The Golden Age: Reclamation War

by Maderfole

Book 3 of The Golden Age Trilogy. How far would you got to reclaim what was lost? What would you do to get your old life back? The culmination of the epic story. Over two million words of history leading in, and at least a million more to go.

35. Depths of Terror

Author Note: As a side note, Valley of Giants is the longest non-data chapter not just in RW, but in all of TGA, edging out the OVA chapter of ED by a few hundred words. Normally I try and contain my chapters to between 10-20k words, but that chapter really had ahold of me, it felt like about half as long when I was actually writing it. But yeah, think of it this way... you just read a chapter that's longer than 4 of the seven story category lengths of this site. Anyway, looks like mixed opinions on the Wendigo's so far, though an overall positive on Eric's situation. As I've assured Atrum, I haven't forgotten that Eric used to be a hotshot Mobile Suit pilot who stood against both Yzak and Cagalli in a half destroyed Strike Crusader back in CC, and that sometime in the second half of the story, be on the lookout for something called "Ymir", with Erk the Wendigo at the helm. Ah, also, I'm searching for a good name for a very tragic event set to occur on Jan 1st, C.E. 86. Like Purgatory Day in May for Orb, the Night That Was Day for North America's east coast, or the Bloody Valentine tragedy from canon. Ears are open for suggestions

VoG was also the first real Lilia-Frost "date" chapter, in the same vein as Noah's kidnapping of Meyrin back in ED. I put up posts on the inspirations of Noah and Lilia on the forums, plus another post of the future of the series as done with the children of the current heroes (and Villians, Arcadian is going to be so awesome...), but I'll say this again here... in no way, shape or form is LF the same as MN, save for very basic themes of bad guy and good girl. Or at least I don't intend for it to be, who knows how things will actually work out, right? Ah yes, and for all those who think Frost has become lessened by his defeat, I'd like for you to remember something. We still haven't seen Frost in Seed mode yet, much less Ascended Seed mode (the Tree, though he doesn't know how to use that one, its not something you can do just by wanting to, certain conditions must be met that he has a hard time with). He's not used to relying on it, unlike most everyone else. So the black Seed remains unbroken, as yet.

And now, for another highly anticipated chapter (though from what I understand, EVERY chapter is highly anticipated, which really puts a blush on my cheeks) of the Reclamation War. Prepare to dive into the Depths of Terror!

xxxx

New Eden, Southern Pacific Ocean, 500 miles south of Orb, Experimental Deep Sea City Trieste Town, December 1st, Early Morning

"This is Trieste Town Upper Harbor Control, ONS Endymion, we welcome you and the rest of Task Force Red Dawn. The harbor gate is opening now, please follow guidance beacon Omega Charlie Niner, tune your navigational systems to channel twelve. Thank you for your service, may Hameya protect you all." The voice of the harbormaster clicked off, the comm channel filling with the pulsating harominc of the guidance beacon for a moment before Murrue turn the commscreen off. She sat back in the extremely comfortable and well padded Captain's Chair, place centrally in the Endymion's bridge, which itself was actually placed close to the heart of the ship, tending toward the rear. Both chair and bridge placement were the result of design improvements suggested by none other than Murrue herself, results of having spent far too much time in stiff backed metal chairs that were costing her thousands of dollars at chiropractors to offset, and having nearly gotten blown to hell by a close range Mobile Suit targeting the Archangel's exposed bridge one too many times for her comfort.

The Endymion was a radical new design of ship, as revolutionary as the Archangel was back in the day, its shape having more in common with some of the gigantic sea dwelling manta-rays that sometimes swam through Orb's waters, meaning the ship was relatively short in terms of length, only 75 meters, but very broad, at close to 350 meters from wingtip to wingtip, like the "flying wing" stealth bombers of the late 21st century. Its external surfaces were very rounded and smooth, the ship looking like a teardrop shape in cross section, with the broad bulging part being the front. It was definitely a far cry from the blocky, geometric elongated cross of the Myrmidon heavy cruisers or the elongated pyramid shape of the Incarnate Dreadnaughts of the SPF. For that matter, it looked nothing like the newer regular forces warships, the Defender heavy destroyers or the Dawnblade battlecruiser, both of which designs strongly emulated the style of Orb's terrestrial naval vessels, though both new classes of ships could be used either as surface ships or space ships, much like the Endymion itself could function equally fine hovering over land, sailing on or under water, or flying through space. It was also one of the few ships of any class that could achieve orbit without recourse to extra boosters.

Whereas the Archangel had been designated a Mobile Assault Carrier, combining the roles of battleship and aircraft carrier, the Endymion was more a cross between an aircraft carrier and a counter-intelligence warship, focusing more on speed and stealth capabilities, as well as the Mobile Suits carried on board, rather than having the Archangel's plethora of heavy weapon systems. Which was not to say that the Endymion was unarmed, far from it, the ship mounted a pair of 50cm Rapidfire FRALA cannons mounted on pivots on the front-center part of the ship; a full complement of 10 57mm Valkyros beam CIWS guns, 6 mounted dorsally and 4 ventrally; 12 eight tube VTP missile launchers, mounted six per wing and finally a single 200cm Earthshaker Magnus class artillery cannon mounted centerline along the dorsal surface, all such weapon mounts being fully retractable into the interior of the ship for added speed and atmospheric entry/exit operations.

The hull of the Endymion was made from Heat Absorbing Conducive type material, the same as armored the Simurgh, making the ship immune to all but excessively repeated hits from beam weaponry and allowing it to maneuver around during atmospheric entries or exits without fear of causing damage to the crew or ship through friction heat. The ship was equipped with Mirage Colloid cloaking fields, and spent most of its time with them up, even surrounded by the other ships of TF Red Dawn. A series Red EDEN vats and nanoemitters provided on the spot manufacturing and repair capabilities in the case of battle damage. A different series of nanites could be released to surround the ship in a "Diamond Dust" field, which greatly reduced the efficieny of light waves traveling through it, sharply attenuating the power of FRALA beams both incoming and outgoing. Finally the ship could generate a Positron Shield blister around itself, covering slightly less than ninety five percent of the ship's surface area. The addition of the "Hameya's Cunning" Magnetic Wrapper System to both the Earthshaker and missile tubes allowed them to fire outward through the ship's own Positron shields even while they were raised.

In short the Endymion was faster and more versatile than the Archangel class ships, but less heavily armed, though it could still reliably punch above its weight class due to technological advantages and it was damned hard to knock out of the fight. Unfortunately it was also a lot more expensive to produce and took a lot more time to build, which was why Orb was keeping the Archangel class of ships around, the Gabrial and the Raphael remaining in service even though they were relatively outdated, filling the role of pocket battleships and fleet flagships for Orb's space fleet and home defense fleet. The Endymion also carried fewer Mobile Suits than its predecessors, the Endymion had hanger space for up to five Mobile Suits or Gundams, in five seperate maintenance bays that doubled as vertical launch systems, like those used by ZAFT's submarine carriers, meaning all five could be deployed at once. And currently, only three of those five slots were filled, with the Simurgh, Balmung and Dreadnaught. A fourth bay housed two of the three sections of the Firebird combination Mobile Armor piloted by Mu, and the fifth was empty, awaiting the deployment of the Amaterasu to the front lines, once a reliable pilot was found.

Morganroete had kept with the idea of largely automating the ship, which had come in handy more times that Murrue liked to remember, where she and a bare handful of friends and subordinates had managed to fight entire campaigns with themselves as the only operators of the vessel. The Endymion only required a bridge crew of four, the Captain, the helmsperson, the CIC and the weapons officer, and even then most tasks were handled by LEXI, who had a quantum node link to the ship, practically like a small mainframe the ship carried with it at all times. Another twenty roles throughout the entire ship were filled by people, again mostly as redundancy, and that was it for the crew. Even with multiple shifts worth of crew, that was less than one hundred actual ship's personnel. With less crew detail needed for ship operations, that left more slots to fill up for maintenance personnel and auxiliary forces, meaning each Mobile Suit bay had a full complement of technicians, scientists and mechanics to tend to the sole needs of that bay's occupant, and there was even room left over for a full platoon sized detachment of Stormhounds, for shipboard security and special infantry operations, their Hellhound PUMA's boxed for travel, secured in the ship's storerooms. The Colonel's Jones were assigned to command of the Stormhound detachment, and having had her ship and her life personally saved by them on at least one prior occassion, Murrue was definitely glad to have them aboard.

The Endymion was designed to be operated solo, away from any sort of backup or allies, for extended campaigns of front line combat, but for the meanwhile they were traveling in convoy with the ships of Task Force Red Dawn, assigned to the African Theatre by USN high command in support of the upcoming Operation Royalty, the assault on Victoria Spaceport, or its remains and the Edenite City/Military Base built there now. TF Red Dawn consisted of the Dawnblade, Orb's largest capital warship, plus a core escort group of three Defender class heavy destroyers, all of which could leave the sea behind for low level hover flight over land, much like the Archangel's, though only the Endymion could actually fly at high altitudes. Around this core were four Aegis trimaran cruisers and ten trimaran frigates, plus a single Takigmazuchi class Mobile Suit carrier, The Uzumi Nara-Attha. Each Defender carried three M-7 Dawndrakes, the Dawnblade had ten more M-7's, and the Uzumi had thirty more M-7s. TF Red Dawn represented almost fifty percent of Orb's military strength, perhaps more if you put extra weight on the capabilities of the Gundams.

Instead of going north and passing through the Gulf of Carpentaria and past Carpentaria base, the usual route for ships going from Orb to the Indian Ocean and eventually Madagascar, which was where the rendevous point was, Chief Representative Kurenai and the military HQ had decided to send their ships along the southerly route, skirting Australia's southern coast, and passing by Orb's most distant terrestrial territory, the experimental deep ocean settlement of Trieste Town, the only settlement of Earthlings outside of Orb's Glasshouse. The reasoning was that the Eddies would most likely be watching Carpentaria and its surroundings for just this sort of convoy, and would thus be forewarned about the military buildup ahead of time. Also, the operators of Trieste Town had been reporting some strange happenings in their immediate area in the past few weeks, and since the project was a multibillion dollar investment near and dear to Jiro's heart, no amount of security was too much for his eyes, so he wanted the Task Force to check things out.

