MSG: In Vain Doth Valour Bleed

by His Divine Shadow

The 10th PzK and the Titans nearly turn Hameln's Remembrance Day into its Armageddon, as Kaempfer battles Barzam on the bridge across the Weser, while the Church's plan to stop Mellenthin reaps a bitter harvest. Chapter 21 UP!

17. Chapter 16

MSG: In Vain Doth Valour Bleed

Chapter 16

Kassel, Hessen, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

The military jeep tore through the devastated streets of eastern Kassel, en route back to the tent city that was both Federation headquarters and refugee camp/field triage for survivors of the 10th Panzerkaempfer's attack. The Ensign was driving, as ordered, skirting through back alleys and side streets instead of the debris-clogged main thoroughfares, while Dorff sat beside him in the passenger seat and Bryton and Balke rode in back.

"Look!" called Bryton, pointing upwards. The jeep's top was open, a demand on the part of the Ensign due to the heavy beer smell of his three passengers. Every so often a bottle or some other piece of litter was thrown at them as they passed a structure or a crossroads, but their speed was great enough that not a whole lot of garbage seemed to hit anyone except Balke, who was becoming very annoyed by the Kassel citizenry's uncanny aim with refuse.

Balke brushed some cigarette ash (not his own) from his already filthy khaki-colored uniform jacket, then glanced up at where Bryton was pointing, his rheumy eyes catching the flicker of lights in the night sky. "Looks like an incoming chopper to me!"

"It's one of Cramer's Cerberus helos! They must be coming back for resupply!" Bryton's pointing hand lowered and clutched the side of the jeep as the Ensign swerved to avoid a big chunk of rubble.

Dorff was fiddling with the radio console, not looking at the sky. Screeches of fuzz and static and random radio noise were emanating from the onboard speakers as the digital tuner scanned through frequencies no civilian radio set could hope to pick up.

Balke's eyes narrowed even further as he struggled to make something out in the dark sky. The illumination of Kassel itself helped matters immensely. "There's the rest of 'em! Hey!" He slapped the Ensign on the shoulder. "Drive faster, would you? There's a fucking war on, you know!"

"Sir," snarled the Ensign back over his shoulder, "I'm driving as fast as I intend to considering the obstacles we're going to have to cross to get back to the base alive, so please get off my back, sir!"

Balke leaned forward. "I get what you're trying to say, Ensign, but isn't there a quicker way to do this?"

"This is the quicker way to do this!"

"Camael!" yelled Bryton. "Leave the kid alone already! He'll get us there, okay!"

Dorff's radio antics finally picked up on something worthwhile. "Pull over," he said to the Ensign, who complied after Bryton nodded his consent. Balke was still a bit too tipsy to have his judgment trusted at this moment.

". . .baum ahead, Legion One. First Platoon proceeding as instructed. . .no sign of enemy activity within the town itself, sir. Nothing on infra-red or radar within visible range. . .switching to low-light. . ."

Balke tapped Dorff on the back of the neck. "Is that what I think it is?"

Dorff shrugged his massive shoulders. "You tell me, Captain. You're the officer."

Balke snorted. "So?"

"So I have no idea what this is, but if I had to guess," grinned Dorff, "I would say it is most probably the unit frequency for Captain Cramer's mobile suits."

The four of them listened intently for a few moments, as patches of conversation came through the interference that distance and terrain caused. ". . .crossing through the city lim----ference getting stro-----copy, over? Comma----ou copy? Is any-------"

Another voice cut in: "Goddammit, Century One! Keep in radio contact! Do you read me? Answer me if you're receiving! Come in, Century One! Hold position at coordinates Two-Five-Niner East! Do not go into the forest, repeat, do NOT enter the forest!"

Century One's (apparently the call sign for Cramer's First Platoon) answer was unintelligible garble. Balke pointed at the radio. "What the fuck is going on with the reception? Can you boost the gain on that?"

Dorff shook his head. "No, Captain, not with this rig. Perhaps the base will have better signal return with their larger antennae."

Balke shook his head. "Yeah, I guess. . ." he trailed off as his ears caught a noise over the purr of the jeep's engine. "What the hell is that?"

The jeep idled quietly as the four listened to sounds much closer than what was coming out of Steinbaum. Dorff pulled out a magazine of 9mm ammunition he had stashed up his jacket sleeve and slammed it home into his service automatic.

"Sounds like a riot, sirs," said the Ensign. "Maybe three blocks ahead of us."

"Another one?" asked Bryton. This would make the third in as many days. "Don't these people ever sleep?"

Balke looked at his subordinate. "You were in the War, Brak. How well did you sleep after Bayreuth?"

Bryton was sober enough to look ashamed. "I--I don't know where that came from, Camael. I'm sorry."

"'S okay, Brak, I try my best to forget it, too. Ensign, can we get around it?"

"I think so." The Ensign popped the jeep into reverse. "Gonna have to do a little backtracking, sirs."

"I think we can forgive you," commented Dorff as he chambered a round and put the hand holding the gun in his lap. The radio traffic had dissolved into useless static.

The jeep backed up for about two blocks, then took a sharp left and sped up. As they crossed the street separating two of the blocks, Balke looked over and saw a large throng of people in a group. "Not good," he murmured, no one able to hear his voice over the jeep's engine. The next block they crossed had no crowd, and he relaxed a bit.

"It'll get worse, sirs," yelled back the Ensign as he drove, evading most of the debris. "There's probably a mob of press sitting outside the gate to the base by now!"

"No surprise there," said Bryton.

"Yeah, those fuckers're attracted to disasters, and now that Cramer's found himself one, they're all over the--" The jeep screeched to an abrupt stop, cutting off Balke's words and making him almost bite off his own tongue. He clapped a hand over his mouth and winced at the pain, feeling his glands salivate in an effort to deaden the sensation. He gave off an agonized groan, sucking air between his fingers and teeth before staring daggers at the Ensign's back.

His eyes caught the reason before he started to bitch out the Ensign. There was a roadblock made of very angry people in front of them. "Oh, hell. . ." he whispered.

"What now, Captain?" asked the Ensign worriedly. "I don't want to have to run these people down."

"Back away slowly," replied Balke. "Try to get us back to the last block, then detour."

"No go," said Bryton, glancing backwards. Another crowd had formed up behind them. They were boxed in completely. "I think we have a problem."

Balke could not think of a reason to disagree with Bryton's analysis of the situation. He could smell rage emanating from these people. "Nobody panic. Let's just try to ease past without inciting something."

"Forgive me for saying so, Captain," said Dorff, voice like solid steel, "but I doubt seriously any of them intend to let us 'ease' to anywhere."

After a moment of silence, the jeep motor's hum the only sound aside from breathing, there came a cry of anger from the crowd ahead of them, and the mob surged forward with a yell that sounded like the depths of Hell had just run their ambient sound through a Bose amp. Within seconds, the jeep was surrounded, even as the Ensign started moving forward again.

Clawing fingers and grasping hands tore at Balke's uniform, their strength overwhelming his attempts to free himself. The jeep stopped as the Ensign began fighting off the horde as rocks and other debris began raining down on them. Balke gritted his teeth and fought back as best as he could, which was to say more like the way he did before he was a soldier. Even as fists beat him and fingernails gashed his flesh open, his mind fled, recalling another time when sticks and rocks and other fists smashed his flesh to the earth, forcing a young orphan from the streets of Augsburg to crawl in the dust for being a bastard without a name and without a home. The Church had saved him then; where was the Church now? Where were those cassocked priests in black who picked up his shattered form from the filth and grime and nursed him back to health; those stern countenances that he had once thought could have nothing gentle about them, who gave him his name and spoke to him as a man even though he wept as a child? Where were they now, as the very same people who had forced him to be the man he was raked and grabbed at him with their unyielding strength and relentless hatred for him, for the uniform he wore? Were they in this crowd, finally judging him as the lost cause he always knew he was, shaking their heads and fingering their rosaries, or screaming obscenities and curses into his face in German and in Federation Standard, spitting on him for who and what he was? He wondered if this was where he was to die, with his life flashing before his eyes the way it was.

For the briefest instant, he thought to himself that this was the moment he began to relate to Dietrich von Mellenthin, when the Federation consigned him to life forever amongst a people that despised him; a Hell from which he would have never escaped if he had not clawed his way free of his captors. As a stone struck him in the forehead, he thought: I need to remember this. It's important.

Someone broke a glass bottle over the Ensign's head, and Balke felt the shards rain down on his own face. Bryton was screaming, trying to yell over the roar of the mob, trying to reason with them, but they were not listening. Desperate but still mentally aware of his surroundings, he reached out and grabbed Bryton's hand, even as the struggling younger man was being ripped from his seat in spite of the belt. The crowd pulled with a power that was unreal, but Balke would not release Bryton's hand, even as someone in the multitude took up a length of timber about three feet long and brought it down on Balke's outstretched forearm with a crack.

That was when Balke finally opened his mouth and roared with pain that the alcohol in his bloodstream could not numb, but he did not let go of Bryton's hand. At the sound of his friend's voice, Bryton's head turned, eyes wide in shock, to look at Balke. Bryton saw the second blow come down, heard the sickening crack again, saw Balke's sweat- and blood-soaked head shake in denial, felt his hand clench even tighter on Bryton's own. . .

Ka-POW!!! broke the sound of the crowd's screams of hate and changed them to cries of terror, and the hands released them. Bryton slid back into the jeep's seat, covering the injured Balke with his own body, before looking for the source of the thunderclap. The first thing he saw was a pair of boots, standing on the hood of the jeep. His neck strained to raise his head.

Dorff stood there, face calm even as blood ran down the side of his head, pistol upraised in the air, smoke emanating from the barrel. The mob had taken a step or three away from the jeep with the gun-toting man atop it. Things went very quiet as the shot echoed through the alley.

"Listen!" called out Dorff to the crowd, "I can understand that you all must be angry! However, that understanding does not permit me to allow the unlawful detainment and injury of Federation personnel! Disperse!! Now!!"

Some brave soul in the crowd yelled out: "Or what?!?"

Dorff faced the mob without fear. "Or you don't want to have to find out, that is 'what'! There has been enough killing here already! Go and find life again! You will find no vengeance here, killing four men who seek the very thing you all do!"

"There's a hundred of us, and only one of you!" called out someone else. "You can't kill us all!"

