Treize was looking through some reports on possible Gundam sightings (possible only because the bases in question had been so thoroughly destroyed that there was no evidence remaining of what had destroyed them), when someone cleared their throat right behind him. It was only because it had already happened a dozen times that he managed not to jump out of his skin at the sudden noise.
Instead, he turned his chair around to calmly regard the boy... no, young man... leaning against the wall behind him. "It's been some time, dragon," he commented, setting his work aside.
"We've been busy," Wufei remarked sardonically.
"Indeed. Six ships, three bases and a transport strike in only three weeks," Treize replied. "Not to mention that entire debacle with the strike in the research lab."
"I wanted to talk to you about that."
Treize shook his head slightly. "You know better than that. We agreed at the beginning not to discuss the outside world here. Anything else and we'll spend all of our time probing each other for information."
"And I agree, but this isn't our world we're talking about," Wufei responded evenly.
That comment got Treize's attention. "Another world?"
"I know you must already have this information. The girl you held before is not from this world."
"And how do you know this?"
"I've seen her world."
"You have?"
"I have. One of your experiments went awry."
"So he was telling the truth," Treize murmured, more to himself than anyone else. However, Wufei caught the comment. For a second something strange glinted in his dark eyes, then it was gone.
"You're holding him already," he commented. "What do you think of him?"
"It's disturbing, to say the least," Treize commented. "And although I know it's irrational, I can't stand him. I did do the blood analysis, and he and I are identical genetically within one one-hundredth of a percentage, and that can be accounted for by normal testing error." He was not happy about that, to know that somewhere else he might have become someone like Velanz.
He saw something... relief?... flicker through Wufei's eyes before they became unreadable black pools again. He immediately set about chasing down what the elusive emotion had been. Something told him that it was very important.
"It's not irrational. The man is a dishonorable toad," Wufei told him. "Don't trust him - he would think nothing of slitting your throat while you sleep."
"I have him under surveillance."
"Not under lock and key?"
"He's promised me the secret of faster-than-light travel if I assist him in recapturing the girl."
"And you made a deal with him?" Wufei did not sound happy. In fact, he sounded a hairsbreath away from outraged, which was not a good sign.
"We could use that technology, if he really can give it to us."
"In return for the life of an honorable warrior."
"Honorable?"
"Much more so than that cur you're dealing with," he snarled.
Treize's mind finally caught up with what he'd seen before. It had been relief in Wufei's eyes that he'd seen, and he'd been relieved when Treize said that Velanz was his genetic double. That meant one of two things - that Wufei had been worried that they weren't genetically identical, or that he hadn't known it was Velanz in the first place. Somehow it didn't seem likely that he was overly concerned with them being genetically identical or not, which meant that it was the second issue.
"You're missing someone," he said, absolutely certain of himself, and saw chagrin on Wufei's face. "Who?"
"You know I'm not going to tell you that, but he never made it back," Wufei said. "Thank you for confirming that you don't have him."
"You were pumping me for information." There was no hint in his voice that his words were an accusation, but they both knew they were. Wufei was right, this was a very unusual situation, but he was coming dangerously close to crossing a line that had been set when they first got together. "The least you can do now is tell me who it was."
"I can't do that," Wufei said, turning so that his back was to Treize, a sure sign that he was feeling guilty about what he'd done. He was silent for a few minutes, then turned back, his expression strained. "But I can give you some other information... the man, Velanz, he can do what he says."
"Excuse me?"
"He can probably give you faster-than-light travel. I don't know much about his knowledge specifically, but his world does have faster-than light travel. If he says he can do it, he probably can."
"How do you know that?"
"That they have faster-than-light travel? When we arrived at one of their bases, it was on another planet."
"You're certain? It wasn't some sort of trick?"
"There were two suns," Wufei told him.
Treize smiled slightly. Despite everything he'd seen and done, he'd never quite gotten over a basic love of outer space and the adventure and challenge it represented. To stand on another planet...
"I envy you, dragon."
Wufei shrugged slightly. "The colonies they have there are nearly as fragile as our own - they may live on other worlds, but they still live in domes, depending on their own constructions for survival. In some ways they're even more fragile. We refused to teach them how to make mobile suits."
"You did?" That surprised him. Among other things, the Gundam pilots were known for being absolutely ruthless. He would have expected that they would act to give their new allies every advantage in their home universe.
"Mobile suits would have destroyed their worlds - for them, the conflict must remained contained, or millions will die. The population of their colonies far exceeds ours, and the Alliance has already proven their willingness to destroy colonies for their own interests. From what I've seen, it's standard policy for them. They've gone even farther than even you dared to," he added with a raise of an eyebrow.
"Then they've gone too far," Treize said coldly. He'd been furious when he heard that Lady Une had threatened to destroy the colonies unless the Gundam pilots surrendered. Zechs had summed it up perfected when he called it 'tasteless tactics.' If he won using such tactics, it would make his winning meaningless, and he was determined not to let that happen. And Wufei knew that. He was using Treize's determination to manipulate his emotions, the manipulative little brat. Suddenly Treize remembered why he'd started a relationship with the young pilot. It was for the same reason that he and Zechs had gotten together. There were so few people who could keep up with him mentally, and fewer still chose to use that knowledge in the word games he adored.
That reminded him. "Who is the girl in the other world?" he asked, his earlier anger already dismissed.
He saw a flash of surprise in Wufei's eyes and allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction. If Wufei was going to play word games with him, he should be prepared to have the game turned on him. Wufei had been right - this was very different than discussing troop placements or something like that, this was safe to talk about, and now Trieze was ready to enter the game in earnest. "What do you know?" he asked in response.
"Velanz said that she is not human. That she is some sort of genetically engineered weapon."
"She is something more than human, faster and stronger, as you have no doubt seen," Wufei told him. "And she is a leader of men back in her own world. Women are weak... but she is not quite a woman, is she?" he asked neutrally. Trieze managed not to raise an eyebrow at that comment. The girl must be absolutely spectacular at whatever skills she possessed to wring an admission like that out of Wufei. He'd never been able to understand Wufei's insistence that women were always weaker than men. To be sure, most were, made that way because of the expectations of society, but not all women were like that. Wufei never understood that - this was the first time that Treize had heard him speak of a female without scorn in his voice.
Wufei's eyes flickered to the antique clock on the wall, right above the digital one set on military time. Both were necessary, one for his own mental well-being, the other for business. Treize was still looking for a way to combine the two, so far without success. Maybe the two were meant to be apart.
"I have to go now - I only came to warn you about him."
"And to make sure that we did not hold your comrade," Treize corrected him mildly, with a hint of rebuke in his tone.
"Indeed. Please convey my greetings to Zechs. I am sorry I missed him."
"Yes, well, he's a bit busy cleaning up after your last attack."
"I know."
Treize signed - he would give a lot to know how Wufei seemed able to pinpoint their locations at any time with little to no effort - he'd had Lady Une go over their security a dozen times, and still he couldn't find the leak.
Wufei opened the window and climbed up onto the sill, apparently not at all concerned at the guards who were supposed to be outside, guarding him. Treize would have to speak to them about that. "Just be very careful with this man. He would think nothing of betraying you if he thought it was in his interest, much like Romafeller."
"I'll keep that in mind," Treize told him. He was also going to keep in mind the fact that Wufei's perspective on this issue was more than a little biased.
Wufei knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. "It is true, I am not entirely objective in this, but then, I get along much better with my double then I think you do with yours. But remember this - they offered us their aide, risked their lives for us even when we refused to give them mobile suit technology. Your double refuses to give you even basic information about your enemies unless you aide him." Wufei's lips quirked in a slight smile. "Is it any surprise that I think you're making a terrible mistake?"
