Archangel's Amazing Adventures

by CSS Stravag

Mass Crossover fic. Chapter 51 UP! Powerful magic draws the Archangel and the ZAFT Creuset Team into a world of magic and intrigue like nothing imagined by the straight-laced CE residents. Their battles on Cephiro are only the beginning of their nightmarish journey as they give Odysseus a run for his money in the 'bizarre trip home' category...

13. Gone Power Shopping

(Section 2, Chapter 5: Gone Power Shopping)

(Author's Note: All persons be warned: this chapter is well over three times longer than my usual. I got some seriously super-evil ideas for things to do on Twycross, and I ain't even through yet on this planet. Har har har!)

The sickening feeling had not taken all that long to hit Nicol; in fact, at about the same time he could sense that Commander La Flaga and Captain Ramius were having their fourth shots of whiskey each, he was feeling real bad about his actions that day.

What the hell have I become?

For over an hour, Nicol had been staring at the palms of his hands, wondering what had possessed him to believe that vengeance would be a good thing, especially when he knew beforehand that this would happen, that he would be so disgusted and depressed with himself that he definitely wouldn't like what he believed he had become.

What's the point? What the hell am I fighting for any more? A paycheck? Is all I have become nothing more than a mercenary?

Nicol had signed up because he wanted to help protect the PLANTs from further attacks. That seemed to have fallen astray of late, even when one could consider their actions up to and following Heliopolis to be necessary to preventing the Earth Alliance from gaining an upper hand against ZAFT. He wasn't really defending anything except himself now, and his few remaining friends.

What did Dearka die for? It sure as hell was not for the PLANTs, we aren't anywhere near them.

His right-hand spatha came into existence completely unbidden; it had shocked him initially, though after a while he began inspecting it, for the first time since he had received it. It looked plain initially, but it was indeed very ornate with the green pommel gem, gilded hilt, and the line of runic lettering running down the inside of the sword's fuller (blood groove) (1). The lettering itself was written out in emerald that was inset into the sword, though he could not read it due to the fact it was written in a very foreign language to him.

What am I trying to accomplish? Is there anything I'm trying to do that is worth it? Is getting home worth it, or is this all a damn fantasy?

The sickening feeling hit him again, this time in remembrance of placing the Gundam-sized satchel charge on the command center. He had seen in some of the windows as he approached, there were dozens of people in there, killed for the sake of military expediency. A diversion, a distraction to draw their forces in two directions to make it easier for the assault teams to kill them off. Nicol had done it, believing that the lives he had taken were somehow justified because he was paying them back for killing Dearka. After the fact, that seemed like such an arrogant, hollow, damn near evil justification for killing as many as he could put sights (and explosives) on.

I know what I have become...this day's battle, and Princess Emeraude, and High Priest Zagato. I have become a murderer.

Nicol had only one small, weak light on in his quarters right now. Athrun was who-knows-where, probably feeling just as rotten as Nicol was. Thus, there was nobody in the room to see him simply staring at his sword. Nobody could see the pain on his face as his conscience fought with the cold, hard reality of the life he had lived, of the actions he had taken. Part of him thought he was doing the right thing by fighting onward, in the hopes that someday he would get home. The rest of him was unsure what it was worth.

A murderer...is that all I am now?

Nicol was engrossed in thought and did miss his room ringer.

Do I—

"Nicol?" Fuu asked over the intercom outside his room. That had not failed to get his attention; his head whipped around and centered on the door, staring at it almost accusingly, until she rang the bell a second time.

"Oh, one moment," Nicol says. He figured he would have plenty of time to sort out how he felt about these things in the coming weeks as they ventured to the jumpship and then to Twycross, their supposed next destination. Nicol stows his sword after standing up and approaches the door, then hits the unlock button which immediately causes it to open, as Fuu was standing real close to the door when she hit the call button. This also put them real close to each other when the door opened. "Is, uh, something wrong?"

"I was wondering if I could speak to you...alone."

"Huh? Sure, I guess," Nicol replies, wondering what was going on. He takes a step back; before she steps in, she takes a look around the corridor, then steps in herself. After a moment, the door hisses closed. "Is...what's wrong, Fuu?" Even in his mental state, Nicol could recognize that Fuu had been crying quite recently.

"I...feel terrible...about what we did today."

I think we all do, Nicol thinks but did not say offhand. His silence was interpreted by Fuu as at least part of an answer, leading to her reason for being in this room, talking to the Gundam pilot:

"How...do you cope with this feeling? I feel as if I've done something monstrous, and I can't escape my own heart for it," it hurt Nicol just as bad to hear Fuu talking about it, since he could feel that her soul was being tormented by it.

"I'm not, Fuu, I don't think any of us are." Nicol sits down on the side of his bed, and was joined shortly by Fuu. "I was just asking myself the same questions you have been. And I don't have an answer."

"Then...did we do something wrong?" There was a hint of desperation to her voice.

"I...don't know, Fuu. I just don't know."

Thine foes seek the destruction and enslavement of all the worlds held by man, Windam's mental voice echoes in both their minds. The Clans believe themselves the true ward of the old Star League. To defend the rights and lives of those around you is nary but the right path to take. Do not fear nor regret your actions of this day; rest assured that you have nothing to regret of what has transpired.

"Wait a second, I thought the Rune Gods were mostly concerned with Cephiro," Nicol thinks aloud.

Though our ultimate purpose is to defend Cephiro from threats within and without, just as thine morality transcends your homeworld, so does ours. Hold in thine heart that where you walk, so should what you believe follow. Quell thine hearts with the knowledge that though the path long and winding and convoluted, it shall lead you home. The last part was more or less aimed at Nicol, who had less than average faith on that subject of late. Fuu had never really given up hope on that subject, which immediately told her that though he was a soldier, he had some doubts about what he was dong and where they were going.

"Is it...really that bad for you?" Fuu asks after a few moments of silence.

Nicol knew what she was referring to, the last part of Windam's statement was directed at him.

"Yes, it is. Going from day to day, knowing one of your best friends from the academy died on some unheard-of planet in an unheard-of parallel dimension, wondering if you will ever get home or how many will make it home alive, it is hard to explain. I keep getting this feeling that if I ever get home, I don't know what I'll do, and that above the feeling that I might not make it home."

"Why not just do what you normally do when you get home?" Fuu asks quite reasonably. "I thought you were more optimistic than how you're acting right now."

Nicol flops down backwards onto the bed. "It's hard being optimistic when all you really have to look forward to is the off-chance of getting home alive and uninjured."

"Well, Nicol, I hope you believe you're not alone in wanting to go home. We're all trying to make it home, and I'm not going to give up on the journey or you until we make it home."

"Y'know, Fuu, that is why I like you. You're always nice to someone. So few people are like that any more."

Nicol could not see it, since he was technically looking at the back of her head, but Fuu had blushed bright red at his comment.

-x-x-x-

"Kira, you blockhead!" Flay says as she finally works up the courage to enter the medical ward and walks immediately to his bed. "How could you let this happen to yourself?"

"Now, Flay, be gentle, he's got a long way to go before he recovers completely," the Doctor cautions.

"Well, still, you should not have taken the hits, Kira," Flay says as she grabs a seat next to his bed.

"I'm still alive, aren't I?" Kira asks.

"Well, you get a pass for that, but you can do better than that, and no lame excuses," Flay notes.

How the hell does he put up with that kind of abuse? Yzak asks within the confines of his mind.

"Flay, calm down, I'll be all right. I just broke four ribs and my left arm, I'll heal...eventually."

"How long?" She asks earnestly.

"Three weeks," Kira replies; "give or take a few days. I'm really all right, Flay, I'm more concerned about the Strike right now." It went without saying that without the Strike, the ship loses quite a bit of its firepower and flexibility.

"Oh, that, it'll be all right. I overheard Murdoch talking about he had to refit something on it, we're out of a certain spare part and your fall busted that part we're out of," Flay notes with all the grace of a typical non-engineering non-technical person; the way she commented about it offended Kira quite a bit, figuring that she could have been more tactful about it.

"Lovely," Kira moans.

The doctor could sense he was not pleased about it, either. "All right, missie, out of here. Go on, git," the Doc shooes Flay toward the door.

Before she starts walking, she stands up and gives him a good kiss on the lips. "Get well soon, Kira, you and I have a lot to talk about in the next few weeks." She promptly leaves thereafter.

Yzak had the comment de rigeur about her conduct: "How the hell do you put up with that, Kira?"

Kira motions to the door with his eyes while looking at the Doc still; he moves to the door and checks, seeing Flay round the corner down the hall, then gives Kira a thumbs-up gesture. "Well, Yzak, I know why she's the way she is. She's afraid right now, really afraid that the last person in the world she cares about would die."

"You?" Yzak asks with quite a bit of shock in tone. Unconsciously he flinched his left arm, which sent a wave of pain up and down his arm and throughout his chest. "Ow, shit! Oh, I hate Elementals," Yzak notes for not the second-dozen time in the past four hours.

"Yeah, me. Her mom died when she was real young, her dad was killed onboard a ship shot down by the Vesalius, Heliopolis was shot out from under her, then she gets sent on this magical whirlwind tour with even more unusual ways to die, she's had a rough couple of months. Personally, I have to wonder what's keeping her from completely flipping out."

"You, probably, she thinks she may be getting somewhere with you."

"And you?" Kira asks.

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"What do you think of her?" Kira replies calmly.

That took Yzak a few moments: "She kinda creeps me out, but I think I can track with where she's coming from," Yzak declares, then appends: "Sort of. Athrun would probably understand her best, his mother was killed in Bloody Valentine and his dad might as well not even be there, he's that distant and cold about things."

"Thanks, Yzak," Athrun says as he enters the door to the med lab. "How're you two doing?"

"He's definitely doing better than I," Yzak notes.

"I don't think so, he'll be up and moving in a week, I have two weeks before I'm even allowed to stand," Kira notes sourly. Staying still and doing nothing was about as foreign to Kira as porno magazines were.

"God, Doom and Gloom in the same room, swearing the other one will get better first. There may be something wrong with this," Athrun notes sourly.

"Yeah, we got beat up to begin with," Yzak replies acidly.

"Hey, in your defense, both of you, you lost to the enemy's best from both sides, infantry and armor. The lady that took you down, Yzak, is a Star Commander of Elementals, and she didn't get there by luck. She can pick up 300 kilos and walk with it."

"Holy shit," Yzak notes.

"And that big thing that got the Strike?" Yzak asks before Kira could do the same.

"A Stone Rhino, big sucker with a design concept that predates the Star League. The Clanners redid it right, and it got Kira's charge chamber on the Agni cannon. Basically converted the hyper-impulse-beam-spitter into a hyper-impulse-based bomb. Paired Gauss Rifles, paired Large Pulse Lasers, small pulse laser for shits and grins up close. The only person that got that close, though, was Nicol and Fuu."

"So, basically a walking long-range sniper," Yzak notes. "Did we get intact?"

"Yeah, we did, we hangared it for Murdoch to play around with, as well as a pair of Warhawks and some smaller units. The rest we sold back to the Federated Commonwealth; they'll be along to pick everything up and sign off on it in about a week, so we're waiting that long until they're satisfied we got everything."

"Oh, nice," Yzak notes. "I'm beginning to think we're not cut out for this ground-pounding shit, can we hire us a crew of Elementals to do the leg work?" He floats as something approaching a complaint.

"That's going to be dicey," Athrun notes. "So far, only the Clans have these battle armor units. The FedCom Intelligence Secretariat were practically drooling over the sets we recovered."

"Oh," Yzak notes.

"So, what're they modifying on the Strike?"

"Murdoch is replacing all the hydraulics on the Strike with Myomer systems."

"Oh, I must have blown out the hydraulics when I landed," Kira notes with a hint of dejection.

"Relax, the myomer systems should be just as fast as the hydraulics, though they take up a little more room inside it's impossible to cripple all the myomer in a machine unless you're Hikaru," Athrun notes with a bit of an amused snort.

"Huh?" Kira asks in reply.

"You didn't hear? Hikaru used her Ruby Lightning spell on one of those Elementals, fried out the Myomer after having every muscle in the frame contract at once. That elemental ended up doing a good impression of a board for a few hours. I think it was the same one that got you, Yzak,"

"More's the pity that said elemental didn't take more abuse than that," Yzak notes sourly.

"Oh, she did, Captain Ramius used her relic weapon on it," Athrun notes neutrally.

"Huh? Someone finally figured out what it does?"

"Yeah, it builds a pure magical energy charge ball in the hands, which she can throw at a target. Hellishly effective, she put it through that Elemental, just like a gunshot but energized. I think it will even go through Phase Shift armor."

"Holy shit," Yzak replies. "That's a powerful weapon."

"I know, thankfully she's on our side."

"Uh, Athrun, forget you're ZAFT again?" Yzak had had to remind Athrun more than once over the past two months about that.

"No, I think you keep forgetting that the great ZAFT versus Earth Alliance war doesn't mean shit in the middle of the Inner Sphere," Athrun replies testily.

"Don't make me kick you out too, Athrun," the Doc warns him rather sternly.

"Huh? You kicked someone out of here already?" That had to be a record, since Kira had been in the ward for only a few hours.

"Yeah, Flay came in and riled Kira up, so the Doc kicked her out. She got her digs in, though, and one good smooch for the parting." Kira rolled his eyes famously at the last, figuring that Yzak could have spared that last detail.

"Kira, I thought you were trying to avoid her," Athrun notes accusingly.

"Does it look like I can avoid a third grader with a Popsicle stick right now?" Kira asks in sharp retort.

"My question is, what does said third grader intend to do to Kira with the Popsicle stick?" Yzak asks; his question got sniggers from Athruun, Kira, Tolle, and Miriallia, the latter two who had just entered.

"Tolle, how're you doing?" Kira asks.

"Usual, man," Tolle had passed by Kira's bed over toward Yzak. "Yzak, want to borrow my old music player?"

"Serious?" Yzak asks.Man, I could use something to listen to other than Kira's heart monitor, Yzak thinks aloud.

"Sure, Mir's gonna choke me out if she catches me playing it loud any more, and you guys can probably use it more than I since it's kinda drab in here," He notes.

"Thanks," Yzak notes as Tolle hands it off to Yzak's good arm. The player was possible to set up and use with one hand, which Yzak figured out fast enough.

"All of you, out of here, now," The Doc orders. Damnit, now I have to listen to that stuff, the Doc thinks aloud, which was picked up by Miriallia. Of course, she had to comment about that to Athrun and Tolle after they were out of earshot of the medical ward.

"Man, do you have any friends stranger than that?" Yzak asks bluntly after about a minute of diddling with Tolle's music player.

"Are we counting you as well?" Kira asks after a few moments.

Silence, from the ZAFT Gundam pilot, was the only response.

-x-x-x- (dateline: 30 April 3050) -x-x-x-

The whole principle of what the Archangel was doing in the Inner Sphere had rather disgusted the Clansmen that had been taken as bondsmen. Clansmen, intrinsically, do not like mercenaries, tagging them as vultures and soldiers of fortune, with no real convictions.

That attitude changed quite a bit when they learned of the true origin of the Archangel and the mobile forces. It changed even more when they were told of Cephiro, and the nature of the three Rune Gods. The greatest change, though, was when explained that the crew of the Archangel was simply trying to return to their own world and dimension to rejoin the war effort there, and that included the four (now three) ZAFT pilots in the unit. Surviving the Inner Sphere and the Clan invasion was completely ancillary to that task, but had to be done even so.

And the fact that Dearka had been killed in a rather pointless nighttime ambush battle did not please the Archangel crew, much less the ZAFT pilots. That much was obvious to the Clansmen, who did not press on the issue (wisely).

The memorial service had been held in one of the starport hangars. The whole crew attended; the ship was left under guard of the militia forces, who believed they owed the Archangel a large debt of gratitude for their actions in ridding the planet of the Clanners and taking out most of their forces. All three of the ZAFT pilots spoke of his exploits and wishes, as well as Captain Ramius speaking of his willingness to look past the conflicts of home to the here-and-now that challenged them and his willingness to stand in the way of forces unknown in defense of innocent lives. A ComStar reporter and cameraman had wheedled his way in on the ceremony, and had recorded the whole ceremony, for broadcast to to the worlds of the Inner Sphere. (It went without saying: this force would definitely get some props, they took down a whole Cluster of Clan 'mechs with relatively little in the way of damage to the ship or the units.)

His remains (what little of him was left from the cockpit of the Buster) were interred at a memorial site that was being built to the east of the starport, and of all that the militia and starport administration had planned and fronted for the memorial, already a marble pedestal had been erected with the engraving: "Dearka Elsman, Gundam pilot of Zodiac Alliance of Freedom Treaty. Born 29 March, Cosmic Era 54, killed in action 26 April 3050 during the Clan invasion of Romulus. Age 17." On a second paragraph: "Though not born of this dimension or knowing of the people therein, he sacrificed himself to defend the people threatened by Clan aggression."

A weaver in the city had made a set of ZAFT flags, one for the Archangel, one for the memorial, and one for the ceremony. Even after a thousand years past the dawning of modern military tradition, the folding of the flag was still done the same. In this case, the folding was done by Athrun, Nicol, Natarle, and Mu. The 21-gun salute was handled by Murrue and the marine contingent of the Archangel. Then the casket was lowered into the vault and sealed in; a couple of the starport technicians finished up with the spadework. The flag that had been folded was sealed in a flag case, with his magic glove in the right corner of the long box for the flag and the medal he had been awarded by the Federated Commonwealth for his actions, being the Federated Commonwealth Medal of Honor. Athrun figured that ZAFT might (slim possibility) add the Order of the Nebula to that when they return home, since his actions were against a very nasty aggressor party and brought honor to ZAFT and the PLANTs by standing in the way of what would otherwise have been a slaughter.

The honest part of Athrun knew there would be no such accolade. After all, to the ZAFT command structure, Existence comprised two types of people: Coordinators and everyone else. And 'everyone else' was inferior to ZAFT, therefore whether they lived, died, or sat down and rotated meant nothing at all to the command structure. Just bugs, really, to be stepped on in the inevitable march toward progress.

And what he saw here, in the past month and more recently, contradicted that belief to a fare-thee-well. The Captain and Commanders of the Archangel are not people to be sneezed at, for starters, he mentally mused.Kira is a Coordinator, true, but still on the 'Earth Alliance' side. His friends, Tolle, Kuzzey, Sai are not weaklings in the least bit; they do their jobs professionally as would any ZAFT midshipman. Miriallia is actually a bit theoretically scary, not only was she competent behind the control panels, she can literally read minds; Miriallia waved at him, apparently in thanks for the compliment that was unstated but heard even so. Major Steiner and the Strikers are not slouches, despite being overwhelmed categorically they still fight. Colonel Hartman's Militia were nothing more than occasional fighters, nothing major, yet they still fought courageously against the Clans and would do so again if they came back. The Magic Knights, Hikaru, Umi, Fuu, wrenched from being schoolgirls and dropped into first a world they knew nothing about, then a whole galaxy of war, never gave up heart even when faced with the impossible task of fighting mechanized range-combat units with swords and magic.

His conclusion was inevitable, inescapable: he, Athrun Zala of ZAFT, Coordinator though he may be, was the least flexible and most conceded person in the unit. Well, probably not the most, that title would definitely go to Yzak if a vote came up about it; a moment after the polling was done, he'd fly off the handle and get pissed off, thereby proving the poll correct. Quietly Athrun had to admit he was a close second, still believing that being an elite Coordinator Gundam Pilot was something real special, as if he was entitled to a free beer somewhere for being so. The realization that Dearka had the same sentiments up until the end, and he died at the hands of a non-coordinator driving a machine smaller and technically inferior to his, was not a fact to be overlooked.

My...arrogance...is going to cost me my life sooner or later, probably sooner if we're going to keep going head-to-head against these Clanners, Athrun thinks as he stares at the pedestal that would soon have a bronze statuette of the Buster on it. There was something to be said about luck in combat, but Athrun knew that luck (or fate or chance, however you want to look at it) would not continue to smile kindly on him if he kept taking the view that he was somehow superior to those around him. Something about bad Karma, he figured he could get a good explanation of it from Yzak, who was into all that mystical study and process. For that matter, it might not be all that bad an option to consider studying with the Knights, maybe I could come to understand more of this Magic that seems to follow us around... That would be an interesting thing to explain to the ZAFT review board when they got home and were summarily court-martialed for their conduct: oh, yes, while I was working with the Archangel to save more than a few words from destruction, I picked up the ability to kill people with just my mind. Care to see a demonstration? He thinks irreverently.

