I don't own anything except Ken DiFalco, his team, and Sophia DiFalco

I also do not own the Odin; it is Deathzealot's creation, and the credit is his, not mine

Archangel, Bridge, September 26th, C.E. 71

For a time, it seemed the universe itself was holding its breath.

First Arkbird plowed into Jachin Due, overloaded her reactor, and took Captain Lance Cooper and his entire crew with her into radioactive oblivion. Then Dominion appeared from the debris field that had once been the Fourth Fleet, took aim at Asmodeus, and blew her Bridge off.

No word had since been heard from the ship, and Captain Thomas Delaney was presumed dead.

Now, taking the matter-annihilating stream of antimatter meant for the Archangel, ZGMF-X00A Preybird had also been consumed... and Commander Kenneth DiFalco with it. His death, coming on the heels of the loss of two of his remaining Demons, was a blow to them all... none more so than their captain.

Murrue Ramius could only stare in horrified grief at the patch of space Preybird had occupied only moments before. All that remained there now were the shards of the machine's Gerbera Straight; evidently, Ken had used the weapon at the last moment to supplement his light-wave defense, buying the Archangel precious time with his own life.

"It... can't be..." she whispered. "You... you promised you'd come back to me..." Her vision blurred, and her head fell.

In CIC, Natarle fully understood what her captain was going through... and realized that she, as exec, needed to take command. "Continue fire on the Dominion," she ordered, voice only slightly tinged by her own sense of loss. "Bring that ship down, now!"

On the main screen, which still displayed Dominion's transmission, Muruta Azrael smiled wickedly. "Well, well, saved by the space monster... I can't say I'm pleased your ship is still holding air, but getting rid of DiFalco was worth the delay." He laughed cuttingly. "How pathetic, really. He sold his humanity to get him this far, and then sacrifices it all to give one ship a few extra moments of life. Truly pathetic..." His head turned. "Admiral, prepare to fire Lohengrin one more time."

"Yes, Director."

"I don't think so!"

Murrue's head came up at last, and her eyes widened in surprise, for seemingly out of nowhere came ZGMF-X10A Freedom, brother to Preybird, fully equipped with the METEOR weapons platform... and piloted by a man consumed by anger. "Kira...?"

"You bastards," Kira Yamato hissed over the radio, fury in his voice. "You just killed your only hope for survival; you have no idea what you've just done!"

Azrael snorted. "I don't know who you are, boy, but we don't need some unnatural bastard like DiFalco to 'save the world'. We can survive just fine on our own, thank you, and we might as well start by killing you, and then that ship DiFalco just tried to save."

"I don't think so," Kira replied coldly, and then said something Murrue never thought she'd hear him say."Because I'm going to kill you first..."

Lagrange Point Five, Near Jachin Due Remnants

Kira Yamato felt a cold rage grip him, the likes of which he hadn't felt since the first battle after Flay began manipulating him. Then, the rage had not truly been his own; but today, the fury came form within his own heart. "You just killed a better man than you could ever hope to be," he hissed over the radio. "Ken sacrificed himself for a cause he believed in, a cause worth believing in, and as long as people like him exist, you can never win!"

Ignoring the shouts now coming over the radio from Dominion, he swooped in toward the ship, firing salvo after salvo of missiles from the METEOR's many launchers; most of them were blown away by Dominion's Igelstellungs, but a number of them got through anyway, blasting small but numerous holes in the vessel's outer hull.

Azrael's flagship didn't take that lying down, of course. Emerald fire flashed out from the Gottfrieds, and Hamilton's helmsman desperately swung the ship around, trying to bring the remaining Lohengrin to bear. But even as the powerful weapons reached out for him, the pressures built in Kira's mind... until an amethyst seed burst behind his eyes.

His mobility enhanced by the METEOR unit Freedom rode, Kira wove a deadly dance through the fire and bullets; a streak of emerald light scorched right past Freedom's head, but he ignored it all, intent only on his target. The massive energy swords on the METEOR's arms flashed into existence, and he swept down in a mighty stroke at Dominion's hull.

From the radio, he could hear the curses of incredulous fury as his blade ripped down through Dominion's starboard Gottfried, the launch deck below it, and even the single remaining Lohengrin on the lowest deck. A massive explosion tore through the starboard side of the ship, vomiting debris, flame, and bodies into space... and the main hangar directly amidships.

Then Archangel got into the act at last, as an enraged Murrue Ramius gave the order to fire her own ship's Lohengrin. She would not deprive Kira of his share of Dominion's hull, but she would hurt those who had stolen Ken from her.

From Archangel's starboard leg, a column of antimatter fury ripped across space, smashed into Dominion's port side, and shattered laminated armor like brittle steel. Launch deck, Gottfried, missile launchers, Valiant... all gone, along with most of that side of the Dominion.

Then Freedom came up for its final run.

Dominion, Bridge

Muruta Azrael glanced around wildly, with fear-maddened eyes. "What's going on?" he demanded harshly. "How can they be doing this to us? It's not possible-"

"Pipe down, Director, please," Hamilton interrupted, actually cutting off his master mid-sentence. "Panic will not help us... not that anything else will, either," he conceded. "It's too late; the traitors have done too much damage for us to succeed now."

Azrael stared at him. "You're sounding remarkably calm for a man facing his own death, Admiral," he snarled, more in terror than anger; and, as if to prove his point, another explosion went off, apparently from the port missile tubes. "They're killing us!"

"Yes," Hamilton said with a calm nod, "they are." He smiled slightly, watching Freedom appear just outside the forward viewport. "You know," he went on, as weapon ports began to glow, "it's ironic, really. Charles died because he cast out his son, and Castor met his fate because of a man we all rejected, and turned to the Coordinator's side of things. Now we're about to go join them... and I think now, perhaps we deserve to. The weak will die off to make room for the strong... and really, it's just like with Charles' son: they bring the fight to us only because we brought the fight to them." He smiled at Azrael's stunned expression. "We all must face judgment for our crimes, Director. In the end, justice always prevails..."

Four beam cannons, two rail cannons, and a pair of plasma cannons erupted from a distance of less than two hundred meters, and one bigoted terrorist, one regretful admiral, and an entire crew of hand-picked Coordinator haters vanished from the face of the universe.

Lagrange Point Five, Near Jachin Due Remnants

Rau Le Creuset paused for a moment, his DRAGOONs falling silent, and Athrun finally had a brief respite. Staying alive long enough to blow up his own machine seemed simple enough in theory... until one considered how strong the safeties on the reactor were. He'd ripped most of them out, but it would still require a countdown to reach meltdown status, so he was grateful for the break... until he heard Le Creuset sigh in what seemed genuine regret.That doesn't sound good...

The masked pilot's words reinforced Athrun's sudden apprehension. "What a shame," he murmured. "Azrael, Azrael... what a disappointment you were. Still, it was a fitting end for you, killed in such a manner... and you deserve it, for depriving us of a proper conclusion."

"What are you talking about, Commander?" Athrun demanded, throat suddenly tight.

Providence turned back to him. "Unfortunately," Le Creuset said quietly, genuinely regretful, "it seems Azrael made a premature attempt to deal with the legged ship... and when he did so, Preybird got in his way." He shook his head. "A positron blast... evidently even Falcon's superior design skills didn't save his machine from antimatter. There's nothing left of him, now."

Justice's pilot felt his stomach clench. I wish I could assume he was lying... but that's not his style. Ugh, this is bad... now we've lost our best chance of stopping GENESIS, leaving only the option of trying to blast through all its phase-shift layers and basic armor... assuming we can even get all our remaining ships here. He closed his eyes. And I don't even want to think about how the Captain and Kira are feeling about now.

"It's just as well Azrael's dead now," Le Creuset went on, almost to himself. "If Kira Yamato hadn't killed him, I would have, for depriving the two of us of our final encounter..."

Athrun decided enough was enough, and it was time to take advantage of his former commander's apparent distraction. Feeding power to Justice's thrusters -and just incidentally increasing the strain on his reactor- he rushed forward, twirling his beam staff.

Le Creuset wasn't stupid; he turned his attention back to the battle at hand, and smiled. "Very good, Athrun; I can see why Falcon placed such trust in your skills. But I'm afraid today isn't the day you'll defeat me. If Falcon and I cannot finish each other, then it will be Kira or Mu who has that pleasure." With a laugh, his DRAGOON system came to life again, bracketing Justice in a web of emerald fire, and his Judicium rifle spat powerful bursts of energy toward him.

Athrun cursed, evading furiously, his machine dancing around in a pattern that would've made a Natural's head spin. Some of the beams ricocheted off his spinning blade, others splattered against his shield... but two got through. One hit precisely in the center of his twinned sabers' hilt, smashing it to pieces, and the other struck squarely between Justice's optics, melting through the armored head and then blowing it clean off.

The sudden loss of forward vision caused Athrun to fall away, unable to see where he was going. No! he raged inwardly. I can't die like this; not for nothing! If I could just last long enough for the reactor to blow... But that clearly wasn't going to happen now.

Le Creuset shook his head. "You are an excellent pilot, Athrun, and your skills rival even Kira Yamato's. Unfortunately, your Justice is simply no match for the divine wrath of Providence; my unit was intended to counter Falcon's ultimate weapon, and next to Preybird, even Justice is but a pale shadow." He smiled slightly, and aimed the Judicium. "Farewell, Athrun Zala... for now. I suspect I shall not long outlive you." His finger squeezed the trigger...

...And the powerful burst of emerald fire splattered halfway between the two machines, for no apparent reason. "Wha...?" Athrun wondered. "What could...?"

The masked commander frowned. "What happened? Oh, I see..."

Simultaneous with his realization came a burst of green fire from an invisible point less than a meter from where Providence's shot had vanished, and a call over the radio. "Get clear, Athrun!" Nicol Amalfi commanded, as his Raiden appeared out of the veil of Mirage Colloid. "Get back to the Archangel; Leanne and I have the Commander!"

"Nicol?" Athrun managed. "What are you...?"

"Go!" Nicol insisted. "If you hurry, you can get repaired in time to still affect the battle, but right now you're no good to anyone." He glared briefly at Justice. "And get your reactor cooling systems back up before you burn up, will you?"

"Ah... right... But..."

This time, it was Lacus' voice that came to him. "Stop running, Athrun," she said fiercely. "I know you blame yourself for what happened to your father, but killing yourself isn't the answer! If you want redemption, you have to live!" Her voice softened. "And too many people have already died today. Do you want the deaths of Captain Cooper and Falcon to be in vain?"

Athrun swallowed. "No, Lacus," he whispered. "No, I don't." He looked back at Nicol's machine. "Be careful, Nicol. Like she said... too many people have died today."

"Don't worry, Athrun," Nicol reassured him. "I'm not going to die here."

