Chapter 5

"…she thinks they may be able to develop it within the next decade. The plans she's shown me look promising, but we all know science only goes so far when trying to apply it practically."

"Terraformation of an entire planet is something humanity only dreamed about until the past century. Relena is making it a reality as we speak. She'll find the right people to make the science work."

The shuttle hummed quietly around them as they closed in on the Coranis resource satellite. Heero sat across from David, speaking quietly to each other while Relena dozed a few seats back. The flight took more than half a day and they had left late the night before after a full schedule of press conferences, meetings, and last-minute paperwork for the Foreign Minister. Relena had fallen asleep almost immediately and remained that way until now. Upon mentioning her, Heero's gaze slid across the shuttle to where she curled across one of the bench seats a half dozen feet away.

Through all her efforts, stress had once again started to take its toll on Relena. Her exhaustion was so complete that she had barely stirred the entire flight. Heero mused that she looked younger when she slept. There was a carelessness that only sleep could bring which interrupted the pristine composure she carried with her in her waking hours. She was always elegant, but her mouth turned soft and playful, ready to smile when her subconscious took over. Her hair became tousled around her face, clothes rumpled, and she tended to sprawl on her side with her arms tangling around each other and across her body at puzzling angles. She slept soundly, unmoving, and woke groggy while looking beautiful when morning light caught her in its halo.

Ultimately, he had been unable to sway her against the trip. She had spent the final weeks almost exclusively at the office, rallying attention toward her upcoming trip and continuing her constant meetings with members of the ESUN on the matter of terraforming and the decline of the Earth. Although public funding was still outside her reach, her hard work was garnering attention from all sectors of space and the planet. More private funding was siphoning in, and many politicians and businessmen were on the edge of adding their support. A quiet murmur was spreading through humanity. All eyes were on Coranis, Cecil Litz, and the Foreign Minister as she headed out to the resource satellite.

He was no exception.

"Heero."

Heero registered that he had stopped talking several minutes ago. David had finally noticed and taken to examining Heero from where he sat across the aisle. His back was turned to where his wife slept, but there was no doubt that he knew where Heero had been looking. Green eyes watched him intently, a sharpness in that gaze that was at once scrutiny and pain. Caught, Heero returned his gaze steadily and without confrontation until David's expression shifted. What overtook it was resolve.

"Heero, can I ask you something?"

"Hn."

"…Will you answer me honestly?"

"If it won't compromise Relena's safety, yes," he promised solemnly.

David hesitated, still considering the Gundam Pilot from across the aisle. In the past month since their impromptu dinner in Relena's office, David had been more present in Relena's life than at any time in the last ten years. Heero guessed that his own presence, combined with the looming visit to the unstable satellite, had spurred the sandy-haired man into a state of near-constant vigilance for her wife. They had been arguing heatedly behind closed doors every few days about the trip until Heero had caught the tail end of one while coming to escort her to a meeting.

"David, I'm not going to keep having this discussion with you. My mind is made up; it was made up weeks before Heero even mentioned this to you!"

"You heard what he said, Relena: it isn't safe! You should not be going and I'm not comfortable with the idea of it!"

"My job will never be safe, David! Being married means that you understand that fact and support me in it! I can't just drop everything I've worked for because you're 'not comfortable' with it! This is important to me, David. It is a chance to show investors that the contribution is worthwhile, that the resource satellites are the groundwork we need to start with in order to make terraformation a success. I can't back out of Coranis just because it's a risk to me. Who wants to invest in an endeavor where the lead advocate is too frightened to risk her own resources?"

"Risking yourself is not the same as risking money, Relena."

"I'm going, David."

"What if I don't let you?"

A quiet, shocked gasp. "…How dare you? You don't have the authority, but how dare you think you can stop me from doing what is right just because it's inconvenient to you?"

"Dammit, it's not about inconvenience, Relena, it's about me protecting my wife from unnecessary danger. And I might not have the authority, but Heero does!"

"Heero supports me in everything I do, even when he disagrees. Heero understands that I believe making this trip is more important to the future than my safety. Heero will be there to protect me, not hold me back!"

