Inside the Somali Complex
In a democratic society that flaunts in its trappings of the Industrial Revolution, a large minority always gets the short end of the stick. Guns are manufactured for maximum sales, and those unable to afford the specialized guns running through smaller production just have to overcome their difficulties with the product the majority is using. I'm talking about left-handed shooters. On assault weapons like Oz submachine guns, steel shell casings fly out at hazardous speeds capable of bruising anyone standing in the wrong spot, and that spot would be just to the right of the gun, where the cartridges are ejected.
In Trowa Barton's situation, this negligible problem just had to be ignored, for he found himself having to shoot from his left side, or else face the alternative, expose himself to the business end of these sort of weapons.
Trowa tried to bare it, setting his face, holding his breath, and poking his gun and left eye out the door. He lined his tiny LED (light emitting diode) sight on another eye, a right eye, aiming at him just meters away. One shot, one punch in the cheek, but also one living Trowa. Straight ahead at eye level, easy, but so was the other guys shot.
"I'm okay. He slept on the trigger," he told himself, focusing on a second shooter, lying prostrate under the previous shooter's body.
His muzzle flashed, but his burst, flying in at under a thirty-degree slope, failed to climb as high as Trowa's wrists. He overcompensated just as Trowa discharged his own burst into his opponent's prone spinal area, severing it somewhere low. He'll live, but only if someone can set him in a spinal brace quickly enough. Sickbay is at hospital quality, Trowa reasoned, so they'd better try it.
An underhand pitch serves a grenade from the left side, making good skeet, and like a clay discuss, the oval fragmented really well when Trowa pierced it- close to the source. 03 followed the hand, triggering shots behind it until catching up just before it reached sanctuary.
"All
right," it hurt to smile; yet he let the trace of one form, "a
standoff is all I need, and that means exact shooting, just like
this."
The newly wounded grenadier surfaces a service pistol,
squeezing off blind right-handed shots. He couldn't handle the
recoil, however, and the result was terribly wild shooting.
Trowa carefully aimed, and completed the set by shattering that hand, too. He followed in quick succession by double-tapping a two-man rocket team settling for distance shots from the room of cubicles, to the wide entrance hall where Hilde and Chang were rolling.
This resulted in an embarrassment to the combat profession. One triggered his 125mm monster to the vicinity of those he supported, and the other overshot into the situations room ceiling.
Sadly, Trowa couldn't allow the relief medics to pass, sniping them as they darted across his path. Reinforcements kneeled and expelled the usual cover fire, but Trowa dulled their power by sniping rather than flinching.
To their credit, the machine gunners succeeded at supporting the medic and reinforcement crossing, but at the expense of being 03's primary targets.
Guns
malfunctioned, shoulders cracked, hands broke, and faces picked up
the same treatment, and Trowa never relented.
In his role as
vanguard, he levied the storm.
Over the Noventa Cannon
The basic doctrine to air warfare is to be at the rear of the enemy, be at a superior altitude, position yourself in the sun if possible, dive at high speed at the enemy, shoot him, and ideally, be done with it.
At close to 50,000 feet and twenty miles out, in the setting sun, Sally Poe, operating a straight-wing interceptor with delta and canard wings, held closely to fighter pilot gospel when she spied a deuce of Aries mobile-suits launch from a hanger in pursuit of a Mogadishu-bound Lear jet, as the Preventers scheduled it.
She pickled her entire payload of multi-fused glide bombs before accelerating in a violent ballistic dive.
Twin red brackets painted the two suits, triggering a pleasing alarm. Sally twitched her selection for a duel firing of middle-ranged radar- guided missiles for each suit, and double-tapped the firing stud on her carefully handled HOTAS joystick. The plane rocked ever so slightly, and four telephone poles chased after those two red brackets. They arced, planning to knock the roof in on the flying beetles.
Rather lethargically, those suits pivoted toward the threat. To late; the four rails transferred kinetic energy on four points, puncturing four holes, then exploding four identical white flashes, all into the "heads" of these beetles.
