Ack! I *will* learn HTML. I *will* learn HTML. Fixed the file. I don't know how I managed to leave out a whole paragraph... How embarrassing. Thanks for the reviews, goblz & cardinal!
Negative Factors
by
Kamchatka
Chapter 2
Heero sat back against a crate of cabbages and went over the floor plans of the OZ military base on the outer wall of Colony C-1102. For the hundredth time he wondered whether his enemies were stupid or simply arrogant. The plans had been far too easy to obtain. Until a few weeks ago, the base had been a warehouse facility for a commercial import-export firm and the contractor who'd done the refitting kept far too many of his records on his mainframe. Only one group of rooms had been converted into holding cells, and those were conveniently close to the loading docks.
He bit into a liberated apple and was amazed at how good it tasted. Amazed and slightly offended. He'd never been to C-1102, but from what he'd seen on the news, motley crowds cheering the fallen gundam, it wasn't a well-to-do colony. Damn few of those civilians had looked like they could afford to eat fresh fruit like their OZ "saviors". OZ's selfishness had made his job easier, though. All that fresh produce had to come from a civilian supplier, and the security for a gourmet wholesaler's private freighter was practically non-existent. And since its cargo was meant strictly for OZ, the ship would go straight to the military base. It was almost too easy.
He tossed the apple core into a corner of the shipping container with a sigh. Even such a small treat made him feel a little guilty. He didn't need luxuries, knew he shouldn't allow himself to enjoy them. Better to maintain a Spartan diet. Pleasures of the senses were too distracting. It was too easy to get spoiled and soft.
I am a weapon.
Getting soft got you dead. Look at Maxwell. His own lack of discipline had delivered him into the hands of OZ. It was the only logical explanation. He'd been in his gundam, the deadliest instrument of destruction in space. A good soldier would have self-detonated rather than allow himself, with all the vital information in his machine and his memory, to be taken by the enemy.
"Anyone can be broken," Dr. J had told him. "Even you. You might hold out against any imaginable physical torture, but eventually they would get tired of beating you and bring out mind manipulating drugs that no human brain can resist. Even an Azrael Block can be broken by a suitably skilled interrogator. It would kill you, of course, but they'd have your information, and once they have that, there's no reason to keep you alive, is there?"
A gundam pilot was too important a trophy to be left in the hands of the enemy. Even if they learned nothing from Maxwell, they'd been granted a fantastic propaganda tool. They were already making him out to be some kind of loathsome anti-colony terrorist. A big public execution would be one more triumph of morale for OZ. The colonies wouldn't have to be beaten down. Their freedom didn't have to be taken by force. They were gift wrapping it and delivering it to OZ themselves, never seeming to notice that OZ was supplying the pretty paper.
Why couldn't you have been a better soldier, Duo?
Or just stayed home.
It all came down to a simple equation. Maxwell had to kept out of the OZ propaganda machine and he had to be prevented from talking. There was only one certain way to accomplish both goals.
I am a weapon.
He is nothing to me.
He is a danger to the mission.
He has to die.
I have to kill him.
But... Duo.
It's my mission.
Mission... acknowledged.
Heero settled back against the wall, willing himself to relax, willing himself to purge the unprecedented uncertainty that had plagued him from the moment he'd learned of the other pilot's capture. There was no room for indecision, no room for compassion, no room for any emotion.
Mission acknowledged.
"Follow your heart," his first mentor, Odin Lowe, had told him. Had Odin followed that philosophy himself? If he had, it hadn't done him much good. His emotions hadn't kept him from being killed.
Stop it! Stop thinking about Lowe.
You believed him, though, didn't you?
Care to take back what you said to Trowa?
Was it a lie?
Heero knew they must be getting close to the colony by now. He folded the plans and sprinkled a bit of flash powder on the paper. It evaporated into fine ash so quickly the heat was almost imperceptible.
He checked the contents of his pack again. Explosives, detonators, and, of course the gun.
He was perfectly capable of killing a man quickly and painlessly with his bare hands.
But not Duo.
To touch him would be to acknowledge his humanity.
He is a target, not a person.
He can never be a person again. Not to me.
Mission acknowledged.
Shooting Duo would bring greater disgrace to his captors, Heero reasoned. Anyone could snap the boy's neck; it was even easy enough to imagine Maxwell annoying his jailers to the degree they'd do it themselves. But leaving a traceable bullet in his skull was an insult, the obvious theft of a valuable prize. They'd know good and well that the enemy had done this, come in and killed one of its own, just to spit in the face of OZ.
It was a mission, nothing more. He would be off C-1102 and back in space before OZ even knew Duo Maxwell was dead.