Murrue idly watched as the Endymion smoothly decelerated as it neared the wavebreaking wall that surrounded the harbor of Trieste Town Upper, the surface component of the actual city, which was located almost 1000 meters below the surface, atop a projecting seamount that stood up from the depths of the surrounding ocean like a single pointer finger, so deep that it could only be reached via the elevators in the harbor or by specially designed submersibles. It was technically posited that the Endymion could survive the descent and actually dock with the city proper, but Murrue was in no hurry to test that particular theory, since the consequences of it being wrong were crushing, to say the least. TTU, as it was called in favor of the military's propensity for abbreviation, was about a kilometer across, most of it open water, a man made lagoon in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by floating walls that extended thirty meters below the surface, and about twenty above it, providing protection against even the heaviest of storm tossed seas, massive retractable sea gates providing access for even the largest of supply and construction ships, or in today's case, the Endymion. The rest of TF Red Dawn would weigh anchor in the lee of the harbor, but would not actually enter, as they weren't planning on staying long enough for it to matter.

Sensor domes and communications antennas dotted the rim of TTU's wall, along with occasional Valkyros emplacements that had been installed just after war was first declared, though TTU was so isolated and hard to get to, nobody really considered it in any danger. The harbor proper was enclosed in a Glasshouse Em field, which the Endymion was even now passing through, cleaning off any Green EDEN that might be clinging to the ship's hull. The field was actually spherical in shape, covering down to a depth of fifty meters below the surface and roughly fifty meters above it as well, a shimmery orange tinted dome of translucent energy projected from the top of the central docking station. Gantries mounting cranes criss-crossed the harbor, radiating like spokes from the central station, connecting it with a half dozen auxiliary docking stations, called ADS's, spread throughout the harbor. It was between ADS 3 and 4 that the Endymion came to anchor, its wide wings just barely touching the fenders of the ADS's cargo/personnel transport platforms. Each ADS was connected to the CDS not only by the crane gantries, but by personnel walkways broad enough for small shuttle like people moving craft. However, each ADS also had an elevator connecting to the town below, so there was no real need to travel to the CDS unless you needed to speak with the harbormaster.

Which was exactly what Murrue needed to do, and so as soon as she was comfortable with how the crew was handling docking procedures, which didn't take long at all, considering they were the best crew in all of Orb... though that fact was often a matter of friendly contestation from the crew of the Dawnblade... Murrue headed to her stateroom to collect her cap and jacket, the outside temperature being quite cool despite being in the middle of summer. She was pleasantly surprised to find Mu just leaving their shared room, already dressed in cap and jacket himself, with hers in his hands, and she sneaked a quick kiss when she was sure there were no crew around to see. Not that the crew cared one way or the other, they were far from the only couple on the ship, official or unofficial, but Murrue found it hard to let go of the code of discipline she'd first been taught, in the Atlantic Federation Armed Forces, which strongly disapproved private relationships between members of the same command, especially between Captain and subordinates.

The rest of the leadership delegation was waiting for them on the port side disembarkation hatchway, and Murrue found herself smiling as she greeted her longtime friends with a casual wave of her hand to brush off the salutes they offered her. It flattered her that they were willing to observe such military minutae, considering that of the five of them there, she could only really claim true authority over Dearka and Miriallia. Athrun, both by dint of his ambassadorial status and by being a member of the Royal family, was quite out her jurisdiction to boss around, indeed, he could actually boss HER around, though he would need serious provocation to ever go that far. On the other hand, Katie and Yzak were technically part of ZAFT still, though as a recognized FAITH member, Yzak was pretty much his own boss when it came to military decisions, that being one provision of his contract with ZAFT and Orb. He didn't want to be pinned down with obligation to one side or the other if it ever came down to a conflict between the nation that was his home, and the nation that was the home of nearly everyone he respected and cared for, he would make up his own mind about who was in the right if things ever came to that. All the same, they deferred to her since she was their friend, and also captain of the ship.

Murrue could not help but wince a little when she considered the three missing slots from what otherwise would have been a grand old reunion of the original leadership of the Three Ships Alliance that had helped end the First and Second Valentine Wars. Lacus was dead and gone, that raw, achy sensation of loss would be a long time fading from everyone. Of more immediate concern and aunguish was the absence of Cagalli, not just because that meant they were down one full Gundam, but because of the fire and spirit her presence always added to any ship crewed by Orb. Such was the adoration for their longstanding Queen that it seemed like the forces of Orb would perform superhuman feats in order to protect or impress her, and though they would of course still do their duty with pride and commitment anyway, there was a certain... lack because of her absence. As one of the few people who knew the truth of Cagalli's condition, Murrue couldn't blame her friend for not being there, but all the same, she was sorely missed by all.

And then there was Kira to consider. Murrue wasn't sure what to think of there. Yes, Kira had been exonerated of the blame of committing those heinous crimes against his family and friends, now that the truth about Zacharis Frost's rebirth had been discovered by Yzak, but there was still the sneak attack upon Orb to consider, which had badly damaged Morganroete and killed hundreds of innocent civilians as well as Morganroete personnel, including Erica Simmons, one of Murrue's best friends, and her son Ryuta, who had been a favorite "big brother" figure of Lewis. During that attack Kira had either been kidnapped or "rescued" from the mental institution that he'd been remanded to by Cagalli's order, and he had participated in a dangerous chase through the streets of Nara-Attha City that had resulted in injuries for several police members and plenty of collateral damage to the city itself. He'd then disappeared, still in the company of the Edenites, and there had been no apparent attempts at communication from him since.

And then, all but out of the blue, they had recieved a USN military intelligence report stating that Kira Yamato had been sighted in Japan during the early part of the past week, piloting an unknown new Gundam strongly based off the prototype data stolen from Morganroete during the sneak attack. A man claiming to be "Executor Kira Yamato" had ambushed and destroyed a USN pacification force ordered to stamp out a guerilla base of Edenites in the Japanese mountains, causing enormous casualties in a startlingly brief time using the power of his Gundam. Over two thousand, five hundred men and women had lost their lives in a matter of minutes, many without even getting a shot off at the Gundam, and there were only ten reported survivors of the entire combined arms regiment sized force! Even the infantry forces had been mercilessly slaughtered by the Edenite Gundam, soldiers forced to bail out of destroyed APC's and IFV's gunned down without a prayer of survival by the Gundam. Which didn't sound very much at all like Kira to Murrue, and even the accompanying video file of "Kira" making threats against the USN forces failed to convinced her.

After all, hadn't they just dealt with someone who looked exactly like Kira going around committing very un-Kira like actions in a bid to discredit Kira and agonize themselves? Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, and the shame was on me. Murrue refused to believe that Kira could have massacred so many basically helpless people, for all that they had been soldiers on a military operation. It had to have been Frost, up to his mind games once again. Though that didn't explain why the Gundam in question was entirely new and did not match up against the Gundam that Yzak had first encountered Frost with, in any way, shape or form. But at this point in time, Murrue just didn't have enough information to make a good call on the matter, and though she had failed Kira once with her lack of faith... they all had, much to their everlasting shame... she wasn't about to make that mistake again until she had absolutely no other choice.

Which was basically the consensus amongst those in the know, which were currently just the people right here and the commander of the Dawnblade, as well as officials back in Orb. Maybe Kira had gone crazy for real this time, but no one was going to automatically assume that, even if there was no evidence proving his innocence as yet. He deserved much better than that sort of assumption from them. Of course it wasn't going to be easy, or even possible, to convince the rest of the USN leadership of their convictions or suspicions, since the upper echelons of the USN were in an uproar over the idea that Kira Yamato had turned traitor and was acting against the interests of the people he had defended for so long. Durandel's propoganda machine was already busy churning out a damning indictment of Kira for his actions, all too eager to trample on the good name of a man who had long been a thorn in Durandal's side. The fact that Kira was an Ultimate Coordinator too would not color him in a good light, even though that had been a semi-publicly known fact for more than a decade.

The hatch hissed and clicked as it equalized pressure between the ship and the outside air, retaining just enough positive air pressure inside the ship so that when the hatch slid open, warm air gusted out around them as they stepped out onto the cargo loading platform of ADS 4. If for some reason the Glasshouse field wasn't working properly and the harbor area was contaminated with Green EDEN, while those who stepped out were more or less on their own, the outflow of air would keep any Green EDEN from getting inside the ship at least. Of course, even if they did get infected, the Endmyion and TTU Harbor Control both were well stocked with Red Pill anti-Green EDEN medicines that, as long as quickly administered before the transformation was too far along, would reverse any accidental infection in a matter of an hour or two. Additionally, the crews of all Orb vessels were kept on a regime of thrice daily Red Pills, one with each meal, just in case of accidental exposure or battle damage venting the hull of a ship.

The air in the Harbor was brisk and rendolent with the smell of machine oil, ozone from the proximity of the Glasshouse field, and the slightly stagnant stench of calm seawater, in short, it smelled just like pretty much every other harbor in Orb, and none of them really even noticed the smell, it was just part of the usual background. A small, electric powered people mover shuttle was waiting for them at the base of the gangway plank that extended from the hatchway, and they quickly took seats along the spine of the shuttle, Dearka and Miriallia sitting at front and rear, taking on the role of tour guides for those features of TTU that there was to see. Dearka had originally purchased a small oceangoing cargo ship and refitted it as a sort of combination home and workplace for his private salvaging company that he'd started up in the years after the Second Valentine War, but in the wake of the Eden Disaster, he'd been spending more time conveying supplies and personnel to Trieste Town than salvaging, and both he and Miriallia were regular visitors to TTU, though they had only visited the Town itself a few times.

There weren't any other ships currently in port, as all of Orb's merchant marine vessels were doing double duty as troop and war material transports to the various theatre HQ bases around the globe, and so the work on Trieste Town was slowing to a crawl, though in truth for what remained that needed to be done, the Town's own factories were more than sufficient to provide the needed materials. It was more a matter of manpower than it was of resources, as had so often been the case in the years following the Eden Disaster, and the great nanotechnology boom that had followed, which had practically eliminated the need for any sort of actual mining for precious metals or other raw materials, nowadays you could literally turn shit into gold with enough time and power, though shit was more often turned into strucutral metals, rather than wasted on something like gold, which was fairly useless except in some electroplating and weatherproofing functions. In any case, Trieste Town was entering the final stages of is production, and was slated for opening for public settlement sometime in the next year and a half, in the meanwhile it remained a primarily scientific venture.

