. There was nothing preventing OZ-06SMS from participating in the urban assault role, even if they were slightly clumsier with their added microgravity propulsion equipment, most of which could be quickly discarded as necessary: that was how the Specials fought in in Space Leos, after all. But the Alliance had to have their unique urban and underground assault unit, small as it was, easily outnumbered by the rest of Alliance Space Forces and OZ. Efficiency and uniformity weren't high priorities.
Some Speciali, including Nichol, served among the Pioneers or Assault Troop for periods of time, though Nichol himself was more of an adviser than a combat pilot. Walker didn't envy him: unlike the Speciali, who were a tightly-disciplined, homogeneous unit, wherever they served, the whole Alliance military had legendary inter-service rivalries, bordering on hostility. Each branch and even many sub-branches had its own academies and schools, and admirals from the navy actively distrusted generals from the army and air forces. Space Forces officers distrusted everyone else, especially those of Colonial backgrounds, the stereotype went. It had always been like this—indeed, this inter-service hostility was probably one of the reasons for the success of the Speciali, who were considered a more desirable option than overcoming those rivalries.
I suppose there's the possibility that if the Alliance ever got its act together, we Speciali would be obsolete. Where would that leave me?
Probably in the technocratic secret society that was "OZ"—the Order of the Zodiac. After all, people were needed to actually design, manufacture and maintain the weapons of war, whether they were mobile suits or machine guns. That was one of his specialties.
"Flight Lieutenant?"
He turned to see an Alliance junior officer looking at him. "Yes?"
"Call for you, sir. Luxembourg."
Luxembourg? He stood up, looking at her. "Who is it?"
"Uh…'The Main Armaments Directorate of the Ministry of Defense'," she replied with uncertainty.
He almost fell over on his cape, running to the private room to take the call. In his rush, he hadn't even asked who was calling him from Luxembourg.
I haven't heard that name in years. The bureaucratic-sounding name was actually a real thing, or rather, it had been the year Walker was born, AC 176. But that was almost twenty years ago, it had long since died a merciful death.
Taking a deep breath and straightening out his uniform, Walker put the handset to his head. "This is Walker. Who is this, really?"
"Very good, Flight Lieutenant. Do you recognize my voice?"
Walker did, immediately. "Of course, your Excellency."