"Good." Turning Justice as smoothly as he could without proper visuals, Athrun hit his verniers and boosted away, noting as he did the presence of a slate-gray GuAIZ. That'll be Leanne, he thought, feeling a pang of grief. She must be hurting; she and Shiho are all that's left of the Gray Demons now. Captain Cooper, Captain Delaney... and the Commander...

Yes, Lacus was right: too many people had died for a victory that was not yet secure.

Sophia DiFalco choked back tears, having heard her little brother die. "Falcon..." she whispered. "No... why you? Brother, why you? This wasn't supposed to happen..."

She'd lost friends before; on the battlefield, that was inevitable. Many of them had died by Ken's hand at the First Battle of Jachin Due. More had perished at First Victoria, the Battle of El Alamein, and the First Casablanca Sea Battle... but this was different. This time, she'd lost her own brother. Though they were not related by blood, he was still the only family she had left... until now.

Lips curled in a snarl of impotent rage, the Victorian Kestrel turned Hyperion's beam submachine gun on the nearest enemy mobile suit. Almost as though her fury lent power to the energy weapon, the staccato burst of emerald darts ripped through the GuAIZ and blasted it into splinters. "Those bastards!" she hissed, throwing herself into the melee; as she did so, Hyperion's free hand snatched out a beam knife, and hurled it into a passing Strike Dagger. By this time, the two forces had melded into one gigantic furball, and it was the Earth Forces pilot's bad luck to happen by at that particular moment.

He exploded, but before Sophia could make another reckless attack, another voice broke through to her. "Watch it, Kestrel!" Mu La Flaga snapped, his gunbarrels spiraling out to put out a barrage of covering fire. "Don't be stupid!"

"You know what they did," she snarled at him. "They just killed Falcon!"

"I know that," he told her, eyes hard on her screen. "I know," he repeated more gently. "But no matter how many you kill, it won't bring him back to life... and if you keep this up, you'll just get yourself killed." His blue gaze locked on her emerald one. "Do you think Falcon would've wanted you to throw away your life like this, Kestrel?"

Sophia sagged in her seat. "No, Mu," she whispered. "No, he wouldn't."

"Then don't," Mu said gently. "And... let's make sure his sacrifice isn't in vain."

She swallowed, took a deep breath, and nodded. "You're right," she said at last. "But it may already be too late. This whole plan was predicated on having Preybird take a full charge from one of the power satellites, fly inside GENESIS itself, and pour a barrage of antimatter directly at the wall leading into warhead storage; the general idea, I guess, being to trigger a sympathetic detonation in the conventional warheads and so set off a nuclear chain reaction. But with Preybird gone, we don't have any mobile suit equipped with a weapon powerful enough to do that, which means the only recourse is to batter it to death, and that presupposes we don't lose any more ships..."

Mu smiled crookedly. "Well, look on the bright side," he suggested. "At least with Zala and Jachin gone, we can take our time with GENESIS; if we have to, we can wait until the battle's over."

Sophia shook her head. "I don't think it's that simple, Mu; if it was, Falcon would've attacked Jachin first, not GENESIS. Even Jachin, for all the protection that rock gave it, was nowhere near as durable as GENESIS and its phase-shift armor. I think he was worried about Zala setting up a deadman switch... and if Falcon was worried about it, I'm inclined to think he was probably onto something."

He winced. "Yeah, you've got a point there. So, what do we do? Try to fly in and take care of it ourselves? We've probably got enough firepower among the remaining mobile suits to do the job, but I don't think we could fit them all down that access tunnel..."

"I know. We'll just have to-"

The Kestrel's words were interrupted by a hyper-impulse blast that would've blown Hyperion clean in two, had she not instinctively raised the light-wave shield. A hyper-impulse cannon, Sophia thought, glancing around. It couldn't be one of ours; so it must be...

Mu cursed, as the culprit made its appearance. "The Raider," he said in disgust. "I was wondering where those guys were."

"You beat us at Orb and Mendel," Clotho Buer taunted, "but not today! Today those hourglasses are all going up in smoke, and you're gonna be terminated right along with them!"

Sophia raised an arm-mounted barrier, intercepting a burst of machine gun fire. "Look on the bright side, Mu," she said, throwing his own words back at him. "At least with Dominion gone, these guys have a time limit on how long their central nervous systems will last."

"And that might be comforting," Mu rejoined, "if not for the fact that they'll probably lose their minds before they die, and crazy people do crazy -and impressive- things."

Sophia shrugged, a distant corner of her mind grateful for the distraction. "Can't have everything," she opined. "Oh, come on; enough talk. Let's shoot him down."

Cagalli Yula Athha felt a spike of white-hot rage as her partner -her friend- fell at the hands of Muruta Azrael and his band of terrorists. That Azrael himself died only moments later did little to cool her fury, and a malachite seed burst behind her eyes.

"You bastards," she rasped, fully as angry as the day she'd found Athrun amidst the wreckage of the Aegis, and learned of what she had then believed a successful attempt on Kira's life. That day, she'd restrained her fury, refrained from pulling the trigger and firing the shot that would've avenged Kira's death by taking Athrun's life... but today, she was in battle, and had a legitimate target upon which to vent. "You'll pay for this!" Her IWSP-equipped Strike Rouge was already amongst the Earth Forces units, and now she chose to wreak her vengeance upon the comrades of those who had killed her partner.

The Natural pilots of the various Strike and Buster Daggers, as well as several clusters of mobile armors, stood no chance against the fury of a Berserker. Cagalli yanked out a ship-killing blade with Strike Rouge's left hand, while the right held the beam rifle that spat emerald death at the Alliance forces.

A Strike Dagger was blown to oblivion as a beam ripped straight through the torso, and another followed it into death when a nine-meter-long blade cleaved through its left shoulder, tearing through armor, hydraulics, and circuitry like it didn't exist, until the weapon came out the right hip. Along the way, the pilot died a bloody death, and his machine exploded spectacularly.

With those two out of her way, Cagalli turned her attention to the Peacemaker Force, only sparing enough attention to annihilate a Buster Dagger with her rail cannons before delving into the midst of the nuclear-armed Moebius units. "You're all nothing but murderers," she snarled, "and you'll pay for what you've done today!" Her rifle sent a steady diet of coherent light into the mobile armors, melting and shattering their light armor like tissue paper... until the moment one of her beams touched off a nuclear missile.

Cagalli's eyes widened as she realized what the sudden, tremendous light was, and she tried desperately to pull Strike Rouge out of the way. I'm not going to make it, she thought, mind racing, there's no time, I'm going to-

Three pairs of hands got hold of Strike Rouge's body, and thrusters from a trio of Astrays poured on power to pull them all out of range of the nuclear explosion, which grew ever larger as other weapons were set off. "Be careful, Lady Cagalli," Asagi Caldwell gasped, breathing heavily. "If we hadn't been there..."

"...You might've been fried," Juri Wu Nien agreed.

Cagalli swallowed. "Thanks, you guys," she said sincerely. "I... I don't think Ken would've been happy if I'd gotten myself killed so soon after he did..."

"Probably not," Mayura Labatt agreed. "I hear Commander DiFalco never did like for his plans to get messed up." She paused. "Orders, Lady Cagalli?"

"We're going after the Peacemaker Force," the Princess of Orb said firmly, knowing now what to do. "Ken sacrificed himself to stop all this, and I won't let it be in vain!"

Morgan Chevalier was, all in all, cautiously pleased with how the battle was going. For all that he was called the "Moonlight Mad Dog", he really wasn't a reckless sort, and it pleased him when a plan worked out at least sort of the way it was supposed to.

Not that everything is going according to plan, of course, he thought to himself, mood dampened as he remembered the most recent sacrifice. Losing the Commander like that... that could be bad. But at least everything else seems to be working in our favor.

Boosting hard to his right to dodge a beam blast, he retaliated against the unfortunate GuAIZ by opening up with his own beam rifle. An emerald dart briefly connected the two machines, and then the GuAIZ blew apart, Chevalier's precise shot having ripped into the energy battery.

"You guys are pathetic," he groused into his radio. "I may not be as crazy as my nickname says, but even I like a good challenge once in a while. C'mon, show your stuff, why don't ya?"

"I'm not sure you want me to take you up on that," a voice replied, "but if you insist..." A quick pair of beams scorched past, missing Chevalier's 105 Dagger by millimeters. "An ex-Earth Forces pilot, I presume? Off the Odin?"

"That's right," the Mad Dog confirmed, eyes narrow. "The name's Morgan Chevalier; not sure you could exactly call me True ZAFT, but we're what you'd call on the same page." His teeth clenched on a cigar he forgot he wasn't smoking, and he tilted his head. "And frankly, I'm not too happy with you people right now. Sparky Cooper was a good man."

"Brave," the pilot of the incoming orange GuAIZ admitted, "and he probably even had a point about Zala. But that doesn't mean I'm going to let you people run amok here; my loyalty is to the PLANTs." Appearing on Chevalier's communications screen, the blonde-haired pilot shrugged. "I'm Heine Westenfluss, by the way; it's an honor to meet the Moonlight Mad Dog."

"Charmed," Chevalier said dryly. "Funny... loyalty to the PLANTs is exactly why Commander DiFalco led this little uprising; kinda strange how that loyalty can be interpreted so differently by two different people, wouldn't you say?"

"The Commander was another brave man," Heine acknowledged, firing another emerald dart. "Misguided, but I happen to belong to the school of thought that says he was misguided, not deliberately treasonous; if your stolen Freedom hadn't already killed Azrael, I'd have been happy to do it myself." He chuckled. "I'll settle for you, instead, Earther."

Chevalier grinned, and deployed his gunbarrels. "If you can't get a real Earth Forces pilot, you'll take an ex-Earth Forces pilot instead, eh? Fine by me, Mister Westenfluss." The spiraling remote weapons began spitting emerald death, and the Mad Dog had to laugh. "At least this way, I won't be bored!"

"So," Le Creuset mused, watching the Justice retreat, "now I have the two of you to deal with? How fitting... another of my former pilots, and the last of the Gray Demons... So, Nicol Amalfi, how have you been? Last I heard, the Strike had cut you in half."

"I've been where I needed to be," Nicol shot back, catching a trio of DRAGOON-fired beams on his Trikeros. "I healed, and then I joined my cousin's conspiracy, because of people like you." He glared at the Providence. "What right do you have to throw away everything we've fought for, Commander?"

"Mankind has outlived its own moral authority," Rau informed him, dashing in close with beam saber activated. "The Ultimate Coordinator Project, Al Da Flaga's bid for immortality, the Bloody Valentine, Falcon's mad project... even Falcon's demise all point to the need for humanity's destruction... and its inevitability!"

