"What are you doing here?" Selphie exclaimed, still stunned.
"Should be kind of obvious, shouldn't it?" Laguna shot back. "I'm here for the same reason you are."
"Buh?"
Laguna hazarded a glance at his watch. "You're running a little late, gang. Better get out of the ship and hunker down."
They filed dutifully out of the ship and crouched near some shrubbery, far enough away to observe the base without being seen in return.
"President Loire," Xu hissed, "Do you really think you should be here? With us?"
"I'm well aware of the political implications," he whispered, in a tone that indicated he would brook no further protest.
"What are we waiting for?" Selphie asked, after a minute or two had passed.
Laguna waved his hand in an unmistakable gesture calling for quiet.
Another few minutes passed in silence. Just as the patience of the SeeDs started to wane, the air started to ring with a sound they found all too familiar. Bit by bit, the wreckage of the Missile Base winked out of existence. A dome constructed of the same panels that made up Esthar's defensive Curtain had projected the image of the ruined base. As the panels turned clear, they revealed an empty expanse of desert. Nothing more.
Laguna rose to his feet, scratching his head idly.
"Huh," he said. "Wasn't expecting that." He glanced down at Xu. "You sure the base is here?"
She scowled, still looking at the dome.
"Positive."
They waited another ten seconds before the ground started to rumble. With a deafening roar, the earth beneath the dome gave way, clouds of dust obscuring lines of sight in all direction. When the dust settled, the desert had undergone a startling transformation.
The dome enclosed control towers, aircraft runways, barracks, and, especially, row upon row of troop ships. The barren patch of desert served as just another layer of camouflage. Mallis had constructed the facility housing The Storm underground, buried beneath massive doors and several inches of obscuring sand.
"We're too late," Xu said, straining to make her voice heard over the roar of the engines as The Storm took to the skies.
"Right on time, I'd say," Laguna replied.
"What are you talking about?" Irvine asked as the ships receded onto the horizon.
Laguna reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced his phone. His eyes wandered from the base to the vanishing ships, and he threw the phone to Xu without looking at her.
"Answer that," he said.
She looked at the decidedly non-ringing phone.
"Uh..."
The phone rang. Xu jumped as if it had transformed into a poisonous snake in her hand. Regaining her composure, she pressed the button and raised it to her ear.
"Yes?" she asked.
"Who am I speaking to?" came a strong voice on the other end.
"Xu Xiucai, SeeD's executive officer. And this is?"
"I'm showing that The Storm has left the base," came the voice, avoiding her question. "Can you confirm this?"
"All the ships are away," she replied. "Who—"
The phone went dead. Xu reached out to hand it back to Laguna, who had started studying the skies with a small set of binoculars.
"Who was that?" Xu asked again.
"Sir Laguna," Selphie said, no longer able to restrain her insatiable curiosity, "what's going on? Who was on the phone? What are we waiting for? What are you looking for?"
"Patience, my dear. Patience."
He did one more scan of the horizon and smiled. "There he is."
"What?" Selphie asked, "Who?"
Laguna handed the binoculars to Selphie. He pointed to a tiny speck on the horizon, and Selphie raised the field glasses to her eyes.
"The cavalry," he answered.
The speck hurtled toward them, increasing in size until they could all recognize it as a small, one-man airship. It landed near the Discovery, and its pilot, a tall, lean man with his face obscured by a flight helmet, jumped out and walked toward the group.
"Laguna," he said, his voice deep and clear. He extended a hand towards Laguna like an old friend.
"Hey, chief," Laguna replied, walking towards the man and taking the offered hand. "Get a load of this place."
"Varrant never was one to skimp on expenses," the man replied, one gloved hand reaching up to unfasten his helmet. "How long until The Storm hits Garden?"
"Well, that's why we're here, isn't it?"
"True enough," he agreed, "true enough." He pulled the helmet off and tossed it over to his ship. "Let's level this place and get our kids back home safe, hmm?"
Xu cradled her head in her hands. "This is a political nightmare."
General Caraway turned to look at her. "The political situation in Galbadia is under control."
"Director Llyriance would love to have an excuse to declare war on us again. Especially after what we did to him."
"Director Llyriance is no more," Caraway said. "In the wake of his interrogation by mercenary enemies of the state, he has been denounced as a traitor to the Galbadian Republic. He has been placed under arrest by joint order of the other members of the Committee of National Defense."
"What's going to happen to him?" Irvine asked.
"He's scheduled for execution in the morning. However, his guards are only human. If they accidentally happen to leave a loaded pistol under his pillow, and if he happens to find it in the night, there's nothing any of us can do about that."
"And the war on Garden?" Xu pressed.
"Llyriance's... removal leaves an empty seat on the Committee. The other eight members smell the blood in the water. They'll be too busy fighting each other to pay to anything else."
"Which is when you establish control," Selphie finished.
"They claim to have the support of the military," Caraway nodded. "But while the Republic has been scrambling to raise cash, I've been the one guaranteeing my troops have food to eat. They're loyal to me, not the Committee. There will be no more public executions. No more denunciations. No more war on Garden."
Caraway hazarded a glance at the base through his own set of binoculars.