The shuttle parked inside one of the expansive cargo warehouses on the CDS platform, and a series of lighted arrows on the deckplates guided them to the manned section of the CDS, the central tower that contained the harbormaster offices, harbor control chamber, basic recreation and mess facilities, and the Glasshouse projector. A sailor wearing slightly oil stained coveralls waited for them by the hatch leading into the interior of the tower, his face paling a bit and his spine stiffening noticably as he picked out Athrun amongst the group, and what might have been more a wave than a salute turned into a gesture of extreme military efficiency. Looks like Athrun had a fan, not that that was particularly uncommon these days in Orb, since they'd had more than a decade to get used to him and respect him for what he did. The sailor conducted them inside and down the short elevator ride to the Harbormaster's office, which was actually built in the lower sections of the tower rather than higher up. The Harbormaster, a gregarious older man that strongly reminded Murrue of a slightly more academic version of the much beloved and lamented Chief Murdoch, was named Jim, and he welcomed them into his office, with its panoramic picture window of the depths below taking up most of two walls of the office.

"Let me get right to the point..." Jim said, after proper introductions were made and he'd gestured for them to take seats from the chairs and couches that had obviously been moved into the office specifically for them. If he was at all intimidated by having the husband of his Queen and many of the most famous people of the past decade all sitting in his office at once, he didn't show it. "I don't know what they told you back home, but since I strongly suspect there is some pencil pushing mouth breather in the BUE (Bureau of Underwater Expansion) who's been sanitizing my reports, I'm betting you didn't get the whole story."

"Truth be told, we're just stopping in for a quick look-see, nobody told us about any major concerns or problems." Mu replied, somewhat distractedly, his eyes inexorably drawn to the huge armored-glass windows that looked down on a seemingly infinite depth of water, though the Pacific Ocean was really only three or four thousand meters deep here. Still, that was pretty damned deep, and the way the water gradually turned from aqua blue to pitch black definitely drew the eyes of the unfamiliar. "For various reasons, we need to be significantly closer to Africa in the next few weeks. The Task Force will probably be moving on later today, but we might be able to spare a day or three, since the Endymion's top speed is significantly faster than that of the convoy." Mu exchanged a sheepish look with Murrue and Athrun. "That is, of course, if the Ambassador and my Captain think its prudent."

"Typical desk jockeys, they never pass on bad news if they can avoid it, not without emasculating it with jargon and politi-speak terms frist." Jim sighed and dropped into his own chair, behind his desk, before he leaned forward, tenting his arms in front of him. "Though truth be told I don't know if it is a problem, really, its just a disturbing and unexplained trend. As a matter of course, we conduct a lot of deep ocean surveys of the surrounding area, trying to catalog all the new species of ocean life as well as taking data on the sub-oceanic currents and the chemical balance of the water and a dozen other parameters. But lately, a lot of the wildlife we've been used to seeing, especially the bigger, more intelligent specimens, such as the whale analogs and some of the more populous game fish schools, have been avoiding the area. It wasn't a gradual thing, one day they would sometimes come so close you'd think they were about to splatter themselves against the Town dome, the next you couldn't find hide nor fin of em even on the long range submersible patrols."

"Perhaps its a sign of some sort of upcoming phenomenon on the ocean floor? A volcanic venting or crustal disturbance of some sort?" Dearka asked consideringly. "A disturbance in the planet's magnetic fields usually registers in the brains of animals well in advance of the actual event, be it eruption or earthquake or tidal wave or whatever. That could explain why they all left, they don't feel safe around here for the time being." Dearka noted the way Yzak was looking at him, from the couch across from him. "What?"

"When did you get so smart?" Yzak asked with a smirk. "You almost sound like you know what you're talking about."

"For your information, I've always been smart, its just lack of will to apply it that's held me back. But now that I have two delightful bundles of joy to constantly bombard me with questions of "why, dad?", I've found that picking up trivial facts can actually be rewarding. For that matter, it helps me keep the Dawn's Light safe, since I don't have super fancy EM sensors on board, if I see all the animals running for cover, thats generally a clue for me to pull well out to sea." Dearka retorted with a matching smirk.

"We thought of that too." Jim admitted, breaking in to their banter. "But we DO have special EM sensors and they aren't picking up any variations in the EM fields around this area, so we were forced to discard that notion. It may be that this is just some never before seen migratory irregularity, or else a reaction to some sort of chemical stimulus that we haven't yet discovered, but since we don't know what's going on, I thought it best to report it. I just got a bad feeling about it, ya know what I mean? I personally think the wildlife IS scared, but not of some geological catastrophe in the making. I think SOMETHING scared them off. I know it sounds crazy, after all, some of these whale creatures break the four hundred foot mark from nose to flukes, they could probably sink one of our cargo ships with a single slap of that tail, but I used to fish a lot when I was younger, and I remember seeing all the minnows dart away whenever a big pike or other predatory fish was inbound."

Jim looked pensive for a moment, as if he was debating whether to go on or not, before he finally sighed and leaned closer to them, his voice dropping about half its volume. "Now listen to this. Normally I'd hesitate to bring this up, but I just can't get rid of the weird shiver going down my spine at odd hours of the night. So look at this and tell me what you think of it." Jim waved his hand and called forth a holorgraphic display from his desk, a sonar map of the surrounding area around Trieste Town. It covered a span of time several hours long, and was dated almost two months prior. "I've been sitting on this for a while because I was all but convinced it was just a deficiency in the sensors, or else an aberrative reading on a mass of denser water with a funny return." Jim all but whispered, as the recording began to play on fast forward. There was nothing to see for almost a minute, close to an hour and a half on the recording, Trieste Town along on its jutting seamount pinnacle, the next largest return being a smaller seamount about five kilometers away and a kilometer further down in the ocean.

And then, just as Murrue was about to ask what they were supposed to be looking for, a new image appeared on the recording, a sonar hit from a HUGE mass that had apparently risen out of the seabed and was slowly moving along the ocean floor to the far South and East of Trieste Town, down around the thirty seven hundred meters below surface level depth. The shape was irregular, blurry almost, but it was definitely just shy of a kilometer long and of considerable, though also variable, width. The unidentified mass spent most of forty minutes drifting along the ocean bed, never coming closer than fifty kilometers to the Town, before it vanished from the recording. Everyone had blinked when the mass appeared, and it was plain that none of them were particularly inclined to believe that it had been a sensor irregularity or a water mass. For one thing, it was fairly obvious to see that the mass had been moving against the prevailing current, for another, the sensors at Trieste Town were among the highest quality instruments to be found anywhere in human space, an error of that magnitude would have shown up more than just once if it was equipment failure!

"Yeah." Jim said with another sigh, acknowledging their blinks of shock and trepidation. "That's one big motherfucker, pardon my french. Listening to the actual sound returns is fairly useless, the distance is so extreme that even the computer has trouble seperating biological noise from the background, even from something that big, tenatively estimated at just over three thousand feet long, about eight times bigger than any other form of sea life we've yet encountered. That's assuming it's a single creature, its probably safer to assume its just one godawful big school of fish, because I don't know about you, but I have enough trouble sleeping as it is, without thinking that there might be a Hameya be damned GODZILLA swimming around out there!"

Murrue was about to say that while what Jim had shown them was definitely a concerning matter, but not something that really could be solved through military involvement even if it was a single gigantic deep sea lifeform, when Jim's desk thrummed to indicate an incoming message from the Town. Canceling the sonar recording, Jim pulled an earbud from his desk drawer and set it into his ear so he could hear what was so important that it would interrupt a meeting with the Hameya blessed Ambassador of all people! Murrue exchanged glances with Athrun as they saw Jim's facial expression changed from blustering irritation to brow furrowed puzzlement, and from there to pasty faced concern. "SAY THAT AGAIN?" Jim half stood suddenly, slamming both his hands down on his desk with startling force. At the same time, Murrue's pocket communicator started buzzing as well, as did similar communicators that her friends had with them, all tied into the data network of the Endymion. A miniature projection of Lexi appeared, a sudden crop of figurine sized red headed girls appearing in the hands of everyone in the room.

"Pardon the interruption." Lexi's voice said in complete synchronity. "But our sonar systems have detected a large irregular mass moving into proximity of Trieste Town. This has been confirmed with the sonar systems of the other Task Force vessels. A large object has appeared on our scans, seperating out from the mass of the seamount, which it may have been using as cover or concealment, as we have no record of it before it appeared only a few hundred meters out from the lower lip of the Town prominatory. Sensors agree that the object is biological in nature, not a technological ship, and movement patterns coincide with certain large predatory fish of record, specifically, the neo-shark species designated "Megalodon"." Lexi extrapolated for them.

"How big are we talking here, Lexi?" Mu asked, unable to drive the image of that anomalous mass from Jim's recording out of his head, freshly imprinted as it was.

"Impossible to say for sure, but I would estimate a length between 120 and 130 meters, slightly more than four hundred feet and massing, depending on density of flesh and skeletal configuration, about thirty five hundred tons. About the size of a trimaran Frigate." Lexi answered, her image shrugging its shoulders. She narrowed her eyes at the expressions of relief crossing the faces of the Fleshies. "What, a flesh eating predator fish the size of a warship doesn't bother you people? It would bother ME, if I was something that could be eaten by it! What were you expecting me to say?"

"Don't worry about it, Lexi, we'll tell you later." Murrue told the AI assistant, still letting out her breath of relief. She turned to Jim. "So what are the protocols for dealing with oversized predators, Jim? We must have some sort of procedure for driving away potentially dangerous animals, something that big could easily see a small submersible and mistake it for a large fish."

"We have sound blasters, though we prefer not to use them since they are omnidirectional and can really screw up the wildlife." Jim replied, cupping his chin in his hand as he thought. "And also electroshock darts, basically neutered torpedoes with a big taser on the tip, that can give a big, unpleasant jolt to anything that happens to get too close." He tapped a finger in a specific pattern on his desk, opening up a line to a different section of the Town below. "This is Jim, we got a major biological predator moving in on the Town, could be what's been scaring off all the wildlife. I don't think it's a real threat, but I'd prefer not to have it hanging around and trying to snack on the drones and patrol subs, so if you could prep a couple shock-darts and put out the unwelcome mat, I'd much appreciate it. Yeah, thanks. Jim, out." Jim turned to the rest of them, his relief much plainer than theirs as he let out his breath. "Well, that settles that, sorry for the scare..."

