"Is it far?" Julia asked, staring straight ahead at the white interior of
the elevator. It turned out that the storage area was actually underground
and in a different part of the base entirely. They were going to take an
elevator to one of many underground tunnels and get a ride over to the
other building. It all seemed rather melodramatic to her, but it was their
base.
"Only a few minutes," he assured her, also staring into the space in front
of him.
Another few seconds passed, and then she asked, "Why did you offer to take
me?"
"I thought you might be more comfortable with someone who you knew, if only
in passing," he replied evenly. "Also, I have no duties here."
"Oh." She wondered why no one had ever taught him something called tact to
go along with all those manners of his. This habit of his of telling the
whole truth could be just a little irritating.
The elevator pinged and the doors opened in front of them. They were now
in a wide hallway, almost large enough to drive a car down, lit with white
fluorescent tubes. There was a man sitting at a desk, and a bunch of golf
carts lined up against the wall. The man barely even glanced at them as
they emerged from the elevator. He marked something off on a paper in
front of him and asked in a bored voice, "Preventer Wind?"
"Yes."
"Here you go. Make sure you turn it in and sign off when you get to
wherever you're going." The man actually tossed a key at Zechs.
His aim was terrible - Julia saw that the key was going to hit Zechs
somewhere around his shins. Without thinking about it, she dropped her
hand and bent to snatch the key out of the air. She glanced up at Zechs as
she stood up again... and froze. Looking at him from this angle, staring
up at his face, he looked very familiar.
A fragment of a memory flashed in front of her eyes - laying on her back,
staring up at the same face she looked at now, only slightly younger...
The memory started to slip away, and Julia grabbed for it -
And found herself lying on her back, a large transparent bubble overhead.
She waved a hand in front of her face, and was amazed by how small it was.
She was very young in this memory, then. Julia-the-baby turned her head to
the side and saw more of the transparent plastic. She had difficulty
getting her eyes to focus at all, and even more difficulty with the
distortion the plastic made, but beyond the wall she could see another
cradle with a plastic bubble over it and a baby lying inside. The baby was
incredibly pale and had very light blonde hair. Katie. Julia pressed her
hand against the plastic, and could dimly see Katie mirroring the gesture a
few feet away.
She felt something, not quite a sound or a touch or an image, but a little
of all three, and without knowing how, she knew that Katie was trying to
reassure her. But reassure her why? No sooner had the question appeared
in her mind than she had an answer. Something was coming, something big,
but it was good. They were leaving.
Julia-the-baby didn't really understand what Katie was trying to tell her,
but allowed herself to be reassured.
Suddenly there was an explosion of noise, of voices shouting, and several
large figures moved past the bubbles. Julia felt a cold stab of fear at
the voices - they were the ones that had haunted her dreams the few times
prior to this that she'd ventured this far back in her memories. Then both
the figures and voices were gone.
There was a little more shouting, then everything got very quiet.
Then more figures moved into view. These stepped right up to the bubble,
talking in low voices. Then one of them lifted the bubble away, and she
saw a young man in a Preventer uniform. Now she knew why Katie had tried
to reassure her, but it didn't stop the panic from rising. These weren't
the owners of the frightening voices, but they were an unknown. Julia-the-
baby had never seen people like this before, and wasn't sure she liked it.
"Commander!" the man shouted, a hint of panic in his voice. "Come here!"
There was another pause, then Zechs - a younger Zechs - came into view.
"My God," he murmured, looking from her to Katie and back. A woman with
short dark hair stepped up beside him and gasped, covering her mouth with
one hand.
That small sound seemed to snap Zechs out of his shock. "Get that one," he
said softly, nodding towards Katie. "We have to get them out of here
before all of the men see them." He leaned over Julia-the-baby and she
felt his hands lifting her into the air, until she rested against his
chest, her head lying on his shoulder.
Zechs turned and she could see the woman cradling Katie in her arms. "You
will mention nothing of this, do you understand?" Zechs asked, and Julia
realized he was talking to the other man.
"Y-Yes, sir!" the man stammered.
Julia started as someone shook her shoulder, then blinked and looked up at
Zechs' face. She was still partially bent over, the key in her hand, in
the tunnel underneath the Preventer base. "Are you all right?" he asked,
looking faintly concerned.
"You... you were the one who picked me up," she said, standing up the rest
of the way, still partially caught up in the memory. "You protected the
two of us, you and that woman. You kept people from knowing about us."
"You remember that?" he asked, his calm finally breaking for a moment as he
stared at her with wide eyes.
"I don't forget anything," she told him. "Who was the woman?"
"Lucretzia. My wife," he told her as she handed him the key and climbed
into the nearest cart.
"The one on Mars?"
"Yes." He inserted the key into the ignition and started driving.
He didn't seem to want to talk about this, so Julia fell silent again,
watching the featureless walls of the tunnel pass them by. Another minute
of driving and they found another line of golf carts, another man at a
desk, and another door. The tunnel extended a few hundred feet beyond this
position, then turned sharply. Julia wondered idly where and how far the
tunnels did extend. If you tried to press an attack at one point, they
could funnel in more troops to that location without anyone ever knowing,
she observed. Of course, tunnels were very easy to block - a few charges
set in the right places, and...
Julia jerked herself back to full alertness, shaking slightly. I have to figure out where that's coming from. Every time she let her mind wander, she started planning invasion tactics. Zechs glanced at her out of the corner of his eye as he parked the cart, but didn't say anything. They climbed out of the cart and walked over to the man at the desk, and handed him the key. "Preventer Wind and Julia Maxwell-Yuy," Zechs told him.