Dorff nodded slowly, pistol still upraised. "No, you're right about that! I cannot! But make absolutely certain that you do kill me, because if you fail in that regard, you will have one pissed-off Bavarian that will promptly cease to give a damn!! Make your choice! Either finish us off and be haunted by the murders of four innocent men, or go about your business and let us kill those who attacked you!"

The crowd actually hesitated, discussion from multiple people trickling through the mass of humans. Dorff stood, rock-solid as a god, eyes scanning the mob unerringly. The Ensign, who had lost his hat and most of a jacket sleeve, face bruised from repeated blows, was staring up at him in awe, and not caring a whit that the back of his uniform was staining itself red with his own blood.

"But you failed us!" shrieked a female voice into the air.

"Yes! We did! But we fight on anyway! Look!" Dorff ran a hand over his face, then held it up, palm and fingers red with his own blood. "See?? We bleed even now, just as you bled!" He flicked his hand towards the stones of the street, red droplets flying from his fingers. "My blood also stains the ground of Kassel! That is my solemn pledge that no Zeon will ever set foot in this city without contest from this moment forward!"

"Are you saying that they will return, to finish us once and for all!?!"

"Perhaps!!" conceded Dorff. "But that is war! No one wins every battle, and we Germans have withstood worse than the likes of the Zeon!! So decide your fate and stop wasting my time!"

After another long moment of silence, the crowd seemed to lose its interest in shredding the four Federation soldiers and trashing their jeep, and slowly began to disperse. Standing on the jeep's hood until he was satisfied that some raving lunatic would not come barreling back swinging a length of pipe at them, Dorff finally clambered back down into his seat, popping the magazine out of his 9mm and tucking it away. After settling in comfortably in his ever-present slouch, he glanced around the jeep at the other occupants.

The Ensign recovered from his awestruck state. "You--you talked them down. . .the whole damn lot of them!"

Dorff simply nodded, eyes alight like he was waiting for something. The Ensign turned around to look at the rest of his passengers. "Is Captain Balke all right?"

"Camael? Camael? You still with us?" Bryton was shaking Balke, who groaned and opened his eyes. "Can I get you anything?"

"Drugs. . ." moaned the Captain, blinking to focus his eyes.

"Yeah, he's alive." Bryton managed to get the cursing Balke straightened up, rubbing absently at a runnel of blood that ran down his face. "Corporal Dorff, you've just become my brand new hero. That was a fine speech, indeed."

"That rubbish?" snorted Dorff. "These Hessians are easy to please. I've made more stringent oaths to my children just to get them into bed on time. Could we perhaps begin forward motion again?"

"Just a minute." Bryton leaned down. "Camael? It's over now. Can you move?"

"Hell, yes, I can fucking well move!! Awww, sheee-it that friggin' hurt!!" The Captain was about as irate as he could get under the circumstances. "Dorff, you're the best personal security ninja a guy can have. Thanks."

"Would you all please stop thanking me and getting all teary? I may start walking in a second if we do not get this vehicle moving again." Dorff crossed his arms over his chest, trying not to look pleased by all the praise.

"You heard the man, Ensign." Gingerly, he flexed the fingers of his throbbing right hand, feeling tendons grate and tissue contract within his swollen forearm. There was pain, and not small amounts of it, but the damage appeared inconsequential.

"Stop doing that!" yelled Bryton, eyes wide. "It's probably broken, you stubborn bull!"

"After that? Please! Spare me, Brak, all that sonofabitch did was ruin a perfectly good fucking buzz. The lectors at the orphanage used to cane us for whispering during Mass. That guy with the makeshift baseball bat was a sissy. It just smarts like all Hell, is all. No more wasted time, cause we've got a war to fight." He clutched at his arm with his good hand, wondering if the same God he had spent years running from had just saved his ass yet again, and in his mind, he cursed the fact that he would owe Him yet another favor. The jeep lurched forward towards the base again.

"Holy Mary, Mother of God!" exclaimed the shift officer when the four of them came staggering into the command tent. "What'd you guys do, sir, get into a bar fight?"

"Not exactly, but I'll be damned if I go out for the night life in this town again," said Balke. His eyes scanned the room until he noticed the crossed sabers of a Cavalry soldier, matched up with the pips-and-bars of a warrant officer. "You! You're a chopper jock, ain't you?"

"Yes, sir," the man saluted the bedraggled Captain. "Dubya-Two Hunt, Dog Flight, 103rd Mobile, sir."

"Report, Hunt. Tell me what went down."

"Well, sir, it went kinda like this. . ." and the next ten minutes were spent telling Balke about the fight. In spite of his obvious pain, Balke's attention did not stray from the pilot's account.

"You're sure there were three of them?"

"Yes, sir. Two Zakus and a Gouf. Both the Zakus are deader than Brex Forra now, but that damn Gouf got away in the woods, and we didn't have the fuel to keep up the chase. The Zakus were pretty tough, especially that fucking K-type flakspitter, but that Gouf was unreal. It sidestepped almost everything we threw at it, and what it didn't dodge it just took like it didn't care."

Balke's good hand was scratching his nose. "Any markings on that Gouf?"

"Black eagle, sir, same as the other two."

"Yeah, it figures," Balke sat down in a field chair heavily, sore arm scrunched against himself. "Seydlitz stayed behind in case Cramer came back to Kassel. He got you guys instead. Probably threw him for a loop, though. You and your boys did good, Hunt, don't let anyone say otherwise. These assholes are all vets, and the Gouf driver's an ace."

"Sir," said Hunt cautiously, "Captain Cramer ordered us to stay here in Kassel. Any way you can see to get in on some more of this action? These pricks took down eleven of my squadron, seven confirmed KIA. Me and mine're a little upset about that."

"Well, chief," Balke popped his neck, feeling the tension in his vertebrae give, "I can't supercede Cramer's order without getting the nod from Titans Major Lizard. Let me get on the horn with--"

Bryton threw open the tent flap. "Camael! Get over here!"

"Huh? What?" Balke sat up straight in his chair, head turning to face Bryton.

"We've got Cramer's people on the radio."

"Coming in clear?"

"Not really. Looks like they've either gone into the forest or are in a Minovsky pocket. But it's them."

Balke motioned to Hunt. "I can't get you and your people back into this fight, but you can at least get the chance to listen in. Someone get some chairs and coffee into the comm tent, we're gonna be up a while longer yet. . .and someone get me some goddamn aspirin or something!"

Steinbaum, Niedersachsen, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

"It's really just a matter of physics, Kommandant," explained the metallic voice of Dietrich von Mellenthin to a spontaneously-delighted Antares de la Somme. Swathed in several field blankets, his breath steamed in the cockpit of his powered-down Gouf Custom.

Von Mellenthin's voice was not coming from the radio, however, since the radio required power to use. Instead, another McKenna innovation had come into being, in the form of a 1 kg tin coffee can that was attached to the open hatchway. Another four cans, each of them with a little label easily readable by Cyalume stick, hung in different spots on the hatchway to keep them all from blending together. From the tails of each can extended a length of copper wire, trailing off into the darkness below, connected to another tin can somewhere either in another cockpit or down at the main tactical site, where the Foxe twins were busily attaching ninety Model 908 Gaussmeter leads to a Model ML-400D MagLab. They had the most tin coffee cans of all, with every suit running a line to their station, which made the whole contraption look like a giant spider web with a box in the center. Their Gelgoog Jaegers were about twenty feet away from them.

"I know that, Deet," called de la Somme into the tin can labeled 'Deet', "but that doesn't make it any less cartoony or 'Beverly Hillbillies'-esque, does it?"

There was a strange sound after a moment, which was von Mellenthin chuckling into the can. "No, I suppose it doesn't. But sometimes, the simplest things work best. We dare not run the risk of being detected in spite of our Minovsky coverage before it's time, so we go back to the basics."

"Yeah," acknowledged de la Somme, trying not to shiver, "but who'd ever believe it?"

"No one, and that is why it will work. Lion One, out."

"Have fun, Lion One!" giggled de la Somme in response. He craned his neck around to a bemused Erik. "All the technology in the universe and we're using tin cans and wire to talk through. Aren't we special?"

Erik's green eyes reflected the equally-green Cyalume stick. "What are we waiting for?"

"Initial contact. Captain Roberts is up ahead playing lookout for the Feddies. When they get here, we're gonna beat the heck out of them just like we said we would."

"How?"

"Well," said de la Somme, scratching at his numbing nose, "we can see them, but they won't be able to see us. It's all part of Reinhardt's plan."

"His plan? How so?" Erik seemed honestly interested.

"Oh, ho, inquisitive, ain't we? Lemme see, maybe it's magic."

"Magic?"

"Yeah, maaaaaa-gic, you know? 'What-ki~nd-of-ma~gic-spell-to-use? Sli~ime and snails; or puppy do~g's tails; thun~der or light~ning?'" The manic pilot paused his squeaky rendition of a Bowie classic. "You don't know that one, do you? I'll have to get you to watch it when we get back into Space. Great plot, rockin' soundtrack, awesome puppets. . .gotta love the puppets."

De la Somme paused again. "I wonder where the hell he is, anyway. Shoulda been back an hour ago at least." He turned around in his seat, smiling. "Betcha he got lost. He never was good without landmarks. 'S why he only came in fifth at the Academy."

Erik smiled back at the thought of von Seydlitz stumbling around the woods looking for them.

The can marked "Kerr" buzzed as the young Private's voice transmitted. "Sir, Sarge, I--I just wanted you guys to know that---sniff---if we don't make it out of this---I love you, guys."

Ogun's voice beat de la Somme to the punch. "Shut the fuck up, Private. You'd ruin a wet dream."

"Ex-cuse me, Sergeant Major, but there are children listening," remarked de la Somme into the two relevant tin cans, voice prissy like a schoolmarm. "Keep your crude references to yourselves, please. And that was very touching, Nolan, but not enough to get you a gold star."

"But I WANTED one!!" Kerr's voice whined plaintively.

"One what? A gold star or a wet dream?" asked de la Somme offhandedly. "I KNOW!! A wet dream about a gold star! Yeah, that's what you were after, wasn't it, Private Kerr?" The ace changed his voice and gave it a lazy Chicago drawl. "Youse got a thing for bein' a wiseguy, Kerr? Do I gots to come ovah theah an' pop youse one?"

"If we don't get some Feds soon, that won't be all that pops, sir," moaned the other man.