Katie frowned and covertly reached out to run her hand down the back of Yzak's shirt, feeling him stiffen as her cold fingers traced down his spine, and he shot her a long suffering glance that quickly mellowed to a look of realization and acknowledgement as he recognized that this wasn't her messing with him, and he opened his mind fully to her needs, boosting her psychic potential as she sent her mind questing downwards into the ocean to scope out the intentions of this super-shark. It didn't take long, the impulses of the mind weren't as constrained by most of the laws of physics as physical sensors were, and besides, the mind of this particular animal shone like a bonfire in the depths. Barely had Katie's attentions caressed the outer edges of the mind than she jerked back, no, actually she was HURLED back, the mind reacting to her unexpected touch with belligerence and a little shock. Katie jerked, her eyes rolling back into her head for a moment as she concentrated on her own shields, boosted by Yzak, as the shark backtraced her efforts to her physical location, even such a minor contact making her head pound like a kettle drum!

Athrun and Dearka had both noticed Katie jerk, and they looked at her and Yzak intently as they recovered from what was likely some sort of psychic effort or other. Lexi's image, having consolidated to just Athrun's communicator with the volume boosted all the way up, stood in his lap, glaring at the infuriating Fleshies who wouldn't tell her what was bothering them. Her expression changed a moment later and she provided a pertinent update to them. "Target biological has changed its course and speeded up considerably. It is now headed for TTU. Recording launch of electroshock torpedoes from Trieste Town, they are pursuing biological, but having trouble catching up. ETA of biological to surface is two minutes and three seconds at current speed. Projected interception of biological by torpedoes at one minute forty seven seconds elapsed. That's one hell of a shark."

"That's not a shark." Katie contradicted a moment later, her voice raw and pained as she massaged her throbbing temples with both hands.

"Well EXCUSE ME, Mrs. Joule, but it IS a shark." Lexi countered irritably. "I ought to know, since it's body contours match those of the shark family and its bio-sounds match up with those of sharks and if I had an image of it, which I will in slightly less than two minutes, I could show you that it very definitely looks like a shark too! If it looks like a shark, feels like a shark and sounds like a shark, tell me, what could it be besides a shark?"

"A Chimera." Yzak replied frostily. "And an upset Chimera at that."

"Oh." Lexi replied, her belligerence fading at once, replaced by a simpering moment of relief. "I see. Sucks to be a Fleshy right now, I guess. Wouldn't want to be YOU guys."

"Thanks for that sentiment, Lexi." Athrun sighed, levering himself to his feet with the aid of his walking cane. "I don't suppose you were the one who pissed it off, were you?" He asked, looking at Katie.

"Um, well, I certainly didn't make him happy, but he was already fairly perturbed to begin with." Katie answered with a shrug and an uneasy smile. "I suppose you could say that I was the one who poked the sleeping bear awake though. And told him where I was, by accident. So now he's coming to see us. But we should be fine, I mean, those torpedoes should stop him before he gets within two hundred meters or so, right?"

"We've never encountered a Chimera before, so I don't know." Jim answered, spreading his arms and shrugging, trying not to stare out the picture window of the office at the depths, from which the shark was speeding up with a vengeance. "He's not much bigger than the biggest whales, and we've successfully stunned one of those before, if only briefly. The whales have a pretty placid disposition even at the worst of times though, I don't think the same could be said of a shark. And from what I hear, even the nicest Chimera's aren't creatures you want to be nearby with."

"Task Forces vessels are issuing an level Orange alert, all crews standing by for possible sudden maneuvers. A collision with something that big could really ruin a ship's day." Lexi reported. "Course it would really fuck up Mr. Shark too, but that's his problem." Lexi opened her mouth to say more, before a priority update override made her image flicker to reset her facial imaging. "Problem. Electroshock torpedoes were nearing intercept point but are now falling away, apparently unpowered. Sound returns indicate presence of crushing metal noise shortly before torpedoes lost momentum and began to sink, conclusion being that the biological somehow managed to damage the projectile's pressure housing, despite them being a hundred meters away at the time. I don't know about you guys, but to me, that sounds an awful lot like telekinesis. Upgrading threat level of biological from "slight" to "medium", pending further upgrade to "high" or "extreme" based on further analysis."

"What do we know about telekinetics?" Athrun asked of Katie, who was still regarded as the resident psychic expert among their group.

"That I can't do it and its very, very scary." Katie replied succiently, her tone still sharp from the pain in her head. "At the basic level, its the manipulation of a tangible object using intangible force, literally moving things with your mind. As yet, the strongest telekinetic I've ever seen was Lacus when she was pissed off. She cracked a pane of glass and shattered a tea-cup. I think you'll agree there's a little difference between a tea-cup and a torpedo. That might just be that Lacus's talents don't run towards telekinesis, it might be that this Chimera is ungodly strong."

"Anyone else thinking that maybe we shouldn't be sitting around in a room where Mr. Shark can swim right up and eyeball us?" Dearka said, nervously eyeing the armored glass picture windows. "I don't know what this glass is rated, but I doubt it will handle 3500 tons of telekinetic shark."

"Too late for that..." Mu commented, his voice a bit strangulated with a healthy dose of fear, as an indistinct shape began to take form from the deeper shadows of the depths below.

xxxx

Depths below Trieste Town Upper

It had been a long while since the Chimera who was known as Gorefin by the surface dwelling food-morsels had allowed his temper to run freely. Though it could be said that anger was a natural state of being for someone that peyed upon other lifeforms for sustenance day in and day out, that would be the opinion of those who did not truly understand the natural order. There was no rage in his eating of lesser creatures, indeed it was much closer to an act of adoration. Most times that is, he had been known to take out a moment of fleeting frustration with his jaws before, as there were few things as soothing to him as the sensation of a raw chunk of muscle meat sliding down his gullet, the aroma of blood pungent in the water around him. But by and large he wasn't a particularly violent or malicious sort, as far as Chimerae went; the Ocean Mother did not tolerate wanton feeding frenzies in her domains after all, at least not unprovoked ones, and even less so from her chief subordinates in the deep water hierarchy. In truth his namesake came more from the reddish tinge that graced the front edge of his dorsal fin than because of his conduct.

As Lord of the Upper Reaches, Gorefin was responsible for the state of all of the ocean that fell into the first ten or so body lengths from wavecrests on down, which was a position of high importance in the Ocean Mother's realms, as it gave him dominion over that part of the ocean that teemed with light and life more than any other realm. Truly, it was as much burden as it was an honor, because it also made him responsible for dealing with the surface dwelling food-morsels and their noisy, inedible shells that they so loved to swim about in. It was part of his job to monitor these inedible shellfish whenever he encountered them, to ensure they were not bleeding poisons into the Ocean Mother's realm, and that they observed the agreed upon rites of tribute during the time when the tidal pull was strongest, when that silver-white eye in the sky was fully open. Sometimes the shellfish, inedible though they themselves were, would defecate the most scrumptious of food items, exotic meats unlike any fish or whale or seal he'd ever eaten. Normally he would never stoop to eating the byproducts of another, as parasitic consumption of that sort was usually reserved for the very bottem echelons of sea life, but the inedible shellfish were a special case.

He had noticed a definite increase in the number of surface shellfish in his domain over these past hundred or so tidal cycles, and the newer shellfish were often much larger than their more familiar kin. Perhaps it was a new species, it had been thousands of tidal cycles since he last personally patrolled this particular section of his domain, and that would make sense, because they had now twice failed to pay the proper tribute at the proper time, and they were simply atrocious with their byproduct poisons, or perhaps it was that their shells were thinner and weaker than the shellfish he was used to encountering, and thus prone to easier bleeding of the toxic blood that flowed through them. Whichever the case, they were in violation of the dictates of the Ocean Mother, and his own patience was just about used up. The surface dwelling prey-morsels were supposed to be self policing in these matters, so had been the agreement the Ocean Mother had made with them, in return for passivity in their harvesting of the ocean's bounty and in the migration habits of their shellfish. If they were not of a mind to uphold their side of the bargain, then it fell to Gorefin to convince them of the folly in their actions by demonstrating the alternative.

He was feeling particularly fervent about the pursuit of his duties because he could sense the presence of the Ocean Mother herself, drifting with the deep sea currents below and behind him, dreaming within the soothing heat swell of a volcanic rift. The Ocean Mother spent much of her time in such dreams, pondering things unfathomable even to the deepest intellectual fancies of Gorefin, who considered himself quite the erudite being, a concept he'd absorbed along with the brain matter of several foolish fishermen that had thought him a whale and tried to harpoon him, much to their brief dismay. But the Ocean Mother was far beyond him, and though he would sometimes engage her in a discussion of philosophic detail, or mutually ponder the vagaries of the natural order and the strangeness of the surface dwelling food-morsels and their inedible shellfish, it was more the discourse of a parent to a baby than a true meeting of equal minds. The Ocean Mother's slumber also helped conserve her energy, though her sheer immensity required that she awake to feed every so often, the bounty of the oceans lining up for the honor of swimming themselves down her gullet to sate her appetite.

The unwelcome discovery of the shellfish nesting ground where he had never encountered anything of the sort before, right at the very lower edge of his domain, had thrown him for a loop, so to speak, and he'd been intent on investigating what was either the largest inedible shellfish he'd ever encountered, or else the birthplace of them all, when he'd felt the pinprick of psychic contact from above, where another huge surface shellfish, far larger than most of its species, surfed lazily across the wavetops, sunning itself like a entire pod of whales. He'd reacted about as one might expect to being suddenly pricked with a psychic inquisition, but his irritation had faded almost at once, to be replaced with curiosity, since the psychic contact had been... different... from what he was used to in those few times he had been forced to discharge his ambassadorial duties as the Ocean Mother's Herald and speak with the surface dweeling food-morsels directly. But then the mother shellfish had launched parasites at him, which had doggedly, even mindlessly pursued him during his ascent, and had only desisted after he had broken their revolving tail fins and crunched their nosetips with his psychic powers. He would return to deal with her shortly, for now he was interested in the school of large and oddly shaped shellfish he could discern above him.