Athrun finally wandered toward the pedestal, though he only went partway the thirty meters or so before he stopped at a small knot where Yzak, Nicol, Major Steiner, Lieutenant Ramirez, and Captain Ramius were discussing the plan for the next several days. Thinking was leaning toward remaining here for the obvious course of dealing with what remains of the salvage, though apparently they also wanted to hold long enough to pick up an order for supplies that she had put into a local company and would not be ready until the 5th of next month. The ships had been restocked with fuel, food, water, and what parts could be gleaned from local stores to continue the journey, which would be four days to the transient jump point (2) the Katana was in, a jump, then twelve days from the Zenith point in the Twycross system to the planet itself. Fifteen, maybe sixteen days...I think I can get the Buster running that fast if we have the parts, Athrun thinks.Only problem is, who pilots it?

"Who pilots the Buster if I can get it fixed?" Athrun asks out loud, though it was more of a mental musing than a directed question.

"Well, there's the problem, we're kinda running short on available personnel, even after getting a flock of bondsmen attached to the ship," Murrue notes. "Still and all, having the Buster out of action is a serious loss to the unit. You have any ideas?"

"What about Sai, Tolle or Kuzzey?" Athrun asks. "As much as I don't want to see Dearka's Gundam...well..."

"Yeah, I understand that," Murrue notes. "Still, someone needs to pilot it for now, at the least." She stops to consider it: Val Ryder was presently without a mount, so he was a possible...but he was a Striker, and likely would not want to stay with the ship. Tolle would probably the best candidate right now, but that would take the Skygrasper out of the equation. The Magic Knights were already linked to the Rune Gods, and in the right circumstances were better than even the Gundams, not to mention the Buster was as alien to their fighting style as group sex was to the Knights in question (3).

"Um, Captain, can I volunteer?" Flay asks. Yzak looks at her weird for a moment, then shrugs, then winces from the pain that bled through the Naproxen he had dosed on so he could stand up with his torn-up shoulder and chest. "And what is that supposed to mean? What makes you think I can't do it?"

Yzak opens his mouth to reply, then snaps it shut audibly. It was a few seconds before he opens it again: "I fucking give up," he says in exasperation and walks away, fuming and quite dejected.

"What...did I...huh?" Flay stutters, staring after the Duel pilot.

"Don't worry about it, Flay," Athrun notes. "That's just typical Yzak. Captain?" At the least, keeping it in the family will help us out of this mess in the long run, Athrun thinks about having Flay as a pilot.

"All right. Athrun, you think you can get her up to standard?"

"Yeah, in a month or two, probably. Did Kira keep the copies of the Natural-compatible OS for the Buster?"

"I don't know, you'll have to ask him," Murrue says.

"I think I'll have to chase him down and discuss this and a few other matters with him..."

"He shouldn't be hard to catch. I hear he's been haunting the medbay lately," Yzak notes sourly; he had gone no farther than the table with the cold cuts and other assorted snack foods, then back to the conversation at hand. "I have only one thing to say," and he was staring directly at Flay; "shoot me, accidentally or otherwise, and it's your ass." That was the last Athrun saw of Yzak that day, as he dodged through the crowd, headed who-knows-where.

"Oh, is he ever going to grow up?" Flay asks in a frustrated tone. "He's like some kind of pissed-off schoolyard bully."

Coming from her? Cold day in hell, film at Eleven, Athrun thinks derisively. The way she pushed Kira around, even in the presence of others, definitely qualified her for her for what she was accusing Yzak of, if only a little less direct and crass in execution. He would have been shocked how many people around the circle agreed. "Well, as soon as I get the Buster fixed, we'll begin drilling," Athrun says. I am so not going to enjoy this. Maybe I can get Nicol to help?

"Done," Nicol says. "You want me to help, right?"

"How did you—don't tell me you're starting to become—"

"No, it's written all over your face, Athrun. You're going to need the help. Say, six hours from each of us a day? I'll do maneuver and tactics, you do weapons and sensors."

"Right, sounds good," Athrun notes. Twelve hours a day for a month might get her up to speed soon enough, but she'd probably take years to get to the point of 'good'. "If you'll excuse me?"

"Good luck, Athrun," Murrue notes. He salutes the group and leaves, headed toward his original destination, the pedestal.

This time, he got there without interruption. When he arrived, he reread the inscription again, reminding himself that though the two times listed for his birth and death were incongruent, reflecting the two different calendars under which he operated, it was no less true than if both had been done in the CE calendar or the IS calendar. Years from now, people that visited this memorial would ask the inevitable question: 'what does Cosmic Era mean' to which there probably would not be much in the way of an answer. Differing histories, differing events, and though alien to the other, no less real than the other.

After he read it again, Athrun stepped up to the memorial. He was still looking at the inscription, but not in the reading fashion, his was a blank stare through it, toward space or Hell or wherever one would look in such cases; anywhere but the inscription. Memorials are made so we never forget. I would not forget anyways. I'll take the flag and medal home for you, Dearka. I swear it. I'll make sure nobody forgets what is right and wrong in life.

"You have to wonder 'what are we doing wrong' when you bury a friend."

"I don't think we're doing anything wrong, Commander," Athrun replies to Commander La Flaga. "But for damn sure our enemies are doing more than something wrong, and I intend on using that against them. Several times over."

-x-x-x- (Dateline: 9 May 3050) -x-x-x-

Natarle had pulled off one sweet coup in logistical planning: since they had to remain on Romulus for a week before the salvage could be sorted through, tallied, and credited to their account (or dispensed with, which is what Murrue did a bit of; the Militia on Romulus now had a compliment of Novas to go with their assorted old-time machines), she had done some creative supply purchase and reallocation. As such, the hangar on the Archangel now had dozens of palettes of steel sheet and steel ring assemblies used in the manufacture of heavy equipment, as well as assorted other construction and shipbuilding sundries. As well as the Gundams, a few Omnimechs, the Stone Rhino, and the chicken coop.

The purpose was simple: the Archangel had a total of 16 turrets for the Igelstellung guns. They now had access to some even more powerful weapons from the salvaged Clan units, including lasers, PPCs, multi-launch missile racks, autocannons, and gauss rifles. In short, they could turn the ship into a veritable mobile fortress since the ship had been designed with a lot of 'dead space' for eventual arsenal upgrades. Most of those upgrades that had been initially planned had centered around more Igelstellung weapons, but in the face of present competition the best bet would definitely be using local weapons, since the Clan ER Particle Cannons were almost as powerful as the Beam Rifles.

Since the ship was running steady toward the planet, and there was no need for a combat watch (the enemy Warship was long gone), the Bondsmen were down in the hangar, half of the 52 were working on reassembling and repairing the held Omnimechs and Battlemechs, the rest were turning the assorted materials into a series of turret collars, turret rings, and turret housings to be attached to the ship in locations that the main Engineers were working on at that time. They had a large arsenal to play with, picked off the dead enemy machines, and a lot of surface space on theArchangel to work with. The plan was to spread an even ring of extra firepower around the ship, as well as provide some excellent secondary firepower to the forward batteries since the Gottfried cannons had a slow fire rate and the Lohengrins had a horrendous fire rate of five minutes between consecutive shots. A helluva lot could happen in five minutes.

They were a day into the journey toward Twycross, and already Murrue had this sickening feeling that she was going to have a helluva welcoming party waiting for her. Sure, she creamed four enemy Dropships and something on the order of 150 enemy 'mechs (including the ones inside the Dropships), but most of that was lucky break, a fat and complacent enemy looking the other way when she came rolling over the north hills and onto the starport proper, charged Lohengrin and Gottfried cannons and all. Such could hardly be called a martial prowess victory except in the fact that Athrun had taken an operational concept and molded it into one hellish four-step battle plan that turned their whole force into swiss cheese, sans the two ships that got away.

"Here's the write-up from the Engineers. Basically, they are thinking about adding this much to the ship's arsenal." The paper had turret listings with the weapons to be mounted in each cluster. It had such small-duty arrays as Medium Pulse Lasers all the way up to a pair of Gauss Rifles mounted in a turret assembly just under and to the outside of the Gottfried turrets. And the notorious weak section of the ship, being the port and starboard quarter, would each side have two assemblies with three LRM-20 launchers and copious reloads below, as well as turret assemblies with the fast-firing and incredibly accurate Large Pulse Lasers. Henceforth, hanging off the arse of the ship would not be a wise idea for enemy mobile forces.

"All this...oh, my," Natarle says as she looks at the documents. The total arsenal upgrade would have little utility against Warships, but against such foes as Dropships (which did not use Warship-type armor, they used fighter-type armor as the Archangel had found out weeks prior), fighters, Battlemechs, and theoretically against Mobile Suits and ground vehicles it would be seriously deadly.

Mu settled back into his seat in the Archangel stateroom, across from Captain Verstadt and Major Steiner, who were also in on this meeting session, having flown over from the Kwaidan for some skull session and hospitality. After all, Captain Verstadt said he owed the Archangel a massive debt of honor for rescuing their Dropship from Clan hands, and almost completely intact at that (only some minor damage to the side of the ship). "It's true, but where we've been, and where we might go, we'll need that firepower and then some."

"True enough. Major, how's your unit coming along?" Murrue asks as the next item on the business.

"Well, we're down the Centurion, the Wolfhound's damaged but should be repairable once we get to Twycross, Hawk's Mauler took a beating in the atarport but it can be repaired, and my Axman is going to need a complete armor rebuild. All in all, the Strikers are out of business for now. You guys?"

"The Strike's undergoing an overhaul right now, replacing all the hydraulics with myomer, and the pilot's still out from injuries. Duel is down, pilot injuries again. Buster is down, no pilot, no cockpit—yet. Blitz is up, Aegis is up as of yesterday. Skygraspers are up, but they are atmosphere only. The Timber Wolf is still undergoing final repairs. The Rune Gods are all feeling a bit sore from the last battle, but otherwise unharmed, and the ship has seen worse days over its lifespan."

"What has happened to your ship...and it has been worse?" Captain Verstadt asks.

"Yes, just before we entered Aube on our homeworld, ZAFT's four aces—the Gundams—managed to blow a few chunks out of the ship," Natarle notes rather coldly. "If you ever doubted how good they were, all you needed to do was take one good look at our ship after the shooting stopped to learn otherwise. Half our ship's guns destroyed, 40 damage to armor, engines knocked offline, sensors malfunctioning, it was not a good day."

"Oh." Rightfully, Captain Verstadt was quite shocked. Being primarily a Jumpship captain, he was not all that well versed in combat damage since Jumpships were protected under the Aries Convention rules of war.

"This ship can take a helluva beating and dish it out," Murrue notes. "Though, they had us on the edge at the spaceport. If they had pushed back hard enough, our forces would have folded, and without the mobile contingent this ship loses a lot of its effectiveness."

"We got lucky there, all right. By the way, I've submitted your pilot, Athrun Zala, for an award for his actions and plan for the spaceport. Without his actions, we would have lost Romulus and the battle to get off the planet," Major Steiner notes. "I think he's earned it."

"Athrun is a good guy. The only thing between us is he was on the other side of our shooting war back home," Mu notes. "Him and Kira get along famously, despite all that. I guess some things never change."

"And you guys?" Captain Verstadt asks.

"If, when we get home, he decides he wants to continue hunting the ship, I'll respect that." Murrue's tone about it was dead even and not shaky in the least.

"There is a lot of bad blood between our two sides; maybe too much to heal the knives in the back," Natarle notes. "Still, some of us are not going to give up. There is a solution to every problem. And that solution may be on this ship, somewhere."

It was then that the general quarters klaxon sounded. "Captain to the bridge, Captain to the bridge, incoming unidentified fighters," Chandratta says tersely over the the intercom.

"Lovely, whose?" Murrue notes as everyone files out of the stateroom and toward the bridge. Transit at running speed only took a minute.

"Report, sensors," Natarle immediately asks as she hops down into her chair.

"Six contacts below 100 tons, confirmed enemy fighters, one contact below 2000 tons, Dropship is hailing us, ordering us to surrender and prepare to be boarded."

"Pirates? Here?" Captain Verstadt asks.

"The scum of space strikes anywhere," Major Steiner spat his contempt at their kind and ways. Nobody in the military of any of the Successor States (and presumably in the Clans as well) liked pirates. "You want me to have the Banshee take them on?"

"No, I think a rude shock is in order, right, Commander?" Murrue did not like the concept of pirates, either, and certainly was not going to surrender the Archangel to them.

"CIC, who is on deck?" Natarle's question was directed to Miriallia.

"Aegis and Blitz are both active right now," Miriallia replies.

"Launch Blitz, Aegis. What's the status on the Moebius Zero?"

"Mu is preflighting it right now as the deck crew pulls it out of storage. Two minutes," Miriallia replies. The mechanics of how they could do both at once was bewildering to Natarle, but if they were doing it, then it must be hair-brained and otherwise impossible for Murdoch to sign off on it.

The ship shudders rather violently as the two Gundams are shot out of the launch rails, though Athrun had his Gundam in Mobile Armor Cruising mode to hide its real nature, and after launching Nicol had gone low to avoid immediate detection.

"Weps, break out the Valiants, load all tubes with Korinthos missiles for anti-ship assault. Igelstellungs on auto-track mode. Charge but do not deploy the Gottfried cannons. Helldarts to special auto, prioritize enemy Aero assets."

"Set and ready, Commander," Chandratta replies almost immediately.

"Miriallia, order the Aegis and Blitz to engage at will," Murrue notes as the fighters began getting solid locks on the ship.

"Aegis, Blitz, full release, fire at will, repeat fire at will," she orders on the radio channel.

Blitz had the first, firing with the 76mm Beam Rifle attached to his weapon shield (Trikeros). The two beams streaked to and struck a smaller fighter in the enemy group, one on the main fuselage, the other in the left wing. This resulted in a damaged fighter, not a kill as he expected. "Damn, that thing's still alive?" Nicol asks in amazement, though he was still aware enough to dodge part of an enemy attack run and block the rest.

"Some fighters have as much or more armor than a Battlemech," Captain Verstadt notes.

"Wonderful." Natarle switches modes on her headset. "Blitz, Aegis, be advised enemy fighters may be as well armored as some Battlemechs, over,"

"Roger that, Command. Nicol, go live on these maggots. Don't hold back."

"Right, will do," Nicol notes as he changes targeting modes on his HUD to his most powerful weapon.

Athrun had decided on going for the heavyweight of the bunch, a fighter that had just unloaded a rather large wad of SRM missiles, a pack of LRM missiles, and even a large-bore autocannon at the Archangel. Most of the missiles befell the Igelstellung array and did not reach the ship, though the four autocannon slugs did get to the ship and tore into the panels above the port-side forward just above one of the Anti-beam depth charge launchers and just below the port-side Gottfried turret. Athrun's response was simple: line up on target, switch over to Mobile Armor attack mode, fire Scylla, repeat if necessary. In this case, it was necessary for a second shot, as though his first burned through almost all the forward armor and into the main body of the enemy craft (it had the appearance of a flying wing with two rudders attached as an engineering afterthought), since the armor on it was apparently heavy enough to withstand most of the first shot with only minimal internal damage.

Athrun never had the chance to take the second on the enemy heavy, however. The first volley of Helldarts fired as the fighter drastically changed course and zoomed behind the conning tower of the Archangel, fleeing desperately away from that monster that just shredded all of his fuselage armor and caused almost half internal damage to his heavy fighter in one shot. The Helldarts outpaced his aging Riever Aerofighter, hammering into the rear of the ship with a fury the rear and wing armor could not withstand. Parts of the fighter continued heading port and away from the Archangel forevermore, too damaged to be worth salvaging.

Nicol lined up on a particularly obnoxious one that while not as slow as the one Athrun had just shared with the Archangel, it was still one for concern as it had a big gun and four Medium Lasers, and had taken two passes at him already. As it looped around predictably for a third pass, Nicol gave it a five MOA lead and fired two Lancer Darts into its side from a range of twenty space hexes, a distance expected to be well out of his engagement range. One Dart struck the body dead and blew a large chunk out of its armor, nothing major. The other dart got into the wing root, in a particularly vulnerable area at one of the fuel caps for fueling the plane. The Dart penetrated the fuel cap and by followed the fuel line with a slight curve downward into the petrol bunker in the fighter and blew. Instantly the ship itself was turned into a spectacular fireball as all the fuel in the craft suddenly decided it wanted to react, not just the small amount in the engine nacelles.

"Commander, Mu is ready to launch," Miriallia reports to Natarle.

"Fire away," Natarle replies. "No, not you, Chandratta, I was talking about the catapult," she corrects when Chandratta begins entering commands.

"Captain, can you zoom in on that Dropship?" Captain Verstadt asks. Murrue does so without hesitation. "A Leopard carrier variant. Captain, if you take that ship down, the fighters may break off their attack or surrender," The captain adds after getting a good look at the slab-sided combat Dropship.

"Natarle?"

"At the least, Captains, we can give it something to think about," Natarle notes coldly. "Aft missile tubes, fire," she orders to the apparently trigger-happy Chandratta. All twelve missile tubes unload in a matter of four seconds, the missiles bending left of center and boring straight in on the enemy ship. They would have a flight time that was lengthy but inevitable since there was really no fighter escort between the enemy Dropship and the Archangel.

Mu joined the battle, his Mobile Armor grossly smaller than the fighters he was challenging yet still capable to the task. Right off the bat he targeted a ship that looked like a fat needle with stubby wings and broke out his gunbarrels. The pilot was prepared for the shot from the Linear Gun, but was grossly unprepared for the hammering he took from four directions by Mu's remote weapons pods. The hits from four directions were enough that he temporarily lost control of his craft and lost his shot at Mu, who reeled his pods in and turned around on the enemy to continue the battle. When realigned on the enemy, he sighted it up and fired twice with the Linear Gun, each slug chunking the rear armor on the enemy craft without reserve.

An enemy small fighter took a personal interest in Mu's Mobile Armor, figuring it the one craft they could assuredly take down (the other two units were proving too hard to kill and had even wiped out their heavy hitters). The pilot reefed his Sparrowhawk in hard and fired both medium lasers into the Mobile Armor as it was breaking off the four barrels it had used on the larger Corsair. The lasers had missed the body of the fighter, though they did blow clear through the top barrel-weapon and caused it to blow. The pilot hammered the engines as the Mobile Armor did the same, though when he reefed his fighter hard right and around for another pass, he came face-to-face with the most hellish sight: the ship had some heavy guns mounted on its sides, in turrets with impossible arcs that allowed it to shoot dead forward to dead rear; his fighter just barely missed the naval-grade gauss rifle slug as it tore apart the rudder fins on his craft, though the much smaller point-defense guns also tore strips out of his armor. He had never seen guns put up that kind of hail of lead, even as he flew through it and his fighter began breaking apart from the multitude of hits. His last conscious act was to pull the ripcord to eject, but even that failed him.

The Korinthos missiles made it to the enemy Dropship without incident and did as they were designed: punch massive holes in enemy ship. The Leopard CV was poorly designed to fight a stand-up engagement of any kind, it was designed to carry a small amount of fighters in relative stealth and speed, whereas the Korinthos missiles were supremely designed to punch massive holes in ZAFT warships, which had a whole helluva lot more armor than a dinky Inner Sphere Dropship. The ship itself could easily have fit inside the Hangar deck of the Archangel if it could have fit into the catapult doors, it was that small. The Captain had thought the two ships were some kind of light-defended transport group headed to Twycross to pick up supplies for the burgeoning war against the Clans; he had realized ten seconds too late that the large white ship was not a transport, it was some kind of small Warship with no shortage of bite to go along with the bark. The ship itself took ten of the twelve missiles, as two of the missiles trailed too close to others and were destroyed without hitting it (warhead fratricide was the technical term, when the explosion of one missile kills another). The ten that hit struck six to the right side of the ship and four on the nose; by the time missile four hit in either location, the ship had no notable armor left in that area and the missile literally flew into the innards of the ship before exploding. Missiles five and six on the right side literally flew so far into the ship that number six blew a gaping hole on the exterior far side of the ship from the Archangel; missile five bored in and physically punched out the ass-end of the ship and in the process blitzed through the fighter decks of the ship. It never detonated; eventually it did run out of fuel, severely deformed from its passage through an enemy ship (the hard way). Natarle could only guess that the missile in question had a faulty detonator and backup, which given Earth Alliance quality control standards was a very real possibility.