The young man's eyes widened slightly at this announcement, but it was at Julia, not Zechs, that he stared. Julia stared back at him. This wasn't like the Preventers she'd been scaring before, this man couldn't be more than five years older than her. There was no way he could have faced either (any?) of her parents in battle. So why did her name provoke that kind of reaction. Maybe he'd heard of her parents, knew who they really were. In the Preventers, that could be it. Or it might not be. As they stepped into another elevator she asked, "Why did he look at me like that?" To Zechs' credit, he didn't ask, "Like what?" or make any other attempts to avoid her question. Instead, he let out a small sigh and stared straight ahead again. "You upset a lot of people," he said. Julia blinked. "What? When?" She'd meant to upset her parents and family, everyone who had lied to her, but she couldn't see what that had to do with the Preventer. "When you disappeared and we couldn't find you. It upset people that a mere child..." his lips quirked up in a wry smile, "...could manage to disappear so thoroughly that we couldn't find her." "Why were you looking for me?" Julia asked slowly, her voice heavy with suspicion. She knew her parents wouldn't have sent the Preventers out looking for her. Family, definitely, local police, maybe, but not the Preventers. "It's standard policy to keep tabs on individuals who have been involved in... altercations. When you disappeared, they tried to reestablish contact, just so we would know where you were." "Altercations..." Julia repeated slowly, drawing the word out. "Define altercations." "Fatal altercations," Zechs clarified. Julia felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. They kept an eye on people who'd killed, probably to make sure that they didn't do it again. And she'd panicked them by disappearing the same day as the 'altercation'. They must have thought that she running from them. And anyone who knew what she really was must have been really panicked, a thing like her on the loose right after she'd killed someone. She closed her eyes, wishing desperately to be normal, just so that she could forget what had happened. How many people had her parents killed during the war? Hundreds? Thousands? Their memories were almost as good as hers, how could they stand to remember every single one of them? "Julia!" Zechs' voice once more broke her out of her thoughts. "Are you all right?" "I... It's just that I've been trying not to think about that," Julia said, blushing bright red with shame and wondering how pathetic, exactly, she sounded. "I understand," he replied. "I spent the better part of my life trying to do that." He was silent for a long moment and then added, almost offhandedly, "It doesn't work, not in the end." The elevator chimed and the doors opened into a waiting room with yet another Preventer sitting behind the desk. If Julia hadn't known they were now several stories beneath the ground, she would have thought that they were in any normal office building. The Preventer watched them approach. "Preventer Wind?" she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. "HQ has called ahead. I've assigned one of my people to give you any assistance you require in finding documents. Through the door and take a right, second door on the left. Yohannes is waiting inside." Zechs thanked her and then stepped to the door. A light on a panel set in the wall flashed green for a second before Zechs pushed at the door and it opened before him. He stepped through and Julia followed him. They were now in a hallway, one that extended at least a hundred feet in either direction before turning or ending. They went right, and Zechs stopped at the second door on the left, waving his hand past the scanner built into the wall. Another flash of green, and the door opened. At a gesture from Zechs, Julia preceded him through this door and into an enormous room. Julia stopped short just inside the doorway, retaining just enough presence of mind to step out of the way so that she didn't block the doorway. She was in the biggest room she'd ever been in. It was at least three stories tall, and probably the size of a football field from end to end. No wonder they hid this place underground - if it was above ground, not only would it be an amazing eyesore, but also an obvious target for any attacks. Almost half of the room was taken up by a huge computer, probably the center of all of the Preventer's systems. There were a few large tables near the door, each with a computer or two on it, presumably so that people could look at the files without taking them out of the room. The rest of the space was taken up by file cabinets stretching from floor to ceiling from one end of the room to the other. Julia focused her eyes on something in the distance, and saw some sort of lift on wheels, presumably there so that people could reach files on the upper levels. Shit. Julia didn't even realize that she'd spoken out loud until the young Preventer standing just inside the door grinned at her. "This is one of the main data storage facilities for the Preventers," he told her. "We have files in here dating back to the creation of the Preventers, before the Mareimaia incident. The computer also has backup files of just about every Preventer file in existence." Julia blinked. I'm not sure that that's such a good idea, storing all of their stuff here. It'd be hard to get to, but if this place did get hit hard, they'd lose everything. As if he'd read her mind, the Preventer - Yohannes - continued, "And, of course, the data on the computer is uploaded every five minutes to a backup computer at a secure location." He grinned again, and Julia realized somewhat belatedly that he was only a few years older than her, and not at all unattractive, with those dark eyes and round face. Immediately dropping her eyes, she wondered if he was flirting with her. No, that was ridiculous. He was a Preventer agent, for goodness sake! There was a short silence, then Yohannes cleared his throat. "Can I help you, sir?" he asked, addressing Zechs directly. "I need to see the files for mission 10342-56," Zechs replied immediately, his voice stern. "Yes sir! I'll get it for you right away, sir," Yohannes said, saluting. He turned and walked briskly down one of the long corridors. "You know the number of that mission, just like that?" Julia asked. "I know the numbers for all of my missions," he replied, then turned to look at her. "And I especially would have remembered that one. Une called me in from Mars to head it." "Why didn't she ask one of... one of the pilots to do it?" Julia managed to get out, after momentarily stumbling over how to refer to her parents and uncles. "I believe that she didn't want to force them to come face-to-face with the doctors again," he replied. "Also, their presence wasn't really necessary. It was a high-profile mission, but not particularly dangerous or difficult. At least, it wasn't supposed to be." Julia didn't like the sound of that. "Wasn't supposed to be?" "They had booby-trapped a large part of their base," Zechs replied in a frosty tone. "I. we lost a few men before anyone realized what was happening and I gave the order to pull back until we could get some bomb specialists in." At that moment, Julia looked at him, and immediately wished she hadn't. She'd seen that look before, when her parents had come looking for her, holding guns on her captor. She'd seen it even earlier, in the recordings they'd given her right after she found out who her parents were. That awful dullness, the guilt... In that instant that Julia looked at Zechs, she knew that he knew the name of every soldier that had ever died for him. She looked down at her feet. "It wasn't your fault," she murmured. That was idiotic. Why would he listen to her? Other people must have told him the same thing, and even if he believed it, that didn't mean it would make him feel any better. But she had