Vision wasn't one of his strongest senses, given that even in the Upper Reaches, only the very top body length or so got any real light at all, and below that was only darkness where normal vision was useless. He could see heat as well, and that was some use, but again, past a certain depth, most creatures operated with body temperatures close to identical with the surrounding water as a camouflage mechanism. His primary sensory organ was his nose, backed up by his sensitivity to the electrical fields emitted by the nervous systems of living creatures, and finally reinforced by his psychic powers. Though his nose could pick up a single drop of blood in ten million gallons of water, he scented nothing but the dead stench of the inedible shellfish. His electrical sensors were itching terribly, a frequent occurence when he got too close to one of the inedible shellfish, which seemed to exude such fields, perhaps as a defensive mechanism, though in truth it was more irritating than disabling. And to his mind the area was curiously empty, save for a few small blooms of psychic energy, one of which had been the one to try and pry into his mind. This was the one that Gorefin homed in on, determined to investigate this presumptuous being.

Despite his weak eyes, Gorefin noticed movement from within one section of the oddly shaped giant shellfish, it looked like some sort of blister or pustule on its lower body, where the shell had withered away into a translucent state, revealing the inner muscles of the shellfish. Gorefin made a note not to bite off any chunks of this particular shellfish, it was clearly diseased, even for one of its kind. There were even parasites, surface dwelling food-morsels, wriggling around in the depths of the pustule, no doubt breeding or laying eggs or whatever it was the food-morsels did while inhabiting their shellfish that made them inedible and toxic. It was enough to turn his stomach, and coming from a shark that would eat just about anything that swam, that was quite saying something. He swam past the pustule, careful not to touch it lest he become infected as well, rolling one huge light blue and golden eyeball to peer into the depths of the blister, studying the parasites inside, searching out the one that had contacted him. It was hard, they all looked alike to him, without access to his sense of smell, he couldn't tell them apart.

Having failed to make much of an impression on his first pass, Gorefin circled around and came back, moving much slower this time, just barely fast enough to keep water gushing through his gill slits so he could breathe. He could of course hover in place as well, a simple exercise of his mind pulling water into his gills to simulate motion, but it was easier just to use his tail to flick himself along like a decrepit seal. However, upon his second pass, the pustule was empty, the parasites having retreated deeper within the flesh of their host, the trepidation and disquiet of the few he could easily feel with his mind suggesting that they sought to avoid his presence. Irritated once more, Gorefin struck out vindictively with his mind, hurling a spine of concentrated water pressure at the pustule, piercing the thinner, weakened shell and releasing the built up gaseous pressure inside in a cloud of bubbles. No doubt the sensation of water filling the raw lesion would be of some annoyance to the huge shellfish, and it might flush out the parasites as well. He'd cracked the shells of other, healthier shellfish and gotten similar reactions from the food-morsel parasites before, he expected no less now.

Echoing noises bounced downwards from the school of shellfish that surrounded what Gorefin now presumed to be some sort of female shellfish in heat, the males lining up to insert their gene fluid one at a time, as some shark species did. Obviously they were reacting to the distress of their female, and their warbling cries and barks were really getting on his nerves, to be totally honest. He'd never encountered a noiser school of shellfish in all his life, if this was how they always were when mating, he would be sure to avoid them during this time of year from now on. He just hoped the racket they were producing wouldn't wake the Ocean Mother from her dreams, she would be sure to castigate him for failure to properly perform his duties if that were the case. The food-morsels were supposed to police themselves, but if they didn't then he was supposed to pick up the slack. And then one of the agitated male shellfish did the unthinkable, and actually launched an attack upon him, a sonic onslaught that made his brain shiver from the concentrated vibrations, his ear and nasal cavities resonating with pain as his body spasmed and twitched, neurons firing randomly as he struggled to unscramble himself!

Gorefin drifted and sank about a half body length before he dropped out of the incapacitating range of the shellfish's harmonic barking, his body almost instantly snapping back into his control, his irritation fading away and being replaced with true anger of a sort he hadn't felt since he was but a yearling and still competing with the largest of his lesser shark brethren for food and females! How dare the shellfish attack him, the Lord of the Upper Reaches, the very Herald of the Ocean Mother herself! New and unlearned these shellfish might be, but in the oceans, all bowed to the hierarchy of the Ocean Mother, and as her designated governer for the Upper Reaches, an assault upon him was an assault upon the Ocean Mother herself! And that was no offense to take lightly! Such an insult could only be redressed with blood, even the toxic blood of the shellfish would do for that much!

Nictating lenses dropped across his eyes, translucent shells of hardened skin that would protect his eyes from being blinded by random flailing of the prey he was devouring, or from splashing bodily fluids. Gorefin powered himself downward with a thrashing of his tail, before inverting and coming back around after a body length or two, gathering his mental energy and then thrusting it out before him, concentrated into a lancing projection like the nose horns of some of the smaller whale species, packing his full psychic might into an area with a cross section less than half the diameter of his eyeballs. As the telekinetic impulses expanded outward from his mind, they collided with the substance of the water around him and drove it before them, greatly magnifying the apparent water pressure within the telekinetic lance to a degree more usually found forty or fifty body lengths below the surface! Gorefin aimed this mental "horn" at the bellies of one of the smaller shellfish, obviously an immature male judging from its size and its position at the edges of the mating school. First he would kill the young and foolish, and then he would return for the elders, still preoccupied with their mating, the dumb beasts!

xxxx

Barely had Yzak reached the surface level platform of the CDS than a geyser of water erupted from the other side of the TTU harbor wall, a needle-like spout of seawater that gushed through the air for over three hundred meters straight up, slicing from side to side like a housewife watering her rosebushes, making an "S" like pattern before it fell away. In its wake, the directed waterspout left the sound of shearing metal plating and the gush of water filling spaces that were not meant to fill with water, as one of the trimaran frigates more or less fell apart in five or six places at once, its hull sliced apart from keel to superstructure by the telekinetically hurled lance of water. Katie almost ran into his back as he stopped to gawk at the now disappeared plume of water, and Yzak shook his head to clear it as he sprined for one of the shuttle carts, Katie right on his heels, the rest of the group some ways back. The blare of the battle alert sirens from the Task Force ships filled the air, as they began to respond to the unexpected attack.

Mobile Suits began to scramble, and missile tubes began opening in preparation for launching anti-ship missile/torpedoes into the depths to seek out and destroy the attacking Chimera, but having already seen what the shark had done to the electroshock torpedoes fired by Trieste Town, not the mention the display of psychic might he'd just witnessed, he didn't have much faith the missiles would do much besides distract the Chimera for a few moments as it crushed them. Yzak leapt onto the cart, Katie right behind, and a flick of the manual override had them racing out onto the walkway leading back towards the Endymion, leaving behind the rest of the group, saddled with escorting Athrun, who couldn't run more than a few meters at a time despite his fervent desires. Well, this is certainly different. I never imagined my first mission with the Balmung would involve fighting off a monster chimera-shark that wants to sink Orb's fleet. Yzak thought wryly.

In one way of thinking about it, we're actually the only ones that really have a chance. Katie cut into his thoughts, as she was wont to do during times of stress. The Simurgh can't use most of its weapons underwater, and the same for the Dreadnaught, with the added caveat that the hulking thing is too slow, no offense to Dearka and Miri, that Chimera would just swim circles around them. And even so, I'm not exactly sure how we're going to beat something with that much psychic power, I never thought what amounts to a superintelligent animal would ever have this kind of power! Much less telekinesis of this order!

There's not a shark born, superintelligent or otherwise, that's a match for me and my Gundam. Yzak answered with a savage smirk. Just you wait and see, we'll carve him up into chum with Fafnir, quick as you like! Yzak saw another spume of telekineticly projected water project above the harbor wall and heard another one of the escort vessels start to break up, its hull compromised in a half a dozen locations in a matter of a second or two, entire sections of the ship collapsing away from each other like a sand sculpture attacked with a samurai sword. Bad enough what pure water pressure could do, with the telekinetic force propelling it, only Phase Shift armor could resist being cut, and even then the sheer force of impact might be enough to rip armor panels from their mountings! Under enough pressure and velocity, water stopped acting like a bludgeon and become much more a scapel!

Grateful that the walkway was more or less perfectly straight, Yzak chanced taking his hand off the steering lever long enough to dig his communicator out of his coat pocket. He held it up to his mouth as he clicked it on to pure transmission mode. "This is Commander Joule speaking to Task Force vessels. You are under attack by a highly powerful psychic entity. Normal weapons and tactics will be ineffective, the best course of action is to retreat as quickly as possible. I recommend that you commence high speed evasive manuevers, and, if possible for your ship, take to the air. You are being attacked with bursts of extremely high water pressure, but they can't reach more than a hundred meters or so above the water's surface, so if you can ascend to three or four hundred meters, you should be safe from attack. Do not, I repeat do NOT attempt to retaliate with guided projectiles such as missiles or torpedoes, at best they will be ineffective, at worst you could end up getting sunk with your own returned munitions!"

"Do you really have the authority to give them orders?" Katie wondered, as Yzak stamped on the braking mechanism and brought the shuttle cart to a screeching halt in front of the Endymion's boarding hatch.

"Of course not. But Athrun will back me up one hundred percent if it saves even a single life, so it's not exactly a bluff that can be called." Yzak replied with his trademark confident smirk. He switched channels on his comm as he sprinted for the hatch, Katie close behind. "Lexi, tell the ground crew to prep the Balmung for immediate launch."

"The Ambassador already gave that order almost twenty seconds ago. Do you wish for me to repeat it, in the interest of urging them on even more?" Lexi answered at once.

"No, no sense in busting their balls." Yzak replied with a shake of his head. Told you so. Athrun may be a dolt most of the time, but when the going gets rough, he actually has a reasonably efficient head on his shoulders. It's almost respectable.

I'll remember you said that he was respectable the next time you're freaking out about how chummy Mina and Jamie are getting with Allister. They really seem to be growing attached to him if you know what I mean... my little darlings are growing up so fast...

Don't even GO there. Yzak could not suppress a shudder, even as he darted through the passageways of the Endymion. I will lock them in their basement rooms and throw away the key LONG before I ever accept their interest in Zala's son! It is NOT going to happen. Anyone but him I could live with. But I will not accept...

