CHAPTER ELEVEN
[Day 10] Lagrange Point 3

Their escort had hailed them half an hour ago, and with their shuttle's navigational capacity taken from them and flanked on four sides by what looked like heavily-armed space cruisers, Heero stood behind the co-pilot's seat that his partner was currently claiming and scowled. They were putting quite a bit of trust into Solo's credibility as a high-ranking Sweepers sergeant. If he gave these rebels any indication that he was some sort of double-agent, Heero estimated their combined chances of escape at less than thirteen percent-fifty-nine if they ignored Une's standing order to avoid direct conflict and combat.

By the time their ship was docked at the resource satellite Duo was visibly agitated, Solo was pacing the back galley of their small shuttle, and Heero was halfway through triple-checking his weapons. The airlock door decompressed loudly, then opened, and a team of five men in flight suits were standing on the platform awaiting them. A somber-looking young man with dirt-colored eyes stepped forward to greet them. "Sergeant Yuy?" he asked. Heero almost responded, but Solo stepped forward quickly and gave the young man a charismatic grin and sloppy salute; it was something Duo would have done, and that irked Wing's pilot for some odd reason. The dirt-eyed man nodded to him. "You can call me Noah," he said calmly. He was clearly indicating that his identity was not to be asked about. "These are your team leaders?" He glanced at Heero and Duo.

Solo's grin grew to an almost leer-like expression. "Yeah, these are Corporals Guy Johnson and John Ritter." With a knowing glance at Heero, his brother threw an arm companionably around the now-braidless American and chuckled. Heero held his breath, praying to space that Duo wouldn't rebuff the purposeful invasion of his personal space, but his partner simply put on his best lopsided smirk and stood there. Crisis averted. "Johnson here approached me about the rumor of resistance in the Sweepers a few weeks ago. Ritter is a colonial sympathizer, and I..." His grin turned wistful. "I'm from L2, born and raised. I'm pretty pissed that after two wars, ESUN still hasn't managed to clean up my home colony. It's bullshit. We'll do anything you need us to do to get your operation in action." He sounded like he meant that too, and Heero was unsure for a moment if the other agent was indeed acting.

Noah nodded thoughtfully, then smiled for the first time. It was a genuine one, the kind that Heero had seen on Winner's boyish face so many times before. Too trusting. This kid was going to end up dead. "Well, I suppose we should take you to the warehouse. That's what you're most interested in, I suspect. We need pilots for these suits, and damned good ones." He turned and began walking through the hangar. His heavily armed escort followed silently, as did the three undercover Preventers. "Do your corporals have any flight experience with mobile suits?"

It was all Heero could do not to laugh outright. He gritted his teeth silently to control the impulse, shooting a covert glance to Duo, who was all but chewing his own lip off to remain quiet. "A bit," Solo answered for them, giving Duo a wary look over his shoulder. "Ritter flew for OZ before leaving to join the Sweepers. Johnson is a mobile suit mechanic, and a damned fine one." The Japanese pilot was almost certain that there was some hidden sexual innuendo in that statement, but he couldn't address it at the moment.

"Excellent," Noah smiled. They had stopped outside of a heavy metal door, and the resistance leader turned to them, surveying both Heero and Duo thoughtfully. "Of course," he said quietly, "We can't jeopardize our operation by allowing just anyone to tour our facility. I require some assurance of your loyalties." Heero felt himself tense as the young man's smile gained a decidedly calculating edge. Just like Winner, indeed. "We have two individuals in our custody whom we have determined to be spies, not supporters of our cause." His muddy brown eyes grew hard and intense. "Ritter and Johnson here are going to dispatch of them." He said it so matter of factly that Heero had to replay the statement in his head twice before he was certain that he'd heard the man correctly.

So they were being initiated? It was crude, but not uncommon. White Fang had had a similar process of gaining entrance in order to separate out the enthusiasts from the potential infiltrators. Heero nodded once. Duo was motionless beside him, but still had that feral, trademark grin on his handsome face. Noah pressed his palm to a security pad near the door and it slid open with a hydraulic hiss. Inside the featureless metal room, two unfamiliar captives were bound in OZ-style forearm cuffs on the floor. They looked terrified. One of them was a middle-aged man in a mechanic's coveralls. The other was a young blonde woman in a wrinkled skirt and suit jacket. Heero swallowed a groan. So much for Une's non-violence policy.

