Legend Of The Jokers Wild Revised

by CSS Stravag

Set 1 of the Jokers Wild tale. A derelict patrol ship of an interdimensional Star Empire suffers a problem when jumping between dimensions, and lands in the L4 area of Cosmic Era Earth. How can one dysfunctional warship and its motley crew change the history of genocide in the lands of the SEEDs? (This Set of the Jokers Wild is completed, working on Set 2 now.)

11. Surviving The Cold Future

(Jokers Wild, Set 1, Chapter 11: Surviving the Cold Future)

"Hey, you! C'mon, we gotta find some cover! They're coming!"

Jillian didn't have a clue who the guy was, but she came up as he waved her forward. Basic infantry weapons and tactics was so long ago for her, she wasn't even sure if she remembered how to arm and use the basic assault rifle any more. She thought she got it right, magazine goes in here until it clicks, then pull the charging handle back...

"Put your safety on, kid, they ain't here yet," a Commander orders of her. "Get behind this crate, peek around the side, and when I say, give 'em hell, got it?"

"Yessir," she replies meekly. This was a far cry from her humdrum duties of paperwork and directing missing people to the right office for their needs. Jachin Due, the final defense of ZAFT, had become a battlefield not by the Earth Alliance, but some completely unheard-of enemies apparently siding with Blue Cosmos in this one. Seventeen, barely able to be legally responsible for herself, not even old enough to go out partying with the older troops, and now she was at hazard of being killed by someone she didn't even know the name of, much less their whims.

"Couple of guys from down below says they're wearing some kind of heavy armor," a Mobile Suit mechanic says. "Says these assault rifles ain't good enough. Doesn't even slow 'em down, he said."

"Not likely," the Commander replies. Jillian could not tell if it was bullshit or not, he sounded gruff and she had known the guy for all of twenty seconds. "I'll admit we don't know shit about these guys, but armor on modern infantry? Not a chance in hell, rifles are too powerful to stop with metallic armor thin enough the poor troops can move."

"You say so," the fifteen-year-old cynic with the light machine gun replies.

Jillian sat and watched, though she wasn't paying attention forward where the enemy was supposed to be coming from. She was watching the others in the little defensive ambush they had set up. Two of them ladies, six men. One of the ladies was a bit younger than she was, probably somewhere around fifteen, maybe sixteen, two of the guys were her age or younger. The Sergeant had to be the oldest, maybe twenty-five at that, the rest were somewhere between her age and that. Not one of them looked calm or happy, most were enervated or even scared of their prospects. If half the rumors that had filtered up was true, these were some serious enemies, and that did not make anyone happy.

The sounds of gunfire echoed back and forth through the halls, the bark of ZAFT automatic weapons against the mixed sounds of many types of weapons—some that even sounded like the 76mm Machine Guns. Every now and again explosions could be heard, sometimes the echo of several explosions in a row—Jillian had no clue what would cause multiple explosions like that, but she knew she did not want to find out.

"Steady, people," the Commander orders as everyone cringes to the sound of a large machine gun.

"RUN AWAY!" A ZAFT infantry officer shouts as he bounces off the wall and keeps drifting down the hall. "They're coming! Oh God, one of them just killed a dozen of us with a Gatling gun! You gotta get away! We gotta evacuate!"

"Moron!" the Commander grabs the drifting infantry officer and hauls him down to the deck. "There is no retreat! There is no evacuate! They hold the space around the fortress! You can't go anywhere!"

"But—we can't stop them! Mobile Suits can't stop them! They're too much even for a GuAIZ to deal with! And they're coming right for us!"

"They're already here," the cynical younger Mechanic declares. The sound of some kind of maneuvering jet could be heard around the corner dead ahead of them. After a few moments a huge assault rifle poked around the corner, pointing in their direction, then pulled back behind the corner. "What was that about?"

"Camera in the rifle. Grenades!" the Commander pulls a grenade himself, followed by several others. The motions to arm and use a grenade were simple, remove the safety clip, pull the pin, throw it. A flock of the little explosive devices went down the hall toward the enemy's location, some of them even managed to bounce into the hallway where they were. The detonations kicked up a cloud of dust in the area, as well as caused Jillian's hearing to start ringing badly from the sound and pressure.

"Did we get them?" An older lady asks, by her insignia she was a pilot-in-training.

Movement in the dust cloud and the continuing sound of thruster jets did not give Jillian a good feeling about what was to happen. "To whom do I owe the hand grenade?" the voice of a guy asks from inside the dust and debris kicked up from the walls and rock faces. A sound of heavier thruster jets, and the dust gave way to the sight of an ungodly large...something, a curved piece of metal with a set of three triangles on the front of it, one triangle stacked on the apex of two others. Jillian's first thought was that it had to be a unit symbol or organization symbol, maybe?

"Oh my god, it's a huge shield!" an older facilities mechanic shouts. Jillian was not looking at the shield itself, but the massive assault rifle that was resting against the shield on an outcropping, aimed in her general direction. The rifle itself had to be double the frame size compared to hers and at least that in bore size, meaning the weapon wasn't so much a rifle as it was a miniature cannon.

"SHIT!" Forward of where Jillian was hiding behind a metal cargo crate, one of the mechanics opened fire on the approaching nightmare, followed by just about everyone else, including Jillian. Another grenade or two went downrange as well, though these grenades detonated and clearly did nothing meaningful to the oncoming foes.

Again, maneuvering jets slowed their approach (at least three of the large shields could be discerned after the shooting stopped), followed closely by the ad-hoc ambush getting a look at the real nature of their foes as the lead soldier twists his / her left arm outward, exposing the trooper behind the shield. "Come on, kiddies, you expect 30-caliber rifles (1) to do anything to three centimeters of woven diamond and metal composite armor plate?" With the massive assault rifle left to free-float, the freed right thumb of the trooper scraped across the edge of the solid and very thick shield, lending credence to what he said. Just as was foretold, the trooper was wearing huge armor, enough armor that Jillian figured a GuAIZ would really be hard-pressed to defeat it in battle.

Jillian's attention was drawn to a slight motion by the Commander, apparently as he hunkered and took careful aim at—CRACK—and Jillian could hear the round careen off walls and other objects as it continued down the hall, though apparently it didn't seem to bother the trooper at all.

"My turn yet?" the trooper asks. Without grabbing for the rifle still free-floating, the trooper simply aimed his right arm at the Commander, and an assembly of some type mounted under the forearm let loose what looked like a controlled, blue lightning bolt that even sounded like a thunder strike. The focused weapon blew apart half the commander's head in that one shot, which immediately stunned Jillian to staring at his lifeless form as it drifted away from the crate. "Now, anyone else?"

Just like that, one shot with one weapon, and he's...dead... Jillian couldn't help her body's reaction, she immediately grabbed onto the hand-belt and fled from the scene, trying desperately to get away from the horrid nightmare her job had become. She didn't know why she panicked and fled, just that she had become so terrified that she couldn't remain where she was.

She took a left at a junction to head toward the centerline of the fortress, then took a crew access up three levels, hoping that somehow, someway, the enemy would be stopped down low and she'd never have to see them again. In the higher level, Jillian immediately realized that she didn't have a freaking clue where she was trying to go, or even if she was actively trying to go anywhere but here. Desperately she wanted to board a life boat or shuttle and return to the PLANTs, just walk away from it all, but what the now-deceased Commander had to say rang true: if these crazy soldiers had the space around Jachin Due held, there was no escape.

"You, operator!" Someone (a Commander at first look) shouts to get her attention. "Come over here!"

"Sir?" She asks of the commander she approached. More ZAFT soldiers approached her, realizing she had come from down below.

"What's going on down below?"

"Are they really armored?"

"Have they been killing everyone?"

"Can we stop them?"

"Silence!" the Commander shouts over the din of questions. "Let her speak, all of you!"

"Sir, I—I was with about a dozen, machine guns and grenades couldn't stop them. I don't know, I even heard from someone that a GuAIZ couldn't stop them, so I don't know what it would take."

"Don't worry, we have something more than just grenades," the Commander says. "We'll want you to take up a light machine gun, that way a volume of fire might possibly get through, or at least distract them while we use this thing."

"What...is it?" Jillian asks. The device sitting on top of a crate with several metal plates in front of the crate had to be a weapon, but it looked about as unsophisticated as a brick.

"This is a Mark Nineteen automatic grenade launcher. In years past this weapon could be used to take out main battle tanks if used right. Hell, these things are even mildly effective against the Earth Alliance tanks. I don't think they've given their troops more armor than that, right?"

"I don't know, Commander, I don't know if it will work," she replies.

"We also got these," and one of the green-coat ZAFT soldiers holds up a long, slender tube. "Anti-tank rockets. These things will stop a tank and kill the crew inside."

"They have shields," Jillian protests.

"What? Shields—as in sci-fi shields that will stop anything?" the Commander asks.

"No, shields—real metal shields on their left arms. Three centimeters thick, the enemy claimed they were made of woven diamond and a metal composite."

"Not good," one of the greencoats in their group says. "If we can't get a hit on their body, these weapons are useless against them."

"Get ready, regardless," the Commander orders. "We'll take them under fire, and we will have to hope we can defeat their armor."

-x-x-x-

"Joker Trump lead, this is Joker's Ace, requesting status update," Star Admiral Centara orders.

"Ace, this is Trump, I have four in the water and one getting ready to join us. No sharks our vicinity, over."

"Roger that, a shark is about to join you for escort." For Wayne, moving to where the Dominion was deployed and launching the Gundams was a simple task of itself, even given Mjolnr was now pulling away from the Dominion to take position nearby Jachin Due and the myriad of space docks for warships and such. The mechanics of ship movement tended to complicate Mobile Suit launches, but in the relative calm around Jachin Due there was not much hustle and bustle to contend with.

"All forces vicinity enemy superweapon, be advised Dominion is firing Lohengrins," the Operators for the area around Jachin Due caution the mobile forces.

Wayne watched, and reveled in the new power added to his little fleet. The Dominion fired first one Lohengrin into the rear of the almost-ready reflecting mirror, which annihilated the support structure of the mirror and put a massive hole in the surface, then a second blast which swept across the surface of the mirror from one side to the next, finishing what was started with the first blast by chunking it into two odd-shaped halves.

"Command, Dominion, enemy weapon is out of action. Now deploying Gundams to escort Trump to final ops point."

"Ace on standby at the rally point," Wayne informs his controller. Four of the five from Trump Element were on station and awaiting the rest of the team arriving, as well as their escorts. The Star Admiral could do naught but shiver at the sight of the machines of Jokers Trump, all five were the much-feared Gundam GP02A, the Physalis of UC 0083 fame. The Mobile Suit that annihilated half of the Earth Federation navy in one stroke. And the Magi used it for pretty much the same purpose.

"Shani Andras, Forbidden, launching!"

"Isis of Joker's Trump, launching!"

Thirty seconds passed, as the two freshly launched from the Dominion closed up on the rally point. "Star Admiral, you out here to supervise, or whoop ass?" Shani asks.

"A little of both, you know," Wayne replies casually. "Magi have no objection to mixing business and pleasure, when you get down to it."