You know it's not going to be your choice, right? Or should I not burst your happy bubble so soon? You know that Alkire and Raine weren't super big on me and Chanel being with you, at first? Though I will admit there was no history of antagonism between your mom and them to get in the way either.

Alkire and Raine... good point, love. Yzak held his communicator up to his lips again. "Lexi, get me the Colonels Jones." He ordered, though the connection was through before he half finished giving the order. "Alkire, it's your favorite son-in-law. Stop what you're doing right now. The PUMA's aren't equipped for this sort of combat, and damn their ability to operate underwater, we're dealing with a meat eating predator the size of a frigate! It would swallow you whole in a moment, if it didn't tear you to shreds with its creepy ass telekinetic powers first. Yes, I know how to play on your phobias very well. You're the one who always makes such a big deal of em. And no, neither of us read your mind. I just know how you think. Yeah, bear that in mind the next time you're contemplating encouraging the girls in their hijinks. I am on to you, Natural..." Yzak cut the channel, a predatory glint entering his eyes. "I so love baiting that man..."

Further conversation was cut short as they burst from the passageway into the Balmung's maintenance and launch bay, the Gundam towering above them, the boarding platform already in place, the special flight suits already draped across the lower railing waiting for them. Yzak was impressed with the response time, which couldn't have been much more than a minute, but then again, this was a top of the line warship headed into a warzone, no doubt they had been exhaustively drilling on rapid scramble procedures ever since they found out they were being deployed. Shucking out of his windbreaker and uniform only took a few seconds, the shipboard uniform custom designed by none other than Yzak himself to include velcro tear-patches holding together the major sections, so the garment could be literally ripped off without damaging it if the need arose. Maybe there was only a difference of ten or fifteen seconds between that and undressing regularly, but ten or fifteen seconds could easily be the difference between life and death on the battlefield he was used to being on!

Yzak sent a glare bounding around the compartment as Katie likewise stripped down and began shimming into her flight suit next to him, it was an instinctive jealous-protective reaction with him, even though they'd been married for years, he was still quite insane when it came to other men looking at what was supposed to belong to him alone, even out of military necessity. Katie chucked him along the side of his mind with a psychic "snort" of derision, and then the platform was rising beneath them, hydraulics extending them upward towards the waiting hatch of the Balmung. Katie climbed in first, and then Yzak followed her, catching the modified flight helmet with its trailing bundle of silvery NIC wires as Katie tossed it to him, snugging it onto his head tightly, waiting for the suit to seal itself to the helmet as he and Katie hooked each other's backback ports to the umbilical cables protruding from the walls of the cockpit space. The flexible tubes began to gurgle thickly as they pumped the suits full of the cool, oxygenated cushioning gel that would serve as personal coolant, air supply and to protect them from jarring impacts and sudden accelerations while in combat. Around them, the cockpit hatch sealed closed, and the cockpit began filling with more cushioning gel, until the pressure of the gel all but mired them in place, the very stiffness important in providing the cushioning effect.

Technically only the flight suits were required to be filled with gel for the GRS system to function properly, but Morganroete engineers believed strongly in redundancy, and so the entire cockpit was filled up as well. Yzak closed his eyes as he felt the pinpricks along his scalp that were the helmet leads boring through his hair and into his skull to make contact with his brain, he felt Katie twitch against his back as she likewise acclimated to the NIC intrusion. And when Yzak next opened his eyes, they were the eyes of the Balmung, Katie's psychic presence a comforting cloak draped against his back, her attention momentarily diverted as she focused on bringing up the Divine Eye system while Yzak took in the status of the Balmung's more regular systems. All was in readiness, just as it should be. "Balmung, this is the CIC assistant." Lexi beamed the comm directly into Yzak's head, or so it felt, the sensation was odd for most, but for a guy used to having a mischeivous female voice poking about his head on a daily basis, it was almost relaxing. "You are cleared for immediate launch, launch timing transferred to you. After you launch, the Endmyion will ascend to take up formation with the Dawnblade and the Defenders. The Chimera is still on the attack, three ships have been sunk so far, and two badly damaged."

"Roger that, CIC." Yzak answered, sending a mental query of concern and inquisition to Katie, recieving the equivalent of a thumbs up in reply. "Yzak and Katie Joule, in the Balmung, taking off!" He announced, the linear accelerators built into the walls of the maintenance bay grabbing hold of the Balmung and hurling it straight up at a velocity that would have crushed him flat were it not for the GRS system, as it was he barely even noticed the sensation, as the FPR kicked to life inside his breast and filled his body with blazing tendrils of power and energy! A subconscious tap on his attitude thrusters kicked the Balmung clear of the Endymion, and then they were falling, Yzak bringing the shield forward on the left arm to hang loosely in front of them, withdrawing the Fafnir blade from its storage locationa cross the Balmung's back and gripping it firmly in his right hand, a picture of the shark appearing in the depths of his mind as Katie reached out with her senses to paint him a picture of what the chimera was thinking and feeling.

And then there was a slight sensation of impact, felt more as a stiffening in the gel encasing his numbed flesh and blood body than anything else, and their view foamed and swirled before clearing, ending up slightly hazy as the cameras tried to adjust to the ambient water conditions, the water stirred up and turbulent both from being hurled about by telekinesis and from the wakes of the frantically maneuvering Task Force vessels as they sought to stay a step ahead of the angry Chimera's attacks. Still, with katie's mind reaching out into the netherscape of the mental plane and feeling out the shark's location and intent, Yzak hardly even needed his physical eyes to see with, other than to avoid crashing into inanimate objects in the environment, which at the moment meant TTU or the ships. Yzak felt an awkward tug between his shoulderblades, and cursed himself for his forgetfulness, sending the command to retract the Photon Cloak that warded his rear and flanks against beam type weaponry, in a underwater battle the superconducting cloth was nothing more than an entanglement hazard!

The attacking Chimera had turned towards them when they first entered the water, but shortly afterwards lost interest as the Balmung slowly sank, prevented from discovering that it was in fact a piloted vehicle and not some form of inert wreckage by Katie's psychic screening of her and Yzak's mind. While actually defending against a mental assault from the Chimera would tax her to her limits, if not break them entirely, merely hiding from its passive telepathic senses was not much more difficult than it was doing the same thing to humans, especially with the shark so busy with its attack upon the surface ships. Yzak brought the crosshair belonging to his dual 75mm monodisc launcher onto the stately form of the shark and fired in two seperate breaths, loosing a flurry of hand sized mono-sharpened explosive discs at Gorefin. Yzak scowled and swore inside the confines of his head a moment later when the discs suddenly veered sharply away from their original course, deflected by a veritable wall of telekinetically propelled water as Gorefin's mind lashed out to form a defensive bubble as he felt the projectiles swarm towards him, tripping the telekinetic "tripwires" he constantly surrounded himself with as a sort of proximity alarm, a tactic common to those with strong telekinesis, holding air or water molecules in a steady sphere around them, and noting when they were pushed aside by incoming or outgoing objects.

Gorefin snapped around, a one hundred eighty degree turn accomplished with little more than a flick of his forefins and a contortion of his cartiliginous skeletal structure, before his tail slammed back and forth and he hurled himself like a guided missile straight at the Balmung, a missile with the mass of a fully laden freight train! Yzak barely managed to twitch aside in time, Gorefin's tail actually spiledriving into the Balmung's side and shield as the shark zoomed past, the displaced water sending the Balmung spinning off balance through the watery void even as Yzak sought to correct the tumble imparted by the glancing hit. Katie shouted a wordless warning to him, the ghostly image of gigantic shark jaws speeding through the water towards his back arrived shortly before the jaws themselves, telekinetic constructs rather than physical jaws, crashed into their back and snapped closed, honed teeth of pure force and water pressure dimpling the Balmung's Citadel scaled hide, golden sparks crawling across its skin as the invisible force gnawed at them just as Gorefin himself would have if it were his real jaws closed about them!

Shrieking pressure slowly built inside Yzak's head as the Balmung warned him of imminent Citadel Scale failure across several sections of the Gundam's skin, the shields not designed to withstand steady, piercing pressure like this for long periods of time, and after seeing what the Chimera had already done to the ships, Yzak had no delusions about how well the physical armor of his Gundam would fare against this esoteric form of attack. He had to break free or they were screwed. Unfortunately that was a lot harder done than said, the telekinetic jaws having a firm grip in several dozen locations, but mostly because except at the very point of contact with his armor, the jaws had NO physical presence whatsoever! Yzak slashed the blue flaring edge of the Fafnir through the area around his body a half a dozen times and cut nothing but unresisting water, the blade passing cleanly through the ghostly image of the attack Katie was projecting into his thoughts. The shrieking in his head grew abruptly louder, as one after another, Citadel Scales began blowing out, the telekinetic teeth ripping into the all too yielding armor plate beneath.

Desperate times called for desperate measures, and so Yzak did two things with near simultaniety. One, he kicked the Balmung's thrusters up to full power and did his best to aim them at the surface, but Gorefin's telekinetic grip was too strong for even the Balmung's power to overwhelm, at least without any previous momentum built up. Which was why Yzak did the second thing, sending an overload power burst through the Storm Aegis EMP field that acted as the Balmung's CIWS. Gorefin was far outside the usual 25 meter protective radius of the field, but that was in atmosphere, water was a much better conductor of electrical fields, and with a triple power burst, the Storm Aegis sent the equivalent of forty or fifty thousand volts crackling through the water for a quarter kilometer sphere, stunning and slightly electrocuting several Orb sailor's who happened to be in contact with the outer hulls of their ships at the time, but also jolting Gorefin across his entire body at once, the electrical disruption serving to break his concentration, the telekinetic jaws vanishing in an instant, loosing the Balmung, which emerged from the ocean less than a second later, retreating to hover atop its Minion pods a few hundred meters up.

"Let's not do that again." Katie said with a slight tremor in her voice as she saw the ravaged state of the Balmung's armor. The Citadel Scales would reactive shortly, as soon as their blown fuses were rebuilt by the nano-repair system, but the actual armor damage would take hours or even days to fill in a few molecules at a time. Actually, the self repair system would work faster if they were submerged underwater, there being more loose molecules available for reconstruction purposes in a fluid than in a gas, but Yzak wasn't going to be going back in the water any time soon. It was time to listen to that piece of advice from all the old shark thriller movies. Do NOT attempt to fight the shark on its own turf. It was a predator that had remained unchanged for millions of years, obviously it was at an advantage underwater.