"I know you're both armed. You will surrender your weapons to my security detail. You will complete your objective the old-fashioned way," Noah said evenly. Heero grunted an affirmative before methodically stripping himself of his sidearms. He unloaded all three of them, ejected the clips, and locked the slides open before handing them to the nearest security escort. Beside him, Duo was similarly disarming himself, pulling guns, knives, and small explosives from his pockets, his vest, his waist, and even the top of one boot. Heero did smirk then. His best friend was a walking arsenal even on his bad days. It took three of the security officers to take all of the American's equipment, and they looked startled. When his partner flashed them an almost evil leer, they backed away hastily. Noah turned to Solo. "You will supervise them. I'll be back in thirty minutes." He turned on his heel and exited the room, calling over his shoulder. "Try not to get too much blood on the floor."

Heero raised one eyebrow at his best friend as soon as the door closed, effectively locking them into the room with the two prisoners. Solo sighed heavily and leaned back against the wall. "I say you rock, paper, scissors to see who has to strangle the chick," he drawled, scratching his chin absently.

.

Fucking Hell.

Duo stared across the stark, bare room at the pathetic faces of the prisoners who were handcuffed, awaiting their execution. The braided pilot had killed before. More times than he could count, but not in the way they were now being expected to.

He didn't like this idea. Killing with the hands, in cold blood. It wasn't something he had ever truly done. He had killed in battle. Civilians may have died in the crossfire, but they had been war casualties. He supposed that murder was murder, no matter how you looked at it.

He shifted uncomfortably and stared; wide-eyed at the woman slumped weakly against the floor. Her eyes were half-lidded. He noticed the state of her clothes and felt a flash of heat rise into his face. Duo knew from the fading hope in her eyes and the state of her clothes what had happened to her. There was nothing Duo Maxwell hated more than rapists. Well, other than child molesters. There was a special hell for people who intentionally hurt the innocent.

He supposed he would be going to that same hell, for killing these people, who were innocent to him.

He didn't want to do this. He knew he couldn't do it feeling the way he was now. He would have to pull a Quatre and try to convince himself that what he was about to do was justified in some sort of way. Or maybe this was a Wufei state of mind. Either way, he had to stop feeling sorry for them.

The mission was the most important thing. This thought had been his mantra ever since he had cut his hair off. Nothing else mattered. He didn't matter. Heero didn't matter. He didn't have a life. He didn't have wants or needs or hopes or morals. He was just here to be the arm of Colonel Une and perform a task.

It was a terrible way to be, to brainwash oneself, but it was the only way to protect his already fragile mental state from being completely fucked.

He took a deep sigh and pushed past Solo, bumping him purposefully with his shoulder as if to say 'knock it off', and carefully padded up to the woman's side. He knelt down slowly and frowned, letting his hand reach out to caress her bruised cheek.

He had been here once, on the floor in handcuffs with a broken body. He had felt hopelessness and the painful realization that his life was about to end. Luckily for him he had people like Heero and the other pilots to help him out. He had Solo once, as he had been as a child, to help him out of a situation not too unfamiliar to this.

The woman turned her bloodshot eyes up to stare at him. She had given up. She was too weak to fight back. She had accepted that her life was over. He frowned and grabbed her frail-looking body up into his arms. She looked frightened at first but then relaxed when he said, "I'll make it quick."

People trusted Duo. There was just something about him. Kids liked him, and complete strangers would tell him things without hesitation. It made sneaking into places ridiculously easy, gaining trust and access to people and places prickly Heero Yuy would never have been able to infiltrate.

"Try not to struggle. Relax, and it will be over before you know it," Duo said softly. He raised his hand up to cover the woman's nose and mouth, applying the slightest of pressure. The woman was tense. Duo tried to smile at her. It was his fake smile, the one he automatically projected when he was in pain or under extreme stress. She wouldn't notice the difference. All she would see is sparkling blue-green eyes and a handsome, friendly grin.