Shani could be heard practically gagging himself in an attempt to avoid laughing outright. The five of Joker's Trump had a few sniggers for the sentiment, but nothing major to add to it. To those soldiers trained for nuclear warfare, this was simply another operation—a case of 'training being bloodless battle, warfare being bloody training' in Roman and later Magi parlance—and everything to them was game face, mission-oriented and ready for battle.

"Clotho Bauer, Raider, Launching!"

"Oruga Sabnak, Calamity, Launching!"

"This it?" Wayne asks after the two pilots close up on the rally point.

"Less than a Binary?" Kingfisher asks in reply. It was obvious that there were less than ten machines there, so... "Yep, we're ready."

"Verify brass balls are locked and loaded, and pray to your Gods for what we are about to do," Cobalt orders.

"One," Kingfisher replies, being an avowed 'neutral' on such subjects.

"Two," Cobalt replies, though she needed not do so since she initiated the call.

"Brass catcher in place. Three, ready," Bane snarks for a few giggles from Clotho or Shani.

"Dear Gods, please help me kick enough ass to stop the nuclear war and no more, thank you." A pause of a moment from Isis, then: "Four, go."

"Five, when the kiddies are done, I'm ready to go," Hellion concludes sarcastically.

"Forbidden, all green," Shani says in his atypical creepy voice that even gave the Star Admiral chills.

"Raider, show ready."

"Calamity, locked and cocked."

"Let's go nuke something," Kingfisher (Star Colonel Tellos) says.

"Raider, you and I have point. Forbidden on the left flank, Calamity to the rear. Let's move, if they have a psionic of their own it won't take them long to find us and bring the world down on us," Wayne orders.

Rearranging the movement order took ten seconds, nothing the nine of them were unaccustomed to. The trek towards the superstructure of the enemy weapon was a bit of a journey, and contrary to the movement of the Mjolnr itself, the team moved slow, in the hopes that the task force not moving around like their asses were on fire would be overlooked, since the 'locals' seemed to have the mindset that speed equaled armor. A mindset that the average among Magi tended to laugh at before blowing them apart to prove otherwise.

"How powerful are those things?" Shani asks, referencing Joker Trump's main weapons.

"They're a dial-a-nuke device, basically. I can run them as low as 100 kilotons, enough to wipe out a small city, all the way up to 250 megatons, or enough to eradicate everything from New York City all the way to Charleston and everything in between." And the kicker: the whole thing was explained matter-of-fact by Hellion, as if he was reporting on the weather, not how much real-estate he could wipe out in one stroke.

"Holy shit, dude, I don't think I want that job now that you mention what you can do," Clotho says. "Too much mass destruction for my taste."

"It takes a kindred, stoic soul to do this job," Kingfisher replies immediately. "On the other hand, riding the shockwave of a nuke, or any other kind of explosion for that matter, is one of the greatest thrill rides money can't buy."

"Whaddya mean 'can't buy'? Explosives aren't cheap, but you can buy them..." Clotho replies.

"You have somewhere to set them off safely?" Cobalt asks. "Didn't think so," she adds after about a half-minute of silence.

"And this is a job you can't buy your way into, even with good grades in school and good commendations on your record. Hell, I have more 'gross misconduct to a superior officer' red cards in my folder than some people will ever have in service awards and rank stripes," Bane explains. "You have to be willing to drop the hammer on anyone to be a NEST soldier, kiddies, and I do mean anyone, friend or foe, civilian or military, political, industrial, commercial, or residential."

"Wait, wait a second! The Code Zellbriggen says that Magi shall never fire upon civilians!" Oruga half-shouts.

"Limited Ragnarok," Star Admiral Centara replies. "If the enemy is a determinate political entity with no clear target structure, or in cases where Magi have suffered mass-destruction attacks that were caused or supported by civilians, then we shall reply in kind. Kingfisher, didn't you do one like that?"

"Aff, Star Admiral, and it's how I know riding the shockwave is fun," he replies deadpan. "The Alteros Incident, kids, look into it after the shooting is done today. Alteros was a fringe, kook world that was effectively Shanghaied by some religious fruits and nuts. We let them have the planet, as they showed a vote not under duress to separate from the Empire. No big deal. Months later, we start getting Cobalt-based nuclear dirty bombs being detonated in neighboring star systems, apparently shipped off Alteros to their 'unholy neighbors' and such. The Commandos traced the cobalt back to the mines on Alteros, and the Division Commander of the Commandos gave them one warning: cease sending dirty bombs out in cargo shipments or you will pay."

"I take it they didn't stop," Shani comments.

"Hell no, they kept shipping them out and detonating them even three months later," Kingfisher replies cynically. "That's when the DCC sent me in, one device with a long-range booster and a release for 100 megatons. I parked it about ninety kilometers out, armed it, and fired. Two minutes later, I was riding the most hellish blast front four thousand meters off the ground with my shield strapped to my Gundam's ass and praying to every God I could think of that I survived the landing. The people of a whole planet voted to poison other worlds with a radioactive isotope of Cobalt for believing in and using technology and wizardry, and I am talking a confirmed, registered vote of 99 percent of the people. I eradicated their four largest cities in one stroke, as well as the main Cobalt mine in question, as clear warning that acting on some beliefs come with too high a price. They got the message loud and clear. The Magi have not heard a peep from them since that firecracker went off. And after I got over the nightmares from riding a nuclear shockwave for fifty kilometers, I ain't lost a whit of sleep over the matter."

"Okay, that's two lessons for the price of one: One, don't fuck with thy neighbors, two, stand well away from the nuke about to be detonated. Thanks, man," Shani notes casually.

"Third, being picked for a NEST team means you one bad motherfucker, if you can annihilate whole cities of religious fucktards and not lose sleep over it," Clotho adds to the list.

"Quick question, Kingfisher," the Star Admiral prompts.

"Hit me, boss-man," he replies in kind.

"You did say it was the Division Commander of the Commandos that sent you in, right?"

"Fuck," Kingfisher replies.

"I thought as much," Wayne says. "How many other Commandos are on my ship?"

"We don't talk, if that's what you're asking, sir."

"Fine, fine, play dumb. I'd prefer knowing who I can call on to do some wet-work when the shit hits the fan, as it inevitably will, but if you don't want to say, I'll just have to guess."

"IP, people," Cobalt says, meaning Initial Point, where things supposedly started going 'live'.

"Enter personal unlock codes and prepare the bazookas," Kingfisher orders.

"Barrels and bombs, barrels and bombs," Hellion half-grumps. He was also the first to unlock the bazooka block and trigger group from his shield. Clotho and Oruga watched as he connected the trigger block to the back end of the Atomic Bazooka, and after the locking the connection-point arrows flashed green. "Hellion reporting ready to shag and slag 'em."

"Kingfisher," said pilot replies, acknowledging he was ready as well. This was followed by "Cobalt," then "Isis" three seconds later, and "Bane" last of all.

"Crap, Star Admiral, we got company," Shani half-shouts. "Half-dozen GuAIZ and one funky-looking one, kinda looks like the Freedom...sorta."

"Shani, Clotho, deal with the GuAIZ, Oruga and I will take on the funky-looking one. Probably a modified ace's machine, double-teaming him in close and at range would be best."

"I read ya," Oruga replies immediately. "Let's see how far I can push this new dual-stage fusion reactor, eh?"

"Go for it. Trump Team, continue to objective."

"We'll have to go through those GuAIZ, and it looks like the wolves are growing thick in between here and there," Kingfisher was referring to a Laurasia-class ship that appeared moving to intercept the Joker's Trump team.

"Then do it," Wayne orders. "Approaching contact."

"Attention unidentified Mobile Suits, stand down immediately or you will be fired upon," one of the enemy units orders over the open radio channels, which were deliberately not being jammed open by the Magi.

Wayne figured he could spare them at least a reason why he was about to chainsaw their formation. "I will not stand down until the threat of nuclear omnicide is extinguished, even if that requires I step over your dead bodies to prevent it. Choose your fate, pilot."

The choice of the enemy ace was evident enough fast enough, Wayne's Gundam immediately recognized the deployed rail cannons on its hips as a snap-shot of the beam rifle did not quite come close enough to the Altron to hit it. Four shots of railgun came at Wayne, even accurately so as he was maneuvering, but only two of them made it close enough to be deflected by his shield. "I got this slacker," Oruga says before unloading six rounds of Schlag long-range beam cannon. Four missed, one scraped the outer edge of a leg, one hit the center of the left shin.

"Slacking or lacking he is not," Wayne replies. "Hold range, Calamity, I'll get in close and distract him, then you blow him a new asshole when he isn't looking."

"Roger that," Oruga acknowledges before he slows his close rate to a fraction of what the Star Admiral had. In contrast, the Star Admiral jammed the throttles on his machine to the max, driving his modified Altron Gundam forward toward the enemy at a breakneck pace with an intent of a collision as he set the round shoulder shield forward.

"Fool!" the enemy pilot shouts. "You're predictable!"

"Am I?" Wayne asks in retort, firing off a pair of shots from the tail binder on his Gundam. The shots and the shield charge only forced the enemy up and right, out of the line of fire from Wayne, and on passing Wayne was subjected to a shot in the rear from a beam rifle. One shot of three, and even with it being the same beam rifle as Freedom and Justice carried, it was still not enough to penetrate his armor, though it did disable his tail binder. "Am I so predictable, pilot?"

"Tag," Oruga comments on the same channel. The enemy pilot lost his whole right leg to the Scylla mounted in the Calamity's chest, at the same time as the detachable flier unit still attached to the enemy machine took two beams and three bazooka rounds, tearing it apart from behind. The bazooka rounds did not pass the flier, but the beams went straight through and into the upper back of the machine. "You're it, punk," Oruga completes the thought.

"Ugh, damnit! MOVE!" the sound of his controls slamming the end of their travel was clearly audible over the radio. "And this thing was supposed to be as well armed as Freedom," he finally grumps, having give up on trying to force it to move.

"Firepower, speed, armor, bravery, duty, useless if you can't put them on target with any measure of skill. This is not politics, boy, not politics!" Wayne rebukes and insults the errant enemy pilot all in one phrase, before he moves to rejoin the remainder of the unit. "Unit, status report."

"Zone clear, we're moving forward so fast that Laurasia can't catch up to us. We'll be inside this weapon platform before they can do anything about it, then...well, nothing to it, as they say," Cobalt says boldly. "In fact, Isis, if you will?"

"Gotcha," Isis moves forward of the other four Physalis units, with her right hand on the Nuclear Bazooka and the left carrying a disposable missile launcher rack armed with three of the nigh-terrifying Thunderbolt class twenty missiles—more than enough firepower to tear apart smaller Mobile Suits in one salvo. She aimed forward to a maintenance hatch into the superstructure of the weapon, fired all three missiles in series, and tossed aside the launcher. The first missile struck off, missing the door by a mere meter, but even still buckled it. The second struck dead-on, tearing the door apart and releasing half of it to free-float. The third missile struck the remnant of the door and loosed it into the hallway behind.

"Charge in!" Hellion shouts, suiting actions to words as his shield comes forward.

"LEEEEERRRRROOOOOOYYYYYY!" Cobalt shouts as she became the first Magi Gundam pilot to enter the weapon.

"JJJEEEEEEENNNNKKKKIIIIINNNNNSSSSS!" Shani finishes up the inevitable radio taunt, made all the more ironic since ZAFT had no nearby assets to even try to stop their suicide charge.