With the Balmung out of the water and still shielded by Katie, Gorefin had lost track of the Gundam, thrashing the water around himself into a brief froth as he raged against the pain of the electric shock he'd suffered, flinging piercing lances of telekinetic force upward at various random angles, like the spines of certain poisonous coastal fish, but he was firing blind so to speak, and for that matter wasn't hurling them hard enough to even get within a hundred meters of his escaped prey. Ineffective as lashing out thusly might be, it was cathartic, and Gorefin soon found himself returning to rationality and returned to his pursuit of the surface dwellers and their inedible shellfish.

By now though, the initial shock of the unprecedented attack had begun to wear off, and things were getting organized among the Orb forces, M-7's flocking back and forth in skimming dive domb assaults, firing carefully into the water with their hyper-impulse cannons and shoulder mounted gatling cannons, firing not at Gorefin but in front of or to his sides, forming udnerwater walls of shrapnel and superheated steam between the shark and his fleeing prey, the still vulnerable surface navy ships, forcing him to veer off or suffer lacerations and steam burns. At least that was what happened initially, but after several forced detours, Gorefin plainly became fed up, and surrounding himself with a sphere of solid water he powered right through the next wall of shrapnel and steam, shoving away the harmful matter with a shockwave of telekinetic force that caused water to geyser upwards almost a hundred feet, like a bomb blast on the surface as he powered after the ships with mighty sweeps of his tail, diving deep before returning upwards from below, swimming almost straight upwards.

The telekinetic blow this time was no needle lance or slicing scapel, it was a pure on battering ram more or less shaped like Gorefin's nose and mouth, and it slammed into the central keel of one of the Aegis Cruisers trimaran hulls and crumpled it inward like a sledgehammer blow from God, the entire ship jumping about four or five feet straight up out of the water, before massive cracks spread through its superstructure and the ship ripped in half, bow and stern diving down into the water and sinking like stones, the entire ship gone from sight except for a few bits of scattered debris and lots of foaming bubbles from escaping air only ten seconds after first being struck, seven hundred souls lost in an instant, most pulped against the interior spaces of the ship during the first instants after the telekinetic blow landed. The water was so turbulent with foaming bubbles that Yzak lost track of Gorefin with his eyes, though thankfully Katie could still keep track of the shark as he dived down deep again, preparing to repeat his new tactic.

"I don't think so, fish food." Yzak gritted out, sheathing the Fafnir and hauling out the "Caladabolg" 105mm Hyperthermal Radiation Cannon, popping open the breech and slotting home a single bulky cartridge from a rack of the expendable power sources on his rear waistline. Much like the original Earthshaker cannon, the still prototypical Hyperthermal Radiation Cannon required manual operation and reloading, there being no current way to reliably hook up the kind of exotic energy converters and accelerator systems the weapon required on a Gundam sized frame for a continous energy feed. It was a different matter for the Dawnblade, which had a much larger HTRC mounted on its prow, but a capital warship had the room to spare for all the support systems a direct energy feed system needed. With NIC functionality, a hand loaded gun wasn't even all that awkward, so Yzak had no complaints. Yzak snapped the breech shut with a flick of the Balmung's arm, and pointed the primed weapon at the mental image of Gorefin, tracking the shark's movements as he reached his optimal depth and turned around for another piledriver charge to the surface.

And then the shark chimera was in range, and Yzak's finger tightened on the figurative trigger, the Caladabolg vomiting forth a dark cerulean blue beam of dense energy, the blast expanding to thirty times the muzzle width only a few feet from the end of the barrel, so that by the time it hit the water's surface in an explosion of steam, the beam was more than ten feet in diameter! It bored a relentless hole through the ocean as it closed in on Gorefin, who aborted his attack run and tried to throw up a wall of telekinetic force as a defensive measure once again, but the massively accelerated radiation particles had plenty of mass and momentum, and Gorefin only managed a slight deflection of the beam, enough to save his life, but not the fins on the left side of his body, which flash-exploded into bloody soup as the concussive shockwave of the steam tunnel bored by the shot slammed Gorefin head over tailtip away from the fleet, his stumps cauterized shut but still leaking bits of blood and flesh into the surrounding waters as he spiraled down into the depths, shocked almost senseless by the pain.

"NICE SHOT!" Dearka congratulated them, from where the Dreadnaught had launched and was now standing atop the harbor wall of TTU, the Earthshaker Omega just lowering as Dearka sent the weapon back into standby mode, having obviously been planning an interception shot of his own had Yzak failed.

"I have my moments." Yzak allowed himself one to bask in the accomplishment. "Looks like fish stew might be on the menu tonight. I hear shark doesn't taste too bad."

Umm... Yzak...

Yes, Katie?

This is not good.

What do you mean "this is not good"? How could this not be good? The shark is dead or crippled, the fleet is safe and we might actually have an exotic dinner depending on whether it sinks or floats!

I don't know if I could stand to eat a former intelligent life form, regardless of its species. Katie pointed out. But that's not the problem. Because Gorefin... that's his name... is neither dead nor crippled, any more than you would be if you'd lost a few fingers. And now he's REALLY pissed off.

So what? What's he gonna do? We're out of his range up here, and if he comes around again we really will have fried fish on the menu!

What's he gonna do? Yzak, what do YOU do in combat when you get really pissed off? Remember, this shark is an Ultimate Coordinator version of a shark! He's gonna use his Seed, that's what he's gonna do!

Oh shit...

Down below, in the depths, Gorefin was overcome with his shock and outrage at his grievous wounding. Contrary to Katie's estimation, it was quite a bit worse than losing a few fingers, more like an arm and part of a leg, with plenty of burns along the torso that made moving of any sort hurt terribly. But it wasn't anything he couldn't compensate for with his telekinesis, though the aunguish of suffering such permanent, disfiguring harm was almost as painful as the actual injuries themselves. Were he not Chimera, this would be a life ending injury, his peers, had he any, would quickly gang up upon him and eat him while he was unable to properly defend himself. As things were, it was like he'd suddenly been aged a century or two, he was neither as fast nor as agile as he was used to being. But he was fast enough, and agile enough, to make sure those that had maimed him regretted their actions most terribly!

It was a fact of life on New Eden that utilizing your Seed was an act of the utmost last resort, for its use signaled desperation and, in a way, vulnerability, which would only attract more predators if you weren't able to accomplish whatever you were trying to do quickly. Any sort of psychic camouflage or discretion you might have been enjoying would be shredded under the blazing explosion of power that heralded a Seed awakening, announcing your presence and intentions to anything with a mind to feel it for anywhere from hundreds of feet to scores of miles! And worst of all, since every living thing on New Eden with even a semblance of self awareness had a Seed, once one was activated, all involved would activate as well to compensate, and since the amount of power granted by the Seed was variable, your foes could suddenly recieve a much greater power increase than you did, completely eclipsing any benefit to the action. It was like pulling a gun in a bar fight, maybe you'd scare the other guys away, but much more likely, you'd just turn a fistfight into a gunfight!

Gorefin cared about none of that right now, though he did spare a bit of a mental wince as he saw the little light blue egg-thing fall through the pits of his mind and explode in a brilliant flash of energy, because when a Chimera of his power activated the Seed, it was a matter of note to every denizen of the oceans for hundreds of miles in any direction. His desperate ploy was all but certain to rouse the Ocean Mother from her contented slumber almost as thoroughly as if he'd swam down and bitten a chunk from her fluke! Already he could feel her stirring, her mind re-engaging to the controls of her vast phsyical form, still but a shell for the far vaster intelligence that inhabited it, and he felt her sleepy query like a rising tide inside his skull. He tried to send her reassurance, but it was futile to be deceptive with the Ocean Mother, she detcted his pain instantly, and a moment later had accessed his memories and learned what had befallen him. And that was when Gorefin, in the full grip of the Seed, began to tremble, because the Ocean Mother, named Leviathan by the surface dwellers, was NOT happy with the treatment of her vassal. It was all but unheard of for her to involve herself directly, but she was on her way right now!

"What the fuck is it doing?" Yzak demanded, more or less of anyone capable of answering, though no one seemed eager to step up. He'd felt Gorefin achieve the Seed mode, like an incandescent bulb flashing right behind his eyes, a throbbing ache building in his skull like he got from trying to stare at the sun directly for too long, a psychic shockwave even the blunt minds of the rest of the Task Force had felt it, a prickle along the spine, a pinch against the bridge of the nose, a premontion of dread from nowhere. But instead of coming up after them, the Chimera continued to slowly swim in a holding pattern a few hundred meters down, favoring its injured left side but not inordinately crippled, just as Katie had predicted. The Chimera was a blazing beacon of psychic power that frankly made Yzak's bowels a bit loose, the shark had easily gotten four or five times more powerful than it originally was, and that did not bode well for ANYONE in the Task Force.

"You want I should sink an Earthshaker shell down to proximity and blow it?" Dearka asked, his voice just a tad bit jittery as he felt the merest lapping of the psychic waves that Yzak and Katie were battling. Overhead, Mu was making wide circles in the Firebird Interceptor Mobile Armor, likewise struggling with the outpouring of emotional strength from the Chimera, like standing too close to an open furnace. "That might shake him up a bit."

"Assuming he didn't just hurl it right back down your throat, yeah." Katie returned, a shade viciously as the throbbing in her head continued to scale upwards, seemingly without end. "This is the most powerful psychic organism humanity has ever encountered, there is literally no telling what it might be capable of now! It might be able to rip your Gundam apart into individual molecules with just a glance!"

"When you put it that way, discretion might be the better part of surviving." Dearka replied, his jocular tone obviously punctured by worry.

They were interrupted by a live comm feed from the Endymion. It was Jim, the Harbormaster. "I hate to interrupt in the middle of a military operation, but we have a BIG problem." Jim said without preamble, his voice edging towards hysteria. "Long range sonar is detecting another large mass moving towards this location at incredible speed. It'll be here in minutes. I think the shark may have called for help." Jim trailed off, his voice stangulated. "And help heard..."

"This wouldn't happen to be that one big mass we were..." Mu started to say.