-----------------------------------------
"How did it go?" Diana asked as Brian, Devin, Andrew and Trowa came walking in the door.
"Mission accomplished," Brian said coldly. Duo did a double-take, trying not to stare... But damnit, Brian sounded so much like Heero when he talked like that. At least he wasn't talking in Japanese - that would have been too much.
"They didn't suspect a thing," Andrew said, elaborating when he saw that none of his companions were going to. "We got in and out, completed the switch..." he shook his head slightly in disgust. "They never even realized that we don't work for Oz."
"And the... machine?" Diana asked, still not having come up with a better name for it.
"Safe in the place that we talked about," Andrew said, not even mentioning it by name now. As far as Duo could tell, there were some things that they just didn't talk about out loud, no matter how secure the situation. The fact that all of them read lips as easily as they breathed might have something to do with it.
"Good," Diana said with a nod, then went back to whatever it was she was doing. She'd been shocked and appalled when informed that they either knew nothing or did nothing about the way that the populace viewed the Gundams, Oz, and the war in general. Apparently a large part of what she did was work to get the public on the side of the Rebels, to let everyone know what the Alliance was really doing. Duo could see why she did that - with no Gundams, the main resource in fighting wars was bodies, plain and simple. And you don't get people to sign up if they think that you're the evil Rebels. So he could see why their five doubles just couldn't be the only force, no matter how good they were. It would be like the five Gundam pilots trying to fight off all of Oz's forces in one-on-one combat. Without their Gundams.
Still, he thought that Diana was going a little overboard with the shock and horror. It wasn't as if the five of them had a whole lot of free time to spend fighting Oz's propaganda. But then, this was I-take-responsibility-for-the-entire-world Diana they were talking about. For her, there was no such thing as too much work. He had no idea how she'd managed not to burn herself out years ago. And I thought Heero was a workaholic.
"When are you leaving?" she asked without taking her eyes off whatever it was she was doing. She had two screens set up in front of her, and was reading from one while she typed at about two hundred words per minute on the keyboard. From where he was sitting, Duo could see that whatever she was typing was going up onto the other screen, based on how fast it was scrolling down.
"Will you at least look at me when you do that?" he demanded.
She instantly moved her eyes from the screen to him, still typing. "Sorry. When are you leaving?"
"Tonight," Duo said. After some talking, they'd decided that he, Kane, and Andrew would go to G's lab in space - him because G gave him his orders, Kane because it ought to confuse the hell out of whoever had betrayed them, and Andrew because he could hack just about anything, and because he could get information out of just about anyone when he wanted. Duo was trying not to think about that part, about how close he'd come to having Andrew perform the same services on him.
He didn't remember what had happened to Quatre when he'd been on the Zero system - he hadn't been there at the time, but he'd heard about it from Heero, and he couldn't forget the look on Trowa's face when he found him again in the circus, after he lost his memory, the naked fear on the normally mask-like face.
He knew that Andrew was sorta like Quatre, except that it seemed like he was constantly half on and half off of the Zero system. It didn't show very often, but... he hid a shudder. Andrew creeped him out in a way that none of the other doubles did, and he wasn't too cowardly to admit it. But he wasn't afraid of him - if nothing else, Andrew was completely in control of himself, and was an ally, albeit a strange one.
"You're sure the scientists..." she actually left of typing for a moment, a sure sign that she was very upset about something. "You're sure they're not the ones who betrayed you?"
"Yeah. They've pulled a lot of crap in their time, but they wouldn't risk their own agenda's by getting us killed. But Heero did confirm that there's a traitor somewhere in the labs. We know G's got one for sure, still looking for confirmation on the others, that's why we get to go first," he told her as seriously as he could manage. Scientists really got to her - it was a good thing that she wasn't going along, she might shoot G as soon as she saw him. And while he was a jerk a lot of the time, he was more valuable alive then dead, at least right now.
She nodded, her eyes traveling back to the screens, but her face looked almost as pale as it had been when she first saw the open sky. That reminded him... "How's that whole fear-of-open-spaces thing coming?"
She glared at him, but looked better already. "Fine. I walked out to the road and back without even hyperventilating," she replied sarcastically. "Did I mention how much I am not liking Earth?"
"Oh, come on, give it a chance. There's some good stuff going for it, don't you think?"
"I might appreciate it more if I could walk outside for more than ten minutes without freaking out," she told him. "You cannot imagine how humiliating this is for me." Luckily, she was only half-serious.
"Look at it as a learning experience," he suggested, and she growled something unrepeatable at him. Nope, definitely nothing like Relena Peacecraft. I think she'd faint if she even thought about those words.
Diana's typing speed actually managed to increase after that comment. She barely glanced up as Kane came in. "How'd it go?" she asked, once again focused on what she was doing.
Or at least that's what it looked like. Was it possible to be completely focused on two things at the same time? When you were in a Gundam you had to concentrate on a dozen things at once, but they were all aimed at one goal - defeating the enemy and keeping yourself alive. In that order. Diana tended to concentrate on several unrelated topics at the same time, or so it appeared.
"No sign of him yet," Kane reported glumly. "Is Wufei back yet? Maybe he's heard of something."
"He said he was going to check out a lead," Diana said. "And he's not back yet."
For an instant Kane's face fell, then the expression disappeared as if it had never been when he grinned mischievously. "Ah, I'm sure Shin's fine. He's probably hanging out in some posh hotel somewhere, living it up on room service. He's a little hard to kill - trust me, we tried."
Duo blinked, then he remembered - Shin had tried to kill Diana before she taught him the truth about the people who'd raised him, and she tried to return the favor. He grinned to himself. It was nice to know that someone, somewhere, also met one of their best friends by shooting them. So what if he had to go to another universe to find them?
"I'm sure we'll find him in no time," he said with a confidence he in no way felt.
"Who among you is best at politics?" Diana suddenly asked, ignoring his comment entirely.
"What? Ah, that would be Quatre, I guess," Duo said with a shrug. None of them were trained for politics - they were trained to kill, in many different fashions, and to support themselves while they did it, but politics was an entirely different story. But Quatre's father was extremely rich and fairly powerful - he'd probably had some training in that stuff. "Why?"
"I want to know what he thinks of this." Diana nodded towards the screen, then looked at Duo carefully. "Actually, you might as well read this, too. I'd like to know what you think of it. It's hard writing stuff for people from your universe. The mindset is completely different."
He blinked. "What?"
"You have to write propaganda that people will understand," Diana said seriously. "And the people in our universe think differently than they do in yours."
Duo found himself interested in spite of himself. "Why?"
"Well, there is this whole two hundred years of war that you guys have had, it makes people more nervous, more suspicious in general - the fact that you have many different nations working together instead of one world nation, or used to anyway, that makes a difference too. Then there's the location of the colonies."
"What?" Damn it, he was beginning to sound like a broken record!
"Well, your colonies are so close to each other - relatively, I mean, and so close to Earth. That makes a big difference in the way people classify themselves. In our universe, for instance, if for some reason you get to talk to someone from another colony or planet, and it barely ever happens, you introduce yourself by your colony name, the planet your colony is on, and finally your ancestry from Earth. So you see, we've very much divorced ourselves from our past. The fact that we're all... well, all true colonists are albinos, that has a lot to do with it, too. It's a lot of work and incredibly expensive to get to Earth, where you're immediately identified as an outsider because of the way you look. I'm speaking from first hand accounts, not personal experience, by the way. So anyway, most people don't want to take that much time and money to go to a place where they can be outcasts. Add to that the fact that the Alliance controls and has restricted communication and travel between the colonies and Earth for over fifty years, and probably less than one colonist in a thousand has ever been to Earth, or even seen it with their own eyes. So we don't have the same connection with Earth that all you do. And that changes the way you perceive everything. Do you want me to go on?"
