Hollow Regrets—Interlude
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To save your world you asked this man to die; would this man, could he see you now, ask why?
W. H. Auden (1907-1973), epitaph for an unknown soldier
It was dark when they pulled into the vehicle bay, and bitterly cold. As the truck settled down, the diesel engine leaving a rumble behind as it shut off, Worser came back through the connection, and went for the hatch, leaning down and unlocking it, then giving it a great jerk and sending it up the rails that traced the edges of the trailer's ceiling. A bitter waft of cold air hit all the passengers, making most of them shiver as they stood uncertainly, clustering closer together as the wind from the open bay bit through even their heavy clothes.
"Come on, kids. They don't bite." Worser hopped down the approximately four feet in his light jacket as if the cold were his natural habitat. The two pilots more used to warmer climes could only gawk at him in disbelief a second before they were both over to their duffels, tearing through them for sweaters and coats. So while all the other teenagers were getting down from the back of the truck to meet their new commanding officers, they were re-packing their duffels at high speed. It wasn't as if they didn't know how to; in fact, it didn't take them very long at all, and before more than thirty seconds had passed since the last of the trainees and soldiers were out of the trailer they followed, to stand at the end of the line of fifteen other boys, dropping their duffels at their feet to grasp their elbows in plea to their own bodies for warmth, and waited.
There was a crowd of men in a rough group facing them. They were all, except for Worser, who, they were sure, used his sheer bulk to avoid the cold, bundled up, and looking almost more wide than tall with the fur linings and trim on their official OZ uniform coats. Quatre and Duo glanced at each other where they were shivering at the end of the line. Sure, they had been on the mission from the second they'd stepped onto the tarmac, waiting for their ride, but, as they stood there at dusk, in that freezing hangar, and saw the OZ officers, they were hit in the gut by just what their mission was. Those officers weren't the target.
Worser turned away from the group to face "his" trainees, stepping forward. "Well, this is th' end o' my command, but Commander Traggat here, he's a sonuva—." He was cut off by a barked "Lieutenant!", but he just grinned at the cadets and kept on going, perfectly skipping the profanity. "So's I feel great puttin' you under 'em. And s'not as if I'm leaven' 'mediately, anyway." He swept his nasty grimace across the boys, noting the grin on MacEvens' face, even if he was visibly shivering, and the slightly sickened cast of Wright's, whose teeth were beginning to chatter audibly, which made him think that maybe the sickened look was more from the cold than the prospect of seeing him everyday for a while more. He just gave a slight, mental, insouciant shrug anyway. You can never win them all.
"Now stand and acknowledge transfer of command." There was an immediate straightening of spines as duffels, gripped in a half-hearted manner because fingers rebelled in the cold, dropped simultaneously to the ground with a thud and hands snapped to sides. Worser huffed and swung around to complete the ordeal.
In the underground base, the walls were carved from the natural rock, making it seem like they were in the tunnels of a giant worm. Even the walls in space were square, making these seem completely un-natural. They had always made Worser uncomfortable, but it was a nagging worry that he could easily ignore. He watched as the cadets moved through the "guided tour" phase of the orientation, gauging reactions. These boys were his future commanders, and they would soon out-rank him. Planning for the future had always been a high priority for the soldier, especially his own future, and the best way to cover his ass was to see which ones he'd need the most covering around. And, of course, it was always a good idea to warp whatever they might think about him.
There were some who seemed to take an immediate disliking to the surroundings. Davies, a tall, sandy-haired youth, (whose parents were richer than God, which left Worser at a loss for the possible reasons why the second son went into the military from that family,) seemed very intent on walking down the exact middle of the hallways, staying as far from the curved walls as he could. That Wong kid, he kept looking up, almost ducking, like he thought the ceiling was going to come down on him. None of the others seemed to find too much wrong with it, but they had been quite interested in it when they had first stepped into the corridors.
Worser, forced into waiting until they were settled before he could commandeer the "tour guide", (an ensign Worser didn't know,) to find his own quarters for his stay, trailed behind the cadets, where he watched them all, as they lost what relaxation they had gained from the long trip, and became stiff, aristocratic adolescents once again.