Raiden stopped the saber with its own, and was flung back a dozen meters by Providence's sheer mass. "You're wrong," Nicol grunted, slicing at a DRAGOON that strayed too close. "And even if you were right, who are you to make that judgment, huh?"

"Only one other man ever had that right," Le Creuset told him, jerking his remote unit out of danger. "Only Falcon and I ever had that right, because of the circumstances of our respective genesis. We have that right... because weare the ultimate expression of mankind's depravity!"

"What about Kira?" the younger -and saner- pilot demanded. "If you're going to justify it that way, how come he doesn't have that right?"

"Perhaps he once did," the masked man said with a shrug, lining up his Judicium, "but he forfeited that right when he chose his path... one which, I note did not sit well with Falcon." He tightened his finger on the trigger...

...And the beam went wide, as Leanne's GuAIZ kicked him in the backpack from behind. "You have no right to talk about the Boss," she hissed. "If you hadn't used his creation this way, we would never have had to come here... and the Boss would still be alive. You bastard."

"Technically correct," he agreed amiably, aiming one of his DRAGOON pods backward. "But then, so was he, was he not? We're both just tools, people created not for our own worth but for the goals of others. Yet we both seized our own destinies, chose our own paths... and though our paths were not the same, they led us both inexorably to this point in time, when only one could live, and the other would die..."

"The Boss wasn't a tool," Leanne snarled, sideslipping to dodge an emerald dart from the DRAGOON. "He was used, yes, but he was never a tool!"

"Have it your way," Le Creuset said with a shrug... and the next blast tore through her GuAIZ's right arm.

"Leanne!" Nicol called in sudden fear, as his cousin's machine spun away, out of control. "Are you okay in there?"

"I'll... be fine..." Leanne grunted, struggling against the centrifugal force that pinned her in her seat. "Just... keep him off me... a few minutes..."

"I will," he promised. "You've gone too far, Commander!"

Le Creuset snorted. "She has nothing to fear from me now, Nicol; even now, I have nothing but respect for the Gray Demons. Besides, it would be far more fitting for her to die with the rest of humanity... consumed in the conflagration Falcon has paved the way for."

Nicol gritted his teeth. "You bastard!" he snarled, and rushed forward, saber blazing across space like a blade of fire...

Darkness...

That was a change from the unremitting light that was his last recollection. But... did that mean he was dead? It was much like the last time, when his machine had detonated around him. The Archangel, he thought. Did I succeed? Is she safe?

"You're not dead yet," a voice rumbled, and he opened his eye -or thought he did- to see the distinctive features of a huge man in a white uniform. "You can't die yet, Boss."

He blinked, unable to understand what his eye was telling him. "...Sparky? But... but you died, slamming into Jachin... If I can see you... then I must be dead, too." After all, only the dead could see the dead, right? That didn't exactly make logical sense, but he didn't really care, under the circumstances.

Sparky shook his head. "You're not dead, Boss, just unconscious. You're dreaming."

That didn't quite make sense, either, but then dreams usually didn't. "Then I will be dead soon," he said logically. "And maybe the better for it. I got us all this far; Kira and the others can take it from here, I'm sure. The kid's gotten good..."

"Idiot," another voice snorted, and he turned in shock to see a blonde-haired woman with malachite eyes staring at him.

"...Laura...?" he breathed.

"You can't die yet, Falcon," Laura Elsman told him. "You promised me you'd live... and you've still got things to do. Even if Zala and Azrael are gone, that's not the end of it. Have you forgotten that even Azrael had backers? Shiva was only going to be the first stage; after the war, there would still be LOGOS... and only you knew enough to be able to stop them."

"Paranoia," a third voice opined. "You're acting like a hero, Boss, but if you don't get your head on straight, everybody will be just as dead as the rats in that laundromat three years ago, because you never told anybody everything."

"Matt Russo," he whispered.

"You can't give up now, Falcon," yet another familiar voice said. "You gotta protect Mir for me, okay? And the Captain will never forgive you if you don't come back to her."

His throat tightened. "Tolle..."

"Go on, Boss," Sparky urged. "It's not over yet..."

He closed his eye again, now reminded of all the sacrifices it had taken to get this far... and of how his own paranoia would make them all meaningless, if he let himself die now.

"Go on, Falcon," Laura murmured, coming forward to stroke his face. "Go on... you can still have a life, with her... now go live it..."

"...Okay."

The voices and figures faded away, and there was light on the other side of his closed eyelid... and within, a seed exploded like a nuclear bomb...

Archangel, Bridge

"What's our status?"

By now, Murrue had managed to recover a semblance of calm, and had taken command once again. Ken's death had hurt her far more than she'd imagined it could, but she owed it to him to complete what he had set out to do, and she could hardly do it if she allowed herself to become an emotional wreck. Later, she promised herself. After the battle is over, you can collapse. Until then...

"The ships have rejoined the formation, Captain," Sai said in response to her question. "Odin has arrived to starboard, and Eternal and Kusanagi are to port. We're now reaching Jachin... I mean, we're now entering the space previously occupied by Jachin Due. We'll be in firing range of GENESIS within moments, Captain."

She leaned back in her chair with a sigh. "Good," she breathed. "The sooner we arrive, the sooner we can find out if Plan B will even work." She glanced back into CIC. "By the way, did you ever have the chance to figure out how Dead Zone reached as far as it did? If I remember right, during the Zantetsuken incident it only covered a few kilometers, and that only with the aid of several other jamming devices..."

"Actually, Captain," Sai replied, "I think I have figured it out. Remember, during Zantetsuken we only faced a few ships, and the technology was so new they'd only been able to fit Dead Zone on a couple of them. But that was a month ago, and this force was the one they were gearing up to use against the PLANTs themselves; as near as I can tell, every single ship in the Fourth Fleet was outfitted with Dead Zone jamming devices, all reinforcing each other, and thus expanding the range exponentially."

"I see," Murrue murmured. "That makes sense..." She frowned. "What's the status on the Peacemaker Force? I know Azrael ordered them launched before he died..."

"Mostly gone, Ma'am," he answered. "They encountered Commander La Flaga's team, and suffered heavy casualties; a few broke through, but several of our GuAIZ units are keeping watch near the PLANTs."

"Very good." All right, Ken... it looks like we have a chance of pulling off your plan after all...

"Approaching firing range of GENESIS now, Captain," Neumann reported. "It looks like they're in the process of replacing the alignment mirror... Romero, how's it look from your side?"

"Confirmed," Pal said after a moment. "It appears Zala left standing orders before he died, as ZAFT forces are continuing to prepare GENESIS for another shot. Also..." The weapons officer fell silent for several moments, scrutinizing his readouts. "There's something strange here; I'm getting a radar return from GENESIS that's not quite consistent with the blueprints Commander DiFalco downloaded into Archangel's database..." Suddenly, he stiffened. "Captain, I'm reading heavy defensive weapons' emplacements on GENESIS itself! Heavy beam weapons charging; they appear to have a power rating higher than our Gottfrieds-"

"Evasive maneuvers!" Murrue snapped. "Tell the other ships to scatter at once!"

As Neumann hauled back on his controls, Flay hurriedly passed the information along to the other surviving ships. If GENESIS was equipped with defensive beam emplacements, most likely with a nuclear power source, then it would take only a few shots to blow away any one of them...

Murrue's eyes clung to the screen throughout the high-g maneuver, and she winced as she watched the Eternal. Fast though she was, she wasn't the most agile ship in the fleet, and she pulled away just a little slower than the others. Most of the ship pulled out of the line of fire, but part of her upper deck was still in range when the massive burst of emerald fire leapt out from the side of GENESIS' outer shell.

"Captain Waltfeld!" she called, even before the explosion faded from her sight. "Captain, are you all right?"

The Eternal's Bridge appeared on screen a moment later, smoke-filled but otherwise intact. "We're still here, Murrue," Waltfeld assured her, coughing on the smoke. "A little cooked, but we're still okay."

Murrue sighed in relief. "Give me a damage report."

"We lost the main cannon," Aisha answered from being Waltfeld, consulting a display, "as well as the catapult and a good chunk of the hangar; some casualties, including three fatalities, but not many people were down there. We don't have any mobile suits left, so..."

Murrue nodded. "Good; but you'd better pull back, Eternal; with your main cannon and one METEOR destroyed, and the other in use by the Freedom, all you have left are missile launchers. Those won't do much against GENESIS' phase-shift."

"We know, Captain," Lacus told her, batting at smoke. "We're pulling out now."

As she spoke, the wounded ship poured power into her main engines, now using speed to escape the powerful defensive weaponry. She'd be out of the fight now, but at least she'd be alive... Which may be more than can be said for us, Murrue thought grimly. Now we've only the three ships to take up against GENESIS, and we've lost some of our weaponry, as well...

"Captain," Pal called, breaking into her thoughts, "that cannon is charging up again; this time it's targeting us."

"Thirty degrees left ascension, Arnold," she ordered. "Romero, get ready to-"

Before Murrue could finish the order, twin streaks of antimatter fire erupted from somewhere behind Archangel, scorching across space and smashing into GENESIS' antiship cannon. Emerald Gottfried blasts followed, wiping out several clusters of antiship missiles before they could even think of firing a salvo.

She blinked in confusion. "Where did that come from?" It wasn't Kusanagi; their weapons aren't that powerful; and it wasn't Odin. She only has the one Lohengrin, so who-?

It was an unexpected voice from the radio that answered her. "This is Captain Delaney, of the Asmodeus," it said. "Archangel, are you still intact?"

"Tom?" Murrue said in disbelief. "But... but you..."

He snorted. "Come now, Murrue, it'll take more than that to kill a Gray Demon. I got to the Bridge elevator just in time; managed to get to a lower deck before the Bridge got melted off." His tone turned grim. "I lost my entire Bridge crew there... but I've got a backup command staff in Auxiliary Control, and we've got the ship moving again." Tom's face appeared on the monitor, and he smiled savagely. "The Dominion made one mistake: she assumed taking out our Bridge would finish us. Unluckily for them, that's all they took out; engines and weapons are both still at one hundred percent, and the only armor we lost was on the top deck of the superstructure."

"It's good to see you, Tom," she said then, with an answering -though strained- smile. "Well, then, if that's your only problem, let's get to work."

"Yeah." Tom's voice became briefly bleak. "We... we can't let the Boss have died in vain."

Lagrange Point Five, Near Jachin Due Remnants

There was a bizarre symmetry to the battle between Raiden and Providence, as their blades clashed. Both used combined weapons systems mounted over an arm, and now both had the energy blades from those units activated, crimson fire arcing across space right at each other.

Le Creuset chuckled as their weapons collided. "I'll give you this, Nicol," he told his old subordinate. "You never give up. An admirable trait... but one that's going to get you killed today. You realize that, don't you? Realize the futility of it all? Even if you stop me -which I doubt you can manage- you'll still die when GENESIS fires, and the flames of war are fanned anew..."