The Helldarts fired in response to the enemy Corsair approaching their firing arc, the pilot grossly stunned by the damage that had been wrought on his Dropship. Said missiles turned the enemy into little more than a metallic cloud in space, caught unawares until after the second missile hit his craft. Again the missiles were spaced too close, and despite their stunning success only two thirds of them made it to the fighter, the remainder cooked off at range by their predecessors. Athrun, as he was planning to engage the Corsair and finish it off, noticed the flaw in the missiles and immediately recognized it for what it was, though he was in little position to do anything about it while in the middle of a fighter-and-MS scrap.

Nicol was caught quite unawares by a rather unusual looking light fighter that had lined up on his back for an attack; while Nicol was tracking the enemy Sholagar (something that looked like a typical UFO cross-bred with a boxy fighter, armed with a trio of Medium Lasers), he received a hellish shock as his right arm was completely detached from the frame of his Gundam; the pilot of the enemy Zero had hit the shoulder joint from the rear with both the Large and Medium lasers. The LRM-10 rack was pro forma and rather pointless against a Phase Shift armored machine, but only added to the shock value. "I'm hit, my right arm is gone!" Nicol notes. He growls as he lines up and fires his last Lancer Dart at the Solagar, but he missed narrowly and the missile did nothing useful.

"Nicol, return to ship, Mu and I can handle the remainder," Athrun notes as he transforms his Gundam from Crusing Mobile Armor to Gundam form. This was in clear sight to the enemy Zero pilot, who promptly crapped a seriously stinky one when he realized he was looking at some ungodly-unusual strange machine of war that he would never live to talk about. Athrun had next, as he flew dead on at the Zero that was flying dead on at him, and at the last moment he powered the right leg beam saber and slash-kicked the fighter right down the central axis.

"I gotcha, punk," Mu says as he spins out the Gunbarrels for one good salvo on the Sholagar that was trying to weave through the Archangel's auto-track barrage and succeeding for the most part. As it got outside Gun range to the ship, Mu struck it hard with his three remaining Gunbarrels and the Linear Gun. The speed of a Sholagar was supreme in the design, not survivability in terms of Mobile Suit warfare. The second Linear Gun hit penetrated the nose of the craft, followed by two bursts of the Gunbarrel cannons, and that fighter was as good as dead; the pilot was the only one that survived to eject

"Moebius Zero to CIC, all enemy machines are downed. One casualty on our side, Blitz lost an arm."

"Aegis, CIC, please recover the missing appendage if possible and all forces return to base." Natarle even felt strange for having to say that; it was not often that one ordered a Gundam to recover something as strange as a detached arm.

-x-x-x- (20 May 3050) -x-x-x-

"Twycross primary Space Traffic Control, this is Lima-Charlie-Alpha-Mike-zero-one-Xray-Alpha, Warship Archangel, requesting permission to de-orbit fifty kilometers west of the spaceport and cruise in overland, over," Kuzzey asks on the STC main channel.

"Roger that, Archangel, wait one," the Traffic Controller replies. "Archangel, STC, request explanation why you are not de-orbiting over the spaceport, over,"

Kuzzey had already been briefed on that logic. "STC, Archangel is still a very experimental ship. If one of our primaries fails during a de-orbit, you don't want to be anywhere near us when we hit the ground, over," Kuzzey notes with quite a bit of irony. Truth to tell, he didn't want to be anywhere near the ship when it de-orbited, but he did not have a choice in the matter.

"Roger that, wait one," 'one' did not last long; "Archangel, you are cleared for requested de-orbit vector, no traffic expected in the area. Ingress to spaceport direct across TSPA VOR, you are authorized to land at gate Delta-one-seven. Welcome to Twycross, Archangel."

"Sensors, Conn, tracking radars at half-strength only, all targeting systems locked down. Weps, confirm all weapons locked in safe," Murrue orders. This was all by the book, though normally one did not enter the atmosphere with running sensors since parts of the atmosphere made it impossible to send or receive signals during descent.

"Conn, Weps, all weapons locked safe."

"Conn, Sensors, set at requested output."

"Helm, activate Ablative Gel Dischargers."

"Helm, aye," Newman notes as he reaches forward of the control yoke and issues several console commands. "Conn, Helm, Ablative Gel Dischargers are functioning, ten seconds to minimum safe ingress coverage."

"All right, Newman, take it in nice and easy," Captain Ramius says.

It was a second before anything was said: "Well at least I wasn't the subject of today's ambiguously perverted joke," Tolle notes.

"How do you think that makes me feel?" Newman asks plainly. Only then did Murrue realize how her phrasing could be grossly misconstrued...

Whoops, need to avoid that phrasing from now on, Murrue thinks aloud.

"I dunno, Captain, the only two that seem to mind are Tolle and Newman," Miriallia notes from down in the CIC pit.

"Beginning atmospheric insertion now...ten minutes to level fight," Newman notes as the ship begins its entry into the atmosphere.

"Confirmed," Murrue replies.

The ride got a lot bumpier before it got softer; once the roller-coaster ride finished up, Murrue noted that part of her body felt quite numb from the vibration, the rest of her wasn't sure how it felt. All things considered, though, it beat the hell out of the four-boilermakers-in-a-row feeling of jumping between star systems. When all was said and done, she was quite happy to see the steepes and the lights of the starport in the distance, as the starport was segmented from the Twycross City urban area for just the same reason that Murrue had brought her ship down away from the starport.

"Captain, we're at hover altitude," Newman says. "Levitator shows 100 charge and all green. Artificial gravity systems are all powered and at zero influence. We're go for atmospheric flight."

"All right, Newman, take her to the starport and park it for the night." They had descended in pitch-darkness, which would last for another twelve hours (Twycross had a longer-than-nominal day of 32 hours) (4).

"Roger that, time to starport is about 20 minutes,"

"Conn, sensors, no contacts bearing zero-nine-zero, clear skies to the spaceport, only ground contact consistent with light vehicle traffic and what I'm guessing is some kind of Battlemech outfitted with a combine attachment." (5)

"Huh?" Both Murrue and Natarle ask at the same time.

"I'm not joking, Captain," Sai says. "On the main screen."

"Oh, that's interesting," Murrue notes. I'm sure my father would love to have something like that, she thinks after a few moments of watching it, since it appeared to have a larger blade width than the combine he had inherited from his father (Murrue's grandfather) and probably had internal storage for what it picked up, something her father's combine only had a couple tons of. She broke the reverie willingly after a few more moments; "Anything else out there?"

"Negative, Captain, just some traffic in the area of the starport, nothing large enough to constitute a threat."

The path to the requested VOR beacon was more or less parallel to a major road, and true to Sai's report there was traffic on it even this late at night. More than one of the drivers on said road had pulled to the side to observe the passage of the Archangel, as even at night it was mostly visible from fifty meters courtesy of the anti-collision lights and the engine nacelles at her stern (the flames of which cast an eerie blue glow behind the ship for a long distance).

"Passing over VOR beacon now, Captain," Newman notes. His navigational radar had just confirmed the VOR signal as being the one he was looking for. "Ten minutes out," Newman notes.

"Comms, pass it onto the starport that we just blew over the VOR beacon," Natarle orders.

"Twycross STC,Archangel, we have passed the TSPA VOR, we are ten minutes out at this time, over,"

"Archangel, STC, we confirm you are ten out at present advance rate, next landing at the port is in thirty minutes so don't be all night at this, over,"

"Roger that, will pass that thought along to the helm, over and out," Kuzzey replies as he keys off the radio. "God, what a crank, if he gets any more ripped I may have to choke him out," Kuzzey mutters in a fashion he hoped was not loud enough to be heard.

It failed: "That bad?" Murrue asks the normally passive and nonviolent Kuzzey. Sai knew that Kuzzey had to be really frustrated to even think loud about that.

"Yes, that bad, his whole attitude came across that we were screwing up his routine," Kuzzey replies while barely concealing what he wanted to say.

"Let it go, Kuzzey, they have not been half as bad as Earth Alliance space traffic control," Natarle says, remembering how crass and rude the controllers at the lunar bases had been when she was first taking out Nelson-class ships in service of the 8th Fleet.

"Yes, ma'am," Kuzzey replies after taking a proper and slightly deep breath.

The starport proper was coming into focus as they came closer, and after a few minutes they were moving over the outside landing fields for other spheroid Dropships like the Kwaidan that was parked in the gate (6) directly east of D17, the Archangel's ordered parking spot. Newman took the ship down one of the taxiways smartly and right to the ordered gate, decelerating smartly until the ship came to rest right over the gate, then depowered the Levitator slowly until the ship touched down easy. "Finished with engines," Newman notes.

"Engineering, Conn, finished with engines," Murrue reports into a growler phone. She receives the expected responses in reply and hangs up. The engines would be shut off and the ship needed to be refueled (she was down about 300 tons of bunkerage since leaving Romulus), a task better performed when not running hot.

"Natarle, you have the first watch. Nothing is supposed to happen until tomorrow, well after daybreak, so if something does happen it isn't going to be good. Just try to avoid frying out anyone's electronics if you have to go hot on the sensors," Murrue was referring to the fact that the Archangel's sensor suites could put out 10 million watts of power that could be electronically steered down a very small bearing, thereby frying out another ship's sensors. Such could blind a ship and do weird things to the crew inside the target vessel.

"Marine guards?" Natarle asks, meaning inside the ship.

"Keep it reasonable, but that would be preferred to nothing. Do not deploy the Gundam unless you have to."

"Roger that, Captain."

"You have the conn, Natarle." Murrue was not the first or the last out of the bridge that night. After the remainder of the bridge staff filed out, all that remained was Sai and Natarle. Natarle was composing a report for her log, Sai was alternating between studying the starport around him and diddling with the modular console system, looking at the ship's systems other than the sensor suite.

-x-x-x- (21 May 3050) -x-x-x-

With daybreak the ship had come alive again, and this time the purpose of the crew was directed. Almost maniacal direction, really.

First off, the ship's numerous cargo storage bays had to be prepared for the incoming supplies that Natarle had ordered readied in advance. It bewildered some of the crew that they thought some of the storage room appeared to be a bit bigger than they were prior, but others in the group just said they were smoking 'it' and needed to share. Natarle figured any size variance could be attributed to the lack of supplies in said rooms.

The supplies themselves were mostly still in transit from various industrial conglomerates all over the planet and were coming in by truck, rail, and even Dropship support from the other side of the planet. They would arrive in staggered loads across the next five days, and would be the primary concern of the ship's crew since the total incoming supplies amounted to about 18000 tons, a far sight larger than most Dropships' total weight, much less what they carried. And all of it had to be crammed in somewhere on the ship, since it was not possible to rely on on-site repair facilities in enemy territory. Wholly 2000 tons of what was incoming would be spare parts for the ship itself, which carried about 17500 tons total of spare parts, enough to keep the ship functional underway for over a year. The remainder would be ammunition for the guns and missile launchers, parts for the Gundams (and now Omnimechs), and provisions for the crew, namely food and water.

The second major thing that needed to happen was the construction crews getting their crap in gear so as to minimize the down-time on the ship's arsenal while it was being upgraded. Certain functions had to be handled while parts of the weapons grid was offline, such as the forward missile racks and the new weapons turrets to go in between the Igelstellung turrets (they had to run new power feeds for the lasers, which ran at a different voltage and cycle than the Igelstellung motors). Nobody wanted the weapons offline for too long, despite the fact that there was little chance of the ship being assaulted on Twycross while the Falcons had their forces yanked out from under them by said ship. There was a second 'Galaxy' of forces coming down the invasion corridor, though by now they had been apprised of the nature of theArchangel and likely were staying well away from it. A ship with weapons capable of blowing clear through a Dropship and mobile forces capable of chopping a medium Omnimech in half were not something the average Clanner wanted to deal with, as Star Colonel Redmond had made infinitely clear to the Captain, though she did admit that even damaging such forces would be considered a worthy challenge by some.

Third, and definitely not on the bottom of the list, because Twycross was not at major risk for being taken over there was a good opportunity for some much-needed crew rest. Granted the amenities of the ship were ever-improving (Nicol and Kira were programming video games to be used through the ship's monitors while Athrun was making a set of handheld controllers for the said purpose out of leftover battlemech parts), but when all was said and done they were still on a warship that wasn't all that massively entertaining when you got down to it. Even this short in time and people were starting to look fairly grim. So, after the necessary maintenance, restock, and modification projects were completed, Murrue had every intention of letting her crew loose on the city to get some real 'vacation' time. Of course, getting everything done, installed, modded, restocked, and maintained would take at least four days with three shifts going, and that was counting the longer day on Twycross to begin with.

"Well, that is a start, and just goes to show you that service is prompt around here, if nothing else," Natarle notes as the first delivery truck from Twycross City came through the gate markings to the ship cargo bay door, where it was stopped by the Marines to be inspected. That much Murrue wanted to be sure of, since the possibility of a hostile party (likely not the Clans, but there were more of them in the Inner Sphere than she would ever meet, Murrue knew) sneaking a special operations team or explosive device onboard was a distinct possibility. Thus, there were Marines posted in the main hangar, where the cargo would be offloaded, and there was always a Gundam hot and ready in the bay to really trash any infantry that might get inside. It went without saying that 75mm APEX shells would do that to even the heaviest-armored of infantry, short of Clan Elementals.

"Control, forward guard, we have one vehicle from Twycross Textiles with a shipment of 1000 pieces new uniforms for the ship, driver says the rest of the shipment is still being packaged at this time, over." It went without saying that at least one Marine had entered the truck load-bed to verify the contents.

"Roger that, forward, entry authorized," Miriallia replies after confirming on the shipment manifests that new uniforms were indeed on the things to receive listing. "New uniforms, commander?"

"I don't know about your size, Miriallia, but when I tried drawing a new set of pants the quartermaster said we didn't have any. And, when you get down to it, since we're a multinational group now we could use a standardized uniform."

"Oh, that makes sense." The only personnel that actually had uniforms, per se, were the ZAFT and Earth Alliance personnel. The captured Clan warriors had come as they were, more or less, and since the Archangel had caught them off guard most of them were not even properly dressed. Then there was the Magic Knights, and though their garb could be considered a uniform, it definitely was not proper for military personnel. Miniskirts did not go along with normal military dress; Miriallia could attest to that firsthand, she was always having problems with hers when on duty. Whatever pervert decided the Earth Alliance enlisted ladies need to wear a miniskirt needs to be choked to death, then shot a few times for good measure, Miriallia thinks out loud, then realizes she may have just put it out telepathically.

"You and I agree on that wholeheartedly, Crewman Haw," Natarle replies diffidently, thereby confirming that she had thought that a bit too loud. Over by the windows she could hear Captain Ramius sniggering about it.

"ZAFT has the same problem," Nicol notes from the presently-unused communications station. Sai had all the commo functions transferred to his so Nicol could do some more work on the Modular API that Kira had written on Dustball. "Back in the academy, more than a few of the enlisted ladies complained long and hard about the miniskirts they were issued. Doesn't make sense, either, what's the point of a uniform miniskirt?" Nicol's question was rhetorical, and the answer was not among the bridge crew of the Archangel.

"Relax, the uniforms I requested are miniskirt-free. And these are just work uniforms, we'll have to figure something out for dress uniforms at a later time."

"Keep our old uniforms as 'dress' uniforms?" Miriallia suggests.

"That is one possibility," Natarle replies after a moment's consideration.

"Regardless of how you cut it, Yzak will insist on using his red-coat for ceremonial purposes."

"He just needs to get it repaired, though," Murrue replies. "And I would foot the bill for it by duty, he got it shredded in service to the ship."

"I'll pass that on to him," Nicol says.

The delivery truck thundered down the starboard catapult and down a makeshift ramp that led from the catapult entrance to the ground. That had been one of Murdoch's best ideas of late, instead of trying to put all traffic through the central bay doors (which he wanted for moving personnel and turret components) the trucks and cargo exoskeletons would go in the port-side launch catapult and out the starboard-side catapult, thereby creating a traffic loop.

Right now, Mu La Flaga was down on the ground with a radio and a crew chief vest, directing traffic and aiding in vehicle searches. Athrun was asleep, Nicol was in the CIC messing with programming, and Yzak was in his Gundam, silently watching the happenings inside the cargo bay. Tolle and Flay were both on the simulators, as Nicol was directing their training. Kira was the only pilot outstanding, and he was still getting used to not being injured, so he was taking it rather easy per the doctor's orders. The Magic Knights, still not 'pilots' as per Murrue's thinking, had no duty section and as such were probably resting somewhere, maybe even in the hot springs.

"Control, forward guard, we have the starport administrator and chief flight controller requesting to speak to the Captain."

Murrue knew it was past inevitable, it was a given that someone from the starport would want to speak to her. She had paperwork to file, of course, not to mention it would be inevitable (after her exploits on Romulus) that she would have to face the press of the Inner Sphere for her troubles. What she had seen, read of what the Press was putting out covered all the basics of how the Archangel got there, though the details were a bit thin in places where Murrue had deliberately been thin on information.

"All right, board them and escort to the stateroom. I will be there momentarily."

"Roger that." Murrue left the bridge, leaving Miriallia, Sai, Nicol, and Natarle as the only persons on the bridge at the time.

"Control, forward, I have a truck here with 40000 kilos of foodstuffs for the ship, driver says they are still packaging the rest at this time for delivery."

"Roger that, forward, what company are they with?"

"Con-Agra," the Marine replies immediately.

"Roger that, we should be receiving another 30,000 from Con-Agra and another 70,000 from Petes and Twycross Water. Entry authorized."

"Hangar, Conn, I have a truck with foodstuffs incoming at this time, offload and storage of this material is priority," Natarle puts out on the hangar speakers. After the phone hangs up, she looks back outside to the most unusual vehicle she had seen ever. "What the hell kinda vehicle is that?"

"Are those things on the cab missile reloads?" Sai asks, watching the activity on his monitors.

"Yeah, a lot of them," Natarle notes. They were the elongated, thin type of missiles for a LRM launcher. And there were a dozen more of the vehicles coming right behind it. "Our first munitions shipment, looks like." There would be dozens more, as though the multipurpose missile tubes at the stern of the ship fired very small missiles by local standards, each missile still weighed five tons. Not to mention each Igelstellung gun sat on a hopper with ten tons of ammo below it and the ship would carry another 400 tons of ammo for the guns, plus reloads for all the new weapons installed, plus reloads for the Helldarts, plus the slugs for the Valiant guns were each a half-ton in mass and the Valiants were a favored problem-solver on this ship (it had been the Valiant that had first drawn blood in Cephiro, lo those months ago). All in all, though the main weapons of the ship were energy weapons, she would still end up carrying a good 1500 tons of ammo in stores for her weapons.

"At least we're not going out again without food and water like we did in Heliopolis," Sai notes sardonically.

"Yeah, our situation is improving, I guess," Miriallia replies.

-x-x-x- (23 May 3050) -x-x-x-

In the days after capturing them, the Bondsmen had told a long and intricate tale of how the Clans were formed of General Kerensky's exodus fleet, who had fled the first succession war and Inner Sphere corruption. That much was entirely plausible to the crew of the Archangel, though the net outcome of that—the formation of the Clans—was still grating on some. Why would someone build a society more or less for the purpose of invading another was beyond most common logic. Even the Earth Alliance at its worst days still was mostly balanced by the civilian population and the 'political' control mechanism still outranked the military. Except, for the Clans the equation was reversed: the military outranked everything and had political control of the rest of the Clan. That was incredibly worrisome to Captain Ramius, as such a society would certainly throw it all down in pursuit of their militaristic goals, whatever they be; never mind the blaring example of that when you looked at the invasion of the Inner Sphere. However, the flip side is that defeating them in combat gained you a bondsman—if they survived—which was not an entirely bad proposition when faired out against their personnel shortage.