"Sure, this is kinda interesting," Duo encouraged her. At least it'll be something to think about when I'm waiting on an ambush. "Ah, just one thing. What do you mean, true colonists? I mean, you were born on one of the colonies, that makes you a colonist, doesn't it?"
"You have to be human to be a colonist," she replied with a shrug, then turned the screen to face him. "Here, I'll show you what I did with this..."
------------------------------------------
"So how is it that you manage with all these different countries?" Velanz asked in a lazy drawl. "It must be terribly inefficient. No, that's a sigma," he corrected the scientist who was reviewing his sloppily written equations.
Treize sighed silently as he set aside another file. Sometimes it seemed that all he ever did recently was paperwork. Right now he was having a hard time concentrating, however, something that rarely bothered him. But Velanz had insisted that he wanted to talk to him, and when Treize said that he had to finish his work first, Velanz announced that he wasn't leaving. So he'd dragged the scientist that was working on his equations in with him, and the two of them had sat in front of Treize's desk for the past two hours, the scientist clearly miserable to be stuck in this position, inconveniencing the beloved leader of Oz, but just as clearly fascinated by what Velanz was showing him.
"Please send this out," Treize said to Zechs, who'd returned from his work cleaning up after the Gundam attack. His presence here wasn't really necessary, but Treize was grateful for it nonetheless, because Zechs acted as a sort of buffer between Treize and his double, allowing Treize to remain outwardly calm and collected.
Zechs nodded slightly, glancing at the papers as he handed them to a subordinate. As the door opened, the man was nearly knocked over by someone running through the door in the other direction. "Your Excellancy! Good news! We've caught one of the Gundam pilots!"
There was a stunned silence in the room. The man looked from Treize's face to Zechs' and back again. "We've got him isolated down in an empty cell block. Would you like to see him?"
Treize rose smoothly from his chair. "Yes. I've heard quite a bit about them, it's about time I finally meet one, don't you think?" he asked rhetorically, purposefully not looking at Zechs. He'd already told Zechs about Wufei's visit. But Wufei had left hours ago - he was probably hundreds of miles from here by now.
As he started following down the hall, he was aware of Zechs falling into step behind him. It was several minutes, however, before he realized that Velanz had also followed him. He stopped short and turned around to frown at his double. "I do not remember giving you permission to come."
"You never told me not to," Velanz said with a shrug. "Besides, you need me. I can tell you if it really is one of your pilots or one of our experiments. They can be hard to tell apart at times," he admitted ruefully.
Treize didn't even bother to acknowledge him with a nod. He spun back and continued following the man down the hall. A few minutes later they reached a cell with two guards standing in front of it at attention. The rest of the hall was deserted.
"It's a one-way mirror," the man explained, pointing at a small window in the door. Treize looked through it and his heard practically jumped into his throat. Wufei was sitting in a chair in the center of the brightly lit room, his arms cuffed behind him. He was wearing a pair of dark glasses and a completely different set of clothes than he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. Even stranger, he had cut his hair. It was in a short cut, no more than a few centimeters long anywhere, with no sign of the small ponytail that he'd had as long as Treize had known him.
"I want to speak with him alone."
"Sir?! But... he's dangerous..."
"Zechs will be here to protect me, and he is restrained. I trust that he will be able to protect me?"
"Sir, I'm sorry, but you have no idea how dangerous he is. He killed eight of our men after we disarmed him. I can't in good conscience let you go in there alone. If you leave the door open..."
Treize hid a sigh. It was obvious that he was not going to be able to talk to Wufei in private, thanks to this overzealously protective subordinate. He nodded his agreement, then keyed in his code to open the door. Wufei raised his head slightly when Treize entered, and he stared at Treize for a few seconds before dropping his head slightly again. Treize exchanged a glance with Zechs. Wufei wouldn't give away that they knew each other, but this behavior was strange. Treize would have expected him to answer with scorn, or disgust. Not this blank silence.
"Well, you're not exactly what I expected," he said in a conversational tone, watching Wufei's face. It was hard to know what he was thinking at any time, and even harder now with those glasses on. "You're just a boy. I wonder what you were thinking, trying to fight us." That was an outright lie - he knew Wufei wasn't a boy any more than he was. None of the Gundam pilots were boys, despite their ages - more like old men stuck in children's bodies.
A hint of a wry smile was playing at the edges of Wufei's lips, and Treize took an involuntary step backwards. There was something very wrong here. He knew Wufei quite well, knew his mannerisms, and this man was displaying none of them. It was almost as if...
A low chuckle interrupted his thought process, and he turned to see Velanz walk into the room, his arms crossed in front of him, an amused look on his face. "You haven't figured it out yet, have you?" he asked Treize. "He's not your pilot." Suddenly one hand snaked out and pulled the sunglasses away from Wufei's face. Wufei turned his head aside for a moment, closing his eyes, then he opened them and glared at Velanz.
Treize took another step back. Wufei's - not Wufei - his eyes were completely white, with tiny black pupils in the center. "You!" he hissed. There was the creak of tortured metal, and he suddenly launched himself at Velanz. There was the crack of gunfire, and not-Wufei suddenly slumped to the ground, blood seeping from his left leg.
"Now, Five, you should know better than that," Velanz said in a casual tone, still holding the gun on the boy. Treize wondered briefly where on Earth he'd gotten the gun from and made a mental note to scold his security officers. They were failing all over the place today, it seemed. "Now get back in the seat and keep your arms at your side, or I'll shoot you in the other leg."
The boy continued to glare at him, but silently climbed back into the chair, showing no discomfort from the bullet wound that had bled all over his jeans and was now dripping on the floor. Actually, as he moved, he didn't act as if he'd been injured at all, Treize noted. He sat bolt upright, pushing his back flat against the back of the chair, arms glued to his sides. He stared straight in front of him, eyes blank, not even looking at Velanz.
"Very good, Five. It's good to see that you haven't lost all your discipline in the presences of those Rebels," Velanz said, then turned his head towards Treize without taking his eyes off the boy. "This is Subject Five of the Omega Project," he said slowly. "It was created less than sixteen years ago, has accelerated healing, increased speed, intelligence, and strength, and... oh, yes. Five, change back to normal."
The boy didn't look at him, but he raised his head slightly, lips tightening.
Velanz tilted his head slightly, then fired a bullet into his other thigh. The boy's eyes snapped shut and his head dropped for an instant. Then he raised his head again and resumed staring into space as he bled onto the floor.
"What are you doing?!" Treize demanded icily. He did not like the look in Velanz's eye, as if he was enjoying torturing the boy. "I want him alive," he added, to give the man an excuse to stop shooting the boy.
"It will survive. We built them to take a lot more punishment than this. Five, if you don't change back right now, I will shoot you in the head," he added, shifting his aim slightly so that the gun was now aimed precisely at the boy's head. The boy's eyes narrowed slightly, then he paled. And paled. Treize's eyes widened as he realized that all of the color was disappearing from his skin and hair, leaving the rest of him as bleached as his eyes.
Wufei's double turned to look at Treize. "You must be Treize Khushrenada. Our doubles told us about you. They said that you were not as lowly as *him*," his eyes flicked towards Velanz. "I am very disappointed to see that they were mistaken in this instance."
"That's enough, Five."