"I'm not going to die here, Commander," Nicol shot back, Raiden's left hand reaching for one of the spears mounted on its back. "And we will stop GENESIS. With Chairman Zala gone-"

"Zala may be dead," Le Creuset told him, catching the phase-shift-tipped spear's thrust with his saber, "but Falcon's legacy lives on. Only Preybird could've have stopped GENESIS from firing, and with Falcon dead, all humanity will soon follow!"

"I won't let you do this, Commander!" Tossing aside the weapon -now useless, its tip cut off- Raiden opened fire again and again, spitting emerald energy at Providence. "We've spent too much blood getting here to let you win now!"

"Yes, you have!" the masked pilot agreed. "And your blood will be the next to be spilled!" His DRAGOONs set up a wall of green fire, inexorably advancing toward Raiden...

Nicol, in an uncharacteristic outburst, cursed vilely as the beams reached out for him. One leg vanished into melted scraps, his machine's head evaporated into free hydrogen, and one more precise blast tore through his right shoulder joint, blasting off the arm in a hale of shrapnel and depriving him of most of his weapons. "Why, you-!"

"Get out of here, Nicol!"

He turned his head in surprise. "Huh? Dearka? Yzak?"

"Go!" Yzak snarled, reiterating Dearka's command. "He's mine, Nicol! Get out of here before he kills you, understand?"

"He's ours," Dearka corrected, barely controlled anger in his voice. "I owe him too much, and I intend to collect on that debt." For you, Falcon, he thought to himself. And you, Laura... I'm sorry. I promised you I'd make sure he stayed alive, but I failed... I guess you're together again, now.

Nicol wanted to protest further, but knew his machine was too badly damaged. I shouldn't push my luck; last time, Kira almost killed me... "Be careful, guys," he said aloud. "The Commander's machine is dangerous; I think it was supposed to counter Preybird..."

"Don't worry," Yzak said darkly, as Raiden began to retreat. "We'll be careful." He remembered all too well what had happened to Duel on the two occasions he'd engaged Preybird in battle. The first time, he'd ended up a basket case, and the second time... Well, that was what had gotten him mixed up in all this to begin with.

Le Creuset slowly shook his head. "And so it comes full circle," he murmured. "First Athrun, then Nicol, now the two of you; all that's left is for me to encounter Mu La Flaga and Kira Yamato... a shame that Falcon can't be included in that list."

"Shut up, Commander," Yzak said harshly. "There's only one thing I want to hear from you: how dare you lead us into a trap, like at Alaska? How could you not tell us about the Cyclops? And," he added, opening up with his beam rifle, "why did you give the Earth Forces the N-jammer canceler data? And how?"

"That sounds like several things, actually," his former commander pointed out, intercepting the attack on his shield, "but one answer suffices for most of them. It's quite simple, really," he went on, raising a DRAGOON curtain of fire as Duel unleashed a missile barrage. "I was trying -and succeeding- to bring the war to the same point Falcon was. In a way, I simply helped along his objective: forcing this final conflict between both sides. Except that my final goal is not peace, but the destruction of our entire, corrupted race!"

"I don't care about any of that," Dearka said savagely, deploying his Death Blossoms as he drew the enormous zweihander. "Maybe I will later, but all that matters right now is that you drove my best friend to his death! I'll never forgive you for that, Commander!"

Le Creuset laughed. "If you think even the two of you together can defeat me, you obviously weren't paying attention when I was your commander... or to the power of Providence. Only Freedom and fallen Preybird could truly challenge me!"

"We'll see about that." Duel darted in, beam saber in hand, and once again the battle was joined.

"I can see why Kira and Athrun had trouble taking these guys down," Sophia commented to Mu, dashing sideways to avoid a blast from Raider's hyper-impulse cannon. "They may not be Coordinators, but they're still a real pain."

"Look on the bright side," Mu grunted, ducking the Mjollnir. "It's only one of them, and between the two of us -especially with that drug wearing off any minute now- we shouldn't have too much trouble." He took the offensive then, slamming his shield into the spherical breaker and forcing it away. "Question is... where are the other two? I don't see Calamity or Forbidden around, do you?"

The Kestrel spared a moment's attention to glance around, and her eyes narrowed. "I can see Forbidden," she said grimly. "Looks like he and Shiho just found each other; I wish her luck."

"Me, too," Mu murmured. "Don't want to lose another Demon..." Though Tom had turned up alive, they'd still lost Sparky and Ken today, and nearly his cousin Leanne... "But where is Calamity?"

"I don't- Look out!"

Both machines scattered to the side... and so did Raider, as a wild burst of emerald and red-orange fire streaked toward them from "above". GAT-X131 Calamity had arrived, fresh from blasting ZAFT machines to bits, and its pilot was laughing. "Ha, got ya, you losers! Come on and die!"

"Orga, you idiot!" Clotho snarled at him. "You nearly blew me away that time!"

"So what?" Orga Sabnak retorted. "Dominion's gone, so we're goners anyway; who cares if I shoot you down, too?"

"Why, you-!"

Hyperion and Strike turned to one another in disbelief. "Is this for real?" Sophia wondered. "Are they really talking about shooting each other?"

"Sounds like," Mu confirmed, equally bemused. "How on earth did they ever work together if they were ready to shoot each other at the drop of a hat?"

"Forget it, Orga!" Clotho snapped. "You wanna shoot me, you can do it later; right now, we've got two of those machines that kept bugging us before shooting at us, so why don't we get a little payback before we worry about the drugs?"

Orga blinked, and Calamity glanced at the True ZAFT units, as if only just noticing them. "Oh, yeah..." His face took on a predatory smile. "Let's get 'em!"

"Uh oh," Sophia said simply, seeing Calamity charge right at her. "This could be bad. Mu-"

"Busy," Mu said shortly, fending off an attack from Raider. "Wish I could help, but I'm a little tied up right now. If I can get this guy off me-"

"That may be too late," she muttered, and cursed as a blast from Calamity melted her beam submachine gun right out of her hand. "If something doesn't happen fast, I'm gonna be space dust!" Another blast narrowly missed Hyperion's head, and another came perilously close to her cockpit-

And it stopped.

From behind the distracted Calamity, another machine had appeared, energized a beam saber, and with one swift cut melted through Calamity's torso, right at the mid-level of the chest-mounted Scylla. With all weapons being on the upper half of the mobile suit, the Earth Forces unit was suddenly rendered helpless... and then that saber came back and jabbed straight through Calamity's cockpit.

There was a brief, chopped-off scream from Orga Sabnak, and then silence.

Sophia blinked, almost unable to believe her sudden reprieve, and then blinked again as she saw who her rescuer was. "Justice...? But... Athrun, I thought-"

"Murdoch pulled a fast repair job," Athrun explained, powering down his saber again. "All that was wrong with Justice was a missing head and sabers, and Eternal was carrying spares for both. Didn't take long to fix, really."

She snorted inwardly. Probably just a mechanic wanting to show us flyboys -and girls- how a real trooper works. Those guys at Victoria Spaceport were just like that... of course, there was also the guy who flipped out, stole a fighter, and flew off into Lake Turkana...

The Kestrel was jolted from her reverie by the sound of an angry snarl from Strike. "Mu, what's happening?"

"Oh, nothing much," Mu grunted, dodging below an attack from Raider's hyper-impulse cannon. "This guy's just- Give me a break, you bastard!" he interrupted himself, as Clotho lined up for a shot on Strike's cockpit. "I won't..."

As often happened on a battlefield, multiple things happened simultaneously: Clotho Buer's finger tightened on the trigger, his dose of gamma glipheptin wore off with agonizing suddenness... and behind Mu La Flaga's eyes, a blue seed burst.

Athrun whistled in wordless admiration as Strike threw its shield into the path of the hyper-impulse blast, used its verniers to thrust around to Raider's rear... and brought all four gunbarrels around to point directly at Raider's torso. They fired as fast as their capacitors could recharge.

Sophia raised an eyebrow. "Okay, I admit it," she radioed, taking in the sight of a pair of wings attached to a cloud of molten metal. "I'm impressed. I don't think I've ever seen a mobile suit reduced to looking like the Blob. So, what do you have planned for an encore?"

Mu started to answer, then cut himself off, as a familiar sensation filled his head You... so there you are. Now it's time to pay you back for everything... He wrenched Strike around, reeled in his gunbarrels, and jetted away from the other two mobile suits. "I'm going to go settle accounts," he said in response to Sophia's question. "I always figured Falcon would be the one to do it... but if he can't, I will."

Athrun watched him go, confused. "Where's he going?" he wondered aloud.

Sophia shook her head. "If I understood him right, he's going to go kill Le Creuset. I remember he and Falcon used to argue -not seriously, I always thought- about which of them would get to bring down Le Creuset. Falcon always said he had a prior claim, and that he felt it was something he needed to do for those he lost at Endymion... but it looks like Mu will have to do it instead." She felt the fresh pain welling up again. "Oh, Athrun, I can't believe he's gone..."

Athrun swallowed. "I'm sorry, Comm- ah, Sophia. I'm an only child, so I don't know what it is to lose a brother, but..."

"Technically, I'm an only child too," she told him softly, "but I know what you mean. And... Well, think of it this way: losing Falcon feels kind of like how you felt when you learned Kira had become your mortal enemy."

He winced. "I see..." Then he blinked, as he remembered something else. "Oh, yeah... what about the Forbidden?"

Sophia glanced toward where she had last seen the green Earth Forces machine and Shiho Hahnenfuss' blue CGUE DEEP Arms. "I don't know, exactly," she admitted, watching Forbidden stagger, and seem almost to go into convulsions. "But if I had to guess, Andras' gamma glipheptin just wore off, which means Shiho is about to be in for either an easy battle... or a really hard one." She closed her eyes. "I hope she makes it. Falcon's old unit is running low enough on people as it is..."

Beam saber clashed with beam claw, and Morgan Chevalier grinned. "Well, what do you know," he said to his opponent, absently wishing for a cigar. "A worthy adversary. I was starting to worry that all the good ZAFT pilots were on our side."

"Not all of our aces are as warped as DiFalco," Heine told him, pulling his claws away. "The man's brilliant, and I believe his intentions are probably good, but he must've taken one blow too many to come up with a course of action like this."

Chevalier snorted. "It's true he didn't exactly come out of his battles unscathed, but it wasn't head trauma that turned him against you guys. He just had a better idea than most how crazy Zala was... before Sparky Cooper rammed Arkbird down his throat, anyway." He cursed, then, as Heine's fire ripped into his upper right gunbarrel, reducing it to scrap attached to his mobile suit by a frayed wire.