to say something, especially since, in a twisted sort of way, it was her fault he'd lost men. "Hmph." He snorted his opinion of that. Julia was glad enough to turn her head when she heard footsteps coming back down the aisle. They sounded odd, as if Yohannes was moving very slowly, as if he was carrying something heavy. Oh. Julia suddenly felt very dumb. Of course he was carrying something heavy, he was bringing the files back. She could see him now, practically staggering under the weight of the huge box he was carrying. "Do you need any help?" she called out. "No, I can handle it," he replied, strain in his voice evident. He somehow managed to carry the box the rest of the way to the front of the room and set it on one of the table/workstations. "Here you go," he said with obvious relief, shoving the box a little farther from the edge of the table. His manner became more formal once again. "Is there anything else you require, sir?" "No, that will be all, thank you," Zechs replied. Yohanes saluted and walked back to a small desk with a computer right by the door. Julia noticed that the placement of the desk would make the person sitting there almost invisible to people standing in the hall, and at the same time would provide a clear line of fire for anyone trying to get in. She shook her head slightly, trying to clear those thoughts from her mind. Zechs noticed the movement. "Are you all right?" "I just want to do this," Julia said, unwilling to lie. She didn't know if she was all right, but she knew that she didn't want to think about it right now. She unfastened the snaps and pulled off the lid of the box. The inside was filled almost to the top with papers and other, smaller boxes. She removed the top one of these and opened it. There were several dozen data disks all stacked neatly on top of each other. "What are these?" she asked, setting the box down next to the computer console. Normally she liked doing all of her own research, but as long as Zechs was here he might as well help her. "Disks we confiscated from their lab. Most of our reports are in hardcopy, or in the mainframe," he replied. "Can you help me find your reports and sort them out from their stuff?" Julia asked. "Certainly." He walked closer and pulled a short stack of folders out of the box. Then he stared blankly at the table for a moment. There wasn't a whole lot of room there, certainly not enough room to spread out the papers. "Here." Julia stepped closer to the box and easily lifted it off the table, setting it gently on the floor. Zechs raised an eyebrow. "What?!" Julia asked sharply, beginning to get a little tired of his ever- so-elegant twitching of the eyebrows. "Did you need any help with the box?" Julia fought the flush that she felt rising to her cheeks as she realized what she'd just done. Without even thinking about it, she used her greater strength to lift something that had given a grown man a great deal of difficulty. She'd assumed that she'd be able to handle it easily, instead of asking for help the way she would have a few days ago. She shook her head silently in response. "Just. help me sort some things out. Let me know when you've got the stuff the Preventers wrote. I'm going to start looking through this," she gestured through the disks.
It didn't take Julia long to figure out that Sally had been right - the vast majority of the files were complex scientific notation for gene sequences - she could tell that much at least - but they didn't mean anything to her. At least, not yet. She intended to do a prolonged study of genetics as soon as she got home. In the meantime, she scanned the pages of data as quickly as she could, scrolling through page after page of text. "What are you doing?" Zechs asked her. "Reading this," she replied, not taking her eyes off the screen. The text was moving pretty fast, and if she took her eyes off for a second, she might miss something and have to come back here to get it. "Do you understand it?" "Not yet." "Then how is reading it going to help you?" Julia stopped the text long enough to give him a withering glare. "I'm memorizing it for later," she said slowly, enunciating each word. He knew what she was, why was he asking stupid questions like that? He blinked. "You can do that?" "I told you. I don't forget things. I can't. Not since I was born. created," she corrected herself bitterly. "Whatever. I don't forget things. Period." There was a long silence. Finally, Zechs broke the silence. "I'm sorry," he said, sounding somewhat shocked. "I didn't realize it was that bad for you." "Well, it's not like I advertise it," Julia muttered, turning back to the screen. That was an odd response he'd given her. Most people would have thought it was a good thing not to forget things. Then again, her parents forgot only a little more than she did, and Zechs was also a Gundam pilot. He might know what it was a like, a little. Maybe. She started scrolling text again. "Give me another minute and I'll be done with this one." A minute later she finished and started looking through the files Zechs handed her. They were boring; for the most part they contained multiple repetitions of: We ran into the base, killed some guards, grabbed some old men, and left. No mention of her or Katie, or what the old men had been doing at the base. After a minute or two, Julia set those aside and started back on the doctor's files. She'd already made it through most of their technical notes, not a difficult proposition when all she had to do was look at the stuff, without actually trying to understand any of it. Now she was beyond the purely technical stuff and onto more comprehensible (to her) plans for the future. They'd apparently had the first several years of her life planned out in well-defined phases. Julia frowned slightly. The discs were apparently out of order - the one she was working on now had the overly-long descriptions of phases two through seven. She quickly glanced through those. Unarmed combat training, weapons, computer systems, more different types of vehicles than Julia had known existed. Yes, well, that's what you do if you're trying to create a soldier, she told herself. Make them ready to handle any kind of situation. Her frown deepened. There was something not quite right here, something that was missing, but she couldn't think of what it was. She sat back and stared at the data in front of her for another minute, trying to blank her mind enough for it to put the information together to give her an answer. Wish I had my juggling-balls with me. They always helped her think. Thinking. That was it! If she'd learned anything from her research on the Gundam pilots, it was that fighting was as much a mindset as anything else. It was ingrained, as well. Her parents were proof enough of how long those thinking patterns could remain. She clearly remembered Daddy hitting the ground once when there was a sound like a gunshot, which turned out to be just a very bad engine on a passing car. That had been when she was six or seven - they'd been out of any sort of danger for years by then, and she still saw their training in some of their behavior nowadays. Maybe it wasn't that way for normal soldiers, but the scientists who'd created her were the same ones who'd trained her parents, so it didn't make any sense that they wouldn't include that sort of training. she hesitated to use the term 'brainwashing' only because she thought her parents were too intelligent for that sort of thing. They'd willingly accepted the conditioning, possibly even knowing how long it would last. Probably the only reason the scientists had been able to do it to them was because they allowed it. Still, if they had a couple of completely helpless, unformed minds, it made sense that they'd try brainwashing. Troubled by the lack of answers, Julia switched discs, trying to find out what they'd intended for Phase one. After a couple of tries, she found it. Phase one had included a number of operations