Interlude: How Icelina Met Garma
It was night, but the sky had not yet darkened. Perhaps unsurprising considering how urbanized the area was, but rather than usual white and hollow of normal skyglow, it was tinged red and glowing off high clouds like it covered a volcano, and accompanied by the roll of distant man-made thunder. The sights and sounds of home dying, just over the horizon. The Burning of New York was well underway.
They'd heard the howl of jet engines and seen Federation fighter-bombers flash overhead twice, flying low, their wing hardpoints carrying weapons. The Federation was unable to stop it, but unwilling to sit by and do nothing. The presence of another glow on the horizon, on the Jersey side of town, showed where they were going as the Federation's military and the local guerrillas did the only thing they could that might help, and attacked the command group of the forces currently trying to level New York.
Then the sound of much closer man-made thunder, and the bright light from behind. Icelina turned in her seat, sharply, shielding her eyes, and in the afterimages saw the shape of a Zeon mobile suit. It was advancing at a slow walk, its gun flashing occasionally as it fired at a civilian vehicle. It was not enough to burn the empty city, it seemed; they must rend and tear anyone they could reach. Some drivers tried to swerve onto the shoulder and pass others; some went off-road entirely, desperate to get away. The orderly group moving away from the horror instantly became a disorganized mob, and just as instantly dissolved into a snarl behind the first few vehicle wrecks that resulted.
And the Zaku kept coming. Thud. Thud. Flash, roar. One round every other step. People were getting out of their cars and running, and that provoked a long roar as the Zaku fired a burst into the crowd before it could disperse. That roar masked another sound; another set of thuds, rising rapidly and quickly.
There is no sound in the world like a group of mobile suits at the charge. From a distance, they sound like they are far more in number than they actually are; four or six sound like dozens, and a dozen or more sound like hundreds. Closer, within a couple of kilometers, it is something both heard and felt: a vibration through the earth and felt in the teeth, and a noise like the crack of doom as eight or more feet supporting sixty-ton three-story tall metal monsters rise and fall in unison. Within half a kilometer, most people are no longer aware of it as a distinct sound, for they have trouble hearing anything at all. It is instead something they are aware of as if an earthquake while loose objects rattle or slide across the ground. Only the most determined can keep their feet without bracing upon something, and the assault on the senses makes it impossible to think coherently. The MS-06F Zaku has a land speed of approximately 88kph. It can cross a kilometer in slightly less than a minute.
"I warned you," Garma said softly to himself. "I warned you that if you crossed that line-" He shook his head, and flipped his comms to active. "Soldier, your name and unit?"
"Prince Garma, this is not your concern," came the answer. Cold and harsh; another of Gihren's wind-up psychotic soldiers, without soul, addressing a man who he regarded as fop. Garma wondered idly where they all came from, Gihren always seemed able to find another.
"Very well. Under Article One I charge you with usurpation of state authority and mass murder." He lined up the Zaku on his crosshairs. "How do you plead?"
"I answer to Gihren Zabi alone."
"Defense noted. You were warned if you crossed the rivers you were subject to my laws as well as those of my brother. In light of the heinous nature of your crimes, the only possible sentence is summary execution." It struck Garma how easy it was, to simply pull the trigger. It caused him no moral qualms that he was firing on another spacenoid, another soldier of Zeon. In that moment, he almost shook his head. How corrupt we've become. How Romanesque, that we so easily turn the weapons of the state against each other. Gihren...what have you done to us?
The other Zaku went down hard and did not stir. "Men, spread out and form a firing line. If those toy soldiers of Capital Division wish to vent their wrath on the helpless then they will come no further, is that understood?"
