Chapter Three
The dust-devils whipped across the surface of the little dirt airstrip. If you looked closely, or had had too much of the strong afternoon Centran sun, you could just make out strange jagged patterns shifting about in the brown sands. This, apart from a few stands of thorny desert scrub trees, pretty much summed up the flatlands all around them, Irvine thought, tapping ash onto the bonnet of the buggy he was leaning against. The place was a complete shithole, even by the long list of shitholes his career had sent him to. And he'd thought being a mercenary was supposed to be all about bad attitude and snappy dressing.
A particularly strong gust of wind blew through the hanger entrance. It caught him just as he inhaled, sending him bending over the hood, coughing furiously and dribbling smoke. His view of the bare concrete block walls of the hanger and its corrugated iron roof blurred up as his eyes teared up from the grit in them.
"-uck!"
"What's wrong Cowboy?"
Selphie Tilmitt pushed herself out from underneath the buggy, still on the wheelie-board she'd been lying on while she checked on the thing's brake hoses. Like Irvine, she was dressed for the desert; splotchy khaki pants and waist-length bush jacket, unbuttoned in the stifling heat of the hanger. The plain navy t-shirt underneath was stained with round sweat-patches at the arms. She wiped a greasy hand on it, before smoothing her hair back and adjusting the big red bandana she wore, trying to keep more of it out of her eyes.
"Well?" she asked him again, holding out a hand to be helped up.
"Aw, I just got a mouthful of grit thanks to the wind and this here cigarette," Irvine told her, pulling her to her feet. As usual she felt like she weighed nothing.
"Kadowaki always said those things were bad for you," Selphie told him unsympathetically. It was one of their old arguments.
"Meh. She never said anything about them choking me to death," Irvine grumbled, wiping at his eyes. He hawked and spat, trying to clear the taste of dust from his mouth. Selphie wrinkled her nose.
"Here, you look like you could use this," she said, picking up her water bottle from the rough concrete floor and passing it to him.
"Thanks," he said gratefully as he took it from her and had a long swig. Selphie spread her arms and leaned gingerly back against the warm buggy with a tired groan. Irvine finished the water before he'd slaked his thirst. He gave the squeeze bottle a wry look, then screwed the cap back on and waved the bottle at the desert buggy and its five neighbors.
"Finished?"
"Yeah, that was the last maintenance check. She's ready to rumble," Selphie patted the side of the ramshackle vehicle fondly. A mischievous glint appeared in her eye; "Hheeeyy… Want to take her for a spin?"
Irvine regarded the buggy dubiously. It and its five neighbors were on loan from the Four Finger archipelago authorities. The island cops claimed to use them for off-road chases, and they certainly looked beaten-up enough for it. The machines were squat, oblong ground-huggers, with three sets of thick bubble-wheels and plenty of suspension. Like the workhorse jeep, they were open-topped, with space for a triad to huddle in the back, and a driver and passenger at the front. Selphie and the other mechanics had spent the last two weeks armoring and fitting them with scaled-down front-seat autocannon which they swore, swore, would be compensated for by the souped-up engines and suspension.
"No thanks," he said with feeling. Selphie followed his gaze to the autocannon.
"Sweet isn't it?" she said proudly "I haven't played with anything like these since Dollet. You know the techs here say no-one's ever mounted anything of this caliber on one of these buggies. We're breaking new ground here."
"Darling, you amaze me as always," Irvine said dryly. Selpie rolled her eyes at his tone.
"You're just jealous because they're so much bigger then your gun," she informed him, tossing her head. The effect was only slightly spoilt by a few strands of hair escaping her bandana and sticking across her cheek. Her top also stuck in interesting ways Irvine noticed. He puffed out his chest.
"There's nothing wrong with my gun," he proclaimed. He pulled Exeter from the over-shoulder holster slung around his torso and hefted it; "It's got reach, stopping-power, target-discrimination-"
"Pft, and so dinky," she pouted at him, flicking at her cheek in annoyance.
"Gun-fetishist," he growled back.
"Girlie-man!"
"Grease-monkey!"
"Man-slu-arrrgghh! No tickling! That's cheating!"
"Ah-, Excuse me?" came an anxious voice behind them. The speaker was the kind to fall back on formality to reassure himself. They broke apart, still giggling. Master-Sergeant Deems stood to attention, eyes pointedly averted. A stocky balding man in his late thirties, Deems was mission-analyst and the third member of the command triad for this assignment. He was from the rebuilt Galbadia Garden, which still had its own way of doing things. Irvine, since making the jump to the more anarchical culture at Balamb, found the Sergeant's rigid brooding hard to endure. The man badly needed to get laid in his opinion, something he'd voiced to Selphie loudly and often. She just seemed to work around him in her usual sunny way.