and injections designed to cement some of the changes they'd made to her body before she was born. She shivered. She didn't have any really concrete memories of that time - the earliest she'd seen was when Zechs found her - but the memories had to be there somewhere, and the shiver indicated that there was some part of her that remembered that time, and didn't like it. An image of a needle once again passed through her mind, again accompanied by a scent of some antiseptic. She shivered again. The memory was there, drifting just at the edges of her consciousness, waiting to be grasped. Julia ignored it. She had a tendency to get lost in really old memories, trapped in them, almost, and she didn't want to take the time now. On top of that, she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to recover that memory. Ever. She turned her thoughts back to the disc. Phase 1 was also supposed to include 'the continuation of mental conditioning from Phase Zero'. Phase Zero? What Phase Zero? There hadn't been any mention of any Phase Zero in the other material. Well, why should there be? Common sense reasserted itself. She was having a hard time holding onto that, nowadays. Things that had seemed simple were confusing now, and she wasn't always certain if 'common sense' was actually sense at all, or if it applied to her situation. There wasn't any mention of any of the other Phases in each breakdown unless there was some kind of continuation, like there is here. Simple, except... Except that Phase One was supposed to start at her 'birth' - when she was removed from the specially constructed incubator with embryonic fluid heated to exactly 37 degrees centigrade. So how could they have done anything to her before that? Stupid, she told herself. She hadn't been inaccessible in that incubator - it was designed that way. How else were they supposed to get at her with all their needles and things? She switched to the file describing Phase Zero. She frowned again. What was in this file was different than anything she'd seen before. It looked like a bunch of essays on various aspects of psychological theory. She looked closer. It was a bunch of essays on various aspects of psychological theory. She recognized some of the names: Freud, Nietzsche, Pavlov, Antel, even some very recent studies by Weaver. She'd read some of his work and argued about it with her parents a couple of years back. He wrote mostly on early formative influences and how the society infants and very young children grew up in formed some of their most basic and primitive ideas of. not right and wrong. Nothing as simplistic as that. More like a sense of the way things should be and the way they shouldn't. It formed a slightly tinted glass through which all other learning, for the rest of a person's life, would be viewed. At the time, Julia had thought it was a fascinating theory, although it was hard to find hard evidence of something so nebulous. Her Daddy had rather violently disagreed. He thought that while early influences certainly skewed your perspective on what was 'normal', that didn't mean that a person who saw a violent act before they were old enough to even remember would forever view violence as the first way to solve a problem. Looking back on it now, she understood why her father had seemed so passionate about the argument. It was easy for her, whose 'formative influences' were two caring and attentive parents, to argue that prememories could shape the way you viewed the world. But for a man whose prememories were probably of violence and death, or, worse in its own way, abandonment? Julia dragged her attention back to the matter at hand. All of that was interesting, but didn't explain what it was doing in her file. She scrolled down, and finally got past the essays and onto actual notes about 'the project'. "Initial conditioning began at 195 days after creation," the notes said. "Which we consider to be the optimal time for establishing basic thought patterns for the future. Tactical will begin at 260 days, followed by a brief period of testing to ensure that the mental capacity is what it should be. After the subject is removed from the incubator, intensive conditioning will continue in between testing periods." The notes went on to describe the procedure in more detail, but Julia's brain had pretty much shut off by that point. All along she'd taken a good deal of comfort in the fact that they'd only held her for a month or two after she was. born, because that meant that that they hadn't had the time to really do anything to her, except create her. That had been bad enough. But if they'd started her training before she was even born. "Ze. Zechs?" she asked softly, cursing herself when she heard her voice begin to break. He instantly set down the papers he was glancing through to look at her. "Yes?" "How. how old was I when you. rescued me?" She knew the answer to that question, but she needed to hear it out loud. He frowned for a second, concentrating, then said, "Roughly three months old, I believe." Six months. They'd had six months to fuck with her mind, plant all sorts of triggers there. All the things that have been popping into my head, how I'd take out this base. Well, what else is tactical training for? And all that stuff about MS piloting, I understood it so easily, was that because they'd already taught it to me, or just prepared me for that kind of knowledge? "Julia? What's wrong?" "They. they didn't wait until I was born to start training me," she said woodenly. "They didn't?" "They. started three months before I was born." "How?" "I wasn't born normally. I was in an incubator, they had plenty of access. And with a memory like mine, the earlier the better." She saw Zechs purse his lips, preparing some sort of response, and knew without thinking about it that he was going to say some empty words about how it couldn't be that bad, that it wouldn't affect her now. She cut him off before he could say anything. "And it's there. I never knew it, but now I do. When I was researching the Gundam pilots, I read through the material that mobile suit pilots used to. All of it. In a couple of weeks. And I understood it. If you put me in the cockpit of a mobile suit, I could probably learn to pilot it in a few hours." He didn't look convinced. "I've been analyzing this base. I didn't know why, but every time I looked around, I'm thinking about how I would take people out. Either myself, or as the head of an invasion force. It's not my imagination, it's there in my head," she insisted. He stared at her for a long moment, but before he could respond, the radio at his belt beeped. Pulling it off his belt, he said, "Preventer Wind here." "We're ready. Can you bring Julia to hanger 3B?" Julia recognized Sally's voice through the static coming out of the radio. "Affirmative. On our way," he responded. "We can come back here later," he told her. Julia nodded silently, then quietly piled the files on the table into several neat stacks, to make cleaning them up easier. Then she exited the program she was in and ejected the disk from the computer, stacking it with the others. "Why is the radio sound quality so poor?" she asked calmly, trying to distract herself from what she'd just found out. Then she realized that that, too, could be taken as a 'tactical' question. "We're in a shielded bunker," he pointed out. "It's designed to be insulated from all sorts of waves, to prevent anyone from trying to communicate out what they found in here. If Sally wasn't so close, and if we weren't using the right kind of equipment, you wouldn't be able to hear anything." "Oh." He looked at her. After a few seconds, he said, "I don't mean this to sound condescending, and please don't take it the wrong way, but are you all right?" "Not really, no. But I'm not going to have a mental breakdown, if that's what you mean." "That wasn't what I meant." Julia didn't know how to respond to that. Finally she said, "Thank you for asking."