"Yee-haw, bitches!" Kingfisher declares when they get into the hollow innards of the machine. "The Verminators are in the house, and all rat bastard weapons will be terminated! So sayeth the Star Admiral, so shall it be!"

"How we gonna do this, boss?" Hellion asks, looking around the endoskeleton of the weapon for any obvious weaknesses.

"Sixty seconds from all five armed, one on the breech pipe, one on the feed, two on the reactor, and one on the front reflector. Fire when ready."

The five pilots each sight up a good placement for their device, though they ended up firing in two pairs and a single, each taking their time to ensure good placement. All five pilots got what they were aiming for, and with that the whole unit left the way they came. Wayne was the last out, sparing a look at the nearest of the devices, but not much of a look. Sixty seconds was not a long time to dawdle in the presence of antimatter weapons.

-x-

Each device was not a rocket or missile, per se, but rather a limpet mine, designed to attach to a target and wait for its timer to elapse before detonating. This delay could be less than 100 milliseconds all the way to three years before detonation. With the impact of the device that had the farthest travel time, the one headed for the reflector dish at the far end of the superstructure, the five devices synchronized their counters and began the sixty seconds to imminent blast.

"Raid warning, raid warning, raid warning! All personnel be advised fifty seconds to antimatter detonation at ZAFT superweapon! Repeat, antimatter detonation at ZAFT superweapon! 45 seconds!"

"About damn time," Gerald declares coldly. "Kingfisher, you puke, what took you so long?"

"Kiss my ass, old man," said pilot replies. "My Physalis isn't as cracked out as your Neue Ziel or even your Physalis Heavy Weps."

"Nuke-Jocks, no respect for the rest of us getting our asses shot off out here in the furball," Kika adds to the conversation.

"Jet-Jocks, no respect for the delicate touch needed to use antimatter weapons to their fullest," Isis replies in kind.

"Getting a little corny on the comms, are we not?" Star Admiral Centara requests to silence the two of them.

"Aff, sir, just getting around to enjoying it," Kika replies immediately. "Fifteen seconds! Oh, I so love antimatter fireworks, the blast always comes out silver-blue..."

"This one isn't going to be a prototypical blast, Kika," Gerald replies. "You will see some blast, but not a lot. Watch," he orders before the radios provide a triple-blast of warning klaxon.

The detonation of 500 megatons worth of antimatter provided a hellish sight to behold for ZAFT, the Earth Alliance, and even the Three Ships. Immediately, the off-center placement of two of the devices caused the superstructure to begin lazily yawing around its axis, as the detonation of the remainder did purely structural damage. The forward blast against the reflector dish caused the whole dish itself to ripple and warp, therein making the weapon never usable again by contorting the structural members and the parabola. The breech block itself was injected with several units of pure antimatter, truly annihilating it at a molecular level and sundering a good portion of the barrel by translated shockwave inside the metals alone. The cartridge feed was completely unprotected from such energy and blast, and the device applied to it trashed the whole feed and the ready cartridges for the weapon itself. The last to lose it was the weapon's reactor and nearby structure, having two devices tasked to it ensured complete annihilation and plenty of translated trauma to the exoskeleton of the weapon.

Outside the weapon, the view of the kill itself was surreal. Gerald summed it up as best as any witness could: "Like the hands of an angry titan tearing the damned thing apart, strip by strip by strip." he says. The side walls of the cylinder body had peeled apart from the blast shockwave ripping through the superstructure, the forward (reflector) and rear (reactor) section themselves ejected from the rest of the frame somewhat intact. Without a doubt, ZAFT's nuclear gambit was done.

NOOOOOO! Someone shouts on the telepathic plane. Gerald could tell that he was the only one to hear it, maybe Kika, but not most normal pilots. He also vaguely recognized the mental voice as being that of the stray pilot from outside Mendel that had been chewed up by Marines and finished off by Gerald.

"Time to get back to work," Gerald says. He knew the voice and knew he would have to track him down soon enough.

-x-x-x-

Jillian found herself fleeing the enemy onslaught once again.

This time, it had been something patently impossible as far as she was concerned. She had her doubts about the enemy's ability to resist an anti-tank missile, but they had withstood those weapons just as readily as they had the assault rifles and light machine guns. Sure, one of the armored enemy took an AT rocket in the face, which appeared to have killed that trooper; the other four took several hits in the shield and even one in the shoulder, and they were still going strong. Strong enough, even, that one of the troopers returned fire on the automatic grenade launcher with their large assault rifle, a horrendous sight and sound as five rounds of the weapon's fire shredded the grenade launcher and the soldier behind it. Jillian could now make the disgusting claim that she had seen a human body torn to pieces by weapons fire, and the thought of it sickened her to the point of vomiting.

This time, she knew she had moved farther 'up' in the Jachin Due structure than she almost ever went—she had passed through the 'west' side of the upper hangar area for Mobile Suits. There were only a few GINN, DINN, and one CGUE unit in the hangar, and no evidence of pilots for any of them anywhere. It was evidence enough that ZAFT was suffering a manpower problem, in addition to being undercut by declining birth rates among Coordinators in the PLANTs. And if this unit of armored nightmares was really a special action group of the Earth Alliance, this would be the death knell of the Coordinators, as far as she could tell.

Her trek up and away from the armored menace continued with another two levels ascension before she came to another group set up in a defensive ambush position. This one was marginally different, however, in that someone had creatively maneuvered part of a GINN torso armor plate into place to guard the defenders against enemy resistance. The soldiers behind it—more actual ground soldiers than mechanics, this time—waved her forward to a Commander that was at the back of their formation, though there were more than a few of the Mark 19 grenade launchers and almost everyone had an anti-tank rocket with spares nearby.

"Sir?" she asks when she approaches.

"Has anyone managed to stop even a single of these Marines?" he asks plainly.

"Yes, sir, an anti-tank rocket to the head killed one, but that's all I've seen so far. Just one."

"Totally different, just totally different," the other Commander at the blockade says. "If you want to stay, take cover, otherwise keep going."

"Too late!" One of the Marines could be seen about thirty meters ahead of the ambush, having just entered the theoretical engagement zone.

"Surrender your arms, ZAFT infantry! This battle is pointless!" their lead soldier demands, though the state of her shield suggested that slowly, they were taking damage.

"I'll give you pointless! Open fire!" All fire centered on the forward trooper of the minimum five Armored Marines that were in their field of fire. Through the dust and blasts, Jillian could see the enemy trooper holding her position despite the bucking shield from all the impacts and explosions. Part of her shield even fractured and broke off from grenade rounds, the assault was that ferocious. For a moment, Jillian held out hope that somewhere, somehow, these Marines could be defeated...

The enemy behind her changed the dynamic quickly enough, reversing the flow of battle with a single, simple weapon. Jillian could recognize the difference between a shotgun and a rifle, and this one was a shotgun. A large, double-barreled magazine-fed shotgun. Each shot was hard to distinguish from the sounds of rockets and the automatic grenade launchers, but each shot she could tell happened as it tore apart the various gunners on her side. The ammunition they were using resembled darts, each dart easily penetrating the standard body armor that would stop the assault rifle rounds cold, dozens of darts per shot. In mere seconds after the Marines opened fire, the only remaining enemies with weapons were assault rifles, hardly a serious threat, as well as Jillian, who had not fired a shot at all from her place of cover.

The lead solider moved forward to the armor barrier, draw a miniature beam saber, and began chopping through the armor to clear a path for the taller Marines. Jillian wasted no time hiding any more, she simply fled again, floating over the dead bodies of both commanders and three regulars to get away from the demons in armor that plagued her relentlessly. They left no real wounded, she had realized; if they took a shot, it was usually enough to kill first time every time. It was horrid, seeing the look in the eyes of the soldier across the hall from her, the fear and anxiety of knowing he would be captured by these ruthless soldiers, and not knowing what his inevitable fate would be. She could no longer stand it.

Jillian fled again, this time looking for the next access path upwards. She found it three corridors down, as well as a horrifying realization: the Marines had captured the central access shafts, no longer using the secondary or emergency access routes. They had free run of Jachin Due and there really was nowhere to flee to.

"I—I can't do it any more!" Jillian shouts, the past half-hour of emotions finally catching up to her and taking their necessary toll. She stops herself in the middle of the corridor to the central access shaft, hunkers down to the wall, draws her knees up to her chest, and simply hovers there, sobbing. Overwhelmed with terror and anxiety, she could push herself no farther; this was not what she wanted for her life, especially coming from what was supposed to be a stable, safe, noncombat administrative job for ZAFT.

She knew not how long she had been sobbing, but she knew when she was no longer alone. The sound of the thrusters nearby was the giveaway. "Too much for her?" a lady asks.

"We are Armored Marines, after all. We're supposed to scare the piss out of our foes, especially in the first skirmish." This lady sounded a bit younger, and had a wildly different accent from the first.

"You injured, kid?" Jillian ventured a glance at the Marines, and the one immediately in front of her was wildly different from the ones she had been chased by all day. There was only a small shield on the soldier's left shoulder, though in gross compensation for the lack of defense the Marine was carrying an absolutely massive sniper rifle, in addition to an array of smaller weapons.

"Oh sweet Jesus," Jillian grumps, looking directly at the muzzle brake of the rifle.

"Don't worry, you're too small to use one of these on," the Marine replies immediately. "Are you injured?"

"No," Jillian replies, looking down toward her knees again. "Just...scared."

"Combat does that to all of us, kid," a third lady among the Marines declares. "No shame in it. Can you stand?"

"Yeah, I can." After a few moments, she stands up, and realizes that the Marines were only on average marginally taller than she was, excluding their armor attachments that made them look massive and frightening.

"Join your comrades headed down to holding. You will not be harmed." The sniper points to the column of ZAFT personnel, both regulars and fighters, headed down into the bowels of the station.

"Right," Jillian grabs the hand-belt and moves to join the defeated and captured. She was that close, an arm's reach, and yet they didn't even point a gun at her. Something didn't add up, in her mind.

-x-x-x-

"Conn, Sensors, looks like ZAFT's rear echelon of ships have taken objection to our blockade of Jachin Due."

"Numbers?" Commander Ward orders of the Sensors pukes.

"I show fourteen Nazca-class, nine Laurasia-class, and a couple different estimates on the mobile compliments."

"So, the kittens have finally found their claws," Commander Ward muses, inadvertently quoting a long-deceased Jade Falcon Star Colonel without even realizing it. "Flight Control, deploy aerofighters. Fire control, you are released to turn those ships into scrap if they shoot at us. If they are simply running and not interested in hostility, leave them be."

"Conn, sensors, little question about that, I show laser designators tracking the ship at this time. Enemy preparing to fire on us!"

"Allow them," Glennaste Ward replies coldly. "The armor on this ship weighs as much as half of their ship's total mass. Let them hammer on it as hard as they want, while we sunder their ships out from under them. Arsenal, begin fire per prior restriction."

"Aff, sir, I have four Laurasia-class and two Nazca-class charging weapons now. They should be firing momentarily," and true to their word, the ZAFT ships fired in series, as each closed enough to be within ZAFT's 'acceptable' naval firing ranges. Even being that close, though, only a third of their shots struck the Mjolnr, which caused some amount of laughing on the part of the gunnery officers. "This is pathetic! I can score at least seventy at this range!"