"My name is Shin."
Velanz drew back the hammer on the gun. "You don't have a name. You're not even human. You're just a weapon that's misfired. I'm going to take you back to our world, and then our scientists will dissect you to find out what's gone wrong with this experiment, so we can try again."
The boy smirked. "There isn't enough brains in the Alliance to create us again. You had to blackmail some *smart* people into doing it the first time, and then to top off your stupidity, you killed them too. There's no one left who can make us," he sneered.
"Maybe," Velanz admitted, walking in a slow circle around the chair, always keeping the gun aimed squarely at the boy. "But we won't need to. Once we have you and the others, the Rebels will collapse."
"Diana's been outsmarting you since she was seven," Shin smirked. "What makes you think that you're going to do any better now that she's had more experience, now that she has the rest of us to help her?"
"Because Subject Eight is foolish enough to believe that she has some humanity in her," Velanz said scornfully. "And because she places the lives of others above her own. She will turn herself over willingly in exchange for your life."
Shin's head snapped around to look at Velanz, his lips tightening with anger. "You bastard..." he whispered hoarsely, and for the first time, Treize saw real fear in his eyes.
Velanz smiled, then casually slammed the butt of his gun into the back of the boy's head. The boy slumped slightly, then raised his head again, eyes partially glazed. Velanz struck again, in the exact same place, and this time Shin slumped completely.
By this time Treize had completely lost control of his usually calm face, and he guessed that his shock was clearly visible on his face, because Velanz turned to him and said, "It was necessary. You don't have anything that would hold him now, and those wounds won't hold him for more than a couple hours. Don't worry, he'll be fine in a day or so - it'll take a lot more than that to crack the skull of one of our creations."
"So what do you recommend now?" Treize asked, not bothering to keep the coldness out of his voice. He'd known the man was dangerous, both his own instincts and Wufei had told him that, but he hadn't know how needlessly cruel the man was. To shoot the boy twice, then verbally torture him like that before knocking him unconscious with a blow that could have very easily paralyzed him or left him brain damaged was completely unnecessary and unacceptable.
"Get some of your doctors to dig the bullets out of it," he said, waving his gun casually. "Don't bother to treat it - he'll heal in a couple of days anyway. I already gave some of your people the formula for a drug that will keep him down as long as we need. Long enough to build a better facility," he observed, looking around the room. "He could have escaped from this place in a second. Look at these cuffs," he said, nudging the boy's limp wrists with the end of his gun. The chain between the cuffs had been torn in half. "Not much harder than tearing paper, for it," he said, shaking his head. "I'll give some of your people plans to build something that has a chance in hell of stopping him for more than one second."
"I see." Treize turned to the guards who were standing in the door with shocked expressions on both of their faces. He nodded to them. "Please see that it's taken care of. And relieve Mr. Velanz of his gun."
Velanz shot him an absolutely murderous glare, which Treize pretended not to notice. As the guards dragged the boy's limp form out the door, Treize exchanged a glance with Zechs, with whom he'd shared Wufei's morning visit. Velanz was more dangerous than he'd ever suspected, and he was beginning to have second thoughts about this entire arrangement.
----------------------------------------
"I can't believe how easy it is to get from Earth to the colonies," Andrew commented out loud to Kane that night as they sat in the front of the shuttle that carried Deathscythe and them to the scientist's lab. Kane hoped that Andrew would be able to remain calm if it turned out that the scientists here were the doubles of the scientists back on their world. The scientists there had done some pretty fucked up things to all of them, but somehow Andrew had born the worst of it, because of his abilities. Kane didn't understand Andrew's desire to not kill people, but he'd seen what it did to his 'brother', the strain of having conflicting desires warring in his head. Leaving the Alliance had been very good for him - they would have killed him eventually, one way or another.
"What's wrong?" Kane asked immediately, recognizing the signs that Andrew was upset about something. Andrew almost never talked to hear the sound of his own voice, and that had been an empty statement if he ever heard one.
"It's Shin. I think something's wrong."
"What?" It had taken Kane some time to get used to the idea that Andrew had some sort of ability that allowed him to see things the others couldn't, but once he did, he accepted those abilities without question.
"I don't know. Just a bad feeling. I can't get anything more specific than that. I've been trying all afternoon to pin it down, but I can't." The way Andrew's lips were pressed together was evidence enough of how very frustrated he was.
"Do you think he got captured?"
"I don't know. I guess we'll hear quickly enough if he did. It doesn't matter right now, we have our own mission to complete." Now that was a change of topic if Kane ever heard one, but if Andrew didn't want to talk about it, Kane wasn't going to push. Andrew could be more closed-mouthed than Brian when he put his mind to it, so Kane just nodded agreement.
"So what do you think of their Gundams?" Andrew asked, jerking his head towards the back of the shuttle, where Deathscythe was and where Duo slept. The Gundam pilots were good, but they were still human and needed sleep. Kane had taken a nap earlier and was set to go for another day or two.
Kane grinned. "I gotta get me one of those. Haven't seen anything as great at destroying as those things, ever. They're even better than C-4," he said, mentioning one of his favorite explosives, and got a real smile from Andrew in return. "But seriously..." he said, abruptly changing gears and shaking his head. "I see why they didn't want to give us the technology back on our world, and we can't bring it back with us. Even a normal mobile suit could destroy an entire colony by accident. These Gundams..." he shook his head again. "They're fine for on Earth, but we'd kill off half the colonists in no time if we tried to build them back on our world."
"Yeah. Quatre let me in Sandrock, showed me how to use it, so I can pilot a mobile suit if we run into trouble, but we can't bring those things back with us." Andrew shivered slightly. "It's hard to avoid killing with those things. Their casualty rates are staggeringly high, and it's not just soldiers. Not that it is with us, but..."
"But when innocents get killed on our side, it's always the Alliance, and almost always deliberate. People here just get hurt." Kane fell silent, thinking of the one time one of Diana's people had decided to get 'creative' and took out an Alliance agent along with his entire family, including three kids. The look on her face when she heard the news had been terrifying, and the incident had not been repeated.
"The randomness here is frightening, sometimes," Andrew confessed. "So much stuff happens without anyone planning it, people live and die... I never thought I'd miss the Alliance, but they sure do keep everything under control. I don't think it's possible to limit an attack here the way we do on our world - no matter what you do, it's going to spread beyond what you planned, and probably involve people who shouldn't be."
"Well, it ain't going to happen this time. A lab in the middle of space, hanging thousands of meters away from any colonies - that's about as isolated as you get. There isn't going to be any fallout from this one, we're just going to capture the traitor and deal with him."
"Or her," Andrew reminded him. Some of their own most effective spies were female, because the Alliance had a strange prejudice against them and believed that they could never accomplish anything worthwhile. An inexplicable attitude, especially given the fact that the head scientist on the project that created them had been female (until they killed her, anyway), and given what Diana had accomplished with her Rebels, many of whom were female. But as long as the Alliance persisted in being stupid, Diana was happy to use those blind spots against them. They rarely suspected her female operatives until it was too late.
"Or her," Kane agreed, then fell silent, looking at the stars outside.
"It's beautiful out here, isn't it?" Andrew said, looking at the starry expanse of space. They'd been to Earth once in their universe, and visited the moon twice, as well as traveling to various other colonies, but they'd never gotten a chance to look at space, since they were always sealed in a windowless room for the journey. The Alliance hadn't wanted them to experience anything out of their direct control, so since the stars weren't yet in the Alliance's domain, no stars for them!
"Yup," he agreed, and the two of them lapsed into a comfortable silence, staring at the stars.