I am a weapon.
Mission... accepted.
He was flat on his back again, all the way flat this time, and moving. He could feel the restraining straps tethering him to the gurney. He cracked one eye open just enough to see that he was being wheeled through a narrow corridor. Hospital? No. OZ wasn't going to bother fixing him up. It was just easier to push him around in a cart than it was to carry him. Safer, too. If he puked again he wasn't going to hit anyone but himself. Yum.
Turn right... twenty-five seconds. Left. Forty seconds. Turn right again. Shit, can't keep track. Stop.
The restraints fell away and a woman's crisp voice commanded him, "Get up. Now."
He let his eyelids flicker open as though he were fighting to wake up. Heero could fake it, maybe he could, too. He let out a pathetic moan, dismayed at how little effort that acting exercise had cost him.
The woman's sympathy expressed itself in the cold barrel of a gun against his temple. "I said get up. You're no more unconscious than I am."
And the award for worst actor in a drama goes to...
As soon as he opened his eyes, he regretted it. The tall, ice blonde woman wore nurse's whites, but she handled the gun with obvious familiarity and didn't look like she would hesitate to use it. Instead of repeating herself, she gestured with the gun and a raised eyebrow. She might have been pretty under other circumstances, but right now her expression was warm as an ice pick, stern and utterly no-nonsense. She wasn't relying solely on her gun and her demeanor, either. An OZ officer stood on either side of her and there were two other men, older guys wearing nondescript coveralls. Janitors? Civilian guards? Ozzie grunts? It didn't matter much. They were big and didn't look like Welcome Wagon ladies.
Laying down he hadn't felt too bad, but sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the wheeled stretcher was a major operation. He'd have liked to have said something scathingly sarcastic, just to see if he could tease a wrinkle onto the blonde woman's smooth, implacable face, but it was enough effort just to sit upright and try to evaluate his surroundings.
He didn't like what he saw. This wasn't any kind of medical facility; it was some sort of locker room with drab walls, cement floor, rows of ancient green personal lockers. A row of sinks and dingy urinals led to two shower stalls. The one in the corner was open, with room for seven or eight guys at once. The other, directly in front of him, was smaller and had some sort of plexiglass door with "Emergency Decontamination Unit" stenciled across it in blocky red letters. Neither of them looked like something he wanted to explore.
Water started running somewhere close, and a chill slithered up his spine. Things were not looking up.
"Stand," the nurse demanded.
He took the deepest breath he could manage without setting off the demons in his ribs and pushed up off the bed. His legs had all the tensile strength of over-cooked ramen, though, and his knees buckled. One of the guards caught him before he went down and held him upright while the nurse grasped his chin in vice-like fingers and inspected both of his eyes with a pen light.
"Pupils equal and reactive," she noted, writing on her clipboard. "Take your clothes off."
Oh yeah, you bet.
"You first," he dead-panned.
She didn't even look up, just nodded at the man who held him.
Before Duo could brace himself, his right hand was yanked up behind him, nearly to shoulder level. Strong fingers planted themselves in the thick hair at the base of his skull and his head was thrust into a deep sink full of water and held under.
After the first instinctive, panicked struggle, he forced himself to go limp. Let them think they'd knocked him out. He was instantly pulled upright and hauled around to face the woman.
Duo wanted desperately to swallow the mouthful of water he'd managed to catch, but held it in until the nurse asked, in a carefully monotone voice, "Are you going to cooperate now?"
The water hit her squarely between the eyes.
Time stopped.
Duo managed to swallow the few drops that remained in his mouth. It tasted like liquid heaven.
The woman made no move to wipe her face, didn't even blink.
"Since our guest does not see fit to clean himself in a civilized manner, give him three minutes in the decontamination shower. 35% solution at 49 degrees. That should remove most of the smell."
"Fuck you," Duo said pleasantly, gracing her with his most angelic smile.
"55% solution at 51 degrees. But limit it to two minutes. We wouldn't want his hair to fall out all at once." She smiled then, and Duo couldn't help shuddering.
She scribbled a signature and handed the clipboard to one of the guards. "I've certified him fit for interrogation. Take him to 1711 when you're finished with him."
When she was gone, the man who'd restrained Duo cuffed his hands behind his back. "I don't know whether you're gutsy as hell or just plain psychotic."
Duo watched as the man set the decontamination controls, opened, then closed the shower door, and started the timer. Steaming orange liquid splashed against the plexiglass door and an acrid chemical odor filled the room.
Duo eyed the man warily, but the fellow was busy counting along with the timer. The other three guards were pointedly looking the other way.
What the hell...?