"All right, bring it down slow," Pytor notes into a radio. After a few moments the turret housing comes down into place; Kira stops lowering the Strike's arms as the chains slacken. "All right, Strike, we will finish up with this turret. Turret Echo-2 should be ready for emplacement in three hours."

"Roger, thanks," Kira steps back from the turret and walks his way back over to the front deck, where he was ostensibly on guard detail though for the most part he was doing more assisting with repairs and construction than he was actually doing guarding. On the other hand, the Lightning Strike EM rifle, combined with the Aile Strike pack (and beam rifle) gave him both excellent long-range sniper fire and good maneuverability with the option of using a higher-power beam weapon when necessary. So far, the only combat units that had even neared the Archangel were a pair of aerofighters attached to the Twycross militia running down the taxiway directly behind theArchangel to the runways, and a lance of medium 'mechs from a little-known mercenary outfit headed to a Dropship bound for Clan Wolf territory. Security personnel had been posted around the gates that the Archangel was occupying, seen going back and forth in their small crew vehicles (the heaviest weapon any of them had was a support machine gun in fifty-caliber, certainly not a threat to a Warship). Mu had been out for six hours earlier in the day, in his maroon Timber Wolf with the feathers, though they had repainted the OMNI symbol with the unit's new symbol, a top-down representation of the Archangel that was further distinguished with a blue circle around it since Mu was an Earth Alliance officer.

The Archangel Team had been born yesterday, what was a scratch-up crew from four different groups was now one unit (though, in the attitude of Yzak, that was a begrudging admission but a whole helluva lot better than anything else in his opinion, like trying to induct them into the Earth Alliance). All the uniforms had a large (8 centimeter) armpatch on the outside of either arm with the unit's symbol, the ship, superimposed over a dark blue field. Kira's uniform had no unit patch, which would have been under the Archangel patch, which was a statement in and of itself that he was only nominally part of the Earth Alliance. For the EA personnel in the crew, the unit patch was typically the OMNI globe, the three from ZAFT had their own armpatches, and the Magic Knights had nothing, though they had each ordered a set of patches for their uniforms with their individual swords on them. They would have to pick those up when the crew was released into the town, though that was still a few days off since the ship still had a lot of work to do.

As for the Clanners, patches with the Jade Falcon symbol of the Falcon carrying a katana (sword) had been ordered, though policy was they would not be issued until the personnel had served their term of Bond and were indicted into the crew. All of them accepted this at face value, in much the same fashion as someone taken prisoner by the Clans would wear a bondcord, a symbol of their status. Truth to tell, especially by Natarle's standards the Clanners were going out of their way to serve the ship, and as Miriallia pointed out, she could sense they considered their status and duty to the ship a matter of honor. An explanation brought out the fact that their honor-bound duty was all the more so since they learned that the ship that defeated them was not even from the reality they knew and had initially wanted no part of their war, until the Falcons had inadvertently drawn them into the battle by threatening civilians.

"Strike to CIC, resuming primary guard position," Kira replies as she adjusts his shoulders unconsciously. The uniform itched in a couple places because it was so new.

"Roger that, Strike," Natarle notes. Miriallia was off-duty at this time, probably in the hot springs on the ship, or maybe she was at the Spaceport Terminal, which the Captain had authorized the personnel to go to now when off-duty. There was plenty of things to do in the starport itself, though just about everyone short of the bondsmen were looking forward eagerly to raiding the city itself. Twycross City was rumored to have some excellent shopping for tourists, which is what the crew of theArchangel amounted to right now.

Wholly a third of the ship's new weapons mods had been installed—the easy third. The other two thirds were going to be the difficult ones, given that the new arrays had to be sandwiched in between the existing armament groups or added wherever space was possible—and that at a premium. The Archangel was not initially designed with modification room any way you cut it, but since the ship was slowly evolving a little room to play with had become available of late. That fact alone made the present status even remotely possible, and a few other things (like the hot springs). All in all, Kira once again had to remind himself that at least a third of what he was doing or experiencing had to be impossible from an engineering standpoint, but just as the existence of the Rune Gods was manifest, so was the possibility that the ship itself was evolving to cope with the rapidly changing environments. How it was achieving that was a mystery, and anything that was a mystery to Kira rather annoyed him, especially when there was no ready answer at hand.

Contrary to what Natarle had believed and said, the ship's cargo holds had also grown in space slightly, to the tune of about 15. That much was a good thing, in everyone's estimate, since the Archangel was designed to be an autonomous attack vessel and needed to carry a lot of supplies along with it. That being said, Kira had little doubt that the extra spare parts would be needed wherever they may go, since not only did they have to do battle against the Clans, they now had the unenviable chance of slipping into yet another alternate dimension, and the next one may not have the ability to manufacture parts for their machines. And without the machines, the Archangel becomes increasingly less effective in battle, to the point of comical ineffectiveness in the face of larger numbers of smaller targets. The new point defense arrays were designed to alleviate some of that, but stopping them all would be impossible for just the Warship alone. Hence the Mobile Forces, a vicious cycle indeed, Kira thought grimly, now completely reminded of why he was in a Gundam instead of an engineering classroom.

Night was dropping at this time, and Kira switched over to his low-light gear so as to have a better view of the area that he was supposed to be watching. Athrun should be coming on duty soon... The metallic impact sound as the Aegis stepped up onto the front deck caught Kira's attention a moment thereafter.

"I'm here to relieve you, Kira," Athrun notes over their radio channel.

"Nothing happening out there, except that Dropship over there has been taking on fuel for a few hours."

"Big sucker," Athrun notes as he looks over the Dropship in question. It had been surreptitiously scanned earlier in the day by Sai, and came back massing over 50,000 tons. It was a cargo hauler like few others, that much was for sure. In fact, it had hauled the missile reloads for the Gundams and the capital-grade missile launchers from the other side of the planet to this starport, as well as some specialty engine and structural repair component spares, though offloading was done by use of cargo exoskeletons instead of the J-27 Ordinance Transport vehicles.

"I pass unto you the makeshift sniper rifle," Kira hands off the Lightning Strike EM rifle, which really did have an excellent range when used right. The Aegis grabbed the rifle and slung it properly after a moment, since it used the same hand plugs as the Aegis Beam Rifle it could be used by the Aegis.

"I hereby receive the rifle, and raise you a bet: I have ten c-bills says you won't be able to dodge a certain person tonight. I'm not going to say who, of course, that would make it too easy on you."

"I think I already know who you're talking about, and I will take that bet," Kira replies defiantly. He already knew what was going to happen tonight, and he already had his plans made in that case. "Ten bucks says nothing like what you think will happen actually happens tonight."

"Only someone as messed up as you could see the logic in that," Athrun replies to his long-time friend. "Deal. I expect a full report tomorrow, same time and place," Athrun replies stoically, already sensing that he was going to be ten c-bills in the hole by this time tomorrow.

The Strike dropped down to the ground, where the launch bay doors were still open for the changing of the guards. With a minor thrust he was back inside the ship, and with some creative dodging of personnel was back inside his gantry and the Strike was locked down. Within moments he was outside the Strike and inside the ship proper, headed for the hot springs for some relief. As per the doctor's orders he had to spend two hours an operational day in the springs to help with recuperation from his multiple injuries on Romulus. Right now, Kira felt like someone had taken a lead pipe to his back, so the Springs would be welcome for dealing with the strains of the day; officially, he would be back to normal (or what passed for it) in two more weeks.

"Kira, you're off duty?" Flay asks as she was apparently passing by his quarters. The catch was, Kira knew she was 'patrolling' around his quarters during her off-hours waiting for him, since her quarters were closer to the port side than where Kira was, since she was now the official pilot of the Buster.

"Good, I need to talk to you, but after I've done two hours in the springs," Kira replies. "Will you be available in two hours?"

"Of course I will," Flay replies. "Don't be all night at it, either," She replies directly and was off, headed toward her quarters for who-knows-what purposes.

At this time of night, the springs were more or less dead, so Kira had little trouble finding space in them for his nightly soak. Outside the springs, like every time prior he had stopped to look at the flag box that memorialized Dearka and his contribution to the ship, the planet Romulus, and to those he had served with. That much weighed on Kira's conscience more than anything else, since he was not able to do anything to save him, just avenge his loss. And it weighed even more when compared to what Flay so badly wanted him to do, which was fight until he was consumed in the battles or he killed off every other Coordinator in Existence, an impossible goal any way you served it. His two hours were filled with indecision, torn between what he felt for Flay and what he knew he had to do to end his involvement with an otherwise genocidal party.

Flay was waiting silently for him, so when he keyed his access code in, he waved her inside before he stepped into his room and turned the lights on medium brightness. "C'mon, Kira, it's been weeks since we've done anything fun, so...huh, is something wrong, Kira?" she says as he sits down in the chair in his quarters.

"Flay, it's time to make a decision," Kira replies simply.

"If this is about whether or not you and I should get married, can't that wait until we get home?" Flay offers as her first dodge, which Kira was expecting just about as much as an average sunrise.

"No, Flay, that has only part to do with this. No, it's time for you to decide what you really feel, because these past weeks have given me a lot of time to think, and I've decided that when we get home, it's over for me."

"What's...over?" Flay asks, almost trembling with fear.

"When we get back to our home, I'm handing in my commission, uniforms, weapons, the whole nine yards. I am not fighting in the war at home when we get home."

"What...why? Why this all of a sudden?" Flay asks, both shocked and rather hurt by his change of attitude. She also had set down on his bed, more shocked of his determination than anything else.

"And I will inform Captain Ramius of my decision tomorrow as well. I'm tired of it, the pointless conflict because of someone else's hatred, it's been eating at my soul since we first came to Cephiro, and now, watching the Inner Sphere burn because of the Clans, I see now that there are some battles worth fighting, and others that have no purpose whatsoever. The Earth Alliance against ZAFT is a war without purpose and I will not fight in it. It's over, Flay," Kira concludes his main argument, though he knew he'd have to get rough with her before she saw the light.

"Kira—I—I thought you were going to protect us? Weren't you?" she shoots back accusingly; another parry that Kira was ready for.

"That hasn't changed, Flay, and never will. But, if you go on with the war when we get home, you go on alone." He looks down to the floor. "And every night I will end up crying for the lady I lost in the pointless war."

"I can't stand this!" Flay shouts as she bolts to her feet. "The Coordinators killed my family! I thought you knew that! I can't forgive them!"

"I know that!" Kira barks back at her, which Flay was not expecting in the least, to the point that it shocked her to silence. "I know that, Flay. You can't forgive them, so what does that leave? Kill them all?" Kira asks plainly.

"Well..." Flay hedges.

"Well what?" Kira asks forcefully.

"Well, yes, kill them all," Flay says, then a moment thereafter gasps when she remembers that who she was speaking to was a Coordinator. "Oh, I'm—"

"No, you are not sorry, Flay. Don't bother saying it. You want all Coordinators dead, and that includes me. That has to include me, or I'd possibly go about playing George Glen and jump-start the Coordinators again, thereby creating this whole mess all over again. What you want is an impossible genocide. And I will not be a part of that."

Flay had started sobbing, though Kira was hardened to her ploys and wasn't buying it. Three weeks of enforced inactivity can give a person plenty of time to sort out his feelings and understand what he was doing...and doing wrong. "I'll...never get revenge for daddy," Flay gasps out between sobs.

"If you really believe revenge is worth billions of lives, then I have nothing else to say." Kira stands up and opens the door by the control panel. "I'm sorry you feel like this, Flay, but this game is over. Out."

"I'm not leaving," Flay says testily. "Not until you apologize for this!" Flay shouts angrily, staring at Kira with wide, rage-shot eyes.

"Then stay here, I'll go bunk with Nicol tonight." Kira had requested that of Nicol earlier in the day, since he knew this might happen. Nicol definitely did not object, and had a bedroll and pillows readied for just such a happenstance. Without another word, Kira exited the room and headed left toward the quarters that Athrun and Nicol were sharing.

Kira had walked six meters before Yzak had come out of his room, dressed in his new uniform and flexing his shoulders to settle the fabric. "Yzak," Kira says by way of greeting.

"Strike, hey, what was that yelling about?" Yzak asks in a level fashion, which made it sound more curious than accusatory.

"Flay...got a little emotional when I had to explain something to—huh?" The door to Kira's room had opened, though the first thing both pilots saw was the blade of her Kodachi. She was not far behind.

"You..."

"Uh, Flay, I don't think—" Kira begins, but chokes when she looks back up at him, with a purely feral and enraged expression.

"DIE!" Flay shouts as she charges toward both pilots, though the set of her blade was toward Kira's heart.

This was the one eventuality that Kira had not considered: that Flay would try to kill him for the emotional duress. Thus, even with the incoming blade he choked badly, without even reaching for his own weapon that would have easily stopped her blade cold.

She never got to Kira, though. Yzak had not been caught unawares, and as soon as Kira was saying 'don't think' he had reached for his glove and the two-handed blade within. As she charged, Yzak had set it with the tip of the blade pointed down to the deck and the hilt above eye level; as she charged past, he jammed the blade of his weapon into the blade of hers, effectively checking it and shoving it outside of her intended path, where it would harm only the wall. He had set his body to receive hers, and when they collided he drove her back with his shoulder. Before she could even begin to react, he had dropped aside his sword and slapped the blade of hers across her body, away from him, then grabbed it on the back edge of the blade and twisted it free of her grip. With him holding the kodachi, he reached back and drove it through the wall of Kira's room to render it inoperable for the time.

"Man, Strike, what the fuck did you explain to her?" Yzak asks as he brings his hands up in a martial-arts guard against Flay's feral stare at him for stopping her attack. Flay did not waste time going back on the offensive, this time unarmed, against Yzak. "Damnit!" Yzak shouts as he has to block several wild swings she took at him that were surprisingly painful for such a person. He ends up shouldering her again, this time followed up with a gut-kick that caused her to screech in pain and collapse to both knees.

"What the hell's going on here? Miriallia said there's someone trying to kill Kira here—huh?" Mu stutters as he comes across the scene, sword in the wall, sword on the ground, Flay on the ground and vomiting, Yzak out of breath, Kira shocked shitless, total chaos.

"Yeah, that's about right, Commander, Strike's girlfriend decided she wasn't going to take 'no' for an answer and tried skewering him."

"Oh, wonderful," Mu says. "Kira, you all right?"

"I—uh—I—"

"No, he's not," Murrue says as she comes up behind Kira. "Mu, pull her glove and take her down to the doctor. We'll decide how to handle this in the morning. Brig her for now, after the doc clears her." Murrue looks to Yzak. "Yzak, your involvement here?"

Yzak figured it a fair question, since she did not seem to be accusing him of anything. "I stepped out as Kira was headed down the hall, and asked him what the yelling was about, then Flay comes out with her sword drawn and charges us down. I stopped her thrust, disarmed her, and just before Commander Flaga showed up I put her down, only after she tried tearing my head off barehanded." By this time the hall in the area was becoming quite crowded with all three Magic Knights in pajamas, Nicol in his fatigues, Murrue, Kira, Yzak, Tolle, and Sai. "What I'd like to know is what the hell happened that she got white-eyed pissed off at Strike," Yzak pins Kira with a very accusatory stare, and for good measure.

"Hey, uh, can we not talk about this? I mean, she's a bit unbalanced right now with what we discussed, and with being away from home like this, and she doesn't deal well with rejection..."

"No shit, Sensei," Yzak replies testily to Kira's comment about her not dealing well with rejection. "I must be on the most insane Warship in all of Creation," Yzak mutters as he dodges past Natarle and Sai to pick up his sword, which he rescinded into his glove without a further word.

"All right, everyone, as you were," Natarle orders, then shoulders her way to Kira as the people begin moving back to their beds or other activities. "Kira, what the hell happened? Really?"

"I...told her to decide between me and her hatred." What that hatred was need not be asked by the officers, for they all knew what that was about. "When she slipped up and said she wanted to kill all Coordinators, I called our relationship off. I was walking down to Nicol's room to bunk in with him tonight when she came out and attacked. What Yzak said is right, that is what happened."

"Thank you, Kira. Get some rest, try not to dwell on it. You're on duty tomorrow."

-x-x-x- (27 May 3050) -x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Someone can't aim)

"...We don't really know where our home is. We don't know how to get there. All the same, we cannot and would not ignore as invaders trash world after world while we try to get home. That is why we are working with the 1st Somerset Strikers." Murrue concludes her first speech as the Captain of the Archangel Team, to a full crowd of press from the planet as well as ringers for ComStar and the major networks of some of the other great houses. "Questions?" she asks, feeling severely out of her depth at this time. Admirals do this kind of shit, not Captains, she thought behind what she hoped was a passive face.

"Your team's first major victory was on Dustball, as well as several victories in heavy fighting on Romulus. Do you think you can keep this winning streak up?" a ComStar reporter asks.

"I don't know, and I am not going to take guesses at it. All we can do is do what we can, and hope between now and when we get home that we make a difference. Next question?"

Doin' good, kid, Major Steiner thinks aloud, watching from a certain store in part of the commercial district.

"So much the better the press seems to like her already," Lieutenant Specter says.

"Your forces have captured a lot of Clan hardware and units, and we've seen at least one 'mech fielded by your unit from their forces, what has become of the rest?"

"As per our arrangement with the AFFC, most of that has been turned over to the FedCom research divisions for analysis, at least that which we are not maintaining possession of for use in the unit. For more details, I'll have to refer you to the AFFC research division. Next question?"

"What's the 'mech compliment of your ship?" A local reporter asks.

"That's classified. Next question?" Murrue could tell he grimaced at that response, but she wasn't going to hand everything to them on a silver platter.

"There are rumors that you have in your team a trio known as Rune Gods. Can you extrapolate?"

"We have Rune Gods in the unit, though their nature is not quite completely known to us they have agreed to aid us in this endeavor. Next question?"

"Follow-up question, ma'am, what is the strength of the Rune Gods?" The person in question sounded as if she disbelieved anything with the word 'God' in it.

"That's classified, and quite frankly the strength of the Rune Gods is a concern between the Rune Gods and whoever they decide is their enemy. Next question?" Murrue definitely was not going to subject Umi, Hikaru, and Fuu to press scrutiny. Thankfully, the press got the hint that time and decided they would not play on that subject for now.

"Ma'am, you lost a pilot in heavy fighting on Romulus, a soldier of the ZAFT faction of your homeworld. Do you believe he will be recognized as having died in combat when the unit gets home?"

Probably not, Murrue thinks aloud, but says: "I do not have an answer for that, I am not ZAFT, though I would hope that the sacrifice he made in defense of civilians would be recognized by their government at that time. Next question?" Natarle gives her the signal from the back of the room for her to cut it off.

"The downed unit, the Buster Gundam, who will pilot it?"

"That information is definitely classified, you know I can't tell who pilots what, people. One more question, please."

"What is you hope, Captain Ramius?"

That one caught Murrue slightly unawares, though not entirely unprepared. "Well, my one hope is to get my crew home, alive and intact, some time between now and mandatory retirement age." The way she had said it caused a few chuckles among the press crowd. "Thank you, ladies and gentlemen." Murrue picked up her hat (she was still using her Earth Alliance hat) and stepped down from the dais, headed down the port side of the room for the two officers at the back of the room, Commander Badgiruel and Commander La Flaga.

"Ready to go, Captain. Major Steiner is waiting for us at the location," Natarle notes.

"Lead on," Murrue says, and at that the press began to break down to add their final notes to their broadcasts before going their separate ways.

There was a staff car waiting for them to head to the location from the general assembly hall in the Twycross Civic building. So far, Murrue's day had been nothing more than a whirlwind of talks, meetings, and paperwork, culminating in the press conference she had just bounced her way through in what she hoped was a dignified fashion. On that account she was not taking bets right now.

"Flay?" Murrue asks.

"Last I checked she was still sobbing in her cell," Natarle notes.