I just added the 5x6x13 because I thought it was interesting and added something to an already complicated situation. I'm not planning anything explicit, I don't think.
Instead, he turned his chair around to calmly regard the boy... no, young man... leaning against the wall behind him. "It's been some time, dragon," he commented, setting his work aside.
"We've been busy," Wufei remarked sardonically.
"Indeed. Six ships, three bases and a transport strike in only three weeks," Treize replied. "Not to mention that entire debacle with the strike in the research lab."
"I wanted to talk to you about that."
Treize shook his head slightly. "You know better than that. We agreed at the beginning not to discuss the outside world here. Anything else and we'll spend all of our time probing each other for information."
"And I agree, but this isn't our world we're talking about," Wufei responded evenly.
That comment got Treize's attention. "Another world?"
"I know you must already have this information. The girl you held before is not from this world."
"And how do you know this?"
"I've seen her world."
"You have?"
"I have. One of your experiments went awry."
"So he was telling the truth," Treize murmured, more to himself than anyone else. However, Wufei caught the comment. For a second something strange glinted in his dark eyes, then it was gone.
"You're holding him already," he commented. "What do you think of him?"
"It's disturbing, to say the least," Treize commented. "And although I know it's irrational, I can't stand him. I did do the blood analysis, and he and I are identical genetically within one one-hundredth of a percentage, and that can be accounted for by normal testing error." He was not happy about that, to know that somewhere else he might have become someone like Velanz.
He saw something... relief?... flicker through Wufei's eyes before they became unreadable black pools again. He immediately set about chasing down what the elusive emotion had been. Something told him that it was very important.
"It's not irrational. The man is a dishonorable toad," Wufei told him. "Don't trust him - he would think nothing of slitting your throat while you sleep."
"I have him under surveillance."
"Not under lock and key?"
"He's promised me the secret of faster-than-light travel if I assist him in recapturing the girl."
"And you made a deal with him?" Wufei did not sound happy. In fact, he sounded a hairsbreath away from outraged, which was not a good sign.
"We could use that technology, if he really can give it to us."
"In return for the life of an honorable warrior."
"Honorable?"
"Much more so than that cur you're dealing with," he snarled.
Treize's mind finally caught up with what he'd seen before. It had been relief in Wufei's eyes that he'd seen, and he'd been relieved when Treize said that Velanz was his genetic double. That meant one of two things - that Wufei had been worried that they weren't genetically identical, or that he hadn't known it was Velanz in the first place. Somehow it didn't seem likely that he was overly concerned with them being genetically identical or not, which meant that it was the second issue.
"You're missing someone," he said, absolutely certain of himself, and saw chagrin on Wufei's face. "Who?"
"You know I'm not going to tell you that, but he never made it back," Wufei said. "Thank you for confirming that you don't have him."
"You were pumping me for information." There was no hint in his voice that his words were an accusation, but they both knew they were. Wufei was right, this was a very unusual situation, but he was coming dangerously close to crossing a line that had been set when they first got together. "The least you can do now is tell me who it was."
"I can't do that," Wufei said, turning so that his back was to Treize, a sure sign that he was feeling guilty about what he'd done. He was silent for a few minutes, then turned back, his expression strained. "But I can give you some other information... the man, Velanz, he can do what he says."
"Excuse me?"
"He can probably give you faster-than-light travel. I don't know much about his knowledge specifically, but his world does have faster-than light travel. If he says he can do it, he probably can."
"How do you know that?"
"That they have faster-than-light travel? When we arrived at one of their bases, it was on another planet."
"You're certain? It wasn't some sort of trick?"
"There were two suns," Wufei told him.
Treize smiled slightly. Despite everything he'd seen and done, he'd never quite gotten over a basic love of outer space and the adventure and challenge it represented. To stand on another planet...
"I envy you, dragon."
Wufei shrugged slightly. "The colonies they have there are nearly as fragile as our own - they may live on other worlds, but they still live in domes, depending on their own constructions for survival. In some ways they're even more fragile. We refused to teach them how to make mobile suits."
"You did?" That surprised him. Among other things, the Gundam pilots were known for being absolutely ruthless. He would have expected that they would act to give their new allies every advantage in their home universe.
"Mobile suits would have destroyed their worlds - for them, the conflict must remained contained, or millions will die. The population of their colonies far exceeds ours, and the Alliance has already proven their willingness to destroy colonies for their own interests. From what I've seen, it's standard policy for them. They've gone even farther than even you dared to," he added with a raise of an eyebrow.
"Then they've gone too far," Treize said coldly. He'd been furious when he heard that Lady Une had threatened to destroy the colonies unless the Gundam pilots surrendered. Zechs had summed it up perfected when he called it 'tasteless tactics.' If he won using such tactics, it would make his winning meaningless, and he was determined not to let that happen. And Wufei knew that. He was using Treize's determination to manipulate his emotions, the manipulative little brat. Suddenly Treize remembered why he'd started a relationship with the young pilot. It was for the same reason that he and Zechs had gotten together. There were so few people who could keep up with him mentally, and fewer still chose to use that knowledge in the word games he adored.
That reminded him. "Who is the girl in the other world?" he asked, his earlier anger already dismissed.
He saw a flash of surprise in Wufei's eyes and allowed himself a slight smile of satisfaction. If Wufei was going to play word games with him, he should be prepared to have the game turned on him. Wufei had been right - this was very different than discussing troop placements or something like that, this was safe to talk about, and now Trieze was ready to enter the game in earnest. "What do you know?" he asked in response.
"Velanz said that she is not human. That she is some sort of genetically engineered weapon."
"She is something more than human, faster and stronger, as you have no doubt seen," Wufei told him. "And she is a leader of men back in her own world. Women are weak... but she is not quite a woman, is she?" he asked neutrally. Trieze managed not to raise an eyebrow at that comment. The girl must be absolutely spectacular at whatever skills she possessed to wring an admission like that out of Wufei. He'd never been able to understand Wufei's insistence that women were always weaker than men. To be sure, most were, made that way because of the expectations of society, but not all women were like that. Wufei never understood that - this was the first time that Treize had heard him speak of a female without scorn in his voice.
Wufei's eyes flickered to the antique clock on the wall, right above the digital one set on military time. Both were necessary, one for his own mental well-being, the other for business. Treize was still looking for a way to combine the two, so far without success. Maybe the two were meant to be apart.
"I have to go now - I only came to warn you about him."
"And to make sure that we did not hold your comrade," Treize corrected him mildly, with a hint of rebuke in his tone.
"Indeed. Please convey my greetings to Zechs. I am sorry I missed him."
"Yes, well, he's a bit busy cleaning up after your last attack."
"I know."
Treize signed - he would give a lot to know how Wufei seemed able to pinpoint their locations at any time with little to no effort - he'd had Lady Une go over their security a dozen times, and still he couldn't find the leak.
Wufei opened the window and climbed up onto the sill, apparently not at all concerned at the guards who were supposed to be outside, guarding him. Treize would have to speak to them about that. "Just be very careful with this man. He would think nothing of betraying you if he thought it was in his interest, much like Romafeller."
"I'll keep that in mind," Treize told him. He was also going to keep in mind the fact that Wufei's perspective on this issue was more than a little biased.
Wufei knew him well enough to know what he was thinking. "It is true, I am not entirely objective in this, but then, I get along much better with my double then I think you do with yours. But remember this - they offered us their aide, risked their lives for us even when we refused to give them mobile suit technology. Your double refuses to give you even basic information about your enemies unless you aide him." Wufei's lips quirked in a slight smile. "Is it any surprise that I think you're making a terrible mistake?"