"Be that as it may, Ensign," Commander Ward begins; "I expect you to prove it. Like, right now, prove it."

"Aye, sir," the Ensign puts actions to his braggadocio, releasing a pattern of fire commands to the guns under his direction literally as the aerofighters launched from the ship. The commands were all released to the guns by the individual fire director for each battery, since there was nothing obviously wrong with the patterns and commands, and the shots were laid out.

-x-

Captain Gladys watched carefully the streaks of green beams headed outbound from the other ships in the assault, seeing where the pattern was centered and how to correct it to get more hits on the massive enemy warship. The first volley was unimpressive, about one hit in three shots, though it was centered on the rear of the ship, not behind the ship as she had feared. The closer the ZAFT ships approached, the better the gunnery would inevitably be.

The insignia on the ship matched nothing of the Earth Alliance whatsoever, and the fact that their forces were siding with neutral terrorists that attacked both the EA and ZAFT meant that these were neutral parties of some fashion. The one thing that irked her severely is the thought that some neutral, unknown faction had a ship far larger than anything that could be reasonably produced by even the Earth Alliance. Not to mention, the smallest of the six escort ships was just slightly less than four times larger than a Laurasia-class ship.

"Weapons, hold fire," she orders as they cross the firing threshold. "I want to get in close, snap several shots off, then turn and run as fast as possible. If we stand off against that monster, we are dead meat."

"Captain, major thermal spike in the enemy ship! Appears to be launching...err, fighters?"

"Fighters? Pathetic," Talia immediately grouses, making the assumption that practically any fighter would be less than effective when compared to a Mobile Suit, based on Earth Alliance fighter designs. "Do not track or fire on them, I want to get in close first."

"Captain!" the XO shouts, mostly gaping over the response from the enemy Warship. The streak of some blue energy weapon was accompanied by tracers from some kind of naval-scale machine cannon, and even the silhouette of some rather large and fast capital missiles fired from static silos in the side of the ship. Actual solid-beam capital-size lasers from the forward section of the ship joined more missiles from that bearing, with more laser clusters and missiles from the rear quarter coming in last on target. Each weapon slashed mercilessly into the ships with few misses from the enemy gunners. By far the most damaging of the attacks came from the machine cannons being used, with such damage that a pair of the tracer groups walked across the fore of a Laurasia running parallel to her ship completely stripped off the armor and flayed into the reinforced internal structure of the ship itself. To say nothing of the multiple massive missiles that followed the burst of cannon in, which only compounded the damage to the ship.

"Fighters closing, enemy launch multiple missiles!" Watching on the magnified optics, Talia could see each fighter loose four missiles of a very large cross-section compared to Earth Alliance missile weapons. "No Radar or laser designator homing systems detected! They dead-fired on us!"

Talia was silent for a moment, watching the sensor plots of the missiles incoming. "Shut off our Neutron Jammer," she orders.

"Captain?" the XO asks.

"Do it! NOW!" She shouts immediately in reply. The Sensor officer immediately snaps the switch for the N-Jammer to the off position.

"Captain, I request an explanation!" the XO exclaims. "You just made this ship vulnerable to radar!"

"Those missiles are passive home-on-jam and home-on-electronic-emission weapons. It's an old technology, but the weapons won't care, all they will see is a jamming system and target it."

"Missiles approaching, five seconds! Four, three, two, one, impact!"

Two of the missiles passed extremely close to the ship but none contacted, instead seeking out the Nazca-class directly aft of the Fermi.

"Captain, how did you...?" the XO lets his sentence peter off.

"Ancient history, Commander," Talia replies immediately. "They use every tactic in the book, even tactics that we deem 'outdated' because of our all-important mobile suits and N-Jammers and Coordinator enhancements. We have to think in the past to understand...oh shit, break off, do not designate the enemy ship!"

"Too late!" the Weps officer had designated the ship as he was ordered to, when they had closed much closer.

"Helm, hard to starboard, flanking speed on the engines! Run parallel to their ship, keep the throttle down and don't let up!"

"Captain, I show active radar, tight beam X-band guidance radars, do not match any known Earth Alliance sensor systems, bands, or repetition rates!"

"Oh shit!" The XO shouts. "Missile launches, enemy warship! Five—no ten—no, fifteen launches! Headed right for us!"

"Go to automatic on CIWS! Launch flares, chaff, helm down pitch angle thirty degrees, emergency power!"

"Too late! We're gonna take hits!" the observer at the bridge window shouts before backing off the magnifier and grabbing her emergency 'Jesus' handles.

"Three seconds;" Captain Gladys slammed the collision warning alarm, which echoed throughout the ship unmistakably even as the sensors officer counted down: "Two, one, impact!"

The impacts of missiles caused Captain Gladys to slam sideways into the side of her command chair, then recoil back into the other side from pure inertia, a combination that hurt severely to her. Her ribs took a beating, as well as her left shoulder and right wrist. It was all she could do to maintain composure, much less pay attention to outside the ship...

"Captain, look!" the XO shouts, pointing out the window to a a group of GuAIZ from another ship...

-x-

"Ace sixteen, be advised we have a cluster of enemy MS attempting to move on what appears to be our cargo Dropship dock points. Intercept and eliminate threat."

"Ace sixteen, roger that, committing in now. 'Porter,' you with me?"

"Roger that, 'Helm,' I'm in. Count six marks at ten high. Three each sound right?"

"Easy prey," 'Porter' (Ace element, pilot seventeen) replies. "This 135-millie wants some."

"Time to feed the need, brother," 'Helm' says. "Tally ho! Engaging targets now!"

The GuAIZ unit shot first, nothing spectacular to the elite Fireball pilots that were bearing in on them, and even two hits before the two fighters rotated on the yaw axis to snap their shots off with an appropriate lead factor. Ace Sixteen led off the attack, and with the much-respected 'A' configuration weapons pods, dumped four ER Large Lasers and two Medium Pulse Lasers into two different targets, striking the third with guided space intercept missiles. Unlike their contemporaries in the Earth Alliance, these missiles did not rely on laser designators, they guided themselves by counter-ECM and counter-emissions, and also unlike the missiles favored by the Alliance, the SCAMRAAM (2) missile was more maneuverable than the foes it targeted. He ended the battle with two crippled machines and one significantly damaged.

Ace Seventeen, an avowed close-quarters specialist, followed in formation with his wingmate by flying in one direction and shooting in another to confuse the enemy gunners. It worked somewhat, but not enough to annul any hits; he took two beam hits directly and one at a glance, not enough to breach his armor in any significant fashion. What he gave was worse for the enemy, splitting his fire between three as did his teammate. Missiles and the monster 135mm autocannon on one machine, the three lasers and Streak LRM-10s to a second, and straight missiles to a third target. The hits were less prolific than he expected, the first target dodged both bursts of the Ultra AC/20, but not the missiles, his right-wing Streak-10 failed to lock on and never fired, and two missiles went erratic (bad guidance), but all in all what he used managed to destroy one and severely damage two.

"Control, Ace Sixteen, enemy forces intercepted, surviving MS are retreating. Zone clear, ready for next op—HOLY SHIT! EJECTING!" the pilot punches out after his right wing and part of the fuselage of his fighter was blown off by a very lucky Naval Beam Cannon hit.

"Control, Ace Seventeen, Sixteen punched out clean, he was wiped out by a Nazca-class, engaging ship now!"

"Roger that, open engagement at this time," the Controller orders.

It was the work of several seconds for 'Porter' to reverse his velocity, but the Fireball's massive TelStar 400XL engine was more than adequate to the task. As the Fireball came to an effective complete stop, he came under fire again from a stray GuAIZ paired with a GINN, though neither of the enemy machines were expecting him to be able to track and fire on them with missiles from the side. Two SCAMRAAM missiles launched forward, quickly reoriented themselves to the tracking point designated by the pilot, determined there were threat units in the designated area, and fired main engines to accelerate hard. The GuAIZ got away with losing part of its shield in the strike, the GINN fared worse in that it lost its hips and both legs from the dead-on impact and detonation of the missile. Before a re-engagement could be orchestrated by the GuAIZ, the Fireball was on the move toward the Nazca-class that had crippled his wingmate.

"HOW DO YOU LIKE THIS ONE, BITCHES?" Ace Seventeen shouts as he ripple-fired his remaining AGM-84SC Harpoon anti-shipping missiles into the side of the enemy ship. The enemy CIWS was able to intercept one of the nine missiles, the other eight all struck the ship in various locations from the engine block forward to the main beam cannons, as they were designed to avoid missile fratricide by spreading around the target when used in an alpha strike method (3). As he passed over the ship, 'Porter' took care to give the captain of the ship a clear warning that his or her actions were not appreciated, firing every weapon on his craft into the Nazca-class ship Fermi, the autocannon alone tearing significant rents in the armor of the craft augmented by ER Medium Laser and Streak LRM 10 missile salvos.

"Seventeen from Four, that ship you just whomped fired off surrender flares, she's throwing in the towel for today. Form up on my point, we're going hunting for Earth Alliance pricks now."

"Roger that," Seventeen replies immediately. A recovery shuttle or Mobile Suit would recover the ejection pod from Sixteen.

-x-

Talia knew she had pissed herself, she had been that scared to see the surviving fighter reorient on her ship and launch torpedoes capable of tearing massive chunks out of armor and structure. Practically every weapon on the starboard facing of her ship was destroyed, there were at least three fires inside the hull, her targeting system was offline, and her sensors were grossly degraded. More to the point, the fighter had even strafed her ship with its anti-MS weapons, and each weapon itself tore chunks out of the ship beyond her wildest imagination. Never again, she swore mentally, never again will I underestimate fighters in my lifetime.

"That thing—it took hits from beam weapons and kept fighting!" the XO says as the fighter forms up on two others, headed in the direction of the Earth Alliance lines.

"Whatever they are, those fighters are extremely dangerous," Talia says. "Two of them are the better of over six GuAIZ mobile suits and a Warship. We got lucky, hitting that one with a naval beam cannon, and that's what it took to bring it down."

"The pilot ejected, and we're approaching his pod, Captain," the ship's helmswoman declares.

"XO, organize a team to recover the pilot. I want to talk to him." I want to know who—what—why they are, she thinks in series.

-x-x-x-

"Another job-sitter, hired in for her administrative talents and not much else," Victoria passes judgment on the whelp they had found sobbing in a side hallway within sight to the central shaft.

"Seems to be about eighty percent of ZAFT's personnel," Helga says. "The other twenty have heart, but not enough battle skill or proper equipment to challenge us."

"It will not be long before they come up with some rudimentary threat to our infantry superiority," Elisa declares coldly. "Marines heading up the shaft! Make a hole!" she orders of the swarm of ZAFT captives. Immediately the people squash to the inside of the stairwell, giving the Marines just barely enough clearance to get moving up the stair shaft. "Command from 3-Alpha-11, come back," Elisa requests on the command channel (4).

"Go," the Galaxy Commander orders.

"Where do you want your pain-in-the-ass sniper and escorts, sir?"