The lighting was a bland, yellowish tone, and it cast everything into washed out shades of their actual colors—what little color there was. The metal fixtures had metal shades. The beds had metal rails, and the chairs were made of metal, cold and un-yielding. Each room in the cadet dorms were identical, one bunk, with two ratty mattresses, a very small desk, only barely larger than that found in most schoolrooms, but one that had two chairs pulled up to it in a mockery of reality, (there was no possible way that two people could really truly study at a desk that small at the same time,) and a small sink, (which had never worked; the pipes stopped two inches above the cement floor).
The large group of youths kept into a small modicum of order, but they were soon beginning to disperse as each door they passed disgorged one or more cadets, those that were curious about the new "refugees". As they walked along, the lieutenant, looking at his data pad, would call out a name, and assign the quarters, leaving one and another "new" cadet behind him, until there were no more left following him. It was after they were all gone, off to their new closet-like rooms, that Worser approached him.
"I need ta' get ta' section 3A, level 14. Show me th' way, Lieutenant." There was weariness in his voice, nearly enough to slur his speech beyond recognition, but apparently, the young lieutenant had no problem.
"Certainly, Sir!" He swept his hand up in a salute for the required second before it landed back down at his side. "Right this way, Sir."
He kept going straight, past dorms Worser thought must be empty, due to the lack of kids being disgorged to view the ruckus what was the new cadets, and then up when they reached the stairwell, which Worser noted in passing that he needed a card and a code to get into. They climbed for three staircases, long enough for Worser to really feel the duffel thrown over his shoulder, and came out, again through an unmarked, but locked, door, into quarters rather identical to those below them, though these contained a single bed, and, when he tested it, a working faucet at the sink. He thanked the lieutenant before he closed the door and slung the duffel onto the rickety bed, ran the water a minute, and washed his face, ignoring the dripping as he opened the duffel to dig around for a hand towel. Then he stuffed everything back into the canvas bag, tossed it into a corner, and ignored the squeaks the bed emitted when he settled down on it. Within two minutes, he'd gotten to that most blessed of all a soldier's needs: sleep.
Simulator runs started the next morning, bright and early, and all the pilots had to concentrate harder than they thought they would to not reveal the level of skill they really had. They were being run on Tauruses, and the runs themselves were elementary to them, simple things. They began at the very beginning, disregarding the vehement complaints of many as they began with the basics; how to correctly hold the grips, the start-up procedure, the amount of pressure used to correctly fire weapons using the hands of the suit. Endless stuff that was second nature—or even beyond that—to the pilots, and they had to do it over and over again and again, always keeping their scores out of the top ten percent.
It was even frustrating for them, because, most of the time, they didn't know the stats, or the answers when the tutoring officers asked those questions. For everyone but Heero, it hadn't even been in their training. And he couldn't remember it; it had been such an insignificant part of his training, a very long time ago. They were all forced, separately, to study out of books and off data readers for the first three days while everyone else did the sims. And then, they had to play catch-up to the other trainees, the ones not needing to go through the extra tutoring, and do it at a reasonable rate, not one so fast that they would stand out. The sheer boredom itself was enough to grate on all of their nerves, and they could do nothing to alleviate it, because of their cover.
Their luck held out though, because they weren't all in the same tutoring sessions, so they didn't stand out as a group more than they already did for coming from the same installation, as well as the isolation they had employed on the journey to this one. Even better then not being grouped together, there were others who also didn't know, or couldn't remember, so they blended in better, and could gauge their progress against the real cadets, "memorizing" everything at approximately the same pace.
Slowly, as the days began to slip by, they began to use the many cadets around them to drift apart from each other, giving off the impression that though they may have grouped together in the unfamiliar surroundings of the trailer because of their shared origin, once they were back in the "normal" world of classes and sims and with a larger group of people around their age, they weren't necessarily a "group". They drifted apart, remaining acquaintances, but avoiding any situations where they would have to work together, and soon, in no more than a week, they were, for the most part, no longer sitting at the same tables during mess, or immediately gravitating towards each other when the entire cadet population congregated.
They knew they weren't suspected; their acting had been too precise, too refined for any to have found a chink in it, but still, to them, it seemed so very engineered. It was what they had been told to do, but the feeling of it felt wrong, just as this mission felt wrong, and nearly everything about it. None of them had thought it a good idea for them all to be grouped in one place, and they had gotten to the point of being constantly on edge, wary of their surroundings, the people around them.