All right, there goes another section. Sorry about the incredibly long delay between sections, but I had a busy summer, and things have been even busier since school started. For reasons unknown to anyone, I'm taking two languages at the same time, which means that any free time I might have had in the past is now taken up by studying. 'well, I'm kinda bored with Latin, so I'll switch over to Japanese for a change of pace!'
Anyway, enough boring stuff about my life. I'm not entirely happy about this section, especially the psychological-type stuff in the middle. I'm not sure if what seemed to make sense in my head meant anything at all by the time it reached the page. I did have a good time writing Zechs. I don't usually write Zechs, because I have a hard time grasping him, but I had fun with him this time. He doesn't strike me as the type who would be particularly comfortable around kids.
Also, the first section was supposed to go with the last chapter, but it was getting too long, so I cut it off. The same thing happened this time, but the chapter is becoming so much longer than I anticipated that I just broke it in two. The next part should be out in a week or two... I hope.
Hope everyone's still enjoying it! Marika
Julia jerked herself back to full alertness, shaking slightly. I have to figure out where that's coming from. Every time she let her mind wander, she started planning invasion tactics. Zechs glanced at her out of the corner of his eye as he parked the cart, but didn't say anything. They climbed out of the cart and walked over to the man at the desk, and handed him the key. "Preventer Wind and Julia Maxwell-Yuy," Zechs told him.
The young man's eyes widened slightly at this announcement, but it was at Julia, not Zechs, that he stared. Julia stared back at him. This wasn't like the Preventers she'd been scaring before, this man couldn't be more than five years older than her. There was no way he could have faced either (any?) of her parents in battle. So why did her name provoke that kind of reaction. Maybe he'd heard of her parents, knew who they really were. In the Preventers, that could be it. Or it might not be. As they stepped into another elevator she asked, "Why did he look at me like that?" To Zechs' credit, he didn't ask, "Like what?" or make any other attempts to avoid her question. Instead, he let out a small sigh and stared straight ahead again. "You upset a lot of people," he said. Julia blinked. "What? When?" She'd meant to upset her parents and family, everyone who had lied to her, but she couldn't see what that had to do with the Preventer. "When you disappeared and we couldn't find you. It upset people that a mere child..." his lips quirked up in a wry smile, "...could manage to disappear so thoroughly that we couldn't find her." "Why were you looking for me?" Julia asked slowly, her voice heavy with suspicion. She knew her parents wouldn't have sent the Preventers out looking for her. Family, definitely, local police, maybe, but not the Preventers. "It's standard policy to keep tabs on individuals who have been involved in... altercations. When you disappeared, they tried to reestablish contact, just so we would know where you were." "Altercations..." Julia repeated slowly, drawing the word out. "Define altercations." "Fatal altercations," Zechs clarified. Julia felt as if someone had punched her in the stomach. They kept an eye on people who'd killed, probably to make sure that they didn't do it again. And she'd panicked them by disappearing the same day as the 'altercation'. They must have thought that she running from them. And anyone who knew what she really was must have been really panicked, a thing like her on the loose right after she'd killed someone. She closed her eyes, wishing desperately to be normal, just so that she could forget what had happened. How many people had her parents killed during the war? Hundreds? Thousands? Their memories were almost as good as hers, how could they stand to remember every single one of them? "Julia!" Zechs' voice once more broke her out of her thoughts. "Are you all right?" "I... It's just that I've been trying not to think about that," Julia said, blushing bright red with shame and wondering how pathetic, exactly, she sounded. "I understand," he replied. "I spent the better part of my life trying to do that." He was silent for a long moment and then added, almost offhandedly, "It doesn't work, not in the end." The elevator chimed and the doors opened into a waiting room with yet another Preventer sitting behind the desk. If Julia hadn't known they were now several stories beneath the ground, she would have thought that they were in any normal office building. The Preventer watched them approach. "Preventer Wind?" she asked, then continued without waiting for an answer. "HQ has called ahead. I've assigned one of my people to give you any assistance you require in finding documents. Through the door and take a right, second door on the left. Yohannes is waiting inside." Zechs thanked her and then stepped to the door. A light on a panel set in the wall flashed green for a second before Zechs pushed at the door and it opened before him. He stepped through and Julia followed him. They were now in a hallway, one that extended at least a hundred feet in either direction before turning or ending. They went right, and Zechs stopped at the second door on the left, waving his hand past the scanner built into the wall. Another flash of green, and the door opened. At a gesture from Zechs, Julia preceded him through this door and into an enormous room. Julia stopped short just inside the doorway, retaining just enough presence of mind to step out of the way so that she didn't block the doorway. She was in the biggest room she'd ever been in. It was at least three stories tall, and probably the size of a football field from end to end. No wonder they hid this place underground - if it was above ground, not only would it be an amazing eyesore, but also an obvious target for any attacks. Almost half of the room was taken up by a huge computer, probably the center of all of the Preventer's systems. There were a few large tables near the door, each with a computer or two on it, presumably so that people could look at the files without taking them out of the room. The rest of the space was taken up by file cabinets stretching from floor to ceiling from one end of the room to the other. Julia focused her eyes