"Oh, you," Galaxy Commander Michaels grouses, knowing quite well who he was dealing with. The one Sniper that had inadvertently managed to point an Armor Sniper Rifle at Commander Waltfeld. Lacus Clyne had delivered some choice words about that matter, as well as pined for her missing Haro, though even the AI entity claimed no knowledge of its fate. "Get your ass up to level 25 and have at it. They're starting to get creative with IED weapons and anti-tank capabilities, honestly I'm surprised this station has as much as they do."

"Crazy prepared?" Karen asks

"Probably dug deep in their outgoing material warehouses to use it on us," the Galaxy Commander replies. "Take one of them alive and squeeze the location of their armory out of them."

"Aff, sir, 3-Alpha-11 moving now."

The trek up to level 25 was a short haul for the team, given that they were already close to the front wave of the assault. Out in the corridors, the team moved with purpose toward the sound of heavy weapons fire, though given that there were casualties being taken all over the level, the team moved in assault formation even in supposed secure areas.

"Oh, you five," one of the Marines near the most intense fighting says with a tone of clearly-feigned disdain.

"Hey, it's Wonder Cho!" Diane half-shouts over the radio band, referring to Cho Eglin, one of the few bloodnamed Marines in the unit. "Where's the rest of your team?"

Said Marine remained silent for ten seconds. "No way, you mean—even Walt?" Karen asks.

"Yeah," Cho replies icily. "RPG to the side of the helmet. Not much left of his head."

"What do we have?" Elisa asks, drawing attention away from fallen comrades and back to the battle at hand.

"Two-part blockade with the smart, surviving assholes of the lower levels. The ones that learned real fast how to use RPGs and LAWS properly." Three detonations in series against the wall to their left sent spall ricocheting all over the place, though this was less than a threat to the Marines. "And automatic grenade launchers for good measure."

"Karen, cluster-fuck 'em," Elisa orders.

"Roger that," Karen says as she loosed her Panzersturmgewehr (Armor Assault Rifle) to free-float, and with the free hand pulled a discus-like object with an attached handle off the inside of her shield. "Cluster out!" she shouts before she pulled the arming pin and tossed it around the corner. Everyone waited the obligatory four seconds before hearing first the initial discharge of the submunitions, which itself caused a momentary scream from a lady on the other side of the battle, then a second later the detonation of the submunitions in one very loud cacophony of explosives, with fragments even reflecting off walls near Elisa's Marines.

"Goin' for it!" Elisa says before she jumped off into the hallway where the enemy fire had been coming from. As she proceeded down the hall, her Armor Sniper Rifle stood at the ready, with Elisa waiting for an opportunity to take a shot even as it became obvious Karen's throw had been dead-on and killed or maimed the entire ambush. "Clear zone! Move up!"

"Moving now!" Helga was the first around the corner after her Point Commander, with Cho a pace behind her and the rest of the team following close behind. Much to Elisa's original estimation, the cluster-grenade Karen used was fatal or lethal to everyone in the blockade point, those few that actively survived did not look like they would survive long without medical treatment. "Medics to my location, mark as point Mike-131, possible fatals but maybe you can do something for them."

"Roger that, 3-Alpha-11, medics moving at this time."

"Frightened, powless (5), unsure who we are or why we have come, they fight desperately to end the threat. It is such a pity we have to bring them down," Cho says. "They have balls, too bad their leadership cannot be redeemed."

"Stack," Elisa orders, meaning the intersection they were approaching. "They should have the morals to know what their masters are doing with that big-ass nuclear laser, and stop him from using it."

"The same can be said of the Earth Alliance and their nuclear weapons," Cho replies in kind.

"It has been said, which is why they are getting an unholy beat-down as well," Helga replies. "Stacked."

"Jump off," she orders. In the moments following her order, Helga and Diane went forward and right, the likely heaviest threat area by encounter zones seen on C3, and encountered only an empty hallway. At the same time, Karen and Victoria jumped left, the 'weak side' relative to estimated threat, and encountered a squad of personnel barely three meters down the hall.

"HOLY SHIT!" the enemy point-man shouts, expecting something but definitely not a heavily-armed and -armored trooper behind a massive shield.

"Drop your weapons! Now!" Victoria shouts immediately thereafter, her preferred close-quarters weapon centered on the lead. The enemy did not take long to realize they were looking down the muzzle of a double-barreled large-bore shotgun with an attached bayonet.

"Oh shit! I surrender!" the point-man, as well as the three behind him, immediately drops aside his assault rifle and throws his arms up.

"Rest of you, loose your weapons and hands above your heads! I'm not gonna order you again!" Victoria declares. They did as ordered reasonably fast, not provoking the lady with the big gun. "Boss-lady, squad of eight plus one non-com, all smart enough," she says.

"Victoria, Karen, forward and disarm tangos, Cho, flanking cover on tangos. Helga, Diane, cover right," Elisa orders rapid-fire and all on her external speakers to make sure the enemy knew what they were facing.

"What's going on here? Who are you maniacs?"

Victoria centered her shotgun on the lady that was floating separate of the soldiers and had challenged them. "You, hands up and where I can see them! Now!"

"What is this? I'm a member ZAFT's diplomats! I demand to know who you are!"

"Honey, you don't start following directions, you'll be arguing your case to four ounces of lead shot heading through you at high speed. I'm not going to put up with the bullshit all day, I have a war to fight. Now put your hands up before I have cause to hamburger your ass."

"I—what is this?" she asks in a lot less demanding fashion, and did put her hands up as ordered.

"All of you against the port-side wall, hands against the wall, no sudden moves. Do it now," Cho orders calmly, her 100mm upper arm-mount autocannon clearly aiming through the bulk of them. As they moved to the ordered arrangement, the two Marines moved forward and individually stripped the weapons off each ZAFT soldier, until the worst they had was a pocket knife or multi-tool, certainly not a serious weapon for combating a Marine.

"Listen, I'm a ZAFT high-ranking official," the lady the soldiers were escorting says. "I can stop this war if I can get to the force control room on this level. I have authorization from the Supreme Council to arrest the Chairman and request a cease-fire—"

"I just said I don't really care who you are, in so many words. If you're dumb enough to—" Victoria begins, but is cut off by her Commander:

"Hold, Victoria," Elisa orders. "Command, 3-Alpha-11, I have a tango captured my location who says she has authorization from ZAFT command structure to arrest the Chairman and request a cease-fire accord, requesting quick-ref."

"Stand by, secure location and await arrival, I am coming your way now. ETA 30 seconds."

"Aff, Galaxy Commander, area is secured at this time."

"What are you? Who are you?" the lady asks.

"Marines, stranded a long way from home and in a foul mood," Karen says. "And what happens when we park it here for a few? The local greenhorns start nuking each other. How pointless can you people get?"

"Enough, Karen, there will be plenty of busting of thy chops after the shooting is over, save it for then," Elisa orders. "Short answer, ma'am, we are a patrol ship from a government you have never heard of or dealt with, marooned in this star system with no practical way to fix our ship while the war continues. And, suffice it to say we do not like watching nuclear omnicide play out in front of us."

"Is that why your forces destroyed GENESIS?"

"GENESIS? Your large nuclear laser?" she nods, still with her hands against the wall.

"Aff, that is precisely why we destroyed GENESIS." The speaker in question was a guy's voice, though the lady noticed he was wearing the same type of armor as the six that had captured her. "The PLANTs are not self-sufficient, by our estimates and intel. You render Terra inhabitable, you kill yourselves slowly and cut off our chance for going home. The Earth Alliance nukes the PLANTs, they turn several stationary objects into several dangerous falling objects that eventually annihilate all meaningful life on Terra. Either way, everyone is screwed in due time, so we invoke a third option. I am Galaxy Commander Carlos Michaels, force commander of the Marines and fifth-in-command de facto of the fleet. You are?"

"Acting Chairwoman Eileen Canaver, ZAFT Supreme Council. I have orders to detain Chairman Zala and offer a cease-fire before the PLANTs are involved in the battle."

"Understood," Carlos replies. "I don't need much motivation to end the shooting, at least in part. Eleven of third, advance to point, we take the CIC and end this segment of the battle."

-x-x-x-

Dearka could never really remember seeing so much carnage generated so quickly in his life, with the possible exception of Junius Seven. Even then, this battle was shaping up to match that bloodbath in scale real fast. The problem was not the fact that people were being knocked off by the dozen, the problem was that there were few, if any, non-fatal casualties. The Magi weapon systems were simply just too powerful to avoid catastrophically killing everything they shot at. And it didn't help that Magi mobile army training precluded taking a deliberately non-lethal shot in most circumstances.

"This is nuts," Dearka says on the Archangel controller frequency, which is one not normally monitored by the Magi. "They kill everything in their path with frightening ease."

"Born and raised to be soldiers, an Empire that gives birth to thousands of babies an hour from artificial wombs, yet they say they are all about freedom and life," Miriallia says. "There is something...I don't want to say it is wrong, but I don't want to say it is right, either. Know what I mean?"

"Yeah," Dearka replies. "They're...just totally different," he concludes, making the final leap of mindset from suspiciously silent to outward hostility without realizing it. "Whoa," he grunts after a moment, watching a half-dozen Earth Alliance contacts disappear off his targeting array, silenced by the Elmeth Mobile Armor assigned to Diamond Element.

"Did they...just wipe out—ah, no they just got a dozen Earth Alliance machines in fifteen seconds," she revises her tally up from the half-dozen Dearka thought they had done.

"Huh?" Dearka was no longer paying attention to the hijinks of Diamond Element, there was movement nearby the Archangel. "Command, I have a 300-Meter class ship in our area, looks like it's getting ready to launch units."

"Roger that, engage it at will," Miriallia relays from the Captain.

"Moving now," Dearka replies. The Strike closes up on him to join in bringing down the last possible Earth Alliance nuclear weapons carrier, of which they had found out fast that the Agamemnon-class ships were the ones carrying the nuclear strike force, making them an instant priority target. "What do you think, Commander? About the Magi, I mean."

"I'm trying not to think about it. Remember, they have a Strategic Psionic," Mu replies immediately.

"Oh, shit," Dearka groans. He had forgotten about her.

-x-

"It would appear the Archangel doesn't like us pretty much at all, any more," Calamira says to Commander Ward. "Cagalli and Colonel Kisaka are the exception from the Three Ships, the rest, well..." her statement trailed off.

"Unsurprising," Commander Ward replies. "They were reluctant partners at best, never really trusting us, never really distrusting us. Now that they have seen Magi steel in real combat, they trust us even less than before."

"Right," Calamira replies.

The two officers were silent for a few moments, Calamira keeping a close scry on the evolving action by the Three Ships. "Should we, erm," again she could not complete her thought vocally.

"Let them be, Calamira. We are part of a wildly different ethos from they, and fool would it be to try and meld ourselves into their way of thinking—or force our thoughts onto them. We shall simply have to earn their trust with honor and integrity, two things strangely enough lacking in these reaches of space."

"The Junk Guild is certainly not lacking such," Calamira replies immediately.

"The Junk Guild are the roaring exceptions to such principle, in that they live on principle. The hands among ZAFT and the Earth Alliance, at least in their leadership, are racist demagogues incapable of thinking more than a meter in front of them. We are required to tread in their presence, much as I would prefer to call down the thunder upon them all, we cannot simply hammer them until they play nice. Today we win on the field of battle to establish our legitimacy, tomorrow we play again at the negotiating table."