"Sir, Ma'am," he said, holding his salute stiffly until they both made brief acknowledgements.
"You don't have to salute us in private Mr Deems," Selphie told the man, smile still lurking round the corners of her mouth. Deems nodded stiffly, but still stood in the formal at-ease posture.
"Something come up, Sergeant?" added Irvine wearily, already bored with this charade. They'd have been on first names with anyone else by now, but though he'd been told Deems' name, his brain rejected identifying the sergeant by it.
"Begging your pardon sir, but the Prime Minister's office has just called to say that the rebels' plane has changed its flight path- they'll be here in three hours."
Irvine and Selphie exchanged a tense look.
"It's really going to happen then," she said, sounding ambivalent.
"Looks like it," Irvine agreed, trying for insouciance and missing.
Crisis generally blew up quickly from small beginnings for SeeDs. Long ago, Centra had been the centre of a great maritime civilization, whose ruins you could find everywhere across the deserts. The continent had had its own Lunar Cry and the golden age of Centran power had ended abruptly, never to return. Even today the region was under-populated- and poor, backward and factionalized. The Four Fingers Archipelago was no exception- Prime Minister Gabon had come to power in a coup twenty-eight years ago, and survived several abortive ones since. One opposition leader-in-exile learned his lesson, and sought outside help. He found it in the giants of the post-Second Sorcery War world- the Trabian Combines.
Fortune had smiled on Trabia. The smallest of the Northern powers had been virtually unscathed by the war or the Cry, and it's economy had been massively boosted by the effort to contain the insatiable Lunar abominations. Trabian manufacturing's demand for raw material had in turn sent producer prices skyrocketing. Suddenly it was worth doing business in parts of the world usually ignored- and Omolla Gabon's government was in trouble.
For the islands held rich deposits of gold and copper, vital metals for the wiring in modern combat suits and warbots that the Northern armies were screaming for. Gabon and his cronies had long dominated the islands' National Copper Board (NCB), a state-owned combine, and for years they siphoned off its profits into their own bank accounts. Outsiders were firmly shut-out from the government monopoly, something the Combines, for all their economic muscle, could do nothing about. Legally. Gabon's enemies had found the lever they could use to pry him from power.
An informal cartel was formed to do something about the Four Fingers problem. In exchange for promises to dismantle the NCB and sell on its assets and claims, the cartel had hired two freelance Galbadian ex-army officers to organize and lead a rebellion against Gabon. They didn't dare approach SeeD, because SeeD had just been contracted by Gabon to train his security services- Xu had passed it on to Irvine and Selphie as a quiet assignment were they would be together.
The Combines had hired their mercenaries elsewhere instead. They were mostly also Galbadian ex-army types. Meanwhile disaffected members of the islands' police were approached and 'security' equipment stockpiled for 'mines' whose locations were never exactly specified. The preparations for the coup had gone extremely smoothly in fact, watched with polite interest by SeeD's industrial espionage unit.
Perhaps the coup-paymasters had no idea how thoroughly their organizations had been infiltrated, but more likely they had never taken the idea seriously. Irvine had been particularly infuriated by their thoughtless intrusion into his job. The idea that the Combine execs might use violence get their way didn't bother him- he knew the world wasn't perfect. But their arrogance, their certainty that they were safe from the nasty little squabbles of everyone else in the world, and that these should be arranged to suit them, did. He'd been looking forward to dragging them all down.
Unfortunately things hadn't gone entirely to plan. The main body of mercenaries had been observed boarding a chartered Trabian plane allegedly to mount an anti-piracy drive off the mainland. The idea had been to arrest all the foreigners at the Archipelago's main airport. Then one of Gabon's police chiefs, earlier suspected of sympathy with the putsch, now attempted to redeem himself in the eyes of his boss. His men swarmed in too early, arresting the senior mercenary officer and twenty-one others at an airport warehouse. They'd only been an advance party, sent to bring in the coup's equipment.
The other plotters were tipped off by panicked com calls. Faced between a long death in a squalid mainland prison or a firing squad on the Archipelago, and running out of fuel, the mercenaries took the crew of their jet hostage and demanded a landing spot and a new plane. Lacking an air force to actually force the plane down, Gabon agreed. Which was how Irvine and the rest of the SeeDs found themselves standing around in a tiny airfield that started off as part of a flying doctor service, waiting for a plane with more hijackers then hostages.