The sudden change in mass and vector of the shredded gunbarrel, still tenuously connected to his Dagger, threw his machine off course, causing a slight spin that he had to fight. Have to jettison the wreckage, he thought, struggling with his controls. Compensate for the spin with the remaining gunbarrels...

The point became moot a moment later, as Heine came in close, beam claws powered up, and burned clean through the wire. "Can't have you losing that easily," he mocked. "Besides, I'd never have it said that I didn't best you in a fair fight."

"There's no such thing as fair fight," Chevalier told him, repaying the gesture by opening up with his rifle. The emerald dart tore across space and impacted on the GuAIZ's left arm, shattering the shoulder and melting through hydraulics like a hammer of fire. "Your own Commander DiFalco always said that, and that's how he lived... and died."

"Died is right," the ZAFT pilot agreed, eyes narrowed as he took in the loss of his arm. "I don't think he's coming back from this one; an antimatter blast is even worse than what happened to him at Endymion, last year." He sent out his grappler claws, even as the 105 Dagger's remaining gunbarrels spiraled in at him.

Chevalier tried to move aside, but the wires of two of the gunbarrels were severed by the sharp claws; they drifted out into space, intact but powerless. "Touche," he granted. "But his cause didn't die with him." As thought to confirm his words, off in the distance fire from multiple shipboard weapons streaked across space and slammed into GENESIS' outer surface. "We'll still win this, you know. The Earth Forces are practically out of the fight, and with Zala gone..."

"Unlike the Earth Forces, our pilots and ship captains know how to take the initiative," Heine informed him, not even blinking when a blast from Chevalier's rifle melted the crest off his GuAIZ's head. "We won't be defeated so easily."

"Ha; we'll see about that, won't we?" Yeah, Chevalier thought to himself, just as a beam shattered his rifle, we'll see about that... but I may not. This guy's good...

Heine laughed. "You're down to your beam sabers and a single gunbarrel, old man," he mocked. "I think it's time we ended this, don't you?"

"Yeah," Chevalier grunted, "let's." He reached up, drew a saber, and charged...

A charge that was promptly interrupted by a hale of bullets from "above" the battle. "Morgan!"

Both pilots looked up, and blinked almost in unison as Archangel's long-disused Moebius Zero dove toward them, wired gunbarrels spitting bullets as fast as they could cycle at Heine's GuAIZ. "Where'd that come from?" Heine demanded. "That hasn't been seen since-"

He broke off into a litany of curses as the projectiles smashed into his machine. First went its head, mangled beyond recognition, then his remaining shoulder was blasted into a million pieces, followed rapidly by crushing blows to the GuAIZ's legs.

Chevalier shook his head in confusion. "Alley? What are you doing here? I didn't know you even knew how to fly one of those things!"

"I was tired of sitting by on the Archangel every time you guys went into battle," Alicia Cateau told him. "And Commander DiFalco's death made me mad, so I decided it was time to do my part. When I saw that upstart ZAFT pilot about to blast you to atoms, I figured this would be a good time to intervene."

"Your timing's appreciated," he admitted. "But how'd you do it in the first place?"

She smiled a predator's smile. "I've been training on a simulator for one of these for a couple months now... and Commander DiFalco left a copy of the same program Dearka uses to control the Death Blossom system in the Zero's computer. Came in handy, no?"

"Perfect timing," Chevalier said again, and looked back at the now-retreating GuAIZ. "Well, it was a good fight, Mister Westenfluss," he called. "Till we meet again, eh?"

"Yeah," Heine agreed sourly. "Next time, though, you won't be so lucky."

Cateau looked at Chevalier's image with an odd expression. "Friend of yours, Morgan?"

He grinned. "Something like that, Alley. Something like that..."

"It's fortunate Providence is nuclear powered," Le Creuset mused, almost to himself, as he blocked a thrust from Duel and used his DRAGOONs to shoot down a missile spread from Buster. "Otherwise, I might've lost this battle of endurance. I am impressed, though, that so many of you hate me enough to kill me..."

"You led us into a trap at Alaska," Yzak snarled. "That would be enough for me. And how many of my comrades were sacrificed before that, huh? Was Heliopolis just another part of this?" Tossing aside his shield, he yanked out his other saber. "Were all the civilians who died there just expendable pawns for your insanity? Answer me, Commander!"

"I don't think I need to remind you, Yzak," his former commander said calmly, "that it was, in the end, Falcon himself who precipitated the collapse of Heliopolis. And I also should not need to remind you that, at the time, you were fully in accord with my intention of using heavy weaponry within the colony."

"That was then," Yzak retorted, thrusting his sabers at Providence's cockpit. "I didn't know any better then; but I sure do now!"

"At least you've learned something since joining Falcon's forces," Le Creuset said dryly. "You certainly hadn't learned anything by the time we destroyed the Eighth Fleet. After all, you personally shot down a shuttle full of civilians that day..."

That brought Duel's pilot up short for an instant. "What... what are you talking about?" he demanded hoarsely. "That was a troop transport..."

Le Creuset laughed, and took advantage of the distraction to move in a DRAGOON pod. "What? Your new comrades never told you? That was a military shuttle, Yzak, but it was actually carrying a load of Heliopolis refugees, from a lifepod Archangel picked up before fleeing the remains of the colony. They were on their way down to Earth, escaping the battle, when you chose to take your anger at the Strike pilot out on them..."

"No... it... it can't..." The moment's inattention, as Yzak struggled with a revelation he knew instinctively was not a lie, was enough for the DRAGOON emitter to unload a massive burst of energy at the Duel.

"Yzak!" Dearka shouted, seeing his friend's mobile suit vanish in smoke and fire... and then he smiled, seeing what had actually happened.

"You bastard!" Yzak snarled, as Duel hurtled out of the explosion. Its assault shroud had been destroyed, but Duel itself was largely unscathed, and now he charged Providence once more. "You... if you hadn't attacked Heliopolis like that, it never would've happened!"

"Deny your own guilt if you want, Yzak," Le Creuset retorted, "but it won't change the facts! You, like the rest of humanity, are a murderer! That's why the entire wretched species must be wiped out!" He lashed out with Providence's right foot, delivering a smashing blow that sent Duel spinning away.

"I won't let you," Dearka hissed. "Falcon died for this victory, and I won't let you take it away from us!" His Death Blossoms spiraled out, spitting rapid-fire emerald death at the rogue ZAFT unit. "You're the one who brought us to this!"

"Yes, and I'll be the one to finish it, too!" With almost absurd ease, the DRAGOON system targeted the Death Blossoms and pounded away at them, easily predicting the computer-controlled maneuvers and using those predictions to reduce the remote weapons to scrap. "Pathetic, Dearka. I expected better of you!"

"You haven't beaten me yet," Buster's pilot said through gritted teeth, and, brandishing the zweihander, charged directly at Providence. "I'll take you down, no matter how I have to do it, and no matter the cost!"

Le Creuset sneered. "You don't have what it takes, Dearka. Even your friend Athrun Zala couldn't stop me; what makes you think you can?" His massive Judicium rifle spat powerful bolts of emerald death, meeting Dearka's reckless, enraged charge with a barrage of destructive energy. "Just die, and be done with it! Even if you survive me, you won't survive the coming conflagration that will engulf the world!"

Yzak clenched a fist, watching Buster begin to take damage. First when the zweihander, smashed away at the hilt, then the pair of beam sabers stowed on the backpack. Another power bolt melted away Buster's head, and the final was going to strike the machine's cockpit...

...Except that by the time the blast arrived, Buster had been knocked aside by another machine. "I don't think so, Le Creuset!" Mu La Flaga snarled, releasing the Buster and turning to face Providence. "We've come a long way, you jackal, and it's time we finished it!"

Le Creuset smiled broadly at the appearance of the Strike, and laughed heartily. "Why, Mu La Flaga! Such a pleasure it is to see you again. How long has it been, since last we met... It was at Mendel, wasn't it, the day I revealed to you what I am... son?"

"You're not my father," Mu hissed angrily. "Yzak, Dearka," he added, glancing to the side, "get out of here. This bastard's mine." Falcon's not here to see it through... so I will. For you, brother... and for all who died because of this madman's insanity.

"All right," Yzak said reluctantly. "Dearka, come on; let's get you back to the Archangel. You're in no shape to continue the fight."

"...Yeah..." Dearka sounded weary, as though it had been he that had taken damage, not Buster -though the lost hit had caused a minor explosion in his cockpit, cracking his faceplate and opening the scar Mir had given him months earlier- and as though his anger had left him drained of everything else. "Yeah, let's go back..."

"I won't be there for long," Yzak informed him. "This may be Commander La Flaga's fight, but I still need to do something... and I think that Sutherland guy Commander DiFalco mentioned is still alive." He smiled briefly. "Don't worry, I don't intend to die here; for one thing... I need to know if what Le Creuset said is true. About the shuttle, I mean." That would explain the weird looks people kept giving me when I first joined up, he thought. If I really did that... then maybe I owe Kira an apology...

Shiho Hahnenfuss found herself hard-pressed, in a way she hadn't been since her time with the Gray Demons on the Grimaldi Front. This guy's crazy! she thought to herself, fending off a scythe attack from the Forbidden. He's completely lost his mind...

That was certainly true; within Forbidden's cockpit, Shani Andras was going out of his mind, literally... and not very quietly. His dose of gamma glipheptin had worn off, and without any way to get more, the pain was driving him mad. "I'm gonna kill you all," he snarled insanely. "The pain, the pain, the pain...!" He triggered a blast from his plasma cannon, forcing the DEEP Arms to dodge to one side.

"I guess I drew the short straw today," Shiho muttered to herself, unleashing a burst from her beam cannons. "If this guy were in his right mind, I might be dead now. A mass-produced model against one of the Alliance's G-weapons..."

"You're all gonna pay," Shani went on mindlessly. "You... and you... and you...!" Exactly who he was referring to was unknown, but a passing Moebius -one of the last of the Peacemaker Force- was abruptly immolated by another plasma bolt.

The next hit a less fortuitous target, and Shiho cursed as her left beam cannon was simply melted out of existence by the incredibly hot blast. "Okay, now I'm getting tired of this," she muttered. "One of us is going down, Natural, and it's not going to be me, understand?" Abandoning her cannon attacks entirely, she tightened the CGUE's grip on the antiship blade, twin to the one Ken DiFalco had long ago stolen from Victor Tempest's unit... the one which had eventually been destroyed when Tolle Koenig made his final, futile attack on the Aegis, months before.

Making the dash back into melee range of Forbidden wasn't easy; completely devoid of any sense, Shani was pumping out bolt after bolt after bolt of plasma... but that very mindless persistence proved to be his downfall, when only moments later that constant firing had its way with his machine.

In the instant before the repeated use of a weapons-grade plasma device ran Forbidden out of power, the sheer rate of fire overheated the plasma cannon, and an explosion ripped through it, spewing debris and a final gout of flaming plasma into space.

