Chapter 9: Swayed
"Sir, we detected a brief reactor activation due northeast. It seems to be as you predicted - it's not an Ahab."
McGillis turned from his view of ships coming back to port in the night. "How long would it take us to rendezvous?"
The brown-haired, tall aide placed his hands behind his back. "Tsuruga is about half an hour from us, and the activation was detected maybe another half an hour out, if we go by mobile suit. I do not recommend other methods of transportation, Sir - the countryside is misleadingly pleasant-looking but it's easy for ground transportation to end up in a bind, particularly in the dark."
"I'm surprised by your local knowledge. What did you say your name was?"
"Isurugi Camice, Sir."
"Seems I made a good choice in bringing you along."
McGillis received a small nod as thanks and admired the lack of sentimentality. "Do you wish to depart now, Sir?"
"Oh no, they've still got a task to accomplish first. We'll let them do one of our chores first. We're down here to monitor, and it'll be easier to make our move when we're close by. The more space we give Ms Wei, the more likely she is to slip through our fingers again."
McGillis walked back up the open hangar ramp into the small transport ship he and his personal team had arrived in earlier that evening. Inside, the still forms of their four suits stared down at him. Isurugi joined him at a respectful distance.
"Are we certain that Tekkadan will not go back on their word?" Isurugi asked him.
"No," McGillis admitted. "Orga Itsuka is young, and Ms Wei has upset the apple cart. He may work well with the unexpected when it's external, but he invited this one in and she's likely going to cloud his judgment. If she endears herself to the crew, it will be clouded further. However, something seems to have happened to prompt him to contact me willingly, so perhaps not."
"Could we not take her back by force, Sir?"
"I like to think of this as a test for them." He glanced at Isurugi, who was carefully trying to keep more questions in check. He smiled, "Don't worry. It will not take them long to reach what remains of the Komori."
Having successfully brought the Khort Mogoi on board, the Isaribi returned to Tsuruga Bay to not draw any more attention to itself. Though the intention had been to rest up before the next leg of the journey - to find the Komori - the new Gundam frame had stirred up too much excitement among the younger crewmembers.
On the ground floor of the suit hangar - where the Khort Mogoi had been secured due to the lack of a proper dock for her - Eugene hung back and listened to Artima regale the younger boys with stories according to each scar they spotted on the Gundam's body. It'd taken her some time to warm up to the pestering, understandably, but this had gone on for an hour now and she wasn't doing too badly. He found the stories interesting, too. She hadn't served for long but boy was there a lot of shit jam-packed into the time she did. However, she looked like she was starting to lose steam from all the talking. He took the opportunity.
"All right, guys, time to give it a rest for the night. Let Miss Wei get some sleep," he said as he walked over, his hands in his pockets.
The boys whined but after some cajoling, obeyed. One of them even gave Artima a quick embarrassed hug - after the other boys had retreated, of course. She watched them go, then stood, stretched testily first one way and then the other, frowning, a hand probing over her abdomen. Eugene decided not to ask.
"Thanks," she said, hopping down from Kheree's arm. She cleared her dry throat. "I was running out of the kid-friendly stories."
"I don't doubt it."
She eyed him. A little knowingly, he'd say. "You were there for a while," she observed. An eyebrow rose. "Still like storytime?"
He hadn't realized she'd clocked him. Peripheries were a great thing, he supposed. She was probably trained for that kind of thing anyhow. He covered it up with a nonchalant, "I guess I do!" and reached up a hand to ruffle through the hair at the back of his head - something Shino had pointed out to him recently that he only did when he was flustered, so he stopped as soon as he started. "Anyway, I thought you might be hungry?" he half-lied.
Her hand went to her stomach again, "Thanks, but not really. A drink, maybe."
Another opportunity! Eugene pulled a hip flask out of his pocket before she could walk past him, waggled it, "You're in luck." He hoped he wasn't pushing his own when he added, "How about some fresh air? Feels nice out." As soon as he said it he thought, You dumbass she's had more fresh air today than you've had in the past month.
Artima smirked to herself and rolled her eyes a bit, pausing, taking the hip flask from him and uncapping it. She sniffed it before sipping. Her dark gaze leveled at him, "All right," she said, and he was under no impression that she was doing anything more than humoring him. She passed the flask back.
Have to start somewhere, though.
They found their way up and outside without saying anything, and before long were sitting on one of the turrets of the main guns. The stars were still out. They passed the flask back and forth and Eugene congratulated himself on having thought to secretly fill it while they were out earlier that day. Every so often Artima would shift position and touch her abdomen, until she seemed to find the most comfortable position was leaning back on her elbows.
She caught him looking at her when she fished one-handed in her hip bag for a pack of cigarettes and a lighter. She tapped one out of the pack and snagged it in her mouth. "Letting you know now that if you try anything you're gonna be sorry," she said and offered him one, which he refused. She dropped the packet on her belly and sparked the lighter. It turned her face into a mask of amber. Cigarette lit, the lighter too plopped onto her ribcage. "Not to mention you're, what, five years my junior and underage besides."
"I wasn't gonna try anything, for the record. I'm not that dumb. I'm just here for the air," Eugene said, though the last part was another half-lie.