"Look on the bright side, Nolan," answered de la Somme, "this way, it's like ordering takeout only you get to shoot the delivery man without having to pay, but you have to be patient about it. In the meantime, why don't/i] you just play with yourself?"

Kerr apparently did not catch all of that. "Huh??"

De la Somme winked at Erik and smirked evilly. "C'mon, you know you wanna, Kerr. It's probably been, what, ten minutes since you last flogged the dog? You've got everything you need right there, Nolan: total privacy, a free--no, TWO free hands, a seven year-old girl in the cockpit with you. Nobody's looking but God, Nolan. It'll make you lighter on your feet, Nolan. Warm you right up, Nolan. 'S workin' for me right now, and I'm just thinking of you."

"You---you're a rotten sonofabitch, sir!" complained Kerr vehemently, who had a twelve year-old niece back in Side 3. "I give up!"

De la Somme thrust a triumphant fist into the air. "How was that, Sergeant Major?"

Ogun's voice sounded a tad blasé'. "No challenge there, Commander, our little chickadee Kerr's too dainty for such talk anyway."

"I AM the Lizard King!" celebrated de la Somme, still the reigning sicko psycho of the 15th Fast Attack. He leaned over to Kerr's can, affecting the Chicago drawl again. "And keep the change, you filthy animal!"

Kerr got in the parting shot. "Don't forget to fuck off, sir." He did not sound amused, but de la Somme never let anyone have the last word.

De la Somme chuckled and sat back. "Yeah," continued the ace, stretching like a cat and picking up right where they left off, "I'll bet he forgot to leave a bread crumb trail to follow back. Poor Reinhardt. I wonder if he'll find a gingerbread house."

Erik knew that story. "He doesn't look much like Hansel."

"You're right, of course, but he'd make a great Gretel, don'tcha think? I'll sure feel sorry for the witch, though. He'd make an ugly cookie."

Erik smiled again, then yawned mightily. De la Somme patted the boy's head, a wistful look in his eyes. "Get some sleep, son. You'll wake up when the action starts. Hell, the whole freakin' world'll rise for this one."

The boy nodded and slid further into the blankets, his stuffed tiger clutched in his hands. De la Somme watched him until his breathing became regular, then settled back into the chair, staring out into the black.

Margul, you fat, stinking, buttplugging fuckwit! If he has so much as the beginning of a nightmare, I'll burn your Jell-O flabby ass to the ground! You wanna fight me, fight me!! But your time's comin', oh, yeah, it's a'comin', Vlady, and I'm gonna be here, Huckleberry, when you really wanna play for blood!

He huffed, watching the white clouds of his breath trail away and vanish. He was fidgeting and he knew it, tapping a foot, then rapping his fingertips on the console, nerves unable to calm themselves.

Damn, now I've got a case of the willies! Okay, God, what're You trying to tell me here? Am I doing the wrong thing? Was this the wrong time to wrangle that favor out of Deet? Am I jumpy 'cause Reinhardt isn't back yet? Please, God, don't let nothing happen to Reinhardt, or his guys. Maybe it's just anticipation. Yeah, that's it, isn't it? I'm just nervous with antici-PA-tion, is all. Nothing wrong here, nope, not a bit. Just send me those Feddies, one by one.

The blackness before him did not respond except with a cold wind, and Antares de la Somme suddenly felt very, very small.

Some meters away, Dietrich von Mellenthin was speaking into the tin can marked 'Tactical'. He had a tin can in his cockpit for every member of his unit, just like the Foxe twins did down below and to the rear. Like de la Somme, he marveled at the simplicity of the can-and-wire phone line, as much as he marveled at how much coffee they had had to drink to acquire that many 1 kg cans. "Lion One to Gemini. Is the grid functioning?"

"Gemini receiving and online, Lion One. Preliminary testing of the grid proceeding now, General, sir," came the odd-sounding reply. "Initiating startup sequence."

Von Mellenthin was a bit confused, a state which he knew was probably spreading over his face. "Who is that? Royce?"

"Of course, sir," came the funny voice again, and von Mellentbin realized that this was the first time he had ever heard either of the Foxe twins speak without the other cloning the words simultaneously. "Who else would it be?" continued Royce Foxe innocently.

"Never mind, Gefreiter. I'm just fascinated by your ability to be an individual after all."

"Is the General making some kind of joke, sir?"

"You'll have to forgive me for my confusion, Mister Foxe, but those of us not part of the collective lack the reference to distinguish between you both."

The voice on the other end became almost patronizing. "I'm glad I could help enlighten the General as to the existence of myself. Did the General realize that pairs of shoes come in individual units, too?"

"Don't make me come down there and kick you for being coy with me, Mister Foxe." For all their difference in rank, the General was not much older than his enlisted personnel. Von Mellenthin craned his neck and faced the can marked 'McKenna'. "Lion One to Onslaught Two. Confirm Minovsky coverage."

McKenna's voice sounded almost cheerful. "Minovsky coverage at 100 percent, General. Those three Zaku torsos are spewing the stuff like an uncorked champagne bottle, reactors at one hundred-ten percent, as ordered. We've got an umbrella out to 600 meters from the treeline, and a hair shy of a kilometer's worth of radius. Density will remain constant as long as the reactors don't fail, sir."

"Excellent, Onslaught Two. How long until estimated reactor shutdown?"

"One hour at this rate, sir. Can't promise any more than that."

The voice of Royce Foxe rang in through his/their can again. "Grid operational, General. Stable ground reading throughout all coordinates."

"Monitor all changes in aspect across the board. You know the order of battle, so assign targets according to that."

"Yes, General."

Von Mellenthin's smile, were it visible to anyone else, would have made the hardest veteran shiver in fright. "Oh, Federation, you should have taught your children that only death lives in this forest. Cramer's Legion will join Varus's long-dead fifteen thousand because of my brother's genius and your own ignorance." But then, it was only natural: no one had ever attempted something like this on the field of battle before.

He was a little concerned about the whereabouts of von Seydlitz, but banished such thoughts from his mind. Von Seydlitz was royal line, a genetically-designed masterpiece of human-enhanced bioevolution, as was himself; to worry was a human norm condition. But von Mellenthin could not stop that particular human nuance from coming to life. He had always worried about von Seydlitz, though he knew the other man would have rankled at the thought of his brother and king deigning to worry like some trivial maid worried about whether or not her nails were the proper shade of purple for some social occasion. That was where the two were different, though. Von Seydlitz placed his faith in the three "G"s of New Koenigsberg's society: God, guns, and genes, and not necessarily in that order. Von Mellenthin placed his faith in the same, but added a fourth: the game plan. Von Seydlitz, had he survived the initial attack when his two subordinates did not (which von Mellenthin knew from the two "Flashpoint" messages von Seydlitz had transmitted during the fight), would have been here. Von Mellenthin knew that his younger brother would rather have chewed off one of his own limbs than go gallivanting through the German countryside. That left two possibilities: either the Colonel had failed to shake off the helicopters and was dead or wounded or outside his mobile suit, or he was lost. Von Mellenthin would have bet on the latter; he was certain that he would have felt von Seydlitz die, such was their bond.

The can labeled 'Roberts' suddenly came to life, the Marine's quiet voice almost inaudible. "Onslaught One to Lion One. Contact, moving northwest at 2500 meters and closing. They'll enter the grid at coordinates Romeo-Romeo-Four-Five in one minute."

"Acknowledged, Marine One. All units," said von Mellenthin, raising his voice so that all the cans picked it up and transmitted it, "begin power-up procedure, but do not activate sensors or thrusters. Just bring up the secondary systems for weapons, TacCom, and gyro control. The twins will deal with the rest of the details. Airborne One, make certain your people use the white-striped ones and not the green-striped ones at the onset. You will release on my order." He mashed the button that began the start-up sequence for the kneeling Zaku Hi-Mo. "Everyone stay frosty, and we'll have them dead to rights. Lion One, out."

As the machine around him came to a slow but steady life, and he felt more than heard the sound of the reactor begin its heart's beat. He flicked on the tactical computer map and brought up the one labeled 'Steinbaum0087Magnitikos'. The tiny screen produced a bird's eye overlay of the region that the 10th Panzerkaempfer lay hidden in, white contour lines denoting changes in elevation. A black set of squares represented Steinbaum on the southwest corner of the screen, and a dark green patch represented the treeline of the Teutobergerwald. . .and there was a perfect red grid, labeled with letters on the X-axis and numbers on the Y-axis, as though a fisher's net had been cast across the land. Several months ago, that grid would have corresponded with a line of shallow trenches in the earth dug by John Roberts and his Marines. The grass and mud had eliminated any trace of human disturbances in the meantime, and none could now tell that something insidious and foreign lay beneath the mulch and sodden earth upon which the Federation would stride to their deaths.

He checked the wrist chrono for the time, even as the actuators for the Zaku Hi-Mo's arms began swinging up the 280mm bazooka from its at-rest position to the shoulder of the suit for firing position. It was almost 0545 hours, nearing sunrise, and nearing the time when the Zeon would lower the fog of war upon their enemies.

Down the gentle slope and to the south, the 103rd gathered its numbers back together. The two command hovertrucks of First and Fourth Platoons, respectively, popped open as their crews started grabbing direct comm lines from their interiors, running them to the ankles of the assembled mobile suits. There were not enough lines for every one of the twenty collected mobile suits, but there were enough to link all of the six officers' suits into a network.

"So," came Cramer's voice into Angela Dyson's ear, "to what do we owe the fucking communications blackout?"

"Minovsky interference, Captain, very dense," came the voice of 2nd Lt. Graham Wippler, CO of First Platoon and one of the 103rd's few veterans. "At least we know we're in the right place, sir. The only things that could be generating it are--"

"--Zeek suits, yeah, I figured that out already, Wippler. How're they pumpin' out this much radiation?"

Wippler's almost-as-rare-as-the-GM Command RGM-79N GM Custom actually shrugged in reply.

Dyson cut on her comm. "Sir, they've probably dedicated several of their suits into generating the field."

"How many would they have to use for this level of density?" asked 2nd Lt. Juris Kagan from the cockpit of his RGC-83 GM Cannon II. The CO of Third Platoon sounded a little unnerved by the idea of being under a screen where radar, IR, and radio were almost or totally useless, against an entrenched foe in very ominous and ancient woods, on a moonless night. Dyson did not begrudge him any blame; this was already treading into the realm of dangerously stupid in her book.