-----------------------------------------
"How did it go?" Diana asked as Brian, Devin, Andrew and Trowa came walking in the door.
"Mission accomplished," Brian said coldly. Duo did a double-take, trying not to stare... But damnit, Brian sounded so much like Heero when he talked like that. At least he wasn't talking in Japanese - that would have been too much.
"They didn't suspect a thing," Andrew said, elaborating when he saw that none of his companions were going to. "We got in and out, completed the switch..." he shook his head slightly in disgust. "They never even realized that we don't work for Oz."
"And the... machine?" Diana asked, still not having come up with a better name for it.
"Safe in the place that we talked about," Andrew said, not even mentioning it by name now. As far as Duo could tell, there were some things that they just didn't talk about out loud, no matter how secure the situation. The fact that all of them read lips as easily as they breathed might have something to do with it.
"Good," Diana said with a nod, then went back to whatever it was she was doing. She'd been shocked and appalled when informed that they either knew nothing or did nothing about the way that the populace viewed the Gundams, Oz, and the war in general. Apparently a large part of what she did was work to get the public on the side of the Rebels, to let everyone know what the Alliance was really doing. Duo could see why she did that - with no Gundams, the main resource in fighting wars was bodies, plain and simple. And you don't get people to sign up if they think that you're the evil Rebels. So he could see why their five doubles just couldn't be the only force, no matter how good they were. It would be like the five Gundam pilots trying to fight off all of Oz's forces in one-on-one combat. Without their Gundams.
Still, he thought that Diana was going a little overboard with the shock and horror. It wasn't as if the five of them had a whole lot of free time to spend fighting Oz's propaganda. But then, this was I-take-responsibility-for-the-entire-world Diana they were talking about. For her, there was no such thing as too much work. He had no idea how she'd managed not to burn herself out years ago. And I thought Heero was a workaholic.
"When are you leaving?" she asked without taking her eyes off whatever it was she was doing. She had two screens set up in front of her, and was reading from one while she typed at about two hundred words per minute on the keyboard. From where he was sitting, Duo could see that whatever she was typing was going up onto the other screen, based on how fast it was scrolling down.
"Will you at least look at me when you do that?" he demanded.
She instantly moved her eyes from the screen to him, still typing. "Sorry. When are you leaving?"
"Tonight," Duo said. After some talking, they'd decided that he, Kane, and Andrew would go to G's lab in space - him because G gave him his orders, Kane because it ought to confuse the hell out of whoever had betrayed them, and Andrew because he could hack just about anything, and because he could get information out of just about anyone when he wanted. Duo was trying not to think about that part, about how close he'd come to having Andrew perform the same services on him.
He didn't remember what had happened to Quatre when he'd been on the Zero system - he hadn't been there at the time, but he'd heard about it from Heero, and he couldn't forget the look on Trowa's face when he found him again in the circus, after he lost his memory, the naked fear on the normally mask-like face.
He knew that Andrew was sorta like Quatre, except that it seemed like he was constantly half on and half off of the Zero system. It didn't show very often, but... he hid a shudder. Andrew creeped him out in a way that none of the other doubles did, and he wasn't too cowardly to admit it. But he wasn't afraid of him - if nothing else, Andrew was completely in control of himself, and was an ally, albeit a strange one.
"You're sure the scientists..." she actually left of typing for a moment, a sure sign that she was very upset about something. "You're sure they're not the ones who betrayed you?"
"Yeah. They've pulled a lot of crap in their time, but they wouldn't risk their own agenda's by getting us killed. But Heero did confirm that there's a traitor somewhere in the labs. We know G's got one for sure, still looking for confirmation on the others, that's why we get to go first," he told her as seriously as he could manage. Scientists really got to her - it was a good thing that she wasn't going along, she might shoot G as soon as she saw him. And while he was a jerk a lot of the time, he was more valuable alive then dead, at least right now.
She nodded, her eyes traveling back to the screens, but her face looked almost as pale as it had been when she first saw the open sky. That reminded him... "How's that whole fear-of-open-spaces thing coming?"
She glared at him, but looked better already. "Fine. I walked out to the road and back without even hyperventilating," she replied sarcastically. "Did I mention how much I am not liking Earth?"
"Oh, come on, give it a chance. There's some good stuff going for it, don't you think?"
"I might appreciate it more if I could walk outside for more than ten minutes without freaking out," she told him. "You cannot imagine how humiliating this is for me." Luckily, she was only half-serious.
"Look at it as a learning experience," he suggested, and she growled something unrepeatable at him. Nope, definitely nothing like Relena Peacecraft. I think she'd faint if she even thought about those words.
Diana's typing speed actually managed to increase after that comment. She barely glanced up as Kane came in. "How'd it go?" she asked, once again focused on what she was doing.
Or at least that's what it looked like. Was it possible to be completely focused on two things at the same time? When you were in a Gundam you had to concentrate on a dozen things at once, but they were all aimed at one goal - defeating the enemy and keeping yourself alive. In that order. Diana tended to concentrate on several unrelated topics at the same time, or so it appeared.
"No sign of him yet," Kane reported glumly. "Is Wufei back yet? Maybe he's heard of something."
"He said he was going to check out a lead," Diana said. "And he's not back yet."
For an instant Kane's face fell, then the expression disappeared as if it had never been when he grinned mischievously. "Ah, I'm sure Shin's fine. He's probably hanging out in some posh hotel somewhere, living it up on room service. He's a little hard to kill - trust me, we tried."
Duo blinked, then he remembered - Shin had tried to kill Diana before she taught him the truth about the people who'd raised him, and she tried to return the favor. He grinned to himself. It was nice to know that someone, somewhere, also met one of their best friends by shooting them. So what if he had to go to another universe to find them?
"I'm sure we'll find him in no time," he said with a confidence he in no way felt.
"Who among you is best at politics?" Diana suddenly asked, ignoring his comment entirely.
"What? Ah, that would be Quatre, I guess," Duo said with a shrug. None of them were trained for politics - they were trained to kill, in many different fashions, and to support themselves while they did it, but politics was an entirely different story. But Quatre's father was extremely rich and fairly powerful - he'd probably had some training in that stuff. "Why?"
"I want to know what he thinks of this." Diana nodded towards the screen, then looked at Duo carefully. "Actually, you might as well read this, too. I'd like to know what you think of it. It's hard writing stuff for people from your universe. The mindset is completely different."
He blinked. "What?"
"You have to write propaganda that people will understand," Diana said seriously. "And the people in our universe think differently than they do in yours."
Duo found himself interested in spite of himself. "Why?"
"Well, there is this whole two hundred years of war that you guys have had, it makes people more nervous, more suspicious in general - the fact that you have many different nations working together instead of one world nation, or used to anyway, that makes a difference too. Then there's the location of the colonies."
"What?" Damn it, he was beginning to sound like a broken record!
"Well, your colonies are so close to each other - relatively, I mean, and so close to Earth. That makes a big difference in the way people classify themselves. In our universe, for instance, if for some reason you get to talk to someone from another colony or planet, and it barely ever happens, you introduce yourself by your colony name, the planet your colony is on, and finally your ancestry from Earth. So you see, we've very much divorced ourselves from our past. The fact that we're all... well, all true colonists are albinos, that has a lot to do with it, too. It's a lot of work and incredibly expensive to get to Earth, where you're immediately identified as an outsider because of the way you look. I'm speaking from first hand accounts, not personal experience, by the way. So anyway, most people don't want to take that much time and money to go to a place where they can be outcasts. Add to that the fact that the Alliance controls and has restricted communication and travel between the colonies and Earth for over fifty years, and probably less than one colonist in a thousand has ever been to Earth, or even seen it with their own eyes. So we don't have the same connection with Earth that all you do. And that changes the way you perceive everything. Do you want me to go on?"