Artima expelled the first cloud of smoke upward; it sailed over him in the slight breeze. "It's good air."
"Not that you're getting the most out of it with that nasty habit," he jibed.
She toyed with the filter end lightly with her thumb, "An old one. At this point it's just something to do with my hands."
Eugene narrowly avoided feeling titillated by the statement, and rapidly moved the conversation on with a, "I wanted to ask you - you worked with a couple of the Operation Meteor pilots?" he checked.
"Yeah," her voice was far away. "01 and 02 - Heero Yuy, Duo Maxwell." She seemed to come back to the present, eyed him with that knowing - teasing - look again, "Why? Fan? Sorry I can't get you an autograph," one corner of her mouth tugged up and the rest of the smile was hidden behind her hand as she took another drag.
"Kinda," he chuckled lightly, resettled. "I know being part of Tekkadan has had plenty of its own firefights and it seems like we never stop, but it's not quite the same, y'know? Or at least it doesn't feel like it."
"Like what?"
He looked toward the horizon. "Like a 'proper mission', I guess. An 'Operation'. Not as noble, you could say - at least Gjallarhorn in theory has that going for it. I mean, we did at first, but not lately. We're a little more primitive. Anyway, what was it like?"
Artima hesitated, thoughtful. She huffed a short, single laugh. "Primitive, when you get down to it. Stupid. Wasteful. Not much different, from what I see." She glanced quickly at him, decided to soften her statement, "Though, I wasn't involved in Operation Meteor. The Five Pilots were Taki's heroes back then, too. Things change when you meet your heroes - for good and bad. You get all tangled up, see the heart of things. It's easy to be swayed." She looked at the rise and fall of her diaphragm, admitted quietly, "Taki was bad about that, in the end."
Eugene watched her, trying to figure out if it was safe to keep probing. It was hard to tell with her. He decided to test it. "How so?"
"She cared too much about me, to start with." Artima laid fully on her back, reached out over the side of the turret to flick ash off the cigarette. As it rose back to her mouth she said, "Then she got too close to Duo." Inhale. "Love, maybe, though I don't think any of us lived long enough to find out." Exhale.
He tried to lighten things. "And let me guess, you were incorruptible by comparison!"
By the way she paused he knew the answer before she simply said, "No."
His brain chose the wrong to remind him that Orga had mentioned it was Heero Yuy that put her in that cryogen-bay. What he'd originally written-off as being a desperate measure by a fellow comrade suddenly had a different meaning. At least, that was what he assumed. He wasn't sure he wanted confirmation but he was a bit of a masochist like that so he ventured, "So, you and Heero…"
Artima cut him a glare, bristled, looked at her half-gone cigarette. "It was complicated."
His mouth charged ahead without him, "You loved him."
"There was never going to be enough time for either of us to figure that out," she said without hesitation, her voice weak.
Eugene sat up a little straighter, overwhelmed by the ridiculous feeling of being inferior to a dead man. After all, what do I compare to somebody like Heero Yuy, for crying out. Guy was a baller. A literal hero. Of course she - he noticed then that she looked sad, confused. Cigarette ash fell on her shirt but she didn't seem to notice, or care; her eyes were distant again, full of the reflection of the stars. He regretted having made this about satisfying his own curiosity.
Eugene reached his hand toward Artima's free one at her side because it seemed the thing to do, but before he could reach it she was lucid again, tutting to herself and sitting up, brushing the ash off. She took another drag, seemed to recognize it was her turn to lighten up the mood. "What's the legal drinking age nowadays, anyhow?" she gestured for the flask.
He gave it to her, let her change topic gladly. "Who knows. I'm sure most establishments have bigger fish to fry."
"Probably." She sipped; by the tinkling he could hear it was the last of it and she offered it back to him, but he let her have it. "Got this on shore? I haven't tasted gin in forever. Surprised they still make it. Not my favorite, but."
He took the empty flask back. "Is that what it is? I just grabbed what I saw and could afford."
"Lord." She stubbed out the cigarette, lit another. "Get something you actually like at least, for fuck's sake." The hand with the cigarette poked in his direction, "But don't make it a habit. Ruin your liver and your eyes'll get the color of your hair."
"You're a fine one to be lecturing me about things that are bad for your health."
"If neither three years of pestering from an absurdly health-and-fitness-conscious teammate or three hundred and sixty-odd years of being cryogenically frozen haven't rid me of the habit, I don't think there's much hope. Best I focus on prevention in others," she said. She chuckled to herself while she attempted to put her cigarette pack and lighter back in her bag, as if she found something absurd. He hadn't seen her laugh much. It made him like her more and he couldn't help the lazy smile it stretched from his face, watching her.
"I'll stop you smoking," he said, bolstered by the warm tinglies from even such a small amount of liquor - and who he was looking at. "Just you wait."
She looked up at him, the amusement subsiding a little but her gaze not as cold as before. This time she really appeared to look at him - to see him. After a moment she said, smiling, "You remind me of someone I knew."
"Not Taki?"
"Not Taki."
"Is that good?"
The warm smile became a smirk. She stood. "Come back when you're older, kid," she said, and hopped down from the turret to return inside the ship.
Eugene quirked his eyebrows, stretched all four limbs and laid on his back, grinning to himself.