"I realize that the Delings weren't ideal leaders. They were vicious dictators. But the Republic is little better than an angry mob given power. With time, and effort, I'll make Galbadia safe again."
He lowered the field glasses.
"Last time I got a shot at Varrant, I was a much younger man. The Delings gave me command of our side of the Sorceress War because they hoped to see me fail. I accepted because I wanted to make Galbadia a safe place is raise a family. Like Laguna, I'm here to finish what we started twenty years ago."
Xu's mouth pulled tight. "The mission profile is out the window. We were supposed to get in there before the ships launched. This was a three-man mission, and now we have five. You don't even have a real weapon," she said, furrowing her brow, "just a flare gun."
"If you went in before, they would have caught you, and you would have had to fight off the entirety of The Storm. You SeeDs are very good, but you're still human. And as for being armed..."
Caraway reached down to his belt and drew his flare pistol. He held it up to the sky and fired, the flare illuminating the night.
A heartbeat passed where nothing happened. Out of nowhere, though, a small squadron of airships filled the sky. They surrounded the SeeDs on all sides, hatches flying open, and disgorging scores of troops who dropped to the ground by fast-rope descent.
"You brought the army?" Xu gaped.
"Not quite," Caraway replied. "Troops!" he called, "Masks!"
As one, the troops reached up and removed the masks obscuring their faces. The SeeDs stared for a long moment before comprehending what Caraway wanted them to see: They knew these troops. Every one of them.
"Haynes... Wilkinson... Poole..." Xu recited, running across the faces.
"And Hewitt and Walsh and Stevenson," Selphie continued. "You all went to Garden," she said. "Why are you working for the Galbadian army?"
"They all went to Garden," Irvine murmured. "And they all failed the SeeD exam."
"You trained them," Caraway explained. "I recruited them. Garden was their home, too. They want to do their part to help retaking it."
Xu nodded. "So we charge in and level the place?"
Laguna smiled his lopsided grin. "That's the best kind of plan."
One of the troops ran up to Caraway and handed him a gun case. Caraway set it on the ground and sprung it open, revealing a glistening silver rifle. He hefted it over his shoulder as Irvine's jaw dropped.
"Is that—" he whispered, reverence deep in his voice. "I never thought I'd see..."
"It is," Caraway replied. "The Exeter Zero-One."
Irvine licked his lips. "It's the prototype for the Exeter model," he explained. "They only made fourteen of them, and that was the first one off the line."
Caraway shrugged and glanced at his troops. "We ready to do this?"
Selphie smiled.
"Make them bleed."
Quistis plummeted through the air at over a hundred miles an hour, battered on all sides by wind and rain, driving the already subzero temperatures even lower. At this altitude, she ran the fatal risk of passing out from a lack of oxygen, which would mean death from "sudden deceleration trauma" – dying on impact. This, alone, did not provide the sole danger of a HALO drop. Goggles had shattered; eyeballs had frozen. Quistis couldn't say she found either option very attractive.
She had long since reached terminal velocity – the speed at which she could fall no faster. After falling more than six miles through the atmosphere, at a height of 2500 feet above the ground, she pulled her ripcords, dramatically slowing her descent.
Much of the jump's difficulty lay behind the SeeDs, but an equal amount lay before them. They still had to hit their target – the Quad. A miniscule postage stamp of a landing zone, each SeeD would have to hit the ground with almost pinpoint accuracy, avoiding the trees, the overhanging roof of the second story, the SeeDs who'd already landed, and, of course, whatever guards Mallis had waiting for them.
The parachute-aided fall made for a welcome change of pace, and Quistis found her mind running over the thousands of concerns that lurked in the back of her mind.
First and greatest of these, she found herself worrying about Squall, floating in controlled motions below her. She felt consumed not with an older sister's worry, or a lover's concern, but the acute sense that her commanding officer, her comrade-in-arms, and yes, her friend, could die. He'd spent so much time in the infirmary, resting up from the last battle with Mallis, that – under normal circumstances – none of SeeD's medical officers would have cleared him for the jump.
Not that he would have listened.
Wherever Mallis had Rinoa, Squall would have to make his way there, potentially fighting through hordes of guards. Seifer had destroyed the elevator, the most direct means of access of the other floors. The remaining options involved a labyrinth of stairs and ladders, guaranteed to exhaust the already-weak Squall. To say nothing of the fight waiting for him when he arrived.
Squall seemed to have other plans, though. Quistis saw his body convulse, and he broke away from their carefully structured pack. She twisted to follow his motion as he moved, trying to find whatever had caused him to deviate from their plan.
As she dropped to Squall's position before he broke away, she saw it – or, more precisely, them: Mallis and Rinoa atop the Garden's central spire. Quistis found her worry replaced with unmitigated horror. Squall had exchanged a merely lethal landing zone for a purely suicidal one. Now he'd have to avoid the Garden's exterior ring and its protruding spokes to land on an almost impossibly small target. The momentum of landing alone virtually guaranteed to carry him over the edge of the spire, leading to a long and assuredly fatal fall.
As Squall struggled against the wind to control his drop, he left her sight, leaving her to focus on her own problems: her landing, her mission, and her half-sister.