"Right, I hope the Star Admiral has a good plan for that," Calamira says offhand. "He shall need it."

"Oh, he does, Strategic Officer. He does," Commander Ward replies.

"Erm, Commander, something is not right about that Agamemnon-class. It's launching midget mobile armors, but they're doing something else on the ship..."

-x-

"What is that ship doing?" Mu asks, focusing on it between taking down the nuclear-armed Moebius armors.

"I don't know, it's acting weird," Dearka replies. "Should we call in some help?" He was referring to the nearby warship Byzantine, one of the Sendai-class escort monitors to the Mjolnr.

"No, we'll do it," Mu replies, wanting to minimize the involvement of the Magi in the battle as much as possible. "Archangel, can you take a shot?"

"Negative, Commander, we're out of range for another minute and a half."

"Dearka, you're it—whoa, shit!" Mu shouts, having seen something he never really thought possible.

The Agamemnon-class ship had pitched down the bow enough to align two load bays for the nuclear missiles on a direct fire course for the PLANTs, given that the load tubes were angled strange through the ship. When aligned, the ship opened the tubes and launched two missiles, then ejected the spent missile cartridges into space; Mu could only guess that the deck crew was furiously busy reloading for another shot.

"I got it," Dearka declares, linking his weapons into sniper rifle configuration. He tracks the first missile, leads it, and squeezes off the shot. A bare moment after the shot was loosed, the missile ignited a secondary motor and booster assembly, driving it forward so fast that his shot missed the rear of the missile by a mere half-meter. The second missile fired its boosters moments later, precluding shooting it down in the same fashion. "DAMN! They both snaked us!"

"Hyperion has them," Miriallia says. The large Monitor was moving away from the battle lines and toward the missile flight path. "Take out the ship before it launches any more," she orders.

"Roger that," Dearka turns his massive beam rifle on the ship, targets the exposed bridge, and taps the trigger. True to his aim, the round penetrated through the ship from bridge to innards with little hesitation, taking it out fo action as a viable weapons platform. "Ship is sunk, let's hope those Mages can do the rest."

-x-

"Weps, Conn, raid warning, priority targets identified as 500-kiloton nuclear cruise missiles. Engage priority, full arsenal, repeat, engage priority, full arsenal," Captain Freeman orders.

"Priority engage, roger that. Targeting array online, valid track high-speed intercept, targeting units with AMS and pulse lasers priority. Fire control released, firing in three, two, one, now," the sound of the Laser AMS units unloading on the passing missiles was heartening to the crew, not to mention the accompanying but slow-firing sound of pulse lasers firing in battery configurations on the same. "BOOYA! Scratch one!"

"Shit, the second—it won't lock! I can't get a solution on it!"

"Go to manual!" Captain Freeman orders. "Designate with X-band radar targeting and slave all weapons, missile, ballistic, energy, to that designator. Move it up!"

"Aff!" the weapons controllers do as ordered; "releasing weapons...no track, no track, weapons not firing!"

"Oh, holy fuck, it just kicked in another booster," the sensors operator declares. "Estimate four minutes to impact...Colony Januarius Nine."

"Do we have anything?"

"Neg, Captain, we're out of options. Nearest intercept...Mjolnr."

"Relay what we have to the CIC on the Mjolnr, they'll know what to do." DAMNIT, DAMNIT, DAMNIT! What the hell went wrong? Those were supposed to be easy, soft kills, the Captain raged inside the confines of his own mind.

-x-

"Conn, Sensors, we have the targeted missile on scope, estimate two minutes until its in our area."

"Weps, prepare to try and smoke it. Helm, move the ship to block the missile's flight path."

"Uh, I know I didn't hear that right," CWO Willy replies. "You want me to put the ship in a place where it could be nuked?"

"Side-effect of the 35000 tons of armor on this ship, Willy, a surface detonation will not cause enough damage to cripple the ship. Hell, it may not even penetrate the armor, if it is small enough."

"Five hundred kilos, sir," the Sensors operator says. "That sounds a bit high to me."

"Five hundred? That's it? Bah, a surface detonation like that won't even slow us down." The rest of the bridge crew looked less than confident in the Commander's declaration. "Willy, move the ship, center the impact point over the port-side forward area. We'll lose less than a third of the armor in that area, with a possible minor structural damage effect. Certainly less than a colony would take."

"This is gonna suck," Willy complains lamely.

"Tell us something we don't know, Helmsman," the Ship's AI grumps. "I'm issuing evac orders to all personnel in that segment of the ship, sir. I'll handle the weapons automatically, for what it is worth."

"Something wrong?" Commander Ward asks in reply.

"Aff, the missile is still accelerating at 5 Gs. When it hits, it may embed itself up to three meters before detonating."

"Still, better us than a colony. Willy, status?"

"Ten seconds to location, Commander Crazy-ass," the Helmsman replies sarcastically.

"Commander, all hands have been evacuated from port-forward. We're ready for this," the AI says calmly.

"Neg, you are never ready to get nuked," Commander Ward grumps as he was picking up the microphone for the intercom system. "Attention all hands, we are about to interpose this ship between Januarius Nine and an incoming nuke. If it detonates on the surface of the ship, the worst we'll take is armor damage. Just be prepared to evacuate if it gets worse. All hands, brace for violent collision at this time!"

The Sensor Operator took over the 1MC. "Attention, ten seconds, nine, eight, seven, six," and the AI entity began unloading standard-scale weapons at it to avert a hit, but did not damage it notably since it was already moving so fast; "five, four, three, two, one, NOW!"

The whole ship jarred once, then everyone had a temporary weightlessness feeling as the blast of the weapon drove the ship down and toward the colony for a moment. Calamira went up almost a half-meter, then came back down on the arm of her chair at a slight angle, striking her ribs against the arm of the chair with a side-order of asymmetrical whiplash to accompany. "Ow, shit!"

"Damage report!"

"Sir, surface detonation, it annihilated a ten-meter-deep crater in the armor and a thirty meter-wide radius. Blast trauma has caused ripple-shearing all throughout the port-forward armor area, and may have crushed the adjacent corridors. No penetration, though I am showing sensors, thrusters, and some weapons on that side severely damaged. We lived!"

"DID YOU HEAR THAT? HUH? HUH? WE JUST GOT RAM-FUCKED BY THEIR BEST AND WE LIVED! WHO DA MAN? HUH? WHO DA MAN?" Willy shouts after getting out of his station.

"Glad you feel that way, Willy, now sit down, shut up, strap in, and get ready to move," Commander Ward orders.

-x-

"Un-fucking-real," Yzak moans. "They just threw themselves in front of a nuke, and the damn thing is still intact!"

"Worse, Commander Joule, not only did it not penetrate, the ship is moving now!" Shiho almost sounded frightened at the thought.

"Uh, sir, they ain't happy," the surviving of the two that could 'sense' the enemy says. "They really ain't happy."

Yzak was tempted to be a smartass and say something snarky, but he knew it was pointless in these circumstances. He'd already had his ass handed to him in several good sized pieces, and this foe looked to be unstoppable in conventional battle. Even the nuclear options were out, Yzak watched GENESIS come apart by whatever weapon they used on it from the inside, and the ship just took a nuke in the side and continued operating, even now appearing to go on the offensive!

"This just is not our day," Yzak grumps. "I know they ain't Earth Alliance, so I wonder what their game is," he muses to nobody in particular.

-x-x-x-

"Chairman! Our forces, our people are being slaughtered! We have to surrender or we won't survive!"

Chairman Patrick Zala had become wearied of the insufferable jackass adviser the Supreme Council assigned to him. Patrick was one of the first true ZAFT patriots, he had fought the Earth Alliance oppression from the beginning, unlike this dickhead who was telling him how to act now. His hand went into the overcoat he wore, the groove of his hand centering on the handle of the 9mm pistol he kept in a shoulder holster. With a fluid motion, the pistol came out and he drew the slide back to chamber a round and cock the pistol. As he turned around his right arm straightened out and the sights centered, before he stopped rotating in his chair positioned properly to give the bastard a pair of chest shots.

His sights fell on target, and he had a slight amount of pressure on the trigger, but he never fired. A violet glow beyond him, a sinister luminescent glow like nothing ZAFT had in its arsenal, drew him to a stop before he could shoot. "What...no way, they're already here!"

"What?" the shocked adviser asks, then looks to where the Chairman was now aiming his pistol. "Oh, that, a...beam saber!"

"Down here, sir! They're breaking in the secondary door as well!" the guards shout from the controller floor.

"This is insane!" Chairman Zala shouts. "This is MADNESS! How can we be defeated? We are the superior beings!"

Even as he shouted such, the sound of the beam sabers cutting through the half-meter-thick blast doors gave way to the sound of the most haunting music he had ever heard. It was very heavy rock 'n' roll music, and extremely hard to understand, but it had the voice of a female lead singer and an off-and-on choral and full orchestral bent to it. The thought of facing armored super-soldiers that listened to metal with opera mixed in for good measure was extremely discordant to Patrick's ears, as if they were trying to have it four separate ways at once.

All activity stopped in the room, all eyes were on the doors in abject terror or dread fascination as beam sabers chopped through the reinforced blast doors. Nothing appeared able to stop them, even a few grenades stuffed out the cracks in the lower door did not slow down the pace of the cut. Patrick watched the troops on the security screens, as did even his adviser he had threatened. "That armor...it withstood GINN machine gun fire?"

"The CIWS on the Duel," Patrick replies. "The secret has to be in the shield, their body plate can't be heavy enough to defend them and still be maneuverable," he opines, only partially correct in his assessment.

"And a dozen weapons on this one, but less on that one. I wonder why..." he was referring to two of the troops standing nearby the one that was slashing into the door.

"Anti-infantry weapons, they're almost all small-caliber machine guns and such," Patrick says. "As opposed to a few mixed weapons on this one, but one huge rifle."

"What rifle?" the Adviser asks. Patrick traces its length across the screen with his finger, though part of a third trooper's head was obscuring the bulk of it. "What the hell would someone use such a huge rifle for?"

"Taking out other armored targets is the only thing I can come up with, sir," a kibitzing infantry soldier says.

"He has a point, Chairman. If they have armor like that, it's safe to say they train to fight other armored soldiers like themselves, and fighting forces like us is just an extension of it."

"Sir, they're almost through!" the other area guard half-shouts, taking aim at the door with his assault rifle.

Patrick focused back on the door, observing as the two beam sabers came together at the top to chop through the remnant few centimeters of the doors. After the last of the hardened titanium was annihilated, the beam sabers disappeared, and Patrick watched on the security screen as the trooper that had done the cutting reattached her shield, then simply booted the door remnant inward. The several tons of door material did not move speedily, but it did move inexorably forward, threatening to crush the one guard in the room that threatened resistance. He was expecting it, and bolted left to clear out from the door's travel path.

The first enemy trooper through the door went for the lone guard, charging through his hail of rifle fire and right up to him. No forewarning, no order to surrender, nothing before Patrick beheld the Marine as she loosed a forearm-mounted blade and swung rapidly. The knife chopped through his left forearm and left shoulder at the same time, almost without resistance, though before he could even begin to properly scream the return slash was horizontal across the neck. The head severed leaked its blood out into the weightless environs, the remainder of the body kept pumping its last blood reserves out to join the head no longer there. More than one of the Operators shrieked after seeing that frightful display, Patrick simply clenched his jaw and said nothing.