The silence that followed had been deafening, filled with shocked realization and bitterness on both sides. Moments later the door to the office had been flung wide, leaving Relena face-to-face with Heero. She had taken one furious look at him, flushed crimson, and stalked wordlessly down the hall, leaving a stunned David to stare out the open doorway at the soldier. David had left looking as though he had been punched.

None of them had spoken about the incident since then.

Now, reclining in the shuttle heading toward the infamous space rock, David appeared unflappable as he asked, "Do you really support this trip?"

"No."

Green eyes appraised the dark-haired man across the aisle with shrewd interest. "Why not?"

"Litz has alterior motives," Heero said bluntly. David's gaze hardened. "He's intelligent and dangerous. His engineering designs were all originally created for use on Earth, and forty-two percent of them fail when they are initially applied in space. All of these failures can be traced back to faulty construction or subpar building supplies."

"…But you think that it's this man?" Heero was encouraged by the fact that David understood so quickly. "…You think he's a Naturalist?"

Heero looked on grimly. "I can't prove it."

David frowned as he processed the information, thoughts flowing behind his eyes as he glanced out the shuttle window at the approaching resource satellite. "So why finance a project like Coranis if he's against terraformation? Why even help make it a distant possibility if he thinks its blasphemy?"

"Most likely, to give him the opportunity to put an end to the entire operation at the root."

A beat passed before Heero saw the realization hit the sandy-haired man. Something violent passed over his face. "Relena."

"Hn."

"Before the trip, you said the satellite is unstable. You think he wants it that way? Have you told her?"

"From the beginning."

"And?"

He just watched the other man silently until David swore softly and sat back in his seat with a scowl. Minutes dragged by in silence. Heero allowed him to digest everything that had been discussed. Eventually tired green eyes looked back at him, fear and resignation plain in their depths for those scant seconds.

"She always sees so much good in the world. Sometimes I think it blinds her to the evil; especially when it's directed towards her."

"Hn…"

David fell silent again for long moments, leaning forward so that his elbows could rest on his knees, chin resting on his fists. Heero eventually closed his eyes and settled back in his own seat, content to spend the last minutes of time before their arrival in planning. He heard David's tentative intake of breath before the question floated across the space between them.

"…Would you have stopped her from going if I had asked you?"

"No." No hesitation, no doubt. It was for the best that David understood. Heero opened his eyes again to regard the man across from him with unwavering conviction. Seeing that expression, muscles clenched in the other man's jaw, green eyes turning to emerald flint.

"Why?"

Heero's gaze wandered back across the shuttle, only to find cerulean looking back at him out of David's sight. He met that gaze steadily as he spoke. "She accepted the risk before she ever decided to go. We've discussed the danger, she's weighed my objections, she knows my suspicions regarding Litz, and she still believes this is the right decision. She is willing to put her own life at risk for the sake of the outcome she can achieve because she understands her influence and is willing to put the future of humanity above her own life." Relena sat up slowly, eyes shining and hair tumbling over her shoulders as they gazed at one another. "I'll protect her against the rest," he vowed in a low voice.

Silence stretched long between them.

"…Heero, how do you really know my wife?"

Heero turned to face the other man just as the shuttle pinged to announce their arrival at the satellite.

"How long did I sleep?" Relena asked loudly, yawning and making a show of stretching and straightening her clothes. "I'm a mess! David, have you seen my bag?"

David opened his mouth while still looking sharply at the stoic Gundam Pilot, paused, then rose from his seat, saying "didn't you put it under your seat, Love?"

Fifteen minutes later they disembarked, husband and wife chatting amiably as they descended the ramp into the hangar. The lead engineer and several of the technicians that worked the satellite waited to greet them, shaking hands and outlining the most recent work that had been done. Progress was slow due to the precarious stability of Coranis, leaving approximately ninety percent of the satellite still untouched, but they were steadily gaining success in their ability to mine the ore and minerals deep within the core while still maintaining living quarters on the surface of the rock. The gas pockets were the most dangerous, as they caused sinkholes to appear without warning within the artificial gravity, but so far no workers had been lost to their appearances.