Her face began to grow flushed, and instinctively she began to struggle. She was panicking. He knew she would. He clenched his arm around her tightly, holding her wriggling body against his chest while pressing his hand firmly against her face.

It hurt. It hurt like hell watching someone die at your hand. Duo had always tried to pretend it didn't bother him by putting on the God of Death act, lamenting about death like it was as commonplace as table sugar. It didn't matter how much he had to say it, it still fucking hurt.

He felt his chest tighten as she began gasping against his palm. He closed his eyes and held his breath.

Thirty excruciating seconds later she went limp. He opened his eyes and stared down into her lifeless face.

He was shaking, but he tried not to show it. He slid her carefully to the ground, resting her small body gently there. He arranged her neatly as if she were encased in a shroud before pulling himself to a stand. He walked over to the wall beside the door, faced the wall and crossed his arms over his chest.

"There. You two can fight over the other one."

.

Watching his best friend murder a woman wasn't nearly as difficult to stomach as Heero had anticipated. They'd both killed a lot of people.

Heero decided that that was his understatement of the year.

The middle-aged man in cuffs had watched Duo suffocate his fellow captive with wide, panicked eyes. They were green, a pale seafoam color that Heero had only ever seen on Earth. It reminded him of Cinq for some reason. Heero knew the man wouldn't try to run. He was almost visibly paralyzed with fear, and he was not a challenge.

Heero knew precisely two hundred and eighteen ways to kill someone with his bare hands. He could bend steel, after all, and to a certain gauge. Crushing the man's trachea would be easy. Blunt-force head trauma would almost definitely kill him. One decent blow to the sternum would stop the man's heart instantly.

There was always something morbidly fascinating about killing someone in close combat. Unlike his partner, Heero did not hesitate. This was a mission. Killing civilians, when not absolutely unavoidable, was acceptable collateral damage. The probability of the three of them leaving this room under favorable circumstances without killing both prisoners was less than twenty percent. Those were not acceptable odds.

Heero was not comfortable with Solo's nonchalant attitude towards this entire situation, however. He was also beyond tired of his brother underestimating him and that challenging glint in the Sweeper's cobalt eyes. Wing's pilot wasn't normally the type to engage in what Duo referred to as 'dick-waving contests,' but this was personal. If there was one thing that Heero was good at, it was being a soldier.

Closing the distance between himself and the second prisoner took four seconds. Positioning himself behind his fear-stricken victim took two. The cold stare he gave Solo as he calmly and methodically snapped the man's neck without any expression on his face took no effort whatsoever. He saw the other agent flinch, then look away distastefully. They may have both been engineered to be 'super soldiers,' but Heero had seen actual combat. He had hurt and maimed and killed many people in nineteen years. He doubted that Solo had ever seen a real battlefield.

When the second victim crumpled to the floor like a ragdoll, Heero walked away from the body without checking for a pulse. He had felt the vertebrae crack in his hands. The guilt that always came afterwards was like a palpable presence lurking just beneath the Japanese agent's conscious thoughts. It wasn't that Heero felt no remorse for killing people; it was that he ignored it. It would only compromise his objectivity and jeopardize the mission.

With one last icy glare at his brother, Heero slumped down against the wall beside his partner and buried his head in his hands. This whole process had taken less than ten minutes. They had another twenty to wait for the resistance leader's return.

.

The next twenty minutes were passed in silence. Duo hadn't turned from staring at the wall. He didn't want to think about what he had done, and turning to look at the bodies would make dwelling on it inevitable. Repression and denial could be a beautiful thing.

Finally the door's lock shifted and the face of the young man from before appeared in the doorway. Duo watched as the Sweeper, Noah, entered the room and checked the pulses of the dead prisoners to verify that they had been killed. Once he was satisfied he addressed Solo curtly, "Well now we know they can take orders and kill. Now we have to establish that they know as much about mobile suits as you claim."

Duo twitched and turned to eye the kid closely. The idea of someone questioning his ability to pilot and understand the innermost workings of any kind of mecha irritated him.