At first, irrationally, she thought it was the Red Comet. A pair of giant red legs, one to either side of her car. A closer looks showed a green torso to the mobile suit, and that it was not some magical gift from the Federation, but a standard Zeon model. There were several others, spreading out to either side, the fires throwing weird highlights off them. They had their weapons raised, or at least she assumed that was what the long things they carried were. Icelina hadn't really gotten a good look at the other one between being dazzled by the muzzle flash and explosions. Ahead of the wreck, lights were coming down the road as well; she couldn't see from what. Her seatbelt finally released, and she stumbled out of the car. One ear was producing nothing but ringing, but the other still worked, though sound seemed distant.
"Miss?" There was someone in a Zeon uniform there. They followed it up with a call of "Medic!" The mobile suit carefully knelt, which produced a lot of noise and made her flinch, but also shielded her and the Zeon troopers from anything else that might come from that direction. A few moments later some very helpful woman in Zeon uniform was wrapping her in a blanket and peering at her left ear in worry.
"Who was that?" Icelina managed to mumble.
"Captain Garma Zabi," the medic replied.
Interlude: The Wages of Sin
The ferries had stopped running ten minutes ago. Fires were flaring on Manhattan. Cima wasn't watching, slumped in her cockpit, exhausted. She had been awake for thirty-six hours straight, and it was catching up with her. "Falkenhayen, report."
"Ferry master reports he got everyone, Commander. The dock was empty. He has video." Everyone. We got everyone out. It couldn't be literally true. People were left behind, somewhere. But not mine!
A small penance, but a worthwhile one. Then her Zaku alerted her to the approach of an aircraft. She spun it on one heel and froze. That had been a Federation Don tactical bomber. "Feddie aircraft passing overhead. Hold fire unless fired upon." She watched the Don swoop towards a Zaku standing guard, then break away and climb suddenly, and the glow of rocket motors from the missiles it unleashed. Tracers chased it. Too late.
She watched the Zaku pilot die with an odd detachment. Capital Division's pilots had no experience with land combat, or Federation aircraft, experience that her own people had won at the cost of broken suits and dead pilots. Against a Mongoose or an attack helicopter, a Zaku could fight on nearly even terms. Against the Federation's Tin Cods and Dons, with heavy electro-optical guided missiles hardened to withstand Minovsky effect...a single Zaku could only try to hide. A large group, throwing everything into flak, could hold them at bay for short periods, but only Dopp support could provide true protection.
I should care. He didn't volunteer for this assignment. Cima paused, and shook her head. Neither did I. And I certainly do not deserve absolution because I didn't volunteer to use nerve gas on a colony. Perhaps it would be appropriate to say a prayer, but she had never learned the words. A skyscraper fell behind her, and she turned, with a sense of terrible slowness, to watch as another collapsed, and another. She'd seen an entire colony die. The scale of what she saw here still baffled her.
A black Zaku decorated with a pair of green lightning bolts on the chest moved up beside her own, and then started to take a step forward before she put out her Zaku's arm to stop it. "We can't, Adrian."
"Damn him." The other pilot's voice resonated with low anger. "It's not even a byproduct of battle, reaction and action for victory. He's doing it just because he can. There are buildings in that city older than the Universal calendar-"
"You can say that to me, Adrian, but you can't say it here." Cima struggled to be kind as she said it, but there were too many other ears now. She trusted her own Marines, but Adrian's own unit was mixed and she knew at least three of them were from Zum City.
"I don't care. Let them drag me out and execute me for treason if they want. This is madness. I am literally watching humanity step backwards, destroy its own progress, for no other reason than because someone felt like it." Adrian's family...she didn't actually know how he got on with the other Vists, though given they were mostly Earthborn, she suspected it was...strained. Still, some of the Vist family's usual refrain regarding the progress of humanity had clearly rubbed off on him.
Cima did not know the words for a prayer, though at the moment she thought she was having the religious equivalent of a bad trip on acid. Faith wasn't something she'd been blessed with before she'd been tricked into gassing a colony. But now she wondered it was possible, if there was even a word, for the opposite of faith.
She did know words appropriate to this moment nonetheless. She knew Kipling. "The wages of sin is death."