"Sure, this is kinda interesting," Duo encouraged her. At least it'll be something to think about when I'm waiting on an ambush. "Ah, just one thing. What do you mean, true colonists? I mean, you were born on one of the colonies, that makes you a colonist, doesn't it?"
"You have to be human to be a colonist," she replied with a shrug, then turned the screen to face him. "Here, I'll show you what I did with this..."
------------------------------------------
"So how is it that you manage with all these different countries?" Velanz asked in a lazy drawl. "It must be terribly inefficient. No, that's a sigma," he corrected the scientist who was reviewing his sloppily written equations.
Treize sighed silently as he set aside another file. Sometimes it seemed that all he ever did recently was paperwork. Right now he was having a hard time concentrating, however, something that rarely bothered him. But Velanz had insisted that he wanted to talk to him, and when Treize said that he had to finish his work first, Velanz announced that he wasn't leaving. So he'd dragged the scientist that was working on his equations in with him, and the two of them had sat in front of Treize's desk for the past two hours, the scientist clearly miserable to be stuck in this position, inconveniencing the beloved leader of Oz, but just as clearly fascinated by what Velanz was showing him.
"Please send this out," Treize said to Zechs, who'd returned from his work cleaning up after the Gundam attack. His presence here wasn't really necessary, but Treize was grateful for it nonetheless, because Zechs acted as a sort of buffer between Treize and his double, allowing Treize to remain outwardly calm and collected.
Zechs nodded slightly, glancing at the papers as he handed them to a subordinate. As the door opened, the man was nearly knocked over by someone running through the door in the other direction. "Your Excellancy! Good news! We've caught one of the Gundam pilots!"
There was a stunned silence in the room. The man looked from Treize's face to Zechs' and back again. "We've got him isolated down in an empty cell block. Would you like to see him?"
Treize rose smoothly from his chair. "Yes. I've heard quite a bit about them, it's about time I finally meet one, don't you think?" he asked rhetorically, purposefully not looking at Zechs. He'd already told Zechs about Wufei's visit. But Wufei had left hours ago - he was probably hundreds of miles from here by now.
As he started following down the hall, he was aware of Zechs falling into step behind him. It was several minutes, however, before he realized that Velanz had also followed him. He stopped short and turned around to frown at his double. "I do not remember giving you permission to come."
"You never told me not to," Velanz said with a shrug. "Besides, you need me. I can tell you if it really is one of your pilots or one of our experiments. They can be hard to tell apart at times," he admitted ruefully.
Treize didn't even bother to acknowledge him with a nod. He spun back and continued following the man down the hall. A few minutes later they reached a cell with two guards standing in front of it at attention. The rest of the hall was deserted.
"It's a one-way mirror," the man explained, pointing at a small window in the door. Treize looked through it and his heard practically jumped into his throat. Wufei was sitting in a chair in the center of the brightly lit room, his arms cuffed behind him. He was wearing a pair of dark glasses and a completely different set of clothes than he'd been wearing a few hours earlier. Even stranger, he had cut his hair. It was in a short cut, no more than a few centimeters long anywhere, with no sign of the small ponytail that he'd had as long as Treize had known him.
"I want to speak with him alone."
"Sir?! But... he's dangerous..."
"Zechs will be here to protect me, and he is restrained. I trust that he will be able to protect me?"
"Sir, I'm sorry, but you have no idea how dangerous he is. He killed eight of our men after we disarmed him. I can't in good conscience let you go in there alone. If you leave the door open..."
Treize hid a sigh. It was obvious that he was not going to be able to talk to Wufei in private, thanks to this overzealously protective subordinate. He nodded his agreement, then keyed in his code to open the door. Wufei raised his head slightly when Treize entered, and he stared at Treize for a few seconds before dropping his head slightly again. Treize exchanged a glance with Zechs. Wufei wouldn't give away that they knew each other, but this behavior was strange. Treize would have expected him to answer with scorn, or disgust. Not this blank silence.
"Well, you're not exactly what I expected," he said in a conversational tone, watching Wufei's face. It was hard to know what he was thinking at any time, and even harder now with those glasses on. "You're just a boy. I wonder what you were thinking, trying to fight us." That was an outright lie - he knew Wufei wasn't a boy any more than he was. None of the Gundam pilots were boys, despite their ages - more like old men stuck in children's bodies.
A hint of a wry smile was playing at the edges of Wufei's lips, and Treize took an involuntary step backwards. There was something very wrong here. He knew Wufei quite well, knew his mannerisms, and this man was displaying none of them. It was almost as if...
A low chuckle interrupted his thought process, and he turned to see Velanz walk into the room, his arms crossed in front of him, an amused look on his face. "You haven't figured it out yet, have you?" he asked Treize. "He's not your pilot." Suddenly one hand snaked out and pulled the sunglasses away from Wufei's face. Wufei turned his head aside for a moment, closing his eyes, then he opened them and glared at Velanz.
Treize took another step back. Wufei's - not Wufei - his eyes were completely white, with tiny black pupils in the center. "You!" he hissed. There was the creak of tortured metal, and he suddenly launched himself at Velanz. There was the crack of gunfire, and not-Wufei suddenly slumped to the ground, blood seeping from his left leg.
"Now, Five, you should know better than that," Velanz said in a casual tone, still holding the gun on the boy. Treize wondered briefly where on Earth he'd gotten the gun from and made a mental note to scold his security officers. They were failing all over the place today, it seemed. "Now get back in the seat and keep your arms at your side, or I'll shoot you in the other leg."
The boy continued to glare at him, but silently climbed back into the chair, showing no discomfort from the bullet wound that had bled all over his jeans and was now dripping on the floor. Actually, as he moved, he didn't act as if he'd been injured at all, Treize noted. He sat bolt upright, pushing his back flat against the back of the chair, arms glued to his sides. He stared straight in front of him, eyes blank, not even looking at Velanz.
"Very good, Five. It's good to see that you haven't lost all your discipline in the presences of those Rebels," Velanz said, then turned his head towards Treize without taking his eyes off the boy. "This is Subject Five of the Omega Project," he said slowly. "It was created less than sixteen years ago, has accelerated healing, increased speed, intelligence, and strength, and... oh, yes. Five, change back to normal."
The boy didn't look at him, but he raised his head slightly, lips tightening.
Velanz tilted his head slightly, then fired a bullet into his other thigh. The boy's eyes snapped shut and his head dropped for an instant. Then he raised his head again and resumed staring into space as he bled onto the floor.
"What are you doing?!" Treize demanded icily. He did not like the look in Velanz's eye, as if he was enjoying torturing the boy. "I want him alive," he added, to give the man an excuse to stop shooting the boy.
"It will survive. We built them to take a lot more punishment than this. Five, if you don't change back right now, I will shoot you in the head," he added, shifting his aim slightly so that the gun was now aimed precisely at the boy's head. The boy's eyes narrowed slightly, then he paled. And paled. Treize's eyes widened as he realized that all of the color was disappearing from his skin and hair, leaving the rest of him as bleached as his eyes.
Wufei's double turned to look at Treize. "You must be Treize Khushrenada. Our doubles told us about you. They said that you were not as lowly as *him*," his eyes flicked towards Velanz. "I am very disappointed to see that they were mistaken in this instance."
"That's enough, Five."
"My name is Shin."