"Six months brig, no involvement with Kira again," Mu notes. "At least you did not have her shot as the regs require," he notes sardonically. Really, though, even the thought of it turned his stomach. Murrue had once used the execution charge as a chock tactic against Kira before he had volunteered, and Mu knew that was what she was going to say, but the possibility was actually here that that would have happened.

"I can understand her feelings partially, but not her method," Murrue replies. "And in the end I don't think being that emotionally distraught and reacting like that warrants the firing squad. Poor judgment, yes, deplorable, yes, but in the end all the evidence does point to temporary insanity. Even Miriallia had testified that she was not in her right senses when that happened. Only problem is now we need someone to fill the Buster pilot position, since she is definitely out of the running." It went without saying that Murrue was definitely not going to issue the Buster Gundam to someone who could become temporarily fratricidal when pushed hard enough.

"Could we have Kuzzey take over the controller station as well as communications and have Miriallia handle the Buster?" Mu asks; the looks he got from Murrue and Natarle was answer enough. "Disregard I said that," he backtracks quite quickly.

"No, Miriallia is best in place right now. Kuzzey probably would not do it. Chandratta is needed where he is, same with Newman, leaving Sai or you, Natarle, as possibles."

"Okay, we neglected Tolle on that one, and as much as I like having a friend in the air, when you get down to it which has more deployable firepower, the Buster or the Skygrasper?" Mu adds to the debate.

Silence in the car for a minute: "Well, put that way, the choice becomes a no-brainer. Then, as Major Steiner has proved, cross-training is a useful skill in the long run," Natarle notes, referring to the possible dual role that Tolle would serve in both the Buster and the Skygrasper.

"We're here," the Marine driver notes.

"All right, let's do this." Murrue, then Natarle and Mu, stepped out of the car and headed into the building in question.

Murrue was Special Operations, and heavily trained on the use of small arms up to and including heavy anti-tank missiles (which did have utility against GINN suits, but not a whole lot). In this case, she felt she had found her equal or better, as she looked down the racks of rifles, pistols, machine guns of every flavor, support weapons that she could only begin to guess how useful they would be. About the only thing the place was missing, at Murrue's first guess, was an Elemental suit (which Murrue had retained possession of two points of them for the Elementals she had taken bondsmen).

"When Mercenaries and small FedCom units operate out in this part of the Inner Sphere, this is one of the better places to shop for weps and ammo," Major steiner says as he approaches. "With the coming of the Clans, depots have been emptying out, so we have had to drop back to going through retailers or straight from the manufacturer."

"Oh, makes sense," Murrue says as one of the shop's proprietors approaches—then stops dead at five meters shocked of demeanor and expression.

"Holy shit, you're that badass team that trashed the Clans on Romulus, ain't ya?" He says as he approaches a little more cautiously. Their uniforms were the same Matte gray as the rest of the team, but the arm patches had a white background and they had transferred their rank insignia to their new uniforms. "I saw a tactical recap of what you guys did to them, that was some slick tactics you hosed them with."

"That was one of our pilots that came up with the plan. We just shot up their Dropships and supported the ground units," Natarle replies, staring distantly at a heavy machine gun.

"That's how the good teams work, how we did it back in the 12th Donegal Guards. So, my question is, what do you guys need?"

An honest-to-God vacation, Murrue thinks sardonically but says nothing immediately. "Between Romulus and Cephiro, we managed to expend most of our small arms munitions and almost all of our infantry-portable anti-tank capabilities. So, we're thinking about replacing them with equivalent or improved arsenal, and I am also thinking about setting up a full reserve infantry platoon for theArchangel, to compliment the squad of Marines I have."

"Ah. So, that leaves the question how do you want your Infantry unit equipped? I can do a Laser platoon, SRM launchers, heavy MG, flamers, or a standard Rifle platoon."

"A Laser platoon, what do they normally carry?" Murrue asks, immediately intrigued.

"Crew-served support laser. It's about the rough equivalent to what an Elemental carries for its primary laser, or so I hear off and on. Standard platoon of 28, it would be eight lasers and twenty rifles, two lasers per squad with three crew each and the squad sergeant."

That's some serious shit, Natarle thinks.

"SRM team?" Murrue asks.

"Usually carries 12 of these," the proprietor hefts a large missile tube. "Fires the exact same SRM as a battlemech.. In a laser team, the crew would carry bunches of these Satchel batteries to power the laser, in a SRM team, the crew would carry spare SRMs for the guy with the launcher. Typically, one squad will carry three launchers, a shooter and a reloader team plus a squad sergeant to direct fire."

"SRMs, Captain, a whole helluva lot more powerful than the LAWS we used on those Elementals," Mu notes. "Not to mention, they're good out to what, 900 meters? More?"

"if you're pushing it, you can get 1200 meters out of one missile, though the engine is burned out by the time it gets to 700 or so and you're going on dead reckoning beyond that."

"I know, that's some serious firepower. Well, we face some serious foes, so how do we want to do this?"

"I'd say get a set of both, the laser gear and the SRM tubes, we'll convert the storage room next to our small arms locker into extra storage."

"Well, that's settled, now we need something for common use," by which she meant rifle and pistol. Already visions of serious c-bills were dancing in the confines of the staff's head, and this was just the official weapons sets. Without question, some of the individual troopers would be along to acquire their own arsenal in time, though he did not know that yet. "Is this still in common use?" Murrue asks as she presents a cartridge from the Earth Alliance assault rifle to the proprietor.

"No, this cartridge went out before the Star League. This is what is in common use around here," the cartridge was similar, but about ten millimeters longer than the .30-caliber from the Earth Alliance rifle.

"Oh. That thing'll have some power behind it," Mu notes as he inspects the difference between the cartridges. "You have a shooting range where we can test these?"

"Definitely, follow me." In the basement of the facility he had a four-lane shooting range with a heavy backstop on it. Inside, there was one shooter on the line, using a sub-machine gun in short, rapid bursts to put small groups on target; Murrue, after inspecting the lady's handiwork, figured she could do better. "So, where do you want to start? Similar to yours, or higher or lower power?"

"We'll start with similar and go from there," Murrue requests between bursts from the active shooter.

"Start here," He offers a demo model rifle of the type used by the AFFC. "This is the Federated AR-32, in use across the Inner Sphere. Fires the cartridge I showed you."

"All right, I'll start off," Murrue accepts the rifle and a magazine. She pulled the safety tag out of the breech, inserted and locked in the magazine, and slammed the bolt shut. Before she continued she put on safety goggles to go along with her hearing protection, as an attendant had motored a silhouette target out to a respectable range (Murrue guessed it was about 100 yards, maybe a little more). She set the sights to 100 yards and centered them over the target in the distance, then dropped the selector switch into (strangely enough) 4-round burst mode. The first burst was a bit of a surprise to her, though the bolt and stock were completely inline and the muzzle climb was very minimal, though the recoil went almost straight to her shoulder. Four rounds had the same translation of recoil, in her estimate, as firing both a twelve gauge and a sixteen gauge shotgun, one right after the next.

"Shooter three, low and right, disable shots," the intercom reports for her efforts. Murrue lines up better, and fires again, this time with a better idea of what the weapon was going to do to her. "Shooter three, on target, four in the chest." This time, Murrue lowers the weapon, then raises it quickly, centers, and fires a burst. "Shooter three, on target, three in the chest and one in the head," the range master reports for her troubles.

"Your turn, Natarle," Murrue offers to the physically smaller Commander after setting the fire selector into 'safe' position. She would be the harder to sell on a new weapon, as she was used to the lighter Earth Alliance automatics. Natarle had once tried her hand at the ZAFT assault rifle and found it less to her liking since it was a full-stock and slightly heavier rifle. Natarle received the rifle gingerly, and immediately came to the conclusion that it was bigger but not entirely unwieldy. She stepped up to the booth, set the rifle in two-round burst mode (as opposed to Murrue's four-round burst that had made her chest shake severely, probably to serious amusement of the proprietor and Mu), which also disabled the safety. She shouldered it and fired a burst, which hammered into her shoulder like a heavy, recoil-padded shotgun.

"Damn, this thing does have a kick," Natarle notes after the announcer rattles off her score (pair of headshots).

"Shooter three, one torso, one ball-buster," there was a display on the side of the booth that showed where she had hit, and indeed one of the slugs would have removed the target's nugs, as well as his lower urinary tract, crank, and shattered his pelvis. Mu cringed at the thought of that being a real person (or worse, him if he pissed her off for some reason).

"That was not deliberate," Natarle notes as she sights up again and fires again. This time, she put both in the optimal kill zone, centered on the tango's sternum. Like Murrue, she also did a burst after raising the weapon from a lowered position, and liked the result. The sights were great, just fell into place and aligned properly without any adjustment for Natarle. "Your turn, Commander," she safed the weapon and handed it off to Mu, who donned his safety glasses without hesitation and took up the rifle.

"All right, let's see how well I do," Mu says as he steps up to the booth. The attendant had cleared the hit record from Natarle's shooting, so he was on his own card at this time. He started with two round bursts. "Shooter three, pair of misses," followed by: "shooter three, left chest, left arm," then followed by: "Shooter three, neck, upper chest."

"Well, I think I'll step it up now," Mu says as he switches to four-round burst.

"Shooter three, two misses, one left leg, one left hip," the announcer was starting to sound a bit amused, which was starting to piss Mu off.

"This thing is going to take some getting used to," Mu says as he pulls the magazine and checks it; the tag showed he had eight rounds left. These went into two more four-round bursts that were better than his first four, but not by much. The announcer had reported that Mu had earned a ball-buster himself, and in unconscious reaction he had crossed his legs. Murrue noticed this, and pointed it out to Natarle, who had a bit of a laugh for it. "You have another mag?" Mu asks, politely ignoring the hushed sniggering behind him.

"Sure, here," he hands off another pre-loaded magazine. "You going to try full auto?"

"Yeah, see how well it can be used for suppressing fire," we'll see how that bastard Le Creuset likes these apples, Mu thinks aloud.

"I'll give you a few extra targets as well," four more holotargets pop up down the way for him to try spraying down. "Go for full-auto," he says after the last one spawns.

"Fire in the hole!" Mu shouts as he levels his weapons and pulls the trigger. Nothing happened.

"Uh, Mu,. you're still on safe," Natarle notes after he wonders what the hell went wrong.

"Damn, that explains that," Mu says as he sets the rifle into full auto and hunkers down again.

The rifle had a very high rate of fire, and since the bolt was inline with the stock the muzzle climb was actually quite negligible for a 7.62mm weapon with a large cartridge behind it. That meant that he actually put most of the rounds in the same area as where he was aiming

"Shooter three, five targets, twelve hits, all targets KIA," the announcer sounded like he was about to bust out laughing.

"I've seen better days," Mu mutters as he clears and safes the weapon.

"Well, shall we move on to the next possible in the automatic rifle category?" the proprietor asks.

-x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Bar and Grill)

Tolle was spared the rigors of having to carry everything they purchased by simple expedient of most of the companies having delivery service to the hotels and spaceport. Thus, for a nominal feel of an extra few c-bills, the stuff that Miriallia mostly picked out was delivered to the ship for them, leaving them free to parade on and purchase more.

The day was dragging on and Tolle was thinking longingly about lunch. "So, Mir, where do we stop for lunch?"

"Oh, I dunno, how about there?" she had indicated a sports bar and grill down the street.

Tolle opened his mouth to say something, but snapped it shut to avoid getting a mouthful of dust. Another hover-car had blown by, and their pants had flared when it passed close enough to blow some wind up their legs. Not to mention they had to be the noisiest vehicles he had ever heard, possibly even worse than the Gundams banging around inside the hangar. They were a luxury vehicle, of course; rich snobs and their toys, he thought crassly. On the other hand, he had enough budget to buy his own ride right now, though it would be on the 'economy' list when you got down to it. He only had a personal allotment of 20,000 C-bills less what he had spent so far.

"What did you say?"

"I was going to say 'sure' before that car passed us," Tolle notes.

"Okay, let's do it, then," Miriallia stepped up to one of the ubiquitous ATM machines and inserted her card, typed in the PIN attached to it, and withdrew thirty C-bills in hard cash to cover their meal. Likely, there would be a machine inside the restaurant as well, though Miriallia was one who believed in being prepared first. The bar in question appeared to be a family-oriented establishment as well as very popular, so she figured it would be safe for two Mercenaries.

They were almost inside when a glint of emerald caught Tolle's eye; as he checked it again, he saw Fuu and Nicol moving down the street toward the bar and grill they were standing outside. "Hey, Nicol, over here!"

"Tolle?" Miriallia asks as she comes back out of the bar. "Oh, Fuu, Nicol!" Miriallia says as she moves to join Tolle, who was headed for Nicol and Fuu, who had heard him and were headed his way.

"Hey, guys, what's going on?" Nicol asks.

"Gettin' ready to raid some lunch," Tolle replies. "You?"

"Thinking the same thing. Do you have any ideas?" Fuu asks.

"Actually, this place," Miriallia points at the building next to them, which happened to be the grill that they were about to enter before Tolle sighted Nicol's glove.

"Okay, is this place safe?" Nicol asks.

"I watched a family with three kids enter about five minutes ago."

"C'mon, daylight's wasting and I still have a few places I'd like to hit," Tolle says.

"All right, hold your horses, Tolle, it's not like the city is going anywhere, nor is our ship," Mir replies tiredly and pushes him in the direction of the bar with an apologetic glance back to Nicol and Fuu, both of which were smiling. It did not take telepathy for her to understand why they were smiling.

There was a very small wait for a booth in the far corner, where they paired off and sat opposite each other. The waitress introduced herself in English (all four of them had English as a second language, so they understood her) and said she would give them a few minutes to decide.

"Now, Tolle, no drinks," Miriallia chides in Japanese.

"Right, Mir," Tolle replies as he pages through the menu. "Hey, this looks pretty good, 'angus beef burger'."

"Oh, this I think I will try, 'ranch chicken garden salad'," Fuu notes.

Nicol figured on the chicken, despite having chicken quite frequently on the ship. Miriallia decided she would try a steak wrap, figuring the array of vegetables on it sounded pretty good when grilled.

"Man, look at that," Tolle says as he nods toward the main viewscreen in the bar area, showing a tournament battle between four battlemechs.

"Some kind of arena match?" Nicol asks. "Not very good when you get down to it," he notes. The pilots in question were missing a little less than half of their shots, and Nicol knew the kind of ammo they were expending was not cheap. "The Clanners do better than that—routinely."

"Yeah, you got that right, they do better than that just shooting at fighters," Tolle replies.

"On the other hand, they kinda stink at real long ranges, so we have them beat there," Nicol notes, then adds: "Only problem is, the Buster and Lightning Strike are the only really long range weapons we have, except for the ship's guns,"

"And the Buster has no pilot," Mir concludes the thought. Their whole conversation was in Japanese, which excluded 95 percent of the bar from understanding them, and their speech was low enough that the 5 percent that could have understood them could not hear them.

"Ready to order?" The waitress asks in English again. All four place their orders, and without trying their choices came out to less than 20 c-bills, actually less than Mir was planning on spending on just Tolle and herself. "It'll be about fifteen minutes. I'll bring your drinks out here in a moment," she notes.

Attention focused back on the screen, where a pilot by the name of 'Hi-Jack' had just won over the other three with creative use of an Autocannon. This was rather unsurprising to Nicol, though hardly praiseworthy in the ZAFT Pilot's mind.

"I got fifty c-bills says either of you two could take all four of them out at once," Nicol says, indicating first Nicol and Fuu, then pointing to the screen.

"I might be able to with Windam's assistance," Fuu notes, then adds: "but I am not as good as Miss Hikaru or Miss Umi."

Bullshit, you're all better than you think you are, Mir thinks but does not say.

The waitress returned with their drinks, just glasses of water with the exception of Tolle who had a cola. She hesitated, like she wanted to ask something, but thanked them and left.

"So, what are you two planning on doing for the rest of the day?"

"Just minor shopping for now," Fuu replies. "Nicol and I have already acquired what we were looking for," she notes hastily.

"Doing better than we are; Mir isn't even half-done yet." Fuu and Nicol could not have missed his suddenly clenched jaw; Nicol did note Miriallia's right upper arm twitch, which told him that she had poked or pinched him for his effort. "Not that I'm complaining, really, I just have a schedule to work by today."

"Oh, is something happening later tonight?" Nicol asks.

"Yeah, a metal concert at the downtown convention center. Admission is ten c-bills, so I'm gonna be all over that," Tolle replies with obvious cheer to voice.

"Oh, you wouldn't happen to be the person that gave Yzak some kind of hard rock music, would you? Athrun is pissed off about it, interferes with his work."

"Oh, crap," Tolle knew that somehow, letting Yzak borrow his player would cause problems. "Hey, I just let him borrow it, what he does with it is Yzak's problem, not mine," Tolle notes hastily.

"I don't see Athrun taking it that way," Nicol replies curtly.

Oh, shit, just who I need as a semi-enemy, Tolle thinks aloud. Athrun Zala, Aegis pilot, general ass-whooper, and mechanical tinkerer. I am so a walking dead man, he thinks loud enough for Mir to pick up on it, who giggles more for his mental tone than the content. "It's only funny to you, Mir," Tolle adds verbally.

"No, I can think of at least two ways to keep the Zala-zilla from flattening you, Tolle, and neither would be hard to accomplish."

"Please, enlighten me," Tolle entreats to his girlfriend.

"No way, you're gonna have to work for it," she replies.

"There is something seriously wrong with you," Tolle notes. "That is just plain cruel." Nicol and Fuu found it quite amusing.

"Get used to it, it's a hard reality we live," Miriallia replies as the waitress was seen to be headed their way with the meal plates. What she had said was quickly becoming the ship's catchphrase.

"So true," Tolle replies as she begins setting the plates down for everyone. "Thank you, ma'am," Tolle notes as he begins preparing his beef burger with condiments. After the initial check, all four told her that it appeared fine for now.

"Um, I have a question of you, if you are willing?" She asks after a moment.

"Uh, sure, what?" Tolle asks.

"Are you four part of the Archangel Team?" she asks real quietly, so as to be just barely audible to the booth and not the nearby people.

"Uh, yeah, we are," Tolle replies after a moment of considering it.

"Thank you." Miriallia could sense nothing derisive of her attitude, just a combination of curiosity and respect for their position. She moved onward to her next table in the area.

"That was strange," Nicol notes.

"Not really," Miriallia replies immediately. "People see a rather stylized image of us courtesy of the news; finding us in real life must be a shock, I guess."

"Oh, man, this is killer beef," Tolle notes after his second bite. "I hope the crazy cook ordered some of this stuff."

"I think he did," Fuu replies. She would know, Tolle knew, since she also did some work in the kitchens as well as her duty in Windam.

"Excellent," Tolle replies before taking another bite of his burger.

The waitress came back after a few minutes and a round at all her tables. "And how is everything? Need more water?"

"Excellent, and I could use another cola if possible," Tolle notes without really looking at her; Mir didn't even need to use her telepathy to tell something was up, like she was deciding what to do about something she had not even explained yet.

"Okay, back in a moment," she says as she grabs up Tolle's glass and heads to the drink dispenser. Miriallia and Fuu both had eyes on her, since Fuu also sensed something was unusual at present.

"Something's not right," Tolle notes quietly and in Japanese.

"No fooling," Miriallia replies tersely as she begins headed back.

"Here you go, sir," she handed off the drink, but under it was a piece of folded paper that would have been hard to see if Tolle was not paying attention. He picked up his drink and took a sip while unfolding it. It had four words on it:

" 'Is your team hiring?' " Mir reads off the paper.

"Something is definitely not right here if she's asking to take a chance like that," Nicol adds.

Miriallia focuses her telepathy on the waitress in question, checking for her surface thoughts without doing any real digging. What she found there shocked her quite a bit. Some were the things that few ladies would ever say aloud, much less in front of the involved parties. "Tolle, pass me the radio."

"Uh, sure," Miriallia grabs it and switches to the frequency that Natarle had said she would be on. "Commander Badgiruel from Tango-two-seven, over," Miriallia puts out in Japanese.

"Go," She replies after four seconds.