Now's my chance!

Before the insane Earth Forces pilot could figure out what to do -or even notice he was still attempting to fire a weapon that no longer existed, Shiho brought the laser sword around in a fierce arc, slicing completely through his scythe. Then, continuing the motion, she ripped it right through Forbidden's midsection.

Shani Andras had an instant to realize he'd just been cut in half, and he began to scream... and GAT-X252 blew apart, sending chunks of debris and shrapnel everywhere.

The last of the Earth Alliance Forces' state-of-the-art mobile suits had been destroyed. Now, the only true factors left on the battlefield were the remnants of the Earth Forces' fleet -held together solely by Rear Admiral William Sutherland's grim determination- GENESIS, and ZGMF-X13A Providence and its pilot, Rau Le Creuset.

"I'm glad to see you, Mu," Le Creuset admitted, as Strike faced off in front of him. "Much as I appreciated the chance to see off my former subordinates, our connection goes back much farther. If it's our fate to die here, it would be quite fitting if we were to do the deed to each other."

"Funny," Mu said cuttingly, "I thought you said the same thing about Falcon; or were you just lying, like you always do?"

"Oh, it was true enough; but as he's dead, you'll have to do." The masked man laughed. "Come now, Mu, don't tell me you haven't dreamed of this day just as I have! Ever since the first time we met on the battlefield, at Endymion Crater, you've longed for vengeance. Don't try to deny it!"

"I don't," the Hawk of Endymion bit out. "I always wanted to take you out; but it should've been my brother here, not me! You drove him to this, and you know it! It was you behind it all, orchestrating all of this -even GENESIS- to bring about your own twisted end!"

"Maybe so," Le Creuset conceded, "but this is in fact human nature! To be the strongest..." His Judicium opened up, sending a powerful bolt at the Strike. "To go the farthest..." His saber ignited, and he boosted forward, swinging the blade of frozen fire. "To climb the highest!"

Mu jerked back, and sent his gunbarrels spiraling out. "Is there a point to all this nonsense?" he demanded. "Or are you just spouting off?"

"You mean you still don't understand what I'm getting at?" Rau shook his head. "Come on, Mu, you should understand by now! Mankind cannot hope to live in peace; we're always biting at each other, trying to prove one man is stronger, faster, better than another. We are incapable of living together in harmony. Even Falcon recognized that!" He sent out his DRAGOONs, spreading out the same web of laser fire that had caused Providence's other opponents to fall today.

"Falcon was always a world-class pessimist," Mu grunted, throwing Strike into a crazy corkscrew of evasive maneuvers. "He called it realism, and maybe it was, but he wasn't always right, and I'm not about to agree that you are, either!"

"Ah, but today, I am, Mu," Le Creuset told him. "How many of your comrades have fallen today, hm? Most of your GuAIZs, a number of your Orb allies... the entire crew of Falcon's Arkbird, and even Falcon himself. It's an endless cycle, Mu, and your actions today will be merely a part of history's endless repetitions!"

"Only if I don't stop you leading us all down this twisted path," Mu snarled... and snarled again as a laser beam pierced Strike's left foot, blowing it off. "Ha! You think that'll be enough to stop me?"

"It's certainly a start, isn't it?" Laughing, Le Creuset fired off another burst, while dodging one of Mu's own gunbarrels. "And by the way," he added, "I've already proved once today that wired gunbarrels are useless against divine Providence!" To prove his point, several emitters targeted one of Strike's gunbarrels, and poured a massive barrage of energy into it. For a moment, it almost seemed to melt, and then it detonated explosively, hurling blobs of molten metal into space, where they instantly froze in the endless cold of absolute zero.

That bastard, Mu thought to himself, hurriedly detaching the cable -which, no longer attached to a counterweight, threatened to warp around his machine in a dangerous fashion- and throwing the other three gunbarrels into an evasive pattern. His skill is unreal; even with the SEED, I can't hit him, and neither could the others. It's like... it's like fighting Falcon. What is it about those two?

"Ha!" Rau laughed. "It's like I told Yzak; only Freedom and Preybird ever had a chance of stopping me, and only Falcon ever had the will!"

"Kira might surprise you," Mu grunted, as another gunbarrel shattered under the withering rain of fire. "I think Falcon taught him a lesson before he died; but that's not going to matter, because- ahh!" Another DRAGOON beam pierced Strike's torso, setting off an explosion that carried into the cockpit. Mu's cry of pain was forced from him as his instruments exploded, peppering him with fragments.

Le Creuset laughed yet again. "See, Mu? I told you that you couldn't win! Now you can just-" He broke off suddenly, as a familiar sensation entered his head. "That's-"

A burst of beam cannon fire scorched across space toward him, forcing him to throw Providence to one side. "Get away from him!" Kira Yamato shouted. "This is between you and me, Le Creuset!"

"K... Kira..." Mu coughed. "What... are you...?"

"Fulfilling a promise I made to a friend," Kira told him, as his METEOR came between Providence and crippled Strike. "I promised Falcon that if anything happened to him, I'd finish his mission, and that's what I'm going to do. Sometimes, if there are things in this world you want to protect, you have to fight for them!"

Rau Le Creuset couldn't help but smile. "Well, well, well... a true battle at last, hm, Kira Yamato? You may at least have the strength to damage me... which will at least make my death interesting!"

Earth Forces Agamemnon-class Battleship Doolittle, Bridge

Rear Admiral William Sutherland simply couldn't believe the disaster this battle was becoming. They'd come to the PLANTs with a full three orbital fleets, along with the Dominion, the three G-weapons, and the Peacemaker Force. They'd blown up everything in their path, culminating in the nuclear bombardment of the asteroid fortress Boaz. Right about now, they ought to have been celebrating their final victory over the PLANTs and the hated Coordinators.

Instead, Fourth Fleet was completely gone, annihilated by the weapon of mass destruction Azrael had identified as GENESIS, Fifth and Seventh Fleets had taken heavy casualties, the Peacemaker Force was effectively wiped out, and even Dominion had been brought down by the traitorous Archangel.

"What do we do, Admiral?" his second in command asked. "The PLANTs are rallying; even with Jachin Due and Zala gone, they've got a large force... and True ZAFT is becoming an ever-greater threat. How do we counter them all, Sir?"

"Be quiet a moment," Sutherland snapped. "I need to think."

It's a good question, he admitted to himself. Had Dominion still existed, he'd have passed the decision up to Director Azrael; as it was, the difficult choice was in his hands now, and he honestly wasn't sure what to do. We can't surrender to those space monsters, he decided. No matter what happens, we won't give them that satisfaction. Still... we lack the forces now to bring this to a successful conclusion. If we stick around much longer, we die...

"Send out orders to retreat," Sutherland said at last, voice sounding nearly as dead as Azrael himself now was. "There's nothing more we can do here. We'll have to regroup, and come back another day."

"Yes, Admiral," his communications officer acknowledged. He didn't sound happy about it, but he was no dummy, either. ZAFT -and, perhaps even more so, True ZAFT- had won this battle. That did not mean, however, that they had lost the war. "Sending out orders-"

"Admiral!" the detection officer interrupted. "Mobile suit incoming; direction zero-zero-zero! Detecting armed weapons-"

Sutherland himself gasped audibly at the sudden sight, as GAT-X102 Duel rose before the forward viewport. "By all that's holy..." he whispered, eyes wide as he took in the face of something he and his organization had intended to make use of themselves. "That's..."

"I know you're there, Admiral Sutherland," Yzak said over the radio. "Commander DiFalco told me about you; and he also told me he really, really wanted to kill you after the Board of Inquiry back at Alaska. Well, he's not here... and I always enjoyed dealing with Earth Forces scum like you." Duel raised its rifle, and Doolittle's Bridge crew took in the sight of the grenade hanging just below the rifle barrel. "It's over, Sutherland. For all of you."

"For the preservation of our blue and pure world..." Sutherland whispered, and the grenade exploded from the rifle, punched through the forward viewport, tore through deck and deckhead alike, and ground to a stop at Sutherland's feat... just before detonating.

Even had enough of the Doolittle survived to identify the ship, it would've taken years to identify William Sutherland's body.

Lagrange Point Five, Near Jachin Due Remnants/Archangel, Bridge

"You're the one to blame for all this," Kira snarled, opening up with all four of his METEOR's beam cannons. "You brought us to this!"

"On the contrary," Le Creuset replied, turning and boosting away, toward GENESIS, "your presence here has little to do with me. It was mankind who brought themselves to their inevitable end... and it was Falcon himself whose manipulations brought you here!"

"Ken made a lot of mistakes," Kira acknowledged, "and never told us as much as he should've, but he only brought us here to stop what you set in motion, by perverting his work! He was a better man that you could ever hope to be!"

"It's true that Al Da Flaga would've been delighted with him," Rau admitted, glancing back to fire his Judicium. "Falcon was the son he'd always wanted; and better yet, unlike me, he suffered no genetic defects. A perfect specimen, a fitting successor for that arrogant man. Too bad they never had the chance to know each other!"

"And it's your fault!" Kira shouted, igniting and swinging a beam sword. "I heard it was you who started the fire that killed Mu's parents; and if it weren't for you, Ken wouldn't have come here, and he'd still be alive!"

"That's my only regret," Le Creuset told him. "I would've wanted to have one last confrontation with him, before the end. But if I cannot have that, the destruction of all humanity will do nicely!" He swung out Providence's right arm, indicating Earth. "You see, Kira? GENESIS' next target is Earth itself; once that machine fires, everything will be over! Everything!"

"Not if I stop you first!" The METEOR rolled, spinning through yet another web of laser fire, and a salvo of missiles poured from its launchers. "I won't let you destroy everything we've worked for!"

"Ah, but you're nothing more than an irritant, a pest! You're someone who should never have been allowed to exist, boy!" Rau smiled cruelly. "Do you really think you'd have survived this long had Hibiki not made you what you are? Do you think you can just return to society when all this is over, with none the wiser? Think again!"

"I'll use my abilities to stop you, Le Creuset," Kira snapped, as a DRAGOON-fired beam tore into the left arm of his METEOR. "But they don't define me! I'm a human, not just the leftovers of an experiment!"

"And who's going to believe that?" Le Creuset demanded. "Who will accept that you are anything more than the last relic of a twisted dream? When people learn of your existence, they'll envy you; and when they realize they cannot acquire your abilities, that envy will turn to hate! There's nowhere in the world you can hide from that kind of hate, Kira! Blue Cosmos and those like them will never stop hunting you!"

"Even if it's true, it doesn't matter!" Freedom's pilot shot back, along with another beam barrage; but the energy surge was too much for the METEOR's battered left arm, and he was forced to jettison it just before it ripped itself apart. "No matter what happens to me, I'll do what's right... even if I have to die!"