The door remnant was given momentum upwards by a follow-on trooper, this one with a mix of large-bore weapons of several types, including something that bore striking resemblance to a miniature tank cannon. In fact, said weapon did look like the barrel of a pre-CE main battle tank at half size and sans the rest of the tank, when pointed at the people on the command platform. In comparison, the assault rifles pointed at them almost seemed of child's toys compared to that tank gun, but intellectually they all knew they would be equally dead regardless of which trooper shot first.

"Well, well, the heart of ZAFT's command structure, caught without anywhere to run. Game, set, and match, I daresay." This speaker was a guy, and not all that old in Patrick's estimation. Certainly younger than he was, though possibly not by much.

"I will give you monsters nothing," Patrick Zala replies coarsely.

"Actually, that is preferred. I do not want anything from ZAFT, in fact it would be nice if you stopped shooting at us. It is getting old," the same officer replies. "Fair enough?"

"What? What manner of insult is this?" Patrick asks. He did not realize he was still pointing a gun at them, though they clearly knew it.

"No insult." Two of the troopers shift aside to let a third through, almost indistinguishable from the rest, until he ejects his shield to free-float and Patrick could identify what appeared to be rank insignia on the chest plate: five silver bars. "We Magi, we have nothing for ZAFT, and nothing against ZAFT. Had you kept the war conventional, you would never have heard from us until after the shooting was done. Seeing as both sides were targeting civilians with nuclear death, well, suffice it to say that we Magi do not like watching civilians killed, especially en masse as you intended."

Another pistol was leveled, this time from one of his subordinates to the Chairman. "Is this true?" the lady asks.

"Stay your pistol, Operator," the Magi officer orders. She looks at him, not understanding what he meant and clearly showing it by her expression. "Holster it, kid. He is defeated, and his own administration has disbarred him from command. Your battle is over."

"What?" Patrick asks, only to catch a glimpse of Eileen Canaver as she moved behind the front rank.

"The Supreme Council has ordered you to stand down, Patrick," Eileen says. "I am to remove you from command, by force if necessary. Please don't make this an issue."

"I will not!" Patrick half-shouts in clear defiance, now pointing at where Eileen was mostly shielded by one of the armored troopers.

"Look to your strategic map, dipshit! You have nothing left to continue this fight!" the armored troop officer pointed to the map in question, and true to his word there was nothing left, or what was left was reporting serious damage and reduced capability. "Continuing this battle, continuing such meaningless omnicidal depredations, it serves no purpose. You are trading and taking lives for precisely nothing!"

"Damnit! We are the superior beings!" Patrick never aimed more deliberately in his life, a single shot that landed dead-center on the officer's visor. Many hearts stopped for a second or more, all eyes on the invading troopers as more poured into the room and a shot caused many raised rifles and support weapons.

The reaction was immediate from the troopers near the officer. The least of the weapons so aimed was a pistol, one with a bore distinctly larger than the ZAFT and Earth Alliance pistols. The greatest was the miniature tank cannon with a baffled muzzle brake, a very frightening sight on something that was presumably infantry or marine.

"Hold! Do not fire!" the Officer orders very forcefully, even as the barrel of the enemy pistol quit smoking. "You are not superior to the Earth Alliance nor our ranks, just as they are not superior to you. Coordinators are not evolved, this supposed superiority of yours is all in the confines of your head." Another shot, practically the same place, and not a whit of damage visible on the visor. Two more shots, clearly of desperation, one flattening against his visor and idly floating away from him, another careened off the side of his helm and embedded itself in a screen. "We have existed for thousands of years, Chairman Zala. We Magi have done much, destroyed planets and birthed stars, crossed the deep darkness between inhabitable worlds in seconds, jumped to and colonized alternate and parallel dimensions, and fought three and a half millennia of genocidal war you could never properly imagine. Never once in our existence have we seen nor engineered an evolutionary step past what we are now—and what you are now, just the same as we. You say you are superior to everyone else?" The enemy commanding officer reaches up to the slug hovering nearby his faceplate, examines it for a moment, then discards it with an idle flick of his wrist. "I say the only thing superior about you is your supreme arrogance and conceit, believing that you have the right to judge humanity based on the irrelevant station of your birth. I, personally, was born in a gene tank using techniques similar to and more advanced over Coordinator enhancements, and I do not believe myself superior or inferior to anyone else in this room. My expanded strength, dexterity and stamina give me the physical power—inside or outside of this armor—to roughly unscrew your head from your body and kick it around this room all day long, and still I am no more evolved than the rest of you attempted Nazi hacks. And, right now, the only thing keeping you alive is the fact that it is not worth the expenditure of ammo to shoot someone who is already dishonored, derelict, and dismissed from his command. Any questions?"

For the first time, Patrick lowered his pistol, realizing that the myriad of guns he was staring down had the right of it. He had been contemplating killing off the population of earth, if for no other reason than to give the Naturals a taste of civilian death, let them feel what it was like to lose friends and family in one omnicidal stroke that they couldn't stop. It took the whole of five seconds for him to realize he had become a complete monster, and even the uninvolved were coming out of the woodwork to stop him.

A deep sigh preceded the Chairman's next action. "Here," he releases his pistol to float across the gap to the officer in charge of the armored troopers. "I surrender, contingent you cease fire on ZAFT troops," Patrick offers.

"Easy enough." the enemy officer activates his radio, which was also transmitting over his external speakers. "Star Admiral Centara from GC Michaels, come back," he requests.

"Go," a voice replies in a clipped fashion.

"ZAFT command is offering a surrender on term that we cease fire on them at this time." the officer had caught the pistol floating his way, and took a few moments to examine it. From what the ZAFT personnel could discern of his examination, he was not impressed.

"Easy enough, there is little ZAFT organized resistance remaining." A pause of a moment; "All forces, this is Joker's Ace. ZAFT forces will be surrendering contingent cease-fire on our parts. All forces are to redirect to the Earth Alliance remnants to continue offensive operations until they surrender. All Sections acknowledge," the Star Admiral orders.

What followed was a rather disheartening acknowledgment listing of all the active formations, as well as the ships involved in the fighting. The ZAFT analysts maintained no illusions, if the massive Warship could survive a direct nuclear strike, there was little left for them to do but surrender.

"Here, keep it," the pistol was sent back to the Chairman. "I don't collect nine-millies. Keep it in holster, though, or one of my Marines may take offense to you waving a piece around."

-x-x-x-

"Boss, you may want to back off from this one. He ain't going to be pleasant."

Wayne nodded thoughtfully in the confines of his cockpit. The enemy in question was obviously a Newtype, he was using remote weapons to slaughter even Magi mobile suits, more than a dozen so far and nary a scratch on his. It would take someone with equal or greater skills and helluva powerful equipment to match or defeat him.

In the end, not a difficult decision. "Roger that, Joker's Ace is returning to base. Good luck, Angel Team."

"Thanks, boss," Gerald replies. "Angel One, follow me in. Engage target priority, don't hold off anything. Enemy machine identified at long range as a Gundam-class machine with a large array of remote weapons."

"And me without my funnels to return the favor," Kika replies in kind. "Oh, well, looks like I'll have to kill him conventionally."

"Wah-wah," Gerald replies sarcastically. He knew that Kika was rated to use 35 Funnels or Bits at any given time, making her a veritable one-lady-army if she could take possession of that many Funnels. Gerald, on the other hand, was rated far higher than she was on that count, and has revealed that to precisely nobody. "Ready to engage?"

"Aff," Kika replies. "Firing now."

Gerald and Kika were aiming at two separate things. Kika, for the enemy Gundam, Gerald, for the funnel-class remote weapons used by the enemy machine. Gerald scored two solid hits and one glancing hit, Kika missed entirely but forced the enemy to pay attention to something other than Hyperion, the Warship he had turned his guns on but completely failed to cause significant damage to.

The mental voice of Creuset was just barely enough to be heard by Gerald and Kika. So, the Angel of Death has come to the field of humanity's final battle...and rendered it moot; a pair of beams lanced out from the high-power beam rifle on the enemy Gundam, though befell Gerald's I-Field system. You cannot stave the final fate of humanity, Angel, it is their destiny to burn!

You know nothing of fate or destiny, scumdog. I have seen it all: life, death, nirvana, pandemonium, heaven, hell, even you cannot comprehend that which shall be. Gerald and Kika streaked past the Gundam that was physically far smaller than their mobile armors, trading shots at closer ranges that still amounted to nothing. You are simply railing against an inevitability that not even we Magi have been able to change, Gerald forcefully tells him across the psychic plane.

"Kika, start in on him with the missiles. I have an idea..."

"I like your ideas," Kika replies, already sensing what the plan was.

No man can see the future, even such as you or I; you cannot believe that you know what the fate of humanity truly is, without the hands of humans causing it! The enemy was creative in his application of the remote weapons systems, using them to harry the two Mobile Armors as they moved away and doubled back for another pass. Gerald silenced another of the beam pods with a well-timed blast from his rear beam cannons, but that was it. They are the Uroburos, the serpent that eats itself in desperation; they will constantly push themselves to be better at everything, fueling hatred and despair wherever they go and with whoever they touch! Even you can see this! They are unfit to inherit the cosmos!

Beings far worse than what you describe have themselves inherited whole cosmos, Creuset, and they have not spawned hatred such as you believe we are capable, Kika declares stoutly. Even I was able to get along with they, and yet you cannot see farther than the front sight of your gun!

Creuset managed to intercept part of the missiles launched from the two Mobile Armors, though he was more concerned with dodging the very large beam cannon strikes that would have annihilated his machine in one stroke. He took five hits, one damaging his shield significantly, though the four that struck body locations only jarred him in the cockpit and caused no systems or armor damage. He smirked pleasureful, enjoying the advantage of Phase Shift armor and a nuclear reactor. Even the pithy burst of machine cannon he received from the Archangel of Death did not damage his machine to any significant amount, just overstressed the left elbow joint of the machine

I damn you all for your intransigence, stopping the inevitable fate of humankind, but the wisdom of your soldiers in Jachin Due is ample. After I kill you off, I will only need destabilize one of the PLANTs and it will destroy enough of Earth to eventually kill all but the colony on Mars.

You have to kill us first, Creuset. The Angel Team does not give freebies, Gerald informs him harshly.

My pleasure, inferiors. Behind a wall of beams that had thinned with the loss of two more DRAGOON pods, Creuset charged headlong at Angel One, seeing in its ponderous form the core of the machine, the Gundam Stamen that controlled the massive Mobile Armor. He was yet surprised that their ability to intercept beams was as solid as he could dish out, but in close the game changed.

"Oh shit! Gerald!" Kika shouts, trying to maneuver away from the closing enemy, and at the last moment trying the anti-ship beam saber. Neither attempt succeeded, and Creuset was still able to close up on the Mobile Suit at the core of the machine. His shield-mounted beam saber destroyed the right-hand beam rifle Kika was carrying in the Stamen, before the beam rifle centered on the body of the Mobile Suit. She tried to reach for the emergency eject to clear away from the Orchis and by extension him, but it was done. One shot, two shots, three, and Gerald heard the buzzing tone from her life support monitor.