"Where are my guns?" He asked briskly, his voice dripping with distrust. The Sweeper hesitated, having been caught off guard by Duo's sudden inquiry.

"That is going to have to wait until my superior officers have given you clearance. For now, you'll be fine without them," Noah said flatly before walking away and out of the door. Duo watched as Solo followed, and obediently he fell into step behind the other undercover agent. He glanced over at Heero with a skeptical look that said 'can you believe this shit?' before trudging reluctantly after the two.

Noah had led them down a series of corridors, heavily staffed and guarded by Sweepers and peculiar looking people of all ethnicities wearing plain clothes. They passed through a security checkpoint where an armed guard was standing in front of the door. He moved at the sight of Noah escorting the new arrivals and allowed the other Sweeper to scan his hand at another door lock. They entered a dark room very similar to the one they had been in before, only this time the room was lined with tables against all four walls.

On the tables Duo immediately recognized various mobile suit parts.

He blinked and turned to look at Noah with a frown. "What is this about?"

Noah gestured to the tables with a casual tilt of his head. "If you are as much of a whiz-kid as Yuy says, then you should be able to tell Sergeant James over there what all of these things are."

Duo looked up and saw an older American man in coveralls standing beside the table to his left. The man seemed familiar, but he couldn't place him. Maybe he had been a friend of Howard?

"Huh. Right, whatevs..." Duo said with a shrug before approaching the table. He smiled at the older man, pointed to the nearest thing on the table and said confidently, "Grease pressure distributor." He shifted one step to the side and pointed at the next item on the table. "DC flux distributor."

.

Heero almost rolled his eyes at the asinine 'test' that Noah had set up for his partner. Wing's pilot knew from personal experience that the American agent could rip apart a Taurus suit in two hours and rebuild the thing with his eyes closed. The man had spent half the war in hangars and shuttle bays playing with dangerous electronics and sensitive explosives, all of which he had used to outfit his Gundam himself. If there was one thing that Duo Maxwell was undeniably good at, it was being a mechanic.

Solo stood silently beside him, an almost proud smirk on his face as Duo pointed at the long row of parts, rattling off names and ad-libbing uses of various mechanisms like a kid in a candy store. If this was how they were being tested on their flight abilities, Heero was confident that they would exceed expectations in any other demands the resistance leader could make of them. He wondered absently if Noah would require them to play in a flight simulator next.

Until 'Sergeant James' tensed perceptibly and moved forward to tower over Duo suddenly, a nasty look on his weathered face. Heero's blue eyes flew to the table, and he saw his friend's hand still lingering over one particular piece of machinery almost possessively. It was a small gunmetal-colored box with an odd line of diodes on one side, and it looked like it had survived some type of high-intensity explosion. The Japanese agent felt his stomach attempt a backflip. The innocuous-looking part was one of the many power converters for the hyper-jammer ECM suite arrays on Deathscythe. Heero knew this because, on the one occasion that he had raided that suit for parts, he'd been sorely tempted to steal that exact technology and outfit Wing with it. Fuck.

"How in hell do you know what that is, boy?" James growled slowly. Heero was ninety-eight percent sure that they were dead. If Duo could come up with a plausible explanation for having an intimate knowledge of a Gundam's radar-jamming technology that didn't include actually piloting the damned thing, Heero swore to himself that he would kiss the man full on the mouth as soon as they got the hell off of this satellite. Hell, he'd blow him.

Tell him you were part of the OZ team that rounded up Deathscythe's parts after Barton blew the damned thing up with a beam cannon.

Say that you worked in reconnaissance for the Barton Foundation and studied the original blueprints for that suit.

For the love of space, lie. For once in your life, lie and save all of our asses.

Heero knew that his partner couldn't hear his thoughts, but he'd be damned if Duo's pride condemned them all to a military-style execution. Not here. Not after everything they'd survived.

Noah was staring at James and Duo with intense interest. Solo looked ready to tackle the older mechanic. Heero himself felt the overwhelming urge to shoot the man, grab his partner, and run as fast as he could, but he knew that simply wasn't possible. All he could do was stand there and pray that his best friend's wit and resourcefulness would shine through in this moment of crisis.