An infrared missile each inserted itself up the intakes for both suits even before the Aries' doctoring computers could assess what happened with the radar-riders.
Preventer Water skirted to the extreme edge of the enemy target package, and held a lengthy Vulcan exchange with the lead suit.
She volleyed all parts of the torso, and kept at it. She spilled bullets still as she brushed past at well over mach two.
Her mask breathed in air, the world flooded into view, but concussive forces pulled her away. Poe bit at it, inhaled/exhaled against it, recollected herself. The jet caught thermals above the water, and turned nose toward the city. In it's wake, that Aries deuce breached the ocean.
On The Coast
Sally's fighter got the jump on a pair of airborne suits, and clusters of lethal rain pockmarked the entire island. The carriers, those glide-bombs, nosed in as kamikazes at the complex's rising laser turrets. To slow, the turrets couldn't unfurl for their spider holes, nor could they duck back under in time.
Rashid felt encouraged by these events, and aimed all his remaining missiles on the big cannon itself.
"No-no-no-no-no!"
It
fired. An aerial cluster waxed white, illuminating the sky. Thousands
of burning munitions followed the interceptor jet- over the
city!
Rashid avenged the city in anger, launching his alpha strike
at his best targeting solution. Thunder thrashed his ears, quaking
his inner gyroscope, but these missiles launched, and met their
destinies afterward.
Encouraging
news; their impacts bore multiple secondary infernos! Behind him, the
same happened.
But his eyes remained fixed ahead, as another shell
climbed heavenward.
"No,
I killed you!" The shelter he and Quatre dug intruded only ten feet
ballpark under the beach. Also, they made it of sand.
Here it
comes...
The Sky over Mogadishu
Thunderclaps combine in a shock-and-awe symphony of sight and sound, heated air-current toss the Lear and the interceptor into the upper strata, both in flat spins, and the control surfaces of both planes are unresponsive. Fuel tanks resealed, but only after leaving little more than fumes aboard.
Nichol manually cranked out the landing gear on the Lear to cut the spin rate. Second, he counter-rotated the plane against the spin best he could with the limited control surfaces still available.
"This is your pilot speaking: could everyone come to the nose of the plane?" A strange request, but even the injured rushed as fast as possible.
"Thanks
for the weight, guys, I have the nose down. You may seat yourselves
now."
Okay, the runway is pockmarked, so crank the wheels back
up, 'cause only a belly landing is even thinkable now.
"Attention passengers: we just survived an attack by a revolutionary organization, and in this attack, a great portion of the airport was destroyed, so we'll have to land on our belly, or else the plane could be flipped over and I'd lose face with all the other pilots in East Africa," he explained in his best "awe shucks" drawl.
Flying at his right wing was Sally Poe. 'Not bad for a girl, but those canards give her more control surfaces to survive the attack.'
Sally: "Hey there! Forget you have thrust vectoring on that civvie shuttle?" Nichol: "Na, I had a fuel rupture, and I wasn't sure how much I'd have left if I tried that, and I didn't see the status bar on the vectoring system as I fixed our predicament. Mind giving me a look over to see if the readout is lying to me?"
Sally: "Sure, I'll peek around, but you have to check my rig, too."
Nichol:
"Rodger."
Turns out both planes had honest computers.
Nichol:
"How's your petrol reading?" Sally: "The bloody thing was
built in America. Reading 108 pounds."
The former Oz officer
converted the number in his head.
Nichol: "You're good to wait in the pattern for a lap or two, but I need to put down. Why don't you empty your Vulcan in the meantime?"
Sally:
"Sure thing."
Nick forgot the fuss that would cause with the
passengers.
"Everyone
remain calm. That's our escort, Preventer Water, dropping a little
weight. Sorry about that."
He approached the field, carefully
using the throttle drop altitude, because the elevators are busted to
Hades and Heck.
He figured he had too little fuel to worry about
creating a fireball, so he didn't bother to jettison any on his way
down. Best just to burn it.
The fire crew is dead, so they aren't
out. No air traffic controllers are talking. The planes on the ground
are slag and smithereens, with several pieces in transition phases.