The serious yet pleasant voice of the Fourth Platoon CO, 2nd Lt. Constance Flavell, spoke up: "At least three or four, doing nothing but dispensing particles. As long as they're doing that, they're out of the fight." Throughout the discussion, her RGM-79Q GM Quell, one of the few newer designs the Federation had bequeathed to the 103rd Mobile Infantry Co., did not take its main camera off of the forest ahead of them, telephoto lenses trying to pick out something in the wall of darkness that lay ahead of them.

"Which means," said Cramer confidently, "that they've given up their mobility. Pretty fucking dumb of them, don'tcha think?"

Lief Dyson chose then to speak up. "That doesn't make any sense, sir. Seydlitz is supposed to be a field maneuver specialist, and he'd know same as we do that locking down mobile suits in place is stupid. Anyone else getting a 'something's screwed' vibe from all of this?"

"Roger that," agreed Dyson with her husband, mostly because it made sense to her. Her main camera only showed what her optics were picking up, and the forest seemed a haunting place in the midst of all that darkness. She cycled back through to low-light, which bathed the picture in a green tableau that did little to ease her own misgivings.

"Now don't you go chickenshit on me, Lieutenant," said Cramer. "We're gonna go in there and kick their asses, Minovsky interference or not. Lieutenant Wippler's First Platoon'll take point, Second and Third Platoons on the flanks in a wing formation, Lieutenant Missus Dyson'll take command of Third while Lieutenant Kagan stays behind with the big gun suits to give fire support. First and Fourth Platoon's command trucks'll drop seismophones and give the heads-ups to the arty suits. Fourth's other suits'll follow us up as reserve and cover our asses. Move into the forest slow and steady, and if you and yours see anything with a mono-eye and spikes, you give 'em two in the chest and one in the head. You gettin' me, killers?"

"Copy that, Legion One," came Lief's voice, while the others nodded.

"Sir, I really don't like this plan," said Dyson hesitantly. With the artillery suits staying behind with the two command hovertrucks, five suits including Cramer's would be remaining behind, and the rest of them would essentially be marching in formation over open ground towards a visual wall they could not see through, under a communications vacuum they could not speak through without physically touching one another and with no way to call in fire support, and relying solely on the hovertrucks' seismographs to vector in the arty support, and that was provided the Zeeks actually moved. "It's too dependant on the Zeon doing what we expect them to do. I think we should send one platoon in to reconnoiter while the rest hold back, then hit the Zeeks when they come out to fight us. They're blind, too."

"You think that, do you, Ex-Oh? Well, Lieutenant Dyson, what I think is that while we're standing here with our dicks in our hands, them Zeeks're making a break for it out the far side of these woods to go cause mischief someplace else and avoid the ass-whuppin' the Federation is about to bestow upon them. Now, I don't appreciate the idea of nickel-and-diming these assholes with probing attacks, so we're gonna hit 'em hard and with all we've got, right now. But you keep on coming up with these ideas, darlin', and one of these days the world'll let us play nice, okay?"

Dyson gritted her teeth at the blatant condescension in Cramer's tone. Surreptitiously, she flicked the fingers of her GM Kai's hand to the side as a signal to Lief, who looked like he was going to cave in Cramer's Guncannon Heavyarms' head with the butt of his 90mm from behind. "Aye, I get you, sir."

"Anyone else have any objections to the plan of attack?"

There were no more objections, the Company XO having failed to convince Cramer otherwise. "All righty, then," continued Cramer, "Missus Dyson, take Third Platoon and cover First's right flank. You're Century Three now. Century One, you know what to do. Everyone's following your lead, Wippler. Do me proud, boy."

The six suits disconnected their comm leads from the command hovertrucks and went to pass the word on to their people. Reluctantly, Dyson strode her GM Kai over to Third Platoon's muster area to chat with her four new soldiers about their mission specifics.

Garuda-class transport Dauphin, over Nordrhein-Westfalen, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

"----ow light-----range three hu------over us, cont----------utes------"

Titans Major Golan Tizard's attention was divided in two, a state of mind his organized and precise intellect disliked having to succumb to. One the one hand, he was in the middle of filling in the rest of his officers on why the 54th "Massachusetts" Titans Tactical Armored Brigade was split up into its component companies; on the other hand, the Garuda's communications suite was monitoring the progress of Cramer's 103rd via radio band scanner, and was piping it through the bridge-wide intercom. Now, it seemed, the radio link was being subjected to unacceptable levels of interference.

"To answer your question, Captain," said Tizard to the assembled officers but mostly to Sajer, whose face was illuminated evilly by the fluorescent lighting of the map of northern Germany and the Low Countries on the big table, "the 54th has become like a hand sifting at the bottom of a lake for something precious. Each of the companies," he indicated their positions with a red pointer, "is like a finger, while the hand is stretched open. However, take note of the equidistance between each of the companies, and also of their distances to the area of Steinbaum, where our prey lives and lurks."

"What about them?" snapped Sajer. "If we've got all of this, why are we waiting for that chucklefuck Cramer to waste his collection of weaklings on the 10th? Why don't we just go in there and burn everything in that forest to the ground?"

"Think about it, Mister Sajer. Which is more advantageous to our psychological war against von Mellenthin? A full-on blitz into territory the enemy knows and controls, where they are prepared for us, or an enemy that believes it has already won that fight and comes out of their hole and into our hand?"

"Psychology. . .ratshit!" Sajer's face went hostile at the thought. "This is a waste of time, sir! We have the guns, let's just go kill them now!"

"Figures," said Lt. Holt from Tizard's right, fastidiously checking his fingernails in an unconscious parroting of Tizard's own habit. "We didn't expect you to get it in one, Captain."

Tizard cut Sajer off before he could respond to Holt's snide remark. "That's enough of that childish drivel, both of you. Mister Sajer, the Steinbaum battle is a giant mousetrap, one that I much prefer Cramer step into and set off instead of my people. We are Titans, and therefore elite and unexpendable. Cramer and his people are the mere scum of the Earth, and destined to die gloriously fulfilling their cannon fodder roles. When the Zeon mousetrap snaps down on their necks, the fingers of the Titans," he waved his hand over the map, stopping it over Steinbaum, "will close into a fist." Tizard's own hand closed into a fist as an example. "Then we will crush the life from the 10th Panzerkaempfer Division and be home in Lyons in time for brunch. If you'll excuse me for a moment; would you take over, Mister Volkyr? I must attend to something."

Tizard strode away from the table and up a set of stairs, maneuvering around the Dauphin's crew members towards the communications station. The only sound that was coming in from the intercom speakers now was static.

"Why are we not receiving anything except a platoon's worth of suits and two trucks?" asked Tizard as he leaned over the communications officer's chair to point at the console.

"Some sort of interference from the ground, sir. Nothing we can do."

Tizard's pale eyes narrowed dangerously. "What sort of 'interference', Lieutenant?"

The Lieutenant shrugged offhandedly. "Could be anything from standard EM jamming to Minovsky rads, sir. Whatever it is, it's blanked out everything, all spectrums and frequencies, within its range. The only reason we're getting anything at all is because those are the units not underneath the jamming coverage. We aren't even getting a radar read from that area, so I'd say it's Minovsky particles, very dense and very constant."

"No way to get a read on the rest of the 103rd? No way at all?"

The pilot turned around in his seat towards the conversing officers. "I could combat drop this bird right on top of them if you'd like, sir."

Tizard was in no mood for pithy commentary. He had been counting on his ability to overhear the fate of the 103rd to assist him in judging the tactics and abilities of the 10th Panzerkaempfer before having to close the five fingers of his fist around the Zeon heart and squeeze it to death. He knew their suits, and he knew their leadership, but he did not know the enemy, and that was a big no-no in the Tizard Book of Battle Tricks. Cramer's people were supposed to be the dowsing rod he would use to divine the mind of von Mellenthin, but he would learn nothing if this dreadful silence continued.

He debated for a moment, even as his head turned to face the Garuda's pilot. To send in his own people early or not? Minovsky radiation was a two-edged sword, and within its demesne anything was possible. Tizard had studied the 10th Panzerkaempfer enough to know that even with his massive numerical superiority, they would fight with anything and everything to deal as much damage to his forces as he did unto them. Every loss the 54th TTAB took was one less unit he would have available to put out the next fire that came to life in Europe. He had relinquished control of so many assets in this year alone that the loss of any more of his people, even in combat, was a hateful thought to the Major, as hateful as knowing that the rest of his Brigade was busily getting fat and lazy in the Philippines chasing ghosts and shadows and indulging in copious amounts of intimate and carnal contact with the indigenous population of the island archipelago.

The 10th Panzerkaempfer was a tool, one that Tizard would gladly use to show the rest of the Titans what it would take to bring order from chaos. He would not spend months chasing Zeon leftovers all over Europe the way the Dorcetshire and the Damascus task forces had vainly pursued their AEUG quarries in space. With Axis looming on the horizon, lurking like a vulture between Luna and LaGrange point 3 near Sides 2 and 5, he was the only farsighted one enough to see what was coming, alliance or no.

The fate of the 103rd MI would settle the question in Tizard's mind as to whether or not his plan was the dream of his own ego or a sound tactical military decision. But that was not up to Tizard, no matter how strongly he wished it; the whole plan hinged on von Mellenthin and what he would do, both during and after the battle with the 103rd.

"No," he shook his head, not blinking as he stared at the pilot, "that won't be necessary. Just get us to Brunswick."

"You got it, sir." The pilot turned back to his controls, eyes glancing out the windows at a Saberfish fighter as it skirted past the massive combat transport in its air patrol screen flight pattern.

Tizard looked down at the radioman once more, then clapped a hand on his shoulder and turned, walking back to the map table in the immense bridge structure, face calm but mind in turmoil.

Nijmegen, Netherlands, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

"Commander Stilwell?" called out the hydrophone operator. "I've got something."

Stilwell grabbed his field glasses and shoved his eyes into the viewing receptacles, staring down the river into the darkness, searching for something. "What've you got?"

"It's big, whatever it is. Coming in at twenty knots, twin screws. Sounds like a barge, at least a thousand-tonner."

The radio operator, who was also the loader, chimed in from the inside of "Ol' Beastly" below Stilwell. "Harbor control reports that all authorized traffic is clear. This one's not legit, and it's not responding to hails on any frequency."

A black shape was in the view of Stilwell's glasses, looming like a mountain as it approached on its watery road. "Distance?" yelled Stilwell.