"Admirable sentiment," Le Creuset sneered. "But what use is it if you die without even accomplishing your goal?" He unleashed green fire from his DRAGOONs, tracing a line of bright emerald death toward Freedom. "Death in vain is nothing more than life wasted!"

"This won't be in vain," Kira grunted, throwing his METEOR to one side of the barrage and retaliating with both smaller beam cannons and the remaining larger. "We've already won, Le Creuset!"

"Nonsense! Zala lived long enough to initiate GENESIS' firing sequence; all Cooper's sacrifice did was buy you a little time and deny you the ability to stop GENESIS from firing!" Rau smiled cruelly. "Only Falcon knew the full details of that machine's design, but even I know that there was only the one set of controls. No matter what you do now, GENESIS will fire a second shot!" He boosted agilely away from the rain of fire, and triggered his Judicium. The pulse of emerald fire arced across space, impacting precisely on the muzzle of the METEOR's surviving one-twenty millimeter beam cannon, traveling all the way down the bore and blasting it to pieces.

"We're not finished yet," Kira fired back, tossing away the METEOR limb before it could hamper him further. "That's one thing about humanity that you just don't understand: we never give up, and that's why we will survive!" Both of his smaller cannons fired, along with Freedom's plasma cannons, and he drew his beam sabers. I hope this works the way it always did for Ken...

Le Creuset would've ignored the attack completely, except that one of the powerful plasma bolts scorched past Providence and wiped one of his DRAGOON emitters from the universe. "Impressive, Kira Yamato! Perhaps you have a point about humanity's tenacity... but their willingness to throw it all away as did your mentor will always be their downfall." He laughed. "Or it would be, except that today will be humanity's final downfall!"

"You're wrong!" As the other DRAGOONs fired, Freedom's sabers moved in a way much like Ken DiFalco had manipulated his own weapons, time after time, catching laser blasts and deflecting them back into space. "Anything built by human hands can be destroyed; GENESIS is no exception!"

"Maybe so, but only a nuclear attack could stop it now, and thanks to your own efforts, there aren't any nuclear weapons around to do the job." Rau smiled in cynical amusement. "The existence of GENESIS, the repeated use of nuclear weapons... it all points in the same direction, Kira: it is human nature to fight with one another, destroy and devour one another!"

"That's garbage!" Another beam came at Freedom, only to be deflected back at Providence; this time, it smashed right into the emitter that fired it, shattering another DRAGOON pod.

"Is it? You and Falcon proved it, Kira, when even you were moved to open fire on one another! In this world, even comrades cannot truly trust one another!"

"We made a mistake," Kira acknowledged. "We didn't understand... but we learned from that, Le Creuset! Humanity learns from its mistakes, but you never do!"

"Of course not!" Le Creuset agreed readily. "After all, I can hardly learn from the 'mistake' when everything I see of humanity just confirms my opinion of them!" His nine remaining DRAGOONs darted in, pouring a murderous conflagration of energy into the METEOR's engines.

Kira cursed, hastily abandoning the weapons platform, and began to understand why Ken had preferred to simply equip his mobile suit with as many weapons as he could, rather than relying on a separate unit. "It's your crazy logic that tells you that," he told the masked pilot, twisting around another blaze of emerald fire. "Maybe if you weren't insane, you'd see the real world, instead of your own delusions!"

"There's no difference between illusion and reality to the person experiencing it," Le Creuset pointed out. "As far as you know, you might be the one with the delusion!"

"Psychological warfare," Kira could almost hear his dead mentor saying. "Let is get to you, and he's won the battle even before the killing shot. Ignore it, or turn it to your advantage."

"What's real is what's right in front of me," he said firmly, shoving the insane man's words to the back of his mind. "What's real is that I have to stop you, no matter the cost to me!"

By now, their battle had taken them close to the Archangel. "Oh, really?" Le Creuset laughed insanely. "What about what it might cost your friends, hm? Did you ever consider that? Falcon is already gone... so let us now send his flagship to the next life to be with him!" He spun around, and his DRAGOONs suddenly ceased their attack on the Freedom.

It took Kira a moment to understand his enemy's intention, and then his eyes widened in horror. "No! You can't- I won't let you-"

On Archangel's Bridge, Murrue was about to order another -probably futile- barrage against GENESIS when the two mobile suits flashed by. Then one of them came back, and she gasped. Providence's massive Judicium rifle was pointed directly at the viewport, with the DRAGOON emitters grouped to either side. Oh, no, a distant corner of her mind thought in almost detached fear. He's going... I guess we'll be together soon, Ken...

I always wondered if I'd know when I was about to die, Natarle thought, oddly calm. Now I know: yes. Like many members of my family before me, I die in battle...

Mir sat frozen in her seat No... not like this... I'm sorry, Dearka. I thought you'd be the one at risk, but it was me... She swallowed. Hey, Tolle... I'll be seeing you soon...

Providence's rifle began to glow, and Rau Le Creuset smiled. A pity, really; they came so far, only to have it end so easily... and pointlessly...

An emerald flash brightened the viewports, and Murrue Ramius prepared herself for death... until she realized she should've been dead in that instant. "What...?" Her eyes widened, for the emerald fire was far brighter than even the Judicium's discharge should've been, and it came from starboard... in the form of forty streaks of light.

Providence flung itself backward, and Le Creuset's eyes went wide with shock and disbelief as a familiar, impossible sensation filled his mind. "What the- Impossible!"

Nearly a kilometer out, but closing fast, came a shimmering shape, emerging from the curtain of Mirage Colloid with a beam saber in either hand and ten remote beam emitters circling it. "I died once already," Commander Kenneth "Grimaldi Falcon" DiFalco snarled. "I can't die twice!"

The Bridge crew looked at each other in disbelief, and Murrue gasped audibly. "Ken...? It... it can't be... I watched you die..."

But it was. Both arm-mounted light-wave generators were sparking ruins, several patches of phase-shift armor looked as though they'd been boiled off, but it was indisputably ZGMF-X00A Preybird that emerged into full view, DRAGOON system giving Providence a taste of its own medicine. "Sorry I'm late," Ken told Murrue, his face appearing on the screen. "I was out of it for a while there, but now I'm back."

His flightsuit was scorched, and his faceplate shattered, blood trailing down his face, but there was a grim smile on his face... and he was alive...

Le Creuset's expression went from disbelief to a wide smile. "Falcon! I should've known you were too clever to be killed so easily. It's good to see you... Brother."

"Save your breath," Ken advised. "You're no brother of mine... and you'll need all your breath if you want to last any time at all." He glared at his long-time nemesis. "Today, it ends, Rau... no matter what."

Behind Murrue, the Bridge elevator opened, and Sophia -who had landed not long after the destruction of Calamity and Raider- entered, supporting an injured Mu. "Falcon..." she breathed. "You're alive..."

Mu's face broke into a smile. "He's the one, no doubt. The Ace of Aces."

Preybird and Providence stared at each other for a long moment, and Ken smiled thinly. "I'm not through yet," he whispered.

Alicia Sharpe... Matt Russo... Victor Tempest...

The tableau shattered suddenly, as Preybird's antenna emitted a narrow beam of red light; most of those watching recognized the effect, especially when the DRAGOON units returned to the wings

Rudolph Krieger... Montgomery Campbell... Yoshinori Nogura...

The white column came back along the beam's path, but this time there was something about the result that bothered Sophia. It seemed... more intense... something that was confirmed by the way the power receptor surfaces actually glowed.

Tatyana Iosefova Sokolov... Petra von Strasser... Eric Tellerman...

"Falcon, you're crazy," Sophia said desperately, now understanding what was happening. "You're overcharging the systems; you could blow apart-!"

"I don't have a choice," Ken told her quietly, throwing Preybird into motion... toward GENESIS. "It takes a massive energy bombardment to break through; even the amount of power I normally funnel through isn't enough." He bled off some of the new energy into his thrusters, powering toward an access hatch. "Archangel, target that hatch for me; I don't have any weapons left that'll open it in time."

Talia Corialis... Laura Elsman... Lance "Sparky" Cooper...

"This is for all my men who fell before me!" he called, his eyes wide and clear, and Pal didn't even wait for further instructions before firing a Gottfried burst at the access hatch.

"I can't let you do that, Falcon," Le Creuset said calmly, throwing Providence into the chase. "No, I'm afraid I cannot permit you to destroy your creation!"

"Godspeed, Ken," Murrue whispered, as the two machines vanished into the interior of the vast weapon called GENESIS. "Come back to me..."

"Come back to all of us," Sophia agreed, choking up. "How did he do it, anyway? He took a positron blast full force... we saw him dissolve under the bombardment. Nothing could've survived that!"

Mu smiled slowly (and painfully, given his wounds). "We saw him dissolve, all right," he said wearily, "but we all forgot that Mirage Colloid has the same visual effect. He must've been trying to make it look like he was dead, throw the enemy off guard; probably intended to tell us by tight-beam once he was clear, but got knocked out by an explosion. Probably when his light-wave barriers shorted out."

"It must've been the Gerbera that bought him enough time to wait out the positron stream," Kira put in. "That thing was pretty tough; it would've taken an antimatter blast to break it like that. With the trans-phase armor he added, nothing short of a meteorite could've broken it kinetically."

"I don't care how he survived," Murrue murmured. "Just that he did..." And now, we both have something to live for. So please, Ken... stay alive...

GENESIS, Interior

"We've come too far along this path for me to let you stop GENESIS, Falcon," Le Creuset called. "We've reached the end of the path; this is what deserves to happen to humanity, and you know it as well as I!"

"You're wrong, Rau," Ken retorted, clashing one of his sabers against Providence's as they flew into the long tunnel. "I made mistakes; I'll be the first to admit that. My folly with Kira nearly cost us both our lives, and my single-minded drive to reach this point in time, convinced that this was the only way, nearly cost us everything. But this is not how the world is meant to end; and if it is, then I'm going to change it!"

"You can't change Fate, Falcon," Rau disagreed, clashing with one of Preybird's blades while the other scored a hit against his left leg. "Nobody can, not even you!" His DRAGOON system opened up, trying to hit Preybird's wings.

"We'll see about that." Ken spun around, his momentum still carrying him inward, and chopped down with his saber; the blade of molten fury carved through a DRAGOON pod, ripping and tearing it apart. "I don't believe in Fate, and what I don't believe in can't bind me!"

"So if you don't believe in gravity, you can fly like a bird?" Le Creuset chuckled. "On the other hand, perhaps you can, Falcon; you truly are the wind, personified... and I'm truly impressed by your skill. Besides you, Kira was the only opponent that was actually able to damage Providence!"