"Yes in fact it would." Jim cut him off, his voice cracking noticably. "If this shark has a mommy, she is now inbound, going several hundred kilometers per hour at a depth of almost thirty eight hundred meters! The displacement is insane, she must be three times the szie of the Uzumi! I'm ordering an emergency evacuation of the Town, if that thing even comes near us, her wake alone could tear the Town from its moorings and send it spinning into the abyss!"

"Taking measurements of incoming massive biological object." Lexi announced next. "Logging data in targeting databanks for future reference. Incoming object, to be designated Epsilon 1, is roughly nine hundred seventy meters long and likely weighs over 450,000 tons, making it bigger than the Uzumi and the Dawnblade combined. Data on Edenite animals complied from TCF sources indicate high probability that size corresponds to intelligence among Eden animals, and often though not always to psychic power as well. If such is true, then Epsilon 1 can probably be safely classified as a strategic WMD level threat." Lexi's analytical tone faded away for a moment. "HOW THE HELL CAN SOMETHING THIS BIG EVEN EXIST!" She demanded, either mimicing hysteria well, or actually perturbed by the thought of such a gigantic living thing. "If the size to intelligence ratios are anything close to what I think they are, this thing could be as smart as I am!" Lexi continued to rant. "Epsilon 1 is at fourteen thousand meters and closing rapidly, depth 2000 meters on a shallow ascent." She added in her CIC voice.

"Dear lord... can you guys see what I'm seeing?" Mu called down from above, his eyes locked onto the thirty meter high and several kilometer wide wave that had risen out of the distance and was hurtling down at them like a runaway express train. "Its pushing a goddamn tsunami in front of it! All hands, brace for sudden impacts!"

Mu's warning turned out to be unnecessary, as the wave subsided into barely more than a gentle push before it reached the fleet, but all the same, the water displacement caused by countless tons of water being moved actually pushed the ships around in the water, like a hand stirring a bathtub full of rubber duckies from below. Katie was the first to feel it, blinkering her senses too late, and she caught the merest fraction of a glimpse of the mind in the depths. Even such a fleeting glance blasted her senseless in a trice, her eyes rolling up and back as she foamed and thrashed in a convulsive fit as the alien, incomprehensible, gigantic thoughts brushed across her mind, the feedback effect jolting into Yzak like a red hot poker inserted through the base of his skull and stirring around in his brain, the Balmung losing cohesion and crash landing atop the harbor wall on its face, only stopped from falling off into the sea by a quick grab from the Dreadnaught.

"Epsilon 1 is surfacing! Epsilon 1 is surfacing!" Lexi warned, watching with an audible gulp as the water around TTU began doming upwards until there was a noticable hummock of water encompassing a several kilometer diameter section of ocean, the center parts a good ten to fifteen feet above the usual water level of the ocean. And then that hummock suddenly flattened out, becoming concav rather than convex, a huge depression in the water's surface that dragged at the ships unfortunate enough not to be able to take to the air, tugging them towards the center of the bowl. And then that too flattened out in a matter of moments, it was almost like Epsilon 1 couldn't decided what she wanted to do long enough to cause any harm. In truth, Leviathan was merely going through the psychic equivalent of yanws and warm up stretches. Now fully awake, and feeding off the distress of her vassal, Leviathan lashed out.

A column of water exploded from the ocean beneath one of the escort frigates, not striking in a manner focused enough to slice or even to crush, it just impelled the entire ship skyward like a bottlecap on a geyser, the edges of the column overlapping around the sides of the ship until the vessel was almost entirely encased within the rising spume of water, armored observation ports shattering inward, watertight hatches ripping off hinges as unstoppable water pressure slammed into the frigate from all sides at once before the water column jerked to a halt, imparted momentum flinging the frigate free of its watery tomb, flipping through the air like a oddly shaped poker chip as it upended and plummeted towards the ocean's surface, almost five hundred meters below its current altitude. The frigate struck the ocean surface canted on its side, and the ship shattered as if dropped upon hard, rocky ground, a telekinetic impulse stiffening the water's surface to the consistency of ice at the moment of impact.

A second frigate was simply hauled underwater, the entire ship pulled straight down like a balloon on a string, its propellers still madly churning, trying to propel the ship to the surface when the water pressure crushed the ship like it was made of eggshell, the wreckage tumbling freely until it slammed into the side of Trieste Town's primary dome, fracturing the pressure tight exo-glass. The spiderweb cracks grew to arm thick fissure in a matter of seconds, the ocean pressing in eagerly, before the entire dome imploded less than a minute later, hundreds of scientists and engineers crushed to pulpy smears by millions of tons of rushing water, a huge bubble of gases and steam escaping to boil the water beneath TTU, which began to slowly drift now that its anchor points were severed. And still Leviathan continued to make her stately way to the surface, gargantuan flukes and flippers of telekinetic force slapping and slamming into the hulls of ships, battering them about like plastic models.

And then the Dawnblade was manuevering around to bring its weapons to bear, the primary turret with its pair of automatic Earthshaker bombardment cannons unleashing a volley of super-large high explosive, proximity fused shells into the water, each shell containing almost as much explosive power as a small tactical nuke! The secondary dorsal turrets, mounted two forward and one after, consisting of a rapidfire "Baron Lohengrin" Positron cannon and dual 120cm Linear cannons in each turret, also revolved around and began firing, churning the ocean's surface into a mass of steam and shrapnel, various Mobile Suits and the remaining ships starting to add their firepower to the cauldron of destruction that was chewing its way down to meet the rising behemoth. Raging currents of telekinetically impelled water surged forward to replace the fluid being vaporized by the Orbites attacks, and Leviathan remained safely cocooned in soothing, cool moisture no matter how much firepower was directed down at her. Whipping tendrils of raw telekinetic force, berefit of water medium, slammed into the TTU harbor wall, tearing out huge chunks of the structure, even boring right through it like invisible hole punches on a colossal scale, sometimes catching a M-7 and throwing it away in fingernail sized pieces, like it was made of glass and not hardened armor plating!

And then the Dawnblade cut loose with its prow mounted 735mm Hyperthermal Radiation Cannon, the much bigger and more powerful brother to the Balmung's Caladabolg, a seventy foot wide beam of crackling cerulean blue energy spearing into the divot pounded into the ocean's surface by the other weapons. The report and blast wave from the firing of the weapon sent the Dawnblade heeling to the side, and the other ships and Mobile Suits were forced to scatter before the expanding walls of mist and steam. The crater of water slowly settled and refilled, the ocean swallowing the hyperthermal energy blast like it had never been fired. The only sign that it had actually been fired were the wisps of heat coming from the prow of the Dawnblade, and the roiling heat signature in the depths. Which strangely wasn't disspiating at all.

"That's odd." Lexi commented, on the bridge of a dozen ships at once. "The heat signature seems to be getting closer..." Even as she said that, she calculated out the probablem short term outcome, and as one the ships jerked into evasive maneuvers. Some ships were more agile than others though, and even on its best day, the trimaran supercarrier Uzumi Nara-Attha was not a sprinter of a ship. yes, it could go quite fast in straight lines, fast enough to keep up with most of its escorts at flank speed. But it wasn't quick to start nor was it particularly good at evasive maneuvers. Certainly not nearly fast enough to avoid the telekinetically corralled hyperthermal blast coming at it from below, which cored through the main hull and exited out through the left-center of the flight deck only three seconds after Lexi started the automatic evasive manuevers. For a long quarter second, there was a perfectly circular seventy foot wide, molten orange rimmed hole in the supercarrier, where someone standing on the flight deck could have bent over and seen almost a kilometer straight down into the ocean. And then the flash heated water shockwave arrived, and the supercarrier went off like a firework, fuel supplies, ammo bunkers and energy capacitors combining to make the ship practically disappear in a near mushroom cloud!

"Dear lord, the Uzumi..." Murrue gasped, sitting in her captain's chair, her eyes wide, hands clenched against the rails of the chair. The second after that, her hard won captain's resolve replaced the shock. "All ships, this is Captain Ramius on the Endymion! This situation is untenable, we cannot prevail against this foe! I am ordering a full withdrawal, all ships, scatter and meet up at the rendevous point as soon as you can! All Mobile Suits should return to their carrier ships, any suits from the Uzumi should hitch a ride on the outer surfaces of the Endymion, Dawnblade, or one of the Defenders. Do not expend any more firepower against Epsilon 1, it will only send it right back at you or another ship!" Murrue bit down on her lip just shy of hard enough to draw blood. "Who would have ever thought the sea contained such monstrous creatures... it's like something out of the myths of the age of sail..."

Murrue watched on the bridge screens as the Endymion fled what had become the battlefield. No, it was no battlefield, there had been no chance of their victory as soon as Epsilon 1 arrived. They fled the site of massacre with their tails tucked between their legs and the shattered remains of Orb's most powerful naval fleet slowly subsiding into the depths, alongside the pulped corpses of hudnreds of civilian workers amid the collapsed dome of Trieste Town. This was a black day indeed for Orb, their proudest fleet put to undignified rout in a matter of minutes by a single creature, albeit one bigger than any two ships of the fleet combined! Murre wondered for a moment how something so big could even survive... what did it eat, and HOW had they not spotted it before? Was a creature of the great depths? But why had it chosen now to come to the surface and attack? Had the shark called it? Some chimera were supposed to be just as smart as the smarter humans, could this be some form of undersea alliance? There was still so much they didn't know about their own changed world...

One of the last things Murrue saw through the cameras, before the Endymion broke through the lower layer of clouds was a huge, grey-black mass of slick hide, faintly reminescent of that of a whale, though the size of a small atoll, break the surface of the water far below, spumes of exhausted air escaping through a multitude of what could have once been blowholes. At first she thought that the creature had just breached its back, until a solid golden eye the size of a Gundam opened in the middle of the mass, and Murrue realized that she was just looking at the thing's head... and only one side of it! The water was so turbulent around the thing it was impossible to get a real feel for its actual shape, there was just a massive dark spot in the ocean, with that great golden eye staring up at them, watching them as they fled. And then water rose up on all sides of the dark mass, a literal mountain of suspended liquid reaching up, and up and up until it towered over the half smashed remains of TTU like a glacial cliff face, briefly forming itself into the image of a colossal, multiflippered whale fluke! And then the water fell, almost in seeming slow motion from a distance, and TTU was erased from existence, and the ocean was clean, calm and totally empty when the Endymion next broke through the clouds about fifteen minutes later.