"Are we accepting applications for employment?"

"Only if they are crazy enough to take the chance of going with us to where-the-hell-ever next we end up," Natarle replies. "Why, you have an offer?"

"Yes, I have a waitress at my present location that could use a change of pace. She should also be good at cooking as well as serving, apparently," Miriallia replies, immediately getting the attention of the other three. "I think this may need to be a stealth pickup as well, for reasons I don't want to mention at present, over," Miriallia adds.

"Roger that. We will convene at 1700 hours at a central location to discuss details, over."

"Understood, Commander, just call me on two-seven with the location and we'll wander that way ASAP."

"Roger that, over and out." Miriallia passes back the radio to Tolle and picks up the note, digging in her uniform pocket for a small pen she had bought earlier in the day to take notes. She writes back 'Yes, there are details' on the flip-side of the note and reverses the fold.

"Was everything to your approval?" to Tolle, she even sounded quite a bit worried.

"Yes, it was lovely," Miriallia replies as she hands the plate off to her. The note was compressed below a fork and was impossible to see unless you knew what you were looking for (which she did).

"Thank you." She only needed one glance to see what it said, and that surreptitiously while stacking the other finished plates. "Can we talk?" she asks quietly.

"Definitely," Miriallia replies. Restroom, three minutes, Miriallia adds telepathically in what she hoped was passable English. She nods just barely enough to be noticed, then takes the plates to the kitchen to be washed and reused in the never-ending restaurant cycle of flatware going in, going out.

Miriallia counts the minutes down on the LCD on her radio. "Tolle, let me out, gotta hit the restroom before we pay and go," she notes rather innocently.

"Right," he sighs as he stands up and lets her out.

"I believe I had best do so as well before we continue, Nicol," Fuu notes, and Nicol lets her out as well.

"I'm going on break, Tandra, spot my tables for fifteen?"

"Yeah, sure, no prob," one of the other waitresses replies to the waitress in question. She ducked into the bathroom after Fuu had, ostensibly and truthfully for the same reason that the two Archangel Team members had.

"I know," Miriallia says simply as she turns the faucet on. It was a noisy one that would drown some sounds out. "If you go with us, you're taking the chance that you'll never come back to this world, or worse, be killed in combat."

"Better than here. My ex-boyfriend's been threatening me and my daughter for months. When can I leave?"

"Oh, man, this is worse than I thought." Miriallia knew the decision was way the hell over her rank, but she didn't have the radio (she was making Tolle carry it, as Nicol was carrying the radio between Fuu and Nicol). Still, there were two things here that had to be exorcised: one, protect a life (she wanted to do that anyway), and two: protect a possible new recruit for the ship that was still slightly understaffed even with the influx of Clanners. "Can you cook?"

"I can try, I think," she replies.

"Well, even if you end up being another Flay, it'd be better than here. C'mon—huh?" the door opened, and the person that had walked in was a guy. "Ugh, a pervert! Get the hell outta here!" Miriallia orders in her best command voice, which did little to even faze the guy.

"Shut up, bitch," he looks to the waitress. "Don't even think about asking them to leave this rock, or I'll kill you, the kid, and them," he indicates Fuu and Miriallia.

"Big mistake, asshole," Miriallia says as she reaches down to her right-hand glove and draws out the bow. Since the upgrade in the volcano on Cephiro her bow was a bit bigger now and quite a bit more ornate, looking something like gold with emeralds up and down the frame. As soon as he recognized what he was looking at his hand shot inside his overcoat for some kind of concealed weapon, but Miriallia had him beat courtesy of long hours of hard practice. The arrow was in place, drawn, and loosed in less time than it took for him to pull a compact pistol; she had centered the shot so it went straight through his sternum, though his heart, through his spine and out his back, then through the partial wall behind it that obscured the door from the rest of the restroom, through the heavy wood door, and apparently out into the customer area where it sailed across the room and lodged itself in a brick wall. The pistol finally clattered to the ground just in front of the waitress, armed but unfired.

"FUCK ME!" Tolle shouts in Japanese loud enough to be heard inside the bathroom. "MIR!" He shouts after a moment.

The waitress was gasping for air from pure shock at seeing him dead so easily. Mir had siezed up, since she was in such confines with another person she had just killed, and in that moment she had seen it all, mostly his perversion and hatred of the woman standing next to her.

"Miriallia, Fuu, are you all right in there?" Nicol asks from a slightly-opened door.

"Yes, we are alive, please call the police Nicol," Fuu replies. "Miriallia, are you well?"

Mir had braced the lower arm of her bow on the tile floor and was holding the top arm against her forehead, rocking back and forth slowly. "I—I had to do it, I didn't have a choice, I had to do it..."

"Mir, I'm coming in, please don't shoot at me again," Tolle says as he comes in. He was not armed, as that was part of the paperwork that Captain Ramius was to work on this afternoon, after going shopping for new small arms for the ship. "Man, that is one fucking dead dude," Tolle says. "And I thought she had shot at me for being a loud-ass pervert again," Tolle says by way of a wan joke.

"No...he confronted us, said he'd kill all three of us, I had no choice when he went for a pistol," Miriallia said.

"Good God," the restaurant's manager said as he came upon the scene and saw the dead body (it went without saying he saw the arrow in the far wall of the restaurant). "Remind me not to piss you Archangel Team members off." The Manager walks to the guy's chest area, squats down, and checks for a pulse. "He's dead. Hey, Mina, isn't this your stalker?"

-x-x-x-

(Shopping vignette: Kira's crazy plan)

"Athrun, if I may ask, what are you trying to find?" Kira asks after a few moments of staring at the fifth 'junk shop' of the day.

"Anything we can use for the machines, Kira. If we run out of parts, that's it, stick a fork in your Gundam, and mine. C'mon," Athrun says as he heads into shop number five.

When inside, Kira immediately heads to the left, as Athrun heads to the right. On the left was the small appliance section, where Kira was looking for spare holoprojector equipment for his own pet project. Athrun had delved into the heavy equipment area, in search of parts that would be compatible with the Gundams and the ship itself, or general junk that would be useful around the ship for tasks other than combat, since he knew that the user modifications to the ship were just beginning, and probably by the time they hung it up or got home, theArchangel would be a veritable cruise liner as well as a warship. In his estimate, though, the Archangel that got home would also be significantly larger than the one that left, as well as better armed and hellishly seasoned from all the weird foes to kill out there, but...

"How goes it, Kira?"

"Dunno yet, still on my first aisle," Kira replies back after a few moments.

"Well, shit, that might come in handy," Athrun notes as he walks by a huge electric motor. It was ostensibly a winch motor used in zero-G settings to reel in large objects by winch, though he figured it would do just as good on his crane project. The price tag was reasonable as well, 1000 c-bills, and he could charge it back to the ship instead of personal funds because of the nature of that project. He had already discussed that with Murrue and Mu, and they had signed off on most of his ideas. Farther down the heavy equipment rack was a large cargo exoskeleton with zero-G maneuver jets, though the price tag on it was a bit higher than his last find he figured he could easily justify that after what Kira had done with one similar (but smaller) on Romulus.

"How's it going, Athrun?"

"Excellent, got a couple things in mind already," Athrun replies offhand, spying a series of military-grade touch-screen control panels that were reasonably priced at 30 c-bills apiece. These he added to the flatbed he had with him for carrying around his load of goodies.

"Okay, I think I finally have enough of the right equipment to do what I want to," Kira says after he wheels a flatbed up to the front counter, just ahead of the flatbed that Athrun had his hands on.

"Oh, Kira, what is all that stuff?" Athrun asks.

"Oh, this is all the components I need to make several full-room holoprojectors and tri-vid recorders."

"Okay, what are you going to do with all that?" Athrun asks.

"I'm going to set up a room in the ship that we can use as a holo-projector theater and entertainment room. Full 3-D models and all that stuff."

"Uh, Kira, have you stopped to consider that, I mean, really consider that?" Athrun asks, hoping his long-time friend had a shred of common sense to see what he was about to initiate.

"Well, yeah, I have, and seeing all the latest movies in three dimensions would be very cool, wouldn't it?" He pauses. "I mean, I'll have to write programs to translate the movie from a flat-screen production to a full 3-D view, but that won't be all that big a deal."

"No, I don't mean that." Athrun sighs; Kira had not thought this one through, which did not surprise Athrun in the slightest. "Kira, you do know that said room would likely not be used for the purpose you intend, right?"

"Uh, no, why?"

"Kira, think about it. Full three-dimensional imagery. You do know that is the greatest dream of every porno pervert in the world, right?" The attendant gave Athrun a strange look. "You wouldn't be able to watch a movie in there because all the perverts on the ship would be in there watching porn when not on duty."

"Oh, wow," apparently, it finally sunk into Kira's thick skull, though his logic on why he didn't think of it was rather disturbing to Athrun: "Well, I never thought about it that way, I'm not a porn reader."

"What the hell do you do in your off-time?" Athrun asks.

"Read a book, and I was sleeping with Flay until just recently."

"For the record, I now officially regret I asked." Athrun covers his face with one hand. "Do what you will, but I swear to it that the Captain will have your hide for a decoration in the stateroom for it," He notes tiredly through his hand.

"Good, I'm gonna need some help setting it up and implementing it," Kira notes as he finishes checking his stuff through the RFID checkout system. "Sir, can you guys deliver this to the starport, gate D-17?"

"Yes sir, we can," the clerk notes. "That'll be five thousand, two hundred c-bills even, sir," Kira hands over his chip, the card that he was assigned for personal funds, and his account was debited to the tune of the equipment prices. "You do realize, kid, you bought enough gear to do what you were saying about four times over, right?"

"Oh, I did?" Kira asks. "Well, I'll set what Athrun was talking about up in one room and one in my room, and maybe two others somewhere,"

"How about in the hot springs? Take steam, a hot tub experience with a movie?" Athrun suggests, immediately coming up with a possible use for the other equipment sets. "We'll need dehumidifiers for the equipment enclosures, though," he thinks after a moment.

"Aisle two, left side, halfway back," the clerk notes. "Here, I'll take this back to our packaging crew, mister Yamato, and you guys can continue gathering your supplies, if that is all right with you," the clerk adds after a moment.

"Sure, please," Kira grabs another flatbed cart for what Athrun was now planning.

"Okay, we'll need dehumidifiers, we can build the enclosures ourselves but we have to keep them clinically dry," Athrun notes. "Here." he piles the requested objects on Kira's new flatbed. "We'll need wire harness to contain the wiring," a coil of the said object hit his flatbed. "We'll need a touch-screen, mil-grade and waterproof, for controlling the players," Athrun found two more just like the dozen he had picked up and dropped them (lightly) onto the flatbed. "I think we can run the data circuits through the mainframe on the ship, through that API you built actually, so we won't need any extra computer hardware. I think that should be it, right?"

"I don't think we'd need anything else, offhand—no, wait, what about—no, forget it, the holoprojector system bypasses that anyways."

"Oh, you were thinking some kind of whiteboard, right? Yeah, no need with the third dimension."

"Yeah."

"Speakers, we definitely need a good sound system for the setup."

"Oh, I completely forgot about that," Kira says. "Here, a pair of mid-range speakers, four tweeters, and two bass kickers, think that would do?"

"Get more mid-range and bass speakers." Athrun pauses, mulling something over, then drops a set of amplifiers onto the flatbed. "I can't believe I'm helping you with this stuff. The Captain is going to have both our asses grilled and served for dinner when she finds out what this is going to be used for."

"Hey, it's gonna be a long and rough road, might as well enjoy it."

"I can't argue with that logic," Athrun admits after a moment.

"C'mon, I think we got everything. We'll have to get a selection of videos somewhere else," Kira says.

"You two ready?" The shop owner asks, covering the register where Kira had initially checked out.

"Yessir," Kira replies, then begins offloading his stuff.

-x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Still Can't aim)

The tally was in: well over 3,120,000 C-bills in small arms and other infantry equipment purchased for the Archangel, including ammo and support weapons for use against armored targets. They had settled on the first assault rifle, they kept the Earth Alliance pistols and added a Ceres Arms model to the inventory, a new series of sub-machine guns from Rorynex, the RM-3/XXI sub-machine gun that was a definite contender for most vicious weapon they had ever encountered. They had laser rifles, support laser weapons, a set of Browning Machine Guns in .50 BMG caliber, a pair of man-pack flamers, grenades of many shapes and sizes (and uses), a set of new grenade launchers, LAWS rockets of several sizes, heavier recoilless rifles (for heavier targets than LAWS is good against), blasting charges, and the best local infantry armor available. And that was just part of what they had purchased.

"All in all, one would think you guys are getting ready for one long-ass war," the shop proprietor says as he finishes drawing the transaction funds out of the ship's account.

"Well, we have to fight the Clans, and when we move on towards home we have to be ready for anything, large or small."

"It still blows my mind to know somewhere, all that fictional magical stuff I read when I was a kid is real."

"I know. I'd given up on all that long before I signed up for the Earth Alliance, then I was dropped right in the middle of it. 'Rude shock' is the polite way of saying it."

"No doubt." The proprietor hands her cards back. "You sure you don't want anything while you're here, Major?" he asks Major Steiner.

"No, we're good on the Kwaidan, they're the ones that came in empty magazines and all, and still kicked major portions of ass," he jerks his thumb at the Commanders.

"Damn you guys are good. I'll keep my eyes on the vid-com, see how well you do in the coming months," he says. "If you're headed toward Trelwan, Major, give my regards to the 12th. Tell 'em Old Willie said 'wazzap', they'll know who's talkin'."

"Roger that, Captain," Major Steiner salutes him, which he returns, followed by Captain Ramius and the two commanders saluting him.

Beep beep beep. "I wonder what's this about?" Natarle asks as she looks at the transmit display being Miriallia's group. "Badgiruel here, go."

"Commander, there's been a shooting incident. Unit two-seven is involved, one enemy casualty, no friendly casualties." Tolle was being clinically precise about the matter, which meant he was not in the best position to speak at the time.

"Present location?" Natarle asks.

"Metro main police station. Ours and one-seven unit have been detained pending investigation."

"Roger that. We are in route at this time." She puts the handset away. "Two seven is Miriallia and Tolle, one seven is Nicol and Fuu."

"Not good, how—what? I don't like this one bit," Murrue notes.

"Just head up to East Main, cut right and take it nine blocks, you can't miss the police station, it's on your right and very big."

"Thank you." All four (including the Major) were out and into the staff car in moments. The Marine had, under permission, wandered off and was doing some shopping, leaving Murrue to drive this time. Nothing big there, the traffic setup was the same as Earth Alliance roads and the traffic was fairly thin for a large city. Finding the destination was just as easy as he had said.

"Can I help...you?" the secretary asks in the main lobby of the station.

"Yes, four of my personnel were detained earlier today, involved in some kind of shooting incident; I am here to see them."

"Oh, you wouldn't happen to mean the school-girl that shot someone dead with a magical bow?"

"That would be the incident," Murrue notes, masterfully suppressing the desire to laugh outright at how she phrased it. Miriallia would likely have found that highly amusing. Or shot her for it.

"And you're their..."

"Commanding officers," Murrue notes coldly, which also set the tone for the secretary.

"Howie, take them up to the fifth," the secretary says to one of the cops hanging around the lobby.

"Follow me, please," the cop leads them to an elevator. The ride was fast, the music rather boring in the typical elevator fashion, and all three could tell the one cop in the elevator was about as nervous as a cat in the middle of a dog kennel. When they got off the elevator, it was onto the 'booking' floor where about three-dozen criminals of various offense and stature were being processed at the time. Even as they passed, some grew quite quiet, wondering why the hottest new merc unit had someone on the booking floor of the Twycross City Municipal PD.

"Commander La Flaga? That was fast," Natarle's head immediately centered on the speaker, Nicol, sitting in a chair outside an interrogation room.

"We weren't all that far away," Mu replies diffidently.

"Okay, what happened?" Murrue asks; "and this is?"

"This is Mina, the person that Miriallia called Natarle about," Nicol replies.

"Oh, good afternoon," Murrue greets her with a nod. "now, what happened—" she was stalled by the presence of a document, a police report that was handed her by Tolle. It only took forty seconds for her to read it straight through. "Here, read this,"

"Typical Miriallia," Natarle notes as she passes the report to Mu. That comment made Tolle blush slightly.

"She put 'paid' to that shithead. Now, are they going to give her an award, or firing squad her?" Mu passes the report to Major Steiner, who read it the fastest of all.

"If what they say of this guy's record is true, I am not going to lose any sleep over his death," Major Steiner says as his analysis.

"Well, Major Steiner, you've probably seen this kind of incident before. What's the likely outcome?"

"About 60/40 in your crewman's favor. Technically she is in the right, but some hard-ass detectives and prosecutors are willing to try...and sometimes even win. I don't see that happening here, but neither of our units can afford the delay."

"Try talking them out of it?" Mu asks as sort of a wan joke in the situation.

"It's worth a shot," Major Steiner replies.

"Okay, let's try it—" Murrue begins, then is stopped by a warning hand from Natarle.

"Captain, allow me. I think it would be most effective if one serious officer from the Archangel did this instead of all three of us."

Murrue immediately knew what she was intending: "All right, just don't go overboard, Commander," Murrue says.

"After you, Major," Natarle says.

Miriallia was presently being held in a non-secured conference room, a measure calculated to make her feel easier about her undeclared status of being interrogated. Thus, eyes were on Major Steiner as he opened the door, followed by Natarle entering with her officer's hat under her left arm. As soon as Natarle was one foot in the door, Miriallia bolted to standing and saluted. "Commander Badgiruel, you're here?"

"Yes, I have been informed of the situation. I hear you gave crewman Koenig quite a scare in the process of shooting that pervert, as well. As you were, crewman Haw." Miriallia returns to her seat after a moment.

"Not by intention, Commander."

"Regardless, there was no blue-on-blue or blue-on-gray in the incident, so that will not end up on your record." Natarle had approached the conference table. "May I?" she indicates one of the unused chairs next to Miriallia, though her question referenced the detective and prosecutor.

"Please do," the detective says, figuring the presence of her commanding officer would reduce her defense against suggestion.

"So, this brings me to the pressing question, if after taking out a known sexual assault practitioner, and there was only minor property damage that the establishment owner has already indemnified and is not holding against us, then why is my ship's staff being interrogated?"

"The details surrounding the three seconds of the shooting incident are still a little fuzzy, we were clearing some things up about it," the prosecutor notes. He was no different than an Earth Alliance court of inquiry prosecution officer, she could sense, all bully at the pulpit and little spine to back it up.

"I do not understand what you define as 'fuzzy' in this case, the report has enough detail to be sufficient in a military tribunal, would you explain to me how that is lacking in your parlance?"

Despite the poker faces, or probably because of them, Natarle could sense they both knew the game was up, not to mention the FedCom officer behind them, the Major of the 1st Somerset, the one unit of the AFFC that was working with the Archangel Team. "We are normally inclined to make sure we have everything correct in the matter, both from a facts and feelings standpoint."

"Ah. The 'emotions' card, I guess from a civil standpoint that can be considered a factor. In either case, has Crewman Haw explained to you that in a close-quarters situation that emotion plays almost zero factor in the execution of operations?"

"Ah...no, she had not yet explained that to us."

"Have either of you ever been caught in a close-quarters battle?" Natarle asks as follow-up.

"No, we have not, but still—"

"Then you would not readily understand the dictum that there is no real time to 'feeling' a problem in a close-quarters battle, you react on a given threat, follow-up with a second attack as necessary on the first target, and check your area for any more threats. No emotion, just trained reaction. I do not see where there might be a fault in there." Natarle's voice was eerily calm, grossly professional, and significantly scary to the 'political' police officer and prosecutor across from her.

"That is...rather cold," the Prosecutor says after several seconds of silence.

"I can tell you are a desk officer," Natarle notes in the same eerily calm fashion. "Oh, if you doubt me on particulars, you have a reference in your own department you can ask, your Special Response Teams will tell you the same thing I have. Close quarters is not a time for hesitation, much less feelings. You do it right the first time or you don't survive to explain what went wrong. Now, that being said, what is the issue here?"