"You can't defeat me, Rau," Ken said flatly, even as another DRAGOON pod shot off his right foot. "I have something you never will: the will to live, to bring this all to an end, and the instinct to survive."

Another DRAGOON pod fell victim to Preybird's blades, and Le Creuset shook his head. "We've reached the end of the path, Brother. It's too late to stop what is happening." He checked a timer on his display. "We have only a couple of minutes before GENESIS fires; do you really think you can stop it in time?"

"I designed it, I know how to stop it." Ken grinned ferally. "And a couple of minutes is plenty of time for me to deal with you. You're not as good a pilot as Kira, and I survived even him!" His Picus CIWS fired with unerring precision, and another DRAGOON turned to space dust.

"But can you survive the fury you're about to unleash?" Rau wondered, hardly caring that he was down to only six emitters. "You know the power that will be released when you fire that weapon in here!"

"If it kills me, then so be it! This was my sign, and this is my atonement; I'd rather live, but death in this cause is not too high a price to pay!" His left leg was abruptly melted off at the knee, but he didn't even care; he was nearing his objective at last.

"So you would circumvent the very doom you helped to bring about?" Le Creuset laughed. "You are the architect of humanity's demise, yet you would try to stop your own work!"

"Maybe I did bring this about," Ken shot back, "but now I'm trying to stop it! Because unlike you... I'm still human!" He lunged toward Providence, stabbing with his sabers.

"And that's exactly why all this has to end!" Providence slid sideways, causing one blade to melt a furrow along its side instead of boring inward, caught the other with a sparking sizzle on its own blade, and brought its DRAGOONs together, and fired a concentrated burst at Preybird. "Because we are human, we too must be annihilated!"

Preybird twisted around the incoming fire, and most of it did nothing more than melt a hole in the side of the tunnel; but part of it caught the machine's left shoulder, traveled down, and obliterated the entire arm. "I disagree," Ken informed him, seemingly unconcerned that his only remaining weapon of use was a single beam saber. "Mankind's nature may be tainted, but though as long as mankind exists, there will be war, there will also be kindness and compassion!"

"And here I thought such concepts were foreign to you," Rau mused, bringing his saber forward against Preybird's remaining blade. "I always thought you the perfect warrior..."

"There's no such thing," the ace told him, "because no human is perfect. But I'll tell you this: if you're the alternative, I'm glad to be who I am!"

"You're a monster, nothing more! That's what Metzinger meant you to be! Just like Tempest!" Le Creuset shook his head. "I'm amazed I didn't recognize the man's features before, but it wasn't so obvious when he was young... and I never paid much attention to him until he already wore the mask. But you know, Brother, he was the same as us!" He triggered his Judicium, aiming the emerald pulse for the targeting systems he knew lay within Preybird's head.

"I never cared about Metzinger," Ken informed him, and his saber snapped into a duelist's salute, neatly intercepting the fiery blast, redirecting it into the tunnel ceiling. "My origins have never mattered to me. It's who I am now that matters, not my birth! It's what my friends and family think of me that I care about, not what a mad scientist tried to make me into!"

Now the two machines emerged into the very core of GENESIS, and suddenly there was room to maneuver again. "This is it, Falcon!" Rau shouted. "The true end of the path!" He poured energy into his verniers, driving his saber in toward Preybird's cockpit. "No matter what happens, this place is where our long battle finally comes to an end!"

"For once, we agree," Ken said through gritted teeth, and threw Preybird to the side at the last moment. As he did so, his years of training in the art of the blade paid off; he knew the exact moment to strike against an opponent who had over-extended himself. Preybird's remaining arm drove its saber in with all the force its artificial musculature could muster, thrusting the fiery blade deep into Providence's shoulder, the weapon's tip coming out the backpack.

The blade's hilt exploded, taking Preybird's right hand with it, but it did its job; Providence's left arm blasted off its body, hurtling away toward one of the distant walls of the massive chamber.

The two machines then boosted apart, with Providence taking up a position directly between Preybird and the wall separating the core from the nuclear cartridge storage. "Impressive, Brother!" Rau shouted, calling back his few remaining DRAGOONs to circle around his mobile suit, much as Ken had done when first facing off with Kira, and his Judicium rose jerkily to firing position, the arm holding it damaged by several near-misses but still functional. "But this is humanity's destiny! They brought us to the inevitable end! No matter what you do here, destiny cannot be denied, Falcon!"

Laser blasts began to stream past, dangerously close to Preybird's cockpit, but Ken ignored it all, jerking Preybird violently to avoid the deadly beams but remaining totally focused on his objective. Here goes... I hope I make it, but if I don't... I love you, Murrue. A blast finally connected, all too close to the cockpit, but he didn't even flinch as energy filled the Nataraja. "Forget destiny," he snarled, and pulled the triggers. Twin beams of red-orange, annihilating fire, began to spread from the twin satellite cannon, just as Providence fired one final burst, and GENESIS' timer reached zero...

Archangel, Bridge

Murrue gasped for perhaps the third time in only a few minutes, as GENESIS finally discharged its second shot. "No," she whispered. "No, he can't have failed... not when he came so close..." The scarred young pilot had fought for this end for just over a year, and for him to fail now, so close to snatching victory from the jaws of defeat...

Behind her, Mu and Sophia closed their eyes; neither wanted to see what would happen now. So this is what it's like to watch a planet die, Mu thought in an oddly detached way. This makes even Endymion and Alaska look like bottle rockets...

Is this it? Sophia wondered. Where do we go from here? Earth will survive... but almost all of humanity will be dead in a few seconds...

An audible gasp from Sai brought the crew's attention back to the screen... for something else was happening. "Captain," he said with some difficulty, "I'm reading a massive energy pulse from within GENESIS; antimatter, and..." He didn't finish, because there was no need to.

The beam seemed somehow to falter, and the middle of GENESIS, far from the emitter bore, began to glow with an inner light. "What the..." Mu whispered. "Is that...?"

"The Shiva Option..." Tom Delaney whispered, from Asmodeus' Bridge.

The pulse of gamma radiation ceased entirely, long before the deadly stream could reach across the hundreds of thousands of kilometers between it and Earth, and GENESIS itself began to warp before their eyes. Explosions were visibly going off on the inside, many of them in succession, all with the power of nuclear bombs. The chain reaction the Shiva Option was supposed to initiate had come, and GENESIS now tore itself apart from the inside. Pieces of debris, several of them larger than the Archangel herself, hurtled into space, others melted into globs of metal, and the whole structure came apart in a gigantic ball of fire...

Not a breath was taken within the Archangel's Bridge, as they watched in awe as the weirdly beautiful explosion began to fade, until Murrue hesitantly spoke up. "But... what about Ken...?" she whispered. "Is... is he...?" She couldn't bring herself to complete the question.

"He made it," Mu said with certainty in his voice. "He must've..." He smiled slowly. "Because he's my brother, and we can make the impossible possible..."

It was Flay who first noticed, after several moments of silence, the static coming over the radio. It had a peculiar modulation... almost like it was trying to talk... "Captain?" she said hesitantly. "I'm getting something here... but I can't quite figure out what..."

"Put it on," Murrue ordered. Not many transmissions out here would be directed at us right now, she mused.Our mobile suits are back, and neither side likes us...

Flay complied. For several moments, there was nothing but static... but then, about the same time a familiar shape appeared in the viewport, words came through the speaker. "There is only one ultimate rule in war," Ken DiFalco's voice said, hoarse but strong. "Survive..."

With those words, Murrue finally felt tears sliding down her face... and they all knew that it was, at last, over.

They'd won.

Archangel, Hangar

It was Freedom and Strike Rouge that carried the battered Preybird back aboard the Archangel. It was missing its right foot, left leg below the knee, right hand, and left arm as a result of its battle with Providence; the catastrophic destruction of GENESIS had also ripped off all ten wings, the twin satellite cannon, and its head.

In short, it would take months of restoration to bring the mobile suit back to anything resembling combat-ready status.

None of the people who hurried into the hangar to greet the returning pilots cared, though. All that mattered to them was that the pilots had come back alive. Not uninjured, perhaps, but alive... to live out the peace their actions had secured.

Kira and Cagalli quickly exited their machines, shared a brief embrace, and moved to Preybird's battered hatch. "I hope I still remember how to open this thing," Kira muttered, punching in commands he remembered from when Mu had been forced to open it, after the nuclear attack that had nearly destroyed Preybird once before. "Come on, come on... There we go."

The hatch -so like the Strike's- split open, allowing the pair access into the interior. Cagalli quickly darted in -it was her partner in there, after all- and came to a floating rest beside the pilot module. "Ken?" she queried softly. "Can you move?"

"...Yeah," Ken managed. "I'm a little beat up, though... and watch my left arm. I think it broke during one of those explosions."

"I'll be careful," she promised, and set to work unstrapping the weary ace. "You're lucky to be alive, you know; how'd you pull it off this time?"

"After I fired the cannon, I shunted all power into the wing-mounted light-wave bubble generator," he explained. "It shorted out a couple of seconds into the event, but that was long enough for me to start moving away from the epicenter. Besides... strange things happen in explosions, and this was really no exception." He winced as his partner gently pulled him out of the cockpit. "I'll tell you this, though: I hope to never, ever have to do that again."

"You're not the only one," Murrue told him, pushing off from the hangar's deck. "If you ever give me a scare like that again, I'll..." She couldn't finish, and just floated there, looking at him.

Ken managed a smile. "To be perfectly honest... I was pretty sure, for a while there, that I was going to die." He coughed. "I told you a few months ago... we were never able to predict what would happen when I unleashed that much power from the Nataraja, and directed it all at a few dozen nuclear bombs. Theories varied, most of them involving very bad things; catastrophic energy release like that usually isn't good for anything caught nearby. That's why... I used light-wave barriers so extensively. If I wanted to survive, standard anti-beam shields wouldn't be good enough; the nuclear chain reaction would just catch that, too, so I needed something stronger. And since there are so few known ways of piercing a light-wave barrier..." He trailed off, and settled for reaching out to her shoulder with his good hand.

Murrue held him at arms' length. "If you'd died out there," she told him, looking right into his eye, "I never would've forgiven you." She held the stare a few moments longer, then softened it with a smile. "But it's over now, isn't it, Ken? Your long mission... even your redemption..."

"Yeah," Ken agreed. "I... I am so very tired..." His eye closed, and he slumped into her arms, unconscious... the long burden of his self-assigned task finally lifted from his shoulders.

Author's note: Dominion has fallen, the Earth Forces G-weapons have been destroyed, and Rau Le Creuset and GENESIS have both perished. The war is over... but how will the survivors deal with peace?

Whew... this may well be the longest thing I have ever written. This chapter seemed almost endless, but now it's finally finished. Well... I guess that's all I have to say. Let me know how it was, so I can get to writing the epilogue. -Solid Shark