"I have kids of my own," the man said, still watching the timer as it ticked away the moments. "You're my enemy and you're a prisoner of war. But we're not animals. Can you hold your breath for 30 seconds?"
Duo blinked and nodded. He had expected anything but compassion.
"Keep your eyes tight shut and whatever you do, don't inhale any of that shit." He opened the door and Duo stepped into the longest 30 seconds of his short life. The chemicals bled through his hair, through his clothing, even through his boots. His skin burned as though he'd been dipped in acid and the stench crept into his nose even though his whole existence was concentrated on not inhaling any of the foul brew. He hadn't been able to take a deep breath and his ribs were screaming by the time the stream turned to plain warm water and then stopped. He leaned against the wall of the shower stall and concentrated on not falling. He was dizzy again, and so tired he couldn't have lifted his arms to wipe the wet hair out of his face even if his hands hadn't been cuffed..
The shower door opened and the air that rushed in was so cold in comparison to the disinfectant spray that he immediately started shivering so hard his teeth chattered. He wanted to get out of the stall, he really did, but he couldn't seem to remember how to put one foot in front of another.
Then two of the men were sitting him down on the gurney. Someone put a blanket around his shoulders. A cup pressed lightly against his lips and he smelled fresh water. He snapped to full awareness and drank gratefully. He fought the urge to gulp as much as he could at once: It would only make him sick again. He contented himself with slow, small swallows.
Why are they doing this?
They're my enemies.
The guy said he was my enemy.
Why?
"Thanks," he mumbled, but he kept his head down.
He didn't want to look up into the eyes of the men whose sudden, bewildering acts of kindness had saved him from further torture. He wasn't ready to see the face of a human being above the uniform he'd been conditioned to hate. He couldn't start thinking of OZ soldiers as people with kids and families, people just like anyone else, people like him. He couldn't. Not yet.
Heero adjusted the helmet on his vacuum suit. The freighter was docking and he had to be ready to move quickly. He tucked the cabbage he'd stolen under his arm and hid beside the hatch. When the container door slid open, he was delighted to see just one man. The guy wasn't wearing a helmet. Good. That meant he could ditch the cumbersome suit.
As the warehouse worker entered the container, Heero let go the cabbage and watched in delight as it caught his attention. One quick blow to the man's neck and he was out in the cargo bay. He discarded his helmet and strolled with studied nonchalance towards the exit.
Duo woke to find himself lying prone on a cold metal floor. He hadn't been out long; his clothes were still a bit damp.
God, I'm going to catch pneumonia at this rate.
Not that it mattered. Not after the shortest interrogation session in
history.
"Who would have thought that a gundam pilot would be just a little kid?"
And he just hadn't been able to keep quiet. What the hell had he been
thinking? Just because one handful of Ozzies had acted like human beings...
"You'll be executed. The people's feelings about the execution will
unite the colonies."
He'd been about to tell them just what he thought about their damned execution
and, sure enough, someone had hit him from behind again.
Executed.
Why hadn't the damned self-destruct switch worked?
Shit. I did the best I could. Why wasn't it enough?His hands were no longer cuffed and he pushed himself to his knees, shivering and coughing. It was a short crawl to the wall. He could probably stay sitting up with a good, strong wall supporting him. His skin felt coated and sticky from the disinfectant shower and his hair... ah, geez, he didn't even want to think about his hair. His one vanity had been reduced to a stinking, bedraggled rag rope. His scalp itched, but he didn't want to touch it. He hadn't been so filthy since he'd been living out of dumpsters on the streets of L2. Back when he'd had...
You don't have lice.
It's just the chemicals.
For crying out loud, get some perspective here.
He felt like he could just roll over on his side and die, but he also knew that he wasn't really hurt that badly. Two or three broken ribs. His lung might be bruised a little, but it wasn't filling up with blood. None of that nasty gurgling feel you got when you were really in trouble. Probably a bit of a concussion, because they just couldn't seem to deny themselves the pleasure of knocking him in the head, and he was still dizzy and having a hell of a time concentrating on anything. He was no doubt sporting a remarkable array of bumps and bruises, too, but he'd have been congratulating the bejesus out of himself if he'd been in a crash and managed to walk away in such good shape.
Gack! Something was crawling on his nose. No, just that stupid bandaid coming loose. He peeled it off and tossed it away. A zit was the absolute least of his worries now.
A sudden commotion outside caught his attention an instant before the door slid open and something tumbled into the cell. A body.
What the...?
Against the darkness of the cell, the light from the corridor was blinding. He couldn't quite make out the figure silhouetted there. Strange. It almost looked like...
"Heero?"
~~TBC~~