Seifer and Zell slid into the security office, locking the door behind them. They'd sliced their way through the first floor of Garden, cutting through scores of Mallis's troops. They'd separated with Quistis at the emergency stairwell leading to the second floor. She'd gone to open up the weapons lockers on the third floor, and they'd come to Seifer's office to release the captured SeeDs, all trapped in the classrooms. The second floor seemed deserted, and they'd barricaded the stairwell as best as possible in the limited time available to them. It might not have bought much time, but at the very least, the soldiers would have to run to the other side of the Garden and use the stairwells there to attack them.
"Take a seat," Seifer ordered, pointing to the chair next to him. "We're going to have to unlock the doors one at a time, and I think they've changed the codes, so it'll take a little time."
Zell sat down as Seifer instructed and started following Seifer's complex instructions.
The door to the office slid open, revealing two armed officers of The Storm. Seifer and Zell jumped to their feet, readying their weapons. The four men looked at each other in a tense standoff for a moment, before one of the officers howled in rage.
"You!" he screamed, pointing at Seifer. "You."
Seifer blinked. "Huh?"
"I was an officer... in the Galbadian Army," the man hissed, panting with anger. "The day of our raid on Dollet... Wedge worked for me... I was supposed toget a promotion... you ruined my life!"
He charged at Seifer, firing his gun wildly. Seifer threw himself on the floor, aiming his gun, but Zell sprang into action first.
He dove at the charging officer, grabbing him by the wrist and pulling him forward and off-balance. He kicked the man's legs from behind, drove an elbow into his neck, and as the man fell, Zell spun him around so he landed on his back, knocking the wind out of him.
"I ruined a lot of lives that day," Seifer said, peering at the name printed on the man's dogtags. "I'm supposed to remember you... Biggs?"
The man howled again, this time from a mixture of fury and pain, when a single gunshot cut him short.
Seifer and Zell looked up at the other officer, standing there with an arm extended, smoke rising from the barrel of his gun.
"He's been holding me back for too long," the other officer said. "And now..."
He twirled his gun, once, so the barrel pointed back at him, and then tossed the gun casually to Zell who snatched it out of the air.
"Killed by invaders," the officer said, shrugging. "Good thing I was able to escape with my life."
He smiled a little, then vanished down the hallway with a jaunty wave.
"Be seeing you."
Selphie hit the door to the massive control room first, bursting through it with vengeance in her heart. She'd kept pushing the First Team forward, moving them ever closer to the heart of the base, leaving Caraway's troops to deal with the mainstay of the base's defenders. While she loved methodical, carefully planned missions of espionage, Selphie possessed no such desire on this particular evening. She wanted to crush, to destroy, to avenge. To invade the base and leave nothing in her wake.
Her speed had surprised the technicians in the control room. They'd scarcely had time to register news of the invasion, it seemed, when the intruders fell upon them.
Some of the technicians attempted to run. Others reached for weapons or froze in place, unsure of the wisest course of action. Their different choices reaped similar results.
"Fire!" ordered Selphie, unloading her weapon into the crowd. Filled with the righteousness of her goal, Selphie found herself only peripherally aware of the actions of her teammates. She could hear the report from Irvine's gun, firing with the same careful detachment he applied to target practice – one shot, one kill. She heard him release a clip, reloading his weapon, and she could picture the bemused grin he always wore in-between shots. She heard the steady, controlled bursts from Laguna's machine gun, three shots at a time. And she could hear the thunderous roar of Xu's enormous custom pistol, disgorging bullets with a sound like the crack of doom.
As the technicians died, the room fell silent. The vast majority of the equipment remained untouched, particularly the slave drive, which Selphie watched with anticipation. She approached it slowly, and heard Laguna at her side.
"There you go," he said. "Total control over every ship in The Storm."
She looked at it for a long minute, familiarizing herself with its controls. It had a dizzying array of dials and buttons, allowing an operator to act as pilot for any ship in the fleet. Although it did not take the form of a glowing red button, Selphie managed to find the self-destruct mechanism, a system requiring simultaneous turning of keys in the panel.
She extended a hand and Irvine slipped a key into it, taken from the corpse of one of the nearby technicians. He had a matching one and took up a place at the panel.
"Ready?" he asked.
Selphie pursed her lips. "Wait a minute," she said, pointing to the monitors showing the cockpits of individual ships. "What does that look like to you?" she asked.
"They're over the ocean," Irvine replied.
Selphie smiled. "That's what I thought."
Her hand lashed out and pressed a few buttons. Alarms lit up all over the slave drive as panicked reports came in from the pilots. She'd pressed the "release" button, responsible for launching the scores of troops contained in the ships. She'd launched their sealed canisters straight into the ocean.
Irvine whistled. "Wow. That's..."
Selphie closed her eyes, once again picturing the train car plummeting into the ocean.
"Fitting," she said.
--
AN: Apologies once more for continued delays. More of the same, I'm afraid, but long hours trapped in the airport makes for plenty of writing time – you may thank the good folks at Northwestern for the bulk of this chapter. Your continued patience is greatly appreciated – we have less than five chapters left, so stick with me.