Needless to say, Heero wasn't holding his breath.

.

Duo stared up at the older man with wide, startled blue eyes. He narrowed them, hoping the man wouldn't have noticed the faint ring of violet around his irises that the colored contacts just barely concealed.

He couldn't believe it. Here it was, a charred piece of his original Deathscythe here in the possession of the rebels. His heart had nearly skipped a beat as he spotted it in the pile of junk they were testing him on. He had reflexively grabbed it, without entirely thinking and muttered, "How the hell did you get this?"

It had been a mistake that he immediately began to regret. The mechanic was upon him in seconds. He flinched and straightened his posture, reflexively glaring in defiance into the face of being revealed.

His mind raced, and he quickly blurted the first thing that came to mind.

"Of course I know what this is," he said arrogantly, still protectively clutching the part in his hands. "This thing is legendary. I never thought I would see one of these things, especially here. You guys are impressive, having access to Gundam technology."

The sound of the word 'Gundam' slipping from his tongue felt foreign. Having been a Gundam pilot, Duo hardly used the word. He had never needed to say it before. In the past he only needed to say 'my suit' or call his suit by name.

James was still staring down at him, unconvinced. Duo smiled brighter, his body language exuding complete ease and confidence.

"What? Never heard of ''? It is only the best resource for all things mobile suit. I have never seen a hyper jammer, except in schematic form. Heh. I guess old timers like you don't lurk the nets much, huh? S'okay. Hey look! A class-three pressure stabilizer with a barometric sensor! Fuck, these things are worth at least thirty-thousand credits!"

Duo flitted away from the older man to inspect more items on the table, hoping his casual demeanor and superior knowledge of the nets made the older man question his suspicions.

Noah cleared his throat and gave the mechanic James a skeptical glance before speaking up quietly, "Yes, well, you obviously know your stuff. Let's move on."

The young man sighed and led them very unenthusiastically through a side door and down a hallway lit only by long strips of light blue luminescent tape. They walked for almost a mile, deep into the underbelly of the satellite. The artificial gravity here was heavy, causing Duo to consciously struggle to pick up his feet with each step, trying his best not to awkwardly trip over his own feet.

They stopped at a hatch door in the dark hall. There were no guards here, only a secure door with a keypad.

Noah ordered his escorts to stand aside and keep everybody back while he punched in a lengthy access code. The door hummed before hissing open. Inside was a round room, lit with only a few spotlights to the right and left side of the room. Duo spotted a large, egg-shaped black object in the center of the room. It had a hatch on the front, open to reveal a replica of a mobile suit cockpit. Monitors and controls covered the majority of the interior of the egg.

A simulator? These guys were really serious when it came to recruiting. Duo thought this was smart of them. Test capabilities before ever letting the prospective recruits know what you had up your sleeve.

Once everyone was inside of the testing room a separate operative closed and locked the door. The boy, Noah, approached the egg and tapped a few keys. The console glistened to life, and the familiar dull whir of a mobile suit operating system booting up. Duo couldn't help but grin. He had forgotten all about that sound.

"Johnson," Noah commanded, the presence of the simulator gad given the young man sharpness to his voice, "If your clearance is passed you'll be admitted to the mechanical unit. Ritter, come and verify that Yuy is no liar."

Duo grinned as he took a seat against the wall where the operatives had gathered. He hoped they had a simulation that could challenge Heero's skills. He then wondered… was Yuy going to show them everything or reign in his abilities to come off more normal?

Well, either way, these guys were in for a show.

.

Heero felt strangely apprehensive about the simulator. His piloting abilities, while formidable in their own right, had relied on the ZERO System for so much of the wars that he wondered briefly if he had grown too dependent on the system. The likelihood that these resistance organizers had managed to procure a copy of the system was less than twelve percent. He would probably be tested on a standard, run-of-the-mill OZ cadet simulator.