"Why are you confining the operation to such a small section of the satellite?" David asked as they wound through the narrow stone-and-metal hallways. Lossen, the engineer, scowled at the question and slapped a hand against the nearest wall.

"The gas pockets that are causing the sinkholes to form are part of a larger network streaming through the entire satellite," he explained, fingers tracing the superficial fissures in the stone. He was a big man, both in height and stature, dwarfing the space around him. "On their own, they represent no threat to us as we are right now, but every moment we dig and further disrupt the natural structure of the rock, the more likely we are to hit a massive pocket that could bring the entire facility down. We have to work section-by-section, using radar and lidar while we mine to avoid the pockets or create infrastructure around them before releasing the gases. Even so, compromising the structure in even the smallest manner runs the risk of causing the gas pressure to override the natural barrier created by the stone. We're walking a dangerous line between our own safety and our ability to perform our work. If we dig too fast, we run the risk of hitting a pocket that will kill us all."

"Does Cecil know?" Relena asked, concern marring her face.

Lossen's eyebrows shot up. "Mr. Litz? He's here most weekends to oversee our progress. He cares about this project, Minister Darlian. He's designed most of the space you find yourself standing in currently – he's a brilliant structural engineer. Makes me a bit jealous, if I'm big enough to admit it." He chuckled in a self-deprecating manner, rubbing one large hand across the back of his neck.

They were taken on a tour around the growing base – a rude structure reinforced by metal beamwork and scaffolding had begun within the rock, allowing for dormitories, a mess hall, a hangar, several workshops and laboratories, and a communal area where chutes branched off leading to the unstable portions of the surface and the mining veins both inside and outside the artificial environment. Most of the satellite was still unexplored, having only been under construction for a handful of months, and the control center for living quarters was still based within one of the sectors that was considered unpredictable – leaving many of the technicians uneasy about their circumstances on the satellite. Heero noted that the many of the workers wore space-grade utility suits even within the environmentally-controlled areas where they should have been able to go without, signifying that they anticipated the controls to fail without warning.

"Most of the men working now have only been on this satellite for a month or two, myself included," Lossen explained as they walked. "The first teams were strictly Mr. Litz's crew until the atmosphere was established. We're still working to stabilize the control center, which understandably makes people nervous, but that's only because the original structure was one of the first casualties of the sinkholes. The first attempt to establish gravity caused the pressure to surge and the entire area gave way. We've mapped all of the substructure since then, but a large part of the risk is being unable to tell how strong the walls between those systems are. With our crews living directly on the satellite, we have to proceed much slower than if we were based on a mining ship."

"Why not use a mining craft then?" David asked with a frown.

"Several reasons, the foremost being that it's time consuming and expensive to have to shuttle crews back and forth. Coranis has its own magnetic field that will disrupt the instruments and navigation of a mining craft, forcing us to maintain greater distance between a ship and the satellite. Also, considering the size of Coranis, it's a waste of resources to have to furnish and feed crew in two separate environments. We'd have to communicate by COM when it is far more economical to have all of the engineers and technicians together on the same platform to consult. There are some problems you simply have to see with your own eyes in order to solve efficiently." Lossen paused in front of one of the few windows built into the satellite.

"Finally, Coranis was chosen because the ice and minerals inside are enough to not only sustain our crew for decades to come, but vast enough to establish a space port out of the skeleton once we've depleted all the resources." Mars loomed heavy through the window, ethereal in its proximity. Had they been further forward on the satellite, the red planet would have been the entire view before them. "It will become the gateway to Mars when we begin to colonize, and Mr. Litz has designed the base living quarters with this in mind. Everything except the communal area was established before we ever got here. Part of our duty here is to ensure that the satellite becomes completely habitable before we welcome the biologists, botanists, microbiologists, and all the other scientists and specialists that will eventually make terraformation possible."

Beside the engineer, Relena gazed outward at the red planet, thoughtful. "Cecil hinted that he had bigger plans for Coranis than just its resources, but I never imagined he would plan so far into the future." Lossen smiled with pride. There was true respect there, Heero realized. Lossen held Cecil Litz in high regard.