Duo, in his efforts to keep his self-proclaimed paranoia in check, had set up a monitoring protocol on all communications in, to, and around the base, using a word-filter to strain through the large mass. By their second day there, all of them knew the entire base, the blueprints accessed by Heero while doing "research" on the proper way to shut down a mobile suit. For the time being, that was all they felt comfortable with, desperate in their concern to not arouse suspicion. Actual exploration of the base would have to wait until someone by-passed the locked doors, and any preparations for the demolition work would commence after the periodical mission instructions were sent to Quatre, the one chosen, at the moment, to be the link between the operators and the pilots.
So, he'd be leaving with the next "shipment" of kids, huh? Okay. That'd be good. The sooner he was away from these teens, the better, 'cause they were driving him nuts. He'd already had to break up three "duels of honor", two fist-fights, for those who'd insulted someone's family beyond what would justify a duel. And he wasn't even an official officer. He shook his head as he made his way towards the mess. These were the upper crust of society, and they were, supposedly, better behaved than the lowly "commoners" who, according to these perfectly informed, (his snort of derision interrupted him here, twitching his nose,) teenagers, had no honor, no manners, and no intelligence.
Frankly, he couldn't wait to get out of there. The halls seemed to be swarming with the brats whenever he stepped foot outside of his small room, and he was constantly on edge around them. He wrote it off to being still tired from the drive the first few times, but after the fifth, when he was forced to eat with them, he couldn't logically call it mere weariness anymore. It was something else, and it continued to bother him. That was why he continued to carefully watch all the students, whenever he could. He had no duties assigned to him, so he was perfectly able to spend massive amounts of time around them, following them to the different classes and sim runs and other activities, always on guard. Slowly, he began to settle his observations into a rough sketch. Of the group of cadets he'd spent the small amount of time watching in the trailer, he watched them even more carefully than he did the others, because, as he'd noticed before, there was what could almost be called a presence around them, that delineated a space around them, marking them away from the others. And he wondered on the answers that MacEvens kid had given him. Mostly, he thought about way the kid had looked when he'd said he'd been ordered to join the OZ organization, and how it was his family.
The door slowly, silently closed behind the braided youth, not waking the sleeping kid left behind. The terrorist felt a fleeing urge to shake his head for such innocence, but didn't, held back by the constraints of his mission. He could only wish for the vain hope of peace, a message delivered in one of these night-time forays that would relieve him from this sickening mission. But then again, he knew it was a vain hope, and he knew that when the time came, he would follow directions, follow the "orders" he received.
The rec room's door was slightly ajar, telling him that Quatre was already there; he would have left it open to keep a better watch. Duo didn't let that stop him from sneaking in without alerting the blond boy, though he was only half-way across the room before he heard the slick noise of a knife coming free from its concealed sheath. He relaxed from his taut "stealth" mode, and gave a slight chuckle.
"Caught me."
"One of these days you're going to end up with four inches of unforgiving metal buried in some part of your body." Duo's smile broadened, hearing the wry amusement threaded through the exasperated scolding, and continued across the fairly large room to where the blond was sitting, his back misleadingly to the entrance.
As Duo came even with him, the slight greenish glow of the screen shadowed the pale hands fussing with it, and Duo's eyes were automatically drawn to that green glow, seeing not the lines of text and numbers and symbols, but the next phase of the mission in code, the code too complex for them to read straight, they had to feed it through five different programs on both Quatre's little piece of electronic magic, and Duo's, pulled hastily from one of his baggy pockets, before they could read it, and then transfer it to the other pilots, during the few times when it wouldn't be suspicious for them to be seen together...like, across the exercise area of the rec room, or in the canteen, where the noise and the bustle would cover up the lip-reading, the hand-signals and the tapping of their own various brands of code.
The download didn't take very long, total time elapsed forty seconds, mostly from the jumping it had to do, and they began setting up the de-coding system, jacking in the cable that connected the two little hand-held computers, entering the codes allowing them to access the decryption protocols, and waiting the four and a half minutes until it was decoded completely.
Without the suspicion or intrigue that Worser already felt for the boys he'd sat with that little bit on the road, he wouldn't have watched them after they had arrived. But the...suspicion was too strong a word...the oddities of them had captured his attention, and he watched as they slowly drifted away from each other, only the one with the braid—MacEvans—and the blond, whom he recalled vaguely as being something like Waters, seemed to keep up any sort of truly "friend"-type relationship.