One down, one to go, then I silence your ships and your comrades!

YOU WILL DINE IN HELL TONIGHT, CREUSET! Gerald shouts on the telepathic plane, something easily heard by everyone within ten thousand kilometers of his Mobile Armor.

Creuset charged the Neue Ziel Upgrade, dodging below the short-range beam blasts and plowing through a salvo of missiles carelessly, intent to close on the Mobile Armor and exploit its weakness at close range. He saw the eight five-round bursts lance out from the machine cannons on the enemy armor, but was too close to divert and still get to his target area, so he plowed through the bursts. It would be his fatal mistake of the battle.

Gerald had planned exquisitely for just such a case, where an enemy had Phase Shift and enough acumen to dodge the beam weapons, though he did not plan on losing Kika and was extremely infuriated with the omnicidal maniac charging him down. Gerald never aimed his cannons more deliberately in his life, and did so with clear purpose and an unseen advantage. His first ton of loaded ammo was standard Ultra AC fare, nothing more than the normal for busting fighters and small craft. 80 percent of that ammo fed through the guns in his first machine cannon attack, and as he expected did not cause any notable damage to the enemy. The last twenty percent fired through the two outboard cannons while the guns switched to the next magazines, which were wildly different from standard HEAP (6) shells, and fired a total of six salvos from the second magazine. These different shells had been designated APPS-HP, or Armor Piercing Phase Shifted – Heavy Penetrator, and a total of thirty of these specially-engineered slugs had been loosed at the Providence Gundam.

Creuset did not have enough time to realize what went wrong, only that something had gone seriously wrong. The PS Penetrators chopped through his armor as if it was paper thin aluminum foil, in every case outmatching the Phase Shift built into his systems. After bypassing the armor, the slugs tore through the internal components and vitals of his machine, and therein the true damage was done. A salvo and a partial chopped through the longitudinal axis of the main reactor cooling systems and power distribution, to which the engineered fail-safes entered fail mode and SCRAMed the reactor. Another burst walked through the quasi-modal cortex of the Gundam, severing the main brain linkage to the rest of the machine with the cockpit. The final coffin nail in the demise of the machine was the destruction of the beam rifle and power distributor in the backpack for the DRAGOON pods, sundered by an off-course penetrator that was not cast uniformly and left the barrel at a strange angle. In mere seconds, what was left of the Providence shut down and promptly impacted the chest glaces plate of the Neue Ziel. Further movement was halted by something catching hold on his machine, then the unmistakable inertia of being reeled by tow-line toward something else.

Surprising you survived that, Creuset. Come on out, I will share with you what Humanity has earned.

Creuset, knowing he was dead whether he stayed inside or went out, gave into his natural curiosity. He ejected the cockpit door and drifted out onto the surface of the wire-guided claw arm of the Neue Ziel. Waiting upon said arm was a soldier in midnight blue exposure armor. What could you possibly know of what Humanity had earned? I alone have the right to pass judgment on they!

Your posturing is not the end of humanity. Your scheming will end as a footnote to this battle, a lesson for future generations that there are people willing to kill everyone out of a sense of depredation and false godhood. You have failed to even modify the outcome of the end of Existence, and for that I can but pity you.

Save your pity for the animals you defend!

Oh, no, Creuset, I will not spare you my pity, Gerald replies smoothly. You took the time to damn us, but it is you who shall be damned for your omnicidal wangsty raging and back-parlor scheming to kill off all humanity. You see, everyone in Existence is reborn cross-dimensionally at the time of death, no knowledge and only some latent link to their past selves. I know the being that facilities these transfers, but you have made yourself a special exception, Creuset. You will die here, your soul object going no farther than your dying corpse. Not that such would be a terrible loss to Existence, mind you.

And how does that bother me? Creuset could not sound any more loaded with conceit to Gerald if he tried.

Someday, that being will be killed in combat. After that, the dead no longer trade locations to continue anew. All of Existence will deplete itself in due time. I do not know if there is a recovery in the end or not, but you can look forward to watching and waiting for it in Hell. And it shall be a long, agonizing wait for the likes of you.

Thank you, Professor Lightbringer. Now be done with it. Creuset sounded as ready as any to die, now knowing what was thought to be the reliable outlook on the future.

I will see you in Hell shortly. Save me a seat, ne? Gerald brought up his Rorynex PDW, a sub-machine gun that fired a small and explosive round. With a short burst of ten rounds, Gerald ripped Creuset's body apart into several large ragged chunks, taking care to walk part of the burst across his faceplate to make sure his head was suitably annihilated.

"Amazing what bullshit you can say and someone would believe you," Gerald mutters to the empty space around him. "Angel One, Command Interpreter Override, return to Mjolnr for emergency landing." He activates his main control link to the radios in his Neue Ziel. "Mjolnr, Angel Zero with two reports. Alpha, Angel one is KIA, beam rifle at close range. Have ordered MA to return to base emergency landing. Bravo report, enemy ace Rau Le Creuset killed in action at my location, confirm enemy scratched Angel One but didn't even nick me. Requesting orders to the front at this time."

"Angel Zero, Centara, negative orders to the front, return to base at this time. ZAFT command has announced surrender during your shooting match, minimal threat from remaining forces. This one is veritably over."

-x-x-x-

To point of Star Admiral Centara's declaration:

"Attention unknown mobile forces and Warships, this is Rear Admiral Joachim Nees, acting fleet commander of Peacemaker Force. I request terms of surrender at this time," the remaining enemy admiralty officer broadcasts on the communication nets, accompanied by white surrender flares.

"Rear Admiral Nees, this is Star Admiral Wayne Centara, Magi warship Mjolnr, I acknowledge your request for terms of surrender. All Earth Alliance forces will immediately cease fire, deactivate targeting and tracking systems, and de-power weapon systems. Your fleet is to move to the left flank of the battle area and maintain formation. We have detected Earth Alliance reinforcements coming from Luna, they will likely join up with you at that time, but given that both sides have requested surrender, I expect negotiations will see this resolved before any more gun action is necessary."

"Roger that, we are moving now to requested area and will await further instructions."

The body of the Blue Cosmos Political Officer floated past him, headed for the opposite side of the bridge in what could be irreverently considered a gruesome game of dead-man's volleyball between his communications and sensors officers. Neither liked her to begin with, which added an extra dimension to the game. The only thing that Rear Admiral Nees would not countenance was violating her body, despite her deplorable conduct when she was alive.

"We live!" the Sensors Officer shouts before shoving the body back across the way toward the Commo officer. "Jesus that was scary! These maniacs know how to fight harder than ZAFT!"

"No doubt," the Rear Admiral replies coldly. "There is a new Sheriff in town, and he just declared that he is the baddest motherfucker on Main street...for today, at least."

---

Author's Chapter Afterword:

Chaotic, frenetic battle. Something about writing about fights that shift rapidly always gets me going faster, harder.

Regardless, though this did not look as random as some of my other battles, you can rest assured that there were some parts I was not expecting to have to write, like Cho's unit being almost completely killed or the amount of casualties that Creuset caused among the Magi. Such things are certainly not as clear-cut until the dice come up snake-eyes (or in this case a roll of 22 and 31 out of 100, meaning dire straights for the Magi). Still and all, the rest of the battle flowed as I expected, and I think I achieved the result I was looking for.

11 chapters in of a planned 25. The more I think about it, the more I like the thought of completing epic narratives, gives me plenty of room to play with prose and concepts. It also helps that I have something approaching an ongoing good-spirit argument about what sides will do to each other with clear purpose to do so. The more ideas I get, the better.

There was some question as to how a multi-planetary and multi-dimensional government like the Magi manages to survive without collapsing of its own weight. I will be exploring that angle in depth and at length here in the next several chapters, for reasons that will become apparent in the next chapter. Y'all should known by now that I do not like spoiling surprises, no?

That's pretty much it for the chapter. I'll leave any mysteries hanging UFN, see who can come up with the most logical explanations.

NEXT UP: The negotiating table becomes something of a hot battleground for an otherwise cold war. Even discourse can get sharp under the right circumstances...

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Review Replies: Five reviews for this last chapter, much thank you all for the support and ideas!

Rickroller: I hope this goes a bit more into the 'smashing ZAFT' territory you like so much.

Necroblade: Haros with Phase Shifting armor? Oh, holy crap, they would be practically the perfect insurrection and espionage tool! But scary nonetheless. Gotta love the Marines, though.

EtienneOfTheWestWind: I think I was aiming for alliteration, not perversion. That whole rant was fueled by sleep deprivation and less-than-stellar judgment, I don't know now why I wrote it or didn't edit it out, or really what the hell I was thinking. At the least, glad to avoid one of your other pet-peeves in so doing. I hope the conclusion of the battle was ample for you :)

Gatomon41: I hope this chapter further reinforces the varying pace and style of battle the story has to offer. Because it definitely is not over yet :)

The Gods of yore are prominent figures in the backstory, up to a certain point (and in limited effect even thereafter). Expect a lot of that in the MMC to come.

I actually do not have much in the way of versing on Warhammer 40K, though everything I have read about it makes me want to read more. I may have to look into it, after all is said and done.

Knives91: The tactical paintball game is favored for force-on-force training sims, but is not without casualties as you saw in the chapter. There may be a few more in chappies to come, but be warned that the sim systems for MS combat are even better...

Thank you one and all for the reviews. Keep 'em coming!

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The Gripe Sheet: Hopefully, Necroblade got them all in this chapter, as he and Strata got them all last chapter.

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Footnotes:

(1): 30-caliber rifles are weapons in the 7.62mm to 7.65mm metric range, with bullet diameters of .300in to .310in in standard units (.308in is the most common). These weapons are powerful and highly effective against unarmored infantry, but even armor-piercing and explosive 30-caliber is veritably useless against powered armor / battle armor / infantry (Marine) armor units.

(2): Space Capable Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missile. Jokingly called Scammers, Scam-Rammers or Scam-Slammers, the SCAMRAAM is carried by Magi Aerofighters as a single-shot external-payload heavy-hitter for use against light and medium targets in both atmospheric engagements and in space. Each Fireball can carry four of the advanced SCAMRAAM in place of one ton worth of bombs.

(3): Missile Fratricide occurs when a missile flies through the debris shower or detonation plume of a preceding missile, damaging or destroying critical components of the missile and preventing it from working properly on the target. This is a real-world problem with missiles, FFAR (folding-fin aerial rockets), and even nuclear ballistic missile warheads, and the author translates this problem to being real in this story as well.

(4): 3-Alpha-11 is a unit assignment designation, consisting of Trinary-Cluster-Point designation. Therefore, the listed designation means that Elisa is Point Commander of the 11 Point, 3 Trinary in Alpha Cluster. Usually, this would be followed up by a Galaxy designation, though in the case of said Marines there is only one galaxy, so no extended listing is needed. An example of the full designation would be 1-Kappa-04 of the 2558th Heavy Aerospace Galaxy.

(5): Powless is a Clan term, directly translated to Powerless, but in common use refers to fighting without their normal weapons or in an environment for which they have not trained.

(6): High Explosive Armor Piercing, munitions specifically designed to penetrate armor. In Battletech terms, these are standard Autocannon shells. Magi designate anti-personnel explosive rounds as HEAR, or High Explosive Antipersonnel Radial.