on something in the distance, and saw some sort of lift on wheels, presumably there so that people could reach files on the upper levels. Shit. Julia didn't even realize that she'd spoken out loud until the young Preventer standing just inside the door grinned at her. "This is one of the main data storage facilities for the Preventers," he told her. "We have files in here dating back to the creation of the Preventers, before the Mareimaia incident. The computer also has backup files of just about every Preventer file in existence." Julia blinked. I'm not sure that that's such a good idea, storing all of their stuff here. It'd be hard to get to, but if this place did get hit hard, they'd lose everything. As if he'd read her mind, the Preventer - Yohannes - continued, "And, of course, the data on the computer is uploaded every five minutes to a backup computer at a secure location." He grinned again, and Julia realized somewhat belatedly that he was only a few years older than her, and not at all unattractive, with those dark eyes and round face. Immediately dropping her eyes, she wondered if he was flirting with her. No, that was ridiculous. He was a Preventer agent, for goodness sake! There was a short silence, then Yohannes cleared his throat. "Can I help you, sir?" he asked, addressing Zechs directly. "I need to see the files for mission 10342-56," Zechs replied immediately, his voice stern. "Yes sir! I'll get it for you right away, sir," Yohannes said, saluting. He turned and walked briskly down one of the long corridors. "You know the number of that mission, just like that?" Julia asked. "I know the numbers for all of my missions," he replied, then turned to look at her. "And I especially would have remembered that one. Une called me in from Mars to head it." "Why didn't she ask one of... one of the pilots to do it?" Julia managed to get out, after momentarily stumbling over how to refer to her parents and uncles. "I believe that she didn't want to force them to come face-to-face with the doctors again," he replied. "Also, their presence wasn't really necessary. It was a high-profile mission, but not particularly dangerous or difficult. At least, it wasn't supposed to be." Julia didn't like the sound of that. "Wasn't supposed to be?" "They had booby-trapped a large part of their base," Zechs replied in a frosty tone. "I. we lost a few men before anyone realized what was happening and I gave the order to pull back until we could get some bomb specialists in." At that moment, Julia looked at him, and immediately wished she hadn't. She'd seen that look before, when her parents had come looking for her, holding guns on her captor. She'd seen it even earlier, in the recordings they'd given her right after she found out who her parents were. That awful dullness, the guilt... In that instant that Julia looked at Zechs, she knew that he knew the name of every soldier that had ever died for him. She looked down at her feet. "It wasn't your fault," she murmured. That was idiotic. Why would he listen to her? Other people must have told him the same thing, and even if he believed it, that didn't mean it would make him feel any better. But she had to say something, especially since, in a twisted sort of way, it was her fault he'd lost men. "Hmph." He snorted his opinion of that. Julia was glad enough to turn her head when she heard footsteps coming back down the aisle. They sounded odd, as if Yohannes was moving very slowly, as if he was carrying something heavy. Oh. Julia suddenly felt very dumb. Of course he was carrying something heavy, he was bringing the files back. She could see him now, practically staggering under the weight of the huge box he was carrying. "Do you need any help?" she called out. "No, I can handle it," he replied, strain in his voice evident. He somehow managed to carry the box the rest of the way to the front of the room and set it on one of the table/workstations. "Here you go," he said with obvious relief, shoving the box a little farther from the edge of the table. His manner became more formal once again. "Is there anything else you require, sir?" "No, that will be all, thank you," Zechs replied. Yohanes saluted and walked back to a small desk with a computer right by the door. Julia noticed that the placement of the desk would make the person sitting there almost invisible to people standing in the hall, and at the same time would provide a clear line of fire for anyone trying to get in. She shook her head slightly, trying to clear those thoughts from her mind. Zechs noticed the movement. "Are you all right?" "I just want to do this," Julia said, unwilling to lie. She didn't know if she was all right, but she knew that she didn't want to think about it right now. She unfastened the snaps and pulled off the lid of the box. The inside was filled almost to the top with papers and other, smaller boxes. She removed the top one of these and opened it. There were several dozen data disks all stacked neatly on top of each other. "What are these?" she asked, setting the box down next to the computer console. Normally she liked doing all of her own research, but as long as Zechs was here he might as well help her. "Disks we confiscated from their lab. Most of our reports are in hardcopy, or in the mainframe," he replied. "Can you help me find your reports and sort them out from their stuff?" Julia asked. "Certainly." He walked closer and pulled a short stack of folders out of the box. Then he stared blankly at the table for a moment. There wasn't a whole lot of room there, certainly not enough room to spread out the papers. "Here." Julia stepped closer to the box and easily lifted it off the table, setting it gently on the floor. Zechs raised an eyebrow. "What?!" Julia asked sharply, beginning to get a little tired of his ever- so-elegant twitching of the eyebrows. "Did you need any help with the box?" Julia fought the flush that she felt rising to her cheeks as she realized what she'd just done. Without even thinking about it, she used her greater strength to lift something that had given a grown man a great deal of difficulty. She'd assumed that she'd be able to handle it easily, instead of asking for help the way she would have a few days ago. She shook her head silently in response. "Just. help me sort some things out. Let me know when you've got the stuff the Preventers wrote. I'm going to start looking through this," she gestured through the disks.