Glancing quickly at his partner, Heero almost rolled his eyes at the lazy grin on Duo's face. He was expecting a spectacle, but Wing's pilot knew that displaying the full spectrum of his flying skills would probably only garner him suspicion. The egg-shaped apparatus felt foreign and uncomfortable. It had been design with a very utilitarian purpose in mind, and it wasn't fitted to his individual body type the way that Wing had been. The seat was far too wide, which would lead to unintentional lateral movement, and he had to sit forward of the chair's back to securely reach the pedals. What a piece of junk.

Sliding the harness straps over his shoulders was second nature, but they were heavily padded and bulky. The two throttle shifters were fairly standard, as was the control yoke was similar to the one in Wing; it even had armament switches to one side. The true differences in this fabricated cockpit became apparent only when it was powered up. Heero found himself completely surrounded by screens-overhead, below the pilot's seat, to his sides, and directly in front of him. Wing's monitor system had been extensive, but this bordered on overkill. It gave him the impression of floating in the air, with visibility in almost every direction. The navigational cluster was digital, and the altimeter, systems status, and mundane data like fuel consumption, velocity, and wind shear scrolled past him on the side of the main monitor, which curved around the front of the cockpit. The weapons and targeting systems for this simulator seemed particularly advanced-the targeting function seemed linked directly with his optical movements, tracked by a thin beam of green light emanating from a small piece of machinery embedded in the top edge of the main monitor. Heero estimated it to be on par with, if not more accurate than, Wing's search-eye ability. Wherever he looked on his monitors, a small red digital scope appeared. His radar was frighteningly similar to Wing's; it made itself apparent as a large globe-like display directly below the yoke, but not quite obstructing his view of the monitor below him. It was an interesting experience to watch the landscape roll by between his knees, to say the least.

This was one of the most advanced cockpits that Heero had ever encountered, and that was saying a lot; he was the former owner of the most advanced mobile suit in the history of after-colony warfare. He barely had time to grab hold of the thrusters before the cockpit hummed around him and sirens began blaring near his head. His radar suddenly pulsed with activity, identifying seven enemy suits. To his vague surprise, the main monitor began offering up blueprints of each model of suit and listing off vulnerabilities before he could target any one in particular. When he blatantly ignored the computer's attempts to auto-lock onto the nearest target, it overrode his decision, refusing to allow him to fire, and a monotone female voice sounded around him. "Target is not optimal."

What the fuck?

Zero had never actually spoken to him. Sure, its operating system contained a mild form of artificial intelligence that sensed when the suit was undergoing more mechanical stress than was acceptable, but it had never, never overrode a direct command from its pilot.

"Override computer targeting," Heero said aloud. The monitor to his left showed two enemy suits closing in on him fast. He attempted to target them once more, but again the computer ignored him.

"Targets present lower threat risk than enemy Taurus at seventy-three degrees south-southeast." Heero growled and swiveled his head to check the monitor below him. Surely enough, there was a suit approaching him at a rapid rate, a beam saber drawn and ready.

The Japanese agent practically growled at the computer. "Terminate computer override," he barked, forgetting momentarily that this was a simulator, and that he was being both watched and tested. His radar screeched and the computer finally relented. He took out all three suits with a skilled twist of the thrusters and pedals, blowing the two to his due west apart before slicing neatly through the suit below him with his simulated beam saber. The other four enemy suits were dispatched in short order, and Heero glanced from the radar to the main monitor. Clear.

"Targets neutralized. Resuming operational capabilities," the computer informed him calmly. He glared at the monitor. What the hell kind of operating system was this?

The simulator was powered down and Noah stepped forward, an incredulous smile on his face. "You're the first potential pilot we've had to force the computer to back down. Good show," he chuckled. "Did you learn to pilot like that in OZ?"

Heero met his stare evenly and lied through his teeth. "Yes."

Nodding to himself, Noah turned to Solo, who looked fairly impressed, and shrugged. "They are who you say they are," he said. "My security detail will escort you to the hangar, now. We'll give you a very brief tour of our new mobile suit models, and then you will be asked to leave. Our final production date is slated for one month from tomorrow, and we will not require your services until just before then."

Solo nodded his assent, and Heero climbed out of the simulator with one last loathing glare at the main monitor. If those suits were equipped with this system, ESUN and Preventers had one hell of a problem. His hands were still shaking as he exited the room beside his partner.