"Six klicks and closing. It'll be here in four minutes."

"This is it! Get on the horn to everybody and tell them to lock and load! The Zeeks are here, so let's give 'em Hell!"

The radioman started yelling into his transceiver while popping open the ammo door release lever with a knee. Outside, the six TGM-79 GM Trainers slammed 100mm magazines into their weapons and ratcheted rounds into their chambers. The six guys operating the makeshift ASROC were manhandling a shallow-fin torpedo into the launch tube.

The radioman finished his call, then shoved a 120mm APFSDS-T antitank round into the breech as Stilwell clambered into the commander's cupola and behind the .50 caliber machine gun. "Hydrophone!! Keep me posted!" he barked.

One of the two jeeps screeched up next to the Leopard II tank. The student on the 20mm Gatling gun cupped a hand over his mouth and hollered: "We still can't raise them on the radio, sir! Forward observation says it's the Duisberg!"

Stilwell stuck his head up from the cupola. "What about those suits?!"

"No word, sir!"

"Get to your position, then! Anything with one eye sticks its head up, blast him!"

"Aye, aye, sir!!" The gunner kicked the rollbar with a boot, and the jeep tore out of the area at breakneck speed.

"Hydrophone! What've we got?"

"Just one ship, sir! No other contacts!"

That worried Stilwell. "This thing's gotta be on proximity or timed-delay fuse! Range to target?"

"Four kilometers! Speed and bearing constant!"

He ducked his head into the cupola again. "Patch me through to the maritime frequency, quick. Run it through the loudspeaker, too."

"You're up, sir!"

Stilwell cleared his throat, covering the mouthpiece of his helmet comm with his hand before speaking: "Zeon soldiers of the 10th Mobile Armored Division! We see your ship and are prepared to do whatever is necessary to defend Nijmegen from you! Heave to and surrender, or we will open fire!" Stilwell repeated the command in Dutch and in German. There was no response from the silent ship. They waited another two minutes to the sounds of their own heartbeats and the throbbing of the engine of the Leopard II.

On the visible horizon, a blacker spot than the river and the sky came into focus, looming like a moving hole in the world. Searchlights arrayed along the riverbanks flashed to life, illuminating the bulk of RMS Duisberg as it cruised at its speed along the Waal, ignorant of what lay before it.

"I've given them warning enough," muttered Stilwell. Best just to take care of this nonsense right now. "All right, men! Commence fire, fire at will!"

The order was relayed through "Ol' Beastly"'s ancient communications rig and down the chain of radio stations. The gunner of the venerable Leopard II mashed his face to the targeting scope and pressed the trigger.

The thunderous, rumbling whump as the 120mm cannon of the tank fired for the first time since 2020 AD was a better signal than any flare could give. The APFSDS-T armor-piercer struck Duisberg in the conning tower, blasting through the barge's superstructure and out the other end, tatters of civilian freighter trailing behind the penetrator as it burst out the far end of the ship.

The TGM-79s' 100mm autocannons began their crescendo, spraying shells at high volume at the incoming 1000-ton draft barge. The twenty-knot speed of Duisberg came to an abrupt stop as a fusillade of high-velocity lead smashed into its bow and across its deck, ripping great holes in the ship and shredding its hull in their fury. The ASROC launcher spat its torpedo into the Waal, the hydro-missile vanishing into the deep river with a splash, even as the ASROC's crew grabbed another fish and began to wrestle it into position. The 20mm chain guns on the jeep hosed the ship as it passed them, pieces of Duisberg flaying away from the ship into the river to be swept away in the relentless current.

Duisberg, for all its impressive size, was not a warship, and was therefore easy prey for the incoming hot rounds that the Federation blazed into and through it. The ship was not being hampered much, but only because the skin of its hull, with the exception of the IMO-rated pressure hull lining its hold, was so thin that the HE rounds the GM Trainers pumped into the great ship simply chopped through the barge instead of encountering anything worth detonating against.

The 120mm tank gun fired again, and then again, adding its basso to the trebles of the GM Trainers' faster-rate-of-fire hellspitters. Duisberg hove to port, its bulk slipping sideways as a round struck her boilers and the momentum of the barrage of warshots dragged it off course. To Stilwell, it looked like a train that derailed and was jackknifing itself to a stop, even as it disintegrated under the onslaught. Then the torpedo hit the port bow.

A brilliant flash of light and a roiling fireball erupted from the foredeck, followed very shortly by a thunderclap as the concussive wave reached the ears of "Stilwell's Irregulars". A geyser of river water sprayed into the sky on the heels of the noise. The GM Trainers finished off their clips, then paused to rearm as the big barge simply buckled and broke, the torpedo flooding her engine room as the ship's keel cracked in half. Duisberg had arrived at her final resting place.

"CEASE FIRE!!" called Stilwell over the loudspeakers, letting go a breath he did not know he was holding through the ordeal. The distant chatter of the 20mm guns came to a stop immediately. For a long moment, everyone just stared at the burning hulk that was RMS Duisberg, waiting for the great cataclysm that would accompany a phosphorus bomb once the open air reacted with its explosive chemical element. Nothing. The ship made hideous creaking noises as it settled to the bottom of the Waal, conning tower still visible above water, Swiss-cheesed by the jury-rigged firepower of the Nijmegen Academy of Armored Warfare.

The cheering swelled behind and around them with all the silent surprise of a sudden spring rain shower, replacing the ringing in their ears of the noise of a lot of big guns firing at the same time. Stilwell turned to see residents of the city atop their roofs and their balconies, in the streets and on their cars, proclaiming their joy at the victory of those who would defend them. The mood was infectious, as the students of the Academy shook hands, gave high-fives, hugged, and raised fists and weapons into the air in celebration. The cheering became a torrent of noise and festivity as Duisberg smoldered, impotent.

The only one not smiling was Stilwell himself, standing with his tank crew atop the turret of "Ol' Beastly", gun barrel warm from its workout but not overly stressed by today's little spectacle. No, Jackson Stilwell, Academy Commandant of Nijmegen, was not cheering at all. He was not even smiling. His boat was a dud, or worse, nothing at all. Only a salvage crew would be able to tell, but in Stilwell's mind, he knew they had just been suckered.

"Where are they?"

Steinbaum, Niedersachsen, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

Oblivious to what lay beneath them, the mobile suits of the 103rd strode towards the treeline where the Teutobergerwald began its meandering growth northwest. Spotlights were activated on the lead platoon, giving the spotters a little light to see by; the rest ran on low-light vision or IR. The Minovsky coverage disallowed everything else, which was why the Zeon were using it as a weapon. The Federation just did not know that part, yet.

Lucien McKenna had done a lot of things in his time as a Zeon soldier, and then even before. The Marine was a natural with all things technical, and was usually the person everyone looked to play engineer whenever they had a problem. In 0084, von Seydlitz had come to him with a problem and told him in no uncertain terms to fix it. That problem was Minovsky radiation and its effects in combat. The solution lay underneath the ground being trampled by the 103rd Mobile Infantry Company, in the form of Hall Effect probe-enhanced Gaussmeter lines.

Minovsky rads had been a facet of mobile warfare since the invention of the fusion engine. It was what had brought high-tech warfare back into the close-combat arena; without the advanced targeting systems and the ability to see the enemy long before they saw you with the simple sweep of a radar, there was no such thing as distance combat with any form of effectiveness. Minovsky radiation was a two-edged sword that harmed both friend and foe alike, rendering them blind except at short range; or worse, melee, where most mobile suit pilots did not like being. Lack of reliable communications was a real pain, too, since one needed to talk to both their teammates and their command structure to receive orders to carry out. Minovsky radiation made such things a haphazard prospect at best.

McKenna had not needed to ask why von Seydlitz was looking for a way around Minovsky particle interference. That was obvious to anyone who had fought in a war: if you can see the enemy and they cannot see you, you own them. The real trick was making it happen when physics said you could not. McKenna admitted that immediately to his superior, whose response could be summed up as "Fuck physics; make the bitch work." So, Lucien McKenna racked his brain for a year and a half to contrive a way of skirting around Minovsky radiation effects in friendly units while still punishing the enemy. His solution came from the kitchen door late one night in 0086 when he was rummaging for munchies while repairing one of the trains in the salt mine.

Metals are magnetic; some weakly, others very strongly. This same magnetism was present in high-tensile steel, in Luna Titanium, and in Gundarium, which meant it was present in the skin and armor and components of modern warfare vehicles. The device used to determine the level of magnetism in an area is a Gaussmeter. McKenna concluded that a mobile suit in or around an area of empty earth would register as having a higher magnetic reading than the surrounding environment, thus projecting (via a MagLab capable of isolating and reading the Gaussmeter's findings) a stable, precise location in spite of the Minovsky radiation; the Gaussmeter was hardwired into the MagLab, not transmitted via radio waves. A larger magnetic presence, like a mobile suit, walking over an area where a Gaussmeter lay would automatically spike the Hall probe's reading, sending the data to the MagLab, where it would be duly registered as being insanely different than the surrounding landscape's relatively tiny magnetic reading.

Communications over distance in a Minovsky field were bypassed using tin cans with copper wire strung between them, like childrens' old play phones, so easy it was enough to make you cry (though you had to be immobile to use them). Enough Gaussmeters (with the addition of Hall Effect probes for maximum sensitivity), arrayed in one-meter by one-meter squares, formed a perfect coordinate grid for indirect artillery bombardment or direct line-of-sight fire acquisition.

McKenna had not had the opportunity to test his idea until this moment, but as the Foxe twins called out to the suit drivers the precise locations and bearings of each of their first targets, he knew it was effective enough to do the job. The psychological blow alone would have been worth it: a Zeon mobile suit unit, immune to Minovsky radiation, would devastate any force sent against it. The impossible had been cast aside in the face of unswerving evidence, and the effect the news would have across Earth and Space would be the functional equivalent of the "Brown Sound". McKenna had every intention of applying this field discovery into mobile warfare somehow; it would just be a matter of rigging a Gaussmeter as a form of long-range beacon or sonar, perhaps. But the first to taste the pain would be the sad souls sent to die here, who did not have a clue.

"Quebec-Quebec One-Fiver, moving at eleven-oh-five degrees northwest," said Bryce Foxe's almost-lonely sounding voice in de la Somme's can marked 'Katzenjammer Kidz'.