These conditions make the situation primitive, so good thing Nichol had a pioneering spirit.
Now
he's just over the Earth, and he wants to reach stall speed without
pitching up his nose or impacting with the ground.
Keep the weight
of the thrust just below that of the plane; he vectors his exhaust
directly below him, just like in a vertical landing. Except he still
has some ground speed?
Touchdown, the jet buffets and scrapes across the horrid runway, and a wing tips over, catching the ground and bringing about an unwanted S- turn, but nobody's hurt.
"Sally,
I've got the plane down. Good work out there, by the way." Sally
accepted his flattery, and made a gentler landing in her less beat-up
combat plane.
Nichol ejected the emergency escape ramp, and
offered Relena Darlian the way out.
"Be sure to assist our older guests on their way down," the pilot suggested.
"Oh I will, Lieutenant Nichol," she asserted before sliding out. Nichol groaned in embarrassment when his passenger's skirt hiked up on the slide down.
'Well at least she went first, so no one but Sally and I saw that.'
Next was Relena's widowed mother, who sensibly held tightly to her garments, then some colony delegates and Darlian family friends, and finally Nichol himself.
"Our
staff car is probably gone, so we'll just have to hike it to
Maxwell House. Some of you ladies may experience trouble walking on
those heels, but we'll need to keep moving no matter how much it
hurts, got that?" Nichol felt a little distress having to walk
across ravaged Mog. Khat-chewing brigands might be roaming already,
and together with Sally, that pits two gunmen against possibly
platoon-strength vehicle-mounted brigands.
Sally jogged over,
offering a high-five.
"You're not bad with a stick," he said.
"Right back at you." Through silent agreement, they un-holstered their service pistols and herded the passengers in a march for Maxwell House. Nichol carried the bigger mini Uzi, a pre Earth Sphere Alliance piece, and Sally gripped her standard Alliance pistol, a more Spartan weapon than the aristocratic Oz hardware.
"I have enough clips to hold off a sizable force," said Nichol, displaying the mags strapped to his jacket.
"Good for you, but I only have enough to count on one hand." That didn't sound like a boast at all.
Inside the complex
Research indicates that an attacker with a twelve-inch or longer blade is on an equal footing with a shooter equipped with a self-reloading pistol of 9mm or less from 5 meters or less, but Chang WuFei, Gundam Pilot, likes to topple expectations.
Brandishing a crescent-shaped blade of twenty-six inches, WuFei pitted himself against security considerably up-gunned for that premise.
"Ah!"
With a slashing sword, animal blind fury actually counts for
something, and WuFei invested a deep check for his super-toned body
to collect.
He flicked his sword-wrist and glanced across a
jugular artery, swept it back across someone's intestines, rowed it
around him, wind milled, cross-slashed, and basically just ran
through a 'kata' sequence, brutally clearing a path for
Hilde to crawl passed the tumult.
WuFei
un-strapped his SMG once past the entrance, knowing that the
situations room offered the defenders to much standoff range for
shooting him.
He nudged his gun around the entrance, set the gun
to five round bursts, squeezed a shot, counted to two, did it again,
and continued the repetitive process while Hilde, at extreme personal
risk, snaked through the room past desks, chairs, tables, and
cubicles, until at last she reach the unattended on switch. WuFei's
50-round magazine held out for ten bursts, equaling about thirty
seconds worth of distraction, just long enough.
'Standing meant death. No one would miss her sudden movement, right? So don't move suddenly, stupid!' Hilde Schbeiker changed orientation, knelt toward forward, and carefully sprayed a clip around WuFei. In the hurried state of combat, people only have time to scrutinize so many facts, right? So the brain only processes to find what looks out of the ordinary, right? SO, once Hilde does exactly what's expected, the mind says 'friend,' and the fight response will only activate if things (1) look to unordinary, or (2) Hilde turns her gun on them, right?
She
doesn't, she just pops out her clip as it empties, goes through the
motions of reloading, and slyly flicks on a lever.
Mission
accomplished. She ducks under a desk. Now Abdul has to upload his
software into the automatic sentry guns.