"Mr. Litz works hard on every project he takes on. He protects his people and works toward the dream of a bright future. He doesn't believe in doing anything half-way, Minister."

Relena smiled, laying a reassuring hand on Lossen's forearm. The big man flushed faintly. "I'm very pleased to hear that. I understand he will be joining us sometime within the next day or so?"

"Yes, Minister. He's set to arrive tomorrow morning. He was very pleased to learn about your visit when you first decided to come." The conversation shifted to the itinerary for the next several days. Relena wanted to hold a press conference at the end of their trip to project the success of the project to other potential investors as well as the ESUN itself. Before that, she was determined to experience a hands-on rundown of the inner workings of the satellite, including sitting down face-to-face with as many members of the crews as possible to gauge ideas on how they might improve the mining process and further the Mars Project as a whole.

After they finished the tour, Relena insisted on being introduced to the basic operations of the satellite. The technicians were all too eager to explain the importance of their roles and the inner workings of the facility. The Foreign Minister was just as eager to learn, asking as many questions as the technicians could offer information. Eventually the conversation branched out to so many different areas that it was decided that it was more worthwhile to revisit the path of their tour so as to be able to demonstrate the machinery.

As they walked, the inhabitants of Coranis flocked to their party in increasingly larger numbers, most to greet the young woman whose name had flooded both Earth and Space in the years since the war. Relena was soon surrounded by men and women waiting with awe and determination to shake the hand of "Minister Darlian," "Relena Peacecraft," and even "Queen Relena." Inevitably, they were forced to abandon any semblance of work and settle in the large expanse of the communal area, Relena at the center while she spoke animatedly to a rather large crowd about her ideals and plans for the Mars Project. Heero found that many of the workers were without family or community – the nameless men and women orphaned and estranged by the war. Others were life-long residents of the mining crafts and engineering vessels that inhabited deep space. Many of them hoped for a new future on Mars when the first colonies were established and terraformation truly began. Many more were already aware of the plans to convert Coranis into a space station and planned to make the resource satellite a permanent home. Litz's name was a prayer on the lips of the residents, many of them telling stories of his benevolence from their brief meetings and through vicarious stories they had heard over the years.

Heero was pleased to find Relena genuinely smiling as she grasped hands and touched shoulders, all trace of strain gone from her face. Somewhere along the way food started to trickle in with the people until the impromptu gathering became a potluck. Relena laughed openly and joked about the challenges facing the project in the years to come. She was greeted by mutual emotion, lighting the austere stone-and-metal cavern to a blazing glow with the force of her personality until late into the evening. It was only when the blonde politician herself released several jaw-cracking yawns that they realized how late it had become. Heero watched with satisfaction as a bleary-eyed Foreign Minister disappeared down the hallway leading to the dormitories, her husband beside her.

With the departure of their honored guest, most of the workers followed suit and retreated to their respective rooms. The communal area was empty in mere moments. Taking advantage of the abrupt absence of most of the crew, Heero used the quiet of the evening to wander unhindered through the deserted halls.

Lossen was correct that the areas constructed by Litz's crews were well-designed, but the structure nagged at him. The communal area was just that because all of the other spaces had been constructed around it, forming a semi-circle where all the chutes met to create the large domed room. Logically, the design created a far more stable infrastructure for the vast meeting area than if they had begun digging in the center due to the support of the neighboring walls that were shared between the areas, but technicians ran the risk of unknowingly creating pockets below the established spaces when they were moving around them rather than outward from a central point.

As he walked, he thought of Wufei's warning a month ago regarding Cecil Litz.

"Litz is scum."

Over the years Heero had learned to take Wufei's prejudices with a grain of salt, finding they often stemmed from that unshakeable search for justice that drove the dark-eyed man. That did not, however, mean that he was wrong when he called someone "scum."

"The Litz Corporation began about a year after the end of the war, but Cecil Litz is a well-known environmental and structural engineer whose family name stretches back decades. His family is Earth-based, and so is the corporation," Wufei narrated, pulling up documents on his computer as he spoke. Pictures sprung up of buildings, bridges, and dams. "Despite this fact, much of his work has actually been applied to the Colonies, which is probably one of the reasons why that woman first became involved with his business."