De la Somme splattered a garish orange dot on a corresponding coordinate point on the red grid displayed on his TacCom map. That was his mark, one of the Federation suits coming up on the left flank of the Zeon position. That was the last one to be plotted, since de la Somme was sitting on the anchor point of the left flank, and the rest of the 10th's people already had their targets.

The diminutive ace flexed his chilled fingers, popped his knuckles, and tossed his cans out of the hatchway, their presence no longer necessary. He then buttoned his uniform overjacket over his latest T-shirt, a little ditty he had picked up while visiting Talos Bunch a while ago. It displayed a cartoonish picture of a red devil with horns and a pitchfork, grinning out at the audience while spearing a hamburger on the tines of the trident-like tool. The caption above the devil read: Purgatory Bar & Grill; a smaller caption beneath that read: Gnash while you wait!! The armored cockpit hatch closed, encasing him and his slumbering passenger in almost total darkness. The main camera clicked on, and the low-light viewscreen displayed almost nothing of consequence.

But that did not matter in the slightest.

In the tin can of Karl Weissdrake's Command Gelgoog , von Mellenthin's voice simply said: "Now."

"Let them fly, boys," said Weissdrake into a cluster of cans near his right knee. At his command, his Gelgoog chucked a white-striped grenade on a painstakingly- and precisely-calculated aerial course through the trees to just the edge of the forest. Seven others just like it arced towards their own destinations.

On impact, the grenades burst not with an explosion but more of a release of contained pressure, and great plumes of white smoke billowed out of their casings. Five metric tons of white phosphorus could make a very powerful smoke grenade.

This piece of the idea had been von Seydlitz's, something he had bumped across when studying 20th Century armored warfare that utilized tanks. In an era without Minovsky radiation, with rockets that could track on enemy ECM jamming, satellites that could track single targets on the ground from orbit, and when infantry were regularly equipped with IR goggles and low-light scopes for operations in all hours of the day or night, tanks still used smoke grenade dispensers on the battlefield to hide their movements from enemy spotters. Von Seydlitz had pored over texts and documents and accounts from sources that ranged across the globe, supplementing his findings with his own razor intellect and almost eidetic memory bank for all things militaire, and had uncovered a little-known variant on the crude cloaking technique. This was why he had been adamant in which chemical he had wanted in bulk when developing his mobile suit-sized smoke grenades.

The Minovsky interference would hide the Zeon from radar and help a little bit with the heat signatures from infra-red scopes. The lack of lights would hide them from low-light vision. The night, the camouflage, and the trees would hide them from most visual forms of recognition. These were fine and dandy, but von Seydlitz was looking for something a little more final in his work to reduce the 103rd into mewling, helpless prey; thus, the smoke grenades. They would not only hide the Zeon from sight totally and completely (all while not interfering with the Gaussmeter grid that dutifully would report enemy location on the grid through magnetic resonance signatures), but the particular variant of smoke von Seydlitz was using would also completely negate the enemy's use of IR spectrum target acquisition by hiding the Zeon heat signatures.

The variant was called plastic white phosphorus, and it was very, very effective.

Striding up the hillock, behind First Platoon, in her GM Kai, Dyson blinked as her screen filled with a. . .a nothingness that had not been there before. Sure, it was dark out, and sure, even low-light was not helping much, but now there was nothing but blackness, as though she had just stepped into a hole. She swung her main camera towards her three platoon-mates, and they were still visible, but it looked like wisps of blackness were reaching out, as though the forest itself was exuding tendrils of its own emptiness.

Her first thought was to call this in, but that would have been dumb. The Minovsky cloud was all around them now, and even good intentions could not pierce it. She knew that prior to her sudden blindness, the rangefinder had read less than 100 meters to the treeline, and it would obviously still be there if she kept moving forward. Instead, she called a halt by raising her GM Kai's fist into the air, arm raised ninety degrees at the elbow. The Federation used a lot of hand signals in places of ultra-dense Minovsky rads. Third Platoon, not used to having the Company XO as their direct commanding officer, immediately stopped in their tracks.

She noticed that First and Second Platoons had also come to a standstill. Spreading the fingers of her upraised fist, then closing them again, she signaled for a powwow with the Platoon commanders. Then she made a circling motion with the GM's wrist, telling the other suits to set up a defensive perimeter while the bosses chatted.

Lief reached her first, putting his GM Command's free hand into one of hers to initiate skin talk. "You seein' what I'm seein'?" he asked her, as Wippler and Flavell also touched her suit to join in.

"Yeah, I do. Any idea?"

"Smoke. but not like any I've ever seen before," replied Flavell coolly, as though she walked through mists every day.

"Explain."

Flavell's voice was almost chiding. "Check your IR, Ex-Oh Dyson. You'll see what I mean."

Cycling her camera to infra-red, she was almost blinded by the screen's shift from total darkness to a blazing riot of color. Aghast, she cycled back to standard visual hurriedly. "What the fuck--?" she said before she could catch herself.

Wippler, who was almost never nervous, was nervous now. "Please tell me it's not a forest fire, that the damn Zeeks haven't led us into an inferno!"

"If it was a fire, we'd smell it," said Dyson, mad at Wippler the veteran for voicing her own concern to their greenhorn colleagues. "So if it's not a fire, then what is it?"

Down the hillock, with the two hovertrucks and the rest of the heavy artillery suits, Herschel Cramer was voicing the same thing: "So if it ain't a fire, what the hell is it?"

Kagan had his hatch open, trying to pick it out with the scant lighting. "It looks like smoke, sir, just white smoke. It doesn't seem to be hurting the suits, but. . ." he trailed off and jumped back into his GM Cannon II to use the magnification option on his main camera. "Sir, the ground beneath Lieutenant Dyson's unit is turning black."

Cramer zoomed in on the feet of the mobile suits. "That ain't the ground, dumbshit, it's the grass turning black. That smoke is killin' it. Greeley, get up there and tell Dyson to haul her ass back here right quick."

"Aye, Captain." The RX-77D Guncannon Mass Production-type headed up the hill at a trot.

One of the hovertrucks reported in. "Still no sign of seismic activity except for our people, sir."

Cramer chewed idly on a thumbnail, a nervous habit he had never managed to rid himself of. Maybe I shoulda brought them choppers after all. . .

Wippler's voice was dripping with scorn. "Here comes the cavalry, Ell-Tee."

Dyson turned her GM Kai around to see the Guncannon belonging to Ensign Greeley of Kagan's (now her) Third Platoon running ponderously towards them. To her right, the sun was rising, starting to cast a dim light over everything "Great. Mother Hen wants a sitrep."

Lief's voice buzzed in her ear. "Doubt it. He's probably coming to let us know that we should draw straws to see which of us gets to pop hatch and take a whiff of this stuff."

"Are you volunteering, Lieutenant Dyson?"

"Ladies first, Lieutenant Dyson."

"Isn't that sweet?" remarked Flavell to Wippler, who just groaned.

Greeley thumped up to them and initiated skin talk. "Ma'am, Captain Cramer wants your people to pull back until we can ID this gunk."

Dyson was just about to respond when her suit shuddered around her, and then there was a sound like the Hammer of God striking the steel of the world.

The first shot fired into the Federation suits was by Dietrich von Mellenthin himself, the 280mm shell from his Zaku's bazooka tearing its way into the innards of one of First Platoon's GM IIs, ripping the suit in half in the explosion. Of course, he himself could not witness its destruction; the target to him was a painted blip on his TacCom, not something in his viewscreen, though the white smoke flashed brightly at the impact of the shell.

One by one, bolts of energy and high-velocity lead commenced fire on the Federation mobile suits, all of whom were on open ground and stationary. Von Mellenthin had chosen the placement of his suits well. As long as the Federation stood there, they were right in the crosshairs of a crescent-shaped Pakfront, blind as bats and as dead as doornails.

Five suits went down in the first volley. Five more went down in the second. None of them had fired off a shot, and three seconds had elapsed. Dyson spun her GM Kai around, trying to identify targets, but there was nothing, just nothing but incoming fire and the death cries of her Company-mates.

Lief's 90mm stuttered in his GM Command's hands, spraying in the direction of the treeline, not certain if he was hitting anything. He had interposed his suit between the trees and his wife's suit deliberately. She snapped out of the shock of the moment and brought her own 90mm into the fight.

Flavell's GM Quell staggered as a bright beam of mega-particle energy severed the left arm of her suit, dropping her beam rifle. Quick as a cat, she reached back with her right arm to snag her 90mm, and a volley of shells cut the GM Quell down. The titanium armor held up against the barrage of smaller caliber warshots, but Dyson watched in fascinated dismay as something in the darkness of the forest came to brilliant light as another bolt of mega-particles scythed through the GM Quell's torso, cutting diagonally across the cockpit.

One of the other damaged GM Kais appeared from the depths of the mist, riddled with bullet holes, but it was still up, one of Second Platoon's suits, unleashing all Hell into the smoke in front of it. Then the suit gave a terrible jerk, as though something had clubbed it, and the haze flashed into brilliance around the stricken suit, that went limp after a few seconds.

Lief's GM Command's back bumped into her suit. "FALL BACK!" he roared, blasting away at the area in front of the downed GM Kai in a fury. The limp GM Kai fell onto its face. Too stunned by the uncanny accuracy of the enemy's fire when they were blind and practically mute, she complied, 90mm chattering back into the darkness.

Greeley's Guncannon's twin 200mm guns poured volley after volley into the treeline, the smoke swirling around the trails of his shots. An ancient RGM-79[E] GM and a more modern GM II were covering him, even as the Dysons moved away faster than the other three suits were.

Cramer took longer to recover than Dyson did. One minute, he had fifteen suits standing in that damnable smoke. The next, he had five, all coming back down as a hail of Zeon gunfire tore apart the earth or scorched the air around them, and it was only dumb luck they were missing.

"GIMME TARGETS!!" he screamed into the commlink at the hovertrucks.

"WE GOT NOTHING!" came the panicked reply.

"That's does it, then," he hissed. "ALL SUITS, OPEN FIRE!! TARGET MUZZLE FLASHES AND ANYTHING ELSE THAT AIN'T OURS!" He depressed the triggers on his Guncannon Heavyarms's firing sticks, and the big suit's twin 240mm cannons and its 60mm Vulcan spat death into the mists, punctuated by shots from the handheld beam rifle in the suit's hands. Phosphorus tracer ammunition began to stretch over the battlefield, coming in both direction.