"Phrased that way, I guess there is no remaining issue," the prosecutor knew he was fighting a losing battle, especially against a mercenary unit that routinely mulched the new badasses on the block, the Clans. "You are free to go, Miss haw,"

"Thank you, sir," Miriallia stands to attention. "By your leave, Commander Badgiruel?" she asks in a professional fashion after picking up on the proper procedure from Natarle's almost-mentally-shouted surface thoughts.

"Dismissed, Crewman Haw." The prosecution's eyes were on her as she left, though nothing was said until after the door closed. "Now, about this tango, this Willy Barks, your fact sheets on him stated that beyond being a several-round convicted sexual predator, he was also a gang member in the '41' gang. I trust there will be no issues with their personnel, correct?"

"There should not be, after the way he was killed gets around they will steer well clear of you Archangel Team personnel."

"Excellent, I would hate to have to conduct ops to rescue downed or compromised personnel inside the city." It went unstated but was clearly understood from Natarle's demeanor: you had best make sure they know the rules or I will have it done for you.

"That would be tragic, yes," the detective said with what was a rapidly shifting demeanor to what was apparently quite afraid that his career was toast if that happened. "We will ensure they—and other gangs of similar disposition—give your forces no trouble."

"Excellent, detective, I am glad we see eye to eye on this issue. Now, if we have no further issues to resolve at present, I have duties on my warship to see to," Natarle stands, followed shortly by the detective and prosecutor standing up. Major Steiner had just stood there, impassive, observing the matter at hand. All four file out of the conference room. "Unit, stand to, we're out of here," Natare says in the same calm, professional tone. Miriallia, is she still in? Natarle's hopefully-heard thought was pertaining to Mina.

Yes, she still desperately wants out of here, Miriallia replies quickly. She's on the level, not a spy, I checked with her permission.

"Yes, ma'am!" Nicol says as they stand up and file toward the elevator at.

"Wait a second—is she—huh?" the detective asks hurriedly, indicating Mina.

"She was authorized and paperwork was initiated before the shooting incident. Before Miriallia dropped a shot on the tango, she was part of the unit. Any other questions, Detective?"

"No, ma'am," he replies hurriedly.

"Thank you. Have a good afternoon." They were down the elevator before anything else was said or done, and out the lobby with no fuss.

A second staff vehicle had been called in for them by Mu, to take the crew back to the ship. "This isn't as punishment, per se, but I think it best that you guys lay low for two days, then I'll cut you loose again," Captain Ramius tells the four. "Also, Mina, you need to return to your apartment and collect any personal belongings."

"I have a daughter, is that going to cause problems?"

"Oh boy, that didn't make it to me." Given the matter listed in the deceased's records, though, deciding was not difficult. "Just keep her out of mischief and this should not be a problem," Murrue orders. Better with her mother on a warship than possible subject to a gang, she thinks aloud, to which Miriallia nods affirmative.

"Mir, Ncol, you two escort Mina to her apartment and back in case word of that punk's demise got to the gang faster than how he was killed. Marine, you are authorized as well."

"Yes, ma'am," all three reply.

"When you have your belongings, return to the ship. Miriallia, have Chandratta process the paperwork for Mina's enlistment, my authority. You know the time factors here," which meant for her to have Kira doctor the submit time for the documents so that an inspection by the pain-in-the-ass police department would show what times Natarle had said.

"Will do, Commander."

"Move out, you don't have all day." Natarle steps back from the passenger-side door, and the vehicle rolls off and takes the first right.

"Where to?" Murrue asks as she sits down in the driver's seat.

"Back to the ship, might as well, I think we've accomplished all out official business for the day," Natarle says. "Unless the Captain is asking us to help her spend some of her money at a bar?"

"No, I think a good restaurant would be the best bet," Captain Ramius says. "Any suggestions, Major?"

"Actually, there's one about four blocks north of here, a sports bar and grill that is pretty good, continental cuisine and all that," Major Steiner notes.

"Sounds good, just tell me where to turn," Murrue says as she begins heading in that direction. It was two blocks northbound before anything else was said.

"Okay, I have to ask, I've heard some lines in my time but how did you do that, Natarle?" Mu asks, obviously referring to the spiel she had run past the prosecutor and detective.

"Yeah, I'd like to know that, as well, Commander," Murrue says.

"Well, you remember when I told you that I am not trying to be a superbitch in the course of this tour from hell, right?" Murrue nods as answer. "Well, I meant that I am trying not to act like one. I can be the queen of superbitches when I need to be, and that just happened to be a very opportune time to sharpen my skills." The main objective, of course, was to get Miriallia off the hook without so much as a blemish on her record (and, by extension, the ship's record). That Natarle had won on all particulars only made it more entertaining to the commander.

"Well, you did a good impression back there, I think the detective was as white as a ghost by the time you were through," Major Steiner replies.

"I walked right into that one," Mu declares, on the note that encouraging such an attitude in his coworker was not going to make his job any easier.

-x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Kira's Crazy Plan: Some Assembly Required)

Getting one of the ship's electricians to sign off on the plan was not a difficult task, and the Engineer that had initially designed the springs was in on it immediately. A machinist for the Gundams was also looped in under, though his participation was sworn to secrecy on the manner for now, until the project was completed, though his participation would be a requirement since someone had to build the enclosures for the projectors.

The first task was getting the wiring from the mainframe to the hot springs. Simple enough; just run it down conduit C-42A and tie it into a switch, where the feeds for the men's side and the feed for the women's side would diverge and not feed onto the other. Out of decency the partition wall had been made a full wall, so though one could hear loud noises in the other side it was impossible to see the other side unless you knocked the wall down. That made things all the much easier for Kira and Athrun, who could set up a proper surround-sound system as well as three-dimensional video for everyone to enjoy.

"Okay, now that we have the cabling run, we terminate it and mount the projectors." (7) Four of the rather inexpensive projectos would be used in each spring, to provide both extended viewing definition and redundancy, since the system only needed two projectors to work right, bout would work better with four.

"All right, you get the terminations, sir, we'll get the projector mounts set up," Athrun tells the electrician as he breaks out the equipment and begins assembling the mounting brackets. "What about the enclosures?" Athrun asks the engineer.

"Almost ready, ten minutes and he'll have all eight done."

"Well, we need his mechanical ass here so he can help terminate the wire," the electrician notes while doing some otherwise-physically-impossible acrobatics with the wires he was working on. It never ceased to amaze Athrun what you could do with enough practice...

"I'm here," The mechanic notes. "All eight enclosures, nobody followed me."

"Set them down there and give us a hand terminating these," Kira waves to the wires that had been run through the lower wall section for the control touchscreen panel. "Connectors are taped to each wire needed," he notes. There was only three connectors, though, so getting it done would not be a big deal.

"All right, easy enough," the mechanic notes as he grabs up some tools to use on the cables.

"Done here," Kira says as he moves his ladder to the next projector.

"Done here," the electrician notes about a minute later..

"All right, this one is ready for the projector," Kira notes ten minutes later.

"This one is done," The electrician replies ten seconds later. "How's the panel coming along?"

"Almost there," the mechanic replies. "Done. Need some caulking to seal this hole up."

"Next to your left foot," the electrician notes. The wires were sealed in and ready for the mounting bracket to be installed, which he did next.

"Athrun, the projectors?" Kira asks.

"Set up and ready. Dehumidifiers are ready as well, 7you did put enough service power to these cables for both, right?" Athrun asks the electrician.

"Yeah, it's ready for everything, I think I have about fifty amps extra ready for the circuit as well, so we should have more than enough."

"Outstanding," Athrun says as he hands up the first of the projectors to Kira. The second went up to the electrician after a moment. With some creative drill work and threading of the holes, the mount brackets for the projectors attached to the ceiling with some schedule eight bolts, rated for 200,000 kilos of torque, so someone could swing off one of those mounting brackets and it would not budge. The small dehumidifiers were attached to the ceiling right next to the projectors, and then the enclosures were attached with a rubber gasket between the ceiling and copious amounts of silicone caulking. The enclosures had no window over them, instead they were set up to seal around the projection lens surface so the lenses would not be obstructed; part of the dehumidifier circuit also was above the lens enclosure to keep some of the moisture off it.

"All right, all we need is the other two and we are ready to test this setup out," Kira notes. Ladders were repositioned again and the same process for the first two was repeated while the mechanic set up the touch-screen panel. All the wiring had already been terminated at the mainframe side, so once everything was connected it was booted into active mode. Since Kira had not designed a UI API for the touch-screen, he had to connect an auxiliary keyboard to it and issue shell commands to the mainframe to get it to do any output to the monitors. After enough commands, a three-dimensional high-res high-polygon image of the Strike Gundam with the IWSP pack was projected onto the water's surface just above the center island, which the engineers were planning on modifying into an above-water table for drinks or refreshments.

"Hell yes, it works!" Kira half-shouts. "Now, we need to get over to the girl's side and get it set up, think we can do it in less than an hour?"

"Eighty minutes, minimum," the first one had taken ninety minutes from the time they entered the room with their tools to the time they finished cleaning up the metal filings and dropped caulking.

"Well, let's do it." They moved out into the hallway, to the podium that was set up for the attendant to track who was in where.

The engineer had stopped at a communication panel, picked up the growler phone, and keyed in a special code to activate the ship's intercom. "Attention all hands, this is engineering, the men's hot springs are now open again, thank you for your patience in this matter. The ladies' hot spring will be closed for the next ninety minutes to two hours for maintenance. That is all."

"What exactly are you putting in there?" Umi asks as she eyes the new equipment. None of it had the prototypical lines and extensions of a camera, so she was suspicious, not alarmed.

"These are special three-dimensional projectors, used for the three-D television and movies you saw out in town today, right?"

"You serious? We can watch movies and television in the springs after this is done?" Umi asks in an excited squeal. The only thing that would make it more relaxing than a dip in the Archangel Springs would be doing so while watching a cool movie.

"Shhh, keep it down, the Captain hasn't signed off on this. We're trying to do this fait accompli to avoid getting ripped too hard for it, especially since the equipment kinda looks like spying equipment," Athrun says hurriedly.

"Oh, right."

"Is the spring clear?"

Umi checks the board. "Yes, it's clear, and I'll put the 'out of order' rope up after you four go in," Umi says. "Just be fast about it, my shift ends in sixty minutes and I'd like to be the first to try out the movie viewer," she says.

"It'll take longer than that," the electrician says as he begins hefting the gear into the shower facilities.

The wires had already been pulled for the ladies' side, so that much did not have to be repeated. Just cut the holes as necessary and pull the wires through to open air so they could be assembled. Thus the process began in earnest as the five persons began assembling the movie projectors for the ladies' room.

Nicol had begun writing the software for the projectors that would convert a flat movie to something that the projectors could put out. The movie itself would continue to be flat (unless Kira could come up with some form of program to model a 2-D movie into 3-D, which Nicol figured was possible but unlikely), but they would be viewable inside the springs and in the mini-theater that Kira was planning on building. He had been at it for over two hours already, since he had returned from town, and wanted to be anywhere except somewhere where he was coding, but some things just had to be done, and he figured hew as good enough to the task. "Hey, guys, how is it going?" he asks on the radio frequency they were using for coordinating the projector project.

"Almost done on this side with the ladies' room, Nicol. How about you?"

"I'm about 10,000 lines short of done and ready to test. I trust this is not going to be used for pornographic purposes?"

There was a pause on the frequency for a moment. Both Nicol and Fuu had to wonder what that was about, until Kira answered: "I'd be lying if I said it could not be used for that. My intention for it is on the level, though, and I think I can write a program to keep any obvious porno flicks out of the main database, but all the control panels also have local media drives so stopping them all is impossible."

"At least Sir Yamato is honest about it," Fuu notes after a few seconds.

"Well, Kira, you get accolades from Fuu for being honest about it, but there has to be a better solution for this one."

"Maybe the best solution is no solution, Nicol, no sense writing up an unenforceable regulation, that would just undermine authority on the ship." Athrun sounded coldly analytical about the matter, as if it had been eating at his mind for some time.

"8000 lines of code to go," Nicol was writing the last of the interface controls that would allow a user to select from the ship's stored movie library. One of the electricians had already added extra storage to the server for just that purpose, though he did not know how Kira and crew were going to execute the movie-viewing.

"Just keep it steady and don't crash their server, Nicol. Springs team, out."

"Roger that," Nicol says in reply though it had not gone out on the radio. Right now, it was just Newman, Sai, Nicol, and Fuu on the bridge, though it would be inevitable that the officers would be back soon to resume post, so Nicol was taking advantage of this time to use the direct-feed consoles on the bridge to program in real-time and get it done as fast as possible. "5000 lines," Nicol notes as his hands simply flew over the keyboard, punching out seven lines of code every three seconds on average.

"Is this what you wanted to do before you became a soldier?" Fuu asks, looking over his shoulder at what he was coding.

"Actually not. I wanted to become a piano symphonist, but with the coming of the war I decided I should help out my homeland. That led me to Heliopolis, which led me to trying to chase down the Archangel, which led us all to Cephiro."

"Kira was studying to become a combination robotics programmer and robotics engineer, before the attack on Heliopolis," Sai notes.

"Springs to programmer, we are ready at this end, how are you coming along, Nicol?" Athrun asks over the radio.

"Programmer reporting, I have about 3000 lines to go, give or take. Seven minutes, nine tops."

"Make it fast, Nicol, Umi's down here about ready to chew my arm off and no Yzak to take the heat for the rest of us," Athrun reports to the programming support. His comment caused a wave of laughter between the four on the bridge; the constant cat-fighting between Yzak and Umi was a ship-wide legend and quite expected at least once a day, sometimes more if the whole ship was generally frustrated or angered. The thing was, who would win the inevitable fight between them (if they didn't end up going out on a date) would come down to how the battle was fought: if Rune God versus Duel, Yzak would likely win the battle, if sword to sword the winner would assuredly be Umi.

"Roger that, Athrun, just tell Umi to hold her horses, the movies will be ready soon." Seven minutes later: "Springs, Programmer, I am done. It should be online at this time."

"Roger that, I am checking now...bingo, looks like it's good to go. Interface is a bit strange, I think I'll sic Kira on that to clean it up," Athrun notes. "You don't object, right?"

"Better him than me, he's the programmer, I'm just a piano player with a second in coding," Nicol replies.

"All right, looks like we got everything right, this one is done. Now all we have to do is figure out where else to put these in."

"One of them is going in my room for sure," Kira says loud enough for the microphone to pick it up.

"What, so you can watch porn all alone?" Athrun had the button on the radio still pressed down but not near his mouth.

"Athrun, you're being a pest and a pervert. Go away. Shoo. Go away." All four on the bridge could just imagine Kira trying to shoo Athrun away by simple hand gesture as he said that. "I already told you, I don't watch porn, until recently I was sleeping with Flay, though I think that's through now."

"I don't know which is more frightening: the fact that you don't watch porn or the fact that you were sleeping with Flay," Athrun says deadpan; Sai and Nicol were trying and failing to suppress their laughing; Newman was outright laughing at the comment; Fuu was rather confused by the logic at hand.

"Yeah, right, later. Thanks for the help, Nicol, we're out here," Kira says.

-x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Bar and Grill 1.5)

"This place looks pretty respectable," Mu says as he inches closer to the head of the short line for a seat. "Been here often?"

"At least once every time I've been to this planet," Major Steiner replies. "Ah, waitress, is Giselda on duty today?"

"Ja, she is."

"Does she have an open in her area?" Major Steiner asks next.

"Ja, she will here in a minute," the Waitress says as she checks the requested area. "Please follow me," she says as she leads the group to a booth in the corner. They were seated, presented menus, and drink orders were placed (two red wines, one draft beer, and a cola for Murrue, who volunteered to play dutiful designated driver).

"Ah, Major Steiner, it has been long since you have been here to Twycross, how goes it?" the area waitress says.

"With the invasion, it's been real rough. Not much chance to take leave and all that," the Major replies.

"And your guests?" Giselda asks.

"You might have heard of them, this is Captain Ramius, Commanders Badgiruel and La Flaga of the Archangel Team,"

"This team I know well," She points her pen to the wall behind Natarle's head. "The hole in the wall is where the arrow your crew-woman's arrow stopped. I was quite shocked to hear a stalker pervert chased them into the bathroom, and very glad they stopped him cold dead," she says with all the finality of some of Murrue's classmates from academy. "It is good to see your personnel can defend themselves in tight spots," she says. "Some local women I know would fold under that pressure," she spat her contempt of those kinds of persons. "And I hear Mina has joined you? So much the better, she's been trying to get away from her for months now."

"She signed up just before the shooting," Natarle notes.

"Very good," Giselda notes. "And that guy she shot dead, he is always causing trouble here at the bar, him and his comrades. Since he died, no trouble at all. Not a speck. The boss wants to give her an award for it," Mu masterfully suppressed a chuckle at that. "You Archangel Team get a discount, same as regular military. Ten percent off. I'll give you a few minutes to decide, and be back with your drinks," Giselda was off in a heartbeat.

"Maybe we should unleash her on the kitchen on the ship?" Mu asks; both Murrue and Natarle suppress chuckles at that.

"Are you joking? We do that, the only survivor in the galley would be the crazy cook," Natarle replies quickly.

"Still, having her clean house might not be a bad idea at all," Murrue thinks aloud. "What do you think, Major?"

"She probably would not leave here," he notes. "She's been here for over thirty years, and most people would not walk away from a job like hers: stable and steady."

"Point," Murrue acknowledges. "Anyways, what're you going to have?"

"Probably a steak and potato," Adam notes. "You?"

"I dunno, maybe a chicken salad?" Natarle replies.

"Definitely the sirloin kabobs," Mu says.

"This mutton wrap looks pretty good, maybe I will try it this time.

"Planning something?" Mu asks.

"We can always come back tomorrow, I guess, and try something else," Murrue replies.

"True, since we aren't heading anywhere for at least another week."

"Someone above us doesn't want us to leave Twycross, yet, though they have not explained why," Major Steiner replies. "Maybe they think this planet is at risk of being invaded?"

"It could be, or there is also the possibility that Colonel Malthus wants our arse in a sling and having us here, in a known location, may draw him out into the open?"

"And then what?" Major Steiner asks.

Murrue gives him a glance; "Do I really need to answer that, Major?"

"I guess not," Adam replies after considering it.

"So then what?" Commander Badgiruel asks. "I mean, as far as intel goes, Colonel Malthus and his CO are the pinnacle of Jade Falcon assault forces, and we've already busted their balls twice over. Their strategos are probably chewing nails right now trying to figure out some way to build momentum again, and oh by the way figure out a way to kill us off. I don't feel like allowing part B to happen again, but stopping A would be nice."

"Well, the Jade Falcons have a second attack vector under a different Galaxy Commander, if we want to completely stop their effort that would be how. Plus, remember that the Jade Falcons are one Clan in four, middle-of-the-road in both strength and viciousness, and if we want to stop them all we have to stop all four of the invading Clans...then take it to the home Clans."

"Man, you know how to paint a grim future in an operational concept," Mu notes to the Major.

"Welcome to the Inner Sphere."

"Your drinks are ready," Giselda notes as she presents them to the group. She presents them quickly and efficiently. "Have you made your choices for your meal?" All four declared their choice of meals and the waitress was gone again, to get their food cooking.

"Y'know what? For today, I say we just forget work," Mu says after his first sip. "I mean, there's no real chance of the Clanners dropping by today, so why don't we all just chill out?"

"He has my vote," Major Steiner says. "So, what do Earth Alliance officers normally do when not on tour?" (8)

"Normally, raid as many bars as possible," Natarle notes. "Some attend concerts or amusement parks in the area of their base, but not often. Shopping around the base is also one of the Earth Alliance passtimes, really."

"And which do you do?" Major Steiner asks in retort.

"Usually raid the bars," Natarle replies in an unconcerned fashion.

"OI!" Someone at the entrance to the bar and grill shouts. "Where's the manager? He's got a shitload of explaining to do!"

"Trouble," Murrue immediately says as the manager made his presence known.

"Hey! You ain't paid this month and one of my friends was killed by some slut in here! What the fuck's your problem?" The loudest among the trio says. Their intent was crystal clear, as two of them had baseball bats and one had a long-blade machete.