Heero studied the photos briefly as the other pilot spoke, ignoring Wufei's refusal to use Relena's name. "All of these structures have been demolished."

Wufei shot a wry look at the other Preventer. "Astute as always, Yuy. These are only a handful of Litz's designs, but all of them are Colony-based and built by Colony crews. Ironic that only these failed, isn't it? Every time, the cause is determined to be a construction flaw."

"You think it's sabotage?"

Wufei shook his head. "I know it is, but I can't prove it. Litz covers himself too well."

Heero leaned closer as more pictures and reports were presented to him, revealing warped steel and poorly welded rivets. Reports detailing the individual collapses peppered the screen. "Why are you so convinced that Litz is the force behind it?" he asked as he sifted through the images.

"Cecil Litz is a Naturalist."

The Naturalists were a group of people who had sprung up after the Mars Project had first been introduced onto the floor of the ESUN by the Foreign Minister. To some, the very notion of using another planet as a home for the human race was deplorable. Add to that the declaration that the Earth was dying, and radicalists had started to come out of the woodwork within a year of Relena's announcement under the title "Naturalist." Some proved themselves to be nothing more than loud-mouthed politicians who thought terraformation was a massive Ponsy scheme, but there was an undercurrent of violence that pulsed through the Naturalists. There had been no few threats towards Relena in the years since by people calling themselves "Protectors of the Natural Earth."

Lossen's opinion of Litz was above reproach - that much was clear. Heero's research into Eric Lossen showed that he was a true Colonist – born to L3, parents dead when he was fifteen of a shuttle crash. He had never been on-planet and showed no strong opinions of Earth-born humans or politics in general. He had worked his way up as a structural engineer by odd jobs and scraping together every dime of money available to put himself through school. He was not married, had never had children, and maintained few relationships that did not stem from his work. Most of his days were spent on job sites and he had never before been associated with Cecil Litz or any of his projects. Yet something Litz had done had made an unmistakable impression on the 39-year-old bachelor.

Litz would be dangerous as an enemy, especially if he was a Naturalist.

"Like everything else, I can't prove it," Wufei practically spat. Heero had seen the Chinese pilot scowl many times over the years, but Wufei looked as though he could chew metal in that moment.

"Litz designed the newest air filtration systems they're putting in L4 and he's revolutionized the hydroponic agricultural protocols that we use in space. He was one of the first to recognize the danger posed by Zech's hole in the Earth and make attempts to counteract the natural disasters the damage is causing. He sees problems before they arise. I'm not surprised your woman values him as an ally; Everything he represents adds credence to terraformation. On the surface, everything he works toward inevitably aids the Colonies."

Heero waited.

"But something doesn't add up. He's too smart for petty flaws like the ones in those bridges. Litz takes years to create his designs. He perfects them first. Everything he engineers begins on Earth, for Earth purposes, but they are inevitably adopted by the Colonies due to their duality in space. He triples the price of the blueprints, claims that the designs require changes for non-celestial application. The problem is, the changes he makes compared to the original blueprints do appear to improve the design for artificial and zero gravities. He gives vague answers to any questions regarding his opinion on terraformation or the Colonies, or he'll have a representative read a scripted response. If he is interested in Mars, I would be wary. Litz doesn't like space, he doesn't like his inventions being used anywhere but on Earth, and he thinks Earth is the only home we should have."

Heero had suspected Litz of being a Naturalist, but like Wufei he had found no solid evidence to back the claim beside circumstantial suppositions and his own instincts. Cecil Litz was thorough and careful, keeping any associations behind closed doors and offline. However, hearing the conviction in the other man's voice cemented what Heero's instincts had already confirmed to him when he first learned of the Earth-based investor. Litz was too steeped in the history of the Earth, his opinions on the terraformation too carefully veiled behind calm silence and contradictory actions.

Now, surrounded by Litz's designs, Heero felt suspicion and unease prickle along his spine. In the morning Litz would arrive, and whatever plans the Naturalist had would most likely be put into play with the presence of Relena onboard the satellite.

Heero put his time to good use as he counted down the hours to that arrival.