The other artillery suits began dumping firepower into the smoke as well. The two GM Cannons blazed away at the nothingness, but were too terrified of hitting one of their own in the haze to just fire randomly. Cramer did not seem to care either way.

Wippler's GM Custom rocketed up into the air and out of the smoke, missing a leg, trying to jump out of the smoke, which was starting to dissipate. Cramer watched in awe as a Zeon Gelgoog Jaeger burst up behind the fleeing GM Custom and tackled it in midair, dragging it down like a beast that had caught a choice piece of prey. A second Gelgoog Jaeger followed the struggling suits back down, beam machinegun at the ready to finish off Wippler's suit. They had fallen back into the smoke before anyone could even get a shot off to help the GM Custom.

Movement to his right brought Cramer away from the carnage, as a Dom Tropen skirted around from the flank and lobbed a grenade at the clustered artillery suits and hovertrucks (whose crews were struggling to unhook their comm leads from the suits and get moving). The grenade burst, knocking a GM Cannon down and upending one of the hovertrucks. Cramer's beam rifle jabbed out and fired at the speedy Dom Tropen, impaling the Zeon suit before it could escape back into the treeline. It crumpled and pancaked into the earth.

Antares de la Somme was on a high, but at the sight of Nolan Kerr's Dom Tropen cut down by one of the Federation artillery suits, he went berserk. For him, the GM Quell he had already racked up into his kill record was now just an appetizer; now the whole buffet would die. Not five minutes ago, he had been teasing Kerr; now he would be burying him. Tears came unbidden, as they always had, but these burned more than relieved. Kerr was his man, his soldier! He had lost so many of them, but it never got easier, and now someone had to pay for that soul being taken from de la Somme's world, where it would not laugh again.

Erik held on for dear life as the ace shrieked his rage at the world and burst from the devastated treeline, flinging his suit at the Federation. There were three targets for him to choose from, but he knew that de la Somme would want them all. His own mind was a turmoil, as the Commonality recoiled from the horror of losing one of its own members. Now they were but seven.

The Dysons had returned by this point, still firing at ghosts in the smoke, which was clearing rapidly enough for them to start seeing targets. The two GM IIs and the Guncannon were still up there, dumping tremendous amounts of ammunition into the area around them, backs to each other now. Cramer watched in horror as a Packard-type Gouf sprinted in out of nowhere, leapt into the air over the incoming fire from the Federation suits and then over the suits themselves, and landed in the middle of them with a flourish. Spinning on its heel, the Gouf slashed all three of the Federation suits across their backs in a single stroke with a heat saber. The Guncannon staggered but kept itself upright just long enough to trigger a burst of fire into the ground as a Kaempfer blew it backwards with a sturmfaust. The two GM IIs fell to their knees as their leg actuators separated from their pelvic actuators, like puppets whose strings had been cut. But they were not out of the fight yet, as one of them managed to turn and sink three or four 90mm rounds into the Kaempfer before the Gouf cut its arm off at the elbow, then planted its 75mm Gatling cannon on the back of the skull of the other GM II and burst the head of the suit apart like a melon under a sledgehammer. Then the Gouf picked up the GM II's severed arm with its weapon and pulled its trigger, firing back into the woods once, before dropping it and moving on.

Another suit crashed into Cramer's Guncannon Heavyarms, knocking the suit to the ground. It impacted with a thud that almost made him bite through his own tongue. His main camera saw only dirt, but his secondaries saw Kagan's GM Cannon II cross beam sabers with a monstrous Gelgoog Marine Commander before they moved away. A Kaempfer, a different one from the one that had been damaged, kicked over the other hovertruck, trapping the crew inside, before triggering its shotgun and shredding the innards of the vehicle.

And Cramer came to the sinking realization that while he and his had been blind, the Zeon had not been.

Vladimir Margul was not the kind of person to overly care about those underneath his authority, but the {apparently} stray 90mm round that had drilled its way into Private Derek Reiter's Kaempfer's cockpit from out of the blue made him want to claw thing apart. One second, the enlisted man who had been a 'Grimraver' since the Lorelei drop in 0079 was there right beside his own Kaempfer, and then he was dead, his suit just standing there, useless. Margul also saw Lacerta's Kaempfer take serious damage to its torso from the stupid GM that de la Somme had failed to kill in one strike. Within the Minovsky field, Margul could not even call to check on Lacerta, having to trust that the Sergeant was okay even though he had caught a full burst and the Kaempfer was not designed to take that kind of damage.

As 'Demon' Margul watched in mute horror, the stricken Kaempfer took a couple of stumble-steps forward and away, like a punch-drunk boxer, before finally falling to the ground to lie still near the wreckage of a downed GM Kai. One of the Foxe twins' Gelgoog Jaeger slid up to the lifeless Kaempfer, using it as cover briefly to snap off a shot from its beam machinegun, before kicking thrusters on and leaping deeper into the fray.

Margul took that piece of advice to heart, and flung his own machine into the fight, using the quick Kaempfer to skirt through the battlefield, seeking prey to appease the deaths of his two 2nd Shock members.

It would occur to him later that if Reiter had not been standing where he was, that 90mm round would have killed him instead.

Dyson's hair fell into her eyes, sticking to her forehead with sweat. This was unreal, and impossible, even as she blazed away at the shield of a Gelgoog Cannon, keeping it from acquiring its aim at a target. Lief was beside her, as always, covering her flanks, with a new 90mm machinecannon to replace the one that had been shot out of his hand by a beam machinegun burst. This was an out-and-out horsefuck, and most of the company was already down for the count. Dyson counted four suits still capable of fighting, and only one enemy suit burning on the ground (looked like a Dom). They had to get the hell out of here, and now.

She saw Cramer's suit get knocked down, at about the same time that poor melee-deficient Kagan's GM Cannon II got diced by the double-bladed beam saber of the Gelgoog he was fighting and fall apart into wreckage. Had she been trying to concentrate on her emotions at this moment, she could not have differentiated between anger and sorrow at this terrible scene she found herself playing a role in.

They had passed outside the Minovsky umbrella, and she heard Lief yell in panic over the radio. Spinning around, she saw him blasting at an incoming Gouf Custom that was barreling straight for them, but it was weaving in and out in a zig-zag pattern, and sharpshooter Lief was hitting nothing but air and earth as it closed in on them. In a moment of clarity, she saw the sigil on the right breast of the Gouf, even as it flicked its e-whip out ahead of itself by several dozen meters and plucked the 90mm right out of Lief's suit's hands.

White star and sword. . .white STAR and SWORD. . .WHITE STAR AND SWORD!!! 'KILLING STAR'!!! NO!

She shoved her 90mm into Lief's GM Command's hands and unleashed her beam saber, intercepting the Gouf while shoving Lief's GM Command behind her GM Kai. She had read about this guy in the post-War briefing they had all received from Cramer at Kassel about the 10th, and knew that she was dead, and Lief was dead, and they were all dead if this ace got past them. How he was alive was unimportant, though she was hornswaggled to figure out how Intel could have missed the presence of Zeon Commander Antares de la Somme for so long. She slashed at the Gouf, then followed it up with a stab, managing to sever a piece of the Zeon suit's shield but not hitting anything else. The 'Killing Star' was good, better than even the books had said he was, and he was adept enough to not even try to parry the beam saber with his own heat saber. She sprayed 60mm Vulcan fire at him, trying to hold him back, but he interposed an ancient oak between them and the rounds splintered the tree's trunk, which the Gouf promptly pushed in her direction, then darted around to come at the right flank. She chopped the tree into flaming cinders with her saber and maneuvered to keep herself between Lief and de la Somme, but it was a battle she might lose. Her GM Kai had better acceleration than the specialized ground suit, but it was not as agile as the Gouf, and the Gouf's design was perfected for close-quarters combat.

As she spun around and tried to cut off the amazingly nimble ace's suit, her eye caught something in her main viewscreen, and it seemed so out of place that her conscious mind actually took its eyes away from her fight to watch as a single Zaku High-Mobility type casually walked out of the trees and the remains of the smoke and through the battlefield, stepping gingerly around the crippled and destroyed mobile suits in its slow and relentless advance. It had a pair of 90mm machinecannons in its hands, the ubiquitous MMP-80, and it was heading right for Cramer's Guncannon Heavyarms, which was clambering to its feet and did not appear to have noticed the approach of the Zaku even as the artillery suit sprayed 60mm Vulcan rounds at the Gelgoog Marine Commander that had killed Kagan's GM Cannon II. As the Gelgoog withdrew, almost in reverence it seemed to Dyson at the time, Cramer's Guncannon turned to face the Zaku, which calmly and smoothly brought up both MMP-80s and pulled both triggers.

The twin licks of flame and lead that spat from the giant machineguns blew both the Guncannon's 240mm shoulder guns from their moorings, rocking the suit back. The Zaku lowered the guns slightly and fired again, stitching shots across the elbow and wrist assemblies of the red-and-gold suit, staggering it further. The guns lowered again and roared, the rounds splitting the armor and internals of the Guncannon's knees and lower legs open, and Cramer's suit collapsed in a heap. A single round into the cockpit finished that fight. In the fire of its guns, she knew that the Zaku was von Mellenthin himself.

Almost unconsciously, Dyson cut at the Gouf as it sidled past her, bulling her GM Kai aside as it went straight for Lief's GM Command, e-whip snaking past his shield and attaching to the 90mm machinecannon again, then yanking it out of Lief's hands. That was when it became apparent to Dyson that the Zeon ace was playing with them, and that thought infuriated her.

A Dom she had not even noticed coming made a typical high-speed run at her, heat saber glowing, and chopped off her suit's head as it glided past, just before the Gouf kicked her suit in the chest and knocked it onto its ass, and she blacked out.

Lief Dyson watched the camouflaged Gouf make a mockery out of his wife's attempts to delay or damage it, and knew he was dead when it kicked her headless suit onto its back and it did not move except to claw blindly at the ground. He himself was weaponless, and not nearly as good as she was at close combat, but he drew the beam saber anyway, and faced the Zeon determined to die a soldier, though his heart grieved that it would all come down to this.

There were nine Zeon suits surrounding him, all bristling with weaponry, but none of them made an attempt to attack him. The circle parted to allow a Zaku-type suit entry, a smoking MMP-80 in one hand, the other hand empty but hovering near the heat hawk.