"Shall we?" Major Steiner asks before one of the waitresses receives a backhand from one of the thugs with the bat.

"No, not yet, if we assault them now they would have the advantage. Let the field clear before we do anything drastic." Nevertheless, Murrue had pulled her pistol and armed it under the table so as to not be heard or seen. The distance between them was about fifteen meters, a fairly easy shot for her given her years of training both on the farm and in the Earth Alliance Special Forces.

"Huh? What the hell is Natarle doing?" Adam asks as Natarle had walked toward them.

When she was about five meters off from them, the manager received a gut-check from one of the bats, hard enough to knock him to the ground in pain. "This is what you get for allowing that shit!"

"Hey, you three got a problem with my unit or something?" Natarle asks in an eerily calm fashion.

"Well, now, I think I have more than a few problems looking at someone like you," their 'lead' says.

"Step outside, shithead, and let's get this over with," Natarle flat orders of them.

"Hell no, I say we sort it out in the bathroom," the machete came up; "unless you have a hotel room?" He asks without any sense of shame as he advances one meter on Natarle. Murrue, Mu, and Major Steiner had closed up on her six, which meant in theory she was not fighting alone.

"Put the blade down before I get violent."

"Uh-uh, sweetie, you play by my rules on this turf," he says as he advances another meter on her.

Natarle wasted no time or words on the matter after that. As soon as he passed the three-meter distance to her, she immediately drew her sword, lunged forward a meter and a half, and began while his machete was still out of position to even begin a block. Her sword flashed upward through his knees at a severe angle, the longer and more ornate cavalry saber hesitated in midair as the blood from her first arc continued into the ceiling; her downswing was accidental in intent but perfect in execution as it came down perfectly to sever his neck as she stepped a meter to her right and brought the blade back down. His body hit the ground in four pieces almost all at once as she prepared a guard for the nearer of the tangos with the bat.

Murrue's pistol and Major Steiner's laser pistol immediately came up and centered on the two with the bats. "Drop the bats, assholes," Murrue orders roughly as her pistol audibly goes off safety.

"Oi!" Someone outside shouts.

"More outside!" Mu says as he reaches for and pulls his halberd. His set was just in time to stop one of the tangos with the bat from tearing his head off with it. As he trained, so did he do: one of his favorite tactics in sparring was to use the haft of his weapon to trip the challenger up, putting them on the ground usually solved the problem. In this case the enemy was not even partially expecting it, and his head bounced off the ground hard enough to stun him when he hit. He reversed the weapon and brought the axe-blade down onto the tango's forearm, and being a powerful-magicked weapon it immediately severed the lower half of his forward from the rest of his body, though not very painfully to the enemy at first, since he was mentally stunned at the time. Mu's blade came back up again, the tip of the pike-blade scratching the chest of the enemy as he set it to deny entry for the incoming punks. "Don't bother, kids," Mu orders of them simultaneous with the last one inside dropping his bat.

The one that Mu scratched vaulted to the side to clear a path for the one immediately behind him— "Mu!" Murrue shouts, seeing the small-caliber automatic just a moment before he started shooting.Pop—Pop—Pop—Pop—Pop—Pop, all six shots in less than two seconds before the slide came down on an empty chamber; the shots themselves did not sound all that impressive, likely from it being a small-caliber subsonic weapon. The first shot hit Mu in the left knee, the second missed, the third hit his surrendered friend in the nugs, the fourth hit Mu in the waist and slightly off-center, the fifth hit his surrendered friend in the chest, the sixth hit Mu in the left shoulder. After the shooting was done, Mu hit the ground with a loud yelp, the injuries quite painful though far from life threatening at present.

Crack—Crack—Crack—Crack,Murrue answered the shooter's weapon with her own while charging an flame bolt in her left hand from her magic armband. The first slug struck the shooter in his beer gut and kept going, out his back and into the midriff of his girlfriend right behind him. Murrue's second shot was higher up, the slug fragmented as it blew through his sternum and ended up lodged inside him. The third round passed through the sternum wound and between two ribs on its way out, where it entered the left breast of his girlfriend and punched clean through her as well (9), finally embedding in the door-frame to the bar. The fourth slug entered the tango's upper chest between the sternum and collarbone, then blitzed through the left shoulder-blade and out through the glass of the door itself, deflected badly from its transit, where it spidered the window around the impact point but did not penetrate the glass completely.

The last punk, the one that Mu had initially scratched before he cleared way for the shooter, had a knife pulled and was within five meters of Murrue, which made the matter quite clear. The magic bolt had been charged with the same energy as what she used on Natalya, but instead of being a dense-pack of high-concentrate this one was more along the lines of low-concentrate, loose-pack energy for a target that did not need a heavy penetration factor (like Elemental armor). When Murrue loosed the ball of energy into the tango, it only burned into him about two centimeters, one-third of which was his cotton sweater and very baggy t-shirt. Inside him the flame ball did little beyond cauterize the wound; to his sweater and shirt, however, the material within ten centimeters of the entry wound immediately caught fire, and being natural plant fiber it began burning rapidly. This being done, he immediately ran out of the establishment, screaming bloody murder as more and more of his clothes were lit on fire by the fanned flames, headed westbound down the road and soon out of sight from within the bar.

"Mu!" Murrue shouts as she drops down beside him.

"I'm all right, help me put pressure on my knee," he says.

Giselda drops a set of bar-towels next to her. "Use these, I've already called the police."

"I shoulda seen that shit coming when his buddy jumped aside," Mu chides himself. "You got him and his girlfriend, though, thanks," Mu adds. A second, far larger pistol was still in his dead girlfriend's hand, which meant that without even really trying Murrue had silenced the worst threat to them before she could take a shot.

"Damnit, same bar, twice in a row today," Murrue says. "Either this place is real hot or we don't have luck in this part of town," she tacks on a moment later.

"Y'know, I got it figured out." Mu takes a deep, pained breath. "We'll station Chandratta, Yzak, Athrun, Murdoch, Natalya, and Kristen Redmond here at happy hour tonight so they can scrap what's left of their gang," he adds with what appeared to be his usual cheer.

"You have big shotguns?" Giselda asks as she helps her manager to standing with Major Steiner's assistance. "We could use the help," she adds. "This Natalya you speak of, she good in battle?"

-x-x-x-

(Shopping Vignette: Closing Oddities! And Arguments! WHOOO!)

"This kicks serious portions of ass, Kira, where did you get the idea for this?" Yzak asks bluntly.

"It just sprang to mind in a burst of inspiration, like every other crazy idea he comes up with," Athrun notes drolly. "And I can't believe I went along with it. When the Captain finds out, we're both dead meat walking, along with one of the engineers, one of the electricians, and a mechanic."

"Bullshit, Captain Ramius would love this," Yzak counters. They were presently watching Immortal Warrior, a Commonwealth action-adventure syndicated show that was so over-the-top unrealistic that it was absurdly funny to the Gundam pilots and mechanics in the spring. It was a true Tri-vid show, so the whole ring could watch and enjoy it without having to interpret it backwards. The main character spent as much time on the screen as big explosions, carried more guns than a squad of infantry (and which probably cost a small fortune in Yzak's estimate), apparently never ran out of ammo (Nicol was counting that down, and should have reloaded his pistol four times already), and had damn near died four times with just barely half the show still to go. "I mean, you did put one over in the ladies' side, right?"

"Yes, we did," Kira says.

"Anybody in the springs while you were doing it?" Murdoch asks.

"Hell no, Umi would've skewered them if they tried that," Yzak replies testily to the chief mechanic.

"So, what's the word on you and Flay, Kira?" Murdoch asks.

"We're through, I'm lucky I'm still alive, and she's in the brig. And I owe being alive to Yzak, he actually stopped her when I just plain froze up," Kira admitted over the sound of explosions in the show.

"I wonder where do we buy one of those?" The show's her was holding some form of six-silo missile launcher that looked and acted pretty badass. Probably also weighs a ton, Tolle thought.

"Yeah, yeah, Strike, you just weren't expecting to get skewered by your ex, that's all. Totally understandable," his tone was somewhere between honest and facetious and definitely joking. "Though, with a girlfriend that crazy, I'd be afraid of being stabbed any time she approached a sharp object," He tacks on for the benefit of the others in the springs. Everyone in the pool had quite a laugh at that.

"That so sounds like Dearka," Nicol says.

"Oi, since he's not here with us, someone has to pick up the slack." Dearka's flag and medal box had been attached to the wall in a secure enclosure in the hall on the wall opposite the hot springs doors. Someone had also put a picture of him taken after they first started working with the Archangel, and he was looking fairly passive at the time. "You have to admit, though beautiful, she is flat frigging nuts. Did you just ignore that part of her for the rest, or what?"

"Well, I guess I got used to it, I'd say," Kira notes.

"Damn, that is talent," Tolle notes.

"Hey in there, I need a role call, please," the voice of Commander Badgiruel comes through the bead screen that someone had put up between the robing room and the springs.

"Kira," Kira says.

"Tolle," Tolle says.

"Pissed off," Yzak says

"Nicol reporting,"

"You're not on a radio, dork," Yzak says.

"Murdoch," Kojiro Murdoch says in something approaching a Spanish romantic's falsetto. It was a bit of a ways off for everyone's opinion, of course.

"Chandratta," said weapon officer adds.

"Athrun," the Aegis pilot adds.

"Harvey," one of the Mechanics adds.

"Crazy," another of the Mechanics says. That was it for who was in the hot springs, as the silence said.

"Okay, guys, I have a subcontract for Athrun, Yzak, and Murdoch, plus a few of the Elementals if you are up to something different," Natarle says.

"We're listening," Athrun says. He figured he could use the extra cash in town to purchase some personal small arms since he spent all day hardware shopping with Kira for his damnable yet enjoyable crazy pet projects.

"You know that grill that Miriallia almost got molested at, and where Mu got shot by a punk?"

"Yeah, I hear it's got killer food and bad customers," Yzak says.

"The owner's a nice guy but ass-deep in gang problems. He wants some professionals to help keep the establishment clean. It's pocket money, but you get to screw up the maggots that tried raping three of our own and shot up one of our officers, if they show up again." Miriallia had made that much of his intentions clear to Natarle and Murrue only after they were back on the ship.

"Fuck yes, sign me up Commander," Yzak says immediately. "When do we deploy?"

"Tomorrow at happy hour. You'll go under infantry arms and a Gundam will be on launch status at the ship in case the shit hits the fan."

"Roger that," Athrun says. "We'll be ready for it at...when is happy hour?" Athrun asks, suddenly realizing he did not know when the usual happy hour began.

"At that establishment, 1900 hours," Natarle notes. "Any questions?"

"No, Commander," Murdoch replies.

"Thank you. I'll leave you to your movie. By the by, to whom do I owe the pleasure of a projector set in the Ladies' springs?"

"Athrun and Kira. Kira's idea," Yzak adds.

"You may have just earned a court-martial if I find those have recording capabilities, but thank you for the television lash-up nonetheless," she says. "As you were, gentlemen," and they could clearly hear her steps as she exited the robing room.

-----

"Thanks for the help, Captain," the doctor notes to his CO.

"Someone has to help with this lug," Murrue notes, though her tone when glancing at Mu was teasing, not derisive.

"He'll be out of it for a few days, just to be on the safe side. I'm still not sure what level of effectiveness the kids' magic has in healing, and I still had to extract those .25-caliber slugs from his body. He'll make a full recover, though, even his left knee." That had all of them worried, since he had to use his knee to control various pedals in a cockpit.

"Give me a few minutes?" Murrue asks.

"Sure," the Doc takes a walk toward the cafeteria, since there was little risk with this patient.

"You need to learn how to dodge or duck, Hawk of Endymion," Murrue scolds him in a teasing tone. "Next time you may not get away with it, and I couldn't stand that," she warns quite a bit forcefully.

"I know, I know, I shoulda seen that coming when the first one jumped clear. At least he was using a pop gun, not a .45 like his girlfriend,"

"Yeah, how the hell does that work?" Murrue asks. "he was holding a six-shot 25-caliber and his girlfriend that was smaller than him had a compact .45."

"Do you really want me to answer that?" Mu asks in a teasing tone; after a moment, Murrue realized how she had slipped up on that one, given that she was the captain of the most powerful warship in the Earth Alliance fleet. "And you put paid to both of them with a nine, shooting through the guy and still managed to kill both. That's one that needs to go on the ship's record books." Nothing was said for almost a minute as Murrue leaned against his hospital bed in the ship's infirmary. "Thanks, by the way. Police said he had his hand on a second magazine when you hit him the first time. I probably wouldn't got lucky twice in a row."

"He'd probably shot me next if he had the chance to reload."

"That's what I meant," Mu notes. "Thank you."

Murrue snorts humorously, smiling happily. "You know, Hawk of Endymion, you really are capable of making the impossible possible." Murrue leans down and gives him a peck on the cheek. "Hurry up and get well, Commander." Murrue was out of the room before another thing was said.

For his part, Mu had to wonder what she meant, though he was already beginning to have suspicions.

-----

"Tolle, how're you feeling after your run through the springs?" Miriallia asks. Something about the way Miriallia asked him immediately made him leery, and check to see how fast he could get out of the cafeteria. "Don't bother running, Tolle, or you'll only die tired."

A table away, Pytor was having his usual ration and a couple glasses of water, when Miriallia had said that. At the time it was said he was taking a drink and gagged on it, to the point that water came out of his nose.

"Okay, okay, you win, what's up?" Tolle asks, now leery and and slightly woried.

"Oh, calm down, it's nothing harmful, Tolle. You might even like it."

That being said had his attention and had calmed him. "So, what's up?"

"I'd like to try an experiment."

"What about?"

"Well, every time I end up in combat I can...hear the thoughts of those that die around me. It hurts, hearing a person's last thoughts."

"Wait...you didn't hear—did you—"

"Dearka? Yes, his was the first, and the most painful. Some of what I heard I can't tell."

"Oh."

"Anyways, I'd like to see what it's like going in the exact opposite direction."

"Exact...opposite...let me think here." The exact opposite of death is life, or the creation of life—holy shit.

Exactly right, Tolle. You don't object, right? Miriallia asks telepathically.

That was actually a hard answer. If they were at home on Heliopolis, he would have had said 'no' in a heartbeat. Being on a Warship, even one of the most screwed-up Warships in Existence, changed the name of the game in more than just a few ways. Still, when it came down to it, this was the person that he was severely in love with and would do anything to help.

"Okay, I'm in, on the proviso that you're not going to do what you read in that email that Athrun intercepted."

"Hell no, not this time at least," Miriallia replies. "Oh, don't give me that look, Tolle Koenig, you know three-quarters of that email was bullcrap and would not work in practice."

"I know that, and I'm not worried about that, what I am worried about is you trying to begin with. Never mind working."

"For an aero pilot, you lack a sense of adventure," Miriallia teases. "But fine, we'll play it without that email, okay?"

"Okay, lead off," Tolle says as he stands up.

Miriallia did indeed lead off, straight to Tolle's quarters that he was not presently sharing with anyone. Tolle had something of an idea what kind of a night he was in for, and he knew that this would go either two ways: they would find it to detriment and call it off pretty quick, or they would find it a serious help to her mental experiences of late and probably wouldn't quit until time to get ready for their duty shifts. For Miriallia her next time on duty was well over twelve hours off, Tolle was on standby alert only and had no duty shift requirements.

For his part, Pytor could only think one thing: stravags are a strange bunch. (10)

---

Author's Chapter Afterword:

That was absurdly long, ne? And the action on Twycross is not even done yet, there is more to come as a VIP drops in and so does an old acquaintance from battles past. Not to mention what other chaos the Archangel crew can cause in Twycross city before they move onward to other battle fronts. I do apologize for taking this long to eke it out, though, the week after I posted chapter 12 I found myself slammered by three flavors of writer's block, and managed to write about 1000 words in six days. I know I can do better than that, and I did, averaging about 3500 words a day over the next two weeks to get this out. OI! And damn it was fun. Just don't expect this kind of chaos again, kiddies, this was a crapload of writing that I could easily have broke down into two separate chapters, but I felt that one would flow better here.

I think I've said everything I really want to say in terms of what is written here. I have nothing really to add to it in afterword, except that you can expect the new weapons that Murrue purchased for the ship to get a serious workout throughout the rest of the story. And what I listed in test is only part of what she bought. Plus there is always the possibility of acquiring other arsenal from other locations they might end up stuck in. Not to mention the Clans have their own infantry-scale arsenal and acquiring some of that might be to the benefit of the Archangel, above and beyond the Elementals.

And now, for the review replies, in order they came unto the review listing:

Knives91: Particle weapons: fun for the whole family. And neg, I don't think I've met a tech crew anywhere, with the exception of IRL computer technicians, that are stranger than Murdoch and crew. And mind you that I am a computer technician IRL, so I know that one very well.

TheBakaBrigade: Expect other Gundams to show up in the story. Period. Whether they be in Archangel hands, friendly hands, enemy hands, or something else I am not going to speculate on.

GongingApples, you are really starting to worry me, comrade. Yet, I find a certain validity to your suggestion to do Xenosaga, I have the first two games and have played the second for about a dozen so far, need to finish that up. I'm working over Wild Arms 3 right now, though, amazing what you find in a bargain bin for ten bucks.

Akasui, thank you for the review. Some magic can help with death, but it takes the kind of mage that the Archangel presently does not have. Even the best don't win them all. And the lapse in the Archangel's defenses was temporary, and came after they crushed the enemy on Romulus, so that was a bit of a moot point.

Etienneofthewestwind, always a pleasure. Oh yes, the bondsmen will definitely play a role in chapters to come, not only in this dimension but in locations to come. And though the time they got in this chapter was a bit thin, expect to see more of them in coming chapters. As to the Gundams evolving, I am unsure if I want to include them in that process, given the mechanic of how the Archangel is doing so.

Bienviendo, thanks for the reviews, comrade. Oh, be warned the first major cameo is coming up next chapter, as well as some serious scrapping in coming time, for Malthus may have had his arse handed to him on Romulus but he has not given up; if anything such a defeat has made him rather desperate to redeem himself. And Galaxy Commander Chistu is not far behind, either. And I find myself rather appalled that you would think this to end up a Mary Sue, you can rest assured that the Archangel and crew are going to get a workout that will make Odysseus sj1t an aluminum brick before everything is said and done.

As is said before, keep the reviews coming, comrades. Your dreams are but drops of fuel for the ongoing nightmares of the Archangel's crew.

Next up: more than one somebody drops in on Twycross, and things get real rough real fast because of it.

---

Footnotes:

(1): Blood Groove is nothing more than a macabre name for a feature that was designed to make a sword weigh less. The less a weapon weighs, the easier it is to handle, and having a fuller (blood grove) on the sword is one way to reduce weight.

(2): Normally, Jumpships go from the top (zenith) or bottom (nadir) of a star's gravity well to the equivalent point in the destination system. Jumpships cannot jump inside gravity wells, but where two gravity wells cancel each other out, they can jump to and from (these are called Lagrange points, Transient points, or sometimes Pirate Points).

(3): I hope severely I do not have to explain this metaphor.

(4): I could find little data on Twycross across the internet, except for industrial info, so I'm freelancing here. Battletech purists that are reading this and cringing have my apologies.

(5): A not-often-used tenet of Classic Battletech level 3 rules: utility 'mechs. This one is an ArgoMech, designed to help harvest crops. I'll toss in more utility 'mechs as the chapter goes on.

(6): In airport parlance, a gate is the parking spot of a plane. Same would apply here, this is where the Archangel comes to rest.

(7): To terminate a cable means to put a connector on the end so that it can be attached to a device or another cable length. I can terminate a CAT-5E (network) cable with dual male RJ-45 ends in about 20 minutes, or with RJ-45 female ends in about fifteen. And I am definitely not the fastest person at terminating cabling where I work, not by a long shot.

(8): Military parlance: a tour is a deployment of a ship or unit.

(9): Yes, a nine millimeter Full Metal Jacket round will punch through two people. Trust me.

(10): Though this may look like a reference to my online name, it is not. That is a valid Clanner thought.