Velanz drew back the hammer on the gun. "You don't have a name. You're not even human. You're just a weapon that's misfired. I'm going to take you back to our world, and then our scientists will dissect you to find out what's gone wrong with this experiment, so we can try again."
The boy smirked. "There isn't enough brains in the Alliance to create us again. You had to blackmail some *smart* people into doing it the first time, and then to top off your stupidity, you killed them too. There's no one left who can make us," he sneered.
"Maybe," Velanz admitted, walking in a slow circle around the chair, always keeping the gun aimed squarely at the boy. "But we won't need to. Once we have you and the others, the Rebels will collapse."
"Diana's been outsmarting you since she was seven," Shin smirked. "What makes you think that you're going to do any better now that she's had more experience, now that she has the rest of us to help her?"
"Because Subject Eight is foolish enough to believe that she has some humanity in her," Velanz said scornfully. "And because she places the lives of others above her own. She will turn herself over willingly in exchange for your life."
Shin's head snapped around to look at Velanz, his lips tightening with anger. "You bastard..." he whispered hoarsely, and for the first time, Treize saw real fear in his eyes.
Velanz smiled, then casually slammed the butt of his gun into the back of the boy's head. The boy slumped slightly, then raised his head again, eyes partially glazed. Velanz struck again, in the exact same place, and this time Shin slumped completely.
By this time Treize had completely lost control of his usually calm face, and he guessed that his shock was clearly visible on his face, because Velanz turned to him and said, "It was necessary. You don't have anything that would hold him now, and those wounds won't hold him for more than a couple hours. Don't worry, he'll be fine in a day or so - it'll take a lot more than that to crack the skull of one of our creations."
"So what do you recommend now?" Treize asked, not bothering to keep the coldness out of his voice. He'd known the man was dangerous, both his own instincts and Wufei had told him that, but he hadn't know how needlessly cruel the man was. To shoot the boy twice, then verbally torture him like that before knocking him unconscious with a blow that could have very easily paralyzed him or left him brain damaged was completely unnecessary and unacceptable.
"Get some of your doctors to dig the bullets out of it," he said, waving his gun casually. "Don't bother to treat it - he'll heal in a couple of days anyway. I already gave some of your people the formula for a drug that will keep him down as long as we need. Long enough to build a better facility," he observed, looking around the room. "He could have escaped from this place in a second. Look at these cuffs," he said, nudging the boy's limp wrists with the end of his gun. The chain between the cuffs had been torn in half. "Not much harder than tearing paper, for it," he said, shaking his head. "I'll give some of your people plans to build something that has a chance in hell of stopping him for more than one second."
"I see." Treize turned to the guards who were standing in the door with shocked expressions on both of their faces. He nodded to them. "Please see that it's taken care of. And relieve Mr. Velanz of his gun."
Velanz shot him an absolutely murderous glare, which Treize pretended not to notice. As the guards dragged the boy's limp form out the door, Treize exchanged a glance with Zechs, with whom he'd shared Wufei's morning visit. Velanz was more dangerous than he'd ever suspected, and he was beginning to have second thoughts about this entire arrangement.
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"I can't believe how easy it is to get from Earth to the colonies," Andrew commented out loud to Kane that night as they sat in the front of the shuttle that carried Deathscythe and them to the scientist's lab. Kane hoped that Andrew would be able to remain calm if it turned out that the scientists here were the doubles of the scientists back on their world. The scientists there had done some pretty fucked up things to all of them, but somehow Andrew had born the worst of it, because of his abilities. Kane didn't understand Andrew's desire to not kill people, but he'd seen what it did to his 'brother', the strain of having conflicting desires warring in his head. Leaving the Alliance had been very good for him - they would have killed him eventually, one way or another.
"What's wrong?" Kane asked immediately, recognizing the signs that Andrew was upset about something. Andrew almost never talked to hear the sound of his own voice, and that had been an empty statement if he ever heard one.
"It's Shin. I think something's wrong."
"What?" It had taken Kane some time to get used to the idea that Andrew had some sort of ability that allowed him to see things the others couldn't, but once he did, he accepted those abilities without question.
"I don't know. Just a bad feeling. I can't get anything more specific than that. I've been trying all afternoon to pin it down, but I can't." The way Andrew's lips were pressed together was evidence enough of how very frustrated he was.
"Do you think he got captured?"
"I don't know. I guess we'll hear quickly enough if he did. It doesn't matter right now, we have our own mission to complete." Now that was a change of topic if Kane ever heard one, but if Andrew didn't want to talk about it, Kane wasn't going to push. Andrew could be more closed-mouthed than Brian when he put his mind to it, so Kane just nodded agreement.
"So what do you think of their Gundams?" Andrew asked, jerking his head towards the back of the shuttle, where Deathscythe was and where Duo slept. The Gundam pilots were good, but they were still human and needed sleep. Kane had taken a nap earlier and was set to go for another day or two.
Kane grinned. "I gotta get me one of those. Haven't seen anything as great at destroying as those things, ever. They're even better than C-4," he said, mentioning one of his favorite explosives, and got a real smile from Andrew in return. "But seriously..." he said, abruptly changing gears and shaking his head. "I see why they didn't want to give us the technology back on our world, and we can't bring it back with us. Even a normal mobile suit could destroy an entire colony by accident. These Gundams..." he shook his head again. "They're fine for on Earth, but we'd kill off half the colonists in no time if we tried to build them back on our world."
"Yeah. Quatre let me in Sandrock, showed me how to use it, so I can pilot a mobile suit if we run into trouble, but we can't bring those things back with us." Andrew shivered slightly. "It's hard to avoid killing with those things. Their casualty rates are staggeringly high, and it's not just soldiers. Not that it is with us, but..."
"But when innocents get killed on our side, it's always the Alliance, and almost always deliberate. People here just get hurt." Kane fell silent, thinking of the one time one of Diana's people had decided to get 'creative' and took out an Alliance agent along with his entire family, including three kids. The look on her face when she heard the news had been terrifying, and the incident had not been repeated.
"The randomness here is frightening, sometimes," Andrew confessed. "So much stuff happens without anyone planning it, people live and die... I never thought I'd miss the Alliance, but they sure do keep everything under control. I don't think it's possible to limit an attack here the way we do on our world - no matter what you do, it's going to spread beyond what you planned, and probably involve people who shouldn't be."
"Well, it ain't going to happen this time. A lab in the middle of space, hanging thousands of meters away from any colonies - that's about as isolated as you get. There isn't going to be any fallout from this one, we're just going to capture the traitor and deal with him."
"Or her," Andrew reminded him. Some of their own most effective spies were female, because the Alliance had a strange prejudice against them and believed that they could never accomplish anything worthwhile. An inexplicable attitude, especially given the fact that the head scientist on the project that created them had been female (until they killed her, anyway), and given what Diana had accomplished with her Rebels, many of whom were female. But as long as the Alliance persisted in being stupid, Diana was happy to use those blind spots against them. They rarely suspected her female operatives until it was too late.
"Or her," Kane agreed, then fell silent, looking at the stars outside.
"It's beautiful out here, isn't it?" Andrew said, looking at the starry expanse of space. They'd been to Earth once in their universe, and visited the moon twice, as well as traveling to various other colonies, but they'd never gotten a chance to look at space, since they were always sealed in a windowless room for the journey. The Alliance hadn't wanted them to experience anything out of their direct control, so since the stars weren't yet in the Alliance's domain, no stars for them!
"Yup," he agreed, and the two of them lapsed into a comfortable silence, staring at the stars.
I just added the 5x6x13 because I thought it was interesting and added something to an already complicated situation. I'm not planning anything explicit, I don't think.