"Identify yourself," spoke a baritone voice through his radio, presumably from the Zaku that stood in front of him. The voice seemed appropriate to the crowned red lion on a blue field that the suit sported on its right breast.

Dyson cleared his throat before answering. "Lief Dyson, Second Lieutenant, service number seven-seven-four-six-nine-eight-three."

The voice was almost pleasant, but something much darker lay underneath it. "I am Generalmajor Dietrich von Mellenthin, Leutnant Dyson, and I have no wish to kill you at the moment, so kindly replace your beam weapon into its proper storage facility and come out of your suit, please."

"I don't think so, General," said Dyson with more bravado than he was actually feeling.

"Please don't make a liar of me, Leutnant. I have no wish to harm you, but if you persist in this foolishness you will be punished. I killed your company in less than three minutes, and if your time playing noble hero with me exceeds that, I shall be very cross indeed."

The beam saber's energy blade began to flicker as the battery began to lose power. Dyson began to feel real panic rise up in his throat.

Von Mellenthin's voice became patronizing. "Uh-oh, Leutnant, you're running out of options now. Decide fast."

"I've still got another one!" he snapped back, even as the saber's light began to fizzle even more frequently.

"Nopers," said another voice, much more mischievous, "ya don't, sorry." The Gouf Custom made a swirling motion with one of its index fingers, just like a human would have.

Dyson switched his camera over to a secondary and noticed immediately that he was missing his second beam saber from the rear waist rack; it had been casually plucked from his suit by a Gelgoog Command-Type, which was burying the blade in the earth so that only the hilt stuck up from the ground. Its battery would die out quickly. "Sons of bitches," he hissed, even as the blade in his hand sputtered and went out. He tossed it to the ground in something of a fit.

"What a rude thing to say. You should be ashamed, an officer of the Federation speaking that way, what is this world coming to? Step out of the mobile suit, Leutnant, or die. No more games."

Reluctantly, Dyson complied, the cold air making him shiver involuntarily as he stepped out onto his open hatchplate. The first thing he noticed was an oily stink, mixed with a heady chemical stench and the smell of scorched chlorophyll and cordite, but his skin did not dissolve, so he was at least grateful for that.

The Zaku's hatch also opened, and Dyson resisted the urge to go for his sidearm. The man who stepped out was the most confident being Dyson had ever encountered, wrapped in an aura of invincibility and command like a suit of armor. A greatcloak swirled about him in the wind, and he seemed like a veritable god standing there. That left no doubt in Dyson's mind as to who was in charge here, even as he tried and failed to keep his eyes locked on the blue of von Mellenthin's.

The General motioned towards the ground, where a few of the other Zeon were gathering. Dyson obediently stepped down, a Zeon soldier with a pistol depriving him of his own sidearm when he reached ground level, then leading him towards another Federation soldier who was being covered by two other Zeon with machine guns. Dyson ran over and wrapped his wife in his arms, grateful to see her alive.

Von Mellenthin watched the display without speaking for several moments, though he gestured to the remaining Dom Tropen and it moved off from the group of Zeon suits. De la Somme hopped down and took a seat on the toes of his Gouf Custom, sporting an ear-to-ear grin but very sad eyes.

Dyson looked over at the Dom Tropen as it began to methodically chop Cramer's Guncannon Heavyarms into pieces with its long heat saber. "What are they doing?" he whispered into his wife's hair.

She turned to look, but shook her head, just content to be with him at what seemed like the final moments of their lives.

"In case you were wondering," mentioned von Mellenthin casually, "it's a ritualistic desecration of your commander's corpse."

"Why?" asked Angela Dyson, tears streaking down her face from both tension and sadness.

"In spite of everything we set against you, you still managed to kill three of my men. They demand the 'proudest prisoner of the Goths, that they may hew his limbs, and on a pile ad manes fratrum sacrifice his flesh before the earthly prison of their bones; that so the shadows may not be unappeased, nor we disturb'd with prodigies on earth.'" We don't exactly have a mausoleum, and the unfortunate Herschel Invictus Cramer has failed to survive living up to his middle name, so we must make do with what we can."

"Barbaric," snapped Dyson.

"'Patient yourself, madam, and pardon me'," said von Mellenthin, eyes cold but face aglow with a light that was visible as the sun rose on the horizon. He pointed to the still-smoldering Dom Tropen in the distance, and to a Kaempfer that seemed to have had some life left in it before succumbing to its own damage and exploding. "'These are their brethren, whom you Goths beheld alive and dead, and for their brethren slain, religiously they ask a sacrifice.'" Would you rather it be this way, or do I divorce you both in a fashion even the Catholic Church would not protest?"

They all watched as the Dom Tropen belonging to Inaba Ogun finished hacking Cramer's suit to pieces, then plant a grenade in the midst of the scattered bits and detonate it before striding back.

"Now that that is taken care of, my people can deal with the rest of your suits, as well as with our own dead. Are you wounded in any way? I regret we've no doctor, but we can at least make you both comfortable within the limits of first aid." Von Mellenthin seemed no more adverse to the treatment of Cramer's mobile suit than he would have been discussing a wine vintage.

Angela Dyson felt her husband shake his head.

"Very well, then. Behave yourselves while we clean up our mess and you will not be harmed. If you will excuse me for a moment, I have a service to attend to briefly. I will return, and then we will speak of many things." Von Mellenthin turned to face the forest. "You've made a complete mess of this place, all that ranDom firing. It will take decades to recover this portion of the woods."

"You'll kill a Federation officer in a crippled suit and not care, but you'll mourn over a tree?!" yelled Dyson at von Mellenthin's back.

The smaller man in the gray-and-gold uniform laughed from his perch at Lief Dyson's accusation. "Yeah, you'll get real far with that, cockknocker."

Von Mellenthin turned his blue eyes on the Dysons, their expression almost mocking. "These trees have outlived empires, just as they will outlive your Federation. I take solace in the fact that someone who loves these trees more than an Earthenoid sworn to defend them has clearly been the victor in this battle. You've just brought into focus exactly why it is you will lose this war, and that my cause is just."

The other man, who must be Antares de la Somme, smirked as he jumped off of his Gouf's foot. "If ya can't stand the pus, don't pop the zit." He shrugged his shoulders and ran to catch up to von Mellenthin, leaving the Dysons under the guns of their guards.

Bielefeld. Nordrhein-Westfalen, Central Europe

November 14, 0087

The last sound that came from the radio was a scream for help from the second hovertruck in Cramer's 103rd MI Company. It did not go unheard.

Titans Lieutenant Connor Horvath was the CO of Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, 54th Titans Tactical Armored Brigade, and he was not accustomed to listening to other Federation personnel just suddenly die. He wiped away the tears that were streaming down his face as the radio dissolved into static as dead as the people they had all heard on the speaker. It was so fast, from alive to dead, just like that. A snap of the fingers, a blink of an eye, like that.

Wiping his face with his black sleeve one more time, he brought the mouthpiece of his headset to his lips. "GO, goddammit! Take off, right fucking now!" he screamed into it, as his four platoon leaders jumped in their seats at the sound of his voice. Horvath had been silent the entire time, as they had listened to what they could hear of the 103rd's approach, plight, and final curtain call.

Horvath was a man of emotion as opposed to ration. In spite of Major Tizard's order to stay put in Bielefeld, holed up in the Garuda-class transport Avignon while sitting on the airfield awaiting the signal for takeoff, Horvath was not the kind of man to sit still while Federation personnel died and he was in a position to support them. A former Federal himself, he had joined the Titans because he had wanted to make a difference in the way people treated each other. An enforced pacifism by a just and moral organization seemed a better fate than the constant ins-and-outs of diplomacy, combat, armistice, more combat, more armistice, funerals, and nothing ever changing. He had believed the Titans to be the organization for that. 30 Bunch changed that, but it was too late to get out, so he started doing what he thought best in an attempt to change the outward scene the Titans were presenting to the very people they were tasked to defend. The group he had joined had turned out to be somewhat amoral in its actions, but he had sworn it would never be because of him.

Tizard had not bothered to share the aspects of his plan with Horvath, or even with Captain Palaccio, the 2nd Battalion CO, and Horvath had never met Herschel Cramer, but neither of those circumstances affected Horvath's take on the situation. For him, it was clear as night and day: there were Federation personnel getting killed, live, on the radio, and Delta Company was going to get them out of trouble and kill von Mellenthin all at the same time. Easy as that, never mind that Cramer had walked into the shitstorm with both eyes open and both cheeks spread, or that Tizard's whole scheme relied on each Company moving simultaneously at the right moment.

Thankfully for Horvath, his platoon leaders adored him, unlike their feelings for Palaccio, who was more inclined to spend his time with his nose up an ass than play in the mud with his people. Horvath was a hard-charger, who liked dirt and big guns and sweat and loved the people he was responsible for as much as he loved the cause he thought the Titans should be fighting for. They respected him because he respected them. In the best of all possible worlds, Delta Company would have followed Connor Horvath into Hell, which was what he had asked them for not three minutes ago when Captain Cramer lost control of the situation. A bit of strong-arming and some convincing later, the pilots of the Avignon taxied the huge machine onto the strip and took off, leaving the pair of Saberfish fighters behind.

"Set course for the last beacon location of the 103rd," he told the pilots, "best speed, please. We'll be combat-dropping right on top of them, so keep giving me the heads-up on ETA to target."

"Roger that, Captain, but we're going to have to set you down on the near side of the forest and you'll have to go the rest of the way on foot."

"Why's that?"

"If the Zeeks've got something that can waste a mobile suit company in that short a time, you think we're gonna risk this big-ass bird doing a direct flyby?"

Horvath nodded, closing his eyes and leaning his head against the back of his seat, grief-stricken at the loss of the 103rd. "Yeah, I get it. Do what you can, guys. And thanks for this."

"It's your call, Captain. We're just driving. ETA ten minutes to drop zone."

"Got it." Horvath removed the headset and rubbed his hair. "We're going to be too late, but we'll get the bastards."

"Sir," said Sergeant Nelson, CO of 2nd Platoon, "what're we gonna tell Major Tizard when we say we just killed his Zeeks for him."

Horvath stared Nelson in the eyes, his own red-rimmed. "That we did our job, Sergeant. It's all we can do. It's what we must do. I can't get it any more clear than that."

Nelson gave Horvath a thumbs-up. "No need to get clearer, sir; I can see through it real good."