They seemed to have been old-time child-hood acquaintances, and they knew many of the same people; it was natural for them to continue along the same lines, or even using the half-way precarious position they found themselves in as cadets to even deepen it to the level of true friends. Certainly it seemed that way to Worser's admittedly poorly-trained eye. He had no experience, really, with younger people. He could judge an officer at fifty yards, could tell if he were a hard-assed bastard, or one who faithfully looked after the men under his command; he knew how to keep a frightened man fighting, but he didn't know anything "concrete" about teenagers, so he treated them just as he did any of his men, with, maybe, just a little more teasing, hassling and general joking around, where they'd let him, these haughty children.
Those five boys though, they had caught him, in the way they seemed to work together, or something like that, no matter that he hadn't seen them all together since they'd stepped out of the trailer. And the more he watched them, the more it became like that. Their actions seemed choreographed, with how they were never too close, or ever worked together on projects, aside from the two he'd noticed as being friends. In fact, the more he looked at it, the more they seemed to practically avoid each other. He stored that away with everything else he'd been slowly gathering about them, and went on in his self-assigned task.
He could see Duo out of the corner of his eye, could watch his fingers moving as they tapped incessantly, could follow the sweeps of his arms as he chattered with—or at, which he was thinking far more likely—the cadets lined up in the rows around him in the large canteen. Heero kept his head down, listening to the general conversation of those sitting on his either sides, and across from him, even injecting comments here and there, playing up his own persona, trial though it was, of a shy, quiet student, as he watched the coded message as it played out, literally from the tips of Duo's fingers.
His comments would make him look up at those around him, making him lose the direct eye contact he was keeping on Duo's movements, but he was watching when he looped through the message the second time, and caught everything he needed to, giving his own signal, (a slight toss of his head, as if he were absentmindedly shaking the hair out of his eyes,) to show he didn't need it repeated again, and saw Duo's hands begin to move in a random pattern., shifting just that slight amount, still in tune with whatever bullshit he'd already been saying.
Even farther away from him, across the room, he saw Trowa playing with a butter knife. He was stabbing down at the table, in between his fingers, but he was doing it in a very good simulation of someone only partially proficient with a knife, nothing like what Heero knew he really could do. The motions were slightly hesitant, and they were fairly far out from the webbing of his fingers. And the speed was fairly minimal, though it was fast enough to make people gather around him. Heero watched it, a perfectly fine activity, with the attention it was garnering from others. For him, though, it wasn't an amusing distraction, it was an attempt to decipher the coding, quickly matching it up against his personal codex. Trowa was using the gaps in his fingers. He only had four gaps, plus the two on either side of his hand, so six numbers. He was going back and forth, randomly, one, three, two, four, six, two...Heero stopped watching it when he saw the code, turning his attention back to his own table-mates with a suppressed sigh. Innocents, or close enough for it to sit ill with him.
And, according to the message, they wouldn't be his responsibility. They were Wufei's. Of course, Duo and Quatre were the next out of here, but after that, it would be him and Trowa. He didn't bother to repress the snort he felt building in him, because someone had told a mild joke, and the snort would be seen as innocent laughter; Wufei could handle this base. Heero knew that Duo had already by-passed the doors, and made up some master keys, one for each of them. That was also in that message. He could pick up one from the inside light-fixture in the dorm's showers. Fifth stall on the right. He looked up again from his half-edible meal. They were so...young.
He knew that this entire thing disturbed his fellow pilots, too. They all, at some point, had voiced their opinion that this was, though necessary, something that disgusted them. They were on edge, the sheer stupidity of having them all in one place causing them serious paranoia, including him. He'd taken to sleeping so lightly that a single rustle of his room-mate's blankets would have him jerking upright, his gun already half out from under his ratty pillow. It disturbed him. And it was beginning to wear on the others as much as it was him. So it was a very good time for the next phase of the mission. Even with only two of them leaving, it would be so much better than all five of them as sitting ducks. Now, all he could hope was that he and 03, as he'd been designated by OZ (they used the designations now to give away as little information as was possible) would be leaving soon as well. Their deadline was slowly creeping up on them