It didn't take Julia long to figure out that Sally had been right - the vast majority of the files were complex scientific notation for gene sequences - she could tell that much at least - but they didn't mean anything to her. At least, not yet. She intended to do a prolonged study of genetics as soon as she got home. In the meantime, she scanned the pages of data as quickly as she could, scrolling through page after page of text. "What are you doing?" Zechs asked her. "Reading this," she replied, not taking her eyes off the screen. The text was moving pretty fast, and if she took her eyes off for a second, she might miss something and have to come back here to get it. "Do you understand it?" "Not yet." "Then how is reading it going to help you?" Julia stopped the text long enough to give him a withering glare. "I'm memorizing it for later," she said slowly, enunciating each word. He knew what she was, why was he asking stupid questions like that? He blinked. "You can do that?" "I told you. I don't forget things. I can't. Not since I was born. created," she corrected herself bitterly. "Whatever. I don't forget things. Period." There was a long silence. Finally, Zechs broke the silence. "I'm sorry," he said, sounding somewhat shocked. "I didn't realize it was that bad for you." "Well, it's not like I advertise it," Julia muttered, turning back to the screen. That was an odd response he'd given her. Most people would have thought it was a good thing not to forget things. Then again, her parents forgot only a little more than she did, and Zechs was also a Gundam pilot. He might know what it was a like, a little. Maybe. She started scrolling text again. "Give me another minute and I'll be done with this one." A minute later she finished and started looking through the files Zechs handed her. They were boring; for the most part they contained multiple repetitions of: We ran into the base, killed some guards, grabbed some old men, and left. No mention of her or Katie, or what the old men had been doing at the base. After a minute or two, Julia set those aside and started back on the doctor's files. She'd already made it through most of their technical notes, not a difficult proposition when all she had to do was look at the stuff, without actually trying to understand any of it. Now she was beyond the purely technical stuff and onto more comprehensible (to her) plans for the future. They'd apparently had the first several years of her life planned out in well-defined phases. Julia frowned slightly. The discs were apparently out of order - the one she was working on now had the overly-long descriptions of phases two through seven. She quickly glanced through those. Unarmed combat training, weapons, computer systems, more different types of vehicles than Julia had known existed. Yes, well, that's what you do if you're trying to create a soldier, she told herself. Make them ready to handle any kind of situation. Her frown deepened. There was something not quite right here, something that was missing, but she couldn't think of what it was. She sat back and stared at the data in front of her for another minute, trying to blank her mind enough for it to put the information together to give her an answer. Wish I had my juggling-balls with me. They always helped her think. Thinking. That was it! If she'd learned anything from her research on the Gundam pilots, it was that fighting was as much a mindset as anything else. It was ingrained, as well. Her parents were proof enough of how long those thinking patterns could remain. She clearly remembered Daddy hitting the ground once when there was a sound like a gunshot, which turned out to be just a very bad engine on a passing car. That had been when she was six or seven - they'd been out of any sort of danger for years by then, and she still saw their training in some of their behavior nowadays. Maybe it wasn't that way for normal soldiers, but the scientists who'd created her were the same ones who'd trained her parents, so it didn't make any sense that they wouldn't include that sort of training. she hesitated to use the term 'brainwashing' only because she thought her parents were too intelligent for that sort of thing. They'd willingly accepted the conditioning, possibly even knowing how long it would last. Probably the only reason the scientists had been able to do it to them was because they allowed it. Still, if they had a couple of completely helpless, unformed minds, it made sense that they'd try brainwashing. Troubled by the lack of answers, Julia switched discs, trying to find out what they'd intended for Phase one. After a couple of tries, she found it. Phase one had included a number of operations and injections designed to cement some of the changes they'd made to her body before she was born. She shivered. She didn't have any really concrete memories of that time - the earliest she'd seen was when Zechs found her - but the memories had to be there somewhere, and the shiver indicated that there was some part of her that remembered that time, and didn't like it. An image of a needle once again passed through her mind, again accompanied by a scent of some antiseptic. She shivered again. The memory was there, drifting just at the edges of her consciousness, waiting to be grasped. Julia ignored it. She had a tendency to get lost in really old memories, trapped in them, almost, and she didn't want to take the time now. On top of that, she wasn't entirely sure she wanted to recover that memory. Ever. She turned her thoughts back to the disc. Phase 1 was also supposed to include 'the continuation of mental conditioning from Phase Zero'. Phase Zero? What Phase Zero? There hadn't been any mention of any Phase Zero in the other material. Well, why should there be? Common sense reasserted itself. She was having a hard time holding onto that, nowadays. Things that had seemed simple were confusing now, and she wasn't always certain if 'common sense' was actually sense at all, or if it applied to her situation. There wasn't any mention of any of the other Phases in each breakdown unless there was some kind of continuation, like there is here. Simple, except... Except that Phase One was supposed to start at her 'birth' - when she was removed from the specially constructed incubator with embryonic fluid heated to exactly 37 degrees centigrade. So how could they have done anything to her before that? Stupid, she told herself. She hadn't been inaccessible in that incubator - it was designed that way. How else were they supposed to get at her with all their needles and things? She switched to the file describing Phase Zero. She frowned again. What was in this file was different than anything she'd seen before. It looked like a bunch of essays on various aspects of psychological theory. She looked closer. It was a bunch of essays on various aspects of psychological theory. She recognized some of the names: Freud, Nietzsche, Pavlov, Antel, even some very recent studies by Weaver. She'd read some of his work and argued about it with her parents a couple of years back. He wrote mostly on early formative influences and how the society infants and very young children grew up in formed some of their most basic and primitive ideas of. not right and wrong. Nothing as simplistic as that. More like a sense of the way things should be and the way they shouldn't. It formed a slightly tinted glass through which all other learning, for the rest of a person's life, would be viewed. At the time, Julia had thought it was a fascinating theory, although it was hard to find hard evidence of something so nebulous. Her Daddy had rather violently disagreed. He thought that while early influences certainly skewed your perspective on what was 'normal', that didn't mean that a person who saw a violent act before they were old enough to even remember would forever view violence as the first way to solve a problem. Looking back on it now, she understood why her father had seemed so passionate about the argument. It was easy for her, whose 'formative influences' were two caring and attentive parents, to argue that prememories could shape the way you viewed the world. But for a man whose prememories were probably of violence and death, or, worse in its own way, abandonment? Julia dragged her attention back to the matter at hand. All of that was interesting, but didn't explain what it was doing in her file. She scrolled down, and finally got past the essays and onto actual notes about 'the project'. "Initial conditioning began at 195 days after creation," the notes said. "Which we consider to be the optimal time for establishing basic thought patterns for the future. Tactical will begin at 260 days, followed by a brief period of testing to ensure that the mental capacity is what it should be. After the subject is removed from the incubator, intensive conditioning will continue in between testing periods." The notes went on to describe the procedure in more detail, but Julia's brain had pretty much shut off by that point. All along she'd taken a good deal of comfort in the fact that they'd only held her for a month or two after she was. born, because that meant that that they hadn't had the time to really do anything to her, except create her. That had been bad enough. But if they'd started her training before she was even born. "Ze. Zechs?" she asked softly, cursing herself when she heard her voice begin to break. He instantly set down the papers he was glancing through to look at her. "Yes?" "How. how old was I when you. rescued me?" She knew the answer to that question, but she needed to hear it out loud. He frowned for a second, concentrating, then said, "Roughly three months old, I believe." Six months. They'd had six months to fuck with her mind, plant all sorts of triggers there. All the things that have been popping into my head, how I'd take out this base. Well, what else is tactical training for? And all that stuff about MS piloting, I understood it so easily, was that because they'd already taught it to me, or just prepared me for that kind of knowledge? "Julia? What's wrong?" "They. they didn't wait until I was born to start training me," she said woodenly. "They didn't?" "They. started three months before I was born." "How?" "I wasn't born normally. I was in an incubator, they had plenty of access. And with a memory like mine, the earlier the better." She saw Zechs purse his lips, preparing some sort of response, and knew without thinking about it that he was going to say some empty words about how it couldn't be that bad, that it wouldn't affect her now. She cut him off before he could say anything. "And it's there. I never knew it, but now I do. When I was researching the Gundam pilots, I read through the material that mobile suit pilots used to. All of it. In a couple of weeks. And I understood it. If you put me in the cockpit of a mobile suit, I could probably learn to pilot it in a few hours." He didn't look convinced. "I've been analyzing this base. I didn't know why, but every time I looked around, I'm thinking about how I would take people out. Either myself, or as the head of an invasion force. It's not my imagination, it's there in my head," she insisted. He stared at her for a long moment, but before he could respond, the radio at his belt beeped. Pulling it off his belt, he said, "Preventer Wind here." "We're ready. Can you bring Julia to hanger 3B?" Julia recognized Sally's voice through the static coming out of the radio. "Affirmative. On our way," he responded. "We can come back here later," he told her. Julia nodded silently, then quietly piled the files on the table into several neat stacks, to make cleaning them up easier. Then she exited the program she was in and ejected the disk from the computer, stacking it with the others. "Why is the radio sound quality so poor?" she asked calmly, trying to distract herself from what she'd just found out. Then she realized that that, too, could be taken as a 'tactical' question. "We're in a shielded bunker," he pointed out. "It's designed to be insulated from all sorts of waves, to prevent anyone from trying to communicate out what they found in here. If Sally wasn't so close, and if we weren't using the right kind of equipment, you wouldn't be able to hear anything." "Oh." He looked at her. After a few seconds, he said, "I don't mean this to sound condescending, and please don't take it the wrong way, but are you all right?" "Not really, no. But I'm not going to have a mental breakdown, if that's what you mean." "That wasn't what I meant." Julia didn't know how to respond to that. Finally she said, "Thank you for asking."
All right, there goes another section. Sorry about the incredibly long delay between sections, but I had a busy summer, and things have been even busier since school started. For reasons unknown to anyone, I'm taking two languages at the same time, which means that any free time I might have had in the past is now taken up by studying. 'well, I'm kinda bored with Latin, so I'll switch over to Japanese for a change of pace!'
Anyway, enough boring stuff about my life. I'm not entirely happy about this section, especially the psychological-type stuff in the middle. I'm not sure if what seemed to make sense in my head meant anything at all by the time it reached the page. I did have a good time writing Zechs. I don't usually write Zechs, because I have a hard time grasping him, but I had fun with him this time. He doesn't strike me as the type who would be particularly comfortable around kids.
Also, the first section was supposed to go with the last chapter, but it was getting too long, so I cut it off. The same thing happened this time, but the chapter is becoming so much longer than I anticipated that I just broke it in two. The next part should be out in a week or two... I hope.
Hope